Spring 2017 United States of America Office of the MEMORANDUM Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy An Movement for Black Lives _____ black vision __________________________________________________ __ _ _____________ ____________________________________________________ ____________________ _______________ _ _________________________ _ _____________________________________ “black revolution” ___ ______ ___ _ An HKS Student Publication The Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy is a student publication at the Harvard Kennedy School. All views expressed in the journal are those of the authors or interviewees only and do not represent the views of Harvard University, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the staff of the Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy or any of its affiliates. © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Except as otherwise specified, no article or portion herein is to be reproduced or adapted to other works without the expressed written consent of the editors of the Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy. ISSN# 1081-0463 Table of Contents Editor’s Note Trayvon, Rest in Power 5 by Derecka Purnell 17 by Sara Trail Teaching the M4BL Policy Platform Movement Movement for Black Black Lives Matter and 9 Lives Policy 18 the Law Roundtable by Justin Hansford M4BL Policy Platform, Law, Protests, and 12 English 22 Social Movements: A Syllabus by Amanda Alexander M4BL Policy Platform, A Radical Education 14 Spanish 31 Platform for the 21st Century by Tressie McMillan Cottom and Angela An- gulo The American Dream A Call to End School 16 by Alyssa Thach 37 Privatization by Alexis Morgan 2 Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy 2017 E11, Protect and Serve? My Blood Is in the Soil Disability Solidarity: 40 by Yosief Teckle 57 by Laura Madriz 69 Completing the ‘Vision for Black Lives’ by the Harriet Tubman Collective E14, Mass Incarceration I Am Not My Clothes Honoring Arnaldo Rios 41 by Ashley Morris and 58 by Carina Cabriales 73 Soto and Charles Kinsey: Mailan Carr Achieving Liberation through Disability Solidarity by Talila Lewis Standing at the 79 Intersection of Race and Disability The Scope of the The Margins of the by Kerima Çevik Platform Margins From #BlackLivesMatter The Hidden Cost of The 1%ers 43 to Black Liberation: 59 Money Bail: 82 by Alonso Saenz An Interview with How Money Bail Harms Professor Keeanga- Black Women Yamahtta Taylor by Gina Clayton, Taina by Aya Saed and Alessandra Vargas-Edmond, and Tanea Brown Lunsford Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Inequality 4 All Gentrification: 50 by Bryan Robinson 67 by Yareli Martinez 83 An American Nightmare by Juan Tapia Hard Times Like, “God!” Education: The Only 51 Reparations in the 68 Way Out Movement for Black by Jamia Williams Lives by Quinn Rallins Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy 2017 3 Editorial Staff Derecka Purnell Aaron Francis Alexis Morgan Anneke Gronke Aya Saed Caleb Gayle Elorm Avakame Malcolm Temple Rae Shih Acknowledgements The editorial board of the Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy would like to thank the following individuals for their generous support and contributions to the publication of this issue: Movement for Black Lives Policy Table Richard Parker, Faculty Advisor Martha Foley, Publisher Tracy Campbell, Copy Editor Monique Z. Osius, Graphic & Layout Designer Basil Kincaid, Cover Art Dean Karen Weaver, Senior Associate Dean for Degree Programs & Student Affairs Degree Programs Douglas Elmendorf, Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Govern- ment 4 Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy 2017 Editor’s Note I grew up in South St. Louis. My neighborhood mostly consisted of poor, Black Americans and East African refugees. Ethiopians gave food to my family that I now pay an embarrassingly bourgeois amount to eat in D.C. Before Edward Snowden, boys in my hood served as whistleblowers, noting which cops watched us walk to the candy lady who sold snow cones out of her trunk at the playground. Mechanics -- with their pliers -- sometimes doubled for dentists because most of us could not afford dental insurance. El- ders loaned their vehicles to large families when the last grocery store in the neighborhood closed. Churches ran Freedom School programs out of their basements. Chinese restaurant owners would give boxes of rice on credit. We took care of each other. I do not wish to romanticize my hood. However, I want to demonstrate how policy in the trap is responsive to the failures of the state. The Movement for Black Lives Policy Table (also known as M4BL or Policy Table) names many of those failures and seeks to concretize some of that policy. This is the twenty-third edition of the Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy. In 2015, my predecessor, Deloris Wilson, called for a “continued discourse and informed strategic action,” so that we may “bear witness to the import of the Black Lives Matter movement.” This year, our partnership with the M4BL Policy Table answered: black vision. black revolution. Black vision is full of struggle and imagination. Marcus Garvey mobilized a pan-Africanist movement to the motherland. Fannie Lou Hamer champi- oned democratic inclusion and partic- ipation. We can learn from the range of our resistance in order to disrupt the status quo and pursue freedom I do not wish to dreams. Black revolution is a commit- ment to challenging our oppressors, romanticize my hood. changing our conditions, and choos- ing to becoming a better person- and However, I want to people- while we navigate the terrain. In this particular moment, our rev- olution requires relentless solidarity demonstrate how policy in with people who are eradicating class oppression, white supremacy, patri- the trap is responsive to archy, homoantagonism, genocide, environmental destruction, religious the failures of the state. intolerance, ableism, and arbitrary state violence against the people and other nations. The M4BL Policy Roundtable introduces our issue. This group describes the process that created the Vision for Black Lives Platform that dropped last summer. All of its contributors are grounded in the interdisciplinary work of the Black Lives Matter movement, spanning law, policy, media, ministry, and grassroots organizing. Their hope? That “others can continue to build on the long history of liberation movements that we understood as our inheritance.” Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy 2017 5 Sara Trail presents the work of the Social Justice Sewing Academy, a pro- gram that she designed for high school students to create art, as storytelling throughout the journal. Her artivist students not only sew to life Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, and Eric Garner, but also offer critiques of immigration, capitalism, gender discrimination, mass incarceration, and gentrification. The Academy imagines a world free of oppression. Legal scholars Amanda Alexander and Justin Hansford offer syllabi on social movements. Hansford uses Black Lives Matter and the Law to provide a foundation of the current move- ment through contemporary texts, tweets, and platforms. Alexander In this particular moment, gifts us a prophetic introduction, syllabus, and a radical, multime- our revolution requires dia social movement political education that places the current relentless solidarity with Movement for Black Lives in broad and historical social movements to people who are eradicating transform the world. Writer and scholar Tressie Mc- class oppression, white Millan Cottom brings us from the syllabus and into the classroom, supremacy, patriarchy, naming the Vision for Black Lives Platform as a radical education homoantagonism, genocide, platform for our time. Cottom nav- igates the racial history and legacy of education in the United States, environmental destruction, as well as Black folks’ efforts to link such a landscape to resistance and religious intolerance, liberation. ThePlatform’s critique of education privatization, she argues, ableism, and arbitrary state undergirds broader economic, social, and penal woes that M4BL violence against the people seeks to address. Alexis Morgan uses current po- and other nations. litical events and the Trump ad- ministration to further address the privatization of education that is found in society and named in the M4BL Policy Platform. Aya Saed and Alessandra Brown interview Princeton Professor Keeanga-Ya- mahtta Taylor and review her book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Libera- tion, a required reading for any student of today’s movement. The review and interview grapple with whether the M4BL is a policy platform, or, a call for society to transform beyond legislative and political means. Reparations is often a freedom dream or an oppressor’s nightmare. Quinn Rallins provides a historical account of the legal and grassroots organizing efforts to secure reparations post slavery and insists that this M4BL demand is possible, despite social and legal challenges. Gina Clayton, Taina Vargas-Edmond, and Tanea Lunsford of the Essie Justice Group push us into the policy realm of the Platform, describing substantive 6 Harvard Kennedy School Journal of African American Public Policy 2017 criminal justice bail reforms that destructively impact Black women as pris- oners, rather than collaterally as girlfriends, sisters, daughters, and