Dissent Magazine

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Now currency has stable rates,
gold and greenbacks are disgraced,
Renminbi are widely trusted,
speculators have been busted.

From a 1950 Chinese propaganda cartoon about the renminbi, or “People’s Currency.” Read Nick Frisch on The Renminbi’s Rollercoaster, from its first printings on guerrilla bases in the 1930s to its recent adoption into the IMF’s elite global currency club.

Announcing our Spring issue! Out next month, the issue includes a special section on The Fight for Climate Justice, featuring:

- Trish Kahle on austerity’s role in the climate crisis
- Kate Aronoff on energy democracy
- Todd Gitlin on the fossil fuel divestment movement
- Audrea Lim on tar sands resistance in Canada
- Wendy Wolford on Brazil’s landless workers movement

and a whole lot more. Subscribe by midnight tonight to get the issue on time, and you’ll get a free copy of The Future We Want, edited by Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara, along with it!

In Praise of Impractical Movements →

Social movements win by making the impossible possible. Here’s how.

(From the authors of the new book This Is An Uprising.)

Against the Political Grown-Up | Dissent Magazine →

By Jedediah Purdy. 

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“Bowie … belonged to the weird kids, the awkward ones, the queers and femmes, to everyone who’s ever felt alien. He belonged to the future, and it is so strange to think that he no longer will be part of it. He was always a little bit ahead of us.”

Sarah Jaffe on David Bowie. 

Save the Children | Dissent Magazine →

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How Racism Became Policy in Ferguson

If nothing else, the Justice Department’s Report on the Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, released last week, gives us a broader context for Michael Brown’s death last August. This is not, we are reminded, simply about the culpability of a rogue or panicked officer. It is about a systematic pattern of oppressive and petty policing, driven in equal parts by local racism and local fiscal incapacity. In the inner suburbs of St. Louis, law enforcement maintains the color line and—in the absence of a stable property tax base—it pays the bills. But this ugly glimpse of the institutional culture of the Ferguson Police Department still only gets us so far. In order to fully understand how and why race became the central premise of policing in the St. Louis suburbs, we need to take another step back and consider the long and troubled history of segregation in St. Louis County.

The first part of this history is one of quarantine. Long before it was subdivided into the western suburbs of St. Louis, St. Louis County was home to a few African-American enclaves—including Elmwood Park, Meacham Park, Malcolm Terrace, North Webster Groves, and Kinloch (just to the west of current-day Ferguson). As postwar growth carved the cornfields into cul-de-sacs, suburban development skirted these enclaves, and the infrastructure that came to the new white suburbs—roads, sewers, water—came to a screeching halt at their boundaries.

The motives and the consequences were unmistakable. In 1937, the city of Berkeley, Missouri was created, on a peculiar half-donut plot, for the express purpose of cleaving the residents of Kinloch (99.3 percent black) into a separate and segregated school district. In 1960, a polio outbreak in Elmwood Park was traced to the absence of potable water, in a neighborhood surrounded by conventional suburban development in Overland to the north and Olivette to the south. In 1965, five children died in a horrific fire in Meacham Park: the unincorporated neighborhood of 100-odd black families was not part of the local fire district and its rickety community fire truck would not start. In the 1970s, even the United Nations took notice of the fact that Meacham Park, at the heart of suburban central county, lacked basic sanitary sewer service.

Read Colin Gordon’s full piece here. 

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“Whatever happened to asking for more than a closet?" 

For our new interview series #Booked, Tim Shenk talks with historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore about Wonder Woman and the lost history of feminism. 

Read the full interview here.

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Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus

Marcia Chatelain

When the unrest in Ferguson unfolded in August, I was among the millions transfixed by the images broadcast live from the heartland. Ferguson’s first act featured a grief-stricken community, the choreography of “hands up, don’t shoot,” and police officers costumed like soldiers—all performed on a tear-gassed stage. Yet the scenes we didn’t see captured my attention the most. I pictured the empty desks and chairs, the rows of vacant lockers, and the deserted playgrounds during an unexpectedly prolonged summer for children in Ferguson. I wanted other educators to think about how painful the introduction to a new school year would be for this town. I hoped to challenge my colleagues on campuses across the country to devote the first day of classes to a conversation about Ferguson.

What emerged was a small call for community across the sometimes impersonal and expansive digital world. I asked professors who used Twitter to talk about Ferguson and to use #FergusonSyllabus to recommend texts, collaborate on conversation starters, and inspire dialogue about some aspect of the Ferguson crisis. Slowly high school teachers, early education specialists, guidance counselors, and middle-school instructors wanted ideas too.

The academy has never owned movements, and youth outside of colleges longed for intelligent questions, honest reflection, and inspiration moving forward. The #FergusonSyllabus organized a disparate population of scholars and students into a virtual movement that used Ferguson to frame how struggle has shaped American history, infused great works of art and literature, and given voice to those most hurt by the failures of leadership, capitalism, and democracy.

When the news that a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to bring Officer Darren Wilson to trial for the killing of Michael Brown, the movement in Ferguson and across the county was reignited. On the ground, activists declaring “Shut it down” and exclaiming “Black lives matter” blocked highways, occupied city halls, and resisted the notion that the grand jury would have the final word on what Ferguson means. Online, the #FergusonSyllabus is also in its second act. Within a few moments, educators began again, suggesting ways to make the most of a pre-holiday class meeting after the announcement. A middle school teacher in Madison, Wisconsin had students review the grand jury evidence. Meanwhile, I had my students in Washington, D.C. connect the Ferguson decision to Rosa Parks’s activism in seeking trials for black women raped by white men in the South. Volunteers in Ferguson read books from #FergusonSyllabus to children—unexpectedly out of school again—at the local public library.

Schools in Ferguson and across the country were closed over the past few days—this time to celebrate the start of the holiday season. Yet the emptiness remains. For the first time, Michael Brown’s family had an extra dining chair at their table this year. And, for many students, this is the first time they are witnessing the dramatization of a protest novel being written everyday as the Ferguson movement seeks law enforcement accountability, the decriminalization of blackness and of poverty, and schools that move children toward liberation rather than confinement. Whether you find yourself teaching in a schoolhouse, in your living room with your children, at a community meeting filled with movement members, in a church basement with others who seek racial reconciliation, or in a detention center common room, the resources below provide a snapshot of what is being taught, what is being felt, and what is being created each day.

Recommendations from #FergusonSyllabus

Engaging Ferguson in Ohio Social Studies Classrooms Website

Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion: Resources on Social Justice Education

Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Responding to Ferguson (Out of Eden, November 26, 2014)

Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Do’s and Don’ts for Teaching about Ferguson, (The Root.com, September 2, 2014)

Colin Gordon, The Making of Ferguson (Dissent, August 16, 2014)

Rebecca Klein, Here’s What These High School Students Had to Say About Events in Ferguson (Huffington Post, November 26, 2014)

Mari Evans, “If There Be Sorrow”

Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America”

David Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education: #FergusonSyllabus (November 25, 2014)

Katherine Schulten, Tom Marshall, and Michael Gonchar, The Death of Michael Brown: Teaching About Ferguson (New York Times Learning Blog, September 3, 2014)

Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings

Anthony Grooms, Bombingham

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Riot”

Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”

For more resources, follow #FergusonSyllabus on Twitter.

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Marcia Chatelain, a proud graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, is assistant professor of history at Georgetown University. Her book South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration will appear with Duke University Press in 2015.

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Spring 1994 Dissent in Transparent! Subscribe before Friday to get our fall issue in print: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/subscribe

Props to Transparent creators for historical accuracy. This is the issue Jeffrey Tambor’s character is clutching: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/issue/spring-1994