#End Jim Crow Laws

[ivygorgon]

Support the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 (H.R.6643 / S. 3423)

An open letter to the U.S. Congress

576 so far! Help us get to 1,000 signers!

Despite his 34 felony convictions, Donald Trump has the wealth, connections, and privilege to ensure he doesn’t have to worry about his eligibility to vote this fall. But the millions of ordinary Americans currently disenfranchised by felony convictions aren’t so lucky. That's why, as your constituent, I urge you to co-sponsor and support the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 (H.R.6643 / S. 3423) to guarantee voting rights to ALL Americans. Right now, Jim Crow-style felony disenfranchisement laws deny voting rights to over 4.4 million Americans. The Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 comprises a series of transformative measures that would end the broken system of felony disenfranchisement and empower marginalized communities: - Guaranteeing the right to vote in federal elections to all Americans who have criminal convictions. - Eliminating state-level barriers that prevent individuals with criminal convictions, whether they are incarcerated or have been released, from exercising their right to vote in federal elections. - Ensuring citizens in carceral settings have access to information about elections and candidates 29 Members of Congress have signed on as sponsors or co-sponsors of the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023. If you haven’t already, please join your colleagues and add your name to that list. And if you’re already a co-sponsor – thank you, and please do everything you can to help pass this groundbreaking legislation into law.

▶ Created on October 14 by Jess Craven · 575 signers in the past 7 days

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[nando161mando]

Just because it's legal doesn't mean anything

[qqueenofhades]

I suddenly thought of an interesting question. What is the purpose of democracy? Is it democracy for democracy's sake? democracy exists to protect human rights. Voting is one of the most typical expressions of democracy, but if, due to the tyranny of the majority—the so-called ‘will of the people’—the human rights of the country’s citizens are actually severely harmed (as in the case of this U.S. election), what then? Does democracy, at this stage, still have any meaning to uphold?I mean, suppose, at this moment, one party were to take power through undemocratic means, such as election manipulation, a coup, or assassination, but this party’s policies were, comparatively, more protective of human rights than the opposing party’s. From an objective standpoint of justice, should it be supported at this stage?🤔

I think this is indeed an interesting question and I'll try to answer it in two parts.

First, the idea that "democracy exists to protect human rights" is a considerably recent idea, and doesn't actually figure much into classical expressions/conceptions of democracy. As it was originally practiced in Athens, it had nothing to do with safeguarding the rights of marginalized groups (indeed, if anything, the opposite). It was just a system where groups of people, i.e. property-owning citizen men, were allowed to make decisions collectively, but it was still able to be adjourned at any time for a despot (in the classical sense) to resume autocratic authority. It just means a system in which the people (demos) have authority (kratia). That means, therefore, who constitutes as a "person" under the law is one of the longest-running questions (and struggles) in the entire history of the concept.

As it was then thought about in the Enlightenment and the 18th-century context in which the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, "democracy" was very much the same idea of a small group of "worthy" but ordinary men making decisions in a quasi-elected framework, rather than as a single inherited monarchy. There was still no particular idea that "human rights" was a goal, and would have been foreign to most political theorists. There was an emerging idea of "natural rights" wherein man (and definitely man) was a specially rational creature who had a right to have a say in his government, but yet again, that depended on who was viewed as qualified to have that say. (The answer being, again, white property-owning Christian men.) There have been many constitutional law papers written on how much the founding fathers trusted the American electorate (not very) and how the American government was deliberately designed to work inefficiently in order to slow down the implementation of possibly-stupid decisions (but therefore also potentially-helpful ones). The Electoral College, aside from being an attempt to finesse the slavery question (did slaves count as people for purposes of allotting House representatives? James Madison famously decided they counted as three-fifths of a person), was a further system of indirect republicanism. Likewise, US Senators were not popularly elected on a secret ballot, the same as the president, until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

Of course at the same time in the 19th-early 20th century, the Civil War, Reconstruction and its end, Jim Crow, women's suffrage movements, were all ongoing, and represented further challenge and revision of what "democracy" meant in the American context, and who counted as a legally recognized person who was thus entitled to have their say in government. It was not until Black people and women began insisting that they did in fact count as people that there was any universal idea of "human rights" as expressed in popular democratic systems. This further developed in the 20th century in the world war context, and then in the decolonization waves in the 1950s and 1960s that dismantled European imperialism and gave rise to a flood of new nation-states. Etc. etc., the Civil Rights movement in America, the gay rights movement starting with Stonewall, and further expansion of who was seen as a person not just in the physical but the legal and actionable sense.

That's why we have political philosophy concepts of "electoral" and "liberal" democracies, and why they're not quite the same. In an electoral democracy, people have the right to vote on and elect their leaders, but there may be less protection of associated "liberal" rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression and assembly, and other characteristics that we think of in terms of protected groups and individual rights. Liberal democracies make a further commitment to protect those rights in addition to the basic principle of voting on your leaders, but as noted, democracy does not inherently protect them and if you have a system where a simple majority vote of 49% can remove rights from the other 48%, you have a problem. Technically, it's still democracy -- the people have voted on it, and one side voted more than the other -- but it's not compatible with justice, which is a secondary question and a whole other debate.

In the modern world, autocrats have often been popularly elected, which is technically a democratic process, but the problem is that once they get there, they start dismantling all the civic processes and safeguards that make the country a democracy, and make it much harder for the opposition to win an election and for power to meaningfully change hands. See for example India (Narendra Modi/BJP), Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan/AKP), Poland (Jarosław Kaczyński/PiS), Hungary (Viktor Orbán/Fidesz), Russia (Vladimir Putin/United Russia) and America (Donald Trump/GOP). Some of these countries were more democratic than others to start with, but all of them have engaged in either significant democratic erosion or full authoritarian reversion. The US is not -- yet -- at the latter stage, as I have written about the features of the system that make it different from other countries on that list, but it's in the danger zone.

Lastly, the idea of "we're morally better and protect human rights but are willing to launch a coup/assassination/etc of the current government" has been claimed many, many times throughout history. It has never been the case. Not least since if a party in a democratic system, however flawed, is willing to throw aside the core feature of that system, they simply don't respect human rights in any meaningful sense. That's why we kept having "the people's revolutions," especially in the 20th century, that promised to uphold and liberate the working class and all ended up as repressive communist dictatorships functionally indistinguishable from the autocracies or even quasi-democracies they had replaced. In this day and age, does anyone want Online Leftists, who will cancel and viciously attack fellow leftists for tiny disagreements on the internet, deciding that they're going to overthrow the government and announce themselves the great protector of human rights? Aside from the fact that they couldn't do it even if they ever tried and stopped being insane keyboard warriors, I don't think anyone would believe them, and nor should they, because violent antidemocratic groups are bad. This is the sixth-grade level explanation, but it's true.

If you're so drastically committed to your ideology that you're willing to destroy everyone else for not agreeing (and even then, post-revolution, the revolutionaries always start eating each other), then you're not special or enlightened. You're the exact same kind of ideological zealot who has been responsible for most of the worst atrocities throughout history. When "I need to kill for my beliefs but I'll clearly only kill the right people" is your guiding philosophy, the "right people to be killed" quickly expand past any controls or laws. Why not, especially when you've just declared the law to be invalid? Pretty soon you're into death-squads and extrajudicial-assassinations territory, and no matter how soaringly noble your aims were to start with, you've become much worse than what you replaced.

This does not mean "we all have an obligation to obey oppressive governments because the alternative is worse," which has been likewise used by the oppressive governments who benefit from it. It just means that if a democracy is violently overthrown, what emerges from it -- no matter how nice their rhetoric might initially sound -- will invariably be much worse. Winston Churchill famously remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the alternatives, and in this, I tend to agree with him. It sucks, but there's nothing that has yet been invented that can take its place or that has any interest in protecting human rights in the way that 21st-century liberal democracy has generally accepted it has an obligation to do, however partial, flawed, and regressive it can often be. Indeed right now, in this particular historical moment, the only feasible alternative is quite clearly far-right populist fascist theocratic authoritarianism, and that -- for you fortunate Americans who have never lived under anything like that -- is much, much worse. So yeah.

[chuunijianghuyuri]

Honestly the way many white people on this site think and act, you'd think the most anti-racist thing you can do is enact/re-enact apartheid so that it's easier to not accidently do a cultural appropriation or some bullshit. These white people internally think the fall of usamerica for white people was the end of jim crow laws.

[viktoriaashleyyx]

Tw: violence against women and children mentioned.

I have been an Anti-Facist Norse pagan for almost 15 years (a pretty lonely life ngl) and the best thing to come of this is my skill to sniff out alt right, facist propaganda before anyone else. Everyone tells me "it's not that deep" until they realize, yep it is that deep.

The ACOTAR books have now been added to my list of Alt Right pipelines and I am convinced that SJM herself is either currently a facist or will be spiraling towards it soon.

If any criticism of the main characters, inner circle, Night court values draws you into a frenzy where you need to use a 1300 word straw man argument to lower your heart rate and pat yourself on the back, you need to do some self reflecting.

Like who you like, I don't honestly care, I'm not here for friends, but if you justify literal Jim Crowe laws because "those people will ruin our beautiful perfect city" I am going to side eye you. That is not something a healthy, non racist, Pro humanity person fantasizes about. There is not a single, natural born illyran woman who can use her own wings under the 500 year rule of "the most powerful high lord." Fantasizing about a lazy sex crazed leader who still allows the breaking of children's bones for misbehaving, is not normal. I am not going to trust you if you justify and praise violence toward children, even fictional children.

The fact that you will go to war to defend the abhorrent policies and actions of the NC when people try to have critical discussions about the texts is shocking to say the least.

Every single character in these books are subject to criticism. SJM herself is subject to criticism for the way in which she portrays these communities and glosses over the unjust policies. The way the Jim Crow laws in Velaris were introduced is a common manipulative tactic to desensitize the reader to the policy itself, paving a way for it to, once again, exist in our world. "It just a fantasy book calm down" no. Media has always been a large method to distribute propaganda.

I don't give half a fuck who Elain ends up with but please, please, please criticize the Night court and recognize it's atrocities or it will affect how you vote and how you see the world around you.

[dotthings]

The maga-packed US Supreme Court decided this week

* to protect bigotry under the guise of religious beliefs

* ended Affirmative Action

* struck down Biden’s plan to extend studen loan forgiveness

This is codified bigotry. If your beliefs require you to be a bigot, it’s time to question your beliefs. Bigotry being legally protected is pushing the US back to the Jim Crow era. The decisions regarding Affirmative Action and student loan forgiveness is part of the deliberate, systemized goal of maintaining oppression perpetrated by powerful, rich white people. Making it even more difficult for anyone but privileged, powerful white people to get an education and opportunities, to be able to afford college. It’s an attempt to keep the deck stacked against everyone but themselves. It’s anti-egalitarian. The far right goes to war daily against LGBTQ people, against PoC, against women. In supreme court decisions, in the vile bigoted laws they try to enact locally. In their public statements. In their tweets

Seeing the first amendment being waved around as an excuse to allow protected bigotry makes me sick to my stomach.

Call it what it is. FASCISM. BIGOTRY. DISCRIMINATION. CLASS WAR.

Please vote. It matters who is in office, on the national and local level.

[readyforevolution]

IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW THIS YESTERDAY THEN TODAY WOULD BE A GOOD DAY TO LEARN THIS.... "All stories don't have a happy ending"

In 1866, one year after the 13 Amendment was ratified (the amendment that ended slavery), Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina began to lease out convicts for labor (peonage). This made the business of arresting Blacks very lucrative, which is why hundreds of White men were hired by these states as police officers. Their primary responsibility was to search out and arrest Blacks who were in violation of Black Codes. Once arrested, these men, women and children would be leased to plantations where they would harvest cotton, tobacco, sugar cane. Or they would be leased to work at coal mines, or railroad companies. The owners of these businesses would pay the state for every prisoner who worked for them; prison labor.

It is believed that after the passing of the 13th Amendment, more than 800,000 Blacks were part of the system of peonage, or re-enslavement through the prison system. Peonage didn’t end until after World War II began, around 1940.

This is how it happened.

The 13th Amendment declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Ratified in 1865)

Did you catch that? It says, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude could occur except as a punishment for a crime". Lawmakers used this phrase to make petty offenses crimes. When Blacks were found guilty of committing these crimes, they were imprisoned and then leased out to the same businesses that lost slaves after the passing of the 13th Amendment. This system of convict labor is called peonage.

The majority of White Southern farmers and business owners hated the 13th Amendment because it took away slave labor. As a way to appease them, the federal government turned a blind eye when southern states used this clause in the 13th Amendment to establish laws called Black Codes. Here are some examples of Black Codes:

In Louisiana, it was illegal for a Black man to preach to Black congregations without special permission in writing from the president of the police. If caught, he could be arrested and fined. If he could not pay the fines, which were unbelievably high, he would be forced to work for an individual, or go to jail or prison where he would work until his debt was paid off.

If a Black person did not have a job, he or she could be arrested and imprisoned on the charge of vagrancy or loitering.

This next Black Code will make you cringe. In South Carolina, if the parent of a Black child was considered vagrant, the judicial system allowed the police and/or other government agencies to “apprentice” the child to an "employer". Males could be held until the age of 21, and females could be held until they were 18. Their owner had the legal right to inflict punishment on the child for disobedience, and to recapture them if they ran away.

This (peonage) is an example of systemic racism - Racism established and perpetuated by government systems. Slavery was made legal by the U.S. Government. Segregation, Black Codes, Jim Crow and peonage were all made legal by the government, and upheld by the judicial system. These acts of racism were built into the system, which is where the term “Systemic Racism” is derived.

This is the part of "Black History" that most of us were never told about.

[for-hunger]

The differences between Hannibal and Lestat have been bothering me ever since I binged Interview with the Vampire, and I got frustrated enough to scribble 3 pages in my notebook. My conclusions are:

Institutional power. First and foremost, Lestat is connected to institutional power. In the context of IWTV, Lestat and Louis do not begin as equals, and are not able to meet each other as equals until the end of S2. (Edit: I am literally talking about him being white in the Jim Crow South) Lestat is always associated with ultimate institutional/group authority, both in New Orleans and in Paris- whether Lestat came to Paris with the intention to see Claudia (and/or Louis) die or not, he is the literal co-founder of the coven, and Claudia and Louis are being persecuted for fighting back against him. He even invokes the "Great Laws" when defending Claudia's murder.

In contrast, in Hannibal, Will is the one associated with this institutional power, even being the mentee of our ultimate lawful authority, Jack. The only time he is without this power is the brief first period of S2. Hannibal and Will begin the show as equals, and for the most part, are playing their back and forth cat-and-mouse game as equals (at least post-S1).

Betrayal. Although Louis shuts down in the face of Lestat's abuse, he never really stops being hurt by Lestat's continued betrayals. Will is hurt by Hannibal's betrayal (especially end of S1), but he knows who Hannibal is. He expects and is, in many ways, satisfied by and interested in Hannibal's continued insanity.

Daughters. Louis is the driving force behind the adoption of Claudia, and Lestat resists emotional involvement with her, is cruel to her, and, arguably, wants her dead regardless of Louis. Hannibal gives Abigail to Will himself, and has his own relationship with her. His murder of Abigail is in revenge for Will's shattering of their relationship, not about anything he hates in Abigail.

God. Hannibal is more directly godlike in comparison to the others in his narrative. Other people are vampires, but no one else can kill like Hannibal does in his world (in his absurd Bugs Bunny way). He even breaks the fourth wall (in S3) to directly invite us into his narrative. The motivation for most of what he does is curiosity rather than any central seduction (sometimes to his dismay), and his attitude is always tongue in cheek. This is also why it's important that he's not associated with institutional power- he rivals the power of God, he doesn't hide from God, he's the Devil, he is smoke, he is not bound by gender, law, time, space, the limits of the body, etc.

Ultimately, there are tons of similarities in these narratives: toxic ass murder husbands, dead daughters who are created and then sacrificed for the love of the husbands, consummation in blood, breakup in blood, European sojourn, temporary other marriages, murder as ascension, et al et al

and I'm certainly not saying that Hannibal is a good husband!!!

[fatehbaz]

"defending civilization against bugs"

lol the mosquito sculpture

see Pratik Chakrabarti's Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960 (2013) and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (2012)

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Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce [...]. [H]e argued that "in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope."

Text by: Rohan Deb Roy. "Decolonise science - time to end another imperial era." The Conversation. 5 April 2018.

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[A]s [...] Diane Nelson explains: The creation of transportation infrastructure such as canals and railroads, the deployment of armies, and the clearing of ground to plant tropical products all had to confront [...] microbial resistance. The French, British, and US raced to find a cure for malaria [...]. One French colonial official complained in 1908: “fever and dysentery are the ‘generals’ that defend hot countries against our incursions and prevent us from replacing the aborigines that we have to make use of.” [...] [T]ropical medicine was assigned the role of a “counterinsurgent field.” [...] [T]he discovery of mosquitoes as malaria and yellow fever carriers reawakened long-cherished plans such as the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) [...]. In 1916, the director of the US Bureau of Entomology and longtime general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejoiced at this success as “an object lesson for the sanitarians of the world” - it demonstrated “that it is possible for the white race to live healthfully in the tropics.” [...] The [...] measures to combat dangerous diseases always had the collateral benefit of social pacification. In 1918, [G.V.], president of the Rockefeller Foundation, candidly declared: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some decided advantages over machine guns." The construction of the Panama Canal [...] advanced the military expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. The US occupation of the Canal Zone had already brought racist Jim Crow laws [to Panama] [...]. Besides the [...] expansion of vice squads and prophylaxis stations, during the night women were picked up all over the city [by US authorities] and forcibly tested for [...] diseases [...] [and] they were detained in something between a prison and hospital for up to six months [...] [as] women in Panama were becoming objects of surveillance [...].

Text by: Fahim Amir. "Cloudy Swords." e-flux Journal Issue #115. February 2021.

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Richard P. Strong [had been] recently appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine [...]. In 1914 [the same year of the Canal's completion], just one year after the creation of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine, Strong took on an additional assignment that cemented the ties between his department and American business interests abroad. As newly appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of United Fruit Company, he set sail in July 1914 to United Fruit plantations in Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. […] As a shareholder in two British rubber plantations, [...] Strong approached Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the tire and rubber-processing conglomerate that bore his name, in December 1925 with a proposal [...]. Firestone had negotiated tentative agreements in 1925 with the Liberian government for [...] a 99-year concession to optionally lease up to a million acres of Liberian land for rubber plantations. [...]

[I]nfluenced by the recommendations and financial backing of Harvard alumni such as Philippine governor Gen. William Cameron Forbes [the Philippines were under US military occupation] and patrons such as Edward Atkins, who were making their wealth in the banana and sugarcane industries, Harvard hired Strong, then head of the Philippine Bureau of Science’s Biological Laboratory [where he fatally infected unknowing test subject prisoners with bubonic plague], and personal physician to Forbes, to establish the second Department of Tropical Medicine in the United States [...]. Strong and Forbes both left Manila [Philippines] for Boston in 1913. [...] Forbes [US military governor of occupied Philippines] became an overseer to Harvard University and a director of United Fruit Company, the agricultural products marketing conglomerate best known for its extensive holdings of banana plantations throughout Central America. […] In 1912 United Fruit controlled over 300,000 acres of land in the tropics [...] and a ready supply of [...] samples taken from the company’s hospitals and surrounding plantations, Strong boasted that no “tropical school of medicine in the world … had such an asset. [...] It is something of a victory [...]. We could not for a million dollars procure such advantages.” Over the next two decades, he established a research funding model reliant on the medical and biological services the Harvard department could provide US-based multinational firms in enhancing their overseas production and trade in coffee, bananas, rubber, oil, and other tropical commodities [...] as they transformed landscapes across the globe.

Text by: Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.]

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[On] February 20, 1915, [...] [t]o signal the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), [...] [t]he fair did not officially commence [...] until President Wilson [...] pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower [...] whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, [...] swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. [...] [W]ith lavish festivities [...] nineteen million people has passed through the PPIE's turnstiles. [...] As one of the many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." [...] One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was [...] the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," [the construction of the Panama Canal] symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns [...]. [I]n the 1910s public health and eugenics crusaders alike moved with little or no friction between [...] [calls] for classification of human intelligence, for immigration restriction, for the promotion of the sterilization and segregation of the "unfit," [...]. It was during this [...] moment, [...] that California's burgeoning eugenicist movement coalesced [...]. At meetings convened during the PPIE, a heterogenous group of sanitary experts, [...] medical superintendents, psychologists, [...] and anthropologists established a social network that would influence eugenics on the national level in the years to come. [...]

In his address titled "The Physician as Pioneer," the president-elect of the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, credited the colonization of the Mississippi Valley to the discovery of quinine [...] and then told his audience that for progress to proceed apace in the current "age of the insect," the stringent sanitary regime imposed and perfected by Gorgas in the Canal Zone was the sine qua non. [...]

Blue also took part in the conference of the American Society for Tropical Medicine, which Gorgas had cofounded five years after the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Invoking the narrative of medico-military conquest [...], [t]he scientific skill of the United States was also touted at the Pan-American Medical Congress, where its president, Dr. Charles L. Reed, delivered a lengthy address praising the hemispheric security ensured by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and "the combined genius of American medical scientists [...]" in quelling tropical diseases, above all yellow fever, in the Canal Zone. [...] [A]s Reed's lecture ultimately disclosed, his understanding of Pan-American medical progress was based [...] on the enlightened effects of "Aryan blood" in American lands. [...] [T]he week after the PPIE ended, Pierce was ordered to Laredo, Texas, to investigate several incidents of typhus fever on the border [...]. Pierce was instrumental in fusing tropical medicine and race betterment [...] guided by more than a decade of experience in [...] sanitation in Panama [...]. [I]n August 1915, Stanford's chancellor, David Starr Jordan [...] and Pierce were the guests of honor at a luncheon hosted by the Race Betterment Foundation. [...] [At the PPIE] [t]he Race Betterment booth [...] exhibit [...] won a bronze medal for "illustrating evidences and causes of race degeneration and methods and agencies of race betterment," [and] made eugenics a daily feature of the PPIE. [...] [T]he American Genetics Association's Eugenics Section convened [...] [and] talks were delivered on the intersection of eugenics and sociology, [...] the need for broadened sterilization laws, and the medical inspection of immigrants [...]. Moreover, the PPIE fostered the cross-fertilization of tropical medicine and race betterment at a critical moment of transition in modern medicine in American society.

Text by: Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Second Edition. 2016.

[edwad]

a few weeks ago i saw a video on twitter thats of some guy talking about how amazing it is that all these people make a pencil and then you can buy it etc. is this the type of stuff you/cordelia mean when youre talking about how some people actually take domination to be a great thing (not only consciously but as an actual articulated value, i mean)

i assume the video was friedman's "i, pencil" riff, which does get at some of those points (and which other socialists have responded to on similar terrain, doing the thing i talk about of merely describing the same processes but with different moralizations), but also at a more general level in the sense that the impersonal mechanisms of capitalism are seen as nondiscriminatory, which for liberal theorists is a major advance over the more direct forms of coercion found in pre-capitalist societies. the benefit here is that markets don't really care about your background, your money is as good as anyone else's, and there's a certain universalizing tendency which comes out of the formal equality which is baked into this logic.

this is echoed in the writings of plenty of classical liberal thinkers like walter e williams that argued segregation would've dissolved on its own if free market forces had been left to run their course, unhindered by racist laws upholding the forced separation of people. eventually, certain business owners would've put their profits before their potential racism, and other firms would've been forced to similarly accommodate in order to stay competitive. williams (who was black) actually criticized some of his friends at the time for spending their money in white businesses that they'd been previously barred from, because in their attempt to stick it to the shop owners that the day before had refused to service them, they were unintentionally enriching racists instead of giving their business to firms that would've taken their money all along, had it been legal and easy to do so. this particular problem (and its market solution) are sometimes dealt with in the context of things like the sears catalog during the jim crow era, which was a big talking point a few years ago as an instance of this market anonymity/impersonality delivering a certain form of economic fairness.

for a lot of marxists, this nondiscriminatory element isn't acknowledged for the merits of not caring about your background, but in some sense for not caring about you at all. everything is reduced to the merely economic. marx pretty famously says as much in the manifesto when he writes:

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

this is also what's at stake in the formal equality of the worker in marx's capital, who, as a newly emerged legal subject with all the rights that entails, discovers their double freedom -- free to work or free to starve. and as he says there in v1, "between equal rights force decides".

what i think is significant here is that these aren't really two different accounts of how the system works. for people like smith and hayek, this impersonal mechanism (the invisible hand, etc) is understood as a kind of coercive force which pushes firms toward particular ends which are independent of the wills of any singular capitalist (and in fact express the whole of human economic activity in the aggregate) and which result in the universal generalization of particular principles throughout society, increasingly undermining lingering prejudices (eg smiths capitalist arguments against slavery). marx's analysis is pretty much identical (and this is the point), except in its normative angling. the totalizing character of capitalist production which recreates the world in its own bourgeois image and strives to constantly overcome its own self-imposed limits is similarly impersonal and indiscriminate, but this is presented as a problem to be overcome. hayek, even moreso than smith, recognizes this aspect of the price system which gets at the exact issue which marx is trying to highlight with his analysis of value.

both are aware of the historical uniqueness of the social formation and have no illusions about it via cliche appeals to "human nature" etc, and as i've mentioned above, its not really a difference in analysis, or even really in results (as cordelia has said, the strong form of the marxian complaint isn't that capitalism is doing something poorly, but that these are the effects when it is working well/asserting itself fully). so the point im making and have made repeatedly is that what's at stake here is a set of underlying normative commitments which marx and marxists have basically left unjustified. the usual claim is that marx was too scientific for that sort of thing, but i don't think that's really a possible reading (and if it is, it's not a good/internally defensible one).

if anything, the immanence of his analysis to the liberal theory which constitutes his object sets the limit on his ability to express himself fully, but it also provides the only adequate place to ground his normative account. his notion of contradiction is supposed to do a lot of the heavy lifting here, but to the extent that these contradictions are located in liberal theory itself, they *necessarily* don't go unaccounted for by liberals. he's not saying or demonstrating anything which hasn't also been posed as a liberal political problem. if you don't like crises, then very well, you can be a keynesian (maybe even a radical one). you don't think that works? well, your argument probably sounds a lot like hayek's. what is marx able to contribute here that isn't already understood as a careful balancing act -- if not a definite limit -- in liberal theory? the potential salvation of communism, which is supposed to overcome the problems (whatever they are taken to be) of capitalism, necessarily stems from some set of normative commitments that can't be written off. if his critique is tightly immanent, as it arguably was, then what marxists need to justify isn't really the account of the system (you don't even have to be a marxist for that!) but the case for its abolition.

if your problem with it is "domination", you need to be able to demonstrate what's wrong with the mechanisms that word is intended to describe, and it can't just be that they're impersonal or coercive. liberals feel the same way about these things and all of us experience gravity that way. you have to be able to say something more than that, but contemporary marxist accounts tend to only go as far as calling it "domination" and getting away with it because the marxists nod along, knowing that domination is naughty, otherwise why would we call it domination?

so, although cordelia can surely speak for herself, this is part of the project that i think she and i have sorta been picking away at in different ways for a while, with me catching on a bit later (maybe too late tbh). when i expressed my frustrations on this point, directed at chambers, i was in some sense admitting that she'd won me over on this style (if not the specific line) of questioning.

all of this aside, this is of course not a defense of liberalism in the liberal sense, but it is a kind of "defense" of liberalism as a project which has to be taken seriously and can't be written off or dreamed away. in this sense, i am merely following in marx's footsteps, who i think felt very strongly about the need to grapple with liberalism on exactly this kind of terrain, but i am turning the ruthless criticism on the ruthless critic, because i don't think he or his contemporary disciples in the value-as-domination literature have done a good job of navigating this problem. probably though, like nearly everyone else, i'm simply left waiting for cordelia's book.

[korrasera]

Voting Helps

Here's a good reason to vote that I never see anyone talk about, especially the people that keep trying to encourage you not to vote:

Voting helps change culture.

Like it or not, power is a strong influence on culture. When you vote to add or remove political representatives from the system, you're changing who has visible access to the levers of power. As they change, so does the culture that put them there.

Voting against fascism helps fight fascists *right now* by depriving them of the tools of the state. Over time, it makes them look weak and it keeps them out of the mainstream political conversation. On a long enough timeline, it helps to reinforce the idea that fascism is a broken ideology that no one should follow and everyone should fight.

Take the civil rights movement in the US as an example. Grassroots activism in the 50s led to massive political action. Activists changed the minds of voters and politicians alike by showing the naked violence of systemic racism. People voted for representatives who would support the movement and that led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The work of the civil rights movement broke the back of the Jim Crow era and ended more than a hundred years of retributive violence visited on African Americans. The activism did the heavy lifting and the voting helped carrying that change forward into the law itself. And as a result, people in the US are born into a world where we see equality as so important that we changed the Constitution to enshrine that value as one of our most precious laws. That matters.

Voting doesn't fix the problem, but it's not meaningless. It plays a part, and possible a broader one that you might be aware of.

If your vote didn't matter, they wouldn't try to stop you.

[1800naveen]

Chapter 27 of ACOWAR

When I first read ACOWAR and got to the part where Mor is having a breakdown about her dad entering Velaris but Rhysand tells her that he won't get in, nothing really was going through my mind. But something clicked today...

This. Just this. This paragraph made me realize that this is Jim Crow. Sarah Janet Maas, did you create the fairy version of Jim Crow? Has anyone else notice this?

In the late 19th century, these laws were created in the Southern part of the US which legalized racial segregation of the black community and other people of color. Black and white students attended separate schools, with black schools typically receiving far less funding and resources. Restaurants, theaters, hotels, parks, drinking fountains, you name it, were segregated.

Black people weren't welcomed almost anywhere. Signs that said "whites only" to keep them away and racists who would get agitated over a black person coming near their establishment. Lynch mobs chasing them, burning buildings associated with the black community, etc.

This also reminds me of ICE or border patrol. The people who deal with immigrants and will send them back to their countries, the same country that they left behind so that they can have a better life for themselves and their family.

Imagine finally leaving Hewn City. You feel a mix of emotions but happiness is one that fills you. You're finally free and you can see the world now! When you go to Velaris, you notice that some things are strange. People look at you funny, they treat you almost as if you're a criminal, they don't serve you at restaurants, they won't let you have a place of shelter, and you can't even have fun. It clicks in your head that this is not a safe, welcoming place for people like you. When it comes to an end, you're sent back into the darkness that you were came from, where you were born from, and you wonder if you'll ever see the light again.

I'm the daughter of two immigrants who left their country due to a civil war and they haven't been back since they left. When they came to America, it was all before shit like that was more serious so they were lucky not to deal with this crap. In many African countries (including my own), we have tribes AKA ethnic groups. Sarah's description of Illyria and the Illyrians makes me think of the dumb stereotypes of Africans. That we live in huts, that we hunt with bow and arrows or spears, that we're primitive, etc. You can tell in Sarah's writing that she has never actually experienced the things she writes.

I feel sad reading this again and knowing what that's the equivalent of. The woman doesn't even bother to hide her racism. Who am I kidding? If she used a black woman's death to promote her book, she can do shit like this! Sarah, you little white-privileged bitch.

How the Illyrians are portrayed as violent, savage, warmongering people who have a patriarchal system and are based on brown/indigenous people remind of George RR Martin's portrayal of the Dothraki who are nomadic warriors that are seen as brutes, warmongers, people who don't have any respect for their natural surroundings, have a patriarchal system, and their men treat women worse than the Illyrians. These guys are based on the Mongolians. I know George wrote this in the 90s and stuff but there had to be something based on portraying a culture into your fictional story.

My honest reaction to Sarah creating the fairy equivalent of the Jim Crow laws and ICE/border patrol:

Me realizing that if there's major problem that different groups of POC faces, she'll somehow put it in her books so that her white main characters can face it, so that they can finally be the ones that get oppressed:

SJM when you tell her that making her white main characters go through and face problems that people of color have struggled and dealt with for years isn't right:

[valorianknights]

"You are far too nice, mercy has a price...

unlike you, I HAVE NO MERCY LEFT TO GIVE."

THIS IS JUST AN OLD FIC W.I.P.

.......

Trina messed up. She wasn't supposed to get attached. She wasn't supposed to care. She wasn't supposed to make friends... But she did. And she kinda liked it.

Then father found out. At first he was proud that she seemingly gained the young genius' trust. Even more so when she also befriended both the Chief of Police and Professor Sato's daughters.

So many useful connections, useful pawns for his plans. What a brilliant outcome. Two possible proteges and a strong bargaining chip if the police try to interfere with his plans.

He didn't think too much about how much time Trina was spending with these children. Or how many times she accept their invitations to lunches, dinners or game nights. Why would he? After all, it's one thing to gain someone's trust, it's another if you make yourself seem reliable and strengthen that trust to ensure that you would never even be considered a suspect of suspicion or doubt.

So, he allowed it. Obake saw her actions as a means to an end. None of it mattered. At least...that's what it started out as.

He molded Trina into exactly what he wanted, no, expected. A completely obedient, loyal, intelligent and diligent daughter (acolyte). She owed him her life, everything she was, everything she is. Is because of him. Because he allowed it. How could she not be grateful?

He was brilliant, a genius, limited only by a world full of limitations. Limitations created by those who are incapable of vision or ambition. Those who try to make excuses due to the "Danger" or "Mortality".

And yet... it's these very same people that allow a broken system to continue, even though it's been proven to be faulty. How many people have to suffered? From small crime like, shoplifters or purse thieves that were just given a slap on the wrist and then a week or a day later, they're back on the streets doing the same thing unless they want to aim higher. Or what about the bigger criminals? The ones that go under the radar. The gangs that have entire cities in their pockets, from the cops to the politicians, like The Double Jade Clan and Big Yama here in San Fransokyo.

People that are so adamant that things like "law and order" keep us safe and yet law hasn't always aligned with what is right.

Segregation was legal, the Jim Crow laws were legal, slaves and indentured servitude were legal and the Japanese internment camps during WWll were legal.

This entire system is broken way beyond repair and the only thing left to do is to start again. Cleanse the sin from world in order to save it.

No, not save. Improve.

A better world. That's what father always said.

He'll make a better world. A world where the guilty won't walk free, the politicians won't be safe from consequences due to their deep pockets or connections... A world where there are no underground criminal organizations, a world where genius can run free from the chains of limitations and "morality", a world that harnesses the power of a star instead of slowly killing the planet.

A world where the Double Jade Clan will never kill another family, leaving a sad orphaned girl with nothing but a thirst for vengeance justice.

"It's okay. We'll show them."

"We will show them all."

He found her. He took her in when he didn't have to, didn't need to...and yet he did it all the same.

He taught her everything she knows, he helped her understand how to be clever, guided her hands when she didn't grasp mechanical engineering at first, trained her in the art of adaptation in order to become almost chameleon-like in any situation.

At first she didn't understand his grand plan, his life's work, when told her in the beginning.She thought it was scary, it was dangerous, it was wrong. Like a plan that a bad guy would have in comic books. She was wrong. She was young, susceptible to what the world wanted us to believe is right and wrong. He helped her understand that she was just corrupted by a system that wanted to keep people away from the truth. To make people weak and force them to never be able to truly thrive.

The illusion of freedom.

And yet...

After all these years, after everything that he's done for Trina, she can't help but feel a tinge of doubt creeping into the dark corners of her mind sometimes.

She never really left her father's lab too often, unless absolutely necessary, like to retrieve something for a device, keep an eye on Yama so he doesn't step out of line, and most recently, creating a diversion to keep the police (and now these self proclaimed "heroes") busy while Obake can do what he needs to without outside interference.

She knew that Obake wanted some help. To have a protege to take under his wing and to help him usher in his utopia of progress and freedom.

Trina after the first few years of living with him she thought that maybe it could be her. She could help him just as he helped her. But, this was just the folly of a then 9 year old child, because, yet again she was wrong. While she may have been smart, especially with Obake teaching her as much as he could of robotics and engineering.

He just didn't have the time. He was busy working towards a better tomorrow that there was only so much time he could devote to her existence. He cared of course, she knew that, but she also knew that he wasn't thrilled that she wasn't grasping everything as quickly as he would've liked. So, she stopped following him around like a second shadow and started studying and learning as much as she could about mechanical engineering, then robotics and chemical engineering. Though try as she might, she just came up short.

She understood that she was smart, she definitely wasn't average intelligence by any means, in fact she's sure that she could have gained admission to any college she wanted with the arsenal of knowledge she was equipped with. It's just... Not enough. Not for him. Not for utopia.

She's intelligent, she's clever, but not genius. Trina just isn't what he needs. It wounded her pride, but she could understand that sad fact(even if didn't like it). He never told her this outright, but he didn't have too. She could read the signs. So she did what she always did.

Find a different perspective, a different angle and she realized that she was exactly what he needed. Just not in the way she wanted originally.

She could befriend his prospective proteges, while also making sure that they're what he needs. She already knew their names, where they spent their time, one of them even was apart of a vigilante group.

Hiro Hamada

Mary Sato

They were teenagers just like her. They didn't know each other but if she could befriend them both and then get them to meet the other... Then they would become friends and make things easier for father.

She would gain their trust and then when the time's right she would get them to understand her father's dream, then they would of course, understand and help to make it a reality.

Sure, an entire city would be destroyed, but hasn't it already been broken and stained with the wrongs that we allow to exist? Why should it stay like this? Big Hero 6 wouldn't even need to exist if this world and it rules actually worked.

The world can't go on like this! It can't. Someone has to do something. It may seem wrong, but sometimes there's a base level of violence that is necessary for change.

Every war ever fought all had casualties that were all simultaneously necessary and needless. Necessary in the sense that humans have to be shown the worst things imaginable in order to actually understand that they are in the wrong. No one will change their mind when they believe they are right, not until they see the consequences of their actions right in front of them.

And Needless due to the same reasoning. The inability to admit or to see the obvious. No hindsight. Just sit and talk. But noooo. Everything must be done the hard way.

Like always.

Like now.

Trina always thought of the people in this city as a means to an end. Numbers on a screen to be calculated and plugged into the advanced equations that Obake would work on to get his calculations right. But... now she's confronted with the doubt that has been creeping into her mind like a bottle of syrup that got knocked over on a table and is slowly but surely covering the area. You could try and wipe it off but it's sticky nauseating sweetness will not be easy to get rid of.

Trina thought that she was right, that father was right, but... she can't see numbers on a screen anymore. She can't see a city that is scheduled for a long overdue demolition. She sees faces, people, families that live here. She even recognized the strange/sweet old blind lady, Joan, who feeds the birds at the park on Sundays, on one of surveillance cameras in the lair.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

When did this happen? When did she begin to doubt the one who gave her everything she had? The one who made her who she was?

When did it start?

Was it when she was at Good Luck Alley trying to keep Hiro from discovering her sending not only the police, but him and his team on a wild goose chase?

Was it when he caught her? And she immediately turned the situation in her favor by explaining that she never stole anything (other than the police's time and attention) and that she was using Kohakutou that was meant to trick the authorities. Weaving a story of half truths and making herself seemingly the victim. Pinning the blame on Yama ( Obake saw no use for him anymore anyway), and gaining not only sympathy but guilt from Hiro who felt terrible for assuming the worst in her (He was on the right track).

After all, he didn't know her very well.

Was it when she was invited to hang out at the arcade with him?

Playing round after round of Robot Monsters VI: Lost Galaxy?

Listening to Megan complaining about the unreasonable amount of homework she got assigned?

Watching as Megan came to life when she was investigating a case behind her father's back?

Listening to hiro vent about a bully he has deal with seeing at school?

Karmi, she later learned her name and made sure she would keep her distance from Hiro after an incident that left Trina banned from the campus (but totally worth it).

Joining Mary and her father, Professor Makoto Sato, for one of their family game nights?

Failing at Roller skating, but laughing anyway with Mary on girl's night out?!

When did it happen? When did their friendship start fill an emptiness that she never knew she had inside?

When did the thought of anything bad happening to Hiro, Mary or Megan begin to fill her with anger and annoyance?

Why wouldn't it stop?

Why did she suddenly care so much about them?!

Why does she not want this feeling to end?

' I want to stay like this forever. '

Oh.

Oh, no.

What happens now?

'What do I do?!'

[bonesfool]

kinda pissed off that people who I've never seen talk about rap before are making memes about the kendrick v drake beef (especially all the people comparing it to the fucking Hmbomberguy James Somerton video like tell me you don't know shit about black culture without telling me Jesus Christ), but I'm glad its become a catalyst for the conversation that so many white people on here just do not engage in black art forms

a lot of people have been boiling it down to if you claim to universally not enjoy rap, a genre that is almost universally populated by black artists, producers and record labels you're racist. this is certainly true, especially if you don't treat other genres as monoliths you can write off. (cough cough we all saw those tags on that one post)

But as someone who has a special interest in protest music (usually American protest music specifically) I think that even if you genuinely do not enjoy the sound of rap, if you consider yourself to be an American leftist, and have not made any effort to at least learn the history of rap you're not only racist, you're also uneducated and I would go as far to say not a real leftist. Why? because rap is inherently political: both in the sense that all music is political because all art is political, but also in the sense that rap uniquely political as a black art form

I've seen a lot of people saying "not all rap is about drugs and violence" which is a true statement, but ignores the fact that a lot of rap *is* about drugs and violence. and for a fucking good reason, both of them dominated the urban black experience in the 80s and 90s, and therefore have a disproportionate appearance in black art. Rap was born in American urban centers in the 70s/80s, a time when Reagan and Nixon's policies had completely divested federal support from urban centers, deindustrialization had made growing wealth in black communities suddenly become unsustainable, and racist policing laws had been put in place to funnel black men into drugs and then into the prison industrial complex (read The New Jim Crow if you have not, this post is already too long and if you don't know about the war on drugs im not gonna whitesplain it to you more than I already have).

Point being, it has always sucked to be black in this country, and rap was birthed in a time where uniquely targeted racism was driving much of federal policymaking. It was a time where mainstream politics were directly reactionary to the progress made by civil rights activists in ending Jim Crow and other de jure racism. So much of rap (particularly gangsta rap) was born as a genre of protest music, and much of it continues to be to this day. If you don't have at least passing familiarity with the giants of the genre (I'm not saying you even have to like their music, you just have to know the artists' and songs' significance in American countercultural history) I simply do not trust your knowledge of American leftism or protest movements

All this to say, I want to wholeheartedly recommend the documentary series Hip-Hop Evolution. It's on Netflix and its 16 episodes covering the history of DJing, hip-hop, and rap. It has lots of interviews with prolific and influential producers and rappers, and you can also hear some of their music throughout the series, so its a great place to get a comprehensive view of the genre and maybe see if there are any subgenres to your taste

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sam Delgado at Vox:

It’s been another big week for the UAW. Over 5,000 auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Vance, Alabama, have been holding their union election vote with the United Auto Workers (UAW); ballots will be counted when voting closes today.

It’s the UAW’s second election in their campaign to organize non-union auto workers, with a particular focus on the South — a notoriously difficult region for union drives. They won their first election with Volkswagen workers last month in Tennessee with 73 percent of workers voting to form a union. What makes the UAW’s recent success compelling is that they’re finding big wins at a time when union membership rates in America are at an all-time low. But each union drive is a battle: With our current labor laws, unionizing is not an easy process — particularly when workers are up against anti-union political figures and employers, as is the case at the Alabama Mercedes plant. So if the UAW can win another union election in a region that’s struggled to realize worker power, it could mean more than just another notch in their belt. It could offer lessons on how to reinvigorate the American labor movement.

What’s at stake in Vance, Alabama?

Unionizing nearly anywhere in the US will require some sort of uphill battle, but this is especially true for the South. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the South had unionization rates below the national average in 2023. Alabama resides within one of those regions, at a union membership rate of 7.5 percent compared to a national rate of 10 percent. This is the result of historical realities (see: slavery and racist Jim Crow laws) that have shaped today’s legislation: Alabama is one of 26 states that have enacted a “right-to-work” law, which allows workers represented by a union to not pay union fees, thus weakening the financial stability and resources of a union to bargain on behalf of their members.

Prominent political figures in Alabama have been vocal about their opposition to the UAW, too. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the UAW a “looming threat” and signed a bill that would economically disincentivize companies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Workers say Mercedes hasn’t been welcoming to the union, either. In February, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International held a mandatory anti-union meeting (he’s changed roles since then). Back in March, the UAW filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Mercedes for “aggressive and illegal union-busting.” And according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the US government voiced concerns to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters, about the alleged union-busting happening at the Alabama plant.

The combination of weak federal labor laws, a strong anti-union political presence, and a well-resourced employer can be a lethal combination for union drives and labor activity — and have been in Alabama. Recent examples include the narrow loss to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, the nearly two-year long Warrior Met Coal strike that ended with no improved contract, and even past failed unionization drives at this Mercedes plant.

[...]

Where’s this momentum coming from — and where is it going?

The UAW is in a strong position after a series of wins. First they won their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. Then they successfully unionized the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-April (the first time a non-union auto plant in the South was unionized in around 80 years). Later that month, they ratified a contract with Daimler Trucks after threatening to strike, securing a wage raise and annual cost-of-living increases among other benefits. Where are these wins coming from? A big part of the momentum comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW. He’s ambitious and a hard-nosed negotiator, isn’t afraid to break from the traditions of UAW’s past, and perhaps most importantly, is also the first leader of the UAW directly elected by members.

The UAW is leading a unionization drive at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. Hope it wins. #UAWVance #UAW #1u

[opencommunion]

“'We chose to file this case on May 1, in solidarity with workers around the world, because ending forced prison labor in ADOC isn’t just about stopping the State’s extractive profiteering from the labor of Black people – both inside and outside of prisons. It’s also about eliminating the control that forced prison labor enables the State to exercise over Black people – an extension of the control exerted by the State through slavery, the Black Codes, convict leasing, and Jim Crow,' said CJ Sandley, Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the workers through its Southern Regional Office.

The six plaintiffs – Trayveka Stanley, Reginald Burrell, Dexter Avery, Charlie Gray, Melvin Pringle, and Ranquel Smith – have all been punished or threatened with punishment for resisting forced work. ... 'I am motivated by my passion to fight for an end to all injustice. That passion burns brighter than my fears. We must stand for something or we will fall for anything. This lawsuit is about the unpaid, overbearing state jobs that I, as well as my fellow inmates, are being forced to work against our will. According to Article I, Section 32, this is against the law,' says Plaintiff Trayveka Stanley, currently incarcerated at Montgomery Women’s Facility in Montgomery, Alabama.

According to Plaintiff Reginald Burrell, who is incarcerated at Decatur Work Release in Decatur, Alabama: 'The most influential public officials in the State of Alabama today remain loyal to and act in unity with their racist slave legacy from the Confederacy and the Jim Crow era, continuing to deliberately make, enforce, and defend bad policy decisions and practices, knowing it results in the demise, disadvantages, and disenfranchisement of poor whites and African-Americans, perpetuating hopelessness, despair, and excessive suffering in our lives today, and knowing it induces, in many circumstances, desperate choices under duress, to give themselves reason to enslave us through incarceration by the Alabama Department of Corrections for the sole purpose of continuing forced labor, slavery, and involuntary servitude in this state.'”