Why older women are dedicating their retirement to leaving a better world behind.
“I can’t get up!”
It was 5 a.m. when the dawn chorus was interrupted by a cry for help. An elderly woman had fallen while sneaking into a field with 25 other nanas, and the group rushed to her aid. “Are you alright?” one asked. They helped her stand up, brushing off her clothes and smoothing her hair. After ensuring she was fine to walk, the group pushed forward.
No nana could be left behind: These women were setting up an occupation.
It was a balmy August morning in Lancashire, a county in North West England known for its sweeping landscapes and greenery. But back in 2014, their idyllic community was facing an outside threat: Cuadrilla, an oil and gas giant and the only company in the United Kingdom with a license to frack, was about to commence shale gas exploration. If the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, went ahead, then the site beneath the nanas’ feet would soon become an industrial wasteland—and the county’s residents would be forced to live with the consequences, unless someone was able to stop it.
(Rory Payne)
The nanas clambered over fences, quickly putting up signs and wrangling tent poles. By 6 a.m., the first tent was up. The women sat on the ground, drinking tea and watching the sun rise above the field that would be their home for the next three weeks. Technically, they weren’t all grandmothers, but before long, this group of anti-fracking activists from Lancashire would be known as the Nanas, both at home and abroad. They’d regularly stage demonstrations, roadside tea parties, and eventually, even a protest outside Buckingham Palace.
And they wouldn’t be alone: In other communities being torn apart by fracking, older people around the world have also been taking the fight into their own hands, spending their golden years in protest. But what makes someone dedicate their later life to activism? To give up the dream of pottering around the garden, pushing grandchildren on swings and enjoying long vacations and their long-awaited retirement?
As it turns out, many of them felt they didn’t have a choice.
Becoming an Activist
In the weeks leading up to their field occupation, the UK Nanas meticulously planned their invasion. What would they wear? How would they get there? Who would bring tea and cake? On the big day, at 3 a.m., they secretly gathered in a hotel basement nearby. Those in charge of wardrobe revealed what would become the Nana uniform: yellow tabards with a graphic of the red rose of Lancaster, proclaiming “Frack Free Lancashire,” alongside matching yellow headscarves. Tina Rothery, now 61, looked on with pride. She was a recent convert to activism, and her role was public relations. Just before leaving the hotel, she hit send on the press release announcing the Nanas’ 21-day field occupation to the world—having no idea that their fight against injustice was about to hit headlines and dominate her life.
As the women adapted to living in a field and spending their nights under canvas, the local milkman began making morning deliveries. Neighbors arrived at the site to indulge their curiosity, bringing ice to help the Nanas keep their food from spoiling or, in some cases, Tina says, to vent their anger.
“Why would you do this? It’s private land,” some of them would ask. But Tina was ready.
“Here’s the thing: You get us, 26 women with a bunch of tents and tent pegs—that’s bad, yeh?” she'd reply. “Or, you get at least a decade of drill rigs, and man camps, and all that goes on, and the noise, and the pollution, the threat to your water and all of that. These are your choices.”
“We’re here to let you know you do have a choice,” she’d continue. “You can stand up, and you can object.”
The UK Nanas. (Rory Payne)
Besides a few naysayers, though, Tina says the protest was relatively peaceful. She recalls the police weren’t too bothered by the presence of 26 older women, and largely left them alone. She says the police were, however, very concerned about the dozens of activists who soon descended on the field next door in support of them. These new protestors were from a group called Reclaim the Power, and they were organized. They brought solar panels, wind turbines, and compost toilets. On the final day of the Nanas’ occupation, they also led a pier-to-pier march, decked out in classic Nana-yellow with placards held high.
That same day, after three weeks of sleeping under canvas, soaking up activism knowledge from Reclaim the Power, and sharing their fears with a growing anti-fracking community, the Nanas took down their tents and searched the field to make sure they’d left nothing behind. They stuck a note on the farmer’s house, whose property they’d been occupying, and notified the police that they’d left. Despite nearly a month sleeping on the scratchy ground in makeshift beds, they felt stronger than ever.
The next day, they were sued by Cuadrilla. The legal papers said they were being fined thousands of pounds for the "eviction,” despite the fact they’d left of their own accord and had informed the landowner, press, and police. One of the Nanas would need to put their name forward and take on the cost. Though she couldn’t afford the fine, Tina stepped forward.
“You can’t get blood from a stone,” she says.
Still, they tried. Cuadrilla embroiled Tina in a legal battle for two years, first serving her the court papers at the Buckingham Palace protest. They wanted more than £55,000 (over $78,000) in legal fees and threatened her with a stint in prison if she didn’t pay up. After Tina finally provided evidence that she couldn’t pay the fees, the case was eventually dropped.
Tina Rothery. (Rory Payne)
Before getting involved with the Nanas, Tina had little experience in activism. She’d recently spent a year and a half caring for her sick mother, staying by her bedside and reminiscing about when they’d globe-trotted from London to Australia to Hong Kong together. This powerful woman, once a leading business executive, was dying, and there was nothing Tina could do. The feeling of helplessness consumed her. She couldn’t help her mother, and she couldn’t change the state of the world beyond her, which at the time, felt like it was spiraling towards further and further injustice. Both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street dominated the news. She watched as uprisings against ruling parties unfolded, and looking to regain some semblance of control, Tina finally decided to join Occupy London in 2011, ending up as a de facto spokesperson.
By the time she received a leaflet on Cuadrilla’s fracking plans from a local residents' action group, Tina had zeroed in on how best to fight the whole system: You had to start closer to home. Until now she’d been trying to get to what she calls the “belly of the beast,” but this new awareness of fracking on her doorstep shifted her mindset—this single issue told the whole story of a broken system. The way she saw it, fracking was one very specific example of how the government was taking risks with people’s lives and affecting individual communities. The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore. Instead of returning to London to join more protests aimed at the government and the wider system, Tina remained in Lancashire to fight Cuadrilla.
She was right about fracking’s impact on her community. In 2019, researchers Anna Szolucha from the University of Bergen, Norway and Damien Short from the University of London carried out a study published by research journal Geoforum to examine how people’s lives were affected during the fracking planning and approval process in Lancashire—and the results were harrowing. They called what they found a collective trauma: a slow-burn shock that ripped apart social lives and damaged the feeling of community.
"You can stand up, and you can object."
“Some residents experienced severe stress and anxiety. Many reported that they lost trust in the police and democracy,” Szolucha says. Residents felt a sense of loss, fear, betrayal, guilt, and anger as the fracking consultation went through its various stages. Notably, Fylde, the area of Lancashire where Cuadrilla planned to drill, has a high population of older people. Residents feared their once quiet country lives would change overnight, punctuated by trucks, drills, and an influx of workmen. The people of Lancashire objected strongly to this, and the County Council voted against moving forward with the fracking. But the Secretary of State overrode their decision, sweeping aside resident wishes, and approved the work. Residents felt betrayed and powerless.
They mounted a legal fight, but even as the case made its way through the courts, Cuadrilla continued preparing the worksite. The locals couldn’t stay silent. They did everything they could to delay the drilling, from slowing down the trucks to showing up to the site every day. Although it wasn’t a specific part of their research, Szolucha says she noticed older campaigners seemed more traumatized than their younger counterparts.
“Older campaigners, many of whom used to be Conservative voters or simply had a pretty Conservative outlook, were often enraged or in tears when they spoke to me about how disappointed they were with their political representatives and the police, who, in their eyes, allowed fracking to happen,” she says.
(Rory Payne.)
A Big Fight in a Small Town
The residents in Fylde aren't the only ones to have experienced this collective trauma, although not every town has been so unanimously against it. In Gloucester, Australia, when energy companies AGL and Halliburton began “consulting” with the locals about fracking for coal seam gas in 2009, it splintered the community—and made enemies out of neighbors.
“Don’t come near my place,” one woman in her eighties yelled at Dominique Jacobs and her foster children during a protest. “I’m going to fucking shoot ya!”
Dominique is a 59-year-old resident of Gloucester, and for nearly a decade, she’s dedicated herself to the fight against fracking—something not everyone agrees with. Sometimes, this means being on the receiving end of her neighbors’ threats during a peaceful demonstration through the town center. She brushes off these encounters with a laugh often bubbling under her voice. But in a town where so few people speak out against fracking, she feels like a pariah. It’s a small town, a farming community of around 3,000 residents. Everyone knows everyone’s business—and many don’t like hers. Even now, there are people her husband has worked with for 15 years who won’t speak to her because of her anti-fracking activism. There are shops she doesn’t go into. People were banking on the jobs fracking had been promising, and as they saw it, people like Dominique were standing in the way. But Dominique says the fracking companies don’t actually care about the community, and that part of why she became such a vocal activist against them was to prove it.
Dominique Jacobs. (Derek Henderson)
“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them,” she says.
Where Tina discovered activism in her later years, Dominique’s inner activist had been bubbling under the surface for most of her life. In her 20s, she was desperate to join the Franklin River blockade against a proposed dam, but couldn’t afford the travel expenses to get there. Instead, she and her husband spent the following years taking part in environmental campaigns and learning about climate change, but as soon as they became parents, their activism took a back seat. Three decades disappeared. Then, the protests appeared on her doorstep, and Dominique couldn’t sit back and watch any longer.
At first, Dominique didn’t know much about fracking. When it first arrived in Gloucester, she had been working in a preschool, and she recalls one of the parents who worked for the energy company trying to sell her on the benefits of allowing fracking in their town. There would be more job opportunities, for starters, they said. At the time, Dominique didn’t know any better, so she believed what they’d told her.
But soon, the big machinery arrived, care of Australian energy company AGL, drilling four wells in their once quiet town after initially proposing 110. In 2011, a group of local residents blockaded the corner of a dairy farm to prevent four more. Dominique started joining the protestors for a few hours at a time. The work slowed down, and as everyone awaited the results of a court challenge, the frackers eventually disappeared. By 2014, though, they’d returned.
“By then, we were really up to speed. We knew exactly what it was all about by then,” Dominique says. The local activists were no longer naive. They had a body of knowledge about what would happen to the landscape, the environment, and the people if the fracking were allowed to continue.
In October 2014, people gathered on the main road of Gloucester in a peaceful protest, populating the area with signs raising awareness about the negative impacts of fracking, like the contamination of land and water. As the small group of anti-fracking locals got into the swing of their protest, Dominique’s eye caught two yellow-clad women sitting on folding chairs, knitting needles clicking away. Fascinated, she walked over. The women were the Knitting Nannas Against Gas—a separate group from the UK Nanas, with similar motivations, tactics, and uniforms (but a slightly different spelling to their name). They were using what they called “gentle activism” to peacefully protest fracking.
If she wanted to join them, they told her, she should put on some yellow and get to knitting. So she did.
The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)
Dominique started spending three days a week manning a peaceful vigil in a little rotunda with a few other members of the community, but soon, knitting didn’t feel like enough: They wanted volunteers for arrestable actions. Dominique was fearful. She was a foster parent, and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that and lose her children. She chose to stick to the peaceful vigil, while others in the group went down to the gates of the fracking site and locked themselves onto it—a tried and true way to kick up a fuss. Dominique watched on as police arrested around 30 people.
Then, something happened that transformed Dominique from gentle activist to risk-taker; an experience that opened her eyes to the environmental devastation fracking could soon cause in her community. In January 2015, she and her family took a trip to Tara, Queensland, where fracking was much more developed than in Gloucester—and she was horrified.
“There was really no life anywhere,” she says of the ravaged areas she drove through. She describes two or three kilometers of road lined by huge ponds holding fracking wastewater. Forests were blocked off by metal fences. “Private property. No trespassing,” signs were plastered on the gates. Trailers, rigs, and grey infrastructure dotted the landscape. She was surprised by how industrialized it had become. Less than a decade earlier, it had been a farming community. Now, it was a wasteland.
“They just leave this broken wreck of a place behind them."
Driving through Tara, Dominique thought of the image the fracking company had sold the people of Gloucester. A little well, some cows grazing out on a green field, perhaps, and everyone enjoying a peaceful life, with no discernible difference to their community.
“When you go up there to Queensland, you go, ‘Oh my god. We've got no idea,’” Dominique says.
What she saw in Queensland was bleak, and a stark contrast to the traditional portrayal of Australia, one of sprawling landscapes teeming with biodiversity. But what happened in Queensland was far from unusual. Travel to Oklahoma, where fracking first began, and you’ll find a similar picture. Drills, industrialization, and wastewater ponds abound. Phillips 66, which used to be a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips but split in 2012, fracks the land there, and has become one of the largest energy exploration companies in the world. They produce millions of barrels of oil a day and are estimated to be worth around $50 billion—and some of its residents are furious about it.
Fracking and the Ponca Tribe
Environmental ambassador Casey Camp-Horinek has lived in Ponca City her whole life. She’s an Elder and Hereditary Drumkeeper of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, and has recently turned 74.
When hundreds of people were arrested at Standing Rock in 2016, Casey was there. The Ponca people once lived further along the Missouri River, in a different region, and on that particular day, Casey was at a Tribal Historic Preservation Office meeting around 20 miles away. Mid-prayer, they got news that militarized police were heading to Standing Rock. They were going to forcefully evacuate the people at Treaty Camp who were standing up against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)
Casey and the other Elders from the meeting arrived as observers, and found hundreds of people peacefully praying. Over the hill and across the road, militarized police lined up shoulder to shoulder, advancing. As they came closer, Casey stood in prayer with the other Elders. Her son was in a nearby prayer circle of around 50 people. Others were singing, drumming, or in ceremony. The peace was soon shattered. Armored trucks and tasers invaded the scene; peaceful protestors were blinded with pepper spray as they prayed. A security helicopter thundered overhead. Sound cannons erupted.
“It was a scene from a horror movie,” Casey says. She speaks slowly and deliberately, frequently pausing to think. “It was like what happened to us all throughout history, going through it again.”
The police reached the Elders. Casey was pulled down and her hands zip tied behind her back. Her son called out, asking them to at least leave the Elders alone. That day, 142 people were arrested by armed police in riot gear, numbers written on the detainees’ arms. Casey was Standing Rock 138. She had to watch as her son was beaten and dragged away, unsure of when she would see him again.
In the cells, tear gas hung on their clothes. Dozens of women were bundled into what Casey describes as dog cages.
“We sang prayer songs and victory songs, and we celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery,” Casey says.
In many ways, it was nothing new. Casey’s stand against fracking and the extractive industries is inseparable from the disastrous consequences of colonialism that the Ponca Nation has suffered: the forced removal to Oklahoma from northeastern Nebraska, the children harmed at the boarding schools they were made to attend. There’s no short answer, she says, to explain how she got to where she is today.
“I guess one has to begin with the fact that I'm a daughter, and a granddaughter, and a great-granddaughter, and a survivor of a holocaust of when the Europeans came to these shores,” she says, speaking in her calm, grandmotherly tone. While Tina was new to environmentalism, and Dominique had spent decades as an activist in waiting, the struggle forced on Casey encompassed not only her whole life, but generations before her.
"We celebrated with each woman who was shoved into the cage with us and honored her for her bravery."
Casey uses strong words to describe what has been done to the Ponca Nation. She calls it a genocide. Nearly a third of the Ponca Tribe died due to their forced removal in the late 1800s. This history has been passed down through generations using oral traditions, which is how she continues to pass them on today. Many of the abuses she details have been well documented, ranging from colonizers gifting Indigenous people blankets laced with smallpox, to countless treaties made and broken, and the Ponca Nation’s 1.5 million acres being reduced to just a small township in Nebraska.
When the Ponca people were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, Casey’s grandparents were only around five or six years old. Their tribe was made to walk hundreds of miles, and many lives were lost along the way.
“At that time, Oklahoma was called Indian Territory. And it was to be the dumping grounds, the killing grounds, of all Native Americans,” Casey says. The Ponca people reached Oklahoma without their seeds and hunting instruments and were newly vulnerable to foreign diseases. Many of those who survived the journey did not survive the new territory.
And then, in 1911, the extractive industries arrived on Ponca land, looking for oil. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency designed to manage relationships between the government and Indigenous communities, made decisions about their land without their consent. She says the extractive industries created “killing fields.”
Casey Camp-Horinek. (Ryan Red Corn)
As it was for Dominique’s community in Gloucester, fracking was presented to Indigenous communities with a positive spin. Today, energy giant Phillips 66 describes itself as “engaging with our communities in an environmentally just way.” A sustainability web page says that they are committed to “providing energy today with an eye on tomorrow,” and that they have the highest levels of responsibility and ethics. Their 2023 sustainability report makes bold claims of supporting biodiversity and restoring park land, and even has a section on connecting with Indigenous peoples “to build meaningful relationships, honoring them and their connection to the land in the regions where we do business.” The front cover of the report shows a sprawling refinery against a blue sky, with a solitary bird soaring overhead, assessing its industrial habitat.
But once the companies arrived, a different reality emerged.
Casey had heard many sustainable claims like these before learning the truth about how water is used in the fracking process. To start, hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water are injected into the earth, per well. The pressurized water, along with chemicals and sand, break open cracks below the surface and release gas. The unusable wastewater is then held in tanks, laced with fracking chemicals like hydrochloric acid, methanol, and petroleum distillates. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report shows this toxic cocktail can leak into drinking supplies from unlined pits or spills, or even be injected directly into groundwater resources. Across a six year period ending in 2012, there were 151 spills in 11 states, according to the EPA’s analysis. They don’t have enough data to definitively say how much this is happening on a national level.
In the US, an average of over 3 million gallons of water were used per well between 2005 and 2015 and at least 239 billion gallons have been used across the US since 2005. This is according to a report from Environment America Research & Policy Center, an organization which researches and educates about environmental issues. At this scale, the potential harm is monumental: A report published in Nature Communications shows that fracking can increase radiation levels by as much as 40% over the background level, putting those living within about 12 miles of fracking sites at increased health risk. Casey says she has seen countless cancer cases in Ponca families, and that many children have developed breathing difficulties since fracking began in Oklahoma. Similar symptoms have been seen elsewhere, as well, with researchers at the Yale School of Public Health finding carcinogens from fracking could be contaminating air and water, increasing the risk of childhood leukemia. The Center for Environmental Health has also warned of how pollutants from fracking might impact children’s respiratory health.
“They don't tell you that it's creating radiation that they're going to dump into your yard,” Casey says.
“We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide,” Casey says.
But however hopeless it might seem, Casey refuses to give up on fighting for this planet and its inhabitants. She is a part of nature, too, and that’s why she keeps pushing back.
"We are dying. We are being killed. We are suffering environmental genocide."
She’s not the only one fighting back in North America. Jesse Cardinal, Executive Director of Keepers of the Water, a group of Indigenous communities and environmental groups working together to protect nature, works with Elders responding to extractive industries across the Arctic Ocean Drainage Basin.
“The thing with the Elders is they remember a life where you can drink water without it having to be treated; they remember drinking straight from the streams; they have lived that life,” she says. They have seen the increase in sickness, mental health issues, and loss of culture, both since colonization and during this current period of extraction. Many Indigenous communities across North America are surrounded by lakes, streams, and creeks, but they are buying bottled water: We’re living in a time now, she adds, where our children don’t know that you can drink pure water.
“The Elders are amazing because having seen all this and lived through all this, they're still the voice of reason, and they're telling people what needs to be done,” Cardinal, who is from the Kikino Métis Settlement in Canada, says. She explains how they attend the rallies, go to meetings, and participate in workshops. “They know right from wrong,” she continues. “They also know that their time is going to end soon, and they don't want to leave this behind for future generations. They're so desperately trying to make change where they can before they leave this place.”
This sentiment seems to be a universal one for fracking’s elder protestors, whether in North America or elsewhere: They’ve lived the past, and many feel they have no choice but to protect the future. The only difference is in how they choose to do it.
With a key role in the UK Nanas, Tina tries to be the voice of reason and to speak up about what needs to happen to stop fracking. She leads demonstrations and raises her voice until she can’t be ignored—but does so in a way that welcomes others to join: She uses gentle protest.
The Craft of Gentle Activism
During the demonstrations in Fylde, Lancashire, the UK Nanas would meet at the community hub every Wednesday around 9:30 a.m., all dressed in white. Together, they would walk up the hill, arrive at the gates of the fracking site, and form a long line. They would then stand in silence for fifteen minutes in what they termed the “Call for Calm.” It was a moment of peace between the police and activists: The women tied ribbons to the gate, singing groups joined, and then they broke into a choreographed dance. People brought stews, quiches, vegan chocolate fudge cake. Once, actor Emma Thompson even made an appearance.
(Rory Payne)
To help bolster their efforts during this period, Tina heavily utilized social media, where she regularly live streamed the daily lives of the Nanas and their demonstrations. Across roughly 1,000 days between 2014 and 2019, Tina shared livestream after livestream on her Facebook page, where she cracked jokes, argued with police, captured people dancing and venting, and fumbled with the technicalities of filming in a beautifully human way. Most importantly to Tina, anyone could easily watch these videos and write comments in real time—wherever and whoever they were.
“I want anyone watching to think, ‘I could do that.’ So if you're eighty, and you're sat at home, I want you to feel it's accessible,” Tina says.
While the UK Nanas relied heavily on social media, in Australia, the Knitting Nannas have so far utilized a more unusual approach to their gentle activism: They play on people’s assumptions about sweet old ladies and use it to their advantage. They turn up to work sites, politicians’ offices, and anywhere else where a demonstration is needed, and they knit. While police officers might assume the Nannas are harmless, it can be a split second before they’re caught off guard and an elderly woman has chained herself to a fence.
In Oklahoma, Casey has a different approach to spearheading change: She is using legal frameworks to her advantage. Although the Ponca Nation passed a moratorium on any future fracking on their land, Casey says this was ignored, and fracking continues to this day. She grew frustrated. Then, she learned about the Rights of Nature.
At first, Casey was skeptical. She was at a meeting of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, where around 100 women from across the world spoke and presented solutions to various environmental issues. It was the co-founder of Movement Rights, Shannon Biggs, who introduced her to the Rights of Nature: a legal framework that recognizes that ecosystems have the right to exist, in the same way that humans do. Within this law, nature is no longer treated as property, and communities could stand up in court and fight for the rights of ecosystems.
"We're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself."
Casey was reminded of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. At the time of its introduction, her brother had scoffed and said, “If religion were truly free, why would they need to put a law around it?” She felt the same way about the Rights of Nature. But over time, as Casey talked to Shannon more, she began to see its potential. With the Ponca’s ability to create their own laws within their tribal jurisdiction, it could be a form of protection.
At the time, Casey was on the tribal council. She created a resolution, the Immutable Ponca Rights of Nature, and it became law in their court—the first time ever that an Indigenous community had recognized the Rights of Nature in tribal law. But Casey describes it as an old concept that’s just new on paper.
“This land is here forever. This water is here forever. These winds that blow are forever. You cannot eat, drink, or breathe that paper money or that plastic money. So the only way to go forward is for all of us, all human beings, to get on board and become those water protectors and land defenders. Because again, we're not protecting nature—we are nature, protecting itself,” she says.
This approach to activism is a different path from the ones Tina and Dominique have chosen. While their activism is about creating impactful moments and disrupting the system, Casey’s is about finding and implementing solutions—and loopholes. But for all of them, it’s ultimately about protection. When fracking threatens the natural world, these women have felt they have no choice but to be its protector.
The Switch
In a research paper on what they term “Nannagogy,” Larraine Larri and Hilary Whitehouse set out to discover what motivates older women to step out of their comfort zone to fight for the planet they will soon leave behind.
“What we found were women who had been marginalized due to age and gender, who were determined to be productive and creative social change agents taking action for a low-carbon future. Our data show many of these women had never done anything like this before,” they wrote.
When it comes to the specifics of that activism, Larri and Whitehouse refer to the Knitting Nannas’ activities as “Craftivism,” a term originally coined in 2003 by crafter and activist Betsy Greer, the “godmother of Craftivism.” In another paper, Larri writes, “In the case of the Nannas, Craftivism emboldens and empowers older women to challenge gender and age-related stereotypes to become vibrant and central actors in the broader social movement.”
The Knitting Nannas. (Derek Henderson)
But are gentle actions enough? Tina says the UK Nanas all had moments where they “switched,” where they decided that they were going to become more defiant. A lot of these women, she says, grew up in an era where they had to be obedient to their husbands, and during their activism, they had this moment of realization: Enough is enough.
Tina’s moment came in 2018, when she decided to take part in her first arrestable action. Up until that point, in all of their demonstrations, Tina had never technically done anything illegal. But as anti-fracking efforts started ramping up, eventually, she was asked to take part in a lock-on, where she would physically attach herself to a static object and block the gates to the fracking site in Lancashire. This would put more pressure on Cuadrilla. It would also break the law: Jail time would be imminent for anyone blocking the fracking site.
“I had always said no because I still want to set the example that you don't have to break the law to win,” she says.
Still, she thought, what if it made all the difference? If Tina was going to do a lock-on, it was now or never. With an upcoming injunction that would prevent trespassing on the exploration site, she was running out of time. So, she and her niece both said yes. The demonstration was called the Caravan of Love, and took months of planning. A group known as The Cooks invented devices for the protestors to lock onto, using hard to cut materials like cement and elevator cable. Lock-ons often end with police cutting through similar contraptions, power tools whirring close to activists’ arms. They were hoping that wouldn’t happen by creating something too dangerous for the attempt—not that this had stopped police before.
Tina remembers hiding up at the camp near the fracking site gates on the day of the demonstration, trying to keep away from the glare of security.
The fight had come to her, and it was impossible to ignore.
“We knew that at just after 2 a.m., someone was going to dump a whopping great caravan in the middle of the entranceway,” she says. The caravan concealed six men who were each locked onto a large household appliance, and once in place, would drop a huge cement foot from inside. The trailer was going nowhere. Its arrival was their cue. Two women ran up and thrust their arms into the vehicle, clipping themselves onto the men inside. Another pair locked themselves onto one side of the trailer together, and then, on the other side, Tina and her niece reached their arms through either end of a torpedo-shaped lock-on device with “love to my mum” written on it. They each clipped themselves onto a hook inside.
Tina stayed like that for 21 hours wearing incontinence pads and battling the discomfort of the outdoors. Eventually, she felt she couldn’t breathe, and the activists hatched a plan to help her escape. First, they’d distract the police, who were watching close by. Next, they’d make the switch.
“When you’re ready,” one of the other activists said.
“Quick, quick, I need some help with my pad,” Tina called out, doing her best to pretend that she really did need help, while the Nana who was attending to their personal care rushed to her “aid.”
This made the policeman standing nearby so uncomfortable, she says, that he walked off. Two other activists ducked under the tarpaulin covering Tina and her niece’s connected arms, taking their place as the two women snuck out. Tina stood up and tried to casually walk away from the scene. She was, of course, immediately arrested.
While Tina had been reluctant to do anything illegal in her anti-fracking efforts, however, after what she’d witnessed in Queensland, Dominique had been ready. Only a couple of years after becoming a Knitting Nanna, she traveled to the town of Pilliga in New South Wales, roughly 250 miles away from her home, to join their local fight against fracking—and jumped at the chance to escalate her actions.
“You kind of get to the point where you've done everything you possibly can do,” Dominique says. “What is there left to do except that? You've written so many letters, you've signed petitions, you've talked to your politicians, and they just leave you with no options. It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something.”
(Derek Henderson)
Early in the morning one January day in 2016, with yellow parasols in hand to defend against the sweltering heat, Dominique and two other Nannas snuck up to the wire gates outside the fracking site, unfolded their chairs, and looped bike chains around their necks, attaching the opposite ends to the gate. Dominique settled into the lock-on and got out her knitting. Each Nanna had a buddy to support her, and eventually other Nannas arrived, throwing out tablecloths and setting up a high tea.
The police eventually ordered the buddies to leave, and tried to persuade the Nannas to do the same, Dominique recalls, telling them they’d made their point.
The Nannas didn’t budge. They knew they were likely to get arrested, but they weren’t going to give in.
The police got out the bolt cutters. They gave the Nannas one more chance to leave, and when they refused, each Nanna was arrested. They walked themselves to the police van. At the station, they weren’t put into cells but sat in the main office while their papers were processed, still wearing the straw hats that had protected them from the sun. When they finally left, it was to the sound of cheers as all the other Nannas lined the path in a guard of honor.
Dominique makes light of the situation now, but makes it clear that it was a desperate measure. They were out of options. Fracking was still happening, and gentle protest wasn’t making a big enough impact. Like Tina, she felt the same mounting pressure to force someone to listen.
"It's kind of empowering that you've finally been able to do something that has actually stopped something."
But for both women, that risk had been a choice—while for others, like Casey, even quiet protest was enough to be considered an offense. When she was arrested at Standing Rock, it wasn’t for something she'd chosen; it wasn’t for a moment of defiance. She was arrested while praying, arrested in spite of her peaceful presence, arrested in spite of the fact she was participating in the exact same vein of quiet protest that Tina and Dominique and countless other nanas around the world had participated in without punishment.
“I applaud the bravery of anyone who chooses to do nonviolent, direct actions. If that involves chaining themselves to equipment, I applaud that,” Casey says, making a particular point that she’s behind those other nanas in their actions. “I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary.”
In her younger years, Casey took part in similar actions that she describes as “pushing the envelope.” But now, as an Elder, her activism looks different. As an Indigenous woman, putting herself in the way of police would come at a higher price for Casey than it would for white activists.
“It always has,” she says. “I don’t see that as a changing trend.” Indigenous people have the second highest incarceration rate of any racial group in the United States. Casey says that if she drives her car to town with tribal tags on it, she knows she’s more likely to get stopped than if she had an Oklahoma tag.
“Yes, racism is alive. And Indigenous men and women on the front line are flagged by racist laws that are being put in place in places like Oklahoma, South Dakota, and many other places where there's large Indigenous populations,” she says. Specifically, Casey is, in part, referring to a law where anyone protesting against fossil fuels can face $100,000 fines or 10 years in prison. In stark contrast, both Tina and Dominique’s cases were eventually dropped, both still have clean criminal records, and both were treated with respect, even while getting arrested. Casey was not.
Something else happened for both Tina and Dominique and their local communities, too: Eventually, the fracking stopped. The same cannot be said for Casey and the Ponca Nation.
Gloucester. (Derek Henderson)
A Fight That’s Never Won
In summer 2019, people in Lancashire felt their homes shaken by tremors measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale. They were the UK’s largest fracking-related earthquakes to date. That November, the government halted procedures following a damning safety report that concluded there was no way to predict the probability or magnitude of future earthquakes. It finally felt like the fight was over—but Tina isn’t convinced.
“It's only a moratorium, and all we did was keep them at bay until we had enough seismic events and time to diminish their resources for it to impact them,” she says. Today, Tina stays vigilant because she still feels a responsibility to make the most of her time. “I feel like I got here really late, and so I've got a lot to do before I go,” she adds.
There are certainly still people in government who aren’t on the Nanas’ side: In the fall of 2022, during her short stint as UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss promised to lift the UK’s ban on fracking. While just a few weeks later, the new Prime Minster Rishi Sunak reversed the decision, it was definitive proof the fight is far from finished in the UK.
Meanwhile, in Australia, less than a month after Dominique’s lock-on in Pilliga, she was at home when the phone rang: The fracking in Gloucester was over. The energy company AGL was withdrawing, citing disappointing production volumes. It was so sudden and unexpected that she could barely believe it. She remembers feeling euphoric. The activists all hurried into town, gathered in the street, and popped bottles of champagne.
“No one could wipe the smiles off their faces. It was so beautiful,” she says. It was a small group of people from a small town who had fought something bigger. She says a lot of people called it the mouse that roared. But not every battle has been won.
"I feel as if it’s time for everyone to take a stand in whatever form is necessary."
In Oklahoma, fracking continues.
“We have so many societal ills caused by these colonists that it is just shameful. And that's not on us. I will not allow my people to ever feel guilt,” Casey says.
She continues to speak about solutions to environmental destruction and the Rights of Nature. She fights fracking because she has not been given any other choice. As of 2020, Oklahoma was the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the US. There are 43,232 wells in the state, according to US Energy Information Administration data from 2019. The number of rigs is falling, but slowly; and earlier in 2021, a natural gas pipeline exploded in northwestern Oklahoma. But Casey is not giving up the fight.
None of them are. For Tina, Dominique, and Casey, their work will never truly be over, even if the battles in their hometowns have been won—or will be. For all three women and the hundreds of others fighting fracking, there will always be another energy company arriving, another community being ignored, another generation facing a threat. They persist because they feel they must, because they want to leave a better world behind. They fight because they feel you must do everything you can to stop injustice, even if you might not see the change in your own lifetime.
Which is why Tina has stayed so vigilant, even four years after the last work truck left Lancashire. It’s why Casey still leads prayer walks, taking her strong and peaceful demeanor directly to Phillips 66 refineries across Oklahoma. And it’s why every couple of weeks, you’ll find Dominique stationed outside the Federal Politician’s Office in New South Wales, Australia. Fracking in Gloucester might be over, but the drills are still in the ground in much of the country, and for as long as they are, she will be there—dressed in her yellow clothes, forcing the government to listen, and knitting.
(Rory Payne)
Photography by Rory Payne, Derek Henderson, and Ryan Red Corn. Additional editing by Mariana Heredia. Fact checking by Tadhg Stevens.
[post_title] => Meet the Anti-Fracking Nanas
[post_excerpt] => Why older women are dedicating their retirement to leaving a better world behind.
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J.K. Rowling could have died a hero, but will instead be remembered by millions of her most ardent fans as a villain.
At first, it seemed subtle enough: Rowling would “like” tweets that framed trans women as men, toeing the line of support for transphobic rhetoric. Then, in 2019, she shifted from passive implied support to active commentary. She tested the waters by voicing support for Maya Forstater, the plaintiff in a UK employment lawsuit claiming she had been discriminated against for “gender-critical” tweets. On her website, best known for its charming Harry Potter-related Easter eggs, Rowling published a nearly 3,700 word essay decrying trans activism. She has even gone so far as to compare her opponents to Death Eaters, a Nazi-esque terrorist organization in the Harry Potter universe. Today, the author’s brand is practically unrecognizable to many longtime fans; if you emerged from a coma you entered in 1997, you might look at Rowling’s Twitter and assume that policing trans lives was her day job.
As one of the leaders of Fandom Forward (formerly The Harry Potter Alliance), an international nonprofit that helps Harry Potter fans and members of other fan communities become real-life heroes through activism, I had a front row seat to Rowling’s shocking transformation. I wasn’t just angry; I was heartbroken, especially since so many of my friends and collaborators in the Harry Potter fandom are trans. Having grown up in the Catholic school system, where people simply didn’t come out until adulthood, many of the first openly trans people I ever met were people I knew through this fan community.
Whether she accepts it or not, J.K. Rowling is fighting to destroy a safe haven that she helped create. She isn’t just collecting royalty checks or rolling around in champagne: She is using the power of storytelling to enact significant political and cultural outcomes for trans people who are merely trying to live freely, without the threat of violence or death.
Fortunately, fans who support trans rights are doing the same thing. I am one of them. As a child, pop culture was the lens through which I understood the world and myself. I didn’t just consume stories. I devoured them, and made them my own. I was born in the early ’90s, and grew up with the Hogwarts trio: The night in 2001 that my grandmother and aunt took me to see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, then set me up with a copy of the book, changed my life forever. I spent countless hours imagining myself at Hogwarts, fighting alongside my favorite characters. Would I be great at Quidditch like Harry and Ron? An intellectual like Hermione? Great with magical creatures like Hagrid? The ability for readers to place themselves in this magical universe and learn something about themselves in the process is part of why the story has endured for so long.
Like many children of my generation, I also understood the Harry Potter universe not as an escape from reality, but an invitation to tackle the world’s injustices. After all, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger were never passive bystanders. Even at age 11, they stepped up to fight evil, often without the support or knowledge of the adults around them.
Today, I am part of a community of fans using the lessons we learned from Harry Potter to combat a rising tide of transphobic violence in the U.S. and U.K. The fandom’s response to Rowling's comments has been swift and impactful, creating a path forward that challenges Rowling’s ideas and fosters trans acceptance, all while offering options beyond a mere boycott. The Gayly Prophet, a Harry Potter podcast with a queer and trans lens, created a guide to firing J.K. Rowling that features countless suggestions for engaging with the franchise ethically, and even supporting trans rights through the purchase of fan-made merchandise. Fandom Forward’s Protego Toolkit provides resources and actions fans can take to lobby against anti-trans legislation, attend protests, volunteer for trans rights organizations, and make community spaces trans-friendly. A consortium of fan organizations called HP Fans Against Transphobia has collected thousands of signatures petitioning HBO against further enriching Rowling through the creation of a new Harry Potter television series. And our heroes themselves have even stepped up to be a part of this activism, too: Recently, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe moderated “Sharing Space,” a Trevor Project web series featuring discussions with trans and nonbinary youth.
Whether it comes from the fandom or “Harry” himself, Rowling faces a powerful storm of collective action, rooted in love and community for trans lives. Because the truth is this: Fans have power, and as a collective, we can make a difference—sometimes even bigger than the thing that brought us together in the first place.
Media scholar Henry Jenkins defines fan activism as “forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and in relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture.” Simply put, fan activism allows fans to channel their creative energy and imagination into civic action—and it’s effective.
As an innovative practice, fan activism can take many forms, though many were popularized by what was once The Harry Potter Alliance, which I joined as a college sophomore in 2012. What started amid a rich ecosystem of transformative works on Harry Potter became a guiding force and community hub for hundreds of thousands of fans. The organization was founded in 2005 to address human rights violations in Sudan and raise money for Amnesty International at local wizard rock concerts in the Boston area. Today, we’ve turned our sights toward countless other causes, too.
In nearly 20 years, fan activists have developed innovative, powerful campaigns on a global scale. As a longtime volunteer and now as the co-chair of the board of directors at Fandom Forward, I have witnessed thousands of volunteers, often young students from various backgrounds, recognize and own their collective power through pop culture. Together, we have donated over 400,000 books and built libraries in underserved communities globally through Accio Books (now Book Defenders), connected with activist mentors at our Granger Leadership Academy (also known as Camp GLA), raised funds to bring three planes (aptly nicknamed Harry, Ron, and Hermione) full of rescue supplies to Haiti during the 2010 earthquake disaster, and even successfully lobbied Warner Bros. to use Fair Trade-certified cocoa products through our Not in Harry’s Name campaign.
The real magic and legacy of fan activism, however, is that it challenges corporate assumptions about what fandom is. The world’s greatest “superfans” are more than just passive media consumers who will buy and stream whatever you put in front of them. They are active participants who will remix and reinterpret your brand through the lens of their own experience. And they aren’t afraid to walk away from the brand itself when its creators do not align with their morals. The swift response to J.K. Rowling’s commentary on trans rights, as well as commentary on fatphobic, racist, and antisemitic tropes in the Harry Potter series, illustrates that pop culture is no longer a top-down hierarchical structure, with audiences waiting to absorb whatever studio executives have decided the masses should consume. Fans have willed ideas about their favorite stories into life. If they don’t agree with the harm a creator has caused, they can—and will—go elsewhere.
This trend is extraordinary not because it is new, but because it brings us one step closer to the heart of what storytelling looks like outside the shadow of corporate greed: not a means by which a few companies could reap profits endlessly, but a modern mythos by which our collective memory passes from generation to generation. Storytelling is one of the key elements that makes us human. For thousands of years, humans have told stories in order to survive. As our species evolved and circumstances changed, stories have shifted in purpose, meaning, and interpretation, but ultimately still exist to help us survive and build community. Fandom, and fan activism by extension, is simply a part of the storytelling evolution.
The passion, joy, and power of fandom is immeasurable. It is a magic that cannot be contained or tamped down, even as brands attempt to wrest control over the meaning and messaging behind their intellectual property. Organizing can still seem daunting, and those in it for the long haul will need plenty of ways to take care of themselves and their community. For fan activists, the hard work of organizing is often accompanied by opportunities to experience joy and self-care at community events, from wizard rock concerts to meditation retreats. In the fight against fascism and anti-democratic practices, my ability to engage in sustainable, joyful activism with other fans has given me hope beyond measure.
While Harry Potter has fostered some of the most popular forms of fan activism, the possibilities are endless, spanning countless other fan communities. The Fan Organizer Coalition, founded in 2021 and co-directed by Fandom Forward and Black Nerds Create, has sparked numerous cross-fandom collaborations. From ending voter suppression with Star Trek fans, to celebrating Indigenous geek culture, to educating Disney fans on how to fight the climate crisis, our civic imagination as fans and as storytellers knows no bounds.
[post_title] => Don't Underestimate Fan Activists
[post_excerpt] => No one knows how to organize like a fandom.
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It’s comforting to imagine that a conscious uncoupling would heal our country’s painful divisions. But it wouldn’t.
Since its inception, the United States has been divided along a number of overlapping fault lines, most saliently race, religion, geography, and politics. Yet for decades, pundits have been acting as if this were a new and terrifying development. What’s actually a number of divides is most often portrayed as one vast gulf between two, roughly equal “sides”: two sides that can’t agree on human rights, school curricula, the role of government, or even what our Constitution means—and would rather burn the whole country down than attempt to compromise for the greater good.
The appeal is obvious. Proponents across the political spectrum argue that we’d all be better off living in our particular version of a “free country”—for liberals, one where abortion is a right and kids are taught science and history; for conservatives, one where private gun ownership is not restricted and kids are not taught anything that deviates from their parents’ beliefs. It’s comforting to imagine that a conscious uncoupling would heal our country’s painful divisions. But it wouldn’t, because our real problem is not our differing beliefs—it's our broken democracy.
The largest and most profound gap in the United States today isn’t between the Right and the Left: It is between what Americans say they want—and in many cases vote for—and the laws and leaders we have. The clearest proof of this can be found in our electoral outcomes. Nearly twenty-three years ago, a conservative Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, installing George W. Bush as president, despite his opponent Al Gore winning the popular vote by over half a million. Likewise, when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to win a majority of votes for president in 2016, the Electoral College again defied the will of the people, anointing Donald Trump instead. In the last 20 years, most Americans who vote have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. Yet thanks to the Electoral College, since 2000, the candidate who won the most votes has twice lost the presidency. Why would someone who voted with a majority of their compatriots in multiple presidential elections, only to see the losing candidate installed in the White House, have faith in our system? Why would they bother showing up to vote the next time?
These elections have consequences that transcend the Oval Office. In 2022, a Court made rabidly right-wing by judges Trump appointed overruled a majority of Americans to strike down Roe v. Wade, extinguishing a nearly 50-year-old precedent which guaranteed limited abortion rights throughout the United States. Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed marriage equality nationwide, is less than a decade old and could very well be next.
Behaving as if the United States is a pure democracy ruled by an enlightened majority is wishful thinking. It’s clearer every day that we are in fact ruled by a reactionary minority. And while it’s true that what the majority believes is not always right—a majority of Americans opposed interracial marriage until relatively recently, for example—consistently overruling the popular will carries its own risks, including widespread apathy and disillusionment.
Despite what he has claimed, Donald Trump has never had the support of a majority of Americans, or even half of them. He became president in 2016 thanks to the Electoral College, not the American people, nearly 3 million more of whom voted for Hillary Clinton. (Not even half of voters cast ballots for Trump, let alone half the country; neither Clinton nor Trump won more than 50 percent of votes cast in 2016—Clinton won 48 percent and Trump got 46.) Throughout his tenure, Trump attained an average approval rating of 41 percent—four points lower than that of any of his predecessors in Gallup's polling era. And voters have not hidden their disapproval: In 2020, more Americans showed up to vote than in any other presidential election in 120 years—and Trump lost by over 7 million votes.
Pundits tend to attribute this abstention to laziness, apathy, or privilege, despite the fact that non-voters are disproportionately non-white and lower-income. But it’s more often a result of hopelessness and despair: While there are many reasons Americans don’t vote, including significant structural barriers and deliberate voter suppression, not voting is also a rational response to mounting evidence that our votes don’t and can’t make a meaningful difference without major democratic reforms. Gun control, abortion rights, Medicare for All, paid family and medical leave, higher pay for child care workers, and government-subsidized child care all have clear majority support. Most Americans also believe the federal government should be doing more to reduce the impact of climate change. But the will of the people only means so much when there’s an Electoral College to overrule the popular vote, a millionaire-dominated Senate to halt popular legislation, and an unelected Supreme Court that can decide, 50 years later, to overturn Roe—itself a far-from-perfect judicial edict which ultimately failed to protect abortion rights.
Yet rather than working to abolish or reform entrenched anti-democratic institutions, pundits across the political spectrum cling to the fantasy of retreating to our separate corners. Right-wing arguments for secession mostly rest on conservatives’ antipathy to, in Rep. Greene’s memorable phrase, “sick and disgusting woke culture issues.” This might make slightly more sense if there actually were a corps of woke warriors in the United States intent on forcing kids to attend drag shows—but, spoiler alert: There’s not. Meanwhile, the liberal case for secession is slightly more reality-based, in that there really are people in power who want to charge women with murder and potentially execute them for having abortions—although such people do not represent half of the country, or even half of South Carolina.
Liberals also sometimes frame their pro-secession arguments as motivated by a desire to protect non-fascists in red states, but how exactly blue state secession would help vulnerable red staters remains a mystery. The argument rests partially on the delusion that blue states will become bastions of freedom, equality, and progressive public policy the moment they sever ties with Mississippi. That analysis conveniently ignores the persistent and uglylegacy of human rights abuses in blue states and requires faith that, as Nathan Newman wrote in “The Case for Blue-State Secession,” blue states newly freed of senators like Joe Manchin would “raise new revenue by increasing tax rates on the wealthy and corporations, and free up funds through lowered military spending”—and put all that new revenue to good and popular use.
A blue state nation might in theory be likelier to raise taxes on the rich, but anyone who has lived in ex-governor Andrew Cuomo’s New York knows blue states have powerful enemies of progress and Manchins of their own. It’s the American people who favor higher taxes on the wealthy, not political elites in any state—just like it’s the American people who want the government to tackle climate change and invest in infrastructure and subsidize child care. Many politicians are in office not to make progress but to block it. All of which is why the best solution is to strengthen our democracy, not divide our country into separate fiefdoms controlled by wealthy interests with different cultural values but a similar stake in avoiding direct democracy.
The United States is enormous, heterogeneous, and full of people with idiosyncratic and often self-contradictory views. It includes families whose members have radically different politics, some of whom live under the same roof. A 2020 report found that more LGBTQ Americans live in the South than in any other region in the country. A recent analysis of public opinion data found that Americans hold substantially more liberal attitudes on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and personal liberty than they did in the 1970s, though their views on issues like gun ownership, abortion, taxes, and law enforcement have changed little in the last 50 years. When Americans have voted directly on abortion policy via statewide ballot measures in the last year, they have—every time and in every state, red, blue, and purple—voted for fewer restrictions, not more.
Opponents of a national divorce tend to focus on the considerable structural and economic obstacles to carving up the country along partisan lines. But the biggest and most urgent reason to oppose this type of schism is the protection of human rights. Avoiding direct democracy is essential to consolidating conservative power. Mitch McConnell is serving his seventh term in the U.S. Senate for many reasons, but popularity in his home state of Kentucky is not one of them—a 2021 poll found that 53 percent of Kentuckians disapproved of McConnell’s performance, and that’s just Kentuckians who are registered to vote. According to a 2020 report, the state of Georgia likely purged nearly 200,000 Georgians from the state’s voter rolls for wrongly concluding that they had moved. Alienation, structural obstacles to voting, voter suppression, and threat of prosecution are powerful barriers to full political participation.
The fact that many of our state governments are conservative does not necessarily reflect the will of the people in those states. Millions of people live in red states and a substantial proportion of them oppose or are unaware of the ugliest policies they purportedly endorse by living there. Even Trump voters do not deserve the policies they supposedly supported; people cast ballots for all kinds of reasons, some of them rational—people whose number one issue is banning abortion will naturally vote for GOP candidates who have promised to do just that—and some of them ill-informed and contradictory. People live where they live for a variety of reasons, most notably family ties and lack of money; not everyone wants or has the resources to move to states with “better” governments. Children and teenagers, who often suffer the most from retrograde state laws, don't choose where they are born or raised. They, too, have rights in need of protection.
Venting our anger by demonizing our neighbors may feel cathartic. It’s a lot easier to rail at red states and the people who live in them than it is to build enough support to achieve the democratic reforms we so desperately need. But officially dividing the country along partisan lines would not only fail to keep vulnerable people safe; it would actively trap them in harm’s way. True democracy, like the worthiest ideals of our original, diverse, and experimental nation, is worth defending. Divorce won’t save us, but a functioning government—one everyone is encouraged and equipped to participate in, and given ample reason to trust—could.
[post_title] => America Needs a Democracy, Not a Divorce
[post_excerpt] => It’s comforting to imagine that a conscious uncoupling would heal our country’s painful divisions. But it wouldn’t.
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Communities directly affected by a mass shooting don't just get to move on when there's another one.
I was a junior in high school when I first imagined dying in a mass shooting. It was 1999 and two young men had murdered 12 of their fellow students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, 1,500 miles from my hometown of Buffalo, New York. A few weeks after the slaughter, a schoolmate burst onstage at an assembly. He was wielding a Super Soaker and wearing a trench coat, the Columbine killers’ signature clothing item. He thought it was funny. Those of us who’d spent that spring mapping out escape routes in our heads were less amused.
On the eve of my 40th birthday, I’ve been thinking about that episode a lot. Columbine stood out in 1999 because it was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, the killers ending more than ten lives at once. Once a grim milestone, it now seems relatively small in scale. While roughly as common as they were in the 1990s, mass shootings have become deadlier and more prominent in the age of social media: Gunmen killed 60 people in Las Vegas in 2017; 49 at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016; 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007; and 26, including 20 first graders, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. Back when I was in high school, these shootings didn’t seem so sickeningly normal.
I was sheltered enough then that I didn’t think about dying every day. Like lots of other kids, my anxiety spiked when I read about Columbine or heard about it on TV, but I didn’t really believe that something like that could happen where I lived or went to school. People frequently die of gun violence in Buffalo—a fact I was only dimly aware of as a teenager—but I invented all kinds of reasons why my classmates and I were exempt from the kind of random mass killing that had taken place at Columbine: New York has tougher gun laws than the rest of the country; my high school was small and close-knit; and, like most sheltered adolescents, I simply didn’t believe that people my age could die. As one high school friend put it, “I definitely didn’t internalize Columbine as a real risk for us. That was something crazy people in other places did.”
For a long time, it felt as if my friend was right. Our city was scarred by everyday violence, but for decades it escaped large mass shootings of the kind that happened at Columbine. Earlier this month, I was grabbing lunch at a diner in Providence, Rhode Island, when I overheard some customers chatting about a local shooting. “Not too many people get shot who haven’t put themselves in harm’s way,” one guy tut-tutted, expressing a belief many Americans still hold. It’s comforting to believe you can avoid violence by being smart and doing right, even when there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Buffalo’s luck ran out in May, when it became the latest American city to experience a deadly mass shooting, this time at a Tops grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Ten people were killed, victims of a targeted, anti-Black hate crime. No decent person would suggest that the victims had “put themselves in harm’s way” by shopping for groceries in the middle of the afternoon. But whether an act of violence feels random and haphazardly cruel or personal and targeted only really matters to those left behind. It makes no difference to the dead.
One of the cruelest aspects of the way we live now—always bracing for the next horrific headline, believing this kind of violence is inevitable because we are told over and over again that it is—is the way all of these massacres, no matter how shocking or deadly or racist or cruel, soon become old news to everyone but those most directly affected. Occasionally they reappear in headlines on anniversaries, or as benchmarks to help contextualize the latest mass shooting. Even the phrase “mass shooting” has acquired a leaden deadness; it’s become so common that it has lost the power to shock and horrify. Before those who lost children and parents and spouses and friends can even keep food down again, the rest of us have already moved on.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
“5/14,” the date of the Tops massacre, has become the equivalent of “9/11” for Buffalonians—a grim shorthand for a community-altering event that few outside of Buffalo would immediately comprehend. When I first heard about the shooting, I cried for two days. My sister-in-law used to shop at that Tops; it’s a mile and a half from my parents’ place. There were vigils and rallies and fundraisers. President Biden showed up to denounce the “poison” of white supremacy. Then we tried to move on. We have come to believe that those not directly affected by a particular mass shooting have to move on; it’s the only way to grasp a few moments of peace before the next one.
The respite was short-lived. Ten days after the murders in Buffalo, an 18-year-old man killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In both cases, the shooter was an 18-year-old man, the weapon of choice was a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle, and communities of color were the target. The killer in Buffalo was a young white man who targeted Black people; the killer in Uvalde was a young Latino man who targeted Latinos and was likely inspired by the massacre in Buffalo.
It’s impossible to stop thinking about something that never stops happening.
Six months on, residents of Buffalo and Uvalde are feuding over how much of the money raised by various victims' funds is going to which victims. Some Uvalde families believe that only those who lost children should be entitled to compensation. At a recent meeting in Buffalo, survivors of the Tops massacre made the opposite argument. Several argued that the people who died were at peace now, while they still had bills to pay and trauma-related symptoms that make it difficult or impossible to go back to work. Some former Tops employees shared stories of forcing themselves to return to their workplace, which now doubled as the scene of a shattering crime. Most couldn’t make it through an hour. Many of the children who watched their friends die in Uvalde have found it difficult or impossible to return to school. They suffer panic attacks, scare easily, and have trouble sleeping. Hundreds of U.S. parents have lost the power to give their children safe and normal childhoods.
In Buffalo, survivors have complained of being promised substantial financial assistance from a $2.9 million victims’ fund, then fobbed off with gift cards and meal vouchers. Worse than the inadequate disbursement policies of a particular fund is the abandonment of a community by the institutions meant to serve and protect it. In Uvalde, where the cowardice and incompetence of local police and other law enforcement officers may have cost children their lives, Governor Greg Abbott announced the opening of a center meant to provide the community with long-term mental health services. The mother of a little girl who survived the massacre toldThe Washington Post that no staffers were there when she stopped by the center to request gas vouchers. “It’s so frustrating,” she said. “Like, I know how this system works. And as an educated person, I see how they’re trying to take advantage of all these families…I knew it was gonna happen. Resources here are so limited. They were limited prior to this. And it was obvious to me this morning that there was no one that could help when we needed it.”
Adding to their trauma is the fact that survivors are now pitted against one another in a Hunger Games-style competition for artificially meager resources. A state government that cares for its people would fully fund its schools and mental health services, ensure families have a basic income, and provide free therapy to traumatized children that parents don’t have to drive for miles to access. A responsibly run charity would seek guidance from the community it is ostensibly serving and be open and transparent about its resources and who can expect what.
Instead, the thousands of people in this country who have been traumatized by a mass shooting—who were there when it happened, who were shot but survived, who lost children and parents and spouses and friends—get thoughts and prayers. They get to talk to high-profile reporters for a few days or a week. Their kids get therapy every other week, sometimes for as little as 15 minutes per session. Maybe they get a couple of gift cards or a meal voucher. After every mass shooting, we vow to support the victims, yet more often than not, what they end up getting is staggeringly inadequate. Meanwhile, the rest of the country moves on. And all these communities are left with is the pain of being associated with the worst thing that ever happened there: “Buffalo” now evokes a brutal hate crime more than football or chicken wings or snow.
On December 14, the Sandy Hook parents, with the exception of those who couldn’t bear to go on living, will have survived a decade without their babies. November 14 marked six months since the Buffalo massacre. The six-month anniversary of the Uvalde shooting falls on Thanksgiving. This year, I am thankful for my friends and family, and the fact that we survived another year in a violent, fraying, heartless country ruled by people who would rather let children smear blood on themselves and play dead than ban assault rifles.
The day this essay was commissioned, there was a mass shooting at the University of Virginia that left three young men dead. Two other students were injured, one by a bullet that went through his back and lodged in his stomach. He is expected to survive, which in this country counts as luck. Two days after I submitted a draft, a 22-year-old man shot up an LGBTQ club in Colorado, killing at least five people and injuring 25 others. The morning after I submitted a final draft, a gunman killed six people and himself at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia.
What is a life worth? What about the lives of three people, or ten, or 12, or 60? We have reached a point where we can’t process the unique horror of any single massacre, let alone deal with the social fallout, before the next one comes along. And until we meaningfully restrict access to guns in the United States, there will always be a next one. That sense of inevitability has led to a pervasive hopelessness that compounds this uniquely American trauma. It is daunting to mourn each life lost, each family broken, each childhood marred, each marriage strained and severed. But that’s what we need to do, and we need to do it while fighting to dismantle the anti-democratic institutions preventing us from ending this carnage. We have to stop moving on from what those who lost loved ones, the use of limbs, or the will to live can never move on from. We have to confront the true cost of these killings: to victims, survivors, society, and every human being with a soul.
[post_title] => Buffalo and Uvalde, Six Months Later
[post_excerpt] => Communities directly affected by a mass shooting don't just get to move on when there's another one.
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As a young girl, I had a spunky friend, who bossed me and dressed me, and she'd stand in her driveway, hand on her hip, taunting me, "How does it feel to want?"
It was a line in a film she saw.
At that time, I could not afford to want. But still, I wanted to have her hair, the way hairspray and crimping irons gave her that perfect Who’s The Boss, Alyssa Milano flair; her capacity to pick up dance moves, jumping off a chair like Janet Jackson in the “Pleasure Principle” video. I wanted her mom, how she sat with us at night and tickled our backs until we fell asleep, how she stocked the kitchen with healthy food, wheat germ, and honey.
Later, in foster care, I was nothing but a meat sack of want. I wanted privacy, time alone; I'd sometimes sit in the bathroom, door and eyes closed, blocking out everything outside. I wanted a home—a real home, with a dog and a family. I wanted to go back to my school where I was enrolled in accelerated classes—where I still had the freedom to dream of becoming a neurosurgeon, or a lawyer, or whatever profession would pull my mom and me out of poverty.
And the less I have, the more I want: Even now, I want ridiculous things with no purpose, the little capitalist elves getting to work on my brain. I want nail polish and lipsticks, nonsensical outfits—jumpers, one-pieces—boots, espadrilles, soaps and face creams. I want accolades, acceptance notices from fancy literary journals, and fellowships. And underneath it all, what I really want is love—to be seen, to be touched, to be held, to be kept, to be possessed wholly with all my good and all my naughty bits, a no turning away kind of love.
I want to move through the world with ease.
~
We try hard to make sense of things in a senseless time. My friend, who I'd spoken to every day before all this, but who's since been exposed to the virus, or some other cruel thing that has her sleeping and using an inhaler, says wistfully into the phone, "I miss malls."
Of malls, Frederic Jameson wrote in Postmodernism, “Overwhelmingly, our daily life, our psychic experiences, our cultural languages are processes performed in and contingent on commercial space.”
In the early days of the pandemic, I wonder what happens when we no longer have that commercial space or when that space becomes virtual. Where do we go when that pinnacle remains burning inside us, but the space to make it grow—disappears? What is America without the physical space to Want?
~
After World War II, Americans embraced the ideal of the suburbs. People moved away from big cities, and malls were a new indication of what LIVING would be like. For all those suburban households, the mall became the epicenter of activity, a place where we could brush arms with the Joneses. And all of us drove there—a luxury in itself. As Joan Didion writes in her essay "On the Mall," "as a child in the late Forties in California, I recall reading and believing that the 'freedom of movement' afforded by the automobile was 'America's fifth freedom.'"
The previous four were outlined in Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address: 1. Freedom of Speech, 2. Freedom of Worship, 3. Freedom from Want, 4. Freedom from Fear.
As for the third, what better homage is there to Want than the mall?
~
America's first malls were outdoors; they were to be community centers—our zocalo—where people could come together for social interaction. These first malls appeared in the 1920s. One of the earliest was opened in the California boom town of Lakewood. With its 154 acres and sprawling parking lot, the Lakewood Shopping Center transformed fields of lima beans into a big city suburb—a precursor for what was to come.
J.C. Nichols, generally regarded as the father of the shopping center for his role in developing Country Club Plaza in Kansas City (1924), established many of the mall’s fundamental merchandising and management concepts. Nichols’ 1945 Urban Land Institute publication, Mistakes We Have Made in Developing Shopping Centers, codified the tenets of the modern mall with a list of 150 maxims, which covered everything from strategies to ensure local political support to adequate ceiling heights.
In 1956, the first enclosed mall—Southdale, in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis—changed everything. It also firmly cemented Austrian architect Victor Gruen as one of America's great mall pioneers. Gruen created a completely introverted building by enclosing once-open spaces and controlling the temperature, establishing the prototype for how we think of most malls today. As William Kowinski illustrates in Malling of America, once inside, the commercial potential of enormous spaces was realized in theatrical "sets" where "retail drama" could occur. Southdale was covered for practical reasons; Minnesota weather allows for only 126 outdoor shopping days a year. But the contrast between the freezing cold or blistering heat outdoors and the mall's constant 72 degrees was only accelerated by its atrium centerpiece, the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, filled with orchids, azaleas, magnolias, and palms.
~
Kowinski identifies mal de mall (literal translation: bad of mall, which could be interpreted as mall sickness) as both stimulation and sedation, characterized by disorientation, anxiety, and apathy. Margaret Crawford writes in her essay “The World In A Shopping Mall” of The Gruen Transfer (named after Victor Gruen), which “designates the moment when a ‘destination buyer’ with a specific purchase in mind is transformed into an impulse shopper, a crucial point immediately visible in the shift from a determined stride to an erratic and meandering gait.”
These effects, in part, might help explain the expansion of the typical mall visit from twenty minutes in 1960 to nearly three hours today. Eventually, the mall became a place to cruise. For teenagers to hang out, and work, and steal, and kiss. Gallerias everywhere achieved a reputation as a safe place for singles to meet, and where "mall walkers"—senior citizens and heart patients seeking a safe place to exercise—could arrive before the shops opened to walk a measured route around the corridors.
To that end, terrazzo tiles were introduced in the '80s because developers thought the carpet would slow shoppers down. Architects also gradually increased lighting to create the illusion of longer afternoons. Finally, in 1992, the Mall of America opened, eventually featuring a whopping 5.6 million square feet of retail. The largest mall in North America, the mall sits just south of the Twin Cities, in Bloomington, Minnesota, and was built on the site of the former Metropolitan Stadium. To honor the location of home plate, the mall houses a plaque in its amusement park that commemorates a home run hit by hall-of-famer Harmon Killebrew on June 3, 1967—definitively placing this shopping center, and its absurd representation of excess, alongside America’s favorite past-time.
By the mid-90s, malls were being constructed at 140/year.
~
I was a latchkey kid when the Westside Pavilion finally arrived in Los Angeles in 1985; my young spunky friend who quoted movies about Want would raid her mother's empty Sparkletts of change, and we'd walk the two miles to the mall. We spent all day trying on clothes at Wet Seal and Contempo Casuals; we'd spend any money we had on Mrs. Fields' cookies or slices of pizza from Sbarro. We’d ride the escalator up and down.
Later the mall became a site for me to act out what feminist theorist Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism": “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” During the holidays, I'd go to the mall and finger all the items, look on longingly at the shoes and handbags, listen to the music, and see the line for Santa, and a part of me secretly hoped that perhaps someone would see me, and take pity on me, and offer to buy me all the things. But no one ever did.
~
There is, of course, a conventional association between women and mall space. Iconic films like Valley Girl and Clueless. Roseanne Barr's television show, wherein her title character worked in the mall. And then, there's the music.
I’m shuttin’ shit down in the mall
And tellin’ every girl she’s the one for me
And I ain’t even planning to call
I want this shit forever man, ever man, ever man, ever man
—Drake, “Forever”
For rapper Drake, girls are granted equivalence to stores as sources for reaffirmation of male dominance and economic success in the hip-hop market. As early as 1998, mall space provided a similar referent for Jay Z in "Can I Get A?":
Do you need a balla? So you can shop and tear the mall up?
Brag, tell your friends what I brought ya
Jay Z directs his curiosities about mall space to female listeners, engaging end rhyme between “mall” and “balla,” a term initially used to describe wealthy athletes but which now refers to anyone or even anything admirable. While these dialogues with mall space certainly perpetuate the same anti-feminist stereotypes—positioning women as shoppers and as “shopped” by the male speakers—they reproduce the very real social relations that occur in mall space, both through the exchange of money for clothing, and sexually, through the bodies of the spatial practitioners.
For example, around 10 AM on April 12, 2019, a woman and her 5-year-old son were standing outside the Rainforest Café on the third floor of the Mall of America when 24-year-old Emmanuel Aranda approached. She asked him if they were in his way and should move. Mr. Aranda, without warning, picked her son up and threw him off the balcony. When asked why he did it, he said he was sick and tired of years of being rejected by women at the mall.
~
My generation, Generation X, could also be aptly named the Mall Generation, as we were around in the before times of malls and now in the after. The before times, for me, were riddled with trips to the local Kmart. A store that allowed for layaway, where we posed for studio-like holiday photos, drank bright blue or red slushies, and ate at the Kmart Cafe.
The first Kmart opened in San Fernando, California, in January 1962; 1500 miles north, and five months later, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Alaska. Both were the blueprint for what a mall could be. In our small military town in northern California, Kmart was one of the few places to hang out. I touched and longed for all the items, imagined a need and a stealthiness with the camping gear, and extended the fictive dream of Capitalism—that somehow being near Jaclyn Smith's discount clothing line put me in closer proximity to becoming one of Charlie's Angels myself.
In the ‘80s, Ma got a job as a security officer for Kmart, and when they were robbed, she was blamed and then let go of. Years later, I worked graveyard at the Winchell's Donut, and I, too, was robbed and then fired. In reality, Jaclyn Smith's discount clothing line just put me closer to who I always was, a girl whose Ma's bounced check was on display at the Food King on Westwood Blvd. A girl who was called to the front of the class with all the other poor kids to get her lunch tickets. The tickets she tucked into the side of her Payless Shoesource ProWings, a brand of shoes all the kids talked smack about.
~
In researching genres, I recently discovered a form of ‘80s minimalist literature called “dirty realism,” also known as "Kmart realism." Author Paul McFedries, in the craft book Word Spy: The Word Lovers Guide To Modern Culture, defines the precursors of Kmart realism as “trailer park fiction, Diet-Pepsi minimalism, and hick chic.” Miriam Clark writes in Studies in Short Fiction that it "represent[s] and reproduce[s] the disintegration of public life [and] the colonization of private life by consumer capitalism."
Authors Bobbie Ann Mason and Joy Williams are most known for this genre, likely coined by author Tom Wolfe in reference to stories that mention Dairy Queens and third-rate motels. In his introduction to Patchwork: A Bobbie Ann Mason Reader, George Saunders writes, "You could say, as critics have, that Mason is writing about a particular form of late-twentieth-century American sadness, a moment during which something has fundamentally shifted in the American ethos. The way I would say it is that she is bearing witness to our descent into a new era of pure materialism."
~
If Bobbie Ann Mason is representative of Kmart realism, then I wonder who or what literature would represent Caruso realism. I'm speaking here of Rick Caruso, the Los Angeles mall developer and mayoral candidate. Caruso's The Grove and The Americana at Brand are the epitome of Los Angeles' animated spaces, spaces that are part fairy ground and part extensions of the body of Los Angeles. Caruso's intentional use of mall space and large multi-use dwelling-consumer spaces have become LA's theme park phantom limbs, filling the ghost imprint of the homes and apartment units bulldozed in the mid-20th century.
Both The Americana at Brand and The Grove are organized upon the idea of a city center—with a mix of architectural styles, building heights, materials used, and vast open spaces at their center. The Grove is reminiscent of 1930s Los Angeles; meanwhile, The Americana reflects the brick factory facades of the industrial era, with its massive elevator shaft with exposed steel beams.
Each of the two intends to appear to be a public space but is private property and is protected as such. But if mall decor and design are not explicit enough to tell young people of color or the unhoused that they are not welcome, more literal warnings can be issued. A bronze plaque placed at the Grove's southern entrance spells out the house rules: "The Grove is private property and has not at any time been dedicated to public uses," listing 18 activities from which visitors must refrain. While the two-acre park in the center of the Americana is technically public property, the private security force that patrols it prevents anyone from photographing with professional equipment without permission. "Sitting on floors, handrails, stairs, escalators, trash receptacles and other areas not specifically designed for seating” is also restricted. The Americana at Brand allows dogs on the property—except on its grassy area, and unless the dog in question is a pit bull.
Still, in a city that lacks accessible public space, The Grove and The Americana provide a peek into an alternate reality. Pedestrianized streets. Seamless sidewalks. Reliable transit. Shady trees. Alissa Walker writes in New York Magazine, “Yes, in theory, the Grove represents the dystopian future where billionaire developers have cordoned off our public spaces into oversurveilled fortresses. But in reality, elements of this future are very appealing to Angelenos. That’s why they go there. If they don’t readily admit that they do, they’re lying. Everybody loves the Grove.”
I will confess here that in recent years, I, too, have found some joy at my local outdoor mall—Americana at Brand—after one winter, as the fake snow blasted upon us, my now-wife bent down on one knee and proposed beside the iconic dancing water fountain.
~
In 1787, Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, supposedly erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River to impress the Russian Empress and her guests on their way to Crimea. He would then disassemble and reassemble the village along the way. Today, the term "potemkin" is used in politics and economics as any construction whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country that is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better.
As I write this, Caruso is running for mayor, and some Angelenos are concerned that he will try to apply these same guidelines and principles to the entire city. "You go to the Grove; it represents everybody in this great city of ours. It's every background. It's every color. It's every creed," Caruso told the Los Angeles Times editorial board earlier this year. Often compared to Walt Disney, the 63-year-old is known for a similar pseudo-urbanism, equal parts utopianism and nostalgia. He’s also known for switching his party affiliation for the race, as he was very publicly registered as a Republican three years ago. Caruso is now making it to the general election after sinking millions of his own money into ads for his campaign, featuring actors and personalities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Snoop Dogg. The Americana, as I see it, is the modern-day Potemkin Village; and Caruso, the modern day Potemkin.
~
Being an off-brand kid—a Kmart kid, sometimes even in the time of malls—I was always consumed with desire; that achy want. The word consumption from the late 14th century to mean "wasting of the body by disease"; from Old French consumpcion, "A using up, wasting"; from consume, "the using up of material, destruction by use."
For me, it is a truly American experience to be overwhelmed with this desire to consume, to waste. I walk around my college campus and cut through USC’s University Village, a Caruso-endorsed project. In this instance, University Village is a $700 million multi-use development described by the LA Times as “a fantasia of just-add-water heritage, equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts.” As trustee and longtime donor, Caruso has been quoted as stating, “It makes it a much more vibrant neighborhood.”
University Village is home to an Amazon pick-up center, a Target, a Trader Joe’s. But there’s most reliably a line outside of Dulce, an artisanal cafe and donut shop. I spy a plump matcha donut in the window dusted with sugar, a dollop of cream winking on the mouth-hole. I want it. Between classes, sweaty, and arm aching from my heavy book bag, I rush past a spa called Face Haus, where customers can stop in for an afternoon facial; I see the aestheticians, their face masks, an advertisement of a woman, her hair wrapped in a towel, eyes closed, relaxing beneath a cool layer of serums. I want it. Some days when I’m in need of comfort, a hug, words of encouragement, I linger a bit too long in front of Honeybird, with their southern fried chicken, banana cream pie; it smells like somebody’s home. I want it, too.
This year, I’ve received notice from two of my undergraduate students stating they had to leave the school after tuition was raised from the already-staggering $60k/year. They do not want to leave. I do not want them to leave. But they do not have what they need to stay. Money.
~
In 1943, The Saturday Evening Post published a series of oil paintings by the Americana artist Norman Rockwell that came to be known as “The Four Freedoms,” along with corresponding essays for each. “Freedom From Want” was published alongside an essay by Filipino writer and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. At the time, Bulosan was a migrant laborer working intermittent jobs when the Post tracked him down to contribute the essay. Initially, the Post lost it, and as there was no carbon copy, Bulosan had to track down the only other draft he had stashed at a bar in Tacoma.
Ultimately, Bulosan's essay proposed that while citizens had obligations to the state, the state had an obligation to provide sustenance to its citizens. Unlike Roosevelt, Bulosan presented the case that the New Deal had not already granted freedom from want as it did not guarantee Americans the essentials of life.
Lately, walking through University Village, I find myself thinking of Want. The facials, the nail salon, yes—but also, the grocery store. As an undergrad, every week, I’d buy a loaf of bread, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and a container of instant coffee. I’d pour the milk on my toast for breakfast and dinner and use it to lighten and sweeten my coffee. I remember the anguish of passing the fast food restaurants on my campus; how the credit card companies would set up tables right outside the Burger King. It worked.
In 2022, it costs up to $30 a day to park on campus, but if you can nab it, there’s free parking on Frat Row off of Hoover. Here, there are people tabling, too—but rather than signing students up for credit cards, they’re selling test strips people can put in their drinks to make sure they aren’t roofied. It works.
If you travel about twelve miles southeast from USC, you’ll hit The Compton Towne Shopping Center, a mall not designed by Caruso. You likely won’t find many USC students there. Compton, a city of 95,000 residents, acutely faces issues of racial injustice and structural inequality—issues that largely haven’t touched USC. Many of Compton’s residents are either unemployed, poorly paid, or ineligible for government assistance. Upwards of 1 in 5 Comptonians live in poverty—double the nationwide average. Compton also happens to be home to the largest city-based guaranteed income pilot project in the country, The Compton Pledge. According to the Compton Pledge website, “Local housing assistance in Compton is at capacity, presenting unaffordable hardships for a city where 46% of residents are renters. In Compton, rates of unemployment have risen to 21.9% since the beginning of COVID-19, and a growing number of residents regularly rely on food pantries.”
Ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and local governments and private nonprofits are still trying to deliver on its promise. Ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and we still haven’t achieved his promise of “Freedom From Want.” Because ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, America can’t even deliver on freedom from need.
And what we need, of course, a mall can’t give us.
A small portion of this essay originally appeared in Lenny Letter.
Additional fact checking by Apoorva Tadepalli.
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Here's what to read so you can get to know us better.
When I started The Conversationalist in 2018, I wanted to create a platform that amplified the voices of women and people of color with creative solutions and deep insights about this chaotic, interconnected world. There were too many critical stories that weren't getting the attention they deserved. The Conversationalist's mission was to build a feminist media outlet to publish these global perspectives, and to foster a space for readers to connect and engage over shared interests and concerns. We believed, and still do, that people are hungry for thoughtful, engaging journalism they can trust, a natural response to the proliferation of disinformation, propaganda, and equivocation over basic facts and human dignity. Curiosity and empathy thrive when the rage clicks disappear.
In pursuit of our goals, we decided to take a step back earlier this year so we could re-evaluate how to best honor our mission moving forward. And now, we're back. Just like before, we're prioritizing writers who shine a light on underreported stories and trends around the world. We plan to continue only publishing a couple stories a week for the time being, in pursuit of putting out fewer, richer stories rather than chasing clicks. But we're also thinking bigger: Feminism, at its core, is about linking the personal to the political, a critical commitment in times like these that demand human connection and collective action. It’s also about finding moments of joy, and with our relaunch, The Conversationalist aims to inform, connect, and delight. As you've noticed, we've fully embraced a new artistic direction, with the aim of supporting artists around the world, and are more committed than ever to celebrating human ingenuity and building community. I want to give a shout-out here to our Executive Editor, Gina Mei, whose editorial and creative vision for this relaunch has been a joy to witness, and the writers, artists, and countless other people who helped bring this new iteration to life.
As for our readers, we're so glad you're here. And in case you aren't already familiar with us, here are a few stories from The Conversationalist's archives—all hand-picked by the team—so you can get to know us a little better.
If you are looking for a sign to leave it all and start a new life as a beekeeper, look no further than this beautiful profile of Towseefa Rizvi and her family's apiary in Kashmir. It's both an honest look at the profession and the region, exploring the economic and cultural hurdles that keep women from beekeeping, while also showing why honey production can be a surprisingly accessible (and meaningful!) trade. Rizvi's deep love and care for her hive is contagious, and her dedication to sharing her knowledge with others is an absolute joy to read. It's a lovely and empowering piece, gorgeously reported by Aliya Kashir.
It’s maddening to watch a green-headed bird with webbed orange feet fly into your home, quacking wildly and gobbling up all your bread, only to be told, “That can’t be a duck; ducks live outside.” And it’s a relief when someone else notices the same things you’ve been noticing, and confirms that you’re not just being hysterical after all. That’s why I’d heartily recommend this story to anyone who’s worried about the future of U.S. democracy—if nothing else, it’ll reassure you that you’re not losing your mind.
My picks follow a theme, which is, times that The Conversationalist’s contributors accurately, if unfortunately, foretold the near future.This article ran before Roe fell, and it remains both prescient and a great example of the solutions journalism The Conversationalist exists to elevate. “Anyone serious about defending the rights and dignity of all women needs to stop mourning and start confronting state power,” writes Lipsitz, and she’s right. Now that we’ve seen the full range of absurd Democratic leadership responses to Roe’s demise (Nancy Pelosi’s fundraising emails and Zionist poetry readings, my god) it’s beyond clear that no person of conscience can continue to perform “childlike deference to institutions that have outlived their usefulness, like the Supreme Court.” Americans may remain fundamentally uncomfortable with demanding accountability from their institutions, but this article is a great place to start contemplating what real domestic resistance could look like.
Immigration vs. emigration vs. migration. What makes someone a refugee vs. an economic migrant? When it comes to immigration, things are more complicated than they may appear. In this beginner’s guide, Katie Dancey-Downs breaks it all down in a very digestible way. I love how approachable this makes the topic, but also how it answered all of my immigration questions I didn’t even think to ask yet. It includes history from some countries around the world (like Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S., to name a few) and takes a look at where we stand today. This is a must-read for anyone looking to learn more about immigration and the motives behind why people seek out a new home.
White supremacist movements are globally interconnected, which Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon demonstrates in this story on "Russian Lives Matter," a knock-off grassroots movement in Russia that borrowed the language of the American alt-right to promote white anti-Putin protesters and denigrate "Black Lives Matter" protests. American racism is one of our most dangerous exports, and an aspect of US influence that is taboo to mention in most mainstream coverage. I appreciate The Conversationalist's commitment to platforming writers who aren't afraid to take on sensitive, critical subjects with moral clarity and deep insight.
Confession: I was ready to hate this story based on the headline. But after a couple paragraphs it became obvious York was making a smart, nuanced point about adapting our behavior (in certain situations) to protect people who are vulnerable in ways we might not immediately recognize. It was a nice reminder to move through the world with more thoughtfulness and compassion. As someone who lives outside the U.S., I also appreciated the acknowledgement that other countries and other peoples exist—and everyone’s lives have meaning.
A scant two months before Russia invaded Ukraine and just four months before the US government imposed severe financial sanctions on Russia in response, The Conversationalist ran this damn-near-prophetic article by Natalia Antonova in which she makes a compelling case for the policy path the U.S. and numerous other nations ultimately followed. To defang Putin, Antonova argues that Western powers should leverage ordinary Russians’ contempt for the kleptocrats who comprise his inner circle—“that very justifiable hatred is one of Russia’s greatest vulnerabilities, and one of the saddest elements of modern Russian life, which is dominated by stress and suspicion.“ In service to this end, Western powers should create painful consequences for this circle via economic sanctions that target their opulent, offshore-stashed wealth. Additionally, she suggests targeting Russian private military companies, which the U.S. Department of State just recently moved to do in June of this year.
What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good headline, and the very concept of a "prodigal techbro" made me laugh—partly because Twitter has ruined my brain forever, but also because it's genuinely a clever moniker for the type of dude that Maria Farrell is describing. The piece takes a scalpel to the all-too-easy redemption arc of those who have left Big Tech and rebranded themselves as what might best be summed up as "good, actually." It's a nuanced take that acknowledges the importance of giving people second chances and allowing them to learn and grow from their mistakes; while also pointing out the many problems with immediately centering these folks in conversations and work that others have been having and doing for far longer.
I loved this story about Pakistani women who have started meeting up in public to drink chai, traditionally thought of as a men-only activity. It's a small but meaningful act of rebellion, as these women challenge patriarchal restrictions to their freedom of movement while enjoying a delicious cup of chai. It's also a story about class, as women from middle and upper class families have more opportunities to go abroad and get out of the house. As movement founder Sadia Khatri put it, "It took living in other countries to learn that I had been conforming to a clever scam my whole life, thinking the city belonged only to men."
—A.L.G.
[post_title] => Welcome to the "New" Conversationalist
[post_excerpt] => Here's what to read so you can get to know us better.
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https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/
https://conversationalist.org/2021/12/21/women-are-people-no-matter-what-the-supreme-court-says/
https://conversationalist.org/2021/05/27/the-fascism-is-already-here-we-just-cant-see-it-through-the-lens-of-exceptionalism/
https://conversationalist.org/2021/12/09/bees-are-like-my-family-how-a-female-beekeeper-is-redefining-honey-production-in-kashmir/
https://conversationalist.org/2022/03/10/a-beginners-guide-to-immigration/
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Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon, in a straight back chair on two legs leaned against the wall.Iced tea or Aperol spritz in hand, Dolly on the record player. We’ve just gotten back from work or visiting elder neighbors or distributing hygiene kits and we’re looking out over the garden, where we grow tomatoes and kale on land returned to and rented from its local Native communities. Some of us will turn our harvest into a vegan vegetable lasagna, while others will do the dishes so no one doubles up on chores. After dinner, we’ll sit around a fire and wax optimistic about the rise of leftist governments in Latin America or the latest rom com, and dance with the kids and pets to Beyoncé until we all get sleepy and retire to our own quiet, comfortable quarters.
… I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here—but it sounds pretty idyllic to me.
For the past few years, I’ve been pitching friends, my girlfriend, and pretty much every person I meet on the idea of starting a queer commune. To me, it’s an easy and perfectly logical sell. Built-in relationships buffered by solitude? Not having to do all the chores (or buy a whole house) yourself? A spirit of chosen family and anti-heteronormativity? I’m not sure what more a millennial queer could want.
Often my audience goes along with it, affecting enthusiasm as if placating a child who’s playing pretend. “Let’s look in the desert!” one friend offers, then later sends me a Zillow listing for land outside Palm Springs. (I guess we’re building.) An ex-girlfriend tells me she and her fiancé joke about buying a multifamily house with her cousin and his boyfriend and raising kids together. A good friend from college and I discuss the animals, activities, and ethos of “the compound” we’ll one day end up on.
What these people fail to understand is that I am not playing—and whatever surface interest they show barely conceals their endgame. Because for every feigned “Fuck yeah” and “We’ll host art shows in our yard!” is another friend, another queer couple, lost to the decaying Xanadu of the American dream: individual homeownership. As they’ve been socialized to see it, they’re not just buying a house, but also buying into the promise of safety, stability, and comfort that can apparently only be secured with a mortgage. I watch, melancholic, as they succumb. This could be us, I whisper, painting pastorals of home-cooked meals you didn’t have to make unless you wanted to make them, and someone always there to take you to the airport, but you and your girlfriend would rather sink a million dollars into an 800-square-foot single-family.
~
I got my first glimpse of communal living in college. I had recently found queerness, and with it, a community of other queer students and alums who lived in double- and triple-deckers where they cooked together, learned from one another, and formed all kinds of relationships—living, laughing, loving, as it were. They probably would have identified this as “intentional living,” more than “commune living,” although both are essentially a group of people sharing space and resources. But semantics aside, they showed me a configuration that felt more loving, more normal, than the purported ideal of a suburban nuclear family. (Admittedly, I was also watching a lot of Big Love at the time.)
Particularly appealing about these spaces was their foundation of queer ethics. The residents were queer, yes, in sexuality, gender, or both, but beyond that, their politics resisted assimilation and oppression and were rooted in inclusive feminism. Many were activists and organizers in other leftist movements; the houses were an experiment in mutual aid, honest communication, and non-punitive measures for addressing harm. They were environments that allowed a multiplicity of relationships and intimacies to bloom. If you were poly, if you didn’t want kids, if you didn’t aspire to anything but being a kind person, if you were just a freak—you could feel at home.
It made sense not just theoretically, but also practically. As someone who prizes privacy and interdependence—and as an Aquarian who loves humanity but not always people—I was taken by the concept of having one’s own space with friends close by, all of us contributing skills and goods and relying on one another. I’m incapable of house maintenance, for example, but I’d happily do the group laundry. I don’t want to raise my own human children, but I think I’d thrive as a weird aunt.
Some might call this immature; a failure to properly adult. In dominant U.S. culture, there’s an expectation of ascending from living with parents or roommates to living alone or with a spouse. But we’re somewhat of a minority there: Around the world, the most common living arrangement is the extended family household. It tracks, then, that we’ve been fed classist and racist notions of communal living as unhealthy, unproductive, and un-American. After World War I, the U.S. government conceived and propagated the aspirational narrative of individual homeownership as a direct response to communism. Later, the Public Works and Federal Housing administrations socially engineered segregated public housing and underwrote the white (wealthied) suburbanization of the U.S. We want to own our own homes because—surprise, surprise—the idea was marketed to us.
If sharing a home with extended family or non-relations is antithetical to this country’s identity, it’s not just about forgoing individual property ownership. Communal living demands and facilitates a way of life that’s inherently anti-capitalist. Six people on one piece of land don’t need to buy six lawnmowers. Cohabitating with housemates from different backgrounds and life experiences gives way to social and political alignments that threaten the dominant paradigm. And if we didn’t have to do everything ourselves—if we weren’t solely responsible for keeping our lights on and our kids fed—what freedom might we know, both collectively and as individuals?
The pandemic, for all its hellishness, has blown illuminating holes through our picket fence individualism. Many of us who’d been relatively comfortable minding our own were suddenly confronted with the reality that we’re vulnerable without each other. We started getting to know our neighbors, trading toilet paper and sourdough starter. The number of multigenerational homes increased, and roommates—whether platonic or romantic—looked after one another when we fell sick. Covid (re)introduced us to communal care.
It also demonstrated and continues to demonstrate how profoundly our neoliberal systems have failed us. From fractured supply chains and healthcare infrastructure to insecure housing markets and wages continually eclipsed by the cost of living, instability and scarcity have blanketed the collective. Rent and inflation increases are knocking more people out of their homes, while more than 3 in 5 people in the U.S. are in debt. After so many mothers left their jobs to care for kids at home in 2020, there are still 1 million fewer women in the workforce two years later.
Why not abandon the road once laid out for us, now all buckled pavement and gaping potholes, and take a detour down the less trodden path of communal living? Why not create our own, ever-expanding social safety net? It’s been made clear that traditional structures of power aren’t going to save us. We are all we’ve got. And when we’re not on our separate, self-reliant islands—when we have more robust immediate support networks of people who may not share our surname—we’re better able to help others in our communities and ourselves. And it works: One recently founded commune, the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, was explicitly developed as a safe haven for queer and trans people trying to survive the previous presidential administration, and continues to grow today.
I’m not too proud to admit I Zillow as much as the next person (though I remain disturbed by how soothing it can be). There are some things I value more, however, than four beds and two baths to myself. In my 20s, I lived with three other queer people who taught me how to change my oil and reminded me of the simple joy of passing an unplanned joint after work. In my current fourplex, we count on one another for emergency pet care, for “Are you home? I think I left my oven on,” and for an unexpected, genuine conversation when passing in the yard. (Not to mention the loaves of bread one of my neighbors regularly bakes for the rest of us.) It’s experiences like these that trigger the spark of connection, the comfort of knowing someone’s close by, and the familial warmth of being cared for and taking care.
The American Dream was never imagined with everyone in mind. At its best, individual homeownership evokes feelings of stability, safety, and attachment. At its worst, it embodies exclusionary consumerism and white-hetero tribalism. The queer commune offers all of the former without the latter, instead gifting collectivism, kinship, and the potential for social transformation. And probably some good homemade dessert.
Y’all coming?
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Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee?
Immigration. It’s a topic at the heart of political arguments and family dinner table rows all around the world. It drives tabloid headlines. But it’s an issue that’s poorly understood by many people. What makes someone a refugee, and what’s an economic migrant? Why do people leave their homes? How easy is it to cross a border?
This is your immigration cheat sheet — an introduction to how humankind migrates. It’s the why, how, and where. The emotional toll many have to face, and the opportunities others enjoy. The changing policies that are impacted by the world in which we live.
What is immigration?
Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee? Meanwhile, the word migrant is often used as an umbrella term for everybody moving somewhere new, regardless of the reason — it isn’t specific to refugees. Here’s a breakdown of some key terms.
Immigration vs. emigration
The difference between immigration and emigration is about whether you’re coming or going. People immigrating are moving into a new country to live, where they become immigrants. Whereas emigration relates to those leaving.
People might also talk about net migration. This is a calculation to show whether more people are moving into a country, than out of it, affecting the overall population. If there are more immigrants to a country than people emigrating, it’s known as positive net migration.
Immigration vs. migration
Moving into a new place is known as immigration. Migration, on the other hand, is the actual act of moving. It’s when people (or birds) leave one location and journey towards another. People might cross multiple borders, or they might even stay in the same country and migrate to a different area.
Immigration under duress
Not all migration is through choice. Many people are forced to move away from their countries, leaving behind homes and loved ones.
Refugees
There are 84 million people in the world who have been forcibly displaced, either within their own countries or beyond its borders. People forced to flee their home countries for fear of being persecuted are known as refugees, and they’re often at risk due to their political beliefs, religion, race, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or sexual orientation. They might be facing war or violence in their home countries. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people are guaranteed the right to seek asylum in another country. They’re also protected from refoulement, where states must not return refugees to places where their lives or freedom would be under threat.
Asylum seekers
Refugees who have made an application to stay in a new country, but have not yet received a decision, are known as asylum seekers. They can only make that application once they’re in the new country. As of 2021, there are 4.4 million people waiting on asylum applications across the world. Some travel through several nations before making an application — there is no obligation for people to seek asylum in the first country in which they arrive. Asylum procedures can be complicated, involving interviews, lengthy legal processes, and even detention-like accommodation.
Trafficked people
Human traffickers take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. Those escaping risky situations, or deceived into believing strangers can find themselves in disastrous situations. Victims of human trafficking can be forced into sexual exploitation, slavery, marriage, or crime. It happens both across borders and within people’s home countries.
Immigration: a brief history
People have migrated throughout the whole of history, from early human movement out of Africa to periods of colonialism. It’s nothing new. But the ways migrants are treated and the factors that drive movement are ever shifting. Climate change is forcing more people to leave their homes, and technological advances mean those who want to work from anywhere often can. The Coronavirus pandemic forced countries to close their borders, and some governments used it as an excuse to turn away people.
Immigration laws
Here’s a snapshot of how immigration laws have changed in recent history, and the moments that made big impacts:
United Kingdom
During World War II, the UK took in around 70,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. British children from cities and towns, known as evacuees, were sent to live in the British countryside, or even in other nations, away from the threat of bombs.
After World War II, the country needed help rebuilding cities and staffing the healthcare system, and invited people from the Commonwealth to move to the UK. Those arriving from the Caribbean were known as the Windrush generation. They were automatically British subjects. However, in 2017, it became clear that the Home Office had wrongly deported commonwealth citizens, after destroying documentation which would have proved their right to live and work in the UK.
The introduction of the Immigration Act in 1971 put an end to Commonwealth citizens enjoying more rights in the UK than those from other nations.
In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union. On 31 January 2020, Brexit came into force, putting an end to freedom of movement for British citizens in the EU.
The European Union and Schengen area
In 1951, six European countries joined together with the key aim of preventing further war and furthering economic growth. Through the European Economic Community, workers were eventually given the right of free movement in 1968.
In 1992, the European Union (EU) was created. Freedom of movement for all EU nationals was enshrined in law. Two years later, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Sweden were also included in free movement measures.
The creation of the Schengen Agreement means that citizens can now travel across 26 European countries (four of which are non-EU) without facing border controls. It is a passport-free zone.
United States
The United States has long been known as a country of immigrants. In 1892, the country’s first immigration station opened — Ellis Island.
The Immigration Act of 1924 brought big changes. Fears of communism were spreading, and many Americans wanted to separate themselves from other nations after the horrors of the First World War. Racism and discrimination increased and the new law limited migration based on nationality. In the same year, the US border patrol was established to stop illegal immigrants crossing into the country.
In 1965, the nationality-based quota system finally came to an end with the Immigration and Nationality Act.
During the Trump administration, the environment for refugees became more hostile. People were forced to wait in Mexico, and anyone traveling through other countries before arriving in the US was denied the right to claim asylum. Some refugees are sent to Guatemala in a “safe third country” agreement.
Japan
Japan has a reputation for strict immigration controls. For much of history, the country has been fairly isolated, with little mix of other ethnicities.
Between 1905 and 1945, a large number of people from Japanese territories migrated to the mainland - they were Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese. After World War II, controls tightened.
The 1952 Immigration Control and Refugee Act made it difficult for foreigners who wanted to live and work long-term in Japan.
In 2021, the government shelved a bill which would have allowed asylum seekers to be pushed back to their home countries when their applications were under appeal.
Uganda now has the largest number of refugees across the whole of Africa. It has an open-door policy, and people from neighboring East African countries arrive to seek safety. Refugees are given plots of land on arrival, access to healthcare and education, and the right to work - it’s known as a self-reliance model. This isn’t the whole story, and there are many challenges, but Uganda’s refugee policies are largely considered progressive. Nearly 1.5 million refugees now live in Uganda.
Immigration visas
Variations of passports and visas have existed throughout history, but up until World War I people could move fairly freely — although the opportunities might not have been as numerous. Following the war years and subsequent security fears, passports as we know them now came into being.
In 1920, the League of Nations set a global standard for the documents. While Western countries were keen for these identity documents, many other countries were against the idea and saw them as restrictive. With the introduction of passports, came entry visas, with the same goal of national security. Just a year after the League of Nations meeting, the US introduced an act that put a quota on the number of immigrants allowed into the country.
How different nations approach immigration visas is constantly in flux. EU citizens don’t require visas to move to other EU states, while nations like New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are pickier in who they welcome into their countries. There’s a large expat population in Singapore, and depending on which country you come from, getting a visa could be fairly straightforward.
World events impact visa restrictions. The coronavirus pandemic means some countries require anyone entering to be vaccinated. Technological advancements and a rise in working from home have created changes too. Estonia, Cape Verde, and Barbados are just some of the countries offering digital nomad passports, allowing people to enjoy residency in a new place, while their career continues from a laptop.
What immigration is like today
United Kingdom
Immigration laws are in a state of flux in the United Kingdom. Since Brexit, this island nation no longer allows people from the EU to live, study, or work in the country visa-free, as was the case before. In the rest of the EU, citizens can move freely.
Following Brexit, the UK has a points-based immigration system.
The government wants to change the asylum laws and push back people arriving via irregular routes. Many are forced to cross the English Channel on dangerous boats or stowed in lorries, for a lack of a safe alternative.
The UK granted British citizenship to 146,483 people in 2021 and gave residence documents to 10,135 people from EEA (European Economic Area) countries. The nation gave protection to 13,210 asylum seekers in the same year.
United States
People who want to call the United States home must first get an immigrant visa. When they land on US soil, they become a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR), allowing them to apply for jobs and live in the country. After five years, they can apply for US citizenship.
There are different rules for immediate family members of US citizens, who have to meet certain eligibility criteria. Skilled workers can also get special visas on a temporary or permanent basis.
Refugees can apply to become LPRs one year after arriving or receiving asylum. They go through a complicated system.
Japan is facing a labor shortage and a shrinking population. For a country long-averse to immigration, things might be about to change. The country plans to start welcoming skilled workers to stay in the country indefinitely. Until now, their visas have only been valid for five years and didn’t extend to family members. Many of the workers come from Vietnam and China.
The country operates on a points-based system for foreign professionals. Most people need a Certificate of Eligibility, applied for by their sponsor in Japan.
People between 18 and 30 can apply for a working holiday visa, which lasts for a year.
Japan has a low rate of accepting asylum seekers, compared to other wealthy countries.
After working in the country for five years, people can apply for permanent residency. Those partnered with or related to a South African citizen can also apply, as well as some other categories.
Different European countries have different refugee policies. Sweden had a welcoming refugee policy until 2016, and offered permanent residency visas to refugees. Since then, the number of applications being granted has declined. In 2021, the new government replaced the offer of permanent visas with temporary ones. However, the country continues to accept 5,000 quota refugees a year, who are people that UNHCR (the UN’s Refugee Agency) select to be housed in safe countries.
The country does not recognize dual citizenship, so taking two passports could mean you get one confiscated. Anyone who’s visited Israel might face problems entering Saudi Arabia.
877 people applied for asylum in 2020 and while very few applications have been processed yet, they’ve all been accepted. It’s worth noting that 247 people from Saudi Arabia applied for asylum in other nations.
Why people migrate
Whether choosing to set up home in a new country or forced to make journeys across borders, there are many reasons people migrate. Economic need or opportunity is a huge driver, while war and violence displace millions every year. People move to join family, study abroad, or retire. And throughout history and today, Indigenous communities have been forced from their native lands.
Migrating for economic reasons
Money is a huge driver of migration. Many people are forced to move, because of a complete lack of opportunity to earn a living in their region. Economic migration is often viewed as a choice, but poverty, dangerous working conditions, or food insecurity can mean some people have little choice but to leave their homes. For these people, migration is a case of survival.
Others choose to migrate because they can earn higher wages in other countries, find more opportunities, or follow particular career paths. Professionals from all over the world take opportunities to make homes in new countries.
Some migrant workers face economic insecurity in their own nations. For these people, the jobs on offer when they migrate are often the ones that nationals don’t want to take on. These industries can be unregulated and migrant workers are at risk of exploitation.
Demographic changes also impact migration. Aging populations come hand-in-hand with labor shortages, leaving a need for young workers. As of 2018, Japan is facing the greatest skills shortage in the world, followed by Turkey, Greece and India.
There are 26.6 million refugees worldwide, with a further 48 million people displaced within their own countries, according to UNHCR. More than two thirds of these people have traveled from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. In these countries and others, people face war, violence, and persecution. Syrians have witnessed executions in the street and had their towns and villages bombed. Politically-driven violence and food insecurity in Venezuela forces people to leave. The recent fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has put people in serious danger.
In Ethiopia, the Oromo people face violence and persecution, as do other specific groups of people across the world. LGBTQIA+ people are often forced to leave countries that outlaw homosexuality, or face prison, violence, or even death. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, unrest and fighting between different groups means people are forced to flee. In some nations, citizens face mandatory military service. In Eritrea, that service sometimes becomes indefinite.
In North Korea, human rights barely exist. There is no access to media from outside the country, famine is rife, and citizens are conditioned to devote themselves to the ‘Great Leader.’ Defectors have little choice but to put themselves in the hands of smugglers. If they are caught escaping, they face forced labor camps. China does not recognize North Koreans as refugees, and so those who are caught are returned.
Many people who become refugees for safety reasons are forced to choose between leaving family behind in dangerous situations, or putting their loved ones at more risk on perilous journeys. It is an impossible decision. For those making the journey alone, they may have to wait years for an asylum decision before accessing family reunification channels, where some can be reunited with their families.
Migrating for family reasons
Many people cross oceans to be closer to their families. Some refugees aim for specific countries because they already have family connections, which they hope will make integration easier. Others are the partners or children of migrant workers. Then there are people who have been apart from their families, and choose to reconnect with them: they might be caring for elderly parents, seeking comfort after changes of circumstance, or moving in with different family members. Some have new family ties — through marriage, long-term relationships, or adoption.
Depending on which country they’re applying from, some people with refugee status can go through family reunification channels to bring their loved ones into their new home country.
In 2018, around 1.9 million people moved to OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation) countries for family reasons. Around 40 percent of family migrants live in the US.
Climate migration
The climate crisis is a growing concern. So too is climate migration. As our planet heats up, geography and weather patterns are disrupted. Island nations like Tuvalu are witnessing rising sea levels before their very eyes and people are reluctantly making migration plans. Storms, droughts, and floods are battering communities across the world, forcing people to relocate. To adapt to climate change, people are moving. Most people are displaced within their own countries, others are crossing borders.
Papua New Guinea is one nation under threat from climate change. Between 2008 and 2013, 151,000 people were displaced in the country, and two thirds of those were due to environmental hazards.
In Peru, people’s livelihoods are impacted by climate change. Glacial melting and temperature extremes mean fishers and farmers are facing new challenges — as are the people relying on these food sources. People are forced from rural areas into cities. Many face floods, landslides, cold, and drought.
Australia was hit by bush fires in both 2019 and 2020, forcing thousands of people from their homes and causing huge destruction to the environment.
Immigration isn’t easy. Once geographical and emotional barriers have been navigated, there are those conditions imposed by governments. And when people are accepted into countries, they might face new challenges — language and cultural barriers, racism, and finding work. The coronavirus pandemic has put another barrier in the way, causing backlogs and closing borders.
Government paperwork
For people who’ve been forcibly displaced, one of the first barriers to immigration can be a lack of passport. People who’ve fled their homes with nothing have difficulty proving their identity or crossing borders safely. When it comes to accessing jobs and education, it can be hard to prove education levels without physical certificates. Once people have applied for asylum, complicated processes, technicalities, or a lack of support can leave people with rejected claims or facing deportation.
Migrants who have relocated willingly are still at the hands of bureaucracy. Lengthy forms or restrictive visas can dissuade people from migrating, or they might be rejected for visas. For people on temporary visas in certain countries, accessing permanent residency can be a stressful process that takes years. I could mean staying in unpleasant jobs just to hold on to a sponsor, or paying out vast sums of money.
There are other pieces in the paperwork puzzle. Criminal record checks, medical reports, and vaccination certificates, to begin with. Couples and families might need to prove that they’re in genuine relationships.
Language
People applying for citizenship in some countries have to prove their knowledge of language and culture.
Asylum seekers can be acutely affected by language barriers. A lack of suitable translators leads to some claims being misinterpreted. People can be, and are, returned to unsafe countries due to being misunderstood or not being given enough opportunity to represent themselves. Accessing services and assimilating into wider society can also prove tough when people are learning a new language from scratch, all whilst dealing with the impact of trauma.
Financial requirements
Immigration can come with a huge price tag. Aside from the usual costs of moving home (along with flights and international haulage), there might be expensive visa fees.
Beyond this, some countries impose further financial requirements, like the salary that migrant workers need to earn. Those applying for family visas in countries like the UK and Canada might have to prove that they can financially support the people they want to bring over. In Australia, those applying for student visas need to prove that they can financially support themselves. In South Africa, anyone who wants a retired person’s visa needs to prove that they earn at least R37,000 (nearly $2,500 US) per month.
Restrictions on migrants
Migrants don’t always have the same rights as nationals. Asylum seekers in many countries are prohibited from working or studying while their applications are being assessed, which can make supporting themselves difficult, as well as impacting their wellbeing. Even though many have been through traumatic experiences, some asylum seekers are held in detention centers. They can be unsanitary and crowded.
In some countries, immigrants are required to pass a language test, undergo medical tests for things like Tuberculosis, or pay extra to access healthcare systems.
People arriving on some visas might be advised not to leave the country again — for example fiancé(e)s arriving on a family visa before the wedding takes place — or risk having to reapply.
The future of immigration
The climate crisis, a health pandemic, and political tensions are all playing into how migration is changing. People stayed put as borders closed to stop the spread of a virus, while others were forced to flee their homes regardless. Technological advances offer greater opportunities for global citizens, while far right politics threaten freedom of movement. How countries respond to refugees is in constant flux, and there are at the same time both positive and worrying trends.
According to Move by founder of FutureMap, Parag Khanna, throughout history we humans have been driven to migrate by five forces: climate change, demographics, politics, economics, and technology. Climate change, now more so than in recent centuries, is going to have a huge impact on migration. It is already happening.
As the US moves further away from the Trump administration, which was famously hostile towards migrants, the UK closes its borders to many. The effects of Brexit are coming into being. Tension in Russia casts a shadow over Europe and beyond. And people left at risk in Afghanistan are still awaiting the refuge that so many countries have promised.
Whether the world chooses to build more bridges, or more walls, is yet to be seen.
[post_title] => A beginner’s guide to immigration
[post_excerpt] => When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee? Meanwhile, the word migrant is often used as an umbrella term for everybody moving somewhere new, regardless of the reason — it isn’t specific to refugees.
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Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics.
As the debate over Critical Race Theory, also known as CRT, rages across the United States, the foundational principles, values, and aims of the American education system are called into question. The war over CRT amplifies these essential questions: Who gets to tell the stories of this country, whose stories are worth telling, and how do these stories inform our lives today? It is ironic, of course, that these heated controversies are playing out across historic and contemporary Indigenous homelands.
There is a manufactured nature to the controversy surrounding Critical Race Theory. Far from an attempt to make white children feel guilty about atrocities that took place before they were born, or shame for their skin color, as CRT detractors have argued, the scholars who pioneered and practice the theory use it as a tool for understanding systemic oppression.
Academics recognized CRT in 1989, but its roots go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when legal scholars developed critical legal theory as a means of interrogating how the legal system served the interests of the rich and powerful at the cost of the poor and marginalized. Today, teachers use CRT to inform their age-appropriate lessons about discrimination, history, and oppression. Political pundits who claim that teaching the perspective of the marginalized is the same as teaching CRT are simply wrong.
It’s easy to see how the sudden outrage from right-wing politicians over CRT has deflected attention from this moment of racial reckoning in the post-George Floyd era. Virginia’s Governor Glenn Youngkin, for instance, made opposition to Critical Race Theory a centerpiece of his election campaign; on this platform, he successfully secured his place as Virginia’s first Republican governor in more than a decade. On his first day in office Youngkin made good on his campaign promise by passing an executive order to “end the use of inherent divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, and restore excellence in K-12 public education in the commonwealth. Put simply, Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics.
To understand the implications of this political development for Native communities, it is important to consider the larger context of Indigenous peoples within existing school curricula. Long before Critical Race Theory was ever formulated, schools in the U.S. failed abysmally in teaching about Indigenous histories, cultures, and contemporary politics. The effect of this failure is painfully obvious among the college students who sit in lecture halls like the ones in which I teach.
As a university faculty member who teaches both American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies at a predominately white institution, I often poll students about their knowledge of Native American history and culture, in order to teach effectively. In most cases, their exposure to Native histories is limited to a sanitized version of Columbus’ “discovery” of America, the Thanksgiving myth, and a little bit about the Cherokee Trail of Tears. My students from California often report on their fourth-grade experience of learning about the Spanish mission system—a system of mass death, forced labor, disease, and starvation—by building miniature replicas of the missions out of popsicle sticks and sugarcoating the historical narrative with actual sugar cubes, which they fashioned into mission fixtures.
One of the most striking and disturbing trends I have noticed throughout my years in the classroom and as a public advocate for Indigenous issues is that non-Natives tend to be woefully unaware of the fact that, in addition to the local, state, and federal government levels, there is also the tribal government level. My students are often dismayed to learn that these tribal governments are not marginal, but numerous and powerful—that there are, in fact, 574 sovereign nations with a government-to-government relationship with the federal U.S. governing institutions. The syllabus of my public high school’s civics and government course did not include any lessons about tribal nationhood, self-governance, citizenship, and sovereignty, and this is clearly the case for the vast majority of public schools.
I am deeply concerned to see that our nation’s rising college-educated youth could potentially embark on careers in government without learning that more than 56.2 million acres of this country—for context, only 11 of the 50 states are larger than 56.2 million acres—are under the jurisdiction of tribal governments. Nor are they aware that the largest tribal reservation, governed by the Navajo Nation, is larger than one-fifth of all states, including West Virginia, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island.
This ignorance is not the fault of the students. The responsibility for ensuring that our youth—our next generation of leaders—receive a historically accurate education and are prepared to go out into the world with a toolbox of knowledge that will carry us all through to the next day falls upon parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers. At a time when Native students are still subjected to racial slurs, nonconsensual haircutting, Indian-themed mascots, and screeching, headdressed mockeries in their schools, the idea that states are passing legislation that will result in teaching even less essential information about Indigenous peoples and our roles in this nation is extremely difficult to accept or understand.
Given the pitiful state of existing education regarding the First Americans, it seems that Critical Race Theory has become the Right’s latest desperate effort to perpetrate a colorblind national narrative. For Native peoples, colorblindness—although not conceptualized as such at the time—can be seen in the pedagogical philosophy of Richard Henry Pratt, the former military officer who, after the Civil War, established residential schools for Native Americans where the guiding pedagogical theory was “kill the Indian, save the man”—i.e., strip Native children forcibly of their culture and language and force them to assimilate into white society.
Pratt ushered in a new policy era that shifted the country’s policies regarding Indigenous populations away from military warfare and physical death, to the new goal of achieving Indigenous cultural and political death through assimilation. Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and hundreds of others that copied his pedagogical model, achieved this aim by separating Indian children from their families and enrolling them in institutions where the children’s hair was cut, their languages and religions forbidden, and all forms of Indigenous community connections disallowed. These are now the sites where hundreds of Native children’s bodies are being discovered in unmarked graves. They are a stain on our national history, an example of the failures of colorblind and assimilationist ideologies, and, indeed, a testament to soundness of the concept of structural racism.
When it comes to the intersection of the current Critical Race Theory debate and Indigenous populations, these continued attempts to silence discussions about the violence endured by Native communities, our strength and resilience in overcoming attempts to wholly eradicate us, and ongoing injustices facing Native peoples today can all be understood within the framework of the attempted erasure our people. But these efforts are not new; various political attempts to “solve” the “Indian problem” have changed and evolved since the founding of the United States.
Those who oppose teaching accurate, representative lessons about Indigenous peoples overlook a fundamental truth that must be reckoned with if we are to continue to grow as a society: Native peoples did not vanish, we are not extinct, and we remain an important part of America’s history and present day. The same is true for Black and other people of color, members of the LGBTQ2S+ community, folks of differing abilities, women, and gender nonconforming individuals, all of whom are represented within the Native population and with whom Indigenous communities are allied in this shared struggle. The very fact that a sizable portion of this nation supports the imposition of legal restrictions on teaching students about race, identity, and history demonstrates the importance of this type of educational instruction.
[post_title] => Critical Race Theory, Native communities, and American education
[post_excerpt] => Critical Race Theory has become a Trojan horse for discussions about privilege, gender, race, and inequity, and serves as a rally point for conservative politics.
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The isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the pandemic have caused a sharp spike in demand for mental health care, but the system is not providing the help people need.
Chelsea, a 33-year-old part-time CrossFit coach, managed her lifelong anxiety by keeping herself busy and physically active, but the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing measures deprived her of those essential coping mechanisms. Suddenly she found herself alone at home and her anxiety, which had been acting up since 2018, became a serious problem. A resident of Edmonton, Canada, Chelsea tried to find a therapist within the public health-care system who could see her for free or on a sliding scale. But the waiting lists were long, and she was unable to afford a private therapist. She tried BetterHelp, a company that provides web-based therapy, but stopped when she realized she had to pay extra to speak with a therapist via video camera. She also tried a free phone service through the Edmonton municipality, but she needed long-term therapy—not a one-time chat.
Chelsea was on two separate wait lists for over two years but did not receive any updates so, to her frustration, she had no idea when her turn would be. Recently, thanks to a new job with improved benefits, she was finally able to find a therapist in the private system.
Canada’s national health-care system, which, for the most part, is publicly available and funded through contributions from the federal and provincial governments, has been stretched to its limits by the pandemic. But even in better times, before COVID, mental health care was difficult to obtain. The national health-care system places a priority on physical health, with a particular focus on critical and emergency medicine. But now, after two years of extreme stress caused by isolation, unemployment, uncertainty, loss, and increased family responsibilities, the demand for mental health care has spiked.
A recent survey by the Canadian Mental Health Association found that the number of Ontario residents currently seeking mental health care has risen to 24 percent, up from 9 percent in 2020. According to another survey conducted in the fall, about one in five Canadians rated their mental health as “poor,” while half the respondents said they were worried about a lack of access to care.
Dr. Simon Sherry, a clinical psychologist and professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said his waiting list has risen from 150 pre-pandemic to about 450 people today. “In Nova Scotia, poor mental health has become statistically normal,” he said, adding that people with pre-existing conditions are having “an especially rough time.” The pandemic has left them with physical and psychological scars.Dr. Karen Hetherington, a faculty lecturer at McGill’s School of Social Work, agreed with Dr. Sherry, pointing out that “it’s no surprise” to see a decline in the mental health of a person who might have spent months in lockdown in a small apartment during Montreal’s long, dark, frigid winter.
Lyla* is a mental health-care specialist in a Montreal hospital’s outpatient clinic, working with patients suffering from schizophrenia. She has seen many cases of people with severe pre-existing issues experiencing a complete breakdown during the pandemic. “I know some patients that just couldn’t function anymore because everything they had in terms of socialization was taken away from them,” she said.
A global calamity of this scale is a natural vector for a mental health crisis, but those who have worked in mental health care for years are grimly unsurprised that the system failed to respond to the sharp increase in demand. They have been asking for extra support for years, but felt as though they were screaming into a void.
“It’s simply been the case that both the health-care field and public health have focused overwhelmingly on physical health,” said Dr. Nicholas King, a professor at McGill University who is an expert in public health ethics and policy. “So, when you have a major, large-scale event that has a huge impact on mental health, that system for dealing with mental health is obviously going to come under strain.”
Dr. Javeed Sukhera is a pediatric and adolescent psychiatrist and Chair and Chief of Psychiatry at the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Previously, he lived and worked for a decade in Ontario. Dr. Sukhera trained in New York State, which, he believes “has a pretty decent” mental health care system. “Where I trained, if a young person needs support, regardless of whether they were poor or not, they usually got fairly timely intervention,” he said. In Canada, by contrast, he encountered “huge obstacles in accessing basic evidence-based psychotherapies” for his patients.
Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care. In fact, Dr. Sukhera said, “There are many jurisdictions in the U.S. where access to basic evidence-based mental health support is way better than in many parts of Canada. And that’s a difficult piece of truth to recognize and reconcile for Canadians who idealize our system. But my lived experience would say that’s the truth.”
Like health workers more broadly, mental health-care providers have burnt out during the pandemic, with many choosing to quit. Lyla cited a combination of overwork, low pay, and a lack of acknowledgment as the factors driving the resignation among her colleagues in mental health. Now, newly vacant positions are going to inexperienced recent graduates. Lyla said that mental health-care jobs were once desirable and difficult to obtain. But these days she and her colleagues are constantly begging for extra support and left feeling that “the benefits [of staying in the profession] don’t outweigh the risks.”
Noelle* works in youth mental health care at a public clinic in Montreal. She, too, has seen many of her colleagues choosing to leave. The vacant positions are going unfilled, which increases the strain on those who stay, which in turn leads to more burnout and more departures. The problem with the public sector, she said, is the way it’s structured. In the type of clinic in which she works, psychologists are told they have “four months to help the patient and then you have to close the file and move on to somebody else,” she said, adding: “In a private setting, you don’t get that.” The government, she says, “treats people like numbers, like employees. Like the way overtime was mandatory for nurses for a long time. How is someone with children supposed to be working 18 hours in a row?”
Although everyone I spoke with agreed that additional funding for the public system was much needed, Noelle also recommends more funding go into community organizations, such as AMI-Quebec, a non-profit that helps the families of those with mental illness, or Cyprès, which provides direct mental health services to individuals in their community. Dr. Hetherington agrees. In her view, the culture in the public sector is simply too “top down. It has no understanding of the real needs of the population, the clientele. It’s so bureaucratic.”
She also does not believe the public sector can be adequately transformed to meet the needs of those suffering. “You can’t change a culture when it’s such an elephant. Then you need to build new structures that integrate a different culture,” she said. She’d like to see the Quebec government fund new non-profit mental health centers with public money. These centers could then contract directly with community organizations. She hopes that this would allow a new culture to flourish in mental health care.
When we last spoke, however, Dr. Hetherington was feeling newly optimistic about mental health care in Quebec, with the provincial government having recently announced that it would invest $1.2 billion in mental health services. “This is the first time the money is attached to a vision,” she said, with funding for both school and refugee mental health. The plan is also focused on bringing mental health services into the community and sensitizing the community. She confirmed that the pandemic “was a facilitator.”
“What we need,” said Dr. Sherry, “is a fundamental kind of courage from decision-makers and government to actually center people who are suffering when making decisions because they’re politically convenient or politically popular.” Many are still waiting for a public system that is failing to provide care for them. Private therapy “is really not affordable unless you’re making a lot of money,” said Chelsea. Without her new job, she’d still be waiting—along with thousands of others.
*Names have been changed upon request.
[post_title] => A spike in pandemic-related mental illness has overwhelmed Canada's health care system
[post_excerpt] => Canadians believe that their system is inherently fairer and more accessible than the one south of the border. But while this is true for physical health care, it is simply not the case for mental health care.
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[post_content] => We know Facebook is hurting individuals and whole societies; but now we know that Facebook knows it, too.
On Sunday, October 3, the Facebook whistle-blower, whose trove of internal research documents has made global headlines for weeks, revealed her identity on 60 Minutes, the prestigious American television news show. Frances Haugen, who quit her job at Facebook in May 2021, said “the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart,” and that Facebook’s senior executives know this but refused to act. Haugen said she took a trove of internal documents to prove beyond doubt that Facebook’s research team and senior executives know exactly the damage the company inflicts but choose to prioritize advertising revenue. She said; “Facebook has realised if they make it safer, people spend less time on the site, click on less ads, they make less money.” She brought proof of what many outsiders have said for years: Facebook prioritizes revenue over public safety, and Instagram makes children—especially teenage girls - mentally ill.
Who is Frances Haugen? She is a 37 year-old American data scientist, a Harvard Business School graduate, who has worked for Big Tech for 15 years, including for Google, Yelp, and Pinterest. At Facebook, where she had worked for two years, Haugen led a small team working on counterespionage for civilians targeted by hostile states—for example, Taiwanese or Uyghur people being spied on by the Chinese government. Her team of just seven people was expected to provide enough protection for people around the world, and requests for more resources were refused. But Haugen says her personal trigger to blow the whistle was when she lost a friend radicalized by social media into far-right racism.
From early 2021, Haugen assiduously copied tens of thousands of pages of Facebook’s own research about the harms it creates. She has worked with the Wall Street Journal — who reported on Instagram’s harms to teenage girls in September —and will testify to the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee later this week. Just as importantly, Haugen has filed several complaints with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulator for companies. She alleges that Facebook is lying to the public and to shareholders when it says it’s making progress on how it deals with disinformation and hate. One internal Facebook study said “we estimate that we may action as little as three-to- five percent of hate… and 0.6 percent of violence and incitement on Facebook.” Facebook replied a full two weeks after Wall Street Journal reports based on Haugen’s leaked documents, to claim its own research was unreliable. (To be fair, one of the Instagram studies had a tiny sample size of just 40 teenagers.) But it did not address many of the factual claims made about the real, ongoing and fully known harms Facebook is perpetrating against children—and against democracy itself.
Of course, none of the claims made by Haugen’s leaks are new. Independent researchers have pointed out for years that Facebook profits from extremism and hate. Facebook’s 2018 change to the algorithm that decides which content users see was designed to aggressively monetize even more the fact that anger drives clicks. Another whistle-blower, Sophie Zhang, said in April 2021 that Facebook systematically under-resources the teams working to counter state manipulation of the platform by autocrats around the world. If it’s the US presidential election, election integrity is a priority and, as Haugen says, rules and system changes were introduced and heavily resourced, at least temporarily. But for countries like Honduras, Albania and Azerbajan? According to Zhang, not so much. Protecting election integrity from disinformation and organized hate in lower priority countries “felt like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper.” And academic researchers have for years provided evidence that Instagram drives eating disorders, suicidal ideation and self-harm. We know Facebook is hurting individuals and whole societies; but now we know that Facebook knows it, too.
Whistle-blowing is vital because it provides documentary evidence not just of harms, but of the culpability of those doing the harm. That’s why Haugen’s tens of thousands of pages are important. No doubt, Senators’ research staff and SEC investigators will be pouring over them, searching for the smoking gun, for whose finger was on the trigger and when. But it is vital that, despite the attraction of focusing on the whistle-blower themselves, we concentrate on what the documents say, and about whom. Attention must go to the independent researchers who have, all along, generated credible evidence of Facebook’s harms. That includes people who have had their access revoked to data Facebook had promised to share, including researchers at NYU just weeks ago, and social scientists around the world whose access to data via APIs was blocked in 2018. Focusing attention on independent researchers is crucial, as they provide context and depth for the claims of harm. Also, every time Facebook has a scandal, it promises to "do better" and be more transparent, but once the media attention relents, it pulls the plug.
Haugen has taken a great risk with her future career, and has provided the documentation that regulators and policymakers need. For this we should be grateful. But she is not the arbiter of what should be done. So far, when asked about solutions, she’s made vague gestures toward “regulation,” but in the context of her belief that “the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart.” To this way of thinking, there is a reachable version of Facebook that would do less harm and be OK. This incremental approach is no surprise. Haugen has already worked for 15 years for companies with names that are synonymous with surveillance capitalism. She doesn’t have a problem with the basic business model of extracting people’s data to sell ads. She just has a problem with Facebook being the most egregious of a very bad bunch.
I’ve written before about the Prodigal Tech Bro, the generic guy who got rich working for Big Tech, but then saw the light and left, to decry its failings. The Prodigal Tech Bro converts his social and actual capital into big platforms to question how technology is used. It’s not just galling; it’s dangerous. Centring people who made the problems pushes aside the people— so often women of colour— who’ve been making independent, good faith critiques for years, with little status or money. And it spotlights incremental, milquetoast “solutions” that don’t fundamentally alter the structures and incentives of Big Tech; “The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent.” Haugen is far, far more courageous than the prodigal tech bro. For choosing to be a whistle-blower she will lose the rest of the career she prepared for and must have planned. She has literally put her money where her mouth is, and I applaud her. But what we need from her now is context, insider knowledge, facts and examples of how Facebook does what it does. We don’t need her to set the frame for what the solutions should be.
I have a lot of empathy for Mark, and Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.
--Frances Haugen
Insider critiques are uniformly based on the feeling that “Mark” or “Sheryl” either don’t really understand the harms they do, aren’t sufficiently informed about them, or just want to do the right thing but are trapped in a system of wrong incentives. “It’s one of these unfortunate consequences,” Haugen says, “No one at Facebook is malevolent, right? But the incentives are misaligned.” But Facebook created its own incentives from nothing, hiring Sheryl Sandberg to build its data-extractive, advertising-based business model. Its focus on growth above all else is what made its platform an extreme amplifier of disinformation and hate, simply because that’s what drives clicks. And the amount of money the trillion dollar company spends on moderating content and following up on the direct incitements to violence it generates is miniscule.
Facebook does what it does because that is who it is. It doesn’t change because, as Haugen encapsulates; “Facebook has realized if they make it safer, people spend less time on the site, click on less ads, they make less money.” Haugen’s simple, pithy summary of why we are where we are is the starting point for real change. The documents she has leaked and her upcoming Senate testimony will focus attention on the fundamental problems the company created. Now we need to listen to a wide range of people and gird ourselves for a course of radical, outsider-driven change.
[post_title] => Blowing the whistle on Facebook is just the first step
[post_excerpt] => Whistle-blowing is vital because it provides documentary evidence not just of harms, but of the culpability of those doing the harm.
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[post_content] => Collaboration between white evangelicals and the Proud Boys is another worrying development.
In late July, a close friend of mine received a series of bizarre text messages from her parents, who urged her to stockpile food as quickly as possible. Over the next couple of weeks, they said, food would become scarce as Democrats cut off the supply and shut down the internet, as they attempted to prevent the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president. This was supposed to happen on Friday, August 13. In early August, with the Delta variant of COVID-19 surging and state governments reimposing pandemic restrictions that had only recently been lifted, my friend decided to call her parents and make one last ditch effort to convince them to get vaccinated. Her parents would have none of it. The vaccine was deadly, they insisted; she had survived only because she was protected by their prayers. They also urged her again to stock up on food and prepare for the events that would lead up to August 13.
My friends’ parents were Catholic when she was born. Soon after that they converted to evangelical Protestantism and embraced the prosperity gospel—the belief that God will give Christians health and wealth if they show sufficient faith—that is now associated with many of Trump’s most loyal Christian backers. She grew up attending church and youth group, and, although there was a time after she became an adult that her parents were not regular church attenders, they now attend weekly. Much of their disinformation seems to have come from YouTube, but, as two recent studies show, their status as white, churchgoing evangelical Protestants is not incidental to their vaccine refusal or to their embrace of the GOP’s “Big Lie” about a supposedly “stolen” election.
The first study’s conclusions are written up in a report released in late July by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Interfaith Youth Core, “Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus.” While the report presents an overly rosy picture of white evangelical Protestants by stressing that the intervention of certain religious leaders had reduced their rates of vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal, the raw PRRI data speak clearly enough. White evangelicals remain the religious demographic with the highest rate of vaccine refusal, at 24 percent. The data also show a clear correlation between vaccine refusal and affiliation with the Republican Party, QAnon conspiracy beliefs, and far-right so-called “news” outlets that purvey disinformation.
Meanwhile, using YouGov data, analysts at The Economist provided another piece of the puzzle by testing the hypothesis “that Americans who have no religious affiliation find themselves attracted to other causes, such as the Q craze.” What they found instead is that “Americans who attend church the least are also the least likely to have a favorable view of QAnon.” Conversely, “adults who attended church at least once a month were eight percentage points more likely than we predicted to rate QAnon favourably.” The Economist singled out white evangelicals as the most conspiratorial demographic. While white evangelicals do still have a net unfavorable view of QAnon, they are more likely than members of any other religious demographic to have a positive view of the groundless conspiracy. In addition, 31 percent of white evangelicals believe “that the American government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip Americans, versus 18% among everyone else.” And about two-thirds of them believe the lie that “millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2020 general election”—a rate that is 34 percent higher than the general population.
These studies provide crucial context for understanding the turbulent events that have wracked the United States this summer. To be sure, the August 13 date—promulgated by American fascists like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who claims that God freed him from his crack cocaine addiction—came and went without another January 6. But the summer has been marred by anti-vaccine and anti-mask rallies; threats of civil war; culture warring against the teaching of critical race theory; new rounds of violence instigated by far-right groups in and around Portland, Oregon; and, especially with back-to-school season, angry conspiracists attempting to dominate and disrupt local school board meetings with their vocal opposition to mask mandates meant to protect children who are too young to be vaccinated against COVID.
There are reports that some of these extremists, some of whom have been charged with criminal conduct, do not even have children attending school in the districts in question (if they have children at all). Indeed, some of the same people have been documented at school board meetings not merely in different districts, but even in different states, making it highly likely that astroturfing is in play. Canadian observers have also noted that their anti-maskers sometimes travel the length of the country to participate in multiple protests; the notoriously homophobic and anti-mask Polish-Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski has also been known to stir up trouble in the United States, including in Portland, my adopted hometown.
In the meantime, Florida passed a law banning school districts from mandating masks, with Republican politicians vowing to punish districts that refused to comply. Thankfully, a court overturned Florida’s deadly anti-social law, but Governor Ron DeSantis nevertheless followed through on the threat of punishment by withholding funding from two school districts that passed mask mandates, despite the fact that Florida’s current COVID outbreak is the worst in the United States. The states of Tennessee, Iowa, Utah, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, all of which are governed by Republicans, have also banned school districts from passing mask mandates. In response, the Biden Administration has opened a civil rights investigation over the apparent discrimination against students with disabilities.
At every turn, Christian symbols and rhetoric have been used by the anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-democratic American extremists to support their actions, which amount to a continuation of January 6—a slow-motion insurrection. In June, for example, DeSantis told audience members at the Christofascist Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference that it was necessary “to put on the full armor of God” in order to defeat those to his political left. By using that language, DeSantis conflated Democrats, liberals, and progressives with literally demonic forces.
Charismatic evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht takes a similar approach with his “Let Us Worship” tour, which brings coronavirus germs and “spiritual warfare” to numerous cities across the United States—frequently without securing the necessary permits for his largely maskless, crowded outdoor concerts—as a protest against the reasonable expectation that churches should comply with legal public health measures. On August 8, Feucht brought his circus to Portland, Oregon, bragging on Twitter about his “security team” consisting of far right-wing street brawlers. This in itself—the increasingly open collaboration between the Proud Boys and their ilk, on the one hand, and explicitly Christian leaders on the other—is a highly concerning development. Similar dynamics have been on display in anti-vax and anti-mask rallies in California. At an August 14 rally that took place in Los Angeles, for example, one speaker openly called for violence in front of signs and banners that included slogans like “Freedom in Jesus” and “Jesus is King.” Other speakers proclaimed that “true conservatism” means “instilling Christian values back into our government,” and, quoting the New Testament book of Romans, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” One sign at the rally read “The blood of Christ is my vaccine.”
As with the January 6 insurrection itself, it concerns me that too few elite journalists and pundits are taking the Christian element of American fascism seriously (to say nothing of the fact that far too few of them are willing to call fascism by its name). There is no way to effectively counter a threat to democracy without understanding the nature of the threat, and to look the other way and pretend that Christianity is always and inherently benign in fact enables the Christofascists by reinforcing Christian normativity and hegemony.
True, the quasi-eschatological predictions for August 13 did not come to pass, despite all the extremist chatter about that date. Nevertheless, it’s been a summer of vocal and violent extremism in North America, much of it theocratic in nature. State-level voter suppression efforts might lead to entrenched minority authoritarian rule by white Christian extremists in the United States in any case, but the left’s counter-messaging should include the robust embrace of pluralism and secular society as the keys to a healthy democracy.
[post_title] => 'The most conspiratorial demographic': White evangelicals and the QAnon connection
[post_excerpt] => White evangelicals are more likely than members of any other religious demographic to have a positive view of QAnon.
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https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/27/authoritarian-christians-are-deliberately-undermining-the-public-health-response-to-coronavirus/
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