A Q&A with Alexandre Baril

This week in North Philly Notes, an interview with Alexandre Baril, author of Undoing Suicidism, conducted by Ally Day during his recent online book launch.

 

Can you tell us about what brought you to this topic?

My desire to write a book on suicide and assisted suicide comes from both a personal and academic interest. I have been a suicidal person since the age of 12. Even though there are periods in my life when I feel better, suicidality never really disappears. Much of my work, such as my work in trans, disability/crip and Mad studies, is anchored in my marginalized identities. My writing and research help me to better understand my lived experience and to connect it to a broader sociopolitical context. My interest in suicide comes from this need to understand my own subjective experience of suicidality and to situate it in a larger sociopolitical context. In terms of my academic interests, I was astonished to learn that no concept existed to name the oppression of suicidal people until I coined the term suicidism. I was disappointed about this lack, and that was the spark for this book.

You have coined the term suicidism. Can you tell us more about suicidism?

Suicidism refers to an oppressive system functioning at the normative, medical, legal, social, political, economic, and epistemic levels, a system in which suicidal people experience forms of injustice and violence, such as discrimination, stigmatization, exclusion, pathologization, and incarceration. Many suicidal individuals face violent and inhumane treatments after revealing their suicidality. Indeed, some are hospitalized without their consent, drugged against their will, experience mistreatments by police officers, have difficulty to find new jobs or lose their current jobs or housing, have their parental rights revoked, to name only a few. Because of these suicidist consequences, suicidal people remain silent and complete their suicides without reaching out to anyone. As I always say, every single completed suicide is the proof that what we are doing currently is not working, because each of those people didn’t call for help before completing their suicides.

These stories illustrate that, despite the supportive discourses surrounding suicidality, suicidal people who call for help do not find the promised support. Worse, I contend that suicide prevention does more harm than good. This is particularly true for marginalized suicidal individuals, such as racialized, Indigenous, homeless, 2SLGBTQIA+, disabled/Mad or neurodiverse individuals, who often experience, through suicide prevention interventions, increased forms of colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and sanism.

You are proposing some radical ideas in this book, notably a suicide-affirmative approach. Can you tell us what this approach entails?

First, I want to say that my approach to suicide and assisted suicide is not intended to encourage suicide. Second, you are right: the most controversial argument of my book is to conceptualize suicide as a positive right. This implies accompanying suicidal individuals in their possible journey toward death. This accompaniment would be provided through what I call a suicide-affirmative approach. My approach is inspired by trans-affirmative perspectives. A suicide-affirmative approach does not mean pushing suicidal people to suicide, just as the goal of the trans-affirmative approach is not to push a person to transition. Rather, it means that instead of trying to cure trans people of their transness or suicidal people of their suicidality, we develop safer spaces in which we can examine their suicidality with them and discuss a variety of options. My approach proposes to shift from a preventionist logic to a logic of accompaniment to help suicidal people to make the best-informed decision, a support that could be life-affirming and death-affirming.

Most importantly, my suicide-affirmative approach has the potential to prevent more deaths by suicide than existing prevention interventions. Indeed, rather than being forced to die in secrecy by completing their suicide without consulting anyone due to fear of experiencing suicidist consequences, suicidal people would have the chance to speak freely and to benefit from an accompaniment process to reach an informed decision.

What distinguishes your position from the extension of assisted death to people with mental/psychological suffering?

I argue that suicidism makes some people’s desire for death abnormal. In contrast, we legitimize assisted death for those cast as “unproductive” and “undesirable,” based on dominant norms, such as disabled/sick/ill/old people. In their case, their desire for death is considered normal. However, suicidal people’s desire for death is cast as “irrational,” “crazy,” “mad,” “insane,” or “alienated,” and they are stripped of their decision-making capacity. In other words, from an ableist, sanist, ageist and capitalist perspective, people who are seen as “unproductive” are supported to die, while suicidal people, who are seen as having productive futures, are excluded from these laws and forced to stay alive. My work questions why are we offering assistance in dying to disabled/sick/ill/old people who, in the vast majority of cases, don’t want to die but ask for better living conditions, while those who do want to die, such as suicidal people, are denied any assistance?

In all national contexts that allow assisted death, suicidal people are excluded; only people who are physically, or sometimes mentally, ill can have access to these procedures, and these laws specify that no suicidal person should be supported in their desire to die. My approach is therefore radically distinct from that of offering assisted death for people for whom mental illness is the sole condition of their request. I advocate for the abolition of these discriminatory laws that allow assisted suicide only for “special populations” based on dominant norms of who should live or die. I would like to see the creation of new laws and policies surrounding assisted suicide for all adults who have a stable desire to die, including suicidal people. In other words, my approach is not based on a physical/mental illness or disability diagnosis.

What would you say are the three most important messages and take-aways of your book?

I would first say that it’s important to understand that suicidal people, like all other marginalized groups, experience structural oppression. Second, it’s important to start listening to suicidal people and realize that prevention discourses and interventions, despite their best intentions, often make things worse for suicidal people, particularly those who belong to marginalized communities. A third key message is that giving positive rights to suicidal people, that is, providing them the support they need and facilitating access to a renewed form of assisted suicide, might be a much more effective way to prevent unnecessary deaths by suicide.

Regarding the concrete take-aways of my book, the first one is that if we are committed to helping suicidal people, particularly those most determined to die and who currently complete their suicide, we need to acknowledge that we do almost everything wrong. The second take-away is that suicidal people have important messages to convey. We should start paying attention to what they have to say and consider them experts regarding their needs. The last take-away is that despite multiple prevention strategies, decade after decade, despite a few ebbs and flows in suicide statistics, we don’t see a significant decrease in suicide rates. What we have been doing so far doesn’t work, and it might be time to try solutions outside the box, like the one I am proposing in this book.

A deep dive into organized taxpayer activity in the 1930s

This week in North Philly Notes, Linda Upham-Bornstein, author of “Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender”, writes about what she unexpectedly discovered about the taxpayers’ associations during the Great Depression.

“Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender” is, at least in part, the product of serendipity. About 25 years ago, my husband and I were reorganizing the basement of his law office in New Hampshire when I happened upon a box containing bound copies of the Coos Guardian from 1934, of which Arthur J. Bergeron, the firm’s retired senior partner, was the editor. This weekly newspaper provided contemporaneous accounts of the efforts of Arthur and the newly formed local taxpayers’ association to effectuate economic and political change in the community, region, and state. This story spurred me to investigate whether this manifestation of organized taxpayer activity was unique to northern New Hampshire or part of a broader movement during the Great Depression. In the ensuing years I identified a plethora of rich, untapped primary sources that documented the emergence of a nationwide taxpayers’ association movement in the 1930s.

A number of my findings surprised me. Among the most prominent are the magnitude of the tax revolt and the speed with which taxpayers’ groups multiplied; the attitudes of organized taxpayers toward the size and reach of government; and the distinctive form of collective tax resistance that emerged in the Reconstruction South.

The proliferation of taxpayers’ leagues in the early 1930s was remarkable. In 1928, they probably numbered fifty or so. As the domestic economy contracted, a good government professional observed in 1932, “an irresistible demand that the cost of local government be reduced” swept “across the country like a prairie fire.” By 1933 there were over four thousand taxpayers’ organizations nationwide.

The attitudes of tax resisters toward the role and reach of government in general, and toward the New Deal in particular, were also unexpected. Because much of modern tax resistance is grounded in the world view, articulated by Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address, that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” I anticipated that Depression-era tax revolters would exhibit intense antistatism. Although some organized taxpayers sought to shrink and shackle government, most did not want smaller, more limited government but rather government that was more efficient, more effective, more progressive, and able to provide necessary services in a cost-effective manner. Nearly all taxpayers wanted the price of government to undergo the same measure of deflation as the economy, but they also wanted to maintain the government services they needed and used. What most organized taxpayers desired was less expensive state and local government so as to reduce their state and local tax burdens.

The views of organized taxpayers toward the New Deal were a complicated and sometimes incongruous mix. The feelings of most members of taxpayers’ associations about the New Deal ranged from outright support to ambivalence. Two factors account for the overall lack of opposition to the New Deal from citizens who were protesting vigorously their state and local taxes.

First and foremost, New Deal programs were conferring direct, concrete benefits on many of these taxpayers, especially the housing, agricultural, and relief initiatives. Consequently, many members of taxpayers’ groups understandably welcomed—and some expected—the federal government’s intervention in the domestic economy. Even taxpayers with an individualistic, antistatist mindset tended to have mixed feelings about the New Deal, harboring suspicions of big government but recognizing their need for assistance from the Roosevelt administration and grudgingly accepting it.

Second, the New Deal tax regime did not produce significant tax awareness among or tax resistance from the middle classes because it eschewed taxing the income of the middle classes and instead relied mainly on taxes on the wealthy and corporations, on indirect or hidden consumer taxes, and on taxes (like social security payroll taxes) that taxpayers did not think of as taxes. By and large, taxpayers who participated in collective tax resistance at the local and state levels did not perceive New Deal spending to be adding to their tax burdens.

In my investigation of the 19^th-century origins and antecedents of Depression-era taxpayers’ associations, I was struck by how different collective tax resistance in the Reconstruction South was from organized taxpayer activity elsewhere. Outside the former confederate states, the overarching goal of nearly all taxpayers’ associations in this era was to reduce taxes, though in many cases taxpayers also had a genuine interest in promoting the public’s interest in good and efficient government. In the Reconstruction South, however, tax resistance under the guise of good citizenship was merely the means to other, ulterior ends. Taxpayers in the South used collective tax resistance in an effort to weaken government authority, “redeem” state governments from Republican control, reestablish the institutions of white supremacy, and nullify in practice (if not as a matter of law) the post-Civil War amendments to the United States Constitution. Taxpayers’ groups in the South also diverged from those in the North in their methods, including extrajudicial violence, which was absent from tax protests outside the former Confederacy.

Finally, tax resistance in the South was untethered to the evolving notions of civic responsibility and good citizenship that broadly animated Northern tax resistance. Most taxpayers’ groups outside the South were interested in, and worked for, better and more efficient government. Southern taxpayers’ leagues wanted the opposite: government that was worse, small, and ineffectual. The Redeemers were highly successful in their quest for low taxes, low spending, and weak state governments after 1877. In Mississippi, for example, between 1875 and 1885, Democrats cut the state budget by more than half and slashed taxes. The connections between organized tax resistance in the South and the commitment to good citizenship, better government, and the rule of law that most Northern taxpayers’ organizations evidenced was attenuated at best and often absent altogether.

Historians strive to be objective, but they often approach the subjects of their research with certain preconceptions. My investigation of organized taxpayer activity in the 1930s reminded me of the importance of keeping an open mind, expecting to find the unexpected, and adapting one’s historical analysis accordingly.

Why Clean Air AND Good Jobs

This week in North Philly Notes, Todd E. Vachon, author of Clean Air and Good Jobs, writes about the double whammy of climate change and income inequality.

In 1989, at the age of 13, I learned two valuable lessons. The first was the importance of unions for building and supporting the middle class, and the second was that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet and would one day have serious consequences for life on Earth. The first was learned through personal experience, the second in a classroom.  

At the time, my family owned a small business—a general store and gas station—in a small town in Eastern Connecticut. Due to market forces, including the rise of corporate chain stores, my parent’s business was struggling. By 1989 we were facing bankruptcy. Fortuitously, there was a rising demand for skilled construction workers at the time. Through his friend network in the volunteer fire department, my father was able to join the local carpenter’s union and immediately began working in the industry—including at several local power plants. Within a year of his becoming a union carpenter, our family experienced a transition from being working poor to being middle class. We had health insurance, I got glasses and braces, and my dad built our family home—the home I now bring my children to visit as he enjoys his retirement thanks to the union pension. 

Around the same time that we were experiencing that economic hardship in the late 1980s, NASA climate scientist James Hansen explained to Congress, and the world, that the heat-trapping gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels were pushing global temperatures higher. Hansen’s remarks marked the official opening of “the age of climate change.” The following school year I learned about “The Greenhouse Effect” in science class and my mind was opened to the possibility that human activity was changing the planet, and not in a good way. In the 34 years since Hansen’s testimony, the scientific community has affirmed that climate change is a serious cause for concern. Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts have become more frequent, more intense, and longer in duration. Yet, annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow and are 44% higher in 2022 than they were in 1989. 

During the same period, private sector unionization in the United States declined from 14% of workers in 1989 to just 6% in 2022. As a result, income inequality has soared as much as greenhouse gas emissions, with the top 1% now taking home 16% of all income while the middle class share of income has declined from 62% to 43% in the past four decades. Major causes of union decline include outsourcing of manufacturing, eroding employment in highly unionized industries, and rabid anti-unionism on the part of employers taking advantage of weak labor law protections for workers. Today, many of the remaining good private sector union jobs are in the energy sector—especially fossil fuels—while many of the new renewable energy and green economy jobs are not unionized and attempts to do so face an uphill battle against hostile employers. This has led many blue-collar unionized workers in the U.S. to adopt a “jobs vs the environment” perspective, fighting to save good jobs in fossil fuel-related industries by resisting measures to decarbonize the economy that threaten to replace the existing good jobs with new lower wage jobs that offer few benefits.  

As the son of a union carpenter and a former carpenter myself, but also the father of three young children growing up in a steadily warming world, I struggled with this dilemma: How can we ensure our kids, and their generation can afford to make a living with good jobs and benefits, like my father did, and also have a planet that will support that living? Grappling with this question led to my spending 10 years participating in the nascent labor-climate movement as an activist and a researcher. It is those experiences and the findings from that research that make up Clean Air and Good Jobs. 

One thing I learned doing this work is that the zero-sum mindset of having to choose between good jobs or having a livable climate is rooted in the deeply ingrained ideology of neoliberalism—the dominant governing philosophy of our time. At the core of neoliberalism is the belief that unregulated free markets create the best outcomes for all and that there should be little to no role for government in the economy. The narrative that addressing climate change must inevitably lead to a further decline in good jobs does not consider the vast array of public policy instruments which could be used to ensure that a green economy is also an equitable economy. It instead only benefits those that would profit from the exploitation of both workers and the environment. Overcoming this barrier, I contend, will require a powerful alliance of labor and communities working together, demanding clean air and good jobs.

Clean Air and Good Jobs documents the efforts of some of the organizations and activists that are working to build such a movement to ensure a fair and just transition away from fossil fuels and toward a more sustainable and equitable future. This, I believe, is the struggle of our time, and the whole of future humanity is counting on us to do the right thing.  

Recovering a Liberating Vision of Jewish Self-Determination in an Age of Entrenched Apartheid

This week in North Philly Notes, Jonathan Graubart, author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, reflects on why he no longer identifies as “pro-Israel.”

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In the early 1990s, I worked at Tikkun Magazine, then the leading liberal-left American Jewish journal. As a young American Jew whose views on Israel had recently become much more critical, I was especially attracted to a forum that challenged Israel’s occupation from an alternative “pro-Israel” perspective. Under Michael Lerner’s leadership, Tikkun provided a much-needed challenge to the American Jewish establishment on Jewish moral responsibility and ethics. I proudly aligned my critical scrutiny with a vision invested in the long-term welfare of Israel and the Jewish people at large. We were the bona fide pro-Israel Jews, while groups such as AIPAC and the ADL, who reflexively defended Israeli actions, were the false champions.

Up through the first part of the 2000s, I faithfully proclaimed my pro-Israel sentiments even as I raised more severe challenges. But like a growing number of Jews committed to justice and solidarity with the oppressed, I have stopped calling myself pro-Israel or Zionist. To begin with, the appeal to an alternative pro-Israel program is decidedly inadequate for confronting Israel’s depravities over the past two decades. As confirmed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem, Israel is an apartheid state where Jewish supremacy prevails in both the occupied territories and in Israel proper. It now has a Kahanist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, with links to Jewish terrorists, as finance minister, whose mandate extends to the occupied territories. Ben-Gvir opened his tenure by ordering a ban on public displays of the Palestinian flag and approving harsher crackdowns of protests. Not to be outdone, Smotrich opined that the West Bank town of Huwara should be “wiped out” after it had just been subjected to settler violence. These trends confirm the haunting assessment in 2016 by the recently departed Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell:

We are at the height of an erosion process of the liberal values in which our society is based. Those who regard liberal values as a danger to the nation, the homeland and the Jewish state are the ones currently in power. They are striving to delegitimize the left and anyone who does not hold the view that conquering the land and settling it through the use of force are the fundamental foundations of Zion.

Furthermore, unlike Sternhell or Peter Beinart, I find no solace in Israel’s foundational principles. As I review in my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism, any liberal values were dwarfed by a commitment to converting a territory that had long been overwhelmingly Arab to a hegemonic Jewish state where the Arab presence was inherently suspect. This is not to say that Israel’s current status inevitably followed from its foundation. Suffice it to note that Jewish supremacy has reigned though all of Israel’s political shifts since 1948. Thus, it is not clear what is the foundation for an alternative pro-Israel program. Fittingly, Tikkun has been supplanted by Jewish Currents as the preeminent critical American Jewish journal, which makes no pretense to providing an alternative Zionist or pro-Israel perspective.

Nevertheless, I have not joined the growing ranks of anti-Zionist Jewish dissenters for two reasons. First, neither the vast majority of Israeli Jews nor Jews elsewhere are about to renounce some form of Jewish self-determination in the territory of Israel-Palestine. Second, although the prevailing Zionist wing demanded Jewish supremacy, the umbrella vision contained appealing dimensions of liberation, egalitarianism, and a just coexistence with Palestinians. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky once remarked, Zionism attracted many Jews who aspired to a transformed Jewish society that would be part of a broader global revolution. Crucially the spirit of an alternative, solidarity-based self-determination still inspires Jewish dissenters. Hence, I regard it as urgent to develop a vision that enables self-determination to flourish for both Jews and Palestinians while categorically breaking from the imperialist and hegemonic nationalist order that has shaped the land since the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

My book reflects my effort to advance such a transformation. I recover the dissenting pre-state Zionist Jewish voices, which included Judah Magnes (a prominent American rabbi and the first chancellor of Hebrew University), Martin Buber, and Hannah Arendt. They looked to Palestine as a base for invigorating Jewish life globally, reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and developing community institutions and practices informed by the best of Jewish and outside values and traditions. In contrast to the mainstream Zionist movement, the dissenters were anti-imperialist and urged an accommodation with the indigenous Arabs. They opposed a hegemonic Jewish state because it would displace Palestinians and elevate realpolitik and state interests over Jewish renewal and social justice. Their alternative was a binational political arrangement, which featured autonomous development for each community, collective equality and shared spaces of governance and community interactions. I adapt this pre-state vision in conversation with a series of post-1967 critical voices, including Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Peter Beinart, and Edward Said to develop a new vision of Jewish self-determination devoted to a hybrid Jewish-universal liberation, a full reckoning of Israel’s depredations, and a just and egalitarian coexistence with Palestinians.

Because the terms “pro-Israel” and “Zionism” have become so attached to a hegemonic and unrepentant set of values, I am not seeking to rescue them. For that reason, I have titled my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism. It is neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel but a plea for a new and inclusive program of Jewish self-determination whereby the fate of the Jewish people is attached to that of Palestinians in particular and of the global community more broadly. It is my hope that a new generation of what Arendt called “conscious pariahs,” some of whom have taken part in Israel’s ongoing and unprecedented wave of mass protests, will embrace such a program.

Announcing the inaugural recipient of the Zane L. Miller Book Development Award

John Tilghman, Associate Professor and Interim Department Chair of History and Political Science at Tuskegee University, has been named the inaugural recipient of the Temple University Press (TUP) Zane L. Miller Book Development Award for his proposed book, currently titled Jim Crow from the Harbor: Black Freedom Struggle and Downtown Baltimore. He will receive $2,500 to fund the development of his urban studies-focused book manuscript.

When presenting Tilghman with the award, the committee noted that his book “provides new perspectives on downtown development, African American history, Baltimore history, and the complexities of class in urban America.”

The prize, named in honor of the late founding editor of TUP’s Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series, is designed to advance the careers of scholars from underrepresented communities who have limited access to financial resources for book development. It also honors Miller, a renowned scholar of urban history and a devoted, tireless mentor to less-experienced fellow authors seeking to navigate the book development and publication process. 

David Stradling, coeditor of the Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series said, “Dr. Tilghman’s work revises the story of the white growth machine’s late 20^th century efforts to protect downtown Baltimore through segregation, redevelopment, and displacement by putting Black voices and Black activism at the center of the story. In Tilghman’s telling, Black home buyers remake Baltimore’s central city neighborhoods, Black shoppers force the desegregation of downtown stores, and Black activists reshape Baltimore politics. Ultimately, efforts to create an all-white citadel in the central city can only crumble.”  

Upon receiving the award, Tilghman said, “Winning the Zane L. Miller Book Development Award is a tremendous honor. I would like to thank the editors at Temple University Press, and particularly Dr. David Stradling and Dr. Davarian Baldwin, for helping me make this proposed book more insightful and impactful.”

Jim Crow from the Harbor examines Baltimore’s downtown redevelopment of the Charles Center and Inner Harbor-Harborplace through the lens of the city’s civil rights movement, with particular attention paid to how these initiatives succeeded in producing a glitzy façade of a revitalized downtown American city while severely constraining the lives of its Black residents.

Tilghman explores the origins and importance of urban tensions between the Black community and downtown interests after the Second Great Migration and during the postwar Civil Rights and Black Power era, the implementation of urban development projects, and anti-freeway and affirmative action campaigns. The author’s research uncovers how a public-private partnership—a coalition of real estate agents, businesspeople, city politicians, and housing developers— worked to exacerbate racial and class segregation and destroy Black communities by expanding the downtown beyond the central business district.

The Zane L. Miller Book Development Award is given annually.

For submission information, please visit https://tupress.temple.edu/webpages/zane-miller-award.