Who We Are, Who We Could Be

“This is not who we are.” “We are better than this.” 

I can’t bear to hear those platitudes from people who are blind, lazy, or have no sense of American history.

This is who we are, and who we have been since Columbus stood on American soil. Since then Native American peoples have been oppressed and the oppression continues.  Forced into soul-destroying reservations, the 17th to 20th century Indian Wars led to the Wounded Knee massacre where thousands of Native Americans were slaughtered. The Trail of Tears march that forced native people off their land killed more than 15,000 first Americans. Today Customs and Border Protection contractors tear through sacred tribal sites destroying archeological treasures that represent America’s history and culture to build a wall for keeping brown people out of this land.

This is who we are, and who we have been since lynching terrorized black Americans into submission and an inferior caste system. Post-Civil War to the 1950s, African Americans living in the south were subjected to unimaginable physical torture that usually ended with being hung and set on fire. Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation to ensure African American’s couldn’t vote, hold decent jobs, or get a good education.

In 1921 black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma were driven from their homes while their entire community was burnt to the ground. The crime was so effectively silenced that few people today know about it.

The infamous Tuskegee Study subjected black WWII airmen to syphilis without their consent so that researchers could conduct experimental treatments. None of the 399 men infected with syphilis received penicillin even though it proved to be an effective treatment.

This is who we still are, as police continue murdering black men and women and bludgeoning peaceful protesters standing up for justice in the names of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and multitudes more.

But fragile though they are, there are signs of who we can be in the face of dictatorial repression. Mass protests, along with global solidarity from people of all ages, races, and economic strata willing to risk Covid in the name of justice, offer hope for another kind of “new normal” as we move forward in these deeply difficult, terribly troubling times.

Police taking a knee and line dancing with protesters gives me hope. Children, black and white, singing and chanting “No Justice, No Peace” gives me hope. Local leaders, like the mayor of Washington who painted the street with “Black Lives Matter” in defiance of a would-be monarch in her city give me hope, as do those who are calling racial injustice an emergency that requires ending police funding and forging new paths to saner, safer policing.

Organizations ranging from local theaters to community foundations to businesses publicly apologizing and pledging reform in hiring, training, and intolerance of racial injustice gives me hope. People learning about the history and violence of institutional racism gives me hope. Bad cops getting charged with felonies gives me hope. Whistleblowers and those willing to forfeit their careers in the name of justice give me hope. Political and military figures who say Enough is Enough! Give me hope. Rev. Al Sharpton’s eulogy of George Floyd gives me hope.

Recent polls like those conducted by Monmouth University and CBS News give me hope. The Monmouth poll showed that 76 percent, including 71 percent of white people, called racism and discrimination a “big problem” in the U.S., an increase of 26 percent since 2015.  Almost 60 percent of Americans see protesters’ anger as fully justified. And the CBS poll revealed that almost 60 percent of Americans believe police officers are more likely to treat black people unfairly than to mistreat whites.

I’m not saying the change we urgently need will be fast, easy or unanimous.  But we are at a bend in the road, because we are on the brink of disaster. We can no longer deny, disregard or ignore that reality. We know now that there is no justice, no peace without racial justice and that demands that we understand the connections between race, class, poverty, discrimination, i.e. “intersectionality.”  Black writers and leaders like James Baldwin and Angela Davis and Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that before many of us did. Today no one understand it better than African Americans who still can’t get a good education, a decent job, or a safe roof over their heads and who worry every day about driving, jogging, living while black.

“What’s really driving home for me right now, what this moment is teaching me, what the death of George Floyd and all the other losses teaches us is that there is no justice anywhere for anyone until there is racial justice. That’s the starting point, the nexus for change,” a friend wrote me.

Her comment reminded me of another crucial moment, and movement, that demanded sustained change. The women’s movement’s starting point, its nexus for change came with the realization that unless women had agency over their own bodies, there would be no justice, no equality, no self-determined future. The movement had measurable results and it’s not finished yet.

Still, we can hope that the hymn is right: “Once [we were] lost, but now [we’re] found, now we see.” As Rev. Sharpton said, the time has come.

Never Again? The Rising Epidemic of AntiSemitism

A shooting in a Jersey City Jewish market. Memorials in remembrance of a massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Cries of “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville. College campus offices, dorms and walls slathered with swastikas. Navy cadets flashing the sign of white supremacy. Cars, offices, homes, synagogues, schools defaced with slogans and swastikas in cities and towns across America. Donald Trump Jr.’s Facebook post of a cup for liberals to cry into covered in gold Stars of David. In France graves desecrated in an old Jewish cemetery and a Holocaust survivor murdered. German warnings that Jews shouldn’t wear yarmulkes or Stars of David in public.

In 2018 anti-Semitic attacks killed more Jews around the world than in any year in decades. Last year saw startling new numbers and acts of violence as well. Anti-Semitism is spiking in alarming ways and in numerous places while calls rise for stronger security measures and government action, but not the kind that Donald Trump promulgated in an Executive Order just before the end of 2019.

Using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the president’s order withholds federal money from colleges and universities that fail to counter discrimination against Jews.  It is at best a misguided gesture, and at worst a threat to First Amendment rights. Aimed at silencing opposition to Israel’s overt oppression, violence, and denial of Palestinian people’s human rights, the order is an attempt to put an end to Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movements.

The BDS movement was started by Palestinians which accounts in part for why it is so abhorred by many Jews and Israeli sympathizers.  But BDS has evolved into a global strategy that uses economic measures to help end tragic discrimination and injustice, as it did successfully in South Africa under the Apartheid government. Its most prominent funder is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which has provided over $1 million to BDS-supporting groups since 2013.

This thinly veiled measure by the president may look like a gesture of concern but realistically it doesn’t begin to address the real source of violent anti-Semitism in America. Stopping public debate on college campuses or threatening workers with dismissal if they openly support BDS does little to tackle the problem emanating from white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups, many of which find inspiration in the words and deeds of Adolf Hitler and his hideous henchmen.

Donald Trump has frequently demonstrated his own anti-Semitic tendencies, despite having a Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and three Jewish grandchildren. He has endorsed crude caricatures of Jews, especially when they include reference to money. He told the conservative Israeli American Council in a 2018 speech that a wealth tax would put Jews out of business. “A lot of you are in the real estate business,” he said. “I know you [and] you’re all brutal killers.” In a speech when the U.S. Embassy was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump told Council members, “You have Jewish people…and they don’t love Israel enough.”

Now, to make his case against BDS movements, the president has gone so far as to posit that Judaism is a nationality, as well as a religion. That’s deeply upsetting to me and many other Jews. It has serious possible ramifications, one of them being a set-up for further immigration discrimination and rejection.

Trump signed the “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism” in December at a White House Chanukah reception attended by evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, who famously said in 2010, “You can’t be saved being a Jew.” The order drew praise from some Jewish organizations, and individuals like Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, as well as vociferous criticism from others. It also drew a vocal backlash from Palestinian activists who said it will chill legitimate free speech that criticizes the Israeli government, especially for its human rights abuses.

Some Jewish leaders worry about its implications for the Jewish community at large. Rabbi Hara Person, the chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, told The New York Times that the order feels dangerous. “I’ve heard people say this feels like the first step toward us wearing yellow stars.”

I was born a Jew, and I remain a secular Jew. That is my religion and my ethnic heritage. I feel deeply my connection to other Jewish people, and to our collective history and culture. At the same time, I am an American. That is my nationality by birth, although as Virginia Woolf said, “As a woman I have no nation. As a woman, I want no nation. As a woman the world is my nation.”

Judaism is neither a race nor a nationality. It is simply, and beautifully, one of the world’s great religions, nothing more, or less.

Everyone needs to understand and respect that, including the president of the United States. And everyone, most especially the president, needs to understand as well that the growing epidemic of global anti-Semitism, reinvigorated by the president’s words and actions, is a real and present danger that threatens the future for all of us. 

“Never again?” I don’t think so.  Here we are, and sadly, “again,” it seems, is now. 

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A Growing Epidemic of Violence Threatens Black Transgender Women

Last month being LGBT History Month, it seems timely to think about what is happening to primarily Black transgender women across the country. It’s not simply timely, it’s urgent given the growing number of mostly Black trans women being murdered.

In 2018 at least 26 murders of transgender people occurred in the U.S. The majority were Black trans women. The year before that the number killed was 29. So far this year at least 26 transgender people, largely Black trans women, have been killed by acquaintances, partners and strangers. The numbers recorded for any year may be low due to under-reporting by victim families and law enforcement. These killings align with other significant factors that render trans people more prone to violent death, such as poverty, homelessness, healthcare barriers, depression, homophobia, racism and sexism.

These tragedies demand a human face. Baily Reeves, 17, was fatally shot in Baltimore, Maryland in September. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding her death.  Jordan Cofer, 22, who was out only to close friends and used male pronouns on social media, was among the nine victims killed in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio in August. A friend told the media he was “one of the sweetest people you’d ever meet, a true saint, but he was scared constantly.” Dana Martin, 31, “beloved by everybody,” was fatally shot in Montgomery, Alabama and found in a roadside ditch in her car. Claire Legato, 21, “full of life,” died of a gunshot wound to her head in Cleveland, Ohio. There are 22 more stories like this so far this year.

Two troubling cases remain unresolved. A 25-year old woman named Medina, denied treatment for a severe health problem in an ICE facility, died at a Texas hospital hours after being released by ICE. Another woman, Polanco, died in a cell at the notorious Riker’s Island prison in New York.

According to GLAAD.org, the American Medical Association has declared the killing of trans women and other trans people an “epidemic” exacerbated by a variety of social issues, including the fact that transgender people face high levels of discrimination and poverty. According to one national survey of transgender people, their level of unemployment is twice the rate of the general population. Transgender people are four times more likely to live in poverty, and 90 percent of them report experiencing harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination on the job. Access to healthcare is extremely limited for transgender people, in part because until recently private insurers have treated transition-related medical care as if it were cosmetic. Some procedures are still not covered, and it continues to be difficult to find a provider who is knowledgeable about transgender healthcare.  Sadly, 41 percent of transgender people reported attempting suicide in one large study.

“We are the most afraid we’ve ever been,” Mariah Moore of the Transgender Law Center, says. Kayla Gore, a transgender advocate in New Orleans, adds that the threat of violence is “always forefront in our minds, when we’re leaving home, going to work, going to school.”

It’s important to understand what “transgender” – and sexual orientation” – mean, among other terms, if violence born of fear and prejudice is to be adequately addressed. According to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a transgender person is someone whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they know themselves to be on the inside. It includes people who have medically transitioned and people who have not.  Sexual orientation refers to emotional, romantic, sexual and relational attraction to someone else, whether you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight or use another word to accurately describe identity. “Gender identity” is one’s internal concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither.  “Transition” is a process that some transgender people undergo when they decide to live as the gender with which they identify. They are not “becoming” a man or a woman; they are starting to live openly as their true gender. Transitioning is a difficult and private decision. People who make that decision deserve respect.

Th reality of living a transgender life makes LGBT History Month an important time for increasing awareness, acceptance, and safety for trans people. Started in 1994 by a Missouri high school teacher to educate schools, religious institutions, and communities about LGBTQ people, it led to LGBTQ Pride Month, celebrated in June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. It has grown from a day of Gay Pride to a month of events.

All the activity surrounding LBGTQ history and life is important. So is the need for lawmakers to strengthen hate crime legislation and for law enforcement and media to do a better job of addressing relevant issues.  As Sarah McBride of the Human Rights Campaign puts it, “the prejudices don’t add upon one another, they multiply upon one another.”  They lead to the murder of innocent human beings, largely women of color, who simply want to live their lives free of fear.

Surely that is not asking too much.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Why Are So Many Native American Women Abused, Missing and Murdered?

Savanna Greywind was a young woman in Fargo, North Dakota about to give birth in a few weeks when she was brutally murdered. Leona LeClair Kinsey was an older woman living in Oregon when she went missing eighteen years ago. She is still missing. RoyLynn Rides Horse, a Crow tribal member, died in 2016 after being beaten, burned, and left in a field to die.

These stories are all too common, but statistics about how pervasive the problem is are hard to find. Many cases go unreported, others aren’t well documented, and no centralized database exists in the U.S. government to track cases.

 According to the Indian Law Resource Center, violence against indigenous women in the U.S. has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence. Alaska Native women have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States. On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average.

“You really have to contact tribe by tribe, family by family, to really see the true impact,” one advocate says. “We are shoved under the rug by corruption even in our own homelands,” says another. “I’m here to say we will not be shoved under the rug anymore.”

At the heart of the problem is the longstanding indifference and hostility to Native Americans, especially Native American women, which can be traced back to the days when separating Native people from their families and homes and denying them their culture was a deliberate attempt to destroy Native beliefs, ways of life, even people.

Continuing racism and sexism contribute to the impression that indigenous women are assailable, says Barbara Perry, a profess at the University of Ontario. “It’s not unusual for women of color generally to be perceived as inferior to white people as a class and inferior white women as a subclass.”

The effects of these travesties remain present in unique ways for Native women. In addition to suffering sex trafficking, sexual violence, and the risk of being disappeared, they are often homeless, living in dire poverty, and totally disconnected from their families and communities.  

Now they face a new vulnerability from the flood of non-native workers into oil-rich regions or near reservations. Of particular concern is the workers who will lay the Keystone XL pipeline running from Canada through Montana, Illinois, and Texas, bringing many more workers into the “man camps” being built along the way. The problems that these camps bring is particularly acute in a region stretching across 200,000 square miles along the Montana-North Dakota state line. Attacks there on Native American women have increased dramatically as tens of thousands of transient oil workers have inhabited the temporary housing known as man camps.

Tribal law enforcement has no jurisdiction over non-native men who assault Native American women on reservations, according to Cheryl Bennet, an Arizona State University professor. “If a white person commits murder or rape against a Native American person, the federal government would have jurisdiction over those crimes instead of the tribe or state government.” But when tribal law enforcement sent sexual abuse cases to the FBI and U.S. Attorney Offices, federal prosecutors declined more than two-thirds of the cases, according to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report.

In recent months, the plight of Native women has begun receiving attention thanks to a growing activist movement that is being heard in state capitals and on Capitol Hill. Last year Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), defeated in the November mid-term election, introduced a bill to standardize law enforcement protocols relating to missing and murdered Native Americans. It attracted sixteen co-sponsors but didn’t make it out of committee.  

At the state level, Republican Rep. Gina McCabe introduced a House bill in Washington State that would bring the federal, state, and federally recognized sovereign tribal governments together to ensure that everyone in the state who goes missing is reported and listed in a central location. The bill, now making its way through the legislative process, mandates that the State Patrol creates a list of missing Native American women in Washington by June this year, working together with tribal and non-tribal police agencies.

May 5, 2017 marked the first National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls. Twelve years earlier, the movement for the safety of Native women, largely spearheaded by the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) and other groups, had led the struggle to include a separate title for Native women, called Safety for Indian Women, in the Violence Against Women Act. It was a start in raising awareness of this national issue but much more needs to be done.

More than half of Native American women have been sexually assaulted, including over a third who have been raped during their lifetime. That rate is nearly two-and-a-half times higher than for white women, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.

As the NIWRC said at the first National Day of Awareness, “Before this crisis is sufficiently addressed, it must first be acknowledged.”

That means by all of us.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.www.elayne-clift.com

Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of America's Dangerous Epidemics

Advocates for sensible gun legislation had it right when they framed the epic number of individual and mass shootings in this country as public health issue. Public health professionals and organizations like the American Public Health Association and the American Medical Association have continued to push for addressing gun violence as a growing epidemic, and so they should.

According to the Brady Campaign, 318 people in America are shot daily in murders, assaults, suicides, suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention. Every day 96 of them die from guns. No wonder. In this country, 1.7 million children live in a home with an unlocked, loaded gun and millions of guns are sold every year in “no questions asked” transactions.

Part of the gun violence epidemic we face resides in the growing, almost contagious episodes of police brutality and unnecessary use of weapons, primarily against people of color.  This year over 430 people have been shot and killed by police and the year is barely half over. Last year’s total number was 987. Some of the names we remember are Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. Among those whose names we may not recall are Danny Ray Thomas, an unarmed black man clearly suffering from a mental health crisis, who was killed by a Texas police officer, and more recently, Stephon Clark, another unarmed black man who was shot eight times, six of them in the back, by Sacramento police while simply holding a cellphone in his grandparents’ backyard.

We are clearly facing a growing number of public health crises involving guns, but gun violence, no matter who commits it, isn’t only contributing to a crisis that involves instant death or disability.  It is also leading to an epidemic of crises in mental health among survivors and victims’ families. Where is the discussion of that issue?  It’s telling that a search for information on this invisible crisis led me to myriad articles ruminating on the idea that gun violence is perpetrated by people with mental health problems, but not one link deliberating on the mental health toll gun violence takes on survivors or family members appeared.

Yet, just think what it must have done to Tamir Rice’s mother to learn that her child, simply playing with a toy, had been shot to death by police.  Or to Stephon Clark’s grandparents as they saw their grandchild gunned down in their backyard. Or to Eric Garner’s family, not only left to deal with economic worries, but with the lifelong sorrow of a husband and father being choked to death by police. Think about what Michael Brown’s family, Trayvon Martin’s family, Sandra Bland’s family and the multitudes of other family members of the unknown victims of violence– spouses, children, siblings – will have to live with for the rest of their lives. It is possible that there are worse things than death, like living with despair, and dread.

There is another epidemic of violence that needs attention as we appear to descend into a dark place while struggling with a new, unfamiliar reality grounded in our current political environment. America has always had an incipient underbelly, but unlike those who survived the fascism of Europe preceding and during WWII, Americans have been fortunate (until now) to avoid the punishing life of autocracy and dictatorship.

Now come Donald Trump et.al., and along with his followers, a dramatic increase in hate crimes not unlike the ones seen in many countries during the 1930s and 1940s and emerging once more. America has seen a growing number of hate crimes in recent years but they are proliferating even more as racists and white supremacy groups feel emboldened to openly spew their contempt for others. That contempt is aimed first at Jews, and then at Muslims, according to the FBI. Hate crimes are also on the rise as perpetrators target the LGBTQ community.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups has increased along with the growing number of hate-filled violent acts.  These crimes range from vandalism in synagogues and cemeteries to graffiti messages and Swastikas on buildings, to threats to religiously affiliated schools. Many hate crimes are perpetrated against individuals. In 2014 a man killed three people at two Jewish centers near Kansas City, and recently a Muslim man was beaten in the Bronx by attackers calling him a terrorist. In another incident in New York, a man shoved a Mexican immigrant onto the subway tracks after dragging him off a train. He narrowly escaped death.

All the growing violence we’re witnessing, whether manifesting as verbal abuse or escalating to hate crimes and murder, even at the hands of police, can appropriately be seen as epidemic. And epidemics, seen through the public health lens, call for controls and eradication. None of us can be inoculated against the diseases of hatred in our zones of relative comfort and safety, because “no man [sic] is an island.”  As another famous quote reminds us, “Together we stand. Divided we fall.” 

The pain of a potential fall looms large, and it is likely to be more than any of us could bear.