But we didn’t anticipate that the act of bringing people together in person for smart, thought-provoking discussions wouldn’t even be possible for most of 2020.

Since 2003, we’ve hosted live events in Los Angeles and beyond. This year, Zócalo—thanks to staff, partners, collaborators, and Zoom—rapidly shifted to hosting our events online, at a time when we felt our audience needed it most. On March 20, 2020, we hosted our first virtual event—thinking and hoping that it would be a temporary state of affairs. Instead, the ongoing pandemic has led us to spend nine-plus months rethinking what makes Zócalo events special. And we’ve begun to see what might be accomplished when we bring people together in a virtual public square to which everyone in the world is invited.

We’re proud of the robust, civil audience chatrooms we’ve hosted, of the thoughtful speakers we brought to you (entirely free, as always), and of a new, Twitter-only live interview format we piloted. We put our heart and soul into all our events, but we do have our favorites—the ones that, this year, drew most deeply on imagination, art, and scholarship to address the toughest problems in our communities and our world.

Thinking back over 2020, it was difficult to choose just a few of our favorites to highlight. But these half-dozen Zócalo events (and the clips we’ve shared here) stood out to us.

How Are Native American Artists Envisioning the Future?

Our final in-person event of 2020 featured three Native American scholars and artists delving into the concept of “Indigenous Futurism”—as a counter to erasure, as a method of solving problems like climate change, and as a way of challenging the status quo. One of the evening’s most memorable moments was when Oglala Lakota artist Kite explained how we might create an ethical relationship with artificial intelligence through the lens of contemporary Lakota epistemologies.

What Can Poetry Offer Us in Distressing Times?

When you bring a group of poets together, the only guarantee is that you will get some unexpected insights into yourself and the larger world around you. That’s exactly what happened when we invited United States Poet Laureate emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, poet and author Inez Tan, and Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Ríos to talk about what their art has to offer in very difficult moments like spring 2020. In this highlight clip Tan talked about asking her poetry students to consider the central emotion from which they write—in her case, that has meant embracing the power of writing from fear.

Why Don’t Women’s Votes Put More Women in Power?

To mark the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, we put together three events this year in partnership with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Titled When Women Vote, the series has investigated the past, present, and future of politics, power, and gender in L.A. and around the world. A powerhouse panel led this lively discussion on gender inequities in politics—which have become even more stark amid the pandemic. During it, Rosa “Rosie” Rios, the 43rd Treasurer of the United States, spoke passionately about why American women lag behind men in almost every major economic and political indicator, and the structural change that’s needed to close this gap.

Does a New Wave of Anti-Asian American Racism Require New Ways of Fighting Back?

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in incidents of anti-Asian American racism that began in early spring—and that was encouraged by President Trump and other politicians. What are the best ways—old and new—to combat this wave of violence? Zócalo and the Daniel K. Inouye Institute brought together scholars and leaders, including United States Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaiʻi, who spoke about how to channel outrage into action and change.

What Would Society Look Like Without Police?

Our final event of 2020 addressed one of the most urgent questions of the year: What should a new, equitable criminal justice system look like? Kicking off our The World We Want series in partnership with the University of Toronto, a panel of scholars compared their visions of a society without police—or rather, a society where the police have vastly different duties than they do in communities currently. University of Toronto Faculty of Social Work Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work dean Dexter Voisin, Harvard University professor of criminal justice Sandra Susan Smith, and Rachel Harmon, director of the Center for Criminal Justice at University of Virginia Law, offered several specific ideas for “de-tasking” the police and reassigning their work in areas from mental health to traffic enforcement.

The 10th Annual Zócalo Book Prize: How Do Oppressed People Build Community?

The Zócalo Book Prize event—where we honor the author of the best nonfiction book that explores community and social cohesion—is always an annual highlight for us. But this year’s lecture and interview with the winner, University of North Carolina historian William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, stood out for its urgent and timely exploration of how communities create social movements. Sturkey, in a fast-paced conversation with Yale University historian David W. Blight, wove the surprising story of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, from its founding in 1882 as a place of opportunity for whites and Blacks alike, to how it helped birth the Civil Rights Movement. Sturkey’s recounting of the first day of Freedom School—July 2, 1964, also the day Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act—was particularly inspiring to an audience that tuned in everywhere from Hattiesburg to Los Angeles, and across the Western Hemisphere.

The post Our Favorite Events of 2020 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So, while we may all have been stuck at home this year, we endeavored to publish new work designed to take you across the world—and the space-time continuum.

The Zócalo essays of 2020 explored the ideas that animate who we are and where we’re going. We looked back to Jamaica in 1831 and to Madrid in the first days of lockdown. We peered inside the minds of a generation trying to save our planet’s future, and looked into the heart of one young woman cleaning airplanes at LAX and dreaming of pursuing higher education.

Thank you for joining us on this ongoing journey. We hope we helped you make sense of a time where very little seemed sensical—and occasionally took your mind off the chaos of 2020, too.

Of all that we published, these were our 10 favorite essays of these hard and strange past 12 months:

A Letter From Madrid, Where Impending Quarantine Permits a Last Look at Goya

Zócalo contributing editor José González Vargas, a Venezuelan journalist currently studying in Madrid, brought us to Spain in the early days of the pandemic, before and just after the country enacted one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. Browsing a local bookstore and musing on Goya at the Prado, he offered what now reads as an aching reminder of the world as it was—and his letter inspired the launch of our Dispatches series, which has taken us from Nigeria and India to the Napa Valley.

The Uprising of 60,000 Jamaicans That Changed the Very Nature of Revolt

As millions of Americans took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd in support of Black Lives Matter, Zócalo published an account of the 1831 rebellion that inspired the British Empire to abolish slavery. Chapman University English professor Tom Zoellner, author of Island on Fire, recounted how the reverberations of a well-organized, initially nonviolent revolt by the enslaved people of Jamaica continue to echo around the world.

Why Today’s Social Revolutions Include Kale, Medical Care, and Help With Rent

Can a single organization help its neighbors meet their basic needs and also fight injustice? Before the pandemic, American nonprofits, increasingly professionalized and corporatized, were by and large siloed into choosing one or the other. Rinku Sen, a journalist and former executive director of Race Forward, looked to the past, present, and on toward the future to explain how nonprofits can adopt mutual aid as the best strategy to serve both individuals and social movements seeking systemic change.

How Quarantine Has Turned Us Into Gardeners of Our Bodies’ Ancient Microbial Wilderness

By now, we know how COVID-19 has changed everything from education and healthcare to work and travel. But if you haven’t read North Carolina State University ecologist Rob Dunn’s Zócalo essay, you might not know what it’s doing to your armpits. Dunn explored how, in normal times, we share viruses, bacteria, and mites with the people around us—and what happens to these microbes when we stop seeing other people and start baking sourdough.

‘Sharp and Subversive’ Scenes of Integrated 1940s Summer Camps

Friends at Camp Christmas Seals, Haverstraw, New York. Courtesy of the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information photograph collection (Library of Congress).

The summer of 1943 found photographer Gordon Parks in the tents, on the docks, and at the dining halls of camps around New York state. He captured what looked like ordinary summertime pursuits of the era—except for the fact that he was showing Black and white children living, playing, and eating together. As Columbia University historian Amanda Hardin-Martin explained in her essay for Zócalo, Parks, who would go on to become a civil rights hero, presented an idyllic vision of nature in America that slyly subverted the segregation of the times.

I Got an Education Cleaning Airplanes in the Middle of the Night

“The airlines provide barf bags, but the dirty secret is that people often don’t use them. They throw up on the floor and the seats. This is not a society that cleans up after itself.” So began Long Beach City College student Shanice Joseph’s account of the lessons she learned working the graveyard shift on a cleaning crew at LAX. The most indelible, however, was the one that inspired her to quit and go back to college: “[Y]our job is temporary, and your education is forever.”

Looking for Jazz Uplift Under Lockdown

Journalist and music critic Larry Blumenfeld considered the power of jazz music—in bringing people together in celebration and mourning, in punctuating moments of social change, and in inspiring either energy or calmness through improvisation—at a time when live performance had come to a screeching halt. Blumenfeld reflected on a strange spring and summer in jazz (and early virus) epicenters New York and New Orleans, and the loss of ritual when people needed it most.

The New Faces of Climate Justice

Teaching environmental studies right now means providing young people with more than lectures about air quality, water sources, and climate change. Humboldt State University’s Sarah Jaquette Ray discovered just how much her Generation Z students need her support in battling the despair they feel about the planet they’re inheriting. At the same time, they taught her more about how entwined climate justice is with social and systemic inequality.

Illustration by Be Boggs.

Where I Go: Growing Up Under the Rim

In 2020, Zócalo brought back our Where I Go feature (after a three-year hiatus) to chronicle the “third places”—outside home and work—to which we find ourselves drawn. Contributors let us tag along to a vintage clothing store in Washington, D.C., and on cold-water swimming expeditions at Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. For his Where I Go, Ky-Phong Tran, a Long Beach-based teacher and writer, took us to Southland basketball courts that have provided him with camaraderie, mentorship, and inspiration as a player and youth coach.

Two Would-Be Supreme Court Justices and Me

How do you cope when two of your high school newspaper friends show up on the Supreme Court short lists—one on Donald Trump’s list and the other on Joe Biden’s? For Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews, it meant recalling the origins of The Paw Print, the newspaper he and Jim Ho—now a U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge who Trump put on his most recent Supreme Court list—founded at their Pasadena high school. It also meant remembering his time editing the copy of Leondra Kruger—now a justice on the California Supreme Court and reportedly one of Biden’s top potential picks—both on The Paw Print and The Crimson at Harvard. For Mathews, an expert in democracy (who is also consistently skeptical of its institutions), this story of the twinning fates of two kids from the same small, elite private school also led to a bigger question: How can we trust Leondra or Jim—or anyone, for that matter—”with the vast and unaccountable powers” granted to a U.S. Supreme Court justice?

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2020 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To My Sons:

I’m so proud of all three of you. I especially appreciate that, now that you’re 21, 18, and 16 years old, you no longer fight with each other constantly like you did when you were little. You’re all doing well in school and in work, and you have bright futures ahead.

But I also want you to never forget how lucky you’ve been to come of age in California during this now-concluding decade, the Roaring 2020s. Our state is doing so well now that it’s hard to remember how fraught things seemed 10 years ago.

In those days, California failed to live up to its progressive ideals. Facing a dire housing shortage and a homelessness crisis, the state had one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Digital technology was causing massive disruption. Mega-fires, sparked by bankrupt utilities and made more dangerous by climate change, were destroying homes and killing people. And the federal government was undermining our desperate efforts to reckon with all these problems.

“It’s the End of California As We Know It,” declared a column in the New York Times in the final weeks of 2019.

What was most dispiriting back then was that, while many Californians were working on our biggest challenges, we couldn’t seem to make much progress. Neither governments, nor businesses, nor civil society provided strong enough tools to deal with problems that seemed too big and overwhelming.

Amidst these feelings of hopelessness, we fell even deeper into a bad habit. We started declaring that we would solve certain problems, or make certain progress, by a set year—without having any real plans for how to do it. This year was 2030.

As a target date, 2030 came up again and again, particularly in efforts to fight climate change. Leaders in Sacramento talked constantly about the need to reduce emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. But those goals weren’t accompanied by realistic plans to achieve the requisite remissions reductions of nearly 5 percent annually—especially in the face of our outsized and increasing emissions from transportation and wildfires.

2030 fantasies went much further than climate, though. In 2018, the State Department of Education declared a goal under “Global California 2030” of making half of all K-12 students proficient in two or more languages. It was a wonderful idea, but it wasn’t serious. No one ever provided the funding for massive increases in immersion programs and foreign language teachers that would be necessary to make it happen.

In retrospect, too many of our 2030 goals were too small and underfunded—like the state’s plans to build up long-term care and other services for seniors when the population of people over 65 doubled between 2015 and 2030. Or the University of California’s underwhelming “UC 2030,” which outlined the modest goal of increasing graduation rates a few points. At the same time as the UC system talked about such improvements, it did shockingly little to make itself a leader in online education—which is what ultimately revolutionized the quality and accessibility of education for all Californians.

Since the three of you were so young at that time, you may not realize what finally shook California out of its stupor of ungrounded goals: two calamities that made the first couple of the years of the 2020s really challenging.

The first was that the housing crisis got dramatically worse after 2019. The state kept making new demands for housing, but local governments kept opposing new construction—making the housing shortage even more severe.

In January 2021, thousands of homeless Californians, desperate for shelter and action, stormed the Capitol and kicked all the legislators, staffers, and even the governor out of their offices. With public opinion on their side, they made the building their home for the next year.

At the same time, a nasty national recession hit, fueled by a loss in confidence after a federal debt default. In one early 2021 poll, half of all Californians feared they could become homeless in the next two years.

That drove the Golden State to take radical action.

During the Great Recession in 2008, California had considered replacing its old and overly complicated constitution, which made governing in crisis impossible, with a new system. But elites instead decided to make budget cuts and suffer through the pain of mass unemployment, rampant foreclosures, and a slow recovery. But by 2021, with housing needs dire and the economy in free fall, it was clear that the governing system needed to change to give people and leaders the agency to deal with our problems. Younger generations of Californians, a more diverse group than their parents, were adamant about starting anew—particularly once they came to understand that California’s existing constitution had been drafted in 1879 by an openly racist convention of white men.

Looking back, it’s clear that what really transformed California in the 2020s wasn’t any of the overly hyped technologies—from self-driving cars to cheaper space rockets—that drove conversations about the future in 2019. Instead, the biggest driver of change was California’s new constitution, drafted in early 2022 and approved by voters later that year. At just 10,000 words, it was only 1/20th the length of the old document, and it was hardly perfect. But crucially, this shorter constitution took powers away from state government, thus creating more freedom for regions and local communities to govern themselves.

The effect was startling, rapid, and deep. The state’s regions were able to accelerate housing, remake transportation systems, take back control of crucial utilities, and ramp up economic development—without the endless delays associated with state regulations. In one constitutional moment, so many pent-up ambitions were unleashed that the entire state seemed to roar with new innovation. It was so transformative that our old 2030 goals began to seem much too small.

In retrospect, we should have been able to see more of the potential within ourselves. Back in 2019, I traveled the state as a columnist and often marveled that, for all the state’s structural problems, our local communities were still finding ways to make progress. Some places, like the city of West Sacramento, were so small that they didn’t have to follow all the usual rules, and could produce the innovative housing and economic development they needed. Others, like Glendale, cleverly devised ways to set themselves on a firmer financial footing. Indeed, even in the despair of early 2020, Fresno was remaking itself into our next great city, and sprawling Los Angeles was so bold in rebuilding its transit system that city governments in Boston and New York took notice.

Now, if I had written a letter like this to you in January 2020, it would have been dismissed as a fairy tale. People’s moods were just too dark and reflexively pessimistic back then.

But, looking back now on the 2020s, the biggest lesson is clear: that deep within our hearts and communities, Californians carry possibilities so grand that the future may happily surprise us.

Love,

Dad

The post Why the 2020s Were California’s Golden Decade appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.