Why many Indians believe Muslims spread COVID-19

May 15, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Wazukhaana in front of Fatehpuri Masjid, a Sufi mosque in northern Delhi, in 2015.

Here’s an analogy. If people are standing in line, and a brown person shoves a white person, it would be incorrect of the white person to conclude that brown people have no manners. I think most Indians understand this. So when we Indians stand in line and a Muslim person shoves a Hindu person, it would be incorrect of the Hindu to conclude that Muslim people have no manners (especially when all of us have seen how our fellow Indians cut lines, everywhere, even when there’s assigned and assured seating, as when boarding a flight).

What prompted this was a conversation I had recently with an old friend, in which Muslims as a whole were being held responsible for one Hindu (said friend) getting shoved while waiting in line at a store, at a time when everyone is supposed to stay 6 feet apart. The friend started to say something about “these people”, so I felt compelled to point out to them that just the previous day, I had to tell a Hindu fellow shopper blocking a narrow aisle in the grocery store to cover her nose and mouth with her mask. Her mask was hanging around her neck like a necklace, and she made no attempt to put it on or to give way when I indicated that I needed to pass her. She had already breathed over who knows how many products, leaving germs all over the place. I told my friend that the definitely-Hindu cashier had no mask either. Everyone knows that this sort of behavior is currently punishable.

A word about Hindus, Muslims, and cleanliness. People who have researched sanitation in South Asia have found that in general, personal hygiene levels in predominantly Hindu India are lower than in the predominantly Muslim neighboring countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan. They surmise that this may be directly related to the fact that Islam has clear prescriptions pertaining to personal hygiene, which are daily rituals. In contrast, they note, Hinduism has none (or no clear and effective ones that are widely taught and practised, at any rate).

And yet our fascist government/media/social circles have brainwashed us into racist thinking by repeatedly portraying Muslims in particular as vectors of Covid-19 (for example, see this, this, this, and after the Delhi government’s own complicity, this). And sadly, even those of us who sincerely believe we are good, smart, sensible, righteous, reasonable, and not-evil take up such racist thinking and let ourselves become pawns in the politics of hate. We slip into believing greater lies like “Muslims are destroying this country”. Many of us vote for leaders based on the racist belief that we have chosen to embrace, instead of voting in the interest of ourselves and our fellow citizens.

 

(Photo credit: Uma Asher / Medium)

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South Carolina will stop shackling women (prisoners) in childbirth!

May 13, 2020 by 3 Comments

In March, we asked if South Carolina would pass legislation outlawing the shackling of women (prisoners) in childbirth. Two months and a few days later, we now have the answer. Yes! More than yes, a resounding and expansive yes. While the Governor has yet to sign the legislation, he has said, on more than one occasion, that he would sign it. Last year, the South Carolina House of Representatives passed the bill, presented by Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican representing Daniel Island, by a vote of 104 – 3, but the bill wasn’t sent over to the Senate in time. This year, the House voted 117 – 0, and Senate voted 42 – 0 to pass the bill. This happened in the midst of the South Carolina focusing on coronavirus related issues. Apparently, no one was more surprised that Nancy Mace, who noted, “This is a really big one. It took a lot of people coming together on both sides of the aisle to make it happen, and I’m just really humbled to see that even during a crisis, in South Carolina, we’re getting things done in a nonpartisan way to make our state better.” 

This is a really big one. Not only did the legislature unanimously endorse the bill, they expanded it. The original bill essentially brought South Carolina into compliance with the federal First Step Act, passed in 2018, which bans the shackling of pregnant women (prisoners). Looking at the situation and seizing the moment, legislators, from both parties, decided to add the following: “requiring availability of menstrual hygiene products, access to adequate nutrition, an end to solitary confinement for pregnant prisoners and weekly contact visits between incarcerated people with low- or minimum-security classifications and their children.”

South Carolina’s chapter of Americans for Prosperity noted, “The legislature took the right step in banning shackling of incarcerated women during pregnancy, labor and postpartum recuperation, ending an inhumane practice that 42 other states have already opposed. Restoring dignity and treating people with compassion is a common-sense reform to our criminal justice system. We thank the legislature for passing this bill and we urge Governor McMaster to stop this cruel policy.”

In South Carolina, as elsewhere, women, prisoners, supporters invoked dignity. In South Carolina, this week, legislators demonstrated that dignity must include the recognition and abolition of cruelty and then proceed to the respect for all human beings, generally, and, here, for women in their specificity and particularity. Not shackling is a good start, but it remains a negation of a negation. Taking care of pregnant women, no matter where they are, is simply the right thing to do. Meanwhile, this week, members of the Michigan Senate began debating a bill, in committee, that would ban the shackling of pregnant women (prisoners). The struggle continues.

 

 

 

(Image Credit 1: Radical Doula)  (Image Credit 2: New York Times / Andrea Dezsö)

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Covid Operations: We must address the cruelty

May 8, 2020 by 110 Comments
Collins Khosa

In the past day or so, the news has suffered a crescendo of iterations of brutality: police brutality; the brutality of racist, White supremacist violence; and the brutality of designating certain populations as disposable, not important to consider when `opening up’ states, cities, countries. This is a snapshot of today’s three faces of brutality: Collins Khosa; Ahmaud Arbery; and the Arlandria/Chirilagua neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia.

Collins Khosa, 40 years old, lived in the Alexandra township, in Johannesburg, South Africa. April 10 was the fifteenth day of the national lockdown, a lockdown enforced by both local police forces and the South African National Defence Force, SANDF. On April 10, members of SANDF saw Collins Khosa and a friend in his yard. The SANDF members saw a cup half full of liquid, which they assumed was alcohol. They asked Collins Khosa whether that was the case, and Collins Khosa correctly answered that drinking alcohol on one’s own premises was not a violation of the lockdown rules. The SANDF members then demanded that Collins Khosa step into the street, so that he might be taught a lesson. Then the SANDF members taught. They beat Collins Khosa to death. Now the Khosa family is in court, demanding an investigation. As they explain, their “case is not about the justification for the lockdown or its extent. It is about combating lockdown brutality”. Lockdown brutality. Leading South African constitutional lawyer Pierre De Vos asks, “Why has there been less public outrage (and less debate) about Khosa’s death and about other lockdown brutality by law enforcement officials, than there has been about the ban on the sale of cigarettes, on the one hand, and about those complaining about the ban, on the other? Is it because soldiers largely patrol working class and poor areas and not the leafy suburbs where most white people live? Is it because victims of brutality have been predominantly black? Or is it because the perpetrators of the abuse have been largely black?”

The past two days have seen numerous reports of lockdown brutality across South Africa, and South Africa is not alone. For example, it was reported yesterday that in Brooklyn, in New York City, of the 40 people arrested for violation of social distancing, 35 are Black, 4 are Latinx, 1 is White: “The arrests of black and Hispanic residents, several of them filmed and posted online, occurred on the same balmy days that other photographs circulated showing police officers handing out masks to mostly white visitors at parks in Lower Manhattan, Williamsburg and Long Island City. Video captured crowds of sunbathers, many without masks, sitting close together at a park on a Manhattan pier, uninterrupted by the police.” Why has there been less public outrage and less debate?

Ahmaud Arbery

 

At the same time, videos circulated showing the cold-blooded murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year-old Black man, a former high school football player, an active athlete, an all-around good guy. Ahmaud Arbery went jogging through a neighborhood in Brunswick, Glynn County, Georgia. Two White men decided that Ahmaud Arbery was dangerous `resembled’ someone suspected of burglary. There were no burglaries, there was no suspect, there was no reason, other than that of Being Black. Being Black was evidence enough of criminality. The two men followed, hunted, Ahmaud Arbery and shot him, killing him. The two men were not charged with any offense. That all happened February 23, in the early afternoon. Only this week a video emerged showing what actually happened. Only this week were the two White men finally taken into custody. Had it not been for the video, they would be free as any other White man with a gun in the United States. Needless to say but it must be said, Ahmaud Arbery was unarmed. The line from police brutality to `citizen brutality’ in the prosecution of some imaginary crime is a short, direct line.

The Commonwealth of Virginia released Coronavirus data this week, the same week that the Governor, a medical doctor, announced that it was time to start `re-opening the state. The data was broken down by postal zip codes. In the small northern Virginia city of Alexandria, itself hotspot, one zip code stood out, 22305, the largely working-class, Latinx immigrant and first-generation neighborhood of Arlandria/Chirilagua. In Arlandria, a community of around 16,000 residents, 608 residents were tested, and 330 tested positive for Covid-19. That’s an extraordinary 55% of the test population testing positive. Why have so few been tested? Because so many are deemed `ineligible’ because of status or income. That leads to a situation in which people only get tested if they can pass various stringent hurdles. In a press conference today, the Tenants and Workers United, a chapter of New Virginia Majority, demanded “expanded access to testing, ensuring tests and treatment are free, and providing housing so that residents can safely isolate.” Repeatedly, they invited Governor Ralph Northam to leave the Governor’s Mansion and come to Alexandria to see what’s actually happening. Earlier in the week, the Legal Aid Justice Center responded to Northam’s plan to `re-open’ Virginia by labelling the proposal “reckless and cruel”. As Legal Aid Justice noted, “Due to systemic racial inequities, infection and death rates are highest in Black and brown communities. In our state capital of Richmond, 15 of the 16 deaths from COVID-19 were Black residents. In Fairfax County, while only 17% of the population is Hispanic, 56% of all confirmed cases are Hispanic.”

It’s all cruelty actually, rather than brutality. Brutality suggests that those committing the acts of violence are somehow “brutes” or “animals”. Cruelty, on the other hand, suggests that those committing the violence range between indifferent to the pain of others to actually taking pleasure in inflicting pain on others. As with the Khosa family pursuit, this concerns more than this particular police officer or that particular White racist, although they must be addressed. It addresses the whole system of disposable populations, a Black man sitting in his front yard, a Black man jogging down the street, an entire Brown neighborhood, all of them trying to make it through another day. Why has there been less public outrage and less debate? We must address the cruelty that structures our lives.

Azucena, member of Tenants and Workers United

(Photo Credit 1: Daily Maverick) (Photo Credit 2: New York Times) (Photo Credit 3: Tenants and Workers United / Facebook)

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In Brazil, domestic workers’ children demand dignity for domestic workers!

May 5, 2020 by 34 Comments

 

“Domestic workers replaced black house slaves as markers of class differences and power in Brazilian society.”   
                                                                                                                                         Maurício Sellmann Oliveira

As of May 5, Brazil leads Latin America in both reported cases of Covid-19 – 110, 156 cases – and reported deaths, 7,458. Brazil has almost as many cases of Covid-19 as Peru, Ecuador and Mexico combined. Domestic workers form the center and fiber of this necro-narrative. Brazil has more domestic workers than any other country in the world, seven million and counting. Almost all are women, and the overwhelming majority are women of African descent. In January 2018, Brazil officially ratified the ILO’s Convention concerning decent work for domestic workers, according some protections to those with more or less permanent appointments. That accord left out the millions of women of color who work by the day. That was before Jair Bolsonaro became President, before the coronavirus pandemic, before the attempt to shred all protections for workers, women, women workers. On March 17, 63-year old Cleonice Gonçalves, a domestic worker in the wealthy Rio neighborhood of Leblon, died of Covid-19. Cleonice Gonçalves was the first Covid-19 fatality in Rio da Janeiro and the fifth in Brazil. Around the same time, Cleonice Gonçalves died, Juliana França – daughter of a domestic worker and goddaughter of a domestic worker, teacher and actress, resident of Rio da Janeiro – began an online petition, “Manifesto by the daughters and sons of domestic workers”, demanding health and labor protections for all domestic workers, demanding concrete and material dignity and respect for all domestic workers. Juliana França started the campaign in the name of her mother, Catarina dos Santos. The Brazilian chapter of the Coronavirus epic is a giant triangle, and at the respective apexes are Cleonice Gonçalves, Juliana França, and Catarina dos Santos.

Cleonice Gonçalves’s story is all too familiar. She worked as a live-in maid four days a week, in the Leblon neighborhood of Rio da Janeiro, a neighborhood reputed to be the most expensive real estate in the country. She’d travel two hours to the working-class suburb of Miguel Pereira. She worked for the same family for decades. Her employers went on a trip to Italy and came back suspecting they had contracted Covid-19. They were tested immediately. They never informed Cleonice Gonçalves. Why would they? On March 13, Cleonice Gonçalves complained of pain while urinating, and went to the doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and sent her back to work. Cleonice Gonçalves was diabetic and lived with high blood pressure. On March 15, Cleonice Gonçalves began having trouble breathing. She went to the hospital and, again, was sent back to work. Her employers continued to remain silent about their own suspicions concerning their health. Her condition continued to deteriorate, her employers continued to tell her nothing. On March 16, hearing of Cleonice Gonçalves’s situation, her family sent a taxi and brought her home. On March 17, Cleonice Gonçalves died. On March 17, Cleonice Gonçalves’s employers’ test result came back: positive. The employers are now thriving. End of story.

Juliana França decided another story is possible. Juliana França’s 57-year-old mother and 75-year-old godmother have work histories similar to that of Cleonice Gonçalves. Working class live-in maids who travel long distances from working class suburbs to upscale neighborhoods, both have worked decades for their current employers. When the pandemic struck, both women’s respective employers insisted that they should continue working. The pandemic? Nothing serious, overblown, listen to the President. Juliana França understood the pressures on her mother and godmother and all the women like them, and so she created the manifesto, “For the lives of our mothers”, demanding paid quarantine leave, health benefit protections, worker protections. Juliana França has also created a network that is linking domestic workers to donors. When Juliana França’s mother, Catarina dos Santos, showed the petition to her employers, they gave her paid leave.

As elsewhere, the story of Covid-19 in Brazil is a story of violent inequality, inequality that structured national and community lives prior to the pandemic and has intensified within the pathological onslaught. At the same time, it is the story of women, overwhelmingly women of color, refusing to accept abuse, for themselves and for their loved ones, refusing to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Remember the martyrdom of Cleonice Gonçalves and remember the Great Refusal of Juliana França and Catarina dos Santos. After too many martyrs, it’s time, it’s way past time, for enforced decent work for domestic workers now! Please consider signing the petition, here.

 

(Image Credit: Change)

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We must decriminalize sex work in order to end human trafficking

May 4, 2020 by Leave a Comment

In a state currently fighting to end human trafficking, supporting the full decriminalization of sex work is a deeply unpopular but very important stance. The victims of human trafficking in Georgia receive widespread sympathy and support, while at the same time often suffering from laws designed to criminalize sex work. Trying to find a different job with sex work charges on your record is exceedingly difficult. Georgia Governor and First Lady Kemp have unveiled proposals that would allow survivors of human trafficking to restrict access to their criminal records for this purpose. A much more direct approach to this that would protect far more people, both those who are trafficked and sex workers, would be to do away with criminalizing the selling of sex within the state of Georgia.

Many advocacy groups for sex workers exist and most have a consensus on what can best be done to protect those most vulnerable to criminalization. According to the Consensus Statement for the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, major demands are for sex work to be acknowledged as legitimate work, for sex workers to be protected under the law, and to be free from violence and discrimination. 

Arguments against the decriminalization of sex work often echo the concerns of those against human trafficking, but the actual wants and needs of sex workers are specifically to protect themselves from being trafficked. The decriminalization of their profession would give them the ability to report crimes committed against themselves and others without the fear of arrest. Sex workers and people who are victims of trafficking both have trouble getting protection from law enforcement because of the current laws against sex work. If sex workers do not have to fear prosecution from law enforcement, they will be able to report human traffickers present in the sex trade. As it stands, sex workers risk arrest and jail time if they report exploitation or the presence of minors. 

Let me be completely clear on something: when sex workers cannot go to the police for fear of prosecution, their lives are put in danger. The rates of violence against sex workers are staggeringly high. Voluntary sex workers and human trafficking victims alike face the same rates of violence and rates of arrest. Criminalizing the voluntary actions of people in the sex industry does not stop people from being trafficked, but it does stop them from being able to go to the police without the possibility of being arrested for their own persecution. Regardless of how they got to where they are, both voluntary sex workers and the victims of human trafficking should be able to go to the police for protection. 

It is not enough to say that you support victims of human trafficking if you are not willing to support legislative changes that can actually reduce exploitation in the sex trade. There’s a reason it is called “the oldest profession”; sex work has been around long before us and will be around long after we are gone. Like any form of labor, it can become exploitation if there is not accountability and protection for laborers. Decriminalizing sex work will not decriminalize illegal business practices and crimes. Sex work can be legal; slavery, human trafficking, rape, and child exploitation are still against the law. The difference is that those who come forward as victims of the latter will not be categorized as criminals for association with the former. It may not feel as morally pure of a stance, but it is the most effective and humane way to protect those most vulnerable to human trafficking. 

 

(Image Credit: Global Network of Sex Work Projects)

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Now more than ever, supporting abolition of the debt is a priority!

May 2, 2020 by Leave a Comment

The covid 19 pandemic has demonstrated that the neoliberal system that leads the world is detrimental to health care systems, public services, and bad for people, especially for the poor and third world populations. We should remind the globalized neoliberal leadership that they asserted not long ago that austerity measures were indispensable to save the economy of an indebted country. There was no alternative. Austerity policies were touted as the only way to save the population of a country. Now, those same countries have their underfunded public services and health care systems unable to guarantee proper safeguards to the people. This scenario exposes that the distribution of poverty is based on exploitation that is gendered, racialized, and divided by class. 

The abolition of the public debt in third world countries has been discussed in supranational assemblies such as the EU, but what exactly is public debt? In the 1980s, “development” became synonymous with  Structural Adjustment Programs, (SAPs), which forced developing countries to incur enormous public debt. The purpose of building public debt is to indebt the entire society, begetting a system of inequality. Today those countries subjected to SAPs are facing the coronavirus pandemic without health resources as they have been whittled away to satisfy repayment of the debt. 

OXFAM’s recent press release reveals two faces of the same coin. One pertains to public debt management of the third world countries and the other one to the budget priorities imposed on these countries. According to Oxfam, 64 countries of the Global South have to spend more on repayment of their “public debt” than health care. For instance, Ghana spends 11 times more on its public debt than on its health care system. Although this reality is not new, it has gone mostly unnoticed and not been considered as a risk for the population. Oxfam highlights that 500 million people in the Global South could face dire poverty, according to UN researchers. Already, 265 million people are facing acute hunger, according to the WHO, showing that “the pandemics are also hunger.”

Meanwhile, since January, the IMF’s wealth has grown by $19.4 billion, while the third world public debt is about $12.4 billion. The IMF and the World Bank promoted Structural Adjustment Programs, SAPs. Will it be time for the IMF to repay its ethical debt to these countries, now that these countries are facing pandemics without protection of any kind? The people in these countries, far from being protected by development, have lost their protection, because the governments of indebted countries were forced to serve the market, not the people. The great ideal of human rights has too often been a place mediated through the neoliberal market-take-all ideology.

The overwhelming influence of the US economic power has influenced the way health care systems around the world work, and the US health care system is the worst system among the OECD countries. It is a for-profit system that has no interest in providing care for the sake of care. In this system, money should not be spent on health care or public services but only on a guaranteed return on investment, removing the idea that health is a basic necessity to guarantee human rights. This approach to health care has dominated the world’s health systems for decades, infecting universal health care system like a contagious virus.

Rebecca Solnit recently asserted: “Coronavirus does discriminate because that’s what humans do.” But who are the ones who discriminate? We certainly don’t feel that we do, and still, we do. We do by not paying attention to systems that promote discrimination while asserting that they do the opposite. We need to organize to persistently denounce, expose, and fight what the globalized neoliberal economy has created. The coronavirus has shown that the prescriptions made by the neoliberal even liberal economists, the gurus of modern power, kill. They warped any political debate to install a mechanism of inequality keeping the entire society eternally indebted. Politics of austerity have spread in every possible niche, including in industrialized countries, affecting all public services. Every nation has seen the number of their hospital beds melting away. France, which had the best health care system in 2000, has seen its health care stripped;, for example the number of beds for 1000 people went from 11 in 1980 to 6 in 2019. In the US that number went from 7.9 in 1970 to 2.8 in 2016. By the same token, funding allocated to fundamental research on virology was curtailed. When the coronavirus spread, the absence of adequate health care resources and research transformed the contamination into a health crisis. This situation is cruel and absurd, and people are starting to talk about it. 

Women, especially women in the Global South, are the most vulnerable to reductions of public services. About 2/3 of their work is unpaid work. This unpaid work represented about 13% of total GDP in 2018. This discrimination is systemic and profoundly anchored in the patriarchal system. Their unpaid work accounted for 13% of global GDP in 2018. It is particularly important in third world countries.  

The priorities have not been on health, clean water, education, local agriculture. They have not been on building a more just society between the North and the South, between the wealthy and the poor. Being poor is determined by gender, race and class. This health crisis has demonstrated that neoliberal leadership had no interest in the protection of the population. In this time of pandemic, the populations who are paying a heavy price are the most vulnerable of the society, whether they live in developing countries, refugee camps, prisons and jails in the United States, or detention centers. This pandemic also offers a window to build kindness and expand global solidarity at the grassroots level. Debunking the official mythical discourse through a transnational feminist lens has to occur to transform the system. The priorities are clear, treating life with respect is the basic of global well-being. This means remove the financial burden on the poor as the wealthy have built hell. Support debt abolition!

Support the abolition of the debt : http://www.cadtm.org/English

 

(Photo Credit 1: Sara Bakhshi) (Photo Credit 2: Ian Espinosa)

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What happened to Andrea Circle Bear and Sarah Lee Circle Bear? American `justice’

April 30, 2020 by 41 Comments
FMC Carswell

Andrea Circle Bear died in federal custody Tuesday, April 28. Andrea Circle Bear is the first woman to die of Covid-19 while in federal custody. Andrea Circle Bear was convicted of a minor offense and should never have been in prison in the first place. When Andrea Circle Bear was sentenced, she was five months pregnant; she should never have been in prison. 

Andrea Circle Bear’s story is a familiar one for Native women in the United States. Andrea Circle Bear lived in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian reservation. In April 2018, Andrea Circle Bear was arrested and admitted to selling a small amount of methamphetamine. In March 2019, Andrea Circle Bear was charged. While awaiting trial, Andrea Circle Bear stayed in the Hughes County Jail, in Pierre, South Dakota. In November, Andrea Circle Bear was released for one day to attend divorce proceedings. On January 15, 2020, Andrea Circle Bear was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison. At the time, she was five months pregnant. Because of her pregnancy, Andrea Circle Bear was transferred to Federal Medical Facility Carswell, the only designated medical facility for women in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. FMC Carswell is in Fort Worth, Texas. 

When Andrea Circle Bear was removed from South Dakota, she was described as appearing to be healthy. Up to this moment, both the Hughes County Jail and Hughes County itself have no reported incidents of Coronavirus. The same cannot be said for Federal prisons in Texas.

As a newly arrived prisoner, Andrea Circle Bear was placed in quarantine on March 20. On March 28, due to concerns about her pregnancy, Andrea Circle Bear was taken to the hospital. She was returned to FMC Carswell the same day. On March 31, exhibiting Covid-19 symptoms, Andrea Circle Bear was taken back to the local hospital, where she was put on a ventilator. On April 1, Andrea Circle Bear underwent a caesarean, and gave birth. On April 4, Andrea Circle Bear was confirmed Covid-19 positive. On Tuesday, April 28, Andrea Circle Bear died. 

According to Andrea Circle Bear’s grandmother, Clara LeBeau, Andrea Circle Bear never belonged in prison in the first place and certainly should never have been shipped off to Texas. Andrea Circle Bear was the mother of five children. Because of earlier caesarean section births and other underlying medical conditions, she was considered a high-risk OB/GYN patient. Clara LeBeau told the court as much, and so did Andrea Circle Bear. According to Clara LeBeau, “She was concerned. She’s going somewhere to have her baby where she’s just not knowing the doctors and staff like she does here at the hospital in Pierre. I was concerned too, it bothered me. I said, ‘You shoulda told ‘em you were high risk,’ and she said she did. I guess they didn’t pay attention.” Andrea Circle Bear called her grandmother from Carswell: “She said ‘I told ‘em I was sick, I was in there four or five days and I was telling them but they didn’t pay attention.’ She said please call my grandma and tell her she’ll know and she’ll pray for me,’ but they didn’t even do that … I really believe it was their fault. If they’d known she was high-risk, they shouldn’t have even flown her. That was the start of everything.”

On July 6, Sarah Lee Circle Bear was “found” unconscious in a holding cell in Brown County Jail in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Sarah Lee Circle Bear was 24 years old, the mother of two children, aged one and two. She was picked up for a bond violation, a minor offense. According to other prisoners, before being transferred to a holding cell, Sarah Lee Circle Bear told her jailers that she was suffering excruciating pain. The staff told her to “knock it off” and “quit faking”. Inmates called to the staff to help her. The staff came, picked Sarah Lee Circle Bear up off the floor, dragged her out of the cell, and transferred to a holding cell. Later, they “found” Sarah Lee Circle Bear “unresponsive.” Seeking justice, the family sued. Just this January, it was announced that the federal law suit would go forward, sometime this year.

Sarah Lee Circle Bear was Andrea Circle Bear’s sister-in-law. 

If they’d paid attention, if they’d known. They paid attention, they knew. They didn’t care. As Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley noted, “Andrea should never have been in jail in the first place. Period. That she was there at all is cruel and negligent.” Cruel and negligent … but not unusual. Senator Dick Durbin concurs: “Andrea Circle Bear committed a low-level nonviolent drug offense, but she did not deserve to die, and an innocent child did not deserve to lose his mother. The Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons must act to prevent more death and suffering, and they must act now.” If history is any indication, Andrea Circle Bear’s death will not compel any federal agency into any action, other than a cover-up.

What happened to Andrea Circle Bear and Sarah Lee Circle Bear? Nothing much. Just another two Native American woman dead in custody somewhere in the United States, missing and murdered.

 

(Photo Credit: Federal Bureau of Prisons)

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Covid Operations: On the genealogy of `overcrowding’, or how we learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

April 28, 2020 by 15 Comments

In the past 24 hours, overcrowding has made the news: “As France releases thousands, can Covid-19 end chronic prison overcrowding?” “Nine killed in Peru prison protest against overcrowded conditions during pandemic”. Earlier in the week, “COVID-19 Reaches Lebanon’s Overcrowded Palestinian Refugee Camps”. Overcrowding is the Janus face of the pandemic. On one hand, with the regime of social and physical distancing comes concern over overcrowding. Beaches and bars are dangerously overcrowded. When schools re-open, how will they maintain social distancing, how will they avoid overcrowding? In this context, overcrowding has a clear metric: six feet or two meters between each person. It’s measurable, there’s a formula. On the other hand, overcrowding is the `petri dish’ for infection: in prisons, jails, immigration detention centers, juvenile detention centers, in `overly dense’ neighborhoods and individual residences. Here, the math gets fuzzy, as do history and memory. Prisons have been overcrowded for as long as mass incarceration has been the ruling ideology; cities have been divided into “neighborhoods” and “slums”, the latter “relentlessly …  overcrowded”, for as long as real estate and commodification of urban space have been a main economic driver. Why does it take a pandemic for `the world’ to take notice?

Consider these statements from the last couple days. In calling for Iran to release its female prisoners of conscience and political prisoners, UN human rights representatives noted, “Iran’s prisons have long-standing hygiene, overcrowding and healthcare problems.” In some places, prison overcrowding is not only long-standing but `notorious’: “Throughout Latin America, prisons are notoriously overcrowded, violent and dominated in large part by gangs or corrupt officials.” “The spreading specter of the new coronavirus is shaking Latin America’s notoriously overcrowded, unruly prisons, threatening to turn them into infernos.” “Throughout Latin America, prisons are notoriously overcrowded and violent, and Peru is no exception.” How did Latin American prisons become notoriously overcrowded while the equally overcrowded prisons of the United States are merely “overcrowded and underfunded” or “significantly overcrowded”. Prisons in the United States are described as having “a troubling history of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions”; prisons in France and Europe are described as a “combination of cramped quarters, poor sanitation and desperate overcrowding”.

Last year, the United Nations reported that by 2018, over 1 billion people were living in slums or informal settlements. In 2018, the world population was around 7.6 billion. 13% of the world was living in slums or informal settlements. 23.5% of urban populations were living in slums or informal settlements. Where was the `notoriety’ over the past thirty years of urban so-called development: escalating rents matched with reducing numbers of rental units, proportionately less and less “affordable and adequate housing”. For the urban poor, at first, and then for everyone but the urban rich, expulsion and exclusion became the daily in what was fast becoming  a planet of slums.

Yesterday, when Cicero Public Health Director Susan Grazzini was asked about Cicero’s high rate of Covid-19 infection, her answer was short and direct: “It’s overcrowding. There are certain areas where we have more COVID-19 (cases). Its more places that are overcrowded.” A week or so earlier, when Gabriel Scally, the Royal Society of Medicine’s head of epidemiology, was asked about England’s urban high rate of Covid-19 infection, his answer was equally direct: “Houses in multiple occupation must be in the same category as care homes because of the sheer press of people. I have no doubt that these kinds of overcrowded conditions are tremendously potent in spreading the virus.”

This is our built environment. More segregated cities where increasing numbers of people live in lethally toxic overcrowded residences, overcrowded both in their respective residences and in their neighborhoods; where cities pay more to sequester the overcrowded than to attend to them. More prisons, more prisoners, where, again, overcrowded goes hand-in-glove with drastic, even criminal underfunding; where administrations, from national to municipal and county, pay more to sequester the overcrowded than to attend to them. This is a small part of the story of how we learned to stop worrying about overcrowding and love the apartheid bomb.

 

(Photo Credit: Meridith Kohut / New York Times)

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Perfect day

April 26, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Perfect day

it is
with a young author
all of 11-year’s old
on my morning radio


she bubbling away
enthusiastic is she
about writing
and reading too


(World Book Day
has passed virtually)


A tad later
another is on
she somewhat 
longer in the game


Perfect day
is her first 
choice of music


a song surely 
to bring cheer 
to humanity


surely not
what with we all
held to ransom 
by a virus


one that has exposed
the planet’s cracks
for all to gasp at
and then to act on


A Perfect day


Two authors and a Lou Reed song on Michelle Constant’s show get this going, on South Africa’s Lockdown Day 31.

 

 

 

(Image Credit: “Joy” by John Von Wicht: Smithsonian Museums)

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In memory of Malak Haider al-Zubaidi: In MENA, we have a long way to go

April 24, 2020 by Leave a Comment

As a Middle Eastern woman, I often find myself engaging in conversations that discuss the evolvement of women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa and the plethora of milestones we’ve reached as women. 

Many leaders of the MENA countries have patted themselves on the back for implementing multi-million dollar projects aimed at promoting women’s empowerment in MENA (largely due to pressures from the international community). And while a large part of the region shifted in its ideological thinking after the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings—particularly amongst Arab youth—girls and women are still facing hardships as a consequence of societal norms and hegemonic masculinity.

Statistics over time have shown that the region continues to lack efforts in its female empowerment agenda: 

Women have not reached their full, independently dignified potential in the region. Having lived in the Middle East for two years in my early 20’s after growing up in Germany and the Czech Republic my entire life, I felt that I had sufficient experience to objectively come to the conclusion that girls and women continue to be suppressed under the control of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and in many cases even, sons—thus, being far from liberated.

Women been fully liberated only when they are given the right to make decisions over their own body, are allowed to be publicly seen with the opposite gender without fear of reputational repercussion, and no longer need permission from others to pursue life the way they want to. 

Women have been fully liberated in MENA only when we stop seeing them get tortured at the hands of their husbands. This is unfortunately the reality of hundreds of thousands of women in the region—from domestic violence to honor killings, as seen recently in the story of a young Iraqi woman, Malak Haider al-Zubaidi.

As the second wife of Mohammed al-Mayahli, Malak Haider al-Zubaidi had been forbidden to visit her parents for the last eight months. Her husband then lit her on fire to prevent her from going, burned her to death, and later taking to Facebook, wrote, “She burned herself with petrol and accused me and my family…There are sponsored accounts that are posting these lies just to slander my family.” Photos of Malak suffering from burn injuries all over her body at a Najaf hospital have caused outrage amongst human rights activists in the region. 

But what becomes more and more abundantly clear about many countries in the MENA region, it’s that corruption and powerful men always prevail over justice. 

Because Mohammed is the alleged son of a high-ranking colonel in the Iraqi army, seeking justice for Malak becomes nearly impossible.

Malak is not the only one. Earlier this year, a seven-year-old girl was raped by the bodyguards of a Kurdish political official in Erbil. While the Kurdistan Region was able to detain some of them, the father of the girl continues to receive death threats from individuals involved. Until today, there is still no update on whether the suspects are detained or not. 

I cannot sit and celebrate the milestones MENA has reached when there are girls and women being oppressed every day, with no accountability taken or justice sought. The next time you find yourself in a conversation about development in the Middle East, bring up the story of Malak and the seven-year-old Kurdish girl. Because we have such a long way to go. 

 

(Photo Credit: Reuters / The National)

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