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How vulnerable is your community to coronavirus? These new maps reveal a familiar pattern.

by FredricAIN Posted on April 2, 2020

The predominantly black and low-income communities living near the back-to-back petrochemical refineries of Louisiana’s “cancer alley” have long suffered compromised immune systems and high rates of disease. Now, the state’s fast-growing COVID-19 outbreak is poised to hit them especially hard.

Yet behind the veil of the pandemic, last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a temporary policy — with no end date specified — to suspend its enforcement of key environmental regulations, allowing industries like Louisiana’s petrochemical giants to make their own determinations as to whether or not they are complying with requirements to monitor pollution levels. Ironically, as the EPA relaxes its rules for polluters, the link between long-term exposure to environmental hazards and the most severe outcomes of coronavirus infections is starting to come into focus.

Jvion, a healthcare data firm, has collaborated with Microsoft to launch a new COVID-19 community vulnerability map to identify the populations most vulnerable to severe complications following a coronavirus outbreak. The interactive map aggregates socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as lack of access to transportation, exposure to toxins, unemployment, and mortality rate. According to the map, these factors make certain “cancer alley” communities particularly vulnerable.

“Our most heavily weighted and frequent determining risk factor was air quality, though that doesn’t mean that it’s the most predictive factor,” said John Showalter, chief product officer for Jvion. “There’s definitely a biologic rationale that environmental health hazards that lead to pulmonary and cardiovascular conditions would then lead people with those conditions to do poorly during a COVID-19 outbreak.”

JVION

Jvion used machine learning to analyze block-level data from the U.S. Census to help identify “environmental health hazard” as one key socioeconomic factor that makes a population more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 outcomes, based on the health effects of polluted air, contaminated water, and extreme heat. They also factored in how chronic exposure to outdoor air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter, can increase the risk of cancer, respiratory illnesses, and cardiovascular disease — preexisting conditions that physicians say can make the novel coronavirus more severe and fatal.

A side-by-side comparison of Jvion’s vulnerability map with the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen (EJScreen) suggests a stark correlation between a community’s proximity to industrial facilities and its projected risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.

Jvion labels Harris County, Texas, as having a high vulnerability for COVID-19 — and a key socioeconomic influencer for that determination is its “above average environmental health hazard.” A new analysis from the University of Texas Health Science Center echoes Jvion’s map: The report shows where risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes (mostly preexisting health conditions) are distributed across Harris County to determine which neighborhoods are most at-risk of hospitalization and intensive care for COVID-19. Cross-referencing the EJScreen, it becomes clear that the Harris County map highlights communities in close proximity to industrial facilities and those at a higher risk of cancer from breathing airborne toxins.

“There’s a familiar pattern in these maps, and it’s a pattern that you see in mobility rates and mortality rates, race and ethnicity demographics, as well as the distribution of industry in our country,” said Corey Williams, the research and policy director for Air Alliance Houston. “All those things overlap to a great extent, so there is a correlation, but it’s difficult to prove causation.”

Philadelphia has seen a rapid uptick in coronavirus cases, and its pockets of vulnerability have similar characteristics to Houston’s. Jvion’s map shows that the predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods of Point Breeze and Grays Ferry are considered to have an “extremely high” vulnerability risk for COVID-19 due to environmental hazards, elevated unemployment rates, and low incomes. The EJScreen shows that the areas are close to major highways with heavy traffic, wastewater plants, and industrial facilities.

It’s clear that the novel coronavirus is already compounding underlying systemic inequities in communities with more people of color, poverty, migrants, and those without access to resources like medical care. These maps can help ensure that government response and medical capacity in these at-risk populations can meet the needs of those likely to be severely ill from the virus, including those living near heavy industry and fossil fuel infrastructure.

In a letter submitted to the EPA last week, environmental groups demanded to know why polluting facilities are now excused from complying with environmental regulations, even as their operations continue relatively unfettered. “What is the basis for presuming that the pandemic means companies can no longer comply with environmental rules while they continue to operate and process all other forms of corporate ‘paperwork’?” the memo asked.

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How vulnerable is your community to coronavirus? These new maps reveal a familiar pattern.

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The Trump administration is helping 9 states prepare for climate change

by RudolfDeRougemo Posted on January 27, 2020

When extreme weather hits the United States, coastal Southern states tend to get the worst of it. Just look at the past few years: In 2017, Texas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas were hit with back-to-back hurricanes, which left parts of those states submerged and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The two years preceding that were rough on the South, too — flooding related to hurricanes Joaquin and Matthew killed dozens of Americans and cost the United States billions combined.

Any climate scientist will tell you that the natural disasters of the past few years pale in comparison to the climate change-fueled weather events coming down the pike. If state legislators were savvy, they would have taken steps years ago to protect their citizens from what’s ahead. The problem is, some of those hurricane-magnet states also happen to be governed by climate deniers.

In 2018, Congress devised a plan to help disaster-ravaged states actually prepare for extreme weather for a change, and President Trump signed off on it. It’s the first time national legislation has designed block grants to help states prepare for future disasters, rather than just clean up damage from ones that have already occurred.

That money, $16 billion of federal funding, will soon be released — more than half will go to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the rest will go to nine mainland U.S. states. The states that got the most money to prepare for climate change all went for Trump in 2016 and are all under at least partial Republican control: Texas is getting upwards of $4 billion, Louisiana is getting $1.2 billion, Florida $633 million, North Carolina $168 million, and South Carolina $158 million. Missouri, California, West Virginia, and Georgia are also getting grants. There’s a reason why a bunch of Republican trifecta states accepted climate change mitigation money without a fuss: none of them had to actually acknowledge climate change to access the funds.

That’s because, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) solicited proposals from the states explaining how they aim to use the funds, it didn’t require them to take climate change into account, even though the money being handed out by the department will be used to protect states from the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, the department asked the grantees to describe their “current and future risks,” based on the latest available science. HUD didn’t even use the terms “global warming” and “climate change” in its request for proposals, though it did ask states to take “continued sea level rise” into consideration. The task of drawing up the states’ proposals generally fell to housing and community development specialists at state general land offices or housing departments.

The results are telling, as the New York Times reported last week: Florida and North Carolina’s applications said climate change poses a major risk to their states. South Carolina and Texas ignored the issue entirely, instead using phrases like “changing coastal conditions” and the “destabilizing effects and unpredictability” of disasters. Louisiana mentioned climate change once on the last page of its plan.

It might seem like allowing states to sidestep climate change is just another way the Trump administration is undermining science, but HUD’s reluctance to compel states to explicitly say they’re preparing for rising temperatures might actually be a good thing. “There are still states where it’s a political lightning rod to acknowledge that climate change is responsible for damage,” Marion McFadden, head of disaster-recovery grants at HUD during the Obama administration, told Grist. “HUD is focusing on the plans, not the root cause of the need to mitigate.” Whether Republican states accept the reality of climate change or not, they’re starting to prepare for it — which could save lives and prevent economic damage down the line.

“Climate change clearly is the motivation behind Congress making the money available, and HUD is making the funds available to communities to put together their own plans for what they want to do at the state or the local level,” McFadden said. “They have to use the best science and the best data available, they just don’t have to connect the dots explicitly.”

Regardless of HUD’s stance on climate change, it seems as though climate-denying state officials could soon face pushback from their own constituents. In Texas, Republicans control the state house, senate, and governor’s office. But the top elected official in Harris County, Texas’ most populous county, thinks climate change is a major problem for the state. “If we’re serious about breaking the cycle of flooding and recovery we have to shift the paradigm on how we do things, and that means putting science above politics,” Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat, said in a statement to the Times. Two-thirds of Texas voters, Republican and Democratic, are in favor of government action to combat the climate crisis, and a third are strongly in favor of it, a recent poll shows. It might not be long before the Texas officials are forced to start connecting those dots.

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The Trump administration is helping 9 states prepare for climate change

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Grandmothers stalled the police as climate protestors created the largest street mural ever

by RUXRobincp Posted on September 11, 2018

More than 3,000 demonstrators in San Francisco have created what’s thought to be the largest street mural ever made. On Saturday, the 2,500-foot-long, 50-foot-wide mural turned five blocks of city streets into scenes of community-proposed solutions for a warming world.

What’s more, the protesters didn’t have a permit to paint the streets — so a group of indigenous-led grandmothers faced off with police to block roads for five hours while the muralists completed their work. With the grannies from the Society of Fearless Grandmothers holding down ground, none of the protesters were arrested.

“You have to believe in a little magic and imagination to build the future that we want,” says Cata Elisabeth-Romo, an artist and one of the lead coordinators for the mural project.

San Francisco’s demonstration was part of a recent, international upwelling of art and activism. Last week, activists took to the streets in 91 countries with picket signs and paint for the “Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice” marches organized by 350.org and dozens of partners. The demonstrations came ahead of the much-anticipated Global Climate Action Summit that will begin in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Elisabeth-Romo working on the street mural in San Francisco.Cata Elisabeth-Romo

The summit is spearheaded by California Governor Jerry Brown and will bring together states, cities, businesses, and community groups to discuss how to achieve climate goals set by the Paris Agreement.

The San Francisco mural stitched together 50 scenes depicting solutions to climate injustices, each put together by a different community group. Indigenous artist and ecologist Edward Willie designed a border around the mural unifying all 50 scenes.

Anesti Vega / Survival Media Agency

The entire mural is temporary. As of Sunday night, four of the five blocks were still painted. The street art was made using charcoal from areas impacted by the recent devastating wildfires, along with tempera paint and raw clay sourced just outside of San Francisco.

Artist Nityalila Saulo designed the mural for the interfaith contingent, which included 2,000 footsteps surrounding the word “Live.” The footprints “remind us of the prints we leave behind as we live on this earth. It is meant to inspire us to value the choices we make every day,” she wrote on Instagram.

The artists’ and activists’ demands include racial and economic justice, and an end to fossil fuel production in favor of a transition to 100 percent renewable energy. From city to city, locals used creative expression to highlight their own priorities.

In New York on Thursday, the sea of protesters included artists and performers in costumes depicting creatures from the sea. No Longer Empty, an NYC group that curates exhibitions to spark community conversations in unconventional spaces, dressed as coral, jellyfish, and a leatherback turtle. It’s all part of a larger work by artist Laura Anderson Barbata called “Intervention: Ocean Blues.”

“This work addresses the urgent need to transform our decisions, to influence policy, and to bring awareness to the importance of the ocean’s health and our dependency on it,” Anderson Barbata told Grist.

Justine Calma / Grist

In New Orleans, demonstrators used banners to call attention to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor that stretches from NOLA to Baton Rouge. Organizers say that on top of the plants and refineries in the area, the planned Bayou Bridge pipeline poses another health threat to residents in St. James Parish, where the march began.

Fernando Lopez / Survival Media Agency

350 commissioned protest artwork from artists in six different continents that demonstrators around the world could download and use in their campaigns.

Christi Belcourt

Christi Belcourt, a renowned Michif visual artist who traces her lineage to the Manitou Sakhigan of Alberta, Canada, contributed an image depicting a woman facing water, wielding lightning in one hand and holding a feather in the other. Belcourt has a message to accompany her artwork:

No amount of money can buy back a people’s river.
No amount of money can buy back the sea.
The Trans Mountain Pipeline cannot be built.
Because we love the rivers.
Because we love the sea.
Because we love this sacred earth.
We will defend our home.

With their art, Belcourt and others are mounting a creative defense against climate change.

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Grandmothers stalled the police as climate protestors created the largest street mural ever

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Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland – Miriam Horn

by Myrna Posted on July 10, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland

Miriam Horn

Genre: Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: September 6, 2016

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Now a feature-length documentary on the Discovery channel narrated by Tom Brokaw. “Lush, gorgeously written…A profoundly hopeful book.” —Tina Rosenberg, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award A Kirkus Best Book of 2016 Many of the men and women doing today’s most consequential environmental work—restoring America’s grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans—would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land: the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth, to ensure that their families and communities will continue to thrive. Unfolding as a journey down the Mississippi River, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman tells the stories of five representatives of this stewardship movement: a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman. In exploring their work and family histories and the essential geographies they protect, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman challenges pervasive and powerful myths about American and environmental values.

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Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland – Miriam Horn

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Republicans are backing a ‘carbon dividend.’ What the heck is that?

by DesireeBleasdale Posted on June 21, 2018

Federal climate action may seem like a far-off prospect, but that’s not stopping a new group of climate hawks from launching a fresh campaign for a national carbon tax.

Here’s the real surprise: The proposal comes from Republicans, and it’s got the support of ExxonMobil and Shell.

The Baker-Shultz Carbon Dividends Plan, floated last year by the Climate Leadership Council, calls for taxing carbon emissions and returning the revenue as a “dividend” to everyday Americans. It’s named after James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, two former secretaries of state and old-school Republican bigwigs.

And now this new bipartisan group, the Americans for Carbon Dividends, wants to push the plan through Congress someday — hopefully soon. The group is chaired by two former U.S. senators, Republican Trent Lott of Mississippi and Democrat John Breaux of Louisiana.

If you’re wondering what the heck a carbon dividend is, or why oil companies might be backing a carbon tax, we’ve got you covered.

The carbon dividend

The basic premise of a carbon dividend is to return 100 percent of the revenue raised from the tax to American households.

Other carbon fees would spend the money differently. To generalize, progressives prefer to invest the revenue in clean energy and climate mitigation. A coalition of new grassroots groups are pushing just this sort of policy in Washington state. Centrist and right-leaning climate-hawks, on the other hand, have called for a revenue-neutral plan that would return money to American citizens.

While Washington state’s proposed fee has an initial price of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, the Baker-Shultz plan starts much higher, at $40 per ton. Under their proposal, the price would ramp up over time, taxing emissions from refineries, mines, wells, and ports.

To make up for higher energy costs, an average American family of four would receive about $2,000 from the program in the first year.

And then there’s cap-and-trade, which puts a limit on annual greenhouse gas emissions and either sells or gives companies permits to pollute. Although California and Northeastern states have figured out how to get regional cap-and-trade schemes in action, an attempt at a national cap-and-trade program failed almost 10 years ago — even with Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress. So…

Could a dividend be successful?

The carbon dividend has had prominent, eclectic backers, from James Hansen, a prominent NASA-official-turned-climate-advocate, to Bob Ingliss, a former Republican representative from South Carolina.

But there’s simply no good precedent. Like carbon taxes in general, it hasn’t been implemented in any state. And that can worry legislators who are considering it.

“It’s not going to happen overnight — we’ve been debating this for 30 years,” former Senator Lott tells the New York Times. But he says “the tide is turning.”

If a carbon dividend does manage to pass, experts are optimistic that it would be popular. In an interview earlier this year, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said, “Once people have the experience of getting that check, there will be a huge constituency saying, ‘Don’t you dare touch my revenue.’”

Leiserowitz pointed to Alaska, where residents get a yearly cut of oil revenue from the Alaska Permanent Fund. It created the sort of popular demand that Leiserowitz thinks could make a carbon tax politically sustainable over the long term, protecting it from future politicians.

Of course, the end goal is to ditch fossil fuels. If the economy ever gets fully decarbonized, you won’t be getting a big check in the mail from the dividend program.

The trade-offs

And now we get to why Exxon and Shell might be a fan of the Baker-Shultz plan. Environmentalists will find some bits hard to swallow. For one, it would protect fossil fuel companies from future lawsuits to hold them accountable for climate change.

Baker-Shultz’s carbon tax would also replace the Clean Power Plan, which regulates pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants. President Trump and Scott Pruitt have been trying to dismantle the Obama-era plan — but maybe Baker and Shultz could end up doing the work for them.

For its part, Americans for Carbon Dividends says their proposal would be better at reducing carbon emissions than all of Obama’s regulations combined.

That’s compromise for ya.

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Republicans are backing a ‘carbon dividend.’ What the heck is that?

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Paid actors faked public support for a power plant in New Orleans

by FannieLatimer Posted on May 7, 2018

Investigative news site The Lens reports that two men hired local actors to attend New Orleans City Council meetings in October and February. Participants were paid $60 to show up, clap for anti-renewable energy comments, and wear T-shirts in support of a new power plant. They were paid extra cash to read a speech.

Entergy, the company that proposed the power plant facility, denies any involvement in the hires. The plant later got the city council’s approval.

This kind of stunt is called “astroturfing” — garnering fake grassroots support for a cause. Surprisingly, it appears to be legal in Louisiana, The Lens found. That didn’t stop the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Sierra Club, among other groups, from pushing the local government to figure out who’s behind the scheme.

If Big Oil were involved … well, we wouldn’t be surprised. It’s been caught astroturfing before, and it has employed some pretty shady tactics over the years.

The industry has been taking notes from the tobacco industry’s playbook to hide the negative impacts of its product. For example, Exxon knew the risks of global warming long ago — and naturally, it funded scientific studies with the intent of challenging the established science of climate change.

Documents released last month show that Shell also knew it was on the hook for climate change. By the mid-’80s, it had even calculated that it contributed to 4 percent of emissions worldwide. Nonetheless, the company ran ads implying that carbon dioxide actually helps the planet. News flash: It doesn’t.

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Paid actors faked public support for a power plant in New Orleans

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Baton Rouge Officer Who Shot Alton Sterling Will Not Be Charged

by BeatrisPerrett Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

The Department of Justice will not pursue criminal charges against an officer involved in the videotaped shooting of a man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last summer, the Washington Post has reported. The announcement—expected tomorrow—will be the first time under Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the department has publicly declined to press charges against an officer investigated in a high-profile police shooting case.

Alton Sterling, 37, was shot and killed by a Baton Rouge Police Department officer in July 2016, setting off days of protests in the city and nationwide. Two officers had responded to a call about a man outside a convenience store who had waived a gun at someone else. When they arrived, they found Sterling outside the store selling bootlegged CDs. A confrontation ensued in the parking lot (the beginning of the incident was not caught on camera), and an officer tased Sterling after ordering him to the ground, cell phone footage of the encounter shows. Sterling remained on his feet, and an officer tackled him while another rushed to handcuff him. In a second cell phone video, one officer is heard yelling “He’s got a gun!” Then he fires several shots into Sterling. Sterling was armed, but it’s unclear from either video whether he reached for his weapon before he was shot. Witnesses told local new outlets that Sterling never reached for his gun during the encounter.

Sterling’s shooting occurred the day before an officer shot and killed another man in a Minneapolis suburb in an incident that was streamed in part on Facebook Live by the man’s girlfriend, and in the same week that a black man—admittedly upset over police shootings of black men—opened fire on officers at a protest over the two shootings in Dallas, killing nine. Just over a week after that incident, three more officers were killed ambush-style in Baton Rouge.

The Obama DOJ launched a criminal investigation into whether the officer who shot Sterling had willfully violated his civil rights by doing so. On Tuesday, the Trump DOJ—led by adamantly pro-police Attorney General Jeff Sessions—will announce that it will not pursue charges against the officer, the Washington Post reports. The decision is not unsurprising—civil rights cases are notoriously difficult to prove in court. The DOJ declined to file criminal charges against officers involved in high-profile police shooting cases on numerous occasions under President Obama, including in the case of of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014.

The report of the Sterling decision comes amid a flurry of other police-related news this week, including the police shooting death of a 15-year-old boy in a Dallas suburb over the weekend and news today that the officer filmed shooting a North Charleston, South Carolina, man in the back multiples times in April 2015 had pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges similar to those considered in the Sterling case. You can read Mother Jones‘ deep dive investigation into the trial of that officer here.

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Baton Rouge Officer Who Shot Alton Sterling Will Not Be Charged

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Daughter Slams Pepsi Protest Ad in One Tweet

by ClarissaMccaffre Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Bernice King, the daughter of legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., has added her voice to the criticism sparked by Pepsi’s controversial protest ad.

The commercial, which was released Tuesday as a two-and-a-half minute video, depicted reality TV star and model Kendall Jenner walking through a demonstration. As police stare down the protesters, Jenner approaches one of the officers to hand him a Pepsi. The gesture appears to defuse tensions, which prompts cheers from the protesters.

The ad quickly became the target of derision, with many calling it “tone-deaf.” Critics also argued Pepsi was co-opting the imagery of recent minority-led protest movements for profit. On Twitter, people pointed out that the scene of Jenner handing a Pepsi to an officer closely resembled a widely-shared photo of a Black Lives Matter protester being arrested during a 2016 protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

On Wednesday, King took to Twitter to share her thoughts about the controversy, posting a photo of her father being pushed back by police officers during a protest. In a particularly cringeworthy bit of timing, the Pepsi ad’s Tuesday release came on the same day of the 49th anniversary of King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee:

In a statement Wednesday, Pepsi announced the ad would be pulled immediately.

“Pepsi was trying to project a global a message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark, and we apologize…We are pulling the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position.”

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Daughter Slams Pepsi Protest Ad in One Tweet

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Here’s How Badly Police Violence Has Divided America These Past Few Years

by PennyWinter Posted on March 19, 2017

Mother Jones

In Shots Fired, the buzzworthy police drama premiering March 22 on Fox, federal agents investigate a black cop who has gunned down a young, unarmed white man. By the numbers, police actually kill more white people than they kill black people, but they kill black people at a far higher rate. Using population data from the Census Bureau and police shooting data from the Washington Post‘s 2015 database, we calculated that black men between the ages of 18 and 44 were 3.2 times as likely as white men the same age to be killed by a police officer. And while black men make up only about 6 percent of the US population, last year they accounted for one-third of the unarmed people killed by police.

We’ve obviously got some policing issues, but the Trump administration seems inclined to look the other way. Last month, in his first speech as attorney general, Jeff Sessions made clear that his Justice Department will curtail the monitoring of problem-plagued police departments that the Obama administration used as a tactic to combat civil rights violations by police. (Sessions suggested the monitoring had undermined “respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult.”) Lest readers have forgotten just how divisive the racial disparities in law enforcement have been, and continue to be, we put together this brief history of recent police violence and backlash to it.

July 2013
Sickened by the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, labor organizer Alicia Garza writes on Facebook, “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.” Her friend Patrisse Cullors turns the last bit into a hashtag.

Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA Wire via AP Photo

March 2014
In a Pew poll, 46 percent of Americans agree that “our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.”
July 2014

Eric Garner is choked to death by an officer on Staten Island, New York. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” become a civil rights slogan.

Bruce Cotler/ Globe Photos/Zuma

Aug. 2014
A white cop in Ferguson, Missouri, kills black teen Michael Brown, sparking weeks of protest. Police deploy riot gear, armored vehicles, and sniper rifles, while demonstrators adopt a “hands up, don’t shoot” posture based on claims that Brown had his hands up when he was shot. On Twitter, #BlackLivesMatter takes off.
Oct. 2014
A Chicago cop shoots Laquan McDonald 16 times. Police officials claim the teen was approaching officers with a knife—a union rep says he “lunged”—but the city won’t release dash-cam footage.
Nov. 22, 2014

Tamir Rice, 12, is killed by a Cleveland officer as he plays with a toy gun in a park.
Nov. 24, 2014
A Ferguson grand jury declines to indict Officer Darren Wilson, Michael Brown‘s killer. More protests. Critics of #BlackLivesMatter respond with #AllLivesMatter.

Darren Wilson St. Louis County Prosecuter’s Office/Reuters

Nov. 30, 2014
Five St. Louis Rams players walk onto the field for a game in the “hands up” position.
Dec. 3, 2014
The NYPD officer who choked Eric Garner escapes indictment. Days later, LeBron James and other NBA players don “I Can’t Breathe” shirts at pregame warmups.

Jonathan Brady/ PA Wire via Zuma Images

Dec. 18, 2014
The White House announces a new task force to “strengthen trust among law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.”
Dec. 20, 2014
Two NYPD officers are ambushed. Their killer, a black man, had posted a photo of his gun on Instagram: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today.”
Jan. 2015
#BlackLivesMatter tweets average 10,000 a day.

Erik McGregor/Zuma

March 2015
A Department of Justice report says Ferguson police employees sent racist emails and targeted black residents with nuisance citations to generate revenue.
April 2, 2015
A white sheriff’s deputy in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shoots black suspect Eric Harris after a foot chase. “I’m losing my breath,” Harris pleads in a video. “Fuck your breath,” another officer responds.
April 4, 2015

Walter Scott is fatally shot as he attempts to flee from Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Walter Scott in his Coast Guard days Courtesy of the Scott family

April 19, 2015
Freddie Gray dies of his injuries after a “rough ride” in a Baltimore police van.
May 2015
“I have heard your calls for ‘no justice, no peace,'” prosecutor Marilyn Mosby says as she announces charges against six officers in the Gray case. The White House task force releases its report: Police must “embrace a guardian—rather than a warrior—mindset.”

Alex Brandon/AP Photo

June 2015
Rapper Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” video depicts him being shot by police. It garners about 70 million YouTube views and wins two Grammys.

July 2015
BLM activists seize the mic at a Democratic candidate forum to grill Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders on police violence.
Oct. 2015
Rapper Vic Mensa’s video for “16 Shots,” a song about Laquan McDonald, goes viral.

Nov. 19, 2015
A judge orders the release of dash-cam footage that appears to show McDonald walking away from police when he was shot. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fires his police chief the next month.
Nov. 22, 2015
Presidential candidate Donald Trump tweets out a chart of fabricated crime statistics suggesting that black criminals are responsible for the vast majority of homicides against white people. It’s entirely bogus. Here’s Politifact’s summary:

Feb. 7, 2016
Beyoncé’s dancers adopt a Black Panther look for the Super Bowl halftime show. Police unions call for a boycott of the star.

via GIPHY

Feb. 24, 2016
BLM activists disrupt a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, demanding she apologize for her racially charged comments about “super predators” during the 1990s. Clinton appears irritated, but the next day she does just that.
May 2016
The first state “Blue Lives Matter” bill passes in Louisiana. Attacking a cop is now a hate crime.
June 2016
The police-van driver in the Freddie Gray case is acquitted.
July 5, 2016

Alton Sterling is fatally shot by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while officers have him pinned to the ground.
July 6, 2016
During a traffic stop, a Minnesota cop shoots Philando Castile as he reaches for his wallet—that’s according to Castile’s girlfriend, who livestreamed his demise on Facebook: “You told him to get his ID, sir!”

July 7, 2016
A black gunman kills five cops at a Dallas protest against police violence. He holes up in a parking garage, where police kill him with an explosives-bearing robot.
July 12, 2016
President Barack Obama defends Black Lives Matter at a memorial for the slain officers. “We have all seen this bigotry in our lives at some point,” and “none of us is entirely innocent,” he says. “That includes our police departments.”
July 17, 2016
A black military vet who ranted online about the treatment of black people by police assassinates three officers (one of them black) in Baton Rouge.
July 18, 2016
At the Republican National Convention, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who is black, proclaims that “blue lives matter.” In an op-ed the same day, he calls Black Lives Matter the “enemy.”

Mike Segar/Reuters via ZUMA Press

July 18, 2016
A police officer in Florida shoots a black caregiver who was lying in the street with his hands up. A union rep explains that the officer had been aiming at the man’s autistic patient, whose toy truck he mistook for a firearm.
July 27, 2016
After further acquittals in the Freddie Gray case, charges are dropped against the remaining officers.
Aug. 2016
49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick starts sitting out the national anthem to protest police violence. A few pros and countless high school and college athletes follow suit.

Kevin Terrell/AP

Sept. 2016
Clinton debates Trump: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police,” she says. Critics pounce. “Yes, Hillary Clinton called the nation racist,” writes a Washington Times columnist.
Oct. 2016
Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the DOJ will (finally) start collecting national data on police use of force.
Dec. 2016
A jury of 11 whites and one African American deadlocks in the trial of Michael Slager. A retrial is scheduled for late August 2017. A separate federal trial, to determine whether Slager violated Walter Scott’s civil rights, is slated to begin in May 2017.

Mic Smith, File/AP Photo

Feb. 2017
In his first speech as attorney general, Jeff Sessions suggests that the Justice Department, under his watch, will discontinue its practice of monitoring police departments suspected of violating people’s civil rights.
March 2017
A new drama series, Shots Fired, debuts on Fox. “There were a lot of people who never saw Trayvon Martin as a kid,” one of the show’s co-creators tells Mother Jones. “He was painted as the victimizer, and Zimmerman Martin’s killer got donations from all over the country. So in doing a show that deals with police violence, the question was how do we make those people who sent in the donations see this kid as a human being? One of the things we came up with was to make one victim white.”

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Here’s How Badly Police Violence Has Divided America These Past Few Years

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Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

by coolmathgamesgU Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Photojournalist Peter van Agtmael considers his third book, Buzzing at the Sill, the latest chapter of what he calls “one greater book”—a sweeping exploration of the September 11th attacks and the impact of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on soldiers and their families. His project began with his 2009 book, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die, and continued with Disco Night Sept. 11, which appeared in 2014. In Buzzing at the Sill, published by Kehrer Verlag, he shifts his attention to unexplored corners the United States, after he realized “how little I know about my country.”

The Magnum photographer first went to Iraq in 2006 when he was 24, and he covered the conflicts there and in Afghanistan for several years before returning to the States. With 72 images pulled from his journalism assignments and others he shot while traveling throughout the country, Buzzing at the Sill examines the reverberations of 9/11 through glimpses of daily American life that often have the intimate feel of a snapshot. The photos in Buzzing at the Sill depict vulnerable, grieving, celebrating, and sometimes threatening Americans, collectively offering a cohesive and sharp reading of the country, with a powerful undercurrent of alienation. “In America, we somehow feel immune,” he writes in Buzzing at the Sill, “but in any country at war, the first thing they’ll tell you is that they didn’t think it could happen there.”

I talked with van Agtmael about making this book and what it might say about the political climate in the United States today.

Kentucky Derby aftermath. (Louisville, KY. 2015)

Mother Jones: Can you tell me about the title, Buzzing at the Sill?
Peter van Agtmael: Buzzing at the Sill is from a Theodore Roethke poem called “In a Dark Time.” I’d heard a small part of it in a play, a sort of sci-fi play about morality in a virtual reality universe. Nothing to do with the book precisely, but it was a great play. I read the poem afterwards because I was intrigued and had one of those strange senses: “This poem is kind of important to me. I don’t know why, but I’m going to just keep it in the back of my mind.” I just kept coming back to it. As I started putting the book together and writing the stories for it, this idea of buzzing as a word kept popping up in my brain.

I started the book with the story of a vulture that flapped up to this window sill outside of a burn ward at a military hospital in Texas. I guess it could smell the rotting flesh through the walls and was just trying to desperately and aggressively get in through that window, I don’t know, to try and feast on the flesh. It was really a troubling moment. But apparently it happens all the time, because the soldiers in recovery and the nurses were totally accustomed to the presence of those vultures.

When I started thinking of the decisions that led me down the road first—which was part of Disco Night Sept. 11 and then the buzzing being— I somehow couldn’t ignore the urge to do things that kind of defy logic. And I liked the poem, I liked the ring of it. I was sitting with David Allan Harvey one day when he pointed out how appropriate the title was for the things I was talking about.

MJ: In what way do you see that Buzzing at the Sill continues the narrative you built with Disco Night?

PVA: I went out to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally because I was interested in war as a notion and in experiencing it. I was interested in history and how societies form. I was interested in the recent history of what had provoked these wars. So when I finally got out there, I was really seeing the wars through the American perspective, much more than through being embedded with American soldiers and Marines. I realized in that process how little I knew about my own country. I had grown up in the suburbs and, after college, I moved out of the country, so I didn’t really know the place well. When I started following soldiers and their families back home, it provoked a lot of the questions about who we are as a nation, questions I realized couldn’t be explored through the more limited framework of looking at the military at war and at home. So that inspired these trips in which I began to explore America in more general terms. I really started this work in 2009. I got the bulk of it done as I was easing out of Disco Night. I started them as almost concurrent projects.

A woman attending the annual Iowa GOP Ronald Reagan dinner, where Sarah Palin gave the keynote speech. (Des Moines, Iowa, 2010)

The Fourth of July. (Brooklyn, New York, 2010)

The KKK had boasted that dozens from their Klan chapter would attend the rally and cross burning, but there were only a few people when we showed up, including a British TV crew and a freelance photographer. (Maryland, 2015)

Outside Lyniece Nelson’s house. Nelson’s 19-year-old daughter, Shelly Hilliard (known as “Treasure”), was strangled, dismembered, and set on fire in 2011. Treasure was a transgender teen born Henry Hilliard Jr. The family is with Treasure’s urn. (Detroit, Michigan, 2012)

MJ: What was your thinking as you approached putting together this body of work? The photos feel like they’re pieced together from assignments or from different stories.

PVA: At first it wasn’t meant to be a book, although I’m always thinking about that in the back of my mind. It started off as a series of exploratory road trips that I was doing with Christian Hansen, who I dedicated the book to. Then I started getting some assignments to go shoot in America because I think editors liked the pictures I was taking. What I was doing for those assignments wasn’t always directly tied to what I was doing for myself, but it gave me the space to photograph. I started getting assignments that dealt with my own interests and made some pictures in that direction. A lot of it was just photographed through general exploration. It was sometimes provoked by assignments, then I’d go back on my own dime if I really clicked with a place. And sometimes it was just hanging out with my family or friends.

MJ: How did you approach the editing? How were you going to tie the pictures together?

PVA: I’m a constant editor. Every few months or so I make a ton of 4×6 prints. I put them on a magnetic board and I live with them for a while to see what bubbles to the surface. A lot of this was part of Disco Night originally, and I suddenly started realizing, “If I keep working on this because I’m not done and I put all that in Disco Night, how can this be one book? Is it going to be too long and bloated and crazy?” Then I started thinking, “Okay, I have so many other questions about America, when do I stop?” I started thinking about each book being a chapter in one bigger book and that gave me the space to cut it off at a certain point. I needed to have some kind of thematic focus to the work.

I was taking all these prints and I brought them to the Magnum meetings, trying the old Josef Koudelka trick: Give them to photographers, who are getting bored during the talks about the economics of the agency, to look through with a pen. They’ll separate them in two piles—what they like and what they don’t like—and put their initials on the back. I started to find the core pictures that people seem to relate to. I’d ask myself why? And did I relate to them? Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But it gave me an idea of how other people were seeing the work. From there, I kept shooting but started making drafts of the work, essentially spending a few days a month sequencing and editing, hanging things up on the board, showing them to trusted confidantes from in and outside the photo world. It started to take its shape naturally over time until I kind of ran out of ideas. At that point I was like, “Okay, I guess it’s a book.”

After dinner at Lyniece Nelson’s house. One of Nelson’s children was murdered, one committed suicide shortly after his 16th birthday. Her house burned down not long after the death of her son, destroying the urns of both her deceased children. (Detroit, Michigan, 2012)

Hunting rabbits with BB guns. (The outskirts of New Orleans, Louisiana, 2009)

Iraqi refugees in a low-income housing community in Portland. The area is home to several thousand Iraqi refugees. (Portland, Oregon, 2015)

MJ: When you’re out on these road trips, do you still see reverberations from 9/11 in the country?

PVA: Constantly. You find them in them most unexpected places, like graffiti on a wall. Sometimes it’s a faded picture; sometimes it’s a newspaper tacked to a wall. Sometimes it’s weird paraphernalia related to it, home constructed paraphernalia. It resonates through society and continues to resonate today. The travel ban that was imposed by the administration is a very direct reverberation of 9/11. Even though most people were disconnected from it, the moment amplified a fairly massive and somewhat irrational fear that exists in the populace at large. And I think a lot of the work I’ve done and a lot of the work I’m going to do in the future still ties to 9/11 and the fallout from it.

MJ: In the text you’ve written for both Disco Night September 11 and Buzzing at the Sill, you are introspective about covering war. Do you still cover conflict?

PVA: I am still covering conflict to some degree. I was back in Iraq last year for the next book I’m working on. I’ve covered quite a bit of the Israel and Palestine conflict in the last five years for another book I’m working on. But I’m not doing it with the kind of intensity I was before and I’m not seeking out the front line and the kind danger that comes with being at the edge of the war the way I used to. It just kind of ran its course for me. For a long time I could justify doing it to myself, no matter how irrational it was. It was important to me and my work. And I just don’t feel it in the same way any more. When it comes up and it’s important to me, I’ll do it, but more out of sense of duty than desire—which used to be a big part of it.

MJ: When we started talking, you mentioned that Buzzing at the Sill reflects the times, the current situation in America. Can you explain what you meant?

PVA: It deals with the margins of America, a lot of parts unseen. Well, parts that are seen and familiar to a lot of the populace, but unseen when it comes to the parameters of what mainstream news and popular culture and Hollywood reflects. That kind of unease, that melancholy, is of course partly my interpretation, but partly, I think, it’s something that’s really there as well. It resonates with this moment and the sort of alienation from the power structure a lot of people feel, as well as a certain amount of desperation, in the hope of disrupting the power structure so they can live better lives. I think in those ways, it’s intimately connected to today.

The youngest children tending the horses. (Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 2011)

A “second line parade” is a local African American tradition where brass bands–known as the first line-march in the streets and are joined by members of the public, the “second liners.” (New Orleans, Louisiana, 2012)

All photos by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos, from his book Buzzing at the Sill.

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Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like

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