Today, we discuss reparations for America’s horrific history of eugenics, talk with an organizer about what Palestinian solidarity looks like on the docks, and review everybody’s favorite Twitter movie, Zola.

California is preparing to pay reparations to people that the state forcibly sterilized as late as 2010. 

The enthusiastically racist American eugenics movement, which sought to “improve” the human race by preventing poor, disabled, Black and brown people from having children, resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations beginning in the early 20th century and officially continuing until North Carolina banned the barbaric practice in 1979. 

California, however, managed to carry on the practice in the one place America’s most appalling practices never die: the prison. They weren’t alone, either. A 2017 story documented ongoing court-ordered sterilizations across the country.

Black feminists in the 1970s took up sterilization abuse as a core concern, distinguishing them from many white feminists who were more focused on abortion. The fight to be able to bear children became a cornerstone of the reproductive justice movement as we know it today. As Dorothy E. Roberts pointed out in what might be that movement's founding text, Killing the Black Body, American natal policy has always been about controlling which Americans get to produce.

Even as the era of outright eugenics sputters toward an end, we should remember that depriving people of resources to take care of children – like decent housing, healthy food or freedom from both state and social violence – continues to condition who gets to have kids. 

The politician who wants to cut health care or welfare today is part of a centuries-long project that has sought the survival of only those with the two most prized American possessions: whiteness and money. 

— Sarah Leonard (@sarahrlnrd)

🚢 Disrupting apartheid’s supply chain

In Oakland, Seattle and Prince Rupert, Canada, residents showed their support for Palestine in June by picketing cargo ships from the Israel-based Zim shipping company. Protesters tried to prevent the docking and unloading of Zim ships at local ports and were successful in either delaying or totally blocking the ships.

But the protests also did something else: They revealed a powerful coalition taking shape.

The pickets in Oakland and Prince Rupert were successful thanks to solidarity from local unionized dock workers and First Nation Indigenous protesters, united in an international campaign called Block the Boat. The demonstration is part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a Palestinian-led grassroots effort to put economic pressure on Israel until apartheid ends. 

AJ+ producer Iliana Hagenah spoke with Lara Kiswani, a leader with Block the Boat and executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) in the Bay Area, about the campaign. The movement is declaring, says Kiswani, that “in our ports, we're going to stop aiding Israel. Our workers are going to stop aiding Israel, and not allow it to do business as usual.”

Block the Boat began with worker solidarity

The original Block the Boat demonstration was held in 2014, during the weekslong war on Gaza, Kiswani said. It drew inspiration from a 2010 community picket line at the Port of Oakland against Israel’s attack on an aid flotilla. Dock workers with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 had refused to cross the community picket line to unload cargo from Zim Integrated Shipping Services Ltd., the oldest and largest Israeli-owned shipping company. At the time, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions had also put out a call for workers to support their struggle against “Zionism, occupation, militarism and apartheid,” Kiswani continued.

“Knowing that the Israeli Zim ship would dock at the port of Oakland every weekend, and understanding that apartheid profiteering was something that our local Longshore Warehouse Union had historically opposed during apartheid South Africa, and building on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, we called for Block the Boat,” Kiswani said.

To organize the effort, they mobilized in the thousands and reached out to workers at union halls. For five consecutive days, hundreds to thousands of people picketed at the Port of Oakland, and the ILWU Local 10 didn’t cross the picket lines. The protest continued for another three months. Beginning in October 2014, Zim ceased to attempt docking at the Port of Oakland. That was, until this June.

An international movement revived

When the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions called for labor solidarity again during Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Jerusalem this spring, activists renewed their calls to block the boats, too. In the Bay Area, Kiswani said organizers heard the Zim shipping company would try to come back to Oakland for the first time in seven years. So for two weeks, thousands of people protested at the Port of Oakland. The ship stayed in the bay, but never attempted to dock. 

Protesters also called for international support for workers to stand in solidarity with Palestine and ILWU Local 10. Supporters responded across the globe, including from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South Africa’s largest federation of trade unions. Protesters also resisted the docking of another Zim ship at the Port of Seattle. 

The protest continued hundreds of miles north. Unable to dock its ship, Zim sailed it to Prince Rupert, Canada, a majority Indigenous and First Nations community with a total population of 12,000. Though Zim likely thought the ship could unload there unnoticed, Kiswani said, First Nations people and port workers continued the picket, preventing that same ship from docking and unloading for two days.  

“It's incredible what we're seeing. The First Nation siblings in Prince Rupert were able to demonstrate what international solidarity is, and what's at stake for us to stand in solidarity with Palestine, because they understand settler colonialism,” Kiswani said.

Policing apartheid

The Block the Boat protest in Seattle was less successful. 

For five days protesters were able to keep that ship at bay. On the sixth day of picketing, the Seattle Police Department attacked protesters, allowing for the ship to dock and unload, Kiswani said.

“At this juncture, we're exposing what apartheid Israel is — its relationship to policing and militarism, and the very fact that workers are standing in solidarity, the only way Zim is being able to work [is] if it's forced to by law enforcement, which really shows the relationship between state violence and apartheid Israel, and also at the receiving end of it, our community and our solidarity and the workers and the city council members who've all stood up and said, this is the time to disrupt apartheid,” Kiswani said.

Kiswami noted that this violence extends across the world: The Zim company has been instrumental in exporting weapons across the Global South, with Israel using U.S. dollars to make weaponry and then exporting weaponry to be used by “repressive regimes and law enforcement agencies to use against other poor working class Black and brown Indigenous communities across the world.” 

A whole world to win

By blocking the largest shipping line from the state of Israel, Block the Boat is “not only showing and demonstrating solidarity with Palestine. We are also interrupting international commerce and global capitalism, and isolating Israel economically and politically. And lastly, we're building international community and worker solidarity,” Kiswani said.

"Blocking the boat not only shows that the world supports BDS, that we can actually have a tangible impact on the state of Israel, but also shows the power of labor, the power of labor solidarity, the power of community and worker solidarity.”

— Samantha Grasso (@samjgrasso)

Watch Hagenah’s video on the Block the Boat protests here.

📺 @Zola has moved to the big screen

“Based on a Twitter thread” is not the most promising premise for a movie – until you realize we’ve had almost two decades of “based on a board game” or “based on a theme park ride” blockbusters. And hey, at least a Twitter thread can be narratively coherent.

Zola is, it turns out, a deliciously well-scripted and -acted film. It retells the viral story of Zola, (played by Taylour Paige), a part-time stripper in Detroit who is invited by new friend and white girl sex worker Stefani (Riley Keough) on a road trip to earn big money at a Tampa Bay strip club. But from the moment Zola gets into a truck with Stefani things start getting out of hand.

The film, featuring the racially charged and violent adventures of beautiful young women in Florida, has drawn inevitable comparisons to Spring Breakers (2013), but Zola has less political edge or aesthetic invention than that film. Nevertheless, if you’re somewhere where theaters are reopening, it’s a nice way to return to the movies: pleasurable to watch, with great performances from its leads and fun pacing, colorwork, sound and production design.

Zola is a welcome addition to a string of major releases about sex workers that avoid the Hollywood tropes of innate victimization or tragedy. It is sexually matter-of-fact and morally ambivalent, recognizing that sex work is a form of work like any other, structured around dangerous exploitation but allowing for moments of fun, creativity and power. Zola also avoids the pitfalls of over-romanticization (Magic Mike) or moralistic hand-wringing (Hustlers).

In Zola’s telling, the danger of the weekend is driven by the blundering and violent men around the two women. But insofar as Zola can manage the danger of this rather wild affair, it’s by vetting clients through the now-defunct adult classifieds website Backpage. While such sites were not a guarantor of sex worker safety, they allowed them much more control, choice and knowledge of clientele than working the streets. 

But now, after SESTA/FOSTA, legislation designed to eliminate such sites, the violent men and police that make sex work so dangerous are even more powerful than when her fateful Twitter thread was written.

Can’t get enough cinematic dissection? Vicky Osterweil and Cerise Townsend are engaged in the totally realistic project of ranking every movie ever made. Their podcast is here.

— Vicky Osterweil 

Lil Nas X on his hot boy summer, embracing vulnerability and personal growth. [New York Times]

The climate crisis is making prison conditions worse. [Jewish Currents]

Forget productivity. A four-day work week would make us better people. [Washington Post]

Is England’s men’s football team an example of what “progressive patriotism” could look like? [The Atlantic]

We have a food waste problem. Expiration dates are a lie. [Vox]

A new designer has taken over celebrated fashion house Alaïa. We’ll leave it to Cher in “Clueless” to express the brand’s importance. [YouTube]

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