thenation--2020-07-20--Why the Left Is Winning Over Philly

Why the Left Is Winning Over Philly

Rachie Weisberg , the field director for Rick Krajewski ’ s Pennsylvania House campaign , was working a phone bank from her home in West Philadelphia when she smelled tear gas .
It was only a few days after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd , leading to a wave of protests against racism across the country .
The police had begun shooting tear gas at demonstrators on 52nd Street—two blocks from her apartment—and the wind was carrying it through the neighborhood .
She had to pause to rush and close her window .
It felt as though the fight for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ once , both in the Democratic primary campaigns and in the streets .
“ We ’ re trying to get these progressives elected and push the conversation outside the field of just electoral politics , ” says Weisberg .
“ One can ’ t really exist without the other.
” Two weeks later , Krajewski—who is young and embraces the Green New Deal—declared victory in the Democratic primary over James R. Roebuck , who has represented the 188th District since 1985 .
Roebuck had been unsuccessfully challenged three times in the past 10 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is part of a larger shift .
Across the Schuylkill River , fellow progressive Nikil Saval also won his race , against incumbent state Senator Larry Farnese .
Farnese ’ s influential mentor and predecessor Vince Fumo has repeatedly expressed his displeasure over Saval ’ s candidacy and other progressive developments in the city , including the recent removal of the statue of Philadelphia ’ s notoriously racist former mayor Frank Rizzo .
“ Why don ’ t you go back to your Socialist Party and to NY , where you came from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the campaign .
But even as Fumo seethes , airing grievances in Facebook posts and reminiscing about the days when he represented the Italian bloc in South Philadelphia , the death knell is sounding for the political machine that once backed him .
It ’ s being replaced by something new : an operation run by community organizers who care more about electing progressive candidates than they do about protecting the interests of the Democratic mainstream .
The candidates they champion have strong relationships with left-leaning groups .
Their attention to issues like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are looking to bring communities into the political process that are traditionally ignored by it , like Black residents disproportionately affected by pollution in South Philly and those pushed out by gentrification in West Philadelphia .
In many ways , the changes in Philadelphia are a testament to the importance of a good ground game , which is keeping the Democratic establishment in the city and state on its toes .
The grassroots electoral strategy that has elevated candidates such as Krajewski and Saval is one that organizers have been refining for years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as they have homed in on strengthening local networks of care and solidarity .
As insurgent candidates struggled to reconfigure their game plans when the Covid-19 pandemic led to closures across the country , Krajewski and Saval turned their phone-bank operations into mutual aid hotlines , connecting voters with local groups and resources .
Electoral and nonelectoral groups are working together , forming alliances that close the gap between issues in the streets and at the ballot box .
These alliances are all the more urgent as residents mobilize around racial justice campaigns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remove them from schools .
If the annoyance of Democrats like Fumo seems inconsequential , it ’ s because these races aren ’ t just about sticking it to the party ; they ’ re about building and retaking power among constituents .
Recently , the consequences of other long-simmering injustices have become clearer .
There ’ s the festering asbestos in public schools in the face of a barely reformed tax abatement and an Ivy League school ’ s steady refusal to pay property taxes ; the declining rates of Internet access @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when Comcast is headquartered in the city and enjoys a near monopoly as a network provider ; and the racism institutionalized in poverty rates and health conditions made starker by the recent high-profile closure of a hospital that served mostly Black patients .
The 2016 election of Donald Trump , who won Pennsylvania , prompted many in the strongly Democratic city to realize that the threat of white supremacy was all around them , including in the state legislature .
For Saval ’ s field director , Aileen Callaghan , who lives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kensington and Port Richmond , the election was a reinforcement of what they always knew : For most politicians , people in the neighborhoods they are meant to represent just didn ’ t count .
” When it comes to people who are trying to do constituency services in their communities to make sure that they maintain reelection , they don ’ t look at my neighborhood at all , ” Callaghan says .
“ And they are going to have to now , because of the organizing that I ’ ve been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That was the year Callaghan got involved in Larry Krasner ’ s high-profile campaign for district attorney .
He ran as a progressive—and has since been criticized on a number of fronts , most recently for his reluctance to drop charges against protesters arrested during recent demonstrations against police violence .
But the leftist shift to electoral organizing didn ’ t begin that year ; in 2015 , an organizer named Helen Gym ran for the Philadelphia City Council .
As a former executive director of the Chinatown-based community organization Asian Americans United @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fight the construction of a stadium and later a casino in Chinatown .
She was known for her fiery speeches on abysmal funding gaps in the public school system .
Like Krasner , Gym ’ s bona fides as a progressive have been questioned , such as when she stood by a well-known union leader indicted for corruption and , more recently , when she ( along with every other Democrat on the City Council ) voted for an annual budget that did not meet growing demands to defund the city ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become a coveted one during these elections , but its application is still mostly validated by grassroots organizations that endorse and then mobilize around certain candidates .
As Krajewski acknowledged , the incumbent in his district was known for his record on education and had voiced concerns about the proliferation of charter schools , but Krajewski ’ s campaign and victory in West Philadelphia were styled as a needed insurgence against an older politician entrenched in the Democratic machine who had failed to address urgent issues like gentrification and asbestos in schools .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , complained about the label ’ s being wielded against him .
“ I was progressive when , quite frankly , it wasn ’ t that cool to be progressive , ” he said during his campaign .
But the mobilization of grassroots organizations spoke louder .
Today , Gym is the most popular City Council member , by far .
She received over 60 percent more votes than her nearest competitor in last year ’ s Democratic primary election , the most crowded race in 40 years , with 28 candidates running @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Weisberg , who was then a fellow at the youth-led climate justice group Sunrise Movement , remembers the outcome of that primary as a hard loss : Apart from Gym , none of the candidates the group endorsed won .
“ It was a punch in the gut because what we realized—and what I think a lot of groups around Philly realized—was that we had all been working separately , ” Weisberg says .
“ Each organization kind of headed toward different people , and I think there was some reconciling there that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unified force .
I think we were all coming off the [ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ] high.
” But things turned around when , leading up to the general election in November , Sunrise and several other groups coalesced around a new strategy to replace Republican council members with progressive candidates .
The City Council is composed of 17 members : 10 elected by district and seven elected at-large .
Of those at-large members , at least two must be from a minority party .
Since the system was put in place over 60 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ always been held by the GOP .
In 2019 the Pennsylvania Working Families Party put forward two candidates , Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O ’ Rourke , for those seats .
In a matter of months , Weisberg and others from groups like Reclaim Philadelphia and Democratic Socialists of America were knocking on doors for Brooks and O ’ Rourke .
Tess Kerins , who was a fellow at the WFP at the time and later worked on Saval ’ s campaign , remembers spending a lot of time explaining the mathematics of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic at-large winners have usually gotten over 100,000 votes in the city , Republicans have received only a small fraction of that .
It took persuading thousands of left-leaning voters to drop two Democrats on their ballots in favor of O ’ Rourke and Brooks to swing the scale .
Kerins and Weisberg remember the campaign as energetic , if a little frenzied .
“ Each candidate had so many coalitions together , we couldn ’ t know where the other organizations were canvassing , we couldn ’ t coordinate with them , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to not only campaign finance laws regulating independent expenditures but also the sheer number of groups involved in the canvassing effort , from labor unions to neighborhood groups .
Democratic City Committee leader Bob Brady warned rank-and-file Democrats against voting for the WFP , saying that any committee members who backed non-Democratic candidates would lose their membership and be denied street money and printed ballots on Election Day .
But the strategy was a success , at least for Brooks : She ended up winning 4.55 percent of the vote—enough to secure a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ incumbent Republican .
After the City Council primary , Weisberg says , there was a much stronger understanding among progressive groups that some kind of coordination would be needed from the start .
During their races , Krajewski ’ s and Saval ’ s teams were in close contact .
More convergence between groups doing electoral and nonelectoral work began , too , especially in the lead-up to the election .
In 2019 the Alliance for a Just Philadelphia was created , a coalition of over 40 groups , including Reclaim Philadelphia , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the government ’ s response to the Covid-19 pandemic led to mass unemployment and a public health crisis , they came together to call for a people ’ s bailout .
Saval ’ s campaign responded with a shift to focus on aid .
Phone bank scripts were altered so that in addition to asking whether people knew their polling location , callers began with a check-in to see if neighbors had what they needed in terms of food and medicine ; workers then connected residents with resources or relayed those requests to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talked with volunteers about how to hold space for people who wanted to process what was going on .
“ The amount of conversations we had that would end up lasting about 15 minutes or more…folks were really hungry for human connection .
It was really , really important for us to make sure that people were feeling a sense of hope.
” Just a few days before this year ’ s June 2 primaries , mass protests against police brutality and racism began to shake the city .
“ We noticed that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ justice more than ever before , ” says Weisberg .
“ What that means is that these protests are bringing these things to light and people are thinking about them .
And then we are there to bridge that gap between issues of racial inequality and police brutality .
And what does that have to do with who represents us in office ?
” On the day of the primaries , volunteers for Saval formed a group chat to keep one another updated from different polling locations .
They continued to use the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meet at actions or provide remote support .
In mid-June , when white supremacists attacked protesters near the Christopher Columbus statue in Marconi Plaza , members of the group arranged cars to help get people out of the area .
For Callaghan , that continuity embodies the culture of care that has been embedded in the city ’ s growing leftist community .
“ You would imagine there ’ d be a lot of burnout right now , right ?
There isn ’ t .
Like , we ’ re taking the streets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we are centered in collective care.
” Callaghan ’ s neighborhood is close to an area where neo-Nazis were recently seen marching while police stood by .
They say the organizing that people have witnessed and participated in over the past few years has served to transform political apathy in a neighborhood where people are used to being ignored by those in power .
“ We can ’ t just keep buying into this idea that if we as individuals work a little bit harder and then if we just help out our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neighbor will have our back .
It has to be targeted at the people who have the power to change these things and don ’ t even respect us enough to pander to us , ” Callaghan says .
“ If we just work together , toward this common goal , then we can really flip this stuff like a pancake .
”

Rachie Weisberg, the field director for Rick Krajewski’s Pennsylvania House campaign, was working a phone bank from her home in West Philadelphia when she smelled tear gas. It was only a few days after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, leading to a wave of protests against racism across the country. The police had begun shooting tear gas at demonstrators on 52nd Street—two blocks from her apartment—and the wind was carrying it through the neighborhood. She had to pause to rush and close her window. It felt as though the fight for justice were converging on several fronts at once, both in the Democratic primary campaigns and in the streets. “We’re trying to get these progressives elected and push the conversation outside the field of just electoral politics,” says Weisberg. “One can’t really exist without the other.”
Two weeks later, Krajewski—who is young and embraces the Green New Deal—declared victory in the Democratic primary over James R. Roebuck, who has represented the 188th District since 1985. Roebuck had been unsuccessfully challenged three times in the past 10 years, and his loss to Krajewski is part of a larger shift.
Across the Schuylkill River, fellow progressive Nikil Saval also won his race, against incumbent state Senator Larry Farnese. Farnese’s influential mentor and predecessor Vince Fumo has repeatedly expressed his displeasure over Saval’s candidacy and other progressive developments in the city, including the recent removal of the statue of Philadelphia’s notoriously racist former mayor Frank Rizzo. “Why don’t you go back to your Socialist Party and to NY, where you came from?” Fumo posted on Facebook during the campaign.
But even as Fumo seethes, airing grievances in Facebook posts and reminiscing about the days when he represented the Italian bloc in South Philadelphia, the death knell is sounding for the political machine that once backed him. It’s being replaced by something new: an operation run by community organizers who care more about electing progressive candidates than they do about protecting the interests of the Democratic mainstream. The candidates they champion have strong relationships with left-leaning groups. Their attention to issues like racial and environmental justice means that they are looking to bring communities into the political process that are traditionally ignored by it, like Black residents disproportionately affected by pollution in South Philly and those pushed out by gentrification in West Philadelphia. In many ways, the changes in Philadelphia are a testament to the importance of a good ground game, which is keeping the Democratic establishment in the city and state on its toes. 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 grassroots electoral strategy that has elevated candidates such as Krajewski and Saval is one that organizers have been refining for years, and it has only gained momentum as they have homed in on strengthening local networks of care and solidarity. As insurgent candidates struggled to reconfigure their game plans when the Covid-19 pandemic led to closures across the country, Krajewski and Saval turned their phone-bank operations into mutual aid hotlines, connecting voters with local groups and resources. Electoral and nonelectoral groups are working together, forming alliances that close the gap between issues in the streets and at the ballot box. These alliances are all the more urgent as residents mobilize around racial justice campaigns to defund or abolish the police or remove them from schools. If the annoyance of Democrats like Fumo seems inconsequential, it’s because these races aren’t just about sticking it to the party; they’re about building and retaking power among constituents.
Recently, the consequences of other long-simmering injustices have become clearer. There’s the festering asbestos in public schools in the face of a barely reformed tax abatement and an Ivy League school’s steady refusal to pay property taxes; the declining rates of Internet access, especially in poorer communities of color, when Comcast is headquartered in the city and enjoys a near monopoly as a network provider; and the racism institutionalized in poverty rates and health conditions made starker by the recent high-profile closure of a hospital that served mostly Black patients. The 2016 election of Donald Trump, who won Pennsylvania, prompted many in the strongly Democratic city to realize that the threat of white supremacy was all around them, including in the state legislature.
For Saval’s field director, Aileen Callaghan, who lives in a poor, majority-Black area between Kensington and Port Richmond, the election was a reinforcement of what they always knew: For most politicians, people in the neighborhoods they are meant to represent just didn’t count.
”When it comes to people who are trying to do constituency services in their communities to make sure that they maintain reelection, they don’t look at my neighborhood at all,” Callaghan says. “And they are going to have to now, because of the organizing that we’ve been doing in my community since 2017.”
That was the year Callaghan got involved in Larry Krasner’s high-profile campaign for district attorney. He ran as a progressive—and has since been criticized on a number of fronts, most recently for his reluctance to drop charges against protesters arrested during recent demonstrations against police violence. But the leftist shift to electoral organizing didn’t begin that year; in 2015, an organizer named Helen Gym ran for the Philadelphia City Council. As a former executive director of the Chinatown-based community organization Asian Americans United, Gym had worked on campaigns to fight the construction of a stadium and later a casino in Chinatown. She was known for her fiery speeches on abysmal funding gaps in the public school system.
Like Krasner, Gym’s bona fides as a progressive have been questioned, such as when she stood by a well-known union leader indicted for corruption and, more recently, when she (along with every other Democrat on the City Council) voted for an annual budget that did not meet growing demands to defund the city’s police department. The progressive label has become a coveted one during these elections, but its application is still mostly validated by grassroots organizations that endorse and then mobilize around certain candidates. As Krajewski acknowledged, the incumbent in his district was known for his record on education and had voiced concerns about the proliferation of charter schools, but Krajewski’s campaign and victory in West Philadelphia were styled as a needed insurgence against an older politician entrenched in the Democratic machine who had failed to address urgent issues like gentrification and asbestos in schools. Farnese, the incumbent ousted by Saval, complained about the label’s being wielded against him. “I was progressive when, quite frankly, it wasn’t that cool to be progressive,” he said during his campaign. But the mobilization of grassroots organizations spoke louder.
Today, Gym is the most popular City Council member, by far. She received over 60 percent more votes than her nearest competitor in last year’s Democratic primary election, the most crowded race in 40 years, with 28 candidates running for just five majority-party at-large seats. Weisberg, who was then a fellow at the youth-led climate justice group Sunrise Movement, remembers the outcome of that primary as a hard loss: Apart from Gym, none of the candidates the group endorsed won.
“It was a punch in the gut because what we realized—and what I think a lot of groups around Philly realized—was that we had all been working separately,” Weisberg says. “Each organization kind of headed toward different people, and I think there was some reconciling there that we needed to be a much more unified force. I think we were all coming off the [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] high.”
But things turned around when, leading up to the general election in November, Sunrise and several other groups coalesced around a new strategy to replace Republican council members with progressive candidates. The City Council is composed of 17 members: 10 elected by district and seven elected at-large. Of those at-large members, at least two must be from a minority party.
Since the system was put in place over 60 years ago, those two seats have always been held by the GOP. In 2019 the Pennsylvania Working Families Party put forward two candidates, Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke, for those seats.
In a matter of months, Weisberg and others from groups like Reclaim Philadelphia and Democratic Socialists of America were knocking on doors for Brooks and O’Rourke. Tess Kerins, who was a fellow at the WFP at the time and later worked on Saval’s campaign, remembers spending a lot of time explaining the mathematics of their ballot choice to voters. While Democratic at-large winners have usually gotten over 100,000 votes in the city, Republicans have received only a small fraction of that. It took persuading thousands of left-leaning voters to drop two Democrats on their ballots in favor of O’Rourke and Brooks to swing the scale. Kerins and Weisberg remember the campaign as energetic, if a little frenzied. “Each candidate had so many coalitions together, we couldn’t know where the other organizations were canvassing, we couldn’t coordinate with them,” remembers Kerins. This was due to not only campaign finance laws regulating independent expenditures but also the sheer number of groups involved in the canvassing effort, from labor unions to neighborhood groups.
Democratic City Committee leader Bob Brady warned rank-and-file Democrats against voting for the WFP, saying that any committee members who backed non-Democratic candidates would lose their membership and be denied street money and printed ballots on Election Day. But the strategy was a success, at least for Brooks: She ended up winning 4.55 percent of the vote—enough to secure a seat on the council and oust an incumbent Republican.
City workers and their allies rallied in front of City Hall to protest cut to the City’s budget that would see slashes in essential services across the board at a time when many of those services are most needed in Philadelphia, PA, 2020. (Photo by Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
After the City Council primary, Weisberg says, there was a much stronger understanding among progressive groups that some kind of coordination would be needed from the start. During their races, Krajewski’s and Saval’s teams were in close contact.
More convergence between groups doing electoral and nonelectoral work began, too, especially in the lead-up to the election. In 2019 the Alliance for a Just Philadelphia was created, a coalition of over 40 groups, including Reclaim Philadelphia, doing electoral and other work. When the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic led to mass unemployment and a public health crisis, they came together to call for a people’s bailout.
Saval’s campaign responded with a shift to focus on aid. Phone bank scripts were altered so that in addition to asking whether people knew their polling location, callers began with a check-in to see if neighbors had what they needed in terms of food and medicine; workers then connected residents with resources or relayed those requests to aid groups in the area.
Callaghan talked with volunteers about how to hold space for people who wanted to process what was going on. “The amount of conversations we had that would end up lasting about 15 minutes or more…folks were really hungry for human connection. It was really, really important for us to make sure that people were feeling a sense of hope.”
Just a few days before this year’s June 2 primaries, mass protests against police brutality and racism began to shake the city. “We noticed that people were talking about issues of racial justice more than ever before,” says Weisberg. “What that means is that these protests are bringing these things to light and people are thinking about them. And then we are there to bridge that gap between issues of racial inequality and police brutality. And what does that have to do with who represents us in office?”
On the day of the primaries, volunteers for Saval formed a group chat to keep one another updated from different polling locations. They continued to use the group past the elections, texting to meet at actions or provide remote support. In mid-June, when white supremacists attacked protesters near the Christopher Columbus statue in Marconi Plaza, members of the group arranged cars to help get people out of the area. For Callaghan, that continuity embodies the culture of care that has been embedded in the city’s growing leftist community. “You would imagine there’d be a lot of burnout right now, right? There isn’t. Like, we’re taking the streets. A part of that is because we are centered in collective care.”
Callaghan’s neighborhood is close to an area where neo-Nazis were recently seen marching while police stood by. They say the organizing that people have witnessed and participated in over the past few years has served to transform political apathy in a neighborhood where people are used to being ignored by those in power.
“We can’t just keep buying into this idea that if we as individuals work a little bit harder and then if we just help out our next-door neighbor, then hopefully our next-door neighbor will have our back. It has to be targeted at the people who have the power to change these things and don’t even respect us enough to pander to us,” Callaghan says. “If we just work together, toward this common goal, then we can really flip this stuff like a pancake.”


thenation--2020-07-20--We’re in a Pandemic. Cancel Student Debt Now.

Sarah Sitzler worked all the way through college , but her income was never enough to afford rent in New York City .
Despite receiving scholarships and grants , Sarah was faced with paying for an expensive school in an expensive city—Fordham University , a private school whose undergraduate cost of attendance ranges from $ 54,393 to $ 72,903 per year .
Almost 10 years after graduating , Sitzler has hardly been able to pay off more than the interest on her student loans .
“ Even if I somehow used all of my savings and put it onto the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a significant difference , ” Sitzler told The Nation .
When the pandemic hit and Sitzler could no longer find work , even the minimum monthly payment was out of the question .
“ With the amount of money I ’ m saving now , it ’ s insane to put it on my loans , ” she said .
Sitzler ’ s story is only one of thousands .
Across the country , student loan borrowers say that Covid-19 relief is proving drastically insufficient .
According to a recent survey of over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Student Debt Crisis , a nonprofit working on behalf of borrowers , and technology start-up Savi , more student loan borrowers say that the relief bill , which ultimately received bipartisan support in Congress , did not improve their financial situation than say it did .
“ I am grateful that the government has done this , ” Sitzler told The Nation .
“ But it only goes until September , and none of my money is going to my loans at all right now.
” Sitzler , who said she receives most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , doesn ’ t expect to be at full employment when federal relief ends .
For now , her energy is focused on the rent strikes , which are picking up in New York , and other financial needs .
“ I ’ m focusing on just having a safety net , keeping a safety net , and being able to eventually pay rent , ” she said .
“ Paying off my student loans right now is not even a priority.
” This story was produced for Student Nation , a section @ @ @ @ @ @ @ movements from students in their own words .
For more Student Nation , check out our archive .
Are you a student with a campus activism story ?
Send questions and pitches to Samantha Schuyler at samantha @ thenation.com .
The Student Nation program is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation .
Student loan debt in the United States is at the highest it ’ s ever been , reaching $ 1.6 trillion this year .
Just between 2017 and 2018 , average student loan debt at the time of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 29,200 , according to the Institute for College Access & Success .
Students who earn a graduate degree can have an even harder time paying it back , despite potentially earning a higher salary : 51 percent of overall student debt in 2016 was shouldered by households with at least one advanced degree .
“ It ’ s a class thing , ” Donaldo Prescod , graduate of San Francisco State University ’ s Cinema Studies masters program and New York resident , told The Nation .
“ Whoever ’ s rich in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the CARES Act , and even the Democrat-backed HEROES Act that passed in the House , are only Band-Aids—they delay debt rather than shrinking it .
When it comes to student loan debt , many borrowers feel that neither major political party actually wants to help .
Under the CARES Act , federal student loans fall under an automatic administrative forbearance that temporarily pauses payments and interest until September 30 .
The law also pauses debt collections against defaulted borrowers for the same six-month period .
Some private loan servicers have independently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most cases the borrower must know this relief exists and directly request the assistance .
Meanwhile , 36 percent of federal student loan borrowers who responded to the survey were not aware of the loan relief in the CARES Act ; 40 percent didn ’ t know the pause was automatically applied .
Even worse , 80 percent were unaware of the private loan relief available , meaning that a large segment of the population that could get relief for private loans is likely not calling to request it .
And 59 percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stress , anxiety , and depression due to their student loans during Covid-19 .
While all student loan borrowers struggle , the data suggests this financial system is exacerbating preexistent economic disparities , too .
According to the survey , essential workers are currently some of the worst-affected , with 59 percent owing more than $ 50,000 in student loans and 31 percent owing over $ 100,000 .
And a startling 91 percent of essential workers , the vast majority in the health care field , expect to struggle to make their student @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relief ends .
For Jessica Nguyen , who develops fragrances for a perfume wholesaler ’ s in-house design studio that has shifted to making hand sanitizer during the pandemic , the lack of special relief for essential workers is appalling .
“ We ’ re the sacrificial lambs , ” she said .
“ Yes , I ’ m working—but at what cost , if I have to seek out medical treatment ?
” Additionally , according to research from the Brookings Institute , Black student loan borrowers in the United States already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ student loans than white borrowers by the time they receive their undergraduate degree—indeed , 80 percent of Black students take on student loans compared to 60 percent of white students .
Within four years of graduating , Black alumni tend to have twice as much student loan debt as their white counterparts .
Latinx borrowers , despite graduating with a similar amount of debt as white borrowers , default at twice the rate .
And according to the Center for American Progress , Native American borrowers default at a higher rate than any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the time .
According to the survey from Student Debt Crisis , the financial impacts of the pandemic are only exacerbating these inequities for borrowers .
Respondents across races reported experiencing food insecurity as a result of their student loan payments , but for Latinx borrowers that number was 6 percent higher than for their white counterparts .
The rate of African American and Latinx respondents missing a rent or mortgage payment because of their loans was 5 percent higher than white respondents ’ .
Prescod , who is Panamanian-American , said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in access to financial education .
“ In Black and brown communities , the education about managing money is very absent , ” he said .
Donaldo says that when growing up in Salinas , a 77 percent Latinx city , financial education was noticeably sparse .
And it leaves him wondering , “ How come this stuff isn ’ t taught in a way that also lets me play a part in and compete in it ?
” And there ’ s also an often-unseen facet of the student debt crisis : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still hold student loan debt in their 40s , 50s , and 60s .
Only 7 percent of people between 45 and 59 have student loan debt , and only 1 percent of Americans over the age of 60 .
Though fewer , older borrowers fare worse in terms of financial precarity , education , and awareness , and mental health .
Fifty percent of borrowers over the age of 46 report bankruptcy or having to close a small business at least partly because of student loan debt .
Six percent of borrowers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their Social Security benefits garnished because of debt after the CARES Act was passed , though the bill supposedly prohibits this from happening .
“ There ’ s more existential worry , ” said Jesse Baker , who holds a PhD from the University of California , Irvine , and has refused to pay his student loan payments in protest .
He is 51 .
“ I watch my parents going through this…and it ’ s like , ‘ Oh my God , am I going to have enough money left to pay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Borrowers over the age of 45 reported having significantly less information about student loan payment relief in the CARES Act than their younger counterparts , too .
As many as one in four did not think that federal student loans were suspended for six months , while 22 percent didn ’ t know that the suspension was applied automatically .
“ You ’ re trying to navigate your income options , and then it ’ s , ‘ How am I going to figure out my rent ?
Are my parents going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Life is falling apart , and now I have student loans ?
” The partnership ’ s survey received over 38,800 responses—more than three times as many as Student Debt Crisis ’ s previous , and most successful , survey .
Nearly nine in 10 survey respondents support some kind of debt cancellation .
For Jesse Baker , his support of debt cancellation started in response to the financial crisis of 2008 .
He said he wonders why student loan borrowers can ’ t receive as much relief as major financial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the deal the banks got , ” he told The Nation .
“ Until we get to that , I ’ m not interested.
” Donaldo also said that the relief given to banks versus borrowers is wrong , though he said he doesn ’ t know to whom he should direct his complaints .
“ If they ’ ve shown they can lower the interest rate , who is benefiting by keeping us trapped ?
” he said .
Student Debt Crisis has repeatedly called for student debt forgiveness , most recently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ signatures .
Natalia Abrams , executive director of Student Debt Crisis , said the data “ shows that many people with federal student loans are facing a financial disaster when relief ends.
” “ Delaying doesn ’ t do anything , ” said Prescod .
For him , crafting a stimulus plan that relieves student loan borrowers from trillions of dollars of debt and stimulates the economy is simple : erase the $ 1.6 trillion of American student loan debt .
“ Canceling student debt—that ’ s what would take the burden off @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
”

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Sarah Sitzler worked all the way through college, but her income was never enough to afford rent in New York City. Despite receiving scholarships and grants, Sarah was faced with paying for an expensive school in an expensive city—Fordham University, a private school whose undergraduate cost of attendance ranges from $54,393 to $72,903 per year. Almost 10 years after graduating, Sitzler has hardly been able to pay off more than the interest on her student loans.
“Even if I somehow used all of my savings and put it onto the balance, it doesn’t make a significant difference,” Sitzler told The Nation. When the pandemic hit and Sitzler could no longer find work, even the minimum monthly payment was out of the question. “With the amount of money I’m saving now, it’s insane to put it on my loans,” she said.
Sitzler’s story is only one of thousands. Across the country, student loan borrowers say that Covid-19 relief is proving drastically insufficient.
According to a recent survey of over 38,000 student loan borrowers launched by the Student Debt Crisis, a nonprofit working on behalf of borrowers, and technology start-up Savi, more student loan borrowers say that the relief bill, which ultimately received bipartisan support in Congress, did not improve their financial situation than say it did.
“I am grateful that the government has done this,” Sitzler told The Nation. “But it only goes until September, and none of my money is going to my loans at all right now.” Sitzler, who said she receives most of her income working on film sets, doesn’t expect to be at full employment when federal relief ends. For now, her energy is focused on the rent strikes, which are picking up in New York, and other financial needs. “I’m focusing on just having a safety net, keeping a safety net, and being able to eventually pay rent,” she said. “Paying off my student loans right now is not even a priority.” This story was produced for Student Nation, a section devoted to highlighting campus activism and student movements from students in their own words. For more Student Nation, check out our archive. Are you a student with a campus activism story? Send questions and pitches to Samantha Schuyler at [email protected]. The Student Nation program is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation.
Student loan debt in the United States is at the highest it’s ever been, reaching $1.6 trillion this year. Just between 2017 and 2018, average student loan debt at the time of graduation increased from $28,650 to $29,200, according to the Institute for College Access & Success. Students who earn a graduate degree can have an even harder time paying it back, despite potentially earning a higher salary: 51 percent of overall student debt in 2016 was shouldered by households with at least one advanced degree.
“It’s a class thing,” Donaldo Prescod, graduate of San Francisco State University’s Cinema Studies masters program and New York resident, told The Nation. “Whoever’s rich in that situation is benefiting.” He added that the CARES Act, and even the Democrat-backed HEROES Act that passed in the House, are only Band-Aids—they delay debt rather than shrinking it. When it comes to student loan debt, many borrowers feel that neither major political party actually wants to help. 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 Current Issue View our current issue
Under the CARES Act, federal student loans fall under an automatic administrative forbearance that temporarily pauses payments and interest until September 30. The law also pauses debt collections against defaulted borrowers for the same six-month period. Some private loan servicers have independently offered relief as well, though in most cases the borrower must know this relief exists and directly request the assistance.
Meanwhile, 36 percent of federal student loan borrowers who responded to the survey were not aware of the loan relief in the CARES Act; 40 percent didn’t know the pause was automatically applied. Even worse, 80 percent were unaware of the private loan relief available, meaning that a large segment of the population that could get relief for private loans is likely not calling to request it. And 59 percent of respondents said they are facing increased stress, anxiety, and depression due to their student loans during Covid-19.
While all student loan borrowers struggle, the data suggests this financial system is exacerbating preexistent economic disparities, too.
According to the survey, essential workers are currently some of the worst-affected, with 59 percent owing more than $50,000 in student loans and 31 percent owing over $100,000. And a startling 91 percent of essential workers, the vast majority in the health care field, expect to struggle to make their student loan payments in six months when the relief ends. For Jessica Nguyen, who develops fragrances for a perfume wholesaler’s in-house design studio that has shifted to making hand sanitizer during the pandemic, the lack of special relief for essential workers is appalling. “We’re the sacrificial lambs,” she said. “Yes, I’m working—but at what cost, if I have to seek out medical treatment?”
Additionally, according to research from the Brookings Institute, Black student loan borrowers in the United States already owe on average $7,400 more in student loans than white borrowers by the time they receive their undergraduate degree—indeed, 80 percent of Black students take on student loans compared to 60 percent of white students. Within four years of graduating, Black alumni tend to have twice as much student loan debt as their white counterparts. Latinx borrowers, despite graduating with a similar amount of debt as white borrowers, default at twice the rate. And according to the Center for American Progress, Native American borrowers default at a higher rate than any other racial group—as much as 40 percent of the time.
According to the survey from Student Debt Crisis, the financial impacts of the pandemic are only exacerbating these inequities for borrowers. Respondents across races reported experiencing food insecurity as a result of their student loan payments, but for Latinx borrowers that number was 6 percent higher than for their white counterparts. The rate of African American and Latinx respondents missing a rent or mortgage payment because of their loans was 5 percent higher than white respondents’.
Prescod, who is Panamanian-American, said these trends arise mainly out of differences in access to financial education. “In Black and brown communities, the education about managing money is very absent,” he said. Donaldo says that when growing up in Salinas, a 77 percent Latinx city, financial education was noticeably sparse. And it leaves him wondering, “How come this stuff isn’t taught in a way that also lets me play a part in and compete in it?”
And there’s also an often-unseen facet of the student debt crisis: adults who return to school or otherwise still hold student loan debt in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. Only 7 percent of people between 45 and 59 have student loan debt, and only 1 percent of Americans over the age of 60. Though fewer, older borrowers fare worse in terms of financial precarity, education, and awareness, and mental health. Fifty percent of borrowers over the age of 46 report bankruptcy or having to close a small business at least partly because of student loan debt. Six percent of borrowers over 65 also say they have had their Social Security benefits garnished because of debt after the CARES Act was passed, though the bill supposedly prohibits this from happening.
“There’s more existential worry,” said Jesse Baker, who holds a PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and has refused to pay his student loan payments in protest. He is 51. “I watch my parents going through this…and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, am I going to have enough money left to pay for my rent and food?’”
Borrowers over the age of 45 reported having significantly less information about student loan payment relief in the CARES Act than their younger counterparts, too. As many as one in four did not think that federal student loans were suspended for six months, while 22 percent didn’t know that the suspension was applied automatically. “You’re trying to navigate your income options, and then it’s, ‘How am I going to figure out my rent? Are my parents going to die?’” Baker said. “Life is falling apart, and now I have student loans?”
The partnership’s survey received over 38,800 responses—more than three times as many as Student Debt Crisis’s previous, and most successful, survey. Nearly nine in 10 survey respondents support some kind of debt cancellation. For Jesse Baker, his support of debt cancellation started in response to the financial crisis of 2008. He said he wonders why student loan borrowers can’t receive as much relief as major financial institutions. “I’ll take the deal the banks got,” he told The Nation. “Until we get to that, I’m not interested.” Donaldo also said that the relief given to banks versus borrowers is wrong, though he said he doesn’t know to whom he should direct his complaints. “If they’ve shown they can lower the interest rate, who is benefiting by keeping us trapped?” he said.
Student Debt Crisis has repeatedly called for student debt forgiveness, most recently through an ongoing petition with over 37,000 signatures. Natalia Abrams, executive director of Student Debt Crisis, said the data “shows that many people with federal student loans are facing a financial disaster when relief ends.”
“Delaying doesn’t do anything,” said Prescod. For him, crafting a stimulus plan that relieves student loan borrowers from trillions of dollars of debt and stimulates the economy is simple: erase the $1.6 trillion of American student loan debt. “Canceling student debt—that’s what would take the burden off of so many people’s backs.”


thenation--2020-07-20--Building Community Power in a White Supremacist Country

In late May , as the national uprising against police brutality forced on America a crash course in “ defunding ” and “ abolishing ” the police , another concept also began circulating : “ community control.
” This likely drew a few blank stares , and not without reason : “ Community control ” sounds utopian , even in a federalist country like ours that leaves great autonomy to the states .
But it ’ s not a new idea , and it ’ s not only relevant to our current crisis of a law enforcement regime unaccountable to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proposes that the institutions people depend upon should be controlled by community members working in cooperation , not private individuals , corporate shareholders , or government bureaucrats .
“ We ’ ve known for decades that the things that our communities really need to be healthy and safe not only aren ’ t being invested in , but are actually being starved of resources , ” said Monifa Bandele of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table .
That ’ s why the Movement for Black Lives has made community control a key @ @ @ @ @ @ @ platform , demanding community control of the “ laws , institutions , and policies that are meant to serve us—from our schools to our local budgets , economies , police departments , and our land.
” To begin building community control in the 21st century , activists can look to experiments dating back centuries that have attempted to address systemic inequality and build Black power across different areas of American life , including land , work , education , and law enforcement .
Successive Black freedom movements have advocated or enacted versions of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the civil rights era , the New Left and the Black Power movement .
Examining key experiments in community control from the not-so-distant past—one that attempted to build power outside existing institutions , and one that aimed squarely at the structures standing in the way of Black empowerment—reveals both its potential as a tool for abolishing systemic racism and the challenges the model faces for enacting transformative change .
These reflect the larger question that motivated the earlier experiments : How to end systemic racism when it is baked into every crumb of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not the reality , of direct , democratic control over the institutions that shape our lives was present at our country ’ s founding .
Despite the varied inspirations for community control in the United States—British socialism , utopian communes , intentional communities— “ the most important of these is the history of black ‘ organized communities ’ of the nineteenth century , ” political scientist James DeFilippis writes in Unmaking Goliath : Community Control in the Face of Global Capital .
These trailblazing efforts emerged at a time of great discrimination and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resources of individuals toward collective aims : surviving slavery , racial violence , discrimination , and poverty , as the political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes in Collective Courage : A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice .
Until the end of the Civil War , Black fugitive slaves ran communes where they educated themselves , made a living , managed communal farms , and organized abolitionist resistance along the Underground Railroad .
Black urban communities collected dues from members to establish their own schools , health benefits , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ together , these organizations were born of necessity , and similar mutual aid efforts have also emerged in other communities neglected and targeted by racist society , such as Chinese and Mexican immigrants in the 19th and 20th century .
The early Black cooperative organizations became a springboard for cooperative businesses and trade unions , as W.E.B .
Du Bois observed in 1907 .
He argued that maintaining economic self-sufficiency through collective ownership and control was essential for Black people—and all Americans—to achieve racial equality in a society defined by white supremacy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cooperation would “ weld the majority of our people into an impregnable , economic phalanx , ” he wrote in 1933 .
But by the 1960s , it was obvious that America still wasn ’ t meeting the basic needs of Black Americans .
In 1968 , a global influenza was killing 100,000 in the United States , cities across the country were roiled with mass disturbances following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. , and Richard Nixon was riding a wave of pent-up white rage to the White House .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Black Power , and New Left movements revisited the notion that cooperation , collective ownership , and community governance could give poor , marginalized people more control of their lives , and by extension , more power .
In Southwest Georgia , civil rights activists had been registering Albany ’ s Black voters and organizing sit-ins , boycotts , mass meetings , and demonstrations against the city ’ s segregated bus stations through the ’ 60s , but by decade ’ s end , they hadn ’ t yielded many concrete improvements @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living .
The activists began building islands of Black self-determination to strengthen their position within the seas of white supremacy .
“ We were trying to organize people in the rural area , and we knew the struggle , ” one of the activists , Shirley Sherrod , told me for a story I reported for Harper ’ s Magazine .
The Black community lacked wealth , and farming is hard , low-paying , capital-intensive work .
It was even more difficult for Black farmers who were discriminated against by banks , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Black farmers lost their land and went out of business during this era , as the historian Pete Daniel describes in Dispossession : Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights .
Sherrod knew that racial equality would remain elusive so long as Black people lacked economic clout and stability .
In 1968 , after visiting Israel to study different land communities , Albany ’ s civil rights activists began a cooperative venture on collectively owned land .
“ We were thinking that we would develop something so that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Sherrod said .
New Communities , a Black-led , multiracial cooperative farm , broke ground in 1969 on 6,000 acres of land near Albany .
It is widely considered to be the first Community Land Trust , a model of landholding that places the land in a trust that is governed by a board of community members , managed by a nonprofit , and used for whatever the community chooses , whether that ’ s housing , small businesses , cultural spaces , gardens , parks , or farms .
Maximizing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risks across the collective , community control of land ensures that the land remains in the community—and for the community—beyond the lifespan , efforts , whims , or fate of any one individual .
New Communities was then the largest tract of Black-owned land in the United States .
This was not an “ intentional community , ” those enclaves of like-minded individuals that were popular in the ’ 60s .
Enmeshed in the civil rights movement , collective ownership and control was a way to buttress the economic power of its members @ @ @ @ @ @ @ peanuts , corn , peas , strawberries , collard greens , okra , and eight acres of muscadine grapes .
They sold some of it in the New Communities store , along with syrup they made from their own sugarcane , and ham , bacon and sausage they cured in their own smokehouse , from the hundreds of hogs they raised .
“ You can sustain better because it ’ s a group thing , ” said Gerald Holley , the resident storekeeper and meat-smoker , who later ran his own shoe business @ @ @ @ @ @ @ individual company—one man holding up the company.
” The collective spirit of New Communities also protected them against the hostility of their white neighbors .
“ They didn ’ t want to see the new community succeed , ” Holley told me , but the white racists still bought cigarettes and gas from their store .
But they were still a relatively small Black-run outfit in a hostile white-run state .
In 1969 , the government reneged on a grant they had promised to help New Communities buy the land—Sherrod believes they caved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to take out a private loan .
When severe droughts began in 1981 , the USDA denied them a loan to install irrigation , despite approving nearby white farmers for similar financing—part of a pattern of racial discrimination that became the focus of Pigford vs. Glickman , the Supreme Court case that produced the largest civil rights settlements in US history .
Within their 6,000 acres , New Communities farmers had achieved a measure of autonomy that might ’ ve eluded them as individuals , but their island wasn ’ t completely protected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Unable to pay their mortgage , they foreclosed in 1985 .
As an experiment in building power apart from existing institutions , New Communities shows the often-insurmountable barriers such efforts at self-determination face .
But it has proved even more difficult to establish community control over existing institutions head-on .
Following Brown vs. Board of Education , New York City failed to integrate its public schools : Black children bused into white neighborhoods were greeted with fierce white opposition , schools in Black and brown neighborhoods were overcrowded and underfunded , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United Federation of Teachers , blocked efforts to encourage the best teachers to take assignments there .
Parents also saw the mostly white teachers and principals—only 1 percent of principals and 8 percent of teachers in the city ’ s schools were Black—punishing their children for being “ disruptive , ” rather than treating them with patience , empathy , and care .
So instead of waiting for complacent white politicians and administrators to change the system , they began seeking a more formal role in hiring , firing , and day-to-day management @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 1967 , the city set up three experimental “ community control ” school districts : one in Harlem , one in lower Manhattan , and one in Ocean Hill-Brownsville , a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Central Brooklyn .
Under “ community control , ” parents in each district elected a governing board that could hire superintendents and principals , decentralizing powers once concentrated in the Board of Education .
Though supported by the city ’ s liberal elites and shaped by the Ford Foundation—community control would boost the self-esteem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ threatening the power of white communities , they thought—the plan soon drew the ire of the UFT .
It threatened their control over the city ’ s schools , including a contract clause they were seeking from the Board of Education to allow teachers to remove “ disruptive ” children from schools .
So in May 1968 , when the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community control board transferred 19 teachers and administrators out of their district , claiming they were hostile to community control , the UFT objected .
And when classes started in September @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strike , shutting down all of New York City ’ s public schools for ten weeks .
The events stoked deep , long-lasting racial divisions in New York City and America ’ s progressive movements .
For the UFT , the community ’ s reaction to the strike was just “ union-busting.
” In Ocean Hill–Brownsville , the multiracial teaching staff—hired by the community control board , and backed by Black and brown parents , the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community , civil rights leaders , and the Afro-American Teachers Association—crossed the picket line each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The daily spectacle of activists , community members , journalists , and police became a flashpoint of racial tensions in the city , as New York ’ s white middle-class rallied around the union , and Black and brown New Yorkers coalesced around Ocean Hill–Brownsville leaders .
But the UFT didn ’ t let up .
Only once the city reinstated the transferred teachers and ended the community control experiment in mid-November was the strike called off .
For the Black Power movement , the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle was yet another instance of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its civil rights commitments the moment it meant giving up any power .
Echoes of “ community control ” still exist , if watered-down , in the city ’ s school districts—in 1969 , New York State passed a UFT-backed decentralization bill that created 30 new elected school boards without giving them much control .
But for Mark Winston Griffith , cohost of School Colors , a podcast that examines the afterlives of Ocean Hill–Brownsville , and an organizer who has helped to launch a community-controlled bank and grocery store in Central Brooklyn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ challenges of establishing “ community control ” —and negotiating varied , sometimes-clashing aims—within large , diverse communities .
It ’ s a challenge that any community control experiment will face in taking on an entrenched institution .
Powerful white opposition can quash any new community control experiment , as it did to New Communities and Ocean Hill–Brownsville .
Governments and institutions can co-opt community control rhetoric or structures without redistributing real power to the people , like the 1969 decentralization law .
Yet New Communities was also an unlikely success .
After its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assisting countless black farmers through the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund , a nonprofit association of Black farmers and cooperatives founded in 1967 .
Under Obama , she became the USDA ’ s first black rural development director in Georgia—a radical shift for the agency she once sued .
( Sherrod was infamously forced from her position at the USDA after the Obama administration caved to outcry over a doctored video clip .
When the full clip was made public , the USDA offered Sherrod a new job , which she declined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new model of landholding that other communities continue to modify , strengthen , and adapt .
Two hundred and sixty CLTs are thriving in the United States today , meaning that the experiment never truly ended .
In a way , the current push for community control over police is an amalgam of the inside-outside approaches : defunding police departments—targeting an existing institution that is harming Black communities—allows people to build their own institutions to meet their needs .
“ Control is essential to our platform , because that ’ s about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lives ’ Bandele explains .
“ If you don ’ t control the institutions that are critical to your life , to your existence , then you can not survive .
You can ’ t thrive.
” Activists are divided on the real meaning of community control when it comes to law enforcement , and how such control would relate to the calls to “ defund ” or “ abolish ” the police .
In 1971 , the city of Berkeley voted down the Black Panther Party ’ s program for “ community @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the formation of elected civilian review boards to investigate police shootings , in a referendum .
This version of “ community control of police ” remains the most well-known , and civilian review boards have been criticized by the “ abolish ” camp as largely symbolic , vulnerable to cooptation by pro-police interests , and attempting to tweak a fundamentally oppressive institution without giving the people any real control .
But it ’ s not the only program .
After the Ferguson uprising in 2014 , Max Rameau and his Pan-African Community Action @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Community Control of Police that has since become a central campaign of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression .
It proposes a directly elected , all-civilian council with full or final authority—not just the right to offer input—over police policy , budgets , disciplinary measures , hiring and firing ( including of the police chief ) , full access to all investigations , and negotiations with police unions .
By granting real power over these essential functions to the civilian council , communities can choose to completely overhaul—to abolish and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from this brief , skeletal proposal are answers to the litany of questions that people often raise : How will communities handle violence ?
Can I send my children to the playground and expect them to return unscathed ?
How do we deal with the barrage of fireworks exploding through the night on our block ?
“ We need you to reimagine public safety in your community ” —Rameau and PACA give this directive to communities they engage on the proposal .
It ’ s a prompt for people to figure out what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that only knows to punish people for social violations , and an indication that this program might be more accurately described as “ community control of public safety.
” “ Imagine that you have 100 organizers .
They all have cars .
They have walkie-talkies .
They could have guns .
They don ’ t have to have them , but they could have them .
It ’ s up to you , ” he continues .
“ They ’ re all wearing uniforms .
You know who they are .
How would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” No one ever suggests catching truant kids and putting them in jail , he reports .
No one says they need military-grade weapons or tanks .
Most envision safety and security as someone picking up elderly people from the supermarket in the winter , so they ’ re not waiting for the bus in the cold , or someone finding out why a homeless person is on the street , and then helping them to address the root cause .
These answers still leave conspicuous blank spaces in the same spots @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but the point of sticking with the exercise is to fill them in .
“ We have good answers for why you shouldn ’ t call the police , ” Rameau says .
Namely , that they are instruments of terror for poor communities , even if they are also sometimes protectors .
“ But we don ’ t have an answer for what to do when something ’ s legitimately happening to you , and you need some help and support .
And we need to build that , ” he said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a viable alternative.
” That is what New Communities created : not just a commitment to reimagine the world but an actual model that , despite its limitations , has allowed hundreds of communities to fill in the blanks , improve on the model , and collectively build a different system for the nation , one plot at a time .
“ I ’ m not opposed to the idea of defunding , ” said Rameau .
Defunding is a crucial step to achieving public safety , but in the era of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ budgets were half what they are today , and police were still “ abusive because of who held the power , ” he said .
Yet power is the reason Rameau doesn ’ t use the term “ abolition , ” even if his end goal sounds suspiciously abolitionist : a system of public safety controlled by the people most brutalized and oppressed by police today , and so radically different from existing police that it shouldn ’ t be called “ police.
” “ The real question is : ‘ Has power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t changed since the late ’ 60s , or even the 19th century : power remains concentrated in America ’ s wealthy white communities .
But since that era , proponents of neoliberalism have also steadily strengthened the power of corporations , at the expense of collective and public institutions .
Prisons have been privatized .
The private security industry is ballooning , globally and in the United States , with bodyguards and private patrols protecting shopping malls , luxury hotels , gated communities , and the 1 percent .
Without a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it ’ s not hard to imagine this industry absorbing the functions of public police , but with less accountability , fewer restrictions , and , by extension , more brutality .
“ Walmart is not going to say , ‘ Well , there ’ s no police here , I guess we ’ ll take whatever losses come.
’ ” The divergence between “ community control of public safety ” and “ abolition ” seems to reflect the same question that animated the movements of the late ’ 60s : Do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by principles of justice—by targeting , outwardly , the oppressive system , or by building our own power and , through it , our own alternative ?
Yet if there ’ s a lesson to draw from the earlier community control experiments , it is that each approach also requires the other .
Decentralization , a goal shared by right-wing libertarians , leaves intact the seas of white supremacy , while “ community control ” mechanisms , like civilian boards , risk being corrupted or co-opted by reformist agendas .
If “ abolish @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that ’ s because it doesn ’ t offer a formal alternative—a proposed roadmap , how ever imperfect , that doesn ’ t just lead away from injustice , but toward a more fair society .
With no models of community-controlled public safety at a large scale in the United States , we are ultimately limited by the road maps we create .
“ We want to be visionary and think about things that can and should work , ” says Rameau .
“ Not to say , ‘ We ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that we ’ ve seen already work ’ .
”

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In late May, as the national uprising against police brutality forced on America a crash course in “defunding” and “abolishing” the police, another concept also began circulating: “community control.”
This likely drew a few blank stares, and not without reason: “Community control” sounds utopian, even in a federalist country like ours that leaves great autonomy to the states. But it’s not a new idea, and it’s not only relevant to our current crisis of a law enforcement regime unaccountable to the people it polices. Community control proposes that the institutions people depend upon should be controlled by community members working in cooperation, not private individuals, corporate shareholders, or government bureaucrats.
“We’ve known for decades that the things that our communities really need to be healthy and safe not only aren’t being invested in, but are actually being starved of resources,” said Monifa Bandele of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table. That’s why the Movement for Black Lives has made community control a key plank in its Vision for Black Lives platform, demanding community control of the “laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us—from our schools to our local budgets, economies, police departments, and our land.”
To begin building community control in the 21st century, activists can look to experiments dating back centuries that have attempted to address systemic inequality and build Black power across different areas of American life, including land, work, education, and law enforcement. Successive Black freedom movements have advocated or enacted versions of community control, from the Abolitionists through the civil rights era, the New Left and the Black Power movement.
Examining key experiments in community control from the not-so-distant past—one that attempted to build power outside existing institutions, and one that aimed squarely at the structures standing in the way of Black empowerment—reveals both its potential as a tool for abolishing systemic racism and the challenges the model faces for enacting transformative change. These reflect the larger question that motivated the earlier experiments: How to end systemic racism when it is baked into every crumb of American life?
The idea, if not the reality, of direct, democratic control over the institutions that shape our lives was present at our country’s founding. Despite the varied inspirations for community control in the United States—British socialism, utopian communes, intentional communities—“the most important of these is the history of black ‘organized communities’ of the nineteenth century,” political scientist James DeFilippis writes in Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital. These trailblazing efforts emerged at a time of great discrimination and oppression in order to pool the limited resources of individuals toward collective aims: surviving slavery, racial violence, discrimination, and poverty, as the political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes in Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. 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
Until the end of the Civil War, Black fugitive slaves ran communes where they educated themselves, made a living, managed communal farms, and organized abolitionist resistance along the Underground Railroad. Black urban communities collected dues from members to establish their own schools, health benefits, and social welfare. Turning inward and working together, these organizations were born of necessity, and similar mutual aid efforts have also emerged in other communities neglected and targeted by racist society, such as Chinese and Mexican immigrants in the 19th and 20th century. Current Issue View our current issue
The early Black cooperative organizations became a springboard for cooperative businesses and trade unions, as W.E.B. Du Bois observed in 1907. He argued that maintaining economic self-sufficiency through collective ownership and control was essential for Black people—and all Americans—to achieve racial equality in a society defined by white supremacy, and a fundamentally unequal economic system. Cooperation would “weld the majority of our people into an impregnable, economic phalanx,” he wrote in 1933.
But by the 1960s, it was obvious that America still wasn’t meeting the basic needs of Black Americans. In 1968, a global influenza was killing 100,000 in the United States, cities across the country were roiled with mass disturbances following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard Nixon was riding a wave of pent-up white rage to the White House. In this volatile climate, the civil rights, Black Power, and New Left movements revisited the notion that cooperation, collective ownership, and community governance could give poor, marginalized people more control of their lives, and by extension, more power.
In Southwest Georgia, civil rights activists had been registering Albany’s Black voters and organizing sit-ins, boycotts, mass meetings, and demonstrations against the city’s segregated bus stations through the ’60s, but by decade’s end, they hadn’t yielded many concrete improvements in Black people’s standard of living. The activists began building islands of Black self-determination to strengthen their position within the seas of white supremacy. “We were trying to organize people in the rural area, and we knew the struggle,” one of the activists, Shirley Sherrod, told me for a story I reported for Harper’s Magazine.
The Black community lacked wealth, and farming is hard, low-paying, capital-intensive work. It was even more difficult for Black farmers who were discriminated against by banks, the USDA, and other institutions. Waves of Black farmers lost their land and went out of business during this era, as the historian Pete Daniel describes in Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Sherrod knew that racial equality would remain elusive so long as Black people lacked economic clout and stability. In 1968, after visiting Israel to study different land communities, Albany’s civil rights activists began a cooperative venture on collectively owned land. “We were thinking that we would develop something so that we would never lose the land,” Sherrod said.
New Communities, a Black-led, multiracial cooperative farm, broke ground in 1969 on 6,000 acres of land near Albany. It is widely considered to be the first Community Land Trust, a model of landholding that places the land in a trust that is governed by a board of community members, managed by a nonprofit, and used for whatever the community chooses, whether that’s housing, small businesses, cultural spaces, gardens, parks, or farms. Maximizing the community’s resources and spreading the risks across the collective, community control of land ensures that the land remains in the community—and for the community—beyond the lifespan, efforts, whims, or fate of any one individual. New Communities was then the largest tract of Black-owned land in the United States.
This was not an “intentional community,” those enclaves of like-minded individuals that were popular in the ’60s. Enmeshed in the civil rights movement, collective ownership and control was a way to buttress the economic power of its members. Collectively, they grew soybeans, peanuts, corn, peas, strawberries, collard greens, okra, and eight acres of muscadine grapes. They sold some of it in the New Communities store, along with syrup they made from their own sugarcane, and ham, bacon and sausage they cured in their own smokehouse, from the hundreds of hogs they raised. “You can sustain better because it’s a group thing,” said Gerald Holley, the resident storekeeper and meat-smoker, who later ran his own shoe business. “It’s not an individual company—one man holding up the company.”
The collective spirit of New Communities also protected them against the hostility of their white neighbors. “They didn’t want to see the new community succeed,” Holley told me, but the white racists still bought cigarettes and gas from their store. But they were still a relatively small Black-run outfit in a hostile white-run state. In 1969, the government reneged on a grant they had promised to help New Communities buy the land—Sherrod believes they caved to white opposition—and the farmers were forced to take out a private loan. When severe droughts began in 1981, the USDA denied them a loan to install irrigation, despite approving nearby white farmers for similar financing—part of a pattern of racial discrimination that became the focus of Pigford vs. Glickman, the Supreme Court case that produced the largest civil rights settlements in US history. Within their 6,000 acres, New Communities farmers had achieved a measure of autonomy that might’ve eluded them as individuals, but their island wasn’t completely protected from the whims of the wider world. Unable to pay their mortgage, they foreclosed in 1985.
As an experiment in building power apart from existing institutions, New Communities shows the often-insurmountable barriers such efforts at self-determination face. But it has proved even more difficult to establish community control over existing institutions head-on. Following Brown vs. Board of Education, New York City failed to integrate its public schools: Black children bused into white neighborhoods were greeted with fierce white opposition, schools in Black and brown neighborhoods were overcrowded and underfunded, and the mostly white teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, blocked efforts to encourage the best teachers to take assignments there. Parents also saw the mostly white teachers and principals—only 1 percent of principals and 8 percent of teachers in the city’s schools were Black—punishing their children for being “disruptive,” rather than treating them with patience, empathy, and care. So instead of waiting for complacent white politicians and administrators to change the system, they began seeking a more formal role in hiring, firing, and day-to-day management of their schools.
Their organizing worked. In 1967, the city set up three experimental “community control” school districts: one in Harlem, one in lower Manhattan, and one in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Central Brooklyn. Under “community control,” parents in each district elected a governing board that could hire superintendents and principals, decentralizing powers once concentrated in the Board of Education. Though supported by the city’s liberal elites and shaped by the Ford Foundation—community control would boost the self-esteem and boot-strapping capacities of Black people without threatening the power of white communities, they thought—the plan soon drew the ire of the UFT. It threatened their control over the city’s schools, including a contract clause they were seeking from the Board of Education to allow teachers to remove “disruptive” children from schools. So in May 1968, when the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community control board transferred 19 teachers and administrators out of their district, claiming they were hostile to community control, the UFT objected. And when classes started in September, the union called a citywide teacher strike, shutting down all of New York City’s public schools for ten weeks.
The events stoked deep, long-lasting racial divisions in New York City and America’s progressive movements. For the UFT, the community’s reaction to the strike was just “union-busting.” In Ocean Hill–Brownsville, the multiracial teaching staff—hired by the community control board, and backed by Black and brown parents, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community, civil rights leaders, and the Afro-American Teachers Association—crossed the picket line each day to keep their schools open. The daily spectacle of activists, community members, journalists, and police became a flashpoint of racial tensions in the city, as New York’s white middle-class rallied around the union, and Black and brown New Yorkers coalesced around Ocean Hill–Brownsville leaders. But the UFT didn’t let up. Only once the city reinstated the transferred teachers and ended the community control experiment in mid-November was the strike called off.
For the Black Power movement, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle was yet another instance of a progressive white institution reversing course on its civil rights commitments the moment it meant giving up any power. Echoes of “community control” still exist, if watered-down, in the city’s school districts—in 1969, New York State passed a UFT-backed decentralization bill that created 30 new elected school boards without giving them much control. But for Mark Winston Griffith, cohost of School Colors, a podcast that examines the afterlives of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and an organizer who has helped to launch a community-controlled bank and grocery store in Central Brooklyn, Ocean Hill–Brownsville also highlighted the immense challenges of establishing “community control”—and negotiating varied, sometimes-clashing aims—within large, diverse communities.
It’s a challenge that any community control experiment will face in taking on an entrenched institution. Powerful white opposition can quash any new community control experiment, as it did to New Communities and Ocean Hill–Brownsville. Governments and institutions can co-opt community control rhetoric or structures without redistributing real power to the people, like the 1969 decentralization law.
Yet New Communities was also an unlikely success. After its end, Shirley Sherrod spent two decades assisting countless black farmers through the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a nonprofit association of Black farmers and cooperatives founded in 1967. Under Obama, she became the USDA’s first black rural development director in Georgia—a radical shift for the agency she once sued. (Sherrod was infamously forced from her position at the USDA after the Obama administration caved to outcry over a doctored video clip. When the full clip was made public, the USDA offered Sherrod a new job, which she declined).
Also, New Communities birthed a new model of landholding that other communities continue to modify, strengthen, and adapt. Two hundred and sixty CLTs are thriving in the United States today, meaning that the experiment never truly ended.
In a way, the current push for community control over police is an amalgam of the inside-outside approaches: defunding police departments—targeting an existing institution that is harming Black communities—allows people to build their own institutions to meet their needs. “Control is essential to our platform, because that’s about self-determination,” the Movement for Black Lives’ Bandele explains. “If you don’t control the institutions that are critical to your life, to your existence, then you cannot survive. You can’t thrive.”
Activists are divided on the real meaning of community control when it comes to law enforcement, and how such control would relate to the calls to “defund” or “abolish” the police. In 1971, the city of Berkeley voted down the Black Panther Party’s program for “community control of police,” which proposed the formation of elected civilian review boards to investigate police shootings, in a referendum. This version of “community control of police” remains the most well-known, and civilian review boards have been criticized by the “abolish” camp as largely symbolic, vulnerable to cooptation by pro-police interests, and attempting to tweak a fundamentally oppressive institution without giving the people any real control.
But it’s not the only program. After the Ferguson uprising in 2014, Max Rameau and his Pan-African Community Action (PACA) began formulating a proposal for Community Control of Police that has since become a central campaign of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression. It proposes a directly elected, all-civilian council with full or final authority—not just the right to offer input—over police policy, budgets, disciplinary measures, hiring and firing (including of the police chief), full access to all investigations, and negotiations with police unions. By granting real power over these essential functions to the civilian council, communities can choose to completely overhaul—to abolish and remake—their police. What’s missing from this brief, skeletal proposal are answers to the litany of questions that people often raise: How will communities handle violence? Can I send my children to the playground and expect them to return unscathed? How do we deal with the barrage of fireworks exploding through the night on our block?
“We need you to reimagine public safety in your community”—Rameau and PACA give this directive to communities they engage on the proposal. It’s a prompt for people to figure out what safety would mean outside of a world that only knows to punish people for social violations, and an indication that this program might be more accurately described as “community control of public safety.” “Imagine that you have 100 organizers. They all have cars. They have walkie-talkies. They could have guns. They don’t have to have them, but they could have them. It’s up to you,” he continues. “They’re all wearing uniforms. You know who they are. How would you use them to improve your community?”
No one ever suggests catching truant kids and putting them in jail, he reports. No one says they need military-grade weapons or tanks. Most envision safety and security as someone picking up elderly people from the supermarket in the winter, so they’re not waiting for the bus in the cold, or someone finding out why a homeless person is on the street, and then helping them to address the root cause.
These answers still leave conspicuous blank spaces in the same spots where our collective imaginations usually fail, but the point of sticking with the exercise is to fill them in. “We have good answers for why you shouldn’t call the police,” Rameau says. Namely, that they are instruments of terror for poor communities, even if they are also sometimes protectors. “But we don’t have an answer for what to do when something’s legitimately happening to you, and you need some help and support. And we need to build that,” he said. “We need to get people to a viable alternative.”
That is what New Communities created: not just a commitment to reimagine the world but an actual model that, despite its limitations, has allowed hundreds of communities to fill in the blanks, improve on the model, and collectively build a different system for the nation, one plot at a time. “I’m not opposed to the idea of defunding,” said Rameau. Defunding is a crucial step to achieving public safety, but in the era of New Communities and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, police budgets were half what they are today, and police were still “abusive because of who held the power,” he said. Yet power is the reason Rameau doesn’t use the term “abolition,” even if his end goal sounds suspiciously abolitionist: a system of public safety controlled by the people most brutalized and oppressed by police today, and so radically different from existing police that it shouldn’t be called “police.” “The real question is: ‘Has power shifted?’”
One thing hasn’t changed since the late ’60s, or even the 19th century: power remains concentrated in America’s wealthy white communities. But since that era, proponents of neoliberalism have also steadily strengthened the power of corporations, at the expense of collective and public institutions. Prisons have been privatized. The private security industry is ballooning, globally and in the United States, with bodyguards and private patrols protecting shopping malls, luxury hotels, gated communities, and the 1 percent. Without a viable alternative like the one Rameau seeks, it’s not hard to imagine this industry absorbing the functions of public police, but with less accountability, fewer restrictions, and, by extension, more brutality. “Walmart is not going to say, ‘Well, there’s no police here, I guess we’ll take whatever losses come.’”
The divergence between “community control of public safety” and “abolition” seems to reflect the same question that animated the movements of the late ’60s: Do we get to our goal—a world structured by principles of justice—by targeting, outwardly, the oppressive system, or by building our own power and, through it, our own alternative? Yet if there’s a lesson to draw from the earlier community control experiments, it is that each approach also requires the other. Decentralization, a goal shared by right-wing libertarians, leaves intact the seas of white supremacy, while “community control” mechanisms, like civilian boards, risk being corrupted or co-opted by reformist agendas. If “abolish” doesn’t carry this risk, that’s because it doesn’t offer a formal alternative—a proposed roadmap, how ever imperfect, that doesn’t just lead away from injustice, but toward a more fair society.
With no models of community-controlled public safety at a large scale in the United States, we are ultimately limited by the road maps we create. “We want to be visionary and think about things that can and should work,” says Rameau. “Not to say, ‘We’re going to limit ourselves to the things that we’ve seen already work’.”