[Our interactive map illustrates some ways in which institutional
support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to
policing and systemic white supremacy here where we live, and to US
imperialist projects in other countries. ]
[[link removed]]

SUNDAY SCIENCE: BOSTON’S COLONIAL UNIVERSITIES GRAB LAND FOR
PROFIT, WAR, AND MEDICAL APARTHEID  
[[link removed]]


 

The Mapping Project
June 3, 2023
The Mapping Project
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Our interactive map illustrates some ways in which institutional
support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to
policing and systemic white supremacy here where we live, and to US
imperialist projects in other countries.  _

Allston hates Harvard, Shin Eun-jung, Vertia$: Harvard's Hidden
History (2015).

 

Universities on Turtle Island, as la paperson writes
[[link removed]],
“are land-grabbing, land-transmogrifying, land-capitalizing
machines.” Indigenous land theft, and profits from slavery, enabled
these universities to be built in the first place – and they still
collect profits [[link removed]] from stolen lands.[1]
[[link removed]]

With this accumulated capital, major US universities have become
colonial real estate agents. Harvard University, notably, owns land
all over the world
[[link removed]] –
from vineyards in Washington state to farmlands in Brazil, South
Africa, New Zealand, and Romania
[[link removed]].[2]
[[link removed]] Harvard’s
land-grabbing machine has harmed Indigenous communities, poisoning
their water and crops [[link removed]] in Brazil,
and denying access to burial sites and pasture land
[[link removed]] in
South Africa.

In the Boston area, too, Harvard and other universities grab land and
put it to work for private profit, war, and perpetuation of medical
apartheid. These land grabs increase property values and rents, fuel
the displacement and ethnic cleansing of local communities, and make
it harder for grassroots organizations to survive in the city.

Universities take control of city politics and grab land

Today, Greater Boston’s major universities control many expensive
land parcels (Figure 1). As of 2021, the estimated total market value
of Harvard’s lands and buildings in Massachusetts comes to a
staggering $9.8 billion. Harvard is followed by MIT, whose lands and
buildings are “valued” at $6.7 billion, and Boston University
($2.7 billion).[3]
[[link removed]] In
Cambridge alone, Harvard owns
[[link removed]] 190
tax-exempt acres, while MIT owns over 150. These massive footprints
are the spoils of an 80-year expansion strategy. Harvard and MIT have
built up large “land banks”[4]
[[link removed]] –
property holdings so vast that universities’ policies can harm
entire communities.

Figure 1: University land grabs. Land holdings of Boston-area
universities (as of 2021) with the most highly “valued” properties
(data from MassGIS).

To gain control of the land, universities have helped rewrite the
rules of Cambridge’s government
[[link removed]]. Key
to this was the implementation of Plan E: an anti-democratic system in
which a small number of city councilors are elected from across the
entire city, and where the financial power to implement council
decisions is held by an unelected city manager. Plan E replaced the
more decentralized ward-based system that, despite its problems,
arguably kept powerful entities like Harvard from expanding into new
areas. The brainchild of Harvard academics, Plan E enabled the
university to expand by pushing its favored candidates into city
council.[5]
[[link removed]] Although
Plan E was met with fierce opposition by local groups who denounced it
as fascistic in the late 1930s, it was eventually adopted in 1940.[6]
[[link removed]]

Universities used the new rules to push racist “slum clearance”
policies. At the end of WWII, Cambridge was a working-class, immigrant
city: it was still home to factories, organized labor, and racially
integrated neighborhoods, despite the redlining of its historically
Black neighborhoods
[[link removed]].
As the war ended, however, universities seized the opportunity to turn
what they saw as “slums” into research and development centers for
the reconfigured war industry. Harvard’s push for urban removal
(“urban renewal”) was also motivated by a nakedly racist white
fear of the surrounding communities, with one Harvard student claiming
the university was “in the position of a man about to be eaten by
cannibals.”[7]
[[link removed]] In
1956, Cambridge’s unelected city manager (empowered under Plan E)
appointed José Luis Sert, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of
Design (GSD), as chair of its planning board to steer urban renewal in
the city.[8]
[[link removed]] Collaborating
with municipal offices filled with their alumni, MIT and Harvard’s
urban planning departments advocated bulldozing entire neighborhoods,
especially majority Black and Brown neighborhoods. These neighborhoods
were replaced by developments like Kendall Square that house the
companies and academics working for the US war machine, with Pentagon
sponsorship.[9]
[[link removed]]

As universities expanded, the influx of students and faculty put
pressure on surrounding neighborhoods. Between 1960 and 1970, the
student populations of Harvard and MIT increased by 35%, and by 1968,
4,000 units of Cambridge housing were occupied by Harvard faculty,
staff, and students, with another 2,000 occupied by MIT students and
staff.[10]
[[link removed]] Over
the same decade, Harvard bought 834 Cambridge housing units and tore
down 172. One frontline of the offensive was Riverside, a small
neighborhood between Harvard’s campus and Central Square, threatened
for destruction under the Inner Belt plan.[11]
[[link removed]] Since
Riverside’s school population was 50.5% _non-white_, replacing the
school building to expand student capacity was rationalized as a way
to “restore racial balance.”[12]
[[link removed]] The
architecture firm of the Harvard GSD dean, Sert, Jackson & Associates,
drew up plans that required demolishing the surrounding homes. At a
public meeting, residents voiced their outrage: “As far as we’re
concerned, we won’t be here to enjoy a new school,” said David
Bailey. Lucille Crayton questioned where people whose homes were taken
would go: “It looks like they’d let us stay there. There’s only
a few colored left,” she said, adding “I’m fighting to the
end.”[13]
[[link removed]] By
the time the new school opened in 1976 as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
School, 30 families had been displaced.

Anti-displacement groups working in coordination with student
activists also pressured Harvard to halt the evictions caused by its
expansion. In 1970, 300 community members and students disrupted
Harvard’s graduation ceremonies to demand the last open space on the
Charles River waterfront, the Treeland Bindery site in Riverside, be
reserved for 100 low-income housing units. Under pressure, Harvard
bought an alternate site for 32 low-income townhouses. As local
politician and Riverside resident Saundra Graham put it, “We
successfully stopped Harvard from buying up the whole community –
they only got half of it.”[14]
[[link removed]]

Since then, universities have continued to accumulate properties by
playing the real estate market. They buy housing for their faculty,
students, and staff, which drives up home prices and rents – which
in turn boosts the value of universities’ real estate holdings. In
the 1970s and ‘80s, Harvard Real Estate Inc. ramped up its approach,
seeking to buy any properties “available at a reasonable price,”
and introducing an option plan for faculty homebuyers under
which Harvard retained the right to buy upon resale
[[link removed]].[15]
[[link removed]] As
landlords, Harvard and MIT often bypassed rent control when it
existed, and pushed hard for its abolition in the later ballot
fight.[16]
[[link removed]]

By the 1990s, these university-backed ethnic cleansing programs had
filled Harvard’s surrounding neighborhoods with affluent white
residents who were no longer happy with university expansion – so
the city enacted policies to limit it
[[link removed]]. But since
Cambridge rent control was abolished in 1995 through the actions of
the militant landlord group Small Property Owners Association (SPOA)
[[link removed](SPOA)],
Harvard and MIT’s leverage has only increased. Today, the
land-grabbing machine continues to work at full speed across the
river in 
[[link removed]]Allston
[[link removed]].

University expansion fuels the current housing crisis in Cambridge
[[link removed]] and
continues to ethnically cleanse
[[link removed]] working-class
communities. Meanwhile, these universities’ economics departments
[[link removed]] and housing research centers
produce the propaganda that helped make rent control a taboo term
[[link removed]] among
the political class, even as rents have risen by 30% in Cambridge
[[link removed]] between
2021 and 2022 alone.[17]
[[link removed]] This
ideological consensus helps universities grow their real estate
empires. 

When universities are powerful landlords, who gets space and what is
it used for?

Real estate for war and medical apartheid

Living up to its nickname “Pentagon East,”
[[link removed]] MIT
leases buildings to weapons developers and war profiteers. MIT leases
space to Boeing
[[link removed]] (Figure 2), a
company that provides the Israeli state with missiles, fighter jets,
and helicopters, and also services Immigration and Customs
Enforcement
[[link removed](ICE).html] (ICE).

Figure 2: MIT deals land for war and medical apartheid. A subset of
MIT’s real estate relationships and partnerships with pharma,
weapons developers, and computing corporations in Kendall Square,
Cambridge. MIT parcels as of 2021 shown in green (data from MassGIS).

MIT has also built a joint laboratory with IBM
[[link removed]], a company that
has helped racist regimes keep records – from the US to the German
Nazis and the South African apartheid government. The Hollerith
machine, a mechanical tabulator developed in the 19th century that was
core to IBM’s founding, offered a way to record people’s race and
sex
[[link removed]] on
a large scale for purposes of criminalization. The company has
continued to develop tools of repression with more sophisticated
computers. IBM helped develop COPLINK, a platform used by police
departments across the US to share and analyze records. In
Massachusetts, as many as 25 police departments
[[link removed]] automatically
feed most of their data – from arrests, complaints, and citations to
interviews with police officers – into COPLINK. IBM also services
Israel’s population registry
[[link removed]], which the Israeli state
uses to issue ID cards. The registry supports a colonial
“divide-and-conquer” strategy in which Palestinians are
differentially oppressed by Israel based on where they reside (e.g.,
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship versus Palestinian non-citizens
living in East Jerusalem), a distinction which is tracked using
IBM’s tools.

Along with war, MIT also allocates space to the companies that sustain
medical apartheid, such as Pfizer
[[link removed]], Novartis
[[link removed]], and Takeda
[[link removed]] (which
bought the Cambridge-based biotech Millennium Pharmaceuticals). During
the Covid pandemic, Pfizer cut a deal with the Israeli state: the
company provided vaccines for distribution to Israeli citizens (at the
expense of Palestinians) in exchange for medical data. Novartis fights
to keep drug prices high and to block the production of more
affordable generics in the Global South. In 2013, for
example, Novartis
[[link removed]] fought in
India’s courts for the right to charge exorbitant prices for
Gleevec, a cancer drug. Takeda
[[link removed]] similarly
charges exorbitant fees for cancer drugs while flexing legal muscle
to block production of cheaper generics
[[link removed]].
Like Pfizer and Novartis, Takeda’s expansion
[[link removed]],
which residents have tried to stop, contributes to the ethnic
cleansing of Cambridge’s communities. Harvard has followed a similar
strategy when expanding into Allston, where it has built biomedical
research facilities – geared towards privatization
[[link removed]] and the creation
of startup companies [[link removed]] – against
residents’ will.[18]
[[link removed]]

Replacing the resistance

For the colonial university, Cambridge is a “success” story: if
you visit today, you’ll find a booming industry that works for
capital and empire, built on the ruins of displaced communities.
You’ll see pharmaceutical companies, computing corporations, weapons
developers, and secretive weapons research labs such as Draper
Laboratory
[[link removed]]. But
what existed before this landscape was reorganized by the
land-grabbing machine?

Cambridge was once home to a third of all organizing spaces in Greater
Boston, according to local historian Tim Devin who documented a range
of mutual aid groups, radical feminist organizations, and tenants’
unions working in the city in the 1970s. “Part of the force of these
groups was their visibility,” Devin writes in _Mapping Out Utopia_
[[link removed]], “both in the media, and in
the physical space of the city.” The physical visibility of
storefront organizing spaces depended upon the cheap rent that existed
in Cambridge at that time – cheap rent which was made possible by
prior racist redlining and organized abandonment
[[link removed]] that
had devalued real estate in Cambridge’s historically Black and
immigrant neighborhoods. As universities expanded into these
neighborhoods and displaced their residents, rents increased and many
radical groups couldn’t afford to stay.

Figure 3: Harvard Square, then and now. Left: Tim Devin’s map of
community organizations in Harvard Square in the 1970s (source:
Mapping Out Utopia).

The groups mapped by Devin have been progressively replaced (Figure
3). The landlords of Sanctuary (74 Mt. Auburn St), a shelter and
provider of counseling services for people experiencing homelessness,
sold the building to Harvard in 1974, who terminated the lease; today
it houses the Harvard Office for the Arts. A feminist cooperative
daycare (46 Oxford St) survived a move into a Harvard-owned building
only to become a $2,780/month daycare serving Harvard parents. Other
Ways, an alternative school at 5 Story St, was swallowed up by
Harvard’s campus. Organizations not directly replaced by
universities were destroyed by their effects on the real estate
market. In 2015, a triple-decker at 186 Hampshire St that lefty
landowners had been renting affordably to radical groups for 40 years
was seized by the city for back taxes (for most other landlords,
rising property values are enough to kill low rent).[19]
[[link removed]]

Occupation of a Harvard University building on Memorial Drive, March
1971.

Some organizations held on through struggle, like the Cambridge
Women’s Center [[link removed]],
which in 1971 raised money to buy their current space through a
10-day occupation of a Harvard building
[[link removed]] (888
Memorial Drive) that demanded a Women’s Center and more low-income
housing. But most oppositional spaces from that period are either gone
or transformed into liberal NGOs
[[link removed]].

Beyond Cambridge, in those parts of Greater Boston that haven’t been
as thoroughly “cleansed,” the struggle to stay continues.

Colonizing Boston in the service of the US war machine

By reshaping city politics, universities have directly contributed to
the whitening of the city. But even when universities aren’t
directing displacement, their colonial presence sets the stage for it.
The resulting increases in property values further enrich the
universities as landowners, and enable them to take more resources for
war and medical apartheid. Universities’ colonization of Roxbury
illustrates this racist feedback loop and its connections to US
imperialism.

Protest sign against BU's bioterror lab that emphasizes link between
bioweapons and environmental racism.

In the early 2000s, Boston University decided to establish a
government-funded bioweapons lab called NEIDL (“National Emerging
Infectious Diseases Laboratories”) on Albany Street in the South
End, at the edge of Roxbury (Figure 4), against the residents’ will.
NEIDL cultivates dangerous air-borne pathogens, including Ebola,
smallpox, and anthrax – all to enhance the harm capacities of the US
war machine. Pathogens and epidemics have long been weaponized by
empires for use against colonized peoples and as weapons of
counterinsurgency. The US government has grown its biological weapons
research since World War II, and has a record of experimenting with
bioweapons in urban areas without residents’ consent, especially in
Black communities and other communities of color.[20]
[[link removed]]

Figure 4: Universities grab land and create private wealth amidst
displacement and ethnic cleansing. Universities’ land parcels are
color-coded (Boston University’s parcels in orange), black dots
indicate eviction filings filed between 2015-2022, and blue dots
indicate police stations (data from MassCourts and MassGIS; note
location of Boston Police Department Headquarters). Eviction filings
are certainly an underestimate of the number of actual evictions,
which often take place informally through intimidation, coercion,
and/or punitive rent hikes, without leaving a legal record.

Continuing this pattern, the state chose to build one of its most
dangerous biolabs in Roxbury. Roxbury’s predominantly Black
residents were already suffering from displacement, criminalization,
and organized abandonment under racial capitalism. As George Lipsitz
writes in _How Racism Takes Place_
[[link removed]], “living in segregated
inner-city neighborhoods imposes the equivalent of a racial tax on
people of color” – a “racial tax” that manifests in literal
harm to “the health and well being of Black bodies.”

Some of the city’s most polluting facilities have been imposed on
Roxbury, including power stations, high-traffic bus stations,
junkyards, and waste incinerators.[21]
[[link removed]] The
area’s residents lack access to health care and nourishing foods,
and parts of Roxbury have the shortest life expectancy
[[link removed]] in
the city (59 years), dramatically lower than that of the wealthy Back
Bay area (92 years) which is half a mile away. Roxbury is also where
the forces of ethnic cleansing and displacement are most intense. The
Boston Housing Authority and real estate companies have been evicting
residents in Roxbury at far higher rates than in Cambridge and
Somerville (Figure 4).

By fueling displacement and pursuing biowarfare, universities and
their corporate-state partners negate efforts to build life-affirming
communities. This negation is covered up with propaganda. NEIDL is
presented as a “public health” lab that will develop treatments
for infectious diseases, and which is entirely “safe.” Yet NEIDL
is sponsored by the very entities that block affordable access to
medicines and vaccines, such as the Gates Foundation
[[link removed]] (which
also supports bioweapons development) and pharmaceutical companies
like Merck
[[link removed]] and Takeda
[[link removed]],
and by the US war machine that sucks resources away from communities
and pollutes the earth.

Roxbury residents saw through the lies, and tried to stop Boston
University’s bioterror lab.

Community resistance to the colonial university

As soon as plans for Boston University’s bioterror lab became known,
Roxbury residents organized against it. Stop the BU Biolab
[[link removed]], a coalition
of Roxbury residents and allies, fought against the lab because of the
health and environmental dangers the facility brings, and because of
the inherent harm of putting bioweapons in the hands of the state.
Chuck Turner, then a Boston city councilor backed by Roxbury
residents, repeatedly tried to get the city to ban the lab
[[link removed]].
The community managed to delay NEIDL’s opening by nearly a decade,
until the National Institutes of Health ruled that the lab poses no
substantial risks – despite the history of accidents in Boston
University’s facilities and other bioweapons labs.

Community protests against BU's bioterror lab (photographs from
2005-2007).

Even some local politicians voiced opposition: at a 2005 protest
[[link removed]] against
NEIDL, then Boston city council member Tito Jackson said, “Our
community will no longer get dumped on. We have an expressway, we have
all the traffic that occurs in a city in that area, and we also have a
prison. We do not need ebola, or whatever other airborne or
non-airborne agents in our community.” Organizers have since
continued to warn about NEIDL’s harms. As Klare X. Allen told
[[link removed]] Boston’s
WBUR radio station in 2012, NEIDL has failed to address basic
questions about the facility, such as “How are we going to be safe?
How are we going to eat? How will we be notified [in case of an
accident]? Will there be an alarm? How is it going to be transported?
What neighborhoods is it going through?”

Roxbury resident and organizer Klare X. Allen speaking at a 2006
protest against BU's bioterror lab.

The resistance persists today, as NEIDL continues its secretive
operations. The lab has started working with SARS-Cov-2 in recent
years, and as expected, it has had a series of dangerous accidents
[[link removed](NEIDL).html] that
even made it into NEIDL’s sanitized reports.

Boston University, meanwhile, continues to accumulate wealth. Down the
street from NEIDL, on 700 Albany Street, the university has a set of
campus buildings that the state of Massachusetts values at over $96
million and that sit on land valued at ~$21 million (as of 2021).
Northeastern University also holds expensive real estate in the area
(Figure 4). Private wealth is thus being created amidst evictions,
criminalization, and organized abandonment by the state. The
university drives this violence, both directly through policy (as we
have seen) and more indirectly. The accumulation of property invites
more policing to protect that property; more policing brings more
criminalization and evictions of the “undesirable” residents;
evictions clear the way for real estate developers to serve the
growing population of university professionals; this population
invites more accumulation of property and hence more policing, and the
cycle continues.

Yet history shows that this colonial loop can be disrupted. The
university’s land-grabbing machine has been challenged at every
stage by the organized efforts of the people it seeks to exploit, push
out, and harm. We can fight this machine by building local community
power, and connecting our struggle for health, housing, and liberation
with the struggle against imperialism and war.

Further reading

About US universities displacing and extracting profits from
communities

* John Trumpbour (ed), _How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of
Empire_ (1989)
* Lily Geismer, _Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the
Transformation of the Democratic Party_ (2014)
* Shin Eun-jung, _Verita$: Harvard’s Hidden History_ (2015)
* Davarian Baldwin, _In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How
Universities Are Plundering Our Cities_
[[link removed]] (2021)
* Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Automating Banishment: The
Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land
[[link removed]] (2021)
* Bill Cunningham, _Belonging_ (unpublished manuscript).

About bioweapons and Boston University’s NEIDL

* Stop the Biolab
[[link removed]] website
* “BU flunks the trust test,”
[[link removed]]_Boston
Globe_ (2005)
* “Roxbury, Massachusetts: Direct Action Civics and Biodefense”
in Thomas Beamish, _Community at Risk Biodefense and the Collective
Search for Security_
[[link removed]] (2015).
* “Aberrant Wars” in Harriet Washington, _Medical Apartheid:
The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from
Colonial Times to the Present_
[[link removed]] (2017).
* Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rózsa, and Malcolm Dando, _Deadly Cultures:
Biological Weapons since 1945_
[[link removed]] (2006)

Notes

[1]
[[link removed]] “Land.
And the University Is Settler Colonial,” in la paperson, _A Third
University is Possible _(2017); Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone,
“Land-grab universities,” _High Country News_ (April 2020) (see
also Land-Grab Universities Map [[link removed]]).

[2]
[[link removed]] _Harvard's
billion-dollar farmland fiasco_
[[link removed]]. São
Paulo: GRAIN & Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos. August
2018.

[3]
[[link removed]] These
numbers were calculated from estimates of land and building
“value” to the capitalist market system, done by the state of
Massachusetts (source: MassGIS).

[4]
[[link removed]] Zachary
Robinson and Oscar Hernandez, "Neighborhood Bully: Harvard, the
Community, and Urban Development," in John Trumpbour (ed), _How
Harvard Rules_, 190.

[5]
[[link removed]] Bill
Cunningham, _Belonging_ (unpublished manuscript), 43; _How Harvard
Rules_ (1989), 182-184

[6]
[[link removed]] As
Zachary Robinson and Oscar Hernandez write, “Perhaps city-wide at
large elections [as implemented by Plan E] are not inherently
anti-democratic, but at the time it had that effect…Plan E changed
the tone of politics, creating a sort of mysticism of the professional
municipal problem-solver. It changed the focus of politics towards
highly organized interest groups.” (_How Harvard Rules_, 185).

[7]
[[link removed]] “The
University today is in the position of a man about to be eaten by
cannibals… The fully matured product is visible in a slum-surrounded
university like Columbia or Chicago.…It is hard enough to find good
teachers. Inducing them to live in slums is next to impossible.…The
only alternative is to attack the existing pattern, to develop a new
pattern through urban renewal.…Harvard cannot be fitted to a slum
community, and Harvard cannot move.” (_Belonging_, 44)

[8]
[[link removed]] At
the same time, “Harvard opened its own planning office, ‘to work
closely with the city manager and his urban renewal assistant’”
(_Belonging_, 43).

[9]
[[link removed]] _Belonging_,
49-50; “Throughout the postwar era, MIT boasted the largest defense
research budget of any university, with neighbor Harvard following
closely behind in third place.” (Lily Geismer, _Don’t Blame Us_,
21). See also _How Harvard Rules_, 186.

[10]
[[link removed]] Jon
Pynoos, _Housing Urban America_, 58.

[11]
[[link removed]] The
Inner Belt (I-695) was a ring road highway proposed to link I-95 to
Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville under the eminent domain
powers of the 1949 Housing Act. A cross-neighborhood coalition of
residents succeeded in getting the project canceled in 1971, thereby
preventing massive clearance of central Cambridge and southern
Somerville neighborhoods – but not before neighborhoods in Roxbury
had been leveled along what is now Melnea Cass Boulevard (Karilyn
Crockett, _People before Highways_).

[12]
[[link removed]] _Belonging_,
56.

[13]
[[link removed]] “Seek
Houghton School Site Which Won’t Involve Homes,” _Cambridge
Chronicle_ (March 3, 1966):1.

[14]
[[link removed]] _How
Harvard Rules_, 187-190.

[15]
[[link removed]] In
the words of Thomas O’Brien, vice president for financial affairs at
HRE in the 1980s: "In the long run the University may have the need to
use its properties in other ways that they are currently being used…
When property is available at a reasonable price it has thus been
sensible for the University to buy it.”

[16]
[[link removed]] _How
Harvard Rules_, 194; _Belonging_, 107, 158.

[17]
[[link removed]] According
to a paper by MIT economists [[link removed]],
written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the
“gentrification” produced by “rent deregulation” (abolition of
rent control) reduces “crime.” They write: “Our findings
establish that reductions in crime are an important part of
gentrification and generate substantial economic value.”

[18]
[[link removed]] “A
Hedge Fund With Libraries: The Financial Crisis of 2008,” in Shin
Eun-jung, _Verita$: Harvard’s Hidden History _(2015).

[19]
[[link removed]] _Mapping
Out Utopia_, 46-48.

[20]
[[link removed]] “Aberrant
Wars” in Harriet Washington, _Medical Apartheid: The Dark History
of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to
the Present_
[[link removed]] (2017).

[21]
[[link removed]] “Roxbury,
Massachusetts: Direct Action Civics and Biodefense” in Thomas
Beamish, _Community at Risk Biodefense and the Collective Search for
Security_ [[link removed]] (2015).

What is the Mapping Project?

Welcome to the Mapping Project. We are a multi-generational collective
of activists and organizers on the land
[[link removed]] of the Massachusett, Pawtucket,
Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding
areas) who wanted to develop a deeper understanding of local
institutional support for the colonization of Palestine and harms that
we see as linked, such as policing, US imperialism, and
displacement/ethnic cleansing. Our work is grounded in the realization
that oppressors share tactics and institutions – and that our
liberation struggles are connected. We wanted to visualize these
connections in order to see where our struggles intersect and to
strategically grow our local organizing capacities.

Our interactive map illustrates some ways in which institutional
support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to
policing and systemic white supremacy here where we live, and to US
imperialist projects in other countries. Our map also shows the
connections between harms such as privatization and medical apartheid,
which are often facilitated by universities and their corporate
partners. Since local universities engage in these multiple forms of
oppression and produce much of the ruling class, and because they are
major land holders in our area, we've emphasized the university as a
central nexus that ties together many of the harms traced on the map.
(For more on what we think the map reveals, see What We See
[[link removed]] page and read our
articles [[link removed]].)

We acknowledge that our map is not a complete representation of local
institutions responsible for the colonization of Palestine or other
harms such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement. We also
recognize that the struggles of local Indigenous nations against US
colonization are underrepresented on our map. We would be grateful for
suggestions and knowledge shared with us by those who engage with our
map, and hope it can continue to grow and improve through your
contributions.

This map is intended first and foremost to cultivate relationships
between organizers across movements and deepen our political analyses
as we build community power. Building community power, for us, has
meant seeking the knowledge of those organizing in community with us
and highlighting the radical analyses and resistance of earlier
generations which have been suppressed.

Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local
entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle
them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.

INSIDE THE WAR TEARING PSYCHOANALYSIS APART: 'THE MOST HATRED I’VE
EVER WITNESSED'
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A professor was accused of antisemitism. The controversy has exploded
into a bigger, messier debate about the future of psychology itself
by J OLIVER CONROY
THE GUARDIAN
June 16,2023

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