Will Amazon Finally Kill New York?

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | Month 2018 | 10 minutes (2,519 words)

In May of 2017, Mayor de Blasio unveiled Jimmy Breslin Way, a street sign dedicating the stretch of 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue to the late reporter. It was a strange press conference — half eulogy, half lecture — a chance for the mayor to laud Breslin and scold members of today’s media by whom he often feels unfairly maligned. “Think about what Jimmy Breslin did. Think about how he saw the world,” said de Blasio. He left without taking questions. What was he talking about? Did he imagine he and Jimmy Breslin would get along? In 1969 Breslin wrote a cover story about Mayor Lindsay for New York Magazine, “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” was the title. Lindsay was an inch shorter than de Blasio.

In 2010, Heike Geissler took a temporary position at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Geissler was a freelance writer and a translator but, more pressingly, she was the mother of two children and money was not coming in. Seasonal Associate, which was translated by Katy Derbyshire and released by Semiotext(e) this month, is the product of that job. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) It’s an oppressive, unsettling book, mainly because the work is too familiar. The book is written almost entirely in the second person, a style that might’ve come off as an irritating affectation with a lesser writer or a different subject. Here, it’s terrifying — you feel yourself slipping along with Geissler, thoughts of your own unpaid bills and the cold at the back of your throat weaving their way through the narrative. It’s not just that this unnamed protagonist could be you, it’s the certainty that someday she will be you. “You’ll soon know something about life that you didn’t know before, and it won’t just have to do with work,” Geissler writes. “But also with the fact that you’re getting older, that two children cry after you every morning, that you don’t want to go to work, and that something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten.”

*

The question of who killed New York used to be up for debate. Was it John Lindsay, who couldn’t face reality, who covered the city’s debts with short-term, high interest loans he knew were impossible to repay? His successor, Abe Beame, who bent to the demands of the bankers and gutted the social safety net during the fiscal crisis of the 70’s? Ed Koch, who embraced Beame’s cuts wholeheartedly and mocked past mayors as men who wanted New York “to be the No. 1 welfare city in America”? Giuliani, who launched the deregulation of rent controlled apartments and the quality of life campaign that gave us Broken Windows and COMPSTAT? (I’m not mentioning David Dinkins, because I really don’t think David Dinkins brought us here.) Was it Hipsters and their attendant paraphernalia? Was it the McKibbin Lofts? Union Pool? Was it Shred Stuy?

Inventory work provides Geissler with a granular view of consumerism. Stripped of the marketing and storefronts that make it palatable it quickly begins to look like a form of mental illness. Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face?

All New York City mayors are venal, but some are more venal than others. A few months ago, I would have told you Bloomberg was to blame, our bloodless, billionaire mayor, who rezoned the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods and openly courted real estate investment from foreign billionaires. Rents rose at neat clip alongside the homeless population. To his credit, Bloomberg — a very short man — was always transparent about where his priorities lay. The city, he said, was a “luxury product” and it should behave that way.

De Blasio was supposed to be the antidote to the Bloomberg years, a progressive underdog who ran on universal pre-k and affordable housing. But that affordable housing has largely failed to materialize — where it’s been built, it’s often still pretty unaffordable — and his administration has been marked by disappointing half-measures and an ill-conceived plan for a ridiculous four billion dollar streetcar no one wants.

On Black Friday, Amazon workers staged mass walkouts across Europe. On Cyber Monday, led by community groups Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change (NYCC), protestors stormed Amazon’s Midtown bookstore to protest the planned headquarters in Long Island City and later gathered in front of the LIC Civil Courthouse chanting “I stand in the rain, I stand in the snow, Amazon has got to go!” City Council members Jimmy Van Bremer, Jumanne Williams, and Melissa Mark-Vitero were all in attendance — Williams and Mark-Vitero, it should be noted, are both running for Public Advocate. All of them decried the incentives offered to Amazon, which total about 3 billion. Williams claimed they were steamrolled by the Mayor and Governor Cuomo and that while Cuomo’s betrayal was no surprise, the de Blasio administration was “the biggest waste of progressive capital [Williams had] ever seen.”

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It might’ve been a good show of force, had not all of the aforementioned politicians signed the letter urging Amazon to build its headquarters in New York. What did they think was going to happen? A New York Times investigation released earlier this year showed that the city had lost 152,000 rent-regulated apartments since 1993. The subway system is crumbling, the state leads the nation in income inequality, and the homeless population is at an all time high. No reasonable human being could look around and conclude that the answer to all these problems is to give the most avaricious company in the world the keys to the city. Amazon swallows everything it touches, it isn’t interested in civic health. Only half of the jobs being brought in are in tech and many of the low level positions will likely be replaced by robots fairly soon, but for now, these are the jobs for which the Mayor sold the city. “At any rate,” Geissler writes, early on in Seasonal Associate, “it’s almost impossible not to be forced to your knees and into defiance by this job you’re about to have.”

*

Geissler was hired in the warehouse to handle the Christmas rush, hence the title, and the cold is so omnipresent it seems to be a feature of the company rather than simply the reality of winter. A gate that will not latch properly becomes a major antagonist and everyone is either ill or on the verge of falling ill, although they have been warned specifically against this. “Sick days hurt Amazon,” Geissler is told at her orientation. Precarity manifests as a constant, low-grade fever. You’re the protagonist but her voice leads you through the job, a tired Virgil navigating a new circle of hell. The work is inventory — entering items into the system so they can be purchased online and performing at least a cursory check to make sure they’re undamaged. “Everything exists, in case you were going to ask,” says Geissler. “Absolutely everything exists, and people can buy it all.” Despite the scale of the warehouse, inventory work provides Geissler with a granular view of consumerism. Stripped of the marketing and storefronts that make it palatable it quickly begins to look like a form of mental illness. Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face? Who needs these pre-distressed Iron Maiden hats, already rags at point of purchase? Amazon customers, which is to say, all of us.

Geissler tried to sell the book as straightforward journalism initially and was turned down by five publishers, likely because book is largely boring. It’s a propulsive, weaponized banality though — something unnatural is going on here and it’s hard to see a way out.

Geissler isn’t the typical warehouse employee and as a temporary contractor she’s something of a tourist at Amazon. She’s well-educated, she’s white, she lives with the father of her children, and she’s normally able to make a living — however precarious — as a writer. There’s significant privilege there. Many people spend their entire lives working shitty, unforgiving jobs with arbitrary, infantilizing rules and part of the reason Geissler is so attuned to the myriad indignities of Amazon is because she’s unused to them. She’s aware of this position though. “It has to be said right away,” she writes, “that no one is suited for unhappiness, yet this fact doesn’t get enough recognition.” Seasonal Associate is a book about slippage and a sudden fall into the working class, but it’s a document of anxiety and futility rather than stunt journalism. The central rallying point in the warehouse is a desk made out of a door — a replica of Jeff Bezos’ desk when he founded Amazon; an absurd symbol of frugality and the company’s dedication to customer satisfaction over employees’ personal comfort. As if every warehouse worker has the potential to become the richest man in the world, if only they would stop buying such expensive desks. The idea that if you work hard enough you will inevitably rise out of poverty has always been a sham and Amazon has taken it to it’s logical endpoint. You work hard and nothing happens. You will never be good enough at your job, because you’re a human being, not a machine. As long as you’re alive you’re a potential problem for the company.

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In order to maintain some sense of agency Geissler stages tiny acts of rebellion — refusing to hold a handrail despite the signs instructing her to hold the handrail, keeping her safety vest in her pocket until she absolutely has to put it on. The gestures are adolescent and effectively meaningless, but every time she’s snide it’s a relief — a sign of life. Much later, after her contract is finished, she recognizes a man in a parking lot who she described as Amazon’s “only hipster.” The last time she’d seen him he was docking people’s pay for what’s commonly known as time theft. They had lined up a few minutes early to leave work, rather than waiting, unpaid, to go through security. “Unable to think of anything better,” says Geissler. “Or because it seemed like the most appropriate idea, I called out the name of a book I’d just read, by Mark Greif and others. I yelled at him: What Was the Hipster! I called it twice and I thought then he might know he was over.”

Geissler tried to sell the book as straightforward journalism initially and was turned down by five publishers, likely because book is largely boring. It’s a propulsive, weaponized banality though — something unnatural is going on here and it’s hard to see a way out. “You’ve completely forgotten that you have a profession and are only here to alleviate momentary poverty,” Geissler writes, just after her interview at Amazon. “Something inside you is essentially unsettled and will never calm down again, even though you do get the job. From this point on, you are beside yourself with worry.”

My own mother raised two kids by herself as a high school English teacher and she took a number of side jobs to supplement her income. Tutoring, working at a bakery, working at a strange, luxury gardening store that sold copper birdhouses and rocks that said things like “LOVE” and “CREATE” for people who couldn’t. None of them were bad jobs, none as oppressive as warehouse work, but they did not pay very well. Her desk (worse than Jeff Bezos’) was just a slab of wood, perched atop two filing cabinets. She never made a big deal out of that though, because she is not an asshole. She’d wake up at four or five in the morning to grade the lousy papers of teenage Republicans and shovel the walkway, but she still tried to read to me and my brother before putting us to bed. Oftentimes she’d fall asleep mid-sentence and start mumbling about the electricity bill or replacing the boiler. Eventually, a doctor told her she had to relax — her blood pressure was dangerously high, her muscles so tense that when she breathed, her ribs barely moved.

If you think you’re immune to this — if you went to college, if you believe you’re upwardly mobile, if you imagine you will comfortably survive the inevitable spike in rent once Amazon’s headquarters settles into Queens — unless you have vast familial wealth to draw on, I’m sorry but you’re wrong.

My mom was thrown into financial uncertainty (and my dad wasn’t even a deadbeat) by an early divorce and the responsibility for two small children, but at this point that choking feeling is basically just the lived experience of the average American. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2003 J.G. Ballard said that “the totalitarian systems of the future will be subservient and ingratiating, the false smile of the bored waiter rather than the jackboot.” This is it, the future is here now. It’s because Geissler doesn’t fit the typical profile of an Amazon warehouse worker that her book is such a well-timed warning shot. If you think you’re immune to this — if you went to college, if you believe you’re upwardly mobile, if you imagine you will comfortably survive the inevitable spike in rent once Amazon’s headquarters settles into Queens — unless you have vast familial wealth to draw on, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Without immediate collective action, this is coming for all of us.

*

“Too tall,” Breslin clarified, about Mayor Lindsay, “means too Manhattanish, too removed from the problems of the street corners.” He wrote “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” shortly after his own failed mayoral bid with Norman Mailer, a campaign that left him “nervous and depressed.”

“I saw a sprawling, disjointed place which did not understand itself and was decaying physically and spiritually, decaying with these terrible little fires of rage flickering in the decay…On top of the city was an almost unworkable form of government and a set of casually unknowing, unfeeling, uncaring men and institutions. The absence of communications in a city which is the communications center of the world is so bad that you are almost forced to believe the condition of the city is terminal.”

 

If that doesn’t sound familiar, it will soon. On December 12, the New York City Council held the first of a series of hearings on the new Amazon headquarters. Protestors covered the balcony and unfurled a No HQ2 Banner. “It’s all smoke and mirrors!” a man yelled. “Don’t let them monopolize the city! Don’t let them near the subways, don’t let them near the schools — these guys are lying creeps!” He was escorted out.

Amazon has become so large that it can have the same pacifying effect as the threat of climate change, but despair isn’t helpful right now. As Hamilton Nolan and Dave Colon have already pointed out over at Splinter, Amazon’s New York headquarters represents the best chance at effectively unionizing the company and the resistance to HQ2 is broad and growing. Still, it was difficult to watch the City Council hearing without a paralyzing sense of dread. Amazon is a contractor with ICE, they have a horrific labor record, and they’re accountable to no one. That guy was right, these people are lying creeps, as are many of the people we’ve elected. There’s such a long and rich tradition of grift in this city that it’s rare to be able to definitively level blame, but here we are. De Blasio was too tall to be mayor and we didn’t see it. “Is this all a matter of life and death?” Geissler writes, at the very beginning of Seasonal Associate. “I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later. At that point, I’ll say: Not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives.”

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Earth to Congress

Livia Gershon | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,149 words)

In recent weeks, protesters have swept across France, burning cars, evading tear gas-wielding riot police, and spraying graffiti across the Arc de Triomphe. Called the “yellow vest” protesters for the safety gear that French law requires drivers to carry, they have drawn much of their support from the countryside. They first mobilized in mid-November, in response to a gas tax hike equivalent to 25-cents-per gallon, which was scheduled to go into effect in January to combat climate change. After not very long, they succeeded in cancelling the tax increase. Since that victory, they have continued to stage rallies, taking on President Emmanuel Macron’s overall economic program, which includes shrinking social programs and rolling back labor protections.

In the United States, conservatives were quick to describe the protests as a repudiation of any and all efforts to address climate change. “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris,” President Trump tweeted on December 8. “Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”

There is, in reality, no reason to believe that anyone in France has chanted Trump’s name as part of the yellow vest movement. And protesters have not expressed opposition to the Paris Agreement as a whole—their official demands include adopting substantive ecological policy rather than “a few piecemeal fiscal measures,” as they wrote in a November 23 communiqué. Still, the protests point to a real danger for the most common approaches to environmental policy, which tend to involve tweaking private economic activity through taxes or regulations. Carbon taxes can be devastating to working-class people, especially outside big cities, if there’s no affordable alternative to gas-fueled cars. Rules limiting coal mining and oil drilling can wreak havoc on communities built on those industries if there are no other local sources of good jobs.

In the U.S., however, there is a chance to drastically cut carbon emissions and help the world transition to an ecologically stable path that accounts for labor interests: the Green New Deal, championed by incoming Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement. The official proposal—really a plan to make a plan, by creating a select committee—won the support of 40 House members. Democratic leadership has watered down the committee’s mandate and rules, but high-profile support from senators like Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders suggest that the Green New Deal is likely to remain politically relevant in 2019 and beyond. The idea represents a rare bid to take on climate change with urgency and determination, reminiscent of the U.S. mobilization for World War II. Already, it has taken comprehensive climate policy—one that factors in working class people—out of the realm of fantasy (or street protest) and into the halls of Congress.

***

The Green New Deal is, at this theoretical stage, full of promises: to completely replace power production with renewable energy; to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation; and to retrofit every residential and industrial building in the country for energy efficiency—all within ten years. Ocasio-Cortez’s outline proposed the virtual elimination of poverty by creating good jobs for all Americans, with a particular focus on workers left behind in the shift away from fossil fuels and people who have been harmed by racial, regional, and gender-based inequality. For good measure, it suggested that the committee might “include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others.”

That’s an awful lot. The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas, many of them far less radical than Ocasio-Cortez’s. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, first popularized the phrase “Green New Deal” in 2007. He used it to describe a package of research, loan guarantees, carbon taxes, incentives, and regulations that he hoped would spur environmentally friendly entrepreneurship. President Obama adopted the idea as part of his electoral platform and the 2009 stimulus package, which expanded environmentally friendly infrastructure and entrepreneurship. Ultimately, though, the policy fell far short of putting the country on the road to zero emissions.

Since then, conversations about fighting global warming have typically focused on market-driven solutions, including incentives, subsidies, and, most common of all, some kind of carbon tax. The Democratic Party officially supported such a tax in its 2016 platform, and so do the minority of Republicans who are willing to acknowledge climate change as a threat. Some fossil fuel companies, like ExxonMobil, now say that they support one, too. “To me it’s a kind of smoke screen,” Matt Huber, a geography scholar at Syracuse University who has written about the potential for a Green New Deal, said. “It sort of suggests that this problem can be solved through market pricing, and I’m just not convinced that that’s the case.”

Ocasio-Cortez took up the cause as part of her primary campaign to defeat Joe Crowley, a moderate, from the left. The ambition of her Green New Deal proposal came in line with a report on global warming released in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations. The report states that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade—the level necessary to reduce the risk of droughts, floods, and other disasters that would affect hundreds of millions of people—“would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

To reach that goal through a carbon tax, the IPCC suggests, the tax would need to be between $135 and $5,500 per ton by 2035. By comparison, the proposed hike that triggered the yellow vest protests would have brought the total carbon tax, at maximum, to the equivalent of about $100 per ton. It’s hard to imagine a tax even at the low end of the IPCC’s range proving politically palatable in most countries.

The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas.

Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped craft the green energy investment portion of Obama’s stimulus plan and has created green jobs plans for a number of states and countries, told me that a Green New Deal for the U.S. that aims to reduce the country’s emissions 50 percent by 2035 would probably cost 1.5 to two percent of GDP per year (though delaying investment could increase that cost). His approach would create 4.2 million jobs, he said, doing everything from building solar and wind installations to retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. It would also shrink the fossil fuel industry with a carbon tax and regulation, but workers in those fields would be able to find new, well-paid positions that are carbon neutral. “We need to incorporate the transition side, and it has to be serious,” he said. “We have to take care of the people who are going to be harmed.”

The Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal proposal promised to go further, including a job guarantee that would pay workers a living wage. It also made an overture to “deeply involve” labor unions in training and deploying workers. When Data for Progress, a left-wing think tank, modeled a plan with a similar scope, it projected the creation of ten million jobs over ten years.

***

Given the scale of a progressive vision for a Green New Deal, it’s worth looking at one of the most ambitious U.S. government projects ever: the mobilization for World War II. Federal spending jumped from under ten percent of GDP in 1939 to more than 40 percent in 1944. That’s a much bigger shift than any Green New Deal would bring, but active U.S. involvement in the war lasted only four years. Imagine the 2020s and 2030s as a less intense, more protracted battle against an existential climate threat.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that the U.S. would take up arms against the Nazis. But in 1939, that wasn’t at all clear. After Germany invaded Poland that year, prompting Great Britain and France to declare war, nearly half of Americans said the U.S. shouldn’t get involved, even if the Allied Powers were losing. Even after France fell, 79 percent wanted to stay out of the war.

Like climate change deniers today, many opponents of World War II doubted the scope of the problem. Charles Lindbergh, celebrity pilot and spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee, argued that a German victory was inevitable and that the Nazis really weren’t so bad anyway. (A 1938 survey found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the Nazi persecution of Jews was at least partly the fault of the Jews themselves.)

And, like the yellow vest protesters in France and the residents of U.S. towns facing the threat of economic disaster if coal and oil industries suddenly disappear, many Americans in 1939 worried about the economic cost of entering, at an unprecedented scale, a foreign fight. In July 1941, most Americans believed that the war would be followed by another great depression. Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara has written that, when President Franklin Roosevelt ramped up military production to aid the Allies, the heads of large manufacturing corporations were hesitant to take on the contracts, as they worried about the increased taxes and federal power that would come with military programs. Some were also sympathetic to America First, or at least hesitant to pick a fight with the isolationists; many were reluctant to bet on the unstable demand from the war effort. “I don’t believe that manufacturers are anxious for war business,” Harvey Campbell, of the Detroit Board of Commerce, said in 1940. “They would rather see a steady line of production and employment.”

Labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal.

 

Labor leaders like Walter Reuther, of the United Auto Workers, seized the moment to push for curbs on laissez faire capitalism, helping yoke private industry to a centralized economic plan. Most unions tied their fate to Roosevelt’s agenda, agreeing to no-strike pledges and putting their backs into the war effort. They were rewarded with perhaps the most labor-friendly economy in U.S. history. Unions went from representing fifteen percent of U.S. workers in 1937 to twenty-seven percent in 1945. The government capped corporate profits. Full employment, combined with government and union anti-discrimination programs, brought new opportunities for black and female workers. Employers eager to retain workers in the face of wartime wage freezes began offering pensions and health insurance.

We can’t go back to 1947, and most of us wouldn’t want to. The era brought segregated suburbs, anti-communist witch hunts against labor and civil rights organizers, and an environmentally disastrous dependence on cars. But the war, in combination with the New Deal that preceded it, established a stable economic order and, crucially, widespread faith in the federal government.

***

Today, labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal. Much of Pollin’s research, for example, has been commissioned by unions and their supporters. But the unions of 2018 are much smaller and less powerful than their counterparts of 1939, and no Democratic leader has anything like FDR’s popularity. Enacting a comprehensive plan to fight climate change, poverty, and inequality will require strong alliances. Such an effort must bring together environmental activists, communities that have long depended on fossil fuel industries, and economic justice campaigns like the Fight for $15 and the teachers who mobilized across red states in 2017. It will also take collective action, like the sit-ins, which the Sunrise Movement has been holding at Democratic leadership offices.

It will also require more people to vote, in order to persuade the Democratic Party that this level of investment in economically responsible climate policy is a winning strategy. A minority of Americans voted in the 2018 midterms; working-class people and the young are particularly likely to sit out elections. But, Huber said, an agenda with the ambition of a Green New Deal might help bring more of the to the polls. “I’m a big believer that Democrats could do better just by turning out more working-class and poor people,” he told me. “As the Republicans know, the more people vote, the more they lose.”

The good news is, despite decades of anti-green rhetoric from fossil fuel companies and conservative politicians, environmental action is far more popular now than military action was in 1939. Nearly 70 percent of Americans—including 64 percent of Republicans—say that the U.S. should work with other nations to curb climate change, and 55 percent support the idea of a green jobs guarantee.

A Green New Deal—something on the scale of the Ocasio-Cortez outline, with systemic economic changes beyond subsidies and incentives—could utterly transform what comes after it, much as World War II did. It remains to be see what kind of change Congress can usher in.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Reckoning With Georgia’s Increasing Suppression of Asian American Voters

Anjali Enjeti | Longreads | December 2018 | 18 minutes (4620 words)

 

Early on November 6, Election Day, Kavi Vu noticed that some voters appeared distressed as they exited Lucky Shoals Park Recreation Center, one of five polling places in Gwinnett County, Georgia. A volunteer with the nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta (“Advancing Justice”), Vu had been standing outside to answer questions about voting and offer her services as a Vietnamese translator.

When she began asking the mostly African American, Asian American and Latinx voters about their voting experiences, she learned that after 2.5 hour wait times, many of them had voted via provisional ballots.

Why? As it turned out, Lucky Shoals was not their correct voting location. “A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location,” Vu said.

So when poll workers offered voters the option of voting at Lucky Shoals with provisional ballots, rather than driving elsewhere to wait in another line, the voters took them up on it. They left with I’m a Georgia Voter stickers, and printed instructions for how to cure their ballots. But poll workers didn’t verbally explain to the voters that they’d need to appear at the county registrar’s office within three days to cure their ballots, nor did the poll workers make it clear that the votes would not count at all if the voters failed to do so. What’s more, as the day wore on, poll workers ran out of the provisional ballot instructions altogether.

Vu was alarmed. In an attempt to reduce the number of voters using provisional ballots, she began offering to help voters locate their correct polling place using the Secretary of State website. That’s when poll workers repeatedly began confronting her about her presence outside of the polling place. “They told me to stop speaking with voters in line, even after I explained what I was doing.”

By mid-afternoon, Vu counted some 100 voters who had wrongly reported to Lucky Shoals. When she finally left eight hours after arriving, she was “heartbroken,” over the dreadful conditions at the polling place and the number of votes by minority voters that would likely never be counted.

***

Elsewhere in Gwinnett County, Mohammed Shahid appeared at his usual polling place at noon only to be told that his name did not appear in the voter registration system. Shahid, who speaks fluent Bengali but only limited English, explained as best as he could that he had been casting ballots successfully at the same location for years, that he voted in-person for Clinton in 2016 and absentee in the primary election just a few months earlier. The poll worker told him there was nothing she could do. She turned him away, and failed to offer him a provisional ballot, as is required.

A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location.

Shahid felt that hands were tied. “I left the voting place without voting,” he told me over the phone. “I have a language issue. What else could I do?”

***

Peggy Xu and Arah Kang were both volunteers for Jon Ossoff’s campaign for the 6th district congressional seat last year and Stacey Abrams’ campaign for Georgia governor this year. Xu began to panic when she didn’t receive an absentee ballot by late October. On the 24th, she contacted the Fulton County Election Board and was emailed an affidavit cancelling the first absentee ballot. She then filled out and returned an application for a second absentee ballot. She was assured her second ballot would be mailed to her Washington, DC, residence, where she is temporarily living, by October 29, one week prior to the November 6 election. It never came.

Kang, a college senior in New England, finally received her absentee ballot a few days before the election. She immediately filled it out and expedited it back to the Fulton County Elections office. According to the Secretary of State website, it was never received.

Both Xu and Kang had successfully voted via absentee ballot for the 2016 presidential election, and in-person for the 2017 sixth district special election. When they posted about their frustrations on Facebook, they received a flood of messages from friends and friends of friends, mostly millennial minority voters in Fulton and Gwinnett Counties, all of whom supported Abrams — who never received their absentee ballots. Within 48 hours, they created a database of 40 disenfranchised voters. Most of the voters had taken great pains to follow up with their election board offices multiple times in an attempt to track down their absentee ballots. None were able to vote.

“We compiled this data in only two days,” said Xu. “If a list like this was compiled for the whole state, imagine how many people would be on it.”

“Forty people is not a hiccup,” said Kang. “It’s a wake-up call.”

***

On October 15, the first day of early voting, my phone started buzzing almost nonstop with messages from AAPI friends. The line is too long I have to go back to work. The voting place shut down because the computers aren’t working. A friend told me the machine switched her vote from Kemp to Abrams — what if this happens to me? They’re telling me I’m at the wrong voting place. I spent hours trying to help them sort out various issues online at the Secretary of State website and through the voter protection hotline.

For the past 11 years, I’ve lived and voted in Johns Creek, Georgia, a northern suburb of Atlanta with a 25% Asian American population. These voters reached out to me because I had spent most of 2018 volunteering for Democratic campaigns. I had knocked on their doors, texted them to remind them about the election, invited them to my home to meet candidates or discuss strategies for turnout.

But the number of issues they were having when trying to vote? I had never before seen anything like it.

***

Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were the fasted growing racial group in the South between 2000 and 2010, and in Georgia the AAPI population has exploded. Since 2000, it has grown by 131% to over 480,000. Historically, though, AAPI voters have had one of the lowest voter turnouts among racial minorities. For the 2016 presidential election, it was around 49% nationwide, below white and Black voters and slightly ahead of Latinx voters. But in Georgia, voter turnout was 52% for that election. Foreign born Asian Americans tend to have a higher voter turnout than U.S. born.

Of far greater importance are the reasons for lower turnout. They may include a general failure to mobilize AAPI voters, the minimal contact political candidates make with AAPI voters, or language barriers. In Georgia, over 40% of limited English proficiency individuals speak an AAPI language. And because they speak dozens of languages, including Tagalog, Korean, Mandarin and Vietnamese — advocacy groups must find translators for several languages to assist them.

Over the years, especially recently, Atlanta-area Asian American organizations have launched vigorous voter drive programs to increase turnout for elections. The result? Some 6,400 AAPI statewide registered in 2014, and another 6,500 registered in 2016.

Despite these impressive gains in electoral power, the voting rights of all minority voters have been drastically impeded since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. States, like Georgia, with a history of voter suppression no longer require “preclearance” from federal courts or the Department of Justice to alter voting procedures. Shelby County v. Holder allowed Brian Kemp — who will be sworn in as Georgia’s governor in January 2019, and who became Secretary of State in 2010 — to ramp up his suppression of minority voters.

He first strengthened the “exact match” policy, which required that signatures on voter registrations mirror the signatures on identification from the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. Many times, the discrepancies between signatures are minor — missing hyphens, transposed letters, the day’s date instead of birth dates, or nicknames signed for legal names. But because Asian Americans’ and Latinx’s names don’t always neatly conform to romanization (one first, one middle, one last name), the requirement of exact match disparately impacted them.

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Kemp’s more egregious version of exact match resulted in the purge some 35,000 voters between 2013 and 2015, over 76% of whom were African American, Latinx, and Asian American voters. African Americans were eight times more likely and Latinx and Asian American voters were six times more likely to be kicked off the rolls than white voters. Civil rights groups sued the state; in a settlement, Kemp froze the program,restoring all 35,000 to the voting rolls.

But Kemp didn’t slow down. To the contrary, he accelerated his suppressive tactics, purging half a million voters from the rolls on a single day in July 2017, 107,000 purportedly because of Georgia’s “use it or lose it policy,” which disenfranchises voters for allegedly not voting in the past three years. (Though voters have come forward to state that Kemp attempted to purge them, even though they voted regularly). Another analysis found that Kemp purged some 300,000 voters for purportedly no longer living at the same address — even though these voters never moved. The vast majority of voters affected were minority voters.

A month before November 6, Kemp froze 53,000 “pending” applications due to discrepancies under a new version of the “exact match” law. Though most of the pending registrations could be cured easily with photo identification at polling places, 3,000 were held up due to potential “citizenship issues.”

One of them was an 80-year-old Vietnamese woman, who Cam Ashling, founder of Georgia Advancing Progress PAC, attempted to take to vote during early voting. When she tried to pull up the voter’s information on the Secretary of State website, Ashling learned she had been flagged because of exact match, and that they had to drive to the other side of Gwinnett County to appear in person at the Voter Registration and Elections Office with her naturalization papers — before she could cast a ballot. “This is a major burden on Asian American voters, especially when it’s the state’s fault,” said Ashling. Local civil rights organizations sued the State of Georgia again — now one of multiple times over exact match over the past several years — and won, including an injunction that allowed those voters to vote with proof of citizenship.

At about the same time, Gwinnett County, a majority minority county with 12% AAPI voters, began rejecting absentee ballots at a rate of 8.5%. (By comparison, Fulton County, the largest in Georgia, had rejected only 1.7% of its absentee ballots.) African Americans’ ballots were rejected four times more often than whites’ ballots. Asian Americans’ ballots were rejected six times more than whites’ ballots. According to Victoria Huynh of Center for Pan Asian Community Services, Inc. (CPACS), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, many AAPI voters were not notified that their ballots were rejected. “They were stunned,” she said. “They had no idea there was an issue with their votes until our organization contacted them.”

Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who oversaw his own race, finally resigned as Secretary of State two days after Election Day. Neither Stacey Abrams, down less than two percentage points, nor Carolyn Bordeaux, the Democratic candidate for the heavily Asian American seventh congressional district, overcame their opponents’ leads. Kemp’s merciless purging and blocking of minority voters, coupled with Georgia’s outdated, hackable voting machines, means Georgia voters will never know who veritably won the gubernatorial and seventh congressional district races. And voters like Xu, Kang, and Shahid are left wondering whether votes like theirs, had they been counted, would have changed the outcome of the election.

Despite these impressive gains in electoral power, the voting rights of all minority voters have been drastically impeded since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It may be easy to forget the victories with these tough losses, but the victories, especially against exact match, have been substantial. A few days before the December 4th runoff election, Advancing Justice challenged a Georgia law that required that translators assisting voters be close family members, caretakers or voters registered in the same precinct. (Some half-a-million voters in Georgia have limited English proficiency, most of whom are Asian American or Latinx.) Acting Secretary of State Robyn Crittenden, appointed after Kemp’s post-election day resignation, settled outside of court. Voters will now be able to select any translator of their choosing to assist them at the polls.

Still, the road to the 2020 election is guaranteed to be a brutal one. “We remain concerned of continuing efforts by our state to suppress the voices of immigrant communities — especially as they become more empowered to politically engage,” said Phi Nguyen of Advancing Justice. “Our elected officials must step up and do more to protect the rights of all voters.”

***

Georgia’s AAPI voters are steadily turning bluer. According to exit polling conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), 61% of Asian Americans in Georgia voted for Barack Obama’ second term in 2012. And though a smaller number, 55%, supported Democratic Jason Carter for governor over Republican Nathan Deal in 2014, out of 560 respondents, a whopping 71% percent of AAPIs in Georgia voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

If we break this down by ethnicity, Bangladeshi-Americans and Pakistani-Americans are the most reliable progressive voters in Georgia, with 97% and 96% casting their vote for Hillary Clinton. (Given that Bangladesh and Pakistan are Muslim majority countries, and that Trump made xenophobia and Islamophobia central to his campaign, it’s easy to guess why.) At the other end of the spectrum, Chinese and Vietnamese voters supported Clinton at 61% and 59% respectively.

The trend toward progressivism seems to have continued for this year’s midterms, where 79% of Georgia’s AAPIs (revised slightly down from an initial report) voted for Abrams for governor. For comparison, the Democratic AAPI constituency in Georgia is more left than the constituency in Texas, where 64% voted for Democrat Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate; Florida, where 71% voted for Democrat Andrew Gillum for governor; and in Nevada, where 68% voted for Democrat Jacky Rosen for U.S Senate. The progressive AAPIs of Michigan were the only group that came out ahead, with 91% voting for Democratic Gretchen Whitmer for governor.

Prior to the 2016 election, I had no idea that so many AAPIs in red Georgia were Democrats. Members of my community in Johns Creek rarely discussed elections. We don’t do politics, was a popular refrain. In the years before Trump, progressives largely kept their views to themselves. I was one of the only ones openly horrified by Sarah Palin and birthers.

This apathy began to dissipate during the 2017 sixth district special election when the AAPI community became more organized. During his first term in the State House, Representative Sam Park, the first Democratic Asian American and the first openly gay person elected to the Georgia legislature, headed the Asian American outreach effort for the Ossoff campaign. This was one of the first times, if not the first time, that a Democratic campaign in Georgia poured significant resources into engaging the AAPI constituency.

I worked with Representative Park as a community volunteer to help get Democratic AAPI voters to the polls. This is how I came to understand the untapped power of Georgia’s progressive AAPIs electorate. A meet and greet at my house with Jon Ossoff brought 75 people, mostly Asian Americans. An outdoor event for AAPIs on Mothers’ Day at a local club house brought over 250. Gatherings at mosques, temples, and at Asian restaurants garnered hundreds of AAPI Ossoff supporters.

Over four months, I knocked on the doors of several hundred houses in Johns Creek, most of them belonging to Asian Americans. (This is otherwise known as canvassing.) At first, voters quickly closed the door after accepting Ossoff campaign literature. As the election approached, they lingered on their porches and asked me questions about voting, the election, the candidate. By the time early voting for the runoff election rolled around, three weeks before Election Day, they couldn’t wait to get to the polls. Neighbors who told me they didn’t see the point of voting voted. Friends who used to skip every election except presidential elections voted. Many of them voted for the first time. And getting them on board resulted in a chain reaction — they rounded up their own reluctant voter friends and got them to the polls.

This evolution in commitment and engagement in the AAPI community was astounding.

One the day of the election, I was stationed outside of my polling place as a volunteer poll watcher in a folding chair under the shade of a tree sipping water. I had been up at 6 AM placing signs along the street leading up to the polling place. I hadn’t slept much over the past few weeks.

A car pulled up to the curb in front of me. An elderly Pakistani American woman, an Ossoff supporter I’d met once before, jumped out of the driver’s seat, ran to the other side, and guided a much older Pakistani woman out of the car. They moved slowly up the stairs, arm in arm, and entered the building.

Maybe I was just exhausted. But as soon as the door shut behind them I started crying.

***

After a deep dive into the data, I learned something unfortunate. Though progressive Asian Americans built a sturdy infrastructure for engagement leading up to Election Day, the number of Asian Americans who voted for Ossoff versus Republican Karen Handel is unknown.

Still, when 2018 rolled around, the Democratic AAPI model for the sixth district special election could be dusted off and implemented at a statewide level. Grace Choi led this effort for the Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign, as the AAPI constituency director. Those of us who volunteered our hearts out for the Ossoff campaign began mobilizing again. We organized meet and greets with candidates, canvassing events, and rallies that centered the AAPI constituency.

For those of us working on the ground, the fact that 79% of Georgia’s Asian Americans ended up voting for Abrams (eight points more than the percentage that voted for Clinton two years earlier), coupled with the fact that Democrat Lucy McBath ousted Handel from the sixth district congressional seat only 18 months after Ossoff’s loss — wasn’t entirely out of left field.

But it was immensely rewarding all the same.

***

Unlike progressive AAPI voters, conservative AAPIs seem far more secure and outspoken in their political beliefs. Not long ago two Chinese American voters told me that because Trump supporters “are very vocal” in the Chinese American community, they oftentimes felt as if they were the only Democrats in the room. A conversation I had with an Indian-American neighbor a week later followed suit. “What can you do?” he told me. “Indians are Republicans and you can’t change their minds. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

Despite recent Democratic victories in Georgia, the perception of Asian Americans as conservatives appears to be a deeply entrenched one. Perhaps because not too long ago, many Asian Americans were Republican. The shift of AAPI voters from Republican to Democrat didn’t begin until after 1992, and didn’t gain significant momentum until 2008, when the majority of every Asian ethnic group in the state voted for Obama.

What’s more, for a while, prominent AAPI elected officials dominating the media — like former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and former South Carolina governor and outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — were Republican. And though several Democratic AAPI members of congress are currently leading the resistance — including Representative Ted Lieu, Senator Tammy Duckworth, Senator Mazie Hirono, Senator Kamala Harris, and Representative Pramila Jayapal — the assumption that Asian Americans are Republicans persists in the AAPI community.

How do we counter this narrative, especially at the state level? We elect more AAPIs to office.

The political history of Asian Americans in Georgia (whether Democrats or Republicans) is a relatively short one. Judge Alvin Wong of the Dekalb County State Court, holds the distinction of being the first Asian American elected to judge in the entire southeast. Republican Charlice Byrd served in the Georgia state house for eight years beginning in 2005. In 2008, Democrat Tony Patel, the current chair of the state Democratic Party’s AAPI caucus, ran (and lost) for a state house seat. In 2010, Rashid Malik ran for state senate and lost. (Malik ran again unsuccessfully in 2012 for the state house and in 2016 for the 7th district congressional seat.) Republican BJ Pak won his house seat in 2011, making him the first Korean American elected to the state legislature in either party, and served until 2017. In 2013, five Asian Americans ran for local offices and two won. In 2015, six ran for local offices and another two won.

Democratic Representative Sam Park’s historic November 2016 win was fueled, in part, by the two other Asian American women who helped to steer his campaign, his field director Pallavi Purkayastha and campaign manager Bee Nguyen. Park’s campaign left a vibrant legacy. Last year, Nguyen won the house district seat Abrams vacated to run for governor, becoming the first Vietnamese person elected to the Georgia legislature. Purkayastha, currently chief of staff to Representative David Dreyer, served as campaign manager for Nguyen’s race, and would head Democratic Angelika Kausche’s race for house district 50, flipping it blue for the first time.

Despite the dozen or so pending lawsuits against the state, Raffensperger has pledged to enforce Kemp’s policies, which will likely lead to the further erosion of the voting rights of all minority voters.

Three Asian Americans will be serving in the state legislature in 2019 — the most in Georgia’s history. All three are Democrats. Park will begin his second term, alongside Nguyen, who recently won her first full term, and Sheikh Rahman, who will begin his first term in the State Senate. Rahman is the first Muslim, and Bangladeshi American elected to state legislature; like Kausche, he is an immigrant.

Seeing is believing. To have more impact as a voting bloc in 2020, progressive Asian Americans will not only need to participate more in politics and civic engagement, they’ll need to recruit others in the community to do the same. “When we do not see ourselves reflected in the body elected to serve us, becoming politically engaged becomes more challenging,” said Nguyen. Rahman hopes to begin an AAPI caucus in the legislature, though his focus will remain on voter turnout. “Our main challenge is still how we can increase our folks at the polls.”

***

If Georgia’s progressive Asian Americans want to increase their political capital, they’ll need to continue to evolve as a forward-thinking, radically inclusive constituency. Because Republican AAPIs are getting bolder, even downright aggressive, in their tactics. One local Republican East Asian man I know routinely harasses Asian American women at Democratic events. Democrats don’t care about Asians! Why would you vote for them? Only Republicans care about Asians! He’s confrontational and belligerent, and when the women try to dodge him he tends to follow them around while spouting xenophobic rhetoric about immigrants entering the U.S. “the wrong way.” (He’s an immigrant himself.) I expect he’ll reappear at Democratic events in the months leading to the 2020 presidential election.

Staunch GOP AAPI voters are not uncommon. While the shift to more progressivism among Asian Americans in Georgia has been impressive, 18 percent of AAPI voters still supported Kemp with his shotgun, chainsaw and explosive political ads, despite the fact that many of their origin countries have among the lowest violent gun deaths in the world. We have miles to go before we have the same kind of Democratic turnout success as Black women, 97% of whom voted for Abrams.

In the Hindu Indian-American community, those who support Hinduvta or Hindu nationalism align themselves with the GOP primarily because of its Islamophobia. (Thirty-eight percent of Hindus in Georgia supported Trump in 2016, just one percentage point less than Catholics.) This, despite the fact that they may disagree with the GOP’s positions on guns and healthcare. “Resident Indian-Americans typically come from the dominant community in India,” said Suresh Kolichala, a Hindu-Indian who has been an active volunteer with Democratic campaigns. “When they come to America, they still feel they are part of the dominant community. They can easily identify with the problems of whites because back home in India, they face criticism from the liberal voices about oppressed sections of people.”

Regardless of national origin or ethnicity, Republican AAPIs in Georgia hit the ground running for elections. They throw money at GOP candidates, host lavish fundraisers, and frequently post photos of themselves posing with Republican candidates on social media. Nonpartisan organizations ensure that GOP candidates attend (and oftentimes speak at) their cultural functions, even at risk of jeopardizing their nonprofit status. In other words, conservative AAPIs are winning the publicity game and don’t shy away from promoting their candidates or proclaiming their loyalty. And their loyalty is being rewarded. As of this writing, two Republican Asian Americans are serving on Kemp’s transition team.

Progressive AAPIs are going to need to step up their game to stay ahead. What’s more, they’re going to need to align and uplift Indigenous, Black, and other people of color and reclaim and re-imagine the model minority myth as an unapologetic progressivism that condemns all forms of bigotry. They’re going to need to come out for Black Lives Matter and asylum seekers, the poor, the LGBTQIA+ community, and the disabled.

And above all else, progressive AAPIs must examine their own internalized prejudice. Too many are anti-Black, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic. They spout false Republican talking points about the “migrant caravan” and the need to come to the U.S. “the right way.” They ignore police violence against unarmed Black Americans, and too few have voiced their objections to the anti-gay Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill vetoed by former governor Nathan Deal, but which Kemp has said he will sign into law as long as it reflects the 1993 federal law.

This is no time to rest on our laurels.

***

The Indian festival of lights, Diwali, fell this year during the same week as the midterm election. In between texting hundreds of voters who might need to cure their provisional ballots, I picked up three boxes of cashew burfi and 80 pieces of naan at our local Indian restaurant for our neighborhood’s celebration in Johns Creek. In the intervening days, though we grew less optimistic about Abrams’ likelihood of becoming the next Georgia governor, we beamed about our historic wins. “We did it,” people exclaimed to one another.

After Ossoff’s loss last year, the same progressives at the Diwali party spooning paneer and biryani onto their plates grew even more determined. They donated to campaigns, canvassed and mobilized their networks to vote for Democrats straight down the ticket. We were now reaping the fruits of our labor — a blue wave, the first ever, for Johns Creek. Democrats here flipped the state house and senate seats, and McBath, whose 17-year-old son Jordan Davis was gunned down in Florida in 2012, bested Handel for the sixth district congressional seat. The trifecta of wins felt miraculous.

But the progressive AAPI community must be vigilant. In the December 4th runoff election for Secretary of State, the office responsible for Georgia’s myriad election issues, Republican Brad Raffensperger surpassed Democratic candidate John Barrow. Despite the dozen or so pending lawsuits against the state, Raffensperger has pledged to enforce Kemp’s policies, which will likely lead to the further erosion of the voting rights of all minority voters.

Still, one more city in Georgia is blue, and Asian Americans in Johns Creek played a significant role in making it happen. It’s not necessarily a revolution, but it’s a much needed spark.

* * *

Anjali Enjeti is an Atlanta-based journalist and critic whose work has appeared in The Nation, Newsday, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere.

Editor: Sari Botton
Factchecker: Sam Schuyler

They Wanted Her Body

Rafia Zakaria | Longreads | December 2018 | 13 minutes (3,450 words)

It happened in July, amid the sweltering summer heat of the plains of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. It was one of those days when sweat flows in streams, the beads of depleted moisture dripping down backs and armpits and foreheads as people walk and talk and complain about the heat as if it were a newcomer among them.

The murdered woman was Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani YouTube sensation, whose risqué videos, laden with erotic subtext, had so angered her brother that he strangled her to death. The deed was done late on the night of July 15th. It was late in the morning of the 16th when the first reporter from Pakistan’s rapacious 24-hour news media arrived in the neighborhood.

That journalist was Arif Nizami. After receiving an anonymous tip, he raced to the area and demanded of passersby that he be taken to the “Karachi Hotel.” “This is Karachi-Hotel,” some sympathetic soul finally told him, “the whole neighborhood is Karachi-Hotel.” The comic absurdity of this moment, while an apt metaphor for a country bewildered by looking at itself — especially in the new ways made possible by the internet, ways at which Qandeel Baloch excelled — is a contrast to the tragic scenes that were to follow, all painstakingly recreated in Pakistani journalist Sanam Maher’s book The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch. The book tells an extraordinary story: Qandeel Baloch’s internet fame was built almost entirely from suggestive innuendo-laden videos, shot and shared late at night when millions of Pakistani men go online in search of sexual satisfaction. Qandeel knew that this audience was out there, and in speaking directly to them she captured their erotic imagination.

Tragically for Qandeel Baloch, what Pakistani men love to love in private, they love to excoriate in public. Sexual fantasies, or the women who are part of them, must be shamed with the same ferocity with which their bodies are lusted after. It was this truth which led to Qandeel’s death that summer day, a grisly mix of rage and misogyny ending with her brother’s hands around her neck. In the hours after Arif Nizami arrived at the scene, a sweaty mob of media men crowded before the door of the house where Qandeel lay dead, her body already swollen from heat and decay as the temperature rose. The male gaze, lust-laden in life, had turned voyeuristic in death, the journalists, most of them men, clamoring and pushing and shoving to get a shot of her corpse.

The honor killing tag, once attached, tends to produce a sort of investigatory tunnel vision, the exotic filial element of the crime overshadowing other essential facts with its inherent moral decrepitude.

They would get to see her. When, after many hours, the policemen who had come to investigate carried her body out, they “forgot” to cover it with the standard white shroud afforded the dead. This small courtesy was denied a dishonorable woman of the web. Qandeel Baloch’s body was hidden only by the flowered sheet in which she had once slept. En route, it slipped away from her face, and everyone gathered was able to gawk at the dead woman, grab pictures and videos of her sordid end. Many of these crude recordings live on online, accessible with a simple Google search.

The other videos, those of the living Qandeel offering a striptease to a Pakistani cricketer, sitting in the lap of a religious cleric, and other provocations, are also still online. She had recorded many of them on hot nights just like the one of July 15, 2016. She had trouble sleeping, she would confess to her viewers, as she lay titillatingly sprawled on her bed or sofa. Her heavily made-up face and her outfit would accord with whomever or whatever she was playing that night: the little girl, the sultry siren, the robe-wrapped tease and many more. In a country where women never talk about sex in a public medium, Qandeel reveled and delighted in doing so, using erotic subtext and inventive innuendo to own her sexuality in a way that was quite unprecedented. This she had the savvy to attach to what she knew Pakistani men loved most after sex — sports. In a video made before the Pakistan national team played a crucial match against New Zealand, she promised Shahid Afridi, the team’s star player, a striptease dedicated to him if he wins.

 

Amazon

There wasn’t actually a striptease, not on YouTube anyway, but the suggestion of one openly promised by a Pakistani woman was enough to make the video go viral. While millions of Pakistani girls, minded by ever watchful fathers and brothers and uncles and cousins, remain absorbed in maintaining their respectability, Qandeel Baloch insisted on crossing the line without apology. She was a young woman uninterested in pretending to be a good girl, hoping to nab a suitable marriage prospect; she was a woman who loved being a bad girl, and Pakistan did not seem to know what to do with her.

Here, then, is the story of a culture that avows to love only good girls but finds itself irrepressibly fascinated by a bad girl, a poor girl, an unapologetic girl. It doesn’t end well for the girl, but it reveals much about a culture in flux, where the mores of a shame society obsessed with keeping an eye on everyone else are being challenged by the anonymity and ubiquity of internet technology, 3G connections in far-flung areas, and mobile phones cheaper than a couple days’ worth of meals. The internet has changed Pakistani society in all sorts of unusual and unexpected ways. Camel owners in the sprawling Thar desert, for instance, used to put bells around their camels’ necks, the sound of which could be easily heard no matter how far a camel had wandered in the quiet desert nights; now, the camels bear their owner’s mobile phone number instead. Where matchmakers once toted around worn photographs of young girls and boys, they now arrange video chats on WhatsApp. Food delivery services, even abortion services, are now accessible via Smartphones, as was the world of lust and sexual fantasy offered up by Qandeel Baloch.

Maher’s book points to Qandeel’s murder at the hands of her enraged brother Waseem as a possible honor killing. This classification was doggedly adhered to and pushed by Pakistani and foreign media in the days after Qandeel’s death, when the case was grabbing headlines around the world. It is true that Qandeel Baloch was killed by her brother Waseem; he owned up to the fact in a televised confession, justifying his crime by venting about his disapproval of the things she had done online and the dishonor she had brought on their family.

The honor killing tag, once attached, tends to produce a sort of investigatory tunnel vision, the exotic filial element of the crime overshadowing other essential facts with its inherent moral decrepitude. So too, perhaps, in the case of the murder of Qandeel Baloch. While honor killing in some ways might be an accurate description of what was done to her, the burgeoning culture of what we could call “incels” within Pakistan — millions of men with smartphones and raging libidos caught in a perceived feedback loop of unemployment and wifelessness — may have also played a role. In Pakistan, as elsewhere, a virulent mix of misogyny and lust and entitlement is coming to a head online; the internet is turning out to be a perfect storm of hate in a patriarchal society obsessed with shame over appearances but, concurrently, little or no guilt over wrongdoing when it is carried out in secret.

A woman’s economic empowerment can be anything from an existential threat to an inconvenience, but in any case men believe they are entitled to stop it by stopping her life.

This obsessive shame was, Qandeel’s brother attested, instrumental in catalyzing his murderous rage. So, too, could have been the shame of his own emasculation in the face of his sister’s growing fame and financial success, independent of how it was begotten. “Qandeel was not my daughter but she was my son. She provided us financial and emotional support,” her father Azeem lamented after her death, condemning his sons, Waseem and another brother-accomplice, whom he believed had murdered her. Qandeel had made it and Waseem had not, and this did not look good. In a family whose members had migrated to nearby Multan and even farther away to Islamabad, the (mostly) rural bugbear of family honor was unlikely to have held the same sort of sway on their lives as the shame of taking money from a woman. Indeed, honor killing itself is often just a cover story for male family members’ desire to stop a woman from inheriting property. After the killing, Qandeel’s father alleged that her brothers had murdered Qandeel for her money; and according to police reports, when the assailants fled the scene of the crime, they took Qandeel’s money and jewelry with them. A woman’s economic empowerment can be anything from an existential threat to an inconvenience, but in any case men believe they are entitled to stop it by stopping her life.

*

Before she became a rebel, Qandeel Baloch was just an ordinary little girl growing up in a poor family made up of mainly men. As Sanam Maher reports in her book, Qandeel, whose real name was Fouzia Azeem, regretted not being born a boy. For a time, she put on her brother’s clothes and played in the streets with the other boys, getting rowdy and dirty. All this was brought to a stop with apparent alacrity after she hit puberty. In her late teens, Qandeel was married off to a maternal cousin. Not knowing any men other than her father and brother, she thought he was “the one,” writing the man long letters during the duo’s engagement. A wedding was soon held and she was handed off to her new guardian, a man entitled to control her every move.

He did just that. After a short and fitful honeymoon period, Baloch’s husband grew tempestuous and abusive, and her body was soon covered in bruises and burn marks where he puts out cigarettes on her body. When she complained to her mother, she was not believed. The man was, after all, her husband. In due course, Qandeel became pregnant and gave birth, even as the abusive tenor of her situation rose to a crescendo.

The marriage did not end with any sort of empathic parental intervention, but with the intrepid Qandeel running off with her baby son to a government-run domestic violence shelter in Multan. The Darul Aman shelters (the name of several women’s shelters throughout Pakistan) are full of women who have nowhere to go and no money to go anywhere. The shelters’ dismal, Dickensian reality includes rapist guards who are rumored to pimp their charges to rich men in the city, and the constant grim chaos of women and children clamoring for meager provisions in the windowless darkness, which is deemed necessary to keep their presence secret. Not long after arriving, Qandeel left, handing over her baby son to her husband and his relatives. “I want to make my own life,” she confessed to the shelter administrator. “Whatever I want to do, I cannot do it with a child hanging on to me. I will become helpless.” She disappeared from the shelter the next day.

*

That was not, of course, to be the end of either her trials or her troubles. Not much was heard of Qandeel Baloch in the interim years, between when she ran off from the shelter early in the second decade of the new millennium and when she began to make her YouTube videos. Maher’s book tries to piece together this gray portion of Qandeel’s life. Somewhere in there is a thankless low paying gig working as a hostess on a bus-service whose mostly male customers expect to paw at the hostesses who serve them sandwiches. Then there are the modeling gigs, which promise much yet deliver little to the hundreds of earnest girls, most newly arrived from villages all over Pakistan, eager to shed their rustic edges and become glamorous.

But Qandeel Baloch does become glamorous; she also snags the coveted position of being the favorite of an event promoter. The man, named Mec, adores her. She too seems to like him; whether it is for the career leg up that he provides her or something more is anyone’s guess. Her first taste of real fame happens in 2013, when, clad in pink tights and a dress, she auditions for a show called Pakistan Idol (a remake of the American version) in Multan. She makes it, not in the sense of winning a spot on the show, but in garnering notoriety. The clip featuring her, in her bright and crazy get-up, goes viral. The judges reject her, saying that they find her voice too thin and high. She is devastated for the camera, but it doesn’t matter, because, while she may not have become a contestant, she has become famous. Between 2013’s Pakistan Idol audition and 2016, when she was killed, she would make appearances in music videos, in fashion shows, on television programs and of course in her many YouTube videos.

Qandeel had gone too far this time; not in exposing herself, but in exposing everyone else.

The YouTube video that was the beginning of the end wasn’t made until June of 2016; when Qandeel decided to share it, as well as several accompanying selfies on Twitter, it was as if she had set a clock counting down to her death the following month. The video’s genesis was seemingly innocuous. Qandeel, who had by now amassed enough fame to become a near regular on one or another of Pakistan’s many talk shows, was invited to be a guest on one of them. Another guest was a cleric named Mufti Qavi, whose selection completed a crude moral juxtaposition between the man of faith and the naughty girl of YouTube. A provocative discussion, friendly to the ratings, was the goal, and it was delivered.

The two, goaded by the loaded inquiries and allegations of the interviewer, soon began yelling at each other and talking over each other. The cleric who had gleaned his own fame by positioning himself as the gentle chider of models and actresses, refused to pass a religious edict (fatwa) on Qandeel Baloch to mend her naughty ways. Then he went even further than that, telling Qandeel on-air that he was headed to Karachi soon and that he would love to meet her.

The meeting, which, in Maher’s telling, Qandeel tried to avoid, took place at a Karachi hotel during the month of Ramadan, with all its attendant injunctions against debauchery and fervent exhibitions of public piety. The two shared cigarettes and food, the Mufti urging Qandeel on with the prescription that sharing increases the love between two people. Then Qandeel did what she always did; she began to take selfies of herself and Mufti Qazi, selfies that grow progressively more risqué. In one, they are seated on a couch; in another, she is on his lap, his clerical hat perched atop her head. A short video also showed the same thing.

The pictures and video went viral. Here was an exposure of a different sort, a direct jab at a culture in which men can pretend to be pious in public while keeping secret their lewd behavior with the same “loose” women whom they are happy to chide in public. The video made Qandeel an even bigger star, although now she was reviled as much as admired. Her shenanigans had seemed amusing earlier, but now they challenged the cherished and coddled double standard that permits private debauchery so long as the illusion of piety is publicly adhered to. If this woman’s wild sexuality could tempt a man of faith in this way, she was truly a threat to the pure lives everyone imagined themselves leading. Qandeel had gone too far this time; not in exposing herself, but in exposing everyone else.

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Mufti Qavi was suspended from his position as a member of Pakistan’s official moon-sighting committee following the fiasco with Qandeel. It was a huge demotion from him; the committee, which declares when a new moon has been sighted and thus when the major Eid celebrations are to begin, has national importance and credibility, opening up opportunities for the committee’s members to appear on television shows and reap the rewards of national fame. In an interview Qandeel Baloch gave after the incident, she pointed out just this tendency: “He’s publicity-hungry. He took my number from the media organisation and contacted me, saying ‘I promised I would meet you’. He said ‘I’m coming on this date’ and then sent me his flight…number.”

In the hours after Qandeel Baloch’s death, her father, Azeem, filed a First Information Report with the police. In the report, he blamed not only his two sons and her cousin Haq Nawaz, who he said colluded to asphyxiate Qandeel after adding tranquilizer to the family’s food, but also Mufti Qavi. Investigations into the murder case would back him up. They revealed that the taxicab used as a getaway car in the crime was driven by a relative of Mufti Qavi.

In the hours after the murder, Qandeel’s brother Waseem and his accomplice Haq Nawaz were both arrested. A questionnaire was sent to Mufti Qavi, in which he denied knowing anything at all about the murder or having anything to do with it. In the meantime, Qandeel Baloch’s other brothers all descended upon the little house in Multan that Qandeel had rented for her parents and tried to force them into “forgiving” their youngest brother. Laws related to blood money in Pakistan permit family members of the accused to forgive the perpetrator of crimes against them. In this case, it was all the case of one family.

It was more than a case of an angry brother punishing an errant sister; it was a conspiracy, a crime committed by a group of colluding men who found a powerful and unapologetic woman a danger and a threat to their masculinity.

Two and a half years have passed since Qandeel’s death, and her parents, who are living in abject poverty and have sometimes had to resort to begging for food in their ancestral village of Shah Sadar Din, continue to refuse to “forgive” her killers. (Although, when her parents retracted their accusation against one of the brothers, Aslam Shaheen, whom her father had initially claimed was the one who had incited Waseem to violence, the police claimed Aslam had bribed them.)  Her father drapes her grave in the Pakistani flag and her mother still shows reporters, like Maher herself, the glitzy and glamorous clothes their daughter left behind.

In late November, the court hearing Qandeel Baloch’s murder case refused bail to her younger brother Waseem, who confessed to the killing prior to trial. However Haq Nawaz, also one of the main accused in the case, who had allegedly helped execute the murder, was released pending trial. It is often the way of things in Pakistan that as public interest in a crime dies down, the accused are first freed on bail and then the case is dismissed entirely, with cryptic reasons given as to why. They range widely from a lack of evidence, to the forgiveness of the killer, to alleged false confessions and so on. With Waseem free, the pressure will once again be on the aged parents of the murdered Qandeel Baloch to forgive the son who killed her. Mufti Qavi’s role in the case seems to be fading away. That, too, is unsurprising. In the Pakistani logic of things, why should a bad woman’s death be permitted to ruin a good man’s life?

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Qandeel Baloch knew that to sustain interest in herself, or in anything, in the age of likes and clicks and shares, she must constantly produce new content, up herself and reinvent herself. This is the reality for any internet star, including those who thrive on controversy. But Qandeel was self-made not just in the sense of having charted her own destiny; she was self-invented in her unique ability to satiate that very specific desire for fabricated authenticity that we thirst for in the virtual world — a place where all of us live out part of our lives, but one she chose to live in more fully and more honestly than most. Qandeel knew that the very truth of a woman alone, possessing an inner life and her own desires, was the most riveting spectacle of all. Her death should not be reduced to the sad but simple story of an honor killing in a small city in backward and barbaric Pakistan. This would neatly pin the blame on family and tradition, obscuring the fact that her murder was directly linked to the virtual world of virulent online misogyny, which is, everywhere it takes root, an outgrowth of men’s abhorrence of their own lust and their rage toward the women who are objects of it.

This, then, is the true story of the death of Qandeel Baloch. It was more than a case of an angry brother punishing an errant sister; it was a conspiracy, a crime committed by a group of colluding men who found a powerful and unapologetic woman a danger and a threat to their masculinity. In a society bound by moralizing constraints, where sexual lives and preferences must be kept covert, deviance and decrepitude flourish; a murder evolving from it should not come as a surprise. In the end, they wanted what they had always wanted: They wanted her body.

I fear that no one will ultimately be held responsible for the murder of Qandeel Baloch. Meanwhile, Qandeel herself can still be found, in hundreds of videos, smiling at the camera, thumbing her nose at her haters, making up a new life for herself as she goes.

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Rafia Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (2015) and Veil (2017). She is a columnist at Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English newspaper and writes the “Alienated” column for The Baffler.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Remembering Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks

Buzzcocks lead singer Pete Shelley has died of a heart attack. He was 63.

To my ears, Buzzcocks were always a pop band with punk sensibilities, rather than the other way around. The craftsmanship behind songs like “Why Can’t I Touch It” or “What Do I Get” demonstrate an ambition beyond provocation. Pete Shelley was Ray Davies’ legitimate heir: smart, sincere, and acerbic with an unerring ear for musical hooks. The early Buzzcocks albums Another Music In A Different Kitchen, Love Bites, and A Different Kind Of Tension are each their own kind of greatest hits compilation.

Still, Buzzcocks had an impeccable punk pedigree. Peter McNeish, as he was originally known, organized the June 1976 Sex Pistols gig in his hometown in Manchester. That appearance, though sparsely attended (“I think there were about 42, 43 people there,” Shelley remembered), was the catalyst for almost the entire post-punk Manchester scene, as some of the attendees went on to found Joy Division, The Fall, the Smiths, and Factory Records. The next time the Pistols came through town, McNeish’s new band opened. His stage name was now Pete Shelley, which his parents would have called him had he been born a girl.

The first Buzzcocks EP, Spiral Scratch, was released in January 1977 on their own independent label, New Hormones. “We made quite a bit of money from Spiral Scratch,” Shelley said. “It ended up selling about 16,000 copies and we were able to buy some new equipment.”

Once Shelley took over as principal songwriter and vocalist later that year, the band released a series of extraordinary singles, characterized by breakneck tempos, breathless tempos, canny lyrics about unrequited love,and ingenious chord changes pumped out by buzzsaw guitars. There’s not a rock star guitar solo in sight. Shelley sings with a petulant Manchester yelp. He turned this material out with seeming effortlessness.

It’s an impressive collection, from the delirium of “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” to the confessional testimony of “I Believe,” to the ceaselessly catchy “You Say You Don’t Love Me” — all created by a man who was 26 when his band broke up in 1981.

Shelley did not come out as bisexual until years later, although anyone listening to his romantic complaints and genderless lyrics would have already understood. “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn’t’ve),” the band’s masterpiece, was inspired by a line from Guys and Dolls. “You spurn my natural emotions,” Shelley sings. “You make me feel like dirt and I’m hurt.”

And if I start a commotion

I run the risk of losing you and that’s worse

Ever fallen in love with someone

You shouldn’t have fallen in love with?

“I wrote it about Francis, who was the social sec at Warrington Tech,” Shelley remembered. “I was going through self-discovery, shall we say, a fertile ground for writing songs. In the initial courtship he was resistant to my charms.”

Punk decluttered popular music, and Shelley, already a fan of pared down acts like the Velvet Underground and Can, was prepared to fill the void. “There are plenty of musicians that I enjoy watching that are entertainers,” he told The Guardian in 2006. “But I wouldn’t want to be that, because the thing with an entertainer is that there is always that dishonesty, which is what punk tried to get rid of.”

“It was like, you’re not pretending to be something you are not,” he continued. “You are just what you are.”

He applied this approach to his lyrics as well, always smart but never contrived. “See, with me, I’m never really happy unless everything sounds like it’s conversational,” Shelley told The Quietus a few years ago. “That’s why I find it hard to write lyrics, to simplify it to the point where it sounds like there’s no writing there. So a lot of time and effort goes into me rejecting things.”

Shelley went solo after the Buzzcocks broke up. An early single, “Homosapien” — banned by the BBC because of its “explicit reference to gay sex” — was actually written in 1974, before Buzzcocks formed. But the influence of Shelley’s former band was still rippling out through mainstream culture.

The Fine Young Cannibals’ 1988 cover of “Ever Fallen In Love” reached the top-10  in the UK, which “financed our comeback,” according to Shelley. The band’s reunion lasted almost 30 years. In the meantime, college radio, indie rock, and Nirvana all advanced and receded. Buzzcocks music informed them all.

Punk fizzled, like any musical trend. Its most durable aspects of emotionally direct, vulnerable, aggressive, and unornamented communication have remained. Buzzcocks embodied this approach. Long live Pete Shelley.

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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Matt Giles