The Public i recently talked to Urbana Poet Laureate Ashanti Files
Please tell our readers a little about yourself.
“I am a wife, mother, and registered nurse. I currently work in mental health and addiction services. I enjoy reading, writing (of course), and teaching.”
How does it feel to be the Urbana Poet Laureate? Has the recognition impacted your poetry in any way? Does it give you greater confidence as a writer? Continue reading
Coal ash waste from the Vermilion Power Station has threatened the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River for decades
No More “Cap and Run”
After a multi-year campaign calling for the clean-up of coal ash along the Middle Fork of the Vermilion, Illinois’ only National Scenic River, Dynegy Midwest Generation, owner of the coal ash, has finally agreed to move the contaminated material out of the floodplain. This is a huge victory for environmental advocates who have spent years pushing for a cleanup of the dangerous combustion waste produced at the Vermilion Power Station.
Over the course of 56 years, Dynegy and its predecessor, Illinois Power, deposited approximately 3.3 million cubic yards of this waste in three unlined pits adjacent to the river. Coal ash is the toxic waste material remaining after the burning of coal. It contains toxic substances like mercury, arsenic, selenium, cadmium and chromium. When these materials leach into surface and groundwaters, they contaminate drinking water and natural ecosystems. Coal ash pollutants can cause cancer, as well as damage to nervous systems and other organs, especially in children. Coal ash can also harm and kill wildlife, especially fish and other water-dwelling species. Continue reading
Farmworkers increasingly struggle with extreme heat and its effects
Heat kills, and it kills farmworkers with distressing regularity. The list of the dead includes migrants like 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez in the grape fields of California; 38-year-old Francisco Perez working in a tree nursery outside Portland; Miguel Angel Guzman Chavez picking tomatoes in Georgia; and 36-year-old Humberto Casarrubias Sanchez detasselling in a cornfield in Whiteside County, Illinois.
Over a half century ago one of the most famous documentary films in American history, Harvest of Shame (1960), exposed the inhuman conditions under which farm workers toiled and too often died. Sadly, conditions in the fields remain dangerous and often life-threatening. COVID-19 has itself recently run rampant in the fields, where masks were not provided and the completion of work tasks made successful social distancing difficult or impossible. Workers also had very limited access to vaccines. Continue reading
(National Guard troops were deployed even against orderly protests, contributing to Trump’s narrative of “lawlessness.” U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Jordan Trent)
On August 19, Shamar Betts was sentenced to 48 months in federal prison (minus 12 for time served) for authoring a Facebook post. The sentencing also made Betts personally responsible for repaying $1.5 million for damage committed by others at the Champaign Marketplace Mall on May 31, 2020. Each paycheck of Betts’s future income will be garnished until the obligation is met, turning the four-year sentence into a lifetime sentence of debt peonage and criminal branding as a federal felon. Continue reading
The Safer Illinois app’s building access function
In August, 2020, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) opted for a hybrid in-person/online semester. The decision to partially reopen was made possible by the innovative SHIELD: Target, Test, Tell initiative. A crucial part of this program was the Safer Illinois app, a health-tracking app designed in-house through a murky public-private relationship between the private company ROKMETRO and the UIUC-based ROKWIRE initiative. UIUC alumnus John Paul was involved in creating both the company and the university initiative. Safer Illinois provides users with COVID-19 symptom tracking, monitors COVID-19 exposure, and organizes COVID-19 saliva-test results and communications with health officials. Since then, UIUC has been making plans to sell its COVID-19 testing and monitoring infrastructure to similar institutions. (See also here.)
While COVID-19 provided an impetus for rolling out the app, its development started before the pandemic. The app’s beginnings (as the Illinois app) can be found in the numerous public-private relationships that have made the campus a hot spot for new information technologies, student-data extraction, and market experimentation.
With the pandemic, UIUC fit the app to the alleged needs of the moment. Safer Illinois entered into students’ lives, homes, classrooms, and campus—bringing the violence of the border with it. Continue reading
The author holding her youngest son in the NICU
Five years ago, my world turned upside down after the birth of our first son. What should have been the happiest day of our lives turned into one crisis after another, a transfer to a hospital two hours away, and a stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) . I spent a lot of time blaming myself, thinking there was something wrong with me, myself, my body. I was numb for quite a while but even those closest to me were not able to tell—because that’s what we tend to do as women. That is what we have been taught to do from a young age. Internalize, but make it look pretty on the outside.
The birth of our second son was a scheduled C-section. Controlled. Planned. No room for error. What was supposed to be my calm, healing birth resulted in an even longer NICU stay than with our first. The things I saw during our youngest son’s NICU stay will forever be burned into my brain. The sights, sounds, and smells didn’t leave once we left; the NICU seemed to follow us home. Continue reading
Ubuntu is a term that originated with the Zulu people and roughly translates to “humanity” in English. The term emerged as a political concept following apartheid’s disintegration in South Africa. Now a collective of local community members, scholars, clergy, and elected officials have begun the work of making this progressive vision of humanity real for our city. One of Ubuntu’s most immediate goals is to make sure that the values of humanity are reflected in the current police reform process, especially as Champaign heads into a process of hiring new officers and selecting a new police chief.
Though Ubuntu originally formed in Champaign-Urbana following the police killing of Kiwane Carrington in 2009, the concurrent crises of 2020—the coronavirus pandemic and the global rebellions following the murder of George Floyd—transformed the organization. Initially, the group focused exclusively on once- or twice-monthly discussions related to African American political education. The Facebook page, The Ubuntu Project – Champaign-Urbana, houses recordings of the fifteen Facebook Live events they conducted on an array of topics, including reparations, Black liberation theology, Black and brown solidarity, Black youth politics, and many more. Continue reading
Tens of thousands demonstrate in Paris on June 6, 2020, in solidarity with US George Floyd protests
While we are rightly preoccupied with abuse by the police in the United States, almost no Americans know anything about policing and justice in other countries. France offers a particularly interesting case. In January, six nongovernmental organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, used a French legal provision to put the government on notice for racially discriminatory identity checks, a practice which they found “widespread” and “deeply rooted.” In June, the Council of Europe expressed “extreme concern” about conditions in French police stations and prisons after a report by its Committee for the Prevention of Torture, based on a December, 2019 visit, showed beatings, racist and homophobic insults, overcrowding, use of solitary confinement, and lack of psychiatric care in some cases.
On July 22 and 23, the French legislature passed two security bills, one on preventing terrorism, and one against “separatism” and to bolster “respect for the principles of the Republic.” The new laws, subject to review by the Constitutional Court—which in April struck down a previous version—are the state’s response to popular and police protests since George Floyd demonstrations spread from the US to France just over a year ago, but also build on longer-term trends of police violence and racial profiling, and protests against them, on the one hand; and the escalation of official and media rhetoric around security, Islam, terrorism, and immigration on the other. Continue reading
It’s not an accident that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the site for the battle over the pandemic and the health of the world. Many critics of corporate control of international trade, and of most of everyday life, have been making the case against this organization. In fact, the IMC and the independent media movement came out of organizing against the very same organization and the world view it represents. It’s curious then that one of the few public intellectuals who consistently questions the intellectual property system instituted by the WTO has called this current impasse on ramping up vaccinations around the world a charade. He is Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net). He wrote, “The idea that millions of people will needlessly die because our political leaders did not want to jeopardize the profits of the pharmaceutical industry is too horrible to be aired in places like the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio.”
Baker has a regular column called “Beat the Press,” where he watchdogs the elite press coverage of economic issues. His skepticism of the media is warranted, particularly regarding Big Pharma. Examples of how corporations control discourse abound. He suggests that government-funded research should be open source, and available for use by all. Furthermore, the US does not have to wait for the World Trade Organization to relax its intellectual property and patent restrictions. Is this a Kabuki dance where the Big Pharma-friendly Biden administration, in indicating support for a waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines, seriously expected action at the international level? Continue reading
While some at the Mall committed property damage and theft last year, there was no violence and no confrontations with the police; many at the Mall carried protest placards
I watched the legal machinery eat further into the life of a young man this past month. On June 14, I joined others at the sentencing hearing for Shamar Betts at the federal courthouse in Urbana. Betts is accused of “inciting a riot” by posting on Facebook last May. Public defender Elisabeth Pollock petitioned the judge for a sentence of time served—Betts has already spent more than a year in custody—and a special assessment (fine) of $100. Two years of supervised release would serve the public interest by allowing him to participate in counseling and educational opportunities, and be in line with the sentences given other defendants charged in the wake of last year’s protests. In contrast the United States, represented by prosecutor Eugene Miller, pushed for a five-year sentence, three years of probation and restitution of $2.2 million for property damage. Continue reading
“Abolitionist Elder” by Tori Hong, used with permission
Despite May having been the month to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage, the preceding year saw the increase of violence and hate towards Asians and Asian Americans that ranged from attacks on Asian and Asian American elders and Asian American children being bullied in schools across the nation to, more recently, the March 16 Atlanta shooting. Between March 19, 2020 and March 31, 2021, the organization Stop AAPI Hate received 6,603 reports of anti-AAPI hate incidents, with over 42 percent of the reported hate incidents (2,808) occurring in just the last month of that time. Stop AAPI Hate was formed by the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University to track reporting of violence, harassment, discrimination, child bullying, etc. against AAPI people in the United States as a result of the rise in xenophobia and racism towards AAPI people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading
Journalists describe the conflict in Yemen as a sectarian proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but that fails to capture the complexity of the war: in October, 2020, Human Rights Watch reported more than thirty battle fronts between various armed groups. The Biden administration has signaled changes in US policy, but a solution to the humanitarian disaster remains elusive. Continue reading
Vusa Mkhaya’s 2020 album
Music is often a reflection of struggles for social change, and a source for joy and hope for the future. This can be heard in the songs noted in my first music review article in the February 2021 issue of the Public i. Here are some more great tunes to prove the point. As I wrote last time, almost all of the music described here was reviewed in the great magazine titled Songlines. Please note the YouTube links for each song. Continue reading
Fred Hampton speaks at a Chicago Black Panther Rally in 1969
For more than 70 years and over a century, respectively, television and cinema have presented demeaning images of Black people. And for equally as long, African Americans have responded with boycotts, pickets and alternative visions that “depict[ed] our men and women in a favorable light and as they really are,” as Lester Walton, the arts critic for the African American newspaper the New York Age, put it in 1920.¹ Yet compared to the thousands of degrading representations, positive depictions of Black folk on the small or big screen were admittedly few during the 20th century. In the new millennium, as African American writers and directors have gotten more projects greenlighted, Black films have become more diverse in subject and characterization. One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah stand at the apex of a two-decade-long trend in which African American stories and characters have become less stereotypical and more complex and realistic. Continue reading
Still image from Tanna
Add these three visually stunning and thoughtful films to your watch list. Each, to varying degrees, tells a story of indigenous culture from an insider’s point of view, and each offers the special pleasure of real people playing themselves in fiction films. Continue reading
Mohammad Hamayel was a 15-year-old Palestinian child from Beita village, located south of Nablus, the son of a political prisoner and nephew of two martyrs. His family was expelled from their homes during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising)
In the past month, Palestinians have witnessed yet another escalation of Zionist violence inflicted onto our homeland without reservation. Israeli warplanes murdered over 250 Palestinians and displaced nearly 100,000 people from their homes during a two-week-long bombardment of the Gaza Strip. In East Jerusalem, lifelong residents of the Palestinian neighborhood, Silwan, receive orders to self-demolish their homes within 21 days. Refusal to meet Israel’s sadistic demands for self-demolition is met with state-sanctioned repression. Immediately following the 21-day deadline, the government will arrive with its own bulldozers, erasing Silwan from existence and replacing the Palestinian neighborhood with an Israeli national park. Meanwhile, martyrs from the West Bank are announced on a daily basis. As I write this, I am running out of space to hold grief for the 15-year-old Mohammad Hamayel, shot dead while he protested against the recent expansion of an illegal Israeli settlement built on his village’s land. Despite the initiation of a so-called ceasefire, tragedies pile atop one another every day—and, unfortunately, none of this feels new to me. Continue reading
Poll workers tally votes in the election for members in the constitutional assembly in May, 2021. Photo by Simón González, used under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0
In May, Chilean citizens flocked to polling stations to participate in an election for an unprecedented four categories of office. On top of the regularly scheduled elections for mayors and city councils, citizens also elected governors for the first time since the country’s transition to democracy in 1989. Most importantly, this election in addition included a ballot to choose members for the assembly tasked to write a new constitution. Continue reading
The 1912 Lawrence (Massachusetts) textile strike, also known as the Bread and Roses strike
Anarchists, proponents of “anti-authoritarian socialism,” seek to abolish the state and capitalism. Anarchism replaces authoritarian governance and private ownership of resources with federations of self-managed industries and communities in which those affected by decisions participate in making them directly in assemblies, councils, communes, and neighborhoods. Based on voluntary agreements, local workplaces and communities federate with others and coordinate across localities and regions. Workplace organizing has been a major focus for anarchists, and anarchism and labor organizing share a common history in the United States. Continue reading
