A border patrol agent talks to a group of migrants, mostly from African countries, before processing them after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, taken from Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico, on Nov. 11, 2022. (Photo by Guillermo Arias / AFP)
The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) is calling for a Department of Justice investigation into Immigration Customs Enforcement after records revealed that it has been lying about its racial data collection practices and classifying Black immigrants as white.
For years, BAJI and
other organizations
have demanded that ICE collect and publish racial and ethnic data about the thousands of migrants it detains each year in order to disclose and address racial biases. The Department of Homeland Security has responded that it does not collect such data. However, information BAJI obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit reveals that immigration agencies do maintain racial and ethnic data—but inaccurately so.
BAJI said multiple ICE detention facilities classify just 50% of Gambian immigrants as Black, even though the American GCash processing fee scam Community Survey suggests that 98% of people from Gambia self-identify as Black. The American Immigration Council
also reported
that ICE classified 86% of immigrants in custody at a New Mexico filter sugar babies detention facility as white, even though BAJI said many of those detainees were Black immigrants from countries including Mauritania, Haiti, Senegal, and Mali.
In a statement released Tuesday, BAJI accused ICE of secretly and intentionally collecting, manipulating, and “whitewashing” race data to avoid accountability for the disparate treatment of Black immigrants.
DHS, ICE, and Customs and Border Protection did not respond sugar dating photo verification to requests for comment on BAJI’s findings and other recommendations.
BAJI and the American Immigration Council filed the FOIA lawsuit in 2021 after ICE did not respond to requests for records sugar baby allowance Philippines about its use of force, solitary confinement, and other conditions at eight different immigration detention centers across the American South.
“Immigrants are oftentimes detained in state prisons and jails in the South that have already been condemned for the horrible conditions underpinned by racial and gendered violence,” BAJI Executive Director Nana Gyamfi said in a statement to Prism. “Detention and the disappearing of Black people is a continuation and extension of this country’s slavery and mass incarceration legacy.”
BAJI’s findings come just over a month after Gyamfi spoke at a White House human rights meeting. At the meeting, she
outlined racial disparities
at the border and provided policy recommendations to address them, the first of which was to implement systematic race data collection.
Gyamfi claimed the Biden Administration is
yet to make meaningful progress
on its purported commitment to
advancing racial equity
,
based on a BAJI report that
conditions for Black migrants have gotten sugar daddy na legit worse since 2022.
“The Biden Administration has used the
racial equity
executive order
as a substitute for actually satisfying its human rights obligation to resolve racial discrimination in U.S. policies and practices,” Gyamfi said in her address.
Black migrants face “discrimination at every turn” throughout the immigration process, Gyamfi said, including
anti-Black racism in Mexico
and other Latin American countries, heightened danger at the border, and higher risk of detainment once across it.
“Rape, robberies, murders,” Gyamfi said. “All of that is in a much more heightened, negative, dangerous situation for Black migrants now than what they were experiencing in 2022.”
Black migrants face higher rates of detention, deportation, and denial of asylum claims, said Daniel Tse, who co-founded the
Cameroon Advocacy Network
and works with the
Haitian Bridge Alliance
and
Black Immigrants Bail Fund
.
Tse described his own harrowing experiences when he immigrated from Cameroon in 2017 and was detained in California. He was issued a $17,500 bond, while his Venezuelan bunkmate’s was $1,500.
“I asked, ‘What’s the difference?’” Tse said. “I submitted more supporting documents to show I’m not a flight wealthy men BGC risk, but my bond is higher than his.”
Tse attributed this to anti-Black racism that has bled into immigration policy. Black migrants, he said, receive higher standards and less compassion than other immigrants.
Rabi Filipe, a 25-year-old Angolan immigrant living in Maine, also told Prism about the disparate treatment he faced while detained in a center in Mexico in 2019. While other migrants obtained authorization to cross into the U.S., he was instead targeted by authorities for his facilitation of protests for migrant rights.
After a harrowing monthslong journey through nine Latin American countries, enduring anti-Black sentiment along the way, Filipe had spoken out about conditions at the facility. Packed cells were separated by race, he didn’t have a mattress to sleep on, and surrounding townspeople hurled racist attacks at migrants from African and Caribbean nations. Now, he felt he was being punished.
Filipe eventually fled to Texas, was held in a detention center, and then flew to Maine to pursue asylum. Now 25 years old, he struggles to support himself and his 1-year-old daughter. His work permit expired, rendering him jobless and unable to secure stable housing or pay off his climbing debt.
The challenges facing immigrants sugar baby first date to the U.S. are heightened for Black migrants, who face disproportionate violence and discrimination, Filipe said.
This discrimination also lives in artificial intelligence. BAJI’s report called on DHS to disclose the impact of racial bias in the
CBP One app
, which migrants must use to schedule asylum appointments. The app’s facial recognition feature sometimes most active sugar baby site Philippines cannot register Black migrants, meaning they cannot book appointments.
“If you don’t have an appointment through the CBP app, you just stay on the other side of the border,” Gyamfi said. “The CBP app was not picking up Black faces.”
BAJI also called on the Biden Administration to end the police-to-deportation pipeline, noting that in 2022, 82% of those deported were from majority Black countries.
But even that number is likely an underestimate, Gyamfi said, because it doesn’t account for Black immigrants deported to countries that are not majority Black since ICE has failed to accurately collect or disclose comprehensive racial data.
Gyamfi said this
ultimately results in “hiding Black people.”
ICE’s failure to report racial data “makes it more difficult to track the abuses that are carried out along racial lines,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Franzblau said more than 37,000 people are detained in immigration facilities every day, compared with 14,000 when the Biden Administration first took the helm. At these facilities, Black migrants are
more likely to be placed in solitary confinement
and serve lengthier detentions.
Gyamfi noted that real sponsor Philippines in 2022, the government swiftly embraced Ukrainian refugees.
“They opened up a [border] lane that had been closed and laid out a red carpet…so that Ukrainians Cebu sugar dating could walk into the country while everyone else was stuck at the gate,” Gyamfi said.
While Ukrainians were given Temporary Protected Status within two weeks of the Russian invasion, BAJI and other organizations fought for years to win
TPS for Cameroonians
. Ukrainians were offered subsidized housing and work permits, Gyamfi said, while migrants of color are crammed into
detention centers with poor conditions
. A lack of support and translation services makes it difficult to maintain work authorization.
Gyamfi supports welcoming Ukrainians. But true equity, she said, would mean extending the same treatment to Black migrants.
“All of the anti-Black discrimination that is experienced by African Americans…you’re now experiencing that as this new asylum seeker who has very few protections,” Gyamfi said. “When we address the needs of Black migrants, we address so many of the inequities that exist within those worlds.”
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Tagged:
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,
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Maddie Khaw
Maddie Khaw is a journalist based in Portland, Oregon, and Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently finishing her undergraduate degree in Journalism at Emerson College in Boston, where she is also minoring…
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Queer historical fiction is having a moment. Acclaimed recent novels have imagined queer lives in settings as varied as Puritan New England, antebellum Mississippi, and England during the first World War.
For LGBTQ+ readers, the genre’s appeal isn’t hard to sugar daddy vs sponsor understand. Reading queer historical fiction lets us imagine our way into the gaps in the historical record—to undo our own erasure.
It’s ironic, then, that one of the twentieth century’s finest works of queer historical fiction has been almost entirely forgotten.
Published in 1954,
The Flint Anchor
is the final novel free sugar dating Philippines by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Best remembered today for her debut novel,
Lolly Willowes
(1926), Townsend Warner went on to write another six novels—as well as several volumes of poetry, nine collections of short stories, a translation of Proust, and a biography. (And that’s not even mentioning her letters.)
Critics often cite Townsend Warner’s remarkable range as the reason she isn’t better known today. As her biographer Claire Harman observes, her oeuvre lacks “the impression of coherence upon which a loud reputation depends.” Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics, makes a similar point. “Though utterly individual,” he says, “she never cultivated a trademark style or subject—each of her novels is different from the last.”
They are, in short, queer historical fictions—albeit ones sugar dating photo verification written before the genre had a name.
The settings of her novels certainly vary widely, taking place everywhere from a sleepy convent in medieval England to eighteenth-century Andalusia to Paris during the revolutions of 1848. But these shifting settings obscure a more fundamental similarity. All of Townsend Warner’s novels after
Lolly Willowes
are historical fictions.
What’s more, they often make same-sex love and desire an unquestioned part of their pasts. They are, in short, queer historical fictions—albeit ones written before the genre had a name.
At first glance,
The Flint Anchor
seems like an exception. The novel’s protagonist is a man named John Barnard, and we follow his life from his birth in the small Norfolk village of Loseby until his death in 1863, at the height of the Victorian era. Along the way, Barnard marries, expands his business, and has several children.
It’s a novel, in other words, about a literal patriarch. But Townsend Warner hasn’t come to praise the Victorians—or even to bury them. She’s here to queer them.
Five pages into the novel, while describing how attractive the young Barnard looks at his coming-of-age dinner, the narrator casually informs us that, “Among Loseby fishermen, it was taken for granted that men should feel amorously toward a handsome young man.”
The first time I encountered this sentence, I had to stop and reread it. It was so dazzlingly matter of fact, so calmly provocative. Sex between men was a crime in nineteenth-century England—the historical record can tell us that—but what traces does an unspoken assumption leave behind?
From its opening pages, then,
The Flint Anchor
implies that England’s past is much queerer than the historical record admits.
Townsend Warner soon expands on this idea through a subplot involving a handsome young schoolteacher named Thomas Kettle, who comes to Loseby to help his elderly aunt. On the day he arrives, though, Thomas spontaneously accepts an invitation to go night fishing with a group of fishermen who work for Barnard. Though he sends a local boy, Crusoe, to tell his aunt that he’ll arrive later than expected, the message isn’t delivered on time.
This apparently minor incident sets in motion a sequence of events that leads to Thomas meeting Barnard and, eventually, marrying one of Barnard’s daughters, Mary. Years pass. Unhappy in the marriage, and with the stodgy Barnard family, Thomas begins spending more and more time with the fishermen—including a now grown-up Crusoe, who “dance[s] attendance on [Thomas] like an affectionate bear.”
As a member of the gentry, Thomas is crossing class lines by cavorting with the fishermen who work for his father-in-law. The situation finally comes to a head when graffiti appears in the streets of Loseby, alleging that Thomas “goes with” a fisherman named “Dandy Bilby.”
One of Mary’s sisters spitefully translates it for her (and the reader): “You know what that means.
Loves
. That’s what it means.”
At first—in what feels like a winking allusion to the legend that Queen Victoria was unable to conceive of lesbianism—Mary simply can’t fathom the possibility.
“But they’re both men, you silly girl!” she tells her sister. “Men can’t love each other.”
When finally convinced otherwise, she goes into shrieking hysterics. Any reader who feels similarly is thus put in the place of Mary: naïve, then absurdly melodramatic.
But Townsend Warner’s takedown of prudish Victorian morality is only getting started. Although Thomas isn’t in love with Dandy Bilby, he refuses to deny what his father-in-law calls (in High Victorian dudgeon) “this loathsome, this appalling accusation.” Instead, Thomas uses it as an excuse to escape the Barnard family for good.
Before leaving Loseby, however, Thomas tracks down the person who chalked the message onto the town’s walls in the first place: Crusoe. (He realizes it’s the younger man because his name is misspelled as “Tomas”—something Crusoe has done before.)
When Thomas asks Crusoe why he did it, the fisherman responds with what is, to my sugar baby allowance Philippines mind, one of the most moving declarations of queer love in twentieth century English literature:
Do you see that there moon? There won’t be a night of my life that I don’t see that there old moon, but I’ll think of you. For there’s never been a handsomer, or a stunninger, nor a more remarkable, nor a dearer than you, and never will be. No one I shall love as I love you, be he rich or poor, he or she….
Soon as I clapped eyes on you I took a liking to you, no more than a boy then. Now I’m a man grown, I love you. And I could go with plenty, and I go with some. But never as I’d go with you. I’d follow you round the world, if you’d have me. I’d give you the eyes out of my head, if you were to ask for them.
Crusoe goes on to explain that, though he was “fair busting” to tell Thomas about his feelings, he couldn’t find the words. “There was no other way but to make you angry, so as you’d leave off feeling as a gentleman. I had to get it out somehow, d’you see?”
“Rather to his own surprise,” the narrator tells us, “Thomas did understand. Crusoe’s declaration sounded neither classical nor reprehensible. So rang the long discreet sugar dating Philippines harsh sighs of waves embracing the shore, an elemental voice, alien and indisputable.”
It’s another astonishing moment. By aligning Crusoe’s declaration of love with the sea’s “elemental voice,” Townsend Warner insists on the naturalness of that love. She did this, moreover, in a time and place—England in the early 1950s—when queerness was seen as decidedly
un
natural. As the scholar D. Wallace observes, when Townsend Warner was writing
The
Flint Anchor
, the number of men being prosecuted for homosexual “offenses” was on the rise in England.
Thomas’s next words to Crusoe therefore refer as much to post-war England as they do to its Victorian past: “For a man to love a man is a crime in this country, Crusoe.”
Crusoe’s response is just as remarkable as his declaration of love.
Not in Loseby, Mr. Thomas, not in Loseby. Nor in any sea-going place, that I’ve sugar daddy dating privacy heard of. It’s the way we live, and always have been, whatever it may be inland. I can’t say for inland….But in Loseby we go man with man and man with woman, and nobody thinks the worse. Why, they darsn’t even preach against it.
With this passage, Townsend Warner expands on an idea she raised in an earlier novel,
After the Death of Don Juan
(1938). In that book, while discussing a rumored affair between a gentleman and a priest, one peasant woman tells another, “The gentlemen in the army are good Catholics, so they love the priests. It has always been so, it will always be so.”
The Flint Anchor
extends this claim to the stuffiest-seeming era of English history. It insists that queer people have always existed—even in the supposedly straitlaced nineteenth century—and that to think otherwise is naïve.
After reading the novel in manuscript, Townsend Warner’s longtime publishers, Chatto & Windus, told her that Crusoe’s declaration of love would need to be cut. According to Harman, Townsend Warner was “scornful when she heard this, and scornful of the firm’s prim delay in telling her, and she refused to withdraw the passage. She did, however, agree to perform ‘a little castration,’ and sent the [typescript] back with a new paragraph to make the matter plainer.”
Chatto & Windus should have known better. Townsend Warner’s entire life had been built around queer love. She met her life partner, the poet Valentine Ackland, at a tea party in 1927. At first, they didn’t particularly like one another—Townsend Warner later remembered that she talked too much, intimidated by the tall, handsome, and very quiet Ackland. Eventually, though, the two women became friends, then housemates.
One night, while they were talking through the wall that separated their bedrooms, Ackland confessed that she sometimes felt “completely unloved.” Townsend Warner immediately went to her—and from then on, they were lovers. They exchanged wedding rings after three months and, despite Ackland’s many infidelities, remained together for the rest of their lives.
In 1949, during a difficult period in their relationship, Townsend Warner wrote a letter to pay per meet sugar dating Ackland that reaffirmed their bond by retelling the story of their love.
“From the moment you spoke from your side of the wall and I came in to you,” she said, “we have been sure of each other, as sure as fish are of water, as birds are of air. We are each other’s element.”
For Townsend Warner, then, there was nothing bloodless or academic about
The Flint Anchor
’s depiction of queer love as elemental force. She had lived it.
*
The Flint Anchor
doesn’t end with Crusoe and Thomas sailing into the sunset together—not even Townsend Warner could have gotten that past her publishers in 1954. Instead, she leaves the situation provocatively ambiguous.
Crusoe declares his love for Thomas just before the other man boards a ship bound for the Netherlands. Some months later, a letter for Mary arrives from Spain. Written by Thomas, allegedly on his deathbed, it bids her farewell forever, and encloses a death certificate signed by a doctor.
It’s heavily implied, however, that Thomas has simply faked his own death to get away from the Barnard family for good. Thomas’s own father suspects the letter might be a “trick,” but he ultimately decides not to investigate.
And then there’s the letter’s return address: Málaga, a port city on Spain’s Costa del Sol.
Our last glimpse of Crusoe is equally sugar baby matching tips suggestive. As Thomas boards the ship to the Netherlands, he’s seen off by a rowdy crowd of fishermen.
“All of them but one,” we’re told, “watched the departing boat. Crusoe’s face had tilted upward. He was looking at the moon.”
With this last detail, Townsend Warner invites us to imagine what she couldn’t publish. To see the gentleman and the fisherman reunited in a “sea-going place” where men openly love other men—and always have.
*
Today, more than seventy years after it was first published,
The Flint Anchor
is—unfortunately—more relevant than ever. At a time of renewed persecution of queer and trans people, we need the novel’s message that queer love is natural, ancient, and beautiful.
And we need, too, to recognize Sylvia Townsend Warner as a writer not only of marvelous sugar dating site Philippines historical fiction, but of marvelous
queer
historical fiction.
The Flint Anchor
is, in fact, a bit less queer-centered than some of her other work.
In her 1936 novel
Summer Will Show
, a wealthy English widow goes to Paris to track down her husband’s mistress—and promptly falls in love with her. In
Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
(1927), a missionary in nineteenth-century Polynesia becomes besotted with the young man he’s trying to convert to Christianity. Even novels of hers that don’t center queer relationships, like
After the Death of Don Juan
, still often calmly allude to queerness.
Oddly enough, the very casualness with which Townsend Warner includes same-sex desire in her portraits of the past has, in a sense, worked against her. It’s made it harder to see the queerness of her historical fictions.
Oddly enough, the very casualness with which Townsend Warner includes same-sex desire in her portraits of the past has, in a sense, worked against her.
I’m tempted, now, to say that her matter-of-fact treatment of queerness has also made it sugar baby scams Philippines harder to see how “ahead of her time” she was. But saying that would imply that the past was somehow inferior to our own historical moment—less progressive, less accepting. As though there aren’t many people today who, like Barnard the Victorian patriarch, think queerness is “loathsome” and “appalling.”
Ultimately, saying Sylvia Townsend Warner was “ahead of her time” would ignore one of the core messages of her fiction: the past is always queerer than we think.

By **Lewis Lapham**
In arrangement with
TomDispatch.Com
.
Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
— Henry George
The news media these days look to outperform one another in their showings of concern for the lost battalion of America’s unemployed. Consult any newspaper, wander the Internet or the television talk-show circuit, and at the top of the column or the hour the headline is jobs. Jobs, the bedrock of America’s world-beating prosperity, the cornerstones of its future comfort and well-being—gone to Mexico or China, deleted from payrolls in Michigan and Ohio, mothballed in the Arizona desert.
The nation’s unemployment rate, officially pegged at 9.4% but probably nearer to 17%, in any event no fewer than 25 million Americans, a number more than equal to the entire population of North Korea, out of work or on the run. The metrics, so say President Obama, the
Wall Street Journal
, and
A Prairie Home Companion
, are not good. The stock markets may have weathered the storm of the recession, as have the country’s corporate profit margins, but unless jobs can be found, we wave goodbye to America the Beautiful.
Not being an economist and never having been at ease in the company of flow charts, I don’t question the expert testimony, but I notice that it doesn’t have much to do with human beings, much less with the understanding of a man’s work as the meaning of his life or the freedom of his mind. Purse-lipped and solemn, the commentators for the
Financial Times
and MSNBC mention the harm done to the country’s credit rating, deplore the trade and budget deficits, discuss the cutting back of pensions and public services. From the tone of the conversation, I can imagine myself at a lawn party somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, listening to the lady in the flowered hat talk about the difficulty of finding decent help.
Speaking Tools Versus Busy Bees
The framing of the country’s unemployment trouble as an unfortunate metastasis of the servant problem should come as no surprise. The country is in the hands of an affluent oligarchy content with Voltaire’s observation that “the comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” During Ronald Reagan’s terms as president, the income that individual American families received from rents, dividends, and interest surpassed the income earned in wages. Over the last 30 years, the wealth of the emergent rentier class has been sustained by an increasingly unequal sharing of the gross domestic product; the percentage of GDP accounted for by manufacturing fell from 21% to 14%, and the percentage accounted for by finance rose from 14% to 21%.
The imbalances become greater over time; as between compensations awarded to the high-end baskers in the sunshine and those provided to the low-end squatters in the active sugar dating sites Philippines shade, the differential at last count in 2009 stood at 263 to 1. With wealth comes power in Washington, so it’s also no surprise that the government, whether graspingly Republican or scavengingly Democratic, adopts the attitudes and prejudices of the monied sultanate. So do most of the nation’s news media, their showings of concern expressed in the lawn-party voices of the caterers distributing the strawberries.
The lines of work are as numberless as the hooks in the sea, but they divide broadly into employments bent to one’s own purpose and those bound to a purpose other than one’s own. It is the former that reflects the founding idea of America. The Puritan settlers of the seventeenth-century New England wilderness arrived from an old legit sugar dating sites compared world in which the civilizations both east and west of Suez fetched their food and shelter from the work of variously denominated slaves.
The ruling classes of antiquity, like those in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, regarded the necessity of having to earn a living as a mortification of the body and a degradation of the mind. Aristotle had classified slaves as “speaking tools,” available for every purpose except their own, and for the next 2,000 years, in Asia as in Europe, it was generally understood that the terms of a man’s employment were settled at birth. The newfound land of North America afforded an escape from the burdens of the past imposed by the divine right of inherited privilege as well as those enforced by Barbary pirates and British naval officers, the architects of the New Jerusalem bringing with them the Protestant belief that it was by a man’s work that he was known, not only to himself, but also to God and to his fellow men.
The love of country followed from the love of its freedoms of thought and action, not from a pride in its armies, its monuments, its manners, or its debts.
On no less an authority than that of John Calvin, they had been given to understand that there was “no employment so mean and sordid (provided we follow our own vocation) as not to appear truly respectable and be deemed highly important in the sight of God.” The thought embraced St. Benedict’s Catholic certainty that “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” as well as the meditation of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who likens the work for which men are by their nature born to that of “craftsmen who love their trade,” equivalent in turn to that of the “sparrows, ants, spiders, bees, all busy at their own tasks, each doing his own part toward a coherent world order.”
Further searches for a coherent world order on the western shores of the Atlantic encouraged the authors of the Constitution to conceive the document as a tool turned to the making of things, of laws as well as of ships and cider mills and songs. As with the plow and the surveyor’s plumb line, the instruments of government were meant to support the liberties of the people, not the ambitions of the state. In answer to questions being asked in Europe about what sort of persons were likely to be well received in the new republic, Benjamin Franklin in 1782 published a pamphlet,
Information to Those Who Would Remove to America
, in which he observed that in America people “do not inquire concerning a stranger,
What is he?
but,
What can he do?
If he has a useful art, he is welcome… But a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the public by some office or salary will be despised and disregarded.”
The love of country followed from the love of its freedoms of thought and action, not from a pride in its armies, its monuments, its manners, or its debts. Thomas Jefferson, writing his
Notes on the State of Virginia
in 1781, envisioned a republic of free-standing husbandmen who till the earth, “the chosen people of God… whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” The newfound land and its newfound independence both were to be cultivated by employments bent to purposes of the individual, their joint venture resting on a democratic holding of one’s fellow citizens in thoughtful regard not because they were rich or beautiful or famous but because they were fellow citizens.
The Elephant on the sugar daddy first date Table of American Politics
So at least was the spirit and intent if not always the practice or the case. In return for the Constitution’s ratification by the Southern slave-holding states, the politicians in Philadelphia in 1789 had compromised the principle that all men are created free and equal. They assumed that slavery was soon to become extinct, certain to be swept away on the rising tide of freedom, and so they allowed the Southern planters to temporarily retain their prize collections of speaking tools.
The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 remanded the case for liberty to the higher court of money. Between 1800 and 1860 the demand for cotton on the part of Britain’s satanic textile mills furnished the newly minted United States with its richest flow of capital, serving the purpose that the Saudi Arabians now extract from oil. The opulence of the trade (60% of America’s export in 1860), in large part conducted, to their immense profit, by New York banks and New England ship owners, financed the country’s westward expansion and the early development of its commerce. Without cotton, there would have been no industry, and without slavery, no cotton.
The “darkies” said by Stephen Foster to be singing sweetly in the fields subsidized the music that Walt Whitman heard elsewhere in the country in the singing of “the carpenter,” “the deckhand,” “the mason,” “the shoemaker,” where to find a sugar baby in Philippines “the hatter,” “the woodcutter,” and “the plowboy” —the voices of America’s leaves of grass, the fellow citizens in the 1830s and 1840s plying trades in Massachusetts and Ohio, felling trees and building roads in Illinois, piloting Missouri and Mississippi River steamboats, tinkering with farm equipment and firing pins, going west to Texas and California.
Victory in the war with Mexico added another 529,017 square miles to the inventory of spacious skies and purple mountain majesties acquired in the Louisiana Purchase; the population went forth and multiplied (9,638,453 in 1820; 31,443,321 in 1860), its restless collective energies geared to vocations apt to prove to be their own reward. Frontier people holding fast to what Mark Twain later claimed as “a maxim of mine that whenever a man preferred being fed by any other man to starving in independence, he ought to be shot.”
How then to accommodate both man and beast under the same beach umbrella of the American dream…?
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the shooting would have needed to become extensive. The Civil War had rousted slavery from the plantations of the South, but the industrial revolution in the North required an even greater supply of hired hands bound to purposes other than their own. The employments on offer in the Kentucky coal mines and the Pennsylvania steel mills matched Karl Marx’s job description of alienated labor—a “diabolical activity,” entailing the loss of self. “What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”
How then to accommodate both man and beast under the same beach umbrella of the American dream, make the freedom-loving argument that Franklin’s craftsmen and Jefferson’s husbandmen differ only in their angles to the sun from the hostess in the bunny costume checking coats in a Playboy club? By the turn of the twentieth century, the question of what constitutes the meaning of labor as well as a fair return on its performance was the elephant on the table of American politics.
An alienated proletariat had been imported from China to build America’s western railroads, from Ireland and Eastern Europe to service its eastern factories, and between 1870 and 1914, the bitter, often violent division between the differently purposed lines of work was made manifest in the financial markets and the streets. The great railroad strike in 1877 moved Thomas Alexander Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to suggest that the strikers be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.” State militia and federal troops complied with the suggestion, killing more than 100 strikers in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The putting down of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, and the breaking of the Homestead Strike in Andrew Carnegie’s steel works in 1892, reinforced the rule of money; the bank panics of 1893 and 1907, preceded by heedless speculation in the stock markets, led to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and depression.
The disputes varied in their particulars (the protective tariff, the prices paid for gold and silver, the legitimacy of the labor unions), but in every instance what was at issue were the terms of service as defined on the one hand by President Teddy Roosevelt in a Labor Day speech at Syracuse, New York, in 1903: “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing”; on the other hand by Woodrow Wilson, still president of Princeton University in 1909, speaking to the New York City High School Teachers Association: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
Wilson’s way of looking at things aligns itself with what was to become America’s chrome-plated future, Roosevelt’s with its homespun past. The Rough Rider was trading in nostalgia, looking back to his days as a young man, a young man who also happened legit sugar babies Philippines to be rich, shooting buffaloes in the Dakota Territory. The sentiment shows up in Norman Maclean’s remembrance of the way it was out among the tall trees in the summer of 1927, “As to the big thing, sawing, it is something beautiful when you are working together—at times, you forget what you are doing and get lost in abstractions of motion and power. But when sawing isn’t rhythmical, even for a short time, it becomes a kind of mental illness—maybe even something more deeply disturbing than that. It is as if your heart isn’t working right.”
It is here that one finds the dignity of labor and the expression of man’s humanity to man. One can illuminate the feeling on which Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union, mounted his candidacy for U.S. president in the election of 1912, attracting over 900,000 votes on the strength of his belief that “the workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.”
Wilson didn’t think so, and Wilson won the election, defeating Roosevelt as well as Debs. The establishment in 1913 of the Federal Reserve Bank overruled the prolonged objection by the instruments of labor to their uses in the hands of capital, shifting control of the nation’s currency from the public to the private sector.
The Labor of Consumption
It is man’s nature to be doing something, or at least to fancy that he’s doing something, but to what purpose, and for whom? Satisfactory answers to the questions lately have been hard to find, not only for the unemployed poor but also for the underemployed remnant of what was once a diligently aspiring middle class. It isn’t simply that the consumer markets don’t value work worth doing; it’s that the society’s ruling and possessing classes regard working for a living as the mark of inferior or damaged goods.
For how else could the American leaves of grass join their top-dressed companions on a golf course unless they borrowed money?
The attitude made its first appearance on the American scene during the Gilded Age, dancing with the newly crowned kings of finance under the ballroom chandeliers in Newport and New York. Thorstein Veblen took note of the arrival in 1899, his
Theory of the Leisure Class
suggesting that it is the conspicuous consumption of the product of other people’s time and effort that makes up the sum of one’s own worth and meaning. high quality sugar dating members Not the doing of the work, the digesting of it. “Leisure, considered as an employment,” said Veblen, “is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit, and the achievements which characterize a life of leisure and which remain as its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit.”
During the years prior to the Second World War, the attitude was safely confined to a small number of people preserved in the aspic of what was then big money. The victories over Germany and Japan fostered extensions of the franchise. Rescued by force of arms from the Great Depression, America seemed blessed with the enchantments of both Croesus and Colossus, the indisputable proofs of its wealth and military power giving rise to the notion that all its children were the inheritors of a vast fortune and therefore deserving of the best of all possible worlds that money could buy. No reason not to have it all—a new frontier, a great society, guns for a splendid little war in Asia, butter for the old folks at home, a house in the country, a boat on the lake, the face and fortune in the ad for one of Ralph Lauren’s tennis dresses.
Much of the world in 1945 was either bankrupt or in ruins, and the refurnishing of it supplied the American economy over the next 30 years with an abundance of jobs that afforded the means of independence and a measure of self-worth, while at the same time bringing forth the trophies of exploit to a consumer market more wonderful than the wonderful world of Oz, seeding popular sugar dating apps Philippines ever broader acres of the nation’s human topsoil with the presumptions of entitlement favored by Veblen’s Newport heiresses. Don’t worry, be happy; go forth and shop. Leisure considered as employment.
Which was all well and good until it turned out, somewhere in the middle of the 1980s on the yellow brick road with Toto and the Gipper, that the Wizard was easy access to conspicuous credit. For how else could the American leaves Manila sugar dating of grass join their top-dressed companions on a golf course unless they borrowed money? The country’s working and middle classes discovered that it wasn’t the value of the work itself, or its manufacture of a decent living (as architect, bus driver, sales clerk, actress, lathe operator, automobile mechanic) that made up the sum of the country’s wealth and well-being.
Their great collective enterprise was the labor of consumption, and with it the derivative of debt, a byproduct, like the methane exuded by factory-farmed pigs, that funded the patriotic service owing to God, biggest sugar daddy site Philippines country, and the American Express card. The work was maybe mindless, a substitution of what is animal for what is human, but it fattened the gross domestic product, enriched the insurance companies and the banks, welcomed the second coming of an American Gilded Age, and now accounts for the increasingly grotesque disparity between the income earned as wages and the revenue collected as rent, interest, dividend, stock option, and year-end bonus.
Americans with jobs imagine they now work longer and harder hours than did their forebears on Mark Twain’s Missouri frontier; if so, their labor serves a purpose other than the one in hand. Finance accounted for 47% of total U.S. corporate profits in 2007; 58% of Harvard University’s male graduates in that same year (the heirs and assigns of Woodrow Wilson’s small class of persons deserving of a liberal education) took up careers as high-end traffickers in the drug of debt. It’s a lucrative trade, up to the standard of the cotton export from the dear old antebellum South. That it doesn’t add to the sum of human happiness or meaning is probably why the gentry on the lawns of Connecticut, together with their upper servants in Washington and the news media, talk about the lost battalion of America’s unemployed as a set of conveniently invisible numbers rather than as a body of fellow citizens.
Copyright 2011 Lewis H. Lapham
________________________________________________________________________
This essay originally appeared at
TomDispatch.com
.
Lewis H. Lapham is editor of
Lapham’s Quarterly
. Formerly editor of sugar dating sites with verified profiles Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including
Money and Class in America
,
Theater of War
,
Gag Rule
, and, most recently
Pretensions to Empire
. The
New York Times
has likened him to H.L. Mencken;
Vanity Fair
has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay introduces “Lines of Work,” the Spring 2011 issue of
Lapham’s Quarterly
.
To read more blog entries from
Lewis Lapham
others at
GUERNICA
click
HERE
.

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TUSKEGEE, AL – MARCH 14: Sixth grade students work on math problems together on March 14, 2023, at Tuskegee Public School in Tuskegee, Alabama. (Photo by Julie Bennett for The Washington Post via Getty Images).
Government resources are drying up, vaccine mandates and COVID-19 protocols are being lifted, and students and educators say they feel they’re being left behind
.
This three-part series takes a closer look at how teachers, students, and parents are coping with fear and uncertainty sugar baby scams Philippines as government priorities shift.
Elementary and middle schools that have relied on emergency relief funding throughout the pandemic could soon see those funds dry up.
Money granted by the
Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief Act
(ESSER) gave schools across the country sugar daddy asking for GCash a chance to meet the needs of students, parents, teachers, and administrators during a time of strife and uncertainty.
ESSER funds arrived two weeks into the pandemic in three installments totaling nearly $190.5 billion. Congress set aside $13.5 billion of Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act money for ESSER in March 2020. Schools received an additional $54.3 billion when Congress authorized the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act in December 2020. In 2021, schools received the largest round of funding yet, known as ESSER III, when the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) gave $122 billion to public and charter schools to “address the
impact of the coronavirus pandemic
on the Nation’s students.”
Schools are on a tight deadline for ESSER III spending, which was distributed to
every state
. The funds expire in September 2024, and teachers and best sugar baby sites Philippines administrators are feeling pressure to spend responsibly as conversations about the impact of pandemic learning on teachers, parents, and students reveal a range of socioeconomic divides.
Nearly every state that received ESSER III funding sugar dating features comparison has been explicit about making students’ social and emotional well-being a priority. One
2021 Pew study
showed that the pandemic wreaked havoc on kids’ mental health, leading to higher than average rates of anxiety sugar baby profile tips and depression, a problem that spilled over into hallways and classrooms when schools returned to in-person.
Adriana Publico is the ESSER Project Manager at Washoe County School District in Nevada. Her district received more than $121 million in ESSER funding, a significant portion of which was allocated for hiring
mental health professionals
, social workers, and counselors in the schools. But despite these resources, find a sponsor Manila her optimism that students will fully emotionally recover before ESSER III funds expire is waning.
“We don’t see any federal funding on the horizon,” she said. “And we’re just talking about academics. The social and emotional side I think is going to take even longer because literally everybody’s lived through multiple layers of trauma.”
When it comes to academics, Publico says Spanish-speaking students, Black students, Indigenous students, and other students of color, who altogether
make up 57.5%
of the school’s student population, have fallen very far behind. The district focused heavily on getting more adults into buildings to work directly with students on their individualized needs. They also expanded online learning programs, adding four new distance learning options to their catalog of software for kids struggling in reading and math.
Without ESSER funding, Washoe County School District may have to say goodbye to those programs.
“We’ve got to get students prepared for the futures that they want in our state. And, honestly, for the first time, in my experience here, I think we [legislators, superintendents, school board members] are aligned on all levels to put more funding toward education,” Publico said.
In North Carolina, schools largest sugar baby site Philippines are already saying goodbye to ESSER-funded programs. Chatham County Schools announced in February the
closure of the fully remote learning option
made available to elementary and middle schoolers during the pandemic, citing “budgetary changes” as one reason the school was unsustainable.
The school was established sugar dating photo privacy using ESSER funds that will expire in June 2024. During a
public information session
for the 2021-22 school year, Assistant Superintendent for Academic Services and Instructional Support Amanda Hartness stated that Chatham County Schools had made a “three-year commitment” to the virtual academy. Now, just two years in, they are calling it quits.
The remote learning option was a perfect accommodation for students like Carrie Campbell’s son, Ethan. A rare form of epilepsy makes in-person learning risky for Ethan, so Campbell was relieved after enrolling him in Chatham County Virtual K-8 Academy in 2021. And, for the first time, Ethan formed close connections with his teachers and classmates, and his reading improved, Campbell said.
“I was really disappointed that they would make such a major decision to close down my child’s school,” she said. So, she emailed the superintendent with pleas to keep the academy open, but administrators insist that the money just isn’t there.
Campbell scrambled to find other remote learning options for Ethan. Next year, he will start over at North Carolina Cyber Academy with all new teachers and classmates.
Campbell isn’t the only parent frustrated by sugar daddy na legit the impending loss of funding.
Veronica Quetero is a mother and advocate with three children enrolled at schools in Texas’ largest school district, Houston Independent School District (HISD).
HISD received
nearly $1.2 billion
in ESSER money, and Quetero hopes some of it will go to Benavidez Elementary School.
Before the pandemic, the school lacked basic infrastructure, she said.
“Our children didn’t have working toilets. They didn’t have running water or, in some cases, they had a little bit too much running water, so toilets would overflow,” Quetero said. “There was trash everywhere.”
Like many public schools, Benavidez Elementary is severely understaffed, she said, and the pandemic exacerbated this.
When ESSER funds arrived, Quetero had all kinds of ideas for how to spend the money. She fought for affordable after-school enrichment opportunities for children with special needs after hearing that ESSER funds could be used to expand extracurricular programs before and after school.
Quetero and other parents also urged the school’s board of trustees to address clean-up and staffing, but with certain parameters sponsor dating Manila about how the money can be spent they saw little improvement.
With help from Latinos for Education, a nonprofit working to amplify the voices of Latinx students, families, and educators, they saw some progress. HISD agreed to allocate ESSER funding for
parent liaisons
on every campus throughout the district, opening a line of communication between Spanish-speaking parents and school administrators that didn’t exist before. When ESSER runs out, it’s unclear whether these liaisons will remain in the schools.
Quetero works closely with the liaison at Benavidez Elementary. Together, they’re coordinating a graduation ceremony for the fifth graders.
“These kids are the pandemic children that lost those two-to-three years, and they’ve been through a lot of changes,” she said. “They deserve something nice.”
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Makaelah Walters
Makaelah is a writer for Facing South, an online magazine published by the Institute for Southern Studies. She is the institute's 2022 Julian Bond Fellow. Previously, she was a reporter for the Watauga…
More by Makaelah Walters

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Gathered outside the
headquarters of the US Agency for International Development in downtown Washington, DC, on Monday, a fiery group of congressional Democrats debuted what felt like a new—and potent—message: Elon Musk is acting as an unqualified shadow president, and he’s breaking the law along the way.
The
unelected South African tech billionaire
announced Monday that he and Trump were
shutting down
USAID, which distributes billions of dollars annually in international humanitarian aid to approximately 130 countries—the top recipient in fiscal year 2023 was Ukraine—and employs more than 10,0o0 people,
according to
the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
Established
by an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the agency “provides assistance to strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists U.S. commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade,” the CRS states. To Musk, though, it’s
a “
criminal organization
” and “
radical-left political psy op.
“
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk
posted
on X early Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Hundreds of USAID staffers were
reportedly
laid off last week following Trump’s
executive order
, issued on Inauguration Day, ordering a 90-day freeze on foreign aid. Over the weekend, two top USAID security leaders were
reportedly
put on administrative leave after trying to stop DOGE sugar dating matching process staffers from accessing the agency’s secure systems. Ten Democratic senators from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
wrote
in a letter Sunday to newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio that “security guards present at the facility were threatened when they fake sugar dating profiles raised questions” about DOGE staffers trying to gain entry.
Three US officials
told
CBS News earlier that USAID will be merged into the State Department and will sustain significant cuts to the workforce, but that it will maintain a humanitarian function. ABC News first
reported
that Rubio is now its acting administrator. In the Oval Office, President Trump
claimed
of the agency and its workforce: “I love the concept, but they turned out to be how to start sugar dating Philippines radical left lunatics.” Staffers at the agency were
reportedly
instructed to stay home on Monday, and its website is down.
In response to real sugar babies Philippines all this, high-ranking congressional Democrats
staged
a last-minute news conference to draw attention to the agency’s critical work and what they called Musk’s “crime” in trying to dismantle it. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) summed up the utter mess of the past several days in his opening remarks: “Musk and his band of unelected acolytes at DOGE have locked out USAID employees from their offices, improperly sugar dating account security accessed highly classified information, purged the agency of its nonpartisan leadership and thrown the agency into chaos through a concerted campaign of harassment and intimidation of its employees.” Beyer alleged that Musk and his acolytes’ actions “severely harm our national security”; “put thousands of children around the world at immediate risk of starvation, disease, and death”; and sideline “some of our finest civil servants who work tirelessly every day to make the world a better place.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) called closing the agency “an absolute gift to our adversaries—to Russia, to China, to Iran, and others, because AID is an essential instrument of US foreign policy and US national security policy.” He pointed to a post on X from former Russian president and “Putin stooge” Dmitry Medvedev, who
called
the decision to shutter USAID find sugar daddies Philippines a “smart move by @elonmusk.”
“Elon Musk may get to be dictator of Tesla, and he may try to play dictator here in Washington, D.C., but he doesn’t get to shut down [USAID],” Van Hollen said, adding that the attempt to shutter the agency was “plain illegal” and that doing so would take an act of Congress.
Sen.
@ChrisVanHollen
: "Trying to shut down the Agency for International Development by executive order is plain illegal."
pic.twitter.com/aXbkrFIGhF
— CSPAN (@cspan)
February 3, 2025
“We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” shouted Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), to cheers, “and that’s going to become real clear.”
On the heels of a
New York Times
report
published Sunday that was based on interviews with more than 50 Democratic leaders and alleged that best sugar dating sites Philippines the party was struggling to land on a coherent message, Monday’s news conference seemed remarkably unified in its focus around the dangers of Musk as shadow president and Trump’s isolationist, “America First” ethos. And given that a
Quinnipiac University poll
released last week showed that most registered voters—53 percent—disapprove of Musk’s role in the Trump administration, and a January Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center poll
found
that a majority of Americans don’t want Trump relying on billionaires or family members for policy advice, congressional Democrats may be onto something in making Musk a top target.
The lawmakers also made sure to point out the litany of illegal activities Trump and Musk have undertaken in only—
checks notes
—two weeks in office. (See also: Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, which a federal judge temporarily blocked, as my colleague Isabela Dias
reported
, as well as his
effort to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding
, which two other federal judges also
temporarily blocked
. And if Musk uses the access his team at DOGE was reportedly recently granted to the Treasury’s payments system to control government spending,
that
would also be illegal, sugar dating ID verification Philippines as my colleague Pema Levy
covered
Sunday.)
The Monday press conference was not the only resistance Democratic lawmakers mounted to Musk’s latest moves. They also
tried
to enter the USAID headquarters on Monday, only to have federal law enforcement officials block their entry.
.
@SenatorAndyKim
at USAID: "I talked to the security guard just in there. He said sugar daddy wealth he has been given specific orders to prevent employees of USAID from entering the building today. I just find that to be absolutely ridiculous. This is no way to govern."
pic.twitter.com/ixdFDLqGps
— CSPAN (@cspan)
February 3, 2025
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) also
said to
the
Wall Street Journal
that he would put a “blanket hold” on all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees until the Davao sugar daddy agency is back up and running. “I will do maximal delays until this is resolved,” Schatz told the newspaper.

NEW YORK, NY – FEBRUARY 28: A demonstrator holds a sign overhead at a rally in support of the Adult Survivors Act on Feb. 28, 2020, in New York City. (Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images)
CW: Mentions and descriptions of sexual assault and abuse in prison
The two women huddle next to each other, trying to get in view of the iPhone camera set up on a tripod in front of them. To the left, Julie begins reading aloud her poem “All I Ever Wanted,” as her friend Jennifer listens supportively.
“All I ever wanted was justice without a price,” Julie recites, “All I ever got was raped with a smile.”
The poem is just one tool used by these two women and countless others across New York State who are beginning to speak up about the years of abuse they faced behind the bars of state correctional facilities. After years of forced silence and expired statutes of limitation, the women are seizing a new chance to share their stories.
The moment between Julie and Jennifer is a brief but powerful scene in “
Life After Abuse in Prison
,”
a web documentary produced by Brut America that highlights the New York Adult Survivors Act. The recently passed legislation creates a one-time window for survivors of sexual abuse to file civil lawsuits even if the statutes of limitation have expired. The short film also provides a peek verified sugar daddy sa Philippines into the women’s experience working with the New York law firm Levy Konigsberg, which represents hundreds of formerly incarcerated women filing under the new law.
“It’s important that women know the rights that they have before they lose them again,” says Anna Kull, a survivors’ rights attorney at Levy Konigsberg, in the film.
When Vanessa Santiago, a formerly incarcerated woman who returned home just at the start of the pandemic, saw the video, she knew it was time for her to speak up.
“I said, ‘Shit, if they could talk, I can talk too,’ because I know a lot of stuff, and I’ve been through a lot of stuff in there,” said Santiago in an interview with Prism. “Right now, my whole purpose is to expose the penal system. People need to know what happened, and people know when I speak, it’s the truth, and I have proof of what I went through.”
Santiago’s story has been a winding road through multiple women’s prisons across the state, including Albion, Taconic, Bedford Hills, and Bayview. Throughout more than two decades of incarceration, Santiago was both a witness to sexual abuse and a victim of it. Today, she carries stories that reveal how sexual violence pervades every corner of prison life, from the near-constant surveillance to the whispers of which officers to avoid and which have been quietly terminated following allegations of rape to the fondles, gropes, and touches that prison staff subjected women to either in private or under the eye of other officers.
“I feel like I’m the voice for some of the women in there because I have a lot of friends that are still in there that are currently still going through sexual abuse,” said Santiago.
Passed by the New York State Assembly in May 2022, the Adult Survivors Act (ASA) allows individuals who were age 18 or older at the time of their abuse to file a civil lawsuit even if the statute of limitations has expired. There’s only a year to take advantage of the one-time opportunity, and the window for filing closes in November. The ASA is modeled after the New York Child Victims Act, passed in 2019 after a 13-year legislative fight. The Child Victims Act similarly created a one-year window for child survivors of sexual abuse to file civil suits. The window was extended to two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulted in more than
10,000 lawsuits
—many aimed at large No. 1 sugar daddy site Philippines institutions like the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Church.
Similar to how the Child Victims Act served as a way to illuminate abuse that occurred within—and was condoned by—large institutions, the Adult Survivors Act has brought to light the stories of formerly and currently incarcerated women who faced sexual abuse at the hands of authorities in New York State prisons. While sexual violence inside has been a known plague inside the carceral system, shoddy internal reporting mechanisms, constant threats of retaliation, and a pervasive stigma that often keeps society unsympathetic to the plight of those inside have allowed such abuse to run rampant and unchecked. However, the ASA may serve as an opportunity for women to share their stories and become a watershed moment that lowers our collective tolerance for such violence.
That sea change may already be underway, as evidenced by the sheer number of survivors who have come forward thus far. In an interview with Prism, Kull says Levy Konisgberg is in the process of filing more than 350 cases, with new ones coming in every day.
“Even with the research that I have done on these issues,” said Kull, “I was still astounded to see how many survivors were coming forward. Mostly because so many of these survivors are recounting very similar experiences, and in many cases, they are also recounting abuse by the same individuals.”
“We always get sued. It doesn’t matter”
In addition to repeat offenders, Kull says that what is uniquely chilling about these cases is the sheer fact that state employees are on the job committing sexual crimes while both their employer and society look the other way. fake sugar daddy Philippines The fact that this occurs within a context that purports to be rehabilitative is all the more disturbing.
The cases that have been reviewed thus far also illuminate how each prison’s unique features—location or infrastructure—lend themselves to this type of violence occurring unchecked while also informing how specifically that coercion and exploitation would take place.
For example, Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison formerly located in lower Manhattan, serves as the site for numerous cases filed by Levy Konigsberg. Women incarcerated at Bayview were typically toward the end of their sentences, and given its location in the city, women inside had access to more frequent visitation. They could even sometimes participate in work release programs.
“They had a lot of privileges that were not afforded to them at upstate facilities that had more stringent security requirements,” said Kull. “And that in and of itself created an opportunity for correctional officers who were seeking to abuse their authority to use those privileges as leverage.”
While Bayview’s proximity to loved ones and the prospect of returning home creeping ever closer on the horizon would appear to have created more opportunities for women to speak out when they experienced or witnessed sexual abuse, it actually allowed for the opposite. Bayview officers routinely used those features as bait to keep women silent. Kull says that women who did speak up ran the risk of being framed and written up. A write-up by an officer could trigger time being added to their sentence and a transfer to higher-security facilities upstate.
Meanwhile, the physical structure of some prisons can also facilitate abuse by keeping the violence out of sight. In Bedford Hills, the maximum-security women’s prison in Westchester County, the absence of cameras in some areas helped correctional officers commit acts of abuse without being seen. In contrast, the presence of cameras in other areas turned private and intimate spaces into sites of surveillance.
Santiago recalls that when she was placed in Bedford’s Special Housing Unit (or SHU), she noticed the community recreation area had only two cameras, and officers stationed themselves in a blind spot.
“What happens is you’ll be walking down the hallway and—this is before all the cameras were put up—so they would catch you in an area and do stuff to you, touch you, or whatever and get away with it,” said Santiago. “It’s not like [there were] officers all around; it’s sometimes just one officer in that area. When I was there in the beginning, it was one officer in the daytime and two officers that night on the unit. But [there weren’t] officers all the time, and there were definitely no cameras—you can forget about that.”
On the other hand, the room where gynecology exams and pap smears were performed in Bedford was replete with cameras, eliminating all sense of personal privacy. When Santiago was incarcerated in Albion Correctional Facility, a women’s prison in New York’s Orleans County, she said male corrections sergeants routinely walked into the washrooms while women were showering.
“They would walk through your shower while you’re taking a shower,” said Santiago. “This was all the time. You know, it was just ridiculous. Like, why is that allowed? It’s not like the shower curtains are pitch black; you can see through [them] … I don’t understand where the privacy is.”
The rise of cross-gender supervision (or male correctional officers stationed in women’s prisons) and the fact that correctional officers often oversee entire floors by themselves routinely create not just the ground for sexual violence but the impossibility of even oversight by colleagues.
But even when prison officials are made aware of such abuses, their duty to respond is often placed second to the personal relationships shared with their abusive colleagues or even the stigmas they hold about the women they are employed to help protect. Santiago, who had been outspoken about her experiences, was repeatedly silenced until she realized speaking out would be futile, if not dangerous.
There was the psychologist at Bayview who told her that she was “too smart for her own good” after she reported being attacked by a correctional officer who groped and choked her while she was working a cleaning shift. And the superintendent at Bedford Hills who shrugged off her threat to sue the facility after she was groped and violated by an officer. The superintendent allegedly asserted, “We always get sued. It doesn’t matter.”
That laissez-faire attitude toward sugar dating membership cost litigation only underscored how long the system has
operated with impunity
. Even officials who were meant to ensure that the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was adequately enforced proved to be ineffective for women who filed internal claims. Santiago recalls a former assistant deputy superintendent and PREA compliance manager at Bedford who prioritized her alliances with corrections officers over complaints made by women inside. In 2021, the PREA manager was named
in a lawsuit
filed against leadership of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision sugar baby dating safety Philippines [DOCCS] and Bedford Hills. The suit alleges that after the plaintiff reported being sexually assaulted by two correctional officers, the compliance manager “did nothing to help her and did not report the rapes to [her] supervisors or otherwise ensure that a proper investigation was conducted.”
“They’ve been there for over 20 years, and so they develop these relationships,” recalled Santiago. “So when you report an officer or lieutenant, if they don’t like what you said, they come after you, and that’s what happened to me … She didn’t want women to wear attire that was tight fitting on their bodies, but the minute a woman reported an incident it was ignored.”
That cycle of experiencing abuse, reporting it, and then having it go unanswered or be the source of ongoing retaliation is one that Santiago is deeply familiar with. It echoes some of her earliest memories of suffering sexual abuse as a child, and then having those meant to protect her—whether it be parental figures or school counselors—compound the pain with additional violation. Recollections of those early traumas came to the surface at moments throughout her incarceration, including at Taconic, a women’s prison in upstate New York. There, she was groped from behind by a male corrections officer while in the facility’s clerk office. She had to yell at him to get off of her.
“Every time I went for help, somebody else would do it to me,” said Santiago. “But by the lieutenant’s not reacting to it, or the psychiatrist not reacting to it—it enforced my belief that authority figures were not to be trusted … I became really messed up because of the things that I went through, and it just continued and never stopped. That incident in Taconic sugar dating member quality made me very angry because I felt like I was an adult now: ‘Why am I letting people touch me?’”
While the shades and contours of each survivor are different, the fact that Santiago was a survivor of sexual violence before even entering prison is an experience
shared by many women inside
. In fact, according to a
2016 report
from the Vera Insitute for Justice, 86% of women in jail report having experienced sexual violence in their wealthy men BGC lifetime. Further, intimate partner violence and attempts at self-protection are often the reason for their incarceration.
“These women are coming to prison with their own traumas and then have to leave prison and grapple with layers of abuse,” said Kull. “A wound can’t heal if it keeps reopening.”
Endless hurdles
The looming threat of retaliation informs any incarcerated survivor’s decision to report abuse. For those who do decide to report, a slew of new challenges awaits them as their case travels through a legal system that is not always poised to respond to their grievances favorably.
In a 2008 report by the National Institute of Corrections Project on Addressing Prison Rape at sugar dating boundaries the Washington College of Law, analysis of both government reports and testimony by former prosecutors revealed that prosecutors are often either
reluctant or unwilling
to pursue cases of sexual violence that occur in prisons and jails. Contributing to this hesitancy is the perception that these cases are “not high profile, high value” and could actually weaken a prosecutor’s standing in their community as defending incarcerated individuals might make them appear “soft on criminals.”
“Custodial sexual abuse cases are even more difficult and expose prosecutors to the possibility of expending valuable resources on a case that may not have a high likelihood of prosecutorial success—either a plea or conviction,” the report states.
Further, the study draws out that in many jurisdictions, correctional officers and other prison staff are sworn peace officers, and thus they also serve as individuals whom prosecutors may rely upon for testimony in other criminal cases. Thus, pursuing sexual abuse cases against them can potentially fracture those relationships. Logistically, while sexual assault cases are often difficult to win in general, additional barriers such as delayed reports, lack of physical evidence, and poorly executed investigations can make them even more challenging when they occur within correctional confinement.
This lack of evidence and absence of eyewitness testimony means that sexual assault cases occurring behind bars place a higher burden on the survivor to prove their case. That burden is further compounded by the heightened skepticism already facing them simply by virtue of their incarcerated status.
“In sexual assault cases—especially under these circumstances where the woman is in prison, and the assailant is the authority figure—many times the victim is the exclusive source of the facts, and so her credibility is of paramount importance,” said Kull. “And when that is questioned from the door, women are less likely to come forward.”
In an interview with
The Appeal
about the ASA, Kim Shayo Buchanan, senior research scholar at the Center for Policing Equity, pointed out how incarcerated survivors who come forward must also contend with stereotypes and prejudices that often render their experiences invisible.
“Whatever the law says, gender-normative expectations and racial biases are going to shape the perception of whether what happened to them counts as sexual abuse,” Buchanan said. “That being said, the only way to change that is for people to insist on their full humanity.”
Those expectations, biases, and misperceptions don’t just shape the experiences of incarcerated people in New York prisons or solely in women’s prisons. The sexual violence that has informed life inside facilities like Bedford Hills and Bayview is endemic to the carceral system as a whole and takes shape in a myriad of different ways. In addition to abuse at the hands of prison authorities, gendered violence inside has also looked like seizing control of incarcerated women’s autonomy over their own bodies and reproductive capacities. As Briana Perry, the interim executive director of Healthy and Free Tennessee, wrote in an
essay for Prism
, “jails and prisons were designed as sites of reproductive coercion.” That legacy continues in the form of non-consensual sterilization, gynecological experimentation, inadequate prenatal care, and even shackling during childbirth. find sugar daddies Makati For many survivors, incarceration is also not just a site of gendered violence but an extension of past traumas, as survivors of intimate partner abuse are often funneled into the system after attempting to defend themselves.
In a piece written for Prism last Spring, K Agbebiyi discussed how sexual violence is used to
cement preexisting power imbalances in prison
and how public complacency aids and abets that process. Assumptions about innocence, guilt, and a thirst for punishment allow the public to ignore that violence and disconnect it from broader movements against sexual abuse such as #MeToo.
“Abolitionists are demanding that people realize that a person’s perceived innocence serving as the determining factor for whether or not they are deserving of sexual violence hurts all survivors,” writes K. “Sexual assault is not a well-deserved punishment reserved for certain types of people; it is a violent tool of repression that can completely destabilize the victim.”
The same carceral mindset that allows much of the public to look away from sexual violence is rife with logical pitfalls that reveal the system’s failure to achieve what people believe it does. It is unrealistic, K writes, “to expect prisons to ‘hold people accountable’ for various types of violence outside of prisons while there is violence taking place within prisons themselves.”
Interestingly, and yet not entirely surprisingly, violence inside prison has yet to trigger the same level of moral outrage that we, as a society, have developed around American slavery, even though sexual violence pervaded both institutions. Just as in the cell block, sexual violence and coercion were utilized to foment power dynamics on the plantation among overseers, enslavers, and those they enslaved.
A compassionate approach
While the goal of advocates is to have the whole of society eventually insist on the humanity of all survivors, to take full advantage of legislation like ASA—and the limited window for action that it provides—that culture shift must urgently happen within the legal field. At Levy Konigsberg attorneys like Kull hope to demonstrate what this type of trauma-informed approach might look like and the impact it could have on clients. Kull says her entire team is well-versed in handling trauma and managing cases involving sexual abuse. Further, she makes it known to clients that they can contact her at any time.
The Brut America video that helped inspire Santiago to file her case also features Jubi Williams, the firm’s victim advocate, as she speaks about her work on Jennifer’s case. She explains that her main goal was for Jennifer to feel “comforted and safe because it’s such a vulnerable experience.”
The approach has worked in fostering trust with clients like Santiago and, in doing so, creating one of the first times that the stories of her experiences were met with compassion and understanding.
“I saw that Miss Anna Kull exposed the people of DOCCS, [and] the exposure of it was more compassionate and more like she felt my pain,” said Santiago. “I don’t know what it is, but I feel her compassion, and that’s very important to me. Because I can’t deal with sexual abuse or any type of trauma in my life without feeling that someone can understand and, if not empathize, at least sympathize.”
There’s a delicate balance between the benefits of coming forward and wealthy men Makati the reality that some cases may not end in a legal victory. While the ASA has the potential to end the culture of silence, the legislation and its goals must be shaped around the outcomes of individual cases and the societal shifts they ideally will set in motion.
“Many women are not willing to go forward and out an officer after they’ve seen what’s happened when either they’ve tried to do it, or other inmates have tried to do it,” said Kull, “and you sort of resolve yourself to accepting that these are the circumstances under which I’m going to have to finish out my time, and that’s what really needs to change. We, as a society, have to be intolerant of that.”
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Tamar Sarai
Contributing Writer, At-Large
Tamar Sarai is a writer, journalist, and historian in training. Her work focuses on race, culture, and the criminal legal system. She is currently pursing her PhD in History at Temple University where…
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By **Russ Baker**
By arrangement with
WhoWhatWhy.com
.
However many global warming deniers there are, we already see—or soon will—more in a category we might call “fracking enablers.” These people assure us that the natural most popular sugar dating site Philippines gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) is as safe as…well, as safe as they were just recently telling us nuclear power had become. But what’s the real story about this practice which has spread so rapidly around the United States?
In an article in a feisty sugar daddy financial stability journal called
Capitalism Nature Socialism
, the environmental journalist Karen Charman presents one of the most devastating sugar dating sites with real profiles reports we’ve seen on the particulars in play:
As the large, easy reservoirs of fossil fuels are exhausted, the capitalist machine is now scouring the earth in a frenzy to exploit sources that are much more difficult, risky, ecologically damaging, and expensive to extract. Natural gas from sugar baby photo verification coalbed methane, shale, and tight gas sands; oil from tarsands or increasingly deep wells far below the ocean floor; and thin coal seams that are only “economic” for companies to exploit by blowing up whole mountaintops define the new era of fossil fuel extraction. All of these activities are destroying ever-larger swathes of land, ecosystems, and the communities that depend on them, greatly escalating the global ecological crisis that, if it continues unabated, will make the earth uninhabitable for life as we know it.
Many of the [fracking] chemicals…harm the nervous system, brain, Metro Manila sugar baby respiratory system, gastrointestinal organs, skin, and eye.
…Although the explosion in the availability of environmentally friendly products over the last several years indicates that strong support for non-polluting, renewable energy sources does exist, private energy corporations use every means at their disposal to prevent the widespread adoption of alternatives that would threaten their enormous profits. Energy corporations and their proponents manipulate the public sphere by engaging in sophisticated propaganda campaigns to both strengthen the perceived need for fossil fuels and confuse public debate by distorting facts about the environmental harm of extracting and burning them. Energy corporations have also been supremely successful at manipulating the political process, which supports them with massive public subsidies and laws that ensure their profitability while limiting liability for the direct and indirect harm they cause…
…James L. Northrup, a 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry, describes horizontal hydrofracking of shale as “effectively the explosion of a massive pipe bomb underground.” In order to break up the rock, the fracking pressure in a shale gas well must be extreme—15,000 pounds per square inch, which he notes has three times the explosive pressure of a thermobaric air bomb that can be heard up to 100 miles away. The horizontal orientation of the wells is particularly problematic for drinking water sources, since horizontal wells are much more likely to go under aquifers, lakes, streams, springs, and rivers. Furthermore, horizontal wells are fracked numerous times. This increases the chances of hitting and expanding fault lines, which will carry to aquifers
and groundwater sources naturally occurring toxic chemicals such as pyrite; radioactive elements such as radium and uranium that are common in dark shales like the Marcellus; the verified sugar baby sa Philippines methane gas itself; and the additional chemicals (“fracking fluids”) the companies use to maximize gas production of the wells.
…Some of the fracking chemicals identified include diesel, which contains the carcinogen benzene; ethylene glycol (automotive sugar dating arrangements Philippines antifreeze); formaldehyde; kerosene; various salts and ammonia compounds; and biocides. Many of the chemicals [independent scientist Theo] Colborn was able to identify harm the nervous system, brain, respiratory system, gastrointestinal organs, skin, and eye. Many are known to cause cancer, birth defects, developmental problems, reproductive disorders, immune system damage, kidney problems, cardiovascular and blood disease, and death…
On and on she goes. It’s worth reading the entire journal article, which despite the provocative opening quote from Karl Marx is not ordinarily available for free. Karen has sugar dating membership cost nevertheless arranged with her publisher to make it available at no cost, for a time,
here
.
Don’t expect join a sugar dating site Philippines to take your tap water for granted ever again.
Copyright 2011 Russ Baker
________________________________________________________________________
This piece originally appeared at
WhoWhatWhy.com
.
Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative find a sponsor Philippines reporter and the founder and editor-in-chief of WhoWhatWhy.
To read more blog entries from
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Incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy just committed a “gaffe” in Michael Kinsley’s sense of the most popular sugar dating app Philippines term: in an unguarded moment,
he allowed himself to tell the truth
. The truth sugar dating sites with verified profiles is, as most of has have always known, that
Benghazi!
, like its predecessor
Whitewater!,
was an entirely bad-faith exercise in partisan character assassination from the get-go. But don’t listen to me, how to screen a sugar daddy listen to what the Speaker-to-Be told Sean Hannity:
Related
The Permanent Committee on Benghazi!
Trump Says ‘It Doesn’t Really Matter’ Why He Decided sugar daddy dating privacy to Assassinate Soleimani
The Case for Susan Rice
Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?Â
But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would’ve known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.
Naturally, the rest of the House Republicans are outraged
: not, of course, at Trey Gowdy for ghoulishly making a political meal out of the bodies of four dead Americans, but at McCarthy for blabbing.
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The political press corps is caught in the middle. Lots of Davao sugar daddy those reporters and editors, especially at the
New York Times
, have been more than willing to peddle Gowdy’s “partial-transcript” leaks as if they had news value, and to let Gowdy and his staff meet sugar babies Philippines hide behind anonymity to defame a political rival. In other words, they’ve been playing according to the Clinton Rules, which hold that anything a Clinton does is guilty even after it’s been proven innocent.
So far, most of that crowd has reacted to McCarthy’s stunning admission, which makes them look like fools or scoundrels or both, by ignoring it. But I’m hoping that the second round of stories, with other Republicans commenting on McCarthy’s blunder, will start to crack that sugar daddy membership cost Wall of Silence. And I’m starting to look forward to Clinton’s appearance before Trey Gowdy’s inquisition. He might well come out of that experience as no more than a Deuce.
[Cross-posted at
The Reality-Based Community
]
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Mark Kleiman
Mark Kleiman is a professor of public policy at the New York University Marron Institute.
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The crowd of U.S.-based supporters await the arrival of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a community reception on Sept. 28, 2014 at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Credit:
DON EMMERT/AFP via Getty Images
For years, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) presented itself as an advocacy organization pursuing a “Hindu human rights” agenda in the U.S. The organization snatched up political credibility among Democrats, civil liberties groups, and progressives, all while supporting the far-right Hindu supremacist movement both in India and transnationally, according to a new report by research group Savera, which details how this carefully constructed image is starting to slip.
In its early years, HAF pursued causes that could be said to advance religious freedom, diversity, and inclusion. Behind the push for the public commemoration of Hindu holidays and “taking back” yoga, however, lays a more nationalistic and chauvinistic agenda, advocates say. In January, Savera joined a chorus of observers in pointing out HAF’s connections to a fascist movement in India that not only extols Hindu supremacy, but also holds real political power through India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Savera’s
report
, released in October and titled “HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry as Minority Rights,” tracks how HAF has hidden its true ideology behind a pretense of advocating for Hindus in a Christian-majority country. The report asserts that this approach has made the group palatable to progressives in the U.S.
This latest report builds upon a series of investigations by Savera into the activities of the “Sangh Parivar,” the “family” of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist, organizations across the globe dedicated to transforming the Indian state into a theocracy.
“We have no response to the Savera report,” said Mat McDermott, HAF’s senior director of communications. He went on to describe Savera’s allegations as “baseless” and accused the organization of being affiliated with India’s opposition Congress Party.
Prachi Patankar, an activist and writer whose work against caste-based oppression informed many of Savera’s findings, has meticulously dissected HAF’s strategic facade.
“Hindu American Foundation is leading with this idea of Hindu victimhood,” she said. Some of this sentiment can be traced back to genuine sources, like anti-immigrant find a sponsor Manila sentiment in the U.S. and the persecution of Hindu communities in Pakistan and Bangladesh; Patankar notes, however, that this idea of victimhood is not deployed to address structural inequality or oppression. Instead, HAF mobilizes to “go after other oppressed minorities within the Indian American community, like Dalits and Muslims, because Hindu supremacy is inherently Islamophobic and casteist,” she said.
Appearing across South Asian religions, cultures, and countries, caste refers to a system that allocates social privileges, wealth, occupations, and interpersonal associations based on birth. Dalits, in particular, are treated as complete outcasts.
Savera notes that self-proclaimed
“Hindu rights” organizations in the U.S.
have a vested interest in preserving this system because their origins lie within upper-caste, conservative Indian circles. The issues HAF has brought before state and federal lawmakers have included reframing protections against caste-based abuse as anti-Hindu or “Hinduphobic.” The activist base HAF and others have cultivated within the Indian American diaspora involves itself in localized, overtly bigoted actions, including accusations of terrorism and fanning calls for violence against the Sikh community.
“To challenge the Hindu supremacist far right, we need to bring together the majority that rejects Hindu supremacy—and that necessitates an intercaste, anti-caste, and multifaith coalition,” Patankar said. Savera itself is headed by members of diverse South Asian backgrounds, including Hindus who reject the supremacist aspirations of organizations such as HAF. Since Hindu supremacists in the U.S. have begun
aligning explicitly with white supremacists
and have also expressed support for
punishing groups opposed to the genocide
of Palestinians, Savera has attempted to build coalitions with Black Lives Matter, Standing Up for Racial Justice, and progressive Jewish organizations.
When fascists play the victim
HAF was founded in
2003
when it split from the American branch of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council. A year before, this parent organization became infamous for instigating genocidal violence against Muslims that roiled the state of Gujarat, biggest sugar baby site Philippines allegedly in collusion with Modi, who was the state’s chief minister at the time. Thousands of Muslims
were killed or displaced
in a matter of weeks by armed mobs and complicit law enforcement. Over the years, evidence of most active sugar baby site Philippines Modi’s involvement has mounted.
The Hindu American Foundation arose from a growing frustration within the transnational movement that rhetoric celebrating fascism hindered outreach in countries such as the U.S. Instead, HAF’s founders opted to reframe their messaging as an appeal for minority rights and multiculturalism.
This approach inarguably has won the organization much success. Savera has documented how leading progressive organizations were, at least at one point, convinced they shared principles with HAF. The American Civil Liberties Union reportedly felt comfortable allowing HAF to weigh in on legal cases involving religion in courtrooms, civic spaces, and schools, according to a list of past HAF legal advocacy work listed on its website. In 2019, Americans United for Separation of Church and State spearheaded an initiative with 43 “religious, civil rights, and secular organizations” against Christian nationalist curricula being placed in public schools; HAF was among the groups. HAF Executive Director Suhag Shukla has held up the group’s relationship with the Interfaith Alliance, which includes lobbying the Senate to codify same-sex marriage protections as a pluralistic bona fide.
Savera’s report shows that all of this occurred over the past two decades, during which HAF consistently and publicly advocated for the Sangh’s theocratic interests. This included defending Modi, who could not enter the U.S. for nine years due to sugar daddy sites Manila “severe violations of religious freedom,” over suspicions of his culpability in the Gujarat carnage.
The ACLU and the Interfaith Alliance did not respond to requests for comment. Moises Serrano, media relations manager for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said that the organization was “unaware” of Savera’s report and was unsure when someone from the group would read it.
Lobbying politicians
HAF has also won friends with more formal political power, particularly within the Democratic Party. In 2019, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., a recipient of HAF’s “Friend of the Community Award,” exhorted his colleagues to attend the “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas where Modi and then-President Donald Trump appeared together, according to the Daily Beast, despite alarm over Indian crackdowns in the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir. This past spring, Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., introduced a congressional resolution against alleged incidents of “Hinduphobia,” drawing criticism from marginalized caste, Sikh, and Muslim commentators who noted the term had been used to mask attacks against their communities.
HAF is also tied to the considerable war chest of the Hindu American Political Action Committee. Though the groups are not officially affiliated, most of the PAC’s board is involved with HAF,
according to Al Jazeera
. Sherman, at $20,600, is HAPAC’s third-largest recipient of donations between 2012 and 2024, according to aggregate
Federal Election Commission
data compiled by Al Jazeera. Thanedar received a more modest $5,000. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence in his next administration and a
known Modi supporter
, took in $8,500.
HAPAC donated a grand total of nearly $183,000 to 27 Democratic candidates and just under $52,000 to 11 Republicans, according to Al Jazeera’s analysis. Notably, this breaks ranks with other sugar dating membership fees American appendages of the Sangh, who prefer Republicans, though Savera notes that the gap is narrowing.
Sherman, Thanedar, and Gabbard did not sugar baby na verified respond to Prism’s request for comment.
“Critical caste theory”
Thanendar’s efforts on Capitol Hill are hardly the first instance in which the Sangh, through organs like HAF, has attempted to safeguard its ability to abuse people how to choose a sugar baby of marginalized caste backgrounds behind a dubious aegis of “religious freedom.”
When Senate Bill 403,
a bill
that would put protections in place against caste discrimination, was introduced in the California State Legislature in 2023, it “triggered a veritable moral panic within the American Sangh,” according to Savera’s report. By HAF’s
own admission
, it spent nearly $300,000 opposing the legislation under the auspices of defending Indians and Hindus from being vilified. Ultimately, the Sangh’s efforts helped compel Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto the bill.
HAF’s relatively moderate line is that banning caste discrimination is a moot point since not enough data shows it to be a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. But instances of caste abuse in the U.S. are proliferating alongside calls for its abolition; in 2020, a Dalit employee filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems due to caste discrimination. One year later, Indian laborers constructing a Hindu temple in New Jersey sued, attributing their low pay and coercive work environment to caste abuse.
Savera’s report criticizes HAF for sugar dating profile setup “fearmongering” about what it calls “critical caste theory.”
“Borrowed from the contemporary Far Right’s preferred bogeyman of ‘Critical Race Theory’ and the Christian Far Right’s appropriation of the language of religious freedom sugar dating terms to argue that their particular beliefs entitle them to discrimination, such as against Queer people, the term seeks to manufacture a sense of victimhood by falsely claiming that the movement to ban caste discrimination is itself discriminatory against Hindu Americans,” the report says.
It’s unclear how HAF will move in the wake of the Trump victory. Patankar said that sugar dating account deletion maintaining the tenuous balancing act between playing the victim on the one hand and pursuing a supremacist agenda on the other is essential to the organization, regardless of how things play out.
“In order for them to talk about Hindu victimhood, they need the liberal space because those are the spaces where this narrative can thrive. Because the MAGA far right doesn’t care about that,” Patankar said. “HAF throwing in with MAGA is ultimately going to hurt them too. That’s just the reality of it.”
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Simi Kadirgamar
Simi Kadirgamar is a New York City-based reporter and fact-checker. Her range of work has included covering Hindu nationalism in the U.S., the occupation of Kashmir, and far right politics in martial arts….
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