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Jesse Jackson | The Mark of History Still Scars Tulsa Today
Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times
Jackson writes: "Memorial Day marks one year since the murder of George Floyd by the hands of the Minneapolis police."
One hundred years later, no one has been held responsible for the Tulsa massacre that left hundreds of Black people dead and their prosperous community in ruins.
emorial Day marks one year since the murder of George Floyd by the hands of the Minneapolis police. This week also marks the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a brutal government-aided leveling of a prosperous African American community for which there still has been no accounting and no justice. Few even know about the massacre. It hasn’t even been taught in the Tulsa public schools until this year. Although 100 years old, the massacre poses questions of justice and of decency that America cannot avoid.
After World War I, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, named Greenwood grew to be among the wealthiest Black communities in the country. Booker T. Washington called it the “Black Wall Street.” Here were successful entrepreneurs, doctors, and lawyers who through hard work and good minds were building a prosperous Black community. The district was lined with Black-owned shops. restaurants, a 54-room grand hotel and the Dreamland Theater. It supported two newspapers and a hospital.
Then on the day after Memorial Day, a white mob gathered to lynch a young Black 19-year-old who had startled a 17-year-old white girl, an elevator operator, in an elevator. Rumors inflated the incident into an alleged rape. Black veterans of World War I rushed to the jail to try to protect the young man from the mob. A shot was fired, and the enraged white mob chased blacks back into Greenwood.
Then the massacre began. The police and National Guard joined the mob rather than enforce the peace. Planes circled overhead to drop turpentine bombs on homes and businesses. As Rev. Robert Turner, pastor of the historic Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church that was torched in the massacre, notes, “The first time in American history that airplanes were used to terrorize America was not in 9/11, was not at Pearl Harbor, it was right here in the Greenwood District.”
The 2001 report of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Race Riot of 1921, created by the state legislature, found that the city of Tulsa conspired to destroy Greenwood. According to the commission’s report, the massacre destroyed some 40 square blocks. Nearly 10,000 people were left homeless as 1,256 homes were looted and burned down. So too was the thriving commercial district, including the Black hospital.
White hospitals turned away Greenwood’s wounded. Many bled to death, including Greenwood’s most prominent surgeon. The number of dead is estimated to be as many as 300, but went uncounted. Many were simply dumped in unmarked graves. Ten thousand African Americans were left homeless; some 6,000 were herded into internment camps for weeks. Government officials committed no public money to help Greenwood rebuild. Instead, they opposed any revival, even rejecting offers of assistance from outside of Tulsa.
No one was held responsible for the deaths and injuries, or the millions in property losses. Not one insurance company honored a claim by an African American. City and state officials covered up the crime for decades.
As Dreisen Heath, author of a Human Rights Watch report on the massacre summarized, “The Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa was destroyed, but survivors of the massacre and their descendants are still suffering the consequences. Decades of Black prosperity and millions of dollars in hard-earned wealth were wiped out in hours, but nobody was ever held accountable, and no compensation was ever paid.”
Legacy of discrimination
That history lives today. Tulsa is still one of the most segregated cities in the country. The current mayor acknowledges “the history of racial disparity that exists in our city. A kid that’s growing up in the predominantly African American part of our city is expected to live 11 years less than a kid that’s growing up in a whiter part of the city.” Tulsa still suffers from discrimination, institutionalized in the police, zoning laws, housing policies and more.
One hundred years later, the African American community still seeks justice. Rev. Turner marches each week to the city council to demand repair, reparations for the damage done. The state-created commission called for reparations such as direct payments to “riot survivors and descendants,” a scholarship fund and a memorial. The Human Rights Watch report on the massacre calls on the Tulsa and Oklahoma governments to provide reparations, including “direct payments to the few massacre victims still living and the descendants,” efforts to recover remains from mass graves, and a “comprehensive reparations plan,” including targeted investments in health, education and economic opportunities.” A House subcommittee has opened an inquiry into what can be done.
The issue of reparations always meets with resistance. Why should this generation pay for the crimes of those who lived 100 years ago? Yet once the massacre is admitted, the violation done to people can’t be simply ignored. And the damage incurred — erasing a prosperous Black community and enforcing racially discriminatory policies through the decades — is real.
The mark of history scars Tulsa today. There, and elsewhere in America, there needs to be a process that can officially recognize the injustice, act to repair the damages done, and bring us together, so that our society can continue to make its difficult way to an inclusive, and better America.
A memorial for George Floyd. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
These 3 Cities Began Boldly Reimagining Policing After George Floyd's Murder One Year Ago
Sean Collins, Vox
Collins writes: "A year after George Floyd's murder and the worldwide protests it sparked, more than half of US states have passed reform bills, altering policies like use of force, creating new rules about tracking misconduct, and mandating officer interventions during aggressive encounters. Major cities even made moves to aggressively reimagine policing."
Progress in each has been fitful and difficult. But that hasn’t blunted resolve to truly change policing.
year after George Floyd’s murder and the worldwide protests it sparked, more than half of US states have passed reform bills, altering policies like use of force, creating new rules about tracking misconduct, and mandating officer interventions during aggressive encounters. Major cities even made moves to aggressively reimagine policing.
Some of these changes have been tentative; some have been reversed; others have run up against lawsuits and backlash and red tape; some have been far less than what local protesters have called for. Changing policing, it has become apparent, will not be instantaneous or easy.
“I tell people, this is long, hard work,” said Jo Ann Hardesty, the city commissioner of Portland, Oregon, and a longtime activist.
Although the protests are no longer as large as they were last summer, the will to continue that work seems to still be present: An Associated Press/NORC poll conducted April 29 to May 3 found that 45 percent of Americans see police violence against the public as a serious problem. While that number is down 3 percentage points from the height of 2020’s protests, it is up 13 points from July 2015. The same poll found that 95 percent of Americans believe the criminal justice system needs to be changed, with 68 percent saying the system needs a complete or major overhaul.
As cities have begun enacting these sorts of major reforms, they have broadly fallen into three categories: reallocation of police funds into social services and community programs; citizen-based oversight initiatives; and plans to rethink how police departments look and function. Vox looked at three cities’ journeys toward making radical changes to how policing is done.
“We have to stop being afraid of going against the grain and do something new,” Austin Justice Coalition founder and executive director Chas Moore told me. And now, one year after Floyd’s death, some cities are trying to do just that.
Austin cut its policing budget by a third
More than 20 of the US’s largest cities voted to reduce their police budgets in 2021. Seattle cut about $70 million from its police budget, and has pledged to allow citizens to decide how some of that reduction will be spent; New York eliminated about $500 million (though it may increase the department’s budget for 2022); and San Francisco has pledged to reallocate $120 million in the next two years.
The city that has committed to making the largest cut, as Fola Akinnibi, Sarah Holder, and Christopher Cannon note for Bloomberg, is Austin: In August 2020, the city council there agreed to remove $153.2 million from the Austin Police Department’s 2021 budget — a reduction of about one-third.
At the moment, about $108.1 million of that money has been allocated to two tranches. One is a $31.5 million fund focused on distributing money to organizations and programs aimed at decreasing the need for police — for instance, Cate Graziani of Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, an organization that supports those working with substance abuse, said her group recently received money from this fund. The other $76.6 million fund covers civilian oversight of police, and helps make certain agencies independent of the police.
“Now we have an independent forensics lab, we now have a stand-alone 911 call center that isn’t run by the police department,” Austin council member Gregorio Casar told me. “Just yesterday, we voted to double our family violence shelter capacity in Austin using the reinvestments from the police budget. Over the course of the last few weeks and months, we’ve purchased housing for folks experiencing homelessness. We’ve hired mental health first responders, so now if you call 911 in Austin, you hear, ‘Do you need fire, police, EMS, or mental health?’”
These are significant changes — there is hope, for instance, that making the forensics lab independent will help it avoid further backlogs in rape kits, and activists have been calling for years for more mental health and homeless services.
But some Austin activists have questioned whether they go far enough, and whether they can appropriately address the scale of the city’s issues. On the matter of homelessness, for instance, Grassroots Leadership’s criminal justice organizer David Johnson pointed out that “the city has voted to further criminalize homelessness again,” after city residents voted to ban public camping, and Graziani noted that many of the homeless Austin residents she works with have not had positive experiences with the homelessness services on offer. A significant amount of the money set aside for reallocation also has not yet been spent.
“The headlines would make it seem as if we’re one of the model cities when it comes to defunding the police,” Graziani said. “It’s a lot of headlines, without a lot of substance.”
Graziani, Johnson, dozens of other activists, and several city representatives worked as part of a city-backed group called the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force to provide the substance Graziani says is lacking, researching ways to spend the third and final tranche of money Austin promised to reinvest from its police budget: $45.1 million.
Led by Communities of Color United’s Paula X. Rojas and the Austin Equity Office’s Brion Oaks, these activists put together a report that gives recommendations on how to address the problems caused by poor and violent policing across eight areas, including providing more services to those affected by violence; making significant changes to police training, staffing levels, and patrol practices; and expanding community engagement.
The task force recently presented its recommendations to the city council, and is working with representatives from the city to conduct an analysis of the feasibility, financial effects, and legal basis of the recommendations.
Casar told me that, the analysis aside, he plans to introduce a resolution in June that would codify some of the group’s recommendations into city ordinance: making new housing, mental health, and violence prevention investments — as well as modifying city policy on certain traffic offenses, including nonmoving violations.
Beyond the analysis and resolution, it’s unclear what’s next: “At this point in time, we as a task force are partially waiting — we want to see what the city is going to do next with this,” Johnson said. “However, we can’t afford to sit back and wait, because the community that empowers us empowers us to do this work whether or not the city goes along with us.”
A new model for police oversight in Portland
Also ongoing is the work to provide greater oversight of local police forces through police accountability boards — it’s a task activists have been hard at work on for nearly a century.
In theory, these committees, which are often staffed by community members with no ties to law enforcement, can improve the quality of local policing through inquiries into misconduct, by issuing policy recommendations, and by conducting reviews of departments’ internal investigations.
In practice, however, boards have historically run up against limitations that infringe on their ability to effect meaningful change.
University of Chicago law professor Sharon R. Fairley outlined the most common of these limitations in a 2020 study. Some issues include the fact that in many localities, boards are required to be advised by the city's legal counsel — the same lawyers who are defending cities and their departments against misconduct lawsuits. And many boards lack subpoena power, forced instead to do their work using whatever testimony and documents departments agree to provide, if any, and police unions can stop or weaken oversight through lawsuits and contract negotiations.
These are just some of the limitations that have led to committees with relatively narrow abilities, like those in Nashville, Chicago, and New York, that can recommend discipline following accusations of misconduct but that cannot mete out that discipline; or boards like those in Tampa, Baltimore, and Buffalo, which can suggest policy but cannot institute it themselves.
Portland is trying to take a different approach. In November 2020, 82 percent of the city’s voters approved the ballot initiative Measure 26-217, which changed the city’s charter to create a new community police oversight board that, once set up, will be the country’s most powerful.
“The system we have now, they call it independent police review, but it’s not independent, it doesn’t really review the police,” Hardesty said. “It is a system not built on accountability.”
At the moment, Portland’s Citizen Review Committee has the ability to receive complaints about policing, advise the city’s oversight agency, and field appeals from citizens and officers on complaints and investigations. The new board will have powers beyond this: It will be able to investigate police misconduct — and, to complete its work, will be able to subpoena documents and compel the release of evidence, witness testimony, and the cooperation of sworn officers. Rather than recommend discipline, the board will impose it itself — it will even be able to fire officers, including those found to have lied when presenting evidence or testimony during the course of the inquiry.
And the new board will have the ability to make policy; should the department reject a rule created by the board, that rule will automatically be sent to the city council for a vote, and the council could vote to institute it.
To ensure board members have the resources needed to do their work, the measure tied its funding to the police department’s budget: The board must be given at least 5 percent of the police department’s budget each year — far more than the 0.5 percent and 1 percent of local police budgets boards in Albuquerque and Chicago receive, respectively.
“Creating a truly independent police oversight board is something this community’s been asking for for decades,” Hardesty said. “That has always been the No. 1 thing, because what the community knows is that as long as police police police, there will never be accountability in the system.”
Darren Golden, a political consultant in Oregon, said the board should be up and running in about 18 months, although it has already hit a snag: Despite passing with overwhelming support, the police union has worked to stop the charter change from going into effect.
“This is a drastic change, which is why the Police Association was against it,” Golden said. “The issue that arose was the board has to be reflected in the contract between the city and the Police Association. And since that discipline is attached, it’s a mandatory bargaining item.”
The next step would ordinarily be for an independent arbitrator to help the city and the union reconcile police contracts; however, Golden said, that arbitrator is bound by precedent — and with this change being unprecedented, there was some concern that arbitration would result in November’s vote being overturned.
Instead, the city found what it believes will be a workaround: an amendment to Oregon’s Public Employees Collective Bargaining Act. That amendment, SB 261, Golden said, states that an “independent community police oversight board can be implemented into a contract without mandatory disciplinary bargaining, if the board was voted on and passed by a majority of the people in that area, and if it was done after July 1, 2020.”
The charter change meets both those requirements, and seems poised to go into effect — SB 261 has made it through the state’s Senate and House Judiciary Committees, and advocates for the amendment believe, given current vote counts, that it will become law.
And should that happen, the city will begin the process of standing up the board. Hardesty said she and Portland’s other commissioners have already received more than 100 applications from citizens who want to be part of the 20-member group that will decide the specifics of how the board will operate.
Once it begins its work, it is unlikely to completely solve all of Portland’s problems with policing — but its proponents believe it will create real improvements, particularly given the breadth with which it has been given to operate. Still, Hardesty said its success, and the success of future efforts to better policing, will depend on the community’s continued involvement.
The new oversight board itself is the product of this approach, Hardesty said: “This is work that has been deeply desired by the community for the whole 30-plus years I’ve been working on this issue. I like to tell people, you know, 30 years of work for overnight success.”
Minneapolis plans to recreate its police departments from scratch
A few cities have begun to contemplate whether reforms like oversight and defunding go far enough — and whether their police departments ought to be completely rethought instead.
Brooklyn Center, Minnesota — the Minneapolis suburb where 20-year-old Daunte Wright was killed during a traffic stop in April — recently voted to do just this, authorizing the creation of a new Community Response Department tasked with answering all calls for help related to a “medical, mental health, disability-related, or other behavioral or social need,” as well as a civilian-staffed traffic enforcement department that will handle all nonmoving violations. It also ordered the police department to work with these departments under the umbrella of a new Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention that has to be led by someone with “public health expertise.”
In April, Ithaca, New York, resolved to similarly reorganize its police department, and to create a civilian-led Department of Public Safety that will feature unarmed officers, who will be sent out to nonviolent emergencies. The city will still have armed officers as well but plans to reduce their list of duties, having them focus more on violent crime, while experts in things like mental health handle related crises.
Perhaps the city that has made the most progress toward this sort of reorientation is Minneapolis.
In June 2020, 13 days after Floyd died, nine city council members gathered in Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park and promised to “dismantle” the city’s police department and “create a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.”
Efforts to fulfill that promise began quickly; the council unanimously passed a resolution on June 12 that laid out a plan for beginning “a year long process of community engagement, research, and structural change to create a transformative new model for cultivating safety.”
That process saw some early successes, including changes to the police department’s use of force policy, but the push to dismantle the police department — a reform that would require amending Minneapolis’s city charter, given that document’s language mandating the city have a police department of a certain size and meeting certain characteristics — failed last fall.
But the activists and politicians advocating for dismantling have not given up: Three members of the city council have introduced a new proposal to rewrite the city charter that hopes to avoid the pitfalls that ended the first effort, and a diverse coalition of activists united under the name Yes 4 Minneapolis recently gathered the necessary signatures to guarantee that a ballot initiative on changing the charter, and dismantling the department, will be put before voters during municipal elections this fall.
“The reality is reforms have not worked,” JaNaé Bates, communications director for the advocacy groups ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, said. “There are well-documented decades of reform that the Minneapolis police department has been through. And they have also demonstrably shown that they are completely resilient to reform.”
Because of that, Bates — and many other activists — told me that the sweeping change represented by the charter amendment is necessary.
The council members’ and Yes 4 Minneapolis’s proposals are very similar. As with Ithaca’s plan, neither would take away armed police officers; instead, both would place them in a newly created department of public safety, which would also contain other safety officials, including mental health experts and anti-violence professionals. Both plans also would mandate that the leader of this department be nominated by the mayor and approved by the city council; each leaves room for the expansion and redefinition of the department.
And perhaps most importantly, both would eliminate the staffing and budget language around police written into the city charter — no longer would the city, by law, need to have at least 0.0017 police department employees per resident.
The proposals differ in minor ways. The Yes 4 Minneapolis proposal, for instance, mandates that the Department of Public Safety focus on “a comprehensive public health approach to safety,” language the city council plan lacks. The council proposal outlines how the police chief will be selected (by the mayor and approved by the council), details the Yes 4 Minneapolis plan doesn’t include.
Each has a different path to November’s ballot: The city council proposal made it out of committee in March, and will ultimately need to be approved by the mayor, or a veto-proof majority of the council. The Yes 4 Minneapolis proposal needed 20,000 signatures; it crossed that threshold, was validated by the Minneapolis clerk in May, and is now undergoing legal review by the city.
In order to be instituted, the proposals only need to be approved by the majority of voters. And while there are currently two ideas circulating, the council members and activists plan to reconcile their language before ballots are printed so that voters wouldn’t be presented with two nearly identical ballot initiatives.
Although the election season isn’t yet in full swing, supporters of the proposals are optimistic that voters will approve the change. In a July 2020 ACLU of Minnesota/Fairness Project/Benenson Strategy Group poll investigating support for the first incarnation of the city council charter change, 56 percent of registered voters said they were supportive of the idea, and 61 percent said they were leaning toward voting for it.
As with the defunding and oversight proposals, the Minneapolis charter change would not be a panacea: There would be no guarantees that the armed officers in the Department of Public Safety wouldn’t kill any unarmed people or abuse their power.
“I’m not sure if it’s gonna be the one thing that’s gonna change policing,” council member Andrea Jenkins said. “I’m Black. Racism is at the core of this. So policies can change, laws can change, and people still act out of racial animus.”
The push for police reform and other systemic changes will continue
Many I spoke to about their city’s reform efforts agreed with Jenkins, arguing that while police reform is necessary, it ultimately is one part of a larger system that has traditionally disadvantaged people of color, women, low-income people, and others, a system that was put in place before anyone alive now was born and that was legally structured in a way meant to ensure the rights and privileges of white landowning men and the continued viability of the use of slave labor.
The harm police visit on communities, Austin Justice Coalition’s Moore said, is a symptom of the fact that “the formula for American pie is white supremacy, and racism, and homophobia, and all that shit.”
“We need an American pie that does not use those ingredients,” Moore said. “Let’s get in the fucking kitchen. And let’s whip it up.”
As the pace of progress on police reform has proven, whipping up a new pie is likely to take significant time and effort — should the will to do so be found. Larger issues of racism and structural inequality aside, though, there is currently will to revise policing, and that’s where so many activists and communities around the US are focusing their energy now.
“People have to understand that police is just the front door into a broken system,” Hardesty said. “Yes, we must change policing, because it is the front door. But we have to change the entire system. ... That’s the hard work ahead. Revolution takes a long time.”
Israeli forces move against a Palestinian protest in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Saturday. (photo: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Israeli Police Round Up Palestinian Protesters Out of Global Spotlight
Robert Mackey, The Intercept
Mackey writes: "Palestinian activists urged the world not to look away from their struggle for freedom and equality following the ceasefire in Gaza, as Israeli police began rounding up Palestinian citizens of Israel who took part in demonstrations described as riots by the authorities."
“This is what we warned about. Israel will target us all when you stop looking.”
alestinian activists urged the world not to look away from their struggle for freedom and equality following the ceasefire in Gaza, as Israeli police began rounding up Palestinian citizens of Israel who took part in demonstrations described as riots by the authorities.
At least 74 Palestinians were detained by Monday afternoon, in the first hours of what Israel’s police force is calling “Operation Law and Order.” Palestinian rights groups called the planned arrest of up to 500 protesters — on charges ranging from attacks on the police to vandalism to online incitement — a blatant crackdown on dissent, timed to coincide with the dimming of the global spotlight on the conflict.
“Israeli forces and police are going on a mass arresting rampage in Lydd, and other Palestinian cities in an attempt to ‘even the score’ with Palestinians that spoke up against their ethnic cleansing,” the Palestinian writer Mariam Barghouti observed on Twitter, as video of two men being detained and blindfolded in the city Israelis call Lod circulated online. “This is what we warned about. Israel will target us all when you stop looking.”
“The world tends to look away as soon as Israeli lives are no longer threatened by rockets but it is stuff like this, that Israel does to Palestinians every day, that guarantees future rounds,” the writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer commented on the same images.
“Don’t look away from the purge,” Jalal Abukhater, a Jerusalem-based Palestinian writer and civil servant, urged his international Twitter followers early Monday morning. “Don’t look away from the terror Israeli forces are planning to put in hundreds of Palestinian homes over next 48 hrs.”
“The massive arrest campaign announced by Israeli police last night is a militarized war against Palestinian citizens of Israel,” Hassan Jabareen, the general director of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said in a statement. “This is a war against Palestinian demonstrators, political activists, and minors, employing massive Israeli police forces to raid the homes of Palestinian citizens.”
Another brief video clip that sowed outrage showed a young Palestinian boy being arrested in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
A researcher for the rights group Defense for Children International-Palestine reported that the boy, who is 11, was arrested because Israeli settlers accused him of throwing stones. He was later released.
Palestinian citizens of Israel had started their protests before the fighting in Gaza, in solidarity with Palestinian families threatened with eviction from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, in occupied East Jerusalem, to make way for Israeli settlers. Israeli police used force and mass arrests to try to stifle those protests, detaining more than 1,500 people this month, and Palestinians also faced violence from Jewish supremacist mobs, including racist soccer hooligans and far-right settlers.
“Reminding us that [Palestinians] inside Israel are also fighting a military system bent on oppressing them, Israel has launched a mass arrest campaign to pick up those who took to the street the past 2 weeks,” Tareq Baconi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group commented. There were, he added, “no similar arrests for Jewish mobs – their violence was state sanctioned.”
Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman, told The New York Times that about 70 percent of those arrested this month were Palestinian citizens of Israel, but a Palestinian lawmaker in the Israeli Knesset, Aida Touma-Sliman, estimated that the true share was closer to 90 percent.
As of last week, according to Nimer Sultany, the editor-in-chief of The Palestine Yearbook of International Law, 85 percent of those arrested were Palestinian, and many of the rest were left-wing Israeli Jews protesting alongside them. The first 116 indictments were all against Palestinians.
Three Jewish extremists who took part in a brutal mob attack on a Palestinian man in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam this month were charged on Monday with attempted murder and aggravated assault, Haaretz reported. As the newspaper also reported in its main, Hebrew-language edition, more than 20 attackers were seen on video beating the victim, but only four have been arrested so far, and just three charged.
Later in the day, a 17-year-old Palestinian accused of injuring an Israeli soldier and a civilian with a knife was shot and killed by a border police officer in Jerusalem. Pointing to video of the incident released by the police, and additional footage recorded by a witness, Defense for Children International-Palestine called the incident an apparent extrajudicial killing, since Israeli forces apparently fired at least three shots after the suspected attacker, Zuhdi Muhannad Zuhdi al-Tawil, “was incapacitated and on the ground.”
The wave of arrests of Palestinian citizens of Israel has been accompanied by evidence of casual brutality and racism from Israeli police officers. In one incident, captured on a surveillance camera in Umm el-Fahm — a majority Palestinian town in northern Israel where protesters marched last week — a food delivery driver who stepped aside as Israeli police officers were leading an arrested man away was first shoved off the sidewalk by one officer and then hurled to the ground by another.
Yanal Jbareen, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who reports for Haaretz 21, the Israeli newspaper’s journalistic incubator, posted the video on Twitter along with an interview of the driver, summarized in Hebrew. According to Jbareen, the driver said that while he was lying on the ground, one of the officers told him that he should be more respectful of the police in future, worshipping them instead of god.
Khalil Ferebee, Mr. Brown's son, embraced a woman in front of a memorial to his father in Elizabeth City this month. (photo: Amr Alfiky/NYT)
Woman Runs Over Protesters at March Against Police Killing of Andrew Brown
Alex Woodward, The Independent
Woodward writes: "A woman in North Carolina was arrested on Monday after allegedly striking protesters marching against the police killing of Andrew Brown."
woman in North Carolina was arrested on Monday after allegedly striking protesters marching against the police killing of Andrew Brown.
Two Black women who were “peacefully protesting and exercising their constitutional rights” were hospitalised with non-life-threatening injuries, according to the Elizabeth City Police Department.
The suspect, 41-year-old Lisa Michelle O’Quinn, was charged with two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, one count of careless and reckless driving, and one count of unsafe movement. Police are also considering whether to bring hate crime charges against her.
Her first court appearance is on 27 May.
Daily demonstrations – including Monday’s incident, also on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the policing killing of George Floyd – have continued in the wake of the killing of Mr Brown, who was fatally shot by Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputies on 21 April.
His death and a prosecutor’s decision not to bring charges against the deputies involved in the killing have revived national protests and debate about the lack of prosecutions for police and urgent demands for law enforcement reforms.
Raman Pratasevich in 2019. (photo: AP)
Belarus Journalist's Father Says Video Confession Carried Out Under Duress
Luke Harding, Guardian UK
Harding writes: "The father of the Belarusian journalist Raman Pratasevich said it was clear his son was acting under duress and had been beaten when he recorded a video 'confessing' to organising mass protests against the regime."
Raman Pratasevich, seized from diverted Ryanair flight, appeared to have been beaten, says father
he father of the Belarusian journalist Raman Pratasevich said it was clear his son was acting under duress and had been beaten when he recorded a video “confessing” to organising mass protests against the regime.
Dmitry Pratasevich said Raman was “very nervous” and “spoke in a way that was unusual for him”.
“It’s clear that he was physically harmed because you can see signs of a beating on his face,” he added. He said his son also appeared to be missing some teeth.
It was obvious he was being forced to read out a statement, his father said, in which Raman claimed he was being treated correctly and was not suffering any health problems, following his arrest on Sunday.
“We still don’t know where he is, what his condition is, how he feels,” the father, who lives in Poland, told the news agency AFP.
Speaking on Tuesday, Belarus’s opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, said it was evident Pratasevich was acting “under pressure”. He faced torture from the authorities, she said, adding: “He’s been taken hostage in an act of state terrorism.”
Pratasevich, 26, was detained after Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, personally authorised the forced downing of his Ryanair flight travelling between Greece and Lithuania. His Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, was also seized. Their whereabouts are unknown.
Tsikhanouskaya called on Tuesday for an international meeting to discuss Belarus and asked the British government to invite the country’s democratic forces to take part in next month’s G7 summit in Cornwall, hosted by Boris Johnson.
She urged the Biden administration to step up pressure on Lukashenko, in a call with the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. “It is down to the reaction from the west. We need sanctions and political isolation,” she said.
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has said he would like to invite Tsikhanouskaya to the G7 summit if Downing Street supported the move. “The president is in favour of that, if the British agree to it,” a French official said.
On Tuesday, however, the government said Tsikhanouskaya would not be invited to take part. A G7 spokesperson said there were “no current plans” to include “further national participants”. G7 leaders would discuss Belarus’ “reckless and dangerous behaviour” and “further sanctions for those responsible”, the cabinet office said.
EU leaders have promised fresh economic measures against Lukashenko’s government as well as a flight ban on the national carrier Belavia. The UK and EU have suspended flights into Belarus airspace, with most airlines skirting around it on the way to Moscow.
At home, Belarus has continued with repressive measures that have led to the arrests of 32,000 people since protests began last August after a presidential election Lukashenko allegedly rigged in his favour.
Seven Belarus activists were jailed on Tuesday for between seven and four years. They were found guilty of taking part in “mass unrest” following a closed-door trial in the eastern Mogilev region.
Paval Sieviaryniets, who co-chairs the Christian Democracy party, was arrested in June before the protests began. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. In court Sieviaryniets shouted “Belarus will be free” and broke into a defiant opposition chant: “We believe, we can, we will win.”
Fellow defendant Maxim Viniarski, a member of the European Belarus campaign, was sentenced to five years in prison. He had previously been jailed for protesting against the regime. His colleague Yauhen Afnahel, a veteran organiser and opposition coordinator, got seven years.
Irina Schastnaya, the editor of Maya Kraina Belarus channel, received four years. Last week, the biggest non-state media outlet – website tut.by – was taken offline, with many of its staff arrested.
The Belarus authorities appear determined to stamp out all remaining dissent. On the day after Pratasevic’s Ryanair flight was intercepted, Lukashenko signed a new media decree that gave the state the power to block any media it deems threatening to “national values”. No foreign nationals can be involved in any media function, it says.
The government has to approve mass gatherings, livestreams by media and personal outlets from unsanctioned events are banned, and journalists are forbidden from taking part in “illegal” rallies, it adds. A new law also allows the blocking of 4G and internet.
Mary Beard. (photo: Royal Society of Literature)
"Women & Power: A Manifesto" Author, Mary Beard, Keeps History on the Move
Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
Waldman writes: "If you happen to be speaking with someone who is unfamiliar with Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire Mary Beard, it may take you a few tries to convey her cultural post."
For Beard, change has always been a part of the classics. We need to expose the field’s flaws to learn how we’ve inherited them.
f you happen to be speaking with someone who is unfamiliar with Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire Mary Beard, it may take you a few tries to convey her cultural post. “Classicist” doesn’t quite capture it. “Celebrity historian” inches closer. In a Guardian profile, a colleague of Beard’s recalls a crew of English schoolgirls glimpsing the scholar, a longtime pillar of Cambridge’s faculty, as she prepared to film a documentary about the lost city of Pompeii. “They went insane,” the colleague said. “It was like they’d seen a boy band.”
Stateside, Beard may be best known as the author of “SPQR,” a doorstop Roman history, and “Women and Power,” a trenchant study of ancient and modern attitudes toward female speech. She also contributes criticism to the London Review of Books and maintains a blog, “A Don’s Life,” for the Times Literary Supplement. On television, whether narrating the reboot of the BBC’s series “Civilisations,” demystifying classical attitudes toward immigration, or staging cultural debates from her study, Beard, now sixty-six, seems perfectly cast in the role of the public intellectual: incisive, personable, just shy of charmingly unkempt. She exudes modesty—she could not have been more polite when I mixed up Leonidas, the king of Sparta, with Scipio Africanus, a Roman general who lived some three hundred years later—and her voice slips easily into a storyteller’s rhythm. Online, Beard is a frequent user of Twitter, and as Rebecca Mead observed in a 2014 Profile, she’s found an unlikely hobby in taming Internet trolls. (“She should be able to analyze Augustus’s dictums, or early A.D. epithets / Without having to scroll through death, bomb, and rape threats,” a spoken-word poem uploaded to YouTube goes.) Yet Beard seems delighted to edify and even befriend her haters. Several years ago, a former Twitter adversary asked her for a job recommendation letter. She said yes.
In April, Howard University announced that it was dissolving its classics department, a move that punctuates a heated debate about whether Greco-Roman history should be taught separately or differently from the history of other ancient societies. A new wave of scholars, such as Princeton’s Dan-el Padilla Peralta, view the discipline as inextricable from the imperialist mind-set that created it; they claim that classics sustains a mythology of whiteness. As the field’s most famous practitioner, and a dedicated anti-racist and feminist, Beard takes a middle position: she believes neither that classics deserves a pedestal nor that it must be destroyed. Recently, in conversation, Beard defended her stance—and spoke about feminist translations, Internet manners, and the fluid properties of the canon. Our exchange has been edited for clarity.
I was looking over the list of subjects that you specialize in—things like civilization, empire, power, the exile of women from the public sphere—and thinking that this should be a light, relaxing conversation.
Oh, dear!
But you’ve also written about Roman laughter. Do you have a favorite classical joke to start us off?
Don’t get your hopes up—they’re not that funny. But what’s interesting about them, I think, is that they’re not incomprehensible; they fall on a spectrum of what might strike us as humorous today. Here’s a relatively clean one. A man runs into a friend of his in the city. The friend acts surprised; “I thought you were dead!” he says. “No,” the man says, “I mean, here I am. I’m alive.” And the friend gives him a doubtful look and says, “Well, the person who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you are!”
[Awkward laughter.]
No, it’s not going to make you a lot of money in comedy places, is it? But the joke is, for me, quite interesting, because it’s about one of the things that we forget about pre-modern culture, which is how difficult it was to prove who you were. There were no I.D. cards, no passports. The construction of an authentic, authoritative version of “this is me” was actually quite hard.
I was just listening to an author speak about humor. She said that writers can use it as a mark of in-groups and out-groups: you sort of know who your people are by who laughs at your jokes. So humor can be used to signal loneliness or absence, as when a character says something funny and there’s no one there to hear it.
That’s right. The aggression in humor is not just, Oh, people are laughing at you. It can be subtler—someone declining to notice that you’ve made a joke, withholding their laughter. That can be just as hostile as people piling on you, I think! And again, there’s quite a lot in Roman comedy about how other people know who you are, and how you know who you are, which is bound up, as you say, in laughter and the notion of identification.
What got you interested in classics? I heard there was an origin story.
There is, and yet I distrust it, because you start to tell origin stories and then they become mythologized. But I went to the British Museum when I was about five, with my mom. I wanted to see the Egyptian stuff—not just the mummies, which scared me, but Egyptian daily life. And my mom said, as we were going through this gallery, “In that case is a piece of ancient Egyptian cake, three thousand years old.” I couldn’t see it because it was far up, in the back of the case. And, at that moment, a guy came by, asked if there was something I wanted to see, got the keys out of his pocket, opened the case, and brought out the cake. He put it right up to my nose. And it was totally memorable—partly because, my God, it was a three-thousand-year-old piece of cake—but also because of his facilitation. There was a locked museum case and someone came and opened it up for me. It’s been quite a symbol for me, because I think everybody’s in a position to unlock museum cases for other people.
Of course, I realize that the charming little five-year-old white girl probably has a better experience than many others do. Museums can keep people out by suggesting versions of culture that aren’t inclusive. And yet I also know that they can get people in.
I want to ask you about whether you think that our approach to the past, or maybe our goals in studying the past, are shifting. It seems like contemporary historians are often trying not only to reconstruct history but to remake what the discipline does. There seems to be a strong corrective impulse, and more space for imagination or speculation. Does that sound off base to you?
I think that’s true. But I’m old enough to say that every generation has that corrective impulse, and that’s part of what keeps history on the move. I remember when I was a student and the person speaking to us in Cambridge was Moses Finley, a great historian of ancient Greece. And he just exuded that sense of wanting to rework the way we think about the past, by looking at slavery, debt, poverty, the fragility of democracy. History would be very dull if we weren’t always trying to change how it was done. It’s our conversation with the dead, and we practice a kind of ventriloquism in order to hear from the other side.
How has the field changed since you began?
Oh, it’s changed in all kinds of ways, hugely. For me, obviously, the history of women is one thing which comes to mind. When I was a student, I was at a women’s college in Cambridge, and so I was sensitive to the idea that there might be a history of our own. Back then, though, you would do work like that in the summertime, when the real work had finished. You knew that it wasn’t really serious. And that has been revolutionized in a way that is really productive, because it’s hard to think of a subject that’s more important than gender. The move from total marginalization to the history of specific women to something much broader and more challenging, which is the history of gender, the ideas and conflicts around gender. . . .
I spent part of my career lamenting that there weren’t more female authors in the ancient world. Well, you can mourn the lack of those authors forever, but you’re not very likely to find more. But you can engage with how gender is defined.
What is it like to see a new wave of feminist translations in your field? I’m thinking especially of the subtle vocabulary shifts in Emily Wilson’s “The Odyssey.” It reminds me of the lecture of yours that became “Women and Power,” when you invoked the moment, in Book I, where Telemachus hushes Penelope. You encouraged the audience to see that scene in a new light, as a kind of foundational representation of misogyny.
I think Emily’s translation is great. I think she’d be the first to say that translating is always a question of interpretation, of making the ancient text mean something for us. Emily succeeds brilliantly—and, in a hundred years, there’ll be somebody else translating the poem, and we’ll look at it differently again.
People often say, “Why do we need people to learn Latin and Greek? Everything’s been translated!” But go and look at Gilbert Murray’s early-twentieth-century translation of Greek tragedy, and see whether it says anything to you. It was hugely popular at the time; it was terribly important to the antiwar movement. And now it strikes us as some kind of awful rhyming verse. You see, history is always moving, because we’re changing the questions and it’s changing the answers. One very simple, and yet very important, thing about having this translation is that [Wilson] doesn’t call the slaves “servant girls.” You look through past translations and it’s always a load of euphemistic “servant girls,” as if to deny the hierarchy that is embedded so deeply in the “Odyssey.”
I was reading about how, in some scenes, Wilson’s word choice intensifies the misogyny and violence, as if to surface a kind of feminist critique that’s already there, in the text.
Oh, yes. When the enslaved women are killed. Margaret Atwood does something similar with the incident in her novella “The Penelopiad.”
I wonder if you see a difference between your feminist strategy, if that’s the right word, and Wilson’s. It seems as though she’s trying to rediscover feminism in the ancient world, but you’re more likely to be the source of the feminism yourself. In your art-history books, you’ve talked about bringing women into the frame by forgetting about the creator’s intention—since we’re not likely to know much about them, anyway—and asking, “What would it have been like to see this work through a Roman woman’s eyes?”
Yes, well, if you tell me to go away for two years and translate the “Odyssey,” the result will be terrible. Scholarship allows you a different rhetoric than translation. You’re right that I wanted to ask, “What is it like to look at this? What is it like if you’re an enslaved person from the Athenian empire?” One of the things that historical imagination can do is make you change perspective. I’m always struck by the way that even the most right-on historians will talk about the “great” general Scipio Africanus. What do you mean by “great”? Do you mean that he killed a very large number of people? The adjectives that people use when they talk about the ancient world are terrifically revealing.
Would you ever consider publishing your own translation?
I admire people who do. I obviously enjoy talking to students about how tricky and interesting the language of these Latin writers is. But, no, I just want to go on doing history. How boring.
How do you feel about canons? As a proposition.
They’re always changing, aren’t they? And what’s almost more important than what’s in them is the dialectical element: they’re what you react against. I know I sound like a tricksy academic, but in some ways a canon reveals to you not so much what is there as what’s not there. And so it changes itself; it’s self-destructive. The problem, of course, is that we can’t read everything, and so we have to be aware of what we are and aren’t reading, and why we are or aren’t reading it.
Obviously, there is conservative support for a particular version of the canon, and I think we all know what that looks like. But if you think about some of these apparently conservative institutions more radically, coming face-to-face with them makes you question what you ought to read. And so I think that paradoxically, although it’s easy to get upset about the dead hand of the canon, all the dead white men of literature, et cetera, I also, looking back, can start to say, “But that’s the canon doing its job.” It’s making me ask, “Why is it like this?”
The idea that a canon is fluid, that its job is to evolve, seems really useful. Do you have a personal canon, and how much has it shifted over time?
Oh, I’m probably the wrong person to ask about that, because, you know, one’s internal canon is not “I’m going to sit down and write a syllabus for the great books.” But I can see changes in terms of creative literature and fiction. We’re talking about what gets placed on the front table of bookshops. It used to be posh white men and then occasionally some not posh white men and a few women—all of them in the U.K. And that work is still considered quite important, but literature isn’t defined any longer by what happens to white people in the U.K.
You mentioned that our relationship to history changes when the present forces us to ask different questions of the past. Has any of the upheaval of the pandemic dislodged things for you, or caused you to shift your perspective more radically?
I can see why it might have. The shutdown didn’t make so much difference to me, I suspect, because I was desperately trying to finish a book. It was rather overdue and, awful and tragic as the pandemic was, I actually didn’t spend it exploring or having time to explore things but feverishly checking footnotes.
Can I ask about the manuscript?
You may. I’m going to try and make it sound really, really interesting. It came out of some lectures that I did, in 2014, at the National Gallery in D.C., when I looked at modern representations of Roman emperors—mostly from the fifteenth-century onward. I wanted to say, “Well, why was it that people so often represented this series of men that they hated?” Certainly no one thought these murderers were nice guys. So what cultural role does the imagery of dead political villains play? And how are we supposed to regard a statue of someone abhorrent that has been expressly commissioned by people who disliked him? I had no clue, when I started, that there was going to be any modern relevance to this theme.
Have you been following the controversy in the States over Confederate statues?
Oh, yes. This is about Roman emperors, but I hope I’ve written it to point at the larger questions.
I’m struck by the diversity of platforms and genres that you’ve conquered. You do BBC documentaries and live television, and you write books, articles, and blog posts, and you go on the radio, and you teach. The conventions of each form must be pretty different. Do you find yourself code-switching a great deal?
Less than you might imagine. I use technical terminology in the lectures, because the students need to learn it, and I emphasize uncertainty, what we don’t know or aren’t sure about. But I remember someone telling me, quite early on, that if people turn on the television for a documentary on Rome, they don’t want to hear that we don’t know anything. That’s a real downer. And so I’ve learned to say, in a way that is honest, “Well, what is it that we do know?”
I think probably the telly has informed my undergraduate teaching at least as much as my teaching is important for the telly. A lot of first year undergraduates are smart but ignorant, and they need to be engaged. People think that, if you get up in front of students in Cambridge, you can deliver fantastically detailed lectures that are really boring, because the students have to sit there anyway. Well, no. They just get on their phones.
Do you have a favorite way to communicate with people who are interested in your work?
Face-to-face is the nicest. I think this is what we’ve missed so much recently. One of the most memorable face-to-face encounters I had was in a local prison. I went and spoke to the prisoners about Roman history, and hearing what they had to say about gladiators and punishment and criminality was wonderful. On the other hand, with television, you reach more people, so there’s a bit of a trade-off there. And that’s where Twitter is quite interesting, although people are rubbish on it. It used to be that you’d do a TV documentary and, a few weeks later, you got a letter. But now you can engage even on the simplest things. Someone might say, “I didn’t catch where that purple statue of Augustus was,” and you can just say, “This is where it was.”
You’ve also felt the wrath of trolls online.
Oh, it’s dreadful and cruel what people say to each other on social media, and I’m sure I’m guilty sometimes, too. But people excuse the awful misogyny and racism by saying that you feel particularly disinhibited on the Internet. And, really, what kind of an excuse is that?
In the States, there’s some intersection between classics and the worst of the social Internet. People on the right adopt the names of Roman generals, and there’s an idealization of militarism and “the West” that’s used as a sort of racist dog whistle. What do you make of the way that white supremacists online have appropriated aspects of Greco-Roman culture?
Well, I think they do it extremely badly. It’s probably worse in the United States than in the U.K.—we don’t have your Second Amendment—but I’ve developed a view that, if I see some real rubbish, I try to get back to the poster. “Just so you know, Scipio Africanus didn’t say that”—that sort of thing. And because my day job is being a professor, you sort of have to listen to me, because this is what I do. There is, I suspect, a quite small number of ultra-right users who are drawing on the classics, and a hell of a lot of people who might start to think that they’re right. I think you need them to realize that not everyone agrees with the supremacists.
The extent to which the left versus the right has drawn on classical traditions—has that been stable over time? Like, the scholars of the Enlightenment who more or less invented classics would have considered themselves liberals, right?
The classics have always been fought over. I don’t think there’s something more interesting about the Greeks and Romans than there is about the Persians. It makes little sense to give one culture a star and another a C-minus. But it so happens that the classics have been deeply debated, and because they’ve been deeply debated, they’ve been very important to the European and then the transatlantic West—and to a kind of a conservative, fascist autocracy, which has conscripted classics. But that’s only one side of the story. People have also said, “Look, there’s a way here of thinking about human freedom, democracy, et cetera.” There’s no doubt that Mussolini’s cultural hegemony rested on classics, and I think it’s important to remind people of that; the same would be true of Hitler. At the same time, many others were using the classical tradition to undermine a fascist ideology. So I don’t think it’s intrinsically radical, conservative, liberal, or oppressive. There’s a lot of people who want to use the discipline to discuss precisely those issues, and in some ways the two sides are symbiotic.
I think that, at the moment, there is an over-tendency to come down on the negative side of the history of classics. I suppose that’s balanced by the odious approach that says classics is the foundation of Western culture—so, you know, Athenian democracy, with no women and a load of enslaved people, is where it’s at.
I think the critique from scholars like Dan-el Padilla Peralta might be something like: but what if those unrealized ideals—democracy, liberty, et cetera—have only ever been used as fig leaves over institutional rot? It’s not that the field of classics, or even Western society itself, has fallen short of its articulated goals; it’s that the goals themselves provide a sort of cover for their precise opposite.
First, I think Dan-el is extremely smart, and I respect him enormously. And it’s not just him; a lot of people are pointing to all kinds of places where the discipline needs to change. If you come to my university, it is not a diverse enough culture. There are a lot of people trying to do something about it, but probably not quick enough, and probably not with enough money behind them. Really, we need a bit of action, not just talk.
But, to return to where we started, the strength of a discipline is knowing that it’s going to be different. With classics, we’ve seen it happen with gender. For a time, I was the only woman lecturer in Cambridge’s classics faculty, and now—again, the change has been far too slow—there’s more of us. But here’s the other thing: I don’t think that an overly gloomy view of the history of a discipline helps to change it. I think that you have to diagnose what the problem is correctly, or you’re likely to solve the wrong problem. Classics has been implicated in terrible things, which we need to make people more aware of. And yet where did the legitimization of gay rights in the nineteenth century come from? And when the U.K. started its very slow path to what you might call democracy, where did that come from? It was the classics; those guys were studying Athenian democracy. They were a bit starry-eyed about it being a democracy. But it was what drew those dreadful translations from Gilbert Murray, who was trying to use Greek tragedy to bring peace to Europe during and after World War I. The antiwar slogans on the London buses were in Latin.
Classics is what we make it, and the fact that the classical world has been misrepresented should not be used against it. I don’t think many people would say that we’d be better off without Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” and what it shows us, or what Derek Walcott shows us, working from the same material, or what Romare Bearden shows us, with his images. These artists reveal, embedded in a formative work of Western literature, a version of the colonial ghost. We need to look at that and see what we’re the inheritors of.
You’ve written and broadcast a lot about this indefinable thing civilization. I wonder if the experience of the pandemic has changed your attitude toward it, its fragility or durability or—
I’d say two things. The first is that, unless you have a degree of relativism about civilization, you’re lost. One person’s civilization is another person’s barbarism; history teaches that civilization is always the insiders’ view of themselves. As for the pandemic, rather than “civilization,” let’s say it’s perhaps challenged the role of “arts and culture.” There’s been a bit of a blindness to those things—a sense that what was really keeping us on the road was, of course, the work of scientists, who were working on the vaccine and on better treatment. And in no way would I like to suggest that that wasn’t important. But people tend to think that music, literature, and so on is icing on the cake.
But the arts are essential. They help you understand what you are experiencing. Look at ancient history. Where does Western literature start? It starts, in the “Iliad,” with a bloody plague!
Do you have any fantasies about what you’ll do once everyone is vaccinated?
I have terribly limited ambitions. I’ve got a large house with a garden; I’m not living in a small flat with three kids under six. And I didn’t lose my job. So I think it’s very important for people like me to be humble. You just want the pandemic to be a wake-up call. This is a tiny example, but in the U.K. we have our exam system. We think the only way we can grade students is by making them sit down for eight hours in the Great Hall, where they do everything from memory. I grew up with a slight affection for it because I was good at it; people always have affection, I think, for the things they take to as children. But we didn’t do it last year. We’re not going to do it this year. We’ve got a much more trimmed down version, and I don’t think any injustice has been done. It’s gone, and perhaps it should stay gone—perhaps that would be no bad thing.
Pollination in Svalbard, Norway. In some parts of the Arctic, important pollinating fly numbers declined by 80% between 1996 and 2014. (photo: Stephen Coulson/SLU/Caff)
Climate Crisis Behind Drastic Drop in Arctic Wildlife Populations - Report
Gloria Dickie, Guardian UK
Dickie writes: "A drastic drop in caribou and shorebird populations is a reflection of the dire changes unfolding on the Arctic tundra, according to a new report from the Arctic Council."
Native shorebirds and caribou among species at risk as survival strategies are upended
drastic drop in caribou and shorebird populations is a reflection of the dire changes unfolding on the Arctic tundra, according to a new report from the Arctic Council.
The terrestrial Arctic spans approximately 2.7m sq miles (7m sq km), marked by extreme cold, drought, strong winds and seasonal darkness. Species living in this environment have adapted to thrive in the harsh conditions. But the climate crisis has upended such survival strategies, according to the State of the Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity report, published by the council’s Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (Caff) working group.
“Climate change is the overwhelming driver of change in terrestrial Arctic ecosystems, causing diverse, unpredictable and significant impacts that are expected to intensify,” the report says.
The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, leading to extreme weather events, southerly species moving northward, and the emergence and spread of pathogens among native species. The report, released on Thursday at the council’s ministerial meeting in Reykjavik, is the first to assess the status and trends for Arctic species living on land, following Caff’s 2017 assessment of marine biodiversity.
The report drew on decades of circumpolar biodiversity monitoring to give an overview of the changes occurring in the region. It appears the Arctic is becoming greener and shrubs are gaining ground, slowly replacing mosses and lichens on the tundra. At Zackenberg research station in north-east Greenland, scientists found that important pollinating flies declined by 80% between 1996 and 2014, hinting at a climate-induced mismatch between the timing of plant flowering and pollinator flight activity.
Of the 88 species of shorebirds, or waders, examined, 20% experienced declines in all populations, while well over half had at least one population in decline. “On the Arctic tundra, shorebirds are the most diverse group of birds; if you’re Inuit, these would be the backyard birds of your environment,” said Paul Allen Smith, a biologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada and a bird expert on the report. In the east Asian-Australasian Flyway, a migratory pathway linking the high latitudes with the Pacific Ocean, 88% of shorebirds are declining. This, Smith said, is likely to be due to habitat loss in Asia’s Yellow Sea region, where the birds spend their winters. It is estimated that under different climate scenarios, 80% of high-Arctic shorebirds could also lose large parts of their northern breeding grounds in the next 50 years.
When it comes to caribou, with herds roaming from Russia to Alaska, the climate signal has been harder to separate from the noise. “Caribou populations naturally fluctuate and have cycles of abundance,” explained Christine Cuyler, a consultant for the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and caribou and musk ox expert on the report. “But for some the amplitude has grown. Today, we’re seeing fluctuations beyond known historical levels.”
The majority of migratory tundra and forest caribou populations have declined in recent years, with few exceptions. The Bathurst herd, which ranges from Canada’s Northwest Territories to Nunavut, dropped by 98% between 1986 and 2018. Cuyler said several factors are probably driving these declines, including diminished food availability, rain-on-snow eventsand harassing insects, which prevent the ungulates from foraging and gaining enough weight to survive the winter.
Warmer temperatures have also led to the emergence of pathogens that have had a negative effect on the health of some animals. In 2012, an outbreak of erysipelas, a bacterial infection that affects the skin, killed about 150 musk oxen on Banks Island in the Northwest Territories.
“[The bacterium] is common throughout the world, but it has not been normal for it to show up in the Arctic,” said Cuyler. “It’s normally dormant because of the cool temperatures. The warming Arctic is really changing things.” Moreover, mammals ushered northward by higher temperatures may also bring new diseases and parasites that could affect naive native species.
Such migrants, the report says, are altering predator-prey interactions in the north. Red foxes are known to compete for the same dens as Arctic foxes and even kill them. In Alaska, brown bears are killing musk ox calves. “This is something totally new” that has only been seen in the last 20 years, said Cuyler. “And it’s devastating.”
Ultimately, as climatic zones and species shift northward, the terrestrial Arctic ecosystem will shrink. “Extreme events – weather, wildfires and insect outbreaks – will leave their mark for multiple years in a system like the Arctic,” said Niels Martin Schmidt, a senior researcher at Aarhus University and contributor to the report, “because everything takes a long time to regenerate.” He added that “sustained ecosystem-based monitoring” is needed to be able to track such changes over time.
“We need to understand how species are interacting to fully understand the consequences of climate change on biodiversity loss.”
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