Harvard University Press Blog

“Predictive Policing” and Racial Profiling

While technology used in policing has improved, it hasn’t progressed, says Khalil Gibran Muhammad, if racial biases are built into those new technologies. This excerpt from his book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, shows that for the reform called for by the current protests against systemic racism and racially-biased policing to be fulfilled, the police—especially those at the top—will need to change their pre-programmed views on race and the way they see the Black citizens they are supposed to “serve and protect.”

Law enforcement, especially, has doubled down on crime statistics in what is now the era of big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. Old ideas, yet again, have been programmed into the latest technology.

At the 2015 New York Times Cities for Tomorrow conference on the newest advances in technology and data analytics for everything from urban-based environmental sustainability to crime control, then Police Commissioner William J. Bratton spoke about the New York Police Department’s latest crime-fighting tool. I sat in the audience anxious to hear him speak. With a broad smile and supreme confidence, he praised the newest release of the pioneering crime mapping software known as CompStat, which had been at the heart of stop and frisk policing when it began a generation ago. He likened the latest version to the 2002 film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise as head of a special precrime unit. Set in Washington, D.C., in the year 2054, officers gathered intelligence from a trio of precogs, humanlike beings who can predict murders and identify killers before they act. Bratton was almost giddy about the comparison; the unintended pun on the film’s title seemed to escape him.

Two years later at a 2017 Heritage Foundation summit on “Policing in America: Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future,” Bratton gave more details about the architecture of CompStat 2.0. The software is based on algorithms and “advanced data mining techniques, we call ‘predictive policing,’” he said. “Effectively, it’s the CompStat of the ‘90s on steroids in the 21st century.” And just like all new technology promises, it was guaranteed to be better than before. “It is discriminating, not discriminatory,” he bragged. “It is precise, not prejudiced.”

Until he retired, Bratton was known as America’s Top Cop. Starting his career as a military police officer in Vietnam and then onto Boston in the 1970s, he spent the next five decades running the biggest and most racially troubled police agencies in the country. Bratton served in six departments coast to coast, from New York to Los Angeles and back to the Big Apple. Several of these departments were subject to federal investigations for police brutality either before or after he left. Over the years, he developed a strong personal sense of history, covering the entire span of the post–civil rights era in policing.

But unlike the many critics of aggressive policing tactics, Bratton has rarely, if ever, publicly questioned the value of social science data, except when the research critiqued police racism. In his Heritage speech, he celebrated the theoretical founders of broken windows policing, the criminologist George Kelling and the political scientist James Q. Wilson, “two personal heroes of mine.” He also repudiated the Kerner Commission findings, which he said he had read in 1974 to pass the sergeant’s exam for the Boston Police Department: “They believed at the time that the causes of crime were racism, were poverty, were police practices in many instances, unemployment, demographics. They thought those were the causes. They were not. They are not. And they never have been.” Bratton’s emphatic dismissal of the Kerner report, and all the published evidence of police bias since, demonstrates just how enduring Hoffman’s original innovation with racial crime data has been.

At the summit, Bratton said that by the 1990s, the policing profession had finally figured out how to get past the flawed Kerner legacy. Police leaders started coming together at a series of executive sessions led by faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. There, “we began to get it right,” he noted. “The cause of crime is people.” Paraphrasing Al Gore, he said “there is an inconvenient truth” that cops go where the criminals are. “Data-driven or evidence-based policing is not bias policing.” He continued: “The disparities are not a policing issue. It is about behavior. You have the crime numbers and they are self-evident.”

Future historians will have to place Bratton’s legacy in its fullest context. For now, what’s clear is that he has had an oversized influence on how racial crime data continues to shape the lives of African Americans and Latinx people in the post–civil rights era. But of course, he was not alone. Near the end of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s third term, when activists were demanding an end to stop and frisk and the New York Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights were suing the city, Bloomberg refused to change the policy. He consistently dug in, insisting that racial disparities in stops were not evidence of bias, but of criminality. And, at times, he ridiculed critics for not understanding how crime data works. “In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” he said in late June 2013 on his weekly radio show. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course, or a logic course.”

Less than two months later, the day after a federal judge ruled that stop and frisk was racially discriminatory and unconstitutional in the case of Floyd, et al. v. New York, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly went on national television to defend racial profiling. He suggested that black and brown people, subjected to stop and frisk policing, could not be innocent no matter that they had not broken the law. David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked him about the 4.4 million stops of New Yorkers, over 80 percent of whom were black or Latino, and 88 percent of whom were not even subject to a summons or arrest, between 2004 and 2012. Gregory said, let’s start with the nearly nine out of ten people “not doing anything wrong.” Kelly responded, “It doesn’t mean that people are not doing anything wrong. If you look at the statute, it says reasonable suspicion that individuals may be about, are committing, or have committed a crime.” Like precogs, the police were acting on data-driven predictions based on Compstat. “There’s a preventive aspect to this. People say innocent,” he said, stammering his way to an explanation. “That’s not the appropriate word.” Their crimes: living while black and brown. “This, by the way, is the standard law enforcement practice throughout America.”

Bratton, Bloomberg, Kelly, and so many other police and elected officials continue to defend their vision of policing today based on what they claim the data says and tells them to do. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani put it this way: “When I assigned police officers with Commissioner Bratton and Commissioner Safir, we did it based on statistics. We didn’t do it based on race. If there were a lot of murders in a community, we put a lot of police officers there.” In the name of saving black people from themselves, they’ve turned policing into the most important legacy of the civil rights movement. “In our country, the first obligation of government is public safety,” Bratton told the Heritage audience. But policing has always been at the heart of civil rights activism and the fight for equal citizenship. That is the civil rights movement’s most enduring legacy and unfinished business. Even to take them at their word, by their own empirical standards, there is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.

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The link between race and crime is as enduring and influential in the twenty-first century as it has been in the past. Violent crime rates in the nation’s biggest cities are generally understood as a reflection of the presence and behavior of the black men, women, and children who live there. The U.S. prison population is larger than at any time in the history of the penitentiary anywhere in the world. Nearly half of the more than two million Americans behind bars are African Americans, and an unprecedented number of black men will likely go to prison during the course of their lives. These grim statistics are well known and frequently cited by white and black Americans; indeed for many they define black humanity. In all manner of conversations about race— from debates about parenting to education to urban life—black crime statistics are ubiquitous. By the same token, white crime statistics are virtually invisible, except when used to dramatize the excessive criminality of African Americans. Although the statistical language of black criminality often means different things to different people, it is the glue that binds race to crime today as in the past.

Stop Blaming Feminists: The Feminist Movement We Should Remember

In Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family, a spirited defense of feminism, Kirsten Swinth argues that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. Here, she dispels some common myths that plague the history of the feminist movement.

Feminism is cool in the age of Donald Trump. The movement is surging. #MeToo, women in Congress, and massive women’s marches are all signs of a new feminist moment. One would think we would be looking to feminist foremothers for inspiration. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, pervasive, sometimes pernicious myths about the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s keep rearing their head.

For the feminist movement we need in the Trump era, these myths must be banished. Bad history blocks urgently needed gains. Today’s distorting myths systematically blame feminist foremothers, rather than their opponents or media misrepresentations, for the predicaments we face today. The facts tell a different story: of a diverse, progressive women’s movement, brimming with visionary solutions for the inequality women faced in workplaces as well as in intimate relationships. If we are to make progress on these issues, we need to hear their voices and take up the mantle of their struggles once again.

So let’s get the facts straight.

Fact #1: Feminists were horrified at the media invention of the liberated woman “having it all” by dint of efficient life management. In reality, feminists fought for changes in family and workplaces to make sure that having a family and having a job could be an option for every woman, just as it had been for men. They believed that society had to change the rules of the game in both workplace and family life in order for equality to truly exist. They demanded a national system of childcare and guaranteed incomes for mothers (especially poor mothers) to care for their children. They fought for equal childcare and housework with men, even writing “marriage contracts” to pin recalcitrant men down to their promises to share the load. Their vision was broad and deep—requiring society and systems to change as much as individuals.

Fact #2: Feminists of all stripes and backgrounds made universal, 24-hour, community-controlled childcare a rallying cry of the movement. The absence of a national childcare system today is often chalked up to feminists’ lack of interest in the issue. This is simply not true. In coalition with civil rights and labor groups, feminists nearly achieved a national childcare system in 1971, until conservatives persuaded Richard Nixon to veto legislation approved by Congress. Even then, that did not stop feminists. A grassroots do-it-yourself ethos spread across the country as feminists passed around tattered manuals on how to start your own daycare center, complete with designs for tot-sized furniture. Childcare centers grew by almost a third nationally between 1970 and 1976.

Fact #3: Feminists of color were leaders, indeed among the vanguard, on many feminist issues. African American feminists in the welfare-rights movement fought for a universal basic income so mothers could care for their children without being forced to work. Domestic workers, largely African American, led a feminist fight to recognize the value of household labor by demanding the minimum wage for nannies, house cleaners, and other household employees. Women of color were leaders in major national organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), as well as of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Third World Women’s Alliance. Shirley Chisholm and LaDonna Harris were, for example, among the founders of the NWPC which pledged to fight “sexism, racism, institutional violence and poverty” at its founding in 1971. Well-justified frustrations at the insensitivity of many white feminists to the needs of women of color should not erase the leadership and critical contributions of feminists of color to a rich, varied movement.

Fact #4: Feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s led creative, vibrant campaigns to value housework and caring for children. Feminists saw firsthand the vulnerability of homemakers all around them, particularly with skyrocketing divorce rates in the 1970s. Anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly attacked them for being anti-family and hating housewives, but her charge was unfounded. Women’s rights activists proposed steps still touted today as essential. They calculated the value of household labor and argued that it should count in the gross national product. Feminist legislators and lawyers fought to ensure homemakers had basic rights, like the security of an independent social security account for retirement and a fair share of family property at divorce. The National Organization for Women issued a Homemakers Bill of Rights.

Fact #5: Feminists did not fail and leave us in the pickle we live with today. They were defeated. What they dreamed of achieving was visionary, and ahead of its time. Their opponents found the changes women’s rights activists proposed threatening. If enacted, family relationships and workplace hierarchies would all be upended. These opponents therefore mobilized and successfully countered many feminist proposals. Yet when we look at what feminists really fought for, we see a road map for our own time—a comprehensive vision for changing home and workplace, for involving society in supporting childcare and guaranteeing parental time with children, while accommodating workers with family responsibilities (that is, all of us).

We have foremothers to turn to for inspiration. Edith Barksdale Sloan led domestic workers in their fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Members of the New York Wages for Housework Committee taught us that housework has economic value. Ida Phillips of Florida took her case all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right for mothers not to be denied a job simply because they had children.

By promoting pernicious myths about feminism that have no basis in fact, we do conservatives’ work for them. It’s time to stop blaming feminists and instead to pick up where they left off.

Why Gerrymandering Matters

As with many issues working their way through American courts, legal challenges to political gerrymandering have had their calculus upended by the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Indeed, one expert offered that the odds of seeing the Court identify a standard for determining whether a political map has become unacceptably partisan “plummeted” with Kennedy’s announcement. But as long as American political representation appears not to reflect the politics of Americans, the movement to reform the drawing of districts will continue to find support.

Such reform is just one of many deemed necessary by Allan J. Lichtman in The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present, forthcoming this September. To Lichtman, the failure to include a guaranteed right to vote in the American Constitution was an error that’s plagued the nation since its inception, and along with a rule combining anti-gerrymandering and the establishment of independent redistricting commissions, he identifies the elimination of felon disenfranchisement, expanded voter registration, and a move away from holding national elections on regular workdays as reforms that would transform voting in the United States. In the following excerpt from The Embattled Vote in America, Lichtman outlines some of the spiraling ramifications of the prevailing practice of politically-drawn districts.

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In America’s hard-fought and closely contested presidential election of 2016, only 59 percent of voting-age citizens cast a ballot, equaling about 86 million lost votes. Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with 63 million votes, just 28 percent of America’s voting-age citizens. In the 2014 midterm elections, only 38 percent of American citizens participated, equaling about 140 million lost votes. In closely contested U.S. Senate races across the nation in 2014, candidates typically won seats with votes equal to about one-fifth of the state’s citizens of voting age. Turnout is yet lower in local elections. A 2014 study by two University of Wisconsin researchers found that turnout in 144 mayoral elections across the nation averaged only 25.6 percent of the citizen voting-age population. Thus, candidates could win mayoral elections with support from just over 10 percent of their citizen voting-age constituents.

Turnout is similarly bleak in primary elections that set the choices for voters in the general elections. In 2016, when both parties had spirited contests for their presidential nominations, about 28 percent of voting-age citizens participated in the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries combined. In states holding caucuses, turnout averaged merely 7 percent. Only about 8 percent of American citizens chose Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee and only about 6 percent chose Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. In midterm elections, primary turnout is yet lower. In 2014, just 28.4 million voters participated in the primary elections in forty-five states that had at least one contested statewide primary for both parties, equaling about 15 percent of the citizen voting-age population in those states.

In 1900, the United States led the democratic world in the voting participation of its citizens. Now roles have reversed and America trails most comparable democracies in voter turnout. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center study of thirty-five nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked twenty-eighth in voter turnout.

On Civility

Recent days have seen concern for civility in American public discourse rise to the fore. Some call for its preservation, casting civility as a critical norm, the erosion of which would portend even greater conflict. Others suggest that the time for civility has passed, or cast it as only ever a tool for silencing dissent. Many recognize that we’ve been through these debates before.

Below, we turn to political theorist Teresa Bejan for insight. Her 2017 work Mere Civility, from which the following is adapted, draws on historical texts and contexts in order to bring sorely needed critical perspective to the perennial crises of civility that afflict modern liberal democracies. For Bejan, the advantage of consulting the past lies in opening ourselves to the ways in which it challenges our own commitments and assumptions about what it means to be “civil” today.

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Modern calls for civility, whether in politics or religion, reflect concerns about the corrosive effects of uncivil disagreement on social bonds and tender consciences very similar to those in the seventeenth century. These appeals suggest that if only we could get the manner right, the very practice of disagreement itself might work to harmonize our fundamental differences, thus making it possible for us to regard one another across those differences not as enemies, but friends.

In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron puts the question thus: “Is a tolerant society just a society free from…persecution, or is it a society in which people cohabit and deal with one another, in spite of their…differences, in an atmosphere of civility and respect?” For Waldron, the answer is clear. Some speech about others and their fundamental identities and commitments is simply so uncivil, so intolerant, degrading, and disrespectful that it constitutes a form of persecution against which a tolerant society can and should act. Yet in liberal democracies like the United States the question is not so simple. This is because, as a regime, liberal democracy is distinguished by its dedication to two-fold toleration: (1) of diversity in its members’ fundamental identities and commitments (especially in politics and religion) and (2) of the disagreements those differences inspire. Indeed, the self-conception of liberal societies as “tolerant” hinges on the fact that members are not compelled to confine their differences to a private sphere of individual skulls or intimate familiars, but are permitted, even encouraged, to express them freely in public and to compete for adherents.

Accordingly, in complaining about a “crisis” many commentators present civility as the essential virtue for liberal democracies that promise to protect diversity while allowing for active, often heated disagreement in the public sphere. In the United States, especially, we pride ourselves on our First Amendment freedoms not only to differ but to disagree, and our recent crisis of civility feels so critical because it brings these defining commitments into conflict. Controversies about whether to tame uncivil disagreements through legislation—whether through campaign finance reform, hate speech laws, or college speech codes—are thus usually presented as a conflict between free speech, on the one hand, and the demands of diversity and inclusion, on the other. Yet the early modern toleration debates to which we’ll turn, in which concerns about persecution of the tongue and proposals to ban it could be heard on all sides, suggest a different interpretation—namely, that underlying these controversies is a more fundamental conflict between competing conceptions of civility, understood as a virtuous standard of conversation and conduct that should govern the members of a tolerant society as such. This is clear especially in the case of campus speech codes, which attempt to articulate the standard of civility appropriate to universities as tolerant societies par excellence.

Even so, these efforts to impose and enforce civility legislatively are controversial in the United States in a way they are not in other “tolerant” liberal democracies. Waldron and others have traced America’s peculiar permissiveness toward uncivil speech—exemplified in its unwillingness to adopt the hate speech and religious insult statutes embraced elsewhere—to a peculiar “First Amendment Faith” in which religious toleration and free speech go hand in hand. Few societies protect speech as insistently as we do, and few societies expect that allowing people to insult one another, along with their most cherished commitments or beliefs, will make them more tolerant, not less. Still, even if they cannot see eye to eye on whether a tolerant society should tolerate incivility, commentators in the United States and other Western liberal democracies generally agree that uncivil speech is a threat to the tenuous balance between diversity and disagreement on which ostensibly tolerant—and civil—societies depend. Wars of words are thus both a symptom and a cause of deeper ills, a sign that once the war of swords has ended the real work of tolerance has only just begun.

The American Tradition of Torture

As expected, at this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 “interrogation program” and Haspel’s own role in the program and its aftermath took center stage. Haspel sought to cast the program and its brutal techniques—many of which have since been outlawed—as an aberrant episode in the agency’s history, and vowed that under her leadership “C.I.A. will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.” Just as Haspel aimed to position that use of torture as an outlier in the history of the C.I.A., so too did the hearings propagate an understanding of the brutality of those years as a brief deviation from the long history of moral leadership demonstrated by the United States. Indeed, the majority of Americans would likely share such sentiment: we do not torture.

And yet.

In Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, forthcoming this fall, decorated American historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows that alongside the long American lineage of denouncing torture there’s an equally enduring culture of both embracing and excusing barbarism. Brundage revisits a series of moments and practices—from the initial contact of Europeans with North America, to the early American republic, to slavery, to the American imperial project, to local law enforcement’s embrace of “the third degree,” through the Cold War, and up to the present—to demonstrate that behavior considered to have been torturous in its own time has been far more prevalent in U.S. history than we acknowledge. By threading this past into a cohesive story of debate and dismissal, Brundage reveals the ways in which the mythos of American exceptionalism has underwritten the narrative so evident this week on Capitol Hill.

The passages below come from the introduction to Civilizing Torture.

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In April 1858 Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular American magazines of the day, published a gruesome article entitled “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” Accompanied by graphic illustrations, the article dwelled on the so-called “water cure,” a punishment during which an inmate was stripped and seated in a stall with his feet and arms fastened in stocks and his head extended up into a tank that fit snugly around his neck. The prisoner’s head was drenched with freezing cold water that cascaded down from a height of a foot or more for several minutes at a time. The tank that encircled the prisoner’s neck emptied slowly, inducing a sensation of drowning while the prisoner struggled to keep his mouth and nose above the pool of draining water.

Thirty years later an investigation of practices at Elmira Reformatory, the most acclaimed American penal institution of the day, revealed that staff there continued to douse prisoners with cold water, in addition to confining them in darkened cells for weeks on end, shackling and hoisting them until their toes barely touched the floor, and “paddling” them with specially made boards. In 1899 American soldiers occupying the Philippines after the Spanish-American War sent home letters boasting of their routine application of a variant of the “water cure” to coerce information from Filipino guerrillas. To apply the “cure,” soldiers pinned their victim to the ground by his legs and arms and partially raised his head “so as to make pouring in the water an easier matter.” If he refused to keep his mouth open, his tormentors pinched his nose closed and used a rifle barrel or bamboo stick to pry his jaws apart. Then they poured water into his overextended mouth until he looked like “a pregnant woman.” According to witnesses, a few applications of the “water cure” usually elicited a flood of information.

A century later, the outlines of the “enhanced interrogation” methods adopted by the Central Intelligence Agency and military interrogators during the “War on Terror” became public. Americans learned that between 2003 and 2006 at least eighty-nine Middle Eastern detainees in CIA custody had been slapped, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, stuffed into coffins, and threatened with violent death. The most severe method was “waterboarding,” a modern-day variant of the technique applied a century and a half earlier in American prisons. Waterboarding entailed pouring water over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized detainee, which produced an acute sensation of drowning. One detainee endured more than 180 waterboarding sessions.

Ronald Reagan’s Balcony Heroes

In the days since Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union address, one of the most consistently noted elements of the evening has been the speech’s heavy reliance on the stories of individuals, the so-called “heroes in the balcony” whose courage, kindness, strength, and suffering have long lent pathos to the annual episode. Though the practice is now deeply ingrained in the choreography of presidential address, it’s actually a fairly recent development. In fact, as so much else political theater, it began only with Ronald Reagan. As Corey Robin reminds us, the maneuver’s emergence was tracked by Daniel Rodgers in his Bancroft Prize-winning Age of Fracture, which begins with a revelatory look at the highly structured affair of modern presidential oratory. In the brief Age of Fracture excerpt below, Rodgers points to the ways in which the employment of balcony heroes reinforced Reagan’s subtle insistence on the individual as the fundamental component of a nation founded by and for a people.

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Getting himself out of the way was key to Reagan’s gestures. Restoration was his primary rhetorical act. He gave the nation’s freedoms and its future promise back to “the people.” It was their seamless history that he painted in verbal miniatures, their hopes he claimed to enunciate. Reagan performed the part of identification with the people far more effortlessly and with vastly less inner contradiction than did his rival, the populist Carter, despite Carter’s sweaters, suitcases, and Mr. Rogers–derived props of neighborliness. Carter and his advisers, struggling to read the minds and the anguish of the people, worried through a relationship that Reagan simply took for granted. “Just three words,” Reagan told the nation’s children in his State of the Union address of 1987, contained the whole secret of America: “We the people.”

Reagan’s commitment to these lines was unswerving. Kenneth Khachigian, called in to work on the 1987 State of the Union message, heard the “We the people” motif from Reagan himself, and wrote it into the speech with the excitement of adding a new and “perfect Reagan touch.” In fact it had been part of Reagan’s core stock of phrases since at least the mid-1960s. In Reagan’s mind the anecdote paired with the words was always the same. In other countries, governments told the people what to do. In contrast, “Our revolution is the first to say the people are the masters and government is their servant.”

To insist on the concrete reality of “the people” was, for Reagan and conservative Republicans, an essential precondition to the act of wedging the government and the people apart into sharply antagonistic political fields. The division was old in Reagan’s rhetoric. “Already the hour is late,” he had warned in 1964. “Government has laid its hand on health, housing, farming, industry, commerce, education . . .” For the Constitution’s drafters, the phrase “We the People” had been a legitimating device: a means to give moral and political foundation to a stronger national government. In Reagan’s speeches, the same words were refashioned to distance the natural, spontaneous acts of the people from the work of those they elected to be their representatives.

The Paradise Papers: Why You Should Care

The trove of records known as the “Paradise Papers” unveiled this week by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has exposed the financial hideaways of iconic brands and power brokers across the political spectrum. Among the revelations resulting from the leak have been ties between Russia and the United States commerce secretary, secret dealings of the chief fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the offshore interests of the queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world. Brooke Harrington, a sociologist who trained as a wealth manager for the investigation that became her 2016 book Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, served as a key analyst for the ICIJ in their work on the Paradise Papers, and has been an increasingly vital source for global media seeking to understand all that’s come to light. Below, Harrington explains why the ongoing exposure of the offshore financial system is about so much more than palace intrigue and political embarrassment.

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“So what?” This question keeps appearing in my Facebook feed, via friends of friends in America, in response to news of the Paradise Papers leak. Some are confused by the complexity of the revelations—what the heck is U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross doing with the Putin family?—and some are distracted by the bizarre array of household names coming together in the story. Fancy Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II having something in common with Martha Stewart and Formula 1 race car driver Louis Hamilton!

What the Paradise Papers tell us, as the Panama Papers did earlier, is that above a certain level of wealth, everybody is using offshore. And they’re not just avoiding tax: lots of people put assets offshore even if they come from places that don’t tax income, inheritances, wealth, or capital gains. They’re putting assets in Bermuda, or Panama, or one of the dozens of other offshore financial centers because they don’t want to pay back their creditors, or submit to fines imposed by a judge, or split assets with a divorcing spouse. Tax avoidance, although it gets the bulk of the media coverage, is only part of that larger, and much more troubling picture.

Leaks like the Paradise Papers tell a story of rampant law avoidance. That’s what really makes the ultra-wealthy different from you and me: for them, the laws are mostly optional. Several of the wealth managers I interviewed for Capital without Borders—people who worked for firms very much like the ones exposed in the recent leaks—marvelled at the degree to which their clients’ wealth and power put them “above the law.” This creates a political problem, especially in democracies where legitimacy depends on all citizens being equal in their obligation to obey the laws of the land. When people see that whole groups of people simply escape that obligation, they get angry and start looking for scapegoats. Thus, Thomas Piketty has linked the use of offshore to the rise of right-wing ultra-nationalist movements, which misdirect that populist anger—encouraging people to blame the poor and marginalized, rather than the lawless ultra-rich.

Thus, my answer to the “so what?” question is political as well as economic. Certainly, the tax evasion part matters tremendously: the former US tax commissioner estimated that honest taxpayers bear an extra 15 percent tax burden to compensate for wealthy Americans’ failure to pay their fair share. And even with honest taxpayers taking up some of the slack, public services like transportation, health care and education still get cut, damaging chances for upward mobility so essential to a dynamic capitalist economy.

Inevitably, this economic stagnation intersects with the concentration of political power to produce conditions that look depressingly familiar to historians: feudal, in fact. When Oxfam reports that just eight people own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of humanity, comparisons to the Middle Ages don’t seem so far fetched. Indeed, this week the Guardian reported that a UK economist believes inequality has become so extreme that we should revisit a medieval document as a model for contemporary action. The Charter of the Forest, which turns 800 years old this year, asserted the right of ordinary people to food and shelter, and challenged that of nobles to monopolize all the resources. That 21st century conditions compel us to re-learn the lessons of medieval history suggests the formidable power of offshore. And that is why we should care.

Social Media and Scholarship (and Impeachment)

On November 10th 2016, it was reported that Google searches for “How to impeach a president” had increased by 4,850%. Fast forward a year, and impeachment is still frequently discussed—and still widely misunderstood. And so last week we published Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, by Harvard’s Cass Sunstein. An urgent addition to our fall list, the book provides an essential guide to what every American should know, and answers important questions like “who impeaches the President?”, “does impeachment mean the president has to leave office?”, and “is impeachment a criminal proceeding?”

This University Press Week we’re joining our sister presses in considering how our publications can cut through the noise and provide the facts. And, just as discussion of impeachment has swirled on social media, social media can help spread word of an important work of scholarship intended to ensure that the swirl’s better informed. Below, alongside a video of Sunstein produced by the virally-minded Big Think, Sunstein’s editor Thomas LeBien writes of the necessity of publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

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For the purposes of this post, you could translate the subtitle of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, as follows: Social Media Doesn’t Contribute to Anything—You Do. Probably there is no one better than a university press editor to remind everyone that, in sentences, subjects and objects matter. Just as it does for citizens in a republic, it matters a great deal if you imagine that social media acts on you and not the other way around. Put differently, I am less focused on whether social media has contributed to the success of a university press initiative than I am on whether thousands upon thousands of individuals have used social media to help spread word of important new scholarship. And that has very much been our hope in publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Here’s a useful irony. Sunstein has done more than his share of scholarly work to focus the world’s attention on nudges, choice architecture, and the dangers of Internet cyber cascades that encourage each of us to live in a news bubble of the like-minded. Here again, the subtitle to Sunstein’s current book is important. Impeachment isn’t a book aimed at just some citizens—for subsets of people who spend time on Twitter and Facebook loathing or lauding a president or political party. It hopes to inform citizens collectively. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein wrote the book without so much as mentioning the current president. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein did not write a book pitched at impeaching someone, but rather wrote a book pitched at guiding American citizens through the Constitutional impeachment mechanism and how it works.

This means, when it comes to social media, that this book should serve as a useful guide for anyone, on any point of the opinion spectrum, thinking about whether and how (and how not) to impeach a president. And therein lies the most vaunted hope. Commercial publishers have become ever more skilled at using social media to toss chum to the like-minded. University press publishers, guided by their non-profit mission, aim to allow readers to use social media for a different purpose. Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide came to be because there was a crying need for authoritative expertise on impeachment. If, as some of Sunstein’s prior scholarship suggests, social media is a vast echo chamber of divisive opinion, then it matters—especially for those of us working to disseminate scholarly insights—that some of those opinions are better informed.

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Head on over to the blogs of Johns Hopkins University Press, Athabasca University Press, and Beacon Press for a few more thoughts on social media and scholarship, or check out a list of everything offered up on the 2017 University Press Week Blog Tour.

“Reminder: Race Is Not a Costume”

In an effort to help forestall the donning of racist Halloween costumes, Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. took the time last week to explain the painful history of blackface and minstrel shows. He was joined in that effort by none other than CUNY Professor Eric Lott, whose writing and thinking have been absolutely critical to our understanding of racial fantasy in American culture for decades, from 1993’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, to Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, which we published this fall.

Have a look at Wood and Lott’s breakdown of the ways in which the mindlessly offensive racial costuming we see each Halloween is rooted in the history and politics of slavery:

In her 1993 review of the “terrifically smart and unexpectedly timely” Love and Theft, author and critic Margo Jefferson expressed the hope that Lott would pursue the threads of this American racial identity crisis into the twentieth century. With Black Mirror, that’s exactly what he’s done. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Lott explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital—including and above all blackface—to reproduce white cultural dominance, threatening in the process to betray the racial hegemony that generated those institutions and that they exist in order to maintain.

“What Kind of World Shall We Make Together?”

In the immediate wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, Jed Purdy wrote at Dissent about the ironic possibility of Trump’s action forcing an overdue sense of emergency. Purdy sees in the agonized response to Trump’s announcement a sense that “Paris had come to stand, at least in liberals’ minds, for the thought that the world was bumping toward the right track, that someone out there was doing something about climate change.” For Purdy, though, the political constraints that shaped the Paris accord rendered it largely symbolic from the beginning, too weak by design to avert major climate disruptions. If the Paris Agreement already fell short of the global cooperation necessary to address climate change, what might such a movement look like? Below, in an excerpt from his 2015 book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Purdy sketches some of the parameters of how the world might democratically shape a way to make human and natural flourishing compatible—even as democracy itself intensifies the emergencies we face.

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Today democratic consent is the only widely accepted way to make political power legitimate, and for very good reasons. It expresses two critically important ideas: that power should not be exercised over people without their consent, and that all individuals should have equal voice in the question of consent—in saying yes or no to a law or a government. But democracy’s standing is less secure than this quick summary suggests. Widespread acceptance of democracy as the standard of political legitimacy can be thin and nominal: it is effectively universal, but not because of deep commitment. In fact, pieties about democracy are now under pressure from, and sometimes yielding to, technocratic government at the heart of the historically democratic world, such as Europe, and assertive authoritarianism in countries such as Russia and China. This newly evident fragility is a reminder that much of democracy’s seemingly universal triumph came from the failure and decline of alternatives, rather than from affirmative democratic success. Moreover, even democracy’s thin universality is novel, a mere wrinkle in history. Less than a century ago, it was common to say that democracies were weak, enervating, feckless, and that stronger, more demanding forms of government must rise to replace them. The romance of authoritarianism was a major theme of the twentieth century, with fascism being only the most indelible instance, and it would be complacent to suppose that the romance will not return. Not all of its variants are revolutionary; indeed, some of the most important today are technocratic and distinctly conservative in their relation to the existing order of power and authority.

Disgust with democracy grows where democracy palpably fails, and failure has recently seemed to be its specialty. Here we return to the ironic awkwardness of calling for more democracy when democracy seems a formula for failure. Today’s American voters, the country’s political parties, and the government they form are unlikely to strike anyone as the source of attractive answers to the question: What kind of world shall we make together? In fact, their answer is already visible in the world we are making, and its drawbacks are evident. Whatever else it means, a call for deepened democracy had better not amount to “More of this, please!”

It will not do to raise pious calls for democracy just because democracy is abstractly a good thing. The Anthropocene question—what kind of world to make together—should be taken as a challenge to democracy. The test is whether citizens can form the kind of democracy that can address the Anthropocene question, the question of what kind of world to make. A democracy that cannot do this will have marked itself as inadequate to its most basic problems.

A commitment to democracy must not be a pious test of faith in a failing system. It must be a commitment to producing democratic politics that can meet these challenges, that can achieve strength and decisiveness of the most delicate kind: in favor of self-restraint.