2026-02-08 01:11:53
President Donald Trump’s legal team submitted false information to the Supreme Court in his ongoing legal battle against author E. Jean Carroll—who he was found liable for sexually assaulting in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996—according to documents reviewed by Mother Jones.
Justin D. Smith, Trump’s lawyer in the case, misrepresented the plot of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in a November 2025 petition to the court. Trump, along with some of his supporters, has for years claimed that Carroll’s account of him raping and sexually assaulting her was copied from the 2012 SVU episode.
Friends of Carroll confirm she told them about Trump’s assault years before the episode was filmed.
Trump is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a $5 million judgment from 2023, when a federal jury held that he sexually abused Carroll and then defamed her. (A separate $83.3 million defamation judgement against him from 2024 is not directly at issue, but could be in the future if the Court sides with Trump.) The justices’ are scheduled to review Trump’s petition on February 20.
In the Supreme Court petition, Smith describes the episode as featuring “a business mogul” who “fantasizes about raping a victim in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.” He writes that the “plotline is virtually identical to the false allegations that Carroll launched against President Trump.”
In the episode from season 13, entitled “Theatre Tricks,” there is a small plotline about a sexual encounter in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. But the man involved is a prominent New York City judge, not, as Smith claimed, a “business mogul.” And what happened in the dressing room, which is discussed but not shown in the episode, was pre-planned and by all accounts consented to. A person with knowledge of how the SVU episode came together told CNN in 2019 that there’s “no correlation—none whatsoever” between “Theatre Tricks” and Carroll’s allegations against Trump. Carroll has repeatedly denied she made up her allegation based on the episode. At least two friends of Carroll have confirmed the author told them about the assault shortly after it took place and years before the episode was filmed or broadcast.
Smith did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on the false information included in the petition. Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer in the case, also did not respond to a request for comment.
The Rules of the Supreme Court say that petitioners must present information with “accuracy, brevity, and clarity.” Failure to do so, per Rule 14.4, “is sufficient reason for the Court to deny a petition.” It is unclear if Trump’s lawyer knowingly included inaccurate information or failed to confirm the details of the episode in question.
The plot of “Theatre Tricks” involves a struggling young actress who seeks out sex work on a sugar daddy website, where she meets a judge who she helps fulfill a “stranger rape fantasy” that involves invading a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room while a woman tries on lingerie. It is one of over 550 SVU episodes spread across more than two dozen seasons containing hundreds of different examples of sexual violence—from harassment all the way to murder. The dressing room meet-up with the judge is mentioned for less than one minute in “Theatre Tricks,” which centers on a separate, nonconsensual sexual assault experienced by another character.
Carroll’s first public account of what happened with Trump in that dressing room around three decades ago came in a 2019 New York magazine article, excerpting her upcoming book. She detailed running into Trump when he asked her to advise him on a gift for, as she quoted him, “a girl.” They went around the store before he led them to the lingerie section, she wrote.
What unfolded next, as Carroll has since described many times, was Trump leading her into the dressing room, lunging at her, pushing her against the wall, pulling down her tights, using his fingers on her sexually, and penetrating her with his penis. Carroll wrote that she was eventually able to push him off and run out.
Carroll later sued Trump in 2022 for sexual battery and for defaming her by denying it through New York’s Adult Survivors Act. While Carroll has maintained that Trump used his fingers and penis in the assault, the jury, which ultimately awarded her $5 million, stopped short of finding Trump liable for rape under penile penetration. They found that Trump had “forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” according to District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case.
The legal definition for rape differs by state and, at the time, New York’s law required penile penetration. (In January 2024, New York broadened its rape law to include other kinds of nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact.) Despite that, Judge Kaplan wrote in 2023 that the jury’s decision “does not mean” that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Trump has consistently denied the claims, saying over the years that Carroll is a “nut job,” “mentally sick,” and “not my type.” He has posted on social media more than 100 times about her accusations.
Smith’s faulty description of the SVU episode was detailed by David Boyle, a California lawyer with a habit of filing amicus briefs on major Supreme Court cases. In his early January submission in support of Carroll, Boyle writes of “Trump’s disrespect for rape victims,” and calls out how the president’s filling “makes up a television-show character, or at least the character’s profession, to discredit Carroll.”
Why did Boyle write the brief? “It’s a famous case, and I don’t like rapists,” he says, “even if it’s quote-unquote ‘just’ a digital rapist,” dryly noting Judge Kaplan’s holding about penetration.
“This is the Supreme Court. People are supposed to be on good behavior, their best behavior, and do things in good faith,” Boyle says. “He’s the president. We’re paying him a salary to be president. He’s supposed to be—laugh as you will, knowing who he is—a role model.”
Boyle’s amicus brief was one of five submitted to the court. The other four are in support of Donald Trump and his argument that certain evidence used in the previous trial was inadmissible. Those briefs do not mention the SVU episode.
Trump, members of his legal teams, and some of his supporters have called on the SVU episode for years while attempting to discredit Carroll.
Within days of Carroll’s account originally being published in New York, a short clip from “Theatre Tricks” started circulating online. “Looks like that lunatic E. Jean Caroll got the idea about getting ‘raped’ by Trump in a dressing room at Burgdorfs while trying on lingerie from an episode of Law and Order SVU,” Mark Dice, a right-wing commentator with nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers, asserted. David J. Harris Jr, now host of The Pulse on Newsmax, wrote a post entitled, “Proof That Trump Accuser is a Fraud…Story Came From Law and Order SVU.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also amplified the claim on his website InfoWars. Even Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, retweeted the clip, according to a CNN report from 2019.
During Carroll’s 2023 civil trial against Trump, his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, brought up the episode. While testifying in that trial, Carroll’s lawyer Michael Ferrara asked her if she was “making up your allegation based on a popular TV show?”
“No,” Carroll responded. “No.”
2026-02-08 00:20:14
Vice President JD Vance, standing alongside Second Lady Usha Vance, was met with a chorus of boos at Friday’s Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan. As team USA entered San Siro Stadium, the crowd cheered—but that was cut short when the Vances came on the big screen.
As the New York Times reported, “Their appearance on the screens lasted for only a few seconds,” but the boos “were audible despite the loud music playing for the parade.”
Hours before the ceremony, hundreds of protestors took part in a student-led demonstration against the presence of US immigration agents at the winter games. Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations team are in Milan to “vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organizations,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has said that the ICE personnel in the country “are not operational agents.” Protestors called for the removal of ICE, along with Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also attending, from the games.
When asked about Vance’s icy welcome on Air Force One, President Donald Trump said it was “surprising.”
“Is that true? That’s surprising because people like him,” he said. “I mean, he is in a foreign country in all fairness. He doesn’t get booed in this country.”
Except, Vance has been booed at events multiple times in the US.
While on the campaign trail in August 2024, Vance was booed at a firefighters convention in Boston after claiming that he and Trump were the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” In March, the vice president received screaming boos as he attended a Kennedy Center symphony performance. A few months later, in August, Vance, Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were all heckled and booed in Washington, DC’s Union Station as they went to meet National Guard troops deployed to the city.
At the opening ceremony, some in the crowd noted that the boos appeared to clearly be directed at the Vances—and not at the athletes competing for the US.
“It was quick but noticeable,” wrote Juliette Kayyem, an Obama-era DHS official who is attending the games, of the Vances’ booing. “But,” she continued, “I want to point out that the crowd was loud and supportive when Team USA came out. It was lovely to hear. And quite a juxtaposition.”
2026-02-07 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The year 2010 was a reckoning for Japan’s economic security.
On September 7, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyu 5179 refused an order by Japan’s coast guard to leave disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as Diaoyu. The vessel then rammed two patrol boats, escalating a decades-long territorial feud.
Japan responded by arresting the captain, Zhan Qixiong, under domestic law, a move Beijing considered an unacceptable assertion of Japanese sovereignty. Amid mounting protests in both countries and the collapse of high-level talks, China cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan, which relied upon its geopolitical adversary for 90 percent of its supply. The move reverberated throughout the global economy as companies like Toyota and Panasonic were left without materials crucial to the production of everything from hybrid cars to personal electronics.
It wasn’t long before Japan gave in and let Qixiong go. The crisis, which garnered worldwide attention, became a catalyst for Japan’s push to secure a reliable supply of critical minerals. “That was the turning point,” said Takahiro Kamisuna, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Fifteen years later, that reckoning has only deepened.
China still provides 60 percent of Japan’s critical minerals, a reliance that has grown riskier as Beijing asserts its position as the world’s dominant supplier. Last month, Japan took a bold step to break that dependence when it launched a five-week deep-sea mining test off Minamitorishima Island. A crew of 130 researchers aboard the Chikyu—Japanese for “earth”—will use what is essentially a robotic vacuum cleaner to collect mud from a depth of 6,000 meters, marking the world’s first attempt at prolonged collection of minerals from great depths.
“I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”
Seabed mud off the coast of that uninhabited island, which sits 1,180 miles southeast of Tokyo, is rich in rare earths like neodymium and yttrium—distinct from the potato-shaped polymetallic nodules often associated with marine extraction. Such materials are essential for electric vehicles, solar panels, advanced weapons systems, and other technology.
The expedition, which is expected to end February 14, is being led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, which did not respond to a request for comment. It comes three months after the country signed an agreement with the United States to collaborate on securing a supply of critical minerals. It also propels Japan to the forefront of a growing debate over how far nations should go to secure these materials. Deep-sea mining “is not a new thing,” Kamisuna said, “it’s just gaining more attention mainly because of geopolitical tensions.”
The trawler incident highlighted a vulnerability that successive governments vowed to alleviate. Many criticized then-prime minister Naoto Kan of the country’s center-left party for capitulating to China, but he pledged to never again let Japan’s industrial future hinge on a single supplier. His successor, Shinzo Abe of the center-right party, was more aggressive and saw critical minerals as not just an economic issue, but a matter of national security that must be addressed even if it meant exploiting the deep sea.
Establishing a domestic supply could help Japan reach its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, a high priority for Yoshihide Suga, who succeeded Abe. Although Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, an Abe protégé who assumed office late last year, supports the 2050 timeline, she has said the transition must not risk Japan’s industrial competitiveness and energy stability.
Takaichi has proposed slashing subsidies for large-scale solar projects or batteries, largely because so much of that technology is imported from China. Instead, she has hailed nuclear power as the path toward carbon neutrality. With the mining experiment unfolding in the Pacific, Takaichi hopes to secure a strategic reserve of minerals to protect key industries.
But Japan doesn’t face an either-or choice, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. “Energy security and energy transition are closely tied,” she said.
“To me, it’s much more about the pace, not so much the direction,” said Nakano, who has worked for the US Department of Energy and for the energy attaché at the US embassy in Tokyo. “I don’t find Takaichi’s way of framing this dual challenge—energy security and decarbonization—unique to Japan. A lot of G7 countries are starting to recalibrate again, so they do have to think about international competitiveness. Direction-wise, [Japan] is just aligning itself with the political establishment and the industry.”
Unlike China, Japan lacks the sedimentary geology associated with rare earth deposits, requiring it to look toward the waters within its exclusive economic zones. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Japan has the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, which includes the atoll island of Minamitorishima.
Although the minerals to be found there lie nearly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, proponents of digging them up argue the challenge of extracting them and the cost of refining them is justified by mounting geopolitical tension. With Takaichi’s recent political jabs at Beijing, China has begun choking off its exports to Japan. Nakano said Japanese officials seem “confident” in the outcome of the experiment. “They’ve determined that it merits to have this demonstration of technologies and equipment this time around,” she said.
Japan’s foray into deep-sea mining comes amid mounting concern about the ecological cost of such technology. Scientists and environmental groups warn that marine extraction is racing ahead of our understanding of the impacted ecosystems. They are particularly concerned about sediment plumes, noise and light pollution, and damage to habitats and food webs, noting that scars left by equipment could render the seafloor uninhabitable for decades, even centuries.
“A tiny little nudge, and the whole seafloor is disturbed,” said Travis Washburn, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He studies deep-sea environments and human impacts on marine ecosystems, and he has analyzed the waters around Minamitorishima Island and represented Japan at International Seabed Authority workshops. He believes that mining rare earths from mud could have the same impact as mining nodules. “I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”
Government officials insist the ecological impacts will be closely monitored. But assessing them could be difficult, because the seafloor around the island, home to sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, and potentially rare endemic species—remains the subject of intense study. Scientists fear these ecosystems may be permanently altered before anyone assesses them. As with many extractive industries, Washburn noted, technology is often deployed before anyone fully understands its environmental impacts.
Shigeru Tanaka, deputy director general of the Pacific Asia Resource Center, is an outspoken critic of deep-sea mining. He argues that the industry as a whole disregards international law and that exploiting the seafloor will harm fisheries and trample upon the rights of Pacific Islanders who consider the sea as sacred. (The Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands have raised such concerns in opposing Trump administration plans to open the waters there to mining.) He also believes that some of the experts involved in Japan’s project “are not really taking seriously the risks to the environment and how irreversible it may be.”
Even some government officials have expressed concern. Yoshihito Doi of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy has said Japan should mine only “if we can establish a robust system that properly takes environmental impacts into account.”
It remains unclear what exactly is unfolding beneath the waves during this current test, but based upon his experience working with the Japanese government on similar research, Washburn said the top priority will be assessing whether the technology works. Researchers also will monitor how much material the system can hold and if the machinery can keep the sea mud contained without releasing a massive sediment plume on the seafloor or in the water column.
If Japan can successfully deploy a 6,000-meter pipe that can suck up 35 metric tons of mud under extreme pressure—about 8,700 pounds per square inch, or 600 times the pressure at sea level—government officials say a broader trial, which may include polymetallic nodules, could begin in February 2027.
One longer-term goal is to develop what’s called “hybrid mining.” Because deep-sea polymetallic nodules sit atop the rare-earth mud around Minamitorishima Island, researchers are exploring whether both could be collected and separated in a single operation.
Kamisuna said Japan faces another challenge: The energy needed to acquire and refine a stockpile. “If we want to create a sufficient reserve for rare earth [minerals], either using domestic or export, a large amount of electricity is required,” he said. “And the question is, What are we going to use, liquified natural gas or coal? What is the environmental cost?”
Using more environmentally friendly methods of extraction and processing can be expensive, he said—which is one reason many countries turn to China as a cheaper option.
For now, Japan’s deep-sea mining experiment seems to have drawn little public opposition at home, unlike in the United States and Australia where environmental activists and Indigenous communities have pushed back against such operations, particularly around the Pacific Islands. In the meantime, the country’s test moves forward, even as the implications of success, and questions about its long-term impact, remain unresolved.
“We are not prepared,” Tanaka said. “My personal take is that by the time we are ready, when the technology and the science is set, I really do not think there would be a demand for it.”
2026-02-07 16:01:00
In a Minnesota town outside the Twin Cities, Emily is a nurse who treats many immigrant patients. She can’t locate a patient who just had a test result that shows they might have cancer. The patient was recently detained by ICE; situations like these have forced the clinic to adapt, making house calls and triaging care.
“I’d love to know how well somebody’s kidneys are functioning today,” Emily said, but “I’m gonna wait till three months because I don’t want them to come in for a lab appointment that’s not critical.”
Emily is one of many Minnesotans mounting a quiet, secretive resistance to the Trump administration’s hard-nosed and often violent immigration agenda. Across the state, neighbors are helping neighbors and communities are building grassroot systems to support immigrant families.
This week on Reveal, our Minnesotan reporters Nate Halverson and Artis Curiskis report on how Minnesota is teaching the country to resist federal agents who have arrested children, killed citizens in the street, and pepper-sprayed high schoolers.
2026-02-07 11:25:38
On a frigid Thursday afternoon in late January, in a now-viral video, employees at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park were captured removing interpretive signs about slavery posted at the President’s House Site—where George Washington and John Adams both lived, and where Washington enslaved nine people.
The outdoor exhibit, installed in 2010 after years of advocacy by Black activists and historians, was intended to acknowledge the glaring contradiction between the nation’s founding ideals of freedom, equality and democracy and the brutal system of slavery it maintained. When a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter asked one of the park employees why the signs were being removed, he replied, “I’m just following orders.”
Months after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump directed national parks and museums to root out “divisive, race-centered ideology,” specifically targeting Independence Hall—where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were adopted—in preparation for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“We’re living in a time…where people are really trying to constrain what we learn,” said Brian Jones, an author, longtime educator in New York City public schools and senior director of reading and engagement at the New York Public Library. “Sometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the sensors come along and remind us how powerful they are.”
After nearly a decade as an elementary school teacher, Jones earned a doctorate in urban education at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research there on “a really explosive chapter in Black education history,” the 1968 student uprising at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute—which Jones’ father attended—would become the subject of his first book and propel him to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, first as a scholar-in-residence and later as staff. The more Jones studied Black history, the more he came to believe that Black history was for everyone—the title of his latest book, published with Haymarket Books.
As America nears its semiquincentennial, February also marks 100 years of Black history commemorations, a tradition started by the historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926 and officially recognized by president Gerald Ford during the 1976 bicentennial.
“We are chastised in moments of democratic advance for wanting too much, for trying to do too many things too fast. It’s usually more that we didn’t go far enough.”
Some sixty years ago, in yet another period of social and political upheaval, the writer James Baldwin delivered an address to teachers in his native New York in which he concluded that the source of the country’s troubles was its own slippery sense of self, built on “a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.”
The role of education in such a time, Baldwin argued, was to produce free-thinkers capable of questioning these myths and willing to challenge society in order to save it. By teaching an inclusive and unvarnished view of history, and creating an opportunity for Black students to see themselves in the classroom, educators could liberate all students, he suggested.
To better understand Black history, the liberatory power of education, and how ideas of race and nation shape American identity, I spoke with Jones in early January about Black History Is for Everyone—a book born out of the belief that Black history is an “invitation to rethink everything,” and that studying it “offers an opportunity to begin to see ourselves, whether you identify as Black or not, in a new way.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
“If history is any guide,” you write, “reconstruction is even more difficult than abolition.” Today, amid the rolling back of so many hard-won freedoms, the dilution of Black political power, and the erasure of Black history, what can we learn from past liberatory struggles about the path to building a more durable and equitable democracy?
I mean, that’s the million-dollar question. The idea that reconstruction is even harder than abolition, as you may recall, is an idea I get straight from [the abolitionist Frederick Douglass] and W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black scholar who wrote a masterful book called Black Reconstruction, against the idea that Reconstruction was a disaster filled with just Black corruption, and Black people shouldn’t have been able to do all the things that they were doing, voting and carrying on: [that] it was just too much, too fast.
What Du Bois teaches us is that after the abolition of slavery, the process of reconstructing the South came to this moment in its most radical phase, when the social order got turned totally upside down, and we had this quite radical experiment in biracial democracy. You had people, Black people, elected to offices at all levels, not just state government, but to the Senate, to the federal legislature. You had, through voting, the creation of amazing new state constitutions, some of which banned racism, created, in at least two cases, interracial schooling—[and] in every case, prohibited racism in saying who could go to what school.
“You have white children, in [Reconstruction], going to school for the first time thanks to the advocacy of their Black neighbors.”
There’s a historian, Manisha Sinha, who writes about it as the beginning of social democracy, in a sense, in the United States. Black people at the lead of this process of building a new society with their allies, the radicals in the Republican Party, begin building, for the first time, free, tax-supported, public institutions that didn’t exist before—schools, hospitals. So you have white children, in many cases, going to school for the first time thanks to the advocacy of their Black neighbors.
What came afterwards, I think it’s helpful to think of it as a counterrevolution. That’s what explains the violence of the Klan—burning down schools, burning down churches, burning crosses on people’s lawns, lynching people, terrorizing elected officials, in some cases violently overthrowing elected governments. So it took a lot of violence to turn it all the other way around, and then what we get coming out the other end is a new system of Jim Crow.
Is reconstruction even more difficult than abolition? Is building a durable democratic order more difficult than tearing down something that’s unequal? I think [Douglass] has proved correct that it is more difficult, and that often we are chastised in moments of democratic advance for wanting too much, for trying to do too many things too fast. It’s usually more the case that we didn’t go far enough to secure these democratic changes, and because the changes weren’t thoroughgoing enough, that’s why they become undone.
In the case of Reconstruction, we can see it clearly, because after Lincoln’s assassination, our new president takes a shine to the Confederates and is doing everything in his power to reinstate them. And then that attitude unfortunately becomes the dominant attitude, even among the Republican Party. So instead of squashing white supremacy, instead of making it impossible for the former Confederates to ever raise their heads again, to ever take office again, to ever terrorize anyone again, instead of doing that, they encourage them.
They take their foot off the gas of social change. They back off, allow them to flourish, allow the violence to continue, and the nation is reconciled. There is a new unity between North and South. But it’s sacrificing the project of Black rights and progress and really the project of democracy in the interest of reconciliation. So yeah, we didn’t go far enough.
On the topic of revolution—what about how studying the Haitian Revolution sort of shatters these western notions of freedom and democracy?
“In the grand sweep of human history, nations are new. [We should] ask the question, where did they come from? When did they form? How did they get made?”
This was a real learning curve for me, because I am not Haitian. I don’t speak Creole or read it, so I have tremendous social distance from this history and this event, and so I had to do and continue to do a lot of work to try to learn and understand and especially trying to get closer to Haitian sources, to Haitian authors and Haitian scholars. The more you get closer to the event, the more you realize how earth-shattering it was.
More and more people are on to the idea that this is a really seminal event, that this was a game changer, and putting it up next to the American Revolution is revealing, and the French Revolution, actually. Both of them were revolutions declaring, égalité, fraternité. All men are created equal, all of these very universalistic declarations that are bold. And in both the French and the American cases, they are still keeping people in chains at the same exact time.
The Haitian Revolution, by contrast, is a revolution made by people in chains. It’s the people in chains rising up. And so what’s embarrassing is that the people saying all this universal stuff, not only do they have their own slaves, but then when these people in Haiti rise up and are gaining freedom, the very same kind of liberté that [the French and Americans] are talking about, as soon as it’s happening, they are against it.
First [the enslaved African people are] in a French colony, Saint-Domingue. They rise up to form a new nation. They give it the name [“Ayiti”] that the indigenous people gave to the island, an amazing callback, and they declare in their first constitution the abolition of slavery. That’s the first time anybody does that anywhere in the world in a constitution. That’s amazing.
So the ideas coming out of the Haitian Revolution, the spirit of it, that this individual liberty, that this idea of liberty, that this idea of everyone being free, that we’re not going to have slavery anymore, that all of these ideas apply to the African diaspora, which is the test of universalism. Does it apply to these human beings over here? Haiti passes that test, and American and French Revolutions fail it.
You also write about “the silence of the archives,” and how difficult it can be to access the views of Black revolutionaries in historical documents that are mostly authored and maintained by their oppressors. How can researchers learn to listen to, and for, the voices of Black folks in these texts?
It’s a great question. Sometimes that’s tricky, because the traces that people leave depend a lot on their status—especially, the further back you go in time, the less documentation you have for people of lower status, and those lower-status people often show up in really unpleasant ways in the documents of high-status people. So for rich people, and especially wealthy white people, we have their diaries, and we have their journals, and we have their letters to all their siblings, and we have all this rich material about their internal life. And then we might have a ledger where they’ve kept account of how many Black people they own, and that sort of thing, and who got sick and when.
And we have to then read between the lines of the ledgers: This person disappeared, or this person got sick and then got sick again and then got sick again. Is this somebody who’s repeatedly sick, or is this a form of resistance, of work stoppage? What’s going on here? So there are new tools and new interest among researchers in asking these questions.
“Their fear of our reading lists is part of the answer…they’re so scared of what’s going to happen if people learn the history of the United States.”
On the other hand, there are also other cases where the archives and the ancestors get quite loud. It’s impressive. Like we do have poems and letters, and abolitionist speeches and newspapers. Sometimes we will have a Black newspaper, a Black journal, or the proceedings of a protest organization, but it’s all men, because that’s who got hold of the resources and was writing things down.
So we have to do some extra work to try to get access to the perspectives of Black women in those times, [or] the perspectives of Black folks who didn’t speak English or write in English, or were disabled or were queer, or just all of the ways that we know that archives tend to reflect the hierarchies that we live with. So too are they often unequal in the ways that they reflect people in the past. And that is a serious challenge for researchers.
In your experience, how do you go about deconstructing or challenging the American mythos around race and nation that’s ingrained in so many people from such a young age?
Patriotism is often taught as a kind of unquestioned substrate of the educational journey. It’s like you’re pledging allegiance to the flag in third grade before anybody’s told you what those words mean. And so the very act of posing the question seems radical, but from a kind of educational perspective, it’s not really. It’s just good teaching.
The classroom is a space where all of these things should be objects of study, and in the grand sweep of human history, nations are new. They’re pretty brand-spanking new. So yes, we should hold them up as objects of study and ask the question, where did they come from? When did they form? How did they get made? And that might lead people to the idea that this is not an eternal thing to which one must just bow down, but is a construct of our world.
I think that a lot of people have come around to this idea when it comes to race, but they might feel less comfortable with that kind of talk around nation, and so I’m trying to gently, in some ways, help people see that actually these two are cousins in a sense—that we construct ways of grouping ourselves as human beings, and we don’t have to believe in those constructs, to think through them and about them carefully.
Can you also speak to the liberatory power of education, and what role public schools and libraries play?
These spaces, at their best, are spaces that are just chock-full of democratic possibilities, because they’re places where we might where we have the possibility of learning with and from each other, changing each other’s minds, learning about a different perspective that you’ve never thought about before.
We’re living in a time, as I think you well know, where people are really trying to constrain what we learn, and their fear of our reading lists is part of the answer to your question about the liberatory power of education. That they’re so scared of what’s going to happen if people learn the real history of the United States. If people aren’t allowed to pose these questions, that should tell us how high the stakes are for keeping our schools and libraries open as spaces of learning and possibility. So sometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the censors come along and remind us how powerful they are.
2026-02-07 10:20:59
This story has been removed. Following publication, we learned that the video that we were told was of a warrantless raid in Memphis was from another incident in a different city. As a result, we are no longer confident of some of the details and media included in the story. We have reached out again to the federal and local agencies that did not respond to previous inquires.
