The trajectory of Brexit may threaten hard-earned peace in Ireland. Brexit drama, before the March 29 deadline when Britain is set to legally withdraw from the EU, has taken on the thrum of a dull, persistent headache. A withdrawal with no formal terms in place will affect every aspect of life and commerce in the United Kingdom, from the makeup of its workforce to drug testing to supermarket food prices. But the spikiest issue in negotiations is the question of the return of a “hard border”—customs and surveillance checkpoints and all—between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The sectarian violence around the decades when a real, tangible border existed is a recent memory for many, who now worry what horrors a deal-less Brexit might bring back.
Did the NFL and team owners conspire to keep Colin Kaepernick out of a job? The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who hasn’t been signed to a team since the spring of 2017, officially reached a settlement on Friday with the league over allegations that he’d been blackballed for his spotlighting of issues of racial injustice, including police brutality. The details of the settlement weren’t disclosed, so findings from the process, and how much money the league will ultimately pay to Kaepernick, are unknown. But, Jemele Hill argues, “owners and coaches had already given depositions in Kaepernick’s case, and the details that emerged from those proceedings did not look good for the NFL.”
Evening Reads
(Eric Miller / Reuters)
The act of announcing a run for the presidency of the United States is possibly the only campaign act over which a candidate has near-complete control, writes John Dickerson. Announce for the job you want; not the one you have:
“Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the youngest candidate, is presenting himself as a new-generation problem-solver. When Senator Bernie Sanders inevitably gets into the race, he’ll argue that all his life he has held the positions that Democrats are now getting excited about, which means he’s more believable.
In 1979, Ronald Reagan wanted to look like a president, so he announced his candidacy in a room that looked vaguely presidential. It had an imposing desk, a leather sofa, and a leather chair. (He could also have sold you a quality term-life-insurance policy.) As he spoke, he moved with an actor’s practiced nonchalance. At one point, he meandered over to a globe and spoke like a globalist.”
The Atlantic CrosswordHave you tried your hand at our daily mini crossword (available on our website, here)? Monday is the perfect day to start—the puzzle gets bigger and more difficult throughout the week.
→ Challenge your friends, or try to beat your own solving time.
(Illustration: Araki Koman)
Dear Therapist
(Bianca Bagnarelli)
Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. This week, Lisa from New Jersey writes:
“My son is in the middle of the college-application process. He has very good grades and very good SAT and ACT scores; he is an Eagle Scout and a captain of the cross-country team. He is also white, male, and upper-middle-class—and that is the problem.”
→ Read the rest, and Lori’s response. Have a question? Email Lori anytime at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email newsletters editor Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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The bonfire of scandals in Virginia politics has seemingly burned down to embers as top Democrats have come to accept that their tainted leaders will not be leaving office, at least not anytime soon. While most party elites have not withdrawn their calls for resignation, a week of détente and two television appearances on Sunday suggest that the furor has quieted.
Governor Ralph Northam faced near-universal demands to step down over a picture on his medical-school yearbook page that showed a man in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan garb; he initially admitted to appearing in the photo, then reversed himself and said he was not either of the people in costume, though he recalled a separate incident when he wore blackface for a Michael Jackson impersonation. Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax drew some resignation calls and an impeachment threat after two allegations of sexual assault in the early 2000s, both of which he denied. Attorney General Mark Herring stepped up and confessed that he, too, once wore blackface to a party as a 19-year-old, though he has largely avoided calls to step down.
Read: [The legacy of blackface Ralph Northam didn’t understand]
One of the leading Democrats who quickly urged both Northam and Fairfax to leave office was Terry McAuliffe, the commonwealth’s previous governor and a former Democratic National Committee chairman who is mulling a 2020 presidential run. He called for Northam’s resignation the same day the yearbook photo became public two weeks ago, and Fairfax’s departure within hours of the second sexual-assault allegation a week later. The former governor’s position was, depending on your perspective, either more authoritative or more awkward because Northam had served as his lieutenant and because he has a book coming out titled Beyond Charlottesville: Taking a Stand Against White Nationalism.
Yet in an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, McAuliffe said not a word about resignations, seeming to accept Northam’s plan to redeem his governorship with a “focus on race and equity.”
“I think he’s made a decision he’s going to stay in,” McAuliffe said of Northam, “but the way that Ralph survives and brings Virginia back together, he’s got to lean in on these very important issues.” Northam is seeking proposals on mass transit and affordable housing as he embarks on an “apology tour” that starts this week at the historically black Virginia Union University. As for Fairfax, McAuliffe said, “Very serious allegations have been made. They need to be investigated … So we will go through that process.”
Read: [A reading list for Ralph Northam]
The current Democratic National Committee chairman, Tom Perez, had also called for Northam’s resignation shortly after that scandal erupted. But in a Meet the Press appearance on Sunday, Perez didn’t mention Virginia. In a lengthy question about disciplining Democrats who make mistakes, the moderator, Chuck Todd, mentioned Virginia’s governor and lieutenant governor but focused on Representative Ilhan Omar, the first-term Minnesotan who apologized after an outcry over her comments suggesting that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee buys politicians’ support for Israel. Perez spoke about Omar, but didn’t bring up Northam or Fairfax.
Instead, the party chairman tried to turn these recent incidents into something positive: “The difference between Democrats and Republicans is, when we see people within our own ranks do things or say things that are antithetical to our values, we are not reluctant to call them out. On the other side, unfortunately, they are enablers.” (Perez said nothing of Republican denunciations of Representative Steve King of Iowa, for his recent comments about white nationalism, or President Donald Trump, after his comment that there were “fine people” on both sides of a white-supremacist demonstration and counterprotest in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, during which a protester was killed.)
Perez’s and McAuliffe’s remarks on Sunday suggest that Democratic leaders are coming around to accepting the status quo in Richmond. It leaves the party in a position to still claim the moral high ground on issues of race and gender, having denounced Northam, Fairfax, and Herring, without handing the governorship to the Republican speaker of the state House, who would be next in line if the three top Democrats all resigned. Conservatives question whether the Democrats actually possess the high ground, asking what, aside from party affiliation, distinguishes Fairfax’s situation from that of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
National party leaders are not the only ones who have been quieted, for now. The chairman of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, who had urged both Northam and Fairfax to resign, showed an openness to meet with Northam if he would help advance the caucus’s priorities. “My caucus, I can tell you, they’re fired up to get this stuff done,” Delegate Lamont Bagby said last week. The Associated Press also reported that a group of black pastors and community leaders announced their forgiveness of Northam, who tried to work on typical state business such as budget negotiations. The governor also received steady support from local donors and others from the fraternity of Virginia Military Institute alumni, as The Washington Post reported over the weekend. Meanwhile, although Fairfax faced setbacks, including the departure of top aides, the state delegate who had promised to start impeachment proceedings backed down. The current legislative session ends Saturday, offering the embattled leaders time to recover.
Public opinion may have allowed the state’s leaders to survive despite a loss of support in their own party. A Washington Post poll found Virginians deadlocked on Northam’s future in office, with 58 percent of African Americans saying he should stay in office. After the first accusation against Fairfax, two-thirds of all respondents said they didn’t know enough to judge. Only a third said Herring, the attorney general, ought to step down. Despite the stream of condemnations and calls for resignation, it seems Virginia’s top three elected Democrats will hold on to their positions for now. Whether any of the three can go on to win higher offices remains to be seen; Northam must leave the governor’s mansion because of term limits, but the two others could seek reelection. The other big question mark facing Virginia Democrats is whether the trio of controversies hurts the party as it looks to take control of both houses of the legislature in November’s elections, following its 15-seat gain in the House of Delegates in 2017. Republicans currently control the state Senate 21–19 and the state House 51–48, with one seat open. In presidential elections, Virginia flipped from a reliably Republican to a reliably Democratic state in 2008, driven in part by Washington’s dependably blue suburbs in Northern Virginia. If the GOP holds the legislature this year, it may have the state’s Democratic leaders to thank.
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
My son is in the middle of the college-application process. He has very good grades and very good SAT and ACT scores; he is an Eagle Scout and a captain of the cross-country team. He is also white, male, and upper-middle-class—and that is the problem.
According to all of the statistics and reports, he should be accepted at Ivy League schools, but he has not been. He will eventually get into a “good” school, but it is my guess (based on what we are seeing with his peer group) that he will be overqualified for the school he ends up at.
He is very frustrated and very upset. How do you explain to a bright, eager boy that the system is rigged against him? For example, his twin brother, who has similar grades and an almost identical resume, is going to the U.S. Naval Academy, and his application process, though difficult, was smooth and straightforward.
Lisa
Mendham, NJ
Dear Lisa,
The college-admissions process has become so brutally intense in recent years that it can make anyone lose perspective, and I think that’s what’s happened here. Of course, you’re not the only parent who sees her hardworking and accomplished child do everything “right,” imagines him or her thriving at a particular school, and is frustrated when the child does not gain admission. But if you don’t step back and look at the bigger picture, you’ll be depriving your son of an education that will be far more valuable to him in the long run. So let’s back up.
From the moment kids are born, they take their cues from the adults around them about how to respond to experiences in the world. For instance, when a toddler stumbles in the sandbox, the first thing she does is look at her parent for a signal. If the parent calmly says, “Whoops, you fell down,” and then smiles reassuringly, the child will likely get the message that the fall was no big deal and get right back up. But if the adult looks alarmed, yells, “Oh, no! Are you okay?,” and rushes over to check for injuries, the child may in turn become alarmed: Wait, am I okay? I thought I was okay, but maybe I’m not!
Later, if the child doesn’t get the lead in the school play—despite how talented this child may be—she’ll also take her cue about what this means from the adults around her. If her parents say, “That’s so unfair! Jane only got the part because the drama teacher is friends with her mom,” or “Jane’s parents are on the board,” the girl might think, Yeah, this is so unfair. Jane’s not nearly as talented as I am. The world is rigged. Why even try?
If, on the other hand, the parents say, “We know you really wanted the lead and we hear how disappointed you are. You worked so hard preparing for the audition. Maybe you’ll get the lead the next time around, but meanwhile, the part you did get will be fun, too,” their daughter may still be disappointed, but she’ll be learning about resilience. She’ll take in the message that sometimes we don’t get what we want, even when we’re qualified to have it. She’ll learn that sometimes we might be really good at something, but someone else is even better. She’ll learn that there’s not just one thing that can be enjoyable or fulfilling, but many things—like acting in a play she loves, even if she’s not the lead this time around. She’ll learn that the world is not an all-or-nothing place, where you either succeed or fail. She’ll learn that if she really wants something badly enough, she can try again another time and figure out what would increase her chances. She’ll learn that even if Jane got the role mostly because of her talent but partly because the teacher (consciously or not) favored her, there will come a time when she, too, will get something—an award, a job—not only because of her talent, but also because of, say, the boss’s strong relationship with the colleague who referred her, or the fact that they both grew up in the same town, and an equally qualified candidate will be rejected.
The kid who learns these lessons early on will probably still be upset if despite her stellar application, she doesn’t get admitted to her top-choice school. But she won’t walk through the world feeling as though there’s a conspiracy going on, nor will she walk onto campus the first day of freshman year believing that she won’t be challenged and that her peers are either similarly overqualified or simply beneath her. And if she does find that she’s not getting what she wants at her very good but not Ivy League school, she will know she can talk to an adviser to see what opportunities might be available that she’s not yet aware of, or even apply to transfer elsewhere. Either way, she won’t spend her senior year of high school anticipating how unfulfilling her college experience will be, thereby creating a very unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy.
So how do you explain to your son that the system is rigged against him? You say, “Son, the world is an unfair place and the system is rigged against you.” And then you watch him grow into an angry, unfulfilled adult with a chip on his shoulder who will probably have grossly misguided ideas about women and people of color and his own value and worth and abilities. But if you’d like a better future for him, let me suggest the following.
Start by getting more accurate information, such as the fact that it’s extremely challenging to get into an elite college, and that the vast majority of applicants to these colleges have very high test scores, along with a stunning array of extracurricular activities and prestigious awards or honors. Dig deeper than anecdotal information and you’ll discover that there isn’t a reliable statistic or report out there that says that an applicant with very good grades and very good SAT and ACT scores who is also an Eagle Scout and a captain of the cross-country team “should” be admitted to a particular Ivy League school—regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity. Ask professionals in the admissions field, such as an experienced college-guidance counselor, whether a student with your son’s resume who happens to be a woman of color might still be rejected from the school of her choice. You may be surprised by the answer.
Having this information might help you separate the reality from the reaction you’re having, and this in turn will help you talk to your son in a more productive way about what is, for most families applying to top-tier schools, a grueling and anxiety-provoking process. Remember, he’s taking his cues from you, so if you can view this from a more balanced perspective, so will he. Instead of coming from a place of outrage on his behalf, approach him from a place of curiosity and ask, “How are you doing with this college-application process?” Then listen to what his frustration is about. Is he getting the message (from you? his school? his friends?) that the name of his college defines his worth or is a statement about his intelligence? Does he believe that going to an Ivy League college leads to a better job or a better life or some kind of happiness he won’t find at another very good school?
Help to disabuse him of these faulty notions and explain to him that college is about the right fit, not the most prestigious name, and that no matter where he goes—including an Ivy League school—there will be students just like him, as well as students who are both more and less accomplished on paper, because colleges try to put together a group of outstanding people who will mesh well. Tell him that you have every confidence that he will choose, and be accepted into, a school where he meshes well and maybe even makes the friends he’ll have for the rest of his life.
In other words, how you handle the application process sets the tone for how your son will respond to it. It’s true that sometimes there isn’t enough to go around—there are only so many leads in the school production, so many spots at a given college, and so many openings for a job someone really wants. At the same time, parents have the potential to turn a situation that their kids would otherwise handle just fine into one that’s miserable. At that point, it’s the parent creating the child’s misery, not the situation. The messages parents send their kids have the potential to either prepare them for adulthood or hold them back much more than not being at an Ivy League school would ever do. You have a great opportunity right now to teach your son well.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
Amy Klobuchar made her presidential announcement in the accommodating weather conditions all candidates want. The cold was ringing in the audience’s ears as much as the senator’s words. The snow draped a doily of flakes on her head. She charged ahead without an umbrella: bad weather, but in sync with her message. “I don’t have a political machine. I don’t come from money. But what I do have is this: I have grit.” You can say this about yourself, but it’s better if you can show it.
The presidential announcement is a rare act of campaigning over which the candidates have near-total control. They pick the timing, venue, and message. Only the weather is left to chance, and the good candidates shape that too. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower spoke in the rain at his boyhood home of Abilene, Kansas. He joked about the rain in the English Channel, a casual way to remind anyone who needed it that he had led the successful D-Day invasion there.
A look at the announcements of the past 70 years shows that one change is obvious: Presidential hopefuls used to declare their candidacy in a single speech; now the process is drawn out with peekaboo hints, social-media announcements that lead to explorations, and talk-show teases. It’s like an Advent calendar, but no one gets a square of chocolate.
Other than the slow roll of the rollout, though, presidential announcements have followed an essential pattern. A candidate identifies the problems in America, assures the audience that they can be solved through the application of what Walter Mondale in his 1983 announcement called “some old American values that do not need any update,” and then presents the country’s condition as a puzzle that’s missing one piece, the shape of which the candidate embodies perfectly.
The announcement speeches on the Democratic side this year tell us that the candidates are spoiling for a fight. And they’re not being subtle about it. Senator Kamala Harris used the word fight or a variant nearly 20 times in her announcement speech. She promised to take back America, an implicit challenge to the incumbent who promised to deliver greatness to America. Senator Elizabeth Warren used the same word just as much when she announced her bid. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand brought the idea home: “I will fight for your kids as hard as I would fight for my own.” Combat was the theme also of Donald Trump’s announcement in 2015. Within a minute of taking the lectern, he had promised to beat China, Japan, and Mexico.
Barack Obama, by contrast, used the word fight only once in 2007, which offers some indication of how the political moment has changed. But not every 2020 candidate carries brass knuckles. Senator Cory Booker’s starting pitch had Obama-like echoes of unity: “Together, we will channel our common pain back into our common purpose.”
The presidential-announcement speech is not a substitute for policy. There will be time for plans and details on all the issues Democratic candidates care about: expanding health care, lowering drug prices, managing climate change, and rebuilding the middle class. It’s what their voters expect. But the presidential announcement sets the tone that frames the position papers. It is like an elevator pitch for the candidacy. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the youngest candidate, is presenting himself as a new-generation problem-solver. When Senator Bernie Sanders inevitably gets into the race, he’ll argue that all his life he has held the positions that Democrats are now getting excited about, which means he’s more believable.
In 1979, Ronald Reagan wanted to look like a president, so he announced his candidacy in a room that looked vaguely presidential. It had an imposing desk, a leather sofa, and a leather chair. (He could also have sold you a quality term-life-insurance policy.) As he spoke, he moved with an actor’s practiced nonchalance. At one point, he meandered over to a globe and spoke like a globalist. “It is time we stopped thinking of our nearest neighbors as foreigners,” he said of Mexico and Canada.
But Reagan was more substantive by today’s standards, focusing on inflation, tax policy, and energy policy. Eisenhower dwelled on inflation and spending too. He warned of the bloat that comes from “experts in self-perpetuation and ceaseless expansion,” a group that included military hawks he would later call the “military-industrial complex.” Evident concern about government spending in both announcements (and Bob Dole’s in ’95 and John McCain’s in 2007) reminds us that Republican candidates used to talk about shrinking government a lot. It was Ross Perot’s central concern in his announcement in 1992.
Trump did not engage with that issue in his announcement speech, and he does not engage with it as president. But he echoes one Republican candidate very clearly. In his 1991 campaign announcement, Pat Buchanan promised a “nationalist” campaign in which “we will put America first.”
The Democrats have their own relics of presidential announcements past. There was a time when Democratic candidates thought they won points for candor about national trade-offs. Adlai Stevenson promised in 1952, “Sacrifice, patience, understanding, and implacable purpose may be our lot for years to come. Let’s face it. Let’s talk sense to the American people. Let’s tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains.” In 1974, Jimmy Carter also offered spinach: “We must even face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living.” Eight years later, Walter Mondale offered the same helping: “I call for tougher discipline … Everyone must contribute; all must sacrifice. I call for realism. There is a long haul ahead. Politicians must stop peddling quick fixes.”
More recent Democratic candidates have mostly shied away from that kind of talk because voters don’t think it sounds fun at all. Or they still promise that they will tell truths and then don’t say anything more abrasive or challenging than to list how bad the other party’s leader is.
So far in the 2020 season, no candidate has made an overtly political pitch when announcing his or her candidacy. In 1964, Barry Goldwater didn’t talk about issues, but about political positioning. In his brisk announcement, he explained why he was electable: “I decided to do this also because I have not heard from any announced Republican candidate a declaration of conscience or of political position that could possibly offer to the American people a clear choice in the next presidential election.” His candidacy was going to be, as he famously argued, “a choice, not an echo.”
For political sleight of hand, perhaps no candidate was more successful than John Kennedy. His pitch contained an argument that would help him circumvent the party’s tradition of picking veterans such as the older senators he was running against. “I believe that any Democratic aspirant to this important nomination should be willing to submit to the voters his views, record, and competence in a series of primary contests,” he said when announcing his campaign. Primaries weren’t the main way candidates were picked at the time, but Kennedy would never be the favorite of the backroom selection process. So he was arguing that the primary campaign was morally superior—because it brought candidates closer to the people—and therefore the others should join him on the field.
Often politicians focus on what they are not. In 1991, Bill Clinton pitched himself as a Democrat who could not be easily stereotyped as a typical tax-and-spend liberal. “A Clinton administration won’t spend your money on programs that don’t solve problems and a government that doesn’t work,” he said. Though Jimmy Carter was used by Republicans to create the Democratic bogeyman that Clinton was trying to wriggle out from under, Carter’s 1974 announcement was, one might say, Clintonian. It was filled with appeals for shrinking bureaucracy and streamlining government. Before Clinton was campaigning to “end welfare as we know it,” Carter was. “The word welfare no longer signifies how much we care, but often arouses feelings of contempt and even hatred,” Carter said in his announcement. “Is a simplified, fair, and compassionate welfare program beyond the capacity of our American government? I think not.”
Presidential announcements are a practical art. Good announcements help candidates set themselves apart in a crowded field. They also prepare candidates for the job they want. Candidates have to read the national mood and speak to it in the same way presidents do when they’re in office. Or at least that has traditionally been the case. In his opening bid, Trump, riding down an escalator, tried to create a new national mood, one shot through with the anxiety that the country was declining as surely as the candidate was descending. He succeeded.
Addressing a nation riven by civil war, Charles Eliot offered a solution for its dangerous disunity: education. “The American people are fighting the wilderness, physical and moral, on the one hand, and on the other are struggling to work out the awful problem of self-government,” he wrote. “For this fight they must be trained and armed.” In a word, educated.
Eliot’s essay, “The New Education,” published in The Atlantic 150 years ago this month, articulates a faith in the role of public education as an indispensable preparation for life. And by the 1920s, a free quality education for all had become an intrinsic value of American democracy. Yet today the majority of America’s close to 4 million public-high-school students say they are not learning enough or the right things in school; and as I’ve visited schools over the past 20 years, too many students have told me that they’re bored, uninspired, and unchallenged. These are not the inevitable complaints of existentially vexed teenagers. They are the well-founded fears and frustrations of 21st-century students attending schools designed in 1906—in effect, by Eliot, a few decades after the publication of his essay.
Students start out eager to learn. And for children living in poverty—a great number of them students of color—high school is most often their last chance to discover and develop their ability to make a better life. But many of today’s adolescents rightly reject a century-old teaching method and an outdated curriculum, by disconnecting while in school, skipping classes, or dropping out. Eliot’s essay is a reminder that education needs to periodically realign itself with the world young people face: As our world changes, so must schools.
A math and science professor, Charles Eliot was driven by an overriding ambition to understand the best way to educate Americans. As a young man, he left his teaching post at Harvard in 1863 for a two-year tour of Europe, where he studied the influence of school systems on their country’s culture and economy. France’s lycées and Germany’s Realschule impressed him with their ability to quickly turn apprentices into what he called “commissioned officers of the army of industry.” These French and German high schools gave adolescents the knowledge and skills to succeed in Europe’s growing industrial workforce.
America’s 19th-century schools inspired little hope in Eliot. “Common schools,” the country’s first free primary schools, expanded basic literacy and taught morality, but stopped short of serious academic or practical lessons; and in every state but Massachusetts, they excluded free blacks. Meanwhile, secondary schools—the linchpin of European learning—served mainly boys from elite families, who enrolled for short stints to learn some Latin and Greek before entering high society or college. Their teachers had widely varied capabilities and no clear or uniform goals.
The American experiment would not survive, in Eliot’s view, if high schools taught little more than dead languages to the rich, and largely denied education to the general public, or if teachers did not have adequate training or standards. The “thoughtful American,” he wrote in 1869, “… knows how ignorance balks and competition overwhelms … He is anxious to have his boys better equipped for the American man’s life than he himself was.” Passionate debates raged in journals and magazines over whether schools should be private or public, architectural monuments or humble structures, centered on classics or modern life. Few disagreed, however, that good schools were indispensable to individual advancement, national prosperity, and civic harmony in the United States, and many decried the country’s haphazard approach to something so crucial for its survival.
In “The New Education,” Eliot argued for a radical change. He proposed bringing Europe’s academic rigor, pragmatism, and inclusiveness to America’s sprawling territories and diverse population. It would take him 37 years to figure out exactly how to do this. But to start, he laid out the American education crisis in wonky detail.
American public schools, he argued, needed a broad organizing principle to unify them, and educators needed to work toward common academic ends. Above all, schools had to prepare students for a future that would not resemble the past. “[An American parent] will not believe,” wrote Eliot, “that the same methods which trained some boys well for the life of fifty or one hundred years ago are applicable to his son. The kind of man which he wants his son to make did not exist in all the world fifty years ago.” With agrarianism giving way to industry, more and more people were migrating to cities to work on assembly lines for low wages and in poor conditions. Young people needed to learn new skills—technical and intellectual—to optimize the new promise of the Industrial Age. Schools needed to be updated to help them.
Some American colleges and universities had already begun to take up the challenge when Eliot wrote, and he analyzed their changing curricula in order to inspire more schools to modernize. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for instance, had renovated their pedagogical approaches to meet the demands of a changing society, teaching a more holistic, forward-looking curriculum of applied sciences, math, philosophy, and literature.
High schools, however, had yet to innovate, and their backwardness worried Eliot. From his travels in Europe, he understood that secondary schools were the fulcrum of any successful educational system: “The higher and lower institutions are, indeed, mutually dependent … [Universities and colleges] can only ask for what is to be had.” Institutions of higher education relied on high schools for a well-prepared incoming class, and students of primary schools prepared to be able to reach the bar set by secondary schools. Eliot underscored the interdependence of primary, secondary, and higher educational institutions. For adolescents on the cusp of shouldering adult responsibilities, the stakes were especially high: They needed an extremely well-considered preparation if they were to succeed at the next level of school or enter the workforce.
With this in mind, in 1906, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie offered Eliot, by then president of Harvard University, the chance to realize the “new education” he had sketched out in his essay almost 40 years earlier. Eliot had, some years before, consulted with Ralph Waldo Emerson on the future of American education. So it was that, together, an educator, an industrialist, and a philosopher revolutionized the nation’s approach to education.
The time-based school system they designed will be familiar to most readers, as it has not changed in the past 113 years. The system is predicated on the Carnegie Unit, a measure of the time spent in a classroom, with a teacher, focused on a required subject. To graduate, students typically need to amass 24 Carnegie Units on their transcript, roughly the equivalent of six courses a year, taken over four years. In general, each course meets five days a week for 45 to 60 minutes a day. This stark regimentation effected a broad improvement in the nation’s schools, fulfilling Eliot’s notion that “without a wide-spreading organization, no system of education can have large success.”
The Carnegie Unit streamlined and, to some extent, democratized American education. Suddenly students in Nebraska spent the same number of hours in school and studied essentially the same subjects, to the same standard, as students in Massachusetts and Virginia. Eliot modernized the high-school curriculum to reflect the contemporary world. Greek and Latin were now accompanied or replaced by math, English, active foreign languages, applied sciences, and history.
Carnegie and Eliot’s system caught on fast. Colleges and universities were grateful for a better-trained group of applicants; parents, students, and educators welcomed a fairer and more organized process for college admissions. Decades later, the inequities of standardizing education for nonstandardized kids would receive more attention, but at the turn of the 20th century, the Carnegie Unit put students on more equal footing, if still not an equitable one. Meanwhile, Carnegie created the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to help elevate what he deemed “one of the poorest paid but highest professions in our nation.” The foundation accelerated the nationwide implementation of time-based learning by rewarding the colleges and universities that used it with a teachers’ pension fund.
In just a couple of years, Eliot and Carnegie had spearheaded the transformation of an archaic hodgepodge of secondary schools into a methodical, forward-looking, universal high-school system. It was a stunning and noble achievement, a “new education” that perfectly suited its time.
We are making our way again through uncharted territory. Like Eliot before them, today’s high-school students know that America’s secondary schools are not preparing them to meet the economic and ethical challenges ahead.
There is a tragic irony to the persistence of Eliot’s influence. “The New Education” is, in the main, an ode to ongoing educational innovation. It begs us to expect schools to make significant changes to keep up with a significantly changed society. And yet, a century later, American schools still rely on Eliot’s design.
Many of the jobs our 21st-century high-school graduates will do “did not exist in all the world fifty years ago.” To thrive in a complex, quicksilver world, high-school graduates need to be more adaptable than they were 50 years ago. Yet American public high schools are not teaching our teenagers what they need to learn. More than half a million students drop out every year, and $1.3 billion is spent annually on college remedial courses by high-school graduates and their families. Educators systematically underestimate even the most highly capable low-income students and students of color, and fail to challenge them. And across the United States in the past year, there have been seven teachers’ strikes, largely cheered by the general public, with more planned.
These are clear signals that our current system is faltering. At the same time, families and educators increasingly recognize that America’s public schools need to change. Will we be ambitious enough to rethink and reinvigorate the very way we teach? Local communities and state governments have started collaborating to bring 21st-century learning to high schools. The federal government could, and should, help move things along. Congress can legislate for a forward-looking public-school system, where teachers have cutting-edge training and resources, and students learn to thrive in the world they live in, not the one their great-grandparents inhabited.
The prospects of our nation’s youth, and therefore our nation, remain tethered to their education. In Eliot’s time, public high schools were the single best way to both unify a disparate populace and prepare young people to succeed. Many things have changed since then, but the promise of public high schools, for individuals and society, has not.
If you’ve watched the trailer for Mamoru Hosoda’s Academy Award–nominated Mirai, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it looks a little childish. The Japanese film follows Kun-chan, a 4-year-old boy grappling with his jealousy of his new infant sister, Mirai—until, in a fantastical twist, he encounters Mirai’s future teenage self. For the most part, the movie is eye-level with the little boy; tensions in the film erupt as tantrums, and magic is accepted without much skepticism or comment. Plot points revolve around the mundane experiences of everyday life with small children, like picking up toys or getting lost in a train station.
Many critics have commented on the youthful perspective of the film. In a New York Times review, Bilge Ebiri wrote that Mirai felt “like the dream of a very wise child.” Vulture’s Emily Yoshida remarked that “Mirai’s baby-centric premise seems like guaranteed adorability at first glance.” While these observations are accurate, in the background of Mirai’s tale about childhood unfolds another narrative: that of Kun-chan’s father. By telling his story, Mirai reveals itself to be not only about a boy and his sister, but also about a man finding his footing at a time when traditional gender roles for Japanese parents are being widely challenged.
We first meet Otōsan (Japanese for father) via a slow pan from the feet upward as the camera mimics the sweep of Kun-chan’s eyes from his toddler vantage point. Otōsan and Okāsan (Japanese for mother) have just come home from the hospital with Mirai. Kun-chan throws himself at his mother’s legs, sobbing that he was lonely while she was gone; he ignores his father. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that more than one major adjustment is occurring in this household. For the couple’s second child, Okāsan will be cutting her maternity leave short and returning to work. Otōsan, an architect who has just turned to freelancing, will be handling the majority of the household chores and child-rearing duties.
Okāsan and Otōsan with baby Mirai (Gkids)Hosoda at first illustrates this transition with hilarity and chaos. The morning after Mirai arrives, the family is at the kitchen table. Kun-chan shouts for his breakfast, for milk, and for a banana—each demand prefaced by a whiny “Okāsan!” But his mother sits mutely at the edge of the frame, completely focused on breastfeeding her newborn. Instead, Otōsan yelps “Yes!” to each plea, answering to the name “Mother” and scrambling to procure the thing Kun-chan has asked for; each time, Kun-chan stubbornly pushes away whatever his father hands to him. Otōsan’s good intentions and sincere efforts to step up as a caretaker won’t necessarily be enough, Hosoda suggests, to immediately reorder the family’s power structure.
At one point, Okāsan mentions that when Kun-chan was born, Otōsan was never home, so she’d assumed men were naturally uninterested in babies. As she describes how she did everything by herself, Otōsan makes half-hearted, apologetic noises. While the main story follows Kun-chan as he bonds with his younger sister from the future, Hosoda uses bits of background conversation to hint that Otōsan was perhaps not always the most present father and husband. While there’s a more universal quality to Kun-chan’s conflict—going from being an only child to a big brother—Otōsan’s transformation is one that resonates, especially with a broader cultural shift in Japan.
In interviews about Mirai, Hosoda has said that he has tried to “depict Japan’s societal problems and the family, and how they’re connected,” drawing particular attention to the country’s growing childlessness and changing work culture. Last December, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare reported that the number of babies born in Japan had fallen to the lowest on record with an estimated 921,000 births in 2018, continuing the country’s sharp population decline. Add to that a rapidly aging labor force, as well as Japan’s infamous workplace culture, where more than 40 hours of overtime a week are the norm, and karoshi (death by overworking) is not unheard of. To combat these problems, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has proposed reforms to cut down on overtime, as well as policies to promote “womenomics,” or the idea of boosting labor participation by women in order to fill the gaps left behind by the elderly.
[Read: The mystery of why Japanese people are having so few babies]
Though promising in theory, in practice both of these proposals have flailed. A recent New York Times story describes a bleak reality where Japanese women are now tasked with working in and out of the home—a far cry from the empowered, egalitarian households envisioned by womenomics. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Japanese men do the fewest hours of household chores among men in OECD nations. A separate study by Keio University professor Noriko Tsuya (also referenced in the Times piece) found that Japanese men average less than five hours of housework a week in homes, while women with 49-plus-hour workweeks usually do 25 hours of housework. Other policy changes intended to be ambitious have proven toothless, as the much touted Work Style Reform Bill currently has almost no provisions for legal enforcement.
Though the government has officially placed a cap on overtime (100 hours per month), there are loopholes such as the “highly skilled professionals” system, which allows white-collar employees to be exempt from overtime rules. Even when overtime hours are cut, NHK reports that some men don’t return home, thus avoiding the burdens of housework and childcare. This phenomenon has given rise to a new Japanese slang term: furariiman. A take on the Japanese salaryman, furariiman is an adjective used to describe the aimless wandering of salarymen who, even after finishing work at a reasonable hour, meander around public parks and convenience stores to avoid going home to their families.
Thus, Japan faces these twin social dilemmas: urging female labor participation while also needing mothers to birth and raise babies, and trying to ease brutal workplace conditions to allow men and women more time at home, only to create a fleet of vagabond men who refuse to return to their households. It’s during this ongoing moment of families in flux and parents in crisis that Mirai arrived in Japan.
Hosoda’s film is both a light-hearted fable and an optimistic vision of fatherhood, one that reimagines a man’s role in Japanese society with honesty and humor. Mirai is filled with scenes of Otōsan faltering and failing; he’s a kind but sometimes selfish person with much to learn. Formerly a full-time worker, Otosan visibly struggles with balancing his freelance architectural career with childcare, a nod to the linked realities of shifting workplace and family culture in Japan. He runs back and forth to daycare, carting his children around, and when he finally sits down to work on a project, he’s too exhausted to focus. On the parenting front, he can’t hold his daughter without her crying, nor can he teach his son to ride a bicycle without Kun-chan acting out.
Even society at large is skeptical of Otōsan’s abilities. Early in the film, Otōsan is shown humblebragging in the front yard to a group of mothers, saying it’s no big deal for him to take care of the kids, while the women ooh and ahh at his stay-at-home status. Otōsan goes back inside, cheerfully placing a pot of water on the stove and obviously preening. Okāsan looks up at him, irritated. She lets him know that the women aren’t fooled by his nonchalance and that they gossip about him behind his back. As she finishes her tirade, the pot boils over. Otōsan dives to mop up the water on the ground with a rag, but Okāsan coolly informs him the cloth he’s using is meant for table spillage, not floor spillage. He slumps, dejected.
By showing us Otōsan’s efforts to feign competence and Okāsan’s refusal to protect her husband’s feelings, Hosoda complicates the idea of men as primary caregivers. Mirai doesn’t want Otōsan to be seen as a societal martyr or to receive more credit than he actually deserves. For Hosoda, Otōsan’s personal journey as a parent can’t be spurred on by optics or false confidence; he must first realize his own shortcomings by making mistakes, and only after learning from them can he become a better parent.
At times, Hosoda seems almost merciless in his portrayal of Otōsan’s blundering. This might be in part because Mirai is based on Hosoda’s own family and their experience of having a second child, which is to say the filmmaker knows intimately what it’s like to stand in Otōsan’s shoes. Though the father is technically a supporting character in Mirai, he’s given a decent amount of screen time and is voiced by arguably the most recognizable actor of the ensemble (at least for Japanese audiences): Gen Hoshino, who rocketed to stardom in 2016 for his portrayal of the romantic lead in super-hit drama Nigeru wa Haji da ga Yaku ni Tatsu (incidentally, also about different family structures in Japan).
There’s no satisfying Rocky-style montage where Otōsan gets visibly better at his fatherly duties over the course of minutes; instead, viewers are presented with imperfect moments of success and failure, jumbled together. In one poignant scene, Otōsan despairs after failing to teach Kun-chan how to ride a bicycle without training wheels, a task that feels quintessentially fatherly. By the time Kun-chan is wheeling through the grass on his own (thanks to a time slip to post–World War II Japan to visit his great-grandfather), Otōsan has accepted his uselessness as a bicycle instructor. Instead he stands off to the side, cheering his son on in amazement and joy. It’s as if he realizes that the most important part of parenting isn’t the coaching itself, but offering unequivocal support.
Hosoda has said that Otōsan is meant to depict the “modern father,” whose existence is “difficult to express.” He points to the way families are changing and can no longer be defined by a stay-at-home mother, a working father, and multiple children. Now, he says, we’re in an age where we search for and pick our own families (a prominent theme in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, which is nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar). Though men becoming primary caregivers may not be the answer for every family, or even the solution to Japan’s myriad social ills, at Mirai’s conclusion, viewers are left with an Otōsan who’s still searching but who has chosen fatherhood for himself. He isn’t a perfect parent, but he’s committed and growing.
In the final scene, Otōsan is shown packing the car with his wife for a trip. While their earlier conversations were marked by doubt about Otōsan’s parenting abilities, the duo are now companionable as they discuss how the other has changed. Okāsan says Otōsan seems kinder now—kinder, even, compared to before they had children. Otōsan remarks that Okāsan seems the same. Together, they call out to Kun-chan and Mirai, who respond to both of them, ready for wherever their journey as a family may take them next.
It was music that first brought me to Belfast.
In the 1990s, I would travel from Dublin to see bands play at Queen’s University, though I never ventured much beyond the school. There was a justifiable tension in the city—British army patrols were commonplace, and all vehicles crossing the border that separated the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland were stopped and checked by security forces who were young, armed, and nervous. Getting through was always a relief, a palpable lifting of the tension, tempered only by the fact that I knew I would have to cross again, hours later, to go home.
Music still brings me to Belfast, though now it’s for vinyl. Secondhand music stores have sprouted up across the city, and spending an afternoon browsing for bargains is a joy. I now live about a 30 minutes’ drive from the border, and were it not for the change in speed-limit signs—the republic uses kilometers, while Northern Ireland uses miles—I would not notice the border at all. With Britain’s impending withdrawal from the European Union, that might soon change.
[Read: In Northern Ireland, vigilante violence keeps terrorizing communities]
Ostensibly about Britain’s relationship with the Continent, in reality Brexit is the playing out of a fractious, decades-long struggle within the Conservative Party, one that spilled over into the public sphere through a referendum that became a lightning rod for much of the deep-rooted social and economic anger across British society. The decision to leave the EU will affect all aspects of life in the United Kingdom, from the testing of drugs to the negotiation of international trade deals.
But perhaps none will be as important as that of the now-intangible Irish border. The question of the frontier between the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland played a relatively minor role in the 2016 Brexit referendum. In recent months, however, it has become the singular issue on which Britain’s withdrawal from the EU depends. Lawmakers in British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party have threatened to torpedo any deal over the so-called backstop—the mechanism by which Britain would have to abide by the bloc’s customs rules until the two sides reach an agreement on their future relationship—arguing that it tethers the U.K. to the EU for an indeterminate period of time. Failing to reach a deal by March 29, when Britain is legally set to withdraw, could result in a “hard Brexit,” which might, among other things, reimpose a tangible border between the republic and Northern Ireland.
In effect, the transformation of the border, an achievement that was critical to the development of peace and stability on the island of Ireland, is now at risk, and many are justifiably worried.
[Read: The small party threatening to topple Theresa May’s government]
About 300 roads and pathways intersect the meandering line between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, some of which are so hidden that they were mapped only last year. About 45 million cross-border vehicle journeys take place each year, and the republic is Northern Ireland’s single biggest export market. (As with all trade between members of the EU’s single market, customs and regulatory checks are nonexistent.)
It was not always this way. The island was partitioned in May 1920, although the first customs posts were not opened until April 1, 1923—Easter Sunday. Initially, they were a source of bemusement, as there had never before been a border on the island, but it was not long before they became a source of frustration and resentment, and, eventually, the target of attack.
Partition brought disruption to centuries-old trade and supply routes, particularly in agriculture, the dominant form of economic activity on the island at the time. It resulted in a marked deterioration in the economic well-being of the towns and communities that straddled the border, a shift that was exacerbated by a dispute that erupted in the 1930s between the two countries over land annuities. The border was tightened and trade plummeted. It was only after the end of World War II that things slowly began to improve.
The border, however, remained a contentious political issue. In the 1950s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which opposed British rule of Northern Ireland, began to bomb police stations and border posts in the region. Then the Troubles began.
The Troubles remains an understated term for the political and sectarian violence that engulfed Northern Ireland for decades. The border was quickly militarized, with significant knock-on economic effects. Many “unapproved” roads and bridges—crossings with no police or customs checkpoints—were blocked or blown up by the British army in the 1970s, causing huge disruption to local communities but having little effect on IRA activity. By the 1980s, the border area was bandit country, with significant parts of it inaccessible to security forces, except by helicopter.
Things finally began to improve in the 1990s. All tariffs and sales-tax restrictions between the Republic of Ireland and the U.K. ended in 1993 with the creation of the European Single Market, though border controls remained in place. The security measures were intense, often resulting in delays for hours at a time and requiring an infrastructure that was subject to near-constant attack. It was only after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the demilitarization that followed that the benefits of EU rules, which allowed for the free travel of goods and services, were felt. Peace brought stability to Northern Ireland as well as a strengthening of the all-island economy, particularly in agriculture, which remains to this day a core industry along the border. The production of beef, milk, and poultry products in Ireland is a seamless affair. One dairy farmer told The Detail, a Belfast-based news site, how his produce crosses the border twice before it is even sold in grocery stores.
[Read: The Good Friday Agreement in the age of Brexit]
It was both the single market and the Good Friday Agreement that made the border invisible and ensured that peace became a viable, ongoing reality. The two are needed to sustain that peace. The people of Northern Ireland, who voted to remain in the EU, are fully aware of the dangers of the U.K. leaving the EU without a deal or a solution for the border issue.
Brexit is not just about tariffs or trade: It is about history, and making sure it is not repeated. This is a real concern. Last month, a car bomb exploded outside a courthouse in Derry , Northern Ireland. It was planted by a dissident republican group, a reminder that there are those who are all too willing to see the peace process tossed aside.
Belfast emerged from under the shadow of the Troubles to shine as a city of venues, culture, books, and bargains. The elimination of border and security controls was crucial to that process. Peace came slowly to Northern Ireland. It needs to be nurtured and protected so that the music and the vinyl—not the violence—define the region.
Desde sexta-feira, dia 8, uma foto emblemática escancarou o racismo e a supremacia branca no Brasil. Nela, Donata Meirelles, então diretora da Vogue Brasil, uma mulher branca, aparece sentada numa cadeira utilizada pelas mães de santo no Candomblé cercada de figurantes negras vestidas com roupas tradicionais de baianas – saias longas rodadas, batas brancas, panos da costa, turbantes, múltiplos colares dourados e prateados, brincos e pulseiras. A imagem fatídica era clara: negros em posições subjugadas ao lado de uma branca em um cenário onde a cultura negra é apropriada com fins festivos – Donata celebrava seus 50 anos. Oitenta por cento da população de Salvador é negra, mas a indústria de turismo que vive da imagem de homens e mulheres negras é branca. “Sorria, você está na Bahia!” Donata se desculpou e pediu demissão da revista.
Nem uma semana depois de as imagens da festa evocando a escravidão gerarem uma onda de revolta nas mídias sociais, um jovem negro de 19 anos foi assassinado por um segurança no supermercado Extra no Rio de Janeiro. Pedro Henrique Gonzaga foi morto a sangue frio, depois de ter sido sufocado até a morte pelo segurança, diante de várias testemunhas, algumas das quais alertaram para a morte iminente do jovem.
Estrangulado como Eric Garner – que sucumbiu depois de um abraço mortal de um policial em julho de 2014 nos Estados Unidos e uma comoção nacional –, o brasileiro Pedro Gonzaga agora faz parte das estatísticas assustadoras que mostram que quase 75 % das vítimas de homicídios são negros, a maioria jovens. A revolta contra o racismo de Donata e o assassinato a sangue frio de Pedro são como chagas abertas num país que nunca indenizou nenhum ex-escravo e seus descendentes pelo período no cativeiro. Nenhuma sociedade escravista nas Américas pagou reparações aos antigos escravizados.
Mas o que pouco se sabe é que a luta das populações afrodescendentes contra o racismo e para obter reconhecimento nas mais diversas esferas, tanto no Brasil como nos Estados Unidos, data desde o fim do período da escravidão. E os pedidos de reparações financeiras e materiais pela escravidão continuam em voga nos dias de hoje.
Indenização só a quem escravizouDesde o século 18, escravos e libertos começaram a conceitualizar a ideia de reparações em correspondência, panfletos, discursos públicos, narrativas de escravos e petições judiciais, redigidos em inglês, francês, espanhol e português. O sistema escravista tinha base legal, mas escravos e ex-escravos tinham plena consciência de terem sido vítimas de uma injustiça. Eles sabiam que ao fornecer trabalho não remunerado aos seus proprietários estavam contribuindo para construir suas riquezas. Vários são os casos de pessoas escravizadas ilegalmente que pediram reparações pelo tempo em que viveram no cativeiro.
Entre 1804 e 1888, todas as sociedades nas Américas aboliram a escravidão. Mas o fim da escravidão foi um processo lento e gradual. Mesmo em regiões vistas como paraísos da liberdade, como o norte dos Estados Unidos e o México (onde a escravidão foi abolida mais cedo do que em muitas regiões do continente americano), o fim da escravidão foi um processo longo. Do norte ao sul das Américas, as elites escravistas temiam o fim do sistema servil. Os senhores enfatizavam que a escravidão e o comércio de escravos eram atividades legais e que os direitos de propriedade deveriam ser respeitados acima de todos os direitos.
Alguns abolicionistas até chegaram a chamar atenção para a necessidade de reparações aos ex-escravos e seus descendentes, por meio da redistribuição de terras, salários e educação. Luiz Gama, por exemplo, muitas vezes denunciou publicamente o tráfico ilegal de africanos depois da assinatura da lei de 1831. Na realidade, 786 mil africanos escravizados chegaram no Brasil entre 1831 e 1856. Em 1883, nas páginas do panfleto da Confederação Abolicionista Luiz Gama chegou a calcular o montante devido em salários aos escravizados: “Realmente são insaciáveis os parasitas do trabalho africano! Fazem, por ventura, ideia da soma, que devem em salário às gerações, que se sucederam no cativeiro durante três séculos?” Tomando em conta apenas o número de 1,5 milhão de escravizados que aqui residiam (na verdade, o Brasil importou mais de três vezes esse número de africanos), Gama calculou que mais de R$ 18 bilhões de reais lhes eram devidos.
Ao abolir a escravidão em 1848, a França pagou 6 milhões de francos aos escravocratas.Mas isso foi exceção. O que realmente prevaleceu nos debates públicos era a questão de como compensar financeiramente os proprietários de escravos pela perda da propriedade escrava. Em outras palavras, o fim gradual da escravidão nas Américas durante o longo século 19 foi planejado para proteger os interesses dos senhores de escravos e proprietários de terras, que em diferentes graus recebiam pelo menos algum tipo de compensação monetária.
Após abolir a escravidão em suas colônias em 1834, a Inglaterra indenizou os senhores de escravos. Ao abolir a escravidão em 1848, a França pagou 6 milhões de francos (em vinte prestações com juro anual de 5%) aos antigos proprietários de escravos. Até o Haiti, que aboliu a escravidão e se tornou independente em 1804, teve que pagar a enorme soma de 120 milhões de francos para ter sua independência reconhecida pela França.
Nos Estados Unidos, os senhores de escravos não receberam indenização, mas cabe lembrar que a abolição da escravidão se fez num contexto de uma guerra civil sangrenta que matou 2% da população do país. Ainda durante a abolição gradual da escravidão seja no norte dos Estados Unidos ou no Brasil, as leis do ventre livre previam algum tipo de indenização para os senhores de escravos. Além disso, os proprietários de escravos receberam indenizações quando a escravidão foi abolida na capital Washington DC em 1862.
Belinda entrou na justiça pedindo ao estado uma pensão como forma de reparar o tempo de escravizada na família Royall.Apesar disso, durante a era da abolição gradual nos Estados Unidos, um pequeno número de ex-escravos exigiu que o governo ou seus antigos senhores lhes fornecessem algum tipo de reparação financeira. Uma dessas libertas foi Belinda. Nascida na África Ocidental e trazida para Antigua no Caribe britânico, foi escrava do rico fazendeiro inglês Isaac Royall, que se mudou para a colônia britânica do Massachusetts em 1737.
Após sua morte, seu filho Isaac Royall Junior herdou todas as suas propriedades, inclusive Belinda. Mas quando a Revolução Americana eclodiu em 1775, o herdeiro (leal ao rei da Inglaterra) fugiu para a Inglaterra, deixando em seu testamento uma pensão por um período de três anos para Belinda. Em 1778, o estado do Massachussets confiscou as propriedades de Royall Junior, inclusive seus escravos, que foram então libertados. Logo após ser liberta, Belinda, já com 65 anos, foi viver em Boston e presume-se que tenha recebido a referida pensão. Mas quando o período de três anos terminou e a pensão foi interrompida, ela entrou na justiça pedindo ao estado uma pensão como forma de reparar o tempo em que trabalhou sem ser remunerada para a família Royall. Ela ganhou, mas tinha de entrar com um pedido a cada novo ano. A casa dos Royall, perto de Boston, foi hoje transformada em museu e dá destaque para a história de Belinda.
Petição feita por Belinda para receber a pensão por trabalhar para a família Royall.
Foto: arquivo do Museu Royall House
Nos Estados Unidos, o período que se seguiu à abolição da escravidão trouxe esperanças de redistribuição de terras para os libertos. Mas esses projetos também falharam. A chamada Reconstrução fracassou e, em vez de terra e cidadania plena, a população negra do país se viu privada de direitos e vítima do ódio racial crescente. Foi nesse contexto que, durante a década de 1890, milhares de libertos circularam petições para introduzir no congresso dos Estados Unidos projetos de lei lhes dando pensões pelo tempo em que foram escravizados. Os líderes desse movimento concebiam o pagamento de pensões como reparação financeira pelos muitos anos de trabalho não remunerado que haviam dado aos seus senhores. As atividades desses grupos geraram grandes debates e mobilizaram dezenas de milhares de ex-escravos, mas nunca foram aprovados. Além disso, as autoridades federais perseguiram os líderes do movimento como Isaiah Dickerson e Callie House, que passou um ano na prisão.
Nada parecido aconteceu na América Latina. Embora privados de recursos materiais, em países como o Brasil, provavelmente iludidos pelo canto da sereia da ideologia da democracia racial, os libertos privilegiaram a luta pela cidadania.
Vítimas do holocausto e prisioneiros da II Guerra conseguiramMas no período que se seguiu ao final da Segunda Guerra, esse contexto começou a mudar, especialmente depois que os sobreviventes judeus do Holocausto obtiveram reparações financeiras. Vários grupos que defendiam as reparações surgiram durante a Guerra Fria nos Estados Unidos, enfrentando o estigma de serem constantemente associados ao comunismo. Durante a década de 1960, o movimento ganhou novo sangue com a ascensão de grupos como o Comitê de Reparações para os Descendentes dos Escravos Americanos, liderado pela ativista negra Audley Moore, a República da Nova África e o Manifesto Negro, assinado pelo militante dos direitos civis, James Forman.
No período final da Guerra Fria, o governo dos Estados Unidos pagou restituições financeiras aos nipo-americanos que foram ilegalmente colocados em campos de concentração durante a Segunda Guerra. As décadas de 1980 e 1990 renovaram os pedidos de reparações pela escravidão. Brasil, Colômbia e Equador promulgaram novas constituições reconhecendo o direito de propriedade da terra para suas comunidades negras. Nos Estados Unidos, novas organizações combinando ativismo e ações litigiosas solicitando reparações também emergiram.
Os ecos desse movimento também foram ouvidos na África, onde um grupo de intelectuais, artistas, políticos e ativistas divulgou um documento pedindo reparações para o comércio atlântico de escravos e o colonialismo. Em 2001, a Conferência Mundial Contra o Racismo, Discriminação Racial, Xenofobia e Intolerâncias Correlatas, em Durban, na África do Sul, reconheceu a escravidão e o comércio atlântico de escravos como crimes contra a humanidade. Mais do que nunca, pedidos de reparação adquiriram uma nova força.
Recentemente, em março de 2014, a Comunidade do Caribe (Caricom) aceitou um plano com foco em reparações pela escravidão e pelo genocídio indígena. O programa consiste em dez pontos que compreendem demandas materiais, financeiras e simbólicas dirigidas a vários países europeus como o Reino Unido, Espanha, França, Holanda, Dinamarca, Suécia e Portugal. Esses pedidos de reparações receberam grande atenção da mídia nos países europeus e caribenhos e também nos jornais dos Estados Unidos e do Brasil. Mas apesar desses movimentos e dos debates recorrentes, não houve avanço.
R$ 2 milhões a cada descendenteEsse contexto pode sugerir uma perspectiva pessimista, mas os debates sobre as reparações nas suas mais variadas modalidades continuam muito vivos. Todos os anos novos pedidos de reparação continuam a ser objeto de ações judiciais e permanecem presentes na sociedade por meio de manifestações populares, debates públicos, palestras e encontros internacionais.
No Brasil, a partir da década de 1990, organizações negras lideraram protestos e apresentaram projetos de lei no Congresso Nacional pedindo reparações financeiras ao governo federal brasileiro. Em 1993, estudantes e ativistas negros, membros do Grupo Consciência Negra da Universidade de São Paulo, lançaram o Movimento pelas Reparações (MPR). Em dezembro de 1994, o MPR submeteu uma ação declaratória à Justiça Federal de São Paulo, na qual solicitaram que o estado brasileiro pagasse reparações financeiras aos descendentes de escravos. No documento, pediram ao tribunal que reconhecesse que 70 milhões de afro-brasileiros tinham o direito de receber reparações financeiras do estado brasileiro por 350 anos de escravidão.
Em 2012, Claudete Alves, ativista negra, professora paulista e ex-vereadora da cidade de São Paulo, apresentou uma ação civil pública ao Ministério Público contra o estado solicitando indenização pelos danos causados “a todos os descendentes de africanos escravizados que vivem no Brasil e residem na cidade de São Paulo”. Segundo os advogados de Alves, cada descendente de escravos deve receber R$ 2 milhões. Em 2014, no mesmo ano em que o Caricom, a Comunidade do Caribe, lançou um plano de dez pontos pedindo reparações simbólicas e financeiros a vários países europeus, a Organização dos Advogados do Brasil, a OAB, anunciou a criação de uma Comissão Nacional da Verdade Sobre a Escravidão no Brasil cujo objetivo era examinar o período da escravidão no Brasil e estabelecer modalidades de reparação. Nenhuma dessas iniciativas, porém, tiveram um retorno prático.
Embora muitos grupos tenham privilegiado as reparações de ordem simbólica, o debate sobre as reparações financeiras e materiais, principalmente em relação à propriedade da terra tendem a crescer sobretudo no caso do Brasil, onde o novo governo do presidente eleito Jair Bolsonaro ameaça rever as demarcações de terras quilombolas. Neste momento, mais do que nunca, o estudo da história das reparações pode também nos ajudar lutar melhor contra o racismo, contra as desigualdades raciais e a supremacia branca que dominam as antigas sociedades escravistas, principalmente no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos.
* Esse texto é baseado no livro Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017), ainda não traduzido para o português.
The post Nenhum negro foi indenizado pela escravidão no Brasil. Esse debate é mais urgente do que nunca appeared first on The Intercept.
Aaron Kinzel grew up poor in Toledo, Ohio, and from an early age, he was pulled into a life of crime. He didn’t know his father, and his mother’s partners encouraged him to break into houses, sell drugs, and engage in various forms of violence. “I just grew up around a lot of bullshit,” he says. “I was really groomed to be a professional criminal.”
He was a teenager on probation in 1997 when he left the Midwest on an ill-fated road trip to Maine with his girlfriend. He was carrying drugs and a loaded gun when he was pulled over by a state trooper. With the officer standing outside his car window, Kinzel panicked. He pulled his weapon and fired at the officer, who fired a return shot into the air as he dropped to the ground. That prompted the trooper’s partner to unload: He fired 15 rounds from a 9 mm Beretta into Kinzel’s car. Amazingly, no one was injured — not even the state trooper. Kinzel’s shot had missed him completely. “It was miraculous,” he recalls.
After a high-speed chase and a night on the lam, Kinzel and his girlfriend were apprehended. Kinzel was charged with the attempted murder of a police officer and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Behind bars, his life changed. He earned a GED while awaiting trial, and once in prison, that made him eligible to take college-level classes. He was encouraged to do so not only by the teachers working inside his Maine correctional institution, but also by the lifers he met there. “They were scholars,” he recalls. “They have just been reading for decades and had changed their lives.” They told Kinzel to eschew a life of violence and pursue an education. While still incarcerated, he scraped up enough money to take one for-credit college course. He was hooked. Once he was released, at age 28, Kinzel kept going. He got bachelor’s and master’s degrees and is currently working on a doctorate at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, where he also teaches classes in criminal justice. “I think about the dumb shit I did as a kid and think, God, night and day as compared to how I am now.”
Kinzel’s story is included in a comprehensive new report from the Vera Institute of Justice and Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, which encourages the government to take an important step toward expanding access to postsecondary education for incarcerated individuals: reinstate access to federal Pell Grants for eligible students behind bars. Doing so would lower recidivism, pump millions into local economies, and save state taxpayers hundreds of millions in correctional costs, advocates argue. “It is a common-sense investment,” says Vera’s Fred Patrick, “and a win-win for states, the country, and for incarcerated individuals, because they’re able to come home and thrive.”
To Kinzel, this makes perfect sense. “I think formally incarcerated people, for the most part, are some of the hardest workers. If you give people the opportunity, nobody wants to go back to prison. Nobody wants to sell drugs and do all this grimy shit. It’s just sometimes, you don’t have a choice.”
A Counterproductive BanThe federal Pell Grant program was created in 1972 to provide funding to students who lack the resources to pay for higher education, including incarcerated individuals. (Unlike typical federal student aid, a Pell Grant generally does not have to be repaid.) By 1982, there were 350 postsecondary education programs in prisons, and by the early 1990s, the number had risen to nearly 800 programs spread across some 1,300 facilities.
But in 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which helped to increase the nation’s ballooning prison population while also blocking incarcerated individuals from accessing Pell Grants. It was an ill-conceived move: Access to education behind bars, and the resulting boost to employment after release, wards against recidivism, which in the U.S. runs at roughly 50 percent during the first three years after release. (A government study tracking former inmates from 2005 to 2014 found that 83 percent would be rearrested at least once during those nine years.)
After the Pell Grant ban was implemented, the number of prison-based educational programs rapidly declined. Currently, some 60 percent of individuals in prison will not get any in-prison educational opportunities beyond a GED, though in 2014, 70 percent of people in prison expressed a desire to pursue postsecondary education.
The new report from Vera and the GCPI argues that providing the education that incarcerated individuals want would deliver rich rewards — not only lowering recidivism and saving the broader public millions per year in correctional costs, but also increasing wages and providing a foundation to break intergenerational cycles of poverty and crime.
The vast majority of incarcerated individuals are of prime working age — 78 percent of men and 83 percent of women are between the ages of 18 and 54 — yet they do not fare well in finding work upon release. According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution, just 55 percent of men report any income within a year of release; the median earnings for the group is roughly $10,000.
Vera estimates, conservatively, that if half of all state inmates eligible for Pell Grants (roughly 463,000) were given access to funding and educational programming, rates of employment would increase significantly, while earnings over the first year after release would collectively increase by more than $45 million. And because education relates to a significant drop in recidivism — lowering the odds by 48 percent — states would stand to save more than $365 million per year in correctional costs, according to the report. Texas and New York could each see annual savings of roughly $38 million; in California the annual savings would be almost $67 million.
Arthur Rizer, a former cop and federal prosecutor who now works for R Street, a center-right think tank, is a serious fan of the idea of bringing educational opportunities back into prisons. “It’s bat-shit crazy the way that we’ve handled this in the past,” he says. He notes that the vast majority of jobs require some postsecondary education, so providing that to inmates just makes sense — for individuals, businesses, and the community at large. “I call it trickle-down criminal justice.”
Ultimately, he says that data should be driving criminal justice reforms. “The takeaway for me is that this makes us safer. Period.”
There has been bipartisan support for legislation that would reinstate Pell Grant access. Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, who is chair of the chamber’s education and labor committee, has signaled a willingness to do so as part of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, while Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz has previously proposed a standalone bill — the Restoring Education and Learning Act of 2018 — to repeal the ban. “Most prisoners, sooner or later, are released from prison, and no one is helped when they do not have the skills to find a job,” Alexander told the New York Times last year. “Making Pell Grants available to them in the right circumstances is a good idea.”
Rizer says he is confident that there is an appetite in the White House for this reform too. Coming off passage of the First Step Act (despite the controversy surrounding it), he said he has heard from the White House that President Donald Trump sees criminal justice reform “as his legacy issue.” The iron “is really hot right now for these kinds of issues.”
And even if the feds drag their heels, he says there is plenty of energy in the states to return meaningful education to incarcerated students. Part of the energy is likely attributed to the Obama-era second-chance Pell pilot program, which is funded through 2020. As of fall 2017, enrollment in the program, which pairs 67 colleges with correctional institutions in 27 states, was up to just over 5,000 inmates. There’s movement in Texas, Michigan, and elsewhere to expand educational operations further. And despite the larger ban on access to Pell Grants, a number of institutions have longstanding partnerships to provide postsecondary education to incarcerated students. The Bard Prison Initiative has awarded nearly 550 degrees since 2001; Bard’s graduates have a less than 3 percent recidivism rate. Boston University has been educating students behind bars since 1972 through a program funded by alumni.
What Skills Do You Want Me Using?Jose Bou dropped out of high school in the 10th grade in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and ran away from home. He sustained himself mainly by stealing from unlocked cars. He was eventually caught and locked up for a couple of years and that got him thinking: no more stealing. He wanted something more lucrative, so he became a drug dealer. Eventually, he was busted after selling 300 grams of cocaine to an undercover cop. He pleaded guilty and got a 12-year prison sentence.
Like Kinzel, it was while he was down on that bid that he turned himself around. He enrolled in the BU program and four years later was awarded a bachelor’s degree in English and American literature. He graduated with a 3.98 grade-point average. He told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he remembered sitting in his prison bunk, feeling the raised lettering on his degree and thinking to himself: “This is … the first thing I’ve ever really finished.”
He mentored other prisoners as he finished out his time, and after his release, he enrolled in a master’s program in criminal justice at BU. He taught community college before taking on a new job as the manager of Equity, Family and Community Partnerships for the Holyoke School District. He has come full circle: Once a Holyoke district dropout, he now fosters engagement to keep kids in school and away from the prison pipeline in the same community where he grew up.
Bou is wary about having his story held out as an example, mostly because he knows that the way things are now, he was pretty lucky to end up at an institution with a robust educational program. “It was just cosmic luck,” he says. “Don’t look at Jose Bou and say, ‘Why don’t you do it just like Jose? Straighten up, just like Jose?’ Because they don’t have the opportunity.”
And he agrees that returning Pell Grant opportunities to incarcerated students is important. “You can see the change in people. That’s awesome to see. It’s more fulfilling than locking someone up — of course, we’re always going to need to lock some people up,” he said. “But what are we doing to prepare society for that individual to return?” It’s not as though people in prison don’t have any skills, he notes, but it’s a matter of trading those for more productive skills. “I’ve got other skills I can use: robbing, stealing, violence. So, if you don’t teach me new skills, I’m still going to survive. It’s just, what skills do you want me using?”
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