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One young researcher from Alabama is unearthing the origin stories of schools known as “segregation academies” to understand how that history fosters racial divisions today.

Another is measuring how much these private schools — which opened across the Deep South to facilitate white flight after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling — continue to drain public school enrollment.

And a third is examining how these academies, operating in a “landscape marred by historical racial tensions,” receive public money through Alabama’s voucher-style private school tuition grants.

All three researchers are white women raised in Alabama, close in age, who grew up near these academies. The women — one recently received a doctorate and the other two are working on theirs — approach their research from the varied disciplines of economics, education and history. Their inquiries are probing the very schools some of their family and friends attended.

In an ongoing series this year, ProPublica is examining the continued effects of hundreds of segregation academies still operating in the South. One of the three researchers played a key role in our initial story. Her experiences, both personally and academically, provided essential context to understanding how one segregation academy in rural Alabama has kept an entire community separated by race.

The research conducted by all three women is especially important now. It comes at a time when Southern legislatures are creating and expanding school-voucher-style programs that will pour hundreds of millions of public dollars into the coffers of private schools, including segregation academies, over the coming years.

Annah Rogers was working on her undergraduate degree at Auburn University in 2013 when Republican lawmakers suddenly rushed to pass the Alabama Accountability Act. The legislation created a voucher-style system to pay private school tuition for low-income students. As Rogers followed the debates, she wondered just how accessible private schools are to families with few resources, especially in rural areas. She knew that some of those communities don’t have private schools — and where they do exist, they’re often segregation academies.

Rogers hails from Eutaw, Alabama, a town of 3,000 people located in the Black Belt, a stretch of counties whose dark, rich soil once fueled large cotton plantations. Her parents sent her 45 minutes away to a private Catholic school. (Catholic schools generally aren’t considered segregation academies because most dioceses integrated willingly.) Rogers’ father attended a now-defunct local segregation academy, and her mother went to one in another county.

While working on her doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama, she devoted her 2022 dissertation to examining the state’s voucher-style program and its effects on private schools, including segregation academies. She had expected segregation academies to balk at participating in the program given that more than 60% of students who use it are Black. Yet she found that many do. In fact, they take part at a slightly higher rate — 8% more often — than other private schools.

That discovery prompted more questions: Are the tuition grants enabling Black students to attend segregation academies, making the schools more diverse? Or are the academies merely siphoning off the white students who use the grants?

“The biggest problem is that we don’t know,” said Rogers, who’s now an assistant professor at the University of West Alabama’s education college. She hit a huge hurdle when the state refused to break down by school the demographics of students who use the publicly funded program to pay private school tuition.

Despite that roadblock, she continues to probe these questions while working on related studies, including one that demonstrates how school segregation patterns have continued and even worsened across Alabama’s Black Belt over the last three decades.

Her research will become more critical in the coming years, as more students, including students from wealthier families, will be receiving state money to attend private schools. In March, Alabama lawmakers created a universal voucher-style program to fund private school tuition. It will be open to all children, regardless of household income, starting in 2027.

Danielle Graves grew up in Mobile on the Gulf Coast, where she attended a mostly white private Episcopal school. Although it opened long enough before the Brown v. Board ruling that academics don’t label it a segregation academy, its enrollment still grew substantially during desegregation.

Graves left the South to pursue her master’s and doctorate in economics at Boston University, where she is a fourth-year Ph.D. student. While in the Northeast, she realized that private schools there tend to be much older than in the South. The private school tradition didn’t really catch on in the South until white people thought Black students might arrive at their children’s public schools.

Graves also realized how few people outside of the South knew about segregation academies. Economics literature rarely mentioned them at all.

“I felt like it was this missing piece,” she said.

A lot of economic research on school desegregation and white flight focuses on cities rather than on rural areas “where segregation academies really play a big role,” Graves said. She jumped into that largely empty research lane.

Graves tackles questions like: How have segregation academies affected the average public school enrollment? Are there differences between rural and urban areas?

She taught a class on the economics and history of school segregation at Harvard University this spring and has spent the last two years researching and presenting her work on the impact that segregation academies have on local public schools.

For the dissertation she is finishing, Graves found that on average, when segregation academies opened in Alabama and Louisiana, they caused white enrollment in neighboring public schools to drop by about a third — and the white population did not return over the 15 years that followed.

Now she is measuring the effects of segregation academies on local public school funding, the students who attended them and the communities where they operate.

Unlike the other two researchers, Amberly Sheffield went to her local public schools, which were predominantly Black. As she watched other white families pay to send their children to segregation academies, she wondered: why?

Sheffield grew up in Grove Hill, a town of 2,000 people, where her father briefly attended a local segregation academy. After earning her undergraduate degree, she landed a job teaching history at a segregation academy in neighboring Wilcox County. ProPublica’s first story in its series on these academies focused on Wilcox County and the lasting effect that school segregation has had on community members — including, for a time, Sheffield. 

Almost all of her students at Wilcox Academy were white. The entire faculty was white. Yet Wilcox County is 70% Black.

Like most segregation academies, Wilcox Academy doesn’t advertise itself as such. Some of these schools include their founding years on their websites or entrance signs — as Wilcox Academy does — but mention nothing about the fact that they opened to avoid desegregation.

Sheffield wanted to shed light on the context of the schools’ openings. In her 2022 master's thesis at Auburn University, she chronicled Wilcox County’s history of sharecropping, violence against civil rights advocates, and resistance to school integration.

She also documented the many fundraisers white people held to pay for the segregation academies they rushed to open before many Black students arrived at the white public schools. Families forming one academy held a skit night, barbeque, fish fry, bingo party, pet show and pancake supper. The money raised paid for school equipment and salaries “but equally important, it created a new community for its founders, sponsors, and families,” she wrote.

The schools also joined a new group that provided their accreditation and organized sports events. “These academies allowed whites to gain complete control over their children’s education — they no longer had to answer to any form of government but their own,” Sheffield wrote.

Today, she is continuing her research as a doctoral student in history at the University of Mississippi.

“History is very important in understanding how we’ve gotten to where we are today, especially when you look at public schools in rural communities in Alabama,” Sheffield said. Many of these schools are mostly Black, underfunded and struggling. “I want people to understand how it got that way, and the answer usually is segregation academies.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

Gaza solidarity encampments, which started on U.S. college campuses, have now spread worldwide as students call on their educational institutions to divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid and occupation. The uprising echoes the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, when many in civil society called for divestment from companies that profited from South Africa’s system of racial domination. Democracy Now! explored the parallels this week with South African-born novelist and playwright Gillian Slovo, whose parents were legendary anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First. “I have been to the West Bank, and I had a childhood in South Africa. I knew what apartheid looked like,” Slovo says. “When I went to the West Bank, what I saw was apartheid in action.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Image by Hennie Stander.

Probably the stupidest and creepiest thing I’ve run across in all my years as a radical US American socialist and communist is the Trumpenleft. By the Trumpenleft I mean among other things all the very disproportionately white and male left-identified so-called socialists who accused me and other anti-fascist radicals of supposed hysterical Trump Derangement Syndrome and who mocked and otherwise attacked us for making the elementary observation that Donald Trump is a fascist – and who idiotically accused us of being in cahoots with the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats for having the basic historical and social- and political-scientific integrity to identify and call out Trump and Trumpism for what they are: fascist.

I’ve dedicated three or four book chapters and numerous essays and interviews to showing exactly how and why Trump, Trumpism, the Trump base, the Trump presidency, and now the Trump ex-presidency are fascist. Not “populist.” Not merely “conservative.” Not simply “extremist.” Nationalist but not just nationalist. Nativist but not merely nativist. Racist but not merely racist. Sexist but not only sexist. Authoritarian but not just authoritarian. No, all of that and more. Fascist, cultist, and eliminationist, potentially genocidal if you ask me, determined to overthrow what’s left of bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law and to substitute for the rule of law the rule of raw power and men in the ironic name of law and order.

All I want to discuss here in this short essay is an especially menacing speech that Trump gave to the evangelical Christian fascist Faith and Freedom Conference last June 24, the one-year anniversary of the female-re-enslaving Dobbs v Jackson decision handed down by the far-right Supreme Court that Trump did so much to create.

This speech was loaded with all the standard paranoid-style menace and Orwellian, Hitlerian, truth-eviscerating falsehood one should expect when this orange-hued neo-Nazi addresses his Christian white nationalist cultists. The Malignant One preposterously claimed that the devoutly Catholic Joe Biden was anti-religious, and that Biden is persecuting Christians. The wannabe fascist strongman Trump alleged that the “radical Left” and globalist “deep state,” headed by supposed Marxists like Biden and Merrick Garland, was trying to crucify him. The Mar a Lago maniac promised to revive the sadistic nativist policy of separating children from their parents at the southern US border. The tangerine-tinted tyrant said he would repeal US birthright citizenship, something that would require suspension of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment – an openly dictatorial ambition.

The multiply accused rapist Trump took credit, to loud Christian fascist applause, for ending women’s half-century constitutional right to an abortion. He ridiculously referred to his corporate Democratic Party enemies as both Marxists and fascists, as if those two categories don’t cancel each other out and as if they haven’t long been lethally opposed to each other (please register that, Trumpenleft) – and, of course as if he himself is not an actual fascist.

Then he said some shit that caught even me by surprise. He proclaimed that if he is re-elected he will order the Department of Homeland Security to conduct mass deportations of left-wing people, citizens and non-citizens alike. “At the end of the day,” Trump bellowed, “either the Communists destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.” Using apocalyptic language taken from his hero Adolf Hitler, Trump said “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists. We are headed toward communism,” Trump said, adding that “There’s never been a period of time like that in our country’s history. And that’s the way communism starts. And we can’t let it happen.” (Spoken like a man whose onetime mentor was Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel Roy Cohn.)

Trump raised the holy need to purge socialists and communists from the United States to the center of his campaign for re-election and, as he says again and again now, for retribution.

He called for mass deportations of immigrants with left-wing views: “Using federal law, section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists. Those who come to join our country must love our country…we’re going to be keeping foreign Christian-hating communists, socialists and Marxists out of America. We’re keeping them out of America.”

But Trump went beyond this, adding that his campaign would also seek to expel US citizens for their political views. “Today I’m announcing a new plan to protect the integrity of our immigration system,” Trump said. “Federal law prohibits the entry of communists and totalitarians into the United States” – a technically accurate statement, by the way. “But,” Trump added, “my question is, what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here?”

The Faith and Freedom audience rose in a chorus in response to Trump’s question, chanting “Deport them! Deport them!,” the Christian fascist audience screamed.

“I think,” Trump said, “we have to pass a new law for them.”

Yes, you heard that correctly, “the ones that are already here, that grew up here.”

I don’t want to make things overly personal, but, well, that’s me: US-American born and US-American raised Marxist/socialist/communist and it’s also pretty much everybody I’ve ever considered a good friend and a significant other since early adulthood. Well, maybe not communists but often communists and always at least socialists or some other kind of anti-capitalist.

Many of the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing Jimmy Dore-fan Trumpenleft dopes I’ve been arguing with over the last six years call themselves “Marxists” (which I always find amusing). So, my good pink-brown Trumpenleft friends, if you are serious about being some kind of left radical like you say you are, guess what? The guy you’ve been telling me not to get “deranged” about says he wants to deport you!

It’s a shame more Germans didn’t get Hitler Derangement Syndrome in the 1930s.

Think about all this. I’m guessing that many of the folks who read me and listen to me here and at The Paul Street Report are very likely yourself some kind of socialist, maybe even a communist and that you like me grew up in the United States, love apple pie and ice cream. Some of you like me cherish American-made creations like jazz, the blues, rock and roll, baseball, basketball, the US national parks, the Indiana Dunes, Jones Beach, Chavez Ravine, the Philadelphia Philharmonic, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Dr. King, Charlie Parker, Cornel West, Harriet Arnow, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Rachel Carson, my junior high crush Mary Tyler Moore. I could go on.

Get this through your head: the Trumpist movement says it wants to eliminate us from US soil. And trust me eliminationism is not restricted to deportation. It has another method: incarceration and mass murder.

And, oh by the way, something for Democrats to bear in mind. Trumpism-fascism regularly calls you socialists and Marxists. And guess what? Your very un-Marxist and militantly capitalist party is the other reigning major party with actual power in the US today and because of that the Trump base wants to politically and perhaps physically eliminate you first. So don’t act like “oh all this eliminationist talk is just something for the crazy radical Paul Streets of the world to worry about.” No sir, comrade, you are first; you’re up first.

It was communists and socialists first into the political concentration camps in Nazi Germany, into Dachau in 1933, but that was a time and place when actual Marxist movements were much more significant and powerful than they are in the USA today.

Whoever might go to the camps and/or deportation docks first, this would be a good time to get serious about the real nature of the eliminationist and retributionist and hate-filled Republi-fascist Party. When merely half-liberal books are being pulled off shelves by Christian white nationalists, when fascist state legislatures are mandating white nationalist and patriarchal history-teaching, when a Christian fascist US Supreme Court shreds the nation’s own merely bourgeois and already right-tilted constitution in order to openly restore traditional patriarchal and white supremacist hierarchy in blatantly arch-authoritarian ways, when a nation is full of fascists and saturated with firearms, it’s a good time to remember the old Martin Niemoller quote:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

As I have pointed out on this platform, the left slogan “the people united will never be defeated” is kind of dumb. The people can unite all they want against fascism, capitalism and imperialism but if they don’t take and wield state power against those things and for a new revolutionary socialist society they will be defeated again and again. That said, the inverse is one hundred percent true: the people divided and atomized and indifferent to each other’s fate will be defeated and worse – decimated. Unity and solidarity matter a great deal in response to the very real fascist threat.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

Amazon’s plastic packaging “is a problem for the world’s waterways and oceans, and it’s an issue they need to be prioritizing,” said Dana Miller, Oceana’s director of strategic initiatives and an author of the report. If all the company’s plastic from 2021 were converted into plastic air pillows — the inflated pouches inserted in some Amazon packages to reduce shifting during transit — and laid side by side, Miller said it would circle the globe more than 800 times.

As the largest retailer on the planet, Amazon goes through a lot of plastic. It ships 7.7 billion packages around the world each year, often using plastic air pillows, bags, and protective sleeves to cushion products during transit. Environmental advocates say these are some of the worst kinds of plastics: They can’t be recycled, and their light weight makes them prone to drifting into the oceans, where they kill more large marine mammals than any other kind of ocean debris. As the plastics break down, they not only leach harmful chemicals but can also bind with new ones in the environment, posing toxicity risks to the mussels, oysters, whales, and other animals that unintentionally ingest them.

This plastic “is not a friendly visitor to the oceans,” Miller said. Her organization estimated that 26 million pounds of Amazon’s plastic waste from 2021 will eventually end up in the world’s oceans, rivers, and other aquatic ecosystems. 

Plastics also cause harm during the production phase, emitting greenhouse gases and posing environmental justice concerns. Petrochemical facilities that make plastics tend to be sited near disproportionately low-income communities and communities of color,  exposing them to hazardous chemicals that are linked to cancer, respiratory disease, and neurological problems. 

Historically, the tricky part about holding Amazon accountable for plastic pollution has been its secrecy around the issue. The company has repeatedly declined to disclose its plastic packaging use, even after investors owning nearly 50 percent of Amazon’s shares voted in favor of a shareholder resolution demanding it. Conrad MacKerron, senior vice president of the shareholder advocacy group that filed the resolution, As You Sow, said Amazon has ignored his organization since the vote last May. “It’s really appalling behavior from a company like this,” he told Grist.

It wasn’t until this week, two days before Oceana’s report came out, that Amazon offered its own estimate for its plastic packaging footprint. In a blog post, the company said it used about 214 million pounds of single-use plastic packaging to ship orders to customers in 2021 — less than one-third the amount Oceana calculated.

Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, said this is because Amazon’s estimate only accounts for plastic packaging used for orders sent through Amazon-owned and operated fulfillment centers — which account for an undisclosed fraction of Amazon’s total sales. Oceana’s estimate, by contrast, considers all sales facilitated by Amazon, including those fulfilled through third-party sellers. 

Amazon’s reported figure “is not directly comparable to Oceana’s estimate,” Littlejohn said in a statement. To make its calculation, Oceana used publicly available data on the amount of plastic packaging waste from e-commerce in countries representing Amazon’s top nine markets and Amazon’s market share in those countries. Assuming that Amazon’s market share is correlated with its use of plastic packaging, Oceana multiplied the two numbers together, concluding that the retailer used about 709 million pounds of plastic packaging in 2021.

“Until Amazon is fully transparent on its company-wide use of plastic packaging,” Littlejohn continued in his statement, Oceana’s calculation “is the best available estimate of the company’s total plastic footprint.”

MacKerron, with As You Sow, echoed Oceana’s concerns and noted that Amazon’s blog post still does not address requests for the company to set quantitative plastic-reduction targets. Instead, it speaks in broad terms and highlights two initiatives where Amazon is replacing single-use plastics with paper alternatives, one of which was first announced three years ago.

Other solutions proffered by Amazon — like educating consumers about waste management and funding more plastic collection infrastructure — lean on plastics recycling, which experts say will never scale up to become a viable solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Virtually no U.S. curbside recycling programs accept the kind of plastic that goes into Amazon’s plastic packaging, meaning most of it must be dumped into landfills or incinerated. Amazon tries to get around this by encouraging customers to deposit packaging at “store drop-off” collection points for plastic film, which is ostensibly then picked up and recycled, but experts believe these programs are a “charade.” Not even 6 percent of Amazon users say they use them, and Oceana’s own investigation into 186 of the U.S. and U.K. drop-off locations that Amazon promotes on its website revealed that at least 41 percent don’t actually accept Amazon’s plastic packaging.

Environmental advocates say Amazon is capable of much more to reduce plastic waste, as evidenced by steps the company has already taken in other countries. In response to a plastic elimination policy in India, Amazon says it replaced all of its single-use plastics there. For orders originating from the EU, where the European Commission has proposed plastic reduction requirements for e-commerce, Amazon has said it no longer uses single-use plastic bags, pouches, or air cushions.

In the U.S., environmental advocates hope legislation enacted in California earlier this year could catalyze action from Amazon. The statewide Plastic Pollution Producer Responsibility Act will require companies operating in California to slash the amount of plastic they produce and sell by at least 25 percent between 2023 and 2032. Because California represents about 15 percent of the U.S. economy, Amazon is expected to follow the law nationwide rather than develop separate protocols for the Golden State.

Still, Oceana wants Amazon to preempt these policies and reduce plastics voluntarily. “It’s the right thing to do,” Miller said. Her organization is calling on Amazon to make a company-wide commitment to reduce its worldwide plastic packaging one-third below 2022 levels by 2030 — in addition to releasing public reports on its total plastic use. 

According to MacKerron, these asks are “quite mild,” given the hundreds of other companies — including corporations that generate huge amounts of plastic waste, like Unilever and Mondelez — that have long disclosed their total plastic packaging use and have set targets to reduce it. (They may be failing to meet those targets, but their actions suggest Amazon could publish a quantitative target if it wanted to.) A new shareholder resolution filed by As You Sow on Tuesday says Amazon is “falling behind its peers.”

Oceana’s final demand is for Amazon to account for and reduce the climate impact and plastics footprint of all the products it sells on its website. An investigation published earlier this year revealed that Amazon’s pledge to achieve net-zero climate pollution by 2040 counts life cycle emissions only for products with an Amazon brand label, which account for just 1 percent of the company’s online sales. Miller said it’s imperative that Amazon correct this error and not replicate it in the plastic-reduction policy that Oceana is asking for.

“Amazon should take responsibility for the full climate impact of all products sold through its website and all packaging used to ship these sales,” Oceana says in its report. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amazon’s plastic packaging waste grew 18% in 2021, report says on Dec 15, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Marine Martirosyan.