But that’s not to say she doesn’t see opportunities for the country to reverse course. “I’m very hopeful with young people, and our students in particular,” said Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

The book, published by Oxford University Press this month, is billed as a companion piece to C. Wright Mills’ iconic The Power Elite (Oxford University Press,1956), which Gautney says drew back the curtain on the belief that 1950s America was a bastion of democracy. Her goal in writing a sequel of sorts was to “hopefully provide some explanation for how we got to this place with Trump, January 6th, and all this political unrest.”

Mills wrote at a time when inequality was at its lowest and there was consensus that America was the best of all countries. He argued that in reality America was more authoritarian, with  a consortium of corporate, political, and military elites, driven by greed, holding all the power and manipulating public opinion. Mills warned of “the military industrial complex,” a term made famous by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech. Mills also has been cited as an inspiration for the 1960s counterculture, Gautney said.

Such sweeping analyses are rarely written these days, which is a part of why she felt compelled to pick up where Mills left off. “It’s a lack of historical memory that is how we got where we are. I had our Fordham students in mind. They are so smart, but [because they’re young]they don’t have the historical references.”

Gautney has personal experience in politics at a high level: she was a senior policy advisor for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and served as an advisor in his Senate office and as co-chair of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Education. She also has connections to the film industry, in which her husband works. She says both have opened her eyes to how things really work.

The country now has enormous wealth in the hands of a few who are able to control policy through their billions, Gautney said, and political institutions and the military have been largely subordinated to the corporate sphere. Couple that with the merging of politics and celebrity, and America is fundamentally undemocratic, she argued.

“Celebrity has become a huge corporate conglomerate,” she said. “Now we have celebrities who wield corporate power and are billionaires.”

Mills wrote of the manipulative posturing of mass media. Gautney says today it’s far worse.  “Fox News can make a president now, obviously. It feels like it is an institution that is so far gone, and yet it is so fundamental.”

“It’s Chapter 1 in the authoritarian playbook—manipulating thought,” she said.

Gautney has some ideas for what can be done and hasn’t lost hope, even though she didn’t conclude the book that way. “It would be trivializing to try to summarize how to reverse course,” she said.

She did, however, share some of her thoughts for change in an interview. “Reclaiming the media: setting standards and decommodifying it. We need to start to recognize that certain things should be public goods, like health care and education. They cannot be accessible to only certain strata,” she says.

The way to accomplish all that is by creating and fostering spaces for thinking about systemic changes and how to separate the influence of money, said Gautney. “It is the job of academics to think of alternatives at a broad level.”

She believes students are coming in more well-read and publicly engaged nowadays, but they tend to be engaged more locally—in issues such as the environment or race issues. Building solidarity with other movements is imperative, she said. “You can’t afford to silo and diffuse this power. Young people interested in change need to bring in other groups. That’s vital.” 

Fordham’s service learning initiatives, Gautney believes, are valuable for exposing students to experiences different than the ones they inhabit, which is also key.

“Then you have potential for big impacts,” she said. “That’s how the world changes.”

Eastman was a central figure committed to a wide variety of causes, which proved problematic for forging a clean heroic narrative, said Aronson. Eastman co-founded the National Woman’s Party and the Women’s Peace Party, an antiwar group, and in 1917 she engineered the founding of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which eventually became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She co-published the socialist magazine The Liberator with her brother Max Eastman and is credited with co-authoring the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Yet, her story was largely lost to history because her interests and causes remained so diverse.

“I think her problem involves more than sexism, although that’s certainly part of it. I believe it was Eastman’s intersectionality—her multiple movement identifications—that destabilized her image and her status,” said Aronson. “It complicated her connection to what scholars identify as the mainstays on which historical recognition and remembrance are built.”

Aronson said that Eastman envisioned herself as “one of those circus chariot ladies” with one hand “driving a tandem of the arts and the law,” and “the other hand holding aloft two streaming banners—love and liberty.”

“Although some of her politics were compatible with other progressive activists at the time, most activists eventually evolved and prioritized and chose one major organization to be affiliated with. Eastman never did,” said Aronson.

“The challenge with a complicated narrative is to try to find a way to create some coherence out of it. As scholars, we have to become more conscious of that rather than take the easy ‘role model’ narrative, leaving out the challenging voice, rather than embracing it.”

But Eastman’s forward-thinking philosophy proved hard for Aronson to resist. For example, Eastman refused alimony after divorcing her first husband for infidelity in 1916, saying “no self-respecting feminist would accept alimony—it is a relic of the past.” By her second marriage, she had taken on feminist dilemmas in family life.

“She led debates on issues still pressing today: reproductive rights, paid parental leave, economic partnership within marriage, wages for housework, shared housekeeping and childcare, single motherhood by choice, and work-family balance,” said Aronson.

In an unpublished manuscript written sometime after 1917, she proposed a newspaper column about the silenced longing of married mothers for substantive work outside the home, a yearning that anticipates Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”—nearly half a century before the breakthrough of The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

“And I want to emphasize that this was a woman born before the invention of the fly swatter, the zipper, the ice cream scoop,” Aronson said.

Passing the Torch

As faculty day kicked off, Aronson and her husband Michael Kimmel, Ph.D., mingled with fellow faculty. She spoke of her book launch held last month in a Tribeca loft. There, more than 20 members of Eastman’s family showed up, many of whom Aronson interviewed for the book. Several of them had never met and others hadn’t seen each other in years. After the event, family members continued to socialize and celebrate their ancestor at another locale.

The anecdote provided a glimpse into Aronson’s research methods that include a penchant for interviewing primary sources. It’s a method fostered by her journalist background, yet steeped in academic rigor. More than a quarter of the book is filled with footnotes, which she described as “fragments and whispers of her from disparate sources.”

“My hope is for someone else to take up the research and get Eastman back into the conversations,” she said. “I want to see someone pick it up where I left off and make it better. This is a foundation to enter the story.”

Following her talk, Aronson and the rest of the faculty retired to the Law School for cocktails and dinner. There, awards were given for graduate mentoring, as well as for teaching in STEM, social sciences, and humanities. Sarit Kattan, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology, was honored for graduate mentoring and teaching. Christine Breiner, Ph.D., associate professor of mathematics took home the STEM award. Tom McCourt, Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies, was recognized for social sciences. Andrew Clark, Ph.D., professor of French, received the humanities award.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and other members of the country’s founding generation would be likely be dumbfounded by that answer, said Saul Cornell, Ph.D., Fordham’s Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History.

In The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s–1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019), a new book he co-wrote with Gerald Leonard, Ph.D., of the Boston University School of Law, Cornell tells the story of how the Constitution was shaped; what it was supposed to do when it was ratified; and just as important, how it began to change almost immediately after it was ratified.

A Sharp Break With the Past

For starters, he said it’s worth remembering that in one generation in the late 1700s, aristocracy and monarchy, which were the two central institutions of European government for thousands of years, were tossed aside by the leaders of the American Revolution.

“So, what were the American revolutionaries going to do to replace it? We tend not to think about that because we’ve done it successfully for 200 years and we take it for granted. Today most countries in the West are parliamentary democracies, but our constitutional form is unique,” he said.

The original answer to this question, he said, was far from the “government for the people, by the people” majority rule that we envision the country to be now.

“We still mistakenly think we were always meant to be a democracy. We don’t realize what a struggle it was to take a government that was not designed to be a democracy and make it one,” he said.

Far from being open to a full-fledged democracy, the founders actually established a republic governed by an enlightened elite.

The book, which is geared toward everyone from casual readers to graduate students, sets the scene of the creation for the Constitution, which was ratified in 1788. At the time, he noted, constitutionalism pervaded American culture in a way that’s inconceivable now.

“People were saying in private letters that, ‘Everyone from the doorman at the tavern to the governor is talking about the constitution.’ While I’m sure there were some people who were too drunk to know what was going on, or just not paying attention, what’s remarkable is how many people were caught up in it and paying attention,” he said.

Government by the Few for the Many

Of course, that didn’t mean that everyone actually got a say in the conversation about the Constitutions.  Women, slaves, and native Americans were not directly part of the great debate.

“The general view of most legal scholars is that the people must have been quiescent or just inarticulate. But in fact, they were very much trying in whatever ways were available to them to have their voices heard. There were a lot of people doing the best they could to take the ideas of the American Revolution and make them their own,” he said.

The founders also created the Electoral College as another check against unrestrained democracy setting it up to be something akin to the College of Cardinals, the small group that chooses the Pope.

“You’re essentially creating a filtering mechanism so that the people will not directly elect a president who might not be sufficiently educated, informed, or wise enough,” he said.

He noted that the Electoral College was also meant to be a bulwark against the rise of political parties. Thomas Jefferson famously quipped, ‘If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.’ It was a generation, Cornell said, that was very suspicious of democracy.

“The Founders wanted the people to be involved, but they feared turning over the reins of government to the people; they were deeply worried about that,” he said.

“They’ve looked at the history of Rome, and they know that republics fell because of rabble rousing and the mob: turbulence eventually led to tyranny. So they were trying to create a republic, not a democratic form of government, with checks and balances built in throughout.”

A Populist Movement Emerges

Things began to change pretty quickly, though, thanks to people like Andrew Jackson, a Democrat who was president from 1829-1837. A product of the west, Jackson embraced a more democratic vision for the country, but he did so by appealing to voters who would deny equal rights to women and minorities and who cheered on his vicious treatment of native Americans.

“It was not pre-ordained that America would exclude woman, blacks, Indians. The idea that there was no room for these nonwhite, non-European people in the growing American republic takes center stage with the rise of Jackson,” said Cornell.

The notion of using legal barriers to exclude everyone but white men from political power is obviously absurd today, but Cornell said we’d still be wise to consider the balancing act that the founding generation embraced when they crafted the Constitution. Although ideally democracy and liberty go hand in hand, for most of western history that has not been the case. Many of the populist leaders who have risen to power in recent years, for instance, have done so via democratic processes, but they do not necessarily value or promote liberty, certainly not liberty for all.

“We have this idea that democracy and liberty always support one another. Well, democracy doesn’t always lead to freedom. That’s an important lesson we need to learn,” he said.

If there’s one image that encapsulates Cornell’s thoughts about the American Constitution, he said, it’s the image of Odysseus tied to the mast of a ship in Homer’s The Odyssey. Odysseus understood that if he did not bind himself to the mast it would drive him mad, so, he had his crew plug their ears with wax, and instructed them to not untie him.

“Constitutional governments strive to tie the people to the mast so that they will stay alert but not be swayed by the siren songs of demagogues. The founders sought to build the right kind of mast to tie ourselves to, so we can get back to our safe harbor,” he said.

“If you tied yourself up so tight that you strangled yourself, you haven’t really done yourself much good. If you don’t tie yourself tightly enough to that mast, you’re going to just jump in the water, and you’re another victim of the siren’s song. The nature of constitutional government is to find the right balance between liberty and order:  popular government restrained by the rule of law.”

These words, taken from the poem “Thunderdome” in Sarah Gambito’s new book Loves You, evoke the kind of nourishment the poet hopes readers will find in her work.

In 96 pages of poems, Gambito, an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Fordham, presents a gamut of personal life experiences: how Filipino Americans—and people of color—are assailed and fetishized; the struggle to hold on to cultural identity as an American-born child of immigrants; the nuances of everyday life; and what it’s like to be the mother of a biracial child. But her book has a tasty twist.

Loves You is part poetry, part cookbook. Her poems are divided among five flavors: umami, sour, salty, bitter, and sweet. Most of them reference food in some shape or form. (Example: “When God was Filipino, / he put a pig and fire together and called it porkissimo.”) And her poems give readers a taste of not only her life but also her actual cooking. There are recipes for family favorites—salmon sinigang, barbecue scepters, watermelon agua fresca—scattered throughout the book.

Her ultimate goal? To nurture strangers with her words—to make people feel, she says, even if they are occasionally puzzled by her poems, published by Persea Books on Jan. 22.

“I want people to feel nourished. I want people to feel provoked. I want people to feel … a little freaked out,” she said, laughing a little. “I don’t see it as sort of just a sweet book. There’s anger here, as well. But I think anger can hold equal footing with joy and creation, and with thinking about community and family.”

In her poem “Don’t Eat Filipinos!” Gambito speaks about the subtle symbolism of a biscuit called Filipinos. The controversial cookie is sold in Spain—a country that controlled the Philippines for years.

“To name it after a people, a country that was colonized for 400 years … I really thought it was a joke,” she said. “Literally, it’s like you have Spanish people eating Filipinos.”

As an antidote, the page after that poem lists her husband’s recipe for lychee macarons.

“The epigraph is instead of eating Filipinos, eat these,” Gambito said. “The idea is to be thoughtful about what we’re doing, what we’re putting into our bodies—what it means.”

Gambito’s new poetry book also melds meals with motherhood. Her poem “Hapa,” defined as a person who is partially Asian or Pacific Islander, is about her 8-year-old son. He was born with blonde hair and blue eyes—a stark difference from his Filipina mother. Strangers would mistake Gambito for his nanny. She felt like they were “othering” her from her own child, she said. “Orangutan nanny in the garage / my pleasure—a disappointment,” she wrote in “Hapa.”

Gambito mentions a more universal aspect of motherhood—the joys and fears of being a mother. In the poem “First Born,” she writes, “Basically: my wish is that you are never, never pierced through the heart. / My aim is ordinary. / My anthem open. My berries gasping together in pie.”

Those last six words describe the feeling of being breathless, she said. “You want to provide. You want to give your son beautiful, sweet things, and you feel like always short to the task.”

Loves You is Gambito’s third published collection of poetry. This book was 10 years in the making, she said. But back in the book’s infancy, she recalls sitting at a ramen shop with a friend, pondering over the purpose of her new poetry collection.

“What do you think poetry should do?” her friend asked.

“It should do this,” Gambito said, cradling her warm bowl of broth with her hands. “It should nourish you from the inside out.”

Text of Gambito’s poem “Holiday” in Loves You:

Crashing across cousin stars with deep listening holes. Because we’re

related and every wren that has nested abroad would like to become

my mother. I’d like to lie flayed open upon her twelve breaking torsos.

This blood would weld us to the chair and I’d let a crowd in. I’d always

thought that crowds were created in a panic. A great anti-system of

people fleeing fire. Rather crowd dynamic is cultivated because you

run towards. You want concert tickets or something to do the day after

thanksgiving. They’re almost giving it away. This is what she says as

the gold metal hits the outline of her. She says I want you to find me. I

want that you never give up and you find me.

Cindy, a victim of domestic violence, escaped her abuser with her three children and $50 to her name. She used it to pay the cab fare to a safe house.

After being beaten by his stepfather and losing his mother to suicide, James saw his crack addiction spiral wildly out of control, sending him out on the streets.

Challenged with a learning disability and mental illness, Lisa tried to piece together a life for herself and got her own apartment. After a couple of weeks, she came home and found her belongings on the curb. Her landlord kicked her out after discovering her medication for bipolar disorder because he didn’t want “crazy people” living in his house.

These are among 13 stories of homelessness in the new book Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing, published by Fordham University Press and edited by Fordham University English Professor Susan Celia Greenfield, who conducted hours of interviews with each contributor to help distill their stories.

Describing their life experiences in raw and vivid detail, each storyteller talks about their journey to homelessness and how they healed with the help of faith and community found in a life skills empowerment program for homeless and formerly homeless people. Many of the memoirists graduated from Education Outreach Program (EOP), founded in 1989 by New York Catholic Charities and the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing (IAHH). Today, there are several similar programs in the New York area.

“Telling my story is freeing,” said EOP alumnus Dennis Barton to an audience of nearly 250— including 12 of the 13 contributors—at the book launch at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on December 3.

“I’ve touched base with all of my secrets,” Barton said. “Now this book is out there and can help the sick and suffering.” The Bronx native talked about years of using and selling drugs, being incarcerated, and getting severely beaten by a group of teenagers while asleep on a park bench.

But Barton, who had taken college classes while incarcerated, sought help; in 2002, he graduated from the EOP, something he views as a real accomplishment. “Until that moment, I had never finished anything in my life,” he said.

Barton has since reunited with his family and became an ordained deacon at Middle Collegiate Church. He is a member of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing Speakers Bureau and has been a peer facilitator at the Panim el Panim life skills empowerment program. (Panim el Panim is Hebrew for “face to face.”) He now works as a workshop facilitator at Planned Parenthood of New York City.

“I give back because you can’t keep it if you don’t give it away,” he said, referring to the love and support he received throughout his journey that he now wishes to pass along to others who are struggling.

Sacred Shelter memoirist Michelle Riddle, who graduated from the EOP one year after Barton, told the standing-room-only crowd that she recently celebrated 20 years in recovery. She also volunteers as a life skills empowerment program mentor to give back what was “freely given” to her. “I was strung out and embarrassed, and slowly committing suicide,” she said about her drug addiction. “God rescued me from myself.”

All of the stories chronicled in Sacred Shelter are about serious traumas and crises—mental illness, addiction, and domestic violence. A few storytellers spoke of child abuse and molestation—one was chained to a pole in a filthy basement, another was sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend, and another was routinely beaten by his alcoholic stepfather.

“The most shocking thing to me was the consistency of the trauma,” says editor Greenfield about the interviews she conducted for the book. “It was story after story of gender violence, abuse … and the preponderance of that kind of suffering.”

Another common thread Greenfield sees among the stories is the love and generosity the storytellers showed others even in their darkest moments. She pointed to Riddle, who once gave all of her money to a mother she met on the street with a hungry child, and Barton, who often helped the elderly in his neighborhood carry groceries and clean up.

“It’s so beautiful that even in the thick of it, they were thinking of other people,” said Greenfield, adding that their compassion for others continues in their volunteer work today. “They took the suffering and turned it into an engine of love.”

Also sharing his experience with homelessness at the book launch was James Addison. Despite the horrors of living on the streets and in the Fort Washington Shelter—nicknamed the “House of Pain” among New York City’s homeless—Addison was the recipient of many acts of kindness.

“I was on 34th Street one morning standing in front of a donut shop,” he recalled. “I was so hungry, I hadn’t eaten for days. An employee from the shop came out and handed me a bag of donuts. Those were the best damn donuts I ever ate in my life.”

Barton was also the recipient of kind acts. “People in the neighborhood helped me, gave me food and clothing,” he said. And it wasn’t only strangers; when he reached out to his daughter while in treatment after being estranged for years, she drove from South Carolina with her children to pick him up so they could spend Christmas together—another moment when Barton says that “God showed up for him.”

In their opening remarks, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham; Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky; and Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, talked about the importance of helping others.

They also pointed to the power of the life skills programs for the homeless that run in different churches, temples, and organizations throughout the city, and of the 13 people who shared their stories for Sacred Shelter, who are living examples that change is possible.

“To the 13 very brave men and women who chose to tell their stories: … We are in your debt for reminding us about the dignity of human beings,” said Father McShane.

Added Monsignor Sullivan: “Homelessness is not hopelessness.”

–Claire Curry

Hear Professor Greenfield with memoirists James Addison and Dennis Barton on the Brian Lehrer Show and on Fordham Conversations on WFUV, parts 1 and 2. 

The book, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family (Harvard University Press, 2018), argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists. The book’s arc begins with the intimate sphere of the family in the 1950s and then moves on to larger societal changes where two-income families became the unavoidable economic norm.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” said Swinth. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

Swinth said the movement was affected by a brand of far-right conservatism that would take hold in the Reagan administration but actually began in the early 1970s in the Nixon administration.

“Their opposition undercut feminism’s most far reaching aspirations, many of which are so urgently needed today, so it was a missed opportunity,” said Swinth.

President Nixon initially supported the Comprehensive Child Development Act that would have provided universal child care, she said. But conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, advised Nixon to withhold support, equating it to communist childcare. Swinth said the defeat was the “very early inkling of the conservative right” that would go on to elect Ronald Reagan and now runs the Republican Party.

“Working women were deeply threatening to the established norms of male patriarchy,” said Swinth.

But feminists were simply facing the economic reality of both parents needing to work, which would mean that children would need care outside of the home, said Swinth. Feminists just wanted what was “normal and fair” and called out what they saw as “unfair and unjust,” shifting the national culture in the process.

Swinth said much of the groundwork had been laid by African-American and Latina feminists in the welfare rights and guaranteed income movements.

“They understood that all mothers should be able to take care of their children, so they fought to change the discussion of welfare to one that recognized the value of women’s labor to society,” said Swinth. “Plus, there was and is a social stake in raising families.”

Swinth said the idea that second wave feminism was a “white feminism” is a distortion of the historical record.

“African-American women and Latinas were self-identified feminists who negotiated a distinct position through nationalism rights, civil rights, and their own developing feminism,” she said. “Women of color had some of the most vanguard, pioneering ideas. When we declare 1960s and ’70s as white feminism, we delegitimize the claims they have on the feminist movement. They made a set of pioneering arguments for support of poor mothers by advocating for jobs that were compatible with caring for the kids.”

Swinth said that while today people talk about work and family balance, this certainly wasn’t the case in the era before the 1960s, when the family’s care was the mother’s realm. As such, the feminist cause had to go beyond policy and toward perceptions, she said.

“Feminists struggled to create shared labor with men through caretaking and changing men’s roles, and the very meaning of fatherhood,” she said.

Swinth said that she also researched several male feminists who, she said, understood that being “involved fathers was good for men, for the kids, and good for equality.”

Much of the book focuses on issues outside of the home, from grassroots organizing to a chapter detailing Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s fight to end pregnancy discrimination. As an assistant adjunct law professor at Rutgers University in the 1960s, Ginsberg hid her pregnancy out of fear she’d lose her job. Later, as a tenured professor at Columbia University, she helped draft the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which made it illegal to discriminate against pregnant women in the workplace.

“Employers could fire someone who became pregnant or drop her insurance because the man would support her. Why would you need to make any accommodations for a worker to leave?” Swinth asked rhetorically.

But by the late 1970s, women’s earning power had become essential, she said, forcing many to acknowledge the reality that women weren’t about to “step out of the wager force.” Swinth noted that while many feminists were indeed “radical socialists” with visions of 24-hour child care, local activists negotiated more realistic after-school child care at local libraries. Local activism in turn spawned women leaders in city government, which eventually led to representation at the state and federal levels.

“It’s absolutely critical history for us to have as women so we can continue to fight with a new energy and a set of lessons that we need to inspire us,” Swinth said of the book. “There’s a past here where we can recognize ourselves and our needs. We should continue to be inspired by the determinations and creativity of these women—and men—from our past.”

When Cleon Brown, a white sergeant with over a decade of experience on the Hastings, Michigan, police force, submitted DNA to Ancestry.com in 2016, he hoped to clarify stories he’d heard about having Native American ancestors.

Instead, the site informed him that he was of 18 percent African descent. And that, he alleged in a lawsuit he filed against the city a year later, was when the trouble started. His colleagues nicknamed him Kunta after the character Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots, and ultimately, he was denied training he needed to maintain his rank.

For Tanya Hernandez, Brown’s case, which was settled last month, is the perfect example of how discrimination is alive and well in the United States, even for people of mixed-race ancestry. Hernandez, the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham Law, cites Brown’s case in the opening of her new book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

“This needs more attention in order to dispel a growing trend of people in the public discourse viewing discrimination about mixed-race people as different, and talking about it in ways that undermine discrimination law for everyone,” she said.

Brown’s case, she said, shows how multiracial discrimination can happen to a person even if they don’t identify as multiracial.

“I’ve been doing this work for many years, and I started to see this emerging group of people writing about multiracial discrimination, and characterizing it as something novel and new, and how that necessitated changing our civil rights laws,” she said.

“That didn’t at all correspond to my own experience as a mixed-race person of Latina and African origin, so I thought, ‘I need to look at this a little more closely.’”

For her book, Hernandez explored lawsuits that claimed discrimination against multiracial individuals in housing, employment, education, criminal justice, and public accommodations. Employment cases were most common, which she said wasn’t surprising. She was more surprised to learn that people who file claims against housing discrimination tend to win them much more often, and even more intrigued to learn that many of those cases were actually brought by white grandparents and parents of multiracial couples.

A white grandmother might buy a condominium in Florida, and catch flak from fellow residents when her multiracial grandchildren come to visit, or a landlord might stop by an apartment and see a picture of a nonwhite grandchild on the wall, and then mysteriously decide the tenant is a problem.

“I can’t say I find it surprising, given everything else, but at the same time, it was something that I took note of that I didn’t expect,” she said.

Hernandez said these examples show how in the legal realm, discrimination can be thought of as not a “white versus black” dynamic, but a “white versus everything else” phenomenon. And it should give pause to those who advocate abolishing affirmative action, including members of the Supreme Court who look at the growth of mixed-race citizens and ask whether the country really needs policies of social inclusion anymore.

“The thinking is, people are finding ways to have relations across race lines, so that must mean that the race lines are no longer significant. How will we be able to draw lines if everyone is mixed? These arguments are very familiar to me because they’re part of a long-standing Latin American racial discourse with regards to management of race,” she said.

“That is problematic.”

What attracted you to this tale from the 18^th century underbelly?

It’s not underbelly so much. The Poison Plot evolved from my last book, Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores, which told six different stories from the same period. It’s always the material that attracts me. One book leads to the next, and while researching Witches, I found this extraordinary collection of papers at the Rhode Island State Archives about Benedict Arnold and his wife Mary, and it just made for a great story.  Only after it was published did I realize what The Poison Plot was really about. It is an indictment of the blossoming consumerism of the 1730’s, although that was not my intention when I began research.

Speaking of consumerism, the action takes place in Newport, Rhode Island, which often conjures images of 19th century mansions built by robber barons, not necessarily a bustling 18th century town.   

It’s one of the five major cities of Colonial America, so it’s really just as much an 18th century town, plus they never tore down the houses. As Boston and Philadelphia grew  they tore some of the colonial buildings down. And you know, it just has everything. It has theater, it has a harbor, it has shopping. Newport is so much like New York.

And you write that was always the case, even in the 18th century.

Yes. They had had shows coming in from London, books, pamphlets, and British ideas. The Atlantic crossing took six weeks usually, so letters went back and forth all the time from families that were separated by the ocean. And newspapers kept them up to date, incorporating news from Paris and as far as India. In the book, the last chapter raises a question—again something that only came to me as I was writing: How did this imported culture that surrounded Mary affect her actions toward her husband? In other words, poison was, metaphorically speaking, in the air—especially in transatlantic literature. All these things would’ve had an influence on the characters in the book.

Including marital affairs like the ones Mary had?

Yes, and what I found surprising was how comfortable early Americans were with illicit affairs. It didn’t seem to bother them that somebody’s husband was with somebody else’s wife. And that was a little surprising, because when they do come down on it, they would  prosecute people for adultery.

If it was so common and accepted, why prosecute?  

Because maybe there are too many sordid relationships. It just may be that they wanted to set an example. Do they ever say this? No, of course not. But that’s what it looks like to me sometimes. It was a part of governing. For early Americans, and even in the mainstream America today, heterosexual monogamous relationships are assumed to be the way life should be. And it’s taken us a very long time to accept anything but that.

Why do you think we haven’t heard many of these tawdry tales from the period?

Because historians are conditioned to provide a past that brings us to a great present. Of course, it’s not quite a great present–politically speaking. At least in my mind, it’s not.

Benedict was a wealthy man and Mary liked to spend his money. What are the contemporary parallels between of such consumerism and corruption?

I don’t think that has changed. I think America evolves. I think if you look back at the 18th century, you see aspects that you’re going to see again in the 19th century, and that evolves into the 20th and then the 21st century. We are who we are.

Who are we?

In many ways, we’re still the children of England. I believe that, and I think that’s a good thing. We have our common law from England, our language. There’s a lot of English about us. There are a lot of differences too, of course. Our diversity is more pronounced, which makes us an even more interesting people.

Heather Gautney, Ph.D., felt the “Bern.” And now she wants to share what she learned from it.

In her just-published book, Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement (Verso, 2018), Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham, detailed what it was like to work with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as he campaigned for the 2016 Democratic party presidential nomination. Gautney had previously worked for Sanders when she was an American Sociological Association Fellow during the 2012-2013 academic year and joined his campaign in 2015 as a researcher.

She described the book as half policy analysis, half op-ed, with a particular emphasis on the lessons the Democratic Party should take from Sanders’ surprisingly strong showing in the primaries and the triumph of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Although Sanders ultimately lost the nomination to Clinton, Gautney said his candidacy exposed what she called the contradictions of the Democratic Party’s platform for the last four decades.

Shifting Attitudes Among Voters

“What his campaign did was expose that at least half of the Democratic Party are really people who identify as progressives or support a progressive agenda, and since he ran, I think we’ve been seeing a real shift toward supporting that agenda,” she said.

As evidence, she pointed to proposals to expand Medicare to all U.S. citizens. Sanders has been promoting the idea for years with little success, but this past year, the plan had 16 co-signers, including Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

To some extent, Gautney said she feels that the fact that Trump won is evidence that the party should reconsider issues that Sanders and Democratic leaders butted heads on, such as trade, free education, and universal healthcare.

A “neoliberal agenda that promotes growth, prosperity for all, the wonders of globalization and consumerism and the high-tech future” has left many people behind and cost Democrats voters in places like Wisconsin, she said.

“There’s been lots of glossy language about the wonders of free trade, and yet this was a huge issue in 2016 for people [who opposed it]in Midwestern states,” she said.

A Revival for Ideas Past

Gautney said she was as surprised as anyone else that Sanders got as far as he did and viewed his popularity with millennials as proof that the time is right to promote his agenda. This would have been true even in the event of a Clinton victory, which Gautney assumed would be the case when she started writing the book. To those who say the notion that free education is a radical idea, she noted that City College of New York, her alma mater, was once tuition-free.

“These are things that in some way or form have existed, so Bernie’s goal has been to say that. We are the wealthiest country on earth, we can achieve these things, and we can take care of our people,” she said.

“We can rebuild the middle class in this country. It’ll be like the middle class that existed in the 1950’s, except this time it’ll be a more diverse middle class, and women and people of color will be included.”

Gautney devoted a chapter to the schisms between the Sanders and Clinton camps that were never fully healed. In another, she elucidates the difference between social movements and elections. She also delved into the outreach efforts that Sanders embarked on after the November election to help him get a better handle on why former Barack Obama voters in battleground states then voted for Trump.

It was sobering, she said, because so many of the promises that Sanders had campaigned on—like more money for social security and stronger support of Medicare and Medicaid—were ones Trump embraced as well, and these voters chose to support Trump. She contends that class has a lot to do with it.

“Over the last three or four decades, a class perspective has increasingly been taken off the table, and one of the things that this 2016 election did was put it firmly back on. I argue that class is really a fundamental organizing principle of this election season, on both the right and left,” she said.

The takeaway of the book should be of interest to partisans on both sides of the aisle, she said.

“I think it’ll be interesting as a sort of historical accounting for this kind of moment, and one that reaches back into the 1970s and then reaches forward to 2020 and maybe even beyond.”

Gautney will discuss her book with Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West on May 16 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. For more details, visit the event website.

For her research, Rodriguez conducted two studies. One study focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched American TV in their home country and had lived in the United States for six years or less. The second sampling was an electronic survey of 171 American-born undergraduates from the United States’ Northeast region.

For the foreign nationals living on American soil, the America they recalled seeing on TV in their home countries differed greatly from the one they encountered on arrival, said Rodríguez. For example, the nation proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV.

However, for the home-grown audience things were different. “American millennials had a fairly high degree of awareness that [their]TV doesn’t reflect the diversity of the country,” she said. “After all, they had lived their whole lives in the United States and could see the difference between what was portrayed on TV and what they experienced in real life.”

In addition, the two groups differed in how American TV influenced their views in other areas. For example, anti-smoking ads on U.S. TV seemed to have influenced the U.S. millennials to see smoking more negatively.

TV: As Influential as Ever

Rodríguez said that despite young people’s growing preference for viewing TV shows on computers and mobile devices, content produced by the major TV networks is still being consumed by young people both in the U.S. and around the world; it is just accessed differently.  Also, studies continue to show that, with regard to race, class, and gender patterns, the content in both traditional TV and newer mediums, such as Netflix, has not changed significantly.

She added that the two studies gave a “great deal of insight into how U.S. television content exerts a strong influence”–even though many believe that no one watches TV any more. “Television still garners the greatest number of eyeballs, even though the average show’s viewership is down from 20 million to about to 11 million viewers,” she said. Even though the average is down, however, certain events continue to draw a great many viewers. “The last 60 Minutes show featuring Stormy Daniels netted 22 million viewers,” said Rodriguez.

Rodríguez said the first sample provided fascinating insights into what people take away from watching American TV in their home countries, particularly as it relates to social norms.  One subtle example deals with open-concept kitchens and the islands around which men and women eat, cook dinner, and discuss the day’s events. We take the design and practice for granted today, while, in other countries, seeing both men and women in the same cooking/preparation space would have been eye-opening and a violation of traditional gender and class norms.

Ripped from the Headlines

“In another example, a foreign-born respondent said ‘I remember when I saw the first gay character; it really made me think differently about gay people,’” Rodríguez recalled. “Research show[s]that television has had a great influence on how viewers perceive the roles of women and men.”

In addition, she noted that “ripped from the headlines” TV, a genre begun with shows like Law and Order, continues to exert influence on contemporary events in a subtle manner. She cited recent episodes of Madame Secretary and Designated Survivor as shows that are delivering news analysis–albeit with creative license–though entertainment.

“These stories are being told within an entertainment paradigm, and since people’s defenses are relaxed, just watching the show in that manner will have an impact,” she said. “Sure, it’s just TV, but the way some of these stories are being told may make you think about an issue in a different light.”

Despite the tendency of many to dismiss the medium of TV today, it continues to have an impact on not just Americans, but viewers all over the globe, said Rodriguez.

“Do you think that Donald Trump would have been elected if he hadn’t had his earlier television career, or that we’d be considering Oprah for president?”

And in a bonus track, Sister Johnson reflects on the recent death of renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, an avowed atheist.

Full transcript below:

Patrick Verel: For Christians, Jesus’ death on the cross atoned for the sins of humans, and his suffering is directly connected to our salvation. But what if there were a way to extend that belief in salvation beyond humans to all created beings? I’m Patrick Verel, and today my guest is Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, a Distinguished Professor of Theology and author of Creation and the Cross, which was published last month by Orbis Press. Now, cosmic redemption is a big part of this book. What is it, and why has it fallen out of favor in recent centuries?

Elizabeth Johnson: Cosmic redemption is the idea that all of creation will be saved, every last galaxy, every last earthworm, every portion of the great world that God has created has a future with us in glory with God. It dropped out of awareness in churches’ consciousness pretty much around the 16th century, with the Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin and others focused their question on salvation of humans. The question was, how can I find a gracious God? The answer was through the death of Jesus on the cross.

The issue was, therefore, very focused on human beings and our sinfulness and our need to be redeemed. That tremendous focus on human beings blocked out the whole rest of creation. Once the Protestant reformists began asking that question, the Catholic church began responding. The debate really, the Protestants said, “We are saved by faith alone in Jesus Christ on the cross, and the grace alone.” Catholics answered back, “Yes, but we also need to do good works.” That became an internal squabble among Christians, and that diffuseness of that blocked out the rest of creation.

Patrick Verel: Why is Saint Anselm such an important figure when it comes to this story?

Elizabeth Johnson: Okay, Anselm was a 10th and 11th century theologian, a monk, and ultimately the Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote a wonderful book in Latin called Cur Deus Homo, or in English, Why the God Man. He asked the question, why did God become human and died to save us when He could have done it some other way? He could have shed a tear or done one act of kindness, and that would have solved it.

His answer became enormously influential. His answer was, God became human and died to save us because sin offended the honor of God, and humans had to make satisfaction. Since we are just human creatures and finite, we cannot make satisfaction equal to the glory and honor of God we’ve offended, so an infinite person had to come and do it.

The only way to make satisfaction was to die, because Jesus was sinless and death was understood as a punishment for sin, a result of sin. As the sinless one, he did not have to die, so when he died, he paid back more than was owed to the honor of God. Since he didn’t need any blessing, he shares it all with his brothers and sisters.

Patrick Verel: Okay.

Elizabeth Johnson: The last line of that book Anselm writes, “And so you see, God’s mercy is greater than we could have imagined.” Now, the problem with that is for Anselm’s time, that was an argument that made sense to people because he was living in feudalism, and the lord of the manor, his word was law. There were no police forces, no armies, et cetera.

If you offended the lord, you were breaking up civil orders as well as his own honor. You had to pay it back in a visible way. What Anselm did was take that political arrangement and made it the image of God. That made it cosmic. What has developed is out of that theory is a notion of God as a supreme Lord whose honor is more important to God than God’s mercy. Jesus told parable after parable where God’s mercy violates the norms or the expectations. You think of the Prodigal Son, and so on, that you don’t have to pay back, you see.

God’s mercy comes and saves you regardless. You don’t need to pay, but it became tit for tat, like we had to earn our salvation. We have to pay back and Jesus was the one who paid it back. The cross became a prerequisite for God to be merciful, and that has done terrible damage to the image of God.

Patrick Verel: Creation and the Cross has been constructed in a dialogue form, which is similar to the way that Saint Anselm wrote many of his works. Why did you do that?

Elizabeth Johnson: I did that because Anselm has been so influential, whether you realize it or not, right? I wanted to have like an alternative to Anselm, in the same vein. So, he chose a monk named Boso, seriously B-O-S-O it’s spelled, who used to ask him a lot of questions about things, and set him up as a dialogue partner in this book.

I invented an interlocutor to myself whom I named Clara from the Latin word for light, and I said that she’s an amalgamation of all the very smart, insightful young men and women whom I have taught over the course of my teaching life. It becomes a conversation between a teacher and students in a way, that is easier to follow rather than whole paragraphs of argument.

Patrick Verel: Then the main argument of the book is that cross represents more than just salvation from sin. It’s, and I quote, “An icon of how God is present with all creatures in their suffering and death.” Now, is this a new argument?

Elizabeth Johnson: It’s a very ancient argument, but it’s one that we haven’t paid attention to, right? You can find this, again, in the Bible, in the New Testament, understandings of the death and resurrection of Christ, is that, in Jesus Christ, God became one with us in the flesh, to quote John’s gospel, right?

The flesh was human flesh, but our human flesh, we realize today, is part of the whole flesh of the community of life on earth. I mean, we take in food and air, it keeps us alive. We have evolved out of the whole community of life on earth. I’m using the expression, “Community of life,” which is a key expression in Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’.

To try to make ourselves realize we’re not the only ones prancing around on this planet, but as humans, we are part of a wonderful community of life and that what we say about God, we need to bring that community of life mainstream into our dogmatic teaching and our preaching and our liturgies. The idea in scripture that when the word became flesh and dwelled among us, it was God becoming bonded personally with human beings, but also with all flesh on the earth, with matter.

His genes, Jesus’ genes were of the Hebrew line of the human race, the cells in his body were made of gases and materials that had exploded in the stars billions of years ago, just like our own. Part of God became bonded to the universe humanly, physically as a cosmic event. So, in his death, God is with all creatures who die, not just with humans, but with the pelican chick, and the deer being chased by the lion and so on.

Also, then in the resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ, it’s the beginning of the future of all flesh. If the resurrection means anything is that there’s a future for creation, that everything doesn’t end up in annihilation, but the love of God that created it all is powerful enough to redeem it all. At the end of Laudato si’, Pope Francis writes that, “At the end of history, we will all be together enjoying the beauty of God,” that’s his view of heaven, “and all creatures be splendidly transfigured,” and I’m quoting here, “Will share with us in that joy.”

Patrick Verel: So, if people took this notion to heart, how do you think that will change their outlook on life?

Elizabeth Johnson: I think it would do two things. It would expand our consciousness as human beings on this planet that we are not the king of the hill, so to speak, that we have neighbors and relatives of different species than ourselves. To put us in a context, when God spoke to Job in the book of Job, the first question God says to him is, “And where were you when I created the world?” As if you think you can rule everything. Put us back in a humble position.

The second thing that flows from that is a tremendously powerful impetus for ethics, for ecological care of the earth, for responsibility for the lives of all these others in the air, in the sea, on the land, that we are basically wiping out, making species go extinct as Pope Francis says in Laudato si’, that should be for us a cause of personal suffering to see all this death. Many people in the church are still merrily going on their way as if this is not a religious matter.

Patrick Verel: This notion that Christians have a duty to protect the environment, it’s gotten a lot of attention and obviously you delved into it in great detail in your 2014 book called Ask the Beasts, that one, and the God of Love, and as you mentioned Pope Francis had his encyclical Laudato si’. What’s the common thread between all of these?

Elizabeth Johnson: We live on a marvelous Blue Planet, and we’re destroying it, so wake up.

Bonus track

Patrick Verel: It’s so funny that we’re talking about this now, and Stephen Hawking, of all people, just died.

Elizabeth Johnson: Yes.

Patrick Verel: What was your take on him?

Elizabeth Johnson: He was fabulous. Now, he was an atheist, avowed atheist.

Patrick Verel: Yeah.

Elizabeth Johnson: And so, A Brief History of Time, you know his famous book, at the end of it he’s talking about all the ways equations can explain galaxies and this and that, black holes, everything, and he says, “What is the power that created these equations that makes the universe run this way”, and when I talk about this I always say, “In the integrity of his own atheism, he leaves that question hanging, he leaves it unanswered”, which I honor that. I mean that’s what he … He didn’t know where it all … But, as Christians, we can say, well we think we have an answer. We think this came from the love of God.

Patrick Verel: That’s interesting. It makes him seem more like an agnostic.

Elizabeth Johnson: He’s not like Richard Dawkins or those other idiots. They know nothing about religion and they dis … I mean they’re as bad as the fundamentalists, who just dismiss science.

Patrick Verel: Yeah.

Elizabeth Johnson: I mean the two of them, I wanna say a plague on both your houses, no don’t. Really, but-

Patrick Verel: We’ll edit that out.

Elizabeth Johnson: No, leave it in. No, but Dawkins, yeah, no, I mean I would say he was a rigorous atheist. He really didn’t believe there was anything remotely that he could name God anyway, but he wasn’t damning those who thought, not saying we’re all idiots if we thought otherwise, but I think having that question lined up that way, after all his study, is a beautiful in road to say, someone who lives with faith doesn’t have anymore data than the scientists do in terms of the material world, the physical world evolution and all of that. It has a different interpretation of it. It has a different take on it, sees it with different lens, and the lens says we push it to the ultimate. It comes from the infinite generosity of a loving God. And that makes my life meaningful.

So, I can’t force you to believe this and I can’t prove it either, and that’s why faith is faith. We walk by faith not by sight. It’s not proved, but you have a lot of reasons that can back it up. You have the community that’s trying to live this out, and so on and so forth.

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