Category Archives: News

Two covers for Two Presidents?

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NYU Press takes a different path to publishing a book on the political gridlock in Washington DC

When NYU Press decided to publish a provocative new book, Two Presidents Are Better Than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch, by David Orentlicher, arguing in favor of two Presidents, rather than one, it had a number of major challenges, according to Steve Maikowski, Director of NYU Press. “First, we had to ensure that the final manuscript made a very convincing and well-grounded case for such a controversial idea, and the author, a Professor of Law at Indiana University, did indeed ground his argument forcefully in both law and American history. Otherwise, we feared the book would be dismissed out of hand as implausible by pundits and the review media.”

The Press saw the book, which advances this idea of a bipartisan executive branch, as a way to break the political gridlock between the Republicans and Democrats—and especially timely and worthy of serious review attention, given the endless budget impasses and the ongoing fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington.

A far-fetched argument? Not according to the author, or to the early reviewers of the book, including Sanford Levinson, an acknowledged expert on constitutional law and professor of government at the University of Texas School of Law. Levinson wrote, “Can Orentlicher be serious in calling for a plural executive? The answer is yes, and he presents thoughtful and challenging arguments responding to likely criticisms. Any readers who are other than completely complacent about the current state of American politics will have to admire Orentlicher’s distinctive audacity and to respond themselves to his well-argued points.”

The Press was further encouraged by the very favorable pre-publication buzz the book (or rather, the idea behind the book) received from the Washington Post and Boston Globe. What seemed to be an implausible argument of a plural executive branch was called by the Globe, “a fresh lens on a problem we all complain about—and may offer useful guidance for how we should go about trying to reform our government.” Orentlichter went on to appear on ‘Fox and Friends,’ where he was met with just a twinge of cynicism, but also a whole lot of encouragement.

The book also received several excellent pre-publication reviews, including the following praise from Publishers Weekly: “As unlikely as the thought may sound, Orentlicher makes a surprisingly persuasive case for this radical change. Orentlicher delivers a compelling explanation of how such a system would better align with the framers’ original conception of the executive branch… the author has an incisive eye for the problems of contemporary government.”

With the very positive buzz circulating the book, the next challenge was how best to package and market the book to draw attention to the author’s controversial proposal. The NYU Press design and marketing team met the challenge head on, and immediately found a way to encapsulate the author’s argument in an innovative and exciting design.

In a launch meeting for the book, the discussion turned to how best to evoke visually such a two-headed being. Adam Bohannon, a designer at the Press, and Mary Beth Jarrad, marketing and sales director, decided to publish the book with two different covers—one to appeal to Democrats, and another to appeal to fans of the GOP. The Press then commissioned an illustration that would show the pairing of the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant. The result: two covers that look very much the same, but each features one of the iconic partisan images, the donkey or the elephant.

The book was released to the trade in February, with an equal number of copies of each edition in each carton shipped to wholesalers and retailers. The Press decided it would be too burdensome to track sale of each book, which would have required separate ISBNs and increased management of two titles rather than one. “We’ll probably never know which of the two editions sells the best, and as long as we sell them all, we probably will not care to know,” said Jarrad. “The next big question is, when we publish the paperback in 2014, which of the two covers should we use then.”

In memoriam: Hugo Chávez

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—Michael D. Yates

The death of Hugo Chávez saddens those struggling for a better world. He was a great champion of the impoverished workers and peasants of both Venezuela and the world, and a steadfast and bold critic of the rapacious and murderous imperialism of the United States.

Monthly Review Press is proud of the books we have published on Venezuela, books which describe, analyze, and show solidarity with the Venezuelan road to democratic socialism. A key element in building a revolutionary, new society is to ensure the health of the people. This has been one of Chávez’s singular achievements; millions of poor Venezuelans have received (free) medical care for the first time. In cooperation with Cuba, Venezuela has begun to construct a system of patient-centered, decentralized, and preventive health care, a process examined in Steve Brouwer’s Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care. Remarkably, peasants and workers are themselves trained to be doctors, in a work and study program pioneered by Cuba.

Under Chávez, Venezuela has striven to secure its political and economic independence from the United States, which has had a sordid history of intervention in the country and in all of Latin America. Not only did he help to engineer a strong economy not dependent on the United States, he never hesitated to challenge with words and deeds its imperialist practices. Given the implacable hostility of the United States to Venezuela, examined with great care by Eva Golinger in Bush versus Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela, it is remarkable that Chávez remained in power, winning democratic elections and surviving a Bush-engineered coup. This is a testament to the depth of his revolution and the growing power of Latin American governments to steer a course independent of the United States, a power inspired by Venezuela.

Following the failed coup in April 2002, when massive popular protest propelled him back to the presidency, Chávez sat down with Marta Harnecker and provided insights into his own political trajectory and the nature of what he called “socialism for the twenty-first century.” His words were later published in Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

While Monthly Review Press must sell books to remain in operation, our main purpose has always been to promote radical thought and action in the world. We have published books in which authors have expressed the deepest admiration for Hugo Chávez, but praise for a radical leader is never our goal; it is the empowerment of the masses of workers and peasants we want to help achieve. And yet, it must be said that our love for Chávez has been amply repaid.

In April 2009, at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad, Chávez arose from his seat, walked over to Barack Obama and handed him a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic work of the centuries-long exploitation of Latin America by the great imperialist nations (including, of course, the United States): Open Veins of Latin America. He inscribed the book, “For Obama, with affection.” As word of this spread around the world, the English edition of the book reached #2 on Amazon’s sales charts. This was a great boon to Monthly Review Press and to our distributor, NYU Press. We were inundated with emails and phone calls, and I remember having to quickly re-read the book (which I had used in my classes when I was a teacher), so that I could write and deliver, within one day, a review to an Australian magazine.

Let us hope that as the Venezuelan revolution continues and as the imperial power of the United States someday diminishes in response to popular revolt here, it won’t be necessary for the president of one country to give such a book to the leader of another. Because Hugo Chávez’s dream and that of every revolutionary person will have been realized… That there be no rich and poor, that there be no exploiter and exploited, that there be only one healthy and happy humanity.

Michael D. Yates is a writer, editor, and labor educator. He is Associate Editor of Monthly Review and Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press.

Supreme Court must protect minority rights

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—F. Michael Higginbotham

Recently, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, examining the constitutionality of Section 5 “pre-clearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 mandates that states or portions thereof with a history of discriminatory voting laws get prior approval by the Department of Justice for any changes to their election laws. In 2009, the Supreme Court upheld Section 5, but Chief Justice Roberts indicated that the section creates “serious constitutional questions” and should be “justified by current needs.”

For 47 years, the Voting Rights Act has prohibited certain racially discriminatory election practices and given the federal government supervisory powers over jurisdictions that used such practices. This supervisory role has proven crucial to ensuring protections for racial minorities previously excluded from their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

In signing the bill, President Lyndon Johnson termed it “a monumental law in the history of American freedom.” He was right. Shortly after the law was enacted, 800,000 blacks registered to vote in covered jurisdictions. Few minorities were registered prior to its passage. Today, there are over 10,000 elected black officials; in 1965, there were approximately 300.

Because of this progress, some question whether Section 5 is still needed. Recent voting irregularities in the covered jurisdictions, where allegations of minority voter suppression have been lodged due to faulty election machines, purges in voter rolls, burdensome voter identification requirements, and winner-take-all at-large districting mandates, suggest that it is.

It is in this last category where Section 5 has been most effective preventing changes in election practices that would undermine the voting power of racial minorities.  The Shelby County case provides insight. Prior to local elections in 2008, the City of Calera, located in Shelby County, redrew its jurisdictional boundaries. The redrawn boundary eliminated the City Council’s only majority-black district by adding several white subdivisions adjacent to Calera while refusing to incorporate a black area located nearby. The lone majority-black district was reduced from 70 to 30 percent black, resulting in the election loss of Ernest Montgomery, the only black city councilperson.  The Justice Department would not approve the redistricting plan and, after extensive negotiations, Calera adopted a more inclusive at-large election system. A system that prevented a white numerical majority from controlling 100 percent of the six positions on the city council and that resulted in Montgomery receiving the most votes of all council candidates.

While much progress has been made over the last few decades including black registration rates equivalent to whites, racially polarized voting patterns coupled with vote prevention and dilution practices suggest a continued need for vigilance.  In  2001, the white mayor and all white city council in Kilmichael, Mississippi cancelled elections shortly after blacks became a majority of registered voters. Last year in Texas, two federal courts identified multiple examples of more sophisticated, yet equally outrageous, discriminatory redistricting practices including removing economic centers from majority-minority districts and placing them in white districts without any financial reasons for doing so, and removing minorities from such districts who have voted in prior elections  and replacing them with minorities who have not recently voted in order to maintain the appearance of a majority-minority district without the likelihood of minorities casting the most ballots. In each situation, Section 5 was used to prohibit the discriminatory practice. With so many clearly identified problems, it is hard to believe that five justices of the Supreme Court would decide that anti-discrimination protections in Section 5 are no longer “justified by current needs”.

F. Michael Higginbotham is the Wilson H. Elkins Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He is the author of Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions and Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (NYU Press, 2013).

Black History Month: “Wrong Complexion for Protection” when disasters strike

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—Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright

In thinking about Black History Month and the great strides that have been made in the arenas of civil rights and racial equality, an immense body of work about the glaring racial disparities in employment, education, income and wealth, housing and health care comes to mind. However, far less has been written or publicized about the glaring inequities that exist in government response to natural and human-induced disasters. Decades before Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast, millions of African Americans learned the hard way that waiting for the government can be hazardous to their health and health of their community.

In Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Westview Press, 2009), we documented that racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed Katrina exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs.

We expanded this analysis and focus in The Wrong Complexion for Protection (NYU Press, 2012), a book that places the government response to natural and man-made disasters in historical context over the past eight decades—from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.  Here, we compare and contrast how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, bioterrorism threats, and natural and human-induced disasters that disproportionately affect African Americans.

Our analysis chronicles history lessons not learned, government failures, and inadequate and inequitable government response to natural and human-induced disasters and emergencies.  Our goal is to shed new light on issues of health equity, environmental and climate justice, spatial and racial vulnerability, and the government’s role in providing equal protection under the law for all Americans, without regard to race, color, national origin, or income.

Too often, African Americans have experienced slow, unequal or no response from various local, state, and federal government agencies on a range of emergencies.  This scenario has often been the rule—not the exception—as in the case of the USDA and the discriminatory treatment of black farmers and the slow and inept response by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to protect black landowners in Dickson, Tennessee, tagged the “poster child” for environmental racism.

The simple but urgent message of this book is equity, justice and fairness. Centuries of black exploitation, experimentation, drug testing, and forced surgeries have engendered mistrust of government, medical establishment, and biomedical research. Fairness is essential to building trust and reaching any meaningful solution to natural and human-induced disasters and for achieving sustainability and homeland security.  Fairness matters. It matters how we design and plan strategies for addressing public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents and spills, earthquakes, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, tornados, droughts, heat waves, and bioterrorism threats. Making disaster response equitable is a matter of civil and human rights, and in the spirit of Black History Month, we must strive for equality in the sectors which have historically excluded or otherwise exploited African Americans.

Robert D. Bullard (Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston) and Beverly Wright (founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University, New Orleans) co-authored The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African Americans (NYU Press, 2012).

Gay rights, a gay mayor, and the tiny town of Vicco, Kentucky

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—Bernadette Barton

Last November, I was a guest on a radio call-in show based in Baltimore, Maryland. We were discussing my book Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays and the host asked me how close Kentuckians were to marriage equality. Maryland, of course, had just approved same-sex marriage, and residents were abuzz with their victory, or disturbed and grouchy, depending on their perspective. Regardless, same-sex marriage was in the air.

Headphones on, piped in from an NPR studio in Kentucky, I had a full moment of feeling flummoxed. We are, in fact, nowhere on marriage equality in Kentucky. We do not even have a statewide Fairness ordinance that protects gay people and those who are perceived to be gay from being fired from their workplaces, or denied public accommodations and housing. Indeed, activists are extremely careful about the language they use when discussing gay rights. Kentucky passed a statewide anti-gay marriage amendment in 2004 that lawmakers frequently reference when people lobby for gay rights. For example, the state university where I work finally approved domestic partner benefits for employees two years ago. But, if I choose to put my partner Anna on my plan, she would not be referred to as my “partner,” but rather officially called my “sponsored dependent,” a term that conjures up a foster child to me.

Johnny Cummings, the mayor of Vicco, runs a hair salon three doors down from City Hall.

So it was all the more delightful when Vicco (pronounced with a short “i” like “thick”), a tiny municipality in Kentucky with 334 residents passed a fairness ordinance this January. Vicco joins Lexington, Louisville and Covington as regions of Kentucky with a public commitment to gay rights. A young gay male student of mine, “Michael” stopped by my office last week to share the news.

“Dr. Barton,” he exclaimed, “Did you see the New York Times article on Vicco?”

Michael grew up 20 minutes from Vicco on the Kentucky-Tennessee-Virginia border and had experienced much homophobic bullying growing up in the region. Michael remembered Vicco primarily as the place people made alcohol runs since it had a liquor store. We laughed, appreciating tiny Vicco, with its gay mayor/hair stylist, the tight web of relationships characterizing small communities, and the eccentricity of the Bible Belt. While we may be far from marriage equality in Kentucky, Vicco’s bold stand for gay rights is a step forward.

Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky. She is the author of Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers (NYU Press, 2006) and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays, (NYU Press, 2012).

City of Promises named Jewish Book of the Year

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Awards season is officially in full swing, and we at NYU Press couldn’t be more proud to announce our latest achievement. Our landmark publication, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, was selected by the Jewish Book Council as the Jewish Book of the Year in its’ 2012 National Jewish Book Awards!

Three cheers for the trilogy, and congratulations to Deborah Dash Moore (editor of all 3-volumes), the authors, and everyone at the Press who worked so incredibly hard on this absolutely beautiful set!

The annual National Jewish Book Awards are presented by the Jewish Book Council. Read the complete list of this year’s winners and finalists here.

Silver lining: VAWA’s lapse provides opportunity to reflect

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—Leigh Goodmark

The 112th Congress failed to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which expired at the end of last year. Commentators have decried that failure as yet one more facet of the Republican Party’s War on Women, proof that Congress cares little about the plight of women subjected to abuse by their partners. Some have suggested that it is particularly important to immediately fund the Violence Against Women Act because of the financial support it provides for police, prosecutors and courts in the fight against domestic violence. I agree that Congress should pass the Violence Against Women Act—but not because of the damage that the failure to reauthorize the law might do to the criminal justice response. Instead, we should use the opportunity given by Congress’ failure to reauthorize VAWA to rethink whether pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the criminal justice system is the most effective policy option for combating domestic violence in the United States.

The legal system, particularly the criminal justice system, is the primary response to domestic violence in the United States, largely because, since 1994, VAWA has made that system a priority, channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into criminal justice initiatives designed to eradicate domestic violence.  At VAWA’s inception, the intention to cast domestic violence as a crime, and therefore to address domestic violence through the criminal justice system, was clear. As Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn Mahoney explained during the floor debates on VAWA, “Right now, if you assault a stranger, you go to jail. If you assault your spouse, you get therapy. The Violence Against Women Act brings an end to this backward system.”

Eighteen years later, it’s worth pausing to ask not whether Mahoney was right—she was. VAWA radically changed US policy on domestic violence and ensured that the criminal justice response would be primary. But it is worth pausing to ask what orienting domestic violence law and policy towards the criminal justice system has achieved. A study from the Department of Justice reveals that from 1994 to 2010, domestic violence in the US dropped by 64%, a figure that many have claimed proves the effectiveness of VAWA’s criminal justice focus. But the reality is a bit more nuanced than the soundbyte. From 1994 to 2000, the rate of domestic violence fell 48%—but the crime rate generally fell 47%. From 2000 to 2010, the decline in domestic violence “slowed and stabilized,” according to the study, while the overall crime rate continued to fall.

Given these figures, it is hard to argue that the criminal justice response to domestic violence since 1994 has been particularly effective. Moreover, social science researchers have found scant evidence that the criminal justice reforms of the last thirty years have had any impact on rates of domestic violence, suggesting that the current VAWA proposal to authorize $292 million primarily for police, prosecutors, and courts will simply throw good money after bad.

Which is not to say that VAWA is unimportant. The current version of VAWA, the one that the Congress failed to pass, is particularly important for the same reasons that it has been controversial: because it extends greater protection to those groups—immigrant women, Native American women, and lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people subjected to abuse—who are most marginalized and most in need of assistance. Moreover, VAWA funds other important services for people subjected to abuse, including transitional housing and civil legal assistance.

But VAWA could do so much more. A good start would be to redirect some of the $292 million that is currently earmarked for the criminal justice response into other kinds of assistance for people subjected to abuse. That assistance could target some of the larger structural issues that contribute to domestic violence or fund innovative programs that seek to bring justice to people subjected to abuse without requiring them to engage with the state. VAWA could support programs that provide direct economic assistance, community-based justice responses, restorative justice programs, and reproductive health initiatives.

At the time of its passage, VAWA was revolutionary. It could be revolutionary again by refocusing its efforts on more promising policy initiatives. The criminal justice response to domestic violence has had eighteen years of dedicated funding with underwhelming results. The time has come to think more creatively about how to achieve justice for people subjected to abuse. The delay in passing VAWA provides us with that opportunity.

Leigh Goodmark is Associate Professor of Law, Director of Clinical Education, and Co-Director of the Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She is the author of A Troubled Marriage (NYU Press, 2012).

WWI centennial update

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—Lisa Budreau

It appears that the nation’s plans to commemorate the Centennial of the First World War in 2014 are progressing. The WWI Centennial Commission Act (House Resolution 6364) passed by Congress and was, until recently, awaiting the President’s signature. However, the bill died on the Presidents desk. And, as the rules go, if a bill, for other than appropriations, signed by both parts of the legislature goes to the executive branch and is not signed within 10 days, it becomes law. That’s Poli Sci 101 in any university. And thus, the Frank Buckles bill, heretofore known as the WWI Centennial Commission Act, is now law but quite toothless. There’s no funding. The chairman of the commission can task government agencies as might be pertinent but on a reimbursable basis. (Read more about this here.)

In general, the bill provides for the formation of a board consisting of twelve members within 60 days after it becomes law. Plans have already begun to nominate members of this board, though unofficially. So, who will be the leader of this new Commission? Where will they be based, on the East Coast or Kansas City? What role will the American Battle Monuments Commission play in our national 4-year remembrance? They are, after all, the appointed caretakers of nearly all the American First World War commemorative constructs.

Once again, history repeats itself and commemoration remains one of the most political of all national activities, but risks becoming an exploitative process, one used to fulfill agenda far from the intended purpose of remembering the war dead.

Let’s hope that this group remembers the true meaning of commemorating this first global event. It, and our dead, deserve our respect.

Lisa Budreau is a consultant to the WWI Regional Office with the American Battle Monuments Commission, based in Arlington, VA, and Garches, France. She is author of Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919-1933 (NYU Press, 2009).

Russia’s ban and the real issues facing adoption today

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—Laura Briggs

The Russian adoption ban and the U.S. Magnitsky Act offer all the absurdity of the Cold War, with less geopolitically at stake. Both sides are claiming the other is cruel to children, and neither is making much sense. There are real issues to talk about related to the care of children, but the conversation in the blogosphere and the press on both the Russian and U.S. sides relies on caricatures of each other, children, and adoption.

In early December, Congress passed and Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which was aimed at Russian officials responsible for the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who had supposedly uncovered a tax fraud scheme by Russian officials against Hermitage Capital Management, a U.K.-based financial company that lobbied heavily for the Act. It also imposed visa and financial sanctions against all Russian officials responsible for “gross violations of human rights.” It’s unclear at best what this means, but it does seem to violate U.S. and international law—Russian officials apparently could have assets frozen and even be incarcerated if they set foot on U.S. soil, based simply on allegations by U.S. NGOs.

Russia responded by denouncing the hypocrisy of the U.S.—noting human rights abuses in Guantánamo’s prison—and its parliament passed the Dima Yakovlev Act, which banned U.S. NGOs, including those involved with adoptions, from operating in Russia. Dima Yakovlev was an adopted Russian toddler who died in July 2008 when his new father left him strapped in a hot car for nine hours in a Washington, D.C. area parking lot. The case made headlines in Russia when the father was acquitted on manslaughter charges, joining a steady stream of other terrible cases reported in the press of Russian adoptees being beaten, neglected, and killed by their U.S. parents—igniting calls for an international adoption ban.

While the actions of a mother in Tennessee, who put her seven-year old adopted son from Russia on a plane back to that country in 2010, made headlines in the U.S., for Russians it was just another in a long series, a steady drumbeat of distressing stories about serious abuse of Russian adoptees. While there is little doubt that it was the Magnitsky Act that precipitated the ban on U.S. adoptions from Russia, it wouldn’t have been possible to mobilize so quickly to stop them if there were not already a great deal of pre-existing political sentiment in this direction.

The whole thing seems like nothing so much as the Nixon-Krushchev kitchen debate, the 1959 exchange between the two leaders about a washing machine in a model house they were touring with press in tow. Krushchev accused the U.S. of “capitalist attitudes” that exploited and oppressed women in the home. Nixon touted the U.S. standard of living, and said that while misogynist attitudes were universal, the purpose of things like washing machines was to make things easier for “our housewives.”

The Magnitsky-Yakovlev exchange mirrors this conversation in all its foolishness. The trouble with the U.S. position is that it is entirely too sentimental about how great the nuclear family is for children, while the Russian side is too cynical. For one thing, the U.S. press keeps talking about Russian “orphans.” But almost none of the children living in large Russian institutions—about 120,000, according to most estimates—are actually orphans. They are, like the 400,000 children in the U.S. child welfare system, victims of variously bad circumstances, from parental homelessness to alcoholism or mental illness to abuse. Some have physical or emotional disabilities that make it very difficult for them to live in a family. Certainly the Russian child welfare system has few things to recommend it, being among other things severely underfunded. (One possibly productive side-effect of all of this is the promise of more funding flowing to Russian child-welfare institutions.)

On the U.S. side, after our own experiments with large-scale institutions for children through the 1960s, we have swung to a new anti-institutional extreme that is informing our desire to “rescue” Russian “orphans.” We imagine that virtually all children—no matter what their history, their emotional or physical state, or the likelihood that their parents might return for them or at least visit—would be better off in a nuclear family. This is sentimental and naïve. While most adoptions of children from Russian institutions go well, post-institutional children or those dealing with the aftermath of abuse—whether they’re from U.S. foster care, Russian orphanages, or any number of other places—sometimes have extremely challenging behaviors, outside the box of normal childhood challenges. Some are frighteningly violent, which accounts for some (although by no means all) of the reports of U.S. parents responding with terrible violence of their own to Russian adoptees. The Tennessee single mother who returned her son to Russia had told the local sheriff in her town that the seven-year-old had made credible threats that he would burn the house down while she and her other children slept. She got no help. As the viral circulation of the blog post known as “I am Adam Lanza’s mother” made clear, we have few supports and essentially no idea what to do when families say they are afraid of their children’s violence. This, alongside a rejection of the therapeutic culture that seems to have little to offer either parents or children in these situations, provokes a certain acquiescence and even support for the kind of “spare the rod, spoil the child” parenting that can lead to horrific abuse.

The Russians, like Krushchev in 1959, imagine our families as places that exploit the weak and vulnerable—children, this time.

There is nothing good about the Magnitsky-Yakovlev exchange, nor what it produces for institutionalized Russian children or adoptees in the U.S. But let’s use this opportunity to talk about real issues facing children, parents, and states in the U.S., Russia, and across the globe.

>> This post also appeared on the author’s blog. Click here for more.

Laura Briggs is Associate Professor and Department Head of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her book International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children was published by NYU Press in 2009.

Revisiting the Emancipation Proclamation, 150 years later

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—Kidada E. Williams

Eric Foner, in his 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Fiery Trial, described President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as one of the most misunderstood documents of American history. Many Americans hold it in the same esteem as they do the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, but the actual document is rarely read and its context is far more complex. The Emancipation Proclamation will celebrate its 150th anniversary on January 1, 2013. As we approach its sesquicentennial, the time feels right to put the document and its impact into proper historical context.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a military strategy for winning the war against the Confederate rebellion. By 1862, the war had been going on for longer than either the Union or the Confederacy expected. A number of Unionists concluded that taking away the Confederacy’s most valuable resource, their slaves, was the best way to cripple their ability to continue the fight. Some officials also wanted to arm enslaved black men and believed that the best way to obtain their loyalty to the Union was to free them and their families. As the chaos of war continued, the Lincoln administration searched for military solutions.

Although he was opposed to slavery, Lincoln was slow to use secession and the war to abolish slavery. He understood and respected that the Founding Fathers ensured that the Constitution protected slavery. In the face of mounting demands that he end slavery, Lincoln made clear that his paramount objective was to preserve the Union—the country established by the Patriots who rebelled against Great Britain—and not to destroy slavery.

Lincoln also knew that many white Unionists opposed increasing the size of the free black population for fear of economic and political competition. In his Second Annual Message he explained that a policy of wartime emancipation was the best way to win the war and preserve the Union. The next month, Lincoln used his power as the Commander-in-Chief during a time of armed rebellion to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

It is important to understand what the proclamation did and did not do. It did not free all enslaved people. The proclamation did free enslaved people in states and parts of the states that were still in rebellion against the United States by January 1, 1863. That left more than 800,000 people legally enslaved.

Instead of being a panacea that destroyed slavery, the proclamation’s effect was quite limited. Confederates dismissed the proclamation, believing they could win the war and create their own slaveholding republic. Additionally, as historian James McPherson pointed out, the proclamation’s effectiveness was hindered by the fact that it could not be enforced in areas Union forces did not control militarily. The armies would not control the Confederacy until the war ends fifteen months later. In the end, the proclamation freed only some enslaved people, which is why Lincoln pushed Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment.

One under-appreciated feature of the proclamation is that it authorized the enlistment of African American men in the Union’s military forces. In 1861, when Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the Confederate rebellion, many free black men answered. Lincoln refused their offer to serve because he believed that allowing them to fight might make people think that his priorities for the war had shifted from saving the Union to abolishing slavery. Down but not defeated, some black men continued to prepare for combat. As the war continued, Union forces suffered high casualties, and Lincoln moved closer to instituting a wartime emancipation policy, the president and others conceded that they should use black men in combat; he included that provision in the proclamation, which allowed roughly 185,000 black men to serve.

Civil War-era Americans’ reactions to the proclamation were mixed. Enslaved and free African Americans as well as white abolitionists were elated. More enslaved people who learned of the proclamation and could escape their masters to find Union forces did. Confederates, however, saw the proclamation as an attack on their very way of life, and it renewed their determination to fight. The Confederate Congress and Army responded further by instituting a policy that determined that any black soldiers captured by Confederate forces could be re-enslaved, enslaved (if they were already free), or executed.

As Gary Gallagher shows, many white Unionists supported the proclamation not because they opposed slavery but because they believed that freeing Confederates’ slaves was the fastest way to win the war. However, others worried about the larger social, economic, and political ramifications of ending slavery, namely sharing the benefits of American citizenship with people who they thought were inferior.

One key to understanding the mixed reactions to the proclamation is to remember that Americans during the Civil War knew that the proclamation did not end slavery or the war. The war continued until 1865 when the Confederates surrendered and slavery continued until the Thirteenth Amendment went into effect in December of that year.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation was a military document that had significant limitations, its political implications cannot be overstated. It marked the legal beginning of Americans’ effort to redeem the nation for what many people call the “original sin of slavery” and authorized the enlistment of black men to military service. The Emancipation Proclamation stands as a symbol of American freedom and deserves its place in the nation’s memory, right alongside the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Thirteenth Amendment.

Sources: Emancipation Proclamation Map: http://www.ushistory.org/us/34a.asp.

Kidada E. Williams is Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University and the author of They Left Great Marks on Me (NYU Press, 2012). You can find her on Twitter @kidadaewilliams.

The not-so-simple ‘Decline of Evangelical America’

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—Justin Wilford

A week after the 2012 national and state elections, I noted how downcast many evangelical leaders were about the election results. There was a widespread sense that evangelicals were facing “a new moral landscape,” one in which they were marginal figures. No doubt, for many institutional leaders in American evangelicalism, this is worrisome news. If it is “the end of evangelical dominance in politics,” as one evangelical writer put it, then this cannot bode well for what really matters for these leaders: putting people in the pews.

This past weekend, James S. Dickerson, an evangelical pastor writing in the New York Times’s Sunday Review, argued that although “it hasn’t been a good year for evangelicals” and things look to be trending downward, there is hope still for this embattled form of Christianity.

Dickerson argues that the American evangelicalism can right itself if it embraces its new marginalized status, acting less with the “superior hostility” of a bullying, dominant cultural group, and more with the “grace and humility” of outsiders in a strange land.

This may be good advice in any case; who among us couldn’t do with a little more grace and humility? But it also happens to be the only card left to play for conservative Protestantism. As I show in Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism, many of the largest and fastest growing churches in America—like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church—foreground everyday secular problems of work-life and family, modulate hot-button cultural issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and downplay theological differences between denominations. And yet, these churches hold the same conservative theological views as the churches of older generations. The difference is in presentation, not in the core doctrines held by the church leaders.

This might appear as the purely cynical marketing strategy of a failing brand. Even Dickerson’s excellent presentation of the matter leaves room for such an interpretation (he implores evangelicals to hold on to their “unpopular doctrines” while “re-emphasizing” the less off-putting message of God’s saving grace). But I don’t think the matter is so simple.

First, these hardline doctrines have served as important boundary markers, clearly delineating the sacred in-group from the secular out-group. Now that many evangelicals like Dickerson and Rick Warren are concerned that these very boundary markers are keeping people away, even relegating these issues to secondary importance is a major shift for evangelicalism. It means that the most defining issues of conservative Protestantism, chiefly biblical literalism, could be up for debate as leaders begin to grapple with an increasingly eclectic membership body with few historical ties to evangelicalism who have been drawn in by the “good news” but turned off by the increasingly unpopular cultural doctrines.

Second, the structure of these new churches is built around blurring the distinctions between the sacred and secular. Their buildings are designed to blend into the secular landscape; the weekend sermons are focused on success at work, marriage difficulties, underachieving children, and even fitness and diet; and the most important gatherings in the church occur during the week, in small groups in members’ homes. This is not about drawing boundaries between a (spiritually and doctrinally) pure church and secular world, but rather about tearing down these boundaries to make the church more meaningful in the context of the world. Unfortunately for hardliners, this means that many of the aforementioned “unpopular doctrines” become issues pushed off for another day that never comes.

Finally, Dickerson’s piece and the examples he gives of churches like Warren’s Saddleback are tacit acknowledgments of something that many social researchers’ of religion have been resisting for several years: old-school secularization. When he writes of a “shrinking minority [of evangelicals] in the United States” and a generational crisis in which the young are not replacing the old, he’s describing what has become fashionable to refer to as the “European exceptionalism” of secularization. It appears now that Europe is not so exceptional after all.

What is, however, exceptional about American evangelicalism, and pastors like Dickerson and Warren, is their willingness to innovate, blur old distinctions, and adapt to the culture they are in, rather than fight it. To my eyes, this means that secularization is not a fate, but a situation that can be responded to in a multitude of ways.

Justin Wilford is author of Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism (NYU Press, 2012).

Sandy Hook: Another symptom of widespread cultural despair

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—Jessie Klein

I’m still shaken from last Friday’s shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, one of the worst massacres in the history of the United States.

Not much information is available about the 20-year-old gunman or his motives. We know that he had been a student in the Newtown school system years before, and those who were acquainted with him described him as “brilliant” but “remote.” We need to stop looking for the profile of the perpetrators; and examine instead the profile of schools and society more generally. Many school shooters since 1979 have been described with those same adjectives.

When gunmen are repeatedly described as “remote” or as a “loner,” there is likely more than just a “personality disorder” behind their history. In 2004, the General Social Survey (GSS) revealed that fifty percent of our population has either one person or no one to talk to about important issues in their lives. Scholars suggest that this qualifies as inadequate or “marginal support.”

We need to stop looking for perpetrator’s profiles, and instead examine the profile of schools and society overall. According to GSS data from 1985 to 2004, social isolation has tripled. Other reports suggest that empathy has significantly decreased whereas depression and anxiety rates, among adults and youth alike, are soaring. Panic attacks have become part of the common vernacular and are no longer stigmatized as a characteristic of the insane. With fewer options for social acceptance, it is perhaps no surprise then, that depression among youth is starting at increasingly younger ages.

In The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools, I discuss how bullying and other hurtful behaviors have also become common norms. These days, we are pressured to become as successful and powerful as we can be, but are rarely encouraged to check on our neighbors or offer support to others in need. We are working so hard and are so overscheduled that we barely have time to stop for one another, even if it were our priority.

Schools need to make social obligation and support for one another a top goal in curricula, as well as a value discussed and re-affirmed in every aspect of their community. We need a new generation of youth to lead our country who will feel that being compassionate and empathic is just as important as being successful. We need to find a time again when talking to neighbors and offering support is considered kinder than leaving them alone because they are probably busy.

Of course there would be fewer fatalities if we had better gun control laws. There is no question about that. But then the symptoms of our despairing culture will be revealed in other forms. In addition to gun control, we need to tackle the real issues. People need to authentically connect with one another and support each other as a matter of course. We need to transform our bully society into more compassionate and integrated communities. Only then can we truly change.

Jessie Klein is Assistant Professor of Sociology/Criminal Justice at Adelphi University and author of Bully Society (NYU Press, 2012). She has also served as a supervisor, school social worker, college adviser, social studies teacher, substance abuse prevention counselor and conflict resolution coordinator at many high schools. Her writing appears in scholarly journals as well as popular media.