Jordan remembers jolting awake in his cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, in the early-morning hours of Saturday, February 2. He had been hit with pepper spray to the face. Jordan, who The Intercept is identifying by a pseudonym, said guards sprayed and shackled him and his cellmate, then led them, partially blinded, to a shower area to rinse off. Next, he spent several hours in a “freezing” unit wearing only boxers and a T-shirt, before being transferred to solitary confinement.
“Their objective was to make an example out of my cellie and i,” Jordan, who has since been relocated to another federal detention facility, wrote to The Intercept.
The raid on the cell came after the men locked up on his unit — having endured six days without heat, electricity, phone access, or hot meals — decided to cover their cell doors with cardboard, towels, and toilet paper in order to disrupt the guards’ daily tally of incarcerated people. “We were tryin to demonstrate that enough was enough,” Jordan explained through email. “anybody with a brain and a tad bit of self respect would think to protest those conditions. we just wanted to be treated like humans.”
Later that morning, throngs of family members and others — including local and national elected officials — gathered outside in the parking lot for a weekend of protest against the jail conditions. With the news media looking on, people inside banged on their cell windows. Unbeknownst to those outside, however, the Metropolitan Detention Center was brimming with prisoners challenging their conditions in other ways: large and small acts, both individual and collective. All of them were met with reprisals.
Accounts from incarcerated people, their family members, and lawyers sketch a picture of widespread protests at the Sunset Park detention facility. People across multiple housing units undertook coordinated acts of nonviolent disobedience and at least three hunger strikes. Retaliation by Metropolitan Detention Center staff ranged from pepper spray and solitary confinement to shutting off toilets across entire units. All told, men on at least four housing units inside the jail say they took part in some sort of collective protest of their conditions. In each instance, they say their actions were met with official retaliation.
“When I see protests of the kind that took place at the Metropolitan Detention Center, I conclude that prisoners have really reached their breaking point.”“When I see protests of the kind that took place at the Metropolitan Detention Center, I conclude that prisoners have really reached their breaking point, because they are taking — and they know they are taking — very significant risks,” said David Fathi, who heads the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “Retaliation against prisoners who protest is a common, everyday occurrence. Prisoners are a population who can, with very rare exceptions, be abused almost with impunity.”
Even when Rep. Jerry Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Bureau of Prisons, toured Metropolitan Detention Center during the power outage, incarcerated people told him that they were afraid to talk about what was going on for fear of reprisals by Bureau of Prisons staff. “They told him guards would come up and retaliate,” said Robert Gottheim, Nadler’s district director, who accompanied him on the tour.
The risk seemed worthwhile to some. “Police in here wilding on the inside,” one incarcerated person said in audio from inside the jail obtained and authenticated by The Intercept. “They trying to make us like, go against each other in here, but we’re not falling for their traps,” he added. “Everybody just trying to keep the peace amongst everybody in here, no matter what walk of life they coming from. We just trying to stay strong, but they trying every trick in they book.”
Because sources inside the Metropolitan Detention Center fear further retaliation for speaking about what took place there over recent weeks, The Intercept is withholding the names of people who are confined at the jail, as well as other information that might identify them, like the names of their individual lawyers and family members, or the housing units to which they are assigned.
The Bureau of Prisons, which runs the federal jail, declined to answer a list of questions about protests and reprisals at the Metropolitan Detention Center, citing an ongoing investigation. “Allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated and appropriate action is taken if such allegations are proven true,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons Special Operations Response Team patrol the grounds at the Metropolitan Detention Center after reports of a bomb threat at the facility on February 4, 2019, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On one locked-down unit, according to two lawyers who each spoke with their clients there, residents were initially let out of their cells one at a time at mealtimes to retrieve a tray of food, but were ordered back into their cold, dark cells to eat.
On February 1, the sixth day of the power outage, one man from this unit decided to make a gesture of resistance, sitting down to eat his dinner in the unit’s common area — where the dim illumination of the emergency lights allowed him to see his food. Within seconds, as others looked on from their cells, eight guards in riot gear entered the area and removed the man in handcuffs, leaving those who witnessed the events to assume that he’d been moved to solitary confinement on the Special Housing Unit, or SHU.
The next day, February 2, no breakfast was ever served, even to those with diabetes and other medical conditions. When the first meal of the day finally came at 4:30 in the afternoon, guards in riot gear loomed over the food distribution to make sure no one tried to disobey again. At this point, the entire housing unit decided to go on a hunger strike. “Among themselves,” one lawyer said, relaying their client’s description of events, “they decided that they didn’t want the peaceful protest of their fellow inmate to mean nothing.”
“They went on a hunger strike because they weren’t getting their meals at proper times. He said people are in there, different kind of gangs, and everybody’s united.”At least two other housing units also organized hunger strikes to protest their conditions during the power outage, according to lawyers, family members who have spoken with men on those units, and one incarcerated person.
“They went on a hunger strike because they weren’t getting their meals at proper times,” said a loved one of an incarcerated person who took part. “He said people are in there, different kind of gangs, and everybody’s united.”
While there’s a Bureau of Prisons rule that forbids “Conduct which disrupts or interferes with the security or orderly running of the institution,” no regulation says that people detained at the jail have to eat their food. That doesn’t mean the hunger strikes weren’t dangerous. “Corrections officials generally react quite strongly to even the most peaceful and rule-abiding of protests, so things like refusing a meal or some sort of quiet protest can be risky,” said Betsy Ginsberg, a professor and the director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Cardozo Law School, who represents clients at the Metropolitan Detention Center. “I’ve certainly heard of cases where people are severely disciplined, I think on a theory that a showing of that kind of use of authority is going to prevent further unrest or protest.”
On all three of those housing units where men collectively refused food, jail staff shut off the valves to the toilets in all of the cells, according to accounts relayed to lawyers. Confined to their cells on lockdown, deprived of light, the men on these units now found themselves shivering on their bunks with their heads inches from toilet bowls nearly overflowing with festering feces.
Jail staff has the capacity to shut off toilets from each housing unit’s control room, both in order to prevent contraband from being flushed away during a raid and to make sure that no one deliberately floods the housing unit by stopping up a toilet. But Fathi of the ACLU said toilet shut-offs are also a long-established technique of mass retaliation.
“It’s something that should almost never be done,” Fathi said. “Courts have been very clear that a working toilet is a necessity of life to which prisoners are legally entitled and depriving them of that for anything more than a very short time for a very compelling reason is presumptively unlawful.”
Retaliation during the blackout sometimes seemed arbitrary. On one unit, guards took a man out of his cell and into solitary confinement after he asked them when the heat would come back on, according to a lawyer who spoke with a client housed there. The remaining men on the unit took the move as a warning not to complain about the conditions. Another man on the same unit told his lawyer about an incident in which guards forcefully extracted a man from his cell using pepper spray and took him to the SHU after he complained about needing to take a shower.
Five times daily, according to the federal jail’s handbook, guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center conduct “the count,” during which — if they’re not already locked down — prisoners must return to their cells and be tallied. One man told his lawyer that even as he remained locked down in a lightless cell with no explanation, guards continued to mockingly repeat their ordinary call: “Lights on for the count!”
Jordan and his unit mates decided to cover their cell door windows with towels and paper in order to interrupt this routine. “You’re not helping them in terms of feeding them or anything else, so why should we allow you to do a count?” Jordan’s girlfriend told The Intercept, explaining their rationale.
The day after guards pepper-sprayed Jordan and his cellmate, Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., visited the men in the segregated housing unit, where she says she heard Jordan’s story just as he relayed it to The Intercept. Velázquez, whose district includes the Metropolitan Detention Center, spoke to reporters and activists immediately after touring the facility. “I spoke to both of them,” she said. “They are doing well under their circumstances. Just because they covered the glass to protest the treatment they felt wasn’t fair, they were used as an example to the other inmates.”
“It was a very simple note. It just had a phone number and said ‘Please tell my wife and family that I’m OK.’”Sabrina Shroff, a lawyer with the Federal Defenders of New York, stood in the parking lot outside the Metropolitan Detention Center on the morning of February 3, as temperatures finally crept into the 40s. It had been a week since the federal jail lost power. Shroff had been promised that this morning, for the first time in a week, she and other defense attorneys would be allowed inside to meet with clients to help them prepare for upcoming cases. But when she arrived, she was told that once again, lawyers and family members were barred from entering.
As she waited in the parking lot to see if jail officials would change their mind, Shroff gazed up and was surprised to see a paper airplane drifting down from one of the high windows. She followed it as it drifted in the air, but a prison guard stationed outside got to it first. Fortunately for Shroff, Velázquez, the House member, was also outside the jail, preparing to make another inspection of conditions inside. Shroff persuaded Velázquez to retrieve the paper plane.
“It was a very simple note, written in blue crayon on a visit form,” Shroff said. “There was no name attached. It just had a phone number and said ‘Please tell my wife and family that I’m OK.’”
Shroff tried repeatedly to reach the family over the next few days, but was unable to. The cellphone account attached to the number was out of credit.
The paper plane was just one instance of incarcerated people inside the Metropolitan Detention Center trying to get word out as the power outage dragged on — efforts that went up against tough odds and, in some cases, were met with punitive measures.
Demonstrators outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center speak into the microphone on Sunday, Feb. 3, 2019, in New York.
Photo: Kathy Willens/AP
This kind of direct communication may have made prison officials uncomfortable. One woman says her brother saw guards with nonlethal beanbag guns walking along his housing unit after the lights were restored. They were “trying like to intimidate them,” she said, “telling them, stop banging on the windows, they have the lights now, what are they banging for?”
“It’s really stressful to him,” she added. “They’re treating them like animals and telling them, ‘Y’all getting treated like this because y’all don’t know how to act.’ But … how do you act when you’re in that predicament?”
Others had taken still more risky measures. On January 31, five days after the power went out, men on one housing unit took the opportunity of a brief respite from lockdown to gather in a cell and shoot a video on a contraband cellphone. “It’s freezing in here,” one said, a shirt around his head. Flipping the switch to no effect, the men demonstrated that the lights in the cell weren’t working. Neither was the toilet. People on the unit were getting sick, one of the men said — “They treat humans worse than animals.”
Within days, the video was circulating on social media and posted to the site WorldStarHipHop. People incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center aren’t allowed cellphones and, according to lawyers with clients on the housing unit, the response from jail authorities was swift. Men suspected of making the video were taken from their cells and put in the SHU.
Another man said he believes that he was sent to the SHU because of Facebook posts made by someone outside the prison that drew attention to conditions inside.
“It’s definitely causing a lot of stress for my family,” his loved one told The Intercept on February 11, a week after electricity was restored. “We can’t speak to him. It’s hard to sleep at night not knowing what he’s going through. My children can’t speak to their dad. They’re scared for him.”
Cold and left in the dark, the people locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center were unable to leverage even official channels made available to complain about poor conditions. Under Bureau of Prisons protocols, incarcerated people can file formal complaints using a standardized form called a BP-8. Filing a BP-8 is the first step toward getting grievances about jail conditions addressed.
The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 required prisoners to exhaust the Bureau of Prisons’ internal grievance system before they are allowed to assert their rights in court. The result, say critics of the law, has been the weakening of one of the only mechanisms for independent oversight of jails and prisons. The act “allows prison officials to control prisoners’ access to the courts,” says Fathi of the ACLU. “They can do that by making their grievance system slow and technical and complicated, or just by making grievance forms unavailable.”
Grievance forms were indeed scarce at the Metropolitan Detention Center during and after the power outage, according to lawyers with the Federal Defenders who received a torrent of calls from many of the housing units inside. The clients complained that guards were denying requests for forms and telling anyone asking for them that “they were out of BP-8s.” When news of this reached Deirdre von Dornum, attorney-in-charge of the Federal Defenders for the Eastern District of New York, she immediately emailed Nicole McFarland and Adam Johnson, the jail’s legal liaisons.
“This is unacceptable,” von Dornum wrote. “Please let me know when and how this will be remedied.” McFarland wrote back: “I promptly looked into this issue and learned that there are BP-8 forms available throughout the facility.” Later that day, according to reports the Federal Defenders of New York got from their clients, BP-8s began to appear on the housing units.
As the people in MDC began to fill out the forms, however, many of them realized that there was another hurdle: They couldn’t submit the forms without the signature of their housing unit’s staff correctional counselor; but on several units, counselors were nowhere to be seen.
“Given the severity of the conditions that week at MDC, I’m concerned that these detainees may have been targeted for reprisals by senior leadership.”One person who did manage to submit a complaint about the conditions of the past week soon had cause to regret it. According to his lawyer, within hours of submitting his BP-8, the man was taken from his cell while guards rummaged through and confiscated everyday items in what the man took to be retaliation for his complaint. Von Dornum said she has received multiple reports of people being subjected to disruptive cell searches after filing grievances in the days since the power outage.
The power is back on at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. As a result of public outcyy and lawmakers pressure, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General has launched an investigation into the response to the heat and electricity failures at the jail. Whether the scope of this inquest will include allegations that staff punished people for protesting their conditions remains unclear. In a statement to The Intercept, Velázquez said that any Department of Justice investigation should include these allegations of retaliation. “Given the severity of the conditions that week at MDC, I’m concerned that these detainees may have been targeted for reprisals by senior leadership,” she said.
Last week, when regular visitation resumed at the Metropolitan Detention Center, Jordan’s girlfriend was able to visit him for the first time since he’d been placed in the SHU. During the visit, she says, he described what he had endured, including the pepper spray and shackling. “He’s doing OK for the most part, but he’s still kind of jumpy,” she recalled. “Like, you know, when you hear a door open and you are jumping up?”
Jordan later summarized the cold, dark conditions that precipitated his unit’s protest. “Those are conditions that dog fighters subject their dogs to to make them more vicious,” he wrote. “leave em in the dark n feed em once in a while. it has a psychological effect on you.”
“Unless we speak out it’ll continue to go unnoticed and swept under the rug,” he added. “Right is right and wrong is wrong.”
The post Locked Inside a Freezing Federal Jail, They United to Protest Their Conditions — Only to Face Reprisals appeared first on The Intercept.
“The Brazilian cavalry was very incompetent. Competent, yes, was the American cavalry that decimated its Indians in the past and nowadays does not have this problem in their country.” That’s the opinion of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, expressed on the floor of Congress in 1998. His views appear to have changed little since then; in a video message to supporters 18 years later, he promised to revoke the protected status of an Indigenous reserve in 2019 and in the next breath added, “We’re going to give a rifle and a carry permit to every farmer.”
The protection of Indigenous lands is guaranteed by the Brazilian constitution to preserve the rights and cultures of groups that have been persecuted for centuries. Brazil is home to approximately 900,000 Indigenous citizens from 305 tribes, most of whom live on reserves, but more than half of the locations claimed by Indigenous groups have not yet received government recognition. Bolsonaro, consistent with his anti-Indigenous stance throughout his career, said in a televised interview shortly after his election that if it were up to him, “there won’t be any more demarcations of Indigenous land.”
Any rollback of protections for Indigenous lands would pose a dire threat to the Amazon rainforest, which is being rapidly cut down by ranchers, farmers, and extractive industries.
Bolsonaro’s attitudes toward Brazil’s Indigenous people and their lands are similar to those of the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, during which time thousands of tribespeople were killed and thousands more were driven from their lands to make way for large infrastructure projects and farms.
In last year’s election, Bolsonaro campaigned hard on cuts to government funding for Indigenous services and freezing the expansion of federally protected reserves. He immediately moved to make good on these promises after his inauguration last month.
Meanwhile, armed bands of land grabbers, known as “grileiros,” have been staging attacks on Indigenous communities — a pattern of violence that has surged in the wake of Bolsonaro’s election, according to Indigenous leaders and allies interviewed for this article. “With Bolsonaro, the invaders are feeling more at ease,” Bitete Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, who lives on an Indigenous reserve, told The Intercept by telephone.
He referred to the invaders as “peons” sent by powerful bosses to cut down trees, burn undergrowth, and plant grass for cattle grazing — the first stage in the vastly profitable criminal enterprise of land-grabbing in the Amazon. From there, the lands are often sold several times over on the black market, meaning that poor states lose out on much-needed tax revenue.
Prosecutors have raised the alarm over four territories that have experienced, or are in grave danger of, invasion or attack, while advocacy groups say the number is at least six territories and fear that darker days are still to come. An investigation published this week by the NGO Repórter Brasil found that at least 14 fully protected Indigenous territories are currently under attack.
Photo: Puré Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau
Last month, the image of a bullet-riddled metal plaque reading “National Indigenous Foundation, Protected Territory” made the rounds on WhatsApp, Brazil’s most popular messaging app. The sign marks the entrance to one of several villages in the vast Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous reserve, in a lawless region of the Amazonian state of Rondônia, near the Bolivian border.
Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau leaders and local advocacy groups shared the solemn photograph with an accompanying audio message explaining that the gunshots were fresh, the latest attack in an ongoing “invasion” by groups of grileiros.
The tribe fears that a violent conflict with gun-toting outsiders is imminent. Recently, armed with bows and arrows, they managed to expel a group of grileiros from the reserve and filmed the confrontation. The trespassers promised to return.
“They want to take the land, divide it up into lots, and raise cattle,” Bitete Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau said. “They are getting very close.” The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau are not alone.
On his first day as president, Bolsonaro transferred the authority to protect Indigenous lands from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI, a government entity tasked with the protection of Indigenous communities, to the Ministry of Agriculture, handing a victory to the powerful agribusiness sector that backed his campaign and has its eyes on large tracts of pristine forest. Sydney Possuelo, a veteran Indigenous observer and former FUNAI president, described the move as “the death” of FUNAI, in an interview with the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, now headed by Tereza Cristina Dias, a former member Congress from the powerful “ruralista” agricultural caucus, did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether the demarcation of Indigenous lands would continue.
Days after signing the decree, Bolsonaro tweeted a video clip of another one of his ministers who argued in a cable news interview that many of the existing Indigenous reserves were established using fraudulent documents, and called the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples “spurious” and “treasonous.”
The Chamber of Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities of Brazil’s Public Prosecutors Office has sent an urgent memo to the justice minister warning that the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and three other communities were in danger. The Indigenous Missionary Council, or CIMI, a Catholic aid group, recorded attacks and threats in five states.
“What we are seeing is a new phase of illegal occupations of Indigenous lands,” said Cleber Buzatto, CIMI’s executive secretary.
A January analysis by the Indigenous Missionary Council found that, in the first weeks of 2019, eight Indigenous communities in five Brazilian states have either been attacked or experienced serious threats of invasion by grileiros.
Map: Rodrigo Bento for The Intercept
According to Daniel Azevedo Lôbo, a public prosecutor in Rondônia, the region surrounding the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory is rife with criminal groups constantly looking to illegally exploit Indigenous territories or forest conservation units. In January, he said that dozens of suspected grileiros were planning a major invasion, and another had already taken place this year. Federal Police arrested one suspect, while the rest fled into the forest.
Grileiros “see themselves as workers and producers, but they are criminals,” Lôbo told The Intercept. He said that land grabbers in Rondônia likely felt encouraged by the new administration. “They always look for a way to legitimize their illegal actions,” he said. “The government might have changed, but the law didn’t.”
The 7,200-square mile Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau reserve is larger than the U.S. states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Around 200 tribespeople of different Indigenous subgroups live in villages on the margins, and an unknown number of “isolated” Indigenous people who do not have direct contact with the outside world reside deeper within the borders.
Using satellite imagery, Brazil’s Social Environmental Institute concluded that only 2 percent of the reserve is deforested, as compared to 70 percent in the surrounding area.
Rondônia is one of the Brazilian Amazon’s most deforested states, and much of the remaining jungle is in Indigenous lands and federal conservation units, making them popular targets for criminal gangs. By no coincidence, the state recorded 17 murders related to land conflicts in 2017, one of the worst rates in the nation.
Last year, Bolsonaro won in Rondônia by a wide margin and a retired military police officer from Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party was elected governor.
The Karipuna Indigenous territory, also in Rondônia, is similarly under assault from land grabbers. Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit, Unearthed, reported from the territory in 2017 after prosecutors said the tribe — with less than 60 members living on the site — was at risk of “genocide.” “They are close to the village now,” Adriano Karipuna told The Intercept recently. He visited the U.N. headquarters in New York last year to denounce a possible “massacre” against his people.
Federal Police have since seized tractors and other heavy machinery from the nearby community of União Bandeirantes and are investigating three suspects in connection with illegal logging. The Public Ministry, with the support of the Federal Police and FUNAI, is expected to request National Guard troops to defend the reserve.
FUNAI’s new president, Franklimberg de Freitas — an army reserve general who is currently the target of a government ethics enquiry for conflict of interest regarding his former consultancy gig for the Canadian mining firm Belo Sun — also visited Rondônia late last month following the recent invasions.
Next door in Mato Grosso state, prosecutors warned that they would meet any invasion of the Marãiwatsédé reserve of the Xavante people with an “energetic response.” In 2012, farmers illegally occupying the land were expelled by court order. Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reported that Nelson Barbudo — also known as “Bearded Nelson” — the state’s most popular congressperson and Bolsonaro ally, had encouraged the invasion, calling their removal “a crime against producers.”
Twelve hundred miles south, in Rio Grande do Sul state, local prosecutors have opened an investigation into a reported incident in which two hooded men made threats and opened fire at a small Mbyá-Guarani encampment in the capital, Porto Alegre.
In Maranhão state, Claudio da Silva, who leads a local forest guard on the Caru Indigenous territory told The Intercept that a group of farmers that was removed in 2014 following a court decision was threatening to come back. “With the proposals of Bolsonaro, they are organizing to return to the Awá territory,” he said. “We can’t just cross our arms.”
Photo: Tommaso Protti
About 0.4 percent of Brazil’s population lives on federally protected Indigenous lands, which cover around 13 percent of national territory and contain some of the nation’s best-maintained forests. Climate scientists consider empowerment of Indigenous people and their lands as an important weapon in the fight against climate change. But regardless of who is running the nation, throughout recent history, those concerns have been sublimated to the short-term economic interests of major industries.
Before Bolsonaro, the situation was already increasingly dire for Brazil’s Indigenous communities as the agribusiness lobby has grown more powerful in state capitals and in the corridors of power in Brasília. In 2017, under President Michel Temer, FUNAI’s budget was cut by nearly half, and a law was passed that effectively gave amnesty to land grabbers who had continuously occupied lands since before 2011. A similar measure had already been passed in 2004.
Invasions of Indigenous lands jumped from 59 in 2016 to 96 in 2017, according to CIMI’s annual report “Violence Against Indigenous People in Brazil.” The study highlighted that “one can see a significant increase in invasions; theft of natural resources such as timber and minerals; illegal hunting and fishing; soil and water contamination by pesticides; and fires, among other criminal actions.” It was also one of Brazil’s bloodiest years on record for land dispute-related violence, with at least 70 killings, according to rural violence watchdog Comissão Pastoral da Terra.
Before Temer, President Dilma Rousseff’s administration recognized very few Indigenous lands, experts say, to appease allies in Congress who represented major agricultural interests.
During her mandate, she also inaugurated the controversial Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam. Before construction began in 2011, environmentalists warned — correctly — that it would cause enormous damage and subsequent deforestation in the region.
But under Bolsonaro, Indigenous leaders in the region believe that the actions of unscrupulous loggers and land grabbers will only get worse.
Leo Xipaya, an Indigenous leader who fought against Belo Monte for years, has no doubts about it: “Bolsonaro’s plans put Indigenous people at risk.”
The post Jair Bolsonaro Praised the Genocide of Indigenous People. Now He’s Emboldening Attackers of Brazil’s Amazonian Communities. appeared first on The Intercept.
Em entrevista recente, o atual ministro da Educação, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez disse:
“A ideia de universidade para todos não existe… As universidades devem ficar reservadas para uma elite intelectual, que não é a mesma elite econômica [do país].”
O ministro está certo, “universidade para todos” é uma quimera, particularmente no caso brasileiro. Em nosso país, 52% das pessoas entre 25 e 64 anos, segundo dados da OCDE, não têm sequer o ensino médio completo. Na Argentina e no Chile, essa cifra cai para 39% e 35%, respectivamente. Se comparamos com a média dos países da OCDE (grupo de países ricos), a proporção brasileira é quase o dobro registrado por eles.
Ou seja, o ministro poderia ter dito que “a ideia ensino médio para todos não existe”, pois essa é a realidade do Brasil. E mesmo nessa população dos que têm ensino médio completo, o nível médio de qualificação é extremamente baixo. Em 2015, mais de 23 mil estudantes brasileiros participaram do exame PISA, que avalia o desempenho de estudantes em ciências, matemática e leitura, em 70 países. Os estudantes brasileiros têm desempenho sofrível nas três áreas. Ficamos em 66° em matemática, 63° em ciências e 59° em leitura.
Também de acordo com a OCDE, 15% da população brasileira entre 25 e 34 anos têm curso superior, enquanto nos países ricos é de 41%. O Brasil precisa, portanto, passar por uma revolução no acesso ao ensino superior para atingir o patamar médio dos países ricos. Mas nosso ministro tem a pachorra de afirmar que a educação deve ser reservada para “uma elite intelectual”.
Educação superior é ainda uma mercadoria rara entre os jovens adultos brasileiros.Educação superior é ainda uma mercadoria rara entre os jovens adultos brasileiros. Mas o ministro parece achar 15% um valor excessivo. Talvez ele deseje o retorno para os patamares de 2000, quiçá os de 1960, quando o ensino superior era um caviar apreciado por apenas uma meia dúzia de gatos pingados, em termos estatísticos.
Das duas uma: ou Vélez desconhece os números – o que mostra ignorância – ou quer condenar uma fração ainda maior de nossos jovens a não terem curso superior – o que sinaliza crueldade. Não bastasse a estupidez factual da primeira frase, a segunda é ainda mais medonha. Todos nós conhecemos a história de um ou outro indivíduo, nascido na mais hedionda pobreza e que através dos seus próprios esforços, atingiu os mais altos patamares acadêmicos, de renda e de prestígio.
Esses indivíduos existem, mas eles são a exceção que confirma a regra. O desempenho de uma pessoa ao longo da vida, tanto em termos de renda quanto de anos de estudo, está fortemente correlacionado com a renda e a educação de sua família. É o que se chama na literatura econômica de “background familiar”. Em termos simples: quanto maior a renda e maior a quantidade de anos de estudos dos pais, maior a renda e os anos de estudos esperados dos filhos.
Nascer em um família rica ou pobre não está relacionado a nenhum mérito particular do indivíduo, trata-se de um resultado aleatório, uma “loteria da Babilônia”, como no conto de Borges. Enquanto para o filho de uma família rica, cujos pais têm ensino superior, entrar na faculdade é algo tão natural quanto aprender a engatinhar, numa família pobre, cujos pais têm baixa escolaridade, entrar na faculdade é uma vitória digna de Hércules. Jovens pobres, de periferia, muitas vezes não se enxergam como “bons o bastante” para entrar numa universidade. São até motivo de chacota de colegas, quando externam esse desejo.
Como afirma Naércio Menezes-Filho, que, ao contrário do nosso ministro, é um acadêmico de relevância internacional e versado em questões de educação:
“Os dados da Pnad de 2014, por exemplo, mostram que a probabilidade de uma criança filha de pais analfabetos concluir o ensino superior é de apenas 3%. Por outro lado, se essa criança teve a sorte de nascer numa família em que os pais cursaram a faculdade, essa probabilidade vai para 71%. Poucos países do mundo têm uma mobilidade educacional tão baixa entre as gerações.”
Dizer que “elite intelectual” não significa dizer “elite econômica” é uma mentira comprovada por fatos, números. Mas esse é o tipo de material que os olavistas, como o ministro da Educação, têm alergia. O que Vélez está dizendo, explicitamente, é que universidade é lugar pra rico. E para um ou outro pobre que, desafiando todas as leis da probabilidade, conseguir tal proeza.
E quando falamos de pobreza no Brasil, estamos de falando de pobreza em níveis desumanos. Segundo dados do Ipea, em 2014 – ou seja, antes de toda a crise econômica que veio a partir dali –, havia 8,1 milhões de brasileiros extremamente pobres, que não consumiam sequer a quantidade mínimas de calorias diárias. Em termos mais simples, somos 8 milhões de famintos. Naquele mesmo ano, havia 25,8 milhões de brasileiros pobres. Ou seja, quase 34 milhões de desvalidos. Para quase 17% dos brasileiros o desafio não é sequer atingir uma universidade, é conseguir o que comer.
Vélez claramente não está capacitado para o cargo que ocupa.Vélez claramente não está capacitado para o cargo que ocupa e deveria passá-lo para alguém que o seja. Prestaria assim um enorme favor a esse país de canibais e ladrões de toalhas de hotéis no exterior. Vélez se tornou ministro da Educação não por ser um membro da alta burocracia da área, ou por ser um acadêmico de renome, ou mesmo um político militante da causa. Chegou ao cargo por três motivos básicos: ser anticomunista, ser discípulo de Olavo de Carvalho e ser entusiasta do golpe de 64.
Enquanto expõe suas ideias equivocadas sobre o ensino superior, segue firme no propósito para o qual assumiu o posto: combater o marxismo cultural. Nomeado por Vélez, o novo presidente da Capes, Anderson Ribeiro Correia, egresso da cúpula do ensino militar no país, determinou nesta sexta, dia 15, novas regras para abertura de novos cursos de mestrado e doutorado no país que afrouxam os critérios ao mesmo tempo que exigem provas sobre “adequação e justificativa da proposta ao desenvolvimento regional ou nacional e sua importância econômico-social”. Com isso, o ministro abre brechas para questionar cursos não alinhados com o pensamento da extrema direita com a alegação de que eles não contribuem para o desenvolvimento nacional ou regional.
Vélez era professor de filosofia da Faculdade Arthur Thomas, do interior do Paraná. Seu currículo Lattes, aparentemente portentoso aos olhos de um leigo, é um amontoado de erros, meias verdades e mentiras. Oficialmente, as publicações científicas no Brasil são ranqueadas na seguinte ordem decrescente de prestígio e impacto: A1, A2, B1, B2, B3, B4 e B5. Há ainda os periódicos ranqueados como “C”, que, por sua baixa qualidade, têm peso zero, para quaisquer fins que se possa imaginar. O recomendado, pelos próprios órgãos do governo, é que o pesquisador não publique em periódicos de nível “C”.
Na parte “artigos completos publicados em periódico”, Vélez elenca uma produção mastodôntica: mais de 200 trabalhos. Porém, mais de 50 desses, saíram na “Carta Mensal do Conselho Técnico da Federação Nacional do Comércio”. Essa publicação sequer é ranqueada nos sistemas do governo para a Filosofia, área de atuação de Vélez. A tal revista aparece ranqueada apenas na área de Direito, mas com nota “C”. Ou seja, quase ¼ de tudo que o ministro produziu é, por definição, absolutamente irrelevante. Trata-se de uma engorda de currículo que, ainda que não ilegal, é totalmente imoral para o meio acadêmico. O paradoxo é que sob os critérios de “importância econômica e social” ou “desenvolvimento regional e nacional”, que ele mesmo instituiu para a Capes, sua produção seria rejeitada.
Já na parte intitulada “textos em jornais de notícia/revista”, Vélez enumera textos publicados em seu blog pessoal. Uma deturpação completa, que se presta, mais uma vez, a inflar o número de páginas de seu currículo com vento. Esse pecadilho, ainda que inofensivo para o grande público, já corrói a credibilidade que Vélez poderia ter entre os acadêmicos. Mas isso é o de menos.
O jornal O Globo afirmou que a UERJ não tem registros de Vélez ter atuado como professor naquela instituição, ainda que ele diga que lecionou por lá nos anos 1980. Talvez seja equívoco da instituição, talvez Vélez tenha se tornado um canibal brasileiro.
The post Ricardo Vélez tem razão: não existe ‘universidade para todos’ no Brasil appeared first on The Intercept.
PLANO, Texas—In February 2017, a school nurse in this Dallas suburb began counting women murdered by men.
Seated at her desk, beside shelves of cookbooks, novels, and books on violence against women, Dawn Wilcox, 54, scours the internet for news stories of women killed by men in the United States.
For dozens of hours each week, she digs through online news reports and obituaries to tell the stories of women killed by lovers, strangers, fathers, sons, stepbrothers, neighbors, and tenants.
[Read: Nearly half of all murdered women are killed by romantic partners ]
“I’m trying to get the message [across] that women matter, and that these women’s lives mattered, and that this is not acceptable in the greatest country in the world,” Wilcox says.
Her spreadsheet, a publicly available resource she calls Women Count USA, is a catalog of lives lost: names, dates, ages, where they lived, pictures of victims and their alleged killers, and the details that can’t be captured by numbers.
For Wilcox, these women are more than statistics.
She wants you to know Nicole Duckson, a 34-year-old Columbus, Ohio, woman whose friends “remembered her as a prayerful person and a loving mother.”
And Duckson’s 4-year-old daughter, Christina, who was stabbed to death alongside her mother, “a polite, happy little girl.”
And Claire Elizabeth VanLandingham, 27, a Navy dentist fatally shot by her ex-boyfriend. She had appeared in a video for Take Back the Night, the organization known for fighting dating violence, sexual violence, and domestic violence on college campuses nationally. Her mother said, “Her heart was kind; her spirit generous; her soul wise. She gave her smile to everyone who needed it; to everyone who hadn’t even realized they did.”
Those are just a few of the nearly 2,500 women listed in Wilcox’s album during the past two years.
“Where is the outrage? Where are the marches, the speeches? I know where the silence is. It is everywhere, and it is deafening,” Wilcox says.
Her crusade, she says, was spurred in part by the media frenzy about the shooting death of a gorilla, Harambe, at the Cincinnati Zoo and the uproar over the killing of Cecil the lion, shot by a Minnesota dentist as a trophy.
As an animal lover, she was horrified by those killings. But as she saw the social-media fury and the online petitions spread, she asked herself: What about women?
“Women are people and they deserve to have their lives valued,” she posted on Facebook in 2016, after Harambe’s death. “They deserve our voices speaking out on their behalf. And when they are abused, assaulted, murdered and erased they deserve our attention and our outrage.”
The FBI releases crime data every year, including the number of women who have been killed by men, but local police are not required to file reports to the federal agency, so some state figures are missing.
Florida, for example, has not provided its data to the FBI since 1996, according to reports by the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates to stop gun violence. Numbers from Alabama and Illinois have also been unavailable or limited in certain years.
Since 1996, 1,613 to 2,129 women have been murdered by men each year in the United States, FBI data show. In 2017, the latest year for which data are available, the FBI counted 1,733 women. An overwhelming majority of those women were killed by a man they knew.
“If you just go by the raw numbers, it is undoubtedly an undercount of domestic-violence homicides,” says April Zeoli, an associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University and an expert on domestic-violence homicides and gun laws. Still, she adds, “it’s the most accurate picture we have.”
Wilcox, however, is doing something the FBI does not: putting faces to the cases. Recording the correct number of women murdered isn’t her only goal. Her work is about searching for their stories, finding their photos, trying to learn who they were, so that these women aren’t forgotten.
Wilcox is no stranger to violence against women.
When she was 21, she began dating a man she met in a bar in Dallas. She’ll never forget the first time he hurt her.
On a night out at a dance club, Wilcox’s boyfriend stepped into the restroom. When he came back, she said, he sprayed cologne into her face, which burned her eyes as she groped her way to the bathroom to rinse it out. It was an accident, she says he told her. But Wilcox knew it was an attempt to humiliate her.
The violence escalated, Wilcox said, culminating in a night that left a deep scar on the inside of her arm and a memory of abuse that echoes the stories of the lost women for whom she searches.
It was hot and the power had gone out, leaving her with no air-conditioning as she read a book by candlelight in her apartment. Her boyfriend began kissing her leg, she said, but soon she felt his teeth digging into her as he bit her. She told him to stop, but he put his hand at the base of her throat, pushed her down on the bed, and, after telling her he wanted to taste her blood, bit into the crook of her arm, tearing out skin, she says.
Wilcox went to a local hospital emergency room and then fled to her mother’s home. She eventually ended the relationship with the man.
Wilcox considers herself lucky. “I could’ve easily ended up one of the women on my own list.”
[Read: On the trail of missing American Indian women]
Today, she is married to a man who says his wife’s work has opened his eyes to the pervasiveness of violence against women.
“She’s inspired me,” says Mike Nosenzo, who married Wilcox in 2018. “The amount of time that she spends on it, the dedication that she puts into it—I don’t see how I could feel any other way.”
As her project nears the two-year mark, Wilcox wants to dig deeper to find more details on the lives of these women before their deaths: How many of the women had a protective order against their assailant? And how many cases involved a prior history of domestic violence?
She is here, she said, not only to remember these women, but to make people care about their fate, with the hope of raising awareness to save others.
“I feel like these women were completely failed by all of us, really,” Wilcox says. “A lot of these women did everything you’re supposed to do to keep themselves safe. They told people, they went to the police, they got protective orders, and it still was not enough.”
This post appears courtesy of Kaiser Health News.
Long before the future leaders of America were moonwalking with shoe polish smeared on their cheeks, the first blackface minstrels took to the stage in the early 19th century. Beginning in the decades leading up to the Civil War, troupes of white men, women, and children darkened their faces with burnt cork and traveled the country performing caricatures of blackness through songs, dances, and skits. These performances, arising out of Pittsburgh, Louisville, Cincinnati, and other cities along the Ohio River, became one of America’s first distinct art forms and its most popular genre of public entertainment.
From the beginning, minstrelsy attracted criticism for its racist portrayals of African Americans. Frederick Douglass decried blackface performers as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.” In venues where black artists were often banned from performing and black audiences, if they were admitted at all, were forced to occupy segregated sections, white entertainers in blackface furthered the same paternalistic and degrading stereotypes that plantation owners and politicians advanced to justify slavery, and helped create a racist symbology that came to represent generations of prejudice. Shows featured a cast of recurring characters: the clownish slave Jim Crow; the obsequious, maternal Mammy; the hypersexualized wench Lucy Long; the arrogant dandy Zip Coon; the lazy, childish Sambo. Some of these archetypes continue to surface in the present day.
“There’s always been a resistance to it, in part because it was so demeaning,” says Lisa M. Anderson, who has studied the history of minstrelsy and other performances of race as a professor at Arizona State University. “The shows really were set up to demean blackness and black people.”
But to many white audiences and entertainers, the performances seemed innocuous, fun, even esteemable in their representation of African Americans. Early audiences were composed mainly of white working-class people and recent immigrants, for whom, Anderson says, the exaggerated characters onstage enhanced a feeling of racial superiority and belonging—and provided cheap, accessible entertainment. The shows reflected back a foolish, animalistic image of blackness that was already ingrained in the national culture; the racism was so familiar to observers that it could be lauded as artistic or progressive, or even overlooked entirely. That indulgent ignorance has followed blackface through decades of criticism and transformation, and into the present day.
Two Atlantic articles from the late 1860s provide insight into minstrelsy’s heyday in the mid-19th century. In an article from our November 1867 issue, Robert P. Nevin describes the form’s early development with an admiration largely divorced from consideration of its sociopolitical context or implications. He viewed successful minstrel performances as accurate portrayals of African American culture and mannerisms, praising their ability to retain “unimpaired … such original excellences as Nature in Sambo shapes and inspires.”
He lamented what he saw as the temporary failure of performers in the 1830s and ’40s to live up to this goal. “The intuitive utterance of the arts was misapprehended or perverted altogether,” he recalled. “Gibberish became the staple of its composition. Slang phrases and crude jests, all odds and ends of vulgar sentiment, without regard to the idiosyncrasies of the negro, were caught up, jumbled together into rhyme, and, rendered into the lingo presumed to be genuine, were ready for the stage.”
But ultimately he devoted his article to praising the songwriter Stephen C. Foster, who began writing for minstrel shows in the 1850s and, in Nevin’s eyes, elevated the performances to a position of new respect. Rather than embodying only “the vulgar notion of the negro as a man-monkey,” Nevin wrote, Foster’s art “teemed with a nobler significance. It dealt, in its simplicity, with universal sympathies, and taught us all to feel with the slaves the lowly joys and sorrows it celebrated.”
During this period of heightened popularity and respect, Ralph Keeler, then an adolescent boy who had fled his New York family, became enamored with minstrelsy and joined a traveling troupe. He described the experience in an 1869 article for The Atlantic, charting his three years as a “youthful prodigy” who performed jigs, played female parts in “negro ballets,” and danced as a “wench” to the misogynistic “Lucy Long” song.
To Keeler, the racial aspect of the performances seems incidental; his article makes almost no mention of the nature of the characters he played or his own understanding of blackness. Instead, he dwells on his development as an entertainer, on the excitement of finding a place in a troupe and traveling the country, and on his eventual disenchantment with playing to an audience. When the social and political dynamics of race do enter into his story, it comes off as more inadvertent than anything. He describes, for instance, a black man named Ephraim who began traveling with and serving the troupe, although he was repeatedly told that it couldn’t pay him for his labor, and who became an object of ridicule before being jailed for an altercation with an Irishman that he didn’t initiate. Introducing him partway through the article, Keeler cruelly describes Ephraim as “one of the most comical specimens of the negro species.”
In a more striking passage, Keeler recounts witnessing a mob lynching a man on a boat while traveling through the Midwest. The troupe arrived in the town of Cairo, Illinois, on the night that a group of white men decided to punish a black man who had been running a “gambling-saloon” on his “old wharf-boat” by the town levee. “At a given signal, the wharf-boat was set afire and cut adrift, and, as it floated out into the current, the vigilantes surrounded it in small boats, with their rifles ready and pointed to prevent the escape of their victim,” Keeler remembers. The minstrels and vigilantes watched as the boat exploded with the black man still on board.
“The next day I spoke with the leader of the band in the small boats,” Keeler writes. “He even confessed that … he felt almost sorry for the victim, after the explosion had blown him into eternity.” Then the article moves on, without further reflection.
Keeler does describe losing respect and enthusiasm for minstrelsy, though not because of any moral objection. Early on, he recalls, “I looked upon a great negro minstrel as unquestionably the greatest man on earth,” but later began “to doubt whether a great negro minstrel was a more enviable man than a great senator or author,” and he decided to leave the troupe to pursue a university education.
Soon after Keeler’s stint in the shows, minstrelsy’s popularity began to decline, particularly in the North. Looking back from 1869, he begins by noting: “Negro minstrels were, I think, more highly esteemed at the time of which I am about to write than they are now; at least, I thought more of them then, both as individuals and as ministers to public amusement than I ever have since.”
But despite consistent resistance to the racist portrayals and the rise of more popular art forms, blackface performances persisted, becoming a part of vaudeville shows, radio programs, and television shows and movies as time went on. Only in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with increased public pressure from the civil-rights movement, did the form mostly disappear from stage and screen. But even then it remained a part of the national culture, a feature of parties, Halloween costumes, comedy sketches, and fashion that’s lingered on into the 21st century.
In part, Anderson says, white Americans might continue to wear blackface out of ignorance. “People don’t necessarily know the history of blackface minstrelsy,” she says. “They don’t necessarily even know that was a thing. They’ve seen blackface images, but they don’t know that’s where they came from. So there’s a kind of decontextualization of the place of blackface in our history.”
But in some cases the choice seems to go beyond ignorance. The photo of two men standing side by side in blackface and a Ku Klux Klan robe, respectively, that appeared in Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s medical-school yearbook (without his knowledge, he now claims), is difficult to explain away by saying its racist implications were unclear; even if blackface has been decontextualized, the KKK robe remains unambiguously attached to the tradition of white supremacy that spawned it. And Virginia’s attorney general, Mark Herring, said in a statement about his own youthful experiment with blackface that it was “a minimization of a horrific history I knew well even then.”
That horrific history can also be traced as a legacy of white ignorance, from the 1860s articles that fail to grapple with minstrelsy’s racial context and implications to the statements of frat boys and medical students and police officers who appear in blackface in photos that continue to crop up in the news now. But against a backdrop of consistent criticism and overt racism, some of that ignorance, then and now, appears willful—and some of it doesn’t appear to be ignorance at all.
I would never have put Snoop and Tupac Shakur on the list of things that could potentially harm Senator Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. But this week, two of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time unwillingly played a part in the latest attack on Harris’s blackness, which came after the California Democrat’s appearance on the popular morning-radio show The Breakfast Club.
Harris engaged in a 40-minute-plus, wide-ranging conversation with the hosts Charlamagne Tha God, Angela Yee, and DJ Envy, detailing an agenda focused on issues disproportionately affecting African Americans: the staggering rate at which black women are dying in childbirth, mass incarceration, and poverty.
Unfortunately for Harris, her stances on these matters were drowned out by a dumb headline. Call it #AllEyezOnMeGate. Charlamagne asked Harris whether she’d ever smoked marijuana. She admitted that she’d smoked in college—and did indeed inhale. At some point, Envy asked Harris about her favorite music. But before she could respond, Charlamagne jokingly asked Harris about what she liked to listen to when she imbibed. Harris laughed off Charlamagne’s question and instead told Envy that some of her favorite artists were Snoop and ’Pac. She also mentioned her affinity for Cardi B.
[Read: Kamala Harris’s show of strength]
But when the story went viral, the takeaway was that Harris had smoked marijuana while listening to ’Pac and Snoop. With the help of the typical rush to judgment on social media, and some masterful framing by Fox & Friends, a fake controversy was born. The claim was that Harris lied about her weed experience to curry favor with the black community.
Had the critics bothered to watch her entire Breakfast Club interview, they would have seen just how foolish these assumptions were. But then again, since Harris announced her decision to run for president, the attacks on her blackness have only seemed to gain momentum. Why would it change now?
It’s always problematic to try to define blackness, but the strange part about the reaction to Harris is that her identity and motives are being challenged by both sides. One reason her campaign booked her on The Breakfast Club was that it reportedly saw this as a sound strategy to send a direct signal to those African Americans who just don’t trust that Harris is being authentic.
When she announced that she was running for president at her alma mater, Howard University, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the moment should have been touching and significant. Instead, there was a bubbling sentiment that Harris was, again, doing that only to suck up to African Americans. Forget about her personal connection to Howard, or how a black woman running for president extends the legacy of the civil-rights movement.
[Annie Lowrey: Kamala Harris’s Trump-size tax plan]
Harris should be questioned about her record as a senator and an attorney general, and her tenure as San Francisco’s district attorney, but too much of the conversation about her is instead dominated by insecurities that have nothing to do with determining whether she would be a good president.
The economist and author Boyce Watkins, who is black, tweeted, “If #KamalaHarris went to an #HBCU, what do you think led her to marry a white man?” Harris had to address this in her Breakfast Club interview. She said she’s married to her white husband because she loves him.
Imagine that.
In a nod to the racist birther conspiracy that enveloped President Barack Obama, a tweet claiming that Harris wasn’t eligible to run for president because of her immigrant parents went viral. It has been repeated as fact so often that Harris is now forced to explain her ethnic background.
Was nothing learned from Obama’s run for president? He faced the same inane, pointless questions about his mixed-race identity as Harris. Just like Obama, Harris has exposed narrow-minded views of blackness with her presidential run. Harris is a multiracial woman who was born in Oakland, went to high school in Montreal, and worshipped with both Hindus and Baptists. She’s a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and yet, by her account, knows how to make an incredible Bolognese and a mean pot of collard greens. If the criterion for running for president is being authentically American, people have to accept that this is what that looks like.
“I think they don’t understand who black people are, because if you do, if you walked on Hampton’s campus or Howard’s campus, or Morehouse, or Spelman or Fisk, you would have a much better appreciation for the diaspora, for the diversity, for the beauty in the diversity of who we are as black people,” Harris said on The Breakfast Club. “So I’m not going to spend my time trying to educate people about who black people are. Some folks have a limited vision of who we are as black people. That’s on them. That’s not on us.”
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