Research & Publications

Harvard has shown its commitment to diversity was always a farce

By Crystal Fleming

There is nothing quite as “Harvard” as Harvard throwing minority women under the bus.

This fall, a history scholar named Michelle Jones will begin her doctoral work at New York University. Earlier this year, she was rejected from Harvard — after being initially accepted. While there are plenty of academics who could relate to Jones’s exclusion from one of the most elite universities in the world, a closer look beneath the surface reveals the politics that shape the kinds of people who are typically “selected” — and those, like Jones, who are kept out.

The future Dr. Jones has already distinguished herself as one of the most sought-after graduate students in the country. But unlike many of her peers with elite pedigrees who come from generations of unacknowledged privilege, Jones was forced to overcome unfathomable odds in her quest to enter the overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class world of academia.

Having served 20 years in prison for killing her child, Jones managed to not only survive psychological trauma, sexual violence, physical abuse, poverty, racism, sexism and two decades of incarceration but also obtained a bachelor’s degree, became a certified paralegal, conducted historical research, and produced award-winning scholarship — all from behind bars. Her stellar application included letters of recommendation from internationally known luminaries, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. Read more here...

How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism:

The deep roots of conservative opposition to the environmental state,explained

By: Christopher Sellers

That screeching sound you hear this Earth Day is the sound of our federal government making a U-turn on the environment. What a difference a year and an election have made.

Last April 22, the United States was making notable progress on some of our toughest environmental problems. Grassroots mobilizations and other forms of pressure helped nudge America’s political leadership to halt pipelines and craft new policies on climate change, fracking, and toxics. The rest of the world, even China, was coalescing around a commitment to curb greenhouse gases, and the Paris accord had been signed into force.

Trump’s electoral victory has changed much of that. As part of Steve Bannon’s agenda for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” Trump’s appointees are sharpening their axes for environmental agencies and science. Among their targets: Obama’s climate policies, and the EPA’s budget, which they’ve proposed to cut by 31 percent.

It’s ironic that today’s Republicans see America’s environmental state as such a liability, given that Republican presidents had such a big hand in constructing it. In the early 20th century Teddy Roosevelt pushed a federal system of parks, forests, and monuments. In 1970, it was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed many foundational laws. Even during the last Republican administration of George W. Bush, longtime EPA employees have told me there was considerable if often tacit support by party leaders. ( Read More...)

Slaves of the State: Prison Uprisings and the Legacy of Attica

ROBERT CHASE

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon, $35 (cloth)

In September a national network of incarcerated Americans conducted the first-ever coordinated prison strike against U.S. prison labor. The strike’s manifesto, “Call to Action Against Slavery in America,” declares, “We will not only demand the end to prison slavery, we will end it ourselves by ceasing to be slaves.” During the three-week strike, an estimated 24,000 prisoners in over 29 prisons across at least 23 states refused to work. Facing the threat of administrative lockdowns and individual punishments, the strike ended within a month with its demands unmet. Some individual prisoners are continuing the protest through hunger strikes and disturbances while others are making coordinated plans for future protests that will include activists outside prison. The strikers’ demands varied from state to state and included unionization, fair wages, better medical treatment, access to legal aid, and an end to degrading conditions, including corporal punishment and prolonged stays in solitary confinement. But the shared goal among all was to draw attention to the continued use in U.S. prisons of slave labor.

A total laboring prison population of nearly 900,000 people is coerced to work for a $2 billion-a-year prison industry. The average daily wage is 93 cents. Yet up to 80 percent of these meager wages can be withheld for reasons such as “room and board.” Four states, all in the South, pay no wages at all: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas. Indeed, while Texas prisoners work without any pay whatsoever, Texas Correctional Industries, a for-profit corporation operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, posted nearly $89 million in profits during 2014.

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This Is Fear: ICE Raids on Parents and Children

By Nancy Hiemstra

At the end of December, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would being rounding up Central American immigrants for deportation. This past weekend, the raids began, with parents and children being detained in military-style operations in several southern and border states. Fear has spread through immigrant communities around the country.

As a professor of migration studies at Stony Brook University who has researched consequences of immigration policies for over a decade, I have followed news of this initiative closely. But I am also an Anglo mom of two on Long Island, in a town with sizeable communities of Latino immigrants, many of them from Central America. I speak Spanish, so I talk with Latino immigrants, I listen, I ask. And this is what fear looks like in my town.

Sunday afternoon, my kids were playing with some kids in the community, blowing off end-of-holiday break steam. Suddenly, one boy said to me, “Miss Nancy, did you hear that they are stopping people on the streets, and taking them away? Whole families. My mom was crying, she’s so scared.” I called his mother. She came to Long Island 13 years ago, and while her husband has papers, she does not. Their kids are U.S. citizens. Yes, she said, word was out that ICE was in our town, setting up checkpoints on the roads, knocking on doors, walking through stores where Latinos shop. Everyone was staying home, terrified.

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