Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 137

Female presidents don’t always help women while in office, study in Latin America finds

Chile's President Michelle Bachelet arrives to the airport in Arica, Chile one day after an earthquake on the Pacific coast, Wednesday, April 2, 2014. (AP Photo/Luis Hidalgo, Pool) (Credit: AP)

When Michelle Bachelet steps down as Chile’s president on March 11, she will bring to a close not just her own administration but also an era of female leadership in Latin America.

Between 2006 and 2018, four women served as presidents in the region. On the political left, Bachelet and Argentina’s Cristina Fernández both completed two terms. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, of the progressive Workers’ Party, was impeached a year into her second administration. And, on the center-right, Laura Chinchilla governed Costa Rica from 2011 to 2014.

For gender researchers like ourselves, this is a rare chance to assess how the president’s gender influences policy in Latin American countries. Global research has confirmed that having women in the highest echelons of power leads to greater political engagement among women and girls. We wanted to know what Latin America’s four “presidentas” had done to promote gender equality while in power.

Here’s what we learned.

Reproductive rights not guaranteed

Prior studies had already shown that Latin America’s presidentas nominated more female cabinet ministers, paving the way for future generations of female leaders.

And based on public opinion survey data, we knew that in Latin American countries with female heads of state, women were slightly more likely to participate in local politics than in countries run by men. Latin Americans who have a woman for president are also much less likely than other respondents to say they think men make better political leaders than women.

But our new research disproves the admittedly tempting idea that merely putting a woman in power improves gender equality. Other factors, including party politics and the presence of strong social movements, turn out to exert more influence on a president’s policies.

Take abortion, for example, which is largely outlawed in heavily Catholic Latin America. Even in the few countries, , that allow women to terminate pregnancies resulting from rape, the procedure is still extremely difficult to obtain. Fully 97 percent of Latin American women cannot get safe, legal abortions, leading to high rates of maternal mortality.

But attempts to ease Latin American abortion laws have historically provoked a deep conservative backlash. In Brazil, Rousseff declared her support for abortion liberalization on the campaign trail in 2010, but had to backpedal due to intense media criticism. Once in office, Rousseff remained silent on reproductive rights.

Bachelet also shied away from the issue during her first term. The Catholic opposition was well organized and, at the time, Chile’s feminist movement was relatively weak. Bachelet focused instead on access to emergency contraception.

By the time she ran for re-election in 2013, however, feminists had coalesced around abortion reform. They pushed Bachelet to include reproductive rights in her campaign and kept the pressure on once she was in office. In 2017 Chile made abortion legal in cases of rape, fetal deformity or danger to a mother’s life.

In Argentina, meanwhile, Fernández — also a leftist — actually quashed activists’ efforts to expand reproductive rights. Perhaps unsurprisingly, so did the conservative Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica.

Gender equality lags under populists

That’s because major social change requires more than just a woman president. The kind of political party she leads matters a lot — more, in fact, than her gender.

The left-wing populist parties that ruled Ecuador, Argentina and Venezuela during the period we analyzed made no effort to liberalize abortions. In fact, we found that populist leaders, in their quest to appeal to the masses, actively shut out feminist activists and ignored the demands of female constituents.

Fernández didn’t just uphold Argentina’s harsh abortion restrictions — she actually cut off funding for the country’s universal contraception program, too. Rather than focus on women’s issues, her Justicialist Party expanded social welfare programs, including a hallmark cash-transfer program that subsidizes families with young children.

Anti-poverty policies are typical of the populist Peronist movement that brought Fernández and her husband, former president Nestor Kirchner, into power. These initiatives may also help women, since they are poorer than men, but that’s not the main goal.

In the Latin American countries we studied, those where reproductive rights most improved in the early 21st century were ruled by what political scientists call “institutionalized parties.” Such parties generally have a cogent ideology — though it could be left, right or center — a broad base of support and clear structures for responding to constituent demands.

When Bachelet finally loosened abortion restrictions, it was at the helm of a broad-based coalition called the New Majority. Likewise, Uruguay fully legalized abortion in 2012 under the presidency of José Mujica and his Broad Front alliance.

Men help women, too

Legalizing abortion — one of the world’s most polarizing policy debates — may be asking a lot. So we also assessed whether these four presidentas promoted gender equality in other ways.

We found they did somewhat better on childcare, which enables women to return to the labor market after becoming mothers. Argentina’s Fernández paid the topic little mind, but Bachelet, Rousseff and even Costa Rica’s center-rightist Chinchilla all expanded access to childcare during their tenures.

But so did the men who governed Uruguay during the same period. That supports the idea that party type matters more than the chief executive’s gender when it comes to a country’s women’s rights.

And when looking at perhaps the most dramatic improvement in gender equality in Latin American in recent years — the high number of women in politics — we see that these changes, too, were led by male and female politicians alike.

Improvements began in the early 1990s. Back then, nearly every Latin American country adopted some form of gender quota, which requires political parties to nominate a certain percentage of women for legislative office. In many cases, though, the early laws were rather weak. Parties put women on the ballot in districts they could never win or didn’t get fully behind their campaigns.

Over the past decade, women politicians and feminists across the region have organized to improve political participation among women. In every country where women pushed stronger gender quotas through Congress, those initiatives became law.

The payoff of this popular women’s mobilization has been huge: Between 1990 and 2018, the percentage of female lawmakers in Latin America shot up, from 9 percent to 28 percent.

Merike Blofield, Associate Professor, University of Miami; Christina Ewig, Professor of Public Affairs and Faculty Director of the Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, and Jennifer M. Piscopo, Assistant Professor of Politics, Occidental College

Democrat Conor Lamb likely winner in Pennsylvania — blue wave next?

Conor Lamb; Rick Saccone (Credit: conorlamb.com/ricksaccone.com)

No Democrat has come close to winning Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district in decades. And no Democrat has yet won a special election in the Trump era. On Tuesday night, Democrat Conor Lamb came extremely close, standing on the verge of a startling victory over Republican candidate Rick Saccone in a district that Donald Trump carried in 2016 by almost 20 percentage points. 

With 99 percent of the vote counted, including every vote cast on Election Day, Lamb leads Saccone by 0.2 percent, 113,111 votes to 112,532 votes. That’s an extremely narrow margin — but to win, Saccone would have to get about 70 percent of the roughly 1,400 absentee votes still outstanding. Around 12:45 a.m. on Wednesday, Lamb addressed his supporters in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and declared victory — although Saccone has not yet conceded and a possible recount lies ahead.

Like a regular-season matchup that previews a likely playoff contest, the race between Lamb and Saccone was widely watched for its midterm implications — and it should be little surprise if several vulnerable Republicans soon announce their retirements after this shock election.

The temperature never broke 35 degrees in most parts of the southwest Pennsylvania district on Election Day. That may have played a part in depressing the turnout in a traditionally Republican district that runs through four counties from the wealthy suburbs south of Pittsburgh through the steel and coal mining towns along the West Virginia border that make up the heart of Trump country.

Trump won the district by 19 percentage points in 2016. But Republican voters, traditionally motivated to the polls by anger or fear, appeared apathetic about the first major election of 2018. Energized Democrats, on the other hand, showed up in numbers that more closely reflected state voter registration records, which show Democrats slightly outnumbering Republicans among the 500,000 registered voters in the district.

Despite an all-out push from the White House, including a get-out-the-vote appearance by President Trump for Saccone on Saturday in Moon Township, an area Trump carried by 11 percentage points in 2016, Republican voters simply did not show up on Tuesday.

“The world is watching,” Trump said during the 73-minute speech, where he barely mentioned Saccone’s name even once. Lamb went on to win Moon Township by six points, and outperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers in every part of the district.

The district also saw Vice President Mike Pence, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. campaign on behalf of Saccone. None of it seemed to make much difference.

For his part, Lamb did his best to downplay the national attention. “This is a local race,” he told reporters after voting at a church in his hometown of Mt. Lebanon on Tuesday. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the president.”

Lamb, a 33-year-old Marine veteran and former assistant U.S. attorney, had appeal in the working-class strongholds that make up the rural parts of the district, and piled up big margins in the more affluent suburban areas of Allegheny County, just south of Pittsburgh. A centrist Democrat from a well-known political family, Lamb dramatically outraised Saccone in a district where Democrats hadn’t even bothered to run a candidate the last two cycles. (Former Rep. Tim Murphy, a Republican, resigned after it was revealed that the anti-abortion conservative had urged a woman with whom he had an affair to have an abortion.)

Saccone, a conservative state legislator who described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump,” had previously planned to run for the Senate before the House seat opened up late last year. Since then, Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court has redrawn the state’s congressional district lines in a gerrymandering decision, and this district will no longer exist in November.  

Perhaps more than his naked political maneuvering, or even Trump’s general unpopularity, Saccone may have been most badly hurt by his anti-union stance in this heavily unionized district.

Saccone has a record in the state legislature of opposing organized labor on just about everything, costing him the support of the unions that had largely backed the discredited Murphy. Lamb, who has the backing of unionized steelworkers, came out in favor of Trump’s planned tariffs and campaigned on a pledge to protect union jobs and pensions. His campaign ads frequently vowed to fight for Medicare and Social Security, programs that impact nearly one out of every five residents of the district.

Late on Tuesday night, Saccone declined to concede defeat and it was unclear whether Lamb would claim victory. (The national Democratic Party did not wait, publishing a press release declaring him the winner.) There is no mandatory recount for House elections, but either campaign can petition in court to demand one.

Even if Saccone somehow squeaks out the win, Tuesday’s election was clearly a bad sign for Republicans. Money isn’t enough to save vulnerable Republicans. Nearly 80 percent of outside spending in the district benefited Saccone’s campaign. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s super PAC poured more than $3.5 million into the district. GOP voters still either stayed home or flipped to Lamb.

There are more than 100 Republican members of Congress up for re-election this year in districts considered more competitive than this one, according to the Cook Political Report. No matter how Republicans try to spin this apparent defeat on Wednesday, their fear of the blue wave is more tangible now. 

7,000 pairs of shoes decorate Capitol lawn in honor of child gun violence victims

Seven thousand pairs of shoes, representing the children killed by gun violence since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, are spread out on the lawn on the east side of the U.S. Capitol, March 13, 2018 (Credit: Getty/Chip Somodevilla)

Shoes can be a powerful apparatus in a memorial — think of the heartbreaking shoe exhibit in the Holocaust Museum. On March 13, an advocacy group organized a demonstration harnessing the metaphor of children’s shoes to bring “the heartbreak of gun violence to Congress’ doorstep” by decorating the South East Lawn of the Capital with 7,000 pairs of shoes.

“Shoes are individual. They’re so personal. There are ballet slippers here and roller skates. These are kids,” Nell Greenberg, the campaign director for Avaaz, who organized the demonstration, said via CNN.

The idea was to build “a monument on the Capitol lawn for the children we’ve lost to guns with 7,000 pairs of shoes, representing every life taken since the Newtown shooting,” AVAAZ, a US-based civic organization, explained on its website.

The global advocacy group started receiving donations of shoes on Feb. 28., and began to place them on the Capitol lawn at sunrise on March 13.

Sunrise over the capital, dozens of volunteers laying down shoes to remember 7000 children killed by guns since Sandy Hook. Congress: don’t look away. #NotOneMore #Enough pic.twitter.com/ICwFeaZKtv

— Joseph Huff-Hannon (@JoeHuffHannon) March 13, 2018

The organization picked the number 7,000 based on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) statistic that an estimated 1,300 of children are killed by guns a year. Between now and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Dec. 2012, that would total an estimated 7,800 children’s lives — at least — taken by gun violence in America.

This isn’t the first time Avaaz has organized a monument of shoes.

“In Paris after the terrorist attacks stopped the big march ahead of a global climate summit, we pulled together a beautiful installation of shoes. Pope Francis, UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, Marion Cotillard, along with thousands of others donated a pair of shoes in solidarity,” the organization explains.

Reportedly, some family members of school shooting victims donated shoes in honor of those they had lost. As CNN’s Ashley Killough shared on Twitter, there was even a pair from a family whose son perished in the Columbine Shooting, which killed 15 people in 1999.

Tom Mauser lost his son Daniel at Columbine and has been wearing his shoes ever since. Tom traveled from Colorado to place Daniel’s shoes in a display of thousands of others on the Capitol lawn in a memorial that represents children who have died from gunshot wounds. pic.twitter.com/95vHOQPjTb

— Ashley Killough (@KilloughCNN) March 13, 2018

More observers on Capitol Hill have tweeted about how gripping the scene is.

Such a gripping visual: There are 7,000 pairs of shoes lined up outside the Capitol. Each represents a child killed by a gun since Sandy Hook. #NotOneMore pic.twitter.com/2Y1ZND0prD

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) March 13, 2018

7000 shoes outside the U.S. Capitol rn to represent the children who lost their lives due to guns since Sandy Hook. Tom Mauser brought a pair of his son Daniel’s shoes to help w/ this installation. Daniel was 15 when he was shot and killed at Columbine. #NotOneMore @Avaaz @MoveOn pic.twitter.com/ibUXjzyQU2

— Sara Kenigsberg (@skenigsberg) March 13, 2018

The display comes nearly one month after a gunman killed 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, and the day before a planned national school walkout on March 14. For tomorrow’s walkout, students and teachers nationwide plan to walk out of their schools and colleges in honor of Parkland victims, and to press Congress to pass stricter gun control laws.

“Hap and Leonard: The Two-Bear Mambo”: A dance with racial toxicity

Michael K Williams and James Purefoy in "Hap and Leonard" (Credit: Jace Downs/SundanceTV)

Nightmares play a prominent role in “Hap and Leonard: The Two-Bear Mambo,” the worst originating from the anxiety-ridden subconscious of Hap Collins (James Purefoy). This is not surprising, given Hap’s heretofore irrepressible idealism and his propensity to unleash his mind to wander down the various paths of “what if.”

But in the SundanceTV drama’s latest season, airing Wednesdays at 10 p.m., Hap’s bad dreams infect his common sense to the point of jeopardizing the life and safety of his best friend Leonard Pine (Michael Kenneth Williams). Again. And it’s all over a woman Hap’s hopelessly in love with who doesn’t love him back . . . again.

“Hap and Leonard” viewers are well-acquainted with the pair’s dynamic now that we’re three seasons in. Hap’s sweet, determined and a touch simple; Leonard is ornery, pragmatic and tart-tongued. He’s the brains of the outfit while Hap is the heart. They need and love each other in a way many in their orbit cannot wrap their heads around. All they see is a straight white guy and a gay black man hanging out together and attracting trouble they don’t need.

A procedural familiarity fuels each season’s mystery, all based on Joe R. Lansdale’s novels. But the remarkable difference with “Hap and Leonard” is its willingness to consistently place its heroes in direct conflict with a sinister, pervasive and brazen enemy poisoning their world and ours.

It may be the only scripted series on television right now that portrays racism boldly and without qualification. This also is the most likely reason that its audience size remains relatively modest in comparison to most cable series, even if it’s SundanceTV’s highest-rated original. “Hap and Leonard” is consciously atmospheric, crisply paced high-noon noir, and Purefoy and Williams have an onscreen presence that’s tough to top.

But its stories wade into territory Americans still would rather refrain from confronting, and its status as a period piece only sharpens the discomfort of knowing that bigotry is still as alive now as it was in the late ‘80s, when Hap and Leonard’s adventures take place.

With each new round of episodes, showrunner John Wirth and his fellow executive producers and writers display our fractured race relations more plainly. In its first season we could take comfort in the notion that the epithet-spewing antagonists were psychotic outsiders. Season 2 moved it closer to center stage, as Hap and Leonard contended with the racism of a local justice system rigged by a corrupt judge and local sheriff content to allow a plague of disappeared black boys to go unchecked.

In these six new episodes pit the duo against the Ku Klux Klan, a hate group that only a couple of years ago naively was presumed to be a relic of the pre-Civil Rights era. Reports indicate that they’re openly recruiting again, and shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, we came close to getting an unscripted series about the KKK. This season of “Hap and Leonard” takes place in a version of a 1989 that feels very much like the present, and this is a coincidence. . . to a degree.

The Klan is the dominant power in the deceptively named Grovetown, a place described by one character as a two-hour ride from Hap and Leonard’s East Texas home base “but 100 years away.” Their friend and Hap’s object of unrequited affection Florida Grange (Tiffany Mack) went to the place to assist a client with a legal case and never returned. Not even the chief of police J. D. Cantuck (Corbin Bernsen) knows what happened to her, or so he claims.

Grovetown’s racist reputation is renowned enough that friends warn Hap to go it alone this time, which longtime viewers know is impossible. Depicting small towns as breeding grounds for evil is a go-to for TV series and movies, a fact the writers acknowledge by having the characters name-check “The Twilight Zone” as they drive into the center of town. “Two-Bear Mambo” takes place at Christmas time,  leading the heroes to observe straightaway how much the place resembles a Hallmark card, right down to its blinding whiteness. They also notice that everybody is staring at them, and not a one is smiling.

Any person of color that’s taken a road trip has likely experienced such a moment, and knows that the best course of action is to fill the tank and keep driving. Hap, however, presumes his whiteness will protect Leonard in Grovetown. It did before to a certain extent. The peril they face this time around is much more extreme.

“Hap and Leonard” has a knack for nodding in increasingly unsubtle ways to our society’s lack of evolution in matters of race and sexual orientation. The nature of this season’s conflict means that we spend less time witnessing Leonard’s tribulations as a gay man and much more about his crisis of confidence in America itself. One moment in an upcoming episode leads him to question whether his service in Vietnam, a life chapter in which he takes intense pride, means anything if he can’t safely walk down a street in his own country. Hap went to jail instead of going to Vietnam and draws a similar sense of esteem in his participation in the anti-war movement. The violence of this enemy tries those beliefs as well.

Being surrounded by such radical intolerance threatens to cleave a bond strengthened by a shared life of adversity. This isn’t merely true of the central duo: Grovetown symbolizes the dangerous hollowness of yearning for America’s mythical past. Nothing in the town appears to have progressed out of the mid-‘50s except for the model of standard-issue menacing pick-up truck driven by two homicidal locals. Well, that and the presence of a female officer (Laura Allen) who is up front about her view that black people aren’t human.

No part of these intense predicaments prevents these new “Hap and Leonard” episodes from maintaining heat, humor and sensual appeal, factors that make the difficult scenes easier to absorb. Then again, this has always been the secret of this show’s appeal: it showcases the lush grandeur of regional culture and draws upon local legend to inform each new mystery, while it makes hard observations about the diversity we’ve long taken for granted as Americans.

“Hap and Leonard” remains exceptional in the way that it illustrates the virulence of America’s racism, particularly in communities where whites and people of color exists almost shoulder to shoulder.  Grovetown’s grim history includes a blues legend, and that music still has a hold on the town even though the white folks take measures to make sure the black residents keep to themselves.

The local radio station’s DJ, Sonny Knox (Andrew Dice Clay), has to play more than his share of Burl Ives. Its white residents idolize Elvis — a typical tool of irony in tales like these, but easy to get — while the people on the black side of town have a stellar blues bar. Once again, Hap stands out as the only white patron. But, as always, he’s welcomed more or less — part of his status of being “black by association.”

“The Two-Bear Mambo” feels as agile as previous “Hap and Leonard” chapters, which is quite a feat considering how dire and urgent the plot is from its first moment, when we witness the aftermath of the pair’s harrowing, misbegotten mission before jumping backward in time to trace their path from the start. We see that the boys have taken a tremendous beating, are slumped over and barely speaking.

A fair share of the audience might see Leonard and Hap’s bloodied faces and bruises as an externalization of how our current harrowing moment has left us feeling on the inside. It really is our story. To paraphrase a line from an upcoming episode, we’re born Americans, and we’ll die Americans. What matters is the stuff that happens in between.

Remembering when a school shooting had an impact

The Primary 1 class at Dunblane Primary School, pictured with teacher Gwenne Mayor, who was killed with sixteen of the children as gunman Thomas Hamilton burst into the class, shooting indiscriminately 13 March 1996. (Credit: Getty)

Imagine the tragedy, but with a different outcome. The date is March 13, in a small town with a name few outside of it have given much notice before. A man with a stash of guns that he purchased legally walks into a school. Before turning his weapon on himself, sixteen children and one teacher will be slaughtered in a span of just three minutes. Most of the victims are just five years old. A stunned nation grieves. And then, the next logical, humane thing happens. Change.

What happened to the Dunblane Primary School on that late winter day 22 years ago was a nightmare. What happened since is a clearcut moral lesson, and a very simple one: Children don’t have to be murdered in their classrooms. But then, Dunblane isn’t America.

The UK already had a far more restrained relationship with guns than the US long before that awful day in Scotland. But in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the nation mobilized. The founders of what became known as the Snowdrop Campaign — named for the first flower in bloom at the time of the shooting — launched a petition for reform in the existing handgun laws. Three months after Dunblane, a handgun amnesty program launched, eventually resulting in over 160,000 weapons surrendered.

And though partisanship strongly divided the way political parties at the time thought best to prevent future incidents, there was a baseline comprehension that thoughts and prayers alone weren’t going to be sufficient to get the job done. “Isn’t it time to conclude that, literally and metaphorically,” Tory MP David Mellor said at the time, “the game is up for handguns now?”

Less than one year after Dunblane and under conservative prime minister John Major, the UK passed the Firearms (Amendment) Act of 1997, which banned most handguns. It also recommended severe controls around people who work with children. When Tony Blair’s administration came in three months later, the laws were tightened up even further. Flash forward: In Scotland now, firearms account for only 2% of all homicides. (In the US, that figure is 68%.) And no UK children have died in school shootings since Dunblane. Not in 22 years. Picture that.

Did the aftermath of Dunblane magically eradicate crime and violence entirely? Of course not. In Cumbria in 2010, a taxi driver went on a spree that left eleven people — including his brother — dead, before committing suicide. And guns aren’t the only means of mass violence, as the 2005 suicide bombings in London and last year’s fatal attack during a Manchester Arena concert demonstrated. 

Yet how can we not, when we remember Dunblane now, grieve for all the children killed in their own classrooms in America since then? How can we not wonder what would have happened if we’d learned anything at all after Columbine? Had done something. Anything. Imagine no Sandy Hook. No Parkland. Imagine all those birthday parties and softball games and graduations. Imagine two decades later, and a generation of young adults who were born into a nation that values their lives more than political lines, more than their weapons. What would that feel like, to decide as a people not shrug off child murder, but do something about it?

Why white liberals need to talk about race

"A Conversation with White People on Race" (Credit: Michèle Stephenson and Blair Foster)

In directors Michèle Stephenson and Blair Foster’s film, “A Conversation With White People on Race,” their brave subjects reveal how they really think and feel about what is probably the most uncomfortable subject to discuss in America right now. This documentary is one in the 8-part “A Conversation on Race” series, all of which will be featured on Salon Films.

You can watch the full “A Conversation With White People on Race” documentary on Salon Premium, our new ad-free, content-rich app. Here’s how. 

In the following conversation with Salon, Stephenson and Foster demonstrate they’ve given the subject of race a considerable amount of thought, something we could all do more often.

What drew you to want to make a film about race?

Blair Foster: I was looking for a way to communicate with the white people in my life who believe racism no longer exists and/or isn’t that big of a deal. I strongly disagree with that but trying to discuss it directly with them wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was also trying to acknowledge and come to terms with my own privilege and honestly examine my own beliefs and actions around racism. This is why I not only co-directed but also appeared in the film. I’ve never appeared in one of my own films but I felt that if I was asking other white people to examine their views on race it was only fair that I do the same. I’ll admit it was very uncomfortable, but I think it’s time for white people to get uncomfortable. I’d say that’s the least we can do but that’s a pretty big understatement.

Michèle Stephenson: As a light-skinned black woman of Haitian and Panamanian descent I can’t escape the legacy of racism, colonialism, slavery, genocide and privilege that run through my veins.  And I believe that none of us living in the Americas can escape that common history. It bleeds into all aspects of our lives. To heal as artists, we must tell those stories and make works that open spaces for conversation, self-reflection and system shifts.  I have dedicated my storytelling to explore the aspects of our racial caste system that have affected me and my community, unearthing how we internalize systems of oppression and oft-times repeat them in our personal, professional and social relationships. Digging into those uncomfortable places is where my art is made. In that vein, I felt it was necessary in our “Conversation on Race” series to examine the white power and privilege side of the racial coin and spark some uncomfortable conversation that needed to be had in order move the dial a bit.

It’s evident in the film, but in your words: Why is it uncomfortable for white people to talk about race?

Foster: I think there are numerous answers to this. One is that they are afraid of saying something “wrong” that might offend someone. Some conservative white people believe there is too much talk about race and it isn’t an issue.  But I think the biggest reason is they don’t want to be called a racist — few words provoke a more defensive and hostile response from a white person than calling them racist. White people have the luxury of viewing this issue as individuals instead of being part of a systemic, institutional problem. We like to think we’re personally not racist — see the ubiquitous “I have many black friends” response — but have a much harder time coming to terms with being part of system and institutions that are racist.

Stephenson: It’s hard for white people to acknowledge their privilege and understand that meritocracies don’t really exist in our society. To acknowledge that maybe you didn’t land that job just because you are smart or talented, but that other systemic factors played into it means you have to take a hard look at your own personal journey. Why even do that? It takes a lot of self-awareness to take that deep dive. But we won’t get anywhere without that questioning in the white community. This is the impasse where we are currently stuck when it comes to dismantling systemic racism. It’s more than just feeling guilty, or feeling exposed or fragile in these conversations.  It’s about giving up power — or better yet, sharing power in an equitable and just way —  and that’s a hard thing to do when the white community has often been taught not to “see” race — from the history books to our media to our Hollywood myths.

The subjects of the film seem to be mostly if not entirely reflective liberals — was there an attempt to reach what we’d now call “Trump voters”?

Foster: Absolutely. We reached out to just about every white person we knew and had an extremely difficult time getting anyone to agree to go on camera — a response that only confirmed the need for a film like this.

Stephenson: We also had a very clear strategy in mind — we wanted to stay in the white liberal mind space. For us, in that 2015 pre-Trump era, to focus on more right-wing, overtly racist people would make it easier for many white people to dismiss the conversation we were trying to get people to engage in. We wanted to explore those difficult conversations with liberal-minded people to unravel just how deep white supremacy is internalized by all of us. In addition, we thought it was important to give voice to white people who have been working as anti-racist activists, scholars and educators in their communities. We were fortunate enough to have some of those voices present in the film. They helped us expose to audiences that there are ways to discuss white privilege and systemic racism that go beyond the personal feelings that interrupt an honest dialogue. They have tools available that can get other white people a step closer to reflecting on their own racial identity and to dismantling racism. The change starts right here in our backyard, not necessarily by engaging the extreme end of the continuum where mindsets are deeply fixed.

Big question, I know; How have conversations with white people about race changed since 2015 when the film was first released?

Stephenson: Wow!  Big question indeed. We stand at a crossroads today. I wake up some days feeling frustrated and depressed by how white supremacy stares me in the face in such a flagrant way through the current administration in power. But in some ways this transparency is a gift. The excuses of colorblindness can no longer fly in the same way. Terms such as “white supremacy” are less taboo today than they were a few years ago. I personally have engaged in much more direct conversations with white colleagues about systemic racism. My son comes home from school with questions about truth and history that demonstrate that his classrooms are helping students build critical thinking skills that will push for greater justice in our society. But this is thanks not just to the sudden shift right now that our government has taken and forced us to see ourselves in the mirror, but also thanks to the relentless anti-racism work we are all doing in a variety of fields and that has been happening since the Civil War. Our ancestors’ work continues to be relevant today. We are, however, also paying a price for this ugly veil lifting — from a deeply polarized society to racist shifts in immigration policy to Standing Rock to police brutality.  We are at a crossroads of a battle of narratives on multiple fronts.

Foster: I think the veil has been lifted. Since the election of Trump — there, I said his name — there is no more need for “dog whistle” politics. Not only does the racism no longer need to be couched in terms meant to disguise it, it’s being openly celebrated, as in Charlottesville. I personally believe the 2016 election was a huge wake up call for most of white America, especially liberals and those who consider themselves “middle of the road.” We can no longer fool ourselves into thinking everything is ok and we can enjoy our democracy without actually having to engage and fight for it. The threats to our democratic system are clear and we need to face up to our own privilege and ask ourselves what can we do to help dismantle racism and inequality in order to preserve our democratic principles.

How have they not changed?

Stephenson: Please see my response above. One of the subjects in a short film I am in the midst of completing talks about our history of racism as a history of the ”changing same.” Names and terms may change, some superficial shifts may occur, but who is on the top and who is on the bottom does not change. The rise of a few people of color in strategic spaces may be a step in the right direction, but it is not quite cause for celebration. The house negro was still a slave. So we have a long way to go and much to question deeply in order to experience true liberation and justice for all our communities.  But all of us investing in that struggle is half the battle. And I see young people everywhere taking on that struggle with vision, determination and grace.

What’s your next project?

Foster: I recently co-directed and produced “Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge,” currently on HBO. It’s a two-part doc in honor of the magazine’s 50th anniversary that celebrates journalism and popular culture. Unfortunately I can’t talk about my current project, but you’ll be hearing about it soon!

Stephenson: One of the stories I currently have in production is a non-linear documentary about the poet Nikki Giovanni, titled “GOING TO MARS.” Through the use of archival footage, current-day verité video, and her poetry performances, the film explores her pioneering work in the Black Arts Movement of the ’60s and 70s and her influence today in the hip-hop movement.  Many of the stories I am exploring these days are about resistance, liberation, magical realism and unearthing our common buried history as we seek to heal, move forward and dismantle systemic injustice. Check us out at Radafilm.com.

Watch “A Conversation With White People on Race” on Salon Premium, our new ad-free, content-rich app. Reading this interview in the app already? Select “SalonTV” to find all of our films and shows.

How ending apartheid became a dominant civil rights issue

Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie walk from the Victor Verster prison near Cape Town, South Africa, Feb. 11, 1990. (Credit: AP/Greg English)

Read the first half of this history of the Free South Africa Movement. 

Starting in 1977, the antiapartheid movement briefly became a strong contender for more public attention and for interest not just locally but also in the administration and Congress because of regional developments in Africa. In 1976, Portugal left Africa, stripping and taking off with whatever they could. South African officials continued to use armed insurgencies against the new, rising internal independence movement and independent neighboring countries that had joined forces to overthrow the apartheid regime.

President Carter appointed people who had experience and interest in Africa. Goler Butcher, who had served as Diggs’s counsel on the Subcommittee on Africa, became Africa bureau chief in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Andrew Young, a Georgian, who was rewarded for his early support of Carter with the UN ambassador post, said the civil rights movement had put them in good position to attack apartheid, since it was essentially a civil rights issue. They had to fight off National Security Council chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, who linked Ethiopia and Angola to Cuba and the Soviet Union, still advancing the Kissinger East versus West priority, an anticommunist framing of the African situation.

None of this activity seemed to make a dent in changing U.S. policy or the apartheid regime. Further, the bright prospects for change quickly evaporated. Charlie Diggs left because of corruption charges in early 1979, and Carter fired Andrew Young for violating the no talk-with-the-Palestinians policy. Stephen Solarz (D-NY) became chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa, and Howard Wolpe (D-MI) took the post in 1981. Despite Reagan’s election and Republicans gaining control of the Senate, the House Subcommittee on Africa tried to move forward. The new chair and staff kept up study missions to countries in southern Africa and Namibia and held serious hearings. As members of Congress from the Black Caucus and others interested in Africa grew in numbers and seniority, additional committees began to investigate matters such as U.S. financial dealings with South Africa.

After TransAfrica was founded in 1977, it joined with ACOA, the Washington Committee on Africa (WCOA), the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and other groups to educate the public andto advocate for socially responsible investment. Harry Belafonte and Arthur Ashe formed Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid to ask entertainers to stop working in South Africa and the Sun City resort for white South Africans. Randall Robinson of TransAfrica testified before congressional committees, wrote letters to politicians, and was increasingly frustrated because there was too little public interest in changing American policy toward Africa. He concluded that the media showed political interest when something happened that threatened places with a significant number of whites. The obvious answer was that the precarious future of whites in South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia made those places the best possible sites to redirect policy.

In May 1981, an anonymous government employee informant, whom Randall did not know, gave him classified papers about Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s meeting with South African foreign minister Roelof Botha on furthering the United States’ “constructive engagement policy,” a label coined by Chester Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, to relieve South Africa’s “polecat” status in the world. Randall gave the papers to the press, which led to stories in the Washington Post and other media outlets, and he also went to an Organization of African Unity meeting and distributed copies of the secret papers to representatives of the African countries.

Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980, joining with an independent Angola, even though its South African-fueled military conflict continued. Namibia, however, was still under the control of South Africa, and black Namibians and black South Africans still suffered under apartheid. Blacks in South Africa grew increasingly restive and repressed. In 1982, AFSC published a citizen’s guide for local people on how to withdraw funds from banks and corporations involved with South Africa. Antiapartheid protesters joined in a June 1983 national antinuclear march and the August 1983 March on Washington. The Dennis Brutus asylum campaign was another avenue for protests. In the fall of 1983, Randall suggested civil disobedience, but congressional staffers thought it was too soon. In October 1983, 300 attendees at a national students’ conference in New York planned demonstrations against apartheid for March and April 1984.

In September 1984 came the parliamentary change in South Africa that gave the franchise to coloreds and Indians but not blacks. Protests and repression grew and U.S. constructive engagement continued. Then, in October 1984, the United States, guided by Ronald Reagan, abstained from a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning protests against the continued suffrage policy restriction. The assembly had repeatedly denounced apartheid as racism since 1962. Apartheid also had been an issue in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.

Richard Hatcher, chair of TransAfrica’s board, felt that the organization needed to protest the White House since Reagan’s reelection in 1984 ensured continued American complicity with apartheid. Hatcher was the first black elected mayor of a large city (Gary, Indiana), in 1968, and chair of Jackson’s presidential campaign. Sylvia Hill and the other SASP members and TransAfrica decided to engage in a nonviolent protest at the embassy, the official symbol of South Africa in the United States.

There had been other protests against South Africa in the United States before FSAM. None had dented apartheid. But this history provided the context for the FSAM campaign. When TransAfrica announced the Free South Africa movement, we initially thought the protests might go on for a week. TransAfrica lined up prominent people who, if the first day was successful, had agreed to be arrested: Congressman Charles Hayes (D-IL) and the Reverend Joseph Lowery, chair of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the 26th of November; Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) and William Simons, president of the Washington Teachers Union, on the 27th; Congressman Ronald Dellums (D-CA), Marc Stepp, UAW vice president, and Hilda Mason, D.C. Council, on the 28th; Yolanda King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., Gerald McEntee, president of AFSCME, and Richard Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Indiana, on the 29th; Congressman George Crockett (D-MI), Congressman Don Edwards (D-CA), and Leonard Ball, Coalition of Black Trade Unions, on the 30th.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roger Wilkins, former assistant attorney at the Justice Department and nephew of the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, and Bill Lucy, AFSCME secretary-treasurer and president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, joined the FSAM steering committee in the first week. Randall, Walter, Bill, Roger, and Sylvia Hill, founding members of the Southern Africa Support Project, and Cecelie Counts, as both a founding member and coordinator for FSAM, met early every morning at my house to plan our activities. At first, Randall and his staff may have seen Congressman Walter Fauntroy and me mainly as celebrities who could attract the media spotlight, but with our first meetings, it became clear that our committee collectively had the experience to sustain a movement and make mostly good decisions.

Unlike those students who started the anti-Vietnam War protests 20 years earlier, the original FSAM steering committee members had a great deal of activist experience and knowledge of civil disobedience and of Africa, which informed decisions during the movement. Also, we had experience in government and dealing with government to help us understand how to move legislation. Randall Robinson had spent time in Tanzania in the fall of 1970, which, after Nkrumah fell in Ghana, was the most welcoming African country for black Americans. He and fellow Harvard law students Henry and Rosemary Sanders had trouble getting funded for research fellowships in Africa after law school. They went to the black assistant dean Walter Leonard, who got the Ford Foundation to create a Middle East and Africa Field ResearchProgram for Afro-Americans. The Sanderses went to Nigeria; Robinson went to Tanzania.

Randall, back in Boston in the winter of 1971, worked in a legal assistance office for three years, then at the Roxbury Multi-Service Center as a community organizer. He was an organizer of a protest asking for a Gulf Oil boycott and demanding Harvard’s divestment of Gulf Oil stock because of the company’s key support of colonialist regimes in Africa. Harvard held the largest block of Gulf stock of any American university. In Angola, the oil the company pumped provided 48 percent of Angola’s budget. The protests included a graveyard of one thousand black crosses, which were built on the Harvard campus, and the takeover on April 21, 1972, of the administration building. Harvard didn’t relent, but the educational value was enormous.

Then Robinson went to work for Congressman Charles Diggs, chair of the House of Representatives’ Africa Subcommittee. Before Diggs was felled by a corruption scandal dating to before Randall’s time, every black American who wanted to do policy work on Africa came into his orbit. By the late fall of 1976, Portugal had retreated from Africa and Rhodesia’s government was on the run. Randall went to Cape Town in December 1976 as part of a congressional delegation chaired by Diggs, who offended South Africans by asking when blacks would get the right to vote.

During the Congressional Black Caucus weekend in 1976, the NAACP, black church labor unions, Greek letter organizations, the National Council of Negro Women, and business leaders met with Herschelle Challenor, counsel to the House Africa Subcommittee. These organizations and leaders decided to form TransAfrica, which was incorporated July 1, 1977, as an organization of black Americans to influence US foreign policy on Africa and the Caribbean. Randall became executive director. Because funding was always shaky, the organization started with a fund-raiser, led by his brother Max Robinson, a leading TV newscaster.

Walter Fauntroy was a student at Virginia Union University when he met Martin Luther King Jr. Fellow Baptist ministers, they became friends. Fauntroy joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and upon his return to his hometown, Washington, DC, he became a congressional lobbyist for civil rights. Fauntroy also helped to coordinate the 1963 March on Washington and became pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church and director of the Washington bureau of the SCLC. He served as DC coordinator of the 1963 march, the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and James Meredith’s 1966 Mississippi “March Against Fear.” President Lyndon Johnson appointed Fauntroy vice chair of the White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966 and vice chair of the DC Council in 1967. He founded and headed the Model Cities organization in DC and tried to stop the violence when riots overcame parts of DC after King was assassinated in 1968. Fauntroy served on the city council and then became the district’s first nonvoting delegate to Congress in 1971. Based on his local prominence, experience as a civil rights activist, and service in Congress, Walter was a good choice to become one of the first FSAM protesters.

I was a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and had a great deal of very recent and extensive national press coverage because of fighting Reagan’s attempt to turn back the clock on civil rights. Reagan had fired me for opposing him, but I sued him and won reinstatement in a federal court suit. I also had a great deal of nonviolent protest experience. Between graduate school and law school at the University of Michigan, I had gone to Vietnam to report on the war. I had been involved in anti-Vietnam War protests on campus. And I had been one of the students who took over the university president’s office on April 9, 1968, the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s burial in Atlanta, to demand more funding for African American students and African American faculty hires.

In 1970, I was a new faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park, when an antiwar protest that was bigger and possibly more raucous than the one at Kent State erupted. Thousands of demonstrators occupied and vandalized the university’s main administration building and ROTC offices, set fires all over the campus, and blocked Route 1, the main artery into College Park. Armed with bricks, rocks, and bottles, the protesters continuously skirmished with police, who were armed with riot batons, tear gas, and dogs. As the campus raged, Maryland governor Marvin Mandel finally sent in National Guard troops in an effort to quash the uprising.

Fortunately, unlike Kent State, no lives were lost at College Park. The chancellor asked me and a few other faculty members to sit with him and advise him. I had also gone back to Central Michigan University to help talk the students into ending an armory protest after Kent State, when the university president did not want to let the governor send in the National Guard to arrest protesters because his daughter was one of the protesters.

Also, when I was chancellor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I went outside to meet with students who thought they had to take over a building to get my attention on an issue of academic policy. So, I had lots of nonviolent civil disobedience experience and from both sides.

I also had experience with the African liberation struggle. I had participated in the sixth Pan-African Conference in Tanzania in the summer of 1974, where African heads of state and other speakers argued over Marxist-Leninist reforms as opposed to capitalistic measures against black oppression. Some black nationalists agreed that a socialist revolution might be necessary, but they didn’t think the racism of white workers could be overcome and felt blacks could be liberated only by their own efforts. During the Carter administration, I had also visited South Africa. At that time, I met in the country secretly with some of the freedom fighters. While at the University of Maryland, I had also become acquainted with Zimbabweans and had visited some of the guerrillas in Zambia before independence. When independence came, as a Carter administration political official, I took the opportunity to talk with Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe at the White House on his first visit to the United States. I went again to Zimbabwe and observed whites screaming loudly, objecting when traffic stopped for the motorcade of the new president, calling him a “monkey.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton was an experienced civil rights activist. While in college and graduate school, she was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for SNCC. By the time she graduated from Antioch College, she had already been arrested for organizing and participating in sit-ins in Maryland, Ohio, and Washington, DC. While in law school, she traveled to Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Summer and worked with civil rights stalwarts like Medgar Evers. Her first encounter with a recently released but physically beaten Fannie Lou Hamer forced her to bear witness to the intensity of violence and Jim Crow repression in the South. Upon graduation from law school, she clerked for Judge A. Leon Higginbotham. She was a litigator at the ACLU, head of the Human Rights Commission of New York City, and head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, named by Carter. She then was a professor at Georgetown and a member of FSAM.

A key activist who was not in the room at the meeting with the ambassador when we started the protest, because she was not as obviously newsworthy at the moment, was an academic, Professor Sylvia Hill of the University of the District of Columbia. She had been a leader working for the liberation of southern Africa since the 1970s. She had been the North America regional secretary general for the Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Tanzania, which I attended. At that time, she was a professor at Macalester in St. Paul, Minnesota, and some of her students helped with the conference and the movement. She and her husband, James, had been in SNCC in Mississippi and moved to Minnesota, which was his home. After SixPac, they moved to Washington, DC, bent on organizing to help the liberation of southern Africa. She and Joseph Jordan, Sandra Hill, Cecelie Counts, Adwoa Dunn-Mouton, and others founded the Southern Africa Support Project (SASP), which did a study of local churches and other organizations to find out which ones were most likely targets for organizing. They gave presentations and formed a network of local volunteers interested in the liberation cause. In 1980, Sylvia persuaded ANC head Oliver Tambo, who visited with SASP while in Washington, that Americans could be as responsive to the antiapartheid movement as Europeans, who were its major supporters. Tambo began to allocate resources in the United States. Thereafter, Lindiwe Mabuza, who was assigned to Washington, DC, and Johnny Makatini, serving at the United Nations, gave our movement knowledge and a sense of the ANC’s visions and goals. They traveled, met, and talked with people and collaborated with antiapartheid, traditional civil rights, and women’s groups and appeared in the media wherever they traveled. Adwoa Dunn-Mouton, a SASP member, was the group’s most important black staffer on the Hill serving on the Subcommittee on Africa. SASP organized and delivered the core daily demonstrators, drummers, and picketers when the movement started and as it continued in Washington.

In massive resistance to apartheid, black South Africans mobilized to make the townships ungovernable, black local officials resigned in droves, and the government declared a state of emergency in 1985 and used thousands of troops to quell “unrest.” That, and the success of FSAM and antiapartheid protests around the United States, brought routine media coverage to the South African issue, and congressional action on sanctions became possible. Randall and his staff met weekly with members of Congress, usually in Senator Edward Kennedy’s office.

The antiapartheid public mood became so strong a month after the FSAM embassy protests started that in December 1984, twenty-five conservative Republican House members wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Botha threatening sanctions if apartheid continued. The explanations of inaction by corporations, which were saying, “We’re against apartheid but oppose sanctions,” sounded increasingly hollow. Ever more frustrated as the FSAM push toward legislation gained force, Sullivan said his principles wouldn’t end apartheid and companies should withdraw from South Africa after the FSAM protests continued.

Ending apartheid had become a dominant civil rights issue, and the legislation that had been introduced by Congressman Ronald Dellums, supported by the members of the Congressional Black Caucus in the House, and piloted through the House by Congressman Howard Wolpe, chair of the House Africa Subcommittee, passed. President Reagan’s September 29, 1986, veto was overridden by the House on October 2, while Coretta King, Jesse Jackson, Randall Robinson, and others sat in the gallery and CBC members prowled the Senate floor as the veto was overridden 78–21. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 became law. Soon Britain and the European Union would also pass sanctions.

The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 banned new U.S. investment in South Africa, sales to the police and military, and new bank loans except for the purpose of trade. Specific measures against trade included the prohibition of the import of agricultural goods, textiles, shellfish, steel, iron, uranium, and the products of state-owned corporations. The legislative work was not over. Representative Charlie Rangel (Democrat-New York) in 1987 successfully added an amendment to the Budget Reconciliation Act prohibiting US corporations from receiving tax reimbursements for taxes paid in South Africa. This meant that these corporations essentially had to pay double taxation until they extricated themselves from South African apartheid.

The apartheid system remained in place, but not for long. Resistance continued. In February 1987, the United States and Britain vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have made the sanctions imposed by the 1986 act international. In 1988, South Africa detained thirty thousand people without charges, arrested thousands of children, and banned every civic and political organization. Consistent with its constructive engagement policy, the Reagan administration used every loophole in the 1986 law to work in favor of the South African economy.

By September 1988 the House passed HR 1580, the Anti-Apartheid Amendments of 1988. Even though Shell Oil Company funded a vigorous lobbying campaign against the sanctions bill that was also supported by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s British government, the bill passed, but with a strategic loss. The bill mandated disinvestment. However, the Senate voted to permit US aid to South African-backed forces in Angola, which meant indirectly giving to South Africa through funding the continued conflict and supporting South African-backed forces there.

The South African government tried to fake out the antiapartheid forces by appearing to reform again. In February 1989, P. W. Botha resigned as head of the ruling National Party and was replaced by F. W. de Klerk. Government representatives began to meet openly with representatives of the ANC. Like the ANC, FSAM feared that the political leadership in Congress would accept de Klerk’s leadership as fundamental change in the apartheid regime. We felt that we had to do everything we could in solidarity to expose this effort by the apartheid regime to only appear to make changes.

Unsurprisingly, none of the FSAM leadership had been allowed in South Africa since the protests and the passage of sanctions. Even when Desmond Tutu invited us to his installation as archbishop of Cape Town, none of us could attend. In February 1990, I was permitted to join Jesse Jackson; his wife, Jacqueline Jackson; the novelist John Edgar Wideman; and H. Beecher Hicks, pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, DC, in wangling permission to visit by persuading the ambassador, Piet Koomhof, that if we found progress, we might have something positive to say. When we got there, we went all around the country, accompanied by a large press contingent, speaking, meeting with activists, demanding to see Mandela, and calling for the release of political prisoners.

The government informed us on the evening of February 10 that we could essentially stop agitating because Mandela would be freed the next day. On February 11, at about 7 p.m. South Africa time, the waiting for Nelson Mandela, which had been a constant companion most of my adult life, came to an end. On February 11, 1990, after spending 27 years in prison, he was released. There our group was in the Cape Town City Hall to greet him, with the mayor and his official welcoming coterie. Leading antiapartheid activists Allan Boesak and Frank Chikane were also there, as were Mandela’s prison compatriots, Raymond Mhlaba and Walter Sisulu, accompanied by his wife, Albertina Sisulu. Also there waiting quietly were Mandela’s daughter, Zindzi, and his youngest grandchild, Bambata, still a babe in arms, and Mandela’s mother and sister.

The speech he gave at the Cape Town City Hall reemphasized the need for struggle and for sanctions until the end of apartheid and the institution of democracy. His manner and demeanor, the favorable press, along with continued resistance, seemed to foreshadow eventual political victory for the foes of apartheid.

The Free South Africa movement organized an eleven-day, seven-city trip to the United States for Mandela and the ANC delegation in June 1990, for which Roger Wilkins had the major responsibility. Thousands of people greeted Mandela and the delegation throughout the seven-city tour. The ANC viewed this visit as an opportunity to demonstrate to the politicians that Mandela and the African National Congress had large popular support and to help raise funds for ANC to establish a new South Africa. Mandela was the fourth private citizen in the history of the United States to address both houses of Congress. This represented a major political achievement, since he and the African National Congress had long been viewed by the State Department as terrorists. After Mandela’s visit, the Free South African movement came to a close, although supporting organizations and individuals continued to work on African and other international issues.

FSAM was a catalyst for making the antiapartheid struggle visible both inside South Africa and around the world. The visual, radio, and print media crossed borders to tell and show this struggle. Witnesses against apartheid, numbering some 5,000 in the United States, made their opposition visible with their arrests. The bravery and momentum of the struggle inside South Africa became the visible example of all that was wrong with apartheid. I still affirm what I said when first asked whether I’d willingly get arrested at the South African embassy: “It is the right time and the right thing to do!”

The Free South Africa movement had to make a place on the U.S. government’s foreign policy agenda for a continent usually ignored. In retrospect, it is clear that the 1984 antiapartheid campaign had an inside and outside strategy. We had some access to political leaders and the process, because some of us had been or were political officials. The people we mobilized did not have routine access to a range of policymakers, and the people on whose behalf we protested had none. As Sylvia Hill best explains, we were not acting because of direct harm we suffered but because of the suffering of others and the use of our taxpayers’ funds, which made us complicit in the suffering. Defeating apartheid would help them, and race consciousness and political solidarity on race issues might occur elsewhere and in the United States, but FSAM had no personal benefit in mind beyond the goals of the campaign.

We showed how to mobilize a movement, but not, Cecelie Counts suggests, how to organize coalitions. Some other leaders and organizations who had labored long in the human rights field resented Randall, TransAfrica, and our movement because it was unlike what had existed. But our secrecy, holding information within a small group, and keeping the demands simple had worked. Some established organizations, seeing ending apartheid as a human rights issue much like, say, the Palestinian question, were uneasy with the race-based arguments we used, analogizing apartheid to Jim Crow and framing apartheid as a civil rights issue. But we thought correctly that defining apartheid as a civil rights issue would embarrass opponents, mobilize constituencies, and likely achieve the passage of legislation.

We forgot when apartheid was overthrown that the only thing South African leadership owed us was thanks for getting sanctions. This reality hit Randall hard. I recall the way Barbara Masekela, who later became South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, put it after Mandela came to the United States, “We did what we needed to do, and that was then and this is now.” South Africa’s postapartheid government would have a government-to-government relationship with the United States and essentially didn’t need a protest movement anymore. We had done our work.

Excerpted from “History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times” by Dr. Mary Frances Berry (Beacon Press, 2018). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

Tillerson’s legacy: Experts call him an “abject failure”

Outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson makes a statement on his departure from the State Department, March 13, 2018. (Credit: Getty/Alex Wong)

After a little over a year in office, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired Tuesday morning, to be replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Gina Haspel will take over Pompeo’s post as CIA Director, becoming the first woman to hold the spot. The news was announced by President Trump in an early morning tweet. “Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service!” Trump wrote. Tillerson’s exit was confirmed by the White House in an official statement.

The former Exxon CEO’s departure marks the end of a tumultuous tenure — and one of the shortest of any secretary of state in modern U.S. history, at 405 days — and it was not, experts say, colored by many accomplishments. Tillerson’s time in office “will be remembered as extremely unfortunate,” Robert Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Affairs at Columbia University, told Salon in an interview. Jervis also called Tillerson’s stint “an abject failure.”

Tillerson was ousted amid various clashes and policy disputes with President Trump. Tensions between the two escalated this past summer after NBC News reported that the Secretary of State called the president a “moron” after a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon. Tensions seemed to come to a breaking point after Trump delivered a politically charged speech at a Boy Scouts convention, after which Tillerson, a former Boy Scouts head and Eagle Scout, reportedly threatened to resign.

A man with no government nor diplomatic experience, Tillerson’s appointment to serve as the U.S. Secretary of State caused a division among Democrats and Republicans, and was met with reservations by the U.S. policy community.

Those who opposed the nomination highlighted Tillerson’s lack of diplomatic experience, his opposition to sanctions and his relationships with various governments around the world, some of which are authoritarian and opposed to the United States. Those in favor emphasized his leadership skills from his time as the head of one of the most powerful companies in the world, as well as his international experience and ability to make difficult deals, especially with world leaders.

“He’s an excellent choice to be secretary of state, and he has the opportunity to be an extraordinarily effective one because he has the management skills, he’s got the international experience and he’s got the negotiating skills to do a very good job,” said former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III on CBS This Morning.

Roughly one month after the presidential election, President Trump described him as a “world class player and a deal maker” in a tweet.

Despite initial differences about his appointment, scholars and foreign policy experts across all political stripes seem to agree that Tillerson will leave office without distinction.

“I think he will really go down as one of the worst secretaries of State we’ve had,” Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department under President George W. Bush, told Axios’s Jonathan Swan. “He will go down as the worst Secretary of State in history,” tweeted Ilan Goldenberg, a State Department official during the Obama administration.

Under Tillerson’s watch, many State Department positions, which experts have labeled as crucial, remained unfilled, such as ambassadorships in South Korea and in various European and Middle Eastern countries. That is in addition to a report that 60 percent of the State Department’s top management left and new applications to join the foreign service fell by half, according to data from the American Foreign Service Association.

“Our leadership ranks are being depleted at a dizzying speed,” Barbara Stephen, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama and the head of the AFSA, wrote in a letter for the December 2017 issue of the Foreign Service Journal.

But is Tillerson to blame? If you can say thing about the Trump administration, it is that it is largely impossible to exert significant influence over the president or over his chaotic White House — a place with record-breaking staffing turnover and where policy is often made or announced on Twitter.

When asked in November about job vacancies at the State Department by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump said, “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me. … I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that, you’ve seen it strongly.”

Tillerson’s departure underscores the notion that it’s Trump’s way or the highway; indeed, the president announced Tillerson’s exit in a tweet, and that’s how the secretary found out.

Still, foreign policy experts don’t think Tillerson is a victim of Trump. “He was complicit,” Jervis said. “Tillerson took the same attitude as Trump and made clear he was going to reorganize the State Department. … But he went about it badly and he failed.”

In an emotional post-firing speech today, Tillerson said he is delegating his responsibilities as Secretary of State to his deputy, John J. Sullivan, by the end of the day, and he will formally step down at the end of the month.

“I’ll now return to private life as a private citizen. As a proud American, I’m proud of the opportunity I’ve had to serve my country. God bless all of you. God bless the American people. God Bless America,” he said.

Pay her, she’s the queen: The gender pay gap on “The Crown” is a disgrace

Claire Foy and Matt Smith in "The Crown" (Credit: Netflix/Robert Viglasky)

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but women are angry. We are fed up; we have declared #TimesUp on the grabbing and the assaults and the demeaning comments and the gendered expectations in our workplaces. We are tired of being told we are worth less than our male co-workers, both explicitly and implicitly, and when we fail to rectify that through sheer will alone we are tired of being told we must not have wanted it badly enough. And when you’re already angry and fed up with pushing this boulder up a mountain every day with no summit in sight, one small bit of news can feel like enough to make you want to turn around and hurl the rock as hard as you can down the mountain, devastation in your wake be damned.

According to Variety, the producers of “The Crown,” speaking on a panel in Jerusalem earlier this week, admitted that Claire Foy, star of two seasons of the Netflix historic drama and winner of a Golden Globe for her spot-on and humanizing portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II, was paid less than her co-star Matt Smith, who plays Prince Philip.

Foy plays the title role — the Queen is both a person and the office, which hits at the heart of her character’s conflicts — and yet Smith, because he came into negotiations with a higher profile as a former “Doctor Who” star, pulled in the higher salary.

Asked whether Foy was paid the same as Smith, the producers acknowledged that he did make more due to his “Doctor Who” fame, but that they would rectify that for the future.  “Going forward, no one gets paid more than the Queen,” said Mackie.

Oh, good — except Foy and Smith won’t be around to enjoy their equal financial footing in the workplace. The series is jumping ahead in time for season three, replacing the principal cast members with older versions of the royals. Never mind that Netflix wouldn’t have a successful show to time-hop ahead in without Foy’s cutting precision and her brilliant command of her character, which manages to evoke Elizabeth’s stiff persona without ever veering into cheap parody, and while adding layers of subtle emotional texture and intellectual dimension. Smith did fine work as Prince Philip, but the show isn’t called “The Consort Crown,” nor should it have been. Smith’s role was always secondary to Foy’s, and even in his most brilliant scenes, she remains at the center — the very heart — of the production.

Haven’t we been here already? How loudly do we have to ring the shame bell at producers before they stop underpaying their female talent?

The pushback I am seeing — even among men who agree that the gender pay gap is bad — is that of course Smith could command a higher salary. That’s just how it works! He did four years as the Doctor on “Doctor Who,” after all, between David Tennant and Peter Capaldi, which is a big deal to a certain slice of TV fandom. Foy’s been no slouch herself — before “The Crown” she played Anne Boleyn on the highly-acclaimed, and Golden Globe-winning, limited series adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” for one — but yes, if you want to pit two names against each other in the salary negotiation game, Smith came in with a bigger stick. Never mind that Foy herself had no shot at that coveted Doctor spot until now — Jodie Whittaker is the first female Doctor in “Who” history, and she had to fight to get paid the same as her male predecessors. Yes, they were going to pay a female Doctor less. Is anyone surprised?

Women also don’t advocate for themselves, or their agents don’t, is one lame excuse I am tired of hearing. When Jennifer Lawrence penned her blistering takedown of the gender pay gap in Hollywood two and a half years ago, she wrote about learning that her male co-stars made more than her through data revealed in the Sony hack, not through any kind of transparency in the workplace. A major corporation has to be digitally infiltrated and have all of its sensitive information stolen and exposed to the world — that’s what it can take for women to even know they are being paid less in the first place.

When Lawrence wrote about confronting her gender pay gap, she blamed herself. “I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled,’” she wrote. Can you imagine a world in which women who insist on their own worth don’t have to overcome unspoken, often invisible sexist assumptions first? I’ll wait.

Foy’s not the first woman who’s seen a show take off on the strength of her performance and underpay her for it. In a revelatory THR profile in January, “Grey’s Anatomy” star Ellen Pompeo explained in detail how hard she had to work to get paid what she is worth to the show that also bears her character’s name:

For me, Patrick [Dempsey] leaving the show [in 2015] was a defining moment, deal-wise. They could always use him as leverage against me — “We don’t need you; we have Patrick” — which they did for years. I don’t know if they also did that to him, because he and I never discussed our deals. There were many times where I reached out about joining together to negotiate, but he was never interested in that. At one point, I asked for $5,000 more than him just on principle, because the show is Grey’s Anatomy and I’m Meredith Grey. They wouldn’t give it to me. And I could have walked away, so why didn’t I? It’s my show; I’m the number one. I’m sure I felt what a lot of these other actresses feel: Why should I walk away from a great part because of a guy? You feel conflicted but then you figure, “I’m not going to let a guy drive me out of my own house.”

Pompeo is the highest-paid actress on TV now, but she had to fight for it, despite the fact that the show that actually does revolve around her is a long-running success. What would happen if producers set their salary baselines at what they were willing to pay the women at the top of the cast? Did Matt Smith’s “Doctor Who” fame make “The Crown” a success? No. What’s even more insulting is that “The Crown,” like “Grey’s Anatomy,” is a show that female fans have championed. Shouldn’t the women who make these shows come alive for us get the biggest reward? It’s too late for Foy on “The Crown,” which is a shame, though it sounds like the women coming after her will be treated fairly. Here’s hoping Foy’s next workplace won’t need to be shamed into compliance, too.

Will Trump help Saudi Arabia become a nuclear power?

(Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The House of Saud is angling for approval on a new nuclear power program, and Donald Trump just might grant it.

According to The Young Turks’ Ken Klippenstein, King & Spalding, a law firm that has previously represented the president in his real estate dealings, registered last month to lobby the White House on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Justice Department filings reveal the firm will receive $450,000 over a 30-day period to start, and talks are set to begin in a matter of weeks.

 King & Spalding’s ties to the Trump administration are numerous. Beyond the link to the president, FBI director Christopher Wray served as a litigator at the firm from 2005-2017. As Klippenstein notes, the appointment drew the ire of the ACLU’s political director Faiz Shakir, who said in a statement at the time that, “Christopher Wray’s firm’s legal work for the Trump family, his history of partisan activity, as well as his history of defending Trump’s transition director during a criminal scandal makes us question his ability to lead the FBI.”

If the law firm succeeds in its lobbying efforts, it could set off a bomb in the Middle East, perhaps literally. That’s because Saudi Arabia has refused to sign an agreement prohibiting the enrichment of uranium — a direct violation of Section 123 of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act concerning the peaceful use of nuclear energy. While the Saudis maintain the program would be for strictly civilian purposes, critics fear an ulterior motive.

“It’s tempting to waive the gold standard for Saudi Arabia to secure a deal that could invigorate a struggling U.S. nuclear industry, but we cannot look at this situation purely as a business transaction,” nuclear security expert Lovely Umayam tells The Young Turks. “If the Trump administration decides to omit the gold standard for the Saudis, I suspect that Iran will adversely react to seeing an arch-rival keep open the possibility of ‘nuclear hedging.’ Pitting Iran and Saudi Arabia against each other in terms of their nuclear capabilities could be a backward step for nonproliferation efforts in the region. Also, this could set a precedent for future 123 agreement negotiations, signaling to other countries that the United States would be willing to dilute its stance on nonproliferation if money is involved.”

Read Klippenstein’s report at The Young Turks.