interviews
When Voting Fails
by Dr. Martha Jones
July 9, 2020
This interview with Dr. Martha Jones, a Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Hi! I’m curious to know what’s on your mind right now.
Dr. Martha Jones | I live in Baltimore, Maryland. It's where I teach and where I live. When the spring 2020 protests began, for a moment my city was of interest to the national media. As uprising began to break out in other places across the country, the country recalled that we had had a major uprising here in 2015 after the killing of Freddie Gray. And still, in 2020 national gaze quickly turned away when Baltimore didn't comport, somehow, with expectations. The demonstrations here didn't look like Minneapolis. They didn't look like Louisville. They didn't look like LA or New York.
Media is essential to amplifying and projecting the voices of the disenfranchised. At the same time, the media is moved by the sensational.
There is something untenable for me about the view that we must rise to the sensational in order to be heard.
It's not just that we have to raise our voices. We have to raise them, and that spectacle must be sensational before journalists will deeply partner and become embedded in the scene.
What did Baltimore teach itself in the time between Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2020?
It's important to say I didn't live here in 2015, so I'm learning in real-time about my city.
The city had not only its own sense of outrage but its own vision for how to be. This comes in part from the roles played by seasoned community activists, folks who were part of the 2015 uprising who are still here and have remained deeply committed. In 2020, they have helped to shape an extraordinary series of demonstrations here in Baltimore.
In Baltimore, we were also getting ready to elect a new mayor in June, though with a limited capacity to get to the polls. Maryland had committed to mail-in voting without much debate or objection. But there were troubles with getting the ballots into people's hands and getting the right ballots into people's hands, so in-person polling places had to be opened up. People, in the midst of protests, in the midst of a pandemic, showed up here in Baltimore to cast their ballots. That evidenced another side of the civic culture here. People were tuned in to the fact that there was an election, and people came out for that.
Participating in democracy need not be an either-or proposition. We can simultaneously be in the streets, engaged in direct protest, a democratic tradition in this country, and we can show up to the polls.
That is what I saw happening in Baltimore, and it happened in the midst of a pandemic that encouraged us to stay home and to do nothing at all. Of course, that is complicated by important public health concerns. But I think an insistence that democracy is a participatory culture and not simply a set of principles or a structure, is an important part of what I play out here in real-time.
How does civil unrest and protest lend itself to more civic participation?
The story of the 1960s is instructive for me. It was simultaneously the scene of voting rights and the scene of uprisings. The two facets of that time may not often be told together. But they were not wholly antithetical to one another at all. Immediately in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of African American voters grew importantly and significantly. It is that context that we move into an era of uprisings in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles and New York. Part of what can be learned by voting, are the limits of the ballot. Yes, political power is embodied in casting a ballot and in electing a candidate. At the same time, harnessing political power requires more than showing up at the polls. Demonstrations are another way of being heard and influencing law and policy. I am an historian of Black politics in 19th century Baltimore, which may seem like a very long time ago. Still, that history includes important lessons in how people created their own power in an era, time, and place when they could not vote at all.
I'm interested in what we do when voting fails us, which it almost certainly will.
On this, I draw from the lessons of African American women in history. African American women have been engaged with politics for a long time, and for most of that time, they could not vote. They organized, they lobbied, they used men as surrogates. And when by a state constitution, or the 19th Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they received legally sanctioned political power, they were ready. When African American women got the vote, they were ready to use it as fully formed political actors because they had been constructing their own power for a very long time.
I want to talk more about the prominence of Black women through the history of protest and civil unrest in America.
One of the moments most well known to people during the civil rights movement is the march in Selma, Alabama. Among the best remembered of those marchers, is a young man who is today among our most venerated members of Congress, John Lewis. Lewis was among the scores who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the name of winning voting rights, only to be met with brutal police violence.
Behind the scenes was a Black woman named Diane Nash. She cut her political teeth organizing sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee as a student at Fisk University. She played a critical role in the work of the Freedom Rides in 1961 by sending young people from Tennessee further South to replenish the ranks of the Riders after many had been brutally attacked. It was Diane Nash who, long before Martin King and the SCLC assented to the strategy, came to Selma to wage a voting rights campaign.
Nash was an organizer, planner, and orchestrator, but we don’t see her photo as folks make that fateful march across the bridge. In those long moments, she was back in Selma making sure that there would be medics available when people are brutalized. To me, this is an example of a woman who taught us how leadership takes many forms. She taught that political leadership must embrace many forms of action. Nash never took the stage as a charismatic, upfront character. Still, she was someone who, when we look closely at the scenes in Selma, becomes critical to that story.
Contrast Nash with someone like Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer. The two were peers but worked very differently. Hamer not only understood, she deliberately looked to exploit the cameras to propel her image, and her message, and project efforts to win voting rights in her home state and transform Democratic Party politics nationally. The two women worked by way of different philosophies and differing styles. They adopted divergent tactics even. Taking the work of Nash and Hamer as two parts of a whole during the Modern Civil Rights Movement helps us think in expansive ways about how political power can be won and how it can be wielded.
Looking back is one style more effective than the other?
It's difficult to say, because they are parts of a whole. The thing that knits them together, in some sense, is violence. Nash is deeply committed to nonviolent direct action, the sit-in, the march – but she still sees violence as essential. There's an often-quoted moment when she speaks with federal officials from Washington who tell her to desist from sending young people to join the freedom riders: “You know, we understand that we are walking into a brutal scene. The young people had made their wills the night before they left.” Hamer also knew violence and had a defining moment early in her career when she was stopped, detained, jailed, brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by police after attempting to register to vote.
The women I write about are all, each in their own way, wrestling with the violence that is woven into American politics. They know that violence will be directed unashamedly at their very bodies.
That core insight, one that sits at the foundation of Black women’s political consciousness, extends back to confrontations between enslaved women and their enslavers. In our own moment, the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor is the latest example of how Black women's bodies remain the targets of a brutal politics of violence. This thread runs through Black women's political philosophy and their practice, across time.
African American women have always been plagued by a specific form of violence: sexual violence. So many of the Black woman activists who I write about eventually explain their confrontations with either sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence. This not only informs their tactics, but sets the goals for political power must accomplish. When Tarana Burke gave us the Me Too movement in the 21st century, she was echoing a long-standing critique. Black women aim to use their power to end the scourge of sexual violence, a story that has an origin in the history of slavery but doesn't end with emancipation. It continues until this day.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate having this conversation.
One of the dangers of a conversation like this is to leave the impression either that nothing changes or nothing can change. I struggle with that. History is a tough endeavor in that regard. It is possible to look across two centuries and recognize what hasn't changed.
And still, I am inspired. Black women have been the conscience of this nation since its inception. They have studied the lay of the land. They have thought very hard about our founding ideals. They have also set the bar when it comes to what liberty, equality, and dignity mean. They have shared their ideas, pointing us where the bar is. Listen and Black women will remind you of the ideals that we all should aspire to, individually and collectively. The women I write about say no racism, and no sexism. Period. They say that in 1820 and have waited ever since for us to catch up as a nation. I've watched Breonna Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, speak, and I think I recognize something familiar in that act. She is an African American woman, representing her deceased daughter, and at the same time speaking to all of us about the violence which, as a nation, we must not, cannot, and should not allow.
There is nothing enviable about this position in body politic. And it's not enough. Still, voices that speak fundamental truths, that hold up indelible principles, that insist upon equality and dignity for all are absolutely essential. Someone has to set the bar high in a nation that has been built upon countless indignities and injustices.
Someone has to remind us that ideals animate this country, not interests, convenience, or pragmatism.
Someone has to do that. Black women took up that mantle in the earliest days of this republic and they continue to bear that burden even today, in the 21st century.
interviews
Anti-Colonial Science & The Ubiquity of Plastic
by Max Liboiron
December 18, 2019
This interview with Dr. Max Liboiron was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place December 4, 2018.
I'm Dr. Max Liboiron. I often introduce myself in Michif. So, I say, Taanishi. Max Liboiron dishinihkaashoon. Lac la biche, Treaty 6, d’oshchiin. Mtis naasyoon, niiya ni. Which means my name is Max Liboiron. I'm from Northern Alberta, treaty six territory, where I'm part of Mtis Nation, and I now live and work in Newfoundland and Labrador in Northeastern Canada.
I'm an environmental scientist and we do anti-colonial, feminist science – which means we draw a lot from the insights of the social sciences and also different traditional teachings and law, to inform our scientific practices. So that they are anti-colonial. So they are feminist. So that they do deal with questions of equity, questions of justice, questions of humility, and do work in a good way, as opposed to just an efficient way or a fact-y way.
Science, and research in general, has long played a role in colonial entitlement to land, both in proving that people deserve to be dispossessed in being the reason for research – we need to research tropical diseases so we can better settle in this tropical place, not our environment. Or, how do we patent different botanies? A lot of those legacies have stayed in science and aren't usually noticed anymore.
They used to be fairly contested, especially when science was trying to move into new places or when race was being scientized. But now people seem to have forgotten about that legacy. So our task at CLEAR, my lab, is to first of all recognize how science is already colonial, and then number two, work very hard to do the practices of science in ways that do not reproduce entitlement to land or universalism, which is actually just self portraiture of Europeans usually. The idea of mastery over nature, or that nature is a resource for use.
Every moment of science has these sort of legacies. There's lots and lots and lots of room for doing anti-colonial science and feminist science. Those are different things, but they're related in that they both find that science isn't neutral. It is deeply political.
The presentation of your research, visually, is patient, subtle, pretty – completely different from the majority of images I see related to plastics research. Can you talk about the work you’re doing right now?
I'll start with the premise of that, which is that we, I think, look at plastic very differently than a lot of the dominant discourses. Like you said, a lot of the dominant discourse about plastic is that plastic is inherently bad, and it's a bastard child of industrialization, and it needs to be eradicated, and illegalized, and banned, and exorcized.
But also plastic is our kin, it's our relation. It's from ancestors – organic ancestors from a long time ago. And if you neglect your relations to that, then you're bad kin. Even when plastic is misbehaving, which means it's being bad kin, you can still do good kinship with bad kin. And you know this. You have an asshole uncle somewhere. He might be bad kin but you still call him on his birthday, or bail him out of jail depending on what kind of bad kin he is. The same thing is true of plastics. I spend a lot of time with plastics. I do a lot of care work for plastics. I make sure that they are cleaned properly and I look at them a long time, and when I look at them, and I look at them in aggregate, I learn things about where they've been, and how they might have got there, and what their journeys might have been like, and where they might be going, because they're going to go for a long time.
We hang out together a lot, and they have a lot to teach us. Trying to ostracize them as the only sort of relation you can get, misses a lot of teachings that they have for us and also a lot of the respect. Because they are made of the earth. They've been pulverized in various ways so that they're not very earthy anymore, but you still have to respect that.
There's a tension with that in that the research that I do is mostly ingestion studies. Animals that have eaten plastics. Mostly what we focus on are animals that people, especially in Newfoundland & Labrador, use for food, depend on for food. For cultural sustenance, for nutritional sustenance, for economic sustenance. So the contamination of that food web is a form of colonialism. It's based on the idea that land is pollutable in the first place, that it is an okay place to put wastes. And magically, not magically, it's through different power structures, those tend to accumulate in rural, Indigenous, northern communities, which are never the places that benefit from plastic production. Almost never, but pretty much never.
At the moment, we’re doing some ducks, cod, seal, some geese. We get them mostly from hunters and fishers. We have a rule in the lab, all of our samples have to be eaten because what we test is food. We don't test oceans or some abstract fish, we work on food sovereignty. That means we sample food.
Are you consuming it?
Often.
Is that difficulte after seeing what's inside of it?
No. It's delicious. In the area we're researching, we do find plastic, but we also find them in smaller numbers than we find them in other places. Up in the north, we're fluent in things like the breast milk debate. In the 90's there were these big debates where scientists found really high PCBs in breast milk, and there was this huge protracted debate as to whether or not mothers could be considered abusive for feeding their kids that breast milk. A lot of stigmatization, ostracization, really screwed up relations within science. It turns out after multiple years, scientists decided, and medical practitioners decided, that actually, it's better to feed your kids contaminated breast milk than it is to feed them formula for their entire lives.
That being said, we have some of the least contaminated food in the world at this moment. Maybe not going to stay that way, but we consistently find lower ingestion rates in say, cod or ducks, than in other places. Part of that is the water that surrounds the province that I work in comes from the Arctic. There are certainly plastics in the Arctic, and that number is increasing, but it's not like the Gulf Stream which is filthy, where a lot of people get their fish.
What state is the plastic in when you find it in animals?
The vast majority of what we find are microplastics, smaller than five millimeters, that are fragmented from larger things. You can't usually tell what they're from. Most people don't eat the guts of animals, so we don't usually ingest those plastics. There are some exceptions. People here eat seal intestine, and if you eat the fish called capelin or sardines, you eat the entire animal.
The concern that we have is that we know plastics absorb oily chemicals. Like when you have your tupperware that's stained orange from your chile or your curry, that's because plastics is really good at sucking in oily chemicals. If you want to wash that orange color out, which is really hard, you would put it in hot, abrasic, acidic conditions, like a stomach.
My dogs eat plastic everyday and there's no crisis of the dog species. Most dogs eat plastic.
The albatross on Midway Island, Chris Jordan's photographs, drive me crazy because those birds did not die of plastics. In fact, albatross are one of the only marine bird species in the world that is increasing in population and range. They are the healthiest bird species literally in the world. Albatross die a lot because they're what's called an R-species. They live a really long time and have a baby every year, and the vast majority of those babies die. While those babies are dying and starving, they eat a lot of things that aren't food, including plastics. When you find an albatross that's dead with plastics in its belly, the incorrect assumption is that it died because of plastics, not because it was dying and thus ate plastics.
That’s a revelation & also cause for pause about what we’re panicking about.
I think we need to be concerned, but differently than we're currently concerned.
Right.
We're really concerned about objects that are plastics, and that is a concern. But more concerning are all the chemicals that originate in plastics and get absorbed by plastics, many of whom are built by the same industry. The petrochemical industry makes plastics, makes gas, makes plasticizers, makes fragrances, makes flame retardants. Those are the same companies. Those are the same set of products. And the plastic parts are like the vehicles or the vectors, and that's not great, especially because it assumes disposability and therefore access to land, which is a form of colonialism, to dispose of. But the health concern is really these chemicals.
Are you optimistic about the future of plastics? In our ability to innovate, or participate in change?
No, because I don't believe in end of pipe solutions. At all. And that's because I fully understand the scale of plastics. It's like trying to bail out a boat, but you haven't plugged the hole that's sinking the boat.
How about if we stop top of pipe? How about if we stop the production of disposable and ubiquitous plastics? People like GAIA, or Break Free From Plastics, which are these large coalitions that not coincidentally are global coalitions with a lot of people from the global south in them, those are the groups that are like, screw your end of pipe, because they're the end of the pipe. They're where American corporations are building their incinerators. They’re where the people are shipping their recycling to. And they're like no, these solutions clearly don't work. They just defer and shuffle the problem.
What you need to do is stop the pipe. That's what I believe in. This isn't a technological problem, this is a problem rooted in colonialism that assumes you get access to other people's land for your solutions, whether it's storing your pollution or your recycling or whatever. I'm really interested in things like China's recycling ban, which ripped a hole in the world's recycling program because the entire world's recycling programs depended on the idea that things went away, and away was China.
People are looking for other ways. They're like oh, let’s ship our recycling to other places in Southeast Asia. Oh, Vietnam. And you're like, no, no. China taught us something, folks. What it taught you was you're going to run out of aways, and your aways are going to get tired of you, and folks in Malaysia right now are fighting, fighting, fighting not to be the next away. That's colonialism. That's just waste colonialism. That's just the newest frontier in waste colonialism.
If I'm going to put my optimism somewhere and my change making somewhere, it's in that. It's in people being like no, I'm not going to be your away. Go find your own god damn away. Once we run out of that, or once we take ownership of that – when I say we, I mean industrialized nations mostly. I don't believe in most narratives of “we” because they make it sound like consumers can do something. If you live in Newfoundland, even if you live in other places, there's one fucking store. There's no such thing as consumerism or consumer choice. Reuse is already to the nines because there aren't a lot of resources. So all of the...banning straws? There are no straws.
The straw thing put me over the edge!
A lot of the common discourses make zero sense in the north. It's a handy barometer when someone's like, this is a solution! And you just sort of look around and you say no, not possible. Moving on. Really helps you scale and prioritize the types of things that might work.
What is the alternative to our dependency on mass produced plastics?
The alternatives would mostly come from industry. The number one product category for plastics is packaging. It's not more than half, but it's the largest chunk. Most of that packaging has been necessary only since the 50's. That's living memory. We could circulate goods in ways we remember from living memory differently than totally packaged in plastic. Yeah. They circulate differently. They don't circulate as far. It just means you have different distribution systems. The problem is that oil has just reinvested in plastics big time. Eight months ago they invested more money than they put in the last few years into new plastic production. So that's their call, right?
Why are they re-upping their investment?
I don't know. There was no discussion of why this, like why plastics? I do know, and I have studied historically the reason that plastics and plastic packaging in particular is so attractive to industry is because it is so cheap and it is so easy to turn a profit off of. Part of that is disposability. The fact that you don't have to be responsible for the end of life of your product. Some other country, someone else's land takes care of that for you. It's a huge cost savings compared to other things that are possible.
That's deeply upsetting.
It is. That's why any conversation about plastic, if it also doesn't talk about power, it's missed the boat. If it talks about individual agency and consumers, and it talks about empowerment but not power, it's actually missed the entire structure of plastic production and pollution.
Do you think large government policy can be effective in altering our use of plastic?
Yeah. If government stops subsidizing oil. I look for these things that are not the expected things, like China saying no. Or someone being like, no more corn. No more subsidizing corn for alternative plastic stocks, which makes plastic just like plastic. These unexpected things, because plastic is so dependent on these really extensive networks. Transportation, extraction, production, disposability.
Are more people understanding the relationship and connectedness between plastic and industry?
I don't know about more people, but I do think that key people do. Some of these international global coalitions, get it. A few key scientists get it. The Story of Stuff pretty much gets it. GAIA gets it. Teen Vogue gets it! These folks who have moved away from the end of pipeline story and the recycling story and the five small steps story, and have considered or deeply know power structures. That's increasing, a lot.
I've been working on plastic pollution since before it was cool, and the story has shifted significantly. The recycling and five small things continues to proliferate on its little treadmill, but there's now a lot more variety than there ever has before, especially as people are like holy shit, car tires. Holy shit, clothes. Holy shit. Those are things where you can’t just make a little shift because of their massive infrastructural ubiquity. People are starting to understand scale. Key people are starting to understand scale. Yeah. So that's nice.
How do you work to eliminate plastics but also acknowledge those who will likely become more disenfranchised by a rising cost of plastic, primarily medical items, that are dependent on plastics?
I work with folks who are at the periphery who aren't getting benefits. People who hunt and fish and need that food for all sorts of reasons. The thing is, if you think about anyone who needs plastic medical equipment – medical waste is different than packaging waste. I don't want a pacemaker that's not plastic. First of all, it's not possible. Second of all, I want my fucking pacemaker. But the thing is, there's ways to do that that is not about mass production, that is not about releasing and patenting and circulating chemicals that haven't been tested properly.
The problem isn't plastics. There are natural plastics. There are polymers that decay.
That's the problem. This idea that you either have to ban it all or take it all, you're like no. Those are not the only two things available. And I know this because I live in the fucking north. Concepts of ubiquity don't really work here. The all or nothing doesn't work in a lot of places, and that's obvious.
What would a local plastic economy look like? Huh. No one’s ever asked that question really. If you had to own the plastics, own the extraction of those plastics, own the chemicals that go in the plastics and the extraction of those chemicals, I bet your plastics would look a lot different. I bet you wouldn't have packaging. I bet you wouldn't have BPA. I bet you'd just move to something else half the time. And I bet you'd have plastic pacemakers.