Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 Fables of the Lone Star Liberalhttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/god-save-texas-hbo/Sam RussekMar 27, 2024

A HBO documentary series helmed by Lawrence Wright unknowingly paints a picture of a state incapable of understanding how radically it has changed since its hard-right turn.

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Books & the Arts / March 27, 2024

Fables of the Lone Star Liberal

A HBO documentary series helmed by Lawrence Wright unknowingly paints a picture of a state incapable of understanding how radically it has changed since its hard-right turn.

Sam Russek
(Courtesy of HBO)

A distinguished writer sits in an East Texas diner, chatting with the director Richard Linklater: They shake hands with locals and talk about Linklater’s family, the prison system, and the curious “oppositional personality” of radicals. Now, the writer is speaking in a museum gallery, his hands folded in his lap, explaining Texas’s relationship to slavery: While images play of Black people in cotton fields, he says that the “labor-intensive process” created an “investment” in keeping slaves. Later, we see the same writer gazing at the commercial traffic flowing through the US-Mexico border, his graying eyebrows knitted in concern.

This man is Lawrence Wright, a longtime member of Texas’s liberal intelligentsia who was recently designated with the role of guiding voice. Billed as the gimlet-eyed chronicler of Texas’s influence, Wright translates and explains the complexities of the state for a national audience from his perch at The New Yorker. This role came to fruition with his 2018 book, God Save Texas, a semi-memoir that hopscotched through the state’s history and present (from Spanish colonization and slavery to NAFTA and Donald Trump) to discern what draws people here and what gets them to stay. “Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America,” he writes, “the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation.” It’s a big claim, but we like it that way. All politics is local, after all, but we’re Texas.

In Wright’s view, Texas has “nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation.” Hard to argue with that. Ruled by Republicans since 1994, Texas has wiped away any remnants of the New Deal order, replacing it with a gutted social safety net, an expansive prison system, deepening inequality, and an ever-more-authoritarian conservatism. Riding a wave of anti-“globalist” populism while reaping the rewards of the international economy, the icons of Texas’s hard-right turn—people like Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz—have grown increasingly unrecognizable to the liberals who believed that Ann Richards, the state’s last Democratic governor, was a sign that the long arc of history bent toward progress. (Never mind that Richards vocally supported NAFTA and prison expansion.) The epitaph on her tombstone, which Wright visits at the end of his book, is from her 1991 inaugural address, which reads: “Today we have a vision of Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color—a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.” Ms. Richards, I have some bad news.

How to make sense of a place so renowned for its callousness today, let alone make a home here? This isn’t a question with a single answer, particularly for liberals shocked by each new right-wing transgression. Books like God Save Texas are attempts to narrativize this sense of displacement, pinpointing what sin must be atoned for—or at least understood—before reconciliation and progress can begin again. Now, with the help of HBO, Wright—in his role as producer—has passed the question to three Texan directors: the Oscar-nominated Richard Linklater, the Emmy-nominated Alex Stapleton, and the indie documentarian Iliana Sosa, each of whom unearths some of the contradictions and myths foundational to their home state and their respective hometowns. They do so with Wright’s assistance; he appears on-screen with them at various times, asking questions and providing insights. The resulting three-episode docuseries, also called God Save Texas, is as wounded, inept, and passive as one might expect of the cultural representatives of an unmoored movement incapable of responding effectively to the deepening crises at the state’s core.

HBO originally greenlighted a project titled God Save Texas as a drama series in 2014, with the screenplay to be written by Wright based on his 2005 play Sonny’s Last Shot. Wright had toyed with the script’s basic shape since Richards was in office. It follows Sonny Lamb, a moderate Republican state representative who breaks with his party on questions of gay rights and campaign-finance reform. (Last year, a representative did break with her party on questions of LGBTQ+ rights—only it was a Democrat joining Republicans to limit access to trans healthcare.) Eventually, HBO fell out of love with the drama idea and fired the executive on the series, at which point Wright contemplated turning Sonny’s story into a “musical podcast.” Thankfully, that never came to pass. Instead, he wrote a novel—call it a fantasy—Mr. Texas, published last year.

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This is what politics is really like,” Sonny thinks to himself in the novel. “It wasn’t about doing good, it was about being less awful.” Mr. Texas is billed as a comedy, but melancholy informs Sonny’s political maneuvering. As a moderate Republican, Sonny knows that “he would probably get primaried by one of the Nazi youth the dominionists were so capable of producing” and that he could “never pass for a Dem. Independents didn’t exist.” For Wright, therein lies the problem: no moderating force, no enlightened center! (For further evidence of this tendency of his, consider Wright’s recent chummy contribution to an article by Joe Nocera in The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s right-wing rag, where—from his vantage as a “Pulitzer Prize–winning” quoted source—he joins a chorus of wealthy conservatives to croak about the rise in “lawlessness” in Austin, apparently because police felt “alienated” by the protests in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder.) HBO may have discarded the fictional conceit in favor of a documentary when it revived the God Save Texas title, but the series inspired by Wright’s work is similarly blinkered: captured by a myth about the value of patient, incremental liberal politics that should be dead many times over by now but still lumbers on, permitting the right to determine the bounds of Texas liberalism. Indeed, for many longtime Texas liberals, politics froze in the 1990s. The rest of the world has drifted a long way since then, and it will continue to drift so long as we reach for old answers that have ceased to apply to what ails the state—and the country—today.

Huntsville is a small East Texas town with seven nearby prisons and thousands of prisoners, among whom nearly 1,000 death-row inmates have been murdered. It also inspired some of Linklater’s films—“mostly comedies,” he says somewhat shamefully. Many of his friends growing up here have either worked at a prison or spent time behind bars. Linklater excels at demonstrating the casual cruelty here, contrasting the prison town’s brutality with the rural community’s charm.

In one scene in Linklater’s episode of the HBO series, families wait under the shade of old oak trees for their loved ones to be released. One child among them, waiting for his dad, tells Linklater: “I haven’t really been able to play football with anybody, because, like, my grandma’s not really into football.” As one might expect from the director of Boyhood, Linklater has an eye for moments like these, imbued with emotion even if sometimes his subjects can’t quite find the words to express all they feel. With nearly double the running time of the other two episodes, Linklater has more expanse to let his subjects speak for themselves. We see college students walking to class while a prison siren blares, learn of inmates giving guards and their families free haircuts, and follow a corps of correction officers drawn from a growing community of African immigrants in search of stable jobs.

But when it comes time to think out loud about what changes to the prison system we in Texas might aspire to, Linklater approaches the task self-consciously. No documentary requires its makers to provide a comprehensive list of reforms, but when a solution is offered, it’s worth asking where it leads and how it has informed the film’s argument up to that point. We meet several prison guards, but special attention is paid to Fred Allen, who was responsible for restraining at least 130 death-row inmates for their executions—around 10 percent of all the executions in Texas. Allen reached a point where he simply couldn’t keep going. “You ain’t got a right to take nobody’s life, period,” he says, but Allen still hasn’t budged on the prison system as a whole. His preferred alternative to death row is life without parole, “because that’s the worst sentence that an individual can have.”

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This is the point of view Linklater adopts. “There are sentencing options like life without parole,” he submits, almost pleadingly, near the end of the episode. Within the structure of the documentary, the death penalty once appeared to be the cruelest part of an impossibly cruel institution. By the end, it has become the only part of the system that, at least for Linklater, could possibly be reformed—and even that isn’t guaranteed. It’s as if he’s already tempered his proposal, certain it will be shot down anyway. Taken on their own, the documentary’s images could argue beyond this rather tepid conclusion, and yet Linklater’s scope appears squeamishly limited. Considering the prison-industrial complex, he tells Wright, “I guess, on one hand, it’s a blessing—it’s the local economy, largely—but it is a bit of a curse.”

This is putting it lightly. Even if we ended the death penalty tomorrow, Texas’s incarceration rate would still be among the highest in the world—never mind the “accidental” death toll in the state’s prisons. A 2014 report from the Prison Justice League, a prisoner-rights group in Austin, found that in one Huntsville-area prison, disabled prisoners suffered high rates of physical and sexual abuse inflicted by correction officers. Just last summer, at least 41 inmates in Texas died during a heat wave, including a few in Huntsville (more than two-thirds of our prisons have no air-conditioning in most living areas).

While court-sanctioned murder may be the most outwardly abhorrent piece of our criminal-justice system here in Texas, to remove it while saying little about the many other indignities we visit disproportionately upon poor people behind bars is like smearing lipstick on a pig. History shows that the right will resist practically any “bleeding heart” change to the prison system (though it may be moved on fiscal grounds, provided the system itself remains intact) and is quick to roll back reforms if need be. To limit our political imagination—and thus, political will—based on the whims of the opposition is not only shortsighted but also self-defeating, and it shirks the desperate need to decide what Texas liberalism actually stands for. Is it merely tweaking the worst aspects of an abhorrent system, or something altogether different? Why isn’t it possible to demand more?

This is the smothering effect of political loss after loss, which continues to constrict thinking in the series’ next episode, “The Price of Oil.” Alex Stapleton, a biracial “Texan in exile,” returns to Pleasantville, a suburb of the Houston area that she grew up visiting on weekends. “Where is the Black story in Texas,” Stapleton asks toward the beginning, “and where is the Black story when we talk about oil?” She highlights how settlers mounted the Texas Revolution to keep their slaves. From there, we learn of the origin of Pleasantville: The neighborhood was built in the late 1940s for middle-income Black families, which gave residents access to the benefits of suburban living for the first time. Then, in the 1970s, the refineries expanded practically into their backyards.

Today, chemical fires are common there, as are cancer, asthma, and other environmental harms. If you look at a map of toxic chemicals along the Houston Ship Channel, which is near the area in question, you’ll notice a smattering of red, orange, and yellow warning signs. Stapleton is up-front about the havoc the petrochemical industry has unleashed on the Houston area. The heightened risk comes with few rewards for Pleasantville: Due to systemic racism in the oil industry and among oil-rich politicians, she says, “my family today can continue to live in one of the wealthiest parts of the world without ever having the same opportunities.” Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the fate of her great-aunt’s home, which was damaged during Winter Storm Uri. Rather than attempt more expensive repairs, the local government provided only one option: to demolish the property and replace it with a smaller shotgun home. Meanwhile, the nearby fossil-fuel infrastructure, and the companies that run it, have remained intact.

And yet, toward the end of the episode, Stapleton chooses an odd point of critique: “Among the largest oil and gas companies in America, every CEO is white,” she says. “While other industries have been put on blast for their lack of diversity, the oil and gas industry has not had the same reckoning.” Stapleton does add later that her community needs “a seat at the table” as the country “entertains” a green transition, but the only specific action she suggests is increasing the diversity on corporate boards.

One might say I’m taking the docuseries too literally, and my critiques of what is first and foremost a form of infotainment can’t, or shouldn’t, be held to the same standards as, say, an essay—but this is what’s so galling about the tepid suggestions capping each episode. Consider the stakes: Supposing Chevron or ExxonMobil did face this DEI reckoning—what would actually change about the oil industry? The pollution would not stop, and even if conditions improved in Pleasantville, what about the rest of Texas, let alone the rest of the world? Standing at the base of the San Jacinto monument, which memorializes the Texas Revolution, Stapleton and Wright talk with their hands on their hips, contemplating the region’s environmental situation. “America obviously needs an energy source, and this is what it looks like,” Wright says. “I think the more we talk about Texas, the more complicated it seems.”

Complicated, yes, but can the Bard of Texas not say more? Can infotainment, as it were, not approach these issues with some creative liberty? Instead, Wright and Stapleton bow their heads to the apparent nuance of it all, and Stapleton retreats to old ground: “I want to document the history,” she says, “because that will live forever.”

In many ways, Iliana Sosa’s episode, “La Frontera,” is the prickliest of the three. Like Stapleton, she highlights the not-so-distant past, showing us how racist border policing has changed over time, and celebrates the community’s resilience in spite of this. From the early 1900s, when people crossing over from Mexico were “sanitized” with Zyklon B—the same gas used in Nazi concentration camps a few decades later—Sosa shows us the plans to gentrify downtown El Paso (helped along years ago, I should add, by then–City Councilman Beto O’Rourke). A marketing company commissioned by El Paso’s city government labeled its current, largely Hispanic identity “Old Cowboy,” meaning “male, 50-60 years old, gritty, dirty, [and] lazy.” Illustrating this point was an accompanying photo of an old Hispanic man in a cowboy hat. “That could be anybody’s abuelito,” Sosa says. On the next slide, the company proposed marketing a new identity called “New West”: It would be “educated, entrepreneurial, bilingual,” and modeled after Matthew McConaughey and Penélope Cruz, whose headshots accompany the text.

“We see so many depictions of the border, and I wanted to make sure that we were trying to do something different,” Sosa recently told Texas Monthly. To do so, paradoxically, she draws on the well-trodden work of the influential 1980s-era Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa and her concept of nepantla—an Aztec word referring to the unique space between two bodies of water—to explore identity in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez borderlands. To say Anzaldúa’s work is controversial is an understatement: In her 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa’s most important book, she praises a Mexican eugenicist and uses his writings to inform her own. Still, what sets Sosa’s episode apart, I think, is her honesty.

She comes to a realization near the end of the episode, at an event called Hugs Not Walls, which is hosted once a year to reunite separated families for around five minutes in the middle of the Rio Grande. The fences, surveilled heavily by the Border Patrol, are temporarily opened, and a team of volunteers installs a portable bridge. Lines form on either end, the US side in yellow, the Mexican side in blue. One by one, parents and children find each other, weep, and embrace. Watching this unfold, bitterness overtakes Sosa: “Hugs Not Walls may offer these families a fleeting embrace, but it also feels like I’m witnessing a spectacle of human pain in lieu of any real solution,” she says in a voice-over. That sentence rattled in my head for days after finishing these three episodes. God Save Texas, the title, is itself a plea for divine intervention, a symptom of learned helplessness, but Sosa’s pronouncement may as well be the show’s tagline.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/god-save-texas-hbo/
The Bipartisan Attack on Public Schools https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/school-choice-new-jersey/Sam Russek,Sam RussekNov 15, 2023

In New Jersey, liberal and conservative forces poured resources into the charter school movement. This effort helps explain the woes of the public school system in the country.

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Books & the Arts / November 15, 2023

The Bipartisan Attack on Public Schools

In New Jersey, liberal and conservative forces poured resources into the charter school movement. This effort helps explain the woes of the public school system in the country.

Sam Russek
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker at an educational summit at Rockefeller Plaza, 2010. (Photo by Charles Sykes / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

In 2000, the future Democratic senator Cory Booker spoke at a luncheon hosted by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. His speech was devoted to one topic: the virtues of school choice. Booker—who was then but a lowly Stanford-, Yale-, and Oxford-educated Newark City Council member—maligned the old “entitlement paradigm” that he believed was endemic to his city’s public school system. Booker proposed “redefining” pedagogy to mean “the use of public dollars to educate our children at the schools that are best equipped to do so” and advocated for, in essence, siphoning money away from the public school system and feeding it into more charter schools. The opposition to this movement would be fierce, he conceded, especially from the “educational bureaucracies” that benefited from the status quo, in particular teachers’ unions. But, peppering his speech with references to his political heroes—Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King Jr.—Booker contended that the charter movement would overcome its foes. He concluded with the words of James Baldwin: “One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”

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Much has changed in the past two decades. Although Booker once received funding from the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, which has donated millions to the school choice cause, he was, by 2019, publicly opposing Betsy DeVos’s successful bid to become Donald Trump’s secretary of education. More recently, the Manhattan Institute, which earlier called Booker’s rise “one of the most compelling American political stories of recent memory,” has since veered away from elevating Democrats of any sort and opted for a “marriage of convenience” with the Christian right, according to the historian Jack Schneider, helping foment a moral panic over “CRT” and trans children to drive a conservative referendum on public education. Meanwhile, Democrats have painted themselves as defenders of the public school system, likening their role today to those who fought to desegregate schools in the civil rights era, and their opponents to segregationists who relied on school vouchers to preserve their racist regime.

There’s some truth to this current framing, and yet it also elides decades of intervening history. While school choice has become among the most fiercely partisan issues in contemporary politics, not long ago the charter movement was a bipartisan project. Besides Booker, President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, announced a competitive grant program in 2009 that coerced states into embracing charters (Duncan called the push for school privatization a “new civil rights movement”), and, at Obama’s behest, the Rev. Al Sharpton went on tour with Newt Gingrich to promote “school innovation.” Even earlier, in 1987, New Jersey became the first among dozens of states to pass a “takeover” law, which allowed the state government to snatch control of school districts that failed to “demonstrate improvement.” Two years later, then–Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton collaborated with his future opponent in the 1992 presidential race, George H.W. Bush, to outline “rewards and sanctions” that would compel public schools to meet state standards (which they also determined), opening the way to defund and replace—rather than preserve and reform—public schools.

How could these former bedfellows so quickly become sworn enemies? To organizer and CUNY sociology professor John Arena, we must foreground the greater economic scheme behind divesting from public goods when looking at the history of the school choice movement. It’s not only a racialized issue based on determining who receives what kind of education; it’s also one that has massively benefited for-profit players and real estate interests looking to “revitalize” low-income areas. Studies have shown that school choice can actually accelerate gentrification, causing a spike in home values and exacerbating racial disparities. As Arena argues, it’s no wonder that privatized education found a solid footing as the Reagan administration dismantled the New Deal welfare state, and as the federal government looked to disempower unions and reduce social service spending. Today, as the world economy appears fragile and many US cities exhaust their cut of the Covid-19 stimulus funds, it should come as no surprise that the crusade to privatize has taken on a renewed vitality.

Drawing on the scholarship of Adolph Reed Jr., Arena contends that the racial rhetoric invoked in debates over school choice obfuscates “real class divisions, interests, and ideological diversity,” which has proved an indispensable tool to both “white and black political elites” who may oppose each other’s reasons for privatizing, but not the results. In his new book, Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark, Arena studies how a multiracial elite justified its privatizing schemes under the feel-good guise of racial equity—meaningfully eliding class equity—and how opposing forces were neutralized as a result.

Central to that story is Booker, who as mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013 fostered charters in the inner city but faced an unprecedented pushback from his constituents, and his successor, Ras Baraka (son of Amiri Baraka, one of the most influential Black Power revolutionaries of the post-civil-rights era), who as a progressive, self-proclaimed “radical mayor” ran against Booker’s legacy and only made things worse. Even as Newark passed into the hands of a vocal critic of, in Baraka’s words, Republican Governor Chris Christie’s “neocolonial” regime, all that rhetorical resistance proved to be just that—rhetorical.

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The American commentariat tends to smear Newark as a city of “urban crisis”: a place of crime, poverty, derelict public housing, and racial strife. It began, as with so many of the country’s downwardly mobile urban centers, with the post–World War II suburbanization boom, which prompted decades of white flight. Between 1950 and 1960, 115,000 whites left the city, including half of Newark’s teachers and administrators, only further stoking racial resentments. (Indeed, Amiri Baraka would coordinate a movement to counter-picket a 1971 teachers’ strike, charging that the teachers didn’t have the local students’ interests in mind.) By 1970, the overall city population had dropped by 14 percent. Only Washington, D.C., and Gary, Ind., witnessed as rapid a transition as Newark to a city with a non-white majority.

White flight coincided with a push for private enterprise in cities all across America: Public utilities like housing, healthcare, water, and, yes, schools, became emerging markets for entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the disinvestment of the country’s urban centers, solving a problem that had “bedeviled the ruling class” throughout the Great Depression, Arena writes. But what was good for capitalists was not necessarily good for cities. The loss of businesses and residences in Newark reduced its tax base and slashed home values, which forced city leaders to manage a “long-standing and deepening fiscal crisis” for years to come.

The political machine that emerged to meet this moment was aligned with the city’s shifting demographic makeup: In the post-civil-rights era, Newark was central among the cities that had come to be dominated by what is now known as the “Black Urban Regime” (shortened to BUR), a term Arena borrows from Adolph Reed Jr. that names a new political class made up of Black professionals drawn from a growing “managerial” workforce often employed by nonprofit foundations or government-funded Great Society programs. In 1970, Kenneth Gibson, who was previously a city engineer and vice president of an antipoverty program, became Newark’s first Black mayor—the first Black mayor of any major Northeastern city. The campaign took place in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark riots, which began after two white police officers beat and arrested a Black cab driver. Gibson ran a campaign that promised to reform the corrupt local government and make businesses pay their fair share, a policy he quickly abandoned. His white incumbent opponent, in turn, called him a “puppet” for the Black radical movement. In the end, Gibson’s mayorship did little to fix many of the racist inequities that had inspired the riots in the first place.

Once in office, Gibson obtained state funds to hire more police officers and other public employees, a strategy meant to sanitize the city for business investment. At the same time, he took an oppositional stance to the teachers’ union, seeing it as an opponent of his attempts to balance the city budget. In later years, he touted the improved health services under his watch, but among his regrets, he told The New York Times, was his inability to “attract major job-producing industries to the city.” The members of this new Black political class often seemed progressive in public and even allied themselves with populist causes from time to time, but the policies they supported were no less friendly to business interests than their predecessors, caught as they were between a Black working-class voter base and wealthy capitalist benefactors to legitimize their rule.

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By the time Booker became mayor in 2006, Newark had known 36 years of uninterrupted BUR control. Discrimination had by no means disappeared, and yet the city’s multiracial political class promoted a number of market-friendly policies that did little to solve inequality and, in fact, accelerated it. For instance, James Sharpe, who defeated Gibson in 1986 and held the mayorship for two decades, continued to enable “revitalization” in the city, which saw the demolishing of public housing and low-income neighborhoods in favor of private real estate schemes. Sharpe also enthusiastically backed Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which expanded prisons and padded police departments’ pockets, feeding the widening maw of mass incarceration.

Booker came to Newark’s inner city in 1998 “under the aegis of philanthropy,” Arena writes—he once staged a 10-day hunger strike to draw attention to the drug dealing and violence in Newark—and won a city council seat that same year. Booker’s “primary public policy issue” was public school reform. He contended that the old educational bureaucracy was too slow to respond to the rapidly changing needs of students at the dawn of the new century, and he proposed “choice” through school vouchers and charters for low-income students. His campaign quickly gained a powerful audience.

With support from a number of hedge funds and school-choice foundations, Booker and his local allies became the vanguard of the charter putsch. Mayor Sharpe had delivered on many core components of the privatization agenda, but as Arena writes, the strengthening school-choice movement saw him as an “obstacle” due to his willingness to ally himself with, and make accommodations to, the teachers’ union. While the BUR had been quick to ally with police and destroy public housing, it often still relied on support from different working-class constituencies, including public employees, to vindicate its positions as progressive. “The old post-civil rights black political class had served capital well in demobilizing the struggles of the 1960s and managing downtown regeneration strategies,” Arena writes, but by the end of the 21st century, “some of the very mechanisms these officials had deployed” to manage increasing inequality were becoming untenable.

Booker was innovative: He drew inspiration from “antiracist” rhetoric and a sanitized version of the civil rights movement, one that excused a post-political, post-racial “common sense”—similar to the playbook that, for decades, had allowed mayors across the country to demolish public housing, denigrating these underfunded institutions as an obstacle to progress rather than a meaningful, if flawed, public good. As Booker himself contended, his philanthropy and hedge fund backers found his message so alluring because he was “an African American urban Democrat telling the truth about education.”

In 2010, Booker collaborated with Republican Governor Christie to handpick Newark’s new school superintendent, Cami Anderson, who imposed a shock-therapy privatization plan called One Newark, in which K-12 parents would choose schools from a “menu of options” that included charters. Parents would no longer have a right to send their children to their neighborhood school, “destroying one of the chief, and often only, anchoring institutions serving distressed neighborhoods,” Arena writes. The facilities that saw a decline in enrollment or were designated as “failing” (i.e., the poorest) would be either closed or “restructured” under various schemes. Together, Booker and Anderson planned to maneuver the majority-nonwhite school system beyond what President George W. Bush had famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” In an attempt to whitewash this policy, Booker worked with a former Black nationalist turned charter advocate, Howard Fuller, who was a seasoned organizer and orator, to sell the change to the community. He also courted the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton family, and the now-defunct Steven P. Jobs Foundation, and he even appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show to receive a $100 million grant in person from Mark Zuckerberg.

His administration’s plan was met by an equally vociferous counteroffensive: The move to dismantle Newark’s public schools united teachers, parents, and students in opposition to Booker. Inspired by the recent Occupy movement, they walked out of classrooms, seized administrative buildings, and developed disruptive strategies that tied the Booker administration’s hands. They did so largely of their own accord; the teachers’ union leadership was slow to respond—and sometimes openly hostile—to the rank-and-file anti-charter position, and some principals threatened students with punishment if they participated in walkouts or other disruptions during school hours.

Yet the protests only escalated. The Star-Ledger, Newark’s local paper, pleaded for the local Black clerical wing to “step up and be counted” against the grassroots movement, which had taken to demonstrating outside Cami Anderson’s house and eventually drove her to the suburbs. Booker absconded to the Senate in 2013, before the end of his second term as mayor. Stepping into the power vacuum was Ras Baraka, a former principal whose “activist pedigree” vis-à-vis his father made him a natural antithesis to Booker. He ran a populist 2014 mayoral campaign with the slogan “When I become mayor, we all become mayor” and emphasized the necessity of “local control.”

Critically, Baraka didn’t denounce Booker’s actual education reforms, but rather the lack of democratic input with which they were instated. Students and teachers had demanded not only the removal of Superintendent Anderson but her “entire neoliberal agenda,” Arena writes. They would soon discover that Baraka shared only half of their aspirations.

When Baraka won in 2014, The New York Times called it a “rebuke” of the charter movement. Counterpunch noted, “It is exciting, and rare, to see politicians who really represent people triumph over corporate sponsored sycophants.” The Nation reported that Baraka’s win “might represent a key tipping point” for New Jersey progressives, comparing him positively to the recently elected New York City mayor, Bill DeBlasio.

They celebrated too soon. Although Anderson was ousted under Baraka, her reforms, including One Newark, remained, and Baraka put his thumb on the scale to approve more charter construction. Today, around one-third of Newark’s students attend charter schools; that number was below 7 percent in 2006. Meanwhile, privatization cannibalized millions of dollars from the public schools’ budget. The coalition that had formed to rebuke Booker began to sour on the new “radical mayor,” but by then its members had begun to dissipate, either demoralized by his lack of action or satiated by his rhetorical opposition to Christie’s government—a stark contrast from Booker’s “common sense.” Arena points out that Christie’s “thinly veiled racist attacks” on Newark’s public schools helped displace white suburban resentments toward shared services, which, in turn, “strengthened the power of Baraka’s own [campaign] to steer the movement toward a manageable” level of resistance. So long as he publicly opposed Christie, enough Newarkers believed that Baraka was doing right by them, keeping dissent at a minimum.

Baraka remains Newark’s mayor, and his decade-long reign only intensified the city’s reliance on charter schools. In 2018, as the political winds changed, he called for a halt on charter expansion because of how “aggressively” the industry had grown, yet not much has tangibly changed in the system itself. In addition to increased charter activity, Baraka oversaw the destruction of more public housing, which—along with school charterization—increased property values in the city, pricing longtime residents out, despite half-measures to tamp the trend. If Baraka’s electoral victory was meant to represent a strike against the agenda that preceded him, he has failed. But the movement to block the school district coup failed, too.

Why? Arena notes midway through the book that while organizers could agree on a “jobs for all” program—dusting off a New Deal artifact—they were unable to agree on how to swerve from a force against privatization and toward an alternative. Baraka was not only in the right place at the right time; he also received the backing of the local labor bureaucracy and social justice nonprofits, which were quick to suggest a candidate upon whom demonstrators could park their ambitions. The movement wasn’t savvy enough to recognize how the interests of the multiracial professional class were “cloaked by what is projected as the ‘race interests’ of all African Americans,” Arena writes. Essentially, the movement was duped—but are things really that simple?

Arena’s book leaps from early February 2018, the day Baraka filed for reelection, to conclude in the summer of 2020, recounting how local activists welcomed Baraka to lead the city’s largest march against police violence after George Floyd’s murder. Despite Baraka’s privatizing streak, which intensified rents and “necessitates aggressive policing” of the city’s marginal population—the working class and the unhoused—he was still seen by some as the city’s rightful leader. (He’s also been quick to defend his city’s police force, even arguing against federal oversight due to past civil rights violations.) After the protest, to quell calls for racial justice, Baraka started a fund for Black- and Latinx-owned businesses. Arena points out that this, too, will likely result in driving wealth to Newark’s racially diverse petty bourgeoisie—not to the heavily policed working class. Still, the march went off without a hitch, with no arrests and only minimal property damage. The New York Times called it “a victory” due to “a combination of tactical decisions, community and political leadership and the still-raw memory of 1967,” referring to the riots of yesteryear. “Courageous, defiant Baraka,” Arena previously observed, “was beyond reproach.”

“Let it be said clearly,” writes the social theorist Shemon Salam, “the George Floyd Rebellion is the new criterion to which all theories and politics must be held to account.” In the same way others have attributed the right’s focus on “CRT”—or the recently published No Politics but Class Politics, a collection of essays by Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels—to the notorious events of that summer, Arena is, in his own way, coming to grips with the fallout. He contends that Baraka’s anti-racist agenda was in fact “wholly in line” with the Black Lives Matter movement’s politics. This, again, feels somewhat shallow given all the reasons people were drawn to protest, not to mention the intersecting ways—spatial, legal, and otherwise—that race and class are experienced. Race has, after all, developed within American capitalism; it’s the “language through which” its ugly contradictions are often expressed, to paraphrase Reed. They are inseparable. To imply that the goals of the nonprofit arm “leading” the BLM movement from afar were shared by the entire crowd may, if we follow the logic, insinuate that Baraka was the Newark anti-charter movement—assuming the outcome supersedes each faction’s competing efforts. The 2020 demonstrations were also often spontaneous and swiftly flared out, whereas the anti-charter movement was protracted and organized.

Still, if the two have anything in common, it’s in how swiftly the horizons for their respective causes seemed to be curtailed by organized, well-funded politicos, bolstered by nonprofits, who did so under the guise of racial equity. With an eye toward the not-so-distant past—and the near future—Arena’s book asks why social movements collapse, and how liberal conceptions of racial politics, employed by a multiracial elite, have so often thwarted radical calls for change. Arena does an excellent job showing how the professional class’s tactics kneecap the ability of nascent movements to define themselves and their goals. Although Expelling Public Schools doesn’t answer every question we might have about how this could be prevented, it’s a good place to start.



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The First Great Action Movie About Climate Justice?https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/how-to-blow-up-pipeline-interview/Sam Russek,Sam Russek,Sam RussekApr 13, 2023How to Blow Up a Pipeline into a politically-minded thriller. ]]>

Few recent books on the climate movement have so flustered audiences like Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Since its publication in 2021, the left commentariat has spilled much ink weighing the potential benefits and costs of Malm’s call to sabotage fossil-fuel infrastructure because—to echo the IPCC’s bleak annual reports on climate change—we’re running out of time. But in other corners of opinion, a familiar blend of fascination and disdain emerged. “The problem with violence,” The New York Times noted in its initial review, “is that ultimately it’s impossible to control.” David Remnick of The New Yorker fretted that the property damage might “backfire and damage the movement.” Later, on her SiriusXM talk show, Megyn Kelly smirked at the book’s title and said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

For decades, the popular image of the climate activist in the media has jounced somewhere between out-of-touch tree-hugger and deranged supervillain, either too docile to meaningfully challenge their opponents or too crazy to be trusted with power. But Daniel Goldhaber’s film adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline does away with that paradigm. The film—written by Goldhaber and his friends Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol—boils down Malm’s book into a tightly wound thriller, in which eight lead characters who live hundreds of miles away from one another come together in heist-movie fashion to do exactly what the title states: destroy a major pipeline near Odessa, Tex.

While each character labors over the construction and placement of their homemade explosives, the film explores their motivations. Goldhaber, the son of climate scientists, toys with the climate-activist archetype, playing up the suspense in whether such a project could ever actually succeed. In other, more dismissive hands, Goldhaber’s white punks out of Portland could never have hoped to bridge the divide between themselves and a West Texas local, never mind the poor Black, brown, and Indigenous people whose neighborhoods have been more immediately affected by heat waves and cancer-causing pollutants. But Goldhaber’s film infuses these real tensions with an energizing sense of optimism. If Malm’s manifesto is the philosophical framework for why we should blow up a pipeline, Goldhaber’s film broaches the what if’s. What if a small team of people could utilize sabotage in such a way that their tactic becomes popular across the country? What if, despite each crew member’s varying needs and interests, their plan to topple fossil-fuel capital could actually work?

I spoke recently with Goldhaber about the challenges of making the film, the differences between cultural production and real climate activism, and state involvement in the film industry. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Sam Russek

Sam Russek: It took just 19 months to go from the conception of the idea for this movie to its premiere in Toronto last year, right?

Daniel Goldhaber: Climate change is urgent. We’re on a timeline of years or months, not decades, to solve this problem. From an artistic standpoint, we felt telling the story as quickly as possible [would create] an energy that is present and palpable in the film. My editor loves to say if you put a bunch of young people handling extremely fragile explosive material in a movie, the tension is going to be there whether you want it to be or not.

SR: You’ve said elsewhere that this film shouldn’t be confused with activism, and that “sometimes one can confuse the making of a piece of media or the consumption of a piece of media with having actually done” something. I was wondering if you could expand on that here.

DG: My first jobs in film were working on climate-change documentaries—my first job was as an assistant editor on a movie called Chasing Ice. I think you see a lot of back-patting and self-congratulating people where it’s like, “Yes, you’ve raised awareness; yes, you ‘contributed to the culture,’ but that’s it—and you own five cars that you bought with the money you made making your climate-change documentary.” That’s not to say you’re not allowed to build a career, that you’re not allowed to consume if you engage in activism, but it’s about being frank and at least self-aware about what you’ve done and what you’ve contributed to.

For us, we just don’t want to ever think we’ve done more than contribute a piece to cultural production. If we organize a fundraiser around the film to directly support people who are at the front lines of a movement, that might be a form of activism, but the creation of the movie itself was not. I think one of the reasons why there is so much media that contributes to this feeling on both sides of the aisle is partially a result of the extraordinarily cloistered way in which media is produced, the fact that it exists in these tight-knit communities where people want to feel like they’re doing something about the problems of the world. But the only thing they know how to do is make media, and sometimes they tell themselves they’re doing more than they actually are out of a sense of guilt.

SR: How did you and the other writers think about transmuting Malm’s manifesto into a fiction thriller? What were some of the tensions you wanted to maintain in the film?

DG: Half the battle when you’re writing is figuring out what you’re trying to say. With this, we were kind of handed the argument. Once we knew what the identity of the movie was and what the purpose of the movie was, and knew we were still trying to push back against the book in certain respects, it was a more straightforward process, which allowed us to animate that argument within the structure [of the film]. It was really about figuring out who these people would be, where they would come from, and also: How do you actually blow up a pipeline? Because, of course, the book doesn’t tell you how.

It became more Ocean’s 11-y over the course of the first few weeks of development, but the first movie we hoped to structure ours like was A Man Escaped. You have this title that suggests this process-based action that is a thriller, whether you like it or not. I was in the room with Ariela reading the book that Jordan had recommended to me, and we’d all been looking for something to write together, and I had this image of a bunch of kids in the desert struggling with a bomb—it was kind of a lightning-in-the-bottle moment. The piece of development that came later was the flashback structure, the nature of the ensemble, a lot of that human stuff. Ariella was the one who put those pieces together. It’s still acknowledging, again, these complications, these drawbacks, these character foibles. But at the same time, it’s not falling into a kind of cynicism about the ability to act, and that’s because there have been so many successful social justice movements throughout history—we just have to actually acknowledge and do justice to their tactics.

SR: At the Toronto International Film Festival, you mentioned that a technical adviser credited as “Anonymous” was a “higher-up” working in counterterrorism. It was surprising to me that someone like that was involved in the making of this movie. Can you explain their role a bit more?

DG: I thoroughly misspoke—it was opening night—but I can tell you frankly, our bomb consultant was somebody connected to a friend of a friend who is a giant bomb nerd and who works in counterterrorism as a contractor for the US military. He’s not in the military; he’s a contractor for the military. He’s an expert in improvised explosives that may or may not be used by people considered to be domestic terrorists. I worked with him under the guise of needing a bomb expert, because we wanted to make sure the bomb-building was accurate. He walked us through how to make the bombs, because he doesn’t like that bombs are always inaccurately made in movies. The only part of the script that our bomb consultant read was the bomb-building section. Outside of that, he never read the script; he never knew what the movie was about in full.

He knew it was about a bunch of kids blowing up a pipeline, but I don’t think he dug that deep into that. We talked to him about the nature of the subject matter, and his feeling was that, in his words, “People are very angry these days, and that’s really important to talk about.” And I think he felt there was value in a movie that showed how easily bombs can be made. It’s something people think is more difficult and less accessible than it is.

From our standpoint, it was no different from having a consultation with the oil-pipeline expert we consulted with. I also thoroughly understand suspicions of US involvement in cinema production, because [the government] is involved in quite a bit of propagandistic cinema production, like Top Gun: Maverick. But in this film, nobody ever saw the script, nobody ever gave script notes, and there was actually no material involvement with any actual counterterrorism officials. We had full creative control over the film. At no point did we censor anything in the movie for any reason.

SR: Who else did you reach out to for research?

DG: I’m a bit hesitant to put any individual on blast. But the research process started with Andreas [Malm], initially connecting with people in his network and branching out from there. We started from the standpoint of “Hey, we’re thinking of making a movie that’s an interpretation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline—what do you think that movie should be?” One of the first questions we asked is, “What would you fear most for this film to be?”

SR: What were some of the fears?

DG: That the film may not acknowledge the consequences of an act like this appropriately, and that the film would give enemies of the climate movement ammunition against it. This doesn’t mean the movie will not fall victim to bad-faith criticism, but it was important that we felt we could stand by any criticism we got. But I think, more than fears, there were a lot of points of guidance: to avoid treating the Indigenous voices in the film as a monolith, to include various perspectives. The constant pressure and suspicion that informants and the FBI created in these communities was something we dug into. Ultimately, people really just encouraged us to do justice and pay homage to the very genuine sacrifices that activists make.

SR: I appreciate that Pipeline ends where it does—with all the ramifications yet to be fully felt, allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusion and, in your words, “empathize with this act.” Can you explain that choice?

DG: It was the last thing that we locked in. We kept going back and forth on the ending, because we had originally conceptualized it in terms of trying to demonstrate the impact a little bit more. But I think something we found was that there was no amount of aftermath that was ever going to satisfy the audience—and us—because the problem is, there is no one-to-one relationship between blowing up a pipeline and where it goes from there, and I think it took us a while to really understand this. But that’s part of an act like this: You do it because you believe it’s justified, not because it’s going to immediately save the world. Contemporarily, we have a desire to feel a one-to-one relationship in our stories, especially because of the domination of Marvel in those kinds of stories in the cultural landscape, which is evidence of their propagandistic value and appeal. But ultimately, we recognize that this is a movie about people who do something because they believe it’s just, and they get away with it. They get away with it at great personal cost, and that’s the movie.



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Meet the Woman Leading the Charge Against Bail Reform in New Yorkhttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/madeline-brame-bail-reform-critic/Sam Russek,Sam Russek,Sam Russek,Sam RussekNov 8, 2022

On a cool spring morning outside a Dunkin’ Donuts in the Bronx, Madeline Brame stood before a pair of TV news microphones and cleared her throat. “This is my son, Sergeant Hason Correa,” she said, directing the cameras’ attention to the large poster she held of a man in military fatigues, a photo from when he served in the war in Afghanistan. The rally of around 25 people was made up mostly of friends and collaborators who stood behind her. Four years ago, she said, when her son was 35, “Hason was kicked, punched, stomped, and stabbed nine times by four people he did not know, nor had he done any harm.” The knife stroke that killed him plunged straight through his chest, piercing his heart.

Wesley “Wes” Correa, Brame’s ex-husband and Hason’s father, was stabbed 10 times in the same incident. Three of the alleged perpetrators were being held in the correctional facility on Rikers Island. But since the New York State Legislature passed bail reform in 2019, the fourth person, a woman named Mary Saunders, Brame told the cameras, “has been free on bail for over two-and-a-half years, home with her family.” At this, she paused for several moments. When she spoke again, she was louder, more assured.

“You see, I’m not politically correct,” declared Brame, now 60. “I want to speak directly to the Black and brown community: When are Black lives gonna start mattering to Black people?”

The crowd cheered.

That day’s rally kicked off retired police lieutenant Sammy Ravelo’s 140-mile walkathon from the Bronx to the state capitol in Albany—a demonstration, sponsored by 10 New York–based groups, against the 2019 bail reform law. The New York State statute is among the most progressive in the country, abolishing cash bail for a slew of misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes while mandating that judges consider affordability and prioritize release in cases where bail can be imposed. (Governor Kathy Hochul and former Governor Andrew Cuomo have both added to the list of offenses for which judges can set bail—among them, certain violent crimes and gun crimes).

The movement for bail reform was born out of the understanding that people shouldn’t be held in jail before trial because they lack access to wealth. At its inception, bail was meant to act as a financial incentive to “make sure folks come back to court,” said Krystal Rodriguez, policy director at the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College. In practice, however, it became a sort of pretrial punishment—nearly half a million people held in US jails haven’t been convicted of a crime. The movement gained traction throughout the country over the past decade after a series of high-profile cases in which innocent people were held in jail for years, and culminated before the pandemic with a proliferation of laws and programs aimed at reducing that outcome. Then, as if on cue, the right latched onto public safety as a rallying cry.

To date, there are no studies linking bail reform to a rise in crime anywhere in the United States, and an analysis by the state released earlier this year showed that only 2 percent of bail offenses in New York had led to rearrests on violent felonies. But Ravelo, who ran for Bronx Borough president last year on the Conservative Party line, told the crowd that bail reform was “a Band-Aid” on an open wound. Violent crime was up, he said; people were dying, and the specter of repeat offenders, released without bail, was terrorizing the community. In seven days, Brame and a legion of others would take charter buses to meet Ravelo in Albany and rally again. Before embarking on his walk, Ravelo dedicated his journey to Brame and her son, proclaiming, “She’s the queen of the movement.”

s the midterms drew near, Republicans and conservative Democrats pounced on bail reform as the reason for a rise in violent crime in New York City, and Brame became a prominent spokesperson for their crusade. Their logic: If you release someone accused of a crime—any crime—without any deterrent against committing another one, you risk unleashing a mob of unapologetic criminals. Their solution: the return of the old bail system, and more policing.

Brame’s willingness to link her son’s devastating story to bail reform is a godsend for lawmakers and candidates who have staked their political campaigns on fighting reform. When progressives ask them to back up their tough-on-crime stance with data, they can deflect with her testimony, which is more visceral than any statistic. “It’s a very tragic story that really hits home,” said Patrick McManus, chairman of the Bronx County Conservative Party. Brame purportedly brought him to tears when she spoke at a rally in front of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office. “I’m not a very spiritual person, but I saw something come over her. A spirit comes over Madeline when she speaks of her son.”

Brame was not always an activist. She says her son’s death was the “catalyst” for her journey into right-wing politics. Brame has repeatedly appeared on Fox News to discuss how bail reform is “rewarding” her son’s killer and has been the subject of a number of New York Post articles. Earlier this year, she spoke with former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani on his podcast,  Common Sense, scrutinizing the use of violence in rap music and what she described as the demise of the Black nuclear family—both of which, in her view, have led to an epidemic of Black-on-Black crime. Most recently, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin has drawn on her story to outline his “Pathways Up” plan for low-income, largely Black communities. In early October, he invited Brame to attend a press conference in Harlem where he proposed the “Hason Correa Small Business Incubator Initiative,” a public-private partnership intended to increase entrepreneurship in low-income communities.

When the cameras were gone that day in the Bronx, Brame withdrew to the outskirts of the crowd. She seemed exhausted. For too long, she told me, the scale of justice has tipped in favor of criminals, leaving victims like her to suffer “without a voice.” If criminal justice reform purports to right historical wrongs against the culprits, victims “don’t know where to turn to for help,” she said.

Brame’s complicated story illustrates how a search for catharsis can blur the differences between justice and revenge. It also shows how tough-on-crime policies can attract unlikely supporters in low-income Black communities—and, as voters head to the polls, how criminal justice reform’s conservative opponents are only too happy to exploit tragic stories like Brame’s for their own ends.

n October 20, 2018, at around 2 am, Brame got the call from her daughter-in-law: her son was dead. Stabbed to death.

Hysterical, Brame ran and caught a taxi to the Harlem Hospital Center on Malcolm X Boulevard. When she arrived, she wasn’t allowed to see Hason’s body; he was already in the hospital’s freezer.

Hason’s father, Wes Correa, remained in the hospital for six weeks with severe injuries. Correa declined to tell anyone his side of what happened; even today, he refuses to cooperate with investigators and does not want to testify, a decision that the defense implies in court documents amounts to an admission of fault. Still, details slowly trickled out from the police, tabloids, and, eventually, court documents.

According to these documents, security camera footage showed, at 10:31 pm, Hason and Correa “repeatedly punch, kick, and strike” a man named Gene Crews with a liquor bottle after an argument. Crews, “angry and bleeding,” then fled across the street, where his neighbors—Travis Stewart and Christopher, James, and Mary Saunders, all siblings—were hanging out. Hason and his father went upstairs to an apartment. After 10 minutes, they came back down. Hason stored a pistol from his waistband in a nearby flower box.

Another argument—the men were again in each other’s faces. Hason punched James Saunders in the face, knocking him to the ground. Stewart retaliated, punching Correa in the face, also knocking him to the ground. Hason tried to run away, but he was pursued by the three Saunders siblings. James wielded a knife.

The siblings encircled Hason. Court documents indicate that James stabbed and beat him while his siblings kicked him on the ground. When Correa tried to step in and stop the attack, he was stabbed 10 times. Hason was stabbed nine times—in the head, torso, stomach, leg, and heart. Using his last bit of life, he broke free and ran to retrieve the pistol from the flower box. The suspects fled.

Immediately after, Hason succumbed to the wound to his heart, collapsed, and died. The confrontation lasted approximately three minutes.

Ten days later, Mary Saunders turned herself in. Stewart turned himself in one week after her, while the Saunders brothers were both apprehended by police in the spring of 2019, around the same time the New York State Legislature voted to eliminate cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes, effective in 2020. The three men have each been held without bail. For Mary, bail was initially set at $750,000. But unlike the other defendants, she had no prior offenses. With a daughter at home, she was not deemed a flight risk, and 23 friends, family, and coworkers wrote character reference letters to the judge on her behalf. Her lawyer successfully appealed for a reduction in bail, down to $10,000, in accordance with “recent reform,” which accounts for affordability, and also happens to be the median cost of bail for felonies nationwide. Mary’s family raised the money by pooling their tax refunds.

For Brame, this reduction—though not elimination—of Mary’s bail amounted to a betrayal: “She’s free to come and go like she didn’t just participate in the slaughter of another human being,” she said. Yet Michael Rempel, director of the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, said that even before bail reform, New York judges have had discretion to reduce bail after an initial hearing in violent cases. And “historically,” he added, “judges have been especially receptive to bail reduction arguments if the defense can argue there’s been a change of circumstances.”

In May, Mary accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to one year in jail, but because she’d already spent 14 months in Rikers, she was released. One month later, Travis Stewart accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to seven years. James Saunders pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and first-degree gang assault, with a minimum of a 20-year sentence. At the time of publication, Christopher Saunders’s trial is ongoing.

t the October press conference in Harlem, where Lee Zeldin invited Brame to stand next to him as he announced his proposal for the Hason Correa Small Business Incubator Initiative, Dion Powell, a Black conservative activist and Brame’s friend, felt like his stomach was churning. “I get more disgusted day by day with this,” he said. While Powell supports Zeldin, to him the optics were all wrong. With the exception of the occasional heckler, the windswept crowd behind the camera was too white. Without visible Black supporters, Powell feared the “message” wouldn’t translate for Black voters.

“Did you speak?” Powell asked Brame after she stepped away from Zeldin.

Brame shrugged. “He spoke for me,” she said. Although Zeldin had misidentified Hason as her husband in his speech, to Brame his proposal still represented a consecration of her son’s legacy. “I hope it’s not contingent on him winning,” she said. “Suppose he doesn’t—we’re still gonna do it.”

In his announcement, Zeldin had mentioned North Bellport—part of a village of around 1,900 on Long Island with a historically Black population—saying that nobody, “Republicans or Democrats,” campaigned there because they assumed their votes were spoken for. The result: “Communities that need help the most” are ignored.

Zeldin’s shout-out to North Bellport resonated with Brame, and not only because she agreed with his message. The town happens to be where Brame grew up; it’s where her path to becoming a crusader against bail reform began.

Like most towns across the country, Bellport was segregated. A set of railroad tracks divided rich whites and middle-class Black people on one side, and poor, primarily Black and brown families on the other. Brame’s family was among the middle class. “We were taught, don’t even go near the tracks,” she said. As a child, when she asked why, Brame remembers her mother answering with a laundry list of reasons: drugs, violence, crime, welfare—moral failings, all, according to her mother.

Her mother’s stern orders created a forbidden want within her: She was tantalized by the other side of the tracks, she told me, until she finally made the leap. Of her six siblings, she was the only one not to go either to college or the military. Instead, she ran away with her boyfriend, Wes Correa, who signed with a professional basketball team in Puerto Rico. Soon they had Hason.

In 1988, after Correa failed a doping test, he and Brame broke up, and Hason was taken from her custody. She moved to Harlem at the height of the crack epidemic. She sold drugs, cooked crack herself, and fell headfirst into the criminal justice system, landing in jail after relapsing seven times. Her memory of the 1990s is peppered with time in prison.

“When I first started getting arrested, I had my whole family wrapped around my finger,” Brame said. They visited her constantly. Her mom even sent an allowance. But after repeated offenses sent her back to prison, “My mother said, ‘Wait a minute: You must like it.’”

When Brame’s family stopped visiting, she turned inward. She read the Bible from cover to cover—twice—just to pass the time. Though numerous studies have shown that incarcerating people for drug-related offenses has little impact on rates of substance abuse, Brame said she believes that the tough-on-crime policies that incarcerated her for almost a decade, in tandem with her mom’s tough love, actually made a difference in helping her turn her life around. By 2000, Brame was out of prison and stable enough to reunite with Hason, who moved in with her after graduating high school. In her view, she wouldn’t have had a chance to mother him again if prison hadn’t set her straight.

Brame is critical of mass incarceration; she pins much of the blame on Biden and the Clinton administration’s passage of the 1994 crime bill, which radically increased the number of people in prison. “They would lock people up for minor things,” she told me. “And they never get out of the system.” But at the same time, she holds something akin to nostalgia for Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor and George Pataki’s as governor. If she looks at herself as a case study, she believes their policies worked.

In her search for answers after Hason’s death, Brame went online to brush up on history. She came to believe that Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty was a farce that had expanded welfare to subjugate Black people, forcing them to rely on the state, rather than their own families, to survive. This version of events made sense to her—what had the Democrats done for her, for Hason? She also discovered Candace Owens, a Black conservative pundit who once said police brutality is “not a major issue facing Black Americans today.” According to Owens, the problem is Black-on-Black crime.

Through Owens, Brame discovered the New York State chapter of Blexit, a national foundation Owens established in 2018 that encourages Black people to leave the Democratic Party, among other things. Arthur Roldan, a New York police officer recently named in a Civilian Complaint Review Board letter noting “abuse of authority” against Black Lives Matter protesters, founded Blexit’s New York chapter in 2020. Brame took over as state director in 2021 and says they have approximately 600 members statewide.

For Brame, bail reform is something like a mousetrap—one she sees unfolding in New York City right now. “Let me give you a scenario,” she told me. “Four shiny, brand new mega-jails are being built within the boroughs of New York City.” Brame was referring to the city’s 2017 plan to construct four borough-based new facilities and to reduce the city’s jail population by 25 percent—from around 9,400 people to 7,000—in order to close Rikers by 2027. (Mayor Eric Adams has since cast doubt on whether the project will happen as planned.) Her theory is that while Democrats construct the new facilities, they let the criminals out and allow them to rack up charges. Then, once the cellblocks are ready, Democrats can swoop in and grab all the repeat offenders, holding them for life. “Those are the bodies that are going to fill the beds in those mega-jails,” she said. After all, prison is “a money-making business.”

As has always been the case, Brame said, the people getting the short end of the stick are in Black and brown communities. “Criminals are the industry, right?” she told me, but poor victims are not. There’s no money to be made. “We’re just like collateral damage.”

For Brame, “The only way out of this situation for our communities is for somebody to have the courage to stand up and speak the truth. Statistics,” she said, “are not truth.” But standing up has been alienating. As she’s become more active and outspoken, she’s become estranged from friends, “family members, too,” she said.

“They’re scared to death,” she said. “People are not ready to hear the truth.”

n the day of the trip in April to meet Sammy Ravelo at the New York State capitol, 14 people traveled by charter bus from the Bronx, and dozens more came by another bus from Flushing. One woman around the same age as Brame stepped aboard and introduced herself as Sharlene Jackson Mendez. She held a neon green poster that read, “Wake Up Black America, Return to Excellence.” Brame smiled and told Mendez her name.

Mendez’s eyes widened. She expressed her condolences and planted herself in the seat next to Brame.

Mendez saw Brame as a kind of mirror image. They were both mothers; grandmothers, too. They’d both lived in the Bronx, albeit in different neighborhoods, and had grown up Black in the 1960s.

The two women posited that a range of factors, including “critical race theory” in public schools and “hug a thug” policies in New York, have led to today’s rise in crime. Eventually, Kalief Browder came up. If ever there was a case that might complicate Brame’s conception of bail, Browder’s is it. At birth, Browder was placed into the care of Child Protective Services while his mother struggled with drug addiction. He was arrested in 2010, at age 16, for allegedly stealing a backpack, and held for three years in Rikers. His family couldn’t afford to pay his $3,000 bail. Two years after the charges were dropped and he was released, he died by suicide. His story became a rallying cry for bail reform across the country. Brame and Mendez lowered their voices.

“They use that story.” Brame said in an accusatory tone. “His brother spearheaded bail reform.”

“How do they use his story?” I asked. She told me groups like Black Lives Matter “never let a good tragedy go to waste. Bail reform is something that they have been trying to do for years. And they just needed one instance, one case to prove why it was necessary.”

I asked if she felt like the right used her story in a similar way.

“Absolutely,” she said. “They use me and my son’s story to promote their political agenda and campaign. But at the same time, my son’s story is getting out there. It’s one hand washing the other. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Brame believes Hason’s case will also serve as a kind of spark for a full repeal of bail reform in New York. But bail reform is only the beginning; in the long term, she said, the goal is to inspire a total rejection of criminal justice reform, which, in her view, favors criminals over “tax-paying people.”

A little before 10 am, the bus dropped us off at the state capitol in Albany. We stood in the rain waiting for Ravelo to finish the final stretch of his journey. Passengers of the second bus from Flushing were mostly affiliated with the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY), spurred to action by the uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic.

TV news reporters were setting up their cameras. On the road two days earlier, Ravelo had met with Andrew Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani’s son, then running to be the Republican gubernatorial nominee. Among those waiting for Ravelo in the shadow of the capitol were Joe Pinion III, also a Republican, running for the Senate, and William Barclay, minority leader of the New York State Assembly. Finally, at 11 am, Ravelo limped toward the crowd.

“We’re on Facebook Live right now,” Ravelo said, using an umbrella as a makeshift cane. “I was just saying that I dedicated this walk…to Miss Madeline Brame.”

The rally commenced. Someone unfurled an African American flag, the traditional stars and stripes in red, black, and green. The chairman of the CACAGNY spoke. “The politicians are living in denial and still want to see more data. You’re gonna hear this data!” he said, pointing at Brame. Ravelo was up next. “This walk is not about me,” he said. “This is not about race either.” Then came minority leader Barclay: “This is not about statistics. It’s not about numbers. It’s about the victims of crime. ” And Pinion: “This is not about politics. This is about people.”

By the time Brame approached the microphone, a number of politicians had already slipped away, back to their offices or maybe lunch. Few stayed to hear what she had to say. Ravelo stayed, but Brame told me she hasn’t heard from him in the six months since the protest. If the rally wasn’t about politics, it didn’t seem like it was about her either.

Brame’s voice echoed across the plaza as if calling out from the edge of a canyon. She spoke of Hason, murdered “like he’s an animal.” She spoke of Hason’s children, who visited his grave last Christmas. She spoke of justice. She expelled her grief, and we, the crowd, absorbed it.



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