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Americans didn’t always agree with the court’s conclusions, but they respected it. That’s changing now
It’s the most restrictive abortion law in the country, imposing a huge burden on women without the means or money to travel to another state where abortions remain legal.
It’s also a sure sign that the court’s Republican-appointed justices, who now hold six of nine seats, are ready to overturn the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v Wade, striking down anti-abortion laws across the nation as violating a woman’s right to privacy under the 14th amendment to the constitution.
Last week the court held that Biden’s moratorium on evictions was illegal. A few days before, it refused to stay a lower court decision that people seeking asylum at the southern border must remain in Mexico until their cases are heard – often subjecting them to great hardship or violence.
What links these cases? Cruelty toward the powerless.
I remember a very different supreme court which I had the honor of arguing cases before, almost 50 years ago. It embodied the idea that the fundamental role of the supreme court is to balance the scales in favor of those who were powerless. The other two branches of government couldn’t be relied on to do that.
Even Nixon appointees Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and Warren Burger understood that role. Blackmun wrote the court’s decision in Roe v Wade, and Powell and Burger joined him, as did four Democratic appointees to the court – William O Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan and Potter Stewart.
I don’t remember the cases I argued. They were insignificant. I was a rookie in the justice department who was given either sure winners or sure losers to argue. But I especially recall Douglas, who had recently suffered a stroke and was in obvious discomfort, looking sharply at me as I made my arguments.
I was awed. Here was the justice who wrote the 1965 decision in Griswold v Connecticut, finding that a constitutional right to privacy forbids states from banning contraception. The man who argued the Vietnam war was illegal and issued an order that temporarily blocked sending Army reservists to Vietnam. The justice who wrote in the 1972 case Sierra Club v Morton that any part of nature feeling the destructive pressure of modern technology should have standing to sue in court – including rivers, lakes, trees and even the air – because if corporations (which are legal fictions) have standing, shouldn’t the natural world?
Sitting not far away from him was Thurgood Marshall – who succeeded in having the supreme court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional, in the landmark 1954 case Brown v Board of Education, and who did more than any person then alive to break down the shameful legal edifice of Jim Crow.
Today’s supreme court majority is a group of knee-jerk conservatives whose intellectual leader (to the extent they have one) is Samuel Alito, perhaps the most conceptually rigid and cognitively dishonest justice since Chief Justice Roger Taney.
Five of today’s supreme court majority were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote; three of them by a president who instigated a coup against the United States.
The authority of the supreme court derives entirely from Americans’ confidence and trust in it. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers 78, the judiciary has “neither the sword” (the executive branch’s power to compel action) “or the purse” (the Congress’s power to appropriate funds).
The court I was privileged to argue before almost 50 years ago had significant moral authority. It protected the less powerful with arguments that resonated with the core values of the nation. Americans didn’t always agree with its conclusions, but they respected it.
Today’s cruel and partisan supreme court is squandering what remains of its moral authority.
F-35 fighter jet. (photo: Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Democrats Who Joined Republicans to Increase
Military Budget Have Strong Defense Ties
The amendment from Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the panel's top Republican, was added to the House's National Defense Authorization Act during the committee's debate Wednesday in a 42-17 vote with 14 Democrats voting in favor. The provision would increase the military budget by 3%, which Rogers said would keep the growth of the budget in line with inflation, authorizing additional funding for a number of items not in the Biden administration's Pentagon budget, including additional submarines, planes and combat vehicles.
"The bipartisan adoption of my amendment sends a clear signal: the President's budget submission was wholly inadequate to keep pace with a rising China and a reemerging Russia," Rogers said in a statement after its passage.
This amendment is one of hundreds Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee filed on the defense bill Wednesday to force Democrats on the panel to vote on a variety of politically fraught issues, from Afghanistan and China to banning the teaching of critical race theory -- a subject lawmakers sharply debated for more than an hour Wednesday night.
The committee met to mark up the National Defense Authorization Act and lawmakers offered about 780 amendments that forced the debate into the early hours of Thursday morning.
Of particular concern for Republicans is Democrats' view of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, where the administration has been accused by Republicans of botching the end of the 20-year war. Republicans plan to use this as a talking point ahead of the 2022 midterms, where they hope to win back the majority from Democrats.
"What we saw in Afghanistan last month was devastating. The decisions that President Biden has made were disastrous," Rogers said. "These self-inflicted wounds have made our job even more important and difficult. Today's markup will begin our duty to conduct oversight on the withdrawal from Afghanistan."
Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith, a Democratic congressman from Washington, countered that Congress should be looking at what went wrong across the 20 years of war, and not just the final few months.
"If we're going to really honestly look at Afghanistan we need to look at all 20 years," he said. "There was a lot that went into that and I think simply focusing on the last four months would do an incredible disservice to the men and women who served there."
The committee approved by unanimous consent several non-controversial amendments related to Afghanistan in the early stages of the panel's debate Thursday, including provisions to require the defense secretary to submit quarterly reports on the threats posed by al Qaeda in Afghanistan and on US military operations related to security and threats from Afghanistan.
Additional amendments include provisions to tell Congress what weapons may have fallen into the hands of the Taliban and what intelligence the Pentagon may have shared with them. Other proposals would designate the Taliban as a foreign terror organization, prohibit funding to the Taliban and require an Afghanistan counterterrorism plan from the Biden administration.
Another amendment that was passed by a voice vote would prohibit states from allowing private funds to pay for the National Guard to be deployed to other states.
The amendment, introduced by Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso, comes as a direct result of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, sending the South Dakota National Guard to the Texas border and paying for it with a private donation.
The committee also voted 35-24 to adopt Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan's amendment to require women to sign up for the selective service, by changing the language to be gender neutral. The panel approved by voice vote an amendment from Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming related to US levels of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Several Democrats facing tough races in next year's midterms supported Rogers' amendment to increase the Pentagon budget, including Reps. Elaine Luria of Virginia, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Jared Golden of Maine, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Stephanie Murphy of Florida. Luria said that she was backing the amendment because she believed that the Pentagon needed to keep pace with China's rising military.
The Senate Armed Services Committee also approved a $25 billion increase to the Pentagon budget in its version of the defense authorization act, with most Democrats on the panel voting in favor of the measure.
Critical race theory debate boils over late into the night
Multiple GOP members -- including Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks of Indiana -- introduced amendments that would ban the teaching of critical race theory or any related theories in military educational facilities, which led to a heated discussion that lasted roughly an hour and a half.
Critical race theory recognizes that systemic racism is part of American society and challenges the beliefs that allow it to flourish. While the theory was started decades ago as a way to examine how laws and systems promote inequality, it has taken on new urgency since a series of killings last year of African Americans by police officers, which led to a national reckoning on race. Conservatives, including Banks, have criticized the concept as un-American.
"Every single one of us in this room know that this is the greatest country in the history of this world," Banks said. "Are we perfect? No. Is our history perfect? Of course not. But there's nothing that comes close to what we have in America. And it is not sustainable to tell our troops anything otherwise. In fact, it's dangerous."
Democratic Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida called critical race theory "a poison."
"It otherizes our fellow Americans," Gaetz said. "It is not what we need in our military, in our schools, in our lives or anywhere in a great nation."
Democrats widely panned the series of amendments as irrelevant to the role of the defense authorization bill and some defended critical race theory as an important part of teaching history as well as addressing racism.
"We need to teach the truth about American history. All of American history, including slavery, including Jim Crow," said Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada. "And by being honest about our past, we can actually teach the hard truths about our country."
Smith said the amendments would "discourage people in the military from attempting to address issues of diversity and racism" and that the effort would "have a chilling effect."
The discussion comes after GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas forced a similar vote on an amendment that would ban federal funds from backing teaching critical race theory in schools during the Senate's vote-a-rama on the budget resolution (the amendments were non-binding). West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was the only Democrat to support the amendment with all 49 Republican senators.
Demonstrators protest anti-abortion laws in front of the Governor's Mansion in Austin, Texas. (photo: Evan L'Roy/The Texas Tribune)
A volunteer carries a cross that will be used in the event that human remains are located during a search. (photo: Roberto Guerra/BuzzFeed)
Most of the volunteers are immigrants who took similar paths across the dangerous desert and feel a responsibility to do what they can.
Using a far-off mountain peak as a point of reference and a general idea of where the man was last seen, the members of Aguilas del Desierto, or Eagles of the Desert, marched forward in a horizontal line. Irvin, who had traveled to the border from the Mexican city of Puebla, had been missing for 10 days. At this point, they were searching for a body so they could at the very least give Irvin’s family some sense of closure.
During the week, Aguilas del Desierto volunteers work on farms, as teacher’s aides, and as medical assistants. But on certain weekends, they search for the missing along the US–Mexico border. Many of them were once undocumented themselves, and some made similar journeys across the border.
Among them was Francisco Gonzalez, a middle-aged man who earns money picking fruit and vegetables in Southern California. Years ago he sold fruit to Ely Ortiz, the president of Aguilas del Desierto, and learned about their operation. At the time he was undocumented.
“If one day I get my papers, I want to join you,” Gonzalez said he told Ortiz at the time. “I had big dreams of joining them because what they did was so beautiful to me.”
In 2018, Gonzalez became a US resident and almost immediately started volunteering with Aguilas del Desierto. Sometimes his family will give him a hard time for leaving them to go on searches, but when Gonzalez doesn’t go, he stays up at night wondering if he was meant to find the missing person.
Friends and strangers will tell Gonzalez that he’s crazy, but it doesn’t get to him. One day it could be your family or friend who is lost out there and you’ll call us for help, Gonzalez tells them. Pointing out to the desert, he said he crossed the border with his wife many years ago and had to sleep out in the open for days.
“For migrants, the desert can be very sad because of what we suffer,” Gonzalez said. “But it’s also something beautiful because you’re crossing with nothing but the clothes on your back and the hope that something better lies ahead.”
Aguilas del Desierto receives up to 50 calls a day from families whose loved ones have gone missing in the desert, often abandoned by their smuggler. Before the group commits to a search, they have to make sure the missing person isn’t being detained by US immigration authorities or hasn’t been deported. Otherwise, they will share as much with US Border Patrol about where the person was last believed to be, using information from other immigrants or location details sent by the lost person. If US authorities don't find them, Aguilas at the very least has a starting point for the search.
If Aguilas searchers find the person alive, they give them water, food, and a choice: Do they want to continue on their own or call Border Patrol for help? As much as it pains him, Ortiz, the president, said the organization can’t transport the person themselves — that would be crossing a line, and if they’re caught, US authorities would never let them continue their work.
“It’s cruel and it’s painful because some walk seven or eight days and we allow immigration to take our people,” Ortiz said. “But if we put someone in our truck, we’d be accused of human trafficking and our mission is over.”
Even if a missing person is taken into Border Patrol custody, at least they’re alive and can try again, rather than die like so many others in the desert, he added.
So far in fiscal year 2021, Border Patrol has found the remains of 383 immigrants near the border. The figure surpassed 2020's total of 253 and is the highest since 2013, when agents found the remains of 451 immigrants. Border Patrol has also made 10,528 rescues so far this fiscal year, compared with 5,333 in 2020.
Advocates point to increasing physical barriers, like the border wall, and hardline policies as the reason desperate immigrants are taking more dangerous and remote routes in order to avoid detection. Last month, the Biden administration renewed a Trump-era border policy that sends back most immigrants to Mexico or their home countries. At the same time, US border authorities blame callous smugglers who are only interested in making money and leave immigrants behind to die.
Meanwhile, for Ortiz, the job never ends. His phone rings 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and he always picks up. They’re difficult calls, sometimes coming from the lost immigrants themselves. One of them was a woman who was recently lost in the Texas desert. The woman said she couldn’t take it anymore, and Ortiz asked her to send her location information so he could call for help. But fearing being deported back to Mexico if she was found, the woman told Ortiz that perhaps it was better if she died in the desert than return to the life she was fleeing, one that included threats from an abusive ex-husband and little support.
Ortiz told her to fight for her kids because they needed her and begged her to send her location. She finally relented and sent Ortiz a photo of her surroundings to help the rescue team. In the foreground was the woman’s face, her dry lips cracking and bleeding from one side. He stayed on the phone with her until the ambulance arrived.
“It’s hard to step away because thinking that I may miss a call like that or not give it my full attention fills me with dread,” Ortiz said.
But the work has taken its toll. Ortiz has had two spinal surgeries and was momentarily paralyzed. After a month in a rehabilitation center, he spent another four months in a wheelchair. Even so, he continued coordinating searches from his computer.
“This isn’t a job you can stop and start up whenever you want — it’s a commitment,” Ortiz said.
He got involved in searching for missing immigrants after his brother and cousin went missing along the Arizona border in 2009. That’s when he learned how difficult it was to get help from consulates and Border Patrol. Ortiz linked up with a group to search for his brother and cousin, but by the time they found them, they were dead.
The searchers didn’t find Irvin on Saturday, discovering only the things discarded by immigrants who had made the same journey: water bottles, backpacks, and old clothes.
Aguilas del Desierto was recently able to obtain a piece of land in Ajo, Arizona, where they can camp out after a search. On Saturday evening, the group ate chicken tacos and tostadas in the shade, trading jokes and stories from the day. The organization also exchanged advice with Capellanes del Desierto, or Desert Chaplains, a Tucson-based group that wants to learn how to conduct their own searches.
At a nearby table, Ortiz pored over a map, planning the next day’s search for Warner, another missing man from Mexico, using the little information his family had provided. But from what Ortiz could gather, Warner was somewhere on the property of a US military base.
In 2020, Ortiz said Aguilas del Desierto discovered the remains of 28 people, more than any previous year, and found 45 people alive. So far this year, they’ve found the remains of eight people, which Ortiz attributed to not being granted access to areas where there could be more.
Sometimes the most difficult job is getting permission from landowners to conduct searches. The pandemic has made it worse because Native American reservations, which were hit hard by the virus, won’t give them access now in an attempt to stem infection rates by keeping outsiders away, and it can take weeks to get permission from a military base.
“We don’t have a lot of access to the military bases, where in the previous years we found a lot of bodies,” Ortiz said.
The group was able to get permission to access only a part of the land they wanted to search for Warner on Sunday. Unlike the previous day, the terrain was dry and the heat more intense. The group fanned out, making sure they didn’t break the line by staying in contact on walkie-talkies as they searched dry riverbeds and steep rocky hills. Again, the volunteers didn’t find the person they were looking for. Ortiz worries Warner was on nearby property Aguilas couldn’t get access to.
Aguilas has also been getting more calls about missing immigrants in Texas, some of them families with small children — which is uncommon in California and Arizona, where most of the people they search for are single adults.
Christina Otero, who recently moved from San Diego to a community outside Dallas, has been charged with establishing a group of volunteers in Texas. Otero met Ortiz and his wife, Maricela through their daughters and started to join searches.
She was hesitant at first, but Otero saw how Aguilas helped people, and as a former immigrant herself who had crossed the border illegally, she understood the call for help.
“Most of the people in the group are immigrants who went through the same paths as the people we search for,” Otero told BuzzFeed News. “We know how they suffer.”
Otero will never forget the first time she saw the remains of a person they were searching for — just the leg of the missing young man with a shoe and a piece of his skull. The rest of his body had been scavenged by animals.
“It’s very sad when we find remains, but at the same time it can be good because we are able to give the family some consolation,” Otero said. “But when we find people alive, you're filled with joy because you know they’re leaving the desert alive.”
On a recent weekend, as Otero and others were asking for the donations they depend on to operate the searches, several people went up to the group to thank them for finding family members.
“A young woman came up to me and said, ‘My brother is alive because of Aguilas,’ and hearing those words is what keeps me going,” Otero said. “This isn’t charity, it’s a service.”
A student in classroom. (photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP)
Educators are confused about how to navigate new laws that ban discussions about race in the classroom.
In early June, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill that restricts what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and at public universities, particularly when it comes to sexism and racism. It bans 10 concepts that Republican legislators define as “divisive,” including the idea that “one race or sex is superior to another,” that members of a particular race are inherently inclined to oppress others, and that “the U.S. and Iowa are fundamentally racist or sexist.”
The law, which is already in effect, has sparked confusion and distress among educators, some of whom say it is so broad and the language so ambiguous, they fear they might face consequences for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism in the context of US history.
“Teachers need to know what the legislation means for us, and they have been asking, ‘Is the district going to support us and have our back?’” Monique Cottman, who’s taught elementary school and middle school for 15 years in the state, told Vox.
Cottman is a teacher leader with the Iowa City Community School District, a role that requires her to regularly coach about 50 teachers on classroom instruction strategies, curriculums, and lesson plans. This year, it involves the added work of creating a comprehensive list of FAQs for teachers about the new Iowa law — because there are a lot of questions.
Since at least 2014, when students went to the school board to demand an ethnic studies course, Cottman and other teachers in the district have worked to make anti-racism part of the curriculum, but with the new law, a lot of the momentum they have built has been undercut. “Teachers who would have thought about me last year aren’t listening to teachers like me at all because of fear,” she said.
Cottman isn’t alone in her predicament. Educators across the country are figuring out how to navigate laws like Iowa’s that have turned anti-racist education — often lumped together under the catchall term “critical race theory,” an academic framework scholars use to analyze how racism is endemic to US institutions — into a boogeyman. While critical race theory opponents fear that the framework places blame for inequality on all white people, proponents argue that their goal is to use the lens to identify systemic oppression and eradicate it. Educators who want to teach with an eye toward anti-racism say that their lessons simply reflect an honest history of the country’s founding and development — including the contributions of and the discrimination against marginalized people — which has traditionally been glossed over in textbooks and curriculums.
But in the past six months, seven other states — Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina — have already passed legislation similar to Iowa’s, and 20 others have introduced or plan to introduce similar legislation, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. Meanwhile, in states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, state boards of education and local school boards have denounced, if not totally banned, teaching critical race theory and/or the 1619 Project, a collection of essays that examines the foundational contributions of enslaved Black people to the US.
Teachers are already facing consequences, too. While debates over critical race theory were going on in the Tennessee state legislature, a high school teacher was fired after teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “The First White President” and playing the video of the spoken-word poem “White Privilege.” A Black principal in Texas was recently suspended without explanation after a former school board candidate complained that he was implementing critical race theory, promoting “extreme views on race” and “the conspiracy theory of systemic racism.”
In higher education, entire courses that grapple with inequity were dropped from course rosters or made optional. And even in states where anti-critical race theory legislation hasn’t been passed, education leaders are facing pressure.
The first Black superintendent in a Connecticut district resigned after parents and community members complained to the school board that he was trying to indoctrinate students with critical race theory. (According to reports, he had been championing diversity and inclusion training and spoke out against conspiracy theories surrounding the US Capitol insurrection.)
The country is only just beginning to see this culture war play out, educators and curriculum specialists told Vox. “On one hand, there will be many teachers, particularly in states where the bills haven’t passed, who will continue to do justice work in their classrooms,” said Justin Coles, a professor of social justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “But others are going to resort to glossing over key issues in our history that are deeply intertwined with race and racism, overlooking nuance.”
While teachers like Cottman will continue to teach with an anti-racist lens despite these laws, more teachers are expected to be silenced. “Because of the current social climate,” Coles said, “it will be more acceptable to manipulate the truth and denounce folks who make deep conversations about oppression part of their classrooms.”
Ultimately, the laws, and the discussions around them, have created chaos for teachers who don’t know what they should and shouldn’t be teaching. A lot of the anti-racist discussions that educators had brought into the classroom following the uprisings of 2020, and even prior, could be in danger of being removed. And the people who will feel the greatest impact are students.
With these bans, “learning will be incomplete since [children are] only being taught half-truths,” Coles said. “The classroom will become unsafe spaces for marginalized students since they can’t discuss their lived experiences. These bans make it harder for our country to change.”
How critical race theory bans made their way to schools — and how they’re playing out
The pushback to anti-racist teachings began shortly after last summer’s social justice protests that swept the country, when many Americans started to grapple with the racism embedded in institutions like policing. In August 2020, conservative activist Christopher Rufo declared a “one-man war” against critical race theory, appearing on Fox News and claiming that federal diversity trainings (which he wrongly identified as critical race theory) were dividing workers and indoctrinating government employees.
It didn’t take long for then-President Donald Trump to seize on Rufo’s narrative, going as far as issuing an executive order that banned racial sensitivity training in the federal government. When Trump lost the presidential election a few months later, Republicans in state legislatures picked up the cause, drafting and introducing bills that placed limits on government agencies, public higher education institutions, and K-12 schools teaching “harmful sex- and race-based ideologies.”
At the core of these state bills is the desire to prevent discourse about America’s racist past and present. Last year, amid a deadly pandemic and social justice protests, students had questions about the police shootings of Black and brown civilians and why the coronavirus was disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, and teachers couldn’t ignore talk about a president who threatened “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” As Texas high school teacher Jania Hoover wrote for Vox this July, “The reality is that kids are talking about race, systems of oppression, and our country’s ugly past anyway — from media coverage to last summer’s protests to even this very controversy itself, my students are absorbing these conversations and want to know more.”
The past year, and the social justice movements leading up to it, left a lot of teachers rethinking how they taught history, challenging the colonialist narratives long embedded in elementary and high school curriculums. For example, a third-grade textbook Cottman was required to use only tells a partial story of Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in Louisiana. Bridges was 6 years old when federal marshals escorted her and her mother into the school building as mobs of white people surrounded them, rioted, and yelled threats and racial slurs.
The textbook states that the marshals “protected her from angry people who lined the streets and stood outside the school.” It makes no mention of why those people were “angry” or who they were, leaving out the key context that white people fought for decades to keep Black children from schools because of the belief that Black people were inferior, a detail that Cottman needed to bring forward during classroom discussions.
Another story in a similar textbook tells about a girl who was kidnapped from Greece and sold into slavery in ancient Rome; according to the text, she chose to remain enslaved because her owners treated her well and they all felt like “family.” “Students kept taking away that as long as slave owners are nice to their slaves, there’s nothing wrong with slavery,” Cottman said.
“If teachers continue to do what they’ve been doing, no one wins,” Cottman added. “They need to be interrogating why some of their lessons are problematic.”
As bills opposing critical race theory made their way to state legislatures this spring, confusion over what the theory was and what the bills meant overshadowed Americans’ desire to have nuanced classroom discussions about race. A July Reuters/Ipsos poll found that fewer than half of Americans (43 percent) said they knew about critical race theory and the surrounding debates, with three in 10 saying they hadn’t heard of it at all. Respondents were even less familiar with the New York Times’s 1619 Project (24 percent). Yet a majority of Americans said they support teaching students about the impact of slavery (78 percent) and racism (73 percent) in the US. State laws banning critical race theory in public schools received less support (35 percent). On all fronts, there was a partisan divide, with Republicans more interested in banning talk about slavery, racism, and the teaching of critical race theory and the 1619 Project.
In Iowa, Cottman, also a co-founder of Black Lives Matter at School Iowa, says a handful of parents in support of the ban have already reached out to teachers about the 2021-22 curriculum, but they are not the majority. Parents in support of anti-racist education have also voiced their support at school board and community meetings.
But the vocal minority, coupled with the new law, weighs on teachers and administrators. Though Iowa City is known as the bluest part of the red state, Cottman says she has talked to a number of teachers who are fine with the curriculum as is; she has also spoken to those who are concerned about losing their jobs if they talk about race.
One group of high school teachers decided to stop teaching Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker’s short story “The Flowers” (a story about a young Black girl who comes across a dead body, presumably a Black man who had been lynched, while picking flowers in the woods) after parents were up in arms about it on social media, for fear of further controversy.
Last fall, Cottman says her school ordered 1,000 copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You in an effort to improve their American history coursework. But once some parents got wind of the effort, “the book became optional, most teachers chose to not use it,” Cottman said.
Teachers in other states are also dialing it back. Joseph Frilot, a middle school humanities teacher, learned from his curriculum manager that all of the content he developed about Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement won’t be part of his lessons this year in light of the Texas law that limits discourse on racism and sexism. “A huge chunk of the curriculum that I created was about oppression and resistance, so all of that will be excluded from our curriculum,” Frilot told EdWeek. “Am I allowed to be the transparent and honest educator that I’ve been over the years?”
In Tennessee, where one of the first anti-critical race theory bills was passed, teachers have requested guidance on how they should reframe their lessons and leading class discussions. The guidance from the education department, released in August, clarifies that teachers can introduce topics like racism and sexism as part of discussion if they are described in textbooks or instructional material, but teachers remain concerned that the law limits them from teaching the true history of the state and country. The state’s guidance also lays out major consequences for schools and educators found in violation: Schools could stand to lose millions in annual state funds, and teachers could have their licenses denied, suspended, or revoked.
Some teachers, though, plan to keep anti-racist lessons alive despite these new laws. Cottman tells teachers that even under the new law they aren’t required to say anything to parents, nor are they obligated to solicit parents’ feedback before lessons, but she reminds them that it is “vital” to make sure that parents feel welcome and that “two-way communication is established early in the school year.” When teachers have expressed worry about their classroom libraries, Cottman said she tells them “they do not need to remove any books from their classrooms. If there’s an anti-racism book on the shelf, a student has the choice to read it.”
Lakeisha Patterson, a teacher in Houston, said she plans to continue to talk about how “African Americans were considered less than human,” and the social justice caucus of the San Antonio teachers union is encouraging lessons that foster inclusion and nonwhite perspectives on history.
“For many Black teachers, we aren’t even expressing financial concerns,” Cottman said about the possibility of getting fired for incorporating race discussions in classrooms. “We’re just pissed off that we’re constantly being silenced.”
What anti-racism education looks like in states without bans
States and districts without anti-critical race theory legislation have greater latitude to experiment with anti-racist teaching. For Jesse Hagopian, a high school history and ethnic studies teacher in Seattle, the moment is ripe and long overdue. Beginning in September, Hagopian will be co-teaching the school’s two-year-old Black studies course, the result of organizing in the wake of the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016.
“If anyone is asking, the answer is yes, we are teaching critical race theory,” Hagopian said. “Most educators didn’t know what critical race theory was until Republicans made it their main reelection vehicle. But many of them are now looking it up and realizing how it is aligned with their principles, which I think is wonderful.”
On Hagopian’s syllabus is a wide array of texts to help students center the contributions that Black people have made throughout history, including Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, A Different Mirror, excerpts from A People’s History of the United States, Jazz and Justice, and the YA version of The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks. Each text will help bring nuance to the Black experience. “We’re going to learn about Black intersectional identity — all Black people don’t have the same experiences so it’s important to understand sexism, ableism, and all forms of oppression,” Hagopian said.
He has also made clear what his class is not about. “I’m not teaching white kids to hate themselves. I’m teaching them to understand how racism is systemic and that they can be part of a multiracial struggle to bring about change,” Hagopian said. “That’s empowering to white students, not shaming them.”
Hagopian is not alone in his efforts. While some states are trying to repress anti-racist education, others are mandating that teachers expand on it: The California Board of Education approved a statewide ethnic studies curriculum for high school students this March, and “Indian Education for All” standards will go into effect in Wyoming schools next school year. Meanwhile, in July, Illinois became the first state to mandate Asian American history for elementary and high school students, and Connecticut required all high schools to offer African American studies and Latino studies by 2022, with Native American studies being required in all schools beginning in the 2023-24 school year.
While anti-racism education advocates see these initiatives as promising steps forward — anti-critical race theory laws are also facing legal challenges — teachers in less progressive districts still face an uphill battle if they want to include nuanced discussions of race in their classrooms. For many of these teachers caught in the culture war, what they want most is to give children an education that reflects America’s true, complicated history.
“As a Black woman in Iowa public schools, this is my calling as a teacher and as an advocate,” Cottman said. “I believe fundamentally that students, and teachers, need to know the truth.”
A vigil for slain journalists in Mexico City, Mexico. (photo: Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images)
But as he described the threats and violence he faced, further anxiety filled Garza's thoughts. He didn't know how he could afford to care for his family in the Mexican capital. Most reporters in his home state are paid between $75 to $150 per month and he scraped by on multiple jobs, freelance work and consulting gigs.
"Have you been to see the Mechanism?" an attorney in the office asked him.
Garza would soon fall into the safety net that is the Federal Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, an agency formed in 2012 to address rising violence against activists and reporters. Today, approximately 1,500 human rights defenders and journalists are officially receiving support.
"Mexico has levels of violence - and impunity in that violence - that are comparable to open war zones, even though Mexico is not officially a country at war," says Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. CPJ's Global Impunity Index lists Mexico at No. 6, only behind active conflict zones like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and South Sudan.
When a journalist is in danger, they can contact the Mechanism for an assessment.
After evaluating individual risk factors, the agency can provide journalists with a range of protective measures, like a bulletproof vest or a bodyguard; security cameras at their home or office; targeted police patrols; a panic button to alert authorities if they're in immediate danger. The agency also links journalists to mental health services.
Garza's reporting put his life on the line
"In 2017, I documented two cases of corruption between the state government and the Los Zetas cartel," Garza told NPR. He was no stranger to violence: he'd already been kidnapped three times and a close colleague was murdered in 2013.
But this case was different. The cartel hung a banner telling Garza he had 24 hours to leave the state or they would kill him, his wife, his children and "even the dog."
"In the assessment with the agency, the government of my home state Tamaulipas said I could never return there, that they could not guarantee my safety," he says. Because of this, the Mechanism set Garza and his family up with an apartment in Mexico City and gave them additional financial support, in addition to a bodyguard.
Garza is appreciative of the support during the worst moments of his life, but over time, he has seen major gaps in the agency.
"It is a beautiful and comprehensive framework on paper," he says. "But our bureaucracy is indifferent to the needs of victims."
Garza saw colleagues back home struggling to get protection in critical moments and started the Association for Displaced and Attacked Journalists to further advocate for them. CPJ's Hootsen shares similar critiques of the agency.
"In reality, it doesn't always function really well," he says. "Many of those [protective] measures actually don't have the effect. There are a lot of problems in the communication and coordination from the federal mechanism."
Hootsen says funding for the Mechanism is in jeopardy and that it's desperately in need of additional staff. The Mexico City-based bureaucrats often don't understand the unique struggles of being a vulnerable reporter in rural Mexico, he says. Slow responses are a common complaint among journalists who need immediate help
A recurring complaint NPR heard from reporters who have received help from the agency concerned the panic button. This little cellular device allows a reporter to send a geolocated SOS that will immediately alert the agency and trusted police forces when a reporter is in danger. But the devices are often old and faulty and they rely on cell signals.
"The panic button doesn't work where I live," says Jorge Sánchez, a reporter in Veracruz state. "I'm sitting in my office and it doesn't get a signal here. I know lots of others who have it and it's just useless for most of us."
Seemingly minor slip-ups at the agency can have mortal consequences. In June, a crime reporter in Oaxaca state, Gustavo Sánchez (not related to Jorge Sánchez), was murdered five months after asking the agency for help. They had officially listed him as "protected" but hadn't actually done anything to protect him. Hootsen says Sánchez is at least the seventh reporter killed while under government protection.
He wants the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to put more money, plus more and better trained staff into the agency. But the real driver behind violence against journalists is a fundamental failure of Mexican society: impunity.
A failure to prosecute crimes against journalists means no deterrence
"The vast majority of these cases, I would say anywhere from 90 to 95%, end up lingering in impunity," says Hootsen. In some cases, the person who pulled the trigger may end up in jail, but the mastermind behind that crime almost never will.
"It's very, very rare in Mexico to get full justice," he says. "In fact, I think there may be just two or three cases where this actually happened."
Jorge Sánchez knows this pain well. Every January since 2015, Sánchez has protested in front of the Veracruz state government headquarters over his father's murder that year. Moisés Sánchez ran La Unión, a small online newspaper based near the port city Veracruz. He was a thorn in the side of local politicians, Jorge says.
"He often clashed with local authorities," he says. "I think he took pride in being hated by them. He received plenty of threats in his life but I guess he never took them seriously."
When Sánchez published a report linking the mayor to organized crime in late 2014, threatening calls and messages poured in. On Jan. 5, 2015, masked armed men burst into their home and kidnapped him. His body was found 20 days later.
After years of investigating, there is still only one police officer in prison for the crime, even though he presented evidence that the mayor had ordered him to "make [Sánchez] disappear."
"Even though the governments have changed [and] there have been three governors from three different parties, the impunity is still here," says Sánchez's son, Jorge. "People will let me know when they see [the former mayor] having a coffee or out with his family. He's just free."
Jorge's mother left their hometown after his father's death, but he insisted on staying. In an act of defiance, Sánchez decided to continue publishing La Unión in his father's name. He doesn't make any money from it and his collaborators are all volunteers. They've been able to keep reporting because Sánchez has had a bodyguard and other security measures provided by the Federal Protection Mechanism since 2015.
He's happy to have the protection and hopes he won't have to flee like Garza did. But Sánchez finds his situation, and the situation of so many journalists in Mexico, perverse.
"The criminals are the ones who should be thinking about where to go to hide," he says. "Not us, not the victims."
A jaguar. (photo: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance)
This area is known as the Central Arizona/New Mexico Recovery Area (CANRA) and covers more territory than some other important jaguar conservation areas in Central America and South America, such as the Selva Maya of Guatemala and the forests around Iguaçu Falls in Brazil.
As co-authors of two jaguar studies this year, we have found that the 20-million-acre CANRA is 27 times larger than the critical habitat designated by the government and provides habitat that could support 100 or more jaguars.
Yet, this area was overlooked by a 2018 jaguar recovery plan by the U.S. government, which could have put forth an ambitious blueprint for restoration, but instead only evaluated the U.S. habitat in a narrow 80-mile band along the border with Mexico. Given this reduced scope, the plan concluded there was too little habitat to sustain a jaguar population in the U.S. and largely left the fate of northern, borderlands jaguars to Mexico. This decision went largely unchallenged because most people did not realize that the lion’s share of U.S. habitat had not been analyzed.
However, scientists armed with this new information are calling for the federal government to right the wrong done to jaguars and to rethink jaguar recovery.
When most people think of jaguars, they imagine heavily-built cats with yellowish-brown coats with black spots stalking through lowland tropical jungles and wetlands in South America. However, historical records indicate that southwestern jaguars roamed through habitat that did not fit their popular image as rain forest denizens. Indeed, one-quarter of the more than 60 jaguars documented in the U.S. since 1900 lived in coniferous forest of at least 9,000 feet elevation.
Jaguars were not lost from the U.S. due to scarcity of prey or disease. Rather, they were methodically and mercilessly exterminated by hunters, ranchers, and federal predator control agents for two centuries.
There will be resistance to establishing breeding jaguars in the U.S. for the same reason they were originally killed off ─ prejudice against large carnivores. Nonetheless, recent surveys have shown that a majority of people support large carnivore recovery, and there is good reason to believe that jaguars can fit smoothly into the landscape.
In fact, as many as eight of these wild cats have lived in Arizona or New Mexico over the past 25 years, secretively surviving in mountain ranges like the Santa Ritas, 20 miles from the city of Tucson. Just this year one jaguar was photographed 50 miles north of the Mexican border in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona while a second one was photographed just south of the border. These cats travelling north from Mexico to reoccupy ancestral U.S. lands are almost certainly coming from a small population in Sonora, a hundred miles south of the border. This miraculous yet intermittent appearance sustains hope that a viable U.S. population may be reestablished.
In recent years, the reestablishment seemed highly unlikely owing to the feverish border wall-building by the Trump administration, which blocked the remote, rugged corridors jaguars travel to enter the U.S. Fortunately, with the halt in construction by the Biden administration, some routes remain open. But immediate action is needed from the U.S. government to quickly remove wall sections blocking critical corridors used by jaguars and other wildlife.
In the past, the government and its partners have successfully reestablished populations of other imperiled U.S. predators, including bald eagles and grizzly bears. Mexican gray wolves, like jaguars, were once extirpated from the U.S. but were reestablished in Arizona and New Mexico through a collaborative program with the federal government, a Native American Tribe, states, nonprofits and cooperating private landowners.
Now that we know there is sufficient habitat for jaguars, we ask the Biden administration to embrace this new scientific information and start planning to restore them to their historical and rightful place in the U.S.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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