We don't wanna hear you say "nigga" no more!

This guy wrote a neat paper about the role slavery and mass murder played in ensuring a specific $1 billion a year company currently exists:

At the same time as the Lace family’s role in the slave trade was being whitewashed, their wealth and social prestige continued to grow. Thanks in large part to the long and distinguished careers of Joshua and Ambrose II, the Lace legacy continued in Liverpool’s legal community across the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Indeed, the Lace name remained on one of the city’s largest law firms until 2014.

Meanwhile, the corporate heirs to this legacy conveniently, and predictably, continued to erase the history of slaving upon which their economic foundations rested. In 2006, on the occasion of his retirement, a senior partner of the firm Berrymans Lace Mawer reflected on the company’s past, asking, “What are our traditions?” His answer is worth quoting in full:

Laces was founded in the late 18th Century by a truly remarkable man, Joshua Lace. The Lace family, central to the thriving city of Liverpool, were seamen and merchant adventurers. Joshua became their lawyer and then built the dominant Liverpool legal practice of the 18th and 19th Century. But he worked on a broader canvas—he was not only a key figure in founding the Liverpool Law Society, but was politically active (he bravely opposed the slave trade) and supported the Arts and Sciences. We know little of him personally but his firm was professional, respected and tough. It still is.98

One might dismiss such stories as corporate boosterism. In reality, they repeat the dangerous, deceptive lies of the past. Ambrose Lace and his son William are remembered not as slavers but as “merchant adventurers.” Son Joshua is depicted as the family’s primary legal counsel as they helped build the “thriving city of Liverpool.” Finally, in the coup de grâce, Joshua is remembered as a brave abolitionist, a claim that is patently false. To be clear, this is not simply revisionist history. It is a continuation of the subterfuge executed by Ambrose Lace in the aftermath of the Calabar massacre, as well as his great-grandson Charles’s intentional misrepresentations of the massacre in the late nineteenth century, layering the deceptions and erasures across generations.

If Ambrose Lace was an “ordinary” slave trader, some apologists might characterize him as a “man of his times,” someone who simply capitalized on the legal opportunities of his day. Regardless of one’s thoughts about the past morality of the slave trade, organizing the mass execution of four hundred people was a crime that could have landed Lace in prison, even in his day. Lace clearly understood this to be the case and went out of his way to ensure the cover up, even as he parlayed the massacre into a financial empire that has spanned generations.

Fast-forward to the present day. No scholars have presented Ambrose Lace the way I have here. Thus, it stands to reason that Lace’s corporate heirs would perpetuate his original act of erasure. However, there is ample evidence in public archives, and even online, that Ambrose Lace earned his living primarily as a slave trader. So what would compel a law firm like Berrymans Lace Mawer to characterize the Lace family as “merchant adventurers”? And why would they proudly claim the family’s abolitionist legacy when the truth is actually the opposite? The answer seems fairly clear. Slavery is now widely viewed as a crime against humanity. Corporations, fearing liability, seek to erase their criminal legacies in much the same way Ambrose Lace did over 250 years ago.

In 2014, the Liverpool law firm Berrymans Lace Mawer merged with Scottish firm HBM Sayers, creating one of the largest commercial law and insurance risk companies in Great Britain. The combined firm generated more than £100 million of revenue yearly. As reported at the time of the merger, the new company’s business model hinged on the defense of corporate interests over those of vulnerable, often poor, individuals: “If an employee has an accident in work or a customer slips on a supermarket floor, and then they decide to sue for compensation, it is [the lawyers of this new firm] who will defend the corporate or its insurer.”99 The new firm’s emphasis on protecting corporations over common, working people was stunningly predictable for a business built on earnings from the slave trade.

However, the story only gets more bizarre. At precisely the moment that the Black Lives Matter movement crystallized around the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the United States, this newly merged, multimillion-pound British law firm transformed the Berrymans Lace Mawer name, rebranding the new company “BLM.” Hauntingly, the words “Lace” and “Lives” are interchangeable in the BLM homonym, linking the lives of the four hundred Africans taken by Ambrose Lace at Calabar in 1767 to those of Freddie Gray, Tony Robinson, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and dozens of others who died at the hands of police violence since 2014. It is almost as if the ghosts of Lace’s victims called out across the generations, anticipating the calls of “Black lives matter” and demanding restitution from a legal system birthed in corruption.

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The Board of Peace, authorized under UN Security Council Resolution 2803, is tasked with assessing parties’ compliance with the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict. Rapidly expanding and safeguarding aid is central to the plan, alongside restoring essential civilian infrastructure. But aid volumes remain far below required levels and critical humanitarian access routes have been repeatedly obstructed, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, (OCHA).

“The plan was supposed to bring relief. Instead, Palestinians in Gaza are still hungry, still cannot reach medical care, and civilians are still being killed,” said Adam Coogle, Middle East deputy director at Human Rights Watch.

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Stories from salting’s previous peak, circa the Great Depression, have been a touchstone of Inside Organizer School workshops since a pair of longtime organizers, Richard Bensinger and   Chris Townsend, began holding them in 2018. Those tales, like one salt’s account of swapping names and haircuts to keep getting hired at the same 1930s stockyard, have remained a fixture now that Bensinger’s protégé, 25-year-old Workers United organizer Jaz Brisack, is largely spearheading the trainings.

Brisack, who spent their home-schooled teenage years in Tennessee working at Panera Bread, had been waiting a long time to salt somewhere. They’d defied their Christian fundamentalist parents by renouncing religion, and the labor movement offered an outlet for rebellion and a stand-in for the sense of community and greater purpose that faith used to provide. While they were studying public policy at the University of Mississippi, a professor introduced them to Bensinger. Brisack began assisting Bensinger’s efforts to organize a nearby  Nissan Motor Co. plant and then, during breaks from their Rhodes scholarship in 2019, at a series of coffee shops in upstate New York.

The first Starbucks employee Brisack met with about gauging support for a union quickly got fired. After that, Brisack says, “I had a grudge.” When they returned to the US from the UK in 2020, the upstate New York chapter of Workers United hired Brisack as its organizing director. That December, Starbucks, none the wiser, brought Brisack on as a barista. Their union office in Rochester sat mostly empty for the following year, the nameplate on the door reversed to hide their name. After a couple of months picking up shifts at Starbucks around Buffalo along with another salt, Brisack was confident that the stores could be organized and that the task would require more backup. The union recruited Starbucks salts through the Inside Organizer School, friends of friends and a cryptic online job posting for “Project Germinal,” named for  Emile Zola’s novel about labor strife in French coal mines.

When applying for jobs at Starbucks, the salts would lay it on thick. “When she wasn’t at work, my mother was running down Franklin Street in Syracuse to get a grande iced coffee, no sugar, and one-inch room for cream,” Westlake wrote in his cover letter. “She taught me that the efficiency and quality that Starbucks offers is unlike any other cafe.” (This was a half-truth, he says: “My mom hated Starbucks, but she did really love coffee.”) He also told his interviewer that he would report any colleague he heard complaining about working conditions and that he hoped eventually to ascend to management. Another Starbucks salt, Arjae Rebmann, spent their job interview with their arms crossed or at their side, so the manager wouldn’t notice the hammer-and-sickle tattoo on their left wrist.

With Covid raging, Brisack convened salt training sessions over Zoom, discussing how to get hired and how to make friends. Starbucks salts hosted brunches, gave thoughtful birthday gifts and boned up on their co-workers’ favorite TV shows. Westlake says he changed his look partly to make it more obvious he wasn’t a straight dude and to help his mostly female co-workers feel more comfortable around him. Another salt, Zachary Field, dug into astrology because it was popular with his fellow baristas. When he told them he was a Scorpio, more than one said that was weird—he didn’t seem like the secretive type.

Field and Westlake lived in a group house with a couple more salts. That crew avoided hosting co-workers or even bringing home dates. Instead, some of them hung up pictures of  Karl Marx and  United Farm Workers co-founder  Dolores Huerta, and the group used flashcards to quiz each other on Starbucks recipes and compared notes with other salts on which co-workers could be key to a successful union drive.

These are just some of the troubling findings from audits of six city agencies undertaken by the Mamdani administration to ensure compliance with the city’s sanctuary laws. The audits and recommendations were called for under Executive Order 13, Mayor Mamdani’s first step toward fulfilling his campaign promise to protect New York’s immigrants from federal immigration enforcement. The 19-page executive summary of the audits illuminates the breadth of city agency interaction with immigration enforcement and outlines recommendations for how officials can plug loopholes and rectify weaknesses in the city’s immigrant protections.