Prosecuting Politics

Organizing in extremis is the name of the game this issue. (There are also lesbian monsters and gay detectives, Puerto Rican plantains and hive mind TV, but more on the pleasures that sustain us below.)

As we got ready to close, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines. He had been prosecuted on terrorism charges along with anti-fascist activists who protested the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Texas last year, and the box was evidence. Other protesters received 100 years, 70 years, or are still waiting to learn their fates. Meanwhile, Representative LaMonica McIver, the Black woman representing New Jersey’s Tenth Congressional District, is facing a possible 17 years in prison after being charged by the Department of Justice with assaulting federal officers outside Delaney Hall, the notorious ICE detention center in Newark.

The message of all this is quite clear: Protest, oppose right-wing administrations, or just be a Black person, and we will show you who’s in charge. This is fascism in the American style, so it’s bathed in a white supremacy that evokes not the 1970s, maybe not even the 1950s, but the 1870s, when white Southerners responded to the post-Civil War Reconstruction period — during which Black people organized politically and gained elected office — with a campaign of lynchings and terrorism and the eventual elevation of white politicians and prosecutors who made justice into a laughable name for the legalized brutality that happened in Southern courtrooms and jails. When we see Feds tackling Senator Alex Padilla or arresting McIver and Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor, we’re meant to be afraid — it means there is no status that can protect you. When we see the Prairieland defendants, most of them young, being locked up forever, we know that we’re not facing a threat, but a promise. In this issue, LG Fadiman and Eva Rosenfeld take up the Prairieland case directly, contrasting it with that of the Stop Cop City defendants in Atlanta, who have used novel defense strategies to challenge their prosecution under RICO laws originally designed for the mob.

In another important piece, editor Cheryl Rivera considers what it means to work politically under this kind of threat. She writes about the ways in which the prisons can be incorporated into our organizing terrain, no longer seen as places of social death, but as places where movement work is alive and well. We might have to go there, so what will we do there? New York City is in a state of ecstasy as we write this (our socialist mayor just celebrated the Knicks’ comeback by calling for rent control next to Jalen Brunson), but picking at the edges of any collective happiness is threat — ICE is at large, and only months ago, the NYPD slammed city council member Chi Ossé to the ground while he protested an eviction. Zohran Mamdani may be in charge, they seemed to say, but not in charge of us.

I’d like to take a moment to call attention to a narrative that I find mystifying: Why aren’t young people protesting? I was recently invited by the New York Times Opinion section to discuss this topic on a podcast, which I declined to do in solidarity with the Writers Against the War on Gaza boycott. The political slackness of the youths was the subject of more than one op-ed, and clearly of great concern to the masthead. The premise makes no sense. College kids protested the war on Gaza at their schools, in intelligent, focused campaigns for divestment. They were expelled, arrested, doxxed, and targeted for deportation — and condemned by the New York Times. After protesting an actual internment camp, the Prairieland defendants may live out their lives behind bars. The price of dissent is very high today. It’s frightening to grapple with this instead of just blaming the kids, but if one does, it should shake any assumptions about the “right” way to do politics. As Cheryl notes in her essay, if we truly care for one another, isn’t that measured in the risks we’re willing to take?

This issue is packed with good stuff by some of our favorite writers who are not afraid of the risky questions. In our reviews, Laura Jedeed skewers military manhood, Jordan Taliha McDonald considers Kimberlé Crenshaw’s place in the culture wars, and Sarah Schulman debates who’s to blame for the loss of abortion rights. Davey Davis unpacks hormone hysteria at the New York Times. An exceptional piece by Anupa Mistry reports on Sudan’s international solidarity committees, which collaborate with neighborhood-level groups to supply Sudanese people with wartime food and support. That spirit of transformation can also be found in Grace Cho’s moving dispatch from South Korea, where feminists are fighting to preserve a monument to the abuse of sex workers; in Mariam Rahmani’s restoration of the defiant politics of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad; in Camonghne Felix’s revisiting of the Black tradition of call-and-response. And there’s much, much more.