#Why I don’t trust the left when they call for abolishing prisons

[coochiequeens]

Trigger warning: discusses the sexual assault and murder of a child

A social media account harassing, impersonating, and threatening women critical of gender ideology appears to belong to a trans-identified male convicted of the brutal torture and murder of a 13-year-old child.

On October 24, Reduxx reported that Synthia China Blast had been discharged from his parole with the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision on July 30, quietly marking the end of his sentence and release conditions.

Blast, born Luis Morales, was sentenced in 1996 for the horrific murder of 13-year-old Ebony Nicole Williams. Blast, along with his boyfriend Carlos Franco, were sentenced to 25 years for the crime, one that had both sexist and racist motivations.

Blast and Franco, members of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation gang, targeted the young girl less than 24 hours after she had run away from home. Williams taken to an apartment in Hunts Point where she was held captive.

According to case investigators at the time, Blast and Franco tortured the young girl before stabbing her repeatedly. Realizing she was still alive after having been slashed by Blast, Franco then stomped on the child’s neck until it was broken. Prior to being killed, Blast had reportedly sexually assaulted the girl.

Following her death, Blast and Franco packed the girl’s naked body into a box and dumped it near the Sheridan Expressway. Finally, they doused the box in gasoline, and set it ablaze. A passenger on a nearby train saw the flames and called 911. Blast and Franco were apprehended shortly after the body was retrieved by police.

During the trial, Bronx Prosecutor William Hrabsky said of the crime: “The suffering that this poor child went through is beyond belief and puts this crime in the category of monstrous and barbarous.”

Despite pleading innocence in court and to media in later interviews, Blast had reportedly “bragged” about committing the crime to friends, some of whom would later testify against him on this basis. 

While a rape conviction was never pursued, as the girl’s body had been too severely mutilated for authorities to collect a DNA sample, Blast and Franco both received 25-to-life for the murder of Williams.

One week after the publication of the Reduxx article reporting on Blast’s discharge from parole, Reduxx received an email from an account infuriated that the piece had mentioned the allegations that Blast had raped Williams. The email was sent from an address beginning with the number ‘4300.’

The same day, a Twitter account surfaced with the handle @Code4300, impersonating Reduxx Editor-in-Chief Anna Slatz, using her photo and Reduxx branding. 

While posting highly disturbing, sexualized comments on Slatz, the account began following women’s rights advocates on Twitter in a clear effort to get their attention.

While posing as Slatz, the @Code4300 account claimed to be in a relationship with a trans-identifying male and called for a boycott against, and the banning of, Reduxx. The owner of the account also made several references to Blast and asserting his innocence, using both the female pseudonym and his birth name, Luis Morales.

The account also threatened Slatz, and claimed to have her home address. Within 24 hours, it began cycling through impersonating other female contributors and supporters of Reduxx, using their names and profile photos to post disturbing content. 

Shortly after, @Code4300 was linked to an Instagram account similarly utilizing the ‘4300’ moniker — one which was quickly discovered to belong to Synthia China Blast.

On Instagram, Blast posted about being in a women’s shelter in 2020, which would have been shortly after he was paroled. Around that same time, he advertised a bed available in his apartment for rent, requesting only “men into trans women or women into trans women” apply.

While using the @Code4300 moniker on Twitter, Blast had engaged in repeated calls for violence against women, and in particular women who are critical of the notion that men can become women. 

“TERFs are not only anti-trans they are also anti-men. We must eradicate them before their diseases spread to our young children,” read the account’s description, which has since been changed, along with the username and profile photo. 

Since being exposed as running the account on Twitter, Blast has continued to assert his innocence of the crimes he was convicted of — a trend that follows his previous claims to media that he was wrongfully accused. 

In addition to calling for violence against women, the author made statements suggesting he believes that trans-identifying males are superior to women.

Prior to engaging in the targeted harassment of Reduxxstaff and women associated with the publication, @Code4300 claimed to be in favor of “abolishing prisons,” and celebrated both the shooting of a police officer and the stabbing of a Corrections Officer at Rikers Island.

In the following days, a second Twitter account claiming to be Blast was created using the name HuntingTERFs.

“For the record, my name is Synthia China Blast and I was wrongfully convicted of murder,” reads one post from November 10.

The second account also boasted that another convictionwould see Blast placed in a women’s prison. “If I’m ever again arrested, I go with the females now. No more men’s prison for me,” @KillingTime1235 wrote.

The account appears primarily dedicated to posting screenshots of female-committed crimes, with the intention of proving that “cis women are extremely violent and dangerous.”

In 2014, prominent transgender actor Laverne Cox appeared in a now-deleted promotional video produced by a trans activist prison reform lobbying organization, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP). 

In the video, Cox stated his support for the SRLP and the organization’s Prisoner Advisory Committee (PAC). He then read a letter from Blast which appealed to viewers’ sympathies and described his situation while incarcerated as a “denial of basic human rights.”

Cox later distanced himself from Blast after learning more details about the crimes he was convicted for.

In 2019, one year after Blast was first paroled, he appeared in a video posted to the SRLP’s official Facebook page, and was described as a Political Action Committee member and intern.

“

I came from being in a jail cell to learning about SRLP and its mission, who Sylvia Rivera, as a person, actually was, and … about Marsha P. Johnson, and I was definitely hooked into this movement,” Blast said.

“We all have a voice. And we live in a time, today, where that voice is finally being heard. We haven’t reached that milestone yet. We are all screaming together, and now they are finally listening,” Blast says, then promoting the SRLP as a center which can help transgender people change their names and legal identity. 

“Whenever I find a transgender person, I ask them: Do you know about the Sylvia Rivera Law Project?”

Reduxx previously revealed another trans-identifying male convict who was specifically selected by the SRLP to participate in trans advocacy and prison reform campaigning. Xena Grandichelli, born Jeffrey Willsea, is a convicted child sex offender who has performed community outreach services for the SRLP. In 1994, Grandichelli pleaded guilty to 11 counts of sexual abuse involving a 3 year-old girl.

Grandichelli partnered with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) and was designated as a Movement Building Teammember. In a 2015 letter posted to the SRLP website, Grandichelli described how team members from the organization actively worked to recruit him while he was still incarcerated for sexually abusing a child.

Despite providing advocacy for convicted child abusers, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project receives the financial support of several notable institutions and figures, including the Stonewall Community Foundation and the trans-identifying medical and pharmaceutical millionaire Martine Rothblatt. 

Blast is not the only trans-identified murderer who has been utilizing social media to threaten women critical of gender ideology. 

In 2021, it was discovered that Swedish murdererMagdala Johansson had been targeting Twitter accounts who had posted details about his grisly crime.

Johansson, born Kristoffer, was convicted in 2013 of the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend, 20-year-old Vatchareeya Bangsuan. Johansson stabbed Bangsuan to death before dismembering her and scattering her body parts in a nearby forested area. Some sources have also reported that Johansson masturbated over Bangsuan’s mutilated corpse, spreading his semen on her body parts.

Johansson was ultimately sentenced to 14 years, which was overturned on appeal to 10. He served just 6 years before being released in 2020.

Much like Blast, on Twitter and Instagram, Johansson called himself a “TERF Hunter,” and made misogynistic posts about women critical of gender ideology, sometimes while showing off his gun collection.

By Genevieve Gluck Genevieve is the Co-Founder of Reduxx, and the outlet's Chief Investigative Journalist with a focused interest in pornography, sexual predators, and fetish subcultures. She is the creator of the podcast Women's Voices, which features news commentary and interviews regarding women's rights.

[ameliacareful]

Thinking a lot about the call to abolish the police.

Things that influence my thinking—my biases. I’m old. Born in 1959. With all the best will in the world, I’m shaped by that. I’m white. Cops like me. I’ve never had a threatening interaction with one.

If I were European, I’d be a moderate. I believe in nationalized health care. In the US, I’m pretty hard left. I want gun control.

Police often act as judge and jury. Police forces across the US have been targeted for infiltration by white supremacy. If the police ever were an organization that protected and served, that image has been pretty severely damaged by videos of a cop macing a child or a cop pushing a 75 year old to the ground and cops leaving him unconscious and bleeding as they marched past. Cops are at war with the public they feel doesn’t understand.

Large portions of society distrust cops so much that they don’t call them for help out of fear they’ll be targeted. They solve their problems other ways. As rates of violence around the world fall (the 20th Century, with WWI and WW2, the violence and genocide in places like Cambodia, Armenia, and Rwanda, was still the century with the least likelihood of dying by violence to date and this century is even less violent) and yet police forces have been militized. There is a tendency when someone gives you a hammer to view every problem as a nail.

The police murder innocent people.

Full stop. They murder. They are showing us that many of them consider it their right to murder.

Should police be abolished?

I believe that anarchy can work.

The call to abolish the police is a call for anarchy. Despite its name, anarchy is not a call for chaos, and it doesn’t mean no rules, just as calls to abolish the cops doesn’t mean no rules. Anarchy is a political movement that is fundamentally optimistic about people. There are functional anarchic systems and my favorite example is the Old Order Amish. Yeah, the folk in buggies and bonnets. Although the Amish are subject to laws where they live, they tend to self police rather than turning to law enforcement. They are pacifists. They have a strong culture of non-violence. (They aren’t protesting, the people you see protesting are Mennonite, a kind of cousin religion to Amish. Many Mennonites own cars.). They use social pressure, the most famous being shunning, to punish. Not prison or jail. And yet, they have big problems with domestic abuse of both wives and children. They have issues with rape of women and children. They’re patriarchal and this means that the women and children in this situation have no recourse within the community because the authorities are judge and enforcement.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something from Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel. It’s pop science/sociology and there has been a lot of pushback. There’s a lot Diamond got wrong—for example, his analysis of Easter Island has been sharply criticized. He postulated that a big reason that Europeans were so successful is geographic (i.e., luck, not intrinsic ‘betterness’) and that feels right to me. He also talked about law.

He has friends in New Guinea and they were doing something one day that involved being away from a city in New Guinea. Diamond was inept compared to his friends and one of them asked why the US was so powerful (with the implication being a friendly’when you, a shining example of American exceptionalism, are so inept). New Guinea has laws but in practice, according to Diamond, they’re socially feud based. So if you steal from me, assault me, or murder me, I or my family resolve it by robbing, assaulting, or murdering you or one of yours. The problem with a society organized around this kind of justice is that once I’ve exacted my justice, you are usually likely to feel wronged and the feud continues.

Diamond felt that one of the things that was important was that we had off-loaded justice to a process. That people were socialized to use the courts instead of take care of it themselves. This does not particularly improve the chance of justice—witness black incarceration rates and innocent people on death row, the under reporting of rape as a crime and all the injustice in our society.

Maybe it reduces violence.

We describe areas with gangs or cartels as ‘lawless’ but often they have very strict laws. They just aren’t laws that are enforced by police.

I am a socialist, not an anarchist. I believe in a social system that is heavily shaped by government, where there is a government infra-structure of support. I don’t trust my neighbors enough to put them in charge. My neighbors are mostly capitalist. They are mostly white. I’m in LA so most of them did not vote for Trump but a few of them did. I used to live in Texas and I am far more frightened of white guys doing open carry than I am even of the police because as much of a murdering disaster as the cops are, over-emotional untrained white guys with guns are scary. Abolish the police seems to me to leave the world open for anarchists and the people who created the Autonomous Capital Hill Zone in Seattle which I admire. But I fear the anarchists, queers, and progressives of Seattle are the minority.

Anarchy is hard. It requires a strong moral imperative to do the right thing. It requires internal morality rather than external religious or social morality.

De-militarize the police. Do something about qualified immunity. Spend less money on police and more on addiction, mental health, community infrastructure, change the system. The 57 cops who resigned from the tactical force in support of the officers who were suspended and charged, apparently many did so at the behest of their union and I’m a union supporter but not when it’s in support of crime. Cops who put the thin blue line above protect and serve are cops who believe cops lives are more important than community lives. We have, as a society, rendered our judgement of following orders or supporting others—it is not a justification in war, nor is it a justification in murder.

Policing needs to be examined to its very core. But I am at this moment for reform, not abolition.

However, I am old. White. Female. Middle class. And not optimistic about my fellow humans. I’m also possibly wrong. So I’m putting my thoughts out to hear how others think.

[afrosocialism]

A letter to the Sanderbots

Dear Sanderbots, stop being so fucking pathetic when actual leftists or black folk/POCs criticize your leader. I’m so tried of you Sanders cult followers not accepting any criticism of your leader.

“He’s a socialist…” FULL STOP. He’s a social democrat. A liberal. Socialism is anti-capitalist, not reforming capitalism. That is what Bernie Sanders is. He wants reform capitalism. We should learn from 150 years that social democracy exists to make the capitalist state more comfortable. I’ve fucking warned y’all about fauxcialist liberals, and Sanders is one of them. He barely has any socialist ideas. All it’s nothing but social programs. They’re fine, but they ain’t socialist because you’re still living under capitalism with these programs intact. They’re essentially just scraps. Yes, socialist countries like Cuba has social programs, but it was already implemented as part of the socialist system, rather than passing out legislation for em. Also, he’s essentially anti-socialist because he opposes Castroism and Chavismo. He called Hugo Chavez a dead communist dictator and supported US intervention in Venezuela. Another thing, he never attacks capitalism, he goes like reforms, reforms, reforms. He ain’t anti-capitalist, he’s an European style social democrat and liberal.

“But he’s going to bring change to America and…” Shut up. All he’s gonna do is bring FDR style reforms to America. Another thing, how can you consider a man radical when he, in all those in years in the Senate, never/barely criticize the leaders running this country? He barely went after Bush with his mess and so with Obama. Before anyone say anything about Iraq, he only opposes it because Bush was doing it. He oked Clinton war crimes and same with Obama. He’s ok with imperialism along its a Democrat. He also was thinking about working with Trump, but idk what happened with that. We need to understand that social democrats only bring partial change. How many social democracies became socialist nations without a revolution? When social democrats took over the Weimar Republic, what happened? They collaborated with the far right militias and destroyed actual socialists, which includes Rosa Luxembourg. They exists to pacify socialists or allow a peaceful transition to capitalism and (at times) fascism.

“He marched with MLK…” Full stop. I’m so tired of that shit. Y’all really wanna push white saviors on us. This happened over 50 fucking years ago. There were people who marched in that march who changed their political perspective and some who moved to the right. His involvement in the march doesn’t earn him any entitlement. Another thing your civil rights leader was the senator of whiter than white Vermont. I wonder how many times he stood for black people in Vermont who’s 1% of the population, but 10% of the prison population. He barely wants to do something about racism, only when it’s convenient for him. Why he’s so easily went after Trump because Trump is the racist one. He doesn’t support reparations for slavery. He never spoke of racism under Obama, Clinton, or even Bush. He opposes open borders and mum about abolishing ICE. Also, how many times he stood for black victims of institutional violence and why he only goes to predominantly white liberal cities and neighborhoods? It makes me wonder. He barely appeals to the underclass, as he’s seen talking to white petty bourgs. “But he got nonwhite voters and supporters and…” So does the Clintons. Bill appealed to white Southerners. These two locked up numerous black people. They stole funds meant for Haiti and made money from it. It doesn’t mean shit.

“He’s not white, he’s Jewish” STFU. He can be both. Jew is an ethnicity, not a monolithic race. You can be of any race and be Jewish. There black Jews, Brown Jews, Yellow Jews, and white passing Jews. Him being a Jew, doesn’t limit his whiteness. He benefits from whiteness regardless. He’ll never face the marginalization of nonwhite Jews. Before anyone says anything, go to Israel and see how they’re treated, especially Black Jews. Making people like him the face of Jews, erases nonwhite Jews.

“Do you want x candidate to win?” What fuck is this logic. I ain’t supporting x candidate. I’m not telling you who to vote. Just because I don’t trust Bernie, doesn’t mean the other options are better. All these politicians that ran or running against him like Killary, Trump, Harris, Booker are all fucking trash and don’t deserve support. You think I give a fuck who you support? No. If you gonna support Bernie, go and leave me the fuck alone.

Another thing I wanna add is his cult supporters. They are fucking garbage. They’ll be like social justice and shit, but critique Bernie and they’ll be like the Trump Supporters of the left. For example, when black women went after Bernie after realizing he’s another charlatan, his supporters went after em like a bunch of rabid dogs. When status being shared of Azaelia Banks rightfully critiquing Sanders of only opposing racism when it’s Trump, his supporters got so fucking offended, citing that a black (now formerly) Trump supporter said this. However, her vote was a case of misguidedness and she acknowledged her mistakes, but they wanna go hard on her, but not their Kave Klan Kin who supported Trump and will benefit from him. Some of them even supported Trump when Bernie lost. One thing, Bernie bros fuck off. I don’t support Sanders. Fuck him, and if you gonna be an ass kisser for him, fuck you too. Fuck you, you waste of gentrified hipster avacado toasts.

Here’s the receipts for anyone who disputes this:

https://newrepublic.com/article/149378/bernie-sanders-not-left

https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/16/blood-traces-bernies-iraq-war-hypocrisy/

http://venezuelatoday.net/u-s-senator-bernie-sanders-hugo-chavez-is-just-a-dead-communist-dictator/

https://fusion.tv/video/255113/bernie-sanders-reparations-answer-iowa-forum/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/vtdigger.org/2018/10/22/racial-disparity-vermont-prisons-little-changed-report-says/amp/

[newstfionline]

Brazil looks toward iron-fisted rule

By Anthony Faiola and Marina Lopes, Washington Post, October 26, 2018

RIO DE JANEIRO--Brazil emerged from the shadow of a military dictatorship more than three decades ago, leaving behind an era stained by torture and extrajudicial killings. Now, this nation is on the cusp of electing a former army captain who has pledged to bring his own brand of iron-fisted rule into the presidency.

The front-runner in Sunday’s runoff election, Jair Bolsonaro, 63, has waxed poetic about the generals who led Brazil from 1964 to 1985--their biggest flaw, he argues, is that they didn’t kill enough dissidents. If he wins, he has vowed to stock his cabinet with retired officers, throw leftists in jail, outlaw land-rights groups, weed liberal thought from schools and encourage police to use lethal force.

An iron fist, though, is exactly what some Brazilians seem to want. Confronting runaway crime, a sluggish economy and enormous political corruption, almost a third of voters, polls show, have grown nostalgic for the dictatorship. They portray it as a period of law and order when Latin America’s largest nation thrived.

At a rally in Rio de Janeiro last Sunday, Bolsonaro supporters wildly cheered a passing vehicle carrying heavily armed soldiers--part of an offensive to pacify this violent city’s slums. “Woo-hoo! Let’s go boys! Get them!” yelled one woman, wearing a T-shirt portraying Bolsonaro as Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather.

“It really is frustrating, man,” the Brazilian singer Geraldo Azevedo, who was imprisoned and tortured for 41 days during the dictatorship, told the audience during a performance last weekend. “I was jailed twice during the dictatorship. I was tortured. You don’t know what torture is. All this joy you’re feeling now will disappear, you know that? Brazil is going to become awful if this man wins.”

In 1999, Bolsonaro--then a fringe lawmaker--delivered a fiery speech in which he pledged, if he ever became president, to call on the military to take control of the nation on “Day One.” He has since walked back those words--and pledged frequently in the past few months to uphold democracy.

But his son and adviser--the lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro--recently suggested that soldiers could shut down the supreme court if there were any attempts to prevent his father from taking office. Jair Bolsonaro won a first round of voting this month and is now polling ahead of his leftist opponent, Fernando Haddad, by 12 percentage points as they go into the runoff this weekend.

From the beginning, Bolsonaro’s candidacy has been steeped in militarism. His running mate, Hamilton Mourão, is a retired four-star general infamous for his criticism of democracy. Last year, at a speech in Brasilia, Bolsonaro lamented the state of Brazilian democracy, saying, “When we look with fear and sadness at what is happening, we say, ‘Why don’t we just tear this thing down’?”

If he wins, Bolsonaro is expected to appoint military men to head the ministries of defense, infrastructure and education. Those ministries have a combined budget of $66 billion, or a fifth of the government’s overall spending.

For education minister, analysts expect Bolsonaro to tap retired Gen. Alessio Souto, who has defended “military intervention” to “put democracy back on an appropriate track.” He is expected to aggressively push Bolsonaro’s plan for “no-party” schools--a program that would effectively ban teachers from espousing political views in classrooms.

“It basically serves as a right-wing ideological patrol, because they’ve come up with this narrative that teachers and professors in Brazil are always trying to indoctrinate children as leftists,” said Guilherme Casarões, a comparative politics professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo.

Brazil’s right-wing dictatorship was notably less murderous than those in neighboring Argentina and Chile. Nevertheless, at least 434 people were killed or “disappeared” while the military was in charge. Torture techniques included holding mock crucifixions of dissidents.

Unlike some other regimes in Latin America, Brazil’s military rulers attempted to keep up a veneer of democracy after taking over in 1964. The presidency rotated among a cast of generals, and Congress remained open, though it largely operated as a rubber stamp. Elections were rigged, and most political parties were abolished.

The dictatorship led to higher levels of economic inequality as workers’ rights declined, the minimum wage remained low and salaries rose for the top layer of society. Corruption was rampant, but press censorship meant the public rarely found out about scandals. Speaking out about wrongdoing could lead to prison, torture and death.

“Bolsonaro is selling the idea that there was no corruption under the regime. But there was corruption, and a lot of it, just none that the press could denounce,” said Jorge Ferreira, a historian who has written books on the dictatorship.

Critics fear Bolsonaro would call on the generals for support in the event of a constitutional crisis or attempted impeachment. But it is not clear whether they would answer. Experts say the institution has matured since the military left power in 1985--and its leaders have little interest in political intervention.

The military remains one of the country’s most respected institutions. About 78 percent of Brazilians trust the armed forces, compared with 31 percent who feel the same way about Congress.

“While Brazilian politics fell into moral ruin, the military remained on the outside, they didn’t engage, and conquered the highest levels of prestige and confidence of the people. All this has benefited Bolsonaro as a candidate,” said Paulo Chagas, a retired Brazilian army general and politician.

Brazil’s era of democracy has been tarnished by the corruption and mismanagement of its political class. Since 1985, two elected presidents have been impeached, and a former leader has gone to jail. The sitting president, Michel Temer, is under indictment for alleged money laundering, a charge he denies.

At the same time, millions of Brazilians have become increasingly afraid. Homicide rates here have jumped to record levels as urban slums have turned into gangland killing fields.

Some experts say that Bolsonaro’s tough-on-crime proposals--including encouraging police to use lethal force against criminals and relaxing gun laws so civilians can fight fire with fire--will only intensify the bloodbath, particularly in the country’s shantytowns.

But even there, many are clamoring for the kind of iron-fisted policy that Bolsonaro has promised.

“I’m voting for him because he will combat the drug trade,” said Osvaldo da Torres, 60, an evangelical pastor who ministers in Rocinha, Rio’s largest slum. “Every day, someone around here is dying. It’s very important that people who have guns know that if they commit a crime, they will be punished severely.”

“He used to be in the military,” Torres said. “He understands.”

[rotationalsymmetry]

Oh, that’s what the dress thing is about.

You know, I think it’s really fucking annoying when Democrats don’t stand by their alleged convictions. When they refuse to stand by “defund the police” and instead use “tough on crime” language. When they refuse to stand by the vision of a less militaristic America and talk about wanting America to be “strong”. I think it’s annoying when they refuse to challenge the idea that the stock market doing well is the same as average people having secure, well-paying jobs, and I think it’s annoying when they buy into the idea that people should have to earn necessities through working for them, rather than things like food and shelter and health care and education being inherent rights. I think it’s annoying when they play up their Christianity to avoid offending religious conservatives, when they talk about how abortion should be “rare” to avoid offending conservatives, when they engage in the pretense that racism is primarily a result of poor rural whites getting left behind (granted, poor rural people getting left behind is a very real problem, it’s just… not why Trump got the election in 2016. Nor is that problem fixable by backing off on things like queer rights and immigrant rights. Anyways.)

So when a Democrat does the opposite of that and makes a clear, unambiguous, and indeed controversial statement about what they’re for? That’s a good thing.

AOC can’t win for losing. She’s simultaneously dismissed for being from a working class background (“go back to being a bartender”) and also demonized whenever she wears clothes that are typical of and appropriate for someone in her position. It’s bullshit and regressive, and it’s hard to imagine it’s not connected to her being a woman of color.

AOC isn’t some profound traitor to the cause or whatever. She’s not a demon. She’s not our savior either. She’s a human being like the rest of us with strengths and weaknesses who is attempting to make a certain type of change through the political process. People who are in favor of making that sort of change through those sorts of methods tend to like her and talk her up and that’s good and appropriate and consistent with their worldview. (And…while there are limits to the political process, there are also matters of life and death significance that happen though it whether you are engaging with it or not. There is a difference between someone like AOC being in the House and someone like, idk, whatever conservative is trying to pass the worst fucking laws right now.) People who are cynical about the method do best to give her as little attention as possible and focus on other things — union organizing, protesting, mutual aid, guerilla gardening, sharing info about where to get textbooks for free, figuring out how to show Bezos’ debit card number in Times Square, whatever.

(Obviously I am not advocating doing anything illegal because that would be breaking the law, and breaking the law would be breaking the law. Ahem.)

Realistically most people aren’t radical, and it is as irrational to expect progressives to be radicals as it is for progressives to expect radicals to have the same politics as them.

If you’re following a lot of people who aren’t personal friends and also don’t share your worldview, you’ve got a call to make over whether it’s worth putting up with them expressing opinions based on a different worldview. If there’s someone you have a good relationship with that has a different opinion on the effectiveness of the political process than you, or who thinks it’s ineffective but is stanning AOC anyways because sometimes people are inconsistent, maybe have a direct one on one conversation about that. But there’s really no reason for people on the left to get mad that AOC is making a political statement that at least approximately corresponds to our priorities.

(And there is no way to criticize someone who is making a political statement while doing a normal politician thing that she was going to do in any case, for, you know, wearing an expensive dress or whatever, without it coming across as you’re actually criticizing the statement.)

Sometimes people come to radical politics by a slide from liberal to progressive to radical. (I would have thought that was the only way, but from what some people say on tumblr I guess some people go straight from being raised conservative to radical with no in between? And some people do get raised radical. Anyways.) I think when people slide in the other direction, which can happen, it’s because of things like lack of community support and perceived ineffectiveness. Yelling at progressives isn’t really going to change those issues. Focusing on making the left strong and interconnected and effective is.

“Strong,” just shoot me now. Sigh.

There are some big differences between liberals/progressives and radicals/leftists. I think the core one is liberals/progressives tend to basically trust the system. I think it is actually really important for people with radical politics who were raised trusting the system, myself included, to intentionally unlearn that trust. Maybe for some people that involves a period of demonizing politicians to overwrite a basic tendency to trust the politicians that are on “your side”, idk, maybe this is somehow helpful for someone. For me I think it’s more effective though to take a mellower approach, and go back to core values. AOC is advocating wealth redistribution, and that is a value I share. I also have values that are not anywhere near the Overton window: open borders, land back, police and prison abolition, abolishment of corporations and nation states and capitalism and very specifically the United States as an imperial power, and I’m not sure how many of those AOC is in favor of on a personal level (I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s for open borders anyways), but definitely there is only so far the political process is going to be able to go in moving towards those goals. So regardless of what I think of her as a person or politician, there are some things that she’s not going to be with me on, and that’s ok. Most people aren’t. I can focus on the ones that are, and with the rest I can either focus on other values that we share or I can let them go their own way when they’re not actively standing in opposition to what I’m for. It’s ok.

It’s important to not swing back and forth between “this politician is amazing and the best and is going to change everything for the better” and “this politician is the literal worst” (when they’re actually better/less bad than most.) It’s important to see differences. There is a narrow range of what a given politician is likely to be able to do, and they act within those ranges and can only be sensibly evaluated within those ranges. If you want to go “but fuck all politicians though” that’s fine, there’s something to be said for seeing politicians as a class whose interests don’t align with the interests of people with less power — like landlords, like cops, like bosses. But if that’s your take there’s still no real reason to single out one specific politician who happens to be 1. a woman of color and 2. for that class, about as non-shitty as they come.

I mean, you can fundamentally not like bosses and still notice when a boss who’s a woman of color gets a lot more hate directed at her than the white male bosses, and find that kinda weird and concerning and probably reflective of how people saying those things treat women of color who aren’t in positions of relative power. Same for politicians.

Like yeah “we’re not going to girlboss our way out of this one” sure, but also…how relatively powerful women get treated and how powerless women get treated is not entirely unrelated. And if I can’t dance I don’t want to be a part of your revolution. (=misogyny (and racism and the intersection thereof) within leftism is still a problem actually.)

Anyways: you’ll notice I almost never post about politicians including AOC on here. I’m certainly not going to start stanning her. I don’t think that’s constructive. Democracy, to the extent that it’s a useful concept, isn’t about which horse you back. It’s about organizing and coming together and coalition building and taking to the streets and an awful lot of phone calls and mailing parties and meetings and talking and listening and research and attempting to translate legal text into something that makes sense and figuring out how to phrase things persuasively and supportive infrastructure like local newspapers and hashtags and days of action and petitions and saving your elected officials’ phone numbers in your contacts and showing up. (And so much fucking fundraising, endless fucking fundraising.) It’s often more about stanning laws and policy concepts (“green new deal”, “Medicare for all” etc) than stanning politicians. People who focus on politicians do not know how to do democracy IMO.

[96thdayofrage]

My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage.

My great-grandfather was given the nickname Nwaubani, which means “from the Bonny port region,” because he had the bright skin and healthy appearance associated at the time with people who lived near the coast and had access to rich foreign foods. (This became our family name.) In the late nineteenth century, he carried a slave-trading license from the Royal Niger Company, an English corporation that ruled southern Nigeria. His agents captured slaves across the region and passed them to middlemen, who brought them to the ports of Bonny and Calabar and sold them to white merchants. Slavery had already been abolished in the United States and the United Kingdom, but his slaves were legally shipped to Cuba and Brazil. To win his favor, local leaders gave him their daughters in marriage. (By his death, he had dozens of wives.) His influence drew the attention of colonial officials, who appointed him chief of Umujieze and several other towns. He presided over court cases and set up churches and schools. He built a guesthouse on the land where my parents’ home now stands, and hosted British dignitaries. To inform him of their impending arrival and verify their identities, guests sent him envelopes containing locks of their Caucasian hair.

Funeral rites for a distinguished Igbo man traditionally include the slaying of livestock—usually as many cows as his family can afford. Nwaubani Ogogo was so esteemed that, when he died, a leopard was killed, and six slaves were buried alive with him. My family inherited his canvas shoes, which he wore at a time when few Nigerians owned footwear, and the chains of his slaves, which were so heavy that, as a child, my father could hardly lift them. Throughout my upbringing, my relatives gleefully recounted Nwaubani Ogogo’s exploits. When I was about eight, my father took me to see the row of ugba trees where Nwaubani Ogogo kept his slaves chained up. In the nineteen-sixties, a family friend who taught history at a university in the U.K. saw Nwaubani Ogogo’s name mentioned in a textbook about the slave trade. Even my cousins who lived abroad learned that we had made it into the history books.

Last year, I travelled from Abuja, where I live, to Umujieze for my parents’ forty-sixth wedding anniversary. My father is the oldest man in his generation and the head of our extended family. One morning, a man arrived at our gate from a distant Anglican church that was celebrating its centenary. Its records showed that Nwaubani Ogogo had given an armed escort to the first missionaries in the region—a trio known as the Cookey brothers—to insure their safety. The man invited my father to receive an award for Nwaubani Ogogo’s work spreading the gospel. After the man left, my father sat in his favorite armchair, among a group of his grandchildren, and told stories about Nwaubani Ogogo.

“Are you not ashamed of what he did?” I asked.

“I can never be ashamed of him,” he said, irritated. “Why should I be? His business was legitimate at the time. He was respected by everyone around.” My father is a lawyer and a human-rights activist who has spent much of his life challenging government abuses in southeast Nigeria. He sometimes had to flee our home to avoid being arrested. But his pride in his family was unwavering. “Not everyone could summon the courage to be a slave trader,” he said. “You had to have some boldness in you.”

My father succeeded in transmitting to me not just Nwaubani Ogogo’s stories but also pride in his life. During my school days, if a friend asked the meaning of my surname, I gave her a narrative instead of a translation. But, in the past decade, I’ve felt a growing sense of unease. African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather. I read arguments for paying reparations to the descendants of American slaves and wondered whether someone might soon expect my family to contribute. Other members of my generation felt similarly unsettled. My cousin Chidi, who grew up in England, was twelve years old when he visited Nigeria and asked our uncle the meaning of our surname. He was shocked to learn our family’s history, and has been reluctant to share it with his British friends. My cousin Chioma, a doctor in Lagos, told me that she feels anguished when she watches movies about slavery. “I cry and cry and ask God to forgive our ancestors,” she said.

The British tried to end slavery among the Igbo in the early nineteen-hundreds, though the practice persisted into the nineteen-forties. In the early years of abolition, by British recommendation, masters adopted their freed slaves into their extended families. One of the slaves who joined my family was Nwaokonkwo, a convicted murderer from another village who chose slavery as an alternative to capital punishment and eventually became Nwaubani Ogogo’s most trusted manservant. In the nineteen-forties, after my great-grandfather was long dead, Nwaokonkwo was accused of attempting to poison his heir, Igbokwe, in order to steal a plot of land. My family sentenced him to banishment from the village. When he heard the verdict, he ran down the hill, flung himself on Nwaubani Ogogo’s grave, and wept, saying that my family had once given him refuge and was now casting him out. Eventually, my ancestors allowed him to remain, but instructed all their freed slaves to drop our surname and choose new names. “If they had been behaving better, they would have been accepted,” my father said.

The descendants of freed slaves in southern Nigeria, called ohu, still face significant stigma. Igbo culture forbids them from marrying freeborn people, and denies them traditional leadership titles such as Eze and Ozo. (The osu, an untouchable caste descended from slaves who served at shrines, face even more severe persecution.) My father considers the ohu in our family a thorn in our side, constantly in opposition to our decisions. In the nineteen-eighties, during a land dispute with another family, two ohu families testified against us in court. “They hate us,” my father said. “No matter how much money they have, they still have a slave mentality.” My friend Ugo, whose family had a similar disagreement with its ohu members, told me, “The dissension is coming from all these people with borrowed blood.”

I first became aware of the ohu when I attended boarding school in Owerri. I was interested to discover that another new student’s family came from Umujieze, though she told me that they hardly ever visited home. It seemed, from our conversations, that we might be related—not an unusual discovery in a large family, but exciting nonetheless. When my parents came to visit, I told them about the girl. My father quietly informed me that we were not blood relatives. She was ohu, the granddaughter of Nwaokonkwo.

[nickyschneiderus]

What makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s platform so progressive?

With the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and perhaps Cynthia Nixon, 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most prominent socialist in America. While Nixon’s fame as an actress and Sanders’ tenure in the Senate predate the resurgence of socialism in America, the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez platform has become synonymous with the rise of socialism in American political life.

Ocasio-Cortez was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and she was the first DSA-endorsed candidate to break through in the 2016 midterm primaries after she defeated longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th district. It is unproductive, however, to view American socialism and DSA as monolithic.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez platform: Everything you need to know

There are active disagreements on a number of issues within DSA, and in fact, DSA and Ocasio-Cortez diverge on several issues. While all socialists believe in a class struggle between the rich and the poor, fighting oppression resulting from factors like race, class, and sexual orientation, and ownership of the means of production by workers, they often have different strategic ideas of what that can look like in our current political moment.

Rather than thinking about what Ocasio-Cortez believes as defining socialism, look at her policies as one vision of socialism.

And while Fox News might engage in scaremongering around her political beliefs and those to the left of Ocasio-Cortez might express frustration that her stances don’t go far enough, an examination of her positions reveals that she at once represents a radical shift in American politics and presents a set of ideas that are not so far off from the existing progressive wing of the Democratic party.

Healthcare

On her website, instead of the heading “Healthcare” Ocasio-Cortez uses “Medicare for All.” When Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress, she will be one of the most outspoken, unequivocal supporters of Medicare for All. Unlike some watered-down versions of universal healthcare floating around Washington, Ocasio-Cortez backs a system that would include “full dental, vision, and mental healthcare” and would allow “all people in the US to buy into a universal healthcare system.”

Medicare for All, articulated by figures like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, is also one single public program that is free at the point of service (no copays).

Like Randy “Ironstache” Bryce, who also supports Medicare for All, Ocasio-Cortez had a personal experience that led her to support truly universal healthcare.

Her father died after a prolonged battle with small-cell carcinoma in 2008. She told Rolling Stone about what it’s like to “have medical debt, but you also have credit card debt for the things that the medical debt doesn’t cover.” She added, “Unlike most members of Congress, I know what it’s like to be making $30 or $40K and have to pay almost $200 bucks a month for an $8,000 deductible.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Facebook

Immigration

Ocasio-Cortez made national headlines when she took time during the home stretch of her campaign to visit an ICE detention center on the Mexican border. Abolishing ICE has been a centerpiece of her immigration platform from early in her candidacy, and as a Latinx woman representing a largely Latinx district (New York’s 14th is 60 percent Latinx and 40 percent speak Spanish as their primary language), we can expect that she will continue to frame immigration as a signature issue in office.

Ocasio-Cortez begins describing her immigration platform by saying, “It’s time to abolish ICE, clear the path to citizenship, and protect the rights of families to remain together.” She goes on to compare the inhumane treatment of immigrants today to pre-Patriot Act immigration enforcement by INS and points out that today, ICE is not under the jurisdiction of the DOJ.

Some on the left say that abolishing ICE while giving its duties to an INS-style department wouldn’t fix the problem. Ocasio-Cortez has clarified this point in an interview with The Intercept, in which she said:

I’m starting to see, particularly, other congressional candidates say: ‘Let’s return to the INS.’ And that I want to make sure is not correct either. This is not about going back to the INS. This is really about, in some ways, we need to go all the way back to the root of our immigration policy to begin with… I think to reimagine our immigration services as part of an economic engine, as part of an accommodation to our own foreign policy aims and, where necessary, enforcement of serious crimes like human trafficking and so on.

This is an important point of discussion because, while the left is united in abolishing ICE, there is by no means an agreement about what the future of immigration policy looks like after that happens.

Jobs, housing, and the economy

Rent control has become such an important issue in crowded urban areas like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco that serious progressive politicians in those areas have come to view housing on par with the issues like jobs and the economy when shaping their platforms.

Ocasio-Cortez believes that “Housing is a Human Right,” and as such, she supports a low-income tax credit for housing, funding the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and looking at options like rent control and vacancy taxes as avenues to housing justice.

A federal jobs guarantee is one of Ocasio-Cortez’s signature economic priorities. For her, this would guarantee of a $15 minimum wage, full healthcare, and child/sick leave. While there is some support for a jobs guarantee on the left, leftists policy analysts like Matt Bruening have been critical of jobs guarantees for a variety of reasons: foremost among them being the requirement of “work” in an era of increased automation.

Her other major economic proposals represent a more unified vision from the left. Ocasio-Cortez wants to restore the Glass-Steagall Act and vigorously regulate Wall Street, she rejects the idea of a bank that is “too big to fail,” and she wants to revitalize the postal service by adding banking functions to the USPS, a policy proposal that generally enjoys approval from the left.

READ MORE:

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Criminal justice

The criminal justice priorities of Ocasio-Cortez read like a blueprint for solid left-wing reform. She sets ending mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and the school to prison pipeline as her broad goals.

As a means of achieving these goals, she favors legalizing marijuana, ending for-profit prisons, releasing non-violent drug offenders, bringing an end to cash bail, and demanding full investigations when an individual is killed by law enforcement.

Some strategic moves she wants to make in the legal system as she works toward these goals include better funding for public defenders and ending corporate arbitration.

Wikimedia Commons

Foreign policy

In terms of domestic policy, Ocasio-Cortez is in line with the broader left, however, she has received criticism from left-wing organizations, and specifically members of DSA, for her foreign policy. While DSA fully supports Palestinian liberation and the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement against Israeli occupation, Ocasio-Cortez has sometimes played both sides of the issue. It is worth noting that Bernie Sanders has faced similar criticism.

On other foreign policy matters, Ocasio-Cortez is more closely aligned with left-wing orthodoxy. She is a staunch critic of what she views as a colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico (where she has relatives). She has outlined a five-point plan that would mark a sweeping shift in the U.S. relationship with Puerto Rico, including a “Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico” that would involve “helping the island not only recover from Hurricane Maria but thrive with modern infrastructure and renewable energy systems.”

Ocasio-Cortez also advocates for what she calls a “Peace Economy.” In outlining her foreign policy platform, she states that she “believes that we must end the ‘forever war’ by bringing our troops home, and ending the air strikes that perpetuate the cycle of terrorism throughout the world.”

Women’s rights

As we’ve learned from the likes of Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), being a woman does not guarantee a progressive stance on women’s issues.

Ocasio-Cortez has one of the most intersectional and progressive platforms in American politics when it comes to women’s rights. Her priorities include equal pay, paid parental leave, decriminalization of sex work, and complete reproductive freedom.

In her policy proposals, she explicitly mentions protections for POC women, indigenous women, immigrant women, trans women, and Muslim women. She uses the forward-thinking phrase, “women of marginalized genders” when articulating her policies around patriarchal oppression.

Ocasio-Cortez outlines policy demands that call for “open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion, birth control, and family planning services, as well as access to adequate, affordable pre- and post-natal care, for all people, regardless of income, location, and education.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Facebook

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Higher education

“It’s now time to expand our national education system to include tuition-free public college and trade school,” Ocasio-Cortez writes, kicking off one of the most progressive higher education plans in American politics. In addition to tuition-free college, she also supports a “one-time policy of student debt cancellation” which involves federal loan forgiveness and the buy back of privately owned loans. She argues that such a movement would stimulate the economy, boosting GDP by hundreds of billions of dollars.

All told, the platform provides one vision of what a socialist movement in America could look like, even if it’s not completely in line with what some DSA members believe.

Editor’s note: This article is regularly updated for relevance.

from Ricky Schneiderus Curation https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-platform/

[algeroth]

My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage.

My great-grandfather was given the nickname Nwaubani, which means “from the Bonny port region,” because he had the bright skin and healthy appearance associated at the time with people who lived near the coast and had access to rich foreign foods. (This became our family name.) In the late nineteenth century, he carried a slave-trading license from the Royal Niger Company, an English corporation that ruled southern Nigeria. His agents captured slaves across the region and passed them to middlemen, who brought them to the ports of Bonny and Calabar and sold them to white merchants. Slavery had already been abolished in the United States and the United Kingdom, but his slaves were legally shipped to Cuba and Brazil. To win his favor, local leaders gave him their daughters in marriage. (By his death, he had dozens of wives.) His influence drew the attention of colonial officials, who appointed him chief of Umujieze and several other towns. He presided over court cases and set up churches and schools. He built a guesthouse on the land where my parents’ home now stands, and hosted British dignitaries. To inform him of their impending arrival and verify their identities, guests sent him envelopes containing locks of their Caucasian hair.

Funeral rites for a distinguished Igbo man traditionally include the slaying of livestock—usually as many cows as his family can afford. Nwaubani Ogogo was so esteemed that, when he died, a leopard was killed, and six slaves were buried alive with him. My family inherited his canvas shoes, which he wore at a time when few Nigerians owned footwear, and the chains of his slaves, which were so heavy that, as a child, my father could hardly lift them. Throughout my upbringing, my relatives gleefully recounted Nwaubani Ogogo’s exploits. When I was about eight, my father took me to see the row of ugba trees where Nwaubani Ogogo kept his slaves chained up. In the nineteen-sixties, a family friend who taught history at a university in the U.K. saw Nwaubani Ogogo’s name mentioned in a textbook about the slave trade. Even my cousins who lived abroad learned that we had made it into the history books.

Last year, I travelled from Abuja, where I live, to Umujieze for my parents’ forty-sixth wedding anniversary. My father is the oldest man in his generation and the head of our extended family. One morning, a man arrived at our gate from a distant Anglican church that was celebrating its centenary. Its records showed that Nwaubani Ogogo had given an armed escort to the first missionaries in the region—a trio known as the Cookey brothers—to insure their safety. The man invited my father to receive an award for Nwaubani Ogogo’s work spreading the gospel. After the man left, my father sat in his favorite armchair, among a group of his grandchildren, and told stories about Nwaubani Ogogo.

“Are you not ashamed of what he did?” I asked.

“I can never be ashamed of him,” he said, irritated. “Why should I be? His business was legitimate at the time. He was respected by everyone around.” My father is a lawyer and a human-rights activist who has spent much of his life challenging government abuses in southeast Nigeria. He sometimes had to flee our home to avoid being arrested. But his pride in his family was unwavering. “Not everyone could summon the courage to be a slave trader,” he said. “You had to have some boldness in you.”

My father succeeded in transmitting to me not just Nwaubani Ogogo’s stories but also pride in his life. During my school days, if a friend asked the meaning of my surname, I gave her a narrative instead of a translation. But, in the past decade, I’ve felt a growing sense of unease. African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather. I read arguments for paying reparations to the descendants of American slaves and wondered whether someone might soon expect my family to contribute. Other members of my generation felt similarly unsettled. My cousin Chidi, who grew up in England, was twelve years old when he visited Nigeria and asked our uncle the meaning of our surname. He was shocked to learn our family’s history, and has been reluctant to share it with his British friends. My cousin Chioma, a doctor in Lagos, told me that she feels anguished when she watches movies about slavery. “I cry and cry and ask God to forgive our ancestors,” she said.

The British tried to end slavery among the Igbo in the early nineteen-hundreds, though the practice persisted into the nineteen-forties. In the early years of abolition, by British recommendation, masters adopted their freed slaves into their extended families. One of the slaves who joined my family was Nwaokonkwo, a convicted murderer from another village who chose slavery as an alternative to capital punishment and eventually became Nwaubani Ogogo’s most trusted manservant. In the nineteen-forties, after my great-grandfather was long dead, Nwaokonkwo was accused of attempting to poison his heir, Igbokwe, in order to steal a plot of land. My family sentenced him to banishment from the village. When he heard the verdict, he ran down the hill, flung himself on Nwaubani Ogogo’s grave, and wept, saying that my family had once given him refuge and was now casting him out. Eventually, my ancestors allowed him to remain, but instructed all their freed slaves to drop our surname and choose new names. “If they had been behaving better, they would have been accepted,” my father said.

The descendants of freed slaves in southern Nigeria, called ohu, still face significant stigma. Igbo culture forbids them from marrying freeborn people, and denies them traditional leadership titles such as Eze and Ozo. (The osu, an untouchable caste descended from slaves who served at shrines, face even more severe persecution.) My father considers the ohu in our family a thorn in our side, constantly in opposition to our decisions. In the nineteen-eighties, during a land dispute with another family, two ohu families testified against us in court. “They hate us,” my father said. “No matter how much money they have, they still have a slave mentality.” My friend Ugo, whose family had a similar disagreement with its ohu members, told me, “The dissension is coming from all these people with borrowed blood.”

I first became aware of the ohu when I attended boarding school in Owerri. I was interested to discover that another new student’s family came from Umujieze, though she told me that they hardly ever visited home. It seemed, from our conversations, that we might be related—not an unusual discovery in a large family, but exciting nonetheless. When my parents came to visit, I told them about the girl. My father quietly informed me that we were not blood relatives. She was ohu, the granddaughter of Nwaokonkwo.

I’m not sure if this revelation meant much to me at the time. The girl and I remained friendly, though we rarely spoke again about our family. But, in 2000, another friend, named Ugonna, was forbidden from marrying a man she had dated for years because her family found out that he was osu. Afterward, an osufriend named Nonye told me that growing up knowing that her ancestors were slaves was “sort of like having the bogeyman around.” Recently, I spoke to Nwannennaya, a thirty-nine-year-old ohu member of my family. “The way you people behave is as if we are inferior,” she said. Her parents kept their ohuancestry secret from her until she was seventeen. Although our families were neighbors, she and I rarely interacted. “There was a day you saw me and asked me why I was bleaching my skin,” she said. “I was very happy because you spoke to me. I went to my mother and told her. You and I are sisters. That is how sisters are supposed to behave.”

Modernization is emboldening ohu and freeborn to intermarry, despite the threat of ostracization. “I know communities where people of slave descent have become affluent and have started demanding the right to hold positions,” Professor Okoro told me. “It is creating conflict in many communities.” Last year, in a town in Enugu State, an ohu man was appointed to a traditional leadership position, sparking mass protests. In a nearby village, an ohu man became the top police officer, giving the local ohu enough influence to push for reform. Eventually, they were apportioned a separate section of the community, where they can live according to whatever laws they please, away from the freeborn. “It will probably be a long time before all traces of slavery disappear from the minds of the people,” G. T. Basden, a British missionary, wrote of the Igbo in 1921. “Until the conscience of the people functions, the distinctions between slave and free-born will be maintained.”