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A pattern of indiscriminate violence committed by Russian forces appears to have taken hold in a number of towns and villages in the Kyiv region.
Around noon on Saturday, March 19th, Didyk and his grandfather had walked down the road from their house to feed the family’s cows, chickens, and pigs. By then, Novyi Bykiv had been occupied for several weeks. As Didyk and his grandfather passed a Russian checkpoint, soldiers told them that they had twenty minutes to return, and they had better hurry up. By the time they came back, a different group of soldiers was manning the checkpoint. They separated Didyk from his grandfather and interrogated him: Who in town has gold? Who has weapons? Who is a member of the local Territorial Defense Forces?
As Didyk recalled, soldiers put a bag over his head, and eventually took him to the cellar, where he was severely beaten, with his hands tied. At one point, a soldier struck each of his knees with a hammer. The questions continued. His captors asked for the locations of nearby Ukrainian military positions. Didyk often knew the answers, but “stayed quiet to the last,” he said. “All I told them was where the closest Ukrainian checkpoint was, but they knew that anyway.”
A number of other local men from the village soon ended up in the cellar. Igor Zanko had gone out to buy a pack of cigarettes when Russian troops stopped him. “You have been detained by the Russian Federation under the rules of martial law,” a soldier told him. Another man, Vasily Tirpak, told me that he had been approached by Russian soldiers and forced to his knees at gunpoint. He was asked where weapons were hidden in the village. One soldier drew his pistol and fitted it with a silencer. He pointed the barrel at Tirpak’s head and then hit him with the gun. “If you don’t want to tell us,” the soldier said, “we’ll put you in the cellar for a few days and see if your memory comes back.”
All three men—Didyk, Zanko, and Tirpak—remember the arrival of another prisoner, Victoria Andrusha, a twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher from the neighboring village of Stariy Bikiv. I went to see Victoria’s father, Mykola, a proud man with thick arms and a powerful chest who, as we spoke, was frequently moved to tears. He told me that, on March 25th, a pair of Russian armored personnel carriers showed up on his family’s street. Fifteen men spilled out and searched Mykola’s house, emerging with three thousand dollars in cash—the entirety of their life savings. One Russian soldier sat on the swing in front of the house. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told Mykola. “No one is waiting for me back in Russia. I don’t have a father, and my mother is an alcoholic.”
The Russian soldiers accused Victoria of passing information about Russian military movements to Ukrainian intelligence. Two days later, Mykola saw her being marched at gunpoint in front of the house, but he didn’t dare say anything. “She’d be shot, and so would I.”
Tirpak told me that Victoria insisted on speaking in Ukrainian with her captors. On her second day in the cellar, soldiers took her away. Tirpak said he overheard that she was meant to be part of a prisoner exchange. “She’s a very valuable asset,” he heard a Russian officer say. Zanko told me that Victoria was led away without explanation. He also said that the Russians were erratic; their moods often depended on how much they had to drink. They didn’t say much about why they were in Ukraine, though the commander once told Didyk, “Your country has a bad President, and because of him we had to come here.”
On March 28th, Russian soldiers told the prisoners in the cellar that they were pulling out of Novyi Bykiv. No one mentioned the larger context, that the Russian military command, having failed in its attempt to seize the capital, was withdrawing forces from the region and re-centering the fight in the country’s east. As far as the prisoners could tell, their captors were in a good mood, grilling a pig that they had stolen from a nearby back yard and saying that the war was almost over. The men in the cellar were told that they would soon be set free.
arrived in Novyi Bykiv a few days after Russian forces left. Burned-out armored vehicles dotted the streets. The walls of houses had been ruptured by direct strikes, bricks and wood spilling out into yards. Petro Lutsenko led me to his house, which had been occupied by Russian troops for a month. He and his wife, Tamara, lived with friends in the village during that time. Early on, Tamara went back to pick up some food, and the soldiers were nice enough. The next time that she stopped by, she noticed that one of her pigs was missing. A soldier shooed her away. “Don’t come back or we’ll shoot you,” he said.
Now that the Russians had left, Tamara and Petro were taking stock of what was missing. Every room looked as if it had been ransacked, with clothes and papers and documents covering the floor. Wrappers from Russian-military M.R.E.s lay scattered about. “They took the washing machine, the television, stove, mattress, rugs from the wall,” Tamara said. On the kitchen door, someone had painted a “Z,” the Kremlin’s pro-war symbol. “Savages,” Petro said.
Now that Russian forces have completed their pullback from the Kyiv region, leaving newly liberated towns and villages in their wake, accounts of the monthlong occupation are beginning to emerge. Looting appears to have been a near-universal practice. I heard multiple stories of abductions, torture, and murder. The Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where hundreds of civilians are estimated to have been killed, with bodies strewn in streets and gardens, has become a focal point for the documentation of Russian war crimes. It may prove to be among the more grotesque and horrific examples of indiscriminate violence committed by Russian forces. But assaults on civilians appear to have taken place in many parts of the country.
I stopped in Velyka Dymerka, where people in line for humanitarian aid—the town had been occupied and blockaded for a month, with virtually no access to food or medical supplies—told me that in the first days of occupation, a Russian armored personnel carrier would drive down the streets, shooting at whoever stood nearby. “My friend stepped out of his house, then tap tap tap, he was dead on the ground,” Ivan Chapaev, who witnessed the killing, said. His friend’s body lay in the street for two weeks. In Hrebelki, a village thirteen miles away, I came to the house of Nadezhda Gerasimenko, who is in her late sixties. Her two adult sons, Oleg and Vladimir, had left Kyiv in late February, thinking that Hrebelki would be a safer place to wait out the war. But in early March Russian forces captured the village. Soon after, five Russian soldiers showed up at Gerasimenko’s house. Oleg was standing by the kitchen window; Vladimir near the front door. The soldiers fanned out in the garden and, without warning, opened fire.
Bullets shattered glass and struck Oleg in the back; they ripped through the front door and hit Vladimir in the groin. Gerasimenko fell to her knees and screamed. She heard Vladimir say, “My legs have gone out.” Blood pooled where he lay. “It took a minute for him to die,” Gerasimenko told me. Oleg was still alive but had been hit multiple times. The soldiers stepped inside the house. “Don’t shoot!” Gerasimenko yelled. “You’ve already killed one. And for what?” One of the Russian soldiers offered a vague reply: you killed our guys, so we’re killing you. Gerasimenko didn’t know how to respond. “We don’t have weapons, we don’t have anything,” she said. The soldiers searched the house, took the family’s mobile phones, and left.
Several days later, with Vladimir’s body starting to decompose, Gerasimenko called some neighbors to help bury him in the yard. There was no ceremony; none of the priests from the surrounding villages could make the trip because of the occupation. Oleg was eventually evacuated for treatment to a hospital in western Ukraine.
Gerasimenko and I walked around the side of the house and stood near a mound of dirt marked by an iron cross. “My son, my son, my son,” she wailed. In the days after her son’s killing, she approached Russian soldiers on the streets of Hrebelki, asking repeatedly, “Why did you kill my son?” One of them told her, “Don’t cry, grandma.” Another turned and walked away. A third tried to offer her some money. She refused. “I said, ‘I don’t need your money, just tell me one thing: When are you leaving?’ ”
As in other villages, when the Russians finally did depart, they ransacked homes on their way out. They tore through Gerasimenko’s house, taking her sons’ winter coats and boots, the tires from their cars, even ripping out a back seat. As they drove off, Gerasimenko saw appliances, mattresses, and bags of clothes hanging off of their tanks. Now that they’re gone, Gerasimenko wants to give Vladimir a proper burial, but Russian soldiers are said to have laid mines on the grounds of the local cemetery.
On the day after the Russian troops told their captives in Novyi Bykiv that they would soon be leaving, another contingent of soldiers brought seven more Ukrainian captives. This seemed to anger the soldiers guarding the cellar. “You ruined our nice time,” the commander in charge of the prisoners—no one ever managed to learn his name or rank—said.
A day later, on March 30th, the same commander came into the boiler room. He fired his gun into walls, and into the air, forcing people on their knees and shooting just beside them. Zanko and Tirpak believe he was drunk; Didyk said that the commander was crying. He didn’t want to do what he was about to do, he said. He needed to deliver four dead bodies, and he asked for volunteers. “We have nothing to lose, if that’s our destiny, so be it,” Didyk remembers one prisoner saying as he raised his hand. The Russians took two men away. A few minutes later, they came back and said, “We need two more,” Tirpak told me. “The selection process started again.” I asked Didyk who was killed. “Two older guys and two I didn’t know,” he told me. The soldiers gave each a glass of vodka before they were taken into the night.
Near dawn, the commander came back to the cellar. The Russian units were pulling out at six in the morning, he said. “Wait until after that and you can break down the door and run away.” Around 6:30 a.m., Didyk and seventeen others broke out of the cellar. They ran through the cemetery and toward the neighboring village. Along the way, they passed the bodies of three of the four men who had been shot hours before.
I visited the cemetery in Novyi Bikiv, which is across the road from the cellar where the prisoners had been held. Two of the bodies had been found in a pit near the cemetery’s entrance; another was laying under a piece of corrugated roof on the road. They had since been removed, but I could still see dark splotches of blood in the dirt.
Victoria is still missing. In the days since Russian forces left the area, she has not surfaced on any prisoner-exchange lists; Mykola said that he had heard, secondhand, that she might be in Belarus. I didn’t ask about the other possibility. “My daughter’s a patriot,” Mykola said. “I’m proud of her.” He hasn’t found the words to tell his mother, who is eighty-one and suffering from dementia, about her granddaughter’s disappearance. In fact, he has avoided the details of Russia’s invasion altogether. Instead, he has explained the situation using an analogue from her childhood: “I told her, ‘Mom, the Germans are back.’ ”
A car burns outside the maternity hospital damaged by Russian shelling in Mariupol on 9 March. (photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
Health worker describes aftermath of maternity hospital attack and her own facility’s takeover by Russian soldiers
“He was absolutely calm until he found her,” she said. “Because he told us that until the last, he hoped it was not her. Then he cried a lot. It was a very sad situation.”
An image of the as yet unnamed woman, pale faced and with a bloodied left hip, being stretchered out of the rubble by rescuers is one of the defining images of the terror wrought during the siege of the southern port city. A number of politicians, including Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, have called the attack a war crime.
Russian officials said at the time that patients and staff had left and Ukrainian military targets were on site, although there is no evidence to support the claims.
According to Buzunar, the head of the telemedicine department at the regional intensive care hospital, two buses of dazed and bloodied women and babies, some just days or even hours old, arrived at the hospital – the largest in the Donetsk region – for treatment that day, 9 March.
“When the maternity hospital attack happened, we still had police in the city,” she said. “A police car arrived at our hospital and said they were going to bring us the ladies. We said we don’t have the right conditions to treat them, but in the circumstances we didn’t have any choice.
“We didn’t have a specialist, only a neurologist, a gynaecological surgeon and a gynaecology intern. The woman in the image was hit by shrapnel and lost a lot of blood. We tried to save her but we couldn’t.”
After the attack, one of the women gave birth to two babies – a boy and a girl. Three other children were born, some by caesarean section. However, they came just as Buzunar’s hospital had a new problem to deal with: it had fallen under Russian occupation.
Staff had been sheltering in the basement when, on 11 or 12 March (Buzunar is not sure which, due to stress), they heard gunshots. “Russian soldiers said: ‘Lie down on the floor or we will start throwing grenades at you,’ and that’s when they came into the hospital,” she said.
“They talked to the management, who asked them not to interfere with the work of the hospital. The main thing they asked of us was not to leave. They said that anyone who did would be shot.”
It was a tense and stressful period. She could not leave the premises, so she lived in the basement, sleeping on sofas and chairs alongside colleagues, while two or three armed soldiers were stationed on every floor – first Russians, then separatists, she believes. The men were aggressive, repeatedly threatening doctors with machine guns, and they repurposed the first floor, which had been administrative offices, as a military base.
Buzunar said the Russians soon moved in as many as 2,000 civilians from nearby housing, despite not having the means to feed them or anywhere for people to sleep. At around the same time, the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Facebook that patients and civilians had been taken hostage at the hospital by the Russians and were being used as human shields.
Buzunar said the hospital director, Olha Golubchenko, helped protect staff from the Russian soldiers and “helped us to be brave and strong”. She said she negotiated with the troops and would even stand between them and civilians.
The hospital worked to treat mostly shrapnel and bullet wounds in civilians and soldiers. Russian soldiers were whisked away quickly to recover elsewhere, while Ukrainian soldiers who were unlucky enough to still be in the hospital when the Russians came were considered to be captives, Buzunar said.
“It was already very difficult because we didn’t have a lot of medication and windows were missing because of explosions. It was freezing cold, minus temperatures, so all the patients were kept in the corridors,” she said. “Then a tank came and began to shoot at the hospital. One member of staff had his ribs broken and all the patients who had been lying in the corridor seemed like they were on the open street because the walls were destroyed. All of those patients died.”
Amnesty International has said Russia’s indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas in Ukraine and on protected sites such as hospitals may violate international humanitarian law.
Buzunar, who escaped to western Ukraine in late March, said she asked Russian troops why they had fired at the hospital and they were not able to give an answer. She has no images or video of what happened because people leaving the city are forced to wipe their phones by Russian soldiers. Dozens of other evacuees have also said their phones were checked.
Hospital staff had been told by Russian forces they could not leave until they were replaced by other medical professionals, but Buzunar said new workers had now been brought in from separatist areas and she had managed to flee.
Now she faces the complicated task of coming to terms with her psychological trauma. “When you are working, you try not to show that you’re afraid. But now I’m afraid to even stand by a window because I am waiting for a sniper to shoot me,” she said.
Aleksandar Vučić declares victory in the presidential election in Belgrade. (photo: Darko Vojinović/AP)
Media and military experts said Sunday that six Chinese Air Force Y-20 transport planes landed at Belgrade's civilian airport early Saturday, reportedly carrying HQ-22 surface-to-air missile systems for the Serbian military.
The Chinese cargo planes with military markings were pictured at Belgrade's Nikola Tesla airport. Serbia's defense ministry did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment.
The arms delivery over the territory of at least two NATO member states, Turkey and Bulgaria, was seen by experts as a demonstration of China’s growing global reach.
“The Y-20s’ appearance raised eyebrows because they flew en masse as opposed to a series of single-aircraft flights,” wrote The Warzone online magazine. “The Y-20′s presence in Europe in any numbers is also still a fairly new development.”
Serbian military analyst Aleksandar Radic said that “the Chinese carried out their demonstration of force.”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic all but confirmed the delivery of the medium-range system that was agreed in 2019, saying on Saturday that he will present “the newest pride” of the Serbian military on Tuesday or Wednesday.
He had earlier complained that NATO countries, which represent most of Serbia’s neighbors, are refusing to allow the system’s delivery flights over their territories amid tensions over Russia’s aggression on Ukraine.
Although Serbia has voted in favor of U.N. resolutions that condemn the bloody Russian attacks in Ukraine, it has refused to join international sanctions against its allies in Moscow or outright criticize the apparent atrocities committed by the Russian troops there.
Back in 2020, U.S. officials warned Belgrade against the purchase of HQ-22 anti-aircraft systems, whose export version is known as FK-3. They said that if Serbia really wants to join the European Union and other Western alliances, it must align its military equipment with Western standards.
The Chinese missile system has been widely compared to the American Patriot and the Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile systems although it has a shorter range than more advanced S-300s. Serbia will be the first operator of the Chinese missiles in Europe.
Serbia was at war with its neighbors in the 1990s. The country, which is formally seeking EU membership, has already been boosting its armed forces with Russian and Chinese arms, including warplanes, battle tanks and other equipment.
In 2020, it took delivery of Chengdu Pterodactyl-1 drones, known in China as Wing Loong. The combat drones are able to strike targets with bombs and missiles and can be used for reconnaissance tasks.
There are fears in the West that the arming of Serbia by Russia and China could encourage the Balkan country toward another war, especially against its former province of Kosovo that proclaimed independence in 2008. Serbia, Russia and China don’t recognize Kosovo’s statehood, while the United States and most Western countries do.
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Mimi Reinhardt photographed in 2019 at her home in the Israeli city of Herzliya. (photo: Gideon Markowicz/AFP/Getty Images)
Mimi Reinhardt was in charge of compiling names of Jews to work in German industrialist’s factory
Mimi Reinhardt, who was employed as Schindler’s secretary, was in charge of drawing up the lists of Jewish workers from the ghetto of the Polish city of Kraków who were recruited to work at his factory, saving them from deportation to Nazi death camps.
“My grandmother, so dear and so unique, passed away at the age of 107. Rest in peace,” Reinhardt’s granddaughter Nina wrote in a message to relatives.
Austrian-born Reinhardt, who was also Jewish, was recruited by Schindler himself and worked for him until 1945.
After the second world war, she moved to New York before deciding to move to Israel in 2007 to join her only son, Sasha Weitman, who was then a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University.
“I feel at home,” she told reporters when she landed in the country.
Schindler, who died in 1974, was named by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum as a member of the “Righteous Among the Nations”, an honour for non-Jews who tried to save Jews from Nazi extermination.
The lists that Reinhardt compiled for him helped to save about 1,300 people at considerable risk to his own life.
His initiative was recounted in the bestselling 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark and the award-winning film adaptation by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List.
Reinhardt, who spent her last years at a nursing home north of Tel Aviv, had said she once met Spielberg but found it hard to watch the movie.
The Israeli photographer Gideon Markowicz, who met Reinhardt as part of a project dedicated to Holocaust survivors, described her as an active woman.
“She took part in the activities of the nursing home and was a bridge champion. She surfed the net and monitored the stock exchange,” he said.
After California legalized recreational marijuana, Kika Keith spent years trying to open a dispensary in Los Angeles. (photo: Alex Hunley)
Social equity programs were supposed to correct the disparities of the war on drugs as marijuana became legal. What went wrong?
But throughout 2017, it was Black politicians, Black activists, and Black executives telling standing-room–only crowds in the historically Black neighborhoods of Los Angeles to start a marijuana business and create “generational wealth.” Keith attended dozens of cannabis events that year, trying to immerse herself in the city’s pot industry and learn everything she could.
On a sticky summer afternoon in September, she made her way to a Watts community center to hear from one of the most powerful people in Southern California: Herb Wesson, L.A.’s first Black City Council president. Wesson took the stage in a powder-blue suit and smiled. Looking out at rows of Black faces glistening in the heat, he opened by acknowledging a shared history of hardship: “Most of us grew up in houses that didn’t have air conditioning, so we can handle this,” he said. “We can handle this.” The room swelled with laughter and applause.
California was legalizing marijuana for anyone over 21, and Wesson declared that the Black and brown communities that had been disproportionately targeted for arrest when weed was illegal would now be given priority in running licensed cannabis businesses. “It’s very, very important that you participate,” he said, urging those present to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
For Keith, Wesson seemed to represent a break from the city’s history of segregation and discrimination, offering a path to economic empowerment while standing before a mural of Black luminaries, including Sammy Davis Jr. and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, at the center of the impoverished neighborhood where uprisings against police brutality erupted in 1965 and 1992.
“I’d never seen Black politicians speak directly to Black people and be like, ‘Black people, listen up!’” Keith told me years later. “‘This will be your only time in history! You have to get off your ass!’”
So she listened. At 45, she had three daughters and zero savings. As 2017 wore on, she and many other disadvantaged Angelenos became convinced that starting a pot company would bring them financial stability. “At every single one of these meetings, the people are like eating it up,” she remembered. “The people are like, ‘This is our saving grace! This is our redemptive moment!’”
Keith is the kind of L.A. person who uses “Blessings” as an email signoff but doesn’t go to church. She’s partial to gold bangles, knit beanies, and comfortable, oversize clothing in reds, oranges, and yellows. Her voice has a melodic softness to it, as though she speaks in lullabies, but this gentle exterior belies her tenacity. She has always been an entrepreneur. Several years before pursuing a cannabis business, when she and her girls spent a year in a homeless shelter, she used food stamps and pro bono legal assistance to start a company selling a raw green beverage, made with chlorophyll from alfalfa sprouts, at farmer’s markets around Los Angeles. It was her mother’s recipe, and as the company expanded, she refused to compromise on quality. She even sold a weed-infused version for a while, marveling at how much more she could charge for a healthy drink that got you high.
Soon the chlorophyll beverage was in Whole Foods across the West Coast, but Keith was still struggling to pay her bills. When she combed through her contract with the natural food distributor, she found fees and markdowns and lopsided provisions. She felt that, in her inexperience, she’d missed an opportunity to become a millionaire.
Cannabis was her chance to start over. Legal weed seemed like the perfect match between profit margins and plant medicine, between helping herself and helping other people heal. And this time, she wanted to involve her family. Her cousin had long grown her own weed. Just before California voted to legalize in November 2016, the two women said a prayer and made a pact over a single cannabis seed, vowing to learn the ins and outs of the industry, even if it got the cousin kicked out of her federally subsidized Section 8 housing. “We just made a plan that we were going to put all of our effort into this being a way that we could build a legacy for our whole entire family,” Keith said.
That September afternoon in Watts, Wesson positioned the future of legal pot in a similar fashion: a chance to close the wealth gap between Black and white families, to atone for the damage of the war on drugs, and maybe to provide some small recompense for the entire sordid history of racism in the United States. He described the plan as a product of Black unity, across politics and business, explaining that he was in “true partnership” with L.A.’s two other Black City Council members: “We. Work. Together. There is no competition between us.”
This spoke to Keith. She knew the harm caused by marijuana prohibition; her stepfather was once sentenced to seven years for selling $10 worth of weed. “So much of that blood that has been shed, so many families that have been destroyed, we’ve lived it every day, and so to think that someone is going to say, ‘Here goes a ticket out, and I’m going to give you special provisions because you did experience that?’”
Wesson said that the program was called social equity. For Keith, it was reparations by another name.
Back in 2017, Los Angeles was among the first places in the United States to legalize weed with social equity in mind. Today, social equity dominates the conversation about who should be allowed to sell legal pot, with programs planned or up and running in Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Virginia, Arizona, and more.
Each place defines social equity differently, but the term broadly refers to three initiatives: clearing past cannabis convictions from criminal records; reinvesting tax revenue to help communities of color; and prioritizing cannabis businesses run by “social equity applicants”—a euphemism for Black and Latino entrepreneurs, or whomever else the government defines as deserving a leg up.
In the past five years, the number of states allowing recreational cannabis shot from eight to 18; another 19 allow medical use. As customers transition from dealers to dispensaries, the $24.5 billion legal cannabis industry is poised to nearly double by 2025. With much of the existing marijuana market dominated by deep-pocketed, multibillion-dollar companies like Curaleaf and Green Thumb Industries, social equity began to seem like a simple and necessary corrective, an innovative way of accomplishing justice. Jay-Z created a $10 million fund for Black- and minority-owned cannabis businesses. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer regularly tweets support for federal legislation to “invest in communities hurt by the War on Drugs.” Cannabis CEOs pledge to be part of the solution, issuing press releases filled with buzzwords about inclusion, criminal justice reform, and a historic debt to marginalized communities.
But behind the corporate rhetoric and the political promises are sobering numbers and widespread frustration with how social equity has harmed some of the exact people the programs are meant to help. In the five years since Wesson outlined a plan in Los Angeles, 1,629 people became verified as social equity applicants, but only about 35 retailers have opened. Other places have similar rates. In Massachusetts, which announced an equity program in 2017, there were only 16 equity businesses out of 194 cannabis businesses as of November 2021.
So far, marijuana legalization has been less a revolution and more a grim continuation of a deeply American form of inequality, in which prosperity and social mobility are technically possible but utterly unlikely. Equity applicants are, by definition, at a disadvantage, competing in the open marketplace against well-capitalized, politically connected companies on everything from zoning to pricing. Black entrepreneurs describe being sold on the illusion of easy riches, only to find that it takes money to make money, leading to predatory loans and partnerships that leave them feeling exploited. Governments struggling to oversee the programs are at their best too slow—and at their worst too close with those already in power to enforce both the letter and the spirit of the law.
For the past five years, Keith has thrown herself into achieving the goals of social equity: organizing her community, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, and trying to hold Los Angeles accountable. But the closer she got to the inner circle of decision-makers, the more disillusioned she became. Starting a cannabis business is complicated and expensive. Everybody, it seemed, was out for themselves, no matter how they cloaked their intentions in the guise of social justice. It made her wonder whether anyone had even intended for equity to work, or whether the program was always meant as a gesture of appeasement or distraction.
“This is not just about really creating something historical and monumental,” she says now. “This shit is designed to fail.”
Keith comes from a long line of entrepreneurs whose attempts at generational wealth were thwarted by state-sanctioned exclusion and violence. Her great-great-grandparents owned land in Rappahannock County, Virginia, and operated a store. White neighbors did not want them there. “They were threatened to leave their land or be killed,” Keith’s mother, Shekinah Shakur, told me. “One of my relatives was killed in the doorway of the house.” The family fled to Pennsylvania, where Keith’s great-grandfather became a chauffeur.
Left out of what historian Ira Katznelson calls “white affirmative action”—the unions, social safety net, and federally subsidized mortgage loans created in the 1930s and ’40s—Keith’s grandparents still managed to establish a hotel and bar on the main drag of the only Lancaster, Pennsylvania, neighborhood where Black and Puerto Rican people were allowed to live. The business flourished until the 1960s, when the city used federal funding to cut down the neighborhood’s trees and destroy about 1,000 buildings, part of a nationwide push for “urban renewal”—a program James Baldwin referred to as “Negro removal,” because similar housing destruction in the name of slum clearance displaced tens of thousands of Black families across the country. Once again, Keith’s family left town, this time to Los Angeles.
In the past five years, the number of states allowing recreational cannabis shot from eight to 18; another 19 allow medical use. As customers transition from dealers to dispensaries, the $24.5 billion legal cannabis industry is poised to nearly double by 2025.
As a kid, Keith loved to pore over the ledgers from her grandparents’ hotel, and in fourth grade she became obsessed with the stock market. Her parents were more interested in activism. Her father, Robert “Poppy” Keith, became a revolutionary at 10, when his mother brought him on a march to desegregate the local pool, and he saw his white classmates swimming where he wasn’t allowed. By 15, he was attending Black Power conferences. He co-founded a militant group in Lancaster called Black Rise, which protested police brutality, started a free heroin rehab clinic, and was committed to the same principles as the Panthers.
Keith’s mother, Shakur, used to walk past Keith’s father’s house and gaze up at him on the balcony, where he might be reading Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, or George Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? Soon Shakur, too, became a Black radical, just as the civil rights momentum beget riots demanding an economic revolution, one that would take into account the intractable financial obstacles facing the Black underclass.
Instead, in 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on something else: Black capitalism. Nixon promised “to get private enterprise into the ghetto and the ghetto into private enterprise,” but Keith’s father was convinced it was a red herring. By the time Nixon took office, the elder Keith was incarcerated for what he described as “a charge that they knew I didn’t commit.” After he got out, he saw that, as he had suspected, Black capitalism was not a real program but a “tactical political diversion,” as University of California Irvine law professor Mehrsa Baradaran writes in The Color of Money. Nixon created an Office of Minority Business Enterprise but did not fund it for two and a half years. Studies showed that 20 percent of grants went to white-owned firms using a person of color as a front.
Rejecting the pursuit of wealth, Keith’s father became a criminal defense attorney. Shakur worked in maternal and children’s health, and together they practiced community organizing and Rastafarianism.
Keith hated her childhood. She wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons, and after her father took a trip to Africa, he began dreading his hair and decided the family was going vegetarian. Her interest in business was a form of rebellion, a way of attaching herself to her mother’s parents, who still ate bacon and had once been the kind of people Keith wanted to be: “the socialite family, well-to-do”—the people her father disapprovingly called the “Black elites.” When she left for college, her parents divorced, and she felt free to do as she pleased: studying agricultural managerial economics, and later starting a clothing company and a youth orchestra, before deciding to package and sell her mother’s green drink recipe.
By 2007, Keith’s chlorophyll beverage business was taking off, and her godmother introduced her to a nephew, a charming Compton-born drug dealer turned medical dispensary owner named Virgil Grant. Grant was one of few Black people willing to take the risk of opening medical marijuana storefronts in Los Angeles. Despite popular conceptions of L.A. as a permissive pot paradise, commercial activity was never legal under the state’s 1996 medical marijuana law. Individuals could obtain a doctor’s recommendation to possess weed, but businesses were not allowed. Yet as the recession hit, the number of illegal pot shops in the city ballooned to over 800.
Grant and Keith teamed up on the cannabis-infused version of her chlorophyll drink, called Chronic Tonic. “I was on a good $10,000 a month, easily,” Keith recalled. She thought, “This is a lucrative-ass business”—not understanding that revenue was high because the operation was illicit: no taxes, no regulations, no fees to get licensed. She knew cannabis wasn’t quite legal, though, and when she signed a deal with Whole Foods, she gave up Chronic Tonic to protect her legitimate business.
It was good timing. The following year, Grant got hit with a federal charge of conspiracy to distribute marijuana. For years, he stewed in prison. By 2015, there were around 1,700 illegal dispensaries in L.A. The LAPD and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration would raid the pot shops, seizing cash and product, but hardly anyone was ever incarcerated for selling medical weed, as Grant had been. When he got out, Grant became a prominent advocate for legalization, using his story of discrimination to gain the trust of Wesson, then the City Council president, and rallying illicit weed operators behind a ballot initiative that outlined a plan for social equity.
Keith didn’t know what had become of Grant when she showed up to her first cannabis networking event in March 2017, so she was surprised to see he was one of the featured speakers. “It was at that moment, I just knew, this is it,” she said. “I’m catching a wave right now.”
When the first states began to legalize cannabis, there was no such thing as social equity. A 2009 memo funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and passed among marijuana policy activists advised: “DON’T lodge race, racism or racial disparities at the top of a communications.” Their research showed most Americans didn’t believe in systemic racism.
In 2013, Colorado and Washington were trying to figure out how to implement the first-of-their-kind recreational marijuana ballot initiatives that voters had passed the previous November. The goal was to get the DEA to leave legal cannabis alone, even though pot remains, to this day, illegal at the federal level. State and federal officials came up with a compromise, outlined in a Department of Justice memo: If the states created “strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems” and did their best to keep out “criminal enterprises,” the DEA would lay off.
To exclude traffickers, the states set up complex and costly barriers to entry for the licensed marijuana industry, including precluding anyone with a drug felony from working at or owning a pot company. But all this did was keep out people who had been caught—disproportionately Black people—while anyone else with illicit cannabis experience was in demand.
Every state or municipality has its own idiosyncratic method of deciding who gets a marijuana business license, typically requiring a point-based evaluation of written responses, perhaps $2 million in startup capital, vague attributes such as “character,” and floor plans and zoning clearance for shops that don’t yet exist.
The public tends to distinguish among the places that have legalized pot by asking whether medical or recreational use is allowed, but the more salient question is: How many licenses are there, and how are they given out? Both Minnesota and Oklahoma have medical cannabis, for example, but in Oklahoma there are several thousand licensed marijuana companies, while Minnesota only has two.
But the legal cannabis market is never, in fact, the entire cannabis market. Today, even in the state with the strongest legal industry, Colorado, an estimated 30 percent of weed is still grown and sold illicitly, which means licensed businesses are competing not only with one another, but also with people who don’t pay taxes or install wheelchair-accessible entrances—and don’t have to pass those extra costs on to consumers.
So a cannabis license is not a ticket to automatic riches: A license is just the first hurdle. And the more money needed to get a license, acquire property, pay taxes, and adhere to regulations, the whiter the legal cannabis industry becomes. Bank loans are not an option, as most banks refuse to do business with an industry breaking federal law. State-licensed businesses rely mostly on private capital, something Black people often don’t have access to; in the nearly 160 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black families have gone from collectively controlling 0.5 percent of the nation’s wealth to controlling less than 2 percent.
The first attempt to increase the number of Black-owned cannabis shops came in the wake of the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Attitudes toward systemic racism were beginning to change. In 2015, Maryland’s Legislative Black Caucus designed a medical cannabis licensing system that prioritized Black-owned businesses, but the initiative ran afoul of affirmative action case law, which does not allow race-based preference without documented discrimination. The Maryland attorney general, and later a judge in Ohio reviewing a similar law, asserted that disparities in cannabis arrests did not amount to disparities in the legal cannabis business, and struck down provisions meant to help Black entrepreneurs.
Then in 2016, Oakland designed the first program that used proxies for race to get around affirmative action. The plan was to offer half of the city’s licenses to people with a cannabis conviction, or who lived in areas with higher rates of cannabis arrests. Oakland also prioritized “general” applicants who “incubated” a social equity applicant by offering business advice and free operating space.
As more places chose to legalize, interest in social equity spread. Some programs include veterans and women, or people whose family members have been arrested for weed. Others ask for tax returns to show applicants are low-income. In 2019, Massachusetts reserved all delivery licenses for social equity applicants for three years. That same year, Evanston, Illinois, announced tax revenue from cannabis would be paid directly to select Black residents.
By the time George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, race was at the forefront of cannabis policy debates. Virginia passed a program in 2021 that will prioritize graduates of historically Black colleges and universities. New York pledged in 2021 that half of all cannabis business licenses would be given to equity applicants. Finally, it seemed, governments everywhere were going to fix something that felt very wrong to a lot of people for a long time.
At first, Keith saw her connection to Grant as divinely ordained. He charged some people thousands of dollars for his advice, but he eventually helped Keith for free, treating her like family and introducing her to key people.
Then, a year after she and her cousin resolved to join the green rush, Keith got her first inkling that Los Angeles might not deliver on its promises. The city announced that 191 pot shops—10 percent of the city’s existing illicit dispensaries—could become legal before the social equity program even began, thanks to a deal cut between a portion of existing medical shops and the city. Keith was caught off guard, but Grant was not: He owned three priority shops.
The grandfathering of medical shops has become one of the primary factors undermining social equity across the United States. Once a medical marijuana market opens to recreational use, the existing medical businesses often get dibs on licenses to sell pot to the public. With consumers eager to buy legal bud and politicians hungry for tax revenue, converting existing businesses—which already have weed on hand—seems like a no-brainer.
But once medical businesses gain permission to sell to anyone, they have an incentive to impede any additional businesses joining the market, which in many places means bogging down social equity. “If you allow the medical industry to start first, there is a perverse profit incentive for them to delay equity programs from happening, because it’s tremendous competition coming in,” explained Jason Ortiz, a cannabis advocate in Connecticut. “So many parts of the process are corrupted by that one thing. They’re making money, and they can use that money to push the program back.”
Existing medical marijuana businesses tend to be wealthier and whiter than the general population, having been licensed based on criteria developed between 2005 and 2015 or having survived waves of law enforcement raids and prosecutions. After Illinois passed adult-use legalization in 2019, medical shops were allowed to open to recreational customers before social equity got underway. A 2020 state report determined less than 2 percent of Illinois’s existing dispensary owners are Black or Latino. Three years after legalization, the state’s equity program has been mired in lawsuits, delays, and infighting; not a single social equity business has opened.
Grant was one of about six Black people in Los Angeles who owned priority dispensaries. But across a 16–square-mile stretch of South L.A., in the Black community where Keith’s parents and grandparents had moved in the 1970s, there were no priority shops—meaning that, when recreational sales began in California, those neighborhoods had no legal place to buy weed.
Since 2017, 1,629 people in Los Angeles became verified as social equity applicants, but only about 35 retailers have opened. In Massachusetts, there were only 16 equity businesses out of 194 cannabis businesses as of November 2021.
As adult-use legal sales approached, Keith noticed Grant and other equity advocates shifting their attention from talking about helping the community to paid consulting and developing their own businesses. Keith spent around four months working at a social equity incubator run by a Black woman with political connections and experience in getting government contracts. Then one day, an older Black man walked out of a meeting with her boss, shaking his head. He turned to Keith and said, “That’s a damn sharecropper deal!”
Keith realized, with a start, that she agreed, and quit the job. Recalling her father’s lifelong wariness about “the Black elite,” she started to consider how class divisions and political access were blurring the line between self-interest and community advocacy, exposing weaknesses in the “true partnership” among Black people that the City Council president had promised. “The people who are helping to design it are designing it so that they can get more extra stuff,” Keith said.
In Black on the Block, Northwestern University sociologist Mary Pattillo writes about the complicated, sometimes self-enriching role that Black advocates and elected officials come to play in city politics: as brokers “spanning the space between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of a down but not out black neighborhood.” Pattillo calls these people “middlemen” and “middlewomen.”
“This incredible level of responsibility, my research shows that Black leaders really do take it to heart,” Pattillo told me. “They do the work because they want to improve the conditions for Black folks broadly, and then, you know, as with all politicians, you get in there, and you realize how dirty it is when the sausage gets made.”
Grant acknowledged the complexity of his role in pushing for both an equity program and priority licensing for the dispensaries he owns. “I worked my angles, too, and got what I got. I did mine for the industry. Not just for me personally, for all players,” he told me. “I did it for me, too, because I had three of them businesses, so I did that for me, too.”
Once L.A.’s priority dispensaries got approved, in the first months of 2018, Keith assumed the equity retail licenses would come next and would be processed just as quickly. Instead, the city didn’t fully fund the new department charged with managing licensing, and the time line for allowing social equity stores kept getting delayed.
Before allowing more pot shops to enter the market, Los Angeles shifted its attention to licensing the supply chain: weed growers and weed chocolate makers and weed distributors. According to city law, all of these businesses were supposed to be either owned by social equity applicants or incubating a social equity applicant by providing capital, operating space, and assistance.
Keith decided she would start a cannabis beverage company, similar to Chronic Tonic, and found an edibles company to incubate her. But as the due date for licensing applications approached in summer of 2018, the edibles company stopped replying to Keith’s emails. The due date came and went. Many businesses, including the edibles company, got licensed.
Four years later, the city has yet to check whether any of these businesses are following the social equity provisions of the law. “They have not enforced the social equity aspect of it yet,” confirmed Ryan Jennemann, founder of THC Design, which received 10 licenses in the supply chain round. Eventually, the city announced these companies could pay a fee instead of participating in social equity—but no one has ever come to collect that money. “They haven’t imposed it yet, because they just don’t have anything together there,” Jennemann said.
Keith was dumbfounded. She had no leverage to force these companies to follow the law. She began to see how she and other equity applicants were profoundly hindered by the exact economic and political inequalities that had prompted them to become equity applicants in the first place. Social equity pits people with very little wealth and clout against the plutocracy that runs the world, with billions of dollars at stake. It was never going to be a fair fight.
Starting any business costs money, meaning entrepreneurs like Keith must turn to incubators and investors to pay for things such as lawyers, security consultants, and rent—all before a single joint is sold. Keith watched investors screen dozens or hundreds of potential equity applicants at once, deciding in an opaque process through several rounds of interviews and trainings whom to fund and whom to abandon, leaving the applicants with little time to find another backer. Cannabis companies that incubate social equity applicants might provide loans at 12 to 17 percent interest rates, when the U.S. average is 3 to 7 percent; require the equity applicant to stock the incubating company’s product, purchased at locked-in rates above market value; or stipulate that the social equity applicant’s business can only ever be sold to the bigger company, for a predetermined amount. More cynical financiers might simply offer the equity applicant a $35,000 salary in exchange for total control over the business.
Some applicants embraced social equity as a form of passive income. Jahlil Stansell told me he felt good about lending his name to an investor who planned to list him as a 51 percent owner of a dispensary while only paying him 10 percent of the net profits, and even that only after the investor made back his initial outlay of $175,000.
“I wasn’t putting no money up, so it’s like I was just getting part of a business for nothing, just because I grew up in L.A., in the hood,” Stansell explained. According to the contract, he would be “a silent partner,” with “no voting rights” and no “control or influence over the day-to-day Cannabis Business operations.” Stansell felt he understood what he was getting into: “They was using Black people, because they know Black people don’t have the money and don’t have the knowledge.”
So far, marijuana legalization has been less a revolution and more a grim continuation of a deeply American form of inequality, in which prosperity and social mobility are technically possible but utterly unlikely.
But Keith wanted to actually run and own her own business. That was the point, she thought, and the meaning of the word “equity.” She became determined to win a social equity dispensary license. Yet she felt she couldn’t trust any of the entities she would need to work with to make it happen: not the investors, not the incubators, and certainly not the city.
After the city declined to enforce the social equity provisions of the supply chain phase of licensing, Keith came to believe that politicians in Los Angeles were either incompetent or beholden to moneyed interests, whether through influence channels like lobbying and campaign donations or through more nefarious means. She learned that city law limited the number of pot shops in every district but allowed City Council members the authority to approve additional shops. Keith said she heard other weed entrepreneurs bragging that one City Council member or another had promised them a retail license through this provision, essentially as a political favor. These were not isolated observations. In the summer of 2020, U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna described “rampant corruption at City Hall” in L.A. as part of an FBI investigation that brought down two City Council members—one of whom, according to a lawsuit filed by a former staffer, “was engaged in conduct designed to extort applicants for cannabis permits within his Council District.” (The city settled the lawsuit for $150,000.)
Keith decided she needed to take matters into her own hands. She organized protests. She collected examples of predatory contracts, convincing the city to tighten its rules. She developed contacts with local radio, TV, and newspapers. She gathered social equity applicants to pool information and resources in a back room at an illegal dispensary in a Black neighborhood.
For months, Keith and a friend drove around looking for available properties with the right zoning where equity applicants could open pot shops, and then pairing those properties with people she knew. In this way, she met an investor who offered to bankroll both the rent of a retail space and her activism, in the hopes that her leadership would bring flattering press and help the business.
Now Keith, too, had become a middlewoman. But unlike the Black leaders she had observed, Keith didn’t ask other equity applicants for money or a portion of people’s businesses.
Instead, for the first time in years, she began speaking with her father on the phone every day, to consult on political strategy. It was the elder Keith who suggested signs at one protest read WE SHOULD #OwnOurOwn COMMUNITIES, a reference to Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 observation that “Everybody owns our own neighborhoods except us.” Somehow, in her attempt to get rich, she started to appreciate why her parents had chosen a different path. She began to see her childhood in a more favorable light.
In the summer of 2019, a year and a half after the priority dispensaries became licensed, L.A. finally allowed social equity applicants to register for the chance to get a retail license. Keith and her network of community organizers helped about 250 of the 1,629 people who became verified as having low-income status and a cannabis arrest or residency in a disproportionately policed neighborhood. By now, Keith and her investor had spent $150,000 renting the property where they hoped to operate. Several equity applicants told me they similarly had to spend or borrow six figures to secure a space in order to meet the application’s property requirement, all before knowing who would win the opportunity to open a business.
In the final days before applications became available, Keith’s investor told her many of the provisions outlined in their memorandum of understanding were no longer possible. “He added all that lopsided language where they get all the benefit, but it isn’t reciprocated on your side,” she said. “That’s the game, right?” Though she tried to push back where she could, Keith had little choice but to sign the contract.
At 10 a.m. on September 3, 2019, the city opened online applications for 100 social equity retail licenses, to be chosen on a first-come, first-served basis. After years of work, getting a license was going to come down to a race to submit applications. Keith’s investor was handling her application, but for the members of the community whom she worked with, she rented MacBooks, hired data entry professionals who could type 90 words per minute, and, for faster internet, convinced a cannabis company to lend her group a room in its downtown skyscraper offices.
She was worried about the system crashing, or bots filing applications in record time, since the website’s log-in had no CAPTCHA test, so she made sure that every MacBook was screen recording.
Then, 10 minutes before the city was supposed to begin accepting applications, one of the data entry professionals was checking the password of the applicant she was representing, Jumane Redway-Upshur, and found she was able to log in to the system early. She submitted his application at 9:51 a.m. “The room blew up,” Keith recalled. “It was like chaos.”
By 10:01 a.m., 547 applicants across the city had accessed the system. By 10:05 a.m., 437 applications were submitted. “Every second mattered,” recalled Adam Spiker, a cannabis lobbyist. After the first hour, there were over 650 complete applications for 100 spots.
Weeks later, when the city began releasing information about who had been fast enough to win a license, Redway-Upshur was listed as number one. Only 18 of the 100 social equity licensees were Black. Of those 18, 13 were affiliated with a Black investor who had employed a son of Wesson, the City Council president. Keith sent the screencast of Redway-Upshur’s application being submitted early to someone who worked with Grant, who posted the video to social media. Rumors and memes spread. Applicants turned on one another.
To quell the backlash, the city paused the equity program and conducted an audit, which found over 200 applicants had gotten into the system early. Outraged, Keith and a few others filed a lawsuit. The city proposed a settlement during the summer 2020 protests; suddenly, local leaders didn’t want to be seen as standing in the way of Black-owned businesses, and offered to license the next 100 applicants in line, a group that included Keith.
Now, Keith was accused of becoming exactly the kind of self-interested Black middlewoman that she had tried to distance herself from. “Kika’s about herself, and building herself up, not about putting in the work,” Grant later told me. But the activists who initiated the lawsuit owed their lawyers over $50,000, and didn’t think it was feasible to get the city to agree to any more licenses. So they settled.
Almost two years later, the majority of those 200 social equity retail licensees have yet to open. Some lost their properties after having to pay rent without operating for several years and are now searching for sympathetic landlords with the right zoning. Some cannot proceed because their investors pulled out, frustrated with the city’s volatile time lines. Some are unwilling to move forward until they find their way out of deals they don’t consider fair.
Los Angeles attorney Mike Mancini is trying to help several equity applicants get out of their contracts, which he describes as “some of the most predatory investment deals I’ve ever seen.” He explained that some investors are violating the social equity requirements in the Los Angeles Municipal Code, but once a contract is signed, the burden is on the equity applicants to find the money necessary to buy their investors out or take them to court: “These investors are not stupid. They know the social equity applicants are the perfect group to take advantage of because they can’t afford to do anything about it.”
Across the country, social equity licensing is often just as contentious and litigious as it has been in Los Angeles. Even when local governments provide scrupulous oversight, the investors are often two steps ahead, developing ways to shortchange the equity applicant. And of course, most governments do not provide scrupulous oversight. A cannabis policy consultant told me that he often finds himself explaining to elected officials why their equity program will prompt lawsuits that will stop it from working, only for the politicians to respond that they don’t care if the program doesn’t work, because “Our messaging is the right messaging.”
Many now see social equity as part of a long line of America’s nominal attempts to achieve justice and parity. “They did what they always did: create the illusion of inclusion,” said one applicant who wasn’t fast enough to get one of L.A.’s 200 social equity retail licenses. He told me he has no intention of closing his illegal dispensary: “I’mma trap till the wheels fall off. I ain’t asking for no permission to survive.”
Hundreds of illicit dispensaries and delivery services remain in Los Angeles, outnumbering legal shops. Some experts believe around 80 percent of California’s cannabis market is illegal and unlicensed. The city is slated to eventually give out more social equity retail licenses. But Nicole Elliott, director of the California Department of Cannabis Control, said she is concerned about how the artificial scarcity of licenses is affecting the people whom equity is meant to help. “If you have so many shops and demand for all of those shops,” she said, “then I think that merits the discussion at the L.A. level about whether or not that’s appropriate.”
Four years after she began pursuing social equity, Keith’s dispensary finally opened in August 2021. The space has a warm yellow ceiling, exposed brick, and a sign reading HARVEST A LEGACY. It is a family affair, just as she imagined: One of her daughters manages marketing and brand relations.
But at some point in the past few years, Keith stopped caring about the promise of generational wealth. It’s not about making money for herself and her family anymore. She is dismayed with how social equity has turned out, and determined to stop other cities and states from making the same mistakes. She recently turned 50, and now sees herself as the culmination of all that her parents and grandparents and great-great-grandparents were working toward.
“Out here, Black people be like, ‘If I was in slavery times, I would have done this, that, and the other,’” she told me. She thinks about this a lot. Even if her business fails, even if her friends never escape their predatory contracts, even if the feds legalize and corporations take over the marijuana business, undoing everything that social equity has sought to accomplish, she just wants to know that at least she tried. “If nothing else,” she said, “50 years from now, it could be said that people fought against being shut out of this industry.”
Demonstrators gather on the steps of the Florida Historic Capitol Museum in front of the Florida State Capitol, March 7, 2022, in Tallahassee, Florida. (photo: Wilfredo Lee/AP)
Across the United States, at least a dozen states are considering new legislation that in several ways will mirror Florida's new controversial law, referred to by some opponents as "Don't Say Gay."
The specific details regarding the bills vary between states. But overall, they seek to prohibit schools from using a curriculum or discussing topics of gender identity or sexual orientation.
"The institutionalization of these bills is an overt form of structural transphobia and homophobia, and it goes against all public health evidence in creating a safe and supportive environment for transgender, nonbinary, queer, gay and lesbian youths and teachers to thrive," Arjee Restar, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, told NPR.
Restar, a social epidemiologist and health equity advocate, said the controversial bills will limit all youths to live to their fullest potential, adding "there should be no room for transphobia and homophobia — especially in the classroom."
The Florida law drew controversy — and copycats
Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the state's "Parental Rights in Education" bill, barring public school teachers from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity for students in kindergarten through third grades "or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
"We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination," DeSantis said at the bill signing.
It drew immediate nationwide controversy — and had teachers like Paula Stephens worried.
Teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity isn't part of the first-grade curriculum, Stephens told NPR. But talking about families is part of her curriculum, and some of her students may have two moms or two dads.
"It makes me wonder," she said. "When I talk about families in my classroom, am I going to be violating this law because the children were having discussions about what their family looks like?"
A cascade of bills have followed
Taking Florida's lead, states began proposing their own bills. Among them:
- Alabama advanced a measure prohibiting early classroom instruction on sexual and gender identity.
- An Arizona bill aims to change the state's sex-ed curriculum to focus on biological sex and "not gender identities."
- In neighboring Georgia, lawmakers targeted private schools — which the state can regulate. But it failed to get any traction this year.
- In Iowa, a Senate proposal would require that parents opt in — in writing — to any instruction "relating to gender identity."
- In Louisiana, lawmakers introduced HB 837. It would limit discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in some grades and prohibit it all together in others. A South Carolina bill is similar.
- A Missouri bill would ban "gender or sexual diversity training" in public schools. An Indiana bill does the same. As would a Kentucky bill.
- In Oklahoma, a senate bill would ban books from school libraries that focus on "the study of sex, sexual lifestyles, or sexual activity."
- Tennessee's HB 800 bans books and instructional materials "that promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgender issues or lifestyle."
- Ohio's HB616 has similar language used in the Florida bill.
"When we segment children off and tell them that they don't exist and that they don't matter and effectively erase them from the classroom ... we effectively erase them," Kathryn Poe of Equality Ohio told NPR member station WKSU when the Ohio bill was proposed. "We alienate an entire group of young people who need our affirmation and support."
There's historical precedent
Florida's law is only the most recent expression of attempts to curb classroom discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity across the country, said Ames Simmons, a Duke law senior lecturing fellow.
"Florida may be the first in this wave, but there have been other laws in the past that were called 'no promo homo' laws, which forbid saying positive things about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer people in classrooms," Simmons told NPR. "With the increased visibility of transgender and non-binary people, we have seen these bills expand to also prohibit educating students about gender diversity and gender identity."
Both Simmons and David Brown, legal director for the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, say the legislative activities taking place across the country are targeting other groups.
"This trend is the continuation of a playbook that has been brought out again and again, repeatedly targeting the most marginalized groups in our society for political gain," Brown told NPR.
Simmons added, "What is truly concerning is that these anti-LGBTQ bills have been coupled with legislative proposals that forbid teaching about structural racism and slavery, and patriarchy and sexism, on the grounds that these concepts make others uncomfortable."
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Honeybees. (photo: Soteavy Som/EyeEm/Getty Images)
This is an eight-legged parasite that is smaller than a pinhead, Science explained. It harms bees by feeding on their fat and weakening their immune systems, and also by spreading viruses the bees are then less able to defend themselves against.
“The Varroa mite is the greatest threat to managed honey bee colonies globally,” Dr. Thomas O’Shea-Wheller of the Environment and Sustainability Institute at Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall said in a University of Exeter press release. “So far, new methods to control the mites—and the diseases that they carry—have had limited success, and the mites are becoming increasingly resistant to chemical treatments. It’s a ticking time-bomb.”
Luckily, O’Shea-Wheller and a team of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have found a potential solution. In a paper published in Scientific Reports Thursday, they announced that they have bred honeybees to resist these pesky mites.
The USDA has spent the past 14 years breeding the “Pol-line” strain of honeybees, Science explained. These bees have many beneficial traits: they have large colonies, they produce lots of honey and they exhibit something called varroa-sensitive hygiene.
“Pol-line’s high mite resistance is based on their behavior for removing Varroa by expelling infested pupae—where Varroa mites reproduce—a trait called Varroa-sensitive hygiene (VSH),” study co-leader and USDA Agricultural Research Service entomologist Frank Rinkevich said in a USDA press release.
While the Pol-line bees were developed in 2014, this study marks the first time they were tested against conventional bees in a commercial setting. Starting in 2017, 173 colonies of Pol-line bees were compared to 193 colonies of regular bees, Science reported. Some of the bees were moved between states to pollinate different crops, traveling from Mississippi to South Dakota to California and back with slight variations.
“It’s probably the most demanding system you can place a colony of honeybees into,” O’Shea-Wheller told Science.
The researchers found that the Pol-line bees were 30 percent more likely to survive the frequent flying when compared to conventional bees. The bees were also exposed to different mite treatments. For colonies that received no treatment in the fall, 62.5 percent of Pol-line colonies survived the winter compared with only three percent of conventional colonies, according to USDA. When the colonies received two mite treatments, 72 percent of Pol-line colonies survived when compared with 56 percent of conventional colonies. Overall, 60 percent of Pol-line bees survived the winter compared with 26 percent of regular bees, University of Exeter said. The colonies of the Pol-line bees also had fewer cases of three viruses associated with varroa mites.
“By selectively breeding bees that identify and remove mites from their colonies, our study found a significant reduction in mite numbers, and crucially, a two-fold increase in colony survival,” O’Shea-Wheller told the University of Exeter.
Varroa mites have been the bane of U.S. beekeepers since they arrived from Southeast Asia in 1987, according to USDA. Because the mites originated in Asia, the European honeybees most commonly used in commercial operations do not have natural resistance to them, the University of Exeter explained. About 29 percent of bee colonies lose too many worker bees over the winter to remain viable in the spring, according to Science. This is because of various threats including pesticides and poor nutrition, but varroa mites are the leading concern. The success of the Pol-line bees in the new study offer a solution to beekeepers that doesn’t rely on chemical mite-killing treatments.
“It’s really encouraging, and I hope beekeepers pay attention,” University of Minnesota, Twin Cities bee breeder Marla Spivak, who was not involved with the study, told Science.
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