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Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

As voters around the United States prepare for a tight presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, they will also have to make pivotal decisions on ballot referendums in their respective states. In Wisconsin, one of the questions this year revolves around noncitizen voting.

Noncitizen voting is illegal at the state and federal level in the U.S. On voter registration forms, people must sign under the penalty of perjury that they are a citizen, facing punishment of fines, imprisonment, or deportation if they are not. But on a local scale, noncitizen voting is allowed in some cities and towns in Vermont, California, and Maryland, allowing residents to cast a vote in school board and city council elections.

At this time, there are no elections in Wisconsin that allow for noncitizen voting. Wisconsin previously allowed noncitizen voting in 1848, but that was disallowed by 1912. In a ballot initiative on deck for Nov. 5, however, a coalition of Wisconsin Republicans are seeking to change language in the state’s constitution around citizen voting, making it as explicit as possible that noncitizens cannot vote in any election in Wisconsin.

Currently, the state’s constitution reads “every United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district who may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.” The referendum, however, would change the language to “only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.”

A yes vote for the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment would allow the language change and a no vote would prevent any changes to the constitution.

Behind the bill

There are 14 Wisconsin state senators and 41 state representatives behind the push to pass this referendum, an effort which began in September of 2023.

While several members of the Wisconsin Legislature did not reply to requests for interviews, Sen. Julian Bradley, a Republican among the coalition that introduced the ballot measure, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that their goal is to make it extremely difficult for noncitizens to ever have an opportunity to vote in Wisconsin. He also said he wants less room for interpretation around the law.

"If you want to vote in elections, then you have to declare your citizenship, and you have to go through the process," he told the Sentinel.

However, Debra Cronmiller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, says the initiative is unnecessary and could foster misinformation. The league was one of 30 organizations that has endorsed a no-vote on the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment and also released a toolkit with information about the ballot.

“It creates an opportunity to suggest, imply, whatever word you want to insert there, that this is a problem. This is not a problem. That's been documented time and time again,” she says. “It makes me wonder, is the real motivation here not to change the constitution to prohibit noncitizens from voting in municipal races, but is it to fuel a conversation that is more about us and them, who should have the rights and who shouldn't have the rights.”

Cronmiller compared the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment to a 2011 push by Republicans in Wisconsin to require voter IDs during elections. She said that on its surface, both sound good: ensuring that only citizens of Wisconsin are voting in elections. But she also pointed out the unintended consequences of these policies. In the case of voter IDs, not everyone has a driver's license or works for the state or is a member of a tribal community. And in 2017, the Associated Press reported that the law ultimately turned eligible voters away as a result.

“There's too many people who were unnecessarily disenfranchised because of what sounded like a good idea,” she says. “We suspect [the same] in this instance, where only a citizen should vote sounds good, but the constitution actually already guarantees that.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission, a six-member board created in 2015 to oversee election processes, reported 30 potential cases of fraud from July 1, 2023 through September 12, 2024. However, none of the cases were related to citizenship, and most were related to people voting twice or involved people with felonies.

In October of 2023, a woman in Wisconsin was charged with election fraud for voting in an April school board election, despite not being a citizen. But she admitted to the act, saying that it was a misunderstanding and that her daughter-in-law completed the paperwork due to an English language barrier, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She has since entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and the charges will be dismissed.

Anti-immigrant concerns

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin organization that works with the civil rights of immigrants, says the drive behind the ballot initiative is anti-immigration sentiment and disinformation.

“My greatest concern is that this is being used to create a narrative that is intended to motivate part of Trump’s MAGA base to turn out on election day and based on how people look, and if they’re not English dominant, they will try to intimidate and harass U.S. citizen voters to try to steal the elections,” she says.

Neumann-Ortiz is also concerned that the ballot initiative is part of a longer-term strategy of voter suppression.

“It’s been a very calculated agenda by the right wing,” she says. “There’s been a relentless attack on eroding voting rights.”

She pointed to a lawsuit, Cerny v Wisconsin Elections Commission, filed by a citizen in Wisconsin in August. In the case, Ardis Cerny, a resident of Pewaukee, sued the commission and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to challenge how the state verifies the citizenship status of voters with drivers licenses. Cerny alleges that the commission does not check the registration of applicants with the Department of Motor Vehicles list of driver’s licenses and identification cards to ensure they have citizenship. The lawsuit is still ongoing.

Neumann-Ortiz believes that the amendment would “disenfranchise so many people,” because when residents become naturalized U.S. citizens, they don’t have to go to the DMV to update immigration status, meaning the documentation isn’t always aligned. When they register to vote, however, they have to show evidence of citizenship, she says.

Immigrants who are working to gain citizenship are not interested in registering to vote illegally and jeopardizing their future, Neumann-Ortiz added.

“It’s more anti-immigration rhetoric, it’s more disinformation, and it’s voter suppression for all voters,” she says. “It’s an attack on democracy.”

The Wisconsin constitution has been amended 148 times, with the most recent change in April of 2023. In regards to voting, previous amendments have been made to expand rights based on race, gender, and age. It will also not be the only state where noncitizen voting is on the ballot in November: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina also have ballot measures regarding noncitizen voting this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislature, a coalition of members of state legislatures around the U.S.

“This question on the ballot sounds pretty good, but what you have to do as a conscientious voter is look behind the question. Why is it being asked? What could be the unintended consequences?” Cronmiller says. “Our elections are fair, they're safe, they're accountable, only the people who should be getting ballots are getting ballots. There's no problem to fix here and I think we're actually potentially creating a future problem by enacting this particular constitutional change.”

[post_title] => Is Noncitizen Voting Actually a Non-Issue? [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => noncitizen-voting-wisconsin-citizenship-voting-requirement-immigration-local-state-federal-united-states-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-23 04:23:20 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-23 04:23:20 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7331 [menu_order] => 40 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 23, 2024October 23, 2024

Is Noncitizen Voting Actually a Non-Issue?

by Cassie McGrath

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7313 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-10-22 19:07:12 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-10-22 19:07:12 [post_content] =>

Why you should pay attention to Massachusetts's Question 5 this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

A contentious ballot question has Massachusetts wait and bar staff fearing a dramatic change in their hourly take home pay following this November. For Corri DePatra, a bartender and server since 2001, the potential industry change is maddening.

“They’re trying to pull on heartstrings,” DePatra says. “I just think it is very emotionally manipulative.”

Question 5 on the Massachusetts ballot this election year is an initiative proposed by One Fair Wage, a national nonprofit and NGO. If the measure passes in the state, it would lead to a gradual rise in the minimum wage base pay for tipped workers from its current $6.75 to $15 an hour in the next five years. Eventually, the change would also allow for a shared tip pool between the front and back of the house to be managed by restaurant owners. But many restaurant workers have come out in opposition to its passing, arguing it would likely actually decrease their take home pay.

“We were all at city hall and I went in to listen to the hearing,” DePatra says, noting that she was particularly outraged by One Fair Wage’s closing arguments, which pointed to discrimination against women as a driving factor for the initiative. As a waitress standing with others at the hearing, DePatra felt they were invalidating her experiences as a woman working as a tipped restaurant worker, and misrepresenting the amount of hard work that goes into being a part of the restaurant industry.

DePatra works at The Kenmore, a Boston pub specializing in fresh pregame eats and draft beers, where signs to “vote no” adorn the walls in hopes of informing customers of how their restaurant workers feel. To learn more, all signs point to a website for a coalition of small and large restaurants known as the Committee to Protect Tips.

The Committee is spearheaded by two of the largest groupings of restaurant leaders in the state: Massachusetts Restaurants United (MRU), a coalition of industry leaders from various sized restaurants and cafes that began after the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Massachusetts Restaurant Association (MRA), a not-for-profit lobbyist group. Their joint mission against Question 5 has so far been endorsed by eight local mayors, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and hundreds of Massachusetts restaurant workers.

“A lot of people are going to lose their jobs if this passes,” says Ryan Lotz, president of MRU and leader at Traveler Street Hospitality. “We’re going to see secondary and incurred costs go up for the restaurant operators and owners.”

Earlier this year, an MRU poll about industry crises noted that 85% of restaurant leaders said they are one surprise expense away from having to close. According to Lotz, restaurants are going to see an increase of over $18,000 per year per employee if the initiative is fully deployed, something most simply can’t afford. Restaurants will be forced to shift to models with fewer servers but quicker service, he argues, implementing functions like QR code menus or counters. And for guests, it will also mean higher menu prices and more fees on their checks when it comes to processing service.

“I think that people don't really understand the restaurant industry, and don't really understand how slim the margins are,” Lotz says.

These profit margins typically fall in the 0-15% range, with the bulk of restaurants falling around the 3-5% mark, according to national restaurant system Toast. Most of those restaurants are only able to stay open, Lotz argues, because of tips.

Currently, Massachusetts, like the majority of the United States, operates on a tip credit across the restaurant industry. This translates to every server or bartender making a base pay and tips filling in the rest of the minimum wage and more. Server Adam Dougherty has been in the industry for seven years and currently works at Fenway sports bar Cask ‘N Flagon. Even on a slow day, he says he already surpasses the $15 bar.

“People will probably tip less,” says Dougherty. “I’m going to be voting no.”

Advocates for the ballot question, meanwhile, argue that tipped wages need to become a thing of the past, and allege that the tip credit model is particularly harmful for women and people of color across the industry. This is because it can allow restaurants to get away with paying staff less than a livable wage without consequence, while putting the burden on customers to make up the difference.

One Fair Wage, which is headquartered in California, champions the initiative across the country via satellite organizing heads which advocate for tipped worker payment changes state-by-state. According to Grace McGovern, one of two Massachusetts full-time state organizers working for One Fair Wage, who has been a tipped worker herself, combating misinformation has been difficult.

“So many people are just so surprised that a subminimum wage is still in place,” says McGovern.

She adds opposition from the Committee to Protect Tips has also weaponized their research.

“Even if 90% of the 300 people that they had completed their survey answered that they want things to stay the same, there are still 124,700 tipped workers in Massachusetts—at least—without their voices heard,” McGovern says.

Massachusetts is one of six active campaign efforts targeted at raising the minimum wage this year, with other states including Rhode Island, Arizona, and Missouri. But in total, One Fair Wage has initiated 16 total targeted campaigns in states or territories, according to their website.

One place where the campaign has been successful is Washington, D.C., where according to McGovern, there has been a positive increase in the earnings of workers. Lotz, on the other hand, sees it as a tragedy.

“This passed recently, and when it did, we saw approximately 6,000 jobs lost and restaurants closing,” Lotz says.

Another hotly debated aspect of the Massachusetts ballot question is the change to the shared tip pool. Currently, Massachusetts does not have comprehensive shared tips legislation. According to McGovern, the initiative would eventually allow for tip sharing with front and back of house, but it is not immediately required. Its ultimate purpose, however, is to move us away from tipping culture as a whole, and instead make a higher minimum wage the norm.

Jay Zagorsky, professor of public policy and law at the Questrom School of Business, agrees that tips should be eliminated, but thinks Question 5 is not the answer.

“Question 5 is poorly written and poorly thought out,” he says.

According to Zagorsky, one of the biggest indicators of Question 5’s failure comes in the form of the legislative committee’s comments in the ballot guide, which states in all capital letters that it "OUGHT NOT TO BE ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE AT THIS TIME."

So if Question 5 is not the answer, what is? Those voting no are not quite sure.

“Eliminating the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers on a state-by-state basis is not the right way to go,” says Zagorsky, pointing out how rising labor costs will directly lead to fewer jobs and those that remain will be “worse off.”

For Lotz, fighting the current initiative remains his first priority. He can’t quite think of anything else before that’s resolved.

“I would be more than happy to start working on that if this doesn’t pass,” Lotz says. “What keeps me awake at night is that people are going into the voting booth in November with a lack of knowledge. We need to get as many people to understand the gravity of this question before November.”

[post_title] => The Tipping Point [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Massachusetts's Question 5 this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => massachusetts-question-5-minimum-wage-tips-restaurant-workers-initiative-one-fair-wage-state-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-22 19:08:26 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-22 19:08:26 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7313 [menu_order] => 41 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 22, 2024October 22, 2024

The Tipping Point

by Maya Shavit

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7316 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-10-21 11:04:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-10-21 11:04:00 [post_content] =>

Why you should pay attention to California's Proposition 6 this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

When you’re incarcerated in California and the prison system says you have to work, you can’t say no. It’s the law.

Some prison jobs are basic, like cleaning the showers or the mess hall. Other assignments are more dangerous, such as in 2020, when women at a Chino prison in San Bernardino County said they spent as many as 12 hours a day during the COVID-19 outbreak stitching masks they were forbidden from wearing. Injuries are common, with everything from cuts and bruises and carpal tunnel syndrome all the way up to amputations of fingers and hands. Sometimes, the risks are even higher. When she was incarcerated, Leesa Nomura of Koreatown, Los Angeles, remembers other women crying in fear when ordered to join the prison crews fighting the state’s wildfires, a dangerous and occasionally deadly assignment with pay topping out at $10.24 a day. That’s on the high end. Some prison assignments pay as low as eight cents an hour.

“How do you want your neighbor to come home from prison? You want them to come home beaten down and broken by a system that doesn’t care about them?” asks Nomura, a membership organizer for the nonprofit California Coalition for Women Prisoners. “Something that is breaking down their bodies, that is breaking down their internal resolve over time? Involuntary servitude to a system that is totally, 100% benefiting off of them at cents on the dollar?”

The fundamental power of every worker against dangerous or unfair working conditions is the right and the ability to quit. But on the inside, work stoppages are “serious rule violations” on par with trying to escape. To advocates, that’s why prison work has a likeness to an older practice, especially given that a vastly disproportionate share of prisoners are Black.

“Slavery is slavery, whether you are on the plantation picking cotton, or doing work at the CCWF [Central California Women's Facility] or at San Quentin,” says Katie Dixon, Policy & Campaign Coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

On November 5, Golden State voters could complete the unfinished business of 1865, when states like California followed the lead of the U.S. government in banning chattel slavery but not forced prison work under the 13th Amendment after the Civil War. Approval of Proposition 6 would remove the “involuntary servitude” exemption in California’s state constitution and trigger a companion law, AB 628, that requires the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to develop a voluntary system where prison work can be rewarded, but not punished.

Currently, nearly 60,000 of the roughly 90,000 people incarcerated in California state prisons have work assignments, and “when assigning an individual to work, academic, therapeutic or other institutional programs, the individual’s expressed desires and needs are among the factors that are considered,” Terry Hardy, press secretary for the state prisons, said in an email, declining to comment on the ballot measure. But this doesn’t mean these considerations are without consequences: Saying no to work can mean punishments, such as less time out of your cell, and fewer privileges, including losing out on an early release.

Still, many people who are incarcerated want to work for reasons of their own, and some studies have suggested participation in the California Prison Industry Authority, which runs prison manufacturing and training programs, is associated with lower recidivism. “The alternative to not being out of your cell is being in your cell 24 hours a day,” Donald Hooker, who prefers to be called “C-Note,” says in a phone interview from the Los Angeles County state prison in Lancaster. “You’re in the cell, how far can my thoughts really go? My body, I’m freer. That’s the incentive. Not being cooped up in what is in essence 9 by 15 inches [feet] of cell space, and you’re sharing this with another person. That alone, being in that environment, is incentive enough for many people.”

But when he recently received an assignment for kitchen duty, he refused. “This is intense, intense manual labor, and I’m turning 59 in December,” C-Note says. “I would have been exhausting the remainder of my life force in the service of Gavin Newsom or whoever the governor is. And I can’t see the rest of my limited days on planet Earth exhausting my life force for the state.”

C-Note received corrective action but didn’t realize until later that the notation in his personnel file could have an even bigger impact. “If you have to go to the parole board, as I do, they’ll see that,” he says. “And those could make you stay in prison longer.”

Banning forced prison work altogether has also been a major objective of California’s advocates for reparations to Black Americans. While it would not make prison work illegal, including for pennies an hour, Proposition 6 would allow inmates the option to say no and to have a choice in participating in work.

“People talk about California being a free state [before the Civil War], but we had a law on the books: If someone had slaves when they moved to California, they could continue to own slaves,” says Assemblymember Lori D. Wilson, the Democratic chair of the legislature’s Black Caucus, who sponsored the legislation creating the ballot measure. “We, as Californians, have done historic harm.”

It’s a criminal justice issue where often-progressive California is a follower, not a leader. The state is one of 16 with an involuntary servitude provision on the books even as seven have issued repeals since 2018. An initial effort by California lawmakers stalled in 2022 after a provision to mandate minimum wage for prison work was estimated to cost $1.5 billion annually. The wage demand was dropped for the version on this November’s ballot, which has bipartisan support and little official opposition apart from a couple of newspaper editorials.

“Inmates should not be legally empowered to dictate what chores they’re willing to do while behind bars,” the Mercury News and East Bay Times wrote. “The fundamental question here is whether inmates should be required to provide work that contributes toward their room and board. We believe they should, just as the rest of us on the outside who have not committed crimes must also do.” (The cost of incarcerating each person in California is now $132,860, having skyrocketed in recent years.)

Voters are also skeptical. Fifty percent of likely voters said they oppose Proposition 6, while 46% said they would vote yes, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll. Supporters chalk up some voters’ caution to the ballot measure’s adjacency to another, far more hotly contested criminal justice ballot measure, Proposition 36, which would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes.

“Our polling was very similar to PPIC’s,” says Esteban Núñez of the consulting firm Actum, one of the lead campaign consultants on the Anti-Recidivism Coalition’s ballot push. “We knew this from the gate, but nobody knows what the fuck ‘involuntary servitude’ was. It’s a legal term.”

Proposition 6 supporters are still optimistic they can pull out a victory on Nov. 5 by putting in campaign work in the coming weeks. And a win in the nation’s most populous state could add momentum to the national movement to repeal similar policies at the state and federal levels.

“It’s about making the case between now and then. People are getting their ballots,” says Wilson. “I just don’t want to wake up the day after election day and find out California voters said it was okay to have slavery on the books.”

[post_title] => California Voters Can End Forced Prison Labor [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to California's Proposition 6 this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => california-proposition-prop-6-indentured-servitude-prison-slave-labor-incarcerated-peoples-rights-state-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-22 16:12:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-22 16:12:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7316 [menu_order] => 42 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 21, 2024October 22, 2024

California Voters Can End Forced Prison Labor

by Matt Pearce

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7261 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-10-08 21:36:40 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-10-08 21:36:40 [post_content] =>

Why the Abraham Accords could not bring peace to the Middle East.

In its November/December 2023 issue, the political magazine Foreign Affairs published a longform essay titled “The Sources of American Power,” which posited that the United States needs to “lay a new foundation of American strength” in the Middle East “that protects its interests and values and advances the common good.” Written shortly before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 (but published after), the author argued that “although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades” thanks to the Biden administration’s responsible stewardship. This lapse of critical judgment might have been forgivable had its writer not been US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.¹ But he was also not the only American official who had lulled himself into false security.

Since taking office, the Biden administration, with great fanfare, had chosen to double down on the Trump era’s diplomatic coup, the Abraham Accords, in hopes it would become the crown jewel of regional foreign policy: building a new Middle Eastern economic and security architecture between the Gulf and Israel that would successfully confront and contain their mutual regional antagonist, Iran.

The Abraham Accords’ sleight of hand was subverting the Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking paradigm in the process. Instead of normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Middle East in exchange for a Palestinian state, as was the guiding principle of negotiations since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, the 2020 Abraham Accords dropped the question of establishing a Palestinian state altogether, making instead vague allusions to peace. Its supporters didn’t seem to mind. In Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals, they believed the time was ripe to put aside “tedious” questions of protecting Palestinians or their unrealized sovereignty, and to instead focus on the much more tangible and lucrative questions of trade, defense cooperation, and intelligence-sharing, as well as upgraded strategic relationships with the United States.

In this respect, it worked. Through the Abraham Accords, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan all signed up for normalization agreements with Israel, and a flurry of diplomatic, touristic, and commercial enterprises sprung up in their wake. Israelis partied in Dubai; Bahrainis headed to Tel Aviv. Defense and intelligence sharing accelerated. All the while, the Biden administration continued to pursue Trump’s ultimate goal of bringing Saudi Arabia into the normalized fold. Pundits in the US crowed about a new era of peace.

Today, conditions across the region could hardly be worse. Escalations and counter-escalations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen threaten to deepen the abyss of violence and suffering for civilians. A year ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas’s attack killed over 1,300 Israelis. The attack was strategically timed, in part, to disrupt Israeli-Saudi normalization. In the months since, Israel has killed some 42,000 Palestinians. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what was Gaza. A hundred thousand Palestinians are wounded. Two million Gazans languish amid devastation under Israeli military occupation. The Israeli apartheid machine continues to destroy lives and cities apace in the West Bank. Palestinians confront ongoing Israeli settler violence under the full imprimatur of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Near 10,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned without pretense of due process. Some 2,000 civilians are already dead in Lebanon just in the last week, as Israel launched yet another invasion to fight Hezbollah. Ninety-seven Israeli hostages remain in Hamas’s custody in Gaza. The Red Sea has become a perilous commercial passage owing to Houthi attacks. And the prospect of a full-blown war between Israel and Iran grows ever more acute as Tehran executes another dramatic but fruitless missile barrage. No ceasefire is in sight on any front.

How did the Abraham Accords, heralded as a new paradigm for the Middle East, yield a total collapse of security and stability across the region? The answer lies in the deliberate effort of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foremost backer, the United States, to sustain Israel’s control over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely. American officials—Republican or Democrat—may be loath to acknowledge this reality, but the central conceit (and consequently the failure) of the Abraham Accords lay in imagining a world where Palestinians did not exist. The status quo, which seemed quiet enough to Mr. Sullivan, was, in reality, deeply toxic. Though US policy formally sustains the fiction of a two-state solution, the Abraham Accords in effect tried to bury the question of when—or whether—Palestinians should ever be free and see an independent state come to fruition.

The desperate charm offensive led by Biden administration officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein to convince Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman to accede to the Abraham Accords, dangling offers of a defense pact among other political inducements, has failed. Even authoritarians need to keep their fingers on the pulse of public sentiment—and in Arab states, establishing diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel is deeply unpopular. Mohamed bin Salman has admitted the carnage in Gaza makes the prospect of normalization a political nonstarter in the Kingdom.

The Gulf states are now in an awkward position. On the one hand, states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had already been working steadily to stabilize relationships with Iran, despite overriding tensions for the past several years. At a strategic level, there’s a clear understanding that diplomatic exchanges can head off the worst types of violent confrontation. We see these ongoing efforts as Saudi Arabia and Iran attempt rapprochement: The Kingdom is unquestionably nervous about the threat on its southern border from a febrile and trigger-happy Houthi movement. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are equally pleased to see the destruction of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which they see as Islamist-Iranian proxies that pose a direct challenge to their visions of a consolidated Gulf hegemony in the Middle East.

Reports that American officials greenlighted the Israeli escalation against Hezbollah after the two sides had agreed to a 21-day ceasefire opens the prospect of a more dangerous phase to this transnational conflict, wherein the US and Israel take this moment as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the security architecture of the Middle East. The risk is that Israel could continue pursuing “greater strategic objectives” in responding to Iran’s missile attack on October 1, and drawing in American support for what would be a cataclysmic war of regime change in Iran.

None of this is inevitable. It’s possible that the US will be able to convince Israel to deliver a calibrated military response to Iran’s latest attack, tamping down further escalation for a brief window of time. But it feels increasingly likely that the delicate balancing act between security actors in the region that has prevailed over the last decade is about to come crashing down in the face of Israel’s unabashed impunity in both Gaza and Lebanon. This is not just because Arab states are unwilling to undo their peace agreements with Israel (Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi underscored again last week that Arab nations stand ready to ensure Israel’s security), but because it is unlikely that Israel will ever permit the creation of a Palestinian state, and none will emerge short of an internationally-enforced partition of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The stark reality that Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi should grasp is that the fastest means to defanging the “Axis of Resistance” is the establishment of said Palestinian state. That state is not going to be the product of negotiations, if it ever comes. The occupation will end abruptly; there are no piecemeal negotiated solutions to apartheid. For the sake of his own political survival, Netanyahu will continue to foment chaos across the Middle East to retain power for as long as Washington allows him free rein. And in large part, the Abraham Accords are to blame. In saying the lives of Palestinians were less important than normalization, the brokers of the Abraham Accords helped embellish Israel’s fiction that it could sustain the status quo with Palestinians without friction or blowback. They were grievously wrong.

—

[post_title] => Biblical Failure [post_excerpt] => Why the Abraham Accords were never going to bring peace to the Middle East. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => abraham-accords-middle-east-united-states-foreign-policy-peace-israel-palestine-lebanon-uae-sudan-morocco-bahrain-saudi-arabia-war [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-08 21:36:42 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-08 21:36:42 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7261 [menu_order] => 43 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 8, 2024October 8, 2024

Biblical Failure

by Fatima Ayub

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7248 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-09-30 17:57:50 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-09-30 17:57:50 [post_content] =>

Who's taking the biggest hit in the global fast food boycott?

In the proxy war over fast food that’s now enveloping the Muslim world, it’s clear who took the first shot. But unlike the war that triggered it, who exactly is footing the bill is another matter.

In the early days of the War in Gaza, Israel’s McDonald’s franchisee, Alonyal Ltd, set off a tidal wave of controversy when it announced it would give free food to Israeli soldiers. In January, the Israeli franchisee behind Pizza Hut appeared to follow suit, when the Palestinian news source Quds News Network posted screenshots from Pizza Hut Israel’s Instagram account of smiling IDF soldiers holding stacks of pizza boxes which, according to the caption, Pizza Hut had given them for free.

Both Alonyal and Tabasco Holdings, the Israeli Pizza Hut franchisee, appear to have acted alone, without approval from the American companies that own their respective brands. But their decisions to give food to soldiers fighting perhaps the world’s most watched conflicts has led to serious global ramifications. As the news ricocheted around social media, regular McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC customers all over the world, but especially in predominantly Muslim countries, announced plans to boycott all three restaurants. (The KFC and Pizza Hut brands are both owned by the same company, Yum! Brands.)

Attempting to quell the outrage, McDonald’s Corporation, the US company that Alonyal paid to use the Golden Arches logo and menu, released statements insisting McDonald’s was politically neutral and had no ties to either side of the conflict. Soon after, McDonald’s franchisees from Turkey to Oman—all of them unrelated to Alonyal, except in their common relations to the McDonald’s brand—distanced themselves from Alonyal by issuing their own statements of support for the people of Gaza and pledging support for relief efforts in the region.

But for millions of customers, the presumed complicity of any business wearing the brand of a global fast food company was already a foregone conclusion. Either they did not grasp the fact that franchisees were independently owned, or they believed independent ownership did not absolve them from their Israeli counterpart’s choices. The fact that the United States government is the leading international sponsor of the IDF only added fuel to the flames: Regardless of ownership, customers still considered these brands to be inherently American. Franchisees in countries with large Muslim populations in the Middle East and Asia soon reported massive drops in sales. In February, the McDonald’s Corporation announced it had missed sales estimates for the first time since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Boycott promoters on social media took declining sales as a clear sign they were hitting the intended target. “Let this be a lesson to any company that wants to continue supporting the Zionist entity,” a PhD student in Canada, who goes by the handle @palfolkore, said in a TikTok with over 14 thousand likes, posted the day McDonald’s released its sales figures. “Your stocks will drop. Your earnings will be hit … There is no amount of rebranding you can do to dissuade us … We know what you are. We know what your politics are.” (@palfolkore did not respond to a request for comment.) Their post was one of countless others celebrating the apparent victory, and the boycott continues to this day.

The conceptual simplicity of a boycott, and a fast food boycott in particular, has made it especially easy for activists to get behind: Fast food companies are huge, global, and, unlike arms manufacturers, whose connection to the war is as direct as it is obvious, they depend on money from the general public to keep going. But fast food, like globalization itself, does not easily lend itself to such a straightforward line of attack. Before taking aim at fast food, it helps to understand who’s actually behind it.

If you know something about how the fast food industry works, you’re probably familiar with the concept of franchising. It works like this: The fast food company, called the “franchisor,” gives a company or individual, the “franchisee,” the right to use its name, menu, and likeness in a given area. In exchange, the franchisee typically pays the franchisor an annual fee and gives it a cut of its revenue. During the industry’s early rise in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, franchising gave companies like McDonald’s and Burger King a way to expand without staking their own capital. Instead of borrowing money themselves to build new restaurants, they could rely on people with their own savings and lines of credit to underwrite new operations. It would ultimately benefit customers, too: A person could walk into a McDonald’s in Portland, Maine and another three thousand miles away in San Diego, California and expect the same food and service, despite the fact that each was independently owned.

As the industry became larger and richer, the capital advantage of franchising became less important. Many companies backed off the practice, electing the more profitable route of opening their own restaurants. But overseas, franchising still proved critical to the industry’s expansion. First, franchisees knew their own regions more intimately than a large corporation, headquartered on another continent, ever could. Secondly, local ownership allowed the industry to blur the lines around its own national identity. Depending on the mood of its customers, McDonald’s or KFC could be an American brand, a local one, or some indistinct fusion of the two.

But almost as long as global fast food companies have maintained a presence outside the US, they’ve been the subject of political protest, and even political violence, as was the case in a series of attacks and bombings in Latin American countries, such as El Salvador and Peru, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and in majority Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Lebanon in the 2000s and the 2010s. In many cases, it was clear the activists, rebels, or terrorists who targeted a particular fast food outlet intended to make it a proxy for something bigger. Often, the United States was the primary target. Other times, it was globalization itself. In his book-length account of his travels in India, The Age of Kali, William Dalrymple recounts how, on the 51st anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1999, members of a farmers’ union in Bangalore trashed a KFC in the name of a “second freedom struggle” to stop “the invasion of India by multinationals.”

Drawing a line from India’s independence struggle to KFC may have been a stretch. But it made striking at a locally-owned fast food outlet easier to justify. After all, if multinational corporations were colonial powers, what were franchisees if not their collaborators?

A similar question hovers over the current wave of consumer action sweeping the Muslim world. If symbolism is the point, does it matter who among the multitude of people and institutions behind various international fast food brands takes the biggest hit during a boycott? Fast food corporations may be nebulous, but franchised restaurants are their real-world manifestations. They may be independently owned, but they are nothing if not closely affiliated with the corporations whose names they carry. Why not go after them?

We might see the current wave of boycotts as an attempt to apply that same logic on a massive scale. But the result has been that people are going after franchisees with no business in Israel at all. In August, Americana Group, a franchisee that owns more than 2,000 KFCs and other restaurants across the Middle East and Kazakhstan, reported a 40 percent loss in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2023. QSR Group, the leading KFC and Pizza Hut franchisee in Southeast Asia, temporarily closed over one hundred KFCs in Muslim-majority areas.

“Let’s give it up for Malaysia, everybody,” another TikToker going by the handle @anti__mia said of the news. “The Malaysians really know how to boycott.”

Yet the people most affected by these boycotts may not actually be protesters’ intended target: Neither Americana nor QSR Group has any business in Israel. In fact, the largest backers of both franchisees are agencies of governments that have taken positions against Israel. Americana Group’s largest investor is the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—a country which has never recognized Israel and has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. The controlling shareholder of QSR Brands is an investment company owned by the Malaysian state of Johor, and one of its largest minority shareholders is another government entity, a pension fund controlled by the Malaysian Ministry of Finance. The Malaysian government is so at odds with Israel that, last year, it adopted a boycott of its own, banning all Israeli ships from entering its ports.

Fast food ownership might be fuzzy by nature, but the effects of the current boycotts are quite vivid. Earlier this year, QSR Brands intended to put itself up on the local stock exchange, attracting more investors and likely bringing in additional money for the state-owned agencies that control it. But after closing stores and watching profits tumble, those plans are indefinitely on hold. Despite the avowedly pro-Palestinian position of the Malaysian government, to activists and Gaza-watchers on TikTok, the KFC name—and its American ties—speaks louder.

Back in Israel, McDonald’s has gone through an even more dramatic transition. In April, McDonald’s Corporation made the drastic choice to buy back all 225 of Alonyal’s restaurants for an undisclosed sum. Owning Israeli McDonald’s outright will expose the company to more risk, but it will also give the company more control, and the local stores more stability during a period of political upheaval. Boycott or not, the fast food industry finds a way.

Ownership also means McDonald’s Corporation gets to capture the profits for itself instead of sharing them with a local partner. Ironically, a boycott of Israeli stores now would do more harm to the US company’s bottom line than it did when the boycott began. Despite the protestations of its corporate masters, the fast food industry—like any global industry—is enmeshed in world politics, after all.

[post_title] => The Proxy Fast Food War [post_excerpt] => Who's taking the biggest hit in the global fast food boycott? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => global-fast-food-boycott-gaza-palestine-israel-middle-east-mcdonalds-kfc-pizza-hut [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-10-04 01:41:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-10-04 01:41:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://old.conversationalist.org/?p=7248 [menu_order] => 44 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 30, 2024October 4, 2024

The Proxy Fast Food War

by Alex Park

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7230 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-09-20 20:44:37 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-09-20 20:44:37 [post_content] =>

How the rush back to the office hurts disabled workers—and everyone else.

It has long been possible to shift how we work in the United States, and all it took was a global pandemic and a massive sea change that personally affected white, middle class cis men for it to happen. “When everything first shut down in March 2020, my husband's employer was quick to find a way to allow their employees to work from home, including staggering times for people to come in and get their work computers,” Karistina Lafae, an author and digital media creator, remarks wryly. It was a stark contrast to the hostility she faced when she'd received a similar accommodation. “I got so much more work done at home than I could ever get done in the office,” she says, only to be pushed out of the workplace as a result.

Lafae has multiple disabilities, including Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, usually just abbreviated as ME/CFS (and infamously referred to as “yuppie flu”), which make it easier for her to do her job when she’s able to work remotely. But prior to the onset of the pandemic, she experienced jealousy and resentment from coworkers over the same kinds of work from home accommodations that her husband and millions of other workers would later benefit from.

While many don’t think of it this way, widespread remote work during the pandemic was functionally a disability accommodation, a phenomenon Brooklyn Law Professor Shirley Lin refers to as “mass accommodations.” It was also one some disabled people, like Lafae, had been requesting for decades, only to face skepticism and denial, inadvertently highlighting a struggle over who deserves to be included in the workplace, and who is ultimately doomed to be shut out. For her and many other disabled workers, the pandemic marked a strange inflection point: Seemingly overnight, millions of white collar workers could work from home in order to protect themselves from the risk of infection and cooperate with mandatory shelter in place orders, normalizing a human-first work culture they’d long been fighting for, but had frequently been denied.

Still, the change was accompanied by arguments and pushback that felt very familiar to disabled people seeking accommodations, revealing deep-seated fears and insecurities on the part of supervisors and upper management, and deeper flaws within American work culture at large. These arguments, like the pandemic, are not over, and the stakes for workers remain high. With the number of disabled people on the rise, and the needs of people with long covid becoming a cultural flashpoint, it’s critical to engage with why this might be the case, and to explore the rights of disabled workers and the origins of the social attitudes that have made their position so precarious in the first place. Not doing so would leave discussions about working conditions fundamentally hollow, particularly as work culture returns to “normal,” because discrimination that starts with disabled workers rarely stops there.

The United States is a place where productivity—or at least beliefs about productivity levels— is king, even though the nation is not in fact the most productive, despite its brutal work culture. Any perceived threat to our “efficiency” or “productivity” must be neutralized, and with it, any worker who might be deemed less efficient or less productive, something that has often disproportionately affected disabled workers. Prior to the pandemic, and in the rush to fill offices again after shelter in place orders were lifted, working at home—a very common workplace accommodation—was equated with “goofing off,” with managers implying that remote workers weren’t as productive and would take advantage of their employers. Workers might sleep in, slip off work early, play with their kids, stretch ten-minute breaks into hours, or spend more time gossiping in Slack than filing TPS reports (even though they might do the latter in an office, anyway).

Supervisors and members of the C-suite placed in-person office work on a pedestal as they tried to force people back into the office, even referring to it as “return to work,” arguing it was critical to work in person for group cohesion and collaboration. In tense all-staffs, deep schisms emerged between junior staff and higher-ups who hotly insisted that being remote undermined company functions. In fact, research suggests the opposite: Fully remote and hybrid schedules, that allow workers to select the conditions that work best for them, improve retention—saving companies substantial sums in hiring and onboarding—and are also characterized by more productivity, with the New York Times referring to the pandemic shift as a “productivity boom.”

This is true for all workers, regardless of ability, with productivity climbing an astonishing 11.2 percent in 2020—partially because of the mass loss of low-paying jobs, which left fewer people doing more high-wage jobs. But remote work clearly still played a role in the productivity boost, and not just for disabled people. Many former office workers enjoyed saving time and stress related to commuting, for example, and found it easier to lead their lives when they had more control over where and how they worked. But for disabled white-collar workers in particular, the opportunity to work remotely during the pandemic opened up a new understanding of what work could look and feel like, as they saw the personal benefits of being able to manage their own energy levels, pain, and somatic concerns while still participating in the workforce—something that, previously, was either routinely denied to them or required a tremendous amount of effort to obtain.

Once the option was taken away, many felt they were back to square one.

“I get a pit in my stomach that these things I’m asking for that are extremely reasonable are making it so that I’m being discriminated against or put in a pool that’s ‘Casey can’t do this job, she doesn’t have the energy,’” says Casey Doherty, a Washington, D.C.-based disabled woman early in her career. “[But] I’m an adult and I know what I need to do to be able to work still.”

Women like Lafae and Doherty have chronic illnesses that are sometimes referred to as “contested” or “medically unexplained,” making them a part of a subset of disabled workers who can’t always “show” their disabilities to employers when seeking an accommodation, but who benefited greatly when remote work became the norm. Contested illnesses include fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, multiple chemical sensitivity, Lyme disease, and, more recently, long covid. They are also sometimes treated by society and the medical profession as “psychosomatic”—by which people mean “fake,” and not its actual definition, “a product of complicated interactions between the mind and body.”

These conditions have an unclear etiology paired with sometimes erratic, frustrating, and very real manifestations for patients, who tend to acquire lengthy, labyrinthine medical records as a result. Because of this, people who experience contested illnesses may be labeled “chronic illness fakers” manufacturing their distress for attention, a phenomenon writer Anna Hamilton refers to as a “politics of disbelief.” Notably, they are also more common in women, with Black, Indigenous, and Brown women bearing the brunt—the very same women who are less likely to be taken seriously when they present their symptoms to a doctor, thanks to the pernicious presence of medical racism. Members of these communities are also much more likely to experience misdiagnoses, sometimes with fatal consequences.

The medical establishment’s distrust of these women often validates societal attitudes at large: If even a doctor, the ultimate authority figure, doesn’t think someone is experiencing a real problem, why should anyone else?

Disability does not occur in a vacuum. Disabled women and disabled people of color are profoundly affected by their experiences of race and gender. These differences in experience can also be amplified by contested illnesses because of their seemingly invisible nature. Workers cannot necessarily point to specific test results, particular symptoms, or medical histories to “prove” their illnesses to employers, which means that, for example, racist attitudes about “laziness” can collide with a worker’s self-reported symptoms. The needs of a disabled worker may also vary day to day: On one day, they may have the energy and focus to allow them to pass as non-disabled; on another, they may be confined to bed. Some also need access to stigmatized care, such as opioids for management of chronic pain. All of this sets them up for skepticism from a culture that is already primed to distrust disabled people, women, and people of color; that skepticism then feeds back into attitudes from authorities in the workplace who contend that disabled people are lying or exaggerating their needs.

All forms of disablism are harmful in the workplace—and beyond—but a closer examination of the specific attitudes that surround contested illnesses is merited, especially in ostensibly progressive circles, if we want to have any hope of eradicating it. While those on the left often attempt to display positive change and evolution in the way they address the disability community, contested illnesses are still treated with disdain and disbelief—including, sometimes, by fellow disabled people who attempt to draw lines between themselves and the chronic illness community. This creates an inherent lack of solidarity that can leave chronically ill people out in the cold while ultimately undermining everyone’s equitable access to society.

Intergenerational work by the disability community, who have put their own bodies on the line in the fight for civil rights, has created a legal framework of protections and supports for disabled workers. However, this framework is still scrambling to understand people with invisible illnesses and their needs, both at an individual and an institutional level. In the United States, disabled workers are entitled to “reasonable” workplace accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some workplaces provide accommodations via a very flexible process rooted in the needs of the worker, while others take full advantage of an “interactive process” that starts with an accommodation request and can require weeks or months of negotiation and documentation. This process can be so frustrating, demoralizing, and infantilizing that some disabled workers give up entirely. It’s also often even more complicated for those with contested illnesses. This is very much by design.

“I’m spending so much money just to get a letter [from my doctor] that says, ‘Casey’s sick,’” Doherty says, describing the onerous repetition behind a hard-fought remote work accommodation, which requires her to obtain a new letter every three months for her employer. It’s hardly a unique experience, but it’s one that can be especially trying for people with chronic illnesses, who are more likely to face requirements to continually recertify.

While these issues may pertain to disability specifically, they don’t stop there. Disbelief by default creates barriers to inclusion that require a cultural shift to dismantle, and the tolerance of distrust for one class of workers also opens the door for distrusting all. It’s a slippery slope: Are menstruating people, for example, lying about or exaggerating painful periods? Are parents overstating their need to leave work on time to pick up children from school or childcare facilities? All workers deserve access to the conditions that allow them to do their best work, but this requires a working environment that believes all workers when they share what those conditions are.

No diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, employee resource group, sensitivity training, or interactive process can make up for the fundamental belief that disabled people are not telling the truth, and that, by extension, their needs in the workplace are a product of attention-seeking or laziness. But if all disabled people are positioned as liars, the particular viciousness that underlies responses to chronic illness is especially sharp for a community already culturally treated as “fakers,” or people attempting to exploit the system in some way.

Unfortunately, the notion that accommodations can be highly customized to the individual is novel, and the more abstract an accommodation feels, the less it is trusted, and not just by management, but also by colleagues. Disabled workers across the board routinely report frustrating encounters with coworkers who question or disrespect their accommodations, sometimes with support or affirmation from the supervisors who should be curbing such behavior. This hostility feeds the rise of bitter attitudes about disabled workers somehow “getting away with something” or receiving “special treatment”—often from people who don’t need these same accommodations themselves, and who aren’t materially impacted by a workplace’s decision to provide them. Those with chronic illnesses can experience this more acutely.

“People say ‘I know you’re doing your work,’” Rosie says, who works in clinical research in the Midwest and is using an alias to protect her identity. “This has always been very interesting to me, that I’m not one of ‘them.’”

Rosie, like other disabled workers—and not just those in the chronic illness community—reports a constant pressure to perform in order to continue to avoid being “one of them,” fearing she might otherwise inadvertently contribute to perpetuating disablism in the workplace. A disabled worker may also be more likely to push themselves past their limits or suffer in silence, similarly fearing disbelief and subsequent discrimination while also feeling as though they represent the entire disability community, especially since disabled workers are often compared to each other in a workplace, in an industry, and in general.

In a culture where disability identity has become memeified and the notion of “acceptance” is pedaled in a never-ending slew of awareness days and inspirational memoirs, there’s a distinct lack of action and understanding when it comes to making meaningful structural changes that might actually change this. And these changes shouldn’t just be for office workers: In order to safely work from home during the pandemic, white-collar workers were, of course, supported by an army of “essential workers”—health care providers, grocery store clerks, power plant employees, and many others who needed to work on site to keep society functioning—for whom remote work was an abstract concept, but who still needed accommodations of their own such as social distancing and PPE to do their jobs safely. For them, the fight over remote work while they put their lives on the line for basic protections was a reminder of how undervalued their lives and bodies—many also disabled, thanks to occupational segregation—are under capitalism. If we want to make meaningful structural changes, they must be inclusive of all workers.

The brief shift in office culture that emerged during the pandemic invited the possibility of something greater: What if all workplaces had flexible accommodations to support workers? What if these accommodations weren’t hard-fought, but simply part of how the workplace operates? What if we valued all labor, and laborers, in the same way we protected the lives of people working remotely during the pandemic? Rather than being exceptional, remote work could be one among a number of examples of disability inclusion in the workplace, protecting disabled sanitation workers and booksellers, nurses, and bus drivers, too.

If the pandemic represented a moment when it might be possible to reframe the way we view accommodations and disability in the workplace, the window of opportunity seems to be rapidly closing. The white men are back in the office, and they’ve dragged everyone else with them, in a series of bitter workplace-by-workplace fights that have only further illuminated the need for structural culture change. Office culture is not designed for the benefit of workers: It is for the bosses, and capitalism. The push to get butts back in office seats has again called upon erroneous beliefs about productivity and forming social connections as its supposed driving force, but has also revealed an economy heavily dependent on real estate investment, with offices an industry unto itself that faltered when companies started scaling back.

Instead of reaping the benefits that downsizing their premises might bring, most companies would rather double down on their investments in property than actually invest in the well-being of the people who work there. In the process, workers who still need remote accommodations are now facing escalating resistance that, in some cases, is forcing them out of the workforce altogether, particularly in the case of those who need to continue masking and avoiding public spaces to protect themselves. Allowing this to happen is in itself a form of disablism, because at best, it suggests an inherent distrust of disabled workers and their needs; and at worst, a belief that disabled workers are somehow more disposable than their non-disabled peers. Neither are acceptable, and both are incredibly harmful to all workers, whether or not non-disabled workers realize it; especially when accommodations can potentially benefit an entire workplace—as seen in the case of remote work and offshoots such as hybrid schedules and flex time.

Fighting disablism in the workplace requires going against the politics of disbelief; cultivating cross-community support; and proactively defending disabled workers of all backgrounds and experiences, on-site and off, acknowledging that remote work is only one example of an effective accommodation. Without these support systems, disabled workers will continue to experience the same hostility women like Lafae did—a resentment that some disabled workers say is intensifying again as workplaces roll back remote work benefits. Lafae ultimately turned to freelance work to accommodate her needs, setting her own terms of employment. But she remains a firm believer that no disabled person should be held back at work by their accommodation needs, and that workplaces overall benefit from disability inclusion by fostering an environment where accommodations are rooted in company culture, and, critically, not up for debate.

That culture shift doesn’t have to be hard, and it can have a profound impact on disabled workers that helps them do their best work and lead their best lives, benefiting them and everyone around them.

“When I was forced to work in an office around other people all the time, I tried all kinds of things to counter the incredible drain on my energy and psyche as a whole,” says James, a high-level employee at a large international company who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy. “I'd take really long bathroom breaks, ‘mindfulness breaks,’ ‘prayer breaks,’ lock myself in an open meeting room for a half hour or so, all of that. But it wasn't until I was able to work from home, in a comfortable, quiet, controlled setting, that I realized I was actually good at my job, that the work I did was high-quality and worthy of praise. I had never felt that in a workplace before.”

A culture shift from a disability-hostile working world for chronically ill people, and disabled people more broadly, to one in which disabled workers are treated with dignity and respect, however, also requires reckoning with a poor historical record on chronic illnesses and disablism at large, and all of the attitudes that feed into it. These include devaluing Black women’s pain, attributing many women’s very real physical symptoms to “hysteria” or “neurasthenia,” and insisting that it should be possible for people to bootstrap their way out of disability. And enacting this change necessitates solidarity across different categories of disability, and a more expansive view of disability culture on the part of the left. Without it, all workers will continue to suffer, disabled or not.

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September 20, 2024April 18, 2025

Who Do Workplaces Actually Accommodate?

by s.e. smith

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From Joni Mitchell to nuclear apocalypse and everything in between.












Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen



This is, without a doubt, one of the scariest books I've ever read, and one I haven't stopped thinking about since I finished reading it. Told in astonishing detail (the majority of the book takes place over the course of an hour), Nuclear War posits a play-by-play of what would happen in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike on the United States. In Jacobsen's hypothetical, the ensuing fallout is swift and apocalyptic; something made all the more vivid by her astonishing reporting. Early in the book, I gained a newfound understanding of doomsday preppers, and became convinced that I, too, should start stockpiling drinking water and saving up money for an underground bunker. By the end, I'd given up on the idea entirely, because of how fruitless my preparations would be against the reality of nuclear war. Both are a testament to Jacobsen's incredible work, which so deftly shows the precariousness of nuclear deterrence and the unimaginable horror (and stupidity) of mutually assured destruction.



—Gina Mei








Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido



First published in 1982, it's a delightful, irreverent coming of age novel about falling in love—with a boy, but more so with his family. Importantly, it's a refreshing change of speed from some of the heavier news of late. 



—Anna Lind-Guzik



















New York, My Village by Uwen Akpan



After being on my bookshelf for the last two years, I finally decided to read New York, My Village by Uwen Akpan three years after it was published; I wish I'd read it sooner. In a fictional narrative, a Nigerian editor, Ekong, of the Anaang people—a minority group from the Niger Delta—visits New York City as a publishing house fellow while also working on a Biafra War anthology. For a subject as sensitive as the Biafra War, the author manages to be be both bold and funny in his rendition of how Nigerian ethnic minorities have viewed the war—often overlooked entirely—while demonstrating how his home country's divisions and differences on race, immigration, and history are not too dissimilar from what he experiences in New York. At times, especially in the middle chapters, the dialogue and plot can take rather far-fetched turns, but perhaps part of the amusement of Ekong's story is that they do. I originally picked it up because I think the subject of the Biafra War is difficult to discuss, whether as fiction or nonfiction, and so many perspectives are often lacking the dimension of minority viewpoints that Ekong and his cast of characters engage in, unashamedly. For that reason alone, it was a refreshing read for me personally, even considering the hyperbole that the read accompanied. 



—Kovie Biakolo







Traveling: On The Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers



The new book about Joni Mitchell from NPR Music critic Ann Powers goes far beyond mere biography; it's also a reflection on how our culture defines "genius" (and how gendered that term can be!), and how our own individual perspectives influence our devotion to the artists we love. Powers' depth of research makes the book thrilling for longtime Joni aficionados, and her approach—a genuine but circumspect curiosity about this much-vaunted and perhaps misunderstood artist—welcomes newer fans to the fold, too. 



—Marissa Lorusso



















In Limbo by Deb J.J. Lee



This graphic novels follows the ups and downs of being a Korean-American teenager, with moving commentary on mental health and strained parental relationships. Although my upbringing differed from Lee’s, I saw so much of myself in their story. Beyond the touching narrative, the illustrations are insane. The level of detail is so intricate and intimate. It’s easy to get lost in every page. 



—Kiera Wright-Ruiz



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September 13, 2024February 11, 2025

What We’re Reading This Fall

by The Conversationalist Team

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On gentrification's canary in the coal mine, and the cultural cost when affordable cities cease to exist.

Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.

We all know the haircut, whether or not we know it by name. Usually the sides are shaved, the dye job is fluorescent or uneven, and the bangs are unflinchingly aggressive. The haircut is also, of course, not one haircut, but rather a whole genre of haircuts. A mullet is likely. It is something like medieval monastic cosplay by way of a Superfund Site. Glimpsed across the subway platform or at the local bodega, it is a haircut that strikes horror in the heart of the renter and joy in the heart of the owner. The haircut is gentrification’s own canary in the coal mine: It signals that your rent is about to go up.

Nowhere is the haircut more dreaded than in New York City, where no rent increase, no matter how minute the percentage point, is a casual one. The median monthly rent in Manhattan is north of $4,300. The cost of living is 128% above the national average. When Jimmy McMillan founded his political party, Rent Is Too Damn High, almost 20 years ago, it was described as a single-issue platform. Today, I would argue it’s anything but. Commercial rents have become unaffordable to the point that entire blocks have been emptied of ground-floor tenants. The ascendancy of Amazon and the price of rent have colluded to drive the commercial storefront vacancy rate in New York City north of 10%.

The irony of the haircut is that it both heralds the appearance of artists and their imminent extinction. It also isn’t limited to Manhattan: The length of time between the sighting of the first asymmetrical neon mullet to large-scale, luxury residential development is accelerating in cities across the country, and more locally, has all but collapsed into a single gesture in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens. In the process, it’s also begun flattening the art world—and culture at large—with it.

Of course, in the meme-able version of the gentrification story, the haircut is the mark of the villain. But it was not always so. In postwar New York City, when industries abandoned downtown areas and developers like Robert Moses threatened to raze entire neighborhoods to make way for cars instead of people (usually at the expense of racial minorities), creative classes stepped into wastelands like Soho and not only repurposed entire neighborhoods but spawned a class of creators as diverse as Eva Hesse, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hannah Wilke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, Donald Judd, Nam June Paik, Fred Eversley, and too many others to name.

This cohort—living among one another in constant creative conversation and competition—produced work that helped articulate a fully formed idea of American cultural expression. Today, even adjusted for inflation, none of them would have been able to afford the rent on a closet in Soho.

When artists are priced out of any given city, the consequences resonate far beyond the neighborhood in which they can no longer afford to live. The attendant deracination makes art less tethered to real places, real communities, and real people. Art becomes less human, and derives worth from one thing only: capital. (While many question their artistic merit, NFTs are a sublime manifestation of this conflation.) In New York today, artists are barely hanging on and bled dry for studio space, while writers essentially have no value in a marketplace that has opted for AI. Musical artists are getting raw deals from streaming services and have fewer venues to play in because of soaring rent. Ditto dancers. The city faces a severe housing shortage, but no one will come forward with an honest number for overall vacancy rates, suggesting that the real estate market is falsely inflated to the detriment of all who call the city home (except landlords). Creatives who work as adjunct professors are often overworked, always underpaid, and almost never promoted to tenure-track positions. Having a family in this city on an artist’s salary is essentially fiscal suicide.

Simply put, New York’s artistic community is in danger of no longer existing, and we’ve watched it happen in real-time. Downtown New York used to be a byword for a hotbed of American culture, the same way that Chelsea is now the byword for the most prestigious (read: expensive) gallery district in the country. But while art has thrived on patronage since time immemorial, what sort of art is produced in a city artists cannot afford to live in, and where a commercialized, gentrified simulacrum of diversity signals luxury? The answer is probably an NFT.

A healthy city should contain a diversity of artists, precisely because it also contains a diversity of people. No less an urbanist than Moses-archenemy Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything—certainly not one with much downtown diversity.” In other words, downtown areas are desirable precisely because of the diversity that is priced out by their own desirability. This is also ultimately what leads to their downfall: What is the point of living in a city stuffed with billionaires but starved of human capital? And who can even afford to, anyway?

Of course, art and money have always been intertwined. Rich people have nice things. Art is often considered one of those nice things. However, the more art is commodified—and this certainly bears itself out historically with regard to art as a status symbol or reflection of power—the less of an ability it has to be critical, independent, or introspective. You know, interesting. Gradually, it also has less to say, until art is reduced to a price tag alone—like any other commodity, like currency itself. Art that is only for the mega-rich yields an entire culture that is much the same. Is it any surprise at all that a New Yorker profile of mega-dealer Larry Gagosian from earlier this year took pains to point out that his most lucrative investments were probably in real estate rather than in art?

As a small-m materialist, I am well aware these questions long ago migrated from the urban grid to Instagram’s. Our insatiable need for convenience and connectivity has destroyed our physical social networks in a variety of ways—and dictated how we continually buy into our own dystopia. It’s also sped up our isolation, both from art and from each other: The commercial tools that have warped real estate values and the basics of human interaction all flourished, of course, online. The connectivity and convenience that lured us toward our screens at all hours of the day have robbed us of storefronts, tax revenue, and chance encounters in exchange. And now, the way in which consumerism has displaced our sense of belonging in communities has manifested in urban real estate in such a way as to rob us of a creative class by destroying its habitat. As the world continues to move online, artistic communities will continue to vanish, too.

In an information economy and a literal economy that always prizes the shortest distance between two points—collateral damage be damned—artistic expression is a luxury afforded only to the idle rich. The arts will further retreat into a career path available only to those who can afford to go into them. (That is, if we aren’t basically already there, as the conversation around middle class cultural values and downward mobility seems to indicate.) All counter-culture will be co-opted, sanitized, and sold back to us by the algorithm. The resulting culture will be by the rich and for the rich only, a trend handily encapsulated by the vacuous and nauseating never-ending parade of “fashion X art” collaborations that provide little more cultural expression than a vapid launch party planned purely to be splashed across the aforementioned Instagram grid. (So long as corporations are people, I fear we are stuck with Koons’ and Kusama’s “viral Vuittons,” as their respective creators secret themselves far from any “scene” in either a mega-mansion or psychiatric hospital.)

Meanwhile, as the rich clamor for a front-row seat to this circle-jerk, rents will continue to skyrocket. The National Arts Endowment can protest that “a great nation deserves great art” until it is blue in the face, but where the fuck are the artists going to live?

Again, I return to Jacobs, who also wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Our failures with city neighborhoods are, ultimately, failures in localized self-government.” This is absolutely true: the polis of any diverse city exists in a patchwork of political microclimates. But how can self-government take hold when no one who comes up in the new generation can afford to live in the neighborhoods that most need self-governing? Those who survived the lean years as owners cash out on once-affordable homes so their children can live better lives elsewhere. New developers buy out landlords who evict renters, and suddenly, the neighborhood is gone. The gaps left behind will be filled with coffee shops selling $7 matcha lattes and pilates studios with $45 classes, and the people who can afford to buy them.

Artists as a whole will surely still have the fire to create something, somewhere, but can already only afford to do so far from one another. The dissipation of any urban culture is its death: Downtown cannot exist as a diaspora. The point is the concentration of its energy, a sum far greater than its parts.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs also chides us: “We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.” Culture is not a commodity that can be counted. Yet, it has the power to enfranchise and empower just as much as any vote towards affordable housing or raising taxes on the rich. To preserve it, we must look to an inclusive path forward that prioritizes not just people and their work output but also the character of their communities—communities that contain multiple dimensions of diversity and creative expression that should not have to be commodified to prove their value. No developer, no bank, no corporation will do this for us. We must organize ourselves.

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September 10, 2024September 13, 2024

“Where the F*ck Are the Artists Going to Live?”

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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If we want to restore and preserve abortion rights in the United States, we have to fight harder for the ERA.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s overdue decision to suspend his reelection campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the nomination has given the Democratic Party a decent shot at winning in November. It has also freed the Democrats to emphasize an issue they believe will drive voters to the polls: At its recent national convention, the party put reproductive rights and the “power of women” front and center, hoping to capitalize on voters’ very rational fear of a potential nationwide abortion ban if Trump is reelected.

But while the landscape for abortion rights will be less bleak if Democrats retain the White House next year, electing Harris alone will not be enough to restore these rights or prevent them from being ripped away again. Nor will it keep the far-right Supreme Court from laying the groundwork for the next Republican administration to implement the same reactionary social policies favored by the architects of Project 2025, the so-called blueprint for a second Trump term.

Aside from changing the composition of the Court, many advocates believe that passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is the best and possibly the only way to restore our abortion rights, and, more broadly, to protect the rights of millions of American women and LGBTQ+ people from current and future attacks. First proposed in 1923, the ERA would prohibit gender discrimination and ensure that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”—something our Constitution does not explicitly guarantee. Most crucially, it would also safeguard these rights no matter which political party is in power. Its passage has rarely felt so urgent; in the wake of Dobbs, Americans cannot afford to leave the ERA’s fate up to the leaders of either party. Congress has already repeatedly failed to pass federal legislation to protect abortion rights: With so much at stake, demanding that the Biden administration immediately publish this badly needed amendment, and, to a lesser extent, joining efforts to add gender equality provisions to state constitutions has become far more crucial to preserving our rights than voting alone.

According to the American Bar Association (ABA) and other experts, the ERA has already achieved the number of state ratifications required to add it to the Constitution. (Conservative activists argue that some states’ decisions to rescind their original ratifications means the ERA never met this threshold, but many legal scholars say those rescissions are legally invalid and can be ignored.) But while Biden has repeatedly affirmed his support for the ERA, he has, to the outrage of its proponents, resisted publishing it for years. Why he is so reluctant is anyone’s guess. Perhaps his administration is taking a conservative approach due to perceived legal issues and a general fear of rocking the boat, despite the ERA’s popularity and legal validity. Or maybe they think it’s in their best interest to preserve threats to equality that double as fundraising tools for the Democratic Party and its allies, which help them retain the support of voters who know today’s GOP will do nothing to publish the ERA or protect abortion rights, but still hold out hope that the Democrats might.

It could also be personal: Biden, who is technically pro-choice, is a notably poor advocate with an appalling record on the issue. By contrast, Harris speaks passionately about abortion and, in March, became the first sitting U.S. president or vice president to visit an abortion clinic in an official capacity. In her convention speech, she declared, “We trust women,” and vowed that when “Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom” she would “proudly sign it into law.” Yet she offered no explanation as to why this didn’t happen when Democrats controlled Congress, no strategy for ensuring that it happens in the next Congress, and no reason why the Democratic administration she is currently a part of hasn’t yet published the ERA. There is also no reason to assume that if Harris wins in November, she will honor her 2019 presidential campaign pledge to pass the ERA in her first 100 days in office, either. In fact, she did not mention the ERA in her speech at all, despite the party’s promise in its official 2024 platform that “Democrats will fight to make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land.” Notably, this year’s platform also promised that “Democrats will work to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act”—something then President Obama promised to do over a decade ago—and repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal programs like Medicaid from covering the cost of most abortions, and which Biden supported until June 2019. It did not explain how they plan to do so. (Neither the Biden administration nor the Harris campaign responded to my requests for comment by the time this was published.)

Nicole Vorrasi Bates, Executive Director of the pro-ERA organization Shattering Glass, did not mince words in a recent phone call. “Both parties are playing political football with the rights and lives of 187 million women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people,” she said. Regardless of who is in the White House, the Supreme Court will issue rulings in the next year that could further damage women’s legal standing for decades to come by subjecting claims of gender discrimination to a lower standard of judicial review—something that theoretically could not happen if we could point to language in the Constitution that explicitly guarantees sex equality, rather than relying on what many legal scholars consider an implicit guarantee under the 14^th Amendment.

The quickest and most straightforward path to achieving that guarantee is to publish the ERA. As Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa explained in a 2020 Columbia Undergraduate Law Review article, “the Court has continually changed the test it uses to evaluate claims of sex-discrimination…Without [the ERA], the Court will continue to evaluate sex-discrimination cases without a steady metric, thereby leaving problems of inequality unsolved.” The fact that sex equality is not clearly guaranteed in the Constitution, Wadhwa wrote, gives the Court “a blank check to decide what test to use” and “how seriously to take challenges against statutes that discriminate on the basis of sex.”

Today, the vast majority of pro-ERA politicians are Democrats. But the ERA continues to enjoy broad bipartisan support among voters. A 2016 poll found that 90% of Republicans support it, which suggests that most non-elite Republicans favor basic equality—and GOP leaders are, on this issue, profoundly out of step with their base. A more recent 2022 poll shows that the vast majority of Americans still support the amendment—and gender equality—across party lines. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly derailed the ERA in the 1970s and left it for dead at the dawn of the Reagan era; decades later, fury at Trump resurrected it. Nevada ratified the ERA in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, bringing the total number of state ratifications to the 38 required to make it part of the Constitution.

Twenty-nine states already explicitly guarantee sex or gender equality in their constitutions, which offers stronger and more durable protections for abortion rights than state laws banning discrimination. The ERA would guarantee these protections at the federal level. Such protections are necessary even in blue states with strong anti-discrimination laws for two main reasons: (1) laws are much easier to change and/or repeal than constitutional text and (2) gender discrimination claims are usually subject to intermediate scrutiny, which is a lower standard than the one applied in cases involving explicitly protected categories like race. This is because a minority of Americans with outsized power do not consider abortion a right and do not want U.S. courts to treat gender discrimination as seriously as other forms of prejudice. Once courts are required to apply the same standard to sex-discrimination cases, abortion restrictions, which apply almost exclusively to women, will be much harder to defend.

This is already clear at the state level. In Connecticut and New Mexico, the constitutions of which prohibit sex discrimination, courts have upheld public funding of abortion. The New Mexico Supreme Court is considering striking down abortion restrictions passed by conservative localities because they violate the state’s constitution. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that abortion providers can challenge Pennsylvania’s ban on Medicaid coverage for abortion as sex discrimination under the state’s Equal Rights Amendment and constitutional equal protection provisions. Even in blood-red Utah, the state Supreme Court recently upheld a suspension of the state’s abortion ban, keeping the procedure legal while the ban is being challenged in court. In suing to block the Utah ban, Utah Planned Parenthood argued that it violated several provisions in the state’s constitution, including the right to gender equality.

But as Wendy J. Murphy explained in a recent law review article, amending state constitutions is an imperfect strategy for reasons similar to those put forth by Wadhwa. According to Murphy, only thirteen states enforce their own constitutional gender equity provisions under the highest standard of judicial review. In Texas, for example, the state constitution’s sex equality provision failed to protect Texas women when the state Supreme Court concluded that abortion-related funding restrictions do not deny equality “‘because of’ sex, even though only women [can] become pregnant.” As Murphy argued, “without the ERA, States are free to apply their State constitutional equality guarantees unequally to women.”

This doesn’t mean that states’ efforts are futile. A year ago, abortion rights supporters had reason for cautious optimism: Ballot measures designed to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions passed, and those intended to restrict such rights failed in all seven of the states, including red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, that voted on these measures in the aftermath of Dobbs. In November, New Yorkers will vote on whether their constitution should guarantee equality regardless of gender and reproductive status. (New York’s constitution currently prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, creed or religion,” but not “sex.”) Floridians, too, will have the opportunity to enshrine abortion rights in their constitution. Abortion-related state constitutional amendments are also on the ballot or under consideration in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota.

Yet some recent efforts to protect abortion and other rights via state constitutions have stalled. Despite having approved a resolution calling on Congress to ratify the federal ERA in 2023, Minnesota was unable to pass a state ERA in 2024. Minnesota’s proposed amendment did not include the word “abortion,” but it would have protected Minnesotans’ right to make “decisions about all matters relating to one’s own pregnancy or decision whether to become or remain pregnant.” An effort to enshrine abortion rights in Maine’s constitution similarly failed in April after lawmakers voted against putting the proposal on the November ballot. The Maine proposal, which would have asked whether Mainers wanted their state constitution “to declare that every person has a right to reproductive autonomy,” also omitted the word “abortion,” though supporters did not avoid the word in promoting it.

Even states that have managed to get reproductive rights on the ballot have had to fight to include the word “abortion.” In New York, pro-choice advocates and legislators attempted to revise the language of the upcoming ballot measure to make its primary purpose—protecting abortion rights—clear, after the state board of elections voted to exclude the word “abortion” from the initiative’s description. Democrats challenged that decision on the grounds that the state is obligated to provide easy-to-understand explanations of ballot proposals to voters. A judge recently upheld the vague language, and state Democrats are now squabbling over whether to keep fighting for the broadly popular initiative or retreat in hopes of neutralizing bad-faith GOP attacks on Democrats in swing districts. But allowing an abortion-rights initiative to fail in deep-blue New York would have serious implications for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights nationwide.

Gender equality as a concept is broadly popular in the United States, whether or not it always exists in fact. And as we’ve seen many times in the wake of Dobbs, abortion rights are popular and restricting them is not. That’s why the GOP is working so hard to keep abortion off of state ballots and overrule the will of the voters, and why New York Democrats belatedly tried to tie the word “abortion” to the state’s upcoming ballot proposal: Both parties know that opportunities to defend abortion rights drive voter turnout. But whatever happens in November, our rights would be better protected if Biden simply published the ERA today.

Despite her frustration with the two major parties, Bates remains hopeful that the tide is beginning to turn. “In light of recent events, and given all that’s at stake, the momentum for ERA publication is growing exponentially,” she recently said. Whoever our next president is, one thing is clear: Actions speak louder than words, and we will need to do more than vote to take back our rights.

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September 6, 2024September 6, 2024

Voting Isn’t Going to Be Enough

by Raina Lipsitz

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According to one book, both a lot and very little has changed in the last 100 years.

From the moment I saw The Woman’s Book sitting on a dusty shelf in a secondhand shop, I knew I had to rescue it. I was fascinated: At 719 pages, the hefty tome—browned around the edges and threatening to fall apart—promised to teach well-off British women of 1911 everything they ought to know about womanhood, from poultry-keeping to child-rearing to overseeing the servants.

According to the hand-inked inscription, one lucky Miss Wilson received the manual as a Christmas gift in 1911, with “best wishes” from what looks to be a “Mr. Brooke.” Color me intrigued as to that relationship—but flipping through it, I could only assume that this Mr. Brooke had hoped to begin training his intended future wife, by sending her a literal manual on womanhood. While laying out various tasks, the book gives hints at what a woman’s purpose was in the early 20^th century. The gentlewoman’s aim is to avoid attracting the eye of the crowd. To contain boisterous laughter. To please.

So much has changed! I thought. But so little had, too.

There’s plenty in The Woman’s Book that feels like it’s from another world — the etiquette of visiting cards, how to make a fur muff. Yet a lot also feels familiar: the domestic and family labor that too naturally falls to women, the fact that if we want to embark on certain careers, we better expect a fight to get there. While some of the details might differ, it’s clear that the ultimate purpose of this prescriptive book was to tell women how to exist—and in that regard, we have work to do.

Courtesy of the author.

On Pregnancy

When I picked up The Woman’s Book, I was heavily pregnant, and reading every feminist birthing book I could get my hands on (a sure fire way to terrify yourself about childbirth). I immediately skipped to the baby section to find out what the women of the early 20th century were being told, only to discover that the section titled “Baby’s Arrival” was merely two paragraphs long, with nothing whatsoever about the act of giving birth itself.

On the general topic of dressing during pregnancy, however, there was a full page: three times the space given to pushing the thing out. One important part of pregnancy that is very well covered is whether or not one should wear a corset when with child—not for the safety of the fetus, of course, but because “an effort must be made to avoid appearing conspicuous.” (The author’s advice is to keep the corset, but to wear ones that aren’t quite so tight, giving an inch of priority to health over some idea of vanity.)

And ladies, no snacks during this special time (or, actually, ever), no trips to the theatre, and for god’s sake, please do avoid traveling by bus, train, or tram towards the end of the final trimester. Most importantly, “All morbid and sensational literature should be avoided.”

Over a century later, people who are not medical professionals still tell pregnant women what to do and when. We’re told to take all the drugs, do it without drugs, have a birth plan, don’t have a birth plan— meanwhile, some pregnant women aren’t told an awful lot at all. But never is unwanted advice more abundant than during this magical time. When a yoga teacher told me I had complications in birth because I “didn’t try hard enough” to do it naturally, it took every ounce of peace I had left not to finish her off with a flying warrior pose. I imagine I’d have felt the same if someone chided me for not wearing the proper pregnancy corset.

On Beauty

Unsurprisingly for a book with such strong opinions on pregnancy fashion, The Woman’s Book also has a fair amount of beauty advice. The book is packed with gold like: “Try and cultivate a more cheerful outlook upon life if you would permanently rid yourself of these vexing little lines between brows” and “Overwork and worry are powerful deterrents to all culture of beauty.” Because we women really should prioritize the absence of wrinkles over thinking too hard, of course. (For the record, mischievous grey hairs are usually also caused by worry—so we should all really just STOP WORRYING if we want to remain youthful.)

It’s also in this chapter that it becomes clear who, exactly, the book is targeting. One tip in particular that speaks pretty strongly to the diversity of the UK’s upper-class in 1911 is a set of instructions on how to whiten your neck and arms. For real. It involves bathing in milk (the service of dairy cows is never ending) and dusting on plenty of powder, effectively telling wealthy white women to transform themselves into donuts in order to be beautiful.

But don’t fret gentlewomen, because by 2024, we’ve been freed from this obsession with how contorting our faces makes us hideous, how our bodies must be a certain way, and why any of that matters. Unless of course you count the endless “new beauty obsessions” we’re encouraged to spend our hard-earned money on (which we still make less of than men, of course), the smoothing Instagram filters that it’s now normal to view the world through, and the constant need to define a bikini body as anything other than a body that happens to have a bikini on it.

On Work

After I got the book home safely, I decided to take a closer look at the contents page. Did I spy “careers for women” and “women in politics”? Had I been too quick to judge?

What’s incredible is that Florence B. Jack, the editor of The Woman’s Book, suggests the 1911 woman has it pretty good in the world of work. There are many vocations for a young lady, unlike in those pesky olden times. A woman can be a teacher, a private secretary, a florist, a beekeeper, even a lady clerk, for heaven’s sake! (Not to be confused with a regular clerk, of course.) She can also be the most “womanly profession” of them all: a nurse. But no matter your choice, Jack cautions, there is a catch—you have to be really good. There’s no room for mediocrity when you’re a woman. (Arguably, still true today.)

When it comes to my own profession of journalism, I might have found breaking through a bit trickier in 1911, as Jack warns this is a job “not so easily accessible as other callings.” It’s possible, but the budding female journalist has to be “really clever.” When it comes to training, a girl should get a position as a typist or secretary in a newspaper office. Leave journalism school to the chaps, eh? But if a woman is able to make a success of being a reporter, “her powers of intuition and her tact are so much greater than that found in the average man reporter that she is at times entrusted with very special duties.” Imagine that. An exceptional employee being given more responsibility than an average one. Do we even need feminism anymore?

Shockingly, the book also gives women of 1911 permission to be a doctor. It only asks that there be no female medical students at Oxford and Cambridge, thank you very much. Apparently there’s little “old-fashioned prejudice against the ‘woman doctor’” anymore, either, and even more encouragingly, “there is none of that ‘under-cutting of fees’ which has to be adopted by women in most other professions.” So if you want to earn the same as a man for the same job (will we women ever be satisfied?), start getting to grips with human biology. (Perhaps just don’t consult The Woman’s Book for anatomy lessons.) Oh, and if being a woman surgeon (prefix compulsory, of course) is your raison d'etre, best to get a new raison, because in this profession above all others, “prejudice will prove one of the most formidable opponents.” That old chestnut.

Comparatively, you would hope advice on “careers for women” in 2024 would encourage you to do any job you damn well please. But of course, that doesn’t mean that women and nonbinary people are treated the same as their male coworkers. Call me when female pilots aren’t getting mistaken for air stewards and the gender pay gap has been eradicated. And that’s before we intersect gender with class, race, geography, sexuality, and everything else that has an impact on salary and treatment in the workplace.

On Politics

At last, we get to “women in politics.” In 1911, British women could be canvassers, speakers, and campaign organizers. But let’s not get carried away—they couldn’t be trusted to actually vote, let alone stand as political candidates themselves. Still, after all the advice on household management, what to wear, and how to correctly visit your neighbors, I was surprised that the final section of The Woman’s Book turned to the women’s suffrage movement. Now the men have lost interest, it seems to suggest, here’s what we really think.

There’s plenty of talk of servants and country houses throughout The Woman’s Book, so it’s no surprise that it wasn’t a book for all women: It was a book for privileged women. But I found it somewhat encouraging that one of its final comments is devoted to how the suffragist movement brought together women of all classes and politics, “the peeress and the laundry girl,” walking together in processions and fighting for what’s right. In particular, Jack talks about women’s desires to improve work and wages, so that work could be judged by its “true market value and not by the sex of the worker.” It’s a passionate take on why women want freer lives, and how their involvement in politics can create better circumstances for all of humanity.

In many ways, the same holds true today—and frustratingly, it feels like we’re still fighting for the same things. It also feels like we’re still fighting against the same things, too. I don’t know that a Woman’s Book of 2024 would pay quite so much attention to how to iron frills. But look at the pages of mainstream publications targeted at women and there’s an abundance of pieces on how to outfit prep, how to make a charcuterie board bigger than your actual house, and how to get a smoky lip. Aren’t we still being told how to exist? Isn’t this more of the same?

If instead of treating it as an endnote, there was a central focus on how to collectively push for progress for all of us, we might just be able to surpass all these objective measurements of how a woman should “be,” and instead tick the box of what we actually ought to know.

Courtesy of the author.

[post_title] => "Everything a Woman Ought to Know" [post_excerpt] => According to one book, both a lot and very little has changed in the last 100 years. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => guide-the-womans-book-1911-manual-history-sexism-class-suffrage-movement [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-09-13 19:27:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-09-13 19:27:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7125 [menu_order] => 49 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 15, 2024September 13, 2024

“Everything a Woman Ought to Know”

by Katie Dancey-Downs

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7088 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-08-01 08:20:26 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-08-01 08:20:26 [post_content] =>

A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community.

At the broad, gray steps of the entrance to the European Parliament in Brussels, a group of women circle around one in particular. Most are dressed in traditional Yazidi attire—long, white dresses with short lilac or black vests, and white headscarves—but the woman they’ve assembled around is dressed inconspicuously, her long, dark hair tied in a loose knot. Everybody knows who she is: Feleknas Uca, a long-time advocate for the rights of her Yazidi community. Looking at the women around her, she calls out their names one by one, handing each a badge. With these badges, the women will be able to enter the colossal building before them, where their voices are desperately needed inside. Uca has organized this gathering, a one-day conference, to demand justice for the Yazidi genocide, ten years ago this August.

"Yazidis need to be able to protect themselves,” she says.

Those who remember the Yazidi genocide, which started on August 3, 2014, likely recall the haunting footage of Iraqi and US helicopters throwing water and food down to the bone-dry, scorching hot mountain below, where Yazidi refugees had gathered in a panic. Down the hill, ISIS, the fundamentalist jihadist group that had quickly occupied large swaths of Iraq and Syria, had begun an ethnic cleansing of their people.

Mount Sinjar (or Shingal, in Kurdish) is the center of the historic homeland of the Yazidis, and was, at the time, their last hope for salvation. As some of the helicopters touched ground, they prioritized pulling women, children, and the elderly to safety. Those left behind on the mountain either succumbed to the heat, thirst, or exhaustion; the rest were brought across the border after Kurdish militias opened a corridor to Kurdish-controlled land in Syria.

The fate of those who never made it to the mountain would become clearer in the weeks and months thereafter. Thousands of men were instantly massacred by ISIS, and thousands of women and children were abducted. Girls and women were forced into ISIS “marriages,” sold on markets, and used as domestic and sex slaves, while boys became “cubs of the caliphate,” fighters-in-training. All were forcibly converted to Islam.

Ethnically, Yazidis are considered Kurdish, and their mother tongue is the eponymous language; although some in the Yazidi community consider it an ethnic identity of its own. Others contend all Kurds used to be Yazidis, until the emergence of Islam, when many Kurds converted. ISIS considered the Yazidis to be devil worshippers, as most adhere to a centuries-old pre-Christian and pre-Islamic faith.

Uca was visiting Germany when the genocide started to unfold, receiving the news in real time on the day the tragedy began. ISIS had been approaching, but the Kurdish peshmerga forces present in the Shingal region had promised to protect the Yazidis from harm. They withdrew just as ISIS began their attack.

“A call came from a man I knew who was there,” she says. “His sister wanted to kill herself because she was about to fall into ISIS’ hands. She had a weapon. We tried to talk to her but then I heard a shot. I will never forget that moment.”

The daughter of a Yazidi family that migrated to Germany in the 1970s, Uca was born in the north-central town of Celle, which has a large Yazidi community. In 1999, at age 22, she became the youngest-ever member of European Parliament (MEP) as a German representative of the Party for Democratic Socialism, and later for Die Linke (The Left), where she remained an MEP until 2009, when she didn’t seek re-election. When the genocide began, she had just recently moved from Germany to Turkey, where her family was originally from: The Yazidis are indigenous to Kurdistan, which geographically includes regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. She’d chosen to live in Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast region, and had become a candidate in the parliamentary elections for the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP. Founded in 2012, HDP is a leftist party rooted in the Kurdish political movement; their main objective is to democratize Turkey and give regions and communities the opportunity to govern themselves. In the June 2015 elections, Uca was elected MP and became the first Yazidi in Turkish parliament.

From the start of her time as an HDP MP, Uca was in a delicate position. While advocating for Kurds and for Yazidis specifically, the HDP claimed that the Turkish government had been aiding ISIS, and consequently held it co-responsible for the genocide—something the government vehemently denied. The HDP, including Uca, also supported the armed Kurdish groups that fought against ISIS, including those the Turkish government considered to be terrorists because of their adherence to the same leftist ideology as the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, which has been waging an armed struggle for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey since the 1980s. Because of this overlap, HDP MPs, like Uca, became victims of a government campaign that accused them of supporting terrorism.

Uca was undeterred by it. The author of this piece, herself based in Diyarbakır during those years, got to know Uca as a parliamentarian who was often found among her community, listening to their needs and trying to forge solutions for them in her capacity as MP. For example, many Yazidis who fled to Turkey to escape ISIS were left in refugee camps with tents that did not protect them during harsh winters and hot summers. They also lacked adequate medical care and were not receiving substantial education. As MP, Uca made attempts to increase the budget for the camps, and while she only had limited success, her presence and care endeared her to the community.

Feleknas Uca in 2008. (AP Photo/Christian Lutz)

Having witnessed the Yazidis’ struggles over the years while advocating for them at high levels of government, Uca has a profound understanding of her community’s needs, wants, and fears. Today, she believes what’s most important is ensuring they are able to return to their homeland. In the aftermath of the genocide, thousands of Yazidis left their home as refugees, resettling in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. While they may be physically safe in these places, Uca tells me, their displacement is still a continuation of the genocide.

“What ISIS wanted to do, is not only to kill and enslave the Yazidis, but also remove them from their ancestral lands. One of the problems we face now is that the community is still not able to return to Shingal because it remains too unsafe,” she says.

In Shingal, where the Iraqi army and Iran-backed militias are now stationed, the Yazidi self-defense force—the Shingal Resistance Units (YBŞ)—founded by the PKK in the weeks after August 3, 2014, is under pressure to be dismantled. Like the PKK, Turkey considers the YBŞ a terrorist group, and regularly bombs them, killing fighters; in addition to targeting local medical clinics, according to reports by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group. Consequently, Yazidis can’t always return to their homeland, even if they wish to do so. Uca believes that Europe and the US have a responsibility to step in.

“Many Western countries have recognized the Yazidi genocide, but they don’t take any action to assist the community in building a future again in Shingal,” she says. “They don’t visit the region, they don’t help rebuilding it, they don’t hold Turkey responsible for assisting ISIS then, and letting it attack Shingal now.”

Among her many grievances are the centers that were opened in several European countries—mostly in Germany—where Yazidi women who were rescued from ISIS could process their trauma. These same services remain unavailable in Shingal.

“I have always said that if we really want to help these women, we will have to build trauma centers in Shingal, so they can process their trauma and rebuild their future and live their culture and religion in their homeland, where they were born and raised,” Uca says. “But the therapy has been transferred abroad, and with that, the future of the Yazidis. While the community can only really survive at home.”

The continued plight of the Yazidis could cause Uca great despair, but she is adamant that there are also victories, large and small. She has heard countless stories of Yazidi women, in particular, overcoming horrific circumstances and fighting back. She was able to get a visa for one of these women, Hêza Shengalî, so that she could speak at the one-day conference in Brussels. Shengalî was taken captive by ISIS in 2014 and remained in their custody for a year. After she escaped, she joined the Şengal Women’s Units, or YJŞ—the armed women’s wing of the YBŞ—and requested to be sent to Syria to join the forces fighting ISIS there.

“For me, and for other Yazidi women who have joined the YBŞ, fighting back against ISIS is a way to heal,” Shengalî says.

As a commander, she contributed to their eventual victory in the city of Raqqa, which ISIS had deemed their “capital.” When Raqqa was liberated, many Yazidi women and girls were liberated, too. After returning to Shingal, Hêza was even a part of a small delegation that handed over a newly liberated young Yazidi woman back to her family.

In large part because of the YBŞ, despite the Yazidi community’s past gender conservatism, things have started to change in the last decade, including its expectations of women.

“Hêza is normative for what Yazidi women can accomplish,” Uca says. “In 2014, and after that, even 70-year-old women have taken up a weapon to defend themselves. The community has transformed itself.”

Of course, there is still a long way to go. In early 2018, after ISIS lost the last territory they occupied, the women and their children were locked up in camps in northeast Syria and guarded by Kurdish forces. Amongst them were Yazidi women who were once held captive by ISIS. They were (and are) afraid to reveal themselves as such because ISIS ideology is still prevalent amongst the prisoners there. For others, it’s because they’ve had children with ISIS members and are afraid to lose them, as the Yazidi community does not accept these children as legitimate.

Periodically, Yazidi women and girls have been discovered within the camps and rescued by the Kurdish armed forces, but currently, some 2700 remain missing, and are believed to still be in the camps or abroad with ISIS members who managed to flee to neighboring countries, including Turkey. Others may be dead, and their remains are unlikely to ever be found.

Thousands of boys and men remain missing, as well. In cooperation with the United Nations, mass graves in different locations in the Shingal region have been opened since early 2019. Some remains have been identified by Iraqi authorities in cooperation with the UN and have gone on to be reburied with dignity. However, many mass graves remain untouched, leaving families in anguish over the exact fate of their loved ones and unable to give them a proper burial or grave. Other boys may have died in battle as “cubs of the caliphate,” although occasionally, some are found in Turkey, staying with families who belonged to ISIS, who may have distanced themselves from their ideology or who may quietly still support it. Some Yazidi boys have also been reunited with their families in exchange for a ransom.

Having visited Shingal multiple times since the genocide, Uca has been present to witness some of these reunions. She’s also spent a lot of time talking to the women, men, girls, and boys who have been liberated.

“I remember one boy whose first question was: ‘How is Shingal? Is it liberated?’ I saw hope in his eyes. ‘Yes, it has been liberated,’” she says. “And I see that hope in the eyes of the liberated women, too. They have gone through so much, but their resilience is impressive. This is what makes me feel hopeful.”

Uca knows she still has much work to do. In 2018, she was re-elected to the Turkish parliament and visited Shingal with an HDP delegation after Turkey targeted a clinic with a drone, killing eight. She gave a speech about it in parliament, demanding answers from her fellow MPs—answers she didn’t get.

In last year’s general elections, Uca wasn’t on the ballot, due to the party’s two-term limit for all parliamentarians. The end of her mandate also meant the end of her parliamentary immunity, compelling her to leave Turkey instantly because state prosecutors had opened investigations against her for “propaganda for a terrorist organization,” as it had done to dozens of Kurdish MPs, many of whom have been imprisoned. She returned to Germany, and from there, continued her political work in Europe, including organizing conferences, undertaking diplomacy work in the EU, and networking and cooperating with a wide range of Yazidi, Kurdish, and other women’s groups. She’s still keen to solve her legal problems in Turkey, however, and is also planning a new journey to Shingal; it’s been a year since she was last able to visit. And while there is still much to resolve and to heal in the aftermath of what the Yazidis have endured, for Uca, hope is alive and ahead.

“You know what comes to mind when I think of hope? I remember just walking in Shingal and suddenly seeing a lilac flower. Shingal, too, will bloom again and be the hope of humanity,” she says. “Of course, I can do a lot of work in Europe, but my heart is in Shingal. Only when I am there, working in my community, I know that I am Feleknas.”

[post_title] => The Story of the Yazidi Genocide Isn't Over [post_excerpt] => A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => yazidi-genocide-isis-feleknas-uca-parliament-justice-kurdish-liberation [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-09-13 19:22:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-09-13 19:22:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7088 [menu_order] => 50 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 1, 2024September 13, 2024

The Story of the Yazidi Genocide Isn’t Over

by Fréderike Geerdink

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7098 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-07-30 06:57:58 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-07-30 06:57:58 [post_content] =>

Don't just touch grass. Befriend some.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

The first time a tree talked to me, it nearly knocked me over. I was walking in my neighborhood when I felt a pull toward a Chinese elm I’d seen countless times, and stopped to put my hand on its trunk. I closed my eyes. Instantly, everything that tree had ever felt, known, relished, and endured rushed through me. I saw flashes of images of the people and animals and plants that had lived and died there before us; at once flooded with energy and sense memories that predated the tree itself. When I opened my eyes, I was woozy.

If you had told me this story several years ago—that I’d one day believe I’d conversed with a tree—I would’ve laughed in your face. Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.

There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind.

It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.

I wasn’t always so isolated. Like all of us, I was born with an innate capacity for connection. As a kid, I remember desperately trying to save ants from the eager shoes of the other kids who delighted in stomping on them. I would cry as I tried to steer them to safety; feeling deeply for the ants in my body; each stomp chipping away at a greater whole I didn’t yet understand. As I got older, I’d feel this same connection to the squirrels searching for food in our yard, and the quahogs my family would dig up from the salt marsh to cook and eat. In high school I was swept away by transcendentalism and did my senior project on the benefits of being in nature. I knew there was something sacred going on there—that nature was sacred. But into my 20s, jaded and weighed down by the expectations of a certain kind of adulthood, I found myself communing with non-humans less and less.

The severing of this connection wasn’t conscious, but it wasn’t accidental, either. A capitalist, colonialist society relies on separation and hierarchy to maintain power. We’re indoctrinated with dualisms of human/animal, society/nature, us/them—all of which teach us to fear and loathe the “other.” We become beholden to violent state apparatuses under the guise of safety, and comfort at the expense of our neighbors. We learn to believe that our heartache is not a craving for community and reciprocity, but for more things to buy and other perceived measures of status and power; for the newest iPhone, or more followers. The cult of individualism continues to do its job of isolating us from one another at the expense of the whole, eroding our relationships to other humans and rendering relationships with non-humans almost unimaginable.

In 2020, we were offered a portal into a new world—one that slowed us down, showed us the flowers on our block, and recalled the visceral truth that what happens on another continent, even to those we’ll never meet, still changes us. For a lot of people, this spaciousness was also painful, allowing old wounds to surface and new versions of self to grow. In my corner of the universe, alongside the blooming jasmine and bottlebrush, I was blooming, too: confronting unearthed trauma in a process that scrubbed me clean and made me new. When I came back up from the underworld, I found myself attuned to another frequency. It must have been what Persephone’s first return felt like: I was vibrating on a cellular level with awareness of the animacy, importance, and interconnectedness of every leaf, root, rock, and worm around me.

Surrounded by divine love, I was eager to reciprocate, to let these new friends know I was interested in them, too. In introducing myself, I tried to learn the names of those I’d once passed without a thought. This meant holding up my phone between me and a tree to take photos for iNaturalist then looking at my screen to memorize the results. It didn’t take long to realize that this logocentric, colonized approach was actually impeding our relationship: I wasn’t spending meaningful time with my potential friends, I was acquiring information. I realized they probably didn’t even care what I called them, anyway. It’s not like they chose those names for themselves; we imposed them. As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes, “The divine has never seemed very worried about us getting [their] exact name right.” So neither would I.

In these early, experimental days, I also took to heart what the scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, says about speaking of “the living world as our relatives.” She offers the pronouns “ki” and “kin” as replacements for “it” when referring to plants and the like; with this as a guide, I settled on they/them/their. To me, this shift is an expression of the philosopher Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which recognizes someone’s individual subjecthood, as opposed to “I-It,” which reduces them to an object, an other. By practicing this basic respect, we begin to dismantle our imbalanced relationship to the world around us, instead entering a new one as equals.

After these shifts in consciousness, friendship came easily. Each time I stepped outside, I opened myself up to whoever was around, extending an invitation to engage. Sometimes I’d feel a tree or bird call for my attention and I’d meet them with curiosity and an offering of my heart. One morning it was a hummingbird, floating and feeding at the bottlebrush. Instead of glancing and moving on, I stopped and attuned all my energy to them, and they stopped to look at me, too, holding my gaze for probably five seconds but what felt like lifetimes. A few weeks ago, I sat with the eucalyptus tree up the hill behind my house. Our bodies touching, we soaked up the sun and I sensed a mutual ease and tenderness. On a recent hike through a gorge, I met granite and moss that wanted to tell me what they knew, and I returned their gifts with a gratitude that vibrated through me and sung out in a silent echo.

These friends and I didn’t share a spoken word, but we did share a mother tongue, and the more I practiced listening and speaking to them with body and spirit, the more fluent I became. In my efforts to communicate, I thought of Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,” in which a scientist wonders whether humans will ever understand plant language: “Let another century pass, and we may seem… laughable. ‘Do you realise,’ the phytolinguist will say…, ‘that they couldn't even read Eggplant?’” I was trying to learn.

We also don't need to fully understand one another to build radical affinities across scientific kingdoms. To survive ecocide and genocide; to imagine lives beyond a fascist, imperialist death cult; we have to liberate ourselves from dichotomy and practice interdependence with all of our neighbors. This looks like mutual aid, kinship, care, fluidity—wisdom that rings revolutionary against the values of neoliberal empire but has always been embedded in indigenous practices and political affiliations. Despite what colonial capitalism sells us, the only option is collective vitality. We either all survive together, or perish.

This is notably different from the (white) saviorism of mainstream environmental movements. It’s what Kimmerer calls reciprocity over sustainability; I consider it empathy over pity. I used to see the environment as a flat thing humans acted upon, something we extracted from and damaged and were thus morally obligated to save. I’d failed to consider that the environment, in all their agency, was also acting upon me—that, if anything, they were the ones doing the saving. (Insert tree bumper sticker: “Who rescued who?”) My belief that humans were a scourge upon the earth was rooted in shame, a state of being that prevents us from taking accountability and building connection. Plants helped me understand my value, both to them and to myself. The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose articulated this experience well:

“Westerners… find ourselves embarrassed at the thought that country might really be addressing us… I have from time to time encountered real discomfort around the idea that any nonhuman being really gives a darn about me and my projects, outside of the obvious contexts of, say, hunting—as predator and as prey. However, the corollary to the idea of nobody giving a darn would be that what I do doesn't matter, and that is clearly not true.”

It’s a reminder that it’s not all about us, but it’s also not not about us. My relationships with the Chinese elm on my block, and with the ocean, and with the crows that congregate in front of my house, are an antidote to toxic individualism and its shadow, loneliness. They’re a font of political power, a rooting into the past, and an orientation toward the future. Other-than-human entities showed me I was part of an ecosystem, already and always loved. Now, when I need community, I reach for the leaves of the pepper tree in the front yard. Sometimes I ask how they’re doing in English, but usually it’s a wordless greeting, an exchange of energy. We meet in reception and response and in affirmation of our shared aliveness. We both know neither of us could ever be lonely when surrounded by so much life.

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July 30, 2024September 16, 2025

Have You Made a Non-Human Friend Today?

by M.E. Savard

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