#now I do think he is also very susceptible to widespread public opinion as a whole

[prince-liest]

I've seen a couple of fics where, through happenstance, some of the characters get turned back into humans while still in Hell (whether they lose their memories is flexible) and it just made me think about how this would be the absolute worst case scenario for both Alastor and Vox but in different ways.

Alastor would lose his power, he would no longer be able to hold himself seperate as an enigmatic figure of immense importance because he'd just be a human, a human surrounded by demons at that. He'd suddenly go from being the most dangerous person in the room to being the most powerless. It would be a horribly revealing situation for him.

Speaking of horribly revealing, Vox would just have a breakdown. I can't even imagine how he'd react other than a full shut-down because he's done such a good job hiding his secrets that most people don't even realise there's a secret there to be found, so to suddenly have it be revealed while also putting him back into immense dysphoria-- it would be very, very bad.

Ahhh, that's such a fun little AU idea! I think, as far as 666verse is concerned, you're on the ball with regard to Alastor, but... I actually think Vox might be relatively okay.

Vox wilts slightly. “...Jesus. I haven’t gone off like that since—Val, probably. Like, years and years ago. I forgot what it felt like to give a shit. Um. Thanks.”

There's this moment in the seventh fic, that refers to the fact that Vox has spent many decades coming into himself as a person and establishing his persona. It has genuinely been a very long time since he was worried about how people perceived himself or his gender, and while being trans is not something that he'd like to advertise, it's also not a secret he's desperately keeping, at least beyond the fact that it's nobody's fucking business.

Like, this is a guy who's fully into putting on a sexy maid dress and doing horrible, horrible roleplays with Valentino. Putting on the costume of femininity isn't discomfiting for him because at this point it is very much "a costume." Like I mentioned in the ask about nightmares, I think he fears and resents what his life used to be like... but just plain getting slapped back into his human body would be, y'know, dysphoria-inducing, but not even remotely close to being forced back into the role he used to play.

He would probably go straight back to Vee Tower and take advantage of the support network and power structure that he's spent decades building for himself! It would suck, it would be deeply uncomfortable, but I think he would be very practical about it and, honestly, in a more advantageous position than Alastor would be in his shoes because he's not just Vox - he's one of the Vees.

That's why it fucking blindsides him that Alastor's opinion could risk hurting him so much. He's long since forgotten that particular insecurity - and there are very, very few people whose opinion he thinks matters enough to drag it back up.

[rekkingcrew]

Devaronian Headcanons Actual

So, right, actual devaronian headcanons, ranging from charming to full on dystopic.  

Biological:

Devaronians have two livers and a resistance to all sorts of poisons- that’s just WASTEFUL if the planet isn’t throwing poison at you all the fucking time. Devaron is a toxic death trap, where the life forms have been engaged for millions of years in a toxin-based arms race. And devaronians are the winners.

Silver’s got anti-bacterial properties in laboratory situations. I think Devaronians are more disease resistant than a lot of other species.

Devaronians are listed as carnivorous. They seem like they’re resistant to most everything, so I’m sure they could choke down anything they needed to, but probably derive negligible nutrition from most plant matter. You might eat it for taste or digestion or something, but if it’s all you’ve got, you’re gonna starve.

Which I think means devaronian society probably stayed mobile and small in larger percentages than human society for a long time (not trying to minimize, like, human migratory and hunter gatherer populations, but by analogy if you look at meat as a percentage of diet of any given population group before, like, modern America, more meat equals more mobile), and that the devaronian analogue of the Neolithic revolution was a sort of proto-chemistry that opened up new techniques for long-term meat preservation, with permanent settlements springing up around places where you could get things like salt or caustic alkaline chemicals- though you’d still need people to go ranging.

Because devaronians CAN eat most any awful toxic thing, and because there’d be such a necessity to keep meat from rotting if you wanted to support a fixed population, a lot of traditional devaronian foods tend toward jerkying, pickling, and like, curing with lye. Lots of stuff that looks like lutefisk and hakarl, or some sort of meat kimchi. Lots of bitter, umami, sour, salty. Punctuations of insanely hot peppers. I think devaronians generally consider sweet an oddity and acquired taste.  

While this preservation isn’t a necessity for modern devaronians, I do think they still season things with stuff that’s poisonous to other species, and if your host isn’t paying attention, they might forget to take their arsenic shaker off the table. Eat at your own risk. Because of this and the crazy flora and fauna, outside of the big cities, there aren’t a lot of aliens who stay on planet.

Devaronian babies are all white and fuzzy until they’re about 5-7, when they blow their coats and start being sexually dimorphic. No textual reason. I just like this.

Space-faring, better farming science, and the importation of some alien plants, have allowed post-hyperdrive devaronians a more stable and balanced diet with a wider range of stuff from which they can extract digestible protein.

 Social:

 Because of a relative inability to digest plant matter, devaronian society has always been very susceptible to famine. Different societies developed different strategies for dealing with this (because universal planetary culture is every bit as silly as single biomes), but one strain that gained a lot of dominance was an intense matrilinear/matrilocal strategy where men old enough to make their own way were “encouraged” to leave. There’s a rich intellectual history of justifying this behavior, from the cold calculus that it just takes fewer men than anyone else to maintain population levels, to pontification on how men are just naturally inclined toward wandering, to people making the argument that a low ratio of men to women makes for a happier and more harmonious society. There’s also a rich intellectual history of saying this is monstrous. No society always agrees with itself, and different voices have had more or less dominance at different times throughout devaronian history.

Devaron’s population is sometimes as much as 75% female.

This is the planet of nannies. Seriously. With loads of men gone and women in charge of most of domestic business and governance, childcare is a major industry. Job sharing is super common to provide time off with young children. Partnership and group ownership of businesses by several women is common.

In fact, I’m going to say there’s a mobile childcare corps, replacing a number of more traditional structures as increasingly technological devaronian society centralized; one that has some fun analogies to western conceptions of the military, ie. it’s seen by a lot of people as an important rite of passage for young people, a sign of a strong moral character, and full of exactly the sort of people who make good leaders. Compassionate. Patient. Capable of managing others. It’s hard to get elected office in some places without a service record. Men are, of course, discouraged, due to their natural tendencies. When devaron’s history takes its more authoritarian swings, the MCC is often a very visible propaganda arm, with more obvious uniforms and a chokehold on education and indoctrination. During those times, you will, of course, be expected to thank corps members for their service. Society would not run without them.

In the best of times, they run loads of public crèches and help out immensely in private homes as well. Devaronians of all walks of life often have fond memories of their MCC workers, the way you would with a favorite aunt. Or sometimes they commiserate over stories of their strict MCC workers, like you would with a least favorite aunt. Swings and roundabouts.

The most dangerous term generally applied to men is “expendable.” The second is probably “reckless.” There’s a widespread prejudice that men, as wanderers, lack the long-term vision and planning capacity necessary to manage things (the same way human idiots are prone to saying things like they don’t think gay men have a stake in the future because they don’t have children, both the premise and its conclusion are suspect.) Men who stay on devaron are often funneled into dangerous work, whether that’s the military, or construction/demolition, or less than safe factory work. Overseers and “logistics officers” will tend to be female. In more conservative media, stories about industrial accidents will often be spun as men not listening to their more level-headed female supervisor. 

Most of the sources I found mentioned men sending money home to devaron. Headcanon: this is a semi-ritualized exchange with it’s own fun alien name (but for now I’ll just call it the Tithe, because I’m bad with alien names), it’s one of the foremost ways men can get social prestige, and the devaronian economy really relies on it. And it makes Devaron RICH. (American history side track: Tulsa’s “black wallstreet” was a really good example of outside money flowing into a relatively closed system).

Devaron, with early space faring, has had a few interstellar “Age of Sail” periods, where a lot of the Tithe coming in for prominent families straight up came from piracy, or “Devaronian Privateers”. Harsh on crime at home, and nominally against piracy abroad, there have been times Devaron has really profited by it.  There’s an ugly vein of thought along the lines of “it doesn’t matter if it happens to aliens.” Obviously opinions differ. The dashing star pirate remains a popular romantic archetype in devaronian culture (though he often comes to a tragic end). The devaronian pirate is an archetype in a number of other species’ cultures as well, but notably less romantic.

One of the major ways the Empire controls Devaron is controlling the flow of Tithe, requiring all transfers go through imperial channels and making it much harder to send money back to anyone suspected of dissent.

A lot of men remaining on devaron are locked in a vicious cycle of having limited potential to advance because they’re traditionally seen as less invested in the future; and in turn being less invested in the future because they’re locked out of moving forward into it. Leaving all together is often an enticing proposition. This is often pointed to as evidence of both lack of ambition and a natural tendency toward wandering.

Exploration and travel for men are often deeply romanticized- a real source of meaning in their lives and a chance for something better. There is loads of poetry, literature, music, and other popular culture about it. This is encouraged. A number of female devaronian writers and thinkers have expressed the same. These are often considered scandalous and bad influences.

Obviously there have been, across the vast expanse of history, loads of counter cultures, different fashions, and changing ideas. But these’ll be the big ones, and what people talk about when they say “traditional” devaronian culture.

Anyway, that’s my attempt to reconcile canon! Hope some of it is useful!

[martina-watts-bcu]

Social Changes Effect On The Fashion Industry

Cause and effect 

is a relationship between events or things, where one is the result of the other or others. This is a combination of action and reaction.

- Your Dictionary 2018

POLITICS AND POWER

According to Forbes, these are the top 10 most powerful people in the world in 2020:

Evident growth of nationalistic nations, how will this impact the fashion industry?

When nationalism first emerged, around the time of the French Revolution, patriots in that period opposed ‘fashion’, and most wanted people instead to dress simply and not waste money on frivolities. However, later in the 19th century, fashion and certain styles became a means by which to promote the nation. In my opinion, it will affect the fashion industry as the clothes we wear says a lot about our personality, occupation, wealth, and nationality, every item we decide to wear and how we present ourselves says something about our beliefs. For example, someone who is conservative is less likely to wear bright, edgy clothes and have tattoos and piercings.

If freedom of choice is controlled, will this also start to control the design industries?

I think the decisions of politicians and people in power can have an effect on what design industries produce, however I also think it could go the other way with people rebelling against the decisions that are made to try and control the public.

 The decisions of the top three most powerful people in the world in 2020 (according to Forbes),  Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump appear to be selfish as they have all made attempts to ensure they are in power for longer, rather than focusing on what would be best for the general public. The red hats supporting Trump with “make America great again” sewn onto the front has caused a massive divide between democrats and republicans, as they are boldly stating their political views to the rest of the world, which has caused many public arguments. This is an example of how people in power can influence the fashion industry, and may also represent the intentions of the people in power.

 “HyperNormalisation is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.”

-          Adam Curtis

Is the fashion industry controlled?

I believe that two of the main groups controlling the fashion industry is the consumers and publishers. As the demand for quick and cheap buying has increased, fast fashion has dominated the fashion industry, with new products constantly dropping, as opposed to the five seasons a year in which new season clothes used to be brought out. I also believe that the publishing industry has a massive influence as people who are in charge determine what goes into magazines, defining trends and what the key items are for the upcoming season. Celebrities, public figures and social media all have a big influence as well, with social media being a main tool to spread trends quickly, accessing a large number of the population.

Are trends a form of manipulation?

Although there are definitely manipulation techniques to encourage consumers to buy more and entice them onto online and into physical stores, I don’t think the trends themselves are manipulative, it’s the attempts after the trends are released that are manipulative.

 DIVISION OF WEALTH

“With reference to the World’s inequality report, as Barloni states (2019) “Economic inequality is widespread and to some extent inevitable. It is our belief, however, that if rising inequality is not properly monitored and addressed, it can lead to various sorts of political, economic, and social catastrophes. Especially in countries where the gap between the rich and poor is wider.”

How will this inequality effect the fashion industry?

It will affect the fashion industry if people address the difference in how much the wealthier population have in comparison to the poorer. For example, the people who have many expensive items that aren’t needed and the people who can’t afford the bare minimum.

THE WORLDS RICHEST 1% HAVE MORE THAN TWICE AS MUCH WEALTH AS 6.9 BILLION PEOPLE!

Will this 1% of the population control the fashion industry, and if so what will it be like in 2030?

I think the majority of the public will still have the main influence on the fashion industry as they are the consumers of the product, the supply and demand will be based on what the general public desires, which is why fast fashion has grown so rapidly.

CONSUMERISM

The rise of fast fashion- consumers’ unsustainable habits

Consumerism habits can be destructive and dangerous, with the demand for new clothes so often, it is leaving the planet with mountains of landfills full of our quick buys that get discarded after being worn once. In 2018, around 350,000 tonnes of clothing was sent to landfill, broken down, it works out that of every 30kg of clothing disposed of, only 4.5kg of it is recycled.

with the fast-fashion business model of “see now, buy now” to sell as much as possible, as fast as possible, it leaves no hope for the planet, unless consumers start thinking more sustainably, considering quality, longevity, and having a relationship with their clothes, rather than wearing them once and then throwing them away. Wearing your clothes nine months longer can help reduce your carbon footprint for the garment by 30 percent. 

INNOVATION

Artificial intelligence

Robotic technology- the use of computer controlled robots to perform manual tasks.

Boston Dynamics has created four robots:

·       Pick- enables box unloading from both single and mixed SKU pallets.

·       Spot- navigates terrain with unprecedented mobility, allowing you to automate routine inspection tasks and data capture safely, accurately, and frequently.

·       Handle-  unload trucks, build pallets, and move boxes

·        Atlas- humanoid robot, Atlas is a research platform designed to push the limits of whole-body mobility. Atlas’s advanced control system and state-of-the-art hardware give the robot the power and balance to demonstrate human-level agility.

Is there a future for fashion and textiles with growth of robotic technology?

I believe that there will always be a future for fashion and textiles as there will be people constantly creating innovative ideas, designs, materials, and although robots are helpful with practical and manual tasks, they don’t have the ability to be creative.

Anifa Mvuemba, the designer of the brand Hanifa, showed us what the future of fashion shows could look like as she debuted her latest collection on Instagram live via 3D models. She had plans to show her new collection with augmented reality before COVID and national lockdowns were in place, but it was a very innovative way to show a collection with people not being able to attend a physical show.

 SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is a powerful and dangerous tool, that can have many positive but also many negative effects. We are constantly bombarded with advertisements for products we have recently looked at or similar items, showing us that everything we look at on the internet is recorded and used to try and get us to spend money. There are many ways we are manipulated by social media; big digital media companies use algorithms to discover things about you that you haven’t revealed directly. Their business model involves finding the ways of attracting and holding your attention so that you can be influenced by advertisers, politicians and other paid clients for their purposes, not yours. A vast amount of data is collected about you, moment to moment, who you know, what you read, where you go, what you eat, and your likely susceptibility to assorted attempts at persuasion.  Social media has become an addiction for many people, which is characterized as being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable urge to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas.

How does the fashion industry use social media?

The fashion industry uses social media to promote brands, companies can let a large number of people know if they are having a sale or new stock coming in. social media also allows trends to spread incredibly quickly with celebrities posting on apps such as Instagram, it allows people worldwide to see what they are wearing and follow on the trend. Celebrities posting their outfits, also allows fast fashion brands to mimic their outfits and sell them at a cheap price to the general public.

SUSTAINABILITY

In 2015, world leaders agreed to 17 Global Goals (officially known as the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs). It's now five years on, and we have more work than ever to do. These goals have the power to create a better world by 2030, by ending poverty, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change. Guided by the goals, it is now up to all of us, governments, businesses, civil society and the general public to work together to build a better future for everyone.

[nancyedimick]

Justice Thomas sharply criticizes civil forfeiture laws

In today’s Leonard v. Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas sharply criticizes civil forfeiture laws. The one-justice opinion discusses the Supreme Court’s refusing to hear the case (a result Thomas agrees with, for procedural reasons mentioned in the last paragraph); but Thomas is sending a signal, I think, that at least one justice — and maybe more — will be sympathetic to such arguments in future cases:

This petition asks an important question: whether modern civil-forfeiture statutes can be squared with the Due Process Clause and our Nation’s history….

[I.] Early in the morning on April 1, 2013, a police officer stopped James Leonard for a traffic infraction along a known drug corridor. During a search of the vehicle, the officer found a safe in the trunk. Leonard and his passenger, Nicosa Kane, gave conflicting stories about the contents of the safe, with Leonard at one point indicating that it belonged to his mother, who is the petitioner here. The officer obtained a search warrant and discovered that the safe contained $201,100 and a bill of sale for a Pennsylvania home.

The State initiated civil forfeiture proceedings against the $201,100 on the ground that it was substantially connected to criminal activity, namely, narcotics sales…. Citing the suspicious circumstances of the stop and the contradictory stories provided by Leonard and Kane, the [Texas] Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s conclusion that the government had shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the money was either the proceeds of a drug sale or intended to be used in such a sale. It also affirmed the trial court’s rejection of petitioner’s innocent-owner defense. Petitioner had asserted that the money was not related to a drug sale at all, but was instead from a home she had recently sold in Pennsylvania. The court deemed this testimony insufficient to establish that she was in fact an innocent owner.

Petitioner now challenges the constitutionality of the procedures used to adjudicate the seizure of her property. In particular, she argues that the Due Process Clause required the State to carry its burden by clear and convincing evidence rather than by a preponderance of the evidence.

II. Modern civil forfeiture statutes are plainly designed, at least in part, to punish the owner of property used for criminal purposes. When a state wishes to punish one of its citizens, it ordinarily proceeds against the defendant personally (known as “in personam”), and in many cases it must provide the defendant with full criminal procedural protections. Nevertheless, for reasons discussed below, this Court permits prosecutors seeking forfeiture to proceed against the property (known as “in rem”) and to do so civilly.

In rem proceedings often enable the government to seize the property without any predeprivation judicial process and to obtain forfeiture of the property even when the owner is personally innocent (though some statutes, including the one here, provide for an innocent-owner defense). Civil proceedings often lack certain procedural protections that accompany criminal proceedings, such as the right to a jury trial and a heightened standard of proof..

Partially as a result of this distinct legal regime, civil forfeiture has in recent decades become widespread and highly profitable. See, e.g., Institute for Justice, D. Carpenter, L. Knepper, A. Erickson, & J. McDonald, Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture 10 (2d ed. Nov. 2015) (Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund took in $4.5 billion in 2014 alone). And because the law enforcement entity responsible for seizing the property often keeps it, these entities have strong incentives to pursue forfeiture.

This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses. According to one nationally publicized report, for example, police in the town of Tenaha, Texas, regularly seized the property of out-of-town drivers passing through and collaborated with the district attorney to coerce them into signing waivers of their property rights.

In one case, local officials threatened to file unsubstantiated felony charges against a Latino driver and his girlfriend and to place their children in foster care unless they signed a waiver. In another, they seized a black plant worker’s car and all his property (including cash he planned to use for dental work), jailed him for a night, forced him to sign away his property, and then released him on the side of the road without a phone or money. He was forced to walk to a Wal-Mart, where he borrowed a stranger’s phone to call his mother, who had to rent a car to pick him up.

These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings. Perversely, these same groups are often the most burdened by forfeiture. They are more likely to use cash than alternative forms of payment, like credit cards, which may be less susceptible to forfeiture. And they are more likely to suffer in their daily lives while they litigate for the return of a critical item of property, such as a car or a home.

[III.] The Court has justified its unique constitutional treatment of civil forfeiture largely by reference to a discrete historical practice that existed at the time of the founding. “ ‘English Law provided for statutory forfeitures of offending objects used in violation of the customs and revenue laws.’ ” This practice “took hold in the United States,” where the “First Congress passed laws subjecting ships and cargos involved in customs offenses to forfeiture.”

Other early statutes also provided for the forfeiture of pirate ships. These early statutes permitted the government to proceed in rem under the fiction that the thing itself, rather than the owner, was guilty of the crime. And, because these suits were in rem rather than in personam, they typically proceeded civilly rather than criminally.

In the absence of this historical practice, the Constitution presumably would require the Court to align its distinct doctrine governing civil forfeiture with its doctrines governing other forms of punitive state action and property deprivation. I am skeptical that this historical practice is capable of sustaining, as a constitutional matter, the contours of modern practice, for two reasons.

First, historical forfeiture laws were narrower in most respects than modern ones. Most obviously, they were limited to a few specific subject matters, such as customs and piracy. Proceeding in rem in those cases was often justified by necessity, because the party responsible for the crime was frequently located overseas and thus beyond the personal jurisdiction of United States courts. See Herpel, Toward a Constitutional Kleptocracy: Civil Forfeiture in America, 96 Mich. L. Rev. 1910 (1998).

These laws were also narrower with respect to the type of property they encompassed. For example, they typically covered only the instrumentalities of the crime (such as the vessel used to transport the goods), not the derivative proceeds of the crime (such as property purchased with money from the sale of the illegal goods).

Second, it is unclear whether courts historically permitted forfeiture actions to proceed civilly in all respects. Some of this Court’s early cases suggested that forfeiture actions were in the nature of criminal proceedings. Whether forfeiture is characterized as civil or criminal carries important implications for a variety of procedural protections, including the right to a jury trial and the proper standard of proof. Indeed, as relevant in this case, there is some evidence that the government was historically required to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

[IV.] Unfortunately, petitioner raises her due process arguments for the first time in this Court. As a result, the Texas Court of Appeals lacked the opportunity to address them in the first instance. I therefore concur in the denial of certiorari. Whether this Court’s treatment of the broad modern forfeiture practice can be justified by the narrow historical one is certainly worthy of consideration in greater detail.

Very interesting. Congratulations, by the way, to some authors whose works were cited by Thomas: (1) Dick M. Carpenter II, Lisa Knepper, Angela C. Erickson, and Jennifer McDonald of the Institute of Justice, one of the public interest law firms that I most respect, and (2) Stefan B. Herpel, a rare example of a non-academic practicing lawyer whose law review article gets cited by a Supreme Court justice’s opinion.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/06/justice-thomas-sharply-criticizes-civil-forfeiture-laws/

[wolfandpravato]

Justice Thomas sharply criticizes civil forfeiture laws

In today’s Leonard v. Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas sharply criticizes civil forfeiture laws. The one-justice opinion discusses the Supreme Court’s refusing to hear the case (a result Thomas agrees with, for procedural reasons mentioned in the last paragraph); but Thomas is sending a signal, I think, that at least one justice — and maybe more — will be sympathetic to such arguments in future cases:

This petition asks an important question: whether modern civil-forfeiture statutes can be squared with the Due Process Clause and our Nation’s history….

[I.] Early in the morning on April 1, 2013, a police officer stopped James Leonard for a traffic infraction along a known drug corridor. During a search of the vehicle, the officer found a safe in the trunk. Leonard and his passenger, Nicosa Kane, gave conflicting stories about the contents of the safe, with Leonard at one point indicating that it belonged to his mother, who is the petitioner here. The officer obtained a search warrant and discovered that the safe contained $201,100 and a bill of sale for a Pennsylvania home.

The State initiated civil forfeiture proceedings against the $201,100 on the ground that it was substantially connected to criminal activity, namely, narcotics sales…. Citing the suspicious circumstances of the stop and the contradictory stories provided by Leonard and Kane, the [Texas] Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s conclusion that the government had shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the money was either the proceeds of a drug sale or intended to be used in such a sale. It also affirmed the trial court’s rejection of petitioner’s innocent-owner defense. Petitioner had asserted that the money was not related to a drug sale at all, but was instead from a home she had recently sold in Pennsylvania. The court deemed this testimony insufficient to establish that she was in fact an innocent owner.

Petitioner now challenges the constitutionality of the procedures used to adjudicate the seizure of her property. In particular, she argues that the Due Process Clause required the State to carry its burden by clear and convincing evidence rather than by a preponderance of the evidence.

II. Modern civil forfeiture statutes are plainly designed, at least in part, to punish the owner of property used for criminal purposes. When a state wishes to punish one of its citizens, it ordinarily proceeds against the defendant personally (known as “in personam”), and in many cases it must provide the defendant with full criminal procedural protections. Nevertheless, for reasons discussed below, this Court permits prosecutors seeking forfeiture to proceed against the property (known as “in rem”) and to do so civilly.

In rem proceedings often enable the government to seize the property without any predeprivation judicial process and to obtain forfeiture of the property even when the owner is personally innocent (though some statutes, including the one here, provide for an innocent-owner defense). Civil proceedings often lack certain procedural protections that accompany criminal proceedings, such as the right to a jury trial and a heightened standard of proof..

Partially as a result of this distinct legal regime, civil forfeiture has in recent decades become widespread and highly profitable. See, e.g., Institute for Justice, D. Carpenter, L. Knepper, A. Erickson, & J. McDonald, Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture 10 (2d ed. Nov. 2015) (Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund took in $4.5 billion in 2014 alone). And because the law enforcement entity responsible for seizing the property often keeps it, these entities have strong incentives to pursue forfeiture.

This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses. According to one nationally publicized report, for example, police in the town of Tenaha, Texas, regularly seized the property of out-of-town drivers passing through and collaborated with the district attorney to coerce them into signing waivers of their property rights.

In one case, local officials threatened to file unsubstantiated felony charges against a Latino driver and his girlfriend and to place their children in foster care unless they signed a waiver. In another, they seized a black plant worker’s car and all his property (including cash he planned to use for dental work), jailed him for a night, forced him to sign away his property, and then released him on the side of the road without a phone or money. He was forced to walk to a Wal-Mart, where he borrowed a stranger’s phone to call his mother, who had to rent a car to pick him up.

These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings. Perversely, these same groups are often the most burdened by forfeiture. They are more likely to use cash than alternative forms of payment, like credit cards, which may be less susceptible to forfeiture. And they are more likely to suffer in their daily lives while they litigate for the return of a critical item of property, such as a car or a home.

[III.] The Court has justified its unique constitutional treatment of civil forfeiture largely by reference to a discrete historical practice that existed at the time of the founding. “ ‘English Law provided for statutory forfeitures of offending objects used in violation of the customs and revenue laws.’ ” This practice “took hold in the United States,” where the “First Congress passed laws subjecting ships and cargos involved in customs offenses to forfeiture.”

Other early statutes also provided for the forfeiture of pirate ships. These early statutes permitted the government to proceed in rem under the fiction that the thing itself, rather than the owner, was guilty of the crime. And, because these suits were in rem rather than in personam, they typically proceeded civilly rather than criminally.

In the absence of this historical practice, the Constitution presumably would require the Court to align its distinct doctrine governing civil forfeiture with its doctrines governing other forms of punitive state action and property deprivation. I am skeptical that this historical practice is capable of sustaining, as a constitutional matter, the contours of modern practice, for two reasons.

First, historical forfeiture laws were narrower in most respects than modern ones. Most obviously, they were limited to a few specific subject matters, such as customs and piracy. Proceeding in rem in those cases was often justified by necessity, because the party responsible for the crime was frequently located overseas and thus beyond the personal jurisdiction of United States courts. See Herpel, Toward a Constitutional Kleptocracy: Civil Forfeiture in America, 96 Mich. L. Rev. 1910 (1998).

These laws were also narrower with respect to the type of property they encompassed. For example, they typically covered only the instrumentalities of the crime (such as the vessel used to transport the goods), not the derivative proceeds of the crime (such as property purchased with money from the sale of the illegal goods).

Second, it is unclear whether courts historically permitted forfeiture actions to proceed civilly in all respects. Some of this Court’s early cases suggested that forfeiture actions were in the nature of criminal proceedings. Whether forfeiture is characterized as civil or criminal carries important implications for a variety of procedural protections, including the right to a jury trial and the proper standard of proof. Indeed, as relevant in this case, there is some evidence that the government was historically required to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

[IV.] Unfortunately, petitioner raises her due process arguments for the first time in this Court. As a result, the Texas Court of Appeals lacked the opportunity to address them in the first instance. I therefore concur in the denial of certiorari. Whether this Court’s treatment of the broad modern forfeiture practice can be justified by the narrow historical one is certainly worthy of consideration in greater detail.

Very interesting. Congratulations, by the way, to some authors whose works were cited by Thomas: (1) Dick M. Carpenter II, Lisa Knepper, Angela C. Erickson, and Jennifer McDonald of the Institute of Justice, one of the public interest law firms that I most respect, and (2) Stefan B. Herpel, a rare example of a non-academic practicing lawyer whose law review article gets cited by a Supreme Court justice’s opinion.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/06/justice-thomas-sharply-criticizes-civil-forfeiture-laws/

[ongames]

Dr. Mary Bassett: We Must 'Name Racism' As A Cause of Poor Health

The following is excerpted from Dr. Mary Bassett’s October 2016 acceptance speech, ‘Public Health Meets the ‘Problem of the Color Line,’ for Columbia University’s Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health. Bassett is the commissioner of New York City’s department of health and mental hygiene. 

Before Hillary secured the nomination, before many “felt the Bern,” and indeed, even before there was change we could believe in, there was a presidential candidate of several firsts running to represent a major party ticket who broke the mold in more ways than many could comprehend, let alone support. I am speaking of Shirley Chisholm.

There’s so much to learn from, but what I want to focus on today is her bold, unapologetic, and explicit commitment to naming racism. In her memoirs, she wrote: “Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.” If you think the conversation on race in our country is just getting legs now, can you imagine a presidential candidate saying this in 1972? And still, nearly 45 years later, her analysis stands.

Congresswoman Chisholm has us consider how we lose sight of what’s right in front of us.

This is a consideration that has woven its way throughout my working life. A little over 30 years ago, Nancy Krieger and I published an article in the Monthly Review titled “The Health of Black Folk.” In it, we wrote about the normalization of poor health among black people – how the status quo of poorer health and shorter lives comes to pass as one the “facts of being black.” The following passage begins this essay:

What is it about being black that causes such miserable odds? One answer is the patently racist view that blacks are inherently more susceptible to disease, the genetic model. In contrast, environmental models depict blacks as victims of factors ranging from poor nutrition and germs to lack of education and crowded housing. Instead of blaming the victims’ genes, both liberals and conservatives blame black lifestyle choices as the source of the racial gap in health.

The “facts of being black” are not, as these models suggest, a genetically determined shade of skin color, or individual deprived living conditions, or ill-informed lifestyle choices. The facts of being black derive from the joint social relations of race and class: racism disproportionately concentrates blacks into the lower strata of the working class and further causes blacks in all class strata to be racially oppressed.

I believe we’ve come a long way since the 1980s, but I’m not sure that our analysis of racism and health, or social justice and health, has grown more sophisticated, drawn more practitioners, or explicitly influenced much policy. I can say that because I continue to find myself explaining the very same concepts I wrote about in the 80s in 2015 and 2016, most recently in an interview with Big Think and in a piece for the New England Journal of Medicine about the importance of #BlackLivesMatter.

All of this is true even when there has never been more attention given to concepts like the social determinants of health and health equity. Representative Chisholm’s insight becomes prescient in this respect, for today our analysis of equity and social determinants is ironically myopic, a limitation that keeps us from fully realizing their potential as frameworks.

Today, we can speak of health equity without invoking race at all. Those who do speak of race seldom explicitly name racism, and even in those few forays into racism, there is hardly mention of the history and the contemporary of racial oppression, or the staying power of white supremacy. This troubles me, because it doesn’t take much for invisibility – what we don’t see – to become blindness – what we can no longer see.

My goal is to convince you all that we must explicitly and unapologetically name racism in our work to protect and promote health – this requires seeing the ideology of neutral public health science for what it is and what it does. We must deepen our analysis of racial oppression, which means remembering some uncomfortable truths about our shared history. And we must act with solidarity to heal a national pathology from which none of us – not you and not me – is immune.

There are many well-meaning and well-trained public health practitioners who disagree from the outset that we must name racism. That argument will sometimes claim that the very essence of public health is about helping people, pointing to increased lifespans and decreased infectious disease outbreaks over time. Their argument will at other times claim that we don’t want to muddy the clear waters of public health with the messy politics of race, that this sort of a topic is best left to protesters, opinion editorials and campaign stump speeches. I have also heard the claim that identifying racism opens this Pandora’s Box of problems that our modest field cannot hope to address comprehensively – that identifying racism hoists too heavy a burden. Last, there are those who say that racism is not the core issue, but instead poverty. We cannot fix racism, but we can fix poverty.

Of these, I believe the most dangerous claim is the first, that our technical expertise is enough to meet the challenges of poor health, wherever they are. This mindset presumes a neutrality of public health that has never been true – it ignores the fact that public health both operates in a political context and is itself, like any science, permeated by ideology.

Much is conflated when medicine and public health attempt to fly below the radar of politics by donning the armor of scientific objectivity – guarding the faith by positing the cold logic of the scientific method. Let me start by saying that science is not all methodology – one simply cannot judge the prudence of a whole ecology of funders, research proposals, theory-building, conferences, journals, institutes, and applications by reducing all of that to the scientific method. Each of these facets is fully penetrated by the biases of human behavior, by the ideologies of our time.

Consider two examples: funding priorities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the public health, medical, and criminal justice response to the current opioid crisis.

In the case of the NIH, see its most recent 2012-2013 biennial report to Congress: as my colleague Nancy Krieger has pointed out, not only did it allocate only 9 of its 441 pages to “Minority Health and Health Disparities,” but within these 441 pages, the terms “genome,” “genomic,” “genetic,” and “gene” appeared 457 times, whereas “social determinants of health” occurred only once, “discrimination” and “poverty” twice, “socioeconomic” 12 times, and “racism” not at all.

Or, with regard to the current opioid crisis – and its appropriate reframing as a public health and not criminal justice issue – how differently it would have been had the same framing been used when Nixon declared his “War on Drugs!” But of course he did not. Today, the opioid crisis is perceived as primarily affecting white populations, people who need help. No such frame of deserving victims was used, however, by Nixon. Instead, as shown in Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary new film “13th” that was a “war” that aimed to criminalize the black population and reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty.

We must remember that objectivity is not a synonym for neutrality. Objectivity refers to the idea that independent researchers can independently seek to test the same hypothesis and, if the hypothesized causal processes are indeed going on, they should come up with the same results if they use the same methods. However, what researchers choose to study and how they frame hypotheses determines the context in which objectivity is deployed. I urge you to consider, for example, that a great deal of unacceptable actions have taken place when objective methodology is utilized without regard for the role of science in oppression: eugenics, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee study. Often these are dismissed as bad science, or unethical science, when they too, in fact, are science.

Knowing this, we must name racism in our research proposals, in our theories, in our oral presentations and conference tracks, and even in our hypotheses. The essence of naming racism is this – how we frame a problem is inextricable from how we solve it.

We must remember that objectivity is not a synonym for neutrality. Dr. Mary T. Bassett, NYC commissioner of health and mental hygiene

The first solution to the inadequate colonial workforce was found in Irish bond labor, and so Irishmen worked the plantations until the English desired more labor to maximize the gains of more land. This is where the Atlantic Slave Trade was born. For an early period, some workers of African descent also worked as bond laborers, freed just like the Irish following the period of their indenture.

This period came to an end when the settlers decided they were releasing too many bond servants into freedom to make full use of their land. At the same time, a growing lower class of peasants would occasionally rise up in rebellion against large plantation owners, light-skinned and dark-skinned fighting side by side against the tyrannies of the wealthy.

The elite and lawmakers in Virginia found the most effective answer to this problem, an answer that is still with us today. In the 1680s, Virginia created a new category of people: whites. White people were afforded rights that were subsequently denied to non-whites. By the 1700s, whites could not be held in slavery into perpetuity and black slaves could not gain their freedom through work. Poor whites were instructed that God made non-whites inferior, in much the same way that the propertied were superior to the poor. What’s crucial here is that poor whites were not given the right to vote, and they certainly weren’t given a way out of poverty. What they were given were financial incentives to turn on their former allies – bounties for runaway enslaved Africans and plantation jobs for policing enslaved laborers.

But superiority was enough – the Virginia solution forever created a fissure between poor whites and blacks that the wealthy and powerful have taken full advantage of ever since. The rest of the story, I think, many of you know.

Knowing the origin of whiteness, and seeing whiteness as a social construct with a particular history – these are crucial to racial justice. The creation of white peoples and the data collected since demonstrate roundly that white supremacy without a doubt privileges whites in relation to people of color, but it still limits the potential gains of our collective liberation, whites included.

One the most telling studies in this respect – I turn again to my colleague Nancy Krieger – looks at the relationship between Jim Crow laws and infant death rates. The graph she assembled compares infant mortality for whites and blacks who lived under Jim Crow to those who did not, before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. You might guess that the disparity between blacks living under Jim Crow and blacks not living under Jim Crow was erased. But what is striking to me is that whites living under Jim Crow had higher infant death rates before the Civil Rights Act compared to whites not living under Jim Crow. This disparity too was wiped out following the passage of civil rights legislation.

Yet, dog-whistle politics have harmed whites by racializing the safety nets of our social contract. Since the 1970s, as with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” conservative elites in power have linked nearly every public institution to unworthy people of color, hoping that poor whites would take the hint that they’re the better, hard-working race. By tying government institutions to an undeserving non-white underclass, we saw growing populist support to defund the War on Poverty, the Great Society, public schools, public hospitals, all while increasing penalties on drug possession and use. Today – particularly the last several years in which whites have been railing against the War on Drugs – all of these shortchanges have served to harm both non-elite whites and all blacks. The President of Demos, Heather McGhee, talks about the harms of racism on white people like this: “we prefer to drain the public swimming pool of economic opportunity rather than let people of color swim, too.”

All that said, my hope is that white supremacy does not make you anxious or uncomfortable. It should make you mad. Understand that anti-racism is not a witch hunt, but a collective healing, without which our nation will remain painfully and inequitably divided, corroding opportunity, spirits, and bodies alike.

Over time, the explicit bias of white supremacy has turned into an implicit bias, something measured deftly by the Harvard Implicit Association Test – I encourage you all to go online and take it. What it has shown is that implicit bias against blacks, as well as other identities, is pervasive, including among people of color. The socialization we all go through in this country, because it is so thoroughly imbued with anti-black messaging and imagery, creates a bias most of us most exact active effort to counterbalance. So you can see the power of explicitly naming racism and taking stock of white supremacy.

The question arises – how do we act in solidarity? What does this all mean for our practice?

Naming racism, keeping it at the forefront of our consciousness and in our dialogues, is really important. Talking about racism, I hope, will encourage you to read and study more about some of the topics I’ve discussed, and the many more that I have not. If your study leads to critical self-reflection, I say that’s a good thing if you truly believe that racism hurts everybody. I do caution you, if you are a white person, to avoid placing too much of a burden on people of color to explain their racial oppression to you.

If acknowledging racism and white supremacy is the minimum, there’s room for much more. I wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that we must use our tools in public health to carry out more critical research on racism to help us identify and act on longstanding barriers to health equity. This is why, in part, we are emphasizing the revitalized Neighborhood Health Action Centers I described at the beginning of this talk, and are placing them in neighborhoods long deprived of societal resources that should be theirs.

Further still, we can look inward toward the makeup and conduct of our own institutions. When I started as Commissioner almost three years ago, I put resources toward a group of staff to lead what we call “internal reform” at the health department. With the goal of becoming an anti-racist institution, the agency is acting on recommendations made by staff to reform our budgeting and contracting practices, our recruitment and hiring procedures, our community engagement behaviors, our training protocols, and our communications frameworks. It takes a sustained commitment to realize the full promise of these reforms, but we are laying the groundwork with urgency.

Last, I think one of the most important things we can do to stand in solidarity is lend our voice to advocacy for racial justice, unto itself and fully cognizant of the many other struggles for justice in which the work for racial justice is entwined. Those of us who work in public health have been afforded great privileges, tremendous credibility. The best use of that is to be a voice for the voiceless – and to amplify the voices of those who are speaking up, especially those of the youth who have the energy to drive us forward.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Dr. Mary Bassett: We Must 'Name Racism' As A Cause of Poor Health published first on http://ift.tt/2lnpciY

[yes-dal456]

Dr. Mary Bassett: We Must 'Name Racism' As A Cause of Poor Health

The following is excerpted from Dr. Mary Bassett’s October 2016 acceptance speech, ‘Public Health Meets the ‘Problem of the Color Line,’ for Columbia University’s Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health. Bassett is the commissioner of New York City’s department of health and mental hygiene. 

Before Hillary secured the nomination, before many “felt the Bern,” and indeed, even before there was change we could believe in, there was a presidential candidate of several firsts running to represent a major party ticket who broke the mold in more ways than many could comprehend, let alone support. I am speaking of Shirley Chisholm.

There’s so much to learn from, but what I want to focus on today is her bold, unapologetic, and explicit commitment to naming racism. In her memoirs, she wrote: “Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.” If you think the conversation on race in our country is just getting legs now, can you imagine a presidential candidate saying this in 1972? And still, nearly 45 years later, her analysis stands.

Congresswoman Chisholm has us consider how we lose sight of what’s right in front of us.

This is a consideration that has woven its way throughout my working life. A little over 30 years ago, Nancy Krieger and I published an article in the Monthly Review titled “The Health of Black Folk.” In it, we wrote about the normalization of poor health among black people – how the status quo of poorer health and shorter lives comes to pass as one the “facts of being black.” The following passage begins this essay:

What is it about being black that causes such miserable odds? One answer is the patently racist view that blacks are inherently more susceptible to disease, the genetic model. In contrast, environmental models depict blacks as victims of factors ranging from poor nutrition and germs to lack of education and crowded housing. Instead of blaming the victims’ genes, both liberals and conservatives blame black lifestyle choices as the source of the racial gap in health.

The “facts of being black” are not, as these models suggest, a genetically determined shade of skin color, or individual deprived living conditions, or ill-informed lifestyle choices. The facts of being black derive from the joint social relations of race and class: racism disproportionately concentrates blacks into the lower strata of the working class and further causes blacks in all class strata to be racially oppressed.

I believe we’ve come a long way since the 1980s, but I’m not sure that our analysis of racism and health, or social justice and health, has grown more sophisticated, drawn more practitioners, or explicitly influenced much policy. I can say that because I continue to find myself explaining the very same concepts I wrote about in the 80s in 2015 and 2016, most recently in an interview with Big Think and in a piece for the New England Journal of Medicine about the importance of #BlackLivesMatter.

All of this is true even when there has never been more attention given to concepts like the social determinants of health and health equity. Representative Chisholm’s insight becomes prescient in this respect, for today our analysis of equity and social determinants is ironically myopic, a limitation that keeps us from fully realizing their potential as frameworks.

Today, we can speak of health equity without invoking race at all. Those who do speak of race seldom explicitly name racism, and even in those few forays into racism, there is hardly mention of the history and the contemporary of racial oppression, or the staying power of white supremacy. This troubles me, because it doesn’t take much for invisibility – what we don’t see – to become blindness – what we can no longer see.

My goal is to convince you all that we must explicitly and unapologetically name racism in our work to protect and promote health – this requires seeing the ideology of neutral public health science for what it is and what it does. We must deepen our analysis of racial oppression, which means remembering some uncomfortable truths about our shared history. And we must act with solidarity to heal a national pathology from which none of us – not you and not me – is immune.

There are many well-meaning and well-trained public health practitioners who disagree from the outset that we must name racism. That argument will sometimes claim that the very essence of public health is about helping people, pointing to increased lifespans and decreased infectious disease outbreaks over time. Their argument will at other times claim that we don’t want to muddy the clear waters of public health with the messy politics of race, that this sort of a topic is best left to protesters, opinion editorials and campaign stump speeches. I have also heard the claim that identifying racism opens this Pandora’s Box of problems that our modest field cannot hope to address comprehensively – that identifying racism hoists too heavy a burden. Last, there are those who say that racism is not the core issue, but instead poverty. We cannot fix racism, but we can fix poverty.

Of these, I believe the most dangerous claim is the first, that our technical expertise is enough to meet the challenges of poor health, wherever they are. This mindset presumes a neutrality of public health that has never been true – it ignores the fact that public health both operates in a political context and is itself, like any science, permeated by ideology.

Much is conflated when medicine and public health attempt to fly below the radar of politics by donning the armor of scientific objectivity – guarding the faith by positing the cold logic of the scientific method. Let me start by saying that science is not all methodology – one simply cannot judge the prudence of a whole ecology of funders, research proposals, theory-building, conferences, journals, institutes, and applications by reducing all of that to the scientific method. Each of these facets is fully penetrated by the biases of human behavior, by the ideologies of our time.

Consider two examples: funding priorities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the public health, medical, and criminal justice response to the current opioid crisis.

In the case of the NIH, see its most recent 2012-2013 biennial report to Congress: as my colleague Nancy Krieger has pointed out, not only did it allocate only 9 of its 441 pages to “Minority Health and Health Disparities,” but within these 441 pages, the terms “genome,” “genomic,” “genetic,” and “gene” appeared 457 times, whereas “social determinants of health” occurred only once, “discrimination” and “poverty” twice, “socioeconomic” 12 times, and “racism” not at all.

Or, with regard to the current opioid crisis – and its appropriate reframing as a public health and not criminal justice issue – how differently it would have been had the same framing been used when Nixon declared his “War on Drugs!” But of course he did not. Today, the opioid crisis is perceived as primarily affecting white populations, people who need help. No such frame of deserving victims was used, however, by Nixon. Instead, as shown in Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary new film “13th” that was a “war” that aimed to criminalize the black population and reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty.

We must remember that objectivity is not a synonym for neutrality. Objectivity refers to the idea that independent researchers can independently seek to test the same hypothesis and, if the hypothesized causal processes are indeed going on, they should come up with the same results if they use the same methods. However, what researchers choose to study and how they frame hypotheses determines the context in which objectivity is deployed. I urge you to consider, for example, that a great deal of unacceptable actions have taken place when objective methodology is utilized without regard for the role of science in oppression: eugenics, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee study. Often these are dismissed as bad science, or unethical science, when they too, in fact, are science.

Knowing this, we must name racism in our research proposals, in our theories, in our oral presentations and conference tracks, and even in our hypotheses. The essence of naming racism is this – how we frame a problem is inextricable from how we solve it.

We must remember that objectivity is not a synonym for neutrality. Dr. Mary T. Bassett, NYC commissioner of health and mental hygiene

The first solution to the inadequate colonial workforce was found in Irish bond labor, and so Irishmen worked the plantations until the English desired more labor to maximize the gains of more land. This is where the Atlantic Slave Trade was born. For an early period, some workers of African descent also worked as bond laborers, freed just like the Irish following the period of their indenture.

This period came to an end when the settlers decided they were releasing too many bond servants into freedom to make full use of their land. At the same time, a growing lower class of peasants would occasionally rise up in rebellion against large plantation owners, light-skinned and dark-skinned fighting side by side against the tyrannies of the wealthy.

The elite and lawmakers in Virginia found the most effective answer to this problem, an answer that is still with us today. In the 1680s, Virginia created a new category of people: whites. White people were afforded rights that were subsequently denied to non-whites. By the 1700s, whites could not be held in slavery into perpetuity and black slaves could not gain their freedom through work. Poor whites were instructed that God made non-whites inferior, in much the same way that the propertied were superior to the poor. What’s crucial here is that poor whites were not given the right to vote, and they certainly weren’t given a way out of poverty. What they were given were financial incentives to turn on their former allies – bounties for runaway enslaved Africans and plantation jobs for policing enslaved laborers.

But superiority was enough – the Virginia solution forever created a fissure between poor whites and blacks that the wealthy and powerful have taken full advantage of ever since. The rest of the story, I think, many of you know.

Knowing the origin of whiteness, and seeing whiteness as a social construct with a particular history – these are crucial to racial justice. The creation of white peoples and the data collected since demonstrate roundly that white supremacy without a doubt privileges whites in relation to people of color, but it still limits the potential gains of our collective liberation, whites included.

One the most telling studies in this respect – I turn again to my colleague Nancy Krieger – looks at the relationship between Jim Crow laws and infant death rates. The graph she assembled compares infant mortality for whites and blacks who lived under Jim Crow to those who did not, before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. You might guess that the disparity between blacks living under Jim Crow and blacks not living under Jim Crow was erased. But what is striking to me is that whites living under Jim Crow had higher infant death rates before the Civil Rights Act compared to whites not living under Jim Crow. This disparity too was wiped out following the passage of civil rights legislation.

Yet, dog-whistle politics have harmed whites by racializing the safety nets of our social contract. Since the 1970s, as with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” conservative elites in power have linked nearly every public institution to unworthy people of color, hoping that poor whites would take the hint that they’re the better, hard-working race. By tying government institutions to an undeserving non-white underclass, we saw growing populist support to defund the War on Poverty, the Great Society, public schools, public hospitals, all while increasing penalties on drug possession and use. Today – particularly the last several years in which whites have been railing against the War on Drugs – all of these shortchanges have served to harm both non-elite whites and all blacks. The President of Demos, Heather McGhee, talks about the harms of racism on white people like this: “we prefer to drain the public swimming pool of economic opportunity rather than let people of color swim, too.”

All that said, my hope is that white supremacy does not make you anxious or uncomfortable. It should make you mad. Understand that anti-racism is not a witch hunt, but a collective healing, without which our nation will remain painfully and inequitably divided, corroding opportunity, spirits, and bodies alike.

Over time, the explicit bias of white supremacy has turned into an implicit bias, something measured deftly by the Harvard Implicit Association Test – I encourage you all to go online and take it. What it has shown is that implicit bias against blacks, as well as other identities, is pervasive, including among people of color. The socialization we all go through in this country, because it is so thoroughly imbued with anti-black messaging and imagery, creates a bias most of us most exact active effort to counterbalance. So you can see the power of explicitly naming racism and taking stock of white supremacy.

The question arises – how do we act in solidarity? What does this all mean for our practice?

Naming racism, keeping it at the forefront of our consciousness and in our dialogues, is really important. Talking about racism, I hope, will encourage you to read and study more about some of the topics I’ve discussed, and the many more that I have not. If your study leads to critical self-reflection, I say that’s a good thing if you truly believe that racism hurts everybody. I do caution you, if you are a white person, to avoid placing too much of a burden on people of color to explain their racial oppression to you.

If acknowledging racism and white supremacy is the minimum, there’s room for much more. I wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that we must use our tools in public health to carry out more critical research on racism to help us identify and act on longstanding barriers to health equity. This is why, in part, we are emphasizing the revitalized Neighborhood Health Action Centers I described at the beginning of this talk, and are placing them in neighborhoods long deprived of societal resources that should be theirs.

Further still, we can look inward toward the makeup and conduct of our own institutions. When I started as Commissioner almost three years ago, I put resources toward a group of staff to lead what we call “internal reform” at the health department. With the goal of becoming an anti-racist institution, the agency is acting on recommendations made by staff to reform our budgeting and contracting practices, our recruitment and hiring procedures, our community engagement behaviors, our training protocols, and our communications frameworks. It takes a sustained commitment to realize the full promise of these reforms, but we are laying the groundwork with urgency.

Last, I think one of the most important things we can do to stand in solidarity is lend our voice to advocacy for racial justice, unto itself and fully cognizant of the many other struggles for justice in which the work for racial justice is entwined. Those of us who work in public health have been afforded great privileges, tremendous credibility. The best use of that is to be a voice for the voiceless – and to amplify the voices of those who are speaking up, especially those of the youth who have the energy to drive us forward.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2k47gOn from Blogger http://ift.tt/2kJdksz

[imreviewblog]

Dr. Mary Bassett: We Must 'Name Racism' As A Cause of Poor Health

The following is excerpted from Dr. Mary Bassett’s October 2016 acceptance speech, ‘Public Health Meets the ‘Problem of the Color Line,’ for Columbia University’s Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health. Bassett is the commissioner of New York City’s department of health and mental hygiene. 

Before Hillary secured the nomination, before many “felt the Bern,” and indeed, even before there was change we could believe in, there was a presidential candidate of several firsts running to represent a major party ticket who broke the mold in more ways than many could comprehend, let alone support. I am speaking of Shirley Chisholm.

There’s so much to learn from, but what I want to focus on today is her bold, unapologetic, and explicit commitment to naming racism. In her memoirs, she wrote: “Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.” If you think the conversation on race in our country is just getting legs now, can you imagine a presidential candidate saying this in 1972? And still, nearly 45 years later, her analysis stands.

Congresswoman Chisholm has us consider how we lose sight of what’s right in front of us.

This is a consideration that has woven its way throughout my working life. A little over 30 years ago, Nancy Krieger and I published an article in the Monthly Review titled “The Health of Black Folk.” In it, we wrote about the normalization of poor health among black people – how the status quo of poorer health and shorter lives comes to pass as one the “facts of being black.” The following passage begins this essay:

What is it about being black that causes such miserable odds? One answer is the patently racist view that blacks are inherently more susceptible to disease, the genetic model. In contrast, environmental models depict blacks as victims of factors ranging from poor nutrition and germs to lack of education and crowded housing. Instead of blaming the victims’ genes, both liberals and conservatives blame black lifestyle choices as the source of the racial gap in health.

The “facts of being black” are not, as these models suggest, a genetically determined shade of skin color, or individual deprived living conditions, or ill-informed lifestyle choices. The facts of being black derive from the joint social relations of race and class: racism disproportionately concentrates blacks into the lower strata of the working class and further causes blacks in all class strata to be racially oppressed.

I believe we’ve come a long way since the 1980s, but I’m not sure that our analysis of racism and health, or social justice and health, has grown more sophisticated, drawn more practitioners, or explicitly influenced much policy. I can say that because I continue to find myself explaining the very same concepts I wrote about in the 80s in 2015 and 2016, most recently in an interview with Big Think and in a piece for the New England Journal of Medicine about the importance of #BlackLivesMatter.

All of this is true even when there has never been more attention given to concepts like the social determinants of health and health equity. Representative Chisholm’s insight becomes prescient in this respect, for today our analysis of equity and social determinants is ironically myopic, a limitation that keeps us from fully realizing their potential as frameworks.

Today, we can speak of health equity without invoking race at all. Those who do speak of race seldom explicitly name racism, and even in those few forays into racism, there is hardly mention of the history and the contemporary of racial oppression, or the staying power of white supremacy. This troubles me, because it doesn’t take much for invisibility – what we don’t see – to become blindness – what we can no longer see.

My goal is to convince you all that we must explicitly and unapologetically name racism in our work to protect and promote health – this requires seeing the ideology of neutral public health science for what it is and what it does. We must deepen our analysis of racial oppression, which means remembering some uncomfortable truths about our shared history. And we must act with solidarity to heal a national pathology from which none of us – not you and not me – is immune.

There are many well-meaning and well-trained public health practitioners who disagree from the outset that we must name racism. That argument will sometimes claim that the very essence of public health is about helping people, pointing to increased lifespans and decreased infectious disease outbreaks over time. Their argument will at other times claim that we don’t want to muddy the clear waters of public health with the messy politics of race, that this sort of a topic is best left to protesters, opinion editorials and campaign stump speeches. I have also heard the claim that identifying racism opens this Pandora’s Box of problems that our modest field cannot hope to address comprehensively – that identifying racism hoists too heavy a burden. Last, there are those who say that racism is not the core issue, but instead poverty. We cannot fix racism, but we can fix poverty.

Of these, I believe the most dangerous claim is the first, that our technical expertise is enough to meet the challenges of poor health, wherever they are. This mindset presumes a neutrality of public health that has never been true – it ignores the fact that public health both operates in a political context and is itself, like any science, permeated by ideology.

Much is conflated when medicine and public health attempt to fly below the radar of politics by donning the armor of scientific objectivity – guarding the faith by positing the cold logic of the scientific method. Let me start by saying that science is not all methodology – one simply cannot judge the prudence of a whole ecology of funders, research proposals, theory-building, conferences, journals, institutes, and applications by reducing all of that to the scientific method. Each of these facets is fully penetrated by the biases of human behavior, by the ideologies of our time.

Consider two examples: funding priorities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the public health, medical, and criminal justice response to the current opioid crisis.

In the case of the NIH, see its most recent 2012-2013 biennial report to Congress: as my colleague Nancy Krieger has pointed out, not only did it allocate only 9 of its 441 pages to “Minority Health and Health Disparities,” but within these 441 pages, the terms “genome,” “genomic,” “genetic,” and “gene” appeared 457 times, whereas “social determinants of health” occurred only once, “discrimination” and “poverty” twice, “socioeconomic” 12 times, and “racism” not at all.

Or, with regard to the current opioid crisis – and its appropriate reframing as a public health and not criminal justice issue – how differently it would have been had the same framing been used when Nixon declared his “War on Drugs!” But of course he did not. Today, the opioid crisis is perceived as primarily affecting white populations, people who need help. No such frame of deserving victims was used, however, by Nixon. Instead, as shown in Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary new film “13th” that was a “war” that aimed to criminalize the black population and reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty.

We must remember that objectivity is not a synonym for neutrality. Objectivity refers to the idea that independent researchers can independently seek to test the same hypothesis and, if the hypothesized causal processes are indeed going on, they should come up with the same results if they use the same methods. However, what researchers choose to study and how they frame hypotheses determines the context in which objectivity is deployed. I urge you to consider, for example, that a great deal of unacceptable actions have taken place when objective methodology is utilized without regard for the role of science in oppression: eugenics, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee study. Often these are dismissed as bad science, or unethical science, when they too, in fact, are science.

Knowing this, we must name racism in our research proposals, in our theories, in our oral presentations and conference tracks, and even in our hypotheses. The essence of naming racism is this – how we frame a problem is inextricable from how we solve it.

We must remember that objectivity is not a synonym for neutrality. Dr. Mary T. Bassett, NYC commissioner of health and mental hygiene

The first solution to the inadequate colonial workforce was found in Irish bond labor, and so Irishmen worked the plantations until the English desired more labor to maximize the gains of more land. This is where the Atlantic Slave Trade was born. For an early period, some workers of African descent also worked as bond laborers, freed just like the Irish following the period of their indenture.

This period came to an end when the settlers decided they were releasing too many bond servants into freedom to make full use of their land. At the same time, a growing lower class of peasants would occasionally rise up in rebellion against large plantation owners, light-skinned and dark-skinned fighting side by side against the tyrannies of the wealthy.

The elite and lawmakers in Virginia found the most effective answer to this problem, an answer that is still with us today. In the 1680s, Virginia created a new category of people: whites. White people were afforded rights that were subsequently denied to non-whites. By the 1700s, whites could not be held in slavery into perpetuity and black slaves could not gain their freedom through work. Poor whites were instructed that God made non-whites inferior, in much the same way that the propertied were superior to the poor. What’s crucial here is that poor whites were not given the right to vote, and they certainly weren’t given a way out of poverty. What they were given were financial incentives to turn on their former allies – bounties for runaway enslaved Africans and plantation jobs for policing enslaved laborers.

But superiority was enough – the Virginia solution forever created a fissure between poor whites and blacks that the wealthy and powerful have taken full advantage of ever since. The rest of the story, I think, many of you know.

Knowing the origin of whiteness, and seeing whiteness as a social construct with a particular history – these are crucial to racial justice. The creation of white peoples and the data collected since demonstrate roundly that white supremacy without a doubt privileges whites in relation to people of color, but it still limits the potential gains of our collective liberation, whites included.

One the most telling studies in this respect – I turn again to my colleague Nancy Krieger – looks at the relationship between Jim Crow laws and infant death rates. The graph she assembled compares infant mortality for whites and blacks who lived under Jim Crow to those who did not, before and after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. You might guess that the disparity between blacks living under Jim Crow and blacks not living under Jim Crow was erased. But what is striking to me is that whites living under Jim Crow had higher infant death rates before the Civil Rights Act compared to whites not living under Jim Crow. This disparity too was wiped out following the passage of civil rights legislation.

Yet, dog-whistle politics have harmed whites by racializing the safety nets of our social contract. Since the 1970s, as with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” conservative elites in power have linked nearly every public institution to unworthy people of color, hoping that poor whites would take the hint that they’re the better, hard-working race. By tying government institutions to an undeserving non-white underclass, we saw growing populist support to defund the War on Poverty, the Great Society, public schools, public hospitals, all while increasing penalties on drug possession and use. Today – particularly the last several years in which whites have been railing against the War on Drugs – all of these shortchanges have served to harm both non-elite whites and all blacks. The President of Demos, Heather McGhee, talks about the harms of racism on white people like this: “we prefer to drain the public swimming pool of economic opportunity rather than let people of color swim, too.”

All that said, my hope is that white supremacy does not make you anxious or uncomfortable. It should make you mad. Understand that anti-racism is not a witch hunt, but a collective healing, without which our nation will remain painfully and inequitably divided, corroding opportunity, spirits, and bodies alike.

Over time, the explicit bias of white supremacy has turned into an implicit bias, something measured deftly by the Harvard Implicit Association Test – I encourage you all to go online and take it. What it has shown is that implicit bias against blacks, as well as other identities, is pervasive, including among people of color. The socialization we all go through in this country, because it is so thoroughly imbued with anti-black messaging and imagery, creates a bias most of us most exact active effort to counterbalance. So you can see the power of explicitly naming racism and taking stock of white supremacy.

The question arises – how do we act in solidarity? What does this all mean for our practice?

Naming racism, keeping it at the forefront of our consciousness and in our dialogues, is really important. Talking about racism, I hope, will encourage you to read and study more about some of the topics I’ve discussed, and the many more that I have not. If your study leads to critical self-reflection, I say that’s a good thing if you truly believe that racism hurts everybody. I do caution you, if you are a white person, to avoid placing too much of a burden on people of color to explain their racial oppression to you.

If acknowledging racism and white supremacy is the minimum, there’s room for much more. I wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that we must use our tools in public health to carry out more critical research on racism to help us identify and act on longstanding barriers to health equity. This is why, in part, we are emphasizing the revitalized Neighborhood Health Action Centers I described at the beginning of this talk, and are placing them in neighborhoods long deprived of societal resources that should be theirs.

Further still, we can look inward toward the makeup and conduct of our own institutions. When I started as Commissioner almost three years ago, I put resources toward a group of staff to lead what we call “internal reform” at the health department. With the goal of becoming an anti-racist institution, the agency is acting on recommendations made by staff to reform our budgeting and contracting practices, our recruitment and hiring procedures, our community engagement behaviors, our training protocols, and our communications frameworks. It takes a sustained commitment to realize the full promise of these reforms, but we are laying the groundwork with urgency.

Last, I think one of the most important things we can do to stand in solidarity is lend our voice to advocacy for racial justice, unto itself and fully cognizant of the many other struggles for justice in which the work for racial justice is entwined. Those of us who work in public health have been afforded great privileges, tremendous credibility. The best use of that is to be a voice for the voiceless – and to amplify the voices of those who are speaking up, especially those of the youth who have the energy to drive us forward.

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from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2lprD4L