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Education for Our Liberation
Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Summer 1964 SNCC Freedom School Program in Mississippi
“So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do,
how we are willing to say ‘no’ to withdraw from that system
and begin within our community to start to function
and to build new institutions that will speak to our needs.”
— Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Speech, 1966
Throughout the history of Black freedom struggles—both in the United States and globally—questions of self-determination have remained constant. Whether the battle was against Jim Crow segregation or the cultural remnants of colonialism, visions for new institutions that center the needs of marginalized communities have been extensive. These visions have radically imagined alternatives to socioeconomic disenfranchisement: pinpointing community-based, consciousness-raising education as a key tool for freedom.
In December 1963, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary Charlie Cobb penned a proposal for a summer Freedom School program in Mississippi to the SNCC executive committee, noting the need for some educational program that would supplement the lackluster and racist education Black high school students were receiving in the education system. Due to decades of racialized and gendered poverty, Black people in Mississippi had extreme barriers to educational opportunities. For instance, in the early 1960s, less than five percent of Black Mississippians were high school graduates (Strukey 2016). The SNCC executive committee approved the proposal, and a Freedom School was developed by members of SNCC (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:24).
While racialized violence and discrimination continue into the twenty-first century, it would be remiss of us all not to acknowledge the extensive work done by organizations like SNCC to combat anti-Black racism in their communities.
Context, Curriculum, and Elements
Centering the lived experiences of Black students in Mississippi, the Freedom School curriculum was created by a collective of educators and activists over the course of a two-day conference. In addition to providing the students with extensive academic and intellectual support, the Freedom School was first and foremost proposed to nurture students’ political consciousness and give them the tools to organize against racial injustice themselves (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:25). The curriculum contained a multitude of interdisciplinary elements:
- an academic component focused on developing reading, writing, and math skills,
- a citizenship component to encourage students to think critically about their community and draw connections between their personal experiences and the greater climate of white supremacy in the United States, and
- a ‘Guide to Negro History’ that explored the socio-political activism of Black people around the globe (SNCC Digital Gateway 2016).
By dedicating a large part of the curriculum to Black history, the SNCC Freedom Schools opened the path to a consciousness-raising model that stressed a connection with the greater African diaspora and affirmed notions of Black transnational identity for students. The schools themselves were attended by students voluntarily; Freedom School teachers knocked on doors in the community they taught in to explain the purpose of the school and invite students to attend. By relying on word of mouth, the Freedom School classes across Mississippi gained popularity among community members. By the end of the Summer of 1964, over fifty Freedom Schools had been created, reaching over 2,100 Mississippians both young and adult (Watson 2014).
SNCC’s leadership and teaching model was largely influenced by mentor Ella Baker, an organizer in the Civil Rights Movement who developed the educational pedagogy of ‘democratic education’ which aims to teach students “…about the emancipatory nature of learning and schooling” (Watson 2014). Due to this, the Freedom School curriculum was deliberately developed to invest in the leadership potential of all students and create a learning environment in which teachers and students were both co-creators of knowledge. SNCC recognized that the educational institutions in Mississippi were failing Black students in a multitude of ways, so the curriculum needed to be flexible enough to accommodate various student needs: as they studied the curriculum, teachers were told to discard it and to create, on the spot if necessary, activities and questions that responded to the needs of the students in front of them. The curriculum’s central premise, the importance of questioning, challenged the concept of a written curriculum. The Freedom School curriculum encouraged—in fact, mandated—that teachers improvise (Emery et al. 2004).
Although the majority of Freedom Schools started their day off with singing, each school differed in terms of its daily schedule and classroom content. While some Freedom School students wanted to spend the bulk of their day learning deeply about Black historical figures and events such as the Haitian Revolution or Harriet Tubman, other Freedom School students were concerned with improving reading/writing skills or learning French. Many Freedom School classrooms even focused on the Civil Rights Struggle waging across the nation and internationally at the time. Freedom School teachers pushed students to discuss among themselves organizing tactics and strategies for, for example, Black voter registration (Sturkey 2004). In addition to the use of discussion, Freedom Schools in Mississippi utilized a diverse range of artistic and literary methods to give students the tools needed to both push back on dominant white supremacist societal narratives and take pride in their identity as Black people.
Using poetry, plays, academic essays, roleplaying, and short stories, the 1964 Freedom Schools worked to reconstitute and refigure a Southern Black identity outside of the racism that historically marginalized and defined the life of a Black person in Mississippi. The Freedom School curriculum challenged the reductive 1960s imaginations of the so-called Southern United States as simply a poverty-stricken area and recognized (through art, performance, literature, etc.) that the censuring of Black history in standard textbooks minimized the traumatic history of enslavement and the Black experience in Mississippi. Moreover, many Freedom Schools published newsletters that included the art and writing of Freedom School students as well as news from the Freedom Summer voting registration organizing work (Emery et al. 2004). These newsletters voiced political consciousness and activism to an audience that went beyond the Black students and SNCC volunteers involved in the Freedom Summer campaign.
Funding
Teachers were not paid, so they had to arrange their own room and board in the (typically) small, rural town they’d be teaching in. The budgets of the Freedom Schools were nearly non-existent, so Freedom School teachers were also expected to crowdfund supplies for the classrooms themselves. For example, before the start of the Freedom Summer Campaign, all volunteers were expected to ask companies to contribute books and equipment. Freedom School teachers relied heavily on the communities they lived and worked in for support. While a small budget was calculated for each town, the communities themselves generally provided a place for the classes—e.g., in a church basement—and donated equipment like tape recorders or projectors (Emery et al. 2014).
The Legacy of the 1964 Freedom Summer Schools
The Freedom School program started in 1964 summer was explicitly designed to develop the power of Black Mississippians: the schools pushed to deconstruct the U.S. public educational system that operated (and continues to operate) by maintaining elitist, eurocentric standards of intellect. Through its cultural and educational work, the Freedom Schools created spaces that supported and empowered Black people in a society that did not readily supply that knowledge. For many students, the Freedom Schools served as an entirely new opportunity to dream and envision a future beyond the constraints of exploitative sharecropping or racial terror.
The Freedom School educational model, of providing alternative education as a means of pushing back on dominant narratives and unapologetically claiming the human right to decent education, continued to influence activists beyond just the sociohistorical moment of Freedom Summer. After the summer ended, some Freedom School volunteer teachers decided to stay in Mississippi and continued to facilitate classes into the fall of 1964. Depending on the community, Freedom Schools served as community hubs for tutoring young Black people after school, held nighttime classes for Black adults and the voter registration effort, or continued classes for “children whose regular public school classes had been suspended for cotton-picking” (Emery et al. 2004).
As the Black Freedom Struggle continued, notions of ‘democratic education’ remained present in the ideological framework of the Black Power era institution-building (Carmichael 1966:53) and contemporary freedom projects such as the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School Program which “…serve[s] children and youth in grades K–12 in communities where quality academic enrichment programming is limited, too expensive, or non-existent” (Children’s Defense Fund New York) or the Gaza solidarity encampments on college campuses globally throughout the Spring of 2024 that offered public, political education programming. Although institutional racism and race-based school segregation remain a serious problem (Hale 2014), dozens of freedom schools in the United States today identify the 1964 SNCC Freedom Schools as an influence. Liberation struggles across the globe, from Turtle Island to Palestine, continue to push for change by employing similar educational strategies to inspire others to fight for collective liberation.
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{
"article":
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"title" : "Education for Our Liberation: Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Summer 1964 SNCC Freedom School Program in Mississippi",
"author" : "maya finoh",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/education-for-our-liberation-reflections-on-the-60th-anniversary-of-the-summer-1964-sncc-freedom-school-program-in-mississippi",
"date" : "2024-09-05 21:47:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/sncc-thumb.jpg",
"excerpt" : "“So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do,how we are willing to say ‘no’ to withdraw from that systemand begin within our community to start to functionand to build new institutions that will speak to our needs.”— Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Speech, 19661 Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” Voices of Democracy, University of California at Berkeley, Oct. 29, 1966, www.voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/carmichael-black-power-speech-text. ↩ ",
"content" : "“So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do,how we are willing to say ‘no’ to withdraw from that systemand begin within our community to start to functionand to build new institutions that will speak to our needs.”— Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Speech, 19661Throughout the history of Black freedom struggles—both in the United States and globally—questions of self-determination have remained constant. Whether the battle was against Jim Crow segregation or the cultural remnants of colonialism, visions for new institutions that center the needs of marginalized communities have been extensive. These visions have radically imagined alternatives to socioeconomic disenfranchisement: pinpointing community-based, consciousness-raising education as a key tool for freedom.In December 1963, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary Charlie Cobb penned a proposal for a summer Freedom School program in Mississippi to the SNCC executive committee2, noting the need for some educational program that would supplement the lackluster and racist education Black high school students were receiving in the education system. Due to decades of racialized and gendered poverty, Black people in Mississippi had extreme barriers to educational opportunities. For instance, in the early 1960s, less than five percent of Black Mississippians were high school graduates (Strukey 2016)3. The SNCC executive committee approved the proposal, and a Freedom School was developed by members of SNCC (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:24)4. While racialized violence and discrimination continue into the twenty-first century, it would be remiss of us all not to acknowledge the extensive work done by organizations like SNCC to combat anti-Black racism in their communities.Context, Curriculum, and ElementsCentering the lived experiences of Black students in Mississippi, the Freedom School curriculum was created by a collective of educators and activists over the course of a two-day conference. In addition to providing the students with extensive academic and intellectual support, the Freedom School was first and foremost proposed to nurture students’ political consciousness and give them the tools to organize against racial injustice themselves (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:25)4. The curriculum contained a multitude of interdisciplinary elements: an academic component focused on developing reading, writing, and math skills, a citizenship component to encourage students to think critically about their community and draw connections between their personal experiences and the greater climate of white supremacy in the United States, and a ‘Guide to Negro History’ that explored the socio-political activism of Black people around the globe (SNCC Digital Gateway 2016)5.By dedicating a large part of the curriculum to Black history, the SNCC Freedom Schools opened the path to a consciousness-raising model that stressed a connection with the greater African diaspora and affirmed notions of Black transnational identity for students. The schools themselves were attended by students voluntarily; Freedom School teachers knocked on doors in the community they taught in to explain the purpose of the school and invite students to attend. By relying on word of mouth, the Freedom School classes across Mississippi gained popularity among community members. By the end of the Summer of 1964, over fifty Freedom Schools had been created, reaching over 2,100 Mississippians both young and adult (Watson 2014)6.SNCC’s leadership and teaching model was largely influenced by mentor Ella Baker, an organizer in the Civil Rights Movement who developed the educational pedagogy of ‘democratic education’ which aims to teach students “…about the emancipatory nature of learning and schooling” (Watson 2014)6. Due to this, the Freedom School curriculum was deliberately developed to invest in the leadership potential of all students and create a learning environment in which teachers and students were both co-creators of knowledge. SNCC recognized that the educational institutions in Mississippi were failing Black students in a multitude of ways, so the curriculum needed to be flexible enough to accommodate various student needs: as they studied the curriculum, teachers were told to discard it and to create, on the spot if necessary, activities and questions that responded to the needs of the students in front of them. The curriculum’s central premise, the importance of questioning, challenged the concept of a written curriculum. The Freedom School curriculum encouraged—in fact, mandated—that teachers improvise (Emery et al. 2004)7.Although the majority of Freedom Schools started their day off with singing, each school differed in terms of its daily schedule and classroom content. While some Freedom School students wanted to spend the bulk of their day learning deeply about Black historical figures and events such as the Haitian Revolution or Harriet Tubman, other Freedom School students were concerned with improving reading/writing skills or learning French. Many Freedom School classrooms even focused on the Civil Rights Struggle waging across the nation and internationally at the time. Freedom School teachers pushed students to discuss among themselves organizing tactics and strategies for, for example, Black voter registration (Sturkey 2004)3. In addition to the use of discussion, Freedom Schools in Mississippi utilized a diverse range of artistic and literary methods to give students the tools needed to both push back on dominant white supremacist societal narratives and take pride in their identity as Black people.Using poetry, plays, academic essays, roleplaying, and short stories, the 1964 Freedom Schools worked to reconstitute and refigure a Southern Black identity outside of the racism that historically marginalized and defined the life of a Black person in Mississippi. The Freedom School curriculum challenged the reductive 1960s imaginations of the so-called Southern United States as simply a poverty-stricken area and recognized (through art, performance, literature, etc.) that the censuring of Black history in standard textbooks minimized the traumatic history of enslavement and the Black experience in Mississippi. Moreover, many Freedom Schools published newsletters that included the art and writing of Freedom School students as well as news from the Freedom Summer voting registration organizing work (Emery et al. 2004)7. These newsletters voiced political consciousness and activism to an audience that went beyond the Black students and SNCC volunteers involved in the Freedom Summer campaign.FundingTeachers were not paid, so they had to arrange their own room and board in the (typically) small, rural town they’d be teaching in. The budgets of the Freedom Schools were nearly non-existent, so Freedom School teachers were also expected to crowdfund supplies for the classrooms themselves. For example, before the start of the Freedom Summer Campaign, all volunteers were expected to ask companies to contribute books and equipment. Freedom School teachers relied heavily on the communities they lived and worked in for support. While a small budget was calculated for each town, the communities themselves generally provided a place for the classes—e.g., in a church basement—and donated equipment like tape recorders or projectors (Emery et al. 2014)7.The Legacy of the 1964 Freedom Summer SchoolsThe Freedom School program started in 1964 summer was explicitly designed to develop the power of Black Mississippians: the schools pushed to deconstruct the U.S. public educational system that operated (and continues to operate) by maintaining elitist, eurocentric standards of intellect. Through its cultural and educational work, the Freedom Schools created spaces that supported and empowered Black people in a society that did not readily supply that knowledge. For many students, the Freedom Schools served as an entirely new opportunity to dream and envision a future beyond the constraints of exploitative sharecropping or racial terror.The Freedom School educational model, of providing alternative education as a means of pushing back on dominant narratives and unapologetically claiming the human right to decent education, continued to influence activists beyond just the sociohistorical moment of Freedom Summer. After the summer ended, some Freedom School volunteer teachers decided to stay in Mississippi and continued to facilitate classes into the fall of 1964. Depending on the community, Freedom Schools served as community hubs for tutoring young Black people after school, held nighttime classes for Black adults and the voter registration effort, or continued classes for “children whose regular public school classes had been suspended for cotton-picking” (Emery et al. 2004)7.As the Black Freedom Struggle continued, notions of ‘democratic education’ remained present in the ideological framework of the Black Power era institution-building (Carmichael 1966:53)1 and contemporary freedom projects such as the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School Program which “…serve[s] children and youth in grades K–12 in communities where quality academic enrichment programming is limited, too expensive, or non-existent” (Children’s Defense Fund New York)8 or the Gaza solidarity encampments on college campuses globally throughout the Spring of 2024 that offered public, political education programming. Although institutional racism and race-based school segregation remain a serious problem (Hale 2014)9, dozens of freedom schools in the United States today identify the 1964 SNCC Freedom Schools as an influence. Liberation struggles across the globe, from Turtle Island to Palestine, continue to push for change by employing similar educational strategies to inspire others to fight for collective liberation.References Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” Voices of Democracy, University of California at Berkeley, Oct. 29, 1966, www.voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/carmichael-black-power-speech-text. ↩ ↩2 Charles Cobb, “Prospectus for a Summer Freedom School Program in Mississippi (Excerpt).” HERB: Resources for Teachers, www.herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1158. ↩ Sturkey, William. “The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.” Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Historical Society, May 2016, mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/403/The-1964-Mississippi-Freedom-Schools. ↩ ↩2 Chilcoat, George W., and Jerry A. Ligon. “‘We Will Teach What Democracy Really Means By Living Democratically Within Our Own Schools’ Lessons From the Personal Experience of Teachers Who Taught in the Mississippi Freedom Schools.” Education and Culture 12, no. 1 (1995): 24-42. ↩ ↩2 “Freedom Schools.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, Dec. 2016, www.snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/culture-education/freedom-schools. ↩ Watson, Marcia. “Beyond Slavery And The Civil Rights Movement: Freedom Schools And Transformative Education.” African American Intellectual History Society. Oct. 16, 2014, www.aaihs.org/beyond-slavery-and-the-civil-rights-movement-freedom-schools-and-transformative-education. ↩ ↩2 Emery, Kathy, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Reid Gold. “Introduction: Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools.” Education and Democracy, The San Francisco Freedom School, 2004, www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/A_02_Introduction.htm#_edn16. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 “New York Freedom Schools.” Children’s Defense Fund New York. Children’s Defense Fund, www.cdfny.org/programs/cdf-freedom-schools/new-york-freedom-schools. ↩ Hale, Jon N. “The Forgotten Story of the Freedom Schools.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, Jun. 26, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/the-depressing-legacy-of-freedom-schools/373490. ↩ "
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "A Call to Arms",
"author" : "Jeremiah Zaeske",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/a-call-to-arms",
"date" : "2026-02-03 11:17:00 -0500",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/1000013371.jpeg",
"excerpt" : "Birds perch on the gaps in barbed wire",
"content" : "Birds perch on the gaps in barbed wireBeckoning us to join themWater trickles through the obstruction in its path as if it were nonexistentWe have forgotten that we are waterVines weave a tapestry through metalIf trees cannot find a gap in the fence they will squeeze their way through,engulf it,absorb the border within themselvesThis is a call to armsLOVEI want my love to break through glassI want it to uproot the weeds that have grown in my heart as it picks through yoursI want it to burn through every piece of fabric stained with bloodLove was never a pacifistWhere there is evil there will also be two kinds of joyOne that revels in the misery,grinning faces posing with dead bodieswhile others look on in silence growing numbBut love is the joy of resilienceThe joy of knowing we will always need eachother enoughto tear down the walls and reach out our handsin spite of everything, even deathTo grab at the roots of ourselvesand plant flowers in place of the hate that’s been sown,though the stems may have thornsThis love will be the callouses born from fighting our waythrough rough brick and sharp glass edges,but they’ll just make it that much softer when palm meets palmThis love will be the fertilizer for a garden of scar tissue,never again to be buried under earth and thick skinThis love will be the seeds taking rootafter a long cold winter,sprouting from our chests and cracks in the pavementto greet a long-awaited springA NURTURING DEATHShot-gun weddingDrive-by baby showerClose-range baptismBurn down the forest,the church and the steepleThe baby’s gender is Destruction,Death, andPrimordial ChaosWe are unlocking the worlds they shut away,beyond the talons of textbook definitions,worlds they swore could never existworlds they swore to destroyWe’re pulling out fragmentsthrough the cracked open doorto fill the potholes and cracked cementof our bodymindsouls,to make salve for the woundsThe ones they claimed were pre-existingand unfillableand unfixableand “who’s going to pay for that?”We are toppling immovable fortresseslimb by limb,peeling off skin and tearing through tendonto reveal the brittle forgeries of boneWe are de-manufacturing wildernessNot just free reign for the treesor even all the life they hold,but regrowth for the village of Ahwahnee,birds pecking out the eyes of campers at YosemiteWhat remains will be fed back into the ecosystem,into the bellies of bears and mountain lions,swallowed by insects and earthuntil it’s decayed enough to fertilize the soiland grow foodmedicinelifeA rebirthA nurturing death"
}
,
{
"title" : "This is America: Land of the Occupied, Home of the Capitalists",
"author" : "Mattea Mun",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/this-is-america",
"date" : "2026-02-03 11:11:00 -0500",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/ice-protest-2-gty-gmh-260130_1769810312461_hpMain.jpg",
"excerpt" : "They tell us we live in the land of the free. They declare, “we the people,” and we assume they mean us when we were only ever defined – designed – to be the fodder to build their “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”",
"content" : "They tell us we live in the land of the free. They declare, “we the people,” and we assume they mean us when we were only ever defined – designed – to be the fodder to build their “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”On a Thursday, a 2-year-old girl returned home from the store with her father, Elvis Tipan-Echeverria, when unknown, masked agents trespassed onto their driveway and smashed the window in. In the name of defending the pursuit of happiness, she, with her father, was shoved into a car with no car seat and placed on a plane to Texas. This little girl was eventually returned to her mother in Minnesota; her father – still imprisoned in the land of the free.In the name of liberty, 5-year-old Liam Ramos, with his father, was seized and flown away from his mother and his home to sit in a detention facility in Texas, where his education will halt, his freedom is non-existent, and his pursuit of happiness – denied.In the name of life, Chaofeng Ge was “found” hanging, dead, in a shower stall in detention, his death declared a suicide though his hands and feet were bound behind his back, a fact evidently not deemed worthy of being initially disclosed. Geraldo Lunas Campos was handcuffed, tackled and choked – murdered – in detention, in an effort to “save” him. Victor Manuel Diaz, too, was “found” dead, a “presumed suicide,” the autopsy – classified.American voters like to declare that our present reality isn’t “what they voted for,” despite the fact that one of Donald Trump’s campaign promises in the 2024 election was to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” inevitably according to xenophobic and white supremacist lines. What many of us fail to remember is that this is not the first time we have voted for this. Indeed, I am not confident there is any point in American history that we have not collectively voted for this, regardless of so-called “party lines.”We Have Been Here BeforeWhile the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was founded in 2003, slavery and genocide predated the very Constitution of the United States, the bodies of African Americans and Indigenous Americans brutalized and broken in the service of laying the foundations of (white) American wealth. Though slavery was “abolished” in 1865 by the 13th amendment, this did not end the policing of racialized bodies.During the Reconstruction era, convict leasing and black codes preserved the conditions and social hierarchy that existed under slavery. Moreover, any legal rights afforded Black Americans were and still are persistently undermined by their inferior social caste, whereby their deaths and suffering at the hands of law enforcement, the healthcare system and other Americans often goes unprosecuted and/or unpunished.Within WWII-era Japanese internment camps, inmates were stripped of their freedom to move, subjected to harsh living conditions and coerced to partake in underpaid, unprotected labor.The Lucrative Business of Slavery and its Bipartisan ProfiteersTo this day, the prison system remains a potent vestige of slavery, again for the sake of profit, as inmates’ human rights are systematically liquidated. As early as the 1980s, the federal government has contracted for-profit prison corporations to operate federal detention facilities. Today, over 90% of ICE detention facilities are operated by for-profit prison corporations as of 2023, a figure which increased from 79% within Biden’s presidency alone.These trends, in conjunction with the ongoing mass detainments of America’s people of color, are not surprising when we consider the immense profits our politicians and some Americans stand to gain, made possible by the continuous enslavement of racialized bodies.Our bodies are their profit.Under the Voluntary Work Program, forced carceral labor is codified, whereby detainees are to receive “monetary compensation of not less than $1.00 per day of work completed,” their “voluntary” labor absolving them of legal employee protections, such as minimum wage. And although ICE affirms that “all detention facilities shall comply with all applicable health and safety regulations and standards,” there is confusion as to how these standards are checked, especially when we consider the Trump administration closed the DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in March 2025.Nevertheless, several lawsuits and detainee testimonies attest to the fact that the work program is rarely voluntary, the survival of themselves and the facilities imprisoning them hinging upon their labor and minimal income. Indeed, many detainees are expected to purchase their own basic products, such as toilet paper and soap. Other detainees recall being threatened with solitary confinement, poorer living conditions and material punishment if they refused to work. Martha Gonzalez was denied access to sanitary pads when she requested a day off work, demonstrative of a larger pattern of ICE’s refusal to provide hygiene products and spaces to maintain one’s hygiene in a dignified manner.In 2023, GEO Group, one of the largest for-profit prison corporations, made over $2.4 billion in revenue, of which ICE, as their largest customer, accounted for 43%, or $1.04 million. ICE also accounted for 30% of CoreCivic’s – another large for-profit prison corporation – revenue. Thus, our bodies enable these companies to amass hundreds of millions in profit.Incidentally, CoreCivic and GEO Group are among the private prison companies that contribute the most to political campaigns, parties and candidates. In the 2024 election cycle, GEO Group gave $3.7 million in contributions, including $1 million to Make America Great Again Inc, while CoreCivic provided roughly $785,000 in contributions. While Republican candidates and committees have been the recipient of the large majority of these funds in recent years, Democrats and the Democratic Party are also guilty of accepting funding from these corporations, among others. In the 2024 cycle, CoreCivic contributed $50,000 to the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association and Kamala Harris received $9,500 from GEO Group.The opportunities for profit extend even further beyond the U.S.’s borders as more and more nations are gradually entering deals to imprison noncitizen deportees coming from the U.S. In November, $7.5 million was paid out to Equatorial Guinea for this purpose. Alongside other Latin American countries like Costa Rica and El Salvador, Argentina is also rumored to strike their own deal with the U.S.Our bodies are their profit.The ongoing ICE campaign stands as a bipartisan issue, mirroring the ways our country’s deepest social inequalities have been repeatedly upheld on all sides of the political aisle throughout our history.The Occupied Mind and BodyMoreover, the policing of racialized bodies does not merely pertain to the body alone as a site to be moved and removed. Rather, this violence is also waged in our social spaces, in our fears and inside of our bodies.In the classroom, our curriculums hardly, if at all, represent a version of events where we existed and meanwhile the current administration actively tries to erase any part of history we are given a claim to. Such initiatives, too, have been supported for generations, reflected in the 150-year period Indigenous American and Hawaiian children were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to boarding schools designed to facilitate their assimilation and more seamless theft of their native lands.In our social spaces and lives – if not yet brutally taken – liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not ours for the taking. We are perpetually told under what conditions our movement is permissible. Decades of redlining have, in many ways, preserved segregation and pooled the best resources for the white and the wealthy to the detriment of communities of color.But even this is not enough.They police us from the inside, too. In exchange for gifts like food and photographs of her daughter, a Nicaraguan woman was subjected to have sex with a now former ICE officer whilst in detention. A “romantic relationship,” according to federal prosecutors. Our suffering is still romanticized even when guilt has been assigned. What they still do not realize is that there is no place for romance to reside so long as we remain shackled, our bodies – looted.From the inside, they forcibly remove our reproductive organs, then and now. Many of us were among the 70,000 forcibly sterilized in the 20th-century, deemed “unfit” to reproduce. As we speak, 32% of surgeries performed in ICE detention facilities are performed without proper authorization, and there are reports of mass hysterectomies being exacted behind closed doors.They dictate our movements, lock us up, take our insides out, inject their fantasies onto and into our bodies, deprive us of our right to learn and to work and to live. And even if they have not yet come bounding at our doorstep, we lie anxiously in wait for the moment our past may catch up with us and seep, once again, back into our present.And yet, they have the audacity to say that it is by our hands that we are dying; that if only we had lived and loved differently, things wouldn’t be this way. In the name of safety and peace, they force our bodies into hiding or otherwise out onto the streets, despite the fact that only 5% of us have been implicated in a violent crime. In the name of safety, they drag a half-naked ChongLy Thao into snow-covered streets for existing, in their eyes, incorrectly; that is, non-whitely. In the name of safety, a one-year-old and her father are pepper-sprayed in the eyes whilst sitting in their car at the wrong time.Dismantling the Oppressor to Dismantle OppressionFor all the state’s claims that a “war on crime” is being waged, it has always been and remains a war against our bodies, the means with which they wish to realize ICE’s utopic “Amazon Prime for human beings.” Similarly, the War on Drugs only ever served to terrorize our communities, to lock up and exploit our bodies. Meanwhile, this matter of “crime” never dissipated. For centuries, they tell us that it is our fault – our heinous “crimes” – that we are stripped of our families and our dignity. Meanwhile, politicians of all parties and colors have sat idle even while claiming to bear our interests to heart. We forget that they hold their money closer.And, not so unlike the slave catchers recruited and paid out to return runaway slaves to their owners, so, too, it is we who are being recruited and paid out to bind and beat one another, to tease out the “other.” That is, unless we bring ourselves to see ourselves not only in the “other,” but in the ones dragging our tired feet across the pavement, forcing our bodies into further submission, pulling the trigger – all whilst looking us dead in the eye.It was James Baldwin who said, “Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”Whilst the money and military might of the state and the oppressive systems that prop it up are, no doubt, daunting, their power is nevertheless maintained by individual choices made in the service of oppression and possession, as opposed to liberation. However, it is also important to remember that other individual choices are the reason we remain today, more free than before even if that freedom may be incomplete. Thus, just as individual choices have the power to oppress, so, too, individual choices have the power to resist oppression; to hold our people in check; to liberate.Only through our decision to not become the monster we fear do we have any hope of collective liberation."
}
,
{
"title" : "Couture in Paris, Cuts at the 'Post'",
"author" : "Louis Pisano",
"category" : "essay",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/bezos-sanchez-paris-couture-week-wapo-layoffs",
"date" : "2026-02-02 10:49:00 -0500",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_Bezos_Sanchez_Pisano.jpg",
"excerpt" : "The Cruel Irony of the Bezos-Sánchez Empire",
"content" : "The Cruel Irony of the Bezos-Sánchez EmpireLate on January 25, as snow dusted Washington, about 60 foreign correspondents at The Washington Post hit send on an email that felt like a last stand. They had dodged gunfire in Ukraine, documented Iran’s water crises and protester crackdowns, risked sources’ lives in gang territories. Now they faced their own existential threat: rumors of up to 300 company-wide layoffs, with foreign desks, sports, metro, and arts likely gutted. Their collective letter to owner Jeff Bezos was direct, almost pleading.“Robust, powerful foreign coverage is essential to The Washington Post’s brand and its future success in whatever form the paper takes moving forward,” they wrote. “We urge you to consider how the proposed layoffs will certainly lead us first to irrelevance, not the shared success that remains attainable.” They offered flexibility on costs but drew a line: slashing overseas reporting in Trump’s second term, amid global flashpoints, would hollow out the institution they had built.Whether Bezos opened that email remains unclear. As of this writing, he has not publicly responded to it. In fact, Bezos was 4,000 miles away, strolling hand-in-hand with Lauren Sánchez Bezos into Schiaparelli’s Haute Couture show in Paris. Flashbulbs popped as they arrived, Sánchez in a blood red skirt suit from the house and a white crocodile bag. Hours on, she switched to a steel-blue-gray vintage Dior pencil-skirt suit, its enormous fur collar evoking a mob wife, for Jonathan Anderson’s couture debut with the house.The two didn’t just sit front row, either. Backstage at Dior, Bezos and Sánchez posed with Anderson and LVMH CEO Delphine Arnault. Sánchez lunched with Anna Wintour at The Ritz and was allegedly dressed by Law Roach, the “image architect” behind Zendaya’s accession to fashion darling, who once declared fashion’s power to challenge norms and amplify the marginalized. Roach reshared Sánchez’s Instagram stories, crediting the vintage Dior; later, they toured Schiaparelli’s atelier together. The partnership felt sudden and loaded.Back in D.C., the newsroom simmered. Staffers posted on X under #SaveThePost, Yeganeh Torbati recounting government violence against protesters, Loveday Morris describing blasts rattling windows and the mortal risks to sources, tagging Bezos directly in urgent appeals. In a guild-prompted twist meant to amplify the message, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild encouraged tagging even Lauren Sánchez, though not every reporter followed through. The betrayal stung deeper after years of buyouts, a libertarian-tilted Opinions section, a rebranded mission (“Riveting Storytelling for All of America”) that rang corporate. Losses topped $100 million in 2024 and now the axe is hovering over desks that produced the scoops Bezos once praised when he bought the paper for $250 million in 2013. Now, Bezos parties on in Paris, his wife climbing fashion’s ranks.While the billionaires party, a profound unease is permeating the American media landscape, exacerbated by political shifts and technological disruptions that empower owners like Bezos to sideline core missions in favor of personal ventures. The press, once a vigilant watchdog against authority, now frequently finds itself complicit with power structures, buckling under misinformation, partisan censorship, and budgetary constraints that stifle investigative depth. This dynamic deprives the public of the unflinching journalism that is capable of exposing foreign policy overreaches or everyday human struggle, amplified by economic slowdowns and subscription fatigue in an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. With eroding confidence driving audiences to social platforms, now eclipsing traditional TV and websites as the primary news source in the U.S., the fallout further deepens this public distrust.To be clear, fashion isn’t innocent in this. It loves to posture as progressive, touting body positivity, diversity, resistance as it’s relevant, but rolling out the red carpet for the ultra-rich when the checks clear, especially when the checks come from people whose fortunes are built on real harm. Once upon a time, you couldn’t simply buy your way into the Met Gala; invitations were curated by Wintour based on cultural relevance, creative influence, and a carefully guarded sense of who truly belonged in the room. That’s all over now. The Bezoses have turned every norm in fashion on its head, sponsoring the 2026 Met Gala (funding the event and reportedly influencing invites), making their debut as a couple in 2024, and now leveraging those ties to claim space in couture’s inner circles. Bezos and Sánchez’s couture jaunt is just the latest proof that fashion’s gates, once guarded by creativity and taste, now swing widest for raw wealth and access.Wintour lunches and their prominent sponsorship role in the Met Gala don’t help quell the whispers that Bezos is eyeing Condé Nast (Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker) as a “wedding gift” to Sánchez. Rumors denied yet persistent, revived by every Paris sighting.Not everyone in fashion is staying silent. Some insiders are pushing back hard against the normalization. Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, a longtime voice in the industry, posted bluntly on X: “The hyper normalization is doing my head in… keep your mouth shut about ICE if you’re mingling with them, seating them, dressing them. Accepting their cash.” She called out Amazon’s cloud systems as the backbone of DHS deportation operations and billions in government contracts that sustain what she called “Trump’s terror machine,” concluding that Bezos and Sánchez are at couture simply because they are rich—and their wealth comes from profoundly harming millions daily. “I feel crazy,” she wrote. While couture has always been a bastian of the uber-rich, Karefa-Johnson’s frustration underscores how even fashion’s own are starting to question the cost of that welcome.If that Conde-Nast deal ever materializes, the consequences would compound because control over fashion’s most influential titles would allow Bezos the opportunity to shape narratives around billionaires, soften coverage of labor abuses, environmental costs, or surveillance contracts. The same hand that funds AWS’s CIA contracts, DoD cloud deals, ICE enforcement tools, fossil-fuel operations, warehouse injuries, anti-union tactics, and small-business-crushing monopoly would quietly steer the stories about wealth and style. Already deferential to its biggest advertisers and attendees, fashion journalism would fold into the same closed loop, fusing tech dominance with cultural gatekeeping into one unassailable private empire—all of it ultimately bankrolling the yachts, the space joyrides with Katy Perry, the private-jet hops to couture shows and fashion influence, to polish an image that the Post’s own reporters once might have skewered.[x] It’s almost elegant the way one empire’s dirt gets laundered through another.It’s cruelly ironic how wide the gap between the risks assumed by WaPo correspondents tasked with holding power to account and the comfort with which their owner moves among the powerful in Paris actually is. Fashion has political power, as Roach once said. It can challenge and provoke. It can also resist. But when it courts figures like Bezos, whose empire thrives on the very inequalities it sometimes pretends to critique, it becomes another asset in his already enormous portfolio.But there is no challenge, no provocation. There is no major resistance. Instead, there’s champagne and constant disassociation. Somewhere between the clink of glasses and the photos, Bezos and his wife get a glow up while The Washington Post newsroom waits, knowing the cuts are coming but not yet here. No one is confused about what happened; this is simply how the trade now unfortunately works.Wealth drifts through media, fashion, culture, picking up prestige and shedding people along the way. Whether Bezos ever read the letter is beside the point. The stranger thing is how little anyone expects him, or anyone like him, to answer anymore."
}
]
}
