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Educator and activist Constanza Eliana Chinea explains that her decolonization lessons aren’t designed with white people in mind. Rather, the classes are for people of color; those who “have been colonized” and are “trying to move away from assimilation.”

Chinea was born in New York, then moved to her parent’s birthplace in Puerto Rico at around 8 years old. The family moved to Chicago when Chinea was a teenager, which she says helped her to understand the immigrant experience and the experience of “otherness.”

She says that she uses the Caribbean and Puerto Rico in her work as a kind of “landing path” to show her students the systemic ways in which colonization exists.

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“I think a lot of people think we live in a postcolonial society, which isn’t true. Once we start to dismantle what colonization is and how it exists in ourselves and how we perpetuate it, then we can really start to talk about how we break it down systemically,” Chinea says.

Chinea says that when it comes to the theory of decolonization, it starts with the self, and with the mentality of colonization. Then it moves toward the action.

“I think a lot of times we think we have to become an activist. Anyone can be an activist because they’re taking action in the streets or they’re signing bills or they’re protesting. But it doesn’t mean they’re doing it in a decolonial way,” she says.

She explains that she starts with decolonial literacy and then begins the conversation about the systemic structure and how to change it and evolve from it.

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

“I’m working with people of color to really help them to understand what that means. Decolonization has really turned into a marketing tactic at this point. So I’m really trying to help people understand that it’s not about marketing. It’s not about just using the phrase as a throwaway phrase. It really is an actionable journey that you have to go through. And it’s very personal,” Chinea says.

Her clients are those who are on a journey. “They’re mixed folks who have been raised by white parents or have been adopted into white families … visibly Black and brown people who come to me wanting to reclaim Indigenous practices, but not sure how to start.” She adds it’s also for those looking to “unpack white supremacy and how that has affected them.”

She says colonial mentality is something that people of color absorb as adopting the practices of the oppressor, turning it into culture, turning into lifestyle by way of capitalism. “I think it really comes from a place of they’ve been traumatized, and they want to figure out how does that trauma manifest.”

Chinea’s students find her most easily via her website, her Patreon, and her free content on YouTube. She does offer paid private one-on-one consultation sessions.

Chinea warns that this work isn’t easy. Divesting from colonization means actively and thoughtfully putting your money, your vote, and your energy where your mouth is. Doing the research on the companies where you spend, where you travel, and what spaces you inhabit that support or deny colonization. 

“This is the de-glamorized view of decolonization. … Divesting actually takes effort and it’s very uncomfortable. If we’re still looking at success through Western supremacist view, divesting is always going to be the last resort, because people don’t want that. [What] they want is to look like they’re successful; to have money, the big house, and be able to travel,” she says.

She explains that what people don’t understand is that you can get to a place of financial freedom through divesting.

“But it’s very uncomfortable at first because you have to divest. Even your thinking around, ‘How do I get financial freedom without investing in all of these colonized and capitalist ways?’”

One of the small ways Chinea suggests people can divest from our colonized society is to leave traditional social media platforms—although she herself has had to keep a presence on Instagram. But she did create a platform similar to Instagram called the Anti-Oppression Social Club.

“It’s a place for people, for myself to share decolonized news and politics and pop culture and kind of dismantle all of those things. It’s also a place for other activists and educators to post whatever it is that they want to post without fear of being censored or blacklisted or anything like that,” she says.

The Good Fight is a series spotlighting progressive activists around the nation: Those who are battling injustice in underserved communities and the folks fighting for democracy everywhere.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finally did something right: Of the nearly dozen bills that came across his desk this week, DeSantis vetoed the net metering bill that would have essentially gutted incentives for homeowners interested in using solar panels. HB741 would’ve drastically slashed the funds solar panel leasers and owners receive for the energy their panels generate, known as “net metering.” I even thought DeSantis, who received more than $30,000 from Florida Power & Light, would sign the bill the company’s lobbyists helped create. DeSantis refusing to adopt the bill actually goes against his own record, as he’s publicly said he’s against solar subsidies and even signed a law last year that prevents Florida cities from getting 100% of their power from renewables.

According to a veto letter obtained by the Miami Herald, DeSantis came to his senses because the bill would’ve been wildly unpopular for him as a politician. ““Given that the United States is experiencing the worst inflation in 40 years and that customers have seen steep increases in the price of gas and groceries, as well as escalating bills, the state of Florida should not contribute to the financial crunch that our citizens are experiencing,’’ DeSantis wrote in a statement about his decision. It’s been abundantly clear that a majority of Floridians support the practice of net metering. Nearly half of Floridians polled in February said they’d be less likely to reelect a lawmaker who stood in the way of those incentives and when it came down to it, DeSantis didn’t want to be that lawmaker his constituents turned away from. 

There has been plenty that DeSantis has done wrong, especially as of late: the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” his weird fixation with “Let’s Go Brandon” bullshit, his COVID policies—the list goes on and on. But listening, at least in this case, appears to be one of the few things the stubborn Republican actually got right. Industry advocates, fellow lawmakers, citizens, and pretty much anyone invested in a greener future spoke out in droves against HB741 and their constant pressure worked. Rep. Carlos Smith even noted it on Twitter when celebrating the veto, tweeting that “advocacy matters.” It’s worth noting that, of the 10 bills that did pass, two involved energy: HB481, which affects temporary underground power panels, and HB1411, which actually allows more places in Florida to host floating solar facilities that take underused bodies of water and generate power from them while also decreasing evaporation rates for those waters

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Despite the increased awareness, hate crimes against Asian Americans continue to increase nationwide. These crimes are especially on a rise in states with major cities like New York. It seems like every day in New York an incident of hate has been reported against the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community.

In the most recently reported incident to make headlines, a New York man has been charged with a hate crime after allegedly striking a woman with a pool cue and yelling racial slurs, WGRZ reported. Officials noted the incident happened at San-Dees Pub on Grand Island around 4 AM.

According to the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, as a result of the attack, the victim received stitches for a cut to her lip and suffered pain and swelling to her nose and mouth.  A temporary order of protection was issued on behalf of the victim, the report said.

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

The suspect was identified as 46-year-old Charles Vacanti. He was initially arrested for assault on March 19. According to court records, Vacanti, who is 5’7”, attacked the woman, who is 5 feet tall.

“You can imagine a 5 foot 7, 270-pound defendant striking a 5-foot woman in the head with a pool stick in the head concussed, I’m not sure if she required stitches, but severe enough to charge a felony,” police officials said.

Following further investigation, Vacanti was arrested again on Wednesday, April 20, and charged with one count of felony assault with intent to cause injury with a weapon as a hate crime, as well as one count of criminal possession of a weapon with intent to use.

“They did not know each other. Now how they came about the altercation, that’s something I’d rather not comment on right now. What I could tell you is prior to the defendant striking the victim, he did use some racial slurs and then struck the victim,” said Erie County Sheriff John Garcia.

According to NBC News, at least five witnesses at the bar said they saw Vacanti leave after the attack. Garcia noted that witnesses and employees at the bar helped investigators find and identify Vacanti. Whether there is surveillance footage of the incident is unclear at this time.

Of course, Vacanti claims to have done nothing wrong, despite witnesses confirming they saw the attack. “My client vehemently denies, first of all, any assault or anything of that nature, and certainly any indication or allegation of a hate crime,” said Frank LoTempio, Vacanti’s lawyer.

While xenophobia against the AAPI community is not a new phenomenon, the attack follows an alarming increase in hate crimes across the country. Hate crime data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino found that hate crimes against Asian Americans surged in 2020 in at least 15 cities, Daily Kos reported. As the cities were further reviewed, a new report indicated that crimes against Asian Americans rose by 169% when comparing the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021.

Additionally, women have been most vulnerable to attacks. According to a recent research report released by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, 74% of AAPI women reported having personally experienced racism or discrimination in the last 12 months.

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Starbucks has poured huge amounts of money into its union-busting campaign, deploying extra managers to stores where workers were organizing, keeping an anti-union law firm very busy, and firing union leaders at multiple stores. It hasn’t worked, but the company is still cheerleading its own efforts. And by “it hasn’t worked,” I mean that 41 out of 44 stores to vote have gone union, many by huge margins and several unanimously.

But Starbucks management is committed. In leaked video from an internal anti-union call for store managers, which More Perfect Union obtained and posted clips of, senior corporate management egged on store managers to oppose union efforts more strongly, and some key store managers spoke about how victimized they felt by their workers’ efforts to organize. Poor babies.

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One tearful manager described a violent, scary picket line outside her store—even though the protest had been covered by the media, with video showing a very different scene than the manager described. The manager who harassed and fired teenage shift supervisor Laila Dalton in Phoenix, Arizona, spoke at length about what she described as sincere efforts to get Dalton’s work up to standard—except Dalton already posted video of some of the interactions, and the National Labor Relations Board has filed charges against Starbucks for the retaliatory firing of Dalton and other workers in Phoenix. The consistent message from Starbucks upper management to Starbucks store managers is that the pro-union workers are enemies and probably not really Starbucks workers at all.

The union representation votes happening in store after store show exactly how false those claims are. This week saw another flurry of votes counted, with an extremely strong majority ending in union wins—including in places like Augusta, Georgia, where one store went union on Thursday in a 26 to 5 vote. Less than 5% of workers in Georgia are union members.

There are now more than 40 unionized Starbucks stores across the country. This week alone, in addition to the Georgia store, Maryland, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Minnesota each got their first corporate-owned unionized Starbucks stores. In Eugene, Oregon, the union won four out of five stores that were counted on Thursday.

Workers are pushing back on management’s attempts to intimidate them or discredit them as real Starbucks workers.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders met with a group of workers, one told him about needing to work full-time through chemotherapy in order to afford the health care coverage to pay for the chemotherapy. Workers told Sanders how one of management’s responses to the union effort has been to flood stores with new workers so that the existing workers don’t get enough hours to pay their bills.

Similarly, California Starbucks worker Dulce Duarte told Teen Vogue, “A lot of us would work close to 30 hours a week, but I was [recently] cut [by] 11 hours per week, which did affect me — not only financially, but it also affected the way I’d support my family, as I live with my grandparents and my mom.” Nonetheless, Duarte said, “My advice to any baristas that are considering [organizing] would just be to go for it. Corporate calls us ‘partners,’ yet we’re not treated as such. The only way we’re going to be able to be heard is if we act and not be afraid. It’s definitely a scary thing going into it, but if everyone has each other’s back and everyone stands their ground and doesn’t let management or corporate convince you otherwise, baristas will come out on top.”

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Anyone paying attention was aware of the ineptitude former President Donald Trump displayed in the first days and months of the COVID-19 pandemic … and his entire presidency. But based on a report released Friday by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, Trump’s pandemic response was worse than the public even knew.

The report found that not only did government scientists observe “incidents of political interference in scientific decision-making,” but they were too afraid of “retaliation” to report it. Additionally, “Trump Administration officials overruled, undermined, and muzzled career public health experts, during the critical first year of the pandemic.”  

Most damning are emails released in the report that shows that in May of 2020, the White House tried to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 transmissions in places of worship, despite knowing full well how deadly it could be for people to gather.

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The day before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its guidelines for safety in churches, essentially recommending that churches go virtual, “Trump White House officials made edits to the guidance with no scientific basis,” the report reads.

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

Paul Ray, then-administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, found issues with the CDC guideline, writing in an email to senior White House officials that the recommendation “seems to raise religious liberty concerns.” Ray suggested several deletions and that the CDC be allowed to publish guidance “contingent on striking the offensive passages.”

Then-Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway responded to the email, thanking Ray for “holding firm against the newest round of mission creep.”

White House attorney May Davis referred to the CDC’s faith communities guidance as “problematic,” and proposed changes “on top of Kellyanne [Conway]’s edits.”

Davis added, “[T]hough personally I will say that if I was old and vulnerable (I do feel old and vulnerable), drive-through services would sound welcome.”

“The recommendation to attend virtual religious services did not appear in the final guidance,” according to the report. In fact, Trump deemed churches “essential places that provide essential services,” and demanded governors follow his lead or face the consequences.

In excerpts of a transcribed interview with former CDC Director Robert Redfield, the report states that “one of [his] great disappointments” was “[t]hat HHS basically took over total clearance of briefings by CDC” during the most critical points early on in the pandemic.

Redfield said he was left with “PTSD for probably six months” because “none of our [CDC] briefings were approved” by the Trump administration, and CDC staff were prohibited from doing media or interviews.

“The Select Subcommittee continues to unearth disturbing new details on how the Trump Administration’s pandemic response prioritized politics over public health,” Rep. James E. Clyburn, chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, wrote in a statement.

“While a Trump White House official admitted to her colleagues that proposed CDC guidelines for places of worship were reasonable, she worked with them to strong-arm changes to those guidelines that deprived Americans of useful information on how to protect themselves against this deadly virus. As today’s new evidence also makes clear, Trump White House officials worked under the direction of the former president to purposefully undercut public health officials’ recommendations and muzzle their ability to communicate clearly to the American public,” Clyburn added.  

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The House Jan. 6 select committee is planning to hold eight public hearings in June, hearings that Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) says will “blow the roof off the House.”

“We now have the evidence to support a story of the worst presidential political crime against the union in American history,” he told CBS News. Whether that evidence is also going to expose Trump’s partners in crime among congressional Republicans, he’s not saying. But he’s also not giving those members any quarter in his speeches on the House floor.

Take Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA), one of the 10 Republicans (the usual suspects in what Rep, Liz Cheney has dubbed the “Putin Wing of the GOP”) to vote against updating the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 to facilitate the transfer of military equipment to Ukraine. Ahead of that vote, Greene spent her three minutes of debate time not talking about Ukraine and Russia, but instead screeching about immigration and the massive invasion of foreigners into the U.S.

Raskin was having absolutely none of that.

“The United States of America just witnessed the most astonishing spectacle,” Raskin said. “We are here to debate aid to the people of Ukraine defending themselves against a massive invasion by Putin and his army. Then the minority puts up the distinguished gentlelady from Georgia who does not mention Ukraine once. She does not mention the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have been slaughtered by Putin’s army.”

“Instead, she talks about a massive invasion at the border, a massive invasion which their own speakers have said today, hundreds of thousands of people have been apprehended in,” he continued. “That’s very different from a military invasion. The one in Ukraine, of course, the gentlelady’s not going to talk about that.”

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

Then Raskin reminded the chamber about how Greene heckled him a few weeks ago during the debate to hold former top Trump officials Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino in criminal contempt of Congress. “She had a lot to say the other day when she heckled me continuously when I came to the floor, […] chanting about the Russia hoax and Russia this and Russia that,” Raskin said Thursday.

“Now she had the opportunity to tell the world what her views about Russia are.” He then referenced a tweet storm from Greene in which “she said that the aid that the taxpayers of America are sending to the people of Ukraine to defend themselves against Vladimir Putin and the Russian army falls into the hands of Nazis”. She did say that.

“I want to see her proof. where’s her evidence? She talks about NATO Nazis.” (She does, she uses the hashtag #NATONazis.) “Does the minority believe that our allies in NATO who are trying to defend the people of Ukraine are Nazis?” Raskin continued. “Has it come to this? The gentlelady talked about a massive invasion. We had had a massive invasion of our own chamber and she continues to be a cheerleader for the insurrection and deny what happened here.”

At that point, another Republican interrupted, demanding that Raskin’s words be taken down, what the House does to reprimand a member when they’ve been “disorderly.”

It’s not clear who that Republican was, but it was certainly one that didn’t like hearing the truth about the Putin Wing of the GOP on the House floor.

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