Announcing THREE New, Free, Online Social Studies PD Courses from FJCC/LFI, in partnership with Bay District Schools and support from NARA’s Center for Legislative Archives!

Good evening, friends. You are likely aware of our recent re-launch of the first three courses in our The Civics Classroom series.

TCC EMBED

Well, we just couldn’t wait until July 1st, so are excited to announce that A Constitutional Classroom is now open! This fourth course in the series, developed in collaboration with our partners at Bay District Schools, explores the underlying ideas of the US Constitution and is ‘hosted’ by Dr. Charles Flanagan of the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives!

constitutional-classroom

A Constitutional Classroom will provide teachers with an understanding of:

  • Major ideas in the U.S. Constitution,
  • How to apply disciplinary literacy skills, and
  • Preparing for instruction to make content accessible for all learners.

You can get info to register for the new course, and download the syllabus, over at Florida Citizen!

As the salesman on TV once said, but wait, that’s not all!

high-school-us-history-classroom

We have also completed and are now launching the first course in what we hope will be a strong and long series for high school US history! The High School US History: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era is, like A Constitutional Classroom, hosted by our friend Dr. Charles Flanagan from the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives and was developed in collaboration with our partners at Bay District Schools. 

The High School US History: Civil War and Reconstruction course will provide teachers with pedagogy, content, and resources for:

  • the major ideas of the cause, course, and consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era
  • primary sources and disciplinary literacy
  • strategies and structures for accessible learning

You can get info to register for the new course and download the syllabus at the course page on Florida Citizen.

But what about you folks in high school US Government? We have a new course for you as well!
high-school-government-classroom

The High School Government Classroom: Building Critical Knowledge course will provide teachers with pedagogy, content, and resources for:

  • lesson planning and preparation in social studies
  • the principles of American democracy
  • the US Constitution
  • Founding Documents
  • Landmark Cases

For Florida teachers, this course is intended to help you prepare students for the new Civic Literacy Assessment. However, it also provides a basic foundation in US government content, pedagogy, and resources and aligns with the newHigh School US Government modules on Civics360! (And there will be a post on the launch of that new resource later!). 

You can get info to register for the course and download the syllabus over at, you guessed it, Florida Citizen.

We hope that you find these new courses beneficial!

Questions? Email Steve!

the political economy of policing

Here is a general theory, drawn from the “Bloomington School” of political economy:

  1. Public safety is a good. Providing this good is at least somewhat costly: people must keep an eye on each other, refrain from violence, teach their children to be respectful of others, maybe punish or at least shun violators. The benefit is shared: everyone gains from the prosperity and peace that result from public safety. But the benefit is fragile: when any individual violates these norms, public safety can be undermined for all.
  2. Costly, fragile, shared goods are difficult to provide. One way to provide such a good is to make and enforce a rule that everyone must pay to provide it, and then use the funds to hire some people to do the work. If public education is a public good, then we can require everyone to pay taxes and use that money to hire professional teachers, and perhaps require every child to attend public schools. If public safety is a public good, then we can collect mandatory taxes to pay for police.
  3. One advantage of a mandate is that it solves the collective-action problem of providing the common good. Another advantage is that it puts the service-provider under the control of a government, which can be an equitable and liberal democracy. A third advantage is that the same rules that create the service can also regulate it in the interest of justice. For example, when establishing public schools, we can require that they serve all children.
  4. One disadvantage of this method is that the service-providers will likely reflect the biases and downright evils of the society. In a racist society, the schools, police, public health systems, and other public services will likely be racist. In a colony, they will probably be imperialist. In a communist state, they will probably be predatory. This means that although policing is not inherently racist in all countries and times, the police will be structurally racist in any racist society. (The generic problem is untrustworthiness.)
  5. Another disadvantage is that the service-providers, although meant to be agents of the community, may develop their own interests. They may lobby, threaten to strike, vote as a bloc, form close relationships with elected leaders, and so on. Then their actual impact will deviate from their assigned mission.
  6. Considering that the basic task of policing is coercion, the generic disadvantages of mandates will likely take the form of harmful coercion in the case of police. Harmful coercion is violence. In contrast, mandatory education or public health systems are more likely to demonstrate bias in how they distribute resources and define goods. Hospitals, for example, are “violent” (if at all) in a looser or more metaphorical sense than police with guns.
  7. One kind of solution to the problems listed in #4-6 is reform: change rules, oversight mechanisms, organizational flowcharts, or budgets to reduce bias and self-interest.
  8. Another kind of solution is to develop a thorough alternative to the mandatory approach described in #2. Mandates are not the only way to provide public goods. People can provide goods voluntarily under favorable circumstances.
  9. One kind of alternative to a mandate is a market. Individuals can purchase their own goods, possibly with a subsidy from the state to equalize their buying power. This is the idea behind school vouchers; it is also very common in policing, where lots of security is actually provided by private firms and technology, such as alarm systems. The drawbacks of markets are hinted at in #3.
  10. A different kind of alternative is a “commons”: a mechanism for collective action that is neither a top-down mandate nor a market. For both education and public safety, we see pervasive elements of commons alongside states and markets. For example, on a city block where adults keep their eyes on everyone’s kids, public safety (and education) are handled as a commons.
  11. Hybrids are not only possible; they are usually wise, because they avoid the risks of systematic failure and domination that come from relying on one social form alone. For instance, it is possible to have police with a limited role, a rent-a-cop at the drug store, and a range of voluntary associations and networks that generate public safety as a commons.

See also on the phrase: Abolish the police!; insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory; the Chicago police and NY State prison scandals reinforce the need for countervailing power; avoiding a sharp distinction between the state and the private sphere; China teaches the value of political pluralism; polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; what kind of a good is education?; and the right to strike.

Trump’s Scheme to Sell the Moon

The following opinion piece of mine was published by Al Jazeera English on April 26, 2020, and is re-published here with AJE's permission.

When astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, it was seen as an idealistic leap into the cosmos – a “giant leap for mankind.” A few weeks ago, the real estate developer who improbably became US President has legally declared that he sees the Moon in far less elevated terms. He signed an executive order that authorizes private, commercial uses of the Moon and other “off-Earth” “resources” like Mars and meteors. Heavenly bodies are now seen as underleveraged assets meant to generate profits. 

Invoking competitive threats from Russia and China, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has called on government to support budding space businesses by rolling back regulations and coordinating government aid. He highlighted the gee-whiz possibilities of space tourism (a “Trump Tower Moon,” perhaps?) and the idea of converting solid ice on the dark side of the Moon into hydrogen and oxygen that could be used  as fuel propellant for rockets bound for Mars. It would amount to “turning the moon into a kind of gas station for outer space,” Ross said.

The Trump administration is also exploring the feasibility of “the large-scale economic development of space,” including “private lunar landers staking out de facto ‘property rights’ for Americans on the Moon, by 2020,” as well as the right to mine asteroids for precious metals. If it all sounds like the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, said Ross with evident self-congratulation, well, that vision “is coming closer to reality sooner than you may have ever thought possible.”

Since Donald Trump’s career has been built on claims of “truthful hyperbole,” skeptics might reasonably see this space fantasy as the empty bravado of the Huckster in Chief. Still, we need to ask a fundamental question: Who owns the Moon, anyway?

Economists and politicians are accustomed to referring to space, the oceans, the atmosphere, genetic knowledge and other planetary systems as “global commons.” The ostensible point is to suggest that these things belong to everyone and should be managed for collective benefit. And in fact, nations have crafted a handful of treaties that purport to create cooperative governance to preserve and protect various natural systems.

Believing that Antarctica should remain unowned and nonmilitarized, seven countries with plausible territorial claims to the continent ratified a treaty in 1959 to establish a scientific research commons there. Similarly, as space became a new frontier, more than 100 nations, including the US, ratified the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, to ensure that space exploration would be for the benefit of humanity. A 1979 Moon Agreement (which the US has not signed but is regarded as international law) declared that the surface, subsurface, and resources of the moon shall not be treated as private property. In other words: no ownership, no resource extraction, no militarization, no colonization.          

Imperialistic habits die hard, however. As Trump’s executive order shows, in defiance of treaties, nation-states in practice rarely treat “global commons” as commons – that is, as participatory social systems for stewarding shared wealth in fair, inclusive, long-term ways. More often, at the behest of industry, national governments see “global commons” as free-for-alls for grabbing everything that they can. The needs of ecosystems, other people, and future generations are secondary if not trivial concerns.     

A series of treaties to protect the oceans as the “common heritage of mankind” started out in the 1970s with the ambition of preventing over-exploitation of deepsea minerals, fisheries, and other marine resources. But over time the mindset of nation-states has shifted to “let’s just make sure that our nation can do what it wants and gets its ‘fair share’ of profits.”

In short, the language of “global commons” has been corrupted. Nation-states and industry have no serious aspirations to act as conscientious stewards of our common wealth. Their priorities are return on investment and national aggrandizement.

This habit has taken a dark turn during the Covid-19 pandemic as private pharmaceutical research firms race to produce a vaccine and other treatments. Even though their work is built on our shared inheritance of medical knowledge, often funded by taxpayers – and even though solutions come faster through collaboration and knowledge-sharing – humanity is now held hostage by proprietary, competitive models that pit nation against nation and rich against poor.

Treating medical R&D and treatment discoveries as a genuine commons could produce affordable, widely accessible treatments much more rapidly, as partnerships like the World Health Organization and Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative have shown. We should remember the history of eradicating polio. In the 1950s, when a reporter asked medical researcher Jonas Salk who owned the patent on the new polio vaccine, he replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Times have changed, and now everything from seeds to groundwater, colors and smells, common words and two-second samples of music, are locked up as private property. The Trump Administration’s goal of mining on the moon is simply the logical extension of this ethic. It stems from neoliberal capitalist beliefs about “value” – that which can be encased in private property rights and exchanged for money in the marketplace has value. Anything used for collective, nonmarket, or conservationist purposes, with no cash changing hands, is by definition worthless. Price = value. Open source sharing may be generative, but it doesn’t contribute to GDP.

The point of talking about the commons is precisely to name those types of value that have no price tag. Things that are essential to our planetary survival, that are sacred and core to our identities, and that are critical to the flourishing of everyone and future generations – these must be regarded inalienable. They are not for sale. We may have drifted a long way from this ethic, but it’s not too late to insist that the Moon – and so many other gifts of the universe – belong to all of us.

beauty worn of promise

Consider these points, made in the last 48 hours by scholars of color:

In the last weeks, there have been unprecedentedly large protests against police violence and systemic racism. The grievances are familiar. … But this time seems different. The costs of protesting are higher, and grievances are more intense, as I’ll explain below. Partly as a result, policymakers appear to be doing more to address protesters’ concerns. …

I find that legislators are 44 percent more likely to vote in favor of black protesters’ demands than white protesters’ demands. They are 39 percent more likely to vote in support of Latino protesters’ demands than white protesters’ demands. Legislators are 32 percent more likely to vote in favor of low-income protesters than more affluent protesters. And they are 10 percent more likely to vote in support of in-person protests, like marches or rallies, versus online protests, like online petitions or social media posts.

[She explains that protest by disadvantaged people is more costly, and costly protests have more political impact.] Legislators’ greater support of costly protest exists even when evaluating protests of equal size, disruptiveness and media attention. …

To be sure, the costliness of the protests is not the only factor in these rapid actions. Black Lives Matter has been shifting public opinion for several years now, and the Floyd protests have dramatically increased that shift, so that a majority of Americans now say they support the protesters’ claims. But given the dangers — the costs — of protesting during a pandemic, massive unemployment, widely circulated stories of brutality, and an election year, officials realize that the grievances are intense — and that black people and their allies are likely to punish officials at the polls if they don’t take action now.

LaGina Gause, “Black people have protested police killings for years. Here’s why officials are finally responding

The change is coming “at a speed that I don’t think we’ve seen before in American politics,” said Dorian Warren, president of Community Change, a nonprofit that works with grassroots groups in low-income communities around the county. …

“You can’t argue with the facts that you’re seeing, or wish them away, or make up an alternative story, because it’s 8 minutes, 46 seconds.”

Moreover, the Floyd video came on the heels of years of organizing by Black Lives Matter activists, as well as movements like the Women’s March and, further back, Occupy Wall Street, Warren said. It also came after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, young black Americans whose deaths also sparked outrage. Activists have been drawing attention to issues of police violence and race, gender, and class inequality for years, and those issues have only grown more urgent in recent months.

“One way to think about this metaphorically is like an earthquake,” he explained. Organizing by Black Lives Matter and other groups moves slowly, like tectonic plates: “and then all of a sudden they collide.”

Warren is quoted by Anna North in “White Americans are finally talking about racism. Will it translate into action?

The massive, multiracial coalitions that have taken to the streets to raise their voices against police brutality are replenishing springs of solidarity, nourishing the roots of a future social compact that we must now all get on with the business of making. We will do that most effectively with a common purpose in mind.

A common purpose is not some airy-fairy thing. It is a practical tool that allows people to achieve something together. It is a map marked with a destination, a guide that permits collaborative navigation. A common purpose is perhaps the most powerful tool in the democratic tool kit, particularly in a crisis, because it can yield the solidarity that induces people to do hard things voluntarily rather than through authoritarian compulsion. Yet the tool has been disintegrating from disuse.

Our common purpose is liberty and justice for all. We have rediscovered it. It’s time to build on that discovery.

Danielle Allen, “We seek reforms to policing. But something even deeper needs repair

Anger, shame, and fear are appropriate emotions right now, but the emotional palette should be richer than that. And it is richer for many scholars of color (and others) who were already deeply aware of injustice, but for whom the news is the power of the popular response.

History unfolds gradually, painfully, without evident purpose–until suddenly people break it open, allowing a better future to appear like a flash of light. Many such ruptures close again, but some do not. Pessimism (a habit ingrained by ordinary history) blocks the light. An inward turn, even if it is meant to be self-critical, can turn you away from solidarity. To take advantage of an opening, you must be receptive to hope, boldness, and even joy in the opportunity for solidarity and collective purpose.

See also: the kind of sacrifice required in nonviolence; taking satisfaction from politics in the face of injustice; notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution; the prophetic mode in the Civil Rights Movement and in everyday politics; on the phrase: Abolish the police!; Martin Luther King as a philosopher.

A Time of Reckoning

It has been an awful and amazing two weeks – a time of reckoning that is long overdue, a time of coming together that, despite the tragic circumstances, has been enlivening. What is so remarkable is that the Black Lives Matter protests have been nested within a larger, unprecedented trauma, the pandemic. I have found the protests riveting and inspiring, and the brazen police brutality enraging.  The outpouring has issued a call to all of us, especially white people, to look beyond the engrained American norms that have made life so dangerous and demoralizing for people of color.

Anthropologist/activist David Graeber sees the spontaneous protests as part of a larger movement. As he put it in a tweet: “Direct action and social movement are about the re-creation of society. Society has been taken from us. There has been a 40-year campaign to destroy attachments unmediated by the state or capital. This is the only way to start rebuilding it.” We are witnessing a re-convening of the American people and their ideals.

However, the pain of history is not past, as Faulkner once said. That's because the past is not really past. It is very much with us, internalized, in the present. Thanks to the protests, triggered by a brazen murder carried out by an agent of the state and circulated on social media, a deeper shift in consciousness has begun. It is now clear that there are really no bystanders. We are all implicated, particularly those with white privilege. As the artist Banksy put it, “At first I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue. But why would I do that? It’s not their problem. It’s mine.”

This very idea enrages President Trump, whose denial is manifest in countless deflections and vile insults aimed at protecting white supremacy. Thankfully, history is not trending in his direction. Already major corporations and even the National Football League, the long-time nemesis of “take a knee” quarterback Colin Kaepernick, now publicly support Black Lives Matter. The burden has visibly shifted to white people to look within themselves and take affirmative steps for change.

How refreshing, too, to see ordinary people assert a new vision of history in real time! Citizens have spontaneously toppled statues honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Christopher Columbus. In Bristol, England, a crowd threw the statute of 17th century slave-trader Edward Colston – responsible for selling more than 84,000 Africans into slavery -- into the harbor.

The demonstrations are welcome in these respects, but, ominously, they are also evidence of a profound crisis of legitimacy in American life to which the market/state system is not likely to be able to respond effectively. In a sobering piece in The Atlantic, “Shouting Into the Institutional Void,” journalist George Packer notes:

The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. Congress isn’t preparing a bill to address root causes; Congress no longer even tries to solve problems. No president, least of all this one, could assemble a commission of respected figures from different sectors and parties to study the problem of police brutality and produce a best-selling report [the official Kerner Report that studied the origins of the 1968 race riots] with a consensus for fundamental change. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters.

After half a century of social dissolution, of polarization by class and race and region and politics, there are no functioning institutions or leaders to fail us with their inadequate response to the moment’s urgency. Levers of influence no longer connect to sources of power. Democratic protections—the eyes of a free press, the impartiality of the law, elected officials acting out of conscience or self-interest—have lost public trust. The protesters are railing against a society that isn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. They’re hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse.

Packer’s insight suggests some troubling dangers ahead. We’ve already seen the rise of violent proto-fascist and white supremacist networks and the weakness of state institutions and law. On the other hand, we also have some rich, positive opportunities to transform our political economy and culture – if we can assert a coherent vision for a paradigm shift, if we can get beyond a reversion to a tepid (capitalist-oriented) liberalism.

The state is not impotent in the coming drama, but it is surely distrusted, for good reasons. It has been far more committed to a utopian neoliberalism than to a vision that provides dignity for all citizens, healthcare during a pandemic, basic food and shelter during an unprecedented economic recession/depression, and existential protection as the earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems collapse from too much market growth.

Since the state is so entangled in its deep alliance with capital, the real energy and thought for structural change will not likely be coming from within those circle or traditional politics. It can only come from us – commoners and care workers, families and communities, water protectors and Indigenous peoples, and all others whose fates have not been captured or co-opted by the established, dysfunctional system. 

Despite the many traumas, the past two weeks give me great hope. Deep human truths can still be expressed, heard and acted upon. They have a raw power of their own, if we dare to honor them. But how to deal with the institutional void that George Packer notes? How to build new social attitudes and institutions that can meet our urgent needs, that can build a "more perfect union"? Aye, that is the unmet challenge ahead.

on the phrase: Abolish the police!

Abolish the police! opens vistas of a radically different world. Such prophetic visions are important in the midst of social movements.

Abolish the police! sends a message of conviction and solidarity and indicates a rejection of compromise. Such rhetorical moves can help keep a movement coherent.

Abolish the police! prompts a discussion of possible alternatives, including public safety by unarmed citizen groups. Even if the actual recipe includes policing, these alternatives are valuable to consider.

Abolish the police! is a strong opening position in a negotiation with a police union. It basically says: “We would rather do without you than settle for the status quo, so how far are you willing to move?”

Abolish the police! means changing the responsibilities of the police and moving funds from one governmental department to another–a classic example of policy reform. Note that policing uses a total of about 6% of local budgets, so shifting half of their money from police to other purposes would mean changing 3% of a city’s budget. Christy E. Lopez writes that this “is not as scary (or even as radical) as it sounds,” but it does mean literally abolishing that “aspect” of policing that involves “the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people.”

Abolish the police! will be understood as: “No more police at all” (not even in your bourgeois neighborhood where the police are generally helpful). It will thus be used in advocacy against police reform, whether successfully or not.

Abolish the police! serves as a label for radical ideas, giving moderate politicians cover for incremental change. “I’m not for abolishing the police–some of my best friends are police officers–but we should definitely assign mental health crises and traffic patrol to a civilian agency.”

During mass movements and tumultuous moments in history, phrases suddenly spread from smaller groups to the society at large and are used in many contradictory ways, promoted by both their supporters and their opponents: “No taxation without representation!” “All power to the Soviets!” “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

There is no point in thinking, “This slogan will be misunderstood and will cause a backlash.” The messaging is not really under anyone’s control. I think the most important move is to try to create spaces within a movement for relatively wide-ranging conversations. In this case, those who literally want to abolish the police should continually exchange ideas with those who want to reform the police. This discussion need not include people who deny white supremacy; it need not represent the whole population demographically. But it should bring together different streams of thought to generate the best ideas as circumstances evolve.

(By the way, although my information is entirely anecdotal, I do think such conversations are happening right now.)

See also: the value of diversity and discussion within social movements; insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory; practical lessons from classic cases of civil disobedience; Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas: Nonviolent Campaigns and Deliberation in an Era of Authoritarianism; Why Civil Resistance Works; and notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution.

things to read about the protests against white supremacy

But as an historian of black social movements, my view is that as widespread and destructive as the 1968 rebellions were, neither their size nor the challenge they posed to the American political system approached what the U.S. has seen over the past two weeks. …

More than the number and size of the protests, though, what makes the 2020 uprisings unprecedented are the ways that they have pulled together multiple currents within the U.S. protest tradition into a mighty river of demand for fundamental change in American society. …

The point is not, as others have argued,* that it is the level of involvement of whites in the protests that distinguishes them from previous high points of anti-racist protest. There is in fact a long history of white support for, and participation in, black protest movements. …

[What is distinctive is the reform agenda.] Despite, or perhaps because of the protests’ decentralized and leaderless nature, they have managed to put on the table the broadest and most comprehensive set of social and economic reforms since the Poor People’s campaign that followed on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

Matthew Countryman, “2020 uprisings, unprecedented in scope, join a long river of struggle in America

I want to emphasize that I think white Americans have gone through quite radical changes in their attitudes, and that we’re talking about a more likely 25 percent of Americans who are hardcore racist, but I think most Americans have quite decent views about race.

But sociologists have argued that while some whites may have liberal views, a lot of them are not prepared to make the concessions that are important for the improvement of black lives. For example, one of the reasons why people have been crowded in ghettos is the fact that housing is so expensive in the suburbs, and one reason for that is that bylaws restrict the building of multi-occupancy housing. These bylaws have been very effective in keeping out moderate-income housing from the suburbs, and that has kept out working people, among whom blacks are disproportionate, from moving there and having access to good schools. Sociologists have claimed that while we do have genuine improvement in racial attitudes, what we don’t have is the willingness for white liberals to put their money where their mouth is.

Orlando Patterson, “Why America can’t escape its racist roots” [Not a good headline, because his piece is quite optimistic]

The situation is dire. The causes for personal anger many. In my own case, incandescent rage has blocked my capacity to think for several days. For me, prayer helps.

There is something we can do.

First, choose peace. Revolution never succeeds unless it rides on the back of a deeper commitment to the process of constitution. The goal has to be to build. These things can be done only on the basis of a commitment to peace. We need a better normal at the end of this. Not a new normal, a rinse and repeat of the old but with face masks. We need peace. …

Second, choose self-government. Societies can resolve their problems through only one of two mechanisms: authoritarian decision or self-government. Self-government delivers the sturdier foundation for human flourishing — a foundation that permits people to craft their own life courses and develop their full potential. To choose self-government, however, means to choose the institutions of collective decision-making. Voting, running for office, working through committee processes to identify and implement policy solutions. …

Third, channel the energies of protest directly into governance even through our imperfect institutions. We need a transformed criminal-justice system. Yes, it is good that the officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck has been criminally charged. But the problems we face are not solved one case of police violence at a time. We need a systems-level goal.

Here is what we should choose: reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent. This is not utopian. …

No justice, no peace, we often say. It’s also true, though, that without peace, there is no justice.

Danielle Allen, “The situation is dire. We need a better normal at the end of this — and peace

*including me, on Saturday evening, during a 5-minute interview on KCBS-San Francisco.

See also: Everyday Democracy: racism, policing, and community change; insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory.

The Great Lakes Commons, Podcast Episode #3

The latest episode of the Frontiers of Commoning podcast is now live! This time, I interview Paul Baines, Outreach and Education Coordinator of the Great Lakes Commons, a project that fosters new attitudes and practices toward those massive bodies of endangered water.

The primary strategy of the Great Lakes Commons is not to pursue the usual approaches through the complicated multi-jurisdictional US/Canadian policymaking regime. While a necessary venue for advocacy, these legal and regulatory channels are often a fast track to stalemate. The goal of the Great Lakes Commons is more long-term and structural -- to change culture. It wants to change how people see and relate to the lakes and to each other, which in turn can affect larger motivations for change.

The group’s stated mission is to:

  • Awaken & restore our relationship to these incredible waters.
  • Activate a spirit of responsibility and belonging in the bioregion.
  • Establish stewardship and governance that enables communities to protect these waters forever.

As Baines told me, “I’ve always felt, since my early twenties, that the environmental crisis is not a problem with the environment, but with our culture.” 

So Baines and his colleagues have engaged people who live around the Great Lakes with projects that make them relate to these bodies of water in new ways. Through crowdsourced maps, for example, the Great Lakes Commons has invited people to share memorable personal stories about experiences with the lakes. Their stories are then “pinned” on a digital map indicating where they live, so anyone can browse the map and hear a variety of such stories.

The Great Lakes Commons larger mission is to show people that the lakes are “a revered source of life and a shared and equitable commons” and not a mere “object of management, a measurable resource or a commodity.” To help make this idea more real and public, people are invited to sign the Great Lakes Commons Charter Declaration inspired by the rich traditions within commons and the Indigenous governance of the Anishinabek and Haudenosaunee nations. 

Indigenous peoples who live around the lakes have in fact been close collaborators in the Great Lakes Commons. They have brought their ancient rituals and wisdom about the water and building a more diversified community to defend it against misuse. 

Baines in 2017 launched a “currency of care” project that invited people to imagine the value of money as tied to the quality and availability of water to serve life in the Great Lakes basin. The project co-created its own paper bills for people to give to others who have shown a commitment to the lakes. The idea was to create tangible new circuits of gratitude, reciprocity, mutualism, trust, reverence, and friendship related to the lakes. 

For more on the Great Lakes Commons, listen to Paul’s spirited explanations of its work!

Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century (June 11)

The following event was shared by our friend Sterling Speirn, who has served on the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship along with NCDD Members Martha McCoy and Carolyn Lukensmeyer. Register to attend at the link below!


Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century

Join us for the release of the final report of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Hear from the Commissioners, dedicated Americans, and organizations who came together to make these recommendations. Learn more about the steps we can take to improve the resilience of our democracy by 2026, our nation’s 250th anniversary.

This event takes place Thursday, June 11th at 1:00 PM Eastern/10:00 AM Pacific. Please register to join us via Zoom videoconference at amacad.org/events/our-common-purpose.

The event features Commission Co-chairs:
Danielle Allen, Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University
Stephen B. Heintz, President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Eric Liu, President and CEO, Citizen University

Moderated by Judy Woodruff, Anchor, PBS NewsHour

With Remarks by:
David Brooks, Columnist, The New York Times
and David Oxtoby, President, American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, will deepen the national dialogue around democracy, citizenship, and community, by exploring civic engagement and political participation in the United States today and will set out a plan of action for promoting the values and behaviors that define effective citizenship in a diverse 21st century democracy. Read more about the Commission here.

learning from Memphis, 1968

This clip from Eyes on the Prize* shows the first and only moment in the career of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when a march that he led involved violence. He had to be ushered away in a car and left Memphis. When he returned, he gave perhaps his greatest speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (April 3, 1968) in which he prophesied his own death.

In this, his final speech, he describes the historical moment: “The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

He decries media coverage of the movement:

Let us keep the issues where they are. (Right) The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. [Applause] Now we’ve got to keep attention on that. (That’s right) That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window breaking. (That’s right) I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that 1,300 sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that. (Yeah) [Applause]. Now we’re going to march again, and we’ve got to march again

He lays out a strategy that includes boycotting white-owned companies and “strengthen[ing] black institutions.” He says, “I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank.”

And he makes the case that a massive nonviolent protest movement–in which the sheer number of nonviolent protesters overwhelms both the police and any citizens who use violence–is powerful. It is not (I would say) powerful in the sense of being moving and rhetorically effective, like a “powerful” song or speech. It is powerful in the sense that it seizes the ability to determine outcomes. The Birmingham movement compelled the Civil Rights Act; Selma compelled the Voting Rights Act. “And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to, and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.”

King gave this speech in the evening of April 3, despite a thunderstorm and his own deep qualms about speaking in Memphis. The next day, he was murdered. Riots, uprisings, insurrections (or whatever you want to label them) began across the country. And on Nov. 5., 1968, Richard M. Nixon won a national election that has been attributed to white backlash.

A few observations:

– The backlash was in no way the responsibility of the Civil Rights Movement. The causes included King’s assassination, the police and the FBI, media frames, and a racially biased majority. In Memphis and elsewhere, the Civil Rights Movement was doing what it had to do. To take a phrase from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” blaming the protesters for the backlash would be “like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery.” As King wrote in The Atlantic in 1967, “Let us say it boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.” We must “keep the issues where they are”: on the injustice, not responses to it. On the other hand, 1968 was a year of defeat, and it’s important to strategize about how to win instead of losing.

– Mass nonviolent movements are miraculous. They defy predictions about human behavior based on self-interest, limited information, and powerful emotions. They are also fragile–easy to disrupt with agents provocateurs, misinformation, and violent responses. King fully grasped that a mass nonviolent uprising is a kind of rupture in ordinary history. It is a moment when a better future suddenly becomes visible in the present. That is why delaying it can easily kill it. In the “Letter,” he writes that time can be made “an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” Therefore, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.”

– 2020 seems similar to 1968, yet different in important ways. Nixon was a far more skillful than Trump at exploiting backlash. He made the maintenance of racial hierarchy appear respectable by acting like a sober statesman. Trump is the face of white supremacy but happens to be grievously wounded by the pandemic, which would have been a threat to him even if he hadn’t grotesquely bungled it. (Sheer chance often determines outcomes in human events.) The country has also become more diverse: whites constituted 88% of the US population in 1970 versus 72% in 2020. On the other hand, the virus does make it harder to sustain nonviolent protests that are big enough to marginalize the police and violent individuals. People who would be relatively likely to maintain nonviolent discipline are also relatively likely to stay home to avoid the pandemic. Finally, the media landscape is far more fragmented, so that some Americans can see police rioting against innocent protesters while others see a nation devolving into crime. It is hard even to assess who is seeing what, let alone change the balance.

*Shearer, J. Stekler, P. (Director). (1990). The Promised Land [Video file]. PBS. Retrieved June 3, 2020, from Kanopy.