Before choosing a college or university, many LGBTQ students, staff, and faculty consider how many resources–or the lack thereof–a school has for them. This scrutiny is a necessary part of researching schools because there are many legal barriers to LGBTQ students’ safety on college and university campuses. So what are some of these legal hurdles that LGBTQ students face and try to change on campus?

Challenges Facing LGBTQ Students

LGBTQ students–particularly LGBTQ students of color–face tremendous (and often violent) barriers on college campuses. Lacking a federal legal incentive to protect LGBTQ students on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, college administrations often allow unsafe conditions for LGBTQ students who are constantly subjected to both everyday microaggressions and harassment on campus. LGBTQ students face threats and harassment from other students on campus at a disproportionate rate, including many gay students reporting the use of gay slurs against them while walking alone on campus. A full third of LGB students and staff on college campuses have considered leaving their institution due to campus environments that perpetuate homophobia. Because of these kinds of hostilities, more than half of all LGBT students and staff hide their identity to avoid discrimination and harassment. Even this measure does not even help, however: online forms of harassment, including public outing, contribute to gay students committing suicide, often embodied by the famous case of Tyler Clementi at Rutgers several years ago.

Obstacles for Transgender Students 

Transgender students face a series of unique challenges. Due to the immense legal obstacles (which vary state by state) to obtaining the legal name changes that allow transgender students’ identities to match the names on their ID cards, class rosters, certificates, and school email addresses, many colleges leave transgender students open to being outed on their first day of class as professors read out rosters with students’ incorrect name listed. Without implementing streamlined policies that allow students to enter their preferred name instead of their legal name on all public campus documents, colleges subject transgender students to the kind of unsafe conditions that lead to all sorts of discrimination and harassment.

For transgender and gender nonconforming students in particular, the administrative and legal obstacles to staying safe on campus–even in states that already prohibit discrimination based on gender expression and identity and sexual orientation–are immense, and include daily struggles from consistent misgendering to threats of violence when students simply need to use the restroom. As one transgender student, Zo Anthony Shay, a fourth-year student at UCLA, says, “Every time I took a piss [on campus], I need to look around so I don’t have my face smashed into a wall…We’re fighting for our lives.”

Some states like Kentucky and Texas, are considering criminalizing transgender people who use the restroom that matches their gender identity. This will pose a tremendous problem to campuses in those states, and increases the impetus for LGBT campus activists to ensure that their schools have gender-neutral restrooms to ensure that transgender and gender non-conforming students will not risk severe health issues and violence  for simply using the restroom. This has the potential to be a particular problem for transwomen at women’s colleges in states that do not protect people on the basis of gender identity and expression.

According to Genny Beemyn, the director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,

Trans students and allies have been working now for a number of years at many schools to create gender-inclusive bathrooms and gender-inclusive housing options, because those are pretty basic – to have a place to sleep and a place to pee…They’re looking now to address other important issues, and so gender in name documentation, hormones and surgeries are coming up more and more frequently for schools that have really begun to address transgender issues.

The hormones and surgery coverage that Beemyn refers to brings into question the kinds of health care plans that colleges provide to students and college employees. While only 63 colleges and universities across the country cover transgender-related health care for students, including therapy, hormones, and gender affirmation surgery, even fewer (39 schools) offer these necessary health resources to college employees. These resources are not only vital to the health of many transgender people, but things such as therapy and hormone treatment are generally mandated by state law in order for a transgender person to obtain legal documentation that reflects their proper name. By not granting insurance coverage to students and employees for these medical costs, most colleges and universities across the United States actively bar transgender students and employees from receiving necessary health care.

Lack of Legal Protections

According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Q Research Institute for Higher Education (an initiative of the advocacy group Campus Pride), LGBTQ students–especially all transgender and gender nonconforming students and particularly students of color–face discrimination and harassment on college campuses at more than double the rate experienced by straight, cisgender students. The Chronicle of Higher Education summarized the report as such:

About a quarter of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer students and employees said they had experienced harassment, as did more than a third of transgender and “gender nonconforming” respondents, compared with 12 percent of heterosexuals.

Seventy percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer students and employees felt comfortable with the overall campus climate, the report says, a rate that was higher than that among transgender and gender-nonconforming respondents but lower than that of heterosexuals. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer students who were also members of racial minority groups felt less comfortable in their classes than did their white counterparts, and faculty members were more likely than were students and staff members to have considered leaving their institutions, the report says.

Currently, federal non-discrimination statutes do not directly protect LGBTQ individuals on college campuses on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Senate recently voted down an amendment designed specifically to protect elementary and secondary school LGBT students from legal discrimination across the country. However, a recently introduced bill might offer a legal remedy to that lack of protection. According to Buzzfeed News, the bill, which Democratic supporters have dubbed the “Equality Act,” would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections against discrimination for gender identity and sexual orientation. This would impact higher education by amending Title IV to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination at education institutions receiving federal funding.

Though this Equality Act has the potential to provide legal protections for people using public restrooms that match their gender identity–a huge and dangerous obstacle for students on college campuses–it is unlikely that the bill would be able to provide any immediate relief for students who experience violence and discrimination. For example, even though the NYC Commission on Human Rights has already stated that any user of New York City public restrooms cannot legally be stopped and/or asked to present ID for using the restroom that matches their gender identity, this discrimination is still common practice in New York City. However, in terms of legal precedent, this change could potentially go a long way toward securing broad LGBTQ legal rights on college campuses.

Conclusion

While many, if not most, college campuses do not have provisions to offer legal and day-to-day structural protections for LGBT students, most if not all colleges do have at least informal, active student groups of LGBT students that offer each other support throughout their college careers. The schools that are the most structurally supportive of LGBT students can be found through Campus Pride’s “Campus Pride Index,” and state-by-state regulations that affect school policies are listed at Lambda Legal’s guide here. While some of these schools do an excellent job of welcoming LGBTQ students, more work needs to be done across the board to ensure that everyone is able to have a safe college experience.

Resources

Campus Pride: Q Research Institute for Higher Education

Lambda Project: State Regulations

Buzzfeed: Democrats Plan to Introduce Sweeping LGBT Rights Bill in Congress this Week

Lambda Legal: In Your State

Inside HigherEd: Broadening the Transgender Agenda

Chronicle of Higher Education: Gay Students and College Employees Face Significant Harassment, Report Says

Education Week: Senate Votes Down ESEA Amendment Designed to Protect LGBT Students

The Washington Free Beacon: Feds: Transgender Bathroom Choice a Matter of ‘Health and Safety’

NASPA Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education: LGBTQ Issues on Campus: What’s Changing?

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post LGBTQ College Students: Legal Hurdles and Rights appeared first on Law Street.

While many media outlets and health officials alike are hailing the end of the outbreak of Legionnaires’ desire in the South Bronx, many more are celebrating the Mayor’s signing of a new bill to prevent future outbreaks of such diseases. The piece of legislation requires (not will require: it was effective immediately) landlords to “register, inspect and clean air-conditioning cooling towers on a regular basis, as well as to certify those towers.”

However, this legislation–while important–is very late in coming. The New York Times reported that,

The city’s Health Department was slow off the mark this time. And it had advance warning. Last January, eight cases were reported at Co-op City, a housing complex in the Bronx, and traced to a cooling tower. In May, nine cases in Flushing, Queens, were tied to a cooling tower and a water system in a senior citizens’ center. Although the equipment involved in these small clusters was quickly disinfected, no concerted effort was made by the city to inspect or monitor cooling towers more broadly.

Significantly, the bacteria behind the potentially lethal disease is inhaled far and wide across the city (the bacteria itself is often not lethal) often spewed from the cooling towers usually located on the roofs of buildings that provide water for air-conditioning units. Yet, the lack of concern that the Health Department showed for the outbreaks in the Bronx last January–those in Queens were quickly addressed–mirrors the cause of the most recent outbreak that killed 12 people: environmental racism. This form of racism led to a very slow response to this latest outbreak, which spurred resistance from South Bronx residents.

The generally abysmal health conditions in the South Bronx caused by environmentally racist policies and practices created the perfect storm in the bodies of those who died in the outbreak: pre-existing health conditions such as asthma and heart disease killed these twelve people just as much as the bacteria.

So all this emphasis on the cooling towers is important. It is important that policies are changed so that these towers do not literally spew poison.

But poison is not only being spewed by cooling towers in the South Bronx. It is being spewed by corporate policies that produce obscene amounts of pollution; it is being spewed by power plants that are concentrated in the area so as not to infect predominately white neighborhoods; it is being spewed by the industrial sites that cause asthma and generally make the air unbreatheable.

Until these kinds of poison are addressed–the kinds of poison that the government and corporations directly and deliberately channel into neighborhoods of color–then the new law to “protect” people from Legionnaires’ disease will simply draw attention away from the overall failure to protect South Bronx residents from even worse, chronic epidemics.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Real Causes of the Legionnaires’ Outbreak Stem From Environmental Racism appeared first on Law Street.

It’s that time again.

The TV tells me so with endless ads, and my dreams tell me so with the dreams I’ve had almost every August since I was 6, like my subconscious is whispering it like it thinks it’s auditioning for a horror movie: backtoschool, backtoschool, backtoschooooollll.

And even though my syllabus is done (well, mostly done), my new hire paperwork is in (finally), and I’m pretty sure my bank account won’t empty out completely before I get paid again (grad schools think we don’t pay rent in the summer), I agree with grumpy Twitter users and Leonardo DiCaprio:

"Are you ready for back to school sales?" #BackToSchool pic.twitter.com/hvrxaYqeNG

— CHILDHOOD RUINER (@SongsPost) August 10, 2015

Still, though, I am ready for John Oliver’s take on #backtoschool prep. With the help of Laverne Cox and Nick Offerman, he just released a comical (but oh, too true) sex ed PSA.

And even though most people are rightly focusing on the actual content of the PSA–which Mic sums up in a great series of stills–I’d like to have a moment of online silence for the couple of seconds in his intro when Oliver cracks himself up making fun of kids teetering on the edge of puberty (he tries to get over it from 0:55-0:59). Watching him amuse himself is funnier, for me, than the joke itself, which I would have left out of the damn thing: shouldn’t body positivity go along with any sexual education proclaiming itself to be liberal? If the kid is proud of what his body is doing, let him be proud.

But, if you want to critique where he gets the idea that he should be so proud of a mustache (hello, damaging conceptions of “manhood” that lead to the very rapey sex that the PSA generally tries to address), that’s fine, too: go for it. But shouldn’t a critique of the dominance of masculinity (which Oliver could have gone into with the kid being “way too proud” of his “ghost mustache”) be more incisive than a punchline?

Yes, maybe. But then, everything’s a punchline here (which always, of course, has its goods and its bads). Some (but not all) of the bads: the video is presented as being about “teen birth control decisions.” When I was a teenager, I just turned off (pun?) when people would try to talk about that. A cis woman who was dating another cis woman (and, largely because we were teenagers, thought we’d never want to have sex with anyone else), I wasn’t worried about birth control. At the time, I didn’t think I would ever have to be. So I didn’t pay attention to any sex ed. Because it was super heteronormative. Like Oliver’s video. *facepalm*

So even while we’re watching, and even while we’re getting a lot of things right, we–and by we, here, I mean Oliver’s video–always have to seek to improve where we can. Even and especially through the “everything’s a punchline” mentality.

Some of the goods, though:

From “this is a vagina” (*GIGGLE*) to “and this is a butt,” (*GRAVE STARE*), the PSA says it is addressing itself to teenagers who are going to make a ‘hugely important’ decision: “no decision is probably more important than the one you’ll make about becoming sexually active.” And it does so by making us…laugh.

Which is useful, actually. Because it can diminish nerves and it can take away skittishness. It allows us to laugh about sex while firmly telling us, “no, no, violating someone’s consent is not something to laugh about.” (Best line award goes to Laverne Cox: “This is actually pretty simple: if someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, don’t have sex with them.”)

When we can laugh, we can ask better questions. And our students can ask better questions.

If the laughter isn’t at someone’s expense (like the Ancient Egyptians joke in the PSA. JOHN OLIVER STOP IT RACIST MICROAGGRESSIONS ARE NOT OKAY AND ARE NOT FUNNY), it can level a bit of the power playing field between teacher and student: with laughter easily flowing, it’s harder for teachers to present ourselves as “authorities” of sex. Which we’re not. Instead, we’re more like peers of students, who–like teenagers–have a variety of sexual and sexuality-related experiences. It’s a good thing if we don’t pretend we’re authorities of sex. Because let’s not pretend we all have had all the sexual experiences ever. Or even all the sexual knowledge ever. Because we don’t. Because we don’t all even get the idea that it’s probably best not to rape someone.

Adults need sex ed, too. Everyone is always learning.

And maybe the whole laughter thing can help us get there, just a little bit.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Sex Ed: Now Featuring John Oliver appeared first on Law Street.

I say at least once a week that I want something on a t-shirt. Some quote or another that just rolls out of my mouth, out of a friend’s mouth, or out of the mouth of a Shonda Rhimes character. Some are life philosophies and would actually fit on a t-shirt (Shut Up. Dance It Out.) and some are way too long to put on a t-shirt unless it’s quite creatively done (“They share food, and they say things, and they move, and they breathe. Ugh. They’re like, happy.” “Kick them out.”).

I always want to emblazon these little puppies a tee or tank to (a) make myself squee and (b) irritate and confuse the cishets when I cruise down the street. I want an entire line of these snarky wonders for the gym: sample, “Lesbians love to eat their own.”

"Lesbians Love to eat their own." -Alice #TheLWordQuotes

— L Word Quotes (@TheLWordQuotes) May 27, 2011

I never actually make any of these t-shirts or tank tops.

But this week, Autostraddle did.

From crop tops to crew shirts, the online lesbian media hub has created a line of “Gal Pal” wear, just in time for summer’s last hoorah. And the cishets won’t know it–y’all might think, “oh, isn’t that cute, girls make such great friends to each other, adorable”–we actually mean it to spite you.

Because Autostraddle released–during their Gal Pal Week–a celebratory list of women characters having genuine friendships with other women characters in the media. And the kicker–a lot of these women are queer.

And this is important, because “gal pals” is typically a phrase used by mainstream or cishet (which, in case you don’t know, equals cisgender + heterosexual) media to erase queer women’s identities, desires, and relationships. Our romantic relationships on television are so often dismissed, denied, and washed away (is straightwashing a word?). When two women characters have phenomenal sexual and personal chemistry, they are so often dismissed as “gal pals,” not people who could be/are lovers (or would for sure be lovers if one were written as a man).

As is often necessary, I go to tumblr to provide further explanation:

So when Autostraddle wants to sell me a “gal pals” shirt, I want to buy it. Because yes, we do have gal pals (Meredith and Cristina, anyone?), and we should celebrate each other.

But we also have lovers and desires and chemistries that are erased by mainstream media under the label of “gal pals.”

So when the cishets might think my shirt (which, if my track record proves anything, I won’t actually buy) is cute, I’ll be snickering in my mind (like the wonderful tumblr user above)–“hehe, gal pals. It’s cute how you think you know what you’re talking about.”

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Lesbian Humor is Amazing appeared first on Law Street.

Though positive changes are on the horizon for certain aspects of immigration law affecting transgender asylum seekers, the language that courts use to process transgender asylum cases extends beyond the letter of the law itself. The language with which courts deal with transgender individuals and issues can fundamentally prevent transgender asylum seekers from gaining safety in the United States.

How does the language of asylum courts impact the case law and outcomes of transgender asylum seekers?

Transgender Asylum Case Law: A Legal Overview

Asylum seekers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) face particularly strong obstacles in their application processes. Some protections have been added to immigration case law that have increased protections for LGBT asylum seekers. In 1990, lesbian women and gay men gained protection under immigration law as a “particular social group” (PDF). This means that, in a similar way to how Title IX protects women from gender-based discrimination within the United States, lesbians and gay men became a likewise “protected” group that can be afforded asylum due to homophobic discrimination and violence in their countries of origin.

The dangers of language that is not trans-inclusive are extremely high for trans individuals seeking asylum.  In 2000 and again in 2004, immigration courts recognized people that they term “gay men with female sexual identities” as a “particular social group,” therefore providing that these people can be granted asylum protections if they are persecuted for being a “gay male with female sexual identity” in their country of origin. However, courts misgender many asylum seekers when they label them as such; by refusing to acknowledge the chosen names and accurate (female) pronouns for transgender women seeking asylum, the courts only provide protection for trans women seeking asylum insofar as they are misidentified as “gay men with female sexual identities.” This invalidating language refuses to accept trans women’s status as women, and makes it very difficult for them to make it clear to the court that the violence they face in their country of origin is because of their identity. Because of this refusal to use trans-affirmative language, courts subject transgender asylum seekers to a great deal of added abuse. Sure enough, until very recently, the U.S. government locked up transgender women seeking asylum with men, leaving these women vulnerable to extreme abuse and violence. This violence mirrors the transphobic violence that asylum seekers were trying to flee.

Case Study: Hernandez-Montiel v. INS

Misgendering language in immigration courts does even more than creating an indirectly damaging environment. This language creates strong precedent for transgender individuals to lose their asylum cases because of the uncertainty that misgendering causes. Imprecise and inaccurate language in the court can create tremendous and unnecessary obstacles for advocating for transgender immigrants seeking asylum.

In the case of Hernandez-Montiel v. INS (2000), Hernandez-Montiel applied for asylum on the basis of being a “gay man with female sexual identity” who had suffered past persecution in Mexico. The BIA (Board of Immigration Appeals) denied the request. Hernandez-Montiel applied for asylum at age sixteen after being raped and harassed by police, and though this testimony was found to be credible, the BIA denied the asylum application because the Immigration Judge (IJ) identified Hernandez-Montiel’s social group as “homosexual males who wish to dress as a woman [sic],” which did not at the time qualify as a particular social group.

The 9th Circuit court overturned the BIA’s judgement, finding that “gay men with female sexual identities” such as Hernandez-Montiel, comprise a particular social group for the purposes of asylum cases, and that the sexual assaults that she experienced at the hands of police officers were “on account of” her membership in that group. The 9th Circuit decision also stated that “Geovanni is not required to prove that his persecutors were motivated by his sexual orientation to the exclusion of all other possible motivations.” Therefore, the court granted the asylum petition. This ruling is significant because it establishes the above-discussed precedent that “gay men with female sexual identities” who are persecuted on the grounds of this identity are eligible for protection under U.S. immigration law.

While this may seem like an unambiguous victory for trans women, this language causes a lot of confusion for advocates of transgender asylum seekers. For example, Lambda Legal–an advocacy organization for LGBT people–identified Hernandez-Montiel in a press release as an “effeminate gay man” and, in tandem with the courts, used male pronouns to refer to Hernandez-Montiel. However, specifically transgender advocacy organizations identified Hernandez-Montiel as a trans woman.

This language-based inconsistency and inaccuracy not only places Hernandez-Montiel and others at risk for being imprisoned incorrectly while awaiting decisions, but it ensures that transgender organizations cannot properly advocate for people who are being abused in the system.

Case Study: Reyes-Reyes v. Ashcroft

In a similar case four years later (2004), asylum applicant Reyes-Reyes–referred to by the court by her given name, Luis–was denied entry into the United States because of the extreme misgendering and refusal to acknowledge Reyes-Reyes’s status as a woman that continually manifested in the language of the court’s proceedings. In this 9th Circuit case, Reyes-Reyes, a citizen of El Salvador, applied for asylum, withholding of removal (so that she could stay in the United States longer, without being forced back to El Salvador), and relief under CAT (the Convention Against Torture) for fear of persecution based on Reyes-Reyes’s sexuality and gender expression. The Immigration Judge denied all of these applications, and the Board of Immigration appeals upheld these denials.

Reyes-Reyes fled El Salvador as a teenager 25 years ago for fear of persecution. The court characterizes Reyes-Reyes as “a homosexual male with a female sexual identity… Although Reyes-Reyes has not undergone sex reassignment surgery, he has a characteristically female appearance, mannerisms, and gestures… He has a ‘deep female identity’ and has gone by female names such as Josephine, Linda, and Cukita.” Using inappropriate male pronouns and insisting that Reyes-Reyes is gay instead of transgender, the court acknowledged that Reyes-Reyes has a history of being violently persecuted in El Salvador, having been kidnapped, raped, and beaten “because of his sexual orientation” at age 13. Reyes-Reyes told no one for fear of further brutality, and the Immigration Judge (IJ) focused deeply on this failure to report the crimes. The IJ determined that Reyes-Reyes had not established that the government of El Salvador, or anyone acting on the government’s behalf, would want to do Reyes-Reyes harm upon return. Because of this, it was ruled that Reyes-Reyes had failed to establish past persecution for the purposes of withholding of removal. Upon appeal to the BIA, Reyes-Reyes obtained pro bono representation and presented information from human rights organizations, government, and news sources detailing El Salvador’s hostile political and cultural climate “towards male homosexuals with female identity.” This information included an affidavit from an expert on Latin American culture. The BIA summarily affirmed the IJ’s denials.

The 9th Circuit court remanded these decisions, but not on the grounds that the court was wrong about Reyes-Reyes’s identity. Rather, the court remanded the Immigration Judge and Board of Immigration Appeals’ decisions to deny asylum due to incorrectly applied burdens of proof. This means that the legal precedents of misgendering Reyes-Reyes are still firmly established, including the assertion of her being a “male homosexual with female identity.”

In this case, too, Reyes-Reyes’s identity was interpreted differently by different sources because of the transphobic language used by the court to describe this asylum applicant. The LA Times identified Reyes-Reyes as a trans man, while the advocacy organization Immigration Equality identified Hernandez-Montiel as a trans woman.

Future of Trans Asylum Cases

Despite certain positive changes in immigration law regarding transgender asylum seekers, transgender detainees are still at extreme risk for abuse and violence while being detained in the U.S. Because of the courts’ transphobic language–the refusal to acknowledge the proper names and gender pronouns of transgender applicants, insisting on calling trans women “gay men with female sexual identities”–transgender asylum applicants are placed at increased risk of being denied asylum and being exposed to extreme violence.

Resources

Primary

University of Minnesota Human Rights Library: Hernandez-Montiel v. INS, 225 F.3d 1084 (9th Cir. 2000)

Additional

 Center for American Progress: The Plight of Gay and Transgender Women Seeking Asylum

Immigration Equality: Asylum Law Basics

Bitch Media: Crossing Borders: LGBT People in Immigration Detention Are Often Targets For Abuse

Advocate: Transgender Immigrants to be Detained According to Gender Identity

Fusion: Why Did the U.S. Lock Up These Women With Men?

Lambda Legal: Mexican Gay Man Seeking Asylum Appeals to the Ninth Circuit

Transgender Asylum Weekly: Hernandez-Montiel v. INS

FindLaw For Legal Professionals: Reyes-Reyes v. Ashcroft

LA Times: Transgender Man’s Case Tests U.S. Immigration Law

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Language of Asylum Law: Obstacles for Transgender Asylum Seekers appeared first on Law Street.

I guess it’s not about numbers.

It’s more about percentages. The percentages reveal more about the problem.

The percentages are more damning.

And here, you can see the percentages — glaring in how deeply they reveal the structural racism of the criminal justice system — in animated form.

Animated to best allow for comprehension, because the depth–the scale–of the criminal justice system’s racism is truly incomprehensible.

The percentages are damning because 95 percent of elected prosecutors across the country are white.

Only one percent of the 2,400 elected prosecutors in the United States are women of color.

And most prosecutors — especially considering the extremely racist impacts of prosecutorial discretion in the criminal justice system — wield even more power than judges or cops.

(Which is terrifying. Because cops in the United States kill U.S. citizens at 70 times the rate that cops kill citizens in other economically dominant countries.)

The animation — a project by the Reflective Democracy Campaign on Who Prosecutes America — illustrates in no uncertain terms the fact that almost 80 percent of prosecutors across the country are white men. Only 31 percent of the population of the United States is white men.

(The amount of power they have? Who wouldn’t be shocked by that?)

These white male prosecutors have almost complete impunity to run the system as they will. Their decisions are “almost entirely outside of public scrutiny.”

And these decisions? These decisions that they make? These decisions include altering the jury pool so that more Black people will be killed by the state, as such:

Federal prosecutors often seek the death penalty in federal court in cases that otherwise would be tried in state jurisdictions with substantial minority populations.  Because the federal districts are much larger – they are made up of many counties – they are predominately white. Crimes that are usually prosecuted in state courts can be prosecuted in federal courts based on any “federal interest” such as a carjacking. Federal prosecutors have repeatedly sought the death penalty in New Orleans, Richmond, St. Louis and Prince Georges County, Maryland, where African Americans make up the majority of the population in the county and the jury pools. The decision to prosecute federally in these jurisdictions alters the racial makeup of the jury pools from predominantly black to predominantly white. Those same federal prosecutors seldom seek the death penalty for crimes that occur in counties with largely white populations.

These decisions include seeking life sentences for possessing small amounts of marijuana.

Life. Sentences.

That means that these decisions include sending mostly people of color to die in prison because they carried pot in their pockets, something that white people like me do daily without fear.

This animation is important. This animation is key.

Because this animation demonstrates why and how so many people of color are sentenced to death, daily, by white men.

And it’s completely legal.

Featured Image Courtesy of [Christian Senger via Flickr]

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post How Many Prosecutors Do YOU Think Are White? appeared first on Law Street.

While many people from the United States often concern themselves with “female genital mutilation” in other countries, very few mainstream media sources focus on the nonconsensual surgeries on infants’ genitals that are frequently performed in hospitals in the United States. Approximately one out of every 1,200 births in the U.S. is an intersex child, and doctors generally treat these infants with genital surgeries.

What is the purpose of these genital surgeries, and why do intersex people and advocates often call these surgeries genital mutilation?

What Does it Mean to Have Intersex Traits?

Before discussing surgeries, it is first necessary to define what is meant by “intersex.” The Survivor Project defines intersex as:

The word that describes those of us who, without voluntary medical interventions, possess bodies that doctors can’t neatly classify as male or female. This includes people who have chromosomal sex other than XX (female) or XY (male), or primary or secondary sex characteristics that defy the medical definitions of male and female. Somehow, doctors [react negatively] when a newborn baby is found to be intersexed, and often mutilate her or his genitals to conform them to the doctors’ idea of what a normal baby should look like, even though intersex conditions usually do not threaten the health of the infant. Parents are often not given enough information or support to make an informed decision regarding their babies’ care.

Put another way, Inter/Act, a youth group for youth with intersex conditions, explains being intersex as:

An umbrella term describing people born with variations of internal and/or external sex anatomy resulting in bodies that can’t be classified as the typical male or female. We’re usually taught that sex is merely black and white, “male” or “female,” but that’s simply not true. There are a lot of awesome gray areas in the middle that could make someone intersex.

People with intersex traits are sometimes included in the LGBTQI acronym, but it is important to point out that being intersex does not necessarily mean that someone will not be straight. As a volunteer contributor to “Everyone is Gay!” and someone with intersex traits, Claudia of everyoneisgay.com writes of the debate regarding intersex inclusion and exclusion in queer circles:

People have questioned whether intersex issues really “fit” into the LGBT acronym or not. The LGBT acronym represents those with sexual orientations and gender identities outside the normative party line. And intersex isn’t a sexual orientation or a gender identity–it’s a bodily way of being. (Things can get a bit tricky here–some intersex people might identify their gender identity as “intersex,” and we need to allow intersex people–like all people–the room to identify however is authentic. Strictly speaking, however, intersex is about biology.)…Although intersex is about bodies, intersex people are fighting to be accepted, respected, and protected for being perceived as outside the norm. Since issues of bodily diversity are also often tied up in misunderstandings about how sex, gender, and sexual orientation fit together–hence, why so many people still advocate for “fixing” intersex people to make us “normal,”…including intersex people in LGBT issues makes a lot of sense…Many intersex people support adding the “I” and the LGBTQIA acronym, but some have been hesitant to support this inclusion because they don’t feel an affinity with the queer community. This stems (at least in part) from the perception that intersex people have to be L, G, B, or T in addition to being intersex for inclusion to make sense. But this doesn’t have to be the case.

What is Intersex Genital Mutilation?

Since the 1950s, when infants with intersex characteristics are born in the United States, doctors have chosen with overwhelming frequency to ignore the principles of informed consent and patient-centered models, instead choosing to follow concealment-centered models of care.

Doctors practicing concealment-centered models of care on intersex infants believe that genital “[r]econstruction to create normal functioning genitalia… performed using many different techniques” is a necessary part of giving infants with intersex traits a certain quality of life. To doctors who perform these surgeries, “the most important factors in the sex assignment of intersexed children are achieving a “normal” appearance of the genitalia in the assigned sex, and sexual function. If a male’s phallus is deemed unlikely to be able to “perform” adequately, then re-assignment as a female may become the preferred medical choice. But appearance and sexual function is not the only factor used in sex assignment – many laboratory tests are also done to determine the child’s genetics and potential for fertility.”

Before performing these surgeries, doctors evaluate certain standards before determining whether their surgical intervention will be aimed toward creating more male external genitalia or more female external genitalia. Some of these standards include the ability to ensure that children who will be raised as young boys can urinate while standing, and that children who will be raised as young girls will not have testes. Doctors make these determinations in order to allow children to grow up with genitalia considered typical for their gender.

This model of care encourages doctors to

Carry out largely unregulated and controversial surgeries that aim to make an infant’s genitals and reproductive organs more normal but can often have unintended consequences, according to intersex adults, advocates and some doctors…A long and gut-wrenching list of damaging side effects—painful scarring, reduced sexual sensitivity, torn genital tissue, removal of natural hormones and possible sterilization—combined with the chance of assigning children a gender they don’t feel comfortable with has left many calling for the surgeries to be heavily restricted.

Because one of the standards that doctors use to provide these surgeries is the potential for an infant to eventually have penetrative vaginal sex, many strenuously assert that surgeries on intersex infants is not about the health of the infant, but rather about their potential to successfully perform–both in genital appearance and in sexual activity–heterosexual sex.

Studies show that infants subjected to these surgeries, upon coming into adolescence and adulthood, are dissatisfied with the decisions and abuse inflicted on them by medical providers. Intersex advocates question both the legalities and the ethics of doctors who treat intersex infants with these surgeries. The website of Advocates for Informed Choice, an organization dedicated to the legal rights of those with intersex traits, explains:

These special legal needs are often neglected in the United States, but the Parliament of the European country of Malta has recently banned “normalization” surgeries on intersex infants. Maltese doctors are no longer permitted to perform medically unnecessary genital procedures on intersex babies. This ban is in keeping with a 2013 U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture report, which acknowledges that intersexuality rarely poses a threat to a person’s health, and therefore, performing irreversible “normalization” surgeries to “correct a problem” that doesn’t medically exist is immensely harmful to intersex people.

What is Being Done?

Many intersex people who have been harmed by genital surgeries when they were infants become activists advocating against the future use of these irreversible, medically unnecessary procedures. By advocating for informed consent and patient-centered models of care, people with intersex traits are working to change the medical landscape to ensure that intersex genital mutilation is no longer the default response to intersexuality in infants born in the United States.

Resources

Inter/Act: What is Intersex?

Storify: Female Circumcision and White Savior Complexes

Organization Intersex International: Intersex Genital Mutilation

Organization Intersex International: Words from Malta, the First Nation to Ban Intersex Genital Mutilation

Everyone is Gay!: “Are Intersex People Inherently Part of the Queer Community?”

Gender Blender Blog: Why Surgical Sex “Correction” of Intersex Babies is Genital Mutilation

Survivor Project: Introduction to Intersexuality and Intersex Activism

U.C. San Diego LGBT Resource Center: Intersex: The Basics

Attorneys for the Rights of the Child: Lawsuit Filed Regarding Genital Mutilation of Intersex Children

Intersex Society of North America: Top 10 Myths

Intersex Society of North America: Frequently Asked Questions

Open Society Foundations: Why Are Doctors Still Performing Genital Surgery on Infants?

The Atlantic: Should We ‘Fix’ Intersex Children?

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Infant Intersex Surgery: Genital Mutilation in the U.S.? appeared first on Law Street.

I spent the weekend before last in New York.

Comic Con was in San Diego.

I DEMANDED THAT THE WORLD GIVE ME AN “I’D RATHER BE AT COMIC CON” T-SHIRT.

I didn’t get one.

But then I sighed and spent the weekend taking breaks from novel writing to follow the Tumblr feeds of queer fandoms and spent a great deal of time squeaking so loudly that my girlfriend kept jumping. (They finally sat Lana Parrilla and Jennifer Morrison together for photos, interviews, and panels. Lesbian devotees of Once Upon a Time–myself among them–nearly died from all the feels.)

One consolation for missing the most widely celebrated geek event of the year was that Tumblr feed. Another was the amount of work I got done.

And the third consolation was my set of memories from New York Comic Con a couple of years ago.

Now don’t get me wrong, I had a blast. John Barrowman took a picture with my friend and grabbed her ass (her face was absolutely priceless), and I filmed two of my friends’ engagement (and took pictures at the same time; I’m talented that way).

But I was also lonely.

I had to search for queerness, for narratives and celebrations of narratives that don’t centralize able-bodied white straight cis masculinity. Yep, there was GeeksOUT and a bunch of fantastic Japanese Harry Potter slash fan art/fic zines. My biggest regret is that I went to catch up with the straight folk who were calling my name and didn’t buy any/spend all damn day reveling in their glory. (My other big regret is wearing those boots. I looked sexy, but damn did they hurt. People don’t lie when they tell you to wear comfy shoes to Comic Con, cosplay permitting.)

But for the most part, it was… lonely. Even though there were so many people around.

We have our own guides to getting around Comic Con, our own events. Which is amazing. It’s amazing that we have our panels, our workshops, our social spheres. Absolutely amazing.

And it’s also isolating. So much so that even when we have our own Comic Cons–Flame Con, anyone?–we know that we need to market ourselves as being “family-friendly.”

So maybe it’s alright with me that I spent the weekend writing my own queer fairy tales instead of searching for them among all the queer-baiting in the media and queerphobia and racism at Comic Cons themselves.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Queer Comic Con — A Life Necessity appeared first on Law Street.

Even though only 19 percent of Americans surveyed by the Public Religion Research Institute said they would oppose a lesbian or gay athlete signing onto a professional sports team, there are still many obstacles that exist to LGBTQ players being out in pro sports.

Women have been coming out publicly in professional sports for years, but men in the big leagues have faced a great deal of obstacles keeping their positions on teams.

As more and more professional athletes are coming out, what are the legal rights and difficulties of LGBTQ athletes in professional sports?

Out Athletes in Pro Sports

Not only have queer women been coming out publicly in professional sports for quite some time, several have been actively outspoken against homophobic laws. Speaking out against Minnesota’s 2012 attempt to ban gay marriage in the state, WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist Seimone Augustus told the Associated Press:

I felt like it was the perfect time for me, being on a platform where I can make a change with my voice and my situation… Maybe inspire someone else to come out and be comfortable with themselves. Or maybe someone else’s parents will see my parents saying that it’s OK to be with your child and love your child unconditionally regardless of your sexual preference.

This outspokenness accompanies the activism of fellow out WNBA star Brittney Griner against the constraints placed on her at Baptist school Baylor University.  Griner has commented candidly on the hypocrisy of homophobia in sports:

The more I think about it, the more I feel like the people who run the school want it both ways: they want to keep the policy, so they can keep selling themselves as a Christian university, but they are more than happy to benefit from the success of their gay athletes. That is, as long as those gay athletes don’t talk about being gay.

We’ve got a culture that is OK with casual homophobia and sexist language… What Jason Collins’ presence does–now people have to be held accountable. Because what people said before was, ‘Well, he said that, but he wasn’t talking to anyone, and no one’s gay here, so no one’s offended by it.’ Now that Collins is in existence, people realize there are more Jasons out there, more Michael Sams out there, that when you say something homophobic, you’re actually affecting someone who you truly believe exists now.

Rights and Responsibilities

Advocates of LGBT rights in professional sports have argued that it is the responsibility of professional sports leagues to proactively protect players–and coaches and staff–from discrimination.

In Sam’s case, however, Dr. John Fitzgerald Gates, National Diversity Expert, Principal, and Chief Strategist of Criticality Management Consulting and Former Associate Dean of Harvard College, wrote the following about NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell:

(He) did nothing to assure that Sam would be treated with the respect and fairness accorded other players, or to protect him against being fired because he is gay. According to Goodell, in the NFL: ‘We do things the right way. We will give them that education and training. I hope that will solve the problem.’ But Goodell’s deduction is flawed, for if education and training solved discrimination we surely would have educated and trained our way beyond it by now. As with racial and gender bias, laws must be constructed and enforced to ensure equal protection to LGBT professional athletes. Goodell welcomed Sam onto the field of play without providing him the protection from discrimination that other players have, thereby leaving him uniquely and unfairly vulnerable. Goodell codified the NFL’s right to discriminate when he should have had the courage, like President Obama, to ban it.

It is worth noting that the NFL does, in fact, have provisions in place to protect players from discrimination and harassment based on their sexual orientation. Indeed, when the MLB spoke out against homophobia in the major leagues, it was following the precedent of the NFL, stating that:

Public Religion Research Institute: Ahead of Super Bowl, Nearly Three-in-Ten Americans Support Lifetime Ban for Football Players Who Commit Domestic Violence

OutSports: Trans Athletes

Sports Illustrated: Why NBA Center Jason Collins is Coming Out Now

Huffington Post: The Moment is NOW for Professional Sports to Ban LGBT Discrimination

Huffington Post: Michael Sam: The Practical and Legal Implications of a Gay Professional Athlete

CBS News: NFL Agrees to Do More to Protect Gay Players

Daily Mail: Basketball Star Brittney Griner Opens up About Being a Lesbian at Baylor University and How She was Told to Keep ‘Her Business’ to Herself

Jurist: How Four Major Sports Leagues Influence LGBT Rights

Think Progress: The Benchwarming Journeymen Who Changed American Sports Forever

Think Progress: Dallas Cowboys Cut Michael Sam from Practice Squad

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post LGBTQ Pro Sports: Obstacles and Victories appeared first on Law Street.

This week, the white fiction world has been up in arms about Harper Lee’s portrayal of fictional, white lawyer Atticus Finch as explicitly racist in her long-awaited second book, “Go Set a Watchman.”

This second book shows Atticus — hero of Lee’s 1960 classic “To Kill a Mockingbird,” in which he defended Tom Robinson, a Black man who was falsely accused of raping a white woman–referring to Black people as  “still [being] in their childhood as a people.” “Go Set a Watchman” also reveals that Atticus once attended a KKK meeting.

Mainstream (read: white-dominated) audiences are apparently stunned by this “new shocker.” But the thing is, Atticus’s racism really isn’t shocking at all.

“Go Set a Watchman” does not reveal anything that an anti-white supremacist reading of “To Kill a Mockingbird” wouldn’t have revealed: Atticus Finch, even when being hailed by generations of English teachers and study guides as preaching anti-racism, was always, in fact, racist.

Even the very words out of Atticus’s mouth in the 1960 publication mirror his words now: while in “Go Set a Watchman,” he calls Black people children (carrying on an infantilizing and violently imperialist legacy of rhetoric), his rhetoric is just as racist–if slightly more subtly–in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In a passage that is widely cited as proof of Atticus’s anti-racism, he explains to Scout that “baby, it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.” He is referring, here, to being called an “n-word lover.”

It doesn’t hurt you.

So, by Atticus’s logic, Tom Robinson’s being called a rapist can’t hurt him; it just reflects badly on the people who are accusing him. Black people being called the n-word aren’t hurt, aren’t being threatened, and aren’t being violently attacked: it just reflects badly on the people who are doing the name-calling.

No, no, no, Atticus Finch.

Because Atticus trying to preach anti-racism to Scout is actually profoundly racist: to minimize the power of words–words that can lead to a lynching and that can lead to teenage Black bodies being left in the streets for hours after being murdered by white cops–is to minimize the power behind words. Because some words–like the n-word and like “n-word lover”–are backed by powerful, violent institutions of white supremacy, and this power makes these words lethal.

To ignore that in his explanation to Scout is to ignore the fact that racism is not individual. It is not personal. It is institutional, and it is deadly. His lack of understanding of this demonstrates quite clearly his casual racism–racism that may not be, granted, intentional–but this casual, colorblind-esque racism is perhaps most dangerous of all. Because we don’t recognize it. Sometimes, we even valorize it.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is widely valorized as a “progressive’ book. And this is the larger problem with the book and with Atticus’s character and racism–Atticus was always positioned as a white savior.

Justice, in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” always had a white face.

Black people needed, in this book, to be saved by the just, progressive white man. How is it surprising, then, that in this newer iteration, Atticus is explicit about his understanding of Black people as being “in their childhood”? That belief is exactly what he acted out when he served as the white savior in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

So, intentionally or not, the character of Atticus Finch has always upheld white supremacy. Atticus Finch has always been racist.

It says more about us than it does about these books that we are so damn surprised.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Atticus Finch Was Always Racist appeared first on Law Street.

The 2015 women’s World Cup final brought in millions more viewers in the U.S. than the 2014 men’s final. As the most watched soccer game in U.S. history, the final has spurred quite a lot of thinking about the lack of relative women’s participation in professional U.S. sports more broadly.

We know that men receive more athletic scholarships for college than women; the percentage of women coaches of men’s sports is tiny, and the percentage of women coaches for women’s sports is dropping as pay for coaches increases; and sports media devote precious little, if any, time to women in sports.

All of these forms of discrimination contribute to fewer women having access to playing sports professionally.

But are there actual, legal barriers to women as players participating in male-dominated professional sports? From the NCAA to the NFL, the answer is technically no.

NCAA and Title IX

Originally signed into law as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX is often the piece of legislation that athletes who are women cite as their legal protection in the arena of college sports. Title IX states that,

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Because most colleges and universities cannot function without continuing to receive Federal financial assistance of one kind or another, this legal provision is the means through which many women athletes have attempted to secure their rights to play in intercollegiate sports. Actually playing on a team is not the only aspect of college life Title IX is supposed to regulate, however. More expansive than this, Title IX:

Forbids sex discrimination in all university student services and academic programs including, but not limited to, admissions, financial aid, academic advising, housing, athletics, recreational services, college residential life programs, health services, counseling and psychological services, Registrar’s office, classroom assignments, grading and discipline. Title IX also forbids discrimination because of sex in employment and recruitment consideration or selection, whether full time or part time, under any education program or activity operated by an institution receiving or benefiting from federal financial assistance.

However, because legal standards in the United States require that the court proves individual and/or institutional intent to discriminate in order to prove discrimination, the NCAA’s standards for complying with Title IX–requiring, according to the NCAA’s interpretation, “that men and women be provided equitable opportunities to participate in sports”–is not likely to actually make the systematic changes women need in sports across the country. “Providing equitable opportunities” still allows women’s sports to receive much less than half of college funds for athletics, and it also still leaves athletes who are women vulnerable to more discrete forms of discrimination.

A good case study of these forms of discrimination is the case of Heather Sue Mercer, who in 1997 filed suit against Duke University under Title IX because she was cut from the football team for being a woman and, while she was still on the team, was treated much differently than her male teammates. Even though she was eventually awarded $2 million in damages, the standard for awarding damages (determining malice) is much lower than the standard for determining whether Duke violated Title IX (deliberate indifference, or the intent to discriminate, which Duke was found not to have).

The interpretations of Title IX in intercollegiate athletics that arose from this case have had long-lasting impacts on women trying to break into intercollegiate sports. The court ruled that colleges are not required to allow women to play on “men’s” contact sports teams, leaving decisions about women having access to sports in coaches’ hands. This leaves the door wide open for coaches to make statements like Goldsmith’s, citing arbitrary reasons like size that didn’t seem to impact Mercer’s ability to play just as well as — and better than — others on her team when she was invited to join it in the first place.

And what about the pros?

Though Title IX by default does not directly affect professional sports–by definition, it only impacts institutions that receive federal funding–athletes attempting to make it into the big leagues find themselves strongly disadvantaged by the legacies of Title IX. Women do not only face discrimination on athletic fields that negatively impact their access to playing in the pros, but women’s pro leagues also experience extreme financial hardships that male leagues simply do not face. This acts as a strong barrier to all women, but especially to women who, for example, have a great deal of debt from college because they did not receive the same kind of scholarships that they would have if they were men. Because of the economic impacts of sports-based (and other) discrimination, women–especially women of color–are more likely to lack the resources needed to stick it through playing in underfunded women’s pro leagues.

The lack of ability for women to get professional opportunities and exposure is largely dependent on economic and media biases, as described by Shira Springer of The Boston Globe:

Absent deep-pocketed investors who can commit for several years, women’s professional teams and leagues find themselves scrambling to survive almost from the moment they launch. With the notable exception of the National Basketball Association-supported WNBA, women’s pro leagues never get a chance to play the kind of long game that could build momentum and diverse fan bases. ‘Women’s sports are still sort of niche sports,’ says Angela Ruggiero, president of the Women’s Sports Foundation based in New York City and a four-time Olympic medalist in women’s ice hockey. ‘Part of it is visibility. Because most women’s sports don’t get the same coverage compared to men, it’s not the same fan experience, and it’s much harder to get invested. Part of it is that sports fans are still trying to understand and appreciate women’s sports and female athletes.’

Partly because of this, many athletes who are women aspire to play in the “big leagues” that everyone is almost guaranteed to know about: the MLB, the NBA, the NFL.

Football–due to its emphasis on extreme contact–is often the sport that people react most strongly against women participating in. Many people simply do not believe that a woman could excel in the NFL (or football in general), except perhaps as a kicker.

But are there any regulations–legal or league-based–that actually prevent women from playing in professional “male” sports, even the NBA and NFL? The answer, it seems, is no.

In 2012, the NFL finally made it clear that there are no provisions, legal or otherwise, that would prohibit women from participating in the NFL. Soon after, in 2013, New Yorker and superb kicker Lauren Silberman competed at the NFL’s New Jersey regional combine. While she did not make the cut onto a team, Silberman told NFL.com before the combine that,

I was not aware that I was the first female registrant. I was actually hoping that the 2012 historical milestone rule, to allow women to play, would prompt more women to attend tryouts this year. But for me, what’s important is to finally have a chance to fulfill my dreams by trying out to play in the world’s most competitive football league.

Silberman’s dream was stymied, but like Silberman, the dreams of many women to play in professional sports–like Melissa Mayeux, the first woman eligible to be signed in the MLB from the international registration list–are still moving forward despite the obstacles.

So when will women be in the dominant pro leagues?

While athletes who are women are legally entitled to the equitable access to intercollegiate athletics, the reality is that most women, regardless of ability, do not have access to the same types of opportunities or benefits that athletes who are men have. Similarly, women are not barred by any regulation from participating in pro “male” sports, including high-contact leagues like the NFL; however, even as athletes like Silberman and Mayeux push boundaries in the big leagues, there is a very, very long way to go for women who dream of playing in those arenas.

Resources

NFL.com: Female Will Compete at Regional Combine For First Time

Boston Globe: Why Do Fans Ignore Women’s Pro Sports?

LexisNexis Legal Newsroom: Gender Participation Issues Related to Sports

NCAA: Title IX Frequently Asked Questions

AthNet: Title IX and Its Effects on Intercollegiate Athletics

ESPN W: Five Myths about Title IX

Women’s Sports Foundation: Title IX Myths and Facts

Life and Times: The Impact of Title IX on Women’s Sports

U.S. News & World Report: 40 Years After Title IX, Men Still Get Better Sports Opportunities

NFL: Women Will Compete at Regional Combine For First Time

Weekly World News: NFL to Allow Women to Play

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Women in the Big Leagues: Can They Legally Play on “Men’s” Teams? appeared first on Law Street.

Since 1981, the number of children of incarcerated parents has increased by an extremely dramatic 80 percent. Along with the more than 50 percent increase in the number of incarcerated women–75 percent of whom are mothers–well over half of all adults incarcerated in state and federal prisons today have at least one child under the age of 18.

Though the numbers are grim, they are far from the whole story. How does mass incarceration affect children of incarcerated parents, and how have these children come together to advocate for their needs?

Consequences of Parental Incarceration for Children

Having a parent in prison can have an impact on a child’s mental health, social behavior, and educational prospects. The emotional trauma that may occur and the practical difficulties of a disrupted family life can be compounded by the social stigma that children may face as a result of having a parent in prison or jail. Children who have an incarcerated parent may experience financial hardship that results from the loss of that parent’s income. Further, some incarcerated parents face termination of parental rights because their children have been in the foster care system beyond the time allowed by law.

Unlike children of the deceased or divorced who tend to benefit from society’s familiarity with and acceptance of their loss, children of the incarcerated too often grow up and grieve under a cloud of low expectations and amidst a swirling set of assumptions that they will fail, that they will themselves resort to a life of crime or that they too will succumb to a life of drug addiction.

Children Fighting Back

1. I have the right to be kept safe and informed at the time of my parent’s arrest.
2. I have the right to be heard when decision are made about me.
3. I have the right to be considered when decisions are made about my parent.
4. I have the right to be well cared for in my parent’s absence.
5. I have the right to speak with, see, and touch my parent.
6. I have the right to support as I struggle with my parent’s incarceration.
7. I have the right not to be judged, blamed, or labeled because of my parent’s incarceration.
8. I have the right to a lifelong relationship with my parent.

1. I have the right to be kept safe and informed at the time of my parent’s arrest: (1) Develop arrest protocols that support and protect children; (2) Offer children and/or their caregivers basic information about the post-arrest process.
2. I have the right to be heard when decisions are made about me: (1) Train staff at institutions whose constituency includes children of incarcerated parents to recognize and address these children’s needs and concerns; (2) Tell the truth; (3) Listen.
3. I have the right to be considered when decisions are made about my parent: (1) Review current sentencing law in terms of its impact on children and families; (2) Turn arrest into an opportunity for family preservation; (3) Include a family impact statement in pre-sentence investigation reports.
4. I have the right to be well cared for in my parent’s absence: (1) Support children by supporting their caretakers; (2) Offer subsidized guardianship.
5. I have the right to speak with, see, and touch my parent: (1) Provide access to visiting rooms that are child-centered, non-intimidating, and conducive to bonding; (2) Consider proximity to family when siting prisons and assigning prisoners; (3) Encourage child welfare departments to facilitate contact.
6. I have the right to support as I face my parent’s incarceration: (1) Train adults who work with young people to recognize the needs and concerns of children whose parents are incarcerated; (2) Provide access to specially trained therapists, counselors, and/or mentors; (3) Save five percent for families.
7. I have the right not to be judged, blamed, or labeled because my parent is incarcerated: (1) Create opportunities for children of incarcerated parents to communicate with and support each other; (2) Create a truth fit to tell; (3) Consider differential response when a parent is arrested.
8. I have the right to a lifelong relationship with my parent: (1) Re-examine the Adoption and Safe Families Act; (2) Designate a family services coordinator at prisons and jails; (3) Support incarcerated parents upon reentry; (4) Focus on rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration.

Led by youth who have had a parent incarcerated, Project WHAT! raises awareness about children with incarcerated parents with the long-term goal of improving services and policies that affect these children.  WHAT! stands for We’re Here And Talking, which is exactly what the team is doing. Over seven million children have a parent on parole, probation, or incarcerated. The program employs young people who have experienced parental incarceration as the primary curriculum content developers and facilitators for trainings.

By directly employing youth in their advocacy efforts, Project WHAT! utilizes both long-term advocacy and direct-action strategies. By striving toward long-term goals–like the ones described above–while offering short-term assistance–immediately empowering youth and children through both their programming and their paid employment opportunities–Project WHAT! is a prime example of youth-led organizing across the country. Indeed, children of incarcerated parents in Michigan have also organized to open their own chapters of Project WHAT!.

So where are we now?

Children of incarcerated parents are uniquely impacted by the criminal justice system, even when they are not, themselves, incarcerated. From emotional and psychological trauma, to increased poverty, to being separated permanently from their parents without parent or child’s consent, mass incarceration devastates many of the children whose parents are incarcerated. However, coalitions of children like Project WHAT! are working to ensure that their needs are met, even if the criminal justice system is not interested in meeting them.

Resources

Osborne Association: Children of Incarcerated Parents: A Bill of Rights

Rhonda L. Rosenthal, PC: Severing the Parental Rights of Inmates

California Watch: Number of Children With Parent in Prison Growing

IndiGoGo: Project WHAT! Building a Youth-Led Movement for Prison Reform in Michigan

Community Works: Project WHAT!

San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents: From Rights to Realities

Reporting on Health: Children Who Witness Parent’s Immigration Arrest May Suffer Lifetime Health Consequences

Annie E. Casey Foundation: Children of Incarcerated Parents Fact Sheet

Youth.gov: Children of Incarcerated Parents

Justice Strategies: Children on the Outside: Voicing the Pain and Human Costs of Parental Incarceration

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: The Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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I know, I know. I shouldn’t be so gleeful that so many lesbians were OUT and about (see what I did there?) at the World Cup this year.

No, you don’t need to be super masculine to be amazing at sports. And no, you don’t need to be super masculine to be a lesbian (and yes, you can be super masculine and also somehow not be a lesbian). So no, I don’t want to celebrate just how much lesbiosity there was at this year’s World Cup because I don’t want to perpetuate this idea that masculinity = sports and masculinity = male, so male = sports, and if women are amazing at sports, then women must be masculine and must be lesbians (follow all that?!).

None of that is true. I know.

BUT I AM STILL SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS.

By this, of course, I mean the international platform that the World Cup has become for out lesbian players to advocate for genuine queer inclusion in professional sports.

I also mean–and I giggle gleefully each time I think about it or watch the video (now you can, too: scroll down!!)–Abby Wambach jogging over to the sidelines after winning the World Cup Sunday night and kissing her wife, Sarah Huffman.

But I’m still sad about it. I’m sad that it’s such a big deal.

To describe what I mean, I–the English PhD student and aspiring novelist–am going to have to turn to Tumblr (at least I don’t take myself too seriously, right?). Because really, carmillastakesmyheart hashtagged this post perfectly: When “Just Straight Things # 18” was deemed by the delightful and sadly accurate JustStraightThings blog to be “donating blood” (because we queers aren’t allowed to due to queerphobic and medically meaningless FDA regulations), carmillastakesmyheart reblogged the post with the hashtags #thismademelaugh and #thenmademereallysad (see below).

Which is exactly how I feel about the sensation that has become of Wambach and Huffman’s “Kiss Seen ‘Round the World.” Because it is not (just) an emblem of queer “progress”–the overwhelmingly supportive media response to it is an indication of how far we still need to go.

Because some media couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge that Sarah is her wife.

The homophobia via erasing queerness doesn’t surprise me.

So yes, the kiss makes me laugh with happiness.

But then it makes me sad. Because it’s a big deal. It’s a huge, sensational, enormous deal.

And it really shouldn’t be at all.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Bittersweet Lesbian Kisses at the World Cup appeared first on Law Street.

Oh, I would love it if the way that people are talking about 16-year-old Melissa Mayeux–an excellent French shortstop (and the first woman to be added to the MLB’s international registration list, which makes her technically eligible to be signed this week)–is how we would talk about men.

Take Yankees outfielder Garrett Jones. How ‘ridiculous’ would it be if I took his ‘supportive’ comments about Mayeux and made them about men? Let’s find out, shall we? (Brackets are where I’ve switched pronouns and other such gender-y words.)

I watched the video of [him] taking ground balls and hitting, and [he] looked really good for being 16… [He] looked good for a 16-year-old [girl]. I’m for it. If a [boy] can play up to the level and compete with [gals], I’m all for it. If [he] can compete and help the team win, why not? It’s pretty cool that [boys] are playing baseball. I didn’t know they had that in other countries, like France. So, why not? If a [boy] can compete with the [gals] and play, why not let [him] play?

Hahaha, funny, right–isn’t it so odd to talk about how surprising it is that boys might be as good as girls at something? But it is not ridiculous–it is, in fact, considered complimentary–when we talk about girls that way. When we’re shocked that girls and women are–not can be, but are–as good as men at sports. Or maybe–gasp!–even better?

Keep your compliments to yourselves, boys. I don’t want to hear that I can play if I’m as good as you. (I already know I’m better.)

And just for clarity there, Jones: were you unclear as to whether people in general play baseball in France? Or that girls are allowed to play?

Probably the second one, because you seem surprised that girls play baseball at all (though I suppose you’re right: it is “pretty cool”).

But I suppose maybe it’s not fair for me to take Jones as a proverbial straw man: he was, after all, trying to be supportive, and anyway, the problem is not limited to him.

There’s a problem in the way that most male-dominated sports-casting is discussing Mayeux: in sporting industries where women must automatically be on the defensive regarding whether or not we are “as good as” men, we are bound to get sexist reporting and commentary that is trying very hard to sound non-sexist.

Except it’s failing. Because it is evidence of a sexist industry when supportive people are referring to Mayeux as a “legitimate” shortstop (would we question a man’s legitimacy in his position?)

It is evidence of a misogynist industry when MLB Director of International Game Development Mike McClellan comments on Mayeux smoking a 91 mile-per-hour fastball that she “looked good doing it.”

It is evidence of a misogynist industry when articles rush to assure readers that Mayeux is not interested in–or (unrealistically unlikely) even aware of–breaking down gender barriers.

If she were an outspoken advocate for her right as a woman to enter the MLB, would she be considered a less “legitimate” shortstop?

In the male-dominated gaze of pro sports? Probably, yeah.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post You Play Ball Like a Girl! appeared first on Law Street.

As mass incarceration and state violence vis a vis police brutality are coming increasingly under fire, even in mainstream media, many communities are turning toward alternative methods of addressing violence. Transformative justice–as opposed to criminal justice–seeks to create alternatives to incarceration in a similar manner to its less-radical cousin, restorative justice. But transformative justice does something else, as well: transformative practices encourage communities to avoid involving police in crimes, even in instances of violence.

How can community practices of transformative justice transform the larger criminal justice system? Can community-based methods of addressing violence be the key to transforming this society?

What is Transformative Justice?

According to Generation Five, an organization dedicated to transformative justice in cases of gender-based violence, especially child abuse, transformative justice is described as the following:

Transformative justice [is] a liberatory approach to violence…[which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing.

Three core beliefs:

Individual justice and collective liberation are equally important, mutually supportive, and fundamentally intertwined—the achievement of one is impossible without the achievement of the other.

The conditions that allow violence to occur must be transformed in order to achieve justice in individual instances of violence. Therefore, Transformative Justice is both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice.

State and systemic responses to violence, including the criminal legal system and child welfare agencies, not only fail to advance individual and collective justice but also condone and perpetuate cycles of violence.”

Because of these core beliefs, rather than seeking to integrate transformative practices into the current criminal justice system, transformative justice practitioners actively advocate for remaining outside of state intervention.

Transformative Justice is a response to the State’s inability to provide justice on either individual or collective levels. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a model that responds to experiences of violence without relying on current State systems. We believe this to be a liberating politic that creates opportunities for healing and transformation rather than retribution and punishment. Transformative Justice moves us toward equity and liberation rather than maintaining the inequality that the current State and systems maintain.

Transformative justice practitioners argue that there is a choice, however: by equipping communities to engage in transformative practices instead of resorting to the only option often presented to people–involving the police in cases of violence–harm can actually be repaired and further harm can actually be prevented.

Can Transformative Practices Achieve Justice?

While many people across the country increasingly accept alternatives to incarceration for youth who are convicted of minor, nonviolent offenses–indeed, restorative practices dealing with those kinds of cases are becoming more common–many are skeptical about transformative justice advocates’ claims that alternatives to incarceration should also be used in cases as grave as rape and child abuse.

But does anyone actually practice transformative justice?

In one example of transformative justice principles being used in an effort to keep targeted communities safe without resorting to state intervention, the Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn queer of color youth collective Safe OUTside the System launched a campaign in 2007 in line with transformative justice principles and practices:

In 2007, the collective launched the Safe Neighborhood Campaign. Similar to the Dorchester Green Light Program of the 1970s, the campaign provides safe havens from sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and racist language, behaviour, and violence of all sorts. The campaign has three phases. In the first, neighbourhood public spaces such as restaurants, schools, churches, and businesses agree to visibly identify themselves as safe havens for those threatened with or fleeing from violence. In the second phase, the campaign incorporates an educational component to address some of the causes of anti-gay and anti-trans violence. Members of the campaign train the owners and employees… [on] ways to prevent violent without relying on law enforcement. In the third phase, Safe Space advocates recruit other community members and public figures into the campaign.

In ways that are formal–like these Safe OUTside the System’s effort–and informal, strategies of transformative justice are providing alternatives to the criminal justice system across the country.

Transforming criminal justice?

While transformative justice can be criticized for not offering a structured, consistent approach to providing alternatives to policing, transformative justice advocates continue to emphasize the importance of promoting truly individual and community-based alternatives–which vary with each circumstance–rather than attempting to dictate what is best for different communities. This is because ultimately, the priority of transformative justice advocates is not to transform the criminal justice system, but rather to work outside of it until it can be dismantled and rebuilt in a transformative way that does not continue to target already marginalized peoples.

Resources

Generation Five: Transformative Justice

Generation Five: Toward Transformative Justice

Huffington Post: Seeking Transformative Justice in Ferguson, Dearborn, and Beyond

Huffington Post: Criminalizing Victims: How the Punishment Economy Failed Marissa Alexander

Philly Stands Up!: Transformative Justice Anti-Sexual Assault Action Camp!

US Prison Culture: Thoughts About Community Support Around Intimate Violence

Safe OUTSide the System: The SOS Collective

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Sharonda Coleman-Singleton.

Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

Cynthia Hurd.

Tywanza Sanders.

Myra Thompson.

Ethel Lee Lance.

Reverend Daniel L. Simmons.

Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor.

Susie Jackson.

So, fellow white folks. Know any of these names? Any of these lives?

No?

But we all know the name in the headline.

Stop saying his name. Stop sharing his manifesto. Infamy was one of his goals. #Charleston #DontSayHisName

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) June 20, 2015

That’s why you clicked on this post, right? Outraged, right, because we would never pick up a gun and murder Black people, in a church for crying out loud, so how can we possibly all be this killer kid?

But we don’t need a gun and we don’t need a confederate flag to be the Charleston shooter.

Because the murderer in Charleston was, yes, an individual young person, but the murderer was also all of us white folk.

It’s all of us who tweeted #notallwhitepeople after the shooting but criticized Black people in Baltimore for rising against state violence.

We know #NotAllWhitePeople are racist; we're attacking a white supremacist system, so stop whining. pic.twitter.com/Y5wR0ebSVv

— • J a y n a • (@jxchristine_) June 18, 2015

It’s all of us who let him say that he slaughtered Black people to “protect” white women, and we still remained on the proverbial sidelines, letting him murder people in our name.

It’s all of us who prioritize our white tears over the lived experiences of people of color.

It’s all of us, even when we don’t remain passive in the face of state violence.

Because even when we don’t remain passive, we can travel down the street–or even run down the street–confident that we won’t get shot by cops.

Because even when we do protest against white supremacist state violence, we benefit from it.

We benefit from it, and we can do nothing to change that except, maybe, beginning to acknowledge it, and encouraging other white folk to acknowledge it, too.

Because the Charleston shooting is not an exception. This young man’s racism and racist violence are not exceptions.

Dylann Roof is not an extremist, he's the logical expression of #WhiteSupremacy & nostalgic settler-colonialism: http://t.co/Q1f822CCpG #USA

— Kamal Fizazi (@kamalfizazi) June 23, 2015

He has been honest. He has been explicit about what every single structural foundation of this country is entrenched in.

The young man who took so many lives in Charleston is simply more honest than the rest of the country. He explicitly states what all of these foundational fixtures of U.S. society implicitly yet violently impose on people in this country and across the world every day–from our slavery-defending and genocide-based Constitution; to the racist “war on drugs” that is actually a war on communities of color; to the fact that Black History Month is the only time narratives by any kind of POC are highlighted in our schools; to the microaggressions that dominate the workplace, internet, media, and just about everything else; to the environmental racism that is killing even more people of color than police violence–white supremacy.

White people — all of us, no matter how radical our politics or how intersectional our identities (my dis/abilities and queerness do not make me any less white)–materially benefit from and participate in white supremacy.

So yes, we are all Dylan Roof.

And if we don’t want to be?

Well, acknowledging our positions in a white supremacist country and turning off our white tears in favor of genuinely prioritizing those that white supremacy kills is a fine place to start.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Fellow White Folks: We Are All Dylan Roof appeared first on Law Street.

With mass incarceration under scrutiny, questions arise about alternatives to the punitive practice. One such set of alternatives–a process called restorative justice–is on the rise across the country in youth courts and schools.

Restorative justice has been practiced around the world for quite some time, but how do these dialogue-based alternatives to incarceration operate within the United States’ criminal justice system? Is restorative justice a radical means to advance social justice in an age of mass incarceration, or is it merely another way to reinforce the power structures of the current system? Read on to learn more.

Retributive Versus Restorative Justice

In order to appreciate the differences in approach that restorative justice poses, it is important to first understand that the United States’ criminal justice system operates under a retributive justice approach. Retributive justice is based on the idea of punishment, and the theory behind it is that the state is the ultimate victim of crimes and thus has the power to punish people it deems criminals. This domination-based form of justice is one basis for punishing “victimless crimes” such as drug offenses so harshly. Under retributive justice theories, the state is positioned as the victim.

In other words, the current criminal justice system’s emphasis on retributive justice relies on the logic that:

Retributivism answers the question ‘why punish’ by saying that the offender deserves punishment, and as simple as this statement sounds, its underlying meaning contains a couple of important points about morality and law.  Retributivism as a theory of punishment requires retribution as a rationale for law.  A retributionist assumes that the law exists for a reason — a moral reason.  All crime, even victimless crime, involves a social harm — a moral harm.  In other words, violating the law not only offends against the law of the land, but the moral code of the land.

Restorative justice, however, is grounded in an entirely different logic, philosophy, and practice. Restorative justice is defined by restorative agencies such as the Insight Prison Project as:

A philosophy and a social movement which provides an entirely different way of thinking about crime and victimization.  Our current retributive justice system focuses on punishment, regarding the state as the primary victim of criminal acts and casting victims and prisoners in passive roles. Restorative Justice, by contrast, focuses on healing and rehabilitation… It assumes that the persons most affected by crime should have the opportunity to become involved in resolving the conflict.  The goals of restoring losses, allowing prisoners to take responsibility for their actions, and helping victims move beyond their sense of vulnerability stand in sharp contrast to the conventional focus on past criminal behavior and increasing levels of punishment.

By taking the ideals of community and individual accountability and upholding the goal of mutual understanding and healing, restorative justice processes ensure that police, prosecutors, and judges are not the only ones with power over deciding someone’s fate after a crime has been committed. When prosecutorial and/or judicial discretion is utilized to make restorative processes available to people, the power of deciding how to move forward shifts to the person accused of committing a crime and the people most closely impacted by that crime.

This power shift can involve processes such as victim-offender mediation, conferencing, service provision, and “victim” assistance, as applicable. In the most well-known and widely used forms of restorative justice–mediated community conferences and circles–the offender(s), victims(s), and other closely impacted community members will come together in a mediated dialogue to address the context and harm done by the crime. During this process, the offender is expected to accept responsibility and agree to the group consensus of how to move forward, whether through community service, rehab, or other options. In these types of processes, the offender must agree to following through on the agreement; failing to do so will trigger a return to a traditional, retributive justice approach that will likely result in jail time.

Restorative Justice in Action

Currently in the U.S., restorative justice is most often used in the context of youth offenders and the juvenile justice system. Especially due to the extremely high rates of recidivism in the juvenile justice system, restorative justice, which often produces extremely low recidivism rates, is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to incarceration in many juvenile courts across the country.

Many schools are using restorative processes as a way to keep their youth out of the school-to-prison pipeline. By engaging in restorative processes of mediation, schools are doing the following:

Forging closer, franker relationships among students, teachers and administrators. It encourages young people to come up with meaningful reparations for their wrongdoing while challenging them to develop empathy for one another through “talking circles” led by facilitators.

These talking circles, a trademark of restorative processes, often serve as alternatives to the suspensions and expulsions that fuel the school-to-prison pipeline. By resisting racialized zero-tolerance policies that do not give students a chance to repair any harm they might have done–and that might have been done to them–restorative practices in schools give students, teachers, and administrators the opportunity to identify deeper causes of problems in schools that allow more holistic approaches to students acting out.

Schools from California to Colorado to New York are implementing and expanding their restorative justice programs in order to avoid shipping their students directly into the juvenile justice system. In New York City, restorative programming in schools is being used with increasing frequency and impact:

Over the past few years, the Department of Education has been building its capacity to implement restorative justice programs. The department has provided training to teachers from 55 middle and high schools through the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, which will be training 45 more schools this July and plans to add another 45 in the fall.

At Flushing International High School, where students hail from over 40 countries, social worker Tania Romero said that restorative practices have decreased incidences of violence between students of different nationalities and allowed for deeper conversations on issues like racism. “All schools should be entitled to this,” she said.

While experts acknowledge that restorative justice does not offer a quick fix either to juvenile justice or to schooling issues, many schools are becoming committed to advocating for the kinds of structural and cultural changes that can make restorative justice processes even more effective.

In other cases, however, restorative processes resemble traditional court processes more than they do school-based conferencing or mediation. In Brownsville, New York, for example, where youth of color are particularly targeted by the criminal justice system and jailed at extremely high rates, the city has established a youth court system in which youth offenders try and sentence each other to various sanctions, including community service, essay-writing, and tutoring. In this program, youth are trained for 30 hours and take a 16-page bar exam to prepare for the responsibility of trying and sentencing their peers. Though some might be skeptical of the ability of youth to effectively diminish the crime rates of their peers, the youth going through these restorative processes have a 93 percent compliance rate, which indicates an extremely low recidivism rate–much lower than that produced by the traditional juvenile justice system.

What Are We Trying to Restore?

Despite its success at lowering recidivism rates, restorative justice is often the recipient of criticism. Because restorative justice is a process that relies on the actions of those in the criminal justice system–judges and prosecutors must refer defendants or people convicted of crimes to restorative processes, and reserve the right to re-enact retributive processes if restorative methods are deemed ineffective–many people and organizations criticize restorative justice for being powerless to truly change the criminal justice system from within.

The co-opting of restorative processes by the state actually risks reinforcing the power structures that shape the harm done by crimes to begin with. For example, state-mandated restorative processes may force mediation event participants like police and youth of color together, ignoring the extreme power differences between these individuals and therefore ignoring structural power dynamics and risking perpetuating harm upon people who may have committed a particular crime, but who are also targeted by state violence.

As such, it is crucial to note that restorative practices may be practiced in disproportionate ways that ignore societal power structures. One study shows that schools with more Black students are less likely to use restorative processes because of racialized assumptions about the student population. Further, some question whether restorative practices are accessible to people living with certain dis/abilities.

What then does restorative justice seek to restore? If structural inequality was the baseline condition under which a crime was committed, is restorative justice satisfied with restoring that unjust baseline? Critics of restorative justice and advocates of the more structurally minded transformative justice argue that restorative justice, by nature of working within the criminal justice system, can never truly address these issues of systemic oppression.

So What’s the Verdict?

Restorative justice–especially in the context of the juvenile justice system–has tremendous potential to offer alternatives to incarceration for people who would otherwise be targeted for mass incarceration. Recidivism rates decline and community involvement increases, and these are all impacts that critics of mass incarceration certainly applaud. However, while restorative justice is certainly an important move toward reforming the criminal justice system as is, its lack of emphasis on structural and systemic oppression that is the basis for mass incarceration to begin with makes it an inadequate means of truly transforming the criminal justice system.

Resources

Primary

Oakland Unified School District: Welcome to Restorative Justice

Additional

Conflict Solutions Center: Retributive vs. Restorative Justice

Conflict Solutions Center: What is Mediation?

Partnership for Safety and Justice: Restorative and Transformative Justice: A Comparison

Insight Prison Project: A Restorative Justice Agency

Restorative Justice Online: What is Restorative Justice?

The New York Times: Opening Up, Students Transform a Vicious Cycle

Chalkbeat New York: City Preparing to Expand Restorative Justice Programs

National Public Radio: An Alternative to Suspension and Explusion: ‘Circle Up!’

New York Daily News: Teens are Judge and Jury in Brownsville Youth Court, Delivering “Restorative Justice”

PBS Newshour: To Curb Conflict, A Colorado High School Replaces Punishment with Conversation

Eastern Mennonite University Center for Justice and Peacebuilding: How Effective is Restorative Justice?

Restorative Justice Online: Restorative Justice in Schools: The Influence of Race on Restorative Discipline

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post How Can Restorative Justice Change the Criminal System? appeared first on Law Street.

A prosecutor is “an administrator of justice” whose duties are “to seek justice, not merely to convict.” According to the American Bar Association,

It is an important function of the prosecutor to seek to reform and improve the administration of criminal justice. When inadequacies or injustices in the substantive or procedural law come to the prosecutor’s attention, he or she should stimulate efforts for remedial action.

Chances to combat these injustices often occur in the strong role of prosecutorial discretion in determining someone’s prison sentence. Many argue that prosecutorial discretion is such an enormous responsibility that prosecutors have the power to be strong social justice advocates. Many others, however, suggest that prosecutorial discretion leads to tremendous racial disparities in sentencing. So the question is: Is it possible for prosecutors to be social justice advocates? Or is the criminal justice system overall too big for prosecutors to make any social justice-oriented, system-wide changes from within?

In Defense of Prosecution?

In her Brennan Center post entitled “Prosecutors Can Play a Role in Ending Mass Incarceration”–which argues exactly that–Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program reminds us of the various roles of prosecutors:

The reality is that prosecutors play a unique and immensely powerful role in the criminal justice system. They decide who gets charged, and most importantly, with what crime, and what plea bargains to accept and reject. Sentencing recommendations from prosecutors carry immense weight with judges.

Largely due to this prosecutorial discretion, federal courts impose 20 percent longer sentences on Black men than they do on white men who are convicted of committing similar crimes. Courts similarly impose longer sentences on Latino men than they do for white men convicted for similar crimes.

Many interpret these roles as evidence of prosecutorial racism, because prosecutors determine the course of such huge pieces of defendant’s cases. The immense racial disparities in charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing are all directly traceable to prosecutors’ structurally informed choices. However, Eisen uses this information to argue that the point at which a prosecutor encounters a defendant’s case is already beyond the point at which interference is needed. Eisen asserts that prosecutors can and should play a role in preventing crimes and recidivism.

This is consistent with both the Brennan Center’s recommendations that it should be the priority of federal prosecutors to reduce incarceration, recidivism, and violence, and with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s shifting priorities for law enforcement. Calling for a “Smart on Crime” approach, Holder has stated:

Of course, as we refine our approach and reject the ineffective practice of calling for stringent sentences against those convicted of low-level, nonviolent crimes, we also need to refine the metrics we use to measure success; to evaluate the steps we’re taking; and to assess the effectiveness of new criminal justice priorities.  In the Smart on Crime era, it’s no longer adequate – or appropriate – to rely on outdated models that prize only enforcement, as quantified by numbers of prosecutions, convictions, and lengthy sentences, rather than taking a holistic view.

Prosecutors wishing to pursue such a holistic approach may learn about doing so by exploring resources such as those provided by the Vera Institute of Justice’s Prosecution and Racial Justice Program.

Prosecutors and Restorative Justice

When writing of the extremely large roles prosecutors play in determining the course of the lives of people accused of crimes, activist and scholar Angela Davis argues that:

Whether or not prosecutors intentionally or unconsciously discriminate against defendants of color in the charging and plea-bargaining processes, their decisions–even the race-neutral ones–may cause or exacerbate racial disparities. Their tremendous power and discretion is often exercised in ways that produce unintended and undesirable consequences. However, that same power and discretion can be used to remedy the problem.

Some of these remedies may include ensuring that alternatives to incarceration are widely available across the country. One way that prosecutors can provide alternatives to incarceration for people convicted of committing crimes is through restorative justice processes. Restorative justice is defined by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency as:

Restorative justice offers alternatives to our traditional juvenile and criminal justice systems and harsh school discipline processes. Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm done. At its best, through face-to-face dialogue, restorative justice results in consensus-based plans that meet victim-identified needs in the wake of a crime. This can take many forms, most notably conferencing models, victim-offender dialogue, and circle processes. In applications with youth, it can prevent both contact with the juvenile justice system and school expulsions and suspensions. Restorative justice also holds the potential for victims and their families to have a direct voice in determining just outcomes, and reestablishes the role of the community in supporting all parties affected by crime. Several restorative models have been shown to reduce recidivism and, when embraced as a larger-scale solution to wrongdoing, can minimize the social and fiscal costs of crime.

By utilizing prosecutorial discretion to refer people convicted of crimes to restorative processes instead of being incarcerated, prosecutors can avoid contributing to mass incarceration and can avoid inflicting the devastating collateral consequences of incarceration. Restorative justice alternatives are currently being used successfully in piecemeal initiatives across the country in schools to avoid suspensions and expulsions that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. However, many criticize practitioners and advocates of  restorative justice for staying within the overall criminal justice system because restorative justice works within the system and assumes that there are equal conditions to “restore,” it arguably ignores the fundamental injustices that shape mass incarceration to begin with. Therefore, prosecutors who attempt to advance social justice ends with restorative justice alternatives to incarceration may make positive differences in individual people’s cases, but have an arguably limited impact on mass incarceration as a whole.

#PlotTwist: Changing Who Gets Prosecuted

Along these same lines, some prosecutors may also attempt to advance social justice goals through the prosecution of corporations that are exploiting human labor, perpetuating abuses, and damaging the environment. Critics of these approaches argue that this kind of prosecution is not holistic: it addresses individuals and individual corporations, not the systems that facilitate the abuses in the first place.

Similarly, it is possible for prosecutors to specialize in criminal and civil cases against cops who discriminate and violently abuse their power. Certainly, many social justice advocates actively demand more prosecution of cops. Much of the recent #BlackLivesMatter uprisings recently have been focusing on the fact that prosecutors don’t tend to charge cops who beat and/or murder people of color.

However, many criticize these attempts, too, because they exist only within an already racialized system, thereby reinforcing the power of the criminal justice system that created mass incarceration to begin with. When social justice advocates–or prosecutors–try to use the criminal justice system for social justice aims, they are implying that the criminal justice system does, in fact, deliver justice, when many believe that it does not.

As the prison abolitionist blog Prison Culture published in a post in the wake of George Zimmerman murdering Trayvon Martin in 2012, prosecuting cops or vigilantes who target people of color in the name of “justice” serves to reinforce people’s beliefs that they should turn to the criminal justice system for solutions:

I think that making the main focus of our activism with respect to Trayvon’s killing the prosecution of George Zimmerman is short-sighted. Additionally, it does nothing to address the root causes of racism and oppression which were surely the fuel for this murder. For black people, our history on issues of crime, law, order, and punishment is complex and usually conflicting. In this moment, I question why we as black people who know that there is no “justice” in the legal system are expending the majority of our energy demanding “justice” from said system. How are we going to find “justice” in the prosecution of Zimmerman? The answer is quite simply that we will not.

Attorney and author Paul Butler generalizes this frustration to the role of prosecutors in general. In a forum at NYU in 2009 (see video above), Butler disagreed with moderator Anthony Barkow about the potential role of prosecutors in serving social justice ends:

Butler contended that with racial profiling by police and mandatory sentences for many drug crimes, prosecutors have little power to fight these problems from the inside. To answer the question at the center of the debate, the efforts of good people would be wasted as prosecutors, in Butler’s view. Barkow, however, said that attorneys, even when they are not the lead prosecutor, can and do make discretionary decisions that allow them to work within the law to have influential voices in cases. ‘Supervisors will often defer, extensively in my experience, to the line prosecutors,’ Barkow said. ‘So the line prosecutors making all these discretionary decisions are really kind of driving the bus most of the time…Butler’s overarching position on how good people can and should behave in regards to our system of justice was quite clear, provocative, and sobering.’ He maintained that the way to fight social and racial injustice was not to be a part of the institutions that help to further it. ‘The determination of who goes to criminal court in chains…should not depend so much on race and class,’ Butler said in conclusion. ‘As long as it does, we need people who believe in social justice and racial justice to stand up, to be strong, and to refuse to be complicit.’

So, Can Prosecutors be Social Justice Advocates?

While injustices in the overall criminal justice system make it hard or even impossible for prosecutors to be social justice advocates from within the system, there may be piecemeal, individual roles for prosecutors to play toward incrementally achieving some social justice goals amid broader injustices in the criminal justice system.

Resources

American Bar Association: Prosecution Function

Open Society Foundation: Racial Disparity in Sentencing

Leadership Conference: Race and Prosecutorial Discretion

Brennan Center for Justice: Federal Prosecution for the 21st Century

American Civil Liberties Union: Words From Prison: The Collateral Consequences of Incarceration

Race, Racism, and the Law: Prosecutors as the Most Powerful Actor in the Criminal Justice System

Brennan Center for Justice: Prosecutors Can Play Role in Ending Mass Incarceration

School Book: Alternatives to Suspension: Inside a ‘Restorative Justice’ High School

Partnership for Safety and Justice: Restorative and Transformative Justice: A Comparison

Nation: Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop

Prison Culture: Trayvon Martin and Black People for the Carceral State

Crunk Feminist Collective: Trayvon Martin and Prison Abolition

New York University Law: Butler and Barkow Discuss the Role of Prosecutors in Social and Racial Justice

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Role of Prosecutors as Social Justice Advocates appeared first on Law Street.

So, this week in LesboLand… K-Stew’s mom apparently outed her (in a week of oh so many highly public parental outings); Orange is the New Black basically broke the internet; and Wells Fargo is the latest massive corporation to want to use white lesbians to make a profit.

It must be Pride Month.

(Or just another week in the life of lesbian drama. I’m not picky about cause and effect.)

I came out a decade ago, and a decade ago, I didn’t know about Pride Month. (WE GET OUR OWN MONTH. Which is upsetting for all kinds of reasons related to heteronormativity and the fact that mainstream Prides are so super white-washed and corporatized…but I told myself when I sat down to write this that I wouldn’t be quite as ornery as I usually am. Let’s see how that goes.)

Today, my bedside table has not one, not two, but three stacks–borderline obnoxiously sized stacks (this is not a massive bedside table we’re talking about here)–of queer YA books on it, not to mention a couple of nifty (if not overpriced) Babeland products, and my YA fantasy novel manuscript (spoiler alert: QUEERNESS).

Over a decade ago, I skittishly went online–remember this sound??–and, sweat forming on my upper lip, copy-pasted into Word Perfect as many Star Trek: Voyager fan fiction stories under the “femslash” category as I could. I would read them nervously, quickly, always ready to click into another document with my AP U.S. outlines open, my eyes stuck on one part of the screen as I created a scroll-effect from holding down the delete key as I read.

Erasing the evidence of my queerness (because I didn’t recognize it–though everyone else did–in my flannel, keys-on-belt-loop, thumbs-hooked-into-pockets, all-I-ever-think-about-is-women…ness), even though I didn’t know that’s what it was.

Today, I make no effort to hide my queerness. It’s not something that occurs to me anymore. And there’s a lot of privilege wrapped up in that. I know. I know.

And I feel it every time the OITNB theme song whines out of my roommate’s bedroom (or my own)–we’re still so starving for “representation”–often, no matter what the racist cost of that representation.

Because if OITNB weren’t mediated by a blonde white woman; if The Fosters didn’t positively portray such a brutal and racist criminal justice system; if mainstream Prides were still protests, marches against intersectional systemic oppression rather than white-dominated, corporate parties.

I wonder what Pride Month would look like in the mainstream media.

(And there’s the orneriness.)

But we need to stay ornery. Because yep, we are everywhere. But we’re also oppressed by white-supremacist, heteropatriarcal, ableist systems.

Everywhere.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Lesbians! Lesbians Everywhere! appeared first on Law Street.

People cite it all the time: women make 77 cents to every dollar men make. We use it as a linchpin in arguments about equal pay, feminism, glass ceilings. We offer it up as proof–because mind-bogglingly, we still need to “prove it”–that feminism is a necessary thing.

But the whole 77 cent thing? Not actually true.

Because that statistic is assuming that the default status is whiteness. But really, Black women make 64 cents to every white man’s dollar. Latina women, 53 cents. Native American women, 60 cents. Similarly, women with dis/abilities (race wasn’t specified, as far as I could find) make 67 cents to men without dis/abilities’ dollar, and 87 cents to what men with dis/abilities earn. Queer women? Especially queer and trans women of color? Similar story.

But even that, even complicating the wage gap narrative we offer as “concrete proof” that sexism is, you know, a thing, is not enough. Because sexism at work manifests in way, way more than just pay differentials. It’s more than straight-up (pun intended) discrimination.

Workplace culture is a massive part of the misogyny of the job market (in so many more ways than I have space to discuss here). As Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of the New America Foundation, wrote in 2012 for The Atlantic:

The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family.

But let’s even put aside “family” for a moment–because some women wanting (or needing) time with their families (implication: their kids) isn’t the only reason that “time macho,” as Slaughter calls it, is a misogynist expectation.

“Time macho” is misogynist because it places value on a kind of masculinized “endurance” that is simply unhealthy: the burden of being first in the office in the morning and last to leave at night disproportionately falls on women of color, queer women, women with dis/abilities (and combinations thereof) because we have more to “prove” in this society.

“Time macho” is misogynist because it defines “production” as the primary value while feminizing self-care as weak, as less “tough,” as less competitive. It places short term over long term, and it promotes disdain for those of us who try to take care of ourselves.

“Time macho” is misogynist because it is yet another way that women are not permitted to say “no” without consequences: the rape culture of the working world, “time macho” creates workplace cultures in which women have to say yes to the extra night shift, to the additional project, to the seven-day work weeks in unhealthy and unsafe environments, to the 10:00 PM conference call.

Because if we don’t, we know there are plenty of men (or other token women) waiting in the wings to get paid more than we get paid to do the same thing we do; plenty of men (and women, because we get sucked into this, too) waiting to give us less-than-stellar recommendations about us being “not a great fit” in the office, being “disagreeable” or “confrontational” because no, nope, actually, my health is more important than your misogynist expectations.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post “Time Macho” is the Rape Culture of the Workplace appeared first on Law Street.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is often the subject of daily life experiences and intense internet debates on topics such as trigger warnings or the United States’ use of drones. Rates of PTSD are known to be dramatically affected by racism, sexism, queerphobia, and other forms of oppression.

But what about people who witness extreme traumas without necessarily experiencing the trauma themselves? Lawyers, doctors, social workers, and teachers all are at a high risk of experiencing something variously called vicarious trauma, secondary trauma, or compassion fatigue.

How might legal office cultures leave people from law students to defense attorneys extremely susceptible to vicarious trauma? And, significantly, what impact does this have on clients?

When Trauma is Contagious

Vicarious trauma is often popularly defined in terms of professionals, like lawyers, who work with people who have been traumatized. A form of PTSD in its own right, people enduring vicarious trauma experience symptoms similar to more widely recognized PTSD. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network refers to vicarious trauma as “secondary traumatic stress,” and defines it in this way:

Secondary traumatic stress is the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another. Its symptoms mimic those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Accordingly, individuals affected by secondary stress may find themselves re-experiencing personal trauma or notice an increase in arousal and avoidance reactions related to the indirect trauma exposure. They may also experience changes in memory and perception; alterations in their sense of self-efficacy; a depletion of personal resources; and disruption in their perceptions of safety, trust, and independence.

All of these trauma responses often lead to more commonly known experiences, such as anxiety, depression, sleeping problems, substance abuse, procrastination, and low self-esteem. The Vicarious Trauma Institute highlights, crucially, one of the key differences between vicarious trauma and directly experienced trauma: the intensity of vicarious trauma is dictated by being exposed, first-hand, “to traumatic stories day after day or respond to traumatic situations while having to control your reaction.” Not only are people being exposed to stories or direct experiences of violence, then, but lawyers, social workers, school counselors, teachers, etc. are trained or otherwise expected to keep a straight face and remain a bastion of calm for their clients and/or students. Commonly referred to as “burnout,” many professionals who chronically endure these feelings of vicarious trauma are forced to stop working, leave their field of specialization, or switch professions entirely.

Many who identify as working in a “helping profession”–doctors, lawyers, social workers, etc.–are affected deeply by vicarious trauma. At the Annual Convening of Crisis Intervention in Chicago in 1996, social worker Terri Spahn Nelson contributed the following perspective on vicarious trauma:

Many of us, especially those of us in a helping profession, are secondary witnesses to trauma almost everyday. As we listen to our clients tell about their trauma of incest, rape, domestic violence, alcoholic families or memories of childhood abuse, we bear witness to their victimization. We listen, we support and we validate their feelings and their experience. We offer them the opportunity to let go of some of their burden. As witnesses and healers, we can’t help but to take in some of the emotional pain they have left with us. As the client releases some of their pain, we take it in. By the end of the day, we’ve collected bits and pieces of accounts of trauma. We may have pictures in our mind or intense feelings running through our body. We’ve become a witness to rape, child abuse, domestic violence and death… In simple terms, this vicarious trauma as experienced by professionals and volunteers in the helping field.

By positioning oneself as being a “helping” professional, the burden of “taking in” clients’ trauma becomes a nearly unavoidable expectation. The sense of responsibility for clients–and attendant guilt for not having endured what clients did, especially when client outcomes are not positive–often prove overwhelming for professionals who enter fields expecting to “help” or “fix” clients’ lives.

Legal Burnout

This form of trauma is particularly prevalent in lawyers, who often witness clients’ trauma on a daily basis. Especially when responsibility is placed on lawyers to alleviate that trauma somehow–whether through their efforts to win a criminal or civil case–vicarious trauma can set in.

The lack of control associated with many cases deeply contributes to lawyers’ experiences of vicarious trauma: as Abby Anna Batko-Taylor and Melissa L. Shearer of the Voice of the Defense Online highlight, “In addition to dealing with interpersonal relationships with challenging clients, lawyers also experience personal and institutional pressure to produce results that many times are outside of their control.” Given the relationship between loss of control and trauma in general–traumatic events generally involve survivors losing control of some enormous aspect of life, and can result in a need to control as much as possible in order to feel safe–the feeling of not having control over the outcome of a case can deeply aggravate feelings of vicarious trauma for lawyers.

While issues of vicarious traumatization are not exclusive to lawyers, legal professionals often experience higher rates of vicarious trauma than professionals with similarly traumatized clients. In a study of criminal defense attorneys, defense lawyers were found to experience even higher rates of vicarious traumatization than mental health providers and social workers. Bigger caseloads and lack of supervision around trauma were offered as possible explanations for these higher rates.

According to a Science Alert report on a Macquarie University study on vicarious trauma among those who work in the field of criminal law, these attorneys experience disproportionately higher impacts and intensities of trauma from client interactions. The report goes on:

While often presenting an image of toughness and emotional detachment, it would seem that criminal defense lawyers and prosecutors are significantly more vulnerable to developing depression, stress and vicarious trauma than their non-criminal law colleagues.

These vulnerabilities have tremendous negative impacts on not only legal professionals, but on their clients. In an article for Canadian Lawyer Magazine, which includes clips from lawyers who experience vicarious trauma, cover story author donalee Moulton reports that:

Withdrawal is one of the common symptoms of vicarious trauma. Other symptoms include difficulties solving problems, a sense of being disconnected from work and home, and feelings of powerlessness. In response, lawyers and judges may take on greater responsibility, work longer hours, and attempt to exert greater control over others. They may also become more distant and withdrawn, more cynical, and even more accident prone. It is not unusual for victims of vicarious trauma to develop chronic health problems.

Withdrawal, difficulty solving problems, and issues with control all carry enormous risk of negatively impacting clients both on a case and an interpersonal level.

Despite the fact that unaddressed vicarious trauma is known to negatively affect clients, not to mention its chronic health impacts on lawyers themselves, many legal professionals do not seek or have access to affirmative work environments that can both assist with and help prevent vicarious traumatization.

What does office culture have to do with it?

Not only do many lawyers lack access to assistance and preventive care, but many legal cultures are such that vicarious trauma can take hold. Lack of trauma-related supervision and extremely high case loads as a measure of a lawyers’ skill contribute to a masculinized culture in which addressing and preventing vicarious trauma is perceived as taking time away from the ‘real work.’ In a similar way that the macho, product-oriented culture of journalism is often cited as a cause of vicarious trauma among journalists, lawyers–especially women and people of color–are often actively discouraged from emotional expression in the workplace. This emotional suppression alone has negative impacts on lawyers’ health, and also facilitates a masculinized culture that makes it nearly impossible to treat, let alone prevent, vicarious trauma.

While many workshops and presentations on vicarious trauma focus on individualized healing plans, it is more rare that action plans to ease vicarious trauma focus on organizational cultures. However, research shows that the most effective way to assist professionals who are likely to experience vicarious trauma is through structural changes to office and professional cultures, such as reduced and/or more diverse case loads, comprehensive healthcare provisions, holistic approaches to work and clients, effective supervision, explicit group support, and education.

So, What Can Be Done?

It is clear, then, that vicarious trauma impacts a vast array of people, particularly lawyer–most often defense attorneys and those who specialize in domestic violence, immigration, or family court. Emphasizing the importance of self-care is an important move toward providing healthy, effective, and sustainable services to clients, but it seems that structural changes to office and professional cultures, which are often very cut-throat, can go the longest way toward reducing the negative impacts that vicarious trauma has on both lawyers and clients.

Resources

Primary

Legal Profession Assistance Conference: A Desk Manual on Vicarious Trauma

University of Washington Center for Public Service Law: Secondary Trauma and Compassion Fatigue When Working With Clients in Crisis

National Child Traumatic Stress Network: Secondary Traumatic Stress

Vicarious Trauma Institute: What is Vicarious Trauma?

Additional

Voice for the Defense Online: Representing the Traumatized Client: The Case, the Client, and You

Pyscholawlogy: Lessons About Emotion Suppression for Lawyers

Science Alert: Crime Can Traumatize Lawyers

Huffington Post: A Mental-Health Epidemic in the Newsroom

Good Men Project: Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box

I

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Vicarious Trauma: What is it and How Can Legal Culture Make it Worse? appeared first on Law Street.

In 2006, the criminal justice system helped Josh Duggar’s family expunge his record of abuse and protected him from being exposed in media reports as someone who had “forcibly fondled” younger girls (a.k.a. molested children).

Every day–then, now–the criminal justice system targets people of color–especially women and trans people of color–for abuse and shootings (a.k.a. public executions for walking while Black or Latina).

And yet.

And yet we continue to use pictures of him in suits instead of finding pictures that try to reflect him negatively (see featured photo), like the mainstream media insists on doing with young people of color slaughtered by cops.

When Black young men are murdered by cops, they are cast as “thugs.” When a young white man is accused of child abuse, he retains his status as ‘poor cult victim.’

This serves both racist and misogynist ends: white perpetrators remain victims, and his misogyny is cast as an exception (caused by his cultish family).

The mainstream media likes to speculate on the “scandalous” aspects of how the family helped cover up the abuse; how the family, in fact, abused him through their extremism and his isolation from “mainstream culture”; but we don’t like to speculate on how Josh Duggar is not, in fact, an exception. Josh Duggar is the rule.

Duggar is an embodiment of rich white cis male non-dis/abled privilege, and while the control his family exerts over him is indeed frightening, their misogyny is not an exception.

The Duggars may be particularly explicit in the ways they preach and practice misogyny, but what pieces focusing on the cultish aspects of the Duggars that facilitated the abuse miss is that every person in this country–every. single. person.–is raised to hate women. The Duggars may be more explicit than most, but they are not alone: Josh Duggar’s apparent belief that women and girls exist for male pleasure is the same belief that we are all raised with.

It’s called rape culture, and it’s everywhere.

The fact that the Duggars isolated their children so much that they didn’t have a TV misses the point: all of us with TV, too, receive the same message–in a heteropatriarchal society like this one, women are disposable.

Because rape culture is not isolated to “cults.” It is everywhere.

Because women–especially women of color–are disproportionately targeted by the same criminal justice system that protected Duggar when the first police report was issued against him.

Because living in a heteropatriarchal society makes us much more vulnerable to debilitating mental health issues.

Because “strong women” in the mainstream media is still the only trope we’re allowed to hope for.

Because the kind of misogyny that the media ascribes to the cult of the Duggars is the same kind of misogyny that we are exposed to every single time we turn on the television, interact with men in the street, or are educated in a public school system that still focuses on “great” [read: genocidal] white men and does not teach consent as the golden rule in health classes (a.k.a. teach rape culture to all students).

Because we can condemn–or pity–Josh Duggar as much as we’d like.

But ultimately, we must recognize that his privileged positions and entitled, abusive actions are the rule, not the exception.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Josh Duggar is Not an Exception: On Rape Culture in the U.S. appeared first on Law Street.

At a time when the media is full of references to rising levels of childhood obesity and Diabetes, the debate over mandating physical education classes in elementary, middle, and high schools is a particularly passionate one for many teachers, parents, doctors, and students. But is mandatory physical education helpful, harmful, or a mixture of both?

“Just Do It”–Because Kids Won’t

Across the country, only one quarter of youths are engaging in physical activity for at least an hour a day: that means that three quarters of surveyed young people in the U.S. are arguably at increased risk for various health impairments often associated with weight gain and/or inactivity such as Diabetes and heart disease.

Whether it’s because of long commutes to school, piles of extra homework due to high-stakes testing, race- and class-based inaccessibility to play spaces, or the rise in mobile devices that keep many young people stationary, physical activity is often not prioritized for youths.

Schools are often not helping with this problem, as most schools across the country do not adhere to National Association of Sports and Physical Education standards that school children should participate in 150 minutes of physical education per week.

Advocates of mandatory PE in schools often argue that because school is where most young people spend the overwhelming majority of their time, a lack of gym requirements, combined with increasing restrictions on or complete eliminations of recess time, can be devastating for young people’s health. Proponents argue that schools should require PE classes not only for the present fitness benefits, but for the formation of long-term fitness habits.

The goal, for better and for worse, of much of the U.S. education system currently is to channel many students into jobs that will be stationary: jobs that require us to sit at our desks all day, every day. This is similar to being in school: in this work structure, time must be set aside for physical activity. Getting young people into this habit of going out of their way to exercise each day can help them form routines that will assist with avoiding some of the health risks of remaining stationary for so long.

This is especially important because as young people age, they become less physically active, especially if they enter the nine-to-five workforce. Additionally, young people usually have less independence than adults; while it is an option for an adult with a full-time job to go to the gym either before or after work, young people usually don’t have the same option. Therefore, setting aside mandatory time for them to move around while they are in school is arguably an excellent–and one of the only–options to provide students with access to physical fitness.

In addition to the importance of habit formation and access to spaces where healthy levels of activity are encouraged, mandatory PE is often touted as being emotionally and mentally healthy for young people. Exercise is known to reduce stress and anxiety, and especially when anxiety-inducing high-stakes testing is part of most students’ lives, making the time for PE classes can help reduce this stress, and go a long way toward improving the lives of students.

Not All Gym Classes Are Created Equal

Despite the acknowledged benefits of exercise itself, many argue against PE requirements in schools. Students themselves often bristle at the requirements–according to a major study of PE programs across the country conducted by Cornell University, most students believe that gym classes are ineffective.

Cathy Brewton of the Florida Department of Health surveyed students across five counties in her state and found that:

The reasons [the students] didn’t exercise in school was because they didn’t like getting dressed, getting sweaty during the day, and their classes were over-capacitated… Kids said if they were going to do phys ed, they wanted to do something fun.

And surely not all students have fun when the rest of their class is playing basketball. For example, many students in mandatory PE classes spend most of their time standing or sitting on the sidelines while more traditionally athletic students play. Not only does this exclude many students, but it illustrates that, even when PE classes are required, fitness goals are not being met for all or even most students.

Critics say that academic goals, too, are sidelined by mandatory PE classes. Mark Terry, the president of the National Association of Elementary School Principles, argues that while public school budgets are tightening to begin with, there are many impossible choices that must be made when choosing to require PE classes. He asks,

What are you going to do less of? Are you going to do away with art or cut back on music or cut back on the minutes you have in the classroom?

Bullying in Gym 

Furthermore, many students–even when PE is required–simply do not exercise during the classes, and many are in fact actively discouraged from doing so by mandatory PE classes, particularly through bullying.

A great deal of students are actively alienated in gym classes. These students are often those with dis/abilities, students from low-income families, students considered overweight, and/or LGBTQ students.

Public school teacher Jim Dilmon, who has Aspergers, has written of his experience with gym classes that,

Social settings, including physical education class, often heighten the stress or anxiety levels of kids with Aspergers. However, if properly addressed, the physical education classroom offers a good opportunity for kids with and without disabilities to interact with peers.

He goes on to enumerate and explain many useful strategies that PE teachers can use to make gym classes better and more effective spaces for students on the spectrum.

Short of implementing these recommendations and making curricula overall more accommodating to all students, PE classes may very well increase the stress and anxiety levels (not to mention decrease the physical activity levels) of many students. Even though, as mentioned above, exercise is known to reduce stress and anxiety, the setting of PE classes often induces anxiety for many students. The most basic Google search of “gym class anxiety” will reveal a plethora of cries for help from students and parents alike who make it clear that the stress and anxiety that accompanies mandatory gym classes can be extremely debilitating.

Students who experience this anxiety are often subjected to bullying during PE class. Students who endure maltreatment in their gym classes are shown to stop many forms of physical activity in the long term. LGBTQ students are especially prone to be targeted for bullying–most LGBTQ students report being bullied in PE classes–as are students considered to be overweight and/or dis/abled.

It is not just cruel children who are responsible for this bullying and anxiety, however: there is a larger structure at play in advocacy for mandatory gym classes that values thin, able-bodied, gender-conforming students over those who do not conform to societal standards. By placing such an emphasis on certain kinds of physical abilities and weight loss, mandatory PE increases the anxiety, stress, and feelings of extreme guilt and failure that often accompany the emphasis on obtaining a certain kind of body.

Missing the Bigger Picture?

Even if mandatory PE classes did not risk harming many students, critics argue that emphasizing PE classes as a means to “fight obesity” is completely missing the point.

Schools are struggling for resources as it is, and schools in impoverished areas–often in neighborhoods of color–are struggling more than others. It is precisely in these neighborhoods that young people are more likely to be subjected to the impacts of environmental racism that cause many health problems. That raises the question: would focusing on these structural problems of access be more effective than focusing on symptoms (by mandating physical education classes) rather than causes (which include massive food and diet corporations profiting off of each other)?

Another crucial question about structure relates to intra-school dynamics: would freeing children from being forced to be still at desks all day–changing the structure of education to be itself more holistically active–go a longer way toward encouraging activity than setting aside a half hour to an hour for specific kinds of activity every other day? Perhaps, but there’s no way to know for certain.

So, is PE Good or Bad?

As with everything in education, the answer depends on both the individual students and their circumstances. Overall, it seems that both critics and proponents of mandatory physical education classes agree that in order to be effective, existing PE classes need to exist in the context of broader changes and revamp their curricula to reach more students without alienating those who are often harmed by current PE class structures.

Resources

Time: Couch Culture: Only a Quarter of U.S. Youth Get Recommended Excercise

Time: Childhood Obesity: Most U.S. Schools Don’t Require P.E. Classes

Education.com: Physical Education is Critical to a Complete Education

Time: The Older Kids Get, the Less They Move

Anxiety and Depression Association of America: Physical Activity Reduces Stress

Public School Review: The Pros and Cons of Mandatory Gym Class in Public Schools

NBC News: So Just How Bad is Your Child’s Gym Class?

ABC News: No Sweat When Gym Class Cut

USA Today: More PE, Activity Programs Needed in Schools

University of Michigan: Physical Education in America’s Public Schools

Jezebel: Being the Last One Picked in Gym Class Really Messes You Up

My Aspergers Child: Aspergers Children and “Physical Education” Class

Study Mode: Physical Education Class: The Perfect Place to be Bullied?

Huffington Post: Majority of LGBT Students Bullied in Gym Class and Feel Unsafe

Slate: Food Deserts Aren’t the Problem

Guardian: Fat Profits: How the Food Industry Cashed in on Obesity

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Phys Ed in Schools: Improving Health or Breeding Bullying? appeared first on Law Street.

Legal fanfiction, huh?

Now, by that, I don’t mean fanfiction that stringently follows all copyright rules. If you’re looking for pieces on that copyright jazz, tune into this. Or this. (And I know you’re interested. Because all of us fan fic writers are suitably convinced that actual show writers will find our fics and sue us personally, because, well, we write their characters better than they do. And… we do.)

But this is not the kind of legal fanfiction I’m thinking of at the moment.

Right now, I’m thinking of what would happen if we all tried to rewrite the criminal justice system in the ways that we rewrite our favorite shows, books, and comics.

What would fanfiction of the criminal justice system be like? (Or, rather, non-fanfiction, perhaps, because even a cursory understanding of this country leaves me to ask: how could anyone possibly be a fan of the criminal justice system?)

What if we rewrote the legal system, and made it operate however we, as imaginative writers, wish it to be? How would we re-write our legal system if we were writing fiction if we didn’t feel the need to justify ourselves about how “realistic” an idea is at every turn? If we just… imagined?

How would we re-craft the Constitution; would there be a Constitution? Probably not. So the fundamental basis of the document (and this country) was not the “right” to own property (aka, you know, enslaved peoples, on land that we committed genocide to gain access to)?

AU (for those of us who don’t speak fanfiction, that means “Alternate Universe”) — in which anti-racist universal design rather than racist profit-seeking is the main ethos of urban planning: would Baltimore have to be rising right now?

The more creative ways in which we allow ourselves to imagine the legal system, the more fuel with which we can head off to community organizing and protests.

We can write legal fanfiction–and so many of us do, every day–as real-life alternatives to criminal justice: not fan fictions per se, but real political brainstormings about the (un)limits of what we can accomplish. How can we accomplish prison abolition now? What immediate alternatives would need to be arranged? How could that happen?

What alternatives have we to the white supremacist world order now? Some legal (non)fanfiction–like those liberatory pieces linked to above, a form of activism all its own–might help us out.

Fanfiction. Fanfiction. Fanfiction that, like other forms of fiction, can help craft a better world.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Forget Harry Potter. THIS is the Fanfiction You Should Be Writing appeared first on Law Street.

Much of the environmental activism combating global warming is based on the rhetoric of personal responsibility and consumerism: if we buy more “green” products, global warming can be stopped. But can we really buy our way out of rapidly rising temperatures and increasing devastation from human-created environmental disasters? Read on to learn about the emphasis on personal responsibility in environmentalism, and the arguments for and against such an approach.

Global Warming: “You” Can Fix It

It is nearly impossible to find articles addressing climate change without finding a list of things that “you” can do to help stop a massive planetary process.

These tips are meant to be empowering and are geared toward combating a frightening sense of apathy about issues of dire importance like global warming. Climate change in particular is something that many people perceive as being in the distant future, and therefore a sense of denial colors so many people’s thinking about climate change.

Lists of “Top 10 Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Dioxide Emissions Footprint” that abound on the internet are meant to help break down global warming into something digestible; something that is not so colossal that you might as well give up before you start trying to do anything about it. People and organizations concerned about climate change want to break it down into little things that “we can all do everyday” to combat it. Talk of “greening your commute,” “greening your home,” and “buying energy efficient products” dominate many discussions about addressing global warming.

However, critics of this approach point out that the desire to do “something” may be just as damaging–if not more so–than recognizing that this is a huge problem with no easy solution. Discussing global warming as though it can be adequately addressed by individuals using fluorescent light bulbs arguably risks minimizing the gravity of the situation.

Greenwashing

Gas, technology, and car companies that make so many daily commutes possible engage in practices that have been accused of creating enormous amounts of pollution and unnecessary toxic waste. Instead of encouraging actions that target these corporate practices at a systemic level, many efforts to “fight” global warming may actually encourage the greenwashing of these massive corporations.

Greenwashing is usefully defined on the Greenwashing Index–an online-based, awareness-driven attempt to “help keep advertising honest”–in the following way:

Everyone’s heard the expression ‘whitewashing’ — it’s defined as ‘a coordinated attempt to hide unpleasant facts, especially in a political context.’ ‘Greenwashing’ is the same premise, but in an environmental context. It’s greenwashing when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be ‘green’ through advertising and marketing than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact. It’s whitewashing, but with a green brush. A classic example is an energy company that runs an advertising campaign touting a ‘green’ technology they’re working on — but that ‘green’ technology represents only a sliver of the company’s otherwise not-so-green business, or may be marketed on the heels of an oil spill or plant explosion.

People who criticize corporate greenwashing argue that articles and organizations encouraging people to buy “green” products are actually encouraging people to increase corporate profits by endorsing greenwashing practices. Thus, companies all the way from airlines to those that sell home appliances and personal beauty products engage heavily–and successfully–in greenwashing.

The meat industry often takes the lead in greenwashing. These companies actively distance themselves from the environmental devastation that accompanies factory farming and associated industries, as described by Scientific American here:

Current production levels of meat contribute between 14 and 22 percent of the 36 billion tons of ‘CO2-equivalent’ greenhouse gases the world produces every year. It turns out that producing half a pound of hamburger for someone’s lunch a patty of meat the size of two decks of cards releases as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as driving a 3,000-pound car nearly 10 miles.

Meat company Tyson, for example, has advertised itself as animal-friendly, claiming to slaughter its animals in a “humane” manner. But advocates point out that these claims are greenwashed, as the pigs Tyson sells live their lives in cages so small that they cannot move one step back or forward. Critics point out the greenwashed term that Tyson uses for this torturous practice is “individual housing.” This kind of advertising also erases the tremendous environmental destruction that can result from factory farming. When consumers are encouraged to buy “green” and “ethical” meat, they are encouraged not to think about the ways that any form of mass-meat production inherently contributes to  global warming.

Critics of greenwashing would argue that encouraging people concerned about global warming to “fight” it by changing their buying practices often only encourages companies to simply change the ways they advertise themselves: once they market themselves as “greener,” consumers can feel better about buying what are often more expensive “green” products, and help the corporation to turn a profit.

Unequal Burdens of Personal Responsibility

Critiques of the “you can stop global warming” movement are also concerned that harm can occur on an individual, not just corporate, level.

This individualist focus arguably takes attention away from the ways that the environmentally destructive practices that are driving global warming are not the result of individual failings, but rather of massive structures of capitalism. Sustained collective action, rather than individualized consumption choices, are required to combat these larger systems of oppression that fundamentally shape global warming.

When considering the potential impact of “what you can do to reduce global warming” lists, it is important, also, to ask: who is this “you” that these forms of media are talking to? Awareness website Time for Change refers to “a drought in Africa” because of “your increased yearly consumption of fuels,” which makes it clear that the intended “you” is not African, but probably North American. However, even within the presumed North American audience, the burden of personal responsibility arguably falls differently on people of color and people with dis/abilities.

“What you can do to stop global warming” lists that advocate for increased use of public transportation and biking instead of driving seem to work only for those who live in and near cities with accessible and affordable public transit systems. Public transportation systems–even relatively extensive ones like those found in New York City–are often of vastly unequal quality, cost, and distribution.

When cities are designed in ways that lead to modest-income workers of color being driven out of living in city centers where they are often employed and thus must have long commutes to work, these workers are disproportionately impacted by the very climate disasters that are becoming more frequent with global warming. “What you can do” lists encouraging the use of public transportation as a means to fight climate change take for granted the idea that the “you” the list is addressing are people who have cars and who have consistent, reliable access to public transportation–the structure of which is often biased against modest-income neighborhoods of color to begin with.

Bike riding is also often touted as something “you” can do to put a dent in rising carbon dioxide levels. But not everyone can simply hop on a bicycle: the “you” addressed here is clearly not a person with mobility-related dis/abilities who already has inadequate access to public transportation. Additionally, in neighborhoods like those in the South Bronx that the government and corporations target as dumping grounds, it can actually be unhealthy to ride your bicycle–when you exercise in highly polluted areas, you increase the amount of toxins you are inhaling. With asthma rates already devastatingly high in areas like this due to the practices of governments and corporations, encouraging people to ride their bikes as though everyone can is simply misguided. Individualist steps to address climate change can sometimes backfire, and raise other causes for concern.

So…can “you” stop global warming?

Alone? Perhaps not. Changing individual consumer practices shift some of the priorities of corporations, which puts at least the rhetoric of fighting climate change at the fore. However, these shifts don’t necessarily end environmentally destructive corporate practices. Collective action that targets systemic causes of global warming rather than displacing all the responsibility–and therefore, the blame–onto unconcerned individuals might be a common place to start.

 Resources

Huffington Post: 14 U.S. Cities That Could Disappear Over the Next Century, Thanks to Global Warming

About News: Top Ten Things You Can Do to Reduce Global Warming

Guardian: What’s the Carbon Footprint of… a New Car?

Greenwashing Index: About Greenwashing

Business Pundit: The Top 25 Greenwashed Products in America

Scientific American: How Meat Contributes to Global Warming

Animal Legal Defense Fund: Tyson Exposed by Former Suppliers’ Convictions

One Green Planet: Five Ways Factory Farming is Killing the Environment

CounterPunch: Global Warming is Economic Imperialism

Policy Link: For Millions of Low-Income Workers Left Behind by Public Transit Systems, Every Day’s a Snow Day

Daily News: Bronx, Brooklyn Residents Claim City Targeting Their Neighborhoods for Waste Transfer Stations

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Corporate Greenwashing and Global Warming appeared first on Law Street.

Hey, fellow white people. If you’re not going to be in support of people rising up against racism in Baltimore–and elsewhere–then shut up about it. And listen (or read, or watch. There are plenty of sources that aren’t from white people–like the ones cited throughout this piece–that we can tune into).

Now. People of color who are incensed by white supremacy and the murder of Freddie Gray (and so, so many others) have as many viewpoints about the efficacy and ethics of property damage as there are… well… people. There is no one way to understand or react to protests, anger, and anti-racist (and racist) rhetoric, so I’m not suggesting here that all or even most people of color are comfortable with or support the hashtag #BaltimoreRising as opposed to #BaltimoreRiots (for example). The reactions of people of color to racist violence are not, nor have they ever been, monolithic.

But.

Go lecture the police about non-violence.

— Brienne of Snarth (@femme_esq) April 27, 2015

But. As people with white privilege–the privilege (even when we are queer, poor, and/or dis/abled) of living in this world without our every action being viewed as suspicious; without our every action being interpreted as representative of all white people; without fear that ourselves, our students, our children, our friends, our family, or our colleagues will be murdered by cops because they were walking down the street while Black–we don’t get to watch the uprisings via Twitter, shake our heads, and produce tweets like this:  

Can we just focus on the real issues and injustice behind the #BaltimoreRiots? People have the right to be angry, not violent. — Sarah K (@wildflower93x) April 28, 2015

Or this:

If you act like wild animals and ruin others property dont get confused when you end up in a cage. #BaltimoreRiots #BlackPrivilege

— The Counselor (@anyclinic) April 28, 2015

As people with white privilege (there is no such thing as Black privilege, as is made clear by the dehumanizing, racist animalization that accompanies “The Counselor’s” claim above), we don’t get to condemn Black people’s responses to systemic, pervasive, ever-present, white supremacist, violent oppression. This hypocrisy is especially clear when, as Derrick Clifton over at Mic highlights so well, we do not flinch when white people start fires in the streets.  

If we view rioting as a mass temper tantrum expressed through violence & property damage, white sports fans do that monthly. #Tradition — jesseWilliams. (@iJesseWilliams) April 28, 2015

We do not flinch when white men–their privileged masculinity popping out of their face paint and sports jerseys–burn cars, set fires, vandalize businesses, cause millions of dollars in property damage, or injure over 100 people… drum roll… because their favorite sports team either won or lost a game.

Where are all the think pieces & coverage of the pathology of white culture every time white frustration vents violence & destruction?

— jesseWilliams. (@iJesseWilliams) April 28, 2015

So… according to the white-mediated mass media, Black people pouring into the streets because yet another young Black person was murdered by police for making eye contact with a cop is apparently more disturbing than white men whose entitled rage is so close to the surface that they will set cars on fire over sports and military forces covered in armor and locked-and-loaded with various deadly weapons aimed at Black youths…

You can’t “reform” the brutality out of the police. There’s no reforming systematic violence. You dismantle the institution itself

— Roqayah Chamseddine (@roqchams) April 28, 2015

We really need to re-evaluate what we’re afraid of, white folks. And we need to do it now.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Hey, Fellow White People: We Need to Shut Up About Baltimore appeared first on Law Street.

Regardless of the political debates about global warming, scientists have long been involved in trying to combat this environmental problem. But what exactly are activist-scientists doing–or not doing–to address global warming?

One facet of combatting global warming is dealing with raised carbon dioxide levels. A lot of talk about carbon dioxide levels focuses on so-called “carbon sinks”–forests that, due to plants’ ability to process carbon dioxide, remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere–and their potential to mitigate the effects of global warming. But can forests and artificial means of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere actually “save us” from global warming?

Capturing Carbon Dioxide

Instead of working to prevent the rising carbon dioxide levels that have been fueling global warming, one of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent projects has been the capturing and storage of excess carbon dioxide. This process involves the harvesting of carbon dioxide from facilities such as electricity power plants that emit a great deal of carbon dioxide. Once the carbon dioxide is harvested directly from these sources, it is channeled–sometimes by pipeline and sometimes by truck–usually underground, where it is re-introduced into the earth in order to produce more oil.

Carbon dioxide capturing and sequestration is often upheld as an easy fix to global warming:

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology that can capture up to 90% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced from the use of fossil fuels in electricity generation and industrial processes, preventing the carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide capture can occur through three basic methods. Pre-combustion capture is used in industrial processes like natural gas burning; post-combustion capture is used in the food and beverage industries; and oxyfuel combustion capture is used with water instead of air as a combustion material in industries other than power generation.

Once harvested, the carbon is transported and injected into the earth in liquid form, where it is often channeled into increasing oil production. While sponsors of carbon capture argue that this process is completely safe, there are serious concerns that the injection of such large amounts of liquid into the earth actually increases the likelihood of devastating earthquakes.

Is fueling oil production to fight global warming wise?

Though many support carbon dioxide capture and sequestration, there are serious concerns that this process is used to directly increase, rather than reduce, dependence on non-renewable, highly toxic oil production and use. The carbon dioxide that is harvested from power plants is channeled back into oil production and therefore “helps the United States continue producing record amounts of oil.”

This capture and sequestration method is arguably so popular because it actually creates profits for the massive multinational corporations involved in oil production and related fields. But some scientists are concerned that this process actually further entrenches unsustainable energy practices. David Biello at Scientific American points out:

The process will perpetuate fossil fuel use and may prove a wash as far as keeping global warming pollution out of the atmosphere. Then there are the risks of human-caused earthquakes as a result of pumping high-pressure liquids underground or accidental releases as all that CO2 finds its way back to the atmosphere.

There’s certainly evidence that this corporate-motivated approach to reducing carbon emissions has its drawbacks, especially given the amount of energy that is inefficiently used by the capture and sequestration technology.

 Alternative to Oil: Artificial Photosynthesis

Some scientists are beginning to reevaluate their hesitations about carbon sequestration. Scientists at Berkeley have been working to refine a way that captured carbon can be broken down through artificial photosynthesis instead of being channeled back into oil production.

Dr. Peidong Yang, a chemist at the Berkeley Lab working on artificial photosynthesis–the process that plants use to create food by breaking down carbon dioxide and sunlight into glucose and water—has stated about the research that:

Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground.

Through combining nanowire technology with specific bacterial populations to mimic the photosynthetic processes that leaves undergo naturally, the Berkeley team has created the potential for solar-powered chemistry that non-lethally utilizes sequestered carbon.

The question now is once this new technology is ready for market (it is not quite there yet) will the corporations that profit from the current methods of the re-use of sequestered carbon utilize it?

To the Forests: Natural Photosynthesis and Global Warming

It is important to note, however, that despite the hopefulness with which many are embracing the new developments in artificial photosynthetic capabilities, we seem to be forgetting one crucial thing: Photosynthesis, even on a massive scale such as that accomplished by rainforests, cannot reverse or halt global warming.

Because carbon dioxide is essentially “plant food,” it is easy to focus on an abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as being good for plant growth. In turn, the more plants there are, the more carbon dioxide will be taken out of the atmosphere. Since extremely excessive carbon dioxide emissions are a principle driver of global warming, plants (particularly strong concentrations of plants, such as rainforests) are often thought to be helpful in reducing carbon emissions and in slowing global warming. Indeed, some scientific studies show that, under certain laboratory greenhouse conditions, increased carbon dioxide levels can contribute to a greater amount of plant growth. This is extremely important because, as Carol Rasmussen, a member of NASA’s Earth Science News Team, reports:

Forests and other land vegetation currently remove up to 30 percent of human carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If the rate of absorption were to slow down, the rate of global warming would speed up in return.

Through a natural process referred to as carbon fertilization, plants “eat” the extra carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by human processes, thus reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Recently, however, the purported impacts of carbon fertilization have been called into question: a recent study found that increased tree growth does not always result from increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Regardless of whether forest growth is stimulated by increased carbon dioxide, Climate Science Watch encourages us to think beyond the small picture of plants taking already overwhelming amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. There is a bigger picture of the relationship between global warming–which is already occurring–and plant life. A report by Climate Science Watch reminds us that:

Climate [change] impacts like drought, floods, extreme weather, shifting seasons, and increasing ranges of weeds, invasive species, and plant pests will all negatively impact crop yields [and other plant growth].

Additionally, other nutrient restrictions limit the amount of increased natural photosynthesis that can occur in forests. Differentials in rainfall levels and subsequent droughts that are already being caused by global warming negatively impact the amount of plants that can grow and photosynthesize.

Hammering home these cautionary pieces of evidence is the fact that massive forests like the Amazon have been suffering from increased tree mortality–both due to direct human destruction and the indirect impacts of altered conditions from climate change. Therefore, the Amazon rainforest is consuming a billion tons less each year than it has previously. For perspective, each yearly Amazon drop amounts to twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the U.K. per year.

So Should We Take Carbon Dioxide Back Out of the Atmosphere?

Investing hope and massive resources in carbon capture and sequestration, forest-driven photosynthesis, and artificial photosynthesis produces a sense of calm in many that the impacts of global warming can be combated without creating actual changes in the corporate practices that are increasing dangerous carbon dioxide levels. These debates about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are important, but they are fundamentally invested in addressing symptoms rather than causes. While these are great scientific achievements, the causes of global warming need to be addressed as well.

Resources

Primary

Environmental Protection Agency: Carbon Dioxide Capture and Sequestration

NASA: NASA Finds Food News about Forests and Carbon Dioxide

Additional

Environment 360: Can Carbon Capture Technology Be Part of the Climate Solution?

Alternet: Corporations Have Big Plans to Profit From Global Warming

Guardian: Chevron Accused of Racism as it Fights Ecuador Pollution Ruling

Guardian: Tropical Rainforests Not Absorbing as Much Carbon as Expected

Guardian: Just 90 Companies Caused Two-Thirds of Man-Made Global Warming Emissions

Science Daily: Major Advance in Artificial Photosynthesis Poses Win/Win For the Environment

Climate Science Watch: The CO2 “Fertilization” Effect Won’t Deter Climate Change

Corp Watch: Climate Change and Environmental Racism

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Carbon Dioxide Capture: Can it Stop Global Warming? appeared first on Law Street.

Just a cursory glance at recent social movement-esque trends on Twitter reveals a disturbing tendency of national conversations.

I am currently arching one eyebrow–judging hard–at the fondness we seem to have for localizing national problems in Midwestern states. Observe: homophobia, we locate in Indiana with #BoycottIndiana, almost as though it is the only place with queerphobic laws. Racism and police violence, we locate in Ferguson, as though this city in Missouri itself embodies racism across the country. Even Colorlines.com, an excellent source for intersectional news about structural racism in the U.S., has a separate tab for “Ferguson” on its site. Many tweets hashtag the names of several Black men who were brutalized by cops (or cop stand-ins, in the case of Trayvon Martin), but the only location identified is #Ferguson. No #StatenIsland or #NewYorkCity (where Eric Garner was strangled to death) or #LosAngeles (where Rodney King was savagely beaten by cops in 1991).

Focusing on individuals rather than identifying larger trends (like city-wide implementation of racist stop-and-frisk policies, or nationwide and international waging of a racist “war on drugs”), this place-based use of hashtags allows us to displace racist violence into conveniently “conservative,” Midwestern states like Missouri and Indiana.

This is similar to the trend in films such as “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Brokeback Mountain,” which portray violent homophobia and transphobia as individual acts of hatred rather than structural realities. They also position these acts as being located primarily in rural locations like Falls City, Nebraska and the mountains of Wyoming.

While I was born and raised a city girl, I know (because I have friends, I’ve dated different folks, and I read things like this and this) that vibrant queer cultures exist in rural spaces, and, though I navigate the streets of New York City with the privileges of being white, I know that racist, queerphobic violence is inflicted vis a vis laws and police batons in city centers every day.

As writer Lauren Anderson notes,

[R]ural gay youth teach [urbanites]:
1. Identities are a process of collective action, not a condition waiting for discovery
2. Multiple visibility strategies in play
3. We need to stop moralizing about who does queerness right.

When we erase these kinds of perspectives by asserting that coastal urbanity is the only site of vibrant queer cultures, all it does is romanticize queerness in cities and propagates violence to fellow queers who are from rural areas and/or from Midwestern and southern cities.

And speaking of violence…

Using Ferguson to represent racism and Indiana to represent homophobia risk erasing the massive violences inflicted on queer people of color (as well as white queers and non-queer people of color) that occur in everyday life in cities. Frighteningly, it may well be precisely this erasure that makes #BoycottIndiana and #Ferguson so popular: if we blame individual conservatism and “backward” rural cultures, then we do not have to do the hard labor of dismantling the structural white supremacy and anti-queerness upon which this country–including its cities–operates.

(Looking for more than what I can explain with my limited perspective? Try renting Scott Herring’s Another Country: Queer’s Anti-Urbanism from the library, or read the introduction online here.)

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post #Boycott Indiana, #Ferguson, and Romanticizing Coastal Cities appeared first on Law Street.

Across the United States, it is estimated that more than 61,000 youth are incarcerated each night, and more than 65 percent of these young people are youth of color. The overwhelming majority, 75 percent, are incarcerated for non-violent offenses.

The U.S. incarcerates youth at vastly higher rates than any other country in a world. Given that these incarcerated youth die from suicide at a rate of two to three times higher than the non-incarcerated youth population, there is no shortage of controversies surrounding the jailing of youth.

Read on to learn about the different controversies surrounding the incarceration of juveniles in the American justice system.

Death in Prison Without a Jury: An Overview of Youth Incarceration

Though all 50 states and the District of Columbia have defined legal differences between adults and youth who are accused of committing crimes, different states have different standards and definitions for what age someone has to be in order to be prosecuted as a juvenile. Additionally, there are many provisions that allow for certain juveniles to be prosecuted as adults, even if they are technically considered to be juveniles.

For some youth, this can be seen as an initial advantage: juveniles accused of crimes are not entitled to a trial by jury in light of a 1971 Supreme Court decision. Instead, youth are sentenced at the discretion of judges. But this exposes youth to tremendous vulnerability at the hands of judges who are accused of making decisions on the basis of race, even if it’s unconsciously. As Judge LaDoris Cordell argues, regarding the grossly disproportionate number of youth of color in the juvenile justice system:

What is hard is that if you go up to your average juvenile court judge, and that judge is the one who sends these kids off–we’re the ones ultimately responsible for these statistics–that judge will look you dead in the eye and say, “I’m not unfair, I’m not racist, I’m not prejudiced. I do the best I can.” And that judge is telling you the truth. . . . But what is at play here in most cases? I’m not saying there aren’t those judges who are so prejudiced and so racist; there are those. But I think, in the main, most are not. But I think what happens is that stereotypes are so embedded in the psyche of human beings, that those stereotypes come to play. So that when a young black kid comes into court before a white male judge, who perhaps doesn’t have any experience dealing with young black males… a mindset comes up in that judge’s head… Assumptions get made. . . . I think, in the main, that’s what happens, and I think that’s what accounts for those statistics. . . .

However, the risks of being tried in adult courts are also astronomical: approximately 2,500 youth are currently enduring life in prison without parole for crimes committed when they were children. In addition, youth are likely to experience extreme abuse in adult prisons. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “Children are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted in adult prisons than in juvenile facilities and face increased risk of suicide.”

Additionally, according to Human Rights Watch, while one out of every eight black youths who are convicted of killing someone are sentenced to life in prison, only one out of every 13 white youths convicted of killing someone are sentenced to life in prison.

In New York and North Carolina, this fate is particularly dangerous for youth: these are the only two states that try 16 and 17-year-old young people as adults. In both of these states, the age of adult criminal responsibility is 16, so judges must automatically treat these youth as adults. The prosecution of 16 year olds as adults–and their subsequent processing through the adult, rather than juvenile, system of incarceration–occurs in New York automatically, regardless of the severity of the accused crime. This means that every year, over 200,000 youth under the age of 18 in the U.S. are tried, prosecuted, and incarcerated as adults.

Even young people who are incarcerated as juveniles, however, experience tremendous hardship within the system. In addition to some debilitating and abusive conditions, youth in the juvenile justice system, whether currently incarcerated or on probation, are required to pay money to the courts for their own incarceration and probation. Youth on probation are responsible for payments such as supervisory fees, as well as fees for staying in juvenile hall while awaiting placement in group homes.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

As schools are militarized across the country–with increased police presence and military training for the police placed in some of our schools–the number of students being funneled from schools into the juvenile justice system is correspondingly increasing. Overall, a 38 percent increase in law enforcement presence in schools between 1997 and 2007 is intimately related to 5 times more students being arrested in schools.

Most of these youths–even those who are not incarcerated extensively after their arrest–lose out on further educational opportunities due to schools’ zero tolerance policies. Zero tolerance policies in schools, which mandate harsh punishments for first-time (and often minor) offenses, emerged from zero tolerance approaches to President George H.W. Bush’s “war on drugs.” According to Professor Nancy A. Heitzeg, sociology instructor and the Program Director of the Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity program at St. Catherine University, zero tolerance policies in schools are directly related to the funneling of students from schools into prisons:

While the school to prison pipeline is facilitated by a number of trends in education, it is most directly attributable to the expansion of zero tolerance policies. These policies have no measurable impact on school safety, but are associated with a number of negative effects‖ racially disproportionality, increased suspensions and expulsions, elevated drop-out rates, and multiple legal issues related to due process.

By criminalizing “bad behavior” among children in schools instead of supporting students who are in need, zero tolerance policies have, according to Washington Times reporter Nikki Krug, “produced unnecessary student suspensions for even the slightest violations of conduct, leading to higher risk of failing, dropping out and criminal prosecution for minors.” These higher drop-out rates make recidivism and further involvement in both the juvenile and adult justice systems much more likely, with 70 precent of students who become involved with the juvenile justice system dropping out of school entirely.

Young People in Solitary Confinement

Once involved in the juvenile justice system, many youths find themselves devastated by the impacts of solitary confinement. While New York has recently stated that it will end the solitary confinement of youth and those who are pregnant, the punishment is still a reality for many incarcerated youth elsewhere.

Locked in total isolation in small cells for 23 hours a day, children under the age of 18 are locked in solitary for days, weeks, and months on end across the United States every day. The mental health consequences of youth being locked in solitary are even more extreme than they are for adults. The Attorney General’s office has reported, for example, that half of youths who kill themselves while incarcerated do so while they are in solitary. Of those who are not in solitary at the time of their death, 62 percent had endured solitary confinement before.

The youths who do survive solitary are often plagued by the trauma they endure for years to come. In fact, Juan E. Méndez, a United Nations expert on torture, has argued that solitary confinement, especially when practiced on children under 18, amounts to torture.

Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice

According to the National Juvenile Justice Network, youth of color are disproportionately targeted by the juvenile justice system: “In every juvenile offense category—person, property, drug, and public order—youth of color receive harsher sentences and fewer services than white youth who have committed the same category of offenses.” This means that even though white youth commit the same crimes as youth of color, youth of color are criminalized and receive harsher sentences while white youth are more likely to get community service rather than incarceration.

Among these youth of color who are targeted by the juvenile justice system, a great number identify as LGBT. According to the Center for American Progress, around 300,000 LGBT youth are arrested and detained each year in the U.S., and approximately 60 percent of these youth are black and Latina. These youth are much more likely than non-LGBT peers to be targeted for abuse once incarcerated.

Juvenile Injustice?

Though issues abound in the juvenile justice system, many individuals and organizations are committed to making changes to the system. While efforts to reform and overhaul the juvenile justice system are underway, it is clear that youth who have gone through the juvenile justice system are taking the lead in efforts to ensure that justice, rather than injustice, is served. Until these problems are solved, the youth justice system may continue to be unjust.

Resources

Annie E. Casey Foundation: A Collection of Juvenile Justice Resources

Human Rights Watch: The Rest of Their Lives

Human Rights Watch: Growing Up Locked Down

American Civil Liberties Union: Stop Solitary

Center for American Progress: The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth

PBS: Is the System Racially Biased?

Equal Justice Initiative: Children in Prison

Colorlines: Paying to Get Locked Up

Colorlines: More Police in Schools Means More Students Arrested

Advancement Project: Momentum Grows Against Zero Tolerance Discipline and High-Stakes Testing

NOLO: Do Juveniles Have a Right to Trial by Jury?

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Juvenile Justice System: Inequality and Unjust Treatment appeared first on Law Street.

Amid sustained calls to “fix this now” and the trending Twitter hashtag #boycottindiana, Indiana’s Republican leadership has quietly been maneuvering to maintain the increased discrimination against LGBT residents that Governor Mike Pence‘s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA) enabled. The Indiana legislature voted this week to deny protective provisions that would have ensured that religious protections cannot be used to discriminate against LGBT people. According to Think Progress editor Zack Ford, due to recent legal developments, “outside of the few municipalities with local protections, anti-LGBT discrimination is still legal throughout most of the state.”

And although #boycottindiana is trending hard on Twitter, the RFRA is hardly the only devastating bill to come out of Indiana recently.

But it’s the only one causing majors trends.

Why? One of the big reasons: mainstream (read: overwhelmingly white) LGBT advocates, organizations, and issues have largely gained the support of big businesses and corporations. (Yes, I know that the pizzeria that supported the RFRA made an absurd amount of money from the controversy. But that’s not the systemic trend, which favors corporations making profit off of and cooperating with upper- and middle-class, white LGB people and organizations.)

Whiteness must be decentralized from the LGBT movement. I’m sick of hearing about Leelah Alcorn and not Blake Brockington #HisNameWasBlake

— Ryan Mishler (@storyofryguy) April 9, 2015

So what could be trending under the hashtag #boycottindiana, but is not?

An incredibly scary amendment to Senate Bill 465, which addresses the operations of the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, was passed in the Indiana House this week. Though much ire and rage have been focused on the Indiana Republican leadership that was responsible for the RFRA, it was Democratic Representative Terry Goodin who proposed adding the drug testing requirement to the bill.

Drug testing requirements in order to receive welfare fundamentally introduce even greater racism into welfare programs: even though white people tend to use illegal drugs at comparable or even higher rates than people of color, people of color are arrested and imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates for drug related “crimes” than white people. This means that people of color who are welfare recipients are going to be disproportionately targeted by the new provision’s requirement that recipients with histories of drug-related “crimes” be required to undergo testing. These folks will be stripped of their welfare benefits if they fail two tests.

So… Why is the #boycottindiana hashtag not blowing up with rage over this new twist to already-racist policies? Do my fellow white queers think racist laws are alright while homophobic laws are not?

Racial justice is LGBT justice.

So… Where are the trending boycotts against all kinds of racist laws across the country, like the resurgence of Jim Crow-esque laws that suppress the votes of Black and Latina people by mandating ID requirements for voting?

Where is the #boycottwhitenessinLGBTorganizations hashtag? The #boycottmassincarceration hashtag, or the #boycottracism hashtag? The #boycottwhitesupremacy hashtag?

Oh, yes. We can’t boycott those things. They’re too integrated into what makes this country operate.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post There’s Something Scarier Than Religious Freedom Going on in Indiana appeared first on Law Street.

“Natural” and “organic” labels on food have become a tremendously popular–and tremendously profitable–means of discussing, buying, and selling food.

But what do we really know about what it means when those $4.99 cherry tomatoes are labeled as “organic,” or when that chicken is marketed as “all natural”? And who are we really concerned about when we talk about food labels–only consumers, or the people who produce our food, as well?

 What’s so natural about “natural”?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t seem to have a clear answer to this question. In regards to the definition of “natural” food, the FDA’s website states that it:

Has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives. However, the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.

Without any legally binding regulations to mark which foods can be sold as “natural” and which cannot, the meaning of the label is ambiguous at best. Since “natural” foods are defined inconsistently–perhaps in whatever way sells best–the label is often criticized as being both misleading and meaningless.

The definition of “natural” is, however, regulated for meat and poultry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Safety Inspection Service requires that, in the case of meat and poultry labeling, “natural” must mean:

A product containing no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed. Minimal processing means that the product was processed in a manner that does not fundamentally alter the product. The label must include a statement explaining the meaning of the term natural (such as ‘no artificial ingredients; minimally processed’).

This emphasis on fundamentally altering the product means that the natural label is determined not by the process of raising the animals involved, but in their preparation for being sent to grocery stores after death. This means that what is fed to animals before their death is not regulated by a “natural” label. As a Take Action petition for banning “natural” labels that confuse customers reminds us, this means that:

Meat labeled as ‘natural’ can come from animals that were raised with daily doses of antibiotics and other drugs, given artificial growth hormones, fed genetically engineered soy and corn feed and other artificial ingredients and continually confined indoors.

 How organic is “organic”?

The definitions of “organic” are more legally binding than those of “natural.” According to the U.S. Environmental Agency (EPA), there are standards of “organic farming” that determine whether or not a food item can be labeled and sold as organic. This emphasis on organic as a farming process means that organic definitions are less about ingredients and more about the process of growing and considering the treatment of the plants that were harvested for food.

However, this also means that–especially due to the many kinds of organic labels–foods marketed as “organic” can still be full of chemicals. An informal investigation of Whole Foods organic products by Duke University senior Emma Loewe revealed many additives that are permissible under organic labeling. She writes,

Over the course of my search, I came across organic trail mix that featured Silicon Dioxide, Cirtric Acids and Maltodextrin. Try saying that five times fast. The canned goods aisle brought me to organic soup made up of sodium citrate and a dash of ‘cheese flavor’ for good measure. The organic cereal I picked up was made with vegetable glycerin—a common additive in cosmetics and soaps because of its cooling effect on the skin.

These additives are permitted under “organic” labels largely because there are different kinds of organic. According to the National Science Foundation, the different means of organic phrasing–100 percent organic, organic, made with organic ingredients, and others–are held to a diversity of legal standards. In order to use the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Organic Seal, foods claiming to be 100 percent organic must be made with 100 percent organic ingredients, excluding water and salt. Foods using the label “organic” must have 95-99 percent organic ingredients. Foods can still call themselves organic by saying they are “made with organic ingredients” if between 70 and 84 percent of the ingredients are organic.

This brings us back to the question: what does it mean to be an “organic ingredient”? According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service, the regulations for crops and animals are as follows:

Organic crops. The USDA organic seal verifies that irradiation, sewage sludge, synthetic fertilizers, prohibited pesticides, and genetically modified organisms were not used.

Organic livestock. The USDA organic seal verifies that producers met animal health and welfare standards, did not use antibiotics or growth hormones, used 100% organic feed, and provided animals with access to the outdoors.

Vague statements like “access to the outdoors” and “prohibited pesticides” raise a great number of questions and criticisms regarding loopholes in the standards of organic labeling.

 From the Farm: Labor and Labels

Discussions about food labels so often focus exclusively on the health of people consuming the food. However, these conversations generally erase a bigger conversation about health, that is, the health of the farm workers who are the human backbone of agriculture in this country.

Advocates hope that efforts like these and others, such as emphases on broader immigration reform and health care, can bring a more total picture of health into the conversation about the health issues surrounding “organic” farming and “natural” foods.

So Are “Natural” and “Organic” Foods Actually Healthier?

It is important to determine whose health we are asking about when we discuss the healthiness of “organic” and “natural” foods. Those who consider the health of farm workers that produce foods labeled “organic” and “natural,” worry that the production of these foods can generate horrible health consequences for the humans involved in the process.

As to the question of “is it healthier to consume these foods?”, the answer is perhaps not. It’s important to remember that many large corporations, such as Coca-Cola, own organic brands, which links organic brands to larger environmental devastation and labor exploitation that negatively impact global health.

Given the legal impotence and inconsistency of the label “natural” advocates against the labels argue that foods with this label have anything in common other than their respective corporations’ attempt to tap into a market that wants to eat “natural” foods. Regarding the consumption of “organic” foods, the Mayo Clinic states that while the jury is technically still out, studies conducted over the past fifty years do not make a convincing argument that there are any significant differences in nutritional content between “organic” and non-organic foods. So, next time you go to your grocery store, you may want to keep a close eye on more than just the labels on your food.

Resources

Primary

Food and Drug Administration: What is the Meaning of ‘Natural’ on the Label of Food?

U.S. Department of Agriculture: Meat and Poultry Labeling Terms

U.S. Department of Agriculture: National Organic Program

Environmental Protection Agency: Organic Farming

Additional

Farmworker Justice: Home

Agricultural Justice Project: Home

Grist: Workers on Organic Farms are Treated as Poorly as Their Conventional Counterparts

TakeAction: Stop Confusing Consumers: Ban the ‘Natural’ Label

EcoWatch: Organic Labeling: What You Need to Know

NaturallySavvy: The USDA Organic Program Faces Criticism

EarthJustice: Pesticides: The Workplace Hazard the EPA is Ignoring

Salon: California’s Rampant Farm-Labor Abuse

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Natural or Organic: Not Just the Labels on Our Food appeared first on Law Street.

Lauded broadly as a triumph for love conquering all, the Ad Council’s viral PSA “Love Has No Labels”  is an attempt to spread the message that, as its mission states, “before anything else, we are all human. It’s time to embrace diversity. Let’s put aside labels in the name of love.” You can watch the video below.

My first reaction was: Yes! Because love does have the tremendous capacity to be stronger than hatred or apathy–even persisting in the face of institutionalized violence and microaggressions.

So, sure, yes. But also, no. No, no. No!

Because, contrary to what the video states, love does have race; it does have gender; it does have dis/ability; it does have age; it does have religion.

When we put aside labels or dismiss them as individualized bias, when we do what this PSA and its attendant website implore us to do, we proclaim ourselves “colorblind” and ignore what created these labels: systemic oppression.

Oppression is institutional, not only interpersonal. We cannot dismantle violent oppressions like racism and ableism by kissing and hugging behind an x-ray screen and then using the shock value of emerging from behind the screen, smiling, to rid the world of the white supremacy that shapes racist institutions and the environmental racism that shapes ableism.

“Putting aside” these labels–proclaiming yourself “colorblind”–will only ever benefit people who are on the more privileged ends of the labels at hand.

You cannot “put aside” race if you are a person of color. You cannot “put aside” dis/ability if you have disabilities. You cannot “put aside” sexuality if you are queer.You cannot “put aside” age if you are subject to ageist discrimination.

Interlocking systems of oppression that define our society–and, of course, our labels–will not allow it.

These labels–race, dis/ability, age, body type, sexuality–that Love Has No Labels wants to dismiss outright are vital to our existence. For better and for worse, they intimately shape all of our lives. So, they do matter.

Labels do affect love. Labels affect love because I need my girlfriend to understand that because of my mental dis/abilities, my day-to-day is quite different from hers. Similarly, she needs me to understand the endless ways that as a white woman, I walk through the world with privileges that she has never had. And we both need to accept that while we can never truly understand each other’s respective experiences of oppression, that’s okay, as long as we’re always working to do the best we can.

Which, I guess, is what this “Love Has No Labels” thing is trying to do to begin with. But still, it bothers me. More than that, it enrages me. Because the problem is not “bias,” as the PSA’s website would have you believe. The problem is not individualized bias that can be dissolved by a touching video. The problem is the institutionalized forms of violence that create and perpetuate bias.

Ultimately, it’s all in the label itself. This PSA campaign says we should “embrace diversity” immediately before it says we should “put aside labels.” So we’re embracing difference by putting difference aside? How about we try embracing difference by actually acknowledging it, not erasing it?

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Love Does Have Labels: We Need to Acknowledge Them appeared first on Law Street.

Much ado has been made about the potential impacts of gay marriage on immigrants, and the potential impacts of comprehensive immigration reform on LGBTQ people. But what does all that mean? How do laws aimed at immigrants and laws aimed at LGBTQ people impact those who are both immigrants and LGBTQ? Read on to learn about the different difficulties of LGBTQ immigration, what progress is being made, and what problems still exist.

“Don’t Separate my Family”: Marriage and Immigration

When people hear about immigration and gay rights together in mainstream media sources, chances are that the conversation is about the impacts of gay marriage on immigration policy and individual couples in which one partner is an immigrant and the other is a citizen.

In the build up to the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in United States v. Windsor, which provided full federal recognition of legally married same-sex couples by striking down a critical component of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), many couples in which one partner was not a citizen were featured in efforts of advocacy for gay marriage. A perfect example is the couple featured in the YouTube clip above. In the aftermath of federal recognition of same-sex marriage, a good deal of media coverage focused on long-term lesbian and gay relationships in which one of the partners was granted legal immigration status through marriage to a citizen partner. This New York Daily News article, for example, frames the triumph of gay marriage advocates in New York through the lens of immigration, discussing same-sex marriage as a win for a binational couple’s ability to obtain a green card for one of the partners.

Legal recognition for same-sex marriage has somewhat been a boon for proponents of more accessible immigration. LGBTQ couples no longer need to live in fear that they will not be able to live together in the U.S. because their marriage isn’t recognized: after the DOMA decision, same-sex couples have the right–as straight couples do–to have an immigrant partner obtain a green card through their marriage to a citizen spouse. Prior to the DOMA decision, no federal rights of marriage, including federal taxes and federal benefits, were afforded to same-sex couples, even if they were married in a state where it was legal. There was a lack of ability to obtain a green card for an immigrant partner in a binational couple; these rights are now assured. Transgender immigrants in a binational marriage, rest assured–whether you’re in a straight or  gay/lesbian relationship, the DOMA decision ensures that you or your partner can qualify for a green card.

New Concerns After the DOMA Decision

After the DOMA decision, however, concerns remain for LGBTQ immigrant couples. For example, investigative reporter Seth Freed Wessler writes for Colorlines.com that,

The parts of the marriage-based visa process that include investigation by federal immigration officers into the validity of a marriage… [can pose a problem for] LGBT couples who may not be out to their families, communities, neighbors or bosses, the prospect of a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officer showing up at their apartment building or calling their mother to ask about the relationship poses a pretty serious risk.

This is indeed something to be concerned about, and it may well bar access to green cards for many LGBTQ immigrants. Yet it is precisely this articulation of the U.S. as a liberal bastion and safe-haven for LGBTQ people–juxtaposed against “homophobic” countries–that causes many LGBTQ people to critique the entire framing of same-sex marriage as a vehicle for positive immigration policy.

Many LGBTQ people argue that fighting for marriage takes away attention, energy, and resources (millions and millions of dollars worth) from addressing the underlying issues of structural racism, state oppression and heteronormativity that shape anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ attitudes to begin with. Queercents writer Yasmin argues that marriage “being presented as THE immigration cause for LGBT people” detracts crucial attention away from comprehensive immigration reform, which she and many others assert should be the focal point of immigration efforts. Responding to American Apparel’s same-sex marriage-inspired “Legalize Gay” shirts Yasmin writes that:

Do people wearing this t-shirt have a clue what it really means to be illegal? To be, for instance, an ‘illegal alien’ who gets swept up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid and be deported soon thereafter? To not be able to travel freely because they lack the proper documentation? To pay for their school tuition and rent in cash because they lack social security numbers? [And i]t’s not just the undocumented whose lives are effectively erased by this t-shirt, but the millions who are being funneled into the prison industrial complex in order to increase its profits.

Even if an undocumented immigrant who is LGBTQ is familiar with the fears and oppressions discussed here, they may not have marriage available to them–or may not desire marriage–if they want a green card.

Executive Action and Legal Challenges

President Obama’s executive action in November 2014 that attempted to grant relief from deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants is being legally challenged by 26 states. These legal challenges have left millions of people in limbo, without knowing their status or rights, because the parents of U.S. citizens and families who were protected from deportation under his executive orders now must wait to learn what courts will decide about the legal challenges.

The impacts of Obama’s exercise of executive power (and, then, the impacts of the legal challenges to this power) for LGBTQ people have been much debated in LGBTQ communities. Staff correspondents Rachel Roubein and Lauren Fox argue in the National Journal that Obama’s actions on immigration were a tremendous help to LGBTQ people. They cite, among other things, the life-saving potential of prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases, which can prevent many LGBTQ people from being deported.

Other critics are less optimistic about the potential of Obama’s executive action to serve as the immigration overhaul that many desire, even if the cases against it are unsuccessful. Colorlines.com reporter Julianne Hung reminds her readers that:

The terms [of the action] are stringent: It will apply only to those who have been in the U.S. for five years or more; those who came to the country as young teens; and parents of U.S. citizen children and green-card holders. People with various criminal violations on their records will be barred from relief.

While these familial provisions were portrayed as being meant to keep families together, they do not grant access to many of the 267,000 undocumented LGBTQ adults who will not qualify for relief under Obama’s action because they lack these kinds of familial connections. These stringent terms may be particularly prohibitive for many of the 20,000-50,000 undocumented transgender immigrants in the country, for whom accessing potential relief will likely be particularly difficult due to virulent institutional transphobia that trans immigrants face.

“Mass Incarceration of Immigrants”

Currently, there’s a “mass incarceration of immigrants” in which the state and prison corporations generate many billions of dollars of profit from privately run and revenue-generating facilities that lock up people who are immigrants. In light of that, many LGBTQ immigrants are concerned about prisons generally, and the ways transgender people are targeted for especially horrific treatment in prisons and immigration detention centers. When the Department of Homeland Security came out with new immigration detention policies in 2014 that were aimed at preventing sexual abuse in immigration detention facilities, many lauded the changes as a victory. LGBTQ immigrants in these centers often experience much higher rates of abuse than their non-LGBTQ peers, so the changes were often welcomed by LGBTQ immigration advocates.

However, transgender immigrants did not receive adequate protections under the new guidelines. National Center for Transgender Equality director of policy Harper Jean Tobin referred to the new policies in the following way:

A tremendous missed opportunity which adds urgency to ending our multibillion-dollar mass incarceration of immigrants… The lack of adequate protections for transgender immigrants in particular makes it clear that these vulnerable individuals are not safe in detention facilities and should no longer be detained.

Many transgender asylum seekers are detained in the wrong facilities, particularly women being placed in all-male facilities, making those women targets of extreme sexual violence in immigration detention facilities.

This kind of abuse is experienced at higher rates by transgender immigrants, but LGB immigrants also are sexually abused at 15 percent higher rates than their non-LGB peers in detention facilities.

Organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Immigrant Justice Center, and the Sylvia Rivera Project’s Immigrant Rights Project work at the intersections between immigration and LGBTQ justice. They operate in ways that attempt to make detention safer for LGBTQ immigrants specifically while also working to make detention and deportation non-existent for all immigrants.

Conclusion

For immigrants who are LGBTQ, obstacles to obtaining a green card and safety from deportation can be much greater than for immigrants who are not LGBTQ, though the obstacles and the stakes are quite high for all immigrants. Same-sex marriage may chip away at these obstacles for some LGBTQ immigrants in binational, married relationships, but more overarching reform of the system of detention and deportation of immigrants may be a more holistic way forward for LGBTQ immigrants.

Resources

Primary

Oyez: United States v. Windsor

Additional

National Immigrant Justice Center: Stop Abuse of Detained LGBT Immigrants

Sylvia Rivera Law Project: Immigrant Rights Project

National Center for Transgender Equality: Our Moment For Reform

ABC News: DOMA Ruling Could Mean Green Cards for Gay Immigrants

Colorlines: LGBT Immigrants Could Face Hard Road Applying for Green Cards

Washington Post: Gay Marriage Fight Will Cost Tens of Millions

MakeZine: Is Gay Marriage Racist?

Queercents: Legalize Gay: Or, So You Think You’re Illegal?

Queercents: Uniting American Families Act: Fact, Fiction, Money, and Emotions

Immigration Policy Center: A Guide to the Immigration Accountability Executive Action

AlJazeera: 26 States Sue Obama Over Immigration Plan

National Journal: In Immigration Action, the LGBT Community Once Again Feels Left Behind

Feministing: Is Mass Incarceration and Detention of Women Becoming the New Normal?

Center for American Progress: Dignity Denied: LGBT Immigrants in U.S. Immigration Detention

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post LGBTQ Immigration: Not Just About Marriage appeared first on Law Street.

This won’t be news to anyone who experiences it, but this “just in”–being targeted and locked up by racism and the criminal justice system dramatically increases people’s experiences of depression, suicide ideation, and many other types of “mental illness.”

Except here’s the thing: like Bruce E. Levine over at AlterNet has shown, the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has shoved under the table a survey that demonstrates the explicit connections between high rates of mental illness and mass incarceration, racism, unemployment, heterosexsim, and classism.

One of the most damning aspects of the survey is that the rate and severity of experiencing mental illness is double for adults who have contact with the criminal justice system compared with adults who don’t. (Seriously. Check it out.) There seems to be the perception that this country locks up people because they experience mental illness: this is often true, and is repulsive. But if we want to look at the proverbial big picture, we also have to consider the ways that mass incarceration–and the solitary confinement often involved with imprisonment–and the virulent racism that shapes the prison-industrial complex actually cause mental health issues.

Levine writes, “[f]or decades doctors — and Big Pharma — have pointed to neuroscience [as explanations for “mental illness”]. Cultural variables are often more telling.” Indeed. But by SAMHSA’s logic, why damn the system that produces these mental illness-causing oppressions when you can convince people to buy overpriced, toxic pharmaceuticals drugs and therapy from it?

Of course, people who experience these oppressions don’t need government-sponsored studies and surveys to elucidate the ways that racism, mass incarceration, classism, and heterosexism make many of us live with severely impaired mental health.

Personal Example Time: I am certain that my being a white queer woman in this society fundamentally shaped my diagnoses as depressed and bipolar. Expected to be easily “corrupted” and traumatized because of my whiteness and white privilege; expected to be dedicated to others and feel guilty for putting myself first because of my womanness and heterosexism; expected to daily endure the structural and interpersonal impacts of sexism and queerphobia and always be “polite” about it…my diagnoses (and the feelings that precipitated seeking them) are not surprising.

White men–much like those who shoot people in schools and much like Germanwings co-pilot Andrea Lupitz–are routinely portrayed empathetically by mainstream media sources (instead of being called terrorists) because of their emotional angst and “understandable” mental illness when they kill over 100 people. However, people (especially working-class women) of color who defend themselves against attack are imprisoned, villified, and pathologized. In light of this, the consequences of not addressing racism, heterosexism, and classism in mental health are… well… life-threatening.

And far, far beyond depressing: the causes and consequences are outraging.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Mass Incarceration Leads to Depression, So Why Don’t We Stop? appeared first on Law Street.

From the time we are in elementary school, we are told that copying from someone else’s paper is wrong. As we get a little older, we are given other names for this copying: plagiarism and intellectual property theft. Often, even those who believe that intellectual property laws are a threat to creativity and equitable access to knowledge recognize that even if something is not illegal, it is better form to give credit where credit is due. But a new question has popped up recently: does this logic apply to culture, as well? Some say yes and call it cultural appropriation. But what exactly is cultural appropriation, and when do we cross the line between appropriation and appreciation?

 What is cultural appropriation?

Cultural appropriation is often defined as being similar to intellectual property theft, but with more overt and culturally offensive aspects.

Cultural appropriation is the adoption or theft of icons, rituals, aesthetic standards, and behavior from one culture or subculture by another. It generally is applied when the subject culture is a minority culture or some how subordinate in social, political, economic, or military status to the appropriating culture. This ‘appropriation’ often occurs without any real understanding of why the original culture took part in these activities or the meanings behind these activities, often converting culturally significant artifacts,practices, and beliefs into ‘meaningless’ pop-culture or giving them a significance that is completely different/less nuanced than they would originally have had.

Viewed as a direct continuation of imperialist violence–which assumes that the land, labor, and bodies of people of color are available for white consumption–cultural appropriation “treats all aspects of marginalized cultures… as free for the taking.”

Conversations about the controversy also often come up when discussing music, such as this interview with Azealia Banks over white artists’ cultural appropriation.

But can you really steal a culture?

On the flip side of things, some people believe that accusations of cultural appropriation need to be wielded much more carefully. Arguing that “you can’t ‘steal’ a culture,” American political commentator and linguist John McWhorter asserts that, “with gay white men and black women, for example, it’s not as if the black women are being left without their culture after the ‘theft’ or as if gay white men are somehow out there ‘out-blacking’ the women they ‘stole’ from.” (This refers to white gay men who affect speaking patterns and mannerisms that are often more readily culturally associated with black women.) McWhorter warns that people accusing others of “stealing” culture through appropriation are using the very specific term too loosely. He argues that the loosening of our language allows flippant accusations to be made when more serious issues can be dealt with.

Additionally, accusations of cultural appropriation often generate assumptions about the race, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality of the people involved. This is alluded to by Howell in the video above, which he starts by cautioning viewers not to pre-judge what he says by the color of his skin. He goes on to argue that it is a compliment to people of color (specifically, he is talking about black people) when white people want to engage in aspects of black culture that they find attractive and fun. Reminding his viewers that it is not “wrong” or “low-class” to be black or to perform blackness through dress or actions, Howell argues that cultural appropriation is not actually appropriation at all, but rather a form of a compliment that has the potential to dismantle racist and/or classist assumptions about black people.

In a similar vein, it is often argued that accusing someone of appropriating another culture can force unwanted assumptions onto people. These incorrect assumptions happened to a bride named Krista, who was accused online of cultural appropriation for pictures of her wedding that were posted online. The wedding integrated aspects of Lenape culture, a Mid-Atlantic Native American tribe. Krista, however, reminded online discussants that she has a Lenape background, even though people assumed she was white based on her features and the color of her skin.

Appreciation or Appropriation?

Here are some examples of widely-talked about accusations of cultural appropriation in recent pop culture.

Case Study: Miley Cyrus

Accused by many as putting on a tremendously racist “minstrel show” in her “We Can’t Stop” video and its performance at the 2013 VMAs, Miley Cyrus has been resoundingly condemned by Anne Theriault for having “used black women as props — like, literal props... Miley was, at one point, slapping a faceless black woman on the ass as if she was nothing more than a thing for Miley to dominate and humiliate.” Critics also noted the historical significance of Cyrus’ performance; like so many other white performers before her, Cyrus used black culture and black bodies to re-brand her own image. Her unapologetic use of black women’s bodies to make herself look “cooler” was described by Jody Rosen of Vulture: “Cyrus is annexing working-class black “ratchet” culture, the potent sexual symbolism of black female bodies, to the cause of her reinvention: her transformation from squeaky-clean Disney-pop poster girl to grown-up hipster-provocateur.”

Following Cyrus’ performance there were powerful calls for black female performers to “just say no” to requests to be in her videos or shows in the future. Musician Big Freedia made sure Cyrus knew she wasn’t even succeeding at her attempts to twerk, sardonically offering, “just get me and Miley together so I could give her ass some lessons.”

In the midst of these accusations of Cyrus’ cultural appropriation, however, there were calls to “go easy” on the performer. In the rush to defend Cyrus, Washington Post columnist Clinton Yates asserted that, “it is inherently racist to imply that there is anything wrong with anyone other than black women twerking.” Arguing that the term “hood” connotes affection when said by white people today, McWhorter had a series of questions for those calling Cyrus out on racism. He wanted to know, “How do we know Cyrus isn’t sincere when she says she loves “hood” culture? Because she’s white? I’m afraid that’s a little 1955.”

Entering the realm of accusations of “reverse racism,” these writers argued that cultures are inherently going to borrow from each other whenever they coexist in society. Restraining white people from borrowing from people of color is unfair if the expectation is that it is not culturally appropriate for people of color to adapt aspects of white culture.

Case Study: #BlackLivesMatter

In the wake of the highly publicized and protested murders of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, the slogans “I am Trayvon Martin” and “I Can’t Breathe” rose to the fore of social justice forums. White people were frequently seen in hoodies claiming to “be” Trayvon Martin, and–as seen above–white people were frequently seen claiming to not be able to breathe. Here, the violent potential of cultural appropriation became explicitly clear to some. White users of the hashtag #AllLivesMatter, or asserting that “I am Trayvon Martin” or “We Can’t Breathe” were accused of cultural appropriation because they were attempting to take the experiences of black people as their own. In doing so, they erased the racist dimensions of police violence by “deracializing” the issue, making it about “All Lives” instead of “Black [and Brown] Lives.”

According to critics, by claiming false solidarity–and thus appropriating the cultural experiences of black people–with the deaths of these and other black people at the hands of police, white people were shifting the focus from #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter. These hashtags have been used to refer to two related social movements. #BlackLivesMatter refers to activism attempting to call attention to police violence against black people. #AllLivesMatter refers to activism that states that while police violence against people of color is a problem, it is damaging to focus on race in discussions of police violence. In doing so, people using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter claimed that we live in a colorblind society, which threatens to erase the fundamental violence of racism.

However, the #AllLivesMatter hashtag and protests were largely framed as a response to the shooting of two police officers in New York City. These activists pointed out that in addition to black lives mattering, as Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown stated, “I must say that blue lives do matter. But as I close, I must say that we as a community must begin to recognize that all lives matter.” Basing their rhetoric off of an impulse to ensure that people didn’t feel threatened by, but rather welcomed to join in solidarity with protests surrounding the violent deaths of young people, #AllLivesMatter advocates have decided that it is more important to embrace a less specifically racial call in favor of avoiding any accusations of divisiveness.

ALL LIVES MATTER! United We Stand! Divided We Fall.. Let's Get it together! #AllLivesMatter… http://t.co/uJmI7h8bG0

— Destined (@theatreprince) December 14, 2014

So, is cultural appropriation ever appropriate?

In a scathing critique of Cyrus’ performances as cultural appropriation, Dodai Stewart cautioned readers, “Let’s not get it twisted: The exchange and flow of ideas between cultures can be a beautiful thing. I believe in cross-pollination and being inspired by those whose experience is not like your own.” There’s obviously no clear line here. Perhaps the key is constantly checking in on the impacts of actions, all the while drawing and abiding by distinctions between admiration and exotification, inspiration, and appropriation.

Resources

Zine Library: Cultural Appropriation or Cultural Appreciation?

Hot97: Azaelia Banks on Iggy Azalea

Daily Beast: You Can’t ‘Steal’ a Culture: In Defense of Cultural Appropriation

OffBeatEmpire: Think Twice Before Appointing Yourself Cultural Appropriation Police

Colorlines: On Saying No to Miley Cyrus, the Habitual Cross-Twerker

Huffington Post: What Miley Cyrus did was Disgusting — But Not for the Reasons You Think

Washington Post: Miley Cyrus and the Issues of Slut-Shaming and Racial Condescension

New Republic: Miley’s Twerking wasn’t Racist

Jezebel: Yes, All Lives Matter. Now Shut Up About It

Georgia Political Review: ‘I Am Not Trayvon Martin’: Dismantling White Privilege in Activism

CBS Los Angeles: Things Heat Up as Pro-Police Demonstrators Hold ‘All Lives Matter’ Rally

WRAL: Raleigh Police Chief: Black, Blue, All Lives Matter

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Cultural Appropriation: What’s Appropriate? appeared first on Law Street.

Push a button, kill people thousands of miles away: who is surprised that PTSD is a result? United States pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones, are not immune to the devastation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), despite their relative physical distance from carnage.

Often framed as the ruggedly masculine problem of a “drone warrior,” the PTSD of drone pilots has a history of being valorized by journalists: GQ’s introduction to a piece on Airman First Class Brandon Bryant’s drone-induced PTSD describes him as having “hunted top terrorists, saved lives, but always from afar.” Writing about “terrorists” (many civilians are killed by drone attacks) like they are not human (“hunting”?!), much of the journalism surrounding drone pilots’ PTSD valorizes the suffering of white, straight men as being “for the sake of their country.”

There are exceptions, of course: some journalists slam drone attacks as murder (see video above). However, regarding drone pilots and PTSD, the glorification of American masculinity generally rules the day. Bryant, for instance, tugged at the sympathy of readers when his PTSD was framed by various news sources as being a burden on his sex and love life, turning women away from him and isolating him from potential peers. Even pieces covering PTSD that do sometimes challenge U.S. policy as opposed to glorifying the grit of traumatized male soldiers still leaves readers with the impression that, even if the public is not entitled to know all the details that make drone attacks “necessary,” drone pilots “probably know” (implying, of course, that there are, in fact, justifications for these strikes).

Now don’t get me wrong: PTSD is PTSD, and I would never, ever wish its horrific and suffocating grip on anyone, no matter what they’ve done.

And yet. And yet. Not all PTSD is created equal.

In the context of the U.S. engaging in another war in Iraq (to the tune of depressingly little [or little covered] organized public outrage), the coverage of PSTD in drone pilots is again—and again, and again–on the rise.

What purpose does this serve?

Focusing on U.S. drone pilots having PTSD is important: it is itself horrific and demands attention, and it also may help draw the attention of those who may otherwise find drone attacks unqualified successes. But focusing on the PTSD of U.S. pilots detracts focus from where it really needs to be: the traumas and horrendous death and psychological tolls that drone attacks inflict in countries of color. When “precise” drone strikes target 41 people but end 1,147 human lives, certainly the discussion should be broader than the (undeniably horrendous) pain of the (in media coverage) white American men who pulled the triggers. We must use this coverage of PTSD to expand the conversation to discuss the myriad ways that U.S.-inflicted terrorism in countries of color privileges the terrible traumas of U.S. soldiers at the expense of confronting the mass traumas and mass murders that the U.S. is inflicting through drone attacks.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Drone Pilot PTSD is Awful, But Also Beside the Point appeared first on Law Street.