thenation--2020-07-03--Imagining a New Mount Rushmore

Imagining a New Mount Rushmore

The news that President Trump is planning to stage a “ massive fireworks display ” before a sizable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial ( notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19 ) has left me mulling over once again the possible creation of another such epic-scale monument .
Maybe it could even be incised into a nearby ridge in the same Black Hills area of South Dakota as the original , if the Lakota Sioux could be convinced to allow it , which they certainly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
After all , back in the late 1920s , less than three decades and not 70 miles from the site of the ultimate treachery of the Wounded Knee massacre , that original undertaking to carve the faces of presidents George Washington , Thomas Jefferson , Abraham Lincoln , and Teddy Roosevelt into the side of Mount Rushmore barreled heedlessly along , oblivious to Native American concerns .
In the process , it desecrated one of the Sioux ’ s holiest sites ( the stark cliff face the Lakota ironically called the Six @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaders of the very nation that had stolen their land and then so savagely repressed them .
Incidentally , did you know—I hadn ’ t—that the sculptor of the original Rushmore monument , Gutzon Borglum , was an avid member of the Ku Klux Klan ?
In fact , his first stab at such a gargantuan effort , earlier in the 1920s , had been his proposed Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial , featuring the mounted figures of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson , as well as the president of the Confederacy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ armies .
That vast bas-relief was to grace the very site , half an hour outside Atlanta , where , on a cold Thanksgiving night in 1915 , just a few months after the premiere of D.W. Griffith ’ s movie Birth of a Nation ( and shortly after that , the notorious mob-lynching of the falsely convicted Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in nearby Marietta ) , a select group of sheet-hooded men , led by William J. Simmons , founded the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan .
Their ceremony @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cross atop the dome of the mountain , an act commemorated there every Labor Day for the next 50 years with similarly festive cross burnings .
As it happened , Borglum only made it as far as sculpting Lee ’ s head before the initial version of the project bogged down in financial difficulties and intra-Klan sectarian strife in 1925 .
A couple of years later , he moved on to the Mount Rushmore project .
Several decades later , however , work on a variation of Borglum ’ s Stone Mountain would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mount Rushmore ’ s completion .
Indeed , with work once again well underway toward what would become the largest bas-relief anywhere in the world , a vast state park at the bottom of the mountain was inaugurated on April 14 , 1965 , the 100th anniversary of Lincoln ’ s assassination , and the place would quickly become Georgia ’ s most visited tourist attraction .
But that ’ s another story , worthy perhaps of an entirely different reckoning .
As for my own fantasized Rushmore 2.0 , perhaps the Lakota @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than they were the first time around , since the project would be aimed at addressing our common future , maybe half a century from now , and represent a graven missive from our own time to our progeny ’ s , an attempt to account for the botched and blighted world we ’ ll likely have bequeathed them by then .
Whose Heads ( and Whose Hands ) in the Pillory Stockade ?
Rather than gazing off with visionary zeal toward some divinely sanctioned manifest destiny , as in the original , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would be lined up in a pillory stockade , each with his downcast face bracketed by similarly yoked hands .
( The encasing yoke-planks would be meticulously carved into that granite cliff as well . )
These would be the four men ( and yes , of course , they would all be white men ) from our era who , perhaps more than any others , could be deemed responsible for the dire endgame into which the world by that time might well have plunged : four men who had the resources @ @ @ @ @ @ @ instead chose to swap out the long-term fate of their grandchildren ( and the rest of the human progeny ) in relentless pursuit of short-term profit and power .
The way I envision it , the first slot on that mountain would be reserved for media baron Rupert Murdoch who , by way of his News Corp empire , so single-handedly poisoned the well of public discourse with denial and obfuscation , not only in the United States but also in Britain as well as his native Australia ( where he controls 60 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
For that matter , his damage extends globally , thanks to Fox News , the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal , The Sun , News of the World , and their ilk ( and recently , he even chose to solidify his malign record by installing his ideologically matched son Lachlan atop the firm ’ s line of succession in conspicuous stead of his more circumspect and reportedly reform-minded son James ) .
The next slot over should surely go to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell .
After all , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can scientists and others keep insisting that we only have 10 or 12 years left to avert planetary ecological calamity before those years run out ?
—he managed to upend virtually every effort of the Obama administration , no matter how deeply inadequate , to deal with the burning of fossil fuels .
Then he abetted every anti-ecological , anti-climate-change initiative of the Trump administration , with immediate short-term benefits to his billionaire ( often fossil-fueled ) donors .
Meanwhile , he succeeded in packing the courts with similarly blinkered reactionaries as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any of this .
And no , Donald J. Trump wouldn ’ t even come close to qualifying for the third spot on that cliffside commemorative relief .
The candidates , after all , would have to demonstrate enough intellectual bandwidth to grasp , however faintly , the stakes involved , and Trump demonstrably lacks any grasp whatsoever of the future he ’ s leaving our children and their children .
In any case , his hands are way too small .
They ’ d keep slipping out of the stockade ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hair , how could any sculptor , no matter how gifted , be expected to reproduce such a mare ’ s nest ?
Moreover , merely excluding him from such dubious company should be enough to provoke a veritable tweet storm of umbrage , which could , at least , provide the rest of us with a tad of dark entertainment across these dismal times , even if the project itself never advanced to the chiseling stage .
So what of slot three ?
On that one , I ’ m of at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ case , why should I be the only one who gets to decide ?
Shouldn ’ t these choices be a matter for public conversation and deliberation ?
Still , for my money , onetime Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former vice president Dick Cheney would definitely be in the running , given their formative roles in fomenting the sort of dyspeptic politics that made the current Trumpian moment possible .
And don ’ t forget Bill Clinton either .
( No reason not to be bipartisan on such a monument .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ zeal to be loved by those at the top of the financial pyramid , President Clinton didn ’ t even begin to rebalance the neoliberal excesses of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W .
Bush .
Given the craven surrender of Gingrich , Cheney , and Clinton to the short-term needs and dictates of financial and technological monopolies at the expense of longer-term environmental initiatives , all three would surely merit consideration .
The Fourth Slot for the Fifth Vote ?
Which brings me to that fourth slot , one that could well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and , at least to my mind , is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts ’ s to lose .
Yes , the current administration botched its response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented financial collapse that resulted , and yes , Trump and his minions have appallingly racist instincts in their treatment of immigration , police violence , systemic discrimination , and the widening chasms of economic inequality .
Still , the single most crucial issue in the upcoming November election should surely be the environmental future of our planet , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in that regard the United States remains the decisive battleground in determining all humanity ’ s collective fate .
( And it ’ s hard to overstate the terminal devastation four more years of Trumpian governance could wreak in this regard . )
Of course , with each passing week , Trump ’ s defeat in any sort of fairly conducted election seems ever more assured ( though no thanks to the issue of climate change , which is still being widely ignored ) .
Still , whether the coming election will , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with widespread access to the ballot guaranteed , is fast becoming the defining question of this electoral season .
From President Trump and Mitch McConnell to local operatives in key swing states , the Republicans have made no secret of their determination to shrink suffrage through voter suppression tactics like mass purges of voting lists ; arbitrary registration requirements blatantly tilted against people of color and young people generally ; flagrant efforts to prevent mail-in balloting ( even in the face of a likely autumn upsurge of the Covid-19 pandemic and even if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ order to do so ) ; the conspicuously uneven distribution of polling places on Election Day , along with the assignment of more breakdown-prone polling machines to key opposition districts ; all of that to be supplemented by massive , secretly funded efforts at voter intimidation—and that ’ s not even to mention complications that might arise in the subsequent counting of the ballots .
Most of these gambits will provoke urgent legal challenges that will undoubtedly quickly wend their way to an already highly politicized Supreme Court .
There , Trump and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ least four stalwart votes ( that being in large part why those judges , most recently Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh , were put there in the first place ) .
This , in turn , means that the fate of both the republic and the human future could come down to the jurisprudence of just one man : Chief Justice John Roberts , the fifth vote ( and the only one that may matter in the end ) .
In this context , much is made of the chief justice ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the institution he presides over , its nonpartisan majesty , and its abiding place in the constitutional firmament .
After all , wasn ’ t he the one who found a way to salvage the Affordable Care Act , secure the employment rights of LGBTQ workers , and forestall both the deportation of the DACA Dreamers and the obliteration of abortion , at least for the time being ?
It ’ s worth noting , however , that the absolute right of states and localities to control access to voting in any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to gerrymandering or ongoing racial discrimination ) has been a fundamentally unswerving feature of Roberts ’ s legal philosophy since long before he was on the Supreme Court .
After all , from July 1980 through August 1981 , he clerked for Justice William Rehnquist , who ’ d made it his own life ’ s work to roll back much of the liberal Supreme Court ’ s jurisprudence of the previous three decades , particularly with regard to voting rights .
On leaving that clerkship , Roberts joined the Justice Department ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ under Kenneth Starr in the newly installed administration of President Ronald Reagan .
There , his portfolio was particularly focused on undercutting the 1975 Voting Rights Act , even if to only limited effect , owing to congressional opposition at the time .
In 1986 , he left government to enter private practice .
But after the November 2000 Florida presidential election debacle ( remember those “ hanging chads ” ? )
, Roberts was one of the first outside lawyers selected by 29-year-old Republican campaign adviser Ted Cruz ( another onetime Rehnquist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a preemptive appeal to the Supreme Court .
Thereafter , working behind the scenes on behalf of Florida Governor Jeb Bush , the brother of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush , Roberts fashioned a gambit designed to force the suspension of any recount in that state .
He would thereby award the narrowest possible electoral college victory to the younger Bush over Democratic candidate Al Gore ( who had actually won the national popular vote by more than 500,000 votes ) .
Roberts ’ s strategy proved entirely successful—in partial appreciation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first acts , the newly installed president nominated Roberts to a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C .
Circuit ( a nomination that languished for two years until the Republicans secured control of the Senate ) .
Then , in 2005 , Bush nominated him to succeed the recently deceased Rehnquist as chief justice of the Supreme Court , in which capacity Roberts promptly resumed his lifelong focus on systematically eviscerating most forms of federal electoral supervision .
In 2010 , Roberts was the fifth vote in the notorious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with speech and opened the floodgates to unprecedented private spending in election campaigns , virtually without regulatory oversight .
Three years later , he was the fifth vote in Shelby County v. Holder , a case that gutted major provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , the crown jewel of the civil rights movement , radically undercutting the federal government ’ s capacity to address clearly documented discriminatory practices at the state and local level .
At the end of the 2019 term , Roberts provided the fifth vote in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t review even the most egregiously partisan gerrymanders by state legislatures .
On the eve of the recent Wisconsin primary , his was the fifth vote overturning the ability of that state ’ s governor , acting at the behest of his health commissioner , to suspend or extend primary voting thanks to the rampaging coronavirus .
Roberts and crew thereby sentenced tens of thousands of voters to wait in dangerous lines for hours on end at polling places , especially in urban districts like Milwaukee , where a total of only five @ @ @ @ @ @ @ service the entire city .
So , we ’ ll see .
In the wake of the November 3rd election , will yet another set of fifth votes , this time in defense of a slew of Trumpian election outrages , net him that fourth slot on Rushmore 2.0 , or might some sudden , otherwise unaccountable about-face on his part spare us the need even to erect such a monument ?
If , however , Roberts does provide those deciding votes for the Republican side , will democracy as we know it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so that anyone might ever again even be allowed to muse over and plan , let alone erect , a Rushmore 2.0 monument ?
On the other hand , were Roberts to demur , who knows whether achingly conventional Joe Biden will be able to rise to the historic occasion of his own election or might he , in the fullness of time , yet find himself becoming worthy of insertion into the fourth slot in that stockade ?
History will tell : Some of us may even live to see it .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
The news that President Trump is planning to stage a “massive fireworks display” before a sizable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial (notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19) has left me mulling over once again the possible creation of another such epic-scale monument. Maybe it could even be incised into a nearby ridge in the same Black Hills area of South Dakota as the original, if the Lakota Sioux could be convinced to allow it, which they certainly didn’t the first time around.
After all, back in the late 1920s, less than three decades and not 70 miles from the site of the ultimate treachery of the Wounded Knee massacre, that original undertaking to carve the faces of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt into the side of Mount Rushmore barreled heedlessly along, oblivious to Native American concerns. In the process, it desecrated one of the Sioux’s holiest sites (the stark cliff face the Lakota ironically called the Six Grandfathers) in order to celebrate the leaders of the very nation that had stolen their land and then so savagely repressed them.
Incidentally, did you know—I hadn’t—that the sculptor of the original Rushmore monument, Gutzon Borglum, was an avid member of the Ku Klux Klan? In fact, his first stab at such a gargantuan effort, earlier in the 1920s, had been his proposed Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, featuring the mounted figures of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as well as the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, leading their rebel armies.
That vast bas-relief was to grace the very site, half an hour outside Atlanta, where, on a cold Thanksgiving night in 1915, just a few months after the premiere of D.W. Griffith’s movie Birth of a Nation (and shortly after that, the notorious mob-lynching of the falsely convicted Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in nearby Marietta), a select group of sheet-hooded men, led by William J. Simmons, founded the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan. Their ceremony culminated with the burning of a 16-foot cross atop the dome of the mountain, an act commemorated there every Labor Day for the next 50 years with similarly festive cross burnings.
As it happened, Borglum only made it as far as sculpting Lee’s head before the initial version of the project bogged down in financial difficulties and intra-Klan sectarian strife in 1925. A couple of years later, he moved on to the Mount Rushmore project. Several decades later, however, work on a variation of Borglum’s Stone Mountain would be revived by others, long after Mount Rushmore’s completion. Indeed, with work once again well underway toward what would become the largest bas-relief anywhere in the world, a vast state park at the bottom of the mountain was inaugurated on April 14, 1965, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and the place would quickly become Georgia’s most visited tourist attraction. But that’s another story, worthy perhaps of an entirely different reckoning. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
As for my own fantasized Rushmore 2.0, perhaps the Lakota would be more amenable to this version than they were the first time around, since the project would be aimed at addressing our common future, maybe half a century from now, and represent a graven missive from our own time to our progeny’s, an attempt to account for the botched and blighted world we’ll likely have bequeathed them by then.
Whose Heads (and Whose Hands) in the Pillory Stockade?
Rather than gazing off with visionary zeal toward some divinely sanctioned manifest destiny, as in the original, the foursome on my Mount Rushmore 2.0 would be lined up in a pillory stockade, each with his downcast face bracketed by similarly yoked hands. (The encasing yoke-planks would be meticulously carved into that granite cliff as well.) These would be the four men (and yes, of course, they would all be white men) from our era who, perhaps more than any others, could be deemed responsible for the dire endgame into which the world by that time might well have plunged: four men who had the resources and intelligence to have known better but instead chose to swap out the long-term fate of their grandchildren (and the rest of the human progeny) in relentless pursuit of short-term profit and power. Current Issue View our current issue
The way I envision it, the first slot on that mountain would be reserved for media baron Rupert Murdoch who, by way of his News Corp empire, so single-handedly poisoned the well of public discourse with denial and obfuscation, not only in the United States but also in Britain as well as his native Australia (where he controls 60 percent of all daily newspaper sales). For that matter, his damage extends globally, thanks to Fox News, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, News of the World, and their ilk (and recently, he even chose to solidify his malign record by installing his ideologically matched son Lachlan atop the firm’s line of succession in conspicuous stead of his more circumspect and reportedly reform-minded son James).
The next slot over should surely go to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. After all, across a single crucial decade—and how long can scientists and others keep insisting that we only have 10 or 12 years left to avert planetary ecological calamity before those years run out?—he managed to upend virtually every effort of the Obama administration, no matter how deeply inadequate, to deal with the burning of fossil fuels. Then he abetted every anti-ecological, anti-climate-change initiative of the Trump administration, with immediate short-term benefits to his billionaire (often fossil-fueled) donors. Meanwhile, he succeeded in packing the courts with similarly blinkered reactionaries as a way of forestalling future efforts to reverse any of this.
And no, Donald J. Trump wouldn’t even come close to qualifying for the third spot on that cliffside commemorative relief. The candidates, after all, would have to demonstrate enough intellectual bandwidth to grasp, however faintly, the stakes involved, and Trump demonstrably lacks any grasp whatsoever of the future he’s leaving our children and their children. In any case, his hands are way too small. They’d keep slipping out of the stockade’s granite boreholes, and as for his hair, how could any sculptor, no matter how gifted, be expected to reproduce such a mare’s nest? Moreover, merely excluding him from such dubious company should be enough to provoke a veritable tweet storm of umbrage, which could, at least, provide the rest of us with a tad of dark entertainment across these dismal times, even if the project itself never advanced to the chiseling stage.
So what of slot three? On that one, I’m of at least two minds and, in any case, why should I be the only one who gets to decide? Shouldn’t these choices be a matter for public conversation and deliberation? Still, for my money, onetime Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former vice president Dick Cheney would definitely be in the running, given their formative roles in fomenting the sort of dyspeptic politics that made the current Trumpian moment possible.
And don’t forget Bill Clinton either. (No reason not to be bipartisan on such a monument.) Too clever by half in his zeal to be loved by those at the top of the financial pyramid, President Clinton didn’t even begin to rebalance the neoliberal excesses of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Given the craven surrender of Gingrich, Cheney, and Clinton to the short-term needs and dictates of financial and technological monopolies at the expense of longer-term environmental initiatives, all three would surely merit consideration.
The Fourth Slot for the Fifth Vote?
Which brings me to that fourth slot, one that could well be determined in the next six months and, at least to my mind, is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s to lose.
Yes, the current administration botched its response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented financial collapse that resulted, and yes, Trump and his minions have appallingly racist instincts in their treatment of immigration, police violence, systemic discrimination, and the widening chasms of economic inequality. Still, the single most crucial issue in the upcoming November election should surely be the environmental future of our planet, and let’s face it, in that regard the United States remains the decisive battleground in determining all humanity’s collective fate. (And it’s hard to overstate the terminal devastation four more years of Trumpian governance could wreak in this regard.)
Of course, with each passing week, Trump’s defeat in any sort of fairly conducted election seems ever more assured (though no thanks to the issue of climate change, which is still being widely ignored). Still, whether the coming election will, in fact, be fairly conducted, with widespread access to the ballot guaranteed, is fast becoming the defining question of this electoral season.
From President Trump and Mitch McConnell to local operatives in key swing states, the Republicans have made no secret of their determination to shrink suffrage through voter suppression tactics like mass purges of voting lists; arbitrary registration requirements blatantly tilted against people of color and young people generally; flagrant efforts to prevent mail-in balloting (even in the face of a likely autumn upsurge of the Covid-19 pandemic and even if it takes bankrupting the Postal Service in order to do so); the conspicuously uneven distribution of polling places on Election Day, along with the assignment of more breakdown-prone polling machines to key opposition districts; all of that to be supplemented by massive, secretly funded efforts at voter intimidation—and that’s not even to mention complications that might arise in the subsequent counting of the ballots. Most of these gambits will provoke urgent legal challenges that will undoubtedly quickly wend their way to an already highly politicized Supreme Court. There, Trump and his fellow Republicans can count on at least four stalwart votes (that being in large part why those judges, most recently Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were put there in the first place).
This, in turn, means that the fate of both the republic and the human future could come down to the jurisprudence of just one man: Chief Justice John Roberts, the fifth vote (and the only one that may matter in the end). In this context, much is made of the chief justice’s supposedly overriding concern for the historical reputation of the institution he presides over, its nonpartisan majesty, and its abiding place in the constitutional firmament. After all, wasn’t he the one who found a way to salvage the Affordable Care Act, secure the employment rights of LGBTQ workers, and forestall both the deportation of the DACA Dreamers and the obliteration of abortion, at least for the time being ?
It’s worth noting, however, that the absolute right of states and localities to control access to voting in any way they see fit (without regard to gerrymandering or ongoing racial discrimination) has been a fundamentally unswerving feature of Roberts’s legal philosophy since long before he was on the Supreme Court. After all, from July 1980 through August 1981, he clerked for Justice William Rehnquist, who’d made it his own life’s work to roll back much of the liberal Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the previous three decades, particularly with regard to voting rights. On leaving that clerkship, Roberts joined the Justice Department’s civil rights division where he served under Kenneth Starr in the newly installed administration of President Ronald Reagan. There, his portfolio was particularly focused on undercutting the 1975 Voting Rights Act, even if to only limited effect, owing to congressional opposition at the time. In 1986, he left government to enter private practice.
But after the November 2000 Florida presidential election debacle (remember those “hanging chads”?), Roberts was one of the first outside lawyers selected by 29-year-old Republican campaign adviser Ted Cruz (another onetime Rehnquist clerk) to fashion a legal strategy for a preemptive appeal to the Supreme Court. Thereafter, working behind the scenes on behalf of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, Roberts fashioned a gambit designed to force the suspension of any recount in that state. He would thereby award the narrowest possible electoral college victory to the younger Bush over Democratic candidate Al Gore (who had actually won the national popular vote by more than 500,000 votes).
Roberts’s strategy proved entirely successful—in partial appreciation for which, as one of his first acts, the newly installed president nominated Roberts to a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (a nomination that languished for two years until the Republicans secured control of the Senate). Then, in 2005, Bush nominated him to succeed the recently deceased Rehnquist as chief justice of the Supreme Court, in which capacity Roberts promptly resumed his lifelong focus on systematically eviscerating most forms of federal electoral supervision.
In 2010, Roberts was the fifth vote in the notorious Citizens United decision that effectively equated money with speech and opened the floodgates to unprecedented private spending in election campaigns, virtually without regulatory oversight. Three years later, he was the fifth vote in Shelby County v. Holder, a case that gutted major provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, radically undercutting the federal government’s capacity to address clearly documented discriminatory practices at the state and local level.
At the end of the 2019 term, Roberts provided the fifth vote in a case ensuring that federal courts couldn’t review even the most egregiously partisan gerrymanders by state legislatures. On the eve of the recent Wisconsin primary, his was the fifth vote overturning the ability of that state’s governor, acting at the behest of his health commissioner, to suspend or extend primary voting thanks to the rampaging coronavirus. Roberts and crew thereby sentenced tens of thousands of voters to wait in dangerous lines for hours on end at polling places, especially in urban districts like Milwaukee, where a total of only five polling stations were able to open to service the entire city.
In the Balance
So, we’ll see. In the wake of the November 3rd election, will yet another set of fifth votes, this time in defense of a slew of Trumpian election outrages, net him that fourth slot on Rushmore 2.0, or might some sudden, otherwise unaccountable about-face on his part spare us the need even to erect such a monument?
If, however, Roberts does provide those deciding votes for the Republican side, will democracy as we know it even survive a second Trump term, so that anyone might ever again even be allowed to muse over and plan, let alone erect, a Rushmore 2.0 monument? On the other hand, were Roberts to demur, who knows whether achingly conventional Joe Biden will be able to rise to the historic occasion of his own election or might he, in the fullness of time, yet find himself becoming worthy of insertion into the fourth slot in that stockade?
History will tell: Some of us may even live to see it.


thenation--2020-07-03--Black Lives and the Fourth of July

Black Lives and the Fourth of July

On June 19 , 1865 , the news of emancipation finally reached Galveston , Texas .
On that day , the crack of the master ’ s whip would no longer be sanctioned by the laws of the United States .
Exercising the powers vested in him by President Lincoln , Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger , along with more than 1,800 federal troops , marched into Galveston to announce General Order Number 3 .
Addressed to the “ The people of Texas , ” the order set out Granger ’ s task : to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the end of the Civil War when freedom for the remaining enslaved persons in the deepest parts of the South , and the United States more generally , was confirmed .
In plain language , the General read the order to the now freed population : Thus , a full two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued , freedom for African Americans in the farthest corners of the American slave empire was conferred on the approximately 250,000 enslaved men , women and children in Texas who had been unaware of their already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in December of 1865 , the 13th Amendment was ratified .
Juneteenth is reasonably one of the most important , if not the most significant , dates in the American calendar for African Americans .
‘ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July ?
’ by Frederick Douglass But shortly following it on the calendar is its counterpart .
Thirteen years before the first Juneteenth , Frederick Douglass delivered his famous oration , “ What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.
” The speech proved remarkably prescient , lamenting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Fourth of July was primarily a white people ’ s birthday .
“ The freedom gained is yours ; and you , therefore , may properly celebrate this anniversary , ” he said .
“ The Fourth of July is the first great fact in your nation ’ s history.
” “ Oppression , ” said Douglass , quoting from Ecclesiastes , “ makes a wise man mad.
” And for this reason , he understood the significance of the Fourth of July for European Americans .
The founding fathers , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and overthrowing the yoke of British colonization , and “ if they did not go mad , they became restive under this treatment.
” In 2020 , after Black Americans have commemorated the 155th Juneteenth , it bears remarking that the nation ’ s continued degradation of Black humanity has driven Black America mad enough to ignite yet again another rebellion .
In its wake , the Fourth of July arrives with an indignity that , to some , may have hitherto gone unnoticed .
The rebellion began on another national holiday : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thousands of Black Americans are dying from Covid-19 , the police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd , an unarmed 46-year-old African American man .
The ensuing national uprising in response to his brutal murder has generated great gestures of multiracial solidarity .
Even the whitest states in the country , including Montana , Idaho , Vermont , and Maine , have seen thousands of concerned Americans protesting .
From Minneapolis to New York , from Boston to Berlin , from Chicago to Paris , and from Los Angeles to London , one thing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a time of calls for transformative changes .
Across the United States , the city streets have filled with young , multiracial crowds in what has become the largest uprising since the Los Angeles riots of 1992 .
In one of its more symbolic shows of force yet , the rebellion has offended the racist sensibilities of President Donald Trump , who threatened to unleash the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807 .
It is fitting that the president should invoke his powers to suppress what he believes is an insurrectionary force .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the long history of the Black freedom struggle against white supremacy was , at every turn , a bloody effort against the tradition of anti-Black violence .
“ Slavery everywhere had begun in violence , rested on violence , and nearly always ended in violence , ” he wrote in The Long Emancipation .
As Douglass remarked , on that July 4 , the hypocrisy of American racism was ritualized into a national holiday .
Year after year , African Americans were invited to the “ grand illuminated temple of liberty , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of freedom that served to remind them of the “ sad sense of the disparity between us.
” The majority of white Americans ignored the fact of the “ inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony ” encoded in the symbolism of the Fourth of July for Black Americans .
“ Above your national , tumultuous joy , ” said Douglass , “ I hear the mournful wail of millions !
whose chains , heavy and grievous yesterday , are , today , rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.
” For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the United States would have almost been unthinkable .
Before the Civil War , the general popular opinion of white Americans agreed with the Supreme Court ’ s 1857 Dred Scott decision , marking Black people as “ beings of an inferior order , and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations.
” Black people , the court argued , “ are not included , and were not intended to be included , under the word ‘ citizens ’ in the Constitution , and can therefore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.
” For the court , this logic was an axiom of American nationalism .
A few years after this opinion was announced , Douglass noted that the United States failed to uphold its promise , because “ the Declaration of Independence had been found impracticable ; the Constitution had been found impracticable.
” This impracticability pointed to the founding fathers , whom the Court credited with having created a national body in which Black men and women “ were not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political family which the Constitution brought into existence , but were intended to be excluded from it.
” In other words , the protections , immunities and privileges of US citizenship , per the Court ’ s historical reading , were designated by and for white people .
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was the first step toward reimagining American democracy from its otherwise white supremacist order .
Lincoln declared that “ all persons held as slaves ” within the Confederate states “ are , and henceforward shall be free.
” In the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to delineate the basic human rights of African Americans by first replacing the lash with contractual relations , and severing the master ’ s authority over the working lives of Black people .
Nevertheless , beyond de jure freedom , one question remained : Were Black men and women entitled to citizenship ?
One congressman , John Henderson of Mississippi , argued against anything more than emancipation .
“ In passing this amendment we do not confer upon the negro the right to vote , ” he said .
“ We give him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leave the rest to the States.
” This fateful decision reflected the consensus of the political view of the majority of white Americans , North and South .
The economic experience of African Americans proves the adage that wealth is never destroyed , it is merely transformed or redistributed .
Indeed , the redistributive transfer of wealth extracted from Black bodies and deposited onto white coffers is the transnational story of people of African descent in the Americas .
When slavery ended in the British Caribbean in 1833 , the United Kingdom distributed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The British were merely following the example of France , who leveled an indemnity of 25 million francs against Haiti in 1825 as punitive reparations against Africans for overthrowing French slavocracy .
In the United States , the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act , which ended slavery in the nation ’ s capital in 1862 , paid slaveholders up to $ 300 for each enslaved person they manumitted .
In the same vein , freed persons and their families were offered $ 100 , consistent with a colonization plan by the federal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or Liberia in order to encourage self-exile to other lands .
In the end , some 3,000 slaves had been emancipated , but not under the conditions of their own making .
Hence , the first federal statute to abolish slavery as an institution just as immediately moved to affirm the denigration of Black life , in conceding that masters possessed property claims on the human lives they had held in captivity for generations .
In all three cases , masters were rewarded handsomely with reparative compensations .
The wealth that was created @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black lives were exploited by capital extraction , trickled upward to masters while leaving the victims of slavery ’ s capitalism with no restorative recourse for recuperating the incalculable sums of wealth production .
To this day , the global descendants of the enslaved received nothing .
“ Heretofore the negro had been regarded only as the means of putting money in the white man ’ s pocket , like a bale of cotton , ” said Douglass .
By one calculation , the estimated value of the unpaid labor performed by enslaved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ compounded at 6 percent interest through 2016 , is $ 150,735,000,000,000 .
This gargantuan number suggests the execution of reparative justice in the form of a nationwide financial reparations would far exceed the capacity of the nation to pay .
One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War , a quarter of people of African descent live in poverty .
Freedom in the 21st century is underscored by a median wealth of $ 142,000 per white family and $ 11,000 for Black families .
These facts accentuate the shortcoming of the historical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abolition of slavery did not sever white supremacy from the fundamental core of American political economy .
The culmination of the antislavery struggle came into fruition through the gains of the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th , 14th , and 15th amendments , which granted African Americans birthright citizenship , suffrage , and protection under the law .
Black men and women , as one Radical Republican put it , would have had “ the right to till the soil , to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow , and to enjoy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the dawn of the 20th century , the retrenchment of Black economic citizenship was well underway .
As former slaves left their conditions of servitude behind , they entered a world of hollow and partial freedoms , where the true prospect for succeeding outside of slavery was not so much augmented by the ballot box as it was undermined by deprivation of the basic necessities of life—food , public health , shelter—and , most important of all , land .
A former slave from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ light on this reality when he remarked , “ I feels and knows dat de years after de war was worser than befo.
” Not only was the nation unprepared to deal with the challenges posed by the new citizenship bestowed on the freedmen and -women , in the words of one ex-slave , Houston Hartsfield Holloway , it disregarded their circumstances : “ For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them.
” As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concerned , perhaps the most urgent questions were not whether to be free and independent but what kind of freedom and under what conditions .
Centuries of the political economy of slavery gave way to the structural violence of institutionalized racism as an American way of life .
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed , almost a century after emancipation , “ The American Negro finds himself living in a triple ghetto .
A ghetto of race , a ghetto of poverty , a ghetto of human misery.
” Unlike slavery , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social and political exploitation , a ghettoized freedom is a more elusive and covert concept .
It hides oppressive conditions in spite of legal guarantees .
In a sense , descendants of enslaved Americans have always known that political emancipation without economic decency was an empty promise .
That is why King insisted on the contradistinction between two Americas , one white and one Black .
The former was a society “ overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity.
” As for the latter , it was but an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
” In essence , as King noted , it has historically been easier to guarantee freedom without equal citizenship : Was the absence of slavery itself freedom ?
The promise of the June 19 proclamation that freedom meant , in part , “ an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves ” remains unfulfilled .
If , as W.E.B Du Bois lamented in 1903 , the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black middle class blurred the lines along the axis of political economy .
For what it ’ s worth , blurred lines often denote mirages .
Today ’ s racialized socioeconomic structures mask an effort to speed up neoliberal multiculturalism without gauging the past for what it is .
Meanwhile , racial injustices continue to permeate the civic and political fabric of American life .
Here , then , is the problem of the 21st century : the smokescreen of diversity and progress in so-called “ race relations ” in a political economy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ severed from racism .
In the 1990s , President Bill Clinton dog-whistled to various cadres of white Americans that he could assuage their racial anxieties by “ ending welfare as we know it.
” In other words , he pulled the rug from under Black families whose heads of household had been vilified as welfare queens , just after he had taken their votes .
He added insult to injury when he adapted draconian sentencing laws that further emboldened state-sponsored police brutality .
Taken from their homes , incarcerated Black men disappeared at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where a million African American men became missing fathers , brothers , and sons in absentia .
The logical conclusion of those policies was clear from the outset : economic , political , and social capital disfranchisement .
But their full consequences would not be heard or seen until Black Lives Matter , the movement founded in 2013 by three Black women , Patrisse Khan-Cullors , Alicia Garza , and Opal Tometi , articulated that pain , frustration , and anger precisely .
Ironically , it finally took place during the moment that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Office .
In spite of several movements for civil rights in the past century , we find ourselves back where we started : people of African descent continue to insist on the inherent humanity of Black lives while remaining squeezed between a self-serving narrative of liberal multiculturalism and an emerging white nationalist movement .
Ever since Reconstruction , African American pursuits of civil rights have been fixed in the endeavors—legal , political , and economic—to achieve what is seemingly and ideologically American , but increasingly unattainable : that is , to abolish the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American humanity and citizenship .
For the Black community , the anger and bitterness at the unrestrained police violence , racist abuse , and racially motivated murder have tested their patience , not least because the same words spoken by Douglass on July 4 , 1852 , still ring true on July 4 , 2020 : This year , an American majority felt the promise of Juneteenth for the first time .
Perhaps it will be forced to discover the travesty of Independence Day , too .

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
On June 19, 1865, the news of emancipation finally reached Galveston, Texas. On that day, the crack of the master’s whip would no longer be sanctioned by the laws of the United States. Exercising the powers vested in him by President Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, along with more than 1,800 federal troops, marched into Galveston to announce General Order Number 3. Addressed to the “The people of Texas,” the order set out Granger’s task: to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
It was nearly two months after the end of the Civil War when freedom for the remaining enslaved persons in the deepest parts of the South, and the United States more generally, was confirmed. In plain language, the General read the order to the now freed population:
In accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.
Thus, a full two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, freedom for African Americans in the farthest corners of the American slave empire was conferred on the approximately 250,000 enslaved men, women and children in Texas who had been unaware of their already existing freedom. Six months later, in December of 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified. Juneteenth is reasonably one of the most important, if not the most significant, dates in the American calendar for African Americans. From the archives “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” by Frederick Douglass Dave Zirin
But shortly following it on the calendar is its counterpart. Thirteen years before the first Juneteenth, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” The speech proved remarkably prescient, lamenting the impossibility of freedom before Emancipation. The Fourth of July was primarily a white people’s birthday. “The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary,” he said. “The Fourth of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history.”
“Oppression,” said Douglass, quoting from Ecclesiastes, “makes a wise man mad.” And for this reason, he understood the significance of the Fourth of July for European Americans. The founding fathers, he argued, were wise men for rebelling and overthrowing the yoke of British colonization, and “if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment.” In 2020, after Black Americans have commemorated the 155th Juneteenth, it bears remarking that the nation’s continued degradation of Black humanity has driven Black America mad enough to ignite yet again another rebellion. In its wake, the Fourth of July arrives with an indignity that, to some, may have hitherto gone unnoticed. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
The rebellion began on another national holiday: Memorial Day, May 25. As thousands of Black Americans are dying from Covid-19, the police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old African American man. The ensuing national uprising in response to his brutal murder has generated great gestures of multiracial solidarity. Even the whitest states in the country, including Montana, Idaho, Vermont, and Maine, have seen thousands of concerned Americans protesting. From Minneapolis to New York, from Boston to Berlin, from Chicago to Paris, and from Los Angeles to London, one thing is clear: We are confronted with a time of calls for transformative changes. Across the United States, the city streets have filled with young, multiracial crowds in what has become the largest uprising since the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Current Issue View our current issue
In one of its more symbolic shows of force yet, the rebellion has offended the racist sensibilities of President Donald Trump, who threatened to unleash the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807. It is fitting that the president should invoke his powers to suppress what he believes is an insurrectionary force. As the late historian Ira Berlin argued, the long history of the Black freedom struggle against white supremacy was, at every turn, a bloody effort against the tradition of anti-Black violence. “Slavery everywhere had begun in violence, rested on violence, and nearly always ended in violence,” he wrote in The Long Emancipation.
As Douglass remarked, on that July 4, the hypocrisy of American racism was ritualized into a national holiday. Year after year, African Americans were invited to the “grand illuminated temple of liberty,” and called to join in joyous anthems of freedom that served to remind them of the “sad sense of the disparity between us.” The majority of white Americans ignored the fact of the “inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony” encoded in the symbolism of the Fourth of July for Black Americans. “Above your national, tumultuous joy,” said Douglass, “I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.” For without systemic slavery, the invention of the United States would have almost been unthinkable.
Before the Civil War, the general popular opinion of white Americans agreed with the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, marking Black people as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations.” Black people, the court argued, “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” For the court, this logic was an axiom of American nationalism.
A few years after this opinion was announced, Douglass noted that the United States failed to uphold its promise, because “the Declaration of Independence had been found impracticable; the Constitution had been found impracticable.” This impracticability pointed to the founding fathers, whom the Court credited with having created a national body in which Black men and women “were not intended to be embraced in this new political family which the Constitution brought into existence, but were intended to be excluded from it.” In other words, the protections, immunities and privileges of US citizenship, per the Court’s historical reading, were designated by and for white people.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was the first step toward reimagining American democracy from its otherwise white supremacist order. Lincoln declared that “all persons held as slaves” within the Confederate states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” In the decade that followed, Radical Republicans tried to delineate the basic human rights of African Americans by first replacing the lash with contractual relations, and severing the master’s authority over the working lives of Black people. Nevertheless, beyond de jure freedom, one question remained: Were Black men and women entitled to citizenship? One congressman, John Henderson of Mississippi, argued against anything more than emancipation. “In passing this amendment we do not confer upon the negro the right to vote,” he said. “We give him no right except his freedom, and leave the rest to the States.” This fateful decision reflected the consensus of the political view of the majority of white Americans, North and South.
The economic experience of African Americans proves the adage that wealth is never destroyed, it is merely transformed or redistributed. Indeed, the redistributive transfer of wealth extracted from Black bodies and deposited onto white coffers is the transnational story of people of African descent in the Americas. When slavery ended in the British Caribbean in 1833, the United Kingdom distributed £20 million to slaveholders as compensation. The British were merely following the example of France, who leveled an indemnity of 25 million francs against Haiti in 1825 as punitive reparations against Africans for overthrowing French slavocracy. In the United States, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which ended slavery in the nation’s capital in 1862, paid slaveholders up to $300 for each enslaved person they manumitted. In the same vein, freed persons and their families were offered $100, consistent with a colonization plan by the federal government to facilitate sea passage to Haiti or Liberia in order to encourage self-exile to other lands.
In the end, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act freed some 3,000 enslaved persons, but not under the conditions of their own making. Hence, the first federal statute to abolish slavery as an institution just as immediately moved to affirm the denigration of Black life, in conceding that masters possessed property claims on the human lives they had held in captivity for generations. In all three cases, masters were rewarded handsomely with reparative compensations. The wealth that was created by Black labor, and for which Black lives were exploited by capital extraction, trickled upward to masters while leaving the victims of slavery’s capitalism with no restorative recourse for recuperating the incalculable sums of wealth production. To this day, the global descendants of the enslaved received nothing.
“Heretofore the negro had been regarded only as the means of putting money in the white man’s pocket, like a bale of cotton,” said Douglass. By one calculation, the estimated value of the unpaid labor performed by enslaved African Americans from 1619 to 1865, compounded at 6 percent interest through 2016, is $150,735,000,000,000. This gargantuan number suggests the execution of reparative justice in the form of a nationwide financial reparations would far exceed the capacity of the nation to pay. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, a quarter of people of African descent live in poverty. Freedom in the 21st century is underscored by a median wealth of $142,000 per white family and $11,000 for Black families. These facts accentuate the shortcoming of the historical legacy of Union victory: that the abolition of slavery did not sever white supremacy from the fundamental core of American political economy.
The culmination of the antislavery struggle came into fruition through the gains of the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which granted African Americans birthright citizenship, suffrage, and protection under the law. Black men and women, as one Radical Republican put it, would have had “the right to till the soil, to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, and to enjoy the rewards of his labor.” However, between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the dawn of the 20th century, the retrenchment of Black economic citizenship was well underway.
As former slaves left their conditions of servitude behind, they entered a world of hollow and partial freedoms, where the true prospect for succeeding outside of slavery was not so much augmented by the ballot box as it was undermined by deprivation of the basic necessities of life—food, public health, shelter—and, most important of all, land. A former slave from South Carolina, James Johnson, shed light on this reality when he remarked, “I feels and knows dat de years after de war was worser than befo.” Not only was the nation unprepared to deal with the challenges posed by the new citizenship bestowed on the freedmen and -women, in the words of one ex-slave, Houston Hartsfield Holloway, it disregarded their circumstances: “For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them.” As far as the freedmen and -women were concerned, perhaps the most urgent questions were not whether to be free and independent but what kind of freedom and under what conditions.
Centuries of the political economy of slavery gave way to the structural violence of institutionalized racism as an American way of life. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed, almost a century after emancipation, “The American Negro finds himself living in a triple ghetto. A ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, a ghetto of human misery.” Unlike slavery, which contained overt systems of economic, social and political exploitation, a ghettoized freedom is a more elusive and covert concept. It hides oppressive conditions in spite of legal guarantees.
In a sense, descendants of enslaved Americans have always known that political emancipation without economic decency was an empty promise. That is why King insisted on the contradistinction between two Americas, one white and one Black. The former was a society “overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity.” As for the latter, it was but an “island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” In essence, as King noted, it has historically been easier to guarantee freedom without equal citizenship:
It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality.
Was the absence of slavery itself freedom? The promise of the June 19 proclamation that freedom meant, in part, “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves” remains unfulfilled.
If, as W.E.B Du Bois lamented in 1903, the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line, then the mid-century rise of the new Black middle class blurred the lines along the axis of political economy. For what it’s worth, blurred lines often denote mirages. Today’s racialized socioeconomic structures mask an effort to speed up neoliberal multiculturalism without gauging the past for what it is. Meanwhile, racial injustices continue to permeate the civic and political fabric of American life. Here, then, is the problem of the 21st century: the smokescreen of diversity and progress in so-called “race relations” in a political economy that was never, in fact, severed from racism.
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton dog-whistled to various cadres of white Americans that he could assuage their racial anxieties by “ending welfare as we know it.” In other words, he pulled the rug from under Black families whose heads of household had been vilified as welfare queens, just after he had taken their votes. He added insult to injury when he adapted draconian sentencing laws that further emboldened state-sponsored police brutality. Taken from their homes, incarcerated Black men disappeared at alarming rates, which created hollow communities where a million African American men became missing fathers, brothers, and sons in absentia. The logical conclusion of those policies was clear from the outset: economic, political, and social capital disfranchisement. But their full consequences would not be heard or seen until Black Lives Matter, the movement founded in 2013 by three Black women, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, articulated that pain, frustration, and anger precisely. Ironically, it finally took place during the moment that an African American president occupied the Executive Office.
In spite of several movements for civil rights in the past century, we find ourselves back where we started: people of African descent continue to insist on the inherent humanity of Black lives while remaining squeezed between a self-serving narrative of liberal multiculturalism and an emerging white nationalist movement. Ever since Reconstruction, African American pursuits of civil rights have been fixed in the endeavors—legal, political, and economic—to achieve what is seemingly and ideologically American, but increasingly unattainable: that is, to abolish the racialized economic construction of Blackness from African American humanity and citizenship.
For the Black community, the anger and bitterness at the unrestrained police violence, racist abuse, and racially motivated murder have tested their patience, not least because the same words spoken by Douglass on July 4, 1852, still ring true on July 4, 2020:
The character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
This year, an American majority felt the promise of Juneteenth for the first time. Perhaps it will be forced to discover the travesty of Independence Day, too.


thenation--2020-07-06--Jenny Zhang’s Goo Aesthetics

Jenny Zhang’s Goo Aesthetics

“ Goo , ” in Jenny Zhang ’ s writing , is a noun , a verb , and an adjective .
In her poems there is “ goo goo water ” and a “ goo goo baby.
” Bodies can leak and leave a “ goo trail , ” or mouths can “ swear in goo goo.
” Someone can feel “ goo ” or “ feel so much ” that they goo .
Goo is what Zhang ’ s poetry—itself so much about feeling—feels like : viscous , sticky , thick .
It reminds me of the monosyllabic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of guttural sound for the first time .
Goo perfectly describes the tactile viscidity of Zhang ’ s aesthetics—always a little disgusting , like all bodies are—and the indissoluble , gummed quality of the love that is at the heart of her fiction , essays , and poems .
The 97 poems in My Baby First Birthday , Zhang ’ s latest collection , masticate this gooey love .
They seem to chew , swallow , digest , and shit out the irredeemable injustice and beauty of being born to a world we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we never deserved .
Zhang ’ s own mother has called her poems “ touchable , ” and in My Baby First Birthday , you can see why .
“ I am not interested , ” Zhang said in an interview , “ in writing that ’ s just a bunch of ideas floating independent of the human bodies who came up with them.
” Not only are bodies present in the poems , but the poems themselves seem to have corporeality—glob-like and many-limbed .
Zhang has called herself a materialist and “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ essay Hags , she writes that , as a poet , she was “ unable to look past what was right there .
Unable to hear anything except what was audible .
Unable to imagine touching anything that did not already have a name , a defined form .
I repeated the same ideas in every poem.
” If that idea were to have a body , it would be newly born .
Reading My Baby First Birthday feels like immersing oneself into the muck we are all born with and born into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blood that covers us as we are unknowingly delivered into a world designed to make some bodies suffer for the benefit of others .
To think , another poem adds , that “ my mom was a baby too / and inside her was a teenier baby / if not for that baby / I would still be / essentially an idea.
” Who gets to be a baby ?
Who was never granted such innocence ?
Can we be our own mothers ?
Can we not just survive but also deserve the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ granted ?
Zhang ’ s poems respond to these questions with yearning , rage , and grief for a kind of wholeness and tenderness that is robbed by trauma .
In “ leetle , ” she writes that “ the best people still don ’ t / dance cuter than when they were kids / there ’ s a way of moving that indicates / no one has ever hurt you.
” Elsewhere , she writes , “ be the baby ppl didn ’ t let u be / for once in yr @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Poetry might be Zhang ’ s attempt at rescuing or returning to the genuineness of childhood ( “ I want to be authentic / w everyone like a child ” ) .
Several poems in the collection are longer works , expansive rants or flowing babbles with onomatopoeic interjections ( “ this is how I became a gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah / this is how I became guuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh ” ) or rows of repetition ( “ I ’ m ready / I ’ m ready / I ’ m ready / I ’ m ready / @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m ready / I ’ m ready ” ) .
These long poems are punctured by brief , piercing verses .
One poem is titled “ Jenny ’ s trying ” and includes one line : “ why hide.
” Whether overflowing or bitingly succinct , her poetry evinces exacting care and precision .
If in reading this , we are the babies , Zhang ’ s verse rocks the cradle .
Zhang ’ s previous work includes Sour Heart , a celebrated collection of short stories , the aforementioned Hags , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , her first collection .
These early poems already exhibit some of the enduring obsessions present in her later writing : scatology ( one poem is titled “ Bloodturd my friend ” ) , friendship , and her mother ’ s idiolect ( “ to know me is to know my mother ’ s bad English ” ) .
Zhang has also earned a devoted following as the patron essayist on the painful tenderness of youth for Rookie , which only grew with the publication of Sour Heart .
Sour Heart is nested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Chinese American girls living in and around the outer boroughs of New York City .
The stories are characteristic of Zhang ’ s work—gross , hilarious , obscene , disarming , and tender , often all in a single sentence .
The girls ’ biographies trace similar outlines : immigration marked by bouts of extreme poverty , the ever-present tension between integration and integrity , and , after a lot of work , eventual prosperity .
Each narrates her self-discovery and strife with the delusion and clarity only afforded by childhood .
Almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ devotion to their parents , artists and intellectuals who , upon their arrival in America , were forced to abandon their aspirations and became bike deliverymen , seamstresses , teachers , street vendors .
Their love can be totalizing or cruel , removed or resentful .
The unvarnished details of their sacrifice and destitution are humbling , heavy .
In one story , when Cristina , one of the young narrators , throws up her dinner , her dad gives her his portion and eats her vomit .
With these stories , Zhang @ @ @ @ @ @ @ candor and humor , the cost of becoming American—what the grueling process of acculturation can do to familial love , how it can distort that bond into something brutal and unbreakable .
Despite the poignancy and shimmering weirdness of Zhang ’ s work , more recently , her project as an artist has been hyphenated with the limiting charge of communicating her experience as an immigrant writer of color .
Zhang writes about this lucidly in her essay “ They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don ’ t Exist , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this particular instance , the poet Michael Derrick Hudson , who published poetry under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou—while detailing what it is actually like to be a writer of color .
Because of her name and her race , Zhang knows she and other writers of color will be “ denied any opportunity to ever write something without the millstone of but is this authentic/representative/good for black/Asian/Latino/native people ?
hanging from their necks.
” In “ your body is slanted ” from My Baby First Birthday , Zhang writes , “ when did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for you and your whole dumb family.
” Reading this , you can hear the emphatic exhaustion of a speaker who , having made the rounds of interviews and panels and events and dinner parties , is tired of being asked to contribute her “ intellectual emotional and psychic labor ” to educate white people , especially when she is often the only person of color in the room .
Her writing , like that of other writers of color , is repeatedly read by her white peers for how pristinely it reproduces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ timely ” or “ urgent ” issues .
All that wild sensuousness and the almost grotesque tactility of her art is corralled into the straitjacket of acceptable legibility .
“ My imagination and my talents , ” Zhang writes , “ were framed again and again as too limited , too provincial , too tethered to my identity.
” So Zhang refuses to stay tethered .
In her essay “ How It Feels , ” she celebrates I ’ ve Got It All , a self-portrait by the artist Tracey Emin , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with her legs spread , bills and coins either spilling forth or being shoved into her pussy .
The portrait , Zhang writes , is “ so completely trashy and gleeful and celebratory and excessive and weird , but in another sense , the photo is so much that it becomes a statement against allowing others to tell your story , against those who would insist on your victimhood.
” The same could be said of the poems in My Baby First Birthday .
At times , they read like Emin ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m not an easy woman , ” one poem declares , “ And why would you want to be ?
” The poems are crude and generous , bratty and defiant .
In them , Zhang plumbs baby-ness in all of its squirmy mystery , relentless need , and unfathomable vulnerability .
Anyone who has spent time with an infant knows that babies always ask for what they want and never apologize .
Babies might be helpless , but they are not , in Zhang ’ s universe , victims .
“ You @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and ungrateful when you ’ re a victim , ” Zhang noted in an interview with the Poetry Foundation .
“ Victims can ’ t be cunts.
” Zhang is at her most defiant when she directs the second-person address in her poems to the agents of white supremacy .
These eviscerations are some of the most satisfying works in the collection .
In them , Zhang dodges “ all the saviors / who wan na make heroes / out of our peril , ” bursts white fragility ’ s bubble ( “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your need to not ever be blamed ?
” ) , and torches self-righteous “ liberals ” : Still , her rage at injustice is fueled by equally unsparing love .
Her art is itself protection from and revenge for what white supremacy has stolen from writers ( and people ) like her : What was there from the beginning , and how can we touch it ?
In one of her earlier essays in Rookie , Zhang confesses that , in her middle school diary , she wrote that she wanted “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what it was like to be born.
” Some of the gooiest poems in the collection conjure this impossible memory , twisting and reversing the imagery of motherhood and daughterhood , of birth and care , into a nearly orgiastic communion .
Daughters climb back into their mothers ’ wombs , daughters breastfeed their mothers , mothers kiss their daughters ’ crotches , daughters mother their mothers .
Maybe this is what birth felt like—a moment of intense feeling , pain and gore and beauty and also pleasure ( and a lot of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be born ?
” a poem asks , “ to think the very first moment / happened without you knowing.
” Can you be grateful for something you never asked for ?
“ but in the end , ” the poem continues , “ it is almost impossible / to say no to more life.
” Birth—that unfathomable and universal moment , closely coupled with death—is a kind of inexplicable violence , one that no one ever asked for .
And yet , as Zhang knows , life—even when we didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and a debt , our most precious and painful inheritance .
“ Someone has to feel it , ” Zhang knows , “ it might as well be me .
”

“Goo,” in Jenny Zhang’s writing, is a noun, a verb, and an adjective. In her poems there is “goo goo water” and a “goo goo baby.” Bodies can leak and leave a “goo trail,” or mouths can “swear in goo goo.” Someone can feel “goo” or “feel so much” that they goo. Goo is what Zhang’s poetry—itself so much about feeling—feels like: viscous, sticky, thick. It reminds me of the monosyllabic elocution of babies playing with the joys of guttural sound for the first time. Goo perfectly describes the tactile viscidity of Zhang’s aesthetics—always a little disgusting, like all bodies are—and the indissoluble, gummed quality of the love that is at the heart of her fiction, essays, and poems. Books in Review My Baby First Birthday By Jenny Zhang Buy this book
The 97 poems in My Baby First Birthday, Zhang’s latest collection, masticate this gooey love. They seem to chew, swallow, digest, and shit out the irredeemable injustice and beauty of being born to a world we did not choose and to a family we never deserved. Zhang’s own mother has called her poems “touchable,” and in My Baby First Birthday, you can see why. “I am not interested,” Zhang said in an interview, “in writing that’s just a bunch of ideas floating independent of the human bodies who came up with them.” Not only are bodies present in the poems, but the poems themselves seem to have corporeality—glob-like and many-limbed. Zhang has called herself a materialist and “occasional” sensualist. In her chapbook-length essay Hags, she writes that, as a poet, she was “unable to look past what was right there. Unable to hear anything except what was audible. Unable to imagine touching anything that did not already have a name, a defined form. I repeated the same ideas in every poem.”
If that idea were to have a body, it would be newly born. Reading My Baby First Birthday feels like immersing oneself into the muck we are all born with and born into, that gory goo of flesh and blood that covers us as we are unknowingly delivered into a world designed to make some bodies suffer for the benefit of others. To think, another poem adds, that “my mom was a baby too / and inside her was a teenier baby / if not for that baby / I would still be / essentially an idea.” Who gets to be a baby? Who was never granted such innocence? Can we be our own mothers? Can we not just survive but also deserve the life and love we have been unwillingly granted? Zhang’s poems respond to these questions with yearning, rage, and grief for a kind of wholeness and tenderness that is robbed by trauma. In “leetle,” she writes that “the best people still don’t / dance cuter than when they were kids / there’s a way of moving that indicates / no one has ever hurt you.” Elsewhere, she writes, “be the baby ppl didn’t let u be / for once in yr life / & see what happens.”
Poetry might be Zhang’s attempt at rescuing or returning to the genuineness of childhood (“I want to be authentic / w everyone like a child”). Several poems in the collection are longer works, expansive rants or flowing babbles with onomatopoeic interjections (“this is how I became a gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah / this is how I became guuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh”) or rows of repetition (“I’m ready / I’m ready / I’m ready / I’m ready / I’m ready / I’m ready / I’m ready”). These long poems are punctured by brief, piercing verses. One poem is titled “Jenny’s trying” and includes one line: “why hide.” Whether overflowing or bitingly succinct, her poetry evinces exacting care and precision. If in reading this, we are the babies, Zhang’s verse rocks the cradle.
Zhang’s previous work includes Sour Heart, a celebrated collection of short stories, the aforementioned Hags, and Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, her first collection. These early poems already exhibit some of the enduring obsessions present in her later writing: scatology (one poem is titled “Bloodturd my friend”), friendship, and her mother’s idiolect (“to know me is to know my mother’s bad English”). Zhang has also earned a devoted following as the patron essayist on the painful tenderness of youth for Rookie, which only grew with the publication of Sour Heart.
Sour Heart is nested in the overlapping universes of six first-generation Chinese American girls living in and around the outer boroughs of New York City. The stories are characteristic of Zhang’s work—gross, hilarious, obscene, disarming, and tender, often all in a single sentence. The girls’ biographies trace similar outlines: immigration marked by bouts of extreme poverty, the ever-present tension between integration and integrity, and, after a lot of work, eventual prosperity. Each narrates her self-discovery and strife with the delusion and clarity only afforded by childhood. Almost all the young girls have a consuming devotion to their parents, artists and intellectuals who, upon their arrival in America, were forced to abandon their aspirations and became bike deliverymen, seamstresses, teachers, street vendors. Their love can be totalizing or cruel, removed or resentful. The unvarnished details of their sacrifice and destitution are humbling, heavy. In one story, when Cristina, one of the young narrators, throws up her dinner, her dad gives her his portion and eats her vomit. With these stories, Zhang imparts, with her own twist of candor and humor, the cost of becoming American—what the grueling process of acculturation can do to familial love, how it can distort that bond into something brutal and unbreakable.
Despite the poignancy and shimmering weirdness of Zhang’s work, more recently, her project as an artist has been hyphenated with the limiting charge of communicating her experience as an immigrant writer of color. Zhang writes about this lucidly in her essay “They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist,” which excavates the racist motivations of yellowface—in this particular instance, the poet Michael Derrick Hudson, who published poetry under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou—while detailing what it is actually like to be a writer of color. Because of her name and her race, Zhang knows she and other writers of color will be “denied any opportunity to ever write something without the millstone of but is this authentic/representative/good for black/Asian/Latino/native people? hanging from their necks.”
In “your body is slanted” from My Baby First Birthday, Zhang writes, “when did I agree to be a textbook / for you and your whole dumb family.” Reading this, you can hear the emphatic exhaustion of a speaker who, having made the rounds of interviews and panels and events and dinner parties, is tired of being asked to contribute her “intellectual emotional and psychic labor” to educate white people, especially when she is often the only person of color in the room. Her writing, like that of other writers of color, is repeatedly read by her white peers for how pristinely it reproduces her pain or how well it enlightens “timely” or “urgent” issues. All that wild sensuousness and the almost grotesque tactility of her art is corralled into the straitjacket of acceptable legibility. “My imagination and my talents,” Zhang writes, “were framed again and again as too limited, too provincial, too tethered to my identity.”
So Zhang refuses to stay tethered. In her essay “How It Feels,” she celebrates I’ve Got It All, a self-portrait by the artist Tracey Emin, who depicts herself sitting on the floor with her legs spread, bills and coins either spilling forth or being shoved into her pussy. The portrait, Zhang writes, is “so completely trashy and gleeful and celebratory and excessive and weird, but in another sense, the photo is so much that it becomes a statement against allowing others to tell your story, against those who would insist on your victimhood.”
The same could be said of the poems in My Baby First Birthday. At times, they read like Emin’s quintessential neon signs: “I’m not an easy woman,” one poem declares, “And why would you want to be?” The poems are crude and generous, bratty and defiant. In them, Zhang plumbs baby-ness in all of its squirmy mystery, relentless need, and unfathomable vulnerability. Anyone who has spent time with an infant knows that babies always ask for what they want and never apologize. Babies might be helpless, but they are not, in Zhang’s universe, victims. “You’re not supposed to be sassy and ungrateful when you’re a victim,” Zhang noted in an interview with the Poetry Foundation. “Victims can’t be cunts.”
Zhang is at her most defiant when she directs the second-person address in her poems to the agents of white supremacy. These eviscerations are some of the most satisfying works in the collection. In them, Zhang dodges “all the saviors / who wanna make heroes / out of our peril,” bursts white fragility’s bubble (“what is it with you / and your need to not ever be blamed?”), and torches self-righteous “liberals”:
when did we agree to be on the dumping end
of your no-waste life
just being allowed to live is maybe a waste
& it won’t be long before someone adds up
the energy it costs to keep a life like yours
meaningful in the way you’ve come to expect.
Still, her rage at injustice is fueled by equally unsparing love. Her art is itself protection from and revenge for what white supremacy has stolen from writers (and people) like her:
I have managed to hoard something
that cannot be replicated
it will die when I die
let no one say we didn’t try
to let a different kind of life bloom
and let no one say we didn’t touch
what was there from the beginning
What was there from the beginning, and how can we touch it? In one of her earlier essays in Rookie, Zhang confesses that, in her middle school diary, she wrote that she wanted “to be the first baby to remember what it was like to be born.” Some of the gooiest poems in the collection conjure this impossible memory, twisting and reversing the imagery of motherhood and daughterhood, of birth and care, into a nearly orgiastic communion. Daughters climb back into their mothers’ wombs, daughters breastfeed their mothers, mothers kiss their daughters’ crotches, daughters mother their mothers. Maybe this is what birth felt like—a moment of intense feeling, pain and gore and beauty and also pleasure (and a lot of goo). “did you ask to be born?” a poem asks, “to think the very first moment / happened without you knowing.” Can you be grateful for something you never asked for? “but in the end,” the poem continues, “it is almost impossible / to say no to more life.” Birth—that unfathomable and universal moment, closely coupled with death—is a kind of inexplicable violence, one that no one ever asked for. And yet, as Zhang knows, life—even when we didn’t ask for it—is both a gift and a debt, our most precious and painful inheritance. “Someone has to feel it,” Zhang knows, “it might as well be me.”


thenation--2020-07-06--Covid-19 Has Put Algeria’s Peaceful Revolution on Hold

The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on a visual chronicle of untold stories of the coronavirus crisis and the struggle for racial justice—read more from The Invisible Front Line.—The Editors Before the Coronavirus crisis brought the world grinding to a halt , Algeria was alive with demonstrations .
At the beginning of last year , after our president announced that he would be running for a fifth term , the people had finally had enough : Starting February 22 , 2019 , Algerians flooded the streets every Friday , millions of people filling the cities with protesting voices .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ side-by-side to express their frustration with the political system , demanding change .
As a photographer , I did the obvious : I picked up my camera and started photographing the historical events unfolding every day in front of me .
Being in a protest was new territory for me , as it was for most of my fellow Algerians .
This country hasn ’ t seen mass demonstrations since the days of the 1991–2001 civil war .
The last major protests , in 1988 , were brutally shut down by the government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the government always framed protest as something that would lead us back to “ chaos ” drawing parallel with civil war as well as with Libya and Syria .
But the people had had enough of the corrupt rule of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika , and after 20 years in power , these peaceful protests finally ousted him from office .
When I started photographing the uprising , my images were all about showing the masses , the sheer number of people making their voices heard .
The resulting photos were stereotypical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , fists up , with signs and symbols of revolution .
This visual representation was not true to my own experience of these momentous events , so I changed my approach to shooting with a telephoto lens , isolating individuals from the crowd to represent the highly personal and unique reasons so many of us were taking to the streets .
Protest is not just about shouting slogans or being political , it is also about gathering socially , with people curious about one another and their reasons for demonstrating .
At certain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in awe at the others in the streets as if they were rediscovering the “ other ” Algerian , like at Judgment Dday , when they would see in new ways the people they knew from their past lives .
This social spirit brings groups of friends and families to protest together .
People would ask me to take their picture , proud to be seen in the streets with their fellow Algerians .
My images capture the press of bodies , the euphoria of being among so many people fighting for control @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years of Bouteflika ’ s stultifying rule , many Algerians have had to take control of their own lives alone , making the choice to either stay and make do with the limited options available to them , or to risk everything to leave their country for better opportunities elsewhere .
This is the other thread that runs through my images , the young men and women who have undertaken the dangerous journey on the sea to Europe , risking their lives to make their lives worth living .
That , too , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , finally , that you have had enough .
I will be following other threads that I believe had their own protest , as the resident physicians are still striving for a decent life and to improve working conditions , in 2018 they launched a series of protests that ended without achieving much .
I believe that a protest movement is the sum of little protests from people who struggle at different levels for different reasons ; all have the injustices of the regime in common as a trigger for their protest .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ asked a police officer while I was photographing a demonstration in Algiers .
“ Why do you think I ’ m not Algerian ?
” I responded .
His answer was a brief silence while looking at my skin and hair .
“ You speak differently.
” Another policeman who stopped me asked the same question .
I learned to hide in the protest , to melt into the crowd so that I won ’ t be picked out by the police .
I felt safe in the middle of these crowds in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when alone .
I will never forget the heat coming out of these bodies , all these voices singing loud together .
In these moments I was Algerian to the bone .
When the government declared a health emergency due to Covid-19 in March , the protests stopped .
The people had suddenly lost the right to gather and protest that they had finally gained back last year .
Even after Bouteflika ’ s resignation , the protests had continued against the corrupt elite that control the country , but suddenly the crowds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many activists have been sent to jail .
Under this new reality , I can see our newfound freedom and space for possibilities shrinking every day .
I keep wondering , how will this popular movement persist ?

Abdo Shanan, The Nation, Magnum Foundation

Algiers, eighteen years after the end of the civil war. The regime used the war as an excuse to oppress opposition or any social or political movement that was against the regime. (Abdo Shanan)
The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on a visual chronicle of untold stories of the coronavirus crisis and the struggle for racial justice—read more from The Invisible Front Line.—The Editors
Before the Coronavirus crisis brought the world grinding to a halt, Algeria was alive with demonstrations. At the beginning of last year, after our president announced that he would be running for a fifth term, the people had finally had enough: Starting February 22, 2019, Algerians flooded the streets every Friday, millions of people filling the cities with protesting voices. Men and women of all ages walked side-by-side to express their frustration with the political system, demanding change.
As a photographer, I did the obvious: I picked up my camera and started photographing the historical events unfolding every day in front of me. Being in a protest was new territory for me, as it was for most of my fellow Algerians. This country hasn’t seen mass demonstrations since the days of the 1991–2001 civil war. The last major protests, in 1988, were brutally shut down by the government, resulting in about 500 civilian deaths, and the government always framed protest as something that would lead us back to “chaos” drawing parallel with civil war as well as with Libya and Syria. But the people had had enough of the corrupt rule of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and after 20 years in power, these peaceful protests finally ousted him from office.
Mokhtar in his room. Police arrested him just before he left on a boat to cross the Mediterranean to Spain. “I needed to leave because I felt that even my family doesn’t believe in my dreams.” Mokhtar wanted to be a rapper, but his mother found his notebook of songs and destroyed it. Mascara, Algeria. (Abdo Shanan)
When I started photographing the uprising, my images were all about showing the masses, the sheer number of people making their voices heard. The resulting photos were stereotypical: groups of people in the streets, fists up, with signs and symbols of revolution. This visual representation was not true to my own experience of these momentous events, so I changed my approach to shooting with a telephoto lens, isolating individuals from the crowd to represent the highly personal and unique reasons so many of us were taking to the streets.
Protest is not just about shouting slogans or being political, it is also about gathering socially, with people curious about one another and their reasons for demonstrating. At certain points I noticed how people looked around in awe at the others in the streets as if they were rediscovering the “other” Algerian, like at Judgment Day, when they would see in new ways the people they knew from their past lives. This social spirit brings groups of friends and families to protest together. People would ask me to take their picture, proud to be seen in the streets with their fellow Algerians. My images capture the press of bodies, the euphoria of being among so many people fighting for control of their common destiny.
(Abdo Shanan)
Over the years of Bouteflika’s stultifying rule, many Algerians have had to take control of their own lives alone, making the choice to either stay and make do with the limited options available to them, or to risk everything to leave their country for better opportunities elsewhere. This is the other thread that runs through my images, the young men and women who have undertaken the dangerous journey on the sea to Europe, risking their lives to make their lives worth living. That, too, is a political statement, to say, finally, that you have had enough. I will be following other threads that I believe had their own protest, as the resident physicians are still striving for a decent life and to improve working conditions, in 2018 they launched a series of protests that ended without achieving much. I believe that a protest movement is the sum of little protests from people who struggle at different levels for different reasons; all have the injustices of the regime in common as a trigger for their protest.
“Where are you from?” asked a police officer while I was photographing a demonstration in Algiers. “Why do you think I’m not Algerian?” I responded. His answer was a brief silence while looking at my skin and hair. “You speak differently.” Another policeman who stopped me asked the same question. I learned to hide in the protest, to melt into the crowd so that I won’t be picked out by the police. I felt safe in the middle of these crowds in way I don’t always feel when alone. I will never forget the heat coming out of these bodies, all these voices singing loud together. In these moments I was Algerian to the bone.
A cafe in downtown Souk Aras, 550 km from Algiers, where many young men spend their time. Algeria’s unemployment rate is at 26.9 percent for the population between 16 and 25 years old. (Abdo Shanan)
When the government declared a health emergency due to Covid-19 in March, the protests stopped. The people had suddenly lost the right to gather and protest that they had finally gained back last year. Even after Bouteflika’s resignation, the protests had continued against the corrupt elite that control the country, but suddenly the crowds were gone. Since the lockdown, many activists have been sent to jail. Under this new reality, I can see our newfound freedom and space for possibilities shrinking every day. I keep wondering, how will this popular movement persist?