EREN HBO Max Pulls ‘Gone With the Wind,’ Citing Racist Depictions The New York Times, by Daniel Victor, June 10, 2020

The streaming service said it planned to eventually bring the 1939 film back “with a discussion of its historical context.” HBO Max has removed from its catalog “Gone With the Wind,” the 1939 movie long considered a triumph of American cinema but one that romanticizes the Civil War-era South while glossing over its racial sins. The streaming service pledged to eventually bring the film back “with a discussion of its historical context” while denouncing its racial missteps, a spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday. Set on a plantation and in Atlanta, the film won multiple Academy Awards, including best picture and best supporting actress for Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar, and it remains among the most celebrated movies in cinematic history. But its rose-tinted depiction of the antebellum South and its blindness to the horrors of slavery have long been criticized, and that scrutiny was renewed this week as protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd continued to pull the United States into a wide- ranging conversation about race. “‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society,” an HBO Max spokesperson said in a statement. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.” HBO Max, owned by AT&T, pulled the film on Tuesday, one day after John Ridley, the screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave,” wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times calling for its removal. Mr. Ridley said he understood that films were snapshots of their moment in history, but that “Gone With the Wind” was still used to “give cover to those who falsely claim that clinging to the iconography of the plantation era is a matter of ‘heritage, not hate.’” “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color,” he wrote. By several measures, the film was one of the most successful in American history. It received eight competitive Academy Awards and remains the highest-grossing film ever when adjusting for inflation. In 2007, it placed sixth on the American Film Institute’s list of greatest films of all time. There was little criticism of the film when it was released, though in 1939 an editorial board member of The Daily Worker, a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA, called it “an insidious glorification of the slave market” and the Ku Klux Klan. But the world in which it is viewed has changed, and with each decade discomfort has grown as people revisit its racial themes and what was omitted. In 2017, the Orpheum theater in Memphis said it would stop showing the film, as it had done each year for 34 years, after receiving complaints from patrons and other commenters. The president of the theater said it could not show a film “that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.” Based on a 1936 book by Margaret Mitchell, the film chronicles the love affair of Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of a plantation owner, and Rhett Butler, a charming gambler. Critics have long said that the slaves are depicted as well-treated, content and loyal to their masters, a trope that rewrites the reality of how enslaved people were forced to live. Ms. McDaniel won an Oscar for her performance as Mammy, an affable slave close to Scarlett O’Hara. The nationwide protests of recent weeks have caused other entertainment companies to reconsider how their content is viewed in the current climate. The Paramount Network said on Tuesday that it had removed “Cops,” the long-running reality show that glorified police officers, from its schedule before its 33rd season. There have also been similar moves in Britain. On Monday, the BBC removed episodes of the comedy series “Little Britain” — which featured one character in blackface — from its streaming service. “Times have changed since ‘Little Britain’ first aired so it is not currently available on BBC iPlayer,” a BBC spokesperson said. The show had already been removed from Netflix and was also taken off the BritBox streaming service. “Little Britain,” which was shown in the early 2000s, was created by David Walliams and Matt Lucas. Mr. Lucas, who was recently named the new host of “The Great British Baking Show,” has said in interviews that he would not make “Little Britain” today. After announcing modest police reforms, Trump pivots quickly to a law-and-order message in appeal to his base The Washington Post, by David Nakamura, June 27, 2020 Over the past week, President Trump has signed an executive order to protect public monuments and statues from vandalism. He accused a Black Lives Matter leader of committing “treason.” He threatened a federal crackdown on protesters and vowed “retribution” against vandals, whom he labeled “terrorists.” And he praised a version of New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy that was phased out years ago. Since signing an executive action on police changes on June 16 in the Rose Garden, Trump has shifted almost exclusively to “law-and-order” rhetoric — while dropping almost any pretense of personally addressing the widespread public anger over police brutality that has sparked nationwide demonstrations. The president’s posture comes as he has sought to energize his conservative political base in response to polls that show diminishing public approval over his handling of both the racial justice protests and the coronavirus pandemic. After framing his police executive action as an effort to balance the interests of victims’ families and police officers, Trump has sided squarely with the law enforcement community, reinforcing widespread skepticism about his commitment to addressing complaints of racial bias and systemic abuses in police departments that have harmed African Americans. “There are certain things I’ve accepted about Donald Trump,” said Lee Merritt, the attorney for more than half a dozen black families that met with the president at the White House ahead of his Rose Garden announcement. “Part of it is that he is always going to favor his base, which is law enforcement and law enforcement-aligned individuals.” Amid the nationwide debate that erupted after George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis last month, Merritt added, Trump “needed to be involved in that conversation, but it goes contrary to everything he’s said before with regard to policing.” White House aides insisted that Trump has not given up on the executive actions he outlined to establish federal certification standards on police training, create a national database to track police abuse cases and pair law enforcement agencies with social workers when responding in communities. The administration has been coordinating with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is leading the Senate GOP’s legislative proposals, although that effort has clashed with a competing package from House Democrats that includes more expansive police changes. Ja’Ron Smith, a White House domestic policy aide, said on Fox Business this week that Trump was right to threaten protesters who have torn down monuments because “we’ve got to have a civil conversation and a civil society and a nation of laws. . . . This right here is lawlessness and anarchy, and it doesn’t represent the people in the community.” Smith, who helped develop Trump’s executive actions along with senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, said that the administration “will do all we can do administratively,” including using convening power to “bring both sides together.” Trump aides said the president has expressed support for peaceful protesters and empathy for Floyd on multiple occasions, but the most recent example in a list provided by the White House was June 5. Over the past 11 days, Trump has lashed out against demonstrators repeatedly, and he changed a photo on his Twitter profile to one of him posing with 33 uniformed police officers in front of Air Force One. Ahead of a campaign rally in Tulsa last weekend, he suggested in a tweet that “Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes” would be treated more strictly in the Republican-led city than in New York, Seattle or Minneapolis, jurisdictions run by Democrats. He slammed New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to have artists paint “Black Lives Matter” in front of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, saying New York police “are furious.” And after police thwarted an attempt to topple the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square next to the White House last Monday, Trump declared that “numerous people are in jail and going to jail today.” He also said he had authorized 10-year prison terms for “these vandals and these hoodlums and these anarchists and these agitators.” Yet in his eagerness to project toughness, Trump exaggerated the state of affairs. In fact, authorities made a combined four arrests that day — none in direct connection with damaging the Jackson statue. D.C. police arrested two men accused of spraying officers with a fire extinguisher. And U.S. Park Police arrested two others who allegedly punched officers during skirmishes as the federal officers sought to clear the area of protesters. But the U.S. attorney’s office in the District, led by a Trump appointee, did not pursue criminal charges against the latter two men. “The last time I checked, the executive branch doesn’t make law,” said attorney Mark L. Goldstone, who represents them. “President Trump can tweet all he wants about ‘lock them up,’ but the reality is he doesn’t make the criminal code. Someone needs to teach him a constitutional lesson.” In a town hall-style event with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday, Trump asserted that federal authorities had made hundreds of arrests since the protests began. In fact, authorities have charged about 125 people with federal crimes, according to a Justice Department tally released Friday afternoon. Trump cited a recent spate of community violence in Chicago and told Hannity that city is more dangerous than Afghanistan. He said living in Baltimore; Oakland, Calif.; and Detroit is “like living in hell.” And he touted the “stop-and-frisk” policing policies established two decades ago in New York City by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, now Trump’s personal lawyer. Liberals denounced those policies, which were ended in 2014, as unfairly targeting black residents, and Mike Bloomberg, who succeeded Giuliani, apologized during his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this year for having expanded the program. “President Trump will always stand for law and order — which is the only way to ensure peace on our streets,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said in a statement. She accused Democrats of “calling for defunding our brave police officers, caving to mob rule, and promoting cancel culture which seeks to erase our history. The president speaks for Americans who want safety and security to prevail.” Larry Cosme, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said he believes Trump has tried to strike a balance on police reform. Cosme was among a handful of law enforcement officials who stood next to Trump in the Rose Garden when he signed the executive order in mid-June. The officials also attended the private meeting that day between the president and the black families represented by Merritt. “I was like, ‘Wow, I saw a different side of the president,’” Cosme said. “He was sympathetic to these folks. He listened.” Cosme said his organization, which is nonpolitical, supports peaceful protests, “but you have to follow the law.” However, the scenes of violence have frightened law-abiding demonstrators, he added. “Overall, the message that all politicians should be putting out is the safety for the American public number one, along with being sympathetic to folks who feel victimized,” Cosme said. Merritt confirmed Trump appeared sympathetic in private, and he said the president instructed Attorney General William P. Barr to determine if federal intervention was necessary in their cases. Merritt said he maintains hope that Trump will ultimately support broader legislative reforms, citing his efforts to help push a criminal justice reform bill through Congress in 2018. “That’s a possibility, although it’s unlikely,” Merritt said. If not, Trump and his aides “would then be exposed for being hypocritical and being liars and taking advantage of those most affected by police brutality by taking a meeting just to say he met with them. That would be more politically dangerous than he knows.” CLEMENT What we can do now about Stone Mountain's 150ft Confederate carving? The Guardian, by Ryan Gravel & Scott Morris, June 30, 2020

The largest celebration of the Confederacy should be obscured by vegetation and the park outside Atlanta repurposed away from white supremacy

The current national attention to the interrelated issues of policy reform and representation, along with the murder of two Black men here in Georgia, got me thinking again about the state’s giant monument to white supremacy on the side of Stone Mountain.

It is too big to just tear down, like they are doing with statues in Richmond and elsewhere, but something is going to happen with it eventually. Anti-racist sentiment is growing, and the makeup of Georgia’s population is changing so fast that some kind of modification is inevitable. And while I believe decisions about what ultimately happens there should emerge from meaningful public engagement, I don’t believe we have to wait any longer to make change. Below are some ideas we can start to implement now.

First, some context and history.

Stone Mountain is a massive geological aberration. Often incorrectly identified as granite, the exposed rock is technically a “quartz monzonite dome monadnock” that extends underground for miles in every direction. The visible portion rises 1,686ft (514 meters) above sea level, or 825ft above the surrounding Georgia piedmont.

Located 14 miles east of downtown Atlanta, it sits within a 3,200-acre (1,294-hectare) forest-cum-theme-park that is owned by the state of Georgia and managed by the Stone Mountain Memorial Association. It is cited as “Georgia’s most visited attraction, drawing nearly 4 million guests each year”. Best known for its laser-light show that runs every night throughout the summer, the park also offers hiking, fishing, camping, paddle boats, an excursion train, a golf course, a Marriott conference center, educational exhibits and a handful of memorials to white supremacy. The icon of Stone Mountain Park is one of those memorials. It’s also the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world. Occupying the steep northern slope of the mountain and measuring 76ft tall by 158ft wide, the carving depicts the president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, along with the Confederate generals Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They are riding their favorite horses with their hats over their hearts. Like most southern civil war memorials, their real purpose is to instill in us a 20th-century romanticized narrative about the American south that helps maintain white supremacy through a segregated and unequal society.

The sculpture is an irreparable scar on an ancient mountain with a long history of habitation and use by indigenous people. More blatantly offensive, however, is the sculpture’s undeniable reverence for hate and violence and the honor it bestows on the generals, who, by definition, were American traitors. We need to change that, but before we jump to ideas about the fate of the sculpture itself, it is important to dismiss any claim of valor or heritage so that we can all agree that that fate – whatever it is – is long overdue.

The story of the sculpture’s “heritage” began one November night in 1915, 50 years after the end of the American civil war. Fifteen men burned a cross atop the mountain and marked the founding of the modern Ku Klux Klan. The next year, Samuel Venable, a Klansman and quarry operator who owned the property, deeded its north face to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which planned the original carving. They commissioned the work to a Klan sympathizer – a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum, who after quitting the project in 1925, would go on to carve Mount Rushmore. Another sculptor continued the project for three years until the UDC ran out of money. At that point, only Robert E Lee’s head was complete, and the project languished for 30 years.

In 1958, just four years after Brown v Board of Education and two years after the Confederate battle emblem was added to Georgia’s flag (it was removed in 2001), the state purchased Stone Mountain for the creation of a Confederate memorial park. Five years later, in 1963 – the very same year that Martin Luther King proclaimed in his I Have A Dream speech, “Let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia!” – the state restarted the effort to finish the Confederate sculpture. Historian Grace Hale explains that to white state leaders at that time, “the carving would demonstrate to the rest of the nation that ‘progress’ meant not Black rights but the maintenance of white supremacy”. Work on the sculpture continued throughout the 1960s while nearby Atlanta emerged as the cradle of the American civil rights movement, as the federal government passed landmark legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and even after King was assassinated in 1968. Remarkably, only two years later in 1970, Spiro Agnew, the vice- president of the United States, was a participant at the sculpture’s unveiling. And over time, the park continued to evolve, with additional homages to white supremacy, including the names of streets like Robert E Lee Boulevard and Stonewall Jackson Drive, and a prominent role for the still-flying Confederate battle flag.

Meanwhile, the suburbs of Atlanta grew up around the park. And in an interesting twist of fate, by the end of the century, Atlanta’s suburbanizing African American middle class found themselves living in these once-white neighborhoods. Even more surprisingly, perhaps, despite the park’s overtly racist iconography, park visitors today are decidedly diverse, and modest efforts have been made to contextualize the Confederate memorials. For example, the end of the laser-light show animates the Confederate generals, who break their swords and gallop into the books of American history.

The terrorist attacks by domestic white supremacists in Charleston (2015) and Charlottesville (2017) renewed attention to the legacy of Stone Mountain’s carving. And today, our ongoing struggle with the seemingly relentless humiliation, incarceration and murder of Black Americans by systemic white supremacy make clear that contextualizing the carving through laser animation is not enough.

Something else needs to be done.

The public lands of Georgia must reflect a more accurate history of our people, and they must inspire in us a more aspirational view toward our future. After all, by 2028, Georgia is projected to have a majority non-white population – an ironic fate for a state that once protested the dream of its most famous native son, Dr King, by carving a memorial to white supremacy in the side of an ancient mountain.

In 2017, Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, addressed the removal of several Confederate statues in his city. “There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it,” he said. “These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”

Today, with that perspective as our starting place, we must begin to transform Stone Mountain Park into a more aspirational symbol for our future. That will take time, but to set the tone for that dialogue, here are four things we can do now:

1. Stop cleaning the sculpture State law protects the sculpture from destruction but does not require it to be clean. It remains clear of vegetation only through effort and expense. Trees and plants grow easily from the mountain’s other cracks and crevices. We should allow growth to also overtake the sculpture’s many clefts and crinkles as they naturally collect organic material and allow moss and lichen to obscure its details. We should blast it with soil to encourage such growth and consider this new camouflage as a deliberate creative act, transforming the sculpture into a memorial to the end of the war – not to the traitors who led it.

2. Stop mowing the lawn Allow the Memorial Lawn to grow into a forest. It is not protected by the law. A major problem with Stone Mountain is the formal, triumphant view of the sculpture, making the entire park a celebration of white supremacy. Elimination of this view will also mean the end of the laser-light show – consider a replacement event that similarly draws people together, but instead around new symbols of peace and justice.

3. Update the park’s identity Eliminate any other remaining references to the Confederacy. These are not protected by the law. Conduct a quick re-evaluation of all the names, signage, narrative, flags and iconography throughout the park and remove all problematic references, including the names of streets and lakes, programming and online content. Acknowledging the somber weight of history here, this should also include removal of the theme-park activities below the sculpture.

4. Plan a new park Begin a dialogue for more sweeping changes at the park that will inspire required changes to state law. Consider an international design competition that refocuses the 3,200-acre park around its namesake geological feature and transforms it into a new symbol of peace and reconciliation. Consider proposals for future permanent modifications to the sculpture itself, as well as existing proposals for a mountaintop carillon that honors King’s dream by literally letting freedom ring at the top of every hour. Include the transformation of Memorial Hall into a Memorial to the End of the Confederacy – an honest interpretation of life in the American south, the civil war, the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, and subsequent efforts to romanticize the “Lost Cause” through memorials like Stone Mountain’s 1970 carving.

These proposed changes will not be enough. They are only a start, and only small part of a larger effort to ensure that the design and use of public land and public spaces reflect our highest values, and that those values actually shape the laws that regulate our land. And while we don’t know if challenging the law that protects Stone Mountain will work immediately, we do know that eventually, change is going to come. We have this fleeting opportunity to try to make it happen now, and to tell our children we stood up to hate.

If we wait, our children will have to do the work for us. MAXIME Column: Kamala Harris’ identity shows us the limits of our labels The LA Times, by Frank Shyong, August 24, 2020

It was just the Tamil word for auntie, two syllables in a speech by Kamala Harris last Thursday that covered her childhood, heritage and political awakening and culminated in her acceptance of the Democratic Party nomination for vice president.

But “chithi,” uttered on a presidential stage for the first time and pronounced correctly at that, set millions of Whatsapp chats ablaze around the world. A photo of a young Kamala and her sister Maya in saris and bindis with their grandparents in India circulated furiously. Nationalistic pride, political optimism and representational joy combined in a celebratory moment that was largely absent when Harris announced her presidential candidacy last year

For a moment, a lot of us contemplated the idea of a vice president — someday, maybe even a president — shaped by the sacrifice of immigrant parents, who might feel the pain and injustice of country-specific travel bans in their own family, or have some sense of what it’s like to sip coffee from a Starbucks cup with someone else’s simpler-to-spell name on it.

Even I felt my own cynicism fading ever so slightly. Presidential elections, for better or for worse, spark wide-ranging conversations about race. And Harris, an Oakland-born daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, who is both Black and Asian American, possesses an identity so multifaceted that it threatens to make that conversation a little bit smarter.

But presidential elections, for those accustomed to discussing race intelligently, can also be unfortunate markers of how little progress we have made.

And the enduring poverty of our racial rhetoric was on full display the night of Harris’s nomination, when it seemed no news outlet, poster or commentator could agree on how to identify her, variously describing her heritage as a woman of color, a child of immigrants, Black, Asian American, African American, Jamaican American, Indian American and South Asian. On social media, I saw people fighting over the way Harris was described and pressing their own claims to her identity, various labels flying like flags over ideological fortresses. Pro-Trump commentators weaponized Harris’s biography, claiming first that her Jamaican and then her Indian heritage meant that she did not understand the African American experience. Political operatives even tried to sell the absurd and instantly disproved lie that Harris was ineligible for the role because she was the daughter of immigrants. It was a near echo of the attacks that Barack Obama faced during his presidency.

Identity is always more complex than the labels used to describe it. When I report in ethnic neighborhoods across the city, I’m constantly reminded that behind the label is a story, and although the label doesn’t always fit, the story always makes sense when you hear it.

And I was fortunate to get that chance two months ago, when Harris agreed to appear on our Los Angeles Times podcast “Asian Enough.”

On our podcast, my co-host Jen Yamato and I talk about Asian American identity and how the labels this country uses often don’t fit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harris was game for the conversation.

We talked about her mother’s cooking — Indian, but also barbecue and Italian pasta — and how her mother raised Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, as Black women because she understood that that’s how her daughters would be seen. Harris argued that she was not presenting a confused picture of her identity, as she’s often accused of doing — but that it was instead America itself that was confused about race. She described the pressure of choosing between Indian and Black identities as a “false choice,” an idea I immediately understood as the U.S.-born son of Taiwanese immigrants who feels connections to both countries.

Harris was smooth and occasionally spoke in soundbites as you’d expect of a politician as skilled and as experienced as she is. But there were moments when genuine frustration about the labels applied to her cracked through. “I didn’t go through some evolution about who am I and what is my identity. And I guess the frustration I have is if people think that I should have come through such a crisis and need to explain it. But I didn’t,” Harris said. Perhaps our interview was just as much political performance as anything a politician does. But Harris has consistently resisted choosing among the multiple facets of her identity. Instead of putting on the most expedient label available and wearing it like a mask, I saw Harris attempting to explain her complexity.

Identity, and the terms to describe it, are easy targets these days as more people exhausted by our daily outrage cycles tap out of engaging on issues of race.

But if we don’t understand race ourselves, we will be manipulated by people who do. Voters from communities of color have long been familiar with the way Democrats and Republicans alike have marketed multiculturalism for votes and political gain, without ever delivering change for those communities. But now race is also a marketing tool, a brand, a trendand a hashtag. We have companies and brands using race to sell us chicken sandwiches, airplane tickets and streaming content.

And our racial picture won’t get clearer if we keep coloring with the same three or four dusty, broken crayons. The world is not about to get less complicated. At least half of all children in California have at least one immigrant parent. A Pew study estimated that multiracial people make up 7% of the nation’s population, and that number is expected to triple over the next few decades — a faster rate of growth than any other racial or ethnic group.

All this is to say: We’re going to have to learn some new terms, and also understand that those labels can’t tell the full story.

After all, what label would you use to describe the Harris household, where two Black and South Asian daughters grew up dancing to Aretha Franklin in the living room as their Indian immigrant mother prepared dinners of daal, barbecue and beef stir-fry?

I have no idea. And there’s something exciting about that. ANTOINE C. Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress The Atlantic, by Jennifer Richeson, September 2020

For two days in early June, as America was erupting in sustained protests over the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis, the most watched movie on Netflix was The Help. The 2011 film—which depicts Black servants working in affluent white households in 1960s Mississippi, and centers on a white female journalist—won acclaim in some quarters. But it has also been criticized as a sentimental and simplistic portrayal of racism—and redemption—amid the cruelties of Jim Crow.

To ask what was going on here—why people started watching The Help at a moment of deep racial trauma—is to risk tumbling down a rabbit hole. That the movie was newly available on Netflix does not explain everything. One reality that the Help phenomenon makes us recognize is the enduring power of mythology when it comes to American racism. The mythology takes many forms. Sometimes it involves a desperate grasping for affirmation. Sometimes it involves a gauzy nostalgia. Sometimes it involves a willful ignorance. All of these strains, and others, are woven into a larger and enduring narrative —the mythology of racial progress.

This is a uniquely American mythology. Since the nation’s founding, its prevailing cultural sensibility has been optimistic, future-oriented, sure of itself, and convinced of America’s inherent goodness. Despite our tragic racial history, Americans generally believe that the country has made and continues to make steady progress toward racial equality. Broad acceptance of this trajectory underlies the way our leaders talk. It also influences the way racism is treated in popular culture.

When we think about the nation’s racial history, we often envision a linear path, one that, admittedly, begins in a shameful period but moves unerringly in a single direction—toward equality. As if we’re riding a Whiggish escalator, the narrative of racial progress starts with slavery, ascends to the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, speeds past segregation and Jim Crow to the victories of the civil-rights movement, and then drops us off in 2008 for Barack Obama’s election. Many people asserted at the time that America had become a “postracial” society, or was at least getting close—maybe one more short escalator ride away. This redemptive narrative not only smooths over the past but smooths over what is yet to come: It holds out the promise of an almost predestined, naturally occurring future that will be even more just and egalitarian.

Thinking this way won’t make the future better.

The mythology of racial progress distorts our perceptions of reality; perhaps more significantly, it absolves us of responsibility for changing that reality. Progress is seen as natural and inevitable—inescapable, like the laws of physics. Backsliding is unlikely. Vigilance is unnecessary.

It is obviously true that many of the conditions of life for Black Americans have gotten better over time. Material standards have in many ways improved. Some essential civil rights have advanced, though unevenly, episodically, and usually only following great and contentious effort. But many areas never saw much progress, or what progress was made has been halted or even reversed. The mythology of racial progress often rings hollow when it comes to, for instance, racial gaps in education. Or health outcomes. Or voting rights. Or criminal justice. Or personal wealth. History is not a ratchet that turns in one direction only. Martin Luther King Jr. famously asserted that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And maybe it will, in the end. But in our actual lifetimes we see backward steps and tragic detours.

The protests that began in late May have focused on fundamental questions of police violence and civil rights. This sort of awakening offers great opportunity—more on that in a moment—but it is rare in our history, and challenges the nation’s prevailing psychology. My own research as a social psychologist focuses in part on racial wealth disparities— particularly, what people do and don’t believe, and do and don’t acknowledge about those disparities. Unless people understand the systemic forces that create and sustain racial inequality, we will never successfully address it. But perceptions, it turns out, are slippery.

For the past several years, I, along with my Yale colleague Michael W. Kraus and our students, have been examining perceptions of racial economic inequality—its extent and persistence, decade by decade. In a 2019 study, using a dozen specific moments between 1963 and 2016, we compared perceptions of racial wealth inequality over time with actual data on racial wealth inequality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the respondents in our study significantly overestimated the wealth of Black families relative to that of white families. In 1963, the median Black family had about 5 percent as much wealth as the median white family. Respondents said close to 50 percent. For 2016, the respondents estimated Black wealth to be 90 percent that of whites. The correct answer for that year was about 10 percent.

People’s estimates of inequality were not only far too low for every period, but the estimates actually grew more inaccurate the closer they got to the present. People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially better—and are approaching parity. The mythology of racial progress exerts a powerful hold on our minds.

And the hold is very hard to break, as a study we recently conducted, in collaboration with the Northwestern professor Ivuoma Onyeador, makes all too clear. Up to a point, this new study had the same basic design as the one just cited. But the sample group consisted only of white Americans. And before they provided estimates, a subset of the respondents were asked to read a short article about the persistence of racial discrimination. Exposure to the article had an impact. But here’s the surprise: Those who read the article still estimated that, in 2016, Black wealth was close to that of whites. They simply plotted a more gradual slope of progress. In other words, if people accepted that progress had been slower than they’d imagined—the takeaway message of the article they read—then they arrived at the idea that the past must not have been as bad as they thought. They did not entertain the idea that the present must be worse than they think it is. The mind is a remarkable instrument, adept at many things, including self-delusion. Getting people to alter overly optimistic outlooks—at least in the domain of racial progress—is not a straightforward matter.

Forming narratives is a way for individuals to find meaning in life and to make life seem more orderly and predictable. The narratives we tell about ourselves—and about the social groups to which we belong—help us organize how we interpret events as they unfold, and respond to them. Narratives are part of our mental architecture, and certain quirks of mind make specific narratives hard to escape. For instance, there’s what might be called the generational fallacy: Many who acknowledge the reality of racism see salvation in the ebbing presence of older white people and their replacement by a surging mass of enlightened younger people. But generational change is not so simple. Young people’s racial attitudes are more like their parents’ than they may realize. (It is also the case that this “solution,” even if effective, would be very slow.)

The mythology of racial progress is corrosive in countless ways. It provides a reason to blame the victim: If we’re converging on equality, then those left behind must not be trying. And it diffuses moral responsibility for actively and significantly reforming the American system: If we’re converging on equality anyway, then why do we need laws and other measures to promote it?

This isn’t some abstract worry. You’ll encounter it everywhere, once you’re primed to look for it. The mythology of racial progress animated the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 decision striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Roberts wrote: “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically … There is no doubt that these improvements are in large part because of the Voting Rights Act. The Act has proved immensely successful at redressing racial discrimination and integrating the voting process.”

Since Shelby, multiple states have passed new election laws, including stringent voter-ID regulations, and purged their voter rolls. And the first-line remedy—legal challenges demonstrating that these laws are discriminatory—is unlikely to prevent violations of voting rights.

Similarly, even in upholding some forms of affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor invoked the narrative of racial progress: “It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased … We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Seventeen years later, this prediction seems at best naive. These Supreme Court decisions, different as they may be, rest on a rejection of the idea that systemic racism continues to make itself felt in American institutions. They reflect a Court that sees society, both in terms of institutions and individuals, as becoming more racially egalitarian—admittedly with the help of past “course corrections” that the justices believe are now or soon will be unnecessary and obsolete.

The mythology of racial progress is durable, and can survive many direct hits. The moments in our history when it has fractured decisively have been moments when a sense of national disruption was deep and pervasive, and people could not avoid seeing the chasm between myth and reality. Such moments—after the Civil War, and again in the 1960s—are rare, but they can create significant opportunities. I believe we are in such a moment now. Most Americans are disgusted and angered by police tactics and attitudes toward Black citizens. Police killings of Black Americans are nothing new, of course, but the urgent attention to law enforcement’s behavior comes at a time when the country is also facing a devastating pandemic and historic levels of unemployment—both of which disproportionately affect minority communities. The year 2020 has not been a good one for America’s “master narrative” in any of its traditional forms. And it has exposed, at least momentarily, the narrative of racial progress—automatic, continuous, requiring little real effort—for the myth it has always been.

This is the time to strike, the time to take audacious steps to address systemic racial inequality—bold, sweeping reparative action. The action must be concrete and material, rather than solely symbolic, and must address current gaps in every significant domain of social well-being: jobs, politics, education, the environment, health, housing, and of course criminal justice. A window has opened, and acting fast is essential. It is possible that something has permanently shifted in the American psyche; we should hope that this is true. But history and psychology suggest instead that this window of clarity and opportunity will close quickly—it always has in the past. For one thing, success often proves self- limiting: Implement audacious new measures, and the temptation is to dust off your hands in satisfaction and declare the problem solved. For another, as the historian Carol Anderson demonstrates in her book White Rage, any significant advance toward racial justice will be met with a backlash. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments was followed by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and a new era of racial subjugation in the form of Jim Crow. The landmark legislation of the civil-rights era was followed by Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” and the ascendance of racial dog whistles as a central tactic of American politics.

We should not think of the next year or two as the start of a decade or more of incremental progress. We should think of the next year or two as all the time we have, and a last chance to get it right. BOYAN Does ‘Black Lives Matter’ Hinder Or Help Universal Equity? Three Diversity Executives Speak Out Forbes, by Sheila Callaham, August 23, 2020

Since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May, and the following months of riots, organizations have grappled with how best to address the resulting workplace angst. Black workers have struggled with a 'business as usual' mindset while leaders decided how to respond to the ongoing social upheaval – if at all. Those in diversity and inclusion roles were pressed for quick ‘fixes’; yet, how does one fix centuries of injustice that finally erupted into societal demand for change?

Mary-Frances Winters, president and CEO of The Winters Group, Inc., a diversity, equity and inclusion consulting firm, said that in the last few months, companies have urgently requested intervention. Winters, who has been working to create equity and inclusion for 36 years, knew what to do – go deep – by addressing the history of racism and its intergenerational impact in the workplace and outlining action steps for creating lasting change. And while that worked for many, she is already experiencing pullback; reducing George Floyd’s death to a moment rather than the movement it demands.

In a social media update last week, Winters shared her story of a good firing.

Who was fired? She was.

The reason? The client claimed the training was too focused on the history and impact of racism against Blacks, at the expense of other marginalized groups.

Which begs the question: Does the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the current focus on Black injustice support or hinder the progress of other diversity and inclusion efforts?

“It is similar to the ‘all lives matter’ mindset,” explained Winters, referring to the notion that all diversity issues must be addressed equally. “The problem is that Black lives have not mattered. Because of our unique history with slavery, racism related to Blacks in this country manifests differently than racism against other groups. However, anti-Black racism has been downplayed in the diversity space and lumped with other categories, which minimizes the concerns of all of the diversity dimensions.”

“There’s an adage that says, a rising tide lifts all boats,” said Jerrell Moore, global diversity and inclusion leader at Assurant. Moore believes the Black Lives Matter movement has created broader awareness – a focus on common decency and humanity – allowing for increased opportunities to discuss inequities overall.

“We’ve taken the first step of hosting conversations that center the personal stories of employees most affected by systemic racism and oppression. We have found that our employees feel truly empowered when they can tell their own stories in safe and supportive spaces that encourage them to be brave and candid.”

But stories of systemic inequities can create discomfort – especially among white leaders who don’t feel directly responsible. Nor do they know what to do to make things better.

In her social media post, Winters recounts a recent conversation with the CEO of a major organization who expressed concerns about an upcoming training session. His direct reports were getting nervous because they didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. Other leaders have asked, ‘Didn’t we talk about that already?’

“That’s why this is a journey,” she explained, indicating that people may feel uncomfortable. "This is exactly why we need to go deep, so leaders can develop the competencies to have the conversations, query and recognize the differences that make a difference."

It’s why the focus on BLM should continue.

The Influence of Black Lives Matter on Diversity and Inclusion Efforts

“It’s important to recognize that highlighting the challenges and inequities faced by one group does not discount or diminish the struggles of other groups,” said Moore. “With the recent social unrest and the intense focus on racial issues, we have to be mindful of what sparked it – the troubling current and historical experiences of Black and African American people in America. In a lot of cases, for the first time ever, our white colleagues and friends are saying, ‘Now, I see.’ That is monumental.”

As a result, Moore believes that now, more than ever, companies are evaluating their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. “They are asking the tough questions like, ‘Are we doing enough for everyone, in a way that addresses their particular needs?’ Because it is not, nor can it ever be, a one-size-fits-all approach.”

“BLM helps other groups by mitigating the broad-brush approach to diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Winters. “It raises awareness that the issues are different for different groups and each needs to be studied separately.”

Winters pointed out other ways the movement has effected change that supports other groups.

“The use of social media as a mass mobilization effort that other groups such as #MeToo and #NeverAgain adopted is an example. Additionally, BLM indirectly helped immigration efforts as congressional democrats called for the abolition of ICE, where the use of strong language like abolition comes directly from BLM rhetoric. The BLM movement has, in effect, given other causes the permission to advocate for change in new ways by changing how we talk about and organize for justice for all.”

Moore cites Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

“If we look at the underrepresented groups who have benefitted from the Civil Rights Movement, it’s not hard to see how the Black American fight for justice has positively impacted other diverse groups,” Moore explained. “Just this year, an important ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on LGBTQ+ rights cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the basis for its consenting opinion. That is the power of the Black experience in America—it informs how other groups are included and considered.” Brian Reaves, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Dell Technologies, believes the current focus serves the greater good. "The injustices in the Black community have pushed companies to re-evaluate their policies, processes and commitments to create a more inclusive workforce that better reflects the world in which we live.”

The BLM Movement Must Go On

“The events of the past few months have revealed for everyone what Black people have long known to be true — that racism and socioeconomic disparity continue to create an environment of inequity and inequality for Black people in particular, and people of color overall,” said Reaves. “There is no question that deliberate action needs to happen to deliver change.”

Winters’ writes in her forthcoming book, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body and Spirit (Berrett Koehler; September 15, 2020), “It is paradoxical that with all the attention over the last 50 years on social justice and diversity and inclusion that we have made little progress in actualizing the vision of an equitable society.”

Black Fatigue is the first book to name and describe a phenomena Black people know well: the multifaceted physical and psychological damage wrought by simply living, day by day, in a racist society.

And while it’s true that any protected category under Title VII, ADEA or ADA could claim that not enough progress toward equity has been made, Winters points to the evidence from numerous studies that indicate Black people fare worse than other groups from any socio-economic indicator (e.g., workplace representation, housing, income, criminal justice system).

Personal change is slow. Organizational change is slower. Successful societal change requires a long-term movement that only ends when public support demands and achieves resolution.

Change requires holistic evaluation and response and begins with white people acknowledging their privilege while actively working to end systemic bias and inequality. Leaders need to be held accountable, organizationally and legislatively. And, as Winters writes in Black Fatigue, we must stop prioritizing white discomfort over Black comfort. “It only serves to perpetuate and accept sublime ignorance.”

Moore believes change starts with the mutual respect of humanity. “When we start seeing and appreciating other human beings, who happen to be different than us, the same way we see ourselves, change can happen. We can’t simply write statements and tweet our way out of inequity. To take full advantage of the awakening upon us, we must ask ourselves, how will we change to ensure no one experiences feeling this way again?”

“This is about more than a program or making a splashy hire,” he added. “It’s putting accountabilities in place, such as laws, regulations and corporate policies, that not only promote inclusion but also hold people of influence accountable for the lack of diverse representation. This is the start to sustainable progress.”

Moore encourages everyone to ask — and keep asking —“Are we doing enough to support the movement for racial equality and equity? We need to always push and challenge ourselves to do more, so our children’s children won’t experience the same events generations from now.”

Reaves outlines the purposeful action his company is taking to drive change. “Solving for socioeconomic disparity won’t happen overnight. It will take an ongoing, never-ceasing commitment across our entire company to remove racial bias, increase representation, champion truly inclusive policies and support the Black community in and outside our four walls.”

George Floyd’s murder was, as Winters writes, a tipping point resulting from centuries of injustice and death. She argues the impact of a racist system is not just killing Black people; it is tearing our nation apart.

Resolution requires solidarity. It requires commitment and accountability. The actions we take to eradicate racism against Blacks will make it easier to progress change in other areas, such as gender and age equity. If we can’t get this right, what hope is there for any disenfranchised group? OCTAVE Does racism make us sick? Amid a national reckoning, the question gains new importance The San Francisco Chronicle, by Tatiana Sanchez, August 24, 2020

Elaine Shelly has lived with multiple sclerosis for 30 years. But she said she still panics whenever she has to see a new neurologist because of racial discrimination she’s experienced in the past.

Even getting a proper diagnosis for her illness was a battle. “I’d go to these neurologists who would tell me that Black people don’t get M.S. and that I must be mentally ill,” said Shelly, 63, of San Leandro.

A former print journalist, Shelly said racial stress has been a constant in her life for decades, including in the workplace, where she often faced microaggressions from peers and retaliation from management.

“Living with that stress, day in and day out, I became ill,” said Shelly, who left journalism in 1989. “I can’t say that because of that stress I ended up getting M.S. ... But I can say these are the stressors I experienced before I became ill and never got better.”

The idea that racial profiling and other forms of discrimination can trigger chronic stress — which in turn can provoke illness — is a growing area of research, especially as the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a multidimensional approach to racial equality.

A national conversation about health in the Black community is part of that approach, spurred by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by Minneapolis police in May, and by the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit communities of color disproportionately hard.

Biological responses

Not a lot is known about the health consequences of racism specifically. But it is well known that stress can set off a cascade of biological responses, potentially leading to hypertension, heart disease, cancer, inflammation, abnormal gene activity and a weakened immune system. And numerous studies indicate that persistent racism is a leading cause of stress, particularly among Black people.

These somber connections shed light on the experience of being Black in America, where racism is often embedded in schools, communities, workplaces and medical institutions. Some health consequences triggered by stress can last a lifetime.

One visible example is that more than 40% of Black people in the U.S. suffer from high blood pressure — one of the highest rates in the world — which puts them at significantly greater risk of developing heart disease and stroke compared with their white peers, according to the American Heart Association. Black people also have higher rates of obesity and diabetes and tend to have a shorter life expectancy, research shows.

California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician who has studied the profound health effects of childhood trauma and stress, said racism, too, can lead to poor health, and pointed to the higher COVID-19 death rates among Black and brown people.

“It has so much to do with how our society is structured,” Burke Harris said.

“There is something systematically different about the environments and experiences that Black people are having — which we have created — that is literally leading them to die in far greater numbers,” she said.

Soon after completing her medical residency at Stanford University, Burke Harris joined California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and founded its Bayview Child Health Center in 2007, where she noticed a troubling trend among the children she treated.

Many had experienced significant trauma — including abuse, neglect and household dysfunction, such as divorced or incarcerated parents. Many of those children also suffered a range of illnesses, from asthma or eczema, to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Drawing on research from a landmark 1998 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente, Burke Harris identified Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, as a major risk factor affecting the health of her young patients. ACEs can deeply affect a child’s brain development and can alter their DNA and hormonal and immune systems, causing behavioral issues, learning difficulties and chronic disease, Burke Harris said.

Racism has similar biological effects, she said.

“The evidence is so strong that being exposed to racism — or being targeted by racism — is also a risk factor for toxic stress,” said Burke Harris, who founded the Center for Youth Wellness in 2012 to treat and prevent such chronic or “toxic” stress in children.

She added, “Repeated exposure to threat (and) repeated exposure to marginalization activates the biological machinery that directly leads to cardiovascular disease, directly leads to increased risk of behavioral health conditions and chronic disease.”

'Everyday discrimination'

A 2019 study of more than 25,000 women nationwide by UCSF, the University of Maryland, Harvard, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that Black women not only reported feeling more stress than Asian American, Latina and white women did, but they also had worse cardiovascular health compared to white women — even after scientists accounted for age, socioeconomic status and stress factors.

The study also found that stress appeared to affect cardiovascular health only among Black participants, said Dr. Michelle Albert, director of the UCSF Center for the Study of Adversity and Cardiovascular Disease and principal investigator of the report.

One common form of stress for Black people is “everyday discrimination,” said Albert.

“When we talk about everyday discrimination, what we’re talking about are things like being treated with less courtesy than others, treated with less respect than others, receiving poorer service,” she said. “Obviously, this is perceived everyday discrimination.”

In addition to contributing to clogged arteries, such stresses may lead to abdominal obesity, higher blood pressure and inflammation, and even irregular heartbeat, Albert said.

Experiences with racism — large or small — keep Black people in a near-constant state of increased adrenaline and stress that wear on the body significantly, said Dr. Ayanna Bennett, director of San Francisco’s Office of Equity and incident commander for the city’s COVID-19 response.

“Both of those things cause chronic illness,” Bennett said. “Chronic stress is bad for your heart, it’s bad for your blood vessels, it’s bad for your general health. And we know that those are things that make you vulnerable to COVID-19.”

Black people and COVID-19

Significant disparities among racial and ethnic groups’ rates of coronavirus infections and deaths have brought new attention to Black health and how often this community is underserved — and misunderstood — by the health care system.

Across the country, Black Americans have experienced the highest death rate from COVID-19 of any ethnic group: about 88 deaths per 100,000 people as of Wednesday, the American Public Media Research Lab reported. By contrast, there have been about 40 deaths per 100,000 white people.

In California, a Sutter Health study that analyzed 1,052 COVID-19 cases between January and April found that Black participants were nearly three times more likely to be admitted to the hospital for the disease compared with their white peers, even after taking into account sex, age, income and underlying health problems.

Of the 61 Black participants, more than 70% were tested for the virus in the emergency department or as inpatients — suggesting they had delayed seeking treatment, the report found.

Although the researchers did not investigate why this occurred, they said they believed these disparities stemmed from societal factors that “result in barriers to timely access to care or create circumstances in which patients view delaying care as the most sensible option.”

Among those factors could be a distrust of doctors and health institutions — the result of previous experiences with bias by providers, as happened with Shelly — that could lead Black people to seek care only in the most extreme circumstances, according to the study.

“It means that potentially when you need to get care, you’re reluctant to do what it takes to get that care,” said Jamila Michener, a professor at Cornell University who studies poverty, racial inequality and public policy and was not involved in the study. “In the context of a pandemic ... the deleterious consequences of not trusting the health care system are exacerbated.”

Competent care

Doctors and researchers say the solution to addressing these health disparities lies, in part, with medical providers and institutions that focus on culturally competent care and grassroots programs that engage Black communities.

In July, UCSF announced a new Anti-Racism Initiative that will include mandatory diversity and inclusion training at its medical school, a task force to assess the role of security and policing within the institution, and quarterly meetings to discuss how to end anti-Blackness and racism there.

Dr. Neil Powe, chief of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital and professor of medicine at UCSF, said he’s hopeful the initiative will lead to greater equity for patients and students — and a more diverse workforce.

Powe, who with dozens of UCSF colleagues decried racial injustice after Floyd’s death, thinks back to his own childhood whenever he hears of a Black person killed in an encounter with police.

At 16, Powe was walking home with his best friend on a warm day in Philadelphia after playing basketball at a nearby school when two police officers pulled up in a squad car.

With their weapons drawn, the officers ordered the teens to turn around and put their hands on top of the car. They frisked the boys and quizzed them on why they were in that neighborhood, recalled Powe, who is Black.

He was about 50 feet away from his home.

The impact of the racist incident had a definite long-term effect on Powe, 65. But not in the form of illness.

“It made me want to overcome those biases and help other people,” said the doctor. “In some sense, for me, it became a motivator to change things.” CHARLES C. Should Racial Information Even Be Collected For College Admissions? Forbes, by Richard Vedder, August 24, 2020

A strong case can be made that racial relations in the U.S. are deteriorating, whereas for most of the period after slavery’s end in 1865 they were improving, particularly in the middle of the 20th century and for some time thereafter. I liked Gerald Baker’s recent Wall Street Journal column where he suggested our obsession with defining everything in terms of race has led to problems, such as the rise of extremists of several racial backgrounds. Instead of moving toward a society where “race does not matter,” we are moving closer to one where “only race matters.”

This all came to mind recently when the Justice Department demanded that Yale University end what it considers admission preferences for African-American and to a lesser extent Hispanic students, thereby disadvantaging whites and Asians. This led me to ask the question: what would happen if it were illegal for a college to ask students or employees wishing to join its community about their race, or gather racial information in other ways, such as through mandatory in-person interviews, or required photographs from applicants?

My thinking has evolved from over 50 years of researching and writing about American race relations (much of my early scholarship related to the economics of slavery). Although vicious, hateful racial discrimination was rampant for generations after 1865, it started disappearing at an increasing rate in the mid-twentieth century: for example, lynching essentially stopped and Blacks became prominent in such high paying visible fields as sports and entertainment.

In a forthcoming essay, I argue that the period of greatest post-Emancipation rise in Black incomes relative to whites was between 1940 and the early 1970s —most of it before civil rights legislation had been passed or had become fully effective. In a competitive market- based economy, true racial discrimination, for example favoring a white job applicant over a more qualified Black one, can be costly —the employer is getting less output per dollar spent. Market principles in fact worked slowly but surely to lower discrimination. By the early 1970s, the median income of black households was around 70 % of that of white ones, compared with about 50% as late as 1940.

By 2000, the black to white household median income had risen further, to about 80%. Moreover, racial assimilation has grown rapidly —the number of interracial marriages, for example, has soared. But since 2000, by some indicators, such as household median income, the previous narrowing of inequality has stagnated, at the very time universities increasingly moved away from “affirmative action,” involving strongly nudging campus decision-makers to encourage minority participation, to more militant forms of promoting “diversity and inclusion,” where race became a primary criterion in such things as admissions.

Hence schools like Harvard, Yale and many others are increasingly facing a real legal dilemma: the zeitgeist of universities, the set of ostensibly shared values, increasingly deviates from a traditional American ideal: achievement and rewards in life should depend more on individual accomplishments rather than one’s station in life at birth or on group characteristics which cannot be controlled, like skin coloration. The magisterial admonition of Martin Luther King that what is important is not the color of one’s skin but the content of one’s character is out of fashion, at least on college campuses.

If the courts start ruling against schools like Harvard or North Carolina in current lawsuits, one logical remedy of alleged racial bias would be remove race completely from consideration by eliminating racial information. If we truly want a society where “race does not matter” in assessing human qualities, perhaps we need to make it difficult to take race into account. Arguably ignorance is bliss.

This is not to say “ignore the disadvantaged.” There are others ways to aid disadvantaged persons in our society, disproportionately members of minority groups, and give them an extra boost, besides looking at their skin coloration or other physical attributes, ways that on balance help the most disadvantaged minorities. Giving generous scholarship assistance to those who are poor is an obvious traditional one. Assisting struggling kids, many of them in racial minorities, with after school tutoring and enrichment programs is another. Eliminating preferential treatment of collegiate legacies in admissions (predominantly favoring whites) is a third. ERWAN New York University moves to implement racial segregation in student dorms The World Socialist Web Site, by Karsten Schneider, August 24, 2020

Since late June, the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services at New York University (NYU) has been working closely with a small, student-led task force to make racially segregated housing a reality in undergraduate student dorms.

On July 20, Washington Square News, the weekly undergraduate student newspaper of NYU, published an article titled “Student-Led Task Force Calls for Black Housing on Campus,” in which they reported on the university’s willingness to help implement residential communities open solely to “Black-identifying students with Black Resident Assistants.” Since then, the university has officially given the project a green light, aiming to have NYU’s first segregated residential floor established by Fall 2021.

A little over two months ago, a recently-organized advocacy group called Black Violets created an online petition demanding that the university “implement Black student housing on campus in the vein of themed engagement floors across first-year and upperclassmen residence halls.” In their petition, the group argues that “Too often in the classroom and in residential life, black students bear the brunt of educating their uninformed peers about racism.” African American students, they state, desperately require a “safe space” where they can escape from students, staff, and faculty of other races.

At NYU, “themed engagement floors,” also known as “Themed Engagement Communities,” are a network of theme-based floors, located in various undergraduate residence halls, that allow students living on a specific floor to explore a specific subject through various programs and activities planned by a Resident Assistant. There are over twenty Themed Engagement Communities at NYU, with themes ranging from film, literature, and theater to technology, science, and foreign languages. All floors are open to all students, who request residency on a specific floor prior to the start of the academic year.

The approval of a Themed Engagement Community open to students based on their race is new at NYU. However, it is not the first time that the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services has considered such a proposal. In 2002, an NYU senior submitted a plan to develop race-based housing for African American students, claiming that “such a housing program would unite African American students on campus,” and better combat racial discrimination. This proposal was eventually rejected by the university after a brief review and discussion.

Now, despite signs of minimal support from the undergraduate student body—the online petition has garnered a mere 1,105 signatures out of the 26,733 total undergraduates currently studying at NYU—the proposal for race-based housing has been warmly welcomed by the university administration.

There is nothing progressive about the establishment of racially segregated housing at NYU. It is irrelevant whether the segregation being implemented is voluntary or mandatory. Racial segregation, in all forms, is entirely reactionary.

The vile argument advanced in the proposal is that all non-African American students, staff, and faculty are, to varying degrees, hostile and dangerous towards African American students. Their animosity stems from an inherent antipathy towards individuals of different races. Therefore, to end discrimination and ensure true equality within the university, African Americans must completely separate themselves from the rest of the community and “train” non-African Americans to overcome their intrinsic racism. This irrational and anti-scientific ideology lies at the heart of similar proposals made at several major academic institutions across the country in recent years. This includes the moves towards racially segregated housing at Syracuse University and the recent calls for the implementation of racial quotas at several elite American universities. These demands do not stem from an egalitarian and progressive desire to make education easily available for everyone and eliminate the real dangers that face the majority of students and youth (massive debt, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, poverty, etc.), but from the desire to advance the interests of a very small, privileged layer of the population.

It is no coincidence that a renewed push for race-based housing at NYU comes at a time of unprecedented social, economic, and political crisis in the United States and throughout the world. This move is an outcome of the ever-intensifying racialist campaign being conducted by the sections of the ruling class and affluent middle class politically represented by the Democratic Party and their media mouthpiece, the New York Times. For over 50 years, these oligarchs and their obedient servants in the upper-middle class have relentlessly sought to defend their interests by dividing the working masses through the promotion of racial and identity politics.

Racism cannot be countered with racialism. They are two sides of the same coin. The fundamental division in capitalist society is class, not race. An individual’s relationship to the means of production ultimately determines their position in society.

A review of studies on wealth stratification between the richest and poorest members of the African American community alone exposes the class interests behind identity politics. According to statistics from 2017, the top 10 percent of the African American population owns over 75 percent of all wealth owned by African Americans. The bottom 50 percent of the African American population has zero or negative wealth. Under Barack Obama’s administration, the top 1 percent of African Americans saw their share of wealth double from 19.4 percent to 40.5 percent. Working-class African Americans are worse off than they were four decades ago, while things have never been better for the rich.

The growth of social inequality and poverty has occurred across all racial groups. White workers, black workers, Latino workers, Asian workers, and Native American workers have all seen their standard of living sharply decrease as that of the top 10 percent has dramatically increased.

Regardless of their race, workers face the same daily struggle to survive, laboring for long hours in horrendous conditions for dismal wages. Now, as a result of the ruling class’s ruthless back-to-work campaign, they also face infection with and death from COVID-19 as they are herded back into unsanitary factories and workplaces to pump out the surplus value necessary for the ruling class to pay off its debts.

In the aftermath of the international, multi-racial, mass protests against police brutality, sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the outbreak of wildcat protests and strikes across several major industries, the ruling class has pushed racial identity politics in an effort to misdirect growing opposition. Using the New York Times’ 1619 Project as a basis, they seek to completely erase class consciousness and the progressive content of the two American revolutions in order to stifle movement towards the third.

Identity politics solely serves the interests of the wealthy and privileged layer of society that has profited from the suffering of the working class. Specifically, it is the primary mechanism through which the “next 9 percent,” directly below the top 1 percent, seeks to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent of society. This layer, the upper-middle class, has no more qualms over exploiting the working masses for personal gain than the corporate, financial oligarchs at the very top of society.

University campuses, dominated by the upper-middle class, have been breeding grounds of anti-Marxism and imperialist recruitment for many decades. NYU stands at the pinnacle of that section of academia’s reactionary position within society. The university’s subservience to the profit interests of Wall Street and its extensive ties to US imperialism drive its every decision. Over the last few years, NYU has carried out significant attacks on workers, subordinated student mental health and food insecurity to profit interests, and demonstrated complete contempt for democratic rights. NYU, like all institutions of “higher” education, is first and foremost a business and will do everything in its power to defend the profit system.

This includes full compliance with the ruling class’s vicious back-to-work campaign. NYU, against the advice of medical professionals around the world, is one of the many academic institutions that has decided to hold in-person classes. Students from across the country are currently flying into New York City to undergo a mandatory two-week quarantine before the university opens.

The decision to hold in-person classes at NYU will prove to be disastrous. Over the last few weeks, several major US schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, Princeton, and the University of Southern California, were forced to revert to online instruction after explosions of COVID-19 cases amongst their students, staff, and faculty. Despite this, NYU has decided to go ahead with a full reopening; knowingly sacrificing the lives of students, staff, and faculty for profits.

It is imperative that all students realize the danger that they are facing in returning to school. What is needed is not the division of students along identity-based lines, but their unification against the present, barbaric social order. The fight against all forms of exploitation and oppression is inherently linked to the fight against capitalism. Students at NYU and universities around the world who seek to fight for genuine social equality must turn to the international working class, the great, powerful, progressive force in society. It is only by uniting workers of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and nationalities behind a clear, socialist program and perspective that capitalist barbarism will be overcome.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are at the forefront of this struggle, striving to provide the working class with the independent, socialist leadership that is necessary to end a social order that prioritizes private profit over social need. CHARLES D. A Texas school system can't make a Black teen cut his dreadlocks, court rules CNN, by David Williams & Kay Jones, Augsut 20, 2020

A Texas teenager, who was punished over the length of his dreadlocks, won't have to cut his hair to return to school after a federal court blocked the district from enforcing its hair- length policy against him. US District Court Judge George C. Hanks, Jr. issued a preliminary injunction this week that requires the Barbers Hill Independent School District in Mont Belvieu, Texas, to allow Kaden Bradford to attend school and participate in extracurricular activities without cutting his hair. Bradford, who is returning to Barbers Hill High School for his junior year, has been wearing his hair in locs since the seventh grade and hasn't cut it since then because the locs would unravel. "Locs is a natural Black hair formation and I am an African American," he told CNN. "Also to piggyback off of that I've grown up around the Trinidadian culture and locs is a very important part in that culture as well." He wore his locs up in a hairband to comply with the school's grooming code, which said male students' hair "will not extend, at any time, below the eyebrows, below the ear lobes, or below the top of a T-shirt collar." The district tightened its policy in December, saying that male students could not wear their hair gathered up in a style that would be too long when it's let down. Bradford was told to cut his hair in January and was given in-school suspension when he did not comply. He transferred to another school to finish out the school year. Leaving the friends and classmates he grew up with was tough and he only knew two people when he started at the new school. "It was really hard. Probably one of the most hardest things that I will ever do in my life," he said.

National attention

Bradford's cousin DeAndre Arnold was also given in-school suspension for having his hair in long locs and was told he couldn't walk in his graduation ceremony unless he cut his hair. Arnold's case drew national attention and celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres and Alicia Keyes offered their support. "Not a lot of kids that have came through Barbers Hill have had locs like we have, so yeah, of course I felt that I was being targeted because of my significant hairstyle," Bradford said. Only 3.1% of the students in the district, which is east of Houston, are Black, according to its website. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund represented both students and their families in their lawsuit. "We are encouraged by the court's decision to grant our request to enjoin enforcement of BHISD's discriminatory dress and grooming policy," said senior counsel Michaele Turnage Young in a statement. "It is heartening that the court has recognized K.B.'s (Bradford's) prospects for success on our race discrimination, gender discrimination, and freedom of expression claims in this lawsuit, and ensured that K.B. does not have to continue enduring discrimination that disrupts his learning and reinforces a damaging message of intolerance in the educational environment." Barbers Hill Independent School District Superintendent Greg Poole has defended the policy and insisted that it is not racist. In a statement issued Wednesday, he said he was disappointed by the decision. "This is the second injunction sought by the plaintiffs regarding the District's dress and grooming policy. We are disappointed with the most recent decision. This ruling has the potential to impact many school districts in the state of Texas that maintain similar dress code language. The Board of Trustees will consider its appellate options." The district says its policy allows cornrows and dreadlocks, and only restricts their length. A number of states -- including California, New York, New Jersey and Virginia -- have passed laws banning discrimination against people with natural Black hairstyles. The Texas Legislative Black Caucus says it will introduce similar legislation next year. Bradford told CNN that he's looking forward to going back to school and being back with his friends. "I was really relieved that you know, I'd be able to go back to school I'd be able to go back to normal environment that I've always known and grown up around," he said. He hopes the lawsuit protects other students from having the same experience. ALEXANDRE Postal Service cuts imperil ladder to middle class for many Black Americans Politico.com, by Eleanor Mueller & Kellie Mejdrich, August 18, 2020

Postal workers say DeJoy’s policies would make it nearly impossible to cope with sweeping changes that are affecting their jobs every day.

Jonathan Smith, a Black mail-processing equipment mechanic who joined the U.S. Postal Service in 1988, remembers his grandfather being so proud of his career at the agency that he wore his uniform even when he wasn’t working.

“That job made us part of the middle class,” said Smith, 51, whose aunts and uncles also built careers at the Post Office. For many Black Americans, he said, “The Postal Service is that last symbol of the power of the middle class."

That ticket to economic security could be in jeopardy now. If President Donald Trump and Congress fail to resolve their fight over Postal Service funding, it won’t just put the agency’s financial future at risk. It could imperil one of the country’s longest-running and most reliable civil service jobs, potentially forcing steep cuts to an estimated 669,000- person workforce that is more than one-quarter Black — a rate more than double that of the national labor force.

The sheer reach of the post office in all 50 states combined with the federal government’s anti-discrimination policies have made employment there more accessible than most industries to generations of Black workers. The agency’s pay and benefits often allowed them to share in the American Dream even when racial discrimination was everywhere in the country. A unionized postal worker can make as much as $75,000 a year, well above the national average income.

To be sure, that dream has been gradually eroding throughout the years as Postal Service career employment has declined by more than 37 percent since 1999. That's largely because of automation and financial difficulties, including a decline in letter mail delivery with the arrival of email and the agency’s struggle to make package delivery profitable. But the recent troubles are coming at an especially bad time, with the coronavirus-induced recession hitting Black Americans much harder than white Americans. Black Americans are not only nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid-19, but their unemployment rate was at 14.6 percent in July compared with 9.2 percent for white Americans.

The Labor Department has projected that overall employment of Postal Service workers will decline 21 percent from 2018 to 2028. And Louis DeJoy, Trump's new postmaster general, has said the agency would freeze hiring and seek future early retirement authority “for employees not represented by a collective bargaining agreement.” On Tuesday, DeJoy said he would halt some key restructuring efforts until after the election following complaints from Congress.

While the debate during the latest round of coronavirus relief talks has focused on whether supplying emergency funds to the post office is needed to preserve election integrity and ensure package delivery, Smith and other workers like him fear even greater damage from Washington’s inaction: It could undo years of gains in racial equity that the USPS helped make possible.

“One of the things that attracted me was its commitment to diversity,” said Smith, who heads the American Postal Workers Union’s New York Metro chapter. “When you come from a predominantly Black community … you come into a melting pot.”

That was certainly true for his grandfather, for whom the job symbolized the opportunities he had found in the North after fleeing the institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South, he said.

Union officials and the USPS have issued numerous statements over the summer reiterating their confidence that the agency can handle mail-in ballots for November’s election. But Trump’s resistance to sending USPS more funds, worker reports of a slowdown in mail delivery, and the mail carrier's warning letters sent to 46 states and D.C. about mail-in ballots possibly arriving late challenge those claims.

Congress recognized that the mail carrier’s financial challenges were being exacerbated by the pandemic when it provided the agency with a $10 billion loan in a March stimulus bill, H.R. 748 (116). But unions and Democrats — for whom Black Americans are the most reliable voter bloc — say the aid needs to go further, calling for $25 billion that the agency wouldn’t have to pay back.

Republican critics of the post office argue that the Trump administration has every right to demand an overhaul of the agency, saying the USPS has suffered for years from mismanagement and inefficiency.

USPS “owes it to the American people to improve their operations — this is a fact that even Democrats agreed with when it was politically convenient to do so,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement.

Whereas many other federal agencies are concentrated in specific areas, the USPS — where Black people make up 27 percent of the workforce — has offices across the country. It’s that geographic diversity that, beginning after World War II when Black veterans returned home in search of civilian careers, helped form “the genesis of [USPS] as one of the bulwarks of the Black middle class,” said William Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and the AFL-CIO's chief economist.

“The post office is everywhere,” Spriggs said. “And because it’s less easy to discriminate, it’s an easy route to a federal position.”

‘So you have retirement benefits, you have health care — you have all the things that go with a unionized job.”

Angela Johnson joined the USPS in 1996, working her way up through various mail- processing roles to her current position of general clerk. Now president of APWU’s Northeast Florida chapter, Johnson credits the agency with elevating her and her family to “a better position financially.”

“Many Black families excel through working at the post office,” Johnson, 48, said. “When people first come in, it’s their first job — or their first good job, like it was for me. I was able to do a lot for my kids; it was no longer a struggle for me.”

“It’s going to be a big hit if the post office is not helped. It’s a domino effect for the middle- class Black family who can’t afford that hit.”

For Black workers, that financial security is often more desperately needed than it is for white workers. The net worth of the typical white family is almost 10 times greater than that of a Black family, according to the Brookings Institution — meaning that Black workers rely that much more on their current income than do white workers.

Postal employees “have a secure retirement, secure health benefits — and these are even more valuable to workers of color than they are to white households, who might have inherited money or have other cushions to rely on,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “This is true in general of the public sector, but it’s especially true of the Postal Service.”

“That’s why the fact that these jobs are being undercut right now has repercussions beyond just the workers themselves, for the Black middle class,” she said.

But it’s not just Black employees who could be affected by the USPS’ decline. Spriggs said many Black families live in rural areas only served by the agency — not FedEx and UPS. Black Americans make up 20 percent of the South’s population, compared with 13 percent in the Northeast and 6 percent in the West, according to the 2010 Census.

The inability to guarantee mail delivery would jeopardize thousands of mail-order prescriptions — a lifeline for the disabled and elderly, many of them veterans, who live in places where traveling to a pharmacy could be costly and time-consuming.

“It’s devastating both from the workers’ side and from the community side,” Spriggs said. “A lot of people forget the majority of Black people live in the South, and a lot of them live in rural communities.”

DeJoy’s efforts to reorganize the mail carrier drew criticism from both parties in Congress, responding to constituents who are suddenly more reliant on the post because of the pandemic.

Postal workers say DeJoy’s policies, including the elimination of overtime and late trips, would make it nearly impossible to cope with sweeping changes that are affecting their jobs every day, including the drop-off in letter mail and an explosion in package delivery.

Unable to work extra hours and with many colleagues on leave to take care of themselves or family members, employees report being forced to head home while many packages and other pieces of mail remain undelivered, a trend they say has resulted in the overall slowdown of mail delivery across the country.

“They took an oath of office when they got hired,” said Judy Beard, political director for the American Postal Workers Union. “And now they’re going home [and] leaving boxes — it could be medicine in the boxes, it could be checks in the envelopes — and they don’t feel comfortable about their work anymore.” AUGUSTIN How systemic racism flares up in housing and neighborhoods michiganradio.org, July 24, 2020

On May 25, the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer set off protests across the country, as well as conversations about how racial discrimination and disenfranchisement are upheld by different sectors of American society. This summer, Stateside is conducting a series of conversations on what systemic racism looks like. This week we hear from a journalist, a landlord, and the director of a community center about how systemic racism affects housing, from property rental to the way neighborhoods are structured.

Institutional racism manifests in tangible and intangible ways. One historical example of this is “sundown towns”: municipalities that practiced segregation through a combination of discriminatory policies, intimidation, and sometimes violence against non-white people. Bryce Huffman, a reporter for Bridge Detroit, recently wrote a piece titled, “Detroit suburbs grapple with the history of being anti-Black ‘sundown towns’.” He said that while sundown towns may no longer be codified by laws, practices such as redlining have allowed racism to continue to structure communities.

“I think for Detroit, when we look at home ownership and the poverty rate, they go hand in hand,” Huffman said. “We can’t separate the segregation aspect, the lending practices, redlining, we can’t separate any of that from people wanting to be separate from what they perceived was a Black city that had danger and crime and all of these problems that they wanted to be no longer associated with. And that’s why metro Detroit looks the way that it does nowadays.”

Eviction disproportionately hits Black renters. Here’s what it looks like and what might help.

Earlier this year, the University of Washington released a study showing black renters were seven times more likely to be evicted than white renters. Bonnie Billups is the executive director of Peace Neighborhood Center in Ann Arbor. He said we have a long way to go in terms of housing equity, in part because the United States is not as distanced from its history as many people believe.

“The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, those things were just in the sixties,” Billups said. “And this country has, you know, a history of hundreds of years. And most of those hundreds of years were not pleasant years for people of color. And so, we’re really in our infancy of trying to bring real equality to all people in this country and to live up to the Declaration of Independence.”

Finding solutions for equitable housing and access to capital through a landlord's eyes

Despite the fact that Detroit is an 80% Black city, mortgages in recent years have tended to go to white homeowners. Andre Watson, a landlord in Detroit, said a lack of access to capital plagues would-be buyers who are Black, making it difficult to dismantle an inequitable economy of renting and homeownership.

“Systemic solutions, I believe, would come by lending institutions really opening up their minds, challenging themselves to move beyond their norms and engaging the community that could be a viable customer. It really could be a win-win situation, but it does require more courage and more disturbance to the norms,” Watson said. REMI Black Workers Are More Likely to Be Unemployed but Less Likely to Get Unemployment Benefits msn.com, by Ava Kofman & Hannah Fresques, August 24, 2020

Record numbers of Americans are receiving unemployment insurance during the pandemic. That’s because of the enormous scale of jobs lost — but also because Congress greatly expanded the number of workers eligible for benefits. For the first time, thanks to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, part-timers, independent contractors and gig workers qualify for unemployment payments. Black workers are overrepresented in these nontraditional positions, which in the past has contributed to making them less likely to receive unemployment payments than other groups.

Yet despite the expansion of eligibility, a smaller percentage of unemployed Black workers are receiving unemployment benefits than white workers during the pandemic, according to national survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago: 13% of jobless Black workers received such payments between April and June, compared with 22% for Hispanic workers and 24% for white workers.

During the Pandemic, White Unemployed Workers Have Been More Likely to Receive Unemployment Benefits

According to an analysis of national survey data, Black unemployed workers were about half as likely to receive such benefits.

“In every recession, we see these same disparities,” said William Spriggs, a Howard University economist who analyzed the data. After the 2008 financial crisis, for example, 23.8% of jobless Black workers received unemployment vs. 33.2% for white workers, according to a 2012 study of national claims data by the Urban Institute.

Some of the continuing disparity is explained by geography, according to Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst with the National Employment Law Project. Many states have made it more difficult to access benefits in recent years. In the 1950s, an average of 50% of jobless people were able to regularly access benefits; by the end of 2019, that average had fallen to 28% of workers. The states that have made the deepest cuts to their unemployment programs are mostly in the South and have a higher share of Black residents. In states such as Florida and North Carolina, fewer than 12% of jobless individuals received benefits last year.

Many States Have Severely Limited Who Is Eligible for Benefits … In the South, and other states shaded lightly below, it’s much harder for people to receive unemployment benefits. For example, 10% of jobless residents in North Carolina got benefits in 2018, compared with 50% in New Jersey. Among those who received unemployment benefits in 2018, the program replaced 36% of lost wages in Louisiana, compared with 53% in Iowa.

As a result, the weaker benefits in those states disproportionately affect Black unemployed workers. These low rates perpetuate themselves. People in states with restrictive benefits are often deterred from applying for them, research shows, because they perceive themselves to be ineligible, whether or not they actually are. Moreover, workers who have been historically excluded — because they are temporary employees or work on call — may not know the new pandemic assistance program exists and, therefore, may not have bothered to apply for benefits at all. Black workers have been applying for benefits during the pandemic at a lower rate than white workers, according to the NORC survey.

The inequity in unemployment benefits is all the more damaging because Black workers have been more likely to be unemployed in both the current downturn and in past recessions. Even when the economy is healthy, Black unemployment is dramatically higher — often double — that of white workers. The gap cannot be explained by gender, age or education level. (Were it not for the fact that Black workers are overrepresented in transit and service industry jobs currently deemed “essential,” the rate of Black unemployment today would be even worse.) Black households have long suffered from lower wages, lower incomes and fewer assets to fall back on than white households. “Because Black households have one-tenth of the wealth of white households, it’s that much more important that unemployment insurance kicks in to reduce the different experiences across these racial groups,” said Damon Jones, an economist who teaches at the University of Chicago. “If you start out with less wealth and you have less access to unemployment insurance, you’re doubling down on this negative impact.”

That scenario appears to be playing out today. A Pew study in April found 48% of Black Americans were having trouble paying bills, compared with 44% for Hispanics and 26% for whites. Even when Black workers do obtain benefits, they often receive smaller payments than white workers, since the benefits are determined by salary and Black workers earn less at every education level. “If your historical earnings reflect labor market discrimination, you’re going to get hit with lower benefits,” said Jared Bernstein, a fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The underlying formulas of the system reflect this historical discrimination.”

Black workers are also more likely to exhaust the standard 26 weeks of benefits than white counterparts because they tend to stay unemployed longer than their white peers. Job discrimination in the labor market and fewer workplace protections mean that Black workers are typically the first to lose their jobs and the last to get them back.

If the longstanding gulf suggests a two-tiered unemployment system, that’s by design. “You wonder why this system is so messy and complicated,” Jones said. “And then you look back in the history and you see that the origins of some of these barriers were driven by racism and xenophobia.”

The Social Security Act established unemployment insurance, in 1935, as a joint federal- state system. It had a narrow definition of who deserved benefits: full-time breadwinners who had been momentarily laid off but would return to work as soon as business picked up. This definition deliberately excluded agricultural and domestic workers, jobs held predominantly by Black Americans, from its purview. Historians have debated the extent to which these exclusions stemmed from racial animus. But whatever the motivations, the original definitions had a disparate impact: 65% of Black workers fell outside the reach of the new program, and in agrarian parts of South, that number went up to 80%, according to Larry DeWitt, a former historian for the Social Security Administration.

The economy has radically changed, but the unemployment system has remained largely the same. (Domestic workers and farmworkers were included in 1950s amendments to the bill.) “Our unemployment system has not kept up with the changing demographics of the American labor force,” Spriggs said.

It’s been decades since employers began abandoning traditional work practices, in which full-time staffers put in 40-hour weeks, in favor of part-time arrangements and independent contractors. One study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found “all the net employment growth in the United States from 2010 to 2015” took place through what it called “precarious” arrangements: temporary help agency work, on-call work, contract work and independent contracting. Such arrangements account for 40% of all jobs, according to estimates in a 2015 GAO report, and are expected to increase as the economy emerges from the pandemic.

Despite the pandemic assistance program passed by Congress in March, the outdated vision of employment in most state unemployment systems continues to put Black, Hispanic and female workers at a disadvantage. These workers not only disproportionately hold on-call, temp or contingent positions. They also get shut out of the system because they are more likely than white men to work sporadically or leave work for child care — scenarios that render them ineligible for benefits.

Meanwhile, the pandemic program that expands unemployment eligibility is temporary; it expires on Dec. 31. So far, the various rounds of negotiations on extending congressional funding for unemployment have not focused on continuing the expanded eligibility. Economists like Evermore have called for legislation that would permanently include contingent workers — and increase the amount and duration of benefits. The continuing inequities, she said, make the nation’s unemployment system “far less effective at countering recessions than it could be.” ANTOINE G. Black student alleges racially hostile environment at Ann Arbor high school The Detroit News, by Jennifer Chambers, August 24, 2020

An exercise in a high school economics class requiring students to play an online game to see who could own the most slaves.

A teacher who humiliates Black students struggling in math by putting their grades on a Smart Board in violation of the federal education privacy laws.

These allegations and several others were made Monday by a Black high school student who filed a complaint with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights alleging she and other Black students face a racially hostile environment at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor.

The 16-year-old student is represented by the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative, a clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, which interviewed current and former Pioneer Black students and students of color before filing the complaint, CRLI student attorney Liza Davis.

The Civil Rights Litigation Initiative sent Ann Arbor Public School officials a 14-page letter on Monday describing what Pioneer junior Makayla Kelsey and other students have experienced at Pioneer and how it has interfered with their education, Davis said.

The letter alleges that Pioneer math teacher Michele Macke insults Black students and their parents in front of the class, humiliates Black students who are struggling in math by putting their grades on the Smart Board in violation of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act and is hostile to students who are members of the Black Student Union as well as its faculty advisers.

The letter also accuses the teacher Macke of using coded language against Black students such as calling them “criminals” and “delinquents” and refused to take her class to the Black History Month assembly because it was a “waste of time” and complained that it didn’t focus enough on how white people made contributions to Black people. In one instance in December, Makayla Kelsey alleges she tried to grab a study guide in a classroom and the teacher grabbed her by the arm to stop her. Davis said police investigated the incident and the teacher was placed on administrative leave for a few weeks. The district created a safety plan for the student, Davis said, but the teacher remains on staff.

“High school is hard enough without being bullied by teachers,” the junior said. "All students, not just white students, deserve a welcoming and supportive environment.”

Davis said she sent a copy of the complaint and a letter of demands to the Ann Arbor School District on Monday and is asking them to listen to the students who have come forward.

“This summer, an ever-increasing array of Americans are realizing what Black Americans have always known: this country has spent generations institutionalizing racism in every facet of American life, including education,” Davis said. “We call on Pioneer to listen to the brave students who have come forward to tell their stories, and to rectify the vile racism pervading its environment. Black Lives Matter.”

Davis said the math teacher’s treatment of Black students over the years prompted the Black Student Union to petition the school in February to remove her from Pioneer.

The CRLI letter alleges that “racism at Pioneer is institutional and not limited to a few individuals. Davis said it was distressing to hear how many Black students and students of color felt that they were treated as second class citizens.”

Examples Black students gave of unequal treatment or of a racially hostile environment include:

►An exercise in an economics class requiring students to play an online game to see who could own the most slaves, which distressed the Black students in the class.

►The harsher punishment of Black students for doing the same thing as a white classmate and unequal enforcement of the dress code by teachers and hall monitors against young Black women.

►Discriminatory treatment of the Black Student Union and other predominantly Black organizations.

The CRLI and Kelsey and her family say they are asking the district to terminate the teacher and to hire a civil rights organization to conduct an independent investigation of the racial climate at Pioneer, including whether the curriculum is “culturally responsive” to Black students and whether the faculty and staff reflect the racial and cultural diversity of the school.

They also want the district to create a race discrimination complaint system and encourage students to use it and start the process to terminate the Macke’s employment. THEOPHILE Covid-19 is disproportionately taking black lives Vox, by Fabiola Cineas, April 8, 2020

Hundreds of years of racism has delivered poor health and economic outcomes for black people, making them more vulnerable in the pandemic.

US Surgeon General Jerome Adams gave America a dire warning on Monday: The country was about to enter its worst week yet of the coronavirus pandemic, “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.” While Adams cautioned that the calamities wouldn’t be localized but would be “happening all over the country,” it’s becoming increasingly clear that based on new data, Covid-19 will have a starker impact on one group in particular: black people.

Over the past few days, several states and cities across the country have begun releasing Covid-19 outcomes by race. The preliminary numbers reveal that black people are facing higher risks when it comes to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

As of Tuesday, black people made up 33 percent of cases in Michigan and 40 percent of deaths, despite being just 14 percent of the state’s population. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, where black people represent 26 percent of the population, they made up almost half of the county’s 945 cases and 81 percent of its 27 deaths, according to a ProPublica report. In Illinois, black people made up 42 percent of fatalities but make up only 14.6 percent of the state’s population. In Chicago, the data is even graver: Black people represented 68 percent of the city’s fatalities and more than 50 percent of cases but only make up 30 percent of the city’s total population.

In the South, the numbers are also grim. In Louisiana, black people accounted for more than 70 percent of deaths in a state population that is about 33 percent black. About 33 percent of the state’s 512 deaths as of Tuesday morning have occurred in Orleans Parish, where black people make up more than 60 percent of the population and where 29 percent of people live in poverty, according to 2018 census data. Louisiana’s first teen death — also one of the first teen deaths in the nation — was that of 17-year-old New Orleans resident Jaquan Anderson, an aspiring NFL player, according to local reports. On Wednesday, New York, deemed the country’s epicenter of coronavirus cases, finally released preliminary data of Covid-19 deaths broken down by race. With 90 percent reporting in the state, 18 percent of deaths have been black people, despite being only 9 percent of the population; in New York City, with 65 percent reporting, 28 percent of deaths have been black people, while the city’s population is 22 percent black. Hispanics have made up the highest death rates in both the state and the city, 14 percent and 34 percent respectively, despite being 11 percent of the state population and 29 percent of the city’s.

Meanwhile, the federal government hasn’t released any stats on race.

Health professionals and elected officials, like Congress members Elizabeth Warren and Ayanna Pressley, have called on institutions like the country’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track Covid-19 testing and outcomes by race. The national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, bolstered by 400 doctors from across the country, also demanded on Monday that the federal administration and local governments address racial disparities in Covid-19 treatment and testing, starting with the release of comprehensive information that includes race and ethnicity.

Still, the emergence of just a smidgen of the Covid-19 data on race already tells a grim story that shouldn’t shock anyone who knows a little about the systemic oppression of black people in America. Hundreds of years of slavery, racism, and discrimination have compounded to deliver poor health and economic outcomes for black people — heart disease, diabetes, and poverty, for starters — that are only being magnified under the unforgiving lens of the coronavirus pandemic. And negligible efforts to redress black communities are being agitated like a bee’s nest prodded with a stick.

This has left some health care professionals and academics wondering if the coronavirus pandemic will ultimately become a black pandemic. Once wealthy and middle-class white people overcome the early throes of the virus, will America still care when it’s only ravaging black communities? Can racial demographic information in testing eventually become a tool to further marginalize the most vulnerable? “Nowhere else would we say let’s skip a major variable or factor in analyzing a national or worldwide epidemic,” Brookings Institution fellow Andre M. Perry tells Vox. “The reticence to report racial data is a reflection of how black and brown people are marginalized.”

How health disparities make black Americans more vulnerable to coronavirus

Well before the novel coronavirus arrived at America’s shores, black people across the country, regardless of socioeconomic status, have lived with chronic illnesses — long-term health conditions like diabetes and hypertension — at high rates. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health, the death rate for black people is generally higher than that of whites for “heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and homicide.”

When combined with Covid-19 in the body, people already suffering from chronic illnesses or from comorbidity suffer the worst health outcomes. The underlying conditions increase a patient’s chance of hospitalization and even death. Some health professionals also stress that we pay attention to black people with less prevalent chronic conditions, like lupus and Crohn’s disease, or those with renal failure who can’t stay home because they must go outside for treatments like dialysis, as they may be more vulnerable to coronavirus, too.

In Detroit, where black people make up 80 percent of the city’s population, chronic illnesses have already created a lethal storm. Detroit represents 7 percent of Michigan’s population but 26 percent of the state’s infections and 25 percent of its deaths.

“What we are seeing is that because of the way [Covid-19] attacks the body, in terms of what it does in the lungs and how it interacts with the part of the body that controls the blood system, people with hypertension are more susceptible to the illness itself,” Philip Levy, a professor of emergency medicine and assistant vice president at Wayne State University where he focuses on health disparities in Detroit, tells Vox.

When the virus first began to manifest in the city, Levy helped set up infrastructure to test health care workers and first responders. He has seen a lot of comorbidities in the firefighters and police officers he’s tested, and those who test positive for Covid-19 are especially vulnerable. “We have to get them out of the workforce,” he says. Levy points out that it’s not just elderly people who are falling prey to comorbidity. “There’s a high degree of hypertension among younger individuals here, where they have elevated blood pressure on a higher basis,” he says. “Young people think they are invincible, but they might have hypertension at 30 and succumb to this infection.”

This is also backed up by data released in Louisiana on Monday. In the state, the leading underlying medical conditions in patients who tested positive for coronavirus are hypertension (66.4 percent), diabetes (43.52 percent), chronic kidney disease (25.1 percent), and obesity (24.7 percent).

“Louisiana is already being hit hard by [Covid-19] since there are a lot of comorbidities associated with negative outcomes for the virus,” Paula Seal, an associate professor at Louisiana State University School of Medicine’s infectious diseases division in New Orleans, tells Vox. On the clinical side, Seal works in the HIV outpatient clinic at the University Medical Center and does inpatient counsel for general infectious diseases patients. Seal has been present since her facility, one of New Orleans’ key safety net hospitals, began seeing Covid-19 patients in the second week of March.

The fact that New Orleans sees new HIV diagnoses often means that patients at the clinic already walk in with the hurdles of health inequity and racial disparity, Seal says. “HIV itself accelerates aging and presents a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease and kidney disease, and we are now seeing increased weight gain,” she says. “Many of these things identify as risk factors for [Covid-19 too].”

Seal points out that a reason why racial disparities in health care are more pronounced in the South is the fact that a number of governors, including former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, rejected Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. “It wasn’t until Jon Bel Edwards came in that Medicaid expansion was accepted. That helped a lot,” Seal says.

The 2016 expansion, which covers 10 percent of people in the state, has been proven to decrease annual mortality in Louisiana, cut uninsurance rates in half, and expand access to care. Louisiana is the only state in the Deep South to embrace the legislation. Still, Seal suggests that a lack of access to primary care for generations may have added to the Covid-19 risk factors the black community was already facing.

The reason for compounded health problems among black Americans: racism

“It’s almost like structural racism has made black people sick,” Uché Blackstock, an emergency medicine physician in Brooklyn and the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, an organization that fights health care inequity, tells Vox.

Blackstock, who works in a gentrifying neighborhood in central Brooklyn, says she is used to seeing a mix of people at her clinic, but with Covid-19, it’s lately “been all black people” — essential workers who don’t have the luxury of leveraging wealth to escape to homes on Long Island, upstate New York, Connecticut, or Rhode Island. Environmental racism, including practices like toxic dumping, has worked in tandem with other kinds of oppression (racial restrictive housing covenants and anti-busing measures, to name two) to produce stress and contribute to high rates of chronic illness.

According to Blackstock, the pandemic is exposing a deep-rooted system of the haves and have-nots. It’s also displaying how black and brown people have a more tenuous existence in New York City since they lack job security, sick leave, and health insurance. They must ride public transportation to get to work on the front lines, many of them driving the buses themselves or cleaning the hospitals where they are directly at risk.

And those are the ones who still have jobs: The latest US unemployment figures show that black people were disproportionately impacted by job losses in March. The unemployment rate was highest for blacks at 6.7 percent and lowest for whites at 4 percent. Nationally, the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent as nearly 10 million Americans filed for unemployment compensation at the end of the month.

To fight the spread of the coronavirus, public health experts say that social distancing is one of the most effective measures people can take. But being able to socially or physically distance is a privilege. Black families often live in multigenerational homes, with the very young and the very old together under one roof. In 2016, 26 percent of black people lived in multigenerational homes, while 16 percent of whites did, according to Pew Research. Perry says residential segregation is making black people sick, and it started with housing discrimination and redlining, the unethical practice of refusing or limiting loans and services to people based on race, income, or neighborhood.

“Redlining determined that certain black areas weren’t worthy of housing, ensuring that black people didn’t have the ability to pass down wealth to their children. It determined where black people could live, what kind of jobs they had, and the colleges and elementary schools they would attend,” Perry says.

And over time, low-income black people became concentrated in the same areas, with vulnerabilities stacking atop one another. Black people’s movement has been restricted, making them more vulnerable to economic shocks. “When you’re poor, you use other people to make ends meet,” Perry says. “You share cars, you share energy, you live together. You’re not afforded the luxury of not being connected.”

This dependency feeds the cycle of poverty. Without any intervention, families remain trapped, vulnerable to factors like low food access or low-quality education in segregated neighborhoods that beget their susceptibility to infectious disease. In 2018, the poverty rate for black Americans was 22 percent, according to a 2018 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. By comparison, it was 9 percent for white Americans.

Abandoned populations are the most vulnerable in the pandemic

Black people are also often overrepresented in abandoned populations like the homeless and incarcerated. Because these groups are an afterthought in American society, they’re especially vulnerable. Covid-19 will easily compromise them, public health officials warn, which is why advocates are calling for specific protection measures now.

In Detroit, where the homeless population is majority black, Levy is working with the city to test members of the homeless for Covid-19, an effort that could save thousands of lives.

“There are 2,100 chronically homeless people in Detroit, and we must make sure they don’t get duly afflicted with coronavirus as a virtue of residing in shelters together,” Levy says. The city is reopening temporary shelters and setting up 500 more beds across the facilities that will allow for social distancing. Black people are also disproportionately represented in the country’s prison system; police targeting leads black people to be incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. Add the conditions of confinement — lack of access to basic necessities like clean water, soap, and ventilation — to already existing health conditions, and it’s no surprise that incarcerated people are more susceptible to sickness. In New York City’s Department of Corrections facilities, 286 inmates have tested positive for Covid-19, and on Sunday, New York City’s first inmate died at Rikers Island prison, according to BuzzFeed News. He was awaiting a hearing on a parole violation.

According to Brendan Saloner, a health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins, the result of a widespread outbreak in jails and prisons has catastrophic consequences. “The nature of outbreaks in prison is that once they set off, it’s hard to contain,” he tells Vox. “The pandemic is only magnifying structural inequality, and we won’t ever understand the true magnitude of what’s happening if we don’t include incarcerated populations.”

Some states, like California and even New York, have begun releasing people incarcerated for nonviolent crimes to reduce spread in the pandemic. However, advocates say more could be done, such as releasing those who are more vulnerable to the virus, including people who committed violent crimes but are no longer a threat because they are sick and old. Ultimately, advocates say, bold reforms at both the state and federal levels need to be taken, and taken quickly, if correctional facilities want to slow the escalating number of cases not only among the incarcerated but among those who work in prisons and jails, too.

What comes next will probably further disenfranchise the black community

With a lack of data comes a solid lack of certainty. Many health and civic leaders agree that a disaggregation of race and other demographic information would help health care professionals better treat patients as the country ventures through what is said to be its worst week yet in the pandemic.

“We are in unprecedented times right now so we need the data released immediately,” says Blackstock. “We know it will confirm what we are predicting. We need the information to determine exactly how to respond to the demands of surges of sick people.” There’s worry that we will get the details when it’s far too late. Or worse, even when we get the information we need, it might serve as a ticket for the rest of the country to move on.

In Memphis, Tennessee, community activist and pastor Earle Fisher is certain that the city will be ground zero for understanding how poverty leads to outsized health disparity, particularly in the face of a pandemic. But Memphis and Shelby County leadership have not displayed an interest in releasing detailed information on Covid-19 testing or in ramping up testing for residents at large, according to Fisher. “We’re leaving out a vulnerable community and subjecting them to even more deaths,” he says.

Past pandemics like the 1918 influenza outbreak and subsequent H1N1 seasons show that black people have a higher risk of dying when they contract widespread disease. In 1918, for example, even though black people had lower morbidity and mortality overall, they still had higher fatality rates. And though black people had lower rates of influenza, whites still advanced racist theories about black people being infectious disease threats. Then there is HIV, which has also disproportionately affected black Americans in recent years, a statistic that is rarely talked about.

Fisher recited an age-old saying in the black community: “If white America has a cold, black America has the flu. If white America has Covid-19, what do we have?” The question stumps other leaders, too.

Blackstock and Perry see some validity in asking, if white America recovers and moves on, will the country care about a pandemic that continues to terrorize black communities? Will the president or the CDC continue to hold press conferences once white people are mostly in the clear?

“Black people have been suffering from a number of epidemics and no one batted an eye,” Perry says. “The status of the country has always been measured by the status of white people.” While Blackstock said it’s still too early to make any definitive predictions, she says “those who do care have to be as vocal as possible — we have families and generations of people who call these communities home.” The burden is once again on black people to demand information and related actions that will save their lives. RANIVAN Policing in the U.S. vs. policing in the U.K. and Europe: How racism plays a role CBS News, August 24, 2020

Public scrutiny over racist police encounters with Black people in the U.S. has intensified since the killing of George Floyd. However, according to the most senior Black officer ever to serve on a British police force, the problem is not uniquely American.

"If you're Black, you are five times more likely to be stopped by the police. You're more likely to be charged with a criminal offense," former Chief Constable Michael Fuller told CBS News' Holly Williams, citing data not from the U.S., but from the United Kingdom.

Fuller said he encountered racism in his own law enforcement career, though it was often unspoken.

"They would give me the dirty jobs to do… delivering death messages where relatives had died, searching dead bodies that are being pulled out of the river," he recounted. "Ultimately, I went for promotion and managed to get through some 12 ranks to get to the top of the police service."

On the way to the top, Fuller said he confronted racism as best he could, though he acknowledged it was "very difficult."

"I was uncompromising in tackling racism, in that I would call people out where I could. But sometimes the people being racist were my bosses," he said.

Allegations of police racism are an international issue, but when compared to Europe, any interaction with U.S. police is much more likely to be deadly. American police forces shot over 1,000 people dead in 2019, compared with three in the U.K. and none in Denmark or Switzerland.

"If you've got a highly weaponized society, you've got the police highly weaponized, it is a disastrous cocktail," Fuller said. British police do not routinely carry guns, and under European human rights law, they are only allowed to use deadly force if "absolutely necessary."

Last month, London's Metropolitan Police issued an apology to champion track star Bianca Williams, who was handcuffed by officers in front of her partner and son. Williams claims the incident was racially motivated, but police said it was a routine stop-and-search in a high crime area.

Fuller noted that while some European countries train police officers at national academies for as long as three years, the U.S., in contrast, has no national standards. In many states, training lasts just a few months.

This week, three Black teenagers who were seeking help were detained by police at gunpoint after they said a man with a knife chased them, sparking outrage in their California community and around the country.

"Police officers have tremendous power," Fuller said. "What you want is for the police officers to use that discretion wisely, but in a way that demonstrates they're non- discriminatory. And I think the better educated they are in these issues... the more likely they are to make good decisions."

JULIE Black Venture Capitalists Confront Silicon Valley’s Quiet Racism bloombergquint.com, by Nico Grant, August 24, 2020

At a time when the U.S. has been thrust anew into conversations about racial inequality, many Black venture capitalists say they are grappling with their role and responsibilities in a high-stakes industry that generates extraordinary wealth for a select few and helps determine which tech businesses succeed.

Interviews with Black VCs illuminate the difficulty of making a difference in a tech industry that often refuses to acknowledge the problem; the frustrations of seeking to be recognized for their work irrespective of race; and the internal conflict many face over whether they’re doing enough to create opportunities for others like themselves.

The U.S. population is 13% Black, and just 4% of the VC industry is African-American, according to 2018 data from the National Venture Capital Association—compared with 3% two years earlier. NVCA estimates that 3% of the influential general partners, who lead investments, are African-American. Even when these VCs successfully boost the founders from other underrepresented groups in their portfolio, structural forces keep funding for Black entrepreneurs stubbornly low.

Tyson Clark at Alphabet Inc.’s GV, one of the most prominent Black VCs in Silicon Valley, wondered whether he was failing to push his colleagues to support more Black startups because they didn’t fit neatly into the archetype of a successful investment. He has backed two Black founders out of his 11 investments in the past five years, but said he must do better to make a difference. Reflecting on his role in Silicon Valley caused intense soul- searching in the past two months.

“Have I been so complicit that I’ve traded success for not making a difference?” Clark pondered. “Humbly, there are a group of people in my position who want to do something, but feel like we don’t have enough power yet to be influential on this topic. It’s painful for all of us to feel this helplessness.”

Clark thought he had been doing the right thing. He attended tech events hosted by his Black fraternity and judged pitches from budding entrepreneurs. He toured Southern states with other VCs to visit historically Black colleges and build new connections. He invested outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, in places where the startup scene is more ethnically diverse.

But those steps can’t demolish structural forces standing in the way of Black entrepreneurs -- reduced access to capital relative to White counterparts, fewer network connections in the tech industry because of the schools they attended and jobs they previously held. Racism in this setting is particularly insidious, Clark said, because it’s invisible to perpetrators and bystanders.

Even though some of his colleagues funded startups created by African-Americans, Clark said it took him years to feel comfortable in his job and he didn’t have the confidence to try to persuade his partners to invest in some companies led by Black founders, for fear they may have considered them too risky.

“I thought I was too junior to bring on something that didn’t fit the pattern recognition,” he said, meaning an investment that didn’t look like previous bets. “I knew what was the easy sell and what wasn’t.”

Sydney Sykes, a former VC at New Enterprise Associates, said she remembers the pernicious way race seemed to get in the way of otherwise good deals during her short, once-promising career in venture capital, and how no one acknowledged it.

When Sykes introduced talented Black entrepreneurs to her White colleagues at NEA and in her time as an angel investor since, she said she’d feel the “chemistry in the room” sour. The White investors always used the same reason for turning down the startup: they “just couldn’t get excited.”

“You’re always left wondering if that person didn’t get another meeting because they were Black,” she said. Sykes, who left the industry in 2018, co-founded BLCK VC, a nonprofit advocacy group pushing firms to double the number of Black investors to 400 individuals by 2024. Sykes and other VCs say Black-led startups don’t gain backing because, in general, they haven’t achieved category-defining successes and are viewed as too much of a risk. These types of companies are less likely to have a family-and-friends round when starting a business, which totals about $150,000 on average, and often can’t break through without funding from VCs.

“You feel you have to be a model minority, the best Black person,” said Sykes, who now works at a fashion startup in San Francisco. “If you mess it up, you ruin it not just for you but for everyone who looks like you.”

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police and the renewed attention on the Black Lives Matter movement, at least one Black VC decided it was time to speak up to the firm’s White and Asian partners about race. The person, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations, questioned in a videoconference the paltry number of Black-founded companies the firm had backed and recommended they fund these startups at an earlier stage to make up for the absent family-and-friends round. The partners responded by saying Silicon Valley didn’t have a systemic racism problem -- pointing to the success of Asian immigrants in the industry -- so the firm didn’t need to do anything proactive to help Black entrepreneurs.

The Black VC explained how the African-American experience differed from that of immigrants and, gradually, the partners committed to investing in startups earlier. But they’re trying to work with other venture firms to find a systematic approach to the issue, so little has changed so far.

A number of VC firms have said they want to create a more inclusive industry and have taken concrete steps, like unveiling standalone funds focused on people of color. In early June, SoftBank Group Corp. created the $100 million Opportunity Growth Fund to invest in Black- and Latinx-founded companies, and Andreessen Horowitz unveiled the Talent x Opportunity Fund, which started with $2.2 million in donations from the firm’s partners. Ben Horowitz and his wife, Felicia, pledged to match as much as an additional $5 million in donations.

“We should be well beyond this idea of separate but equal,” Monique Woodard, a VC who created Cake Ventures, which puts money into early-stage companies, said during a videoconference hosted by BLCK VC. “But in venture it seems as if we are moving right back there. Black entrepreneurs don’t need a separate water fountain. You have to fix the systemic issues in your funds that keep Black founders out and keep you from delivering better returns.”

That videoconference, held June 4, was an opportunity for Black VCs to convene, discussing their collective grief over the losses of Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, and their frustration about racial problems in their industry. There was an audience of 4,000 people that tuned in, including White VC workers and Black tech employees.

Shauntel Garvey, who co-founded Reach Capital, also has been reflecting on her VC firm’s lack of investments in Black entrepreneurs. Garvey is conducting an audit to find out why that is, looking back at the times a Black founder met with her or one of her non-Black partners to see why they passed on an investment and how the startup has fared since Reach turned them down.

Garvey remembers speaking with Ruben Harris in July 2018 when he was looking for funding for his startup, Career Karma, which helped helped match computer-coding bootcamps and applicants who want to become software engineers. Garvey turned Harris down. She didn’t like the business model, in which Career Karma was paid only when there was a successful match, and the valuation of the Y Combinator-backed startup was a bit steep for its progress, she thought.

But Garvey said, in retrospect, she realized she hadn’t spoken with Harris enough about the broader vision for his company. Some Black founders are reluctant to over-promise results, she said, so they focus more on the current states of their companies.

“I undervalued him as a founder,” Garvey said. “If you believe in the product and secret sauce, the business model takes a back seat. If he has a vibrant community there, then there are different ways to monetize that. I did not do that work the first time.”

Career Karma ended up raising a $1.5 million seed round with Kapor Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Upfront Ventures and others. (Willett Advisors, the investment arm for the personal and philanthropic assets of Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, is an investor in Y Combinator startups.)

Garvey wondered whether she had been holding founders “to a higher standard, knowing it’s going to be a reflection of me and a reflection of the whole ecosystem.” She now sees it as her responsibility to explore a startup’s long-term vision with founders, to make a fairer judgment on whether it can grow to be a big business.

While Garvey was reviewing her past decisions, Harris reached out to provide her an update on the business and gauge Reach's interest. The racial reckoning and her audit prompted Garvey to look again. Harris had expanded beyond coding bootcamps, letting his company tap into a bigger market.

VCs need to take more risks on Black entrepreneurs, she said, because “nine out of 10 startups fail anyway. So you can’t expect one out of two Black-led startups to excel. You have to get that 10.”

Charles Hudson has had better success investing in Black-led companies than many Silicon Valley VCs. Hudson is the sole partner at Precursor Ventures, a San Francisco- based firm he founded. All three full-time staffers and an intern at the firm are Black.

In Precursor’s first early-stage fund, with a size of $15.3 million, 18 of 83 investments went to Black founders. In the second fund, worth $31.1 million, Hudson has made 20 such investments of 93.

“If you’re a Black founder, you’re welcome here,” Hudson said. “If you look at the investing team at most places, you won’t see a single Black face.”

Hudson has been conscious about taking risks on entrepreneurs across the U.S. rather than clustered in tech hubs. Still, his skin color has meant that when he’s fundraising, some institutional investors assume the goal of his fund is to uplift Black and Brown entrepreneurs -- even though it isn’t.

“I met limited partners and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re a diversity fund.’ Nothing in my deck says we’re explicitly prioritizing diversity. They meet you, they see you and they instantly jump to that.”

Black VCs with their own funds have more latitude to take significant action on race than ones at larger firms with many White partners.

Adeyemi Ajao raised $137 million at his firm Base10 Partners in 2018 and it was seen as a triumph for representation. It was the largest war chest ever compiled by a VC firm with a Black co-founder.

Ajao moved to the U.S. 12 years ago from Spain, where his Spanish mother and Nigerian father mostly raised him. For years, he said he didn’t fully understand the legacy of racial dynamics in the U.S., and while he sought to back a wide variety of founders from underrepresented groups such as women and Latinx people, he didn’t think it was his job to focus on the number of Black entrepreneurs in his portfolio. Base10’s first fund invested in two startups with Black founders out of 23 companies.

Upon his reflection after Floyd’s death, Ajao decided to try to make tech more inclusive for Black people because of the group’s “structural disadvantages” in the U.S. and the untapped economic potential of such a strategy. He unveiled a plan to invest 1% of the firm’s profits and partners’ performance fees to groups seeking to diversify the tech industry, when announcing a second fund valued at $250 million. He hopes that VCs of all races will make similar commitments and consider what else they can do to help solve tech’s race problem, which will take many years and all participants, he said.

“The problem is on the VCs,” he said. “We cannot deflect blame to anyone else. So we are saying, we want to invest in more Black founders so here’s what we’re going to do. My hope is, that is the stance most people will take.”

“How many other Black VCs are out there at funds as big as GV who are general partners?” Clark said. “Not many. So if not me, who? If I’m not powerful enough, then who really is?” THOMAS Responding To Voter Suppression: Understanding Manipulated Elections – OpEd eurasiareview.com, by Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers, August 24, 2020

Voter suppression in the 2020 election has become a topic of great concern. In reality, voter suppression has been part of US politics since the founding of the country. The oligarchs who wrote the US Constitution enabled voter suppression by not including the right to vote in it and only allowing white male property owners to vote, suppressing the votes of 94 percent of the population.

Five of 16 states had white-only voting in 1800 and after 1802, every new state, free or slave, except for Maine banned Black people from voting. In 1807, New Jersey, which originally gave voting rights to “all inhabitants,” excluded women and Black men from voting. Maryland banned Jewish people from its polls until 1828. After the Civil War expanded voting rights to Black men, the Black vote was suppressed through intimidation campaigns and Jim Crow laws. After decades of protests, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and voting by Black people increased, but in recent years suppression tactics are reducing that vote.

This year, the Republican Party and President Trump are working to suppress the votes of Black people, the working class, immigrants, and others, especially by attacking the US Postal Service to decrease mail-in voting.

The Democrats are also guilty of voter suppression as they do all they can to keep third parties off the ballot. Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins explains party suppression is voter suppression because millions of people refuse to choose between two Wall Street-funded candidates and so they don’t vote. Sanders-Democrats also point to an unfair nomination process resulting in Joe Biden becoming the nominee.

Voter Suppression Today

Voter suppression has gotten more sophisticated in recent elections through the massive de-registering of voters, abuse of voter ID laws, cutting the number of polling places in minority communities, felony disenfranchisement, not counting provisional ballots, and voter intimidation at the polls. In 2020, the battle over mail-in ballots and the Post Office is also a major issue.

On March 30, President Trump said in an interview on FOX, if there was high voter turnout “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Trump was explaining why he opposed more money being spent to help states conduct the 2020 election during the pandemic. More recently, Trump floated the idea of delaying the November 3 election, an idea rejected by even Republican allies and something he does not have the power to do.

Removing people from voter registration lists has become a common practice. A Brennan Center study found that almost 16 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. Jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination, which are no longer subject to pre-clearance after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, had a median purge rate 40% higher than other jurisdictions.

Voter ID laws have become a key tool in voter suppression. The ACLU reports that: “Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls. Seven states have strict photo ID laws.” Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification resulting in ID laws reducing voter turnout by 2-3 percentage points, according to the US Government Accountability Office.

This year voter intimidation is making a comeback. Trump’s response to the closing night of the DNC was to tell Fox News that on election day he’s going to send law enforcement, sheriffs, US Attorneys, and Attorney Generals to polling locations. While Trump has no control over sheriffs and police, making the threat is part of an intimidation campaign.

Republicans are recruiting an estimated 50,000 volunteers to act as “poll watchers” in November, part of a multi-million-dollar effort to control who votes. This campaign includes a $20 million fund for legal battles as well as the GOP’s first national poll-patrol operation in nearly 40 years.

Poll watchers in some states can challenge the eligibility of voters. After the 1981 election, Democrats sued over voter intimidation and a federal “consent decree” stopped the practice but the decree was allowed to expire at the end of 2017, and a judge declined to extend it in 2018.

The ACLU points to some of the impacts of these voter suppression efforts and how they are targeted at people of color and youth, writing:

Seventy percent of Georgia voters purged in 2018 were Black. Across the country, one in 13 Blacks cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws. One-third of voters who have a disability report difficulty voting. Only 40 percent of polling places fully accommodate people with disabilities. Counties with larger minority populations have fewer polling sites and poll workers per voter. Six in ten college students come from out of state in New Hampshire, the state trying to block residents with out of state drivers’ licenses.

Voting during the pandemic, mail-in voting and the Postal Service

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new issues for voting in 2020. More people will be voting by mail. Last week, the Democrats in the House passed $25 billion in emergency funding for the Post Office. While this is insufficient, it is opposed by President Trump. Senator Mitch McConnell may not take the issue up in the Senate, saying it is too much money and other COVID-19 relief proposals should be included in it.

Trump is also trying to undermine the ability of the Post Office to deliver ballots on time. Trump crony, Louis DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General, is a prominent Trump donor, deputy finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, and the former lead fundraiser for the Republican National Committee. DeJoy donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Party and its candidates, so he is heavily invested in a Republican electoral victory.

DeJoy fired people with experience running the Postal Service on August 17, and twenty- three postal executives were reassigned or displaced in a new organizational structure that centralizes power around DeJoy. He stopped overtime work and mail sorting machines and mailboxes have been removed. As a result of public pressure, he says he stopped further removals until after the election, although people are reporting finding locked mail boxes.

The Democrats, who have been complicit with the attack on the Post Office, are paying attention now that it is affecting the election. Unfortunately, their proposal falls far short of the $75 billion investment needed by the Postal Service, and doesn’t address the long term problems created by the Congress and president in 2006 when they required the Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of pension and healthcare costs.

We need to act now because they are likely to ignore the efforts at privatization of the postal service after November. We need to demand more money for the Post Office and insist on the end of any privatization of the Postal Service so it remains a public agency serving the public good. The so-called ‘Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act‘ of 2006, which was designed to weaken the Post Office, must be repealed. And, the Post Office should be given greater power to provide other services like a Postal Bank for the millions of people who do not have access to banking services.

Showing up by protesting for the Postal Service gives postal workers the power to defy the Postmaster General and speak out. Postal workers in Washington State are refusing to take mail sorting equipment offline. Postal workers have been ordered not to speak to the press so people are not aware how bad the situation is. If workers see the public is on their side, they may have the courage to speak or anonymously leak documents to the media.

2020 Highlights Mirage Democracy The failure of US democracy is on display in the 2020 election but these are long-term problems. The United States is not a democracy; it is a plutocracy. Elections give people the illusion of choice when in reality the power elites are the ones who choose the candidates, as we described in this 2013 article.

Some people choose not to participate in the elections for this reason. Others choose to use the election to make a point by rejecting the corporate candidates and voting for third- party candidates who support their positions, such as national improved Medicare for All, acting on climate change, ending police violence and imperialism, and more or only voting in down-ballot races. If you choose to participate in the election, here are some actions you can take to protect your vote:

If you want to vote in 2020, order your mail-in ballots, if they are available, as soon as possible. In our state, Maryland, the Board of Elections warns they may run out of ballots. Know your rights. It is illegal to intimidate or coerce voters. If you experience it or see it happening to someone else, record it by video or in writing to poll workers. If you are told you are not registered, demand a provisional ballot. Due to Voter-ID laws, each state has different requirements. Understand what is required in your state, and come prepared. Finally, it is important to remember when we are inundated with a constant focus on the 2020 elections that the power of the people does not derive from elections. Our task is to build people’s power outside of elections.

People have the power to make the country ungovernable. Both parties are ignoring issues supported by a majority of the people, including, improved Medicare for all, a robust Green New Deal, a guaranteed basic income, a tax on the wealth to shrink the wealth divide, cuts to the bloated military budget, free college and vocational education and confronting the climate crisis, which is already wreaking havoc across the nation.

The Occupy Movement, the Fight for $15, the student debt movement, labor strikes and the uprising against police violence show people have power. We have only begun to scratch the surface of our potential. We have to build the power to rule from below, no matter who is elected president in 2020. YOANN Americans are still figuring out how to talk about multiracial identity. Kamala Harris’s nomination is a perfect example. The Washington Post, by Sonia Rao, August 19, 2020

At a public event early last year, a reporter asked Kamala Harris how she describes herself. “Did you read my book?” Harris responded. “I describe myself as a proud American.” It is the root of the California senator’s identity as someone born to parents who emigrated from Jamaica and India, the connective thread between her becoming the first Black woman and first Asian American on a major-party ticket.

“Her story is America’s story,” presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said last week, appearing alongside Harris at their first joint campaign address. But people of mixed racial or ethnic backgrounds often have to deal with others stumbling over their American stories. Harris, who has said she identifies with her Indian heritage and with being Black, told The Washington Post last year that people have struggled to categorize her since she first ran for office: “My point was: I am who I am,” she said. “I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”

Harris’s selection brought about a flurry of reactions to the ticket’s historic nature. News media waffled between descriptors, one anchor referring to Harris as Black moments before another would clarify that she is Asian American, too. Some named both right off the bat, while others played it safe with “woman of color,” the broadest of terms. All are accurate, but suggest there is room for Americans to expand their views of racial identity.

People can be “racially illiterate” when it comes to multiracial identity, said Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a professor at Northwestern University specializing in African American and Asian American studies. Anyone looking for proof need only rewind the clock to Barack Obama’s run for president. Obama, born to a White mother and Black father, dealt with relentless questioning of his identity — “was he Black enough?” some asked early in his campaign — and was subject to racist, false “birther” claims from his political opponents. Similar attacks have already been launched on Harris by President Trump and his supporters. Part of what differentiates the conversation on Harris from the discussion of Obama’s racial identity is her lack of White parentage.

“Black and White is definitely read as the primary binary in which race relations are understood,” Sharma said. “If you’re a dual-minority biracial — Mexican and Filipino, Black and Indian — Whiteness gets decentered. But there’s still a tussle happening, because this reflects Black and Asian relations in the United States.”

While Harris has never shied away from discussing her Indian heritage, the dominant narrative of her career has been that of a Black woman rising through political ranks. Part of the reason begins at home. The senator wrote in her memoir about how her Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan, made sure to raise her daughters as "confident Black women" even after divorcing their father, Donald Harris. Gopalan understood that, as a family friend told The Post's Robin Givhan last year, "in the '60s, you were either Black or White. There was no real distinction between Caribbean or Indian."

Harris attended Howard University, known to many as the “Black Harvard” and to the senator, she told Givhan, as an institution that “very directly influenced and reinforced — equally important — my sense of being.” She joined the oldest historically Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. These experiences were central to Harris coming into her identity as a Black woman, and they resonate with many Black Americans who were proud to see one of their own become a contender for the nation’s second-highest office. Such credentials give Harris a “sense of authenticity,” said Tasha Philpot, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “In an era with such segmented voting blocs, and having Black women as one of the most consistent and strongest voting blocs, it certainly helps Kamala Harris, having that stamp of approval.”

Glynda Carr, chief executive of Higher Heights, an organization dedicated to supporting Black women in politics, described this as a “culture shift moment.”

“Just as many of us are daughters of the Chisholm legacy,” she said, “in the history books, you will see a generation of leaders that will tie back to this moment of Kamala Harris.”

There can be a danger in placing too much stock in symbolic representation, cautioned Daryl Harris, a Howard political science professor. It is just one facet of a politician, he said, and can be a “completely unsatisfying dimension if the bacon is not brought home” in the form of policies that serve a community well. Some liberals have criticized Harris’s record as a prosecutor, for instance, claiming that she upheld anti-Black structures.

But her identity remains significant, and voters pay attention to it “whether they want to admit it or not,” Harris said. Philpot noted that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women suffrage, and 55 years since the Voting Rights Act, aimed at ridding the process of anti-Black discrimination.

“Kamala Harris is someone people can really get behind and be energized by,” Philpot said. “She represents groups that haven’t typically been represented at this level.”

Indian Americans count themselves among those groups, though that aspect of Harris's background has been overlooked in the political sphere to the extent that many seemingly learned of it last week. Part of this could be because of how the senator presents herself, said Pawan Dhingra, a professor of American Studies at Amherst College. Harris tends not to delve into her Indian heritage extensively but has touched on it before, writing in her memoir about the influences of her mother and progressive grandfather, explaining the Sanskrit meaning of her first name ("lotus") and making dosas in a video with Mindy Kaling.

While the video with Kaling only skimmed the surface of the senator’s Indian roots, it resonated with viewers who saw their own family habits in Harris and Kaling’s stories of storing spices in Taster’s Choice jars. “You are Indian, and I don’t know that everybody knows that,” remarked Kaling, whose father is from Tamil Nadu, the same Indian state as Harris’s mother.

“It bothered me that she would get read only as Black,” Dhingra said. “Biographically, not just ancestrally, it’s not accurate. . . . I think it does kind of keep us from embracing the fact that people can be multiracial, and that it’s something meaningful.”

While Dhingra said he hopes it is “painfully obvious” why African Americans are the dominant group mentioned in discussions of race in the United States, he chalked some of the dynamic of those surrounding Harris’s dual heritage to general confusion over how to categorize Indian Americans in the first place. People of South Asian descent, like Harris, aren’t always seen as Asian American the way those with East Asian roots tend to be. It wasn’t until 1980 that “Asian Indian” became a category on the U.S. Census, which only offered an option to self-identity with multiple races beginning in 2000.

Harris also challenges division sown by the model minority myth, which values Asian Americans’s proximity to Whiteness over solidarity with other people of color. She represents “a different kind of Asian American,” Dhingra said. “One who is really powerful . . . who believes in coalition-building across minority groups to achieve change. There’s a long history of that in Asian America, but it’s not the dominant narrative.” He pointed to Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama fighting alongside Malcolm X.

As such, Harris’s Indian heritage has been increasingly discussed relative to her being Black. Beyond initial reactions of pride — and relief among liberals who were glad to see a South Asian politician who “isn’t another Bobby Jindal or Nikki Haley,” a few academics noted — some Indian Americans have taken Harris’s historic achievement as an opportunity to reckon with anti-Blackness within the community.

Harris’s racial makeup evokes the connection between Black Americans fighting for their rights and those who resisted colonialism overseas, according to Shilpa Davé, an American studies professor at the University of Virginia. During the joint address with Biden, Harris recalled how her immigrant parents met in Oakland while participating in a civil rights demonstration, the kind to which they’d later bring her along.

“Her narrative harkens back to the possibilities of what America can bring,” Davé said. “In this time especially, I think people want to see that hope again.” ADAM Medina City Council declares racism against Blacks a public health crisis cleveland.com, August 25, 2020, by Alyssa Alfano

MEDINA, Ohio -- City Council has approved a resolution declaring that racism against African-Americans is a public health crisis.

The largely symbolic resolution has been a topic of discussion for the past several council meetings.

On Monday (Aug. 24), council heard from several residents and discussed the wording of the resolution, which focuses on how racism affects the Black community.

Everybody was mostly in support of the idea behind the resolution, but some were concerned about the wording. In the end, council voted to approve the resolution as is, with Councilman-at-large Paul Rose abstaining.

Among those supporting the resolution was the Rev. Arthur Ruffin, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Medina. He has been active this summer with protests, rallies and community dialogue in the wake of the George Floyd killing by Minneapolis police in May.

“I believe all of us, not only here in Medina but, I think, wherever we live, realize that racism takes place,” Ruffin said.

“I don’t think it’s a question of what ethnicity is being displayed or racist against. I do believe that, in the time we live now, Black lives is the number one on the chart,” he said.

“I would never stand here and say there’s not another race that’s being discriminated against,” Ruffin said. “As long as we live, everybody is going to be discriminated against.

“But there comes a time when there is one more than others and, right now, it is the Black lives, it is the African-Americans, and I don’t believe that it’s an insult to any other race.”

Ruffin had a role in the creation of the resolution, and has also connected with others in recent months as social justice issues have risen to the forefront in the United States. He said that one thing he has learned during this process is that dialogue is very important in the city of Medina.

“How can we write these (resolutions) to protect the city of Medina?” Ruffin said he asked himself during the process.

Pam Miller had also had a role in helping council create the resolution. Miller is a member of the Medina Diversity Project and a former City Council member.

She was in favor of the resolution, but suggested a title change.

“I would like to applaud council for considering the resolution against racism on tonight’s agenda,” said Miller.

“It is a testament to the city’s ongoing commitment to supporting diversity and your willingness to demonstrate to the community that we are a city that is welcoming and is concerned about the wellbeing of all who live and work here, regardless of the color of their skin.”

She said the resolution expresses concern over racism faced by African-Americans, but that it also addresses the treatment of all people of color and does not limit its focus to one group.

“I would respectfully suggest that the title of this resolution be ‘A Resolution Declaring Racism A Public Health Crisis’ rather than the more limiting title on your agenda,” Miller said.

Rose was the main council member with concerns about the wording of the resolution.

“We heard from several residents, and I want to thank each and every one of you who addressed us. Very good commentary; I appreciate it,” said Rose.

He suggested that council take into consideration residents’ suggestions to change the wording of the resolution.

“I would be happy to work on a committee with Pam and Pastor Ruffin to work on the wording that they think would be best for the community,” Rose said.

Councilman-at-large Bill Lamb disagreed with the request to change the wording.

“We have reviewed it. We have discussed it. … As someone said, it’s a feel-good resolution. Well, I feel good about the resolution,” said Lamb.

“It’s not enforceable, it’s not a law. It is a message, and it’s more about education, and I think that’s important,” he said. ADEL We’ll Never Fix Systemic Racism by Being Polite scientificamerican.com, by Aldon Morris, August 3, 2020

Contrary to the sanitized version we sometimes hear about the civil rights movement, change was not achieved solely by protest marches and people singing “We Shall Overcome”

Polarized America agrees on one thing: that the current round of protests against racist police violence may indeed force real reform. President Trump thinks that protesters want to “overthrow the American Revolution” and that the National Guard and regular military must act decisively to “dominate the streets.” Black Lives Matter activists worry that these protests, like so many over the last few decades, will eventually subside, leaving temporary concessions, symbolic victories and an unaltered regime of systemic racism, along with unabated police violence.

History shows us that Trump has some reason for fear—not of an actual rebellion, but of a revolution that could overturn the racism that still pervades American society. Starting in the 1950s and continuing until the 1970s, civil rights protests overthrew the century-long and deeply embedded Jim Crow system in the South. How they accomplished this can offer important lessons for those intent on making Trump’s fears come true.

In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. succinctly summarized what he hoped the Birmingham campaign needed to accomplish in order to force durable structural change: “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

These words were written in the midst of a comprehensive and sustained struggle to create chronic disruption in the city of Birmingham. Large contingents of protesters marched into—and refused to leave—the major downtown department stores; conducted sit-ins in virtually every inch of public space; and clogged all the major thoroughfares in the city. No customers could enter stores, no goods could be delivered, and no business was being conducted. The effort by public safety commissioner Bull Connor to “dominate the streets,” using barbaric police violence against the demonstrators failed; instead, it provoked even more disruption and larger protests. And further arrests were impossible because every jail in the city was filled far beyond capacity.

As King had predicted while incarcerated for his participation in these protests, a crisis- packed situation was achieved. And as soon as the business leaders and political elite realized that the demonstrations were indeed chronic, they negotiated with movement leaders, agreeing to dismantle racial segregation in commerce and pubic services.

These crisis-packed protests led to the eradication of Jim Crow laws and “Whites Only” signs, and ultimately gave way to a regime change across the South. The creation of crisis-packed situations across the South resulted in the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As I write in my book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, contrary to the sanitized, rose-colored glasses version of history, change was not generated through nondisruptive marches of people singing “We Shall Overcome.” Whether the Black Lives Matter Movement creates meaningful and lasting change depends on the degree to which it disrupts regimes of racial inequalities and can sustain that disruption until the captains of white supremacy are ready to negotiate.

The movement has made a good start towards creating and sustaining crisis-packed situations across the United States. Triggered by the killing of George Floyd, mass demonstrations in every state and scores of other countries have been disrupting “business as usual” in virtually every realm of life. On the ground in countless cities, the movement has been replicating Martin Luther King’s Birmingham strategy, filling streets and shopping areas with protests that prevent access to stores, interfere with deliveries and drive away customers, creating—in the midst of the massive disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—a chronic crisis in business districts.

The protests are disrupting police routines—including their routine use of excessive violence against communities of color—and forcing them to restrain their wrongdoing in confronting legitimate protest. The confrontations between police and protestors have produced high-profile police misconduct that has led, as it did in Birmingham, to larger and more disruptive protests, promising to produce the chronic crisis that Martin Luther King prescribed as the necessary prerequisite for meaningful negotiation. The protests are dominating television, print and radio news cycles, and riveting attention on systemic racism. New voices and ideas are penetrating the media and disrupting the engrained loyalty to many of the cultural practices and symbols endorsing and enforcing racism. Protesters topple and remove Confederate monuments from public places, gaining, for the first time in decades, the attention of major media, and forcing government and private institutions to remove symbols of white supremacy from public display.

The protests are disrupting to America’s claim to moral leadership in global affairs, especially when President Trump advocates and acts—as he did in Lafayette Park in Washington—to “dominate the streets” with military attacks on those protesting violent police assaults. And, like Bull Connor’s efforts nearly 60 years ago, these attacks have failed, producing larger and more disruptive protests.

So far, the disruptions have yielded symbolic changes, including changing flags, replacing monuments, renaming buildings and streets, amending music lyrics, and altering our vocabulary of discourse. These changes are hard-won and important, but the eradication of these symbols of white supremacy does not ameliorate the material hardship of systemic racism. They are the first concessions granted, because they are not expensive. The toppling of Confederate statues can produce hurt feelings, humiliation and even homicidal rage among those who cherish the symbols of white supremacy, but they do not cost billions of dollars.

The structural changes that can reduce or eradicate systemic racism are altogether different from cultural changes. They require the reallocation of basic resources to equalize income and wealth, employment and underemployment, educational opportunities, incarceration rates and access to quality health care.

Structural changes are very expensive to implement, and they involve a zero-sum logic that places powerful institutions on the wrong side of history. They involve transferring money currently earmarked for police weaponry to underfunded schools in Black communities; slashing the military budget to finance low-income housing; and taxing obscene levels of executive pay and bloated corporate profits to make the minimum wage a living wage. To achieve structural changes, widespread and sustained social disruptions must continue until the powerful people and institutions whose funds are needed for equalization are ready to negotiate. This is a unique moment in American history. The crucial question is whether current or future white and Black leaders of these powerful institutions appreciate that chronic crisis can only be ended if they negotiate the changes needed to move the country towards the democratic ideals it put on paper centuries ago. There are glimmers of hope that the current protests have been sufficient to compel negotiations that have already led to some reforms (outlawing chokeholds, for example) and put more on the table for the first time, such as defunding the police. If these initial signs do not mature into systemic reform, then national crisis-packed disruption will be needed to move the United States towards a more perfect union. LOUBNA US Attorney General Denies Systemic Racism in Policing Human Rights Watch, by Gerry Johnson, July 30, 2020

United States Attorney General William Barr responded to questions from lawmakers this week in his first appearance before the House Judiciary Committee since taking office. Barr defended the Trump administration on a variety of issues, including its violent response to protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

At one point, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee asked Barr whether he “seeks to end” systemic racism in policing. Eventually the nation’s top law enforcement officer clarified his position: “I don't agree that there's systemic racism in police departments generally, in this country.”

Many pointed out that Barr’s denial of the existence of systemic racism flies in the face of information from nongovernmental groups, the Justice Department’s own data, and the lived experiences of Black people in the US.

It wasn’t the first time Barr has denied the systemic racism that people across the country have been protesting since May, in what might be the largest social movement in US history. In a June 7 interview on CBS’ Face the Nation, he said, “I think there's racism in the United States still but I don't think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist.”

Other top officials in the Trump administration have echoed this sentiment. Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf told ABC News in June, “I do not think that we have a systemic racism problem with law enforcement officers across this country."

National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson have all denied that systemic racism in law enforcement is a major issue.

Human Rights Watch has been documenting systemic racism in US policing for decades. In the 2019 report “Get on the Ground,” we shared evidence of rampant racial bias in the Tulsa Police Department – including a disproportionate rate of police violence against Black residents – which demonstrates the larger human rights problems with policing throughout the country.

US government officials, and particularly those tasked with protecting communities, should work to dismantle systemic racism in law enforcement, not deny its existence. Eradicating racism in policing would be a step toward ending serious injustices that keep bringing protesters to the streets. GUILHEM Jacob Blake’s Shooting Ignites Fresh Anti-Racism Protests In Kenosha And Other U.S. Cities Forbes, by Isabel Togoh, August 25, 2020

Fresh protests and clashes with police firing tear gas and pepper balls broke out overnight on Tuesday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting of Black man Jacob Blake on Sunday, with other U.S. cities, including Portland and Madison seeing renewed protests against police brutality and racism that have been ongoing for three months.

KEY FACTS

– After a first night of protests in front of the local police department, demonstrators stayed out past curfew demonstrating in front of the county courthouse following the shooting of Blake, 29, who is now in a stable condition in hospital. – Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers deployed the National Guard to the city on Monday after condemning the “excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites.” – The demonstrations continued into Tuesday morning, and while mostly peaceful, some business premises and cars were damaged and set on fire overnight by a small group of demonstrators, according to local eyewitness accounts. – Law enforcement officers in riot gear used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters, according to one demonstrator who spoke to Reuters, while local police set another curfew until 7a.m.. – The protests in Kenosha sparked a new wave of demonstration in several U.S. cities following months of anti-racism marches amid calls for police reform. – Portland, Oregon, where anti-racism marches have been ongoing since the death of George Floyd three months ago, police declared a riot overnight after the Portland Police Association building was set on fire, while hundreds of protesters marched downtown in Madison, Wisconsin, across New York City and in Minneapolis.

CHIEF CRITIC

Civil rights activist and lawyer Ben Crump, representing Blake’s family, condemned the incident in a statement, saying of the officers’ actions: “Their irresponsible, reckless and inhumane actions nearly cost the life of a man who was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident. It is a miracle he is still alive.”

Evers has been an outspoken critic of police brutality and shootings and on Monday tweeted: “We must rise to this movement and this moment and meet it with our empathy, our humanity, and a fierce commitment to disrupt the cycle of systemic racism and bias that devastates Black families and communities.”

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday called for an “immediate, full and transparent investigation” into Blake’s shooting.

KEY BACKGROUND

Blake was shot by a police officer on Sunday and had been left fighting for his life in an incident that was filmed and later shared on social media. In the clip, Blake, who appears unarmed, is seen walking towards the drivers side of an SUV after reportedly breaking up a fight, while three officers have their guns pointed towards his back. Blake is then seen entering the car before one officer grabs the back of his shirt and begins shooting while Blake’s sons were inside the car, according to Crump. Blake’s shooting came nearly three months after the death of George Floyd in police custody, which sparked global conversation about anti-racism and calls for an end to police brutality. The officers involved in Blake’s shooting have been placed on administrative leave, with protesters demanding they be arrested. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating the shooting.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

Governor Evers on Tuesday pushed local government to take up plans to reform policing that were first proposed months ago, and signed an executive order calling for a Special Session on policing accountability and transparency for the end of the month. The legislation is seeking to block “dangerous police practices”, invest in community violence interruption programs, and address excessive force in policing, among other proposals. Evers tweeted on Monday: “As our state reels from another attack against a Black man, as communities grieve and exercise their first amendment rights to demand justice, and as Jacob Blake fights for his life— we are reminded that racism is a public health crisis. There is no time to waste.”

TANGENT

Since Floyd’s killing on Memorial Day, several local police departments have moved to introduce reforms, including banning chokeholds, requiring all officers to wear body cams, and bias training. Democratic lawmakers have also sought to introduce the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in a bid to tackle racism, excessive force and misconduct in policing. CORENTIN NBA: Black Lives Matter and basketball’s role in discussion on racism BBC, by Boer Deng, July 31, 2020

When fans tuned in as the NBA season resumed at Disney World on Thursday, they were watching a game with a different feel.

On gleaming courts refashioned from ballrooms, in a basketball 'bubble' protected from coronavirus at the Florida resort, three words were stencilled alongside the enormous NBA logo: 'Black Lives Matter'.

Jerseys ordinarily emblazoned with well-known surnames - prized products sold to fans around the world - instead carried activist slogans: 'Justice Now', 'See Us', 'Hear Us', 'Respect Us', 'Love Us'.

The stands were empty and silent, but one message is already echoing loudly: the NBA wants to talk about racism.

Even before the shocking death of George Floyd triggered a national reckoning, sport had long been a vehicle for protesting against what has been called America's Original Sin.

Big moments - like the raising of a fist by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in a black power salute as the 'Star Spangled Banner' played at the 1968 Olympics - have become iconic images.

More recent gestures, like those sparked by Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand for the national anthem, have become a contentious point of political debate in the United States.

Race, as the respected San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich puts it, is the "elephant in the room in our country" - one that has come charging into the locker room on many occasions.

Of all sports, basketball is arguably the most obvious place for an unvarnished conversation. From its earliest days of being popularised as entertainment by the Harlem Globetrotters, to a sport still primarily played by black athletes and, in the US, watched largely by ethnic minority fans (two-thirds of those who tuned in during 2016-17 on US TV were non-white), race has figured prominently in the NBA.

The league says it will embrace the conversation head-on this time. But will it be any different than in the past - and will it make a difference?

Black players have always been aware of the thin line that separates them from a life of professional success and a far different fate.

As the youngest of three sons of a single mother growing up in inner city Philadelphia, Rasheed Wallace realised early that it would be hard going, as did everyone around him.

"The stakes are high, the stakes are real high," Wallace - who played for 2004 champions the Detroit Pistons - tells the BBC. Growing up poor and with few opportunities, sports are one of the few ways young black men, especially, can conceive of success.

"You see a lot of black parents getting on their kids, no matter [whether] it's football, basketball, baseball or any sport. It's like, 'look - this could be our ticket out of here'," he says.

"There's a standard you have to live up to. And for us, being black kids in the ghetto, we know that. That if I can make it, I got a chance to make it better for my family."

But that success does not change how the world views a black man when he is out of team uniform, Wallace believes.

Stephen Jackson was sitting on his living room sofa in late May when his phone began to light up with messages.

"I opened one from a close friend and it said: 'Do you see what they did to your twin in Minnesota?'," Jackson, a former San Antonio Spurs shooting guard, tells the BBC. He knew immediately what it meant. George Floyd had been a close friend for more than 20 years.

Floyd, an imposing Texan of over 6ft 8in who was 46 when he was killed, and Jackson, 42, looked so much alike they called themselves twins.

Today, one has an NBA championship ring and network sports podcast, and the other is dead.

"That could have been me," Jackson says. "I see myself down there because we look so much alike. I definitely see myself getting murdered in the same fashion by a cop."

Wallace agrees. "For sure, it could have been me. Especially with my attitude, the way I am."

He adds: "Now I think [race] is even more of a bigger burden. It's almost like it's a danger to stand up, to be black. It's a danger for you to be jogging in a neighbourhood. It's almost to the point where black men, we're the targets."

Floyd had been a star athlete in his younger days, and was recruited to play basketball for a university team. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in relation to his death. Three other officers were also charged with aiding and abetting murder. A tentative trial date has been set for March 2021.

For those like Jackson and Wallace, talent has kept misfortune at bay, but it is no guarantee of a happy outcome.

Asked who he would call basketball's greatest of all time, the legendary Kareem Abdul Jabbar did not name Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain or some other household star but Earl Manigault, a street ball player he knew in Harlem, New York as a youth.

Manigault is little known, for he never made it into the professional ranks. Seen as a prodigy on street courts, he instead went from an impoverished youth to difficult adulthood, becoming addicted to heroin and serving time for drug possession. "For every Michael Jordan, there's an Earl Manigault," Manigault once told the New York Times. "We all can't make it. Somebody has to fail. I was the one."

This is the realisation the rest of the country has been waking up to in 2020 - that the cards are stacked this way in black America. The NBA says it wants to bring it into further focus.

According to the league's 2020 handbook, a "central goal" of the season will be to use the NBA's platform "to bring attention and sustained action to issues of social injustice, including combating systemic racism, expanding educational and economic opportunities across the black community, enacting meaningful police and criminal justice reform and promoting greater civic engagement".

Some, including Jackson, are sceptical. This is not the first time the league has made public statements on racial justice.

In 2014, the league allowed players to wear T-shirts bearing the words 'I can't breathe' before matches. Eric Garner, a black man from New York, had uttered the words before he died in a police chokehold during an arrest.

The same year, commissioner Adam Silver ejected Donald Sterling, then owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, from the league after racist remarks he made about black players emerged.

The league publicly condemned Sterling and the team was sold.

But critics say that on the metrics that matter, nothing much has changed. Three-quarters of players in the NBA are black, but only one of the 30 teams has a black majority owner - Michael Jordan of the Charlotte Hornets. As recently as 2017, there were only three black general managers. Now there are six.

After retiring from playing, Wallace served as an assistant coach for the Pistons for a season. There were not many like him in the league.

"We don't get the quote-unquote 'white opportunities' - to be that GM, to be that head coach, assistant GM or partial owner, whatever. That's always up to the white people," he says.

It is another closed door yet to be fully opened - but needs to be, he says, so that youngsters in neighbourhoods like the one he grew up in can see they "don't have to just play basketball or football or baseball to become someone, to become a significant person in my community, or to even make a lot of money".

He adds: "That's the only outlet that we see as young black men: I gotta make it in basketball or football or baseball. And that's all that we're offered."

It would be hard to argue there has not been any progress.

The arc of basketball history has bent toward a bit more justice since the 1920s - when black athletes were forced to stay in segregated hotels while travelling through the American South - or even the 1980s, when white players were paid $26,000 more on average, despite poorer performances on the court.

Black players today have far greater power and command greater respect as public figures, plus the earnings to match. Playing for the Harlem Globetrotters in the 1930s was worth as little as $7.50 a game - $144 (£111) today - according to basketball historian Doug Merlino, but it was often a choice between that or a life of menial labour.

The current top five NBA players, all of whom are black, will make a collective $192m (£147m) on salaries alone over 2019-20.

There are those - fans, commentators and players themselves - who will see the limits of sports activism, or reject it altogether.

"Shut up and dribble" was the response from Laura Ingraham, a right-wing news anchor, when in 2018 LeBron James gave an ESPN interview criticising President Trump's attitudes on race.

That Ingraham did not have similar advice more recently for Drew Brees, a white American football player, to keep out of politics have, in many people's view, lent her previous comments a racial tinge. (Brees had made remarks rejecting the take the knee protest in his sport.)

But the sentiment is not unique to conservative news figures. On plenty of forums and comments below sports talk shows, are complaints from fans decrying the forays of their favourite court stars into politics.

Others see a heavy dose of hypocrisy in how players, former players and the league handle divisive political issues.

Jackson, for example, was engulfed in controversy after making anti-Semitic comments on social media.

He said his comments were taken out of context, but the episode extinguished a measure of sympathy for his racial activism among many. For some others, it nullified all goodwill entirely.

In a column for the Hollywood Reporter, Jabbar said Jackson's comments "undid whatever progress his previous advocacy may have achieved" by himself committing "the kind of dehumanising characterisation of a people that causes the police abuses that killed his friend, George Floyd".

He wrote of "a very troubling omen for the future of the Black Lives Matter movement," adding: "So too is the shocking lack of massive indignation."

More recently, Houston Rockets star James Harden drew fury when he was photographed wearing a mask with an emblem supporting 'Blue Lives Matter', a counter-organisation to Black Lives Matter that backs police.

Harden said he was not trying to make a statement - he just thought that the design 'looked cool' and covered his beard.

Detractors will say it proves sportsmen may not be the best agents of political messaging, and that it distracts from the experience fans are paying for with their time and money - a reprieve from politics.

And if politics should be allowed to enter in, where should the line be drawn? Another row was stirred up after Josh Hawley, the Republican Missouri Senator, wrote to Silver to complain the NBA is allowing Black Lives Matter-themed slogans, but not those supporting US troops, or backing free speech in Hong Kong.

The senator accused the NBA of "excusing and apologising for the brutal repression of the Chinese Communist regime".

"Free expression appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors' sensibilities," he chided.

But even if thorny questions remain, there is no doubt that the zeitgeist in America has shifted more broadly.

Poll after poll in 2020 shows that, unlike in the past, Americans are largely accepting the idea that racism exists and plays a part in the many social ills black people face in the country.

The "myth" that America's problems with race are largely overcome is being challenged, whether in basketball or in the greater society, believes Popovich, the 71-year-old Spurs coach.

"You can't go on and enjoy your life if you don't understand what has happened to so many," he says.

As for the league's race campaign, he is realistic about the prospect of influence.

"Fans are like any other group of people - some will get it, some will understand, some will just enjoy the games and move on," he says.

"Others will hopefully get involved in being part of the solution of being anti-racist, but that's a pretty individual thing."

After all, sport - as much a cultural product of the times as any entertainment - can only reflect the realities of its era. In 2020, the reality is that to be black is in itself to be political, and that position is not a choice, whether you are a basketball star or a bouncer.

The slogan stencilled beside the NBA logo is a reminder. The lives of so many of the men dribbling, jumping, performing feats of athleticism are black ones - and they matter not just on the court. ALEXIS Jacob Blake: Wisconsin sports teams lead calls for change after police shooting skysports.com, August 25, 2020

Green Bay Packers say shooting is 'a painful example of the significant challenges we face with respect to police brutality, systemic racism and injustices against black people'

Wisconsin's three major professional sports teams have led calls for change following the police shooting of a black man, which has sparked violent protests in the Milwaukee suburb of Kenosha.

A video that went viral on Sunday showed 29-year-old Jacob Blake being shot several times, apparently in the back, as he leaned into his SUV, while his three children sat inside the vehicle. Blake was hospitalised and in a serious condition on Monday.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice's Division of Criminal Investigation reported on Monday that the officers involved are now are on administrative leave.

The Green Bay Packers said in statement: "The Packers organisation was shocked to see the video that showed police shooting Jacob Blake multiple times in the back.

"We are hopeful Jacob makes a full recovery, and our thoughts are with his family.

"While we understand a full investigation of this terrible incident will take place, we are deeply troubled at what again has become a painful example of the significant challenges we face with respect to police brutality, systemic racism and injustices against black people.

"We continue to call for meaningful dialogue to affect the needed change we all desire."

Packers head coach Matt LaFleur called the video "disgusting" and "disturbing" as he lamented another incident just three months after the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers urged lawmakers to take a "hard look" at the changes required to address racism in the United States.

"There's a systemic problem, and until the problem is fixed, this is going to be an all-too- common sighting in this country," Rodgers said.

"It obviously hits home being not far from Green Bay. I'm not going to comment directly on the video until more facts come out, but obviously it's something where as a non-police officer, I think for a lot of us the natural question is - when is lethal force necessary?

"Again, I think that goes to a systematic problem that needs to be addressed at some point. There's antiquated laws that are prejudicial against people of colour in this state. I think the governor and the folks at the Capitol need to take a hard look at some of those systems that are in place."

Milwaukee Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer addressed the shooting in a statement to begin his pre-game news conference on Monday, hours before his team defeated the Orlando Magic 121-106 in Game 4 of their first-round playoff series.

"I'd just like to send out my thoughts and prayers to Jacob Blake and his family," Budenholzer said. "Another young black man shot by a police officer. We need to have change. We need to be better." The Bucks also issued a team statement that read, in part: "We stand firmly against reoccurring issues of excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging the black community.

"Our organisation will continue to stand for all black lives as we demand accountability and systemic change on behalf of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sylville Smith, Ernest Lacy, Dontre Hamilton, Tony Robinson, Joel Acevedo and countless other victims. We will work to enact policy change so these incidents no longer exist."

Milwaukee Brewers manager Craig Counsell, who wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt before his team's game on Monday with the Cincinnati Reds, said the violence needs to stop. "We have got a systemic problem that we need to address, and we all need to educate ourselves," Counsell said.

"Whether you agree or disagree with what I am saying, I think it is important that we continue to think, we continue to pursue policy change, we continue to act, because there is violence happening that just absolutely should not be happening. We cannot stay quiet about it."

The Brewers added in a statement: "The video of the shooting of Jacob Blake is deeply disturbing and raises many of the same questions we have been asking related to social injustice and racism in our communities.

"Once again, we are faced with images of a horrific incident that show what appear to be inexplicable and excessive force inflicted upon a black individual. It stirs emotions of anger, confusion and great sadness at a time when we need healing and lasting change. We pray for a full recovery for Jacob, and our thoughts are with his family and loved ones."

The shooting was also widely condemned outside Wisconsin.

Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James, speaking after his team's 135-115 victory over the Portland Trail Blazers on Monday night, said black people in the United States are "terrified".

"People get tired of hearing me say it, but we are scared as black people in America," James said. "Black men, black women, black kids, we are terrified. Because you don't know. You have no idea.

"You have no idea how that cop that day left the house. You don't know if he woke up on the good side of the bed. You don't know if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. You don't know if he had an argument at home with a significant other, if one of his kids said something crazy to him and he left the house steaming. Or maybe he just left the house saying today is going to be the end for one of these black people. "That's what it feels like. That's what it feels like. It just hurts. It hurts. It's just through the grace of God that he's still living. Like seven shots, close range and he's still alive? That's through the grace of God right there.

"My prayers go out to that family and that community, but I've got nothing nice to say about those cops at all. At all."

Donovan Mitchell, who scored 51 points to lead his Utah Jazz team to a win over the Denver Nuggets on Sunday night, tweeted a photo after the game with a caption that read, "Enough Is Enough Black Lives Matter"

And on Monday morning, he added an angry message: "THIS IS SICK AND IS A REAL PROBLEM WE DEMAND JUSTICE! IT IS CRAZY I DONT HAVE ANY WORDS BUT WTF MAN! THIS IS WHY WE DONT FEEL SAFE!!!!"

"Damn they shot that man 7 times.... why can't 3 officers subdue one male? I truly need answers," tweeted safety Tyrann Mathieu of the Kansas City Chiefs. AIMA There's a movement to get more schools to teach Black history and it's being led by teens CNN, by Scottie Andrew, August 25, 2020

Before a fateful trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, Alana Mitchell said she didn't feel like she was Black enough to own African American history as her own. But she found her place in history within its walls, along with a handful of her classmates from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College, a middle and high school in Denver, Colorado. During the high school's 2019 visit to the DC museum, students, including Alana were overcome with emotion. They felt heartbreak, anger and confusion. They were surrounded by the rich history of Black artists, politicians and activists at the museum, so why weren't they taught anything about them in class? "It's sad that we had to travel 1,000 miles away to learn about ourselves," Alana said. "And if we hadn't traveled 1,000 miles away, where would we be right now?" So Alana and her classmates made a demand to their school board -- require African American studies courses at every Denver public school, and teach Black history in every grade. So far, they've guaranteed a course at their own school with plans for expansion. It's a victory, if an incomplete one. In the thick of a nationwide reckoning with racism and a pandemic that's disproportionately killed Black Americans, students and faculty in local communities across the nation are demanding better Black history programs in schools. From lesson plans that lay bare the horrors of the Tulsa race massacre to literature units that center Black authors and Black experiences, young activists and their faculty supporters see an urgent need for education reform. Black history doesn't need to be relegated to a week in February or one unit in US history, proponents say. It doesn't even need to be restricted to social studies. US schools have failed in the past to support their Black students -- now is the time, activists say, to center young Black Americans in their own stories.

Some states require Black history but it's vaguely defined Black history lessons in public schools often hit familiar beats -- slavery, the end of slavery and the civil rights movement. Images of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks might adorn bulletin boards during Black History Month. After 2008, schools may have integrated President Barack Obama into lesson plans. But only a few states require public schools to teach Black history, including Florida, Illinois and, since 2002, New Jersey. Most of those states don't define what should be included in those lesson plans. Under New Jersey's "Amistad" law, named for the rebellion of enslaved Africans who rose up against their captors on a ship bound for the New World, all public schools in the state are required to teach Black history. The law requires schools in the state to teach the horrors of slavery, but districts decide how -- and what -- to teach. The students in the African American Culture Club at New Jersey's Cherry Hill High School East want more than just a week of programming during Black History Month. They want a yearlong course as a graduation requirement. "It's the same thing over and over," said Machayla Randall, rising senior at Cherry Hill East, of the Black History Month curriculum she is taught every year. "With other units, there's projects, and there's tests devoted just for those sections. But for Black history and African American history, there's nothing for that." The death of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests galvanized the Cherry Hill student group. Machayla said that while police brutality isn't a concern in her New Jersey suburb, she's often stereotyped or on the receiving end of microaggressions because she's Black. Those racist incidents may happen less often if their school does a better job of teaching about them, she said. Members of the group have had productive conversations with the school superintendent and the school board -- two members of the board told the Philadelphia Inquirer that an African American studies class would be a positive addition to district curriculum. District officials invited some members of the African American Culture Club to discuss curriculum with the district before the school year starts next month with a hybrid format. Machayla insisted, though, that they'll push district officials until they see results.

Students successfully demand a Black studies course

Educators who support bringing Black history into schools say visibility is critical for young Black students who haven't seen themselves in subjects before -- like Alana and her Denver classmates. If it weren't for the trip to the DC museum, the students said, they may not have ever known what they'd been missing. "That museum kind of broke us all down," said Jenelle Nangah, a student at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College who attended the trip to the DC museum. When the group of students came back from that trip, they formed a Black Student Association. Some members of that group, plus a few more students who weren't on the trip, decided they wanted to see Black history taught in school so younger students wouldn't have to travel across the country for the same experience. The students presented their dream class to their school board, which approved a plan for an African American studies course at the school with plans to expand it to other schools. Now, the course on Black history isn't only offered to only high schoolers -- middle schoolers at the school are learning about the Middle Passage and the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade, the students said. They're also learning about African empires and the cultural impact of Black artists and creators. Still, the expansion to other schools has been slow going. District officials told Denver magazine 5280 that developing a new curriculum takes time and resources that Denver public schools are short on, particularly during a pandemic. But the students have highlighted an undeniable need to do more and do better. "We are not just slavery, we are not just the civil rights movement," said Angel Amankwaah, who didn't attend the trip but helped lead the charge for an African American studies class. "We are not just MLK and Malcom X, we are the Mali empire and the Ghanian empire. We are Black Wall Street. We are the Harlem Renaissance. We are beautiful and amazing things."

Why it's important to teach Black Lives esse Hagopian knows a class on the history and contributions of Black people can be a success. He teaches one at a Seattle high school, and he's helping students with the Black Lives Matter at School coalition demand similar programs in their districts. History is taught through a Eurocentric, whitewashed lens, he said, one that reduces the contributions of Black people. The omission of Black history sends a negative message to Black students that can damage their self-worth. "When Black students don't see themselves in the curriculum, it's truly destructive to their sense of self," he said. "Oftentimes, the only time they see themselves in the curriculum is when slavery is being taught. And you cannot reduce our existence to the enslavement of African people." Too often, when history classes do cover the contributions and challenges of Black people, the accounts are inaccurate or romanticized, Hagopian said. In the instructional text he co- edited, "Teaching for Black Lives," Hagopian and his co-editors recall the time a Connecticut student found a passage in their history textbook that claimed enslaved people were often treated well by slave owners and were considered "family." Anything short of the full, ugly story of slavery and centuries of anti-Black racism is lying to students, he said. "All students benefit from learning about Black struggles," he said. "I think you can't tell this nation's history without telling the story of the relentless ongoing struggle for freedom that Black people have engaged with since we were brought to the shores in slave ships." Students at Cherry Hill East and Dr. MLK Jr. Early College agreed with Hagopian -- they want a full and accurate retelling of history, one that doesn't tip-toe around the horrors of slavery. "The whole textbook is one big euphemism," said Naomi Bereketab, of New Jersey's Cherry Hill East. "Nothing is explicitly told. And it's so dangerous because even though that might be an 'easier' way to approach students, it's not an easier way for us to live, because people don't recognize the truth."

What comes next

The group of Denver students had already successfully pleaded their case to their school board when George Floyd was killed and Black Lives Matter protests revived across the US. Their principal and adviser asked them not to protest for their safety, but they felt they needed to do something that would reach beyond their school bubble. So they started a podcast -- "Know Justice, Know Peace: DMLK's 'The Take.'" Once a week, the group discusses current events and social justice initiatives from their perspective as young Black women. They livestream the shows from their school's YouTube channel. It's important for schools and teachers to engage their students in discussions on the last few months of protests and violence against Black people, Hagopian said -- young people are already having conversations about these complex ideas online and with each other. Why not host difficult conversations in classrooms, too? The Denver students said they've been fortunate that their school has heard their concerns and found solutions when students in other states have been ignored by administrators or shouted down by community members who believe an expanded Black history program is unnecessary. "It's so important that we don't stop here just because we've met a certain standard of success," said Kaliah Yizar of Denver. "The changes that we're making at our school and our community need to be made everywhere before we can even say that our mission has been successful." Steady improvements have been made this year alone: In February, Oklahoma leaders made it mandatory for state schools to teach the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a mob of thousands of White people burned a bustling Black community to the ground and killed hundreds of Black residents. And the widely read history textbooks from McGraw Hill may soon capitalize the "b" in "Black," a decision several news organizations made this summer, too. Cherry Hill East's African American Culture Club is still working to make its dream class happen. They're not expecting a course to appear on school schedules overnight, but they'd like it to come soon -- Naomi and Machayla are graduating next year. But even if they can't take the class they've fought for, if it's successfully implemented one day, they will have helped write it into their school's curriculum. YANI High school students are demanding schools teach more Black history, include more Black authors The Washington Post, by Hannah Natanson, August 17, 2020

As he watched the protests over George Floyd’s killing sweep across America, 17-year-old Hussein Amuri thought about how most of the authors he read in English class — like most of the teachers at his high school in Winooski, Vt. — are White. In Belmont, Mass., Ikenna Ugbaja, also 17, recalled the large bell on the campus of his private, all-boys school — a bell once used to summon enslaved people on a Cuban sugar plantation.

And in Omaha, 18-year-old Vanessa Amoah thought about how her high school taught Black history like it was “a different thing” than American history. She — like Amuri, like Ugbaja — decided it was time for change. All three teenagers, although strangers, unaware of each other and separated by thousands of miles, launched campaigns demanding their schools teach more Black history, among several reforms meant to promote racial equity.

“The education system is where people form values other than what their parents have,” Amoah said. “George Floyd, Philando Castile — none of it would have happened if this country worked on proactively teaching anti-racist values.”

“It is a chain,” she said. “It starts with a racist joke, and not teaching kids about this in class, and it escalates. We have to start at the base.”

They are among a wave of young people throughout the country who are banding together to demand education reform wherever they attend school: at large public systems, elite private schools or small parochial institutions. Teenagers and recent graduates are publishing online petitions, sending letters to their alma maters and testifying at virtual board meetings. They are asking for the inclusion of more Black history in curriculums, a more thorough teaching of events such as the Civil War and a more diverse range of authors in English syllabi.

Their demands extend beyond the classroom: Many are also calling for the removal of armed police in school hallways, the hiring of more Black and Hispanic teachers and for anti-racist trainings for students and staff.

Students have advocated for curriculum reform before in American history. But this moment is unique in several ways: For one thing, it’s taking place in the midst of a pandemic that has plunged the nation into crisis. Still, the shifting of human interaction online has actually played into students’ hands — more adept at social media than adults, teens are making canny use of sites such as Facebook and Instagram to plan reforms, put pressure on school officials and draw inspiration from other activists.

This effort is also being led by a younger cohort than previous pushes, many of which took place on college campuses. But what’s most striking, historians said, is the scope of the movement — while past advocacy focused on a particular high school or district, today groups of students are popping up everywhere. Although no one is tracking exact numbers, #DiversifyOurNarrative, a California-based initiative that helps students push for curriculum reform by offering them email templates and suggestions for anti-racist texts, said it has signed up more than 3,500 students in 250 U.S. school districts since its founding in June.

“It’s this sort of, how to put it, national constellation,” said George Mason University assistant professor Mark Helmsing, who teaches a class on education reform. It is too soon to tell if students’ activism will see wide success, partly because administrators have been focused on deciding if and how to reopen schools. Under the decentralized American education system, local officials have wide latitude to determine what goes into their curriculums, and some school districts have already vowed reforms. But bureaucratic red tape and resistance are common, and many teens are realizing that change may not come during their short high school careers — although they vow they will keep fighting post-graduation.

Karen Murphy, director of international strategy for Facing History and Ourselves, said she feels optimistic. Facing History, a nonprofit group that helps schools and teachers examine societal racism and prejudice, saw a large spike in interest this summer, Murphy said: Its online courses, workshops and two “equity summits” were all oversubscribed, with more than 9,400 total attendees. She attributes the sudden popularity partly to student advocacy, partly to the ongoing national reckoning over racism and the role of police. But really what it means is that a lot of teachers want change, too, she said.

“I think young people have a real opportunity right now to engage the adults in their school community in a serious conversation,” Murphy said. “So — if you see books or authors or histories or historical events that are missing, ask for them!”

'We existed before slavery'

The need for improved education on America’s racist past and a more thoughtful consideration of its present, experts agree, is very real. This is especially true when it comes to slavery: What American children learn depends almost entirely on where they live, because every state has different requirements. Many teachers say they feel ill- prepared to teach about the subject, and textbooks often provide scant — or skewed — information.

Just five years ago, a ninth-grade Geography textbook described the millions transported from Africa to America between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers,” not men, women and children enslaved and brutally oppressed. (After an African American mother’s complaint went viral, McGraw-Hill Education updated the language.)

It is also well-established that White authors and White characters are overrepresented in American K-12 English classes. The problem first got mainstream attention in 2014, when a social media campaign — #WeNeedDiverseBooks — went viral, spurring the formation of a nonprofit devoted to providing schoolchildren with books written by, and featuring, people from diverse backgrounds.

Black students interviewed for this story agreed that slavery should be better taught, with more emphasis placed on the ways in which enslaved people resisted and thwarted their oppressors. But they’d also like to see Black history go beyond slavery — for once.

“The only thing we hear about African American history is slavery and the Civil Rights movement,” said Amoah, who is Black and graduated this year from Central High School. “We existed before slavery.” Amoah joined with a small group of students and alumni to found What YOUth Can Do (WYCD), the group that is pushing Omaha Public Schools for change. They want a rich, full account of Black history integrated into the required curriculum. But that’s just one of five demands WYCD has submitted to school administrators, including requests to diversify the overwhelmingly White honors and AP classes, invest more in mental health resources and remove armed policemen from school hallways.

Omaha, like most American school districts, has the power to comply with the students’ request. Unlike with subjects such as math and science, there is no nationally agreed upon set of standards for teaching social studies and history — each state is allowed to craft its own requirements (although states that have adopted Common Core standards must ensure students are able to meet them). Within states, districts take guidance from state officials, but exercise significant discretion in developing coursework.

“This country has an extremely decentralized system of education,” Helmsing said. “Different regions of the country have different contextualizing effects on the subjects that are taught — for example, California teaches history in a much more progressive and LGBTQ-focused way than, say, Louisiana.”

In Winooski, Amuri has joined a small group of students and young alumni — dubbed “Winooski Students for Anti-Racism” — to petition the school board for an ethnic studies program. The group, formed just after protests began, is also asking that the school system overhaul the existing curriculum so it conforms with “anti-racism standards, expectations, and pedagogy.”

But switching up the syllabus will have little effect if the school doesn’t hire more teachers of color, Amuri said. He is frustrated that Winooski — Vermont’s only majority-minority school district, with a large immigrant population — has a faculty that is lily-White.

Amuri, who immigrated from Tanzania in 2015 with his family, said he found it difficult, during his first few years in America, to attend a school staffed almost entirely by White adults. He sought in vain for a mentor, someone who understood why he was confused and could explain the strange culture of his new home. When he finally found one of the only Black staffers, a man who had immigrated from Rwanda, Amuri felt saved.

“Having someone who is also Black, from Africa, who went through that transition — just talking to him was liberating,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many kids in our school could use that kind of help.”

'I have a lot more to say than I did before'

Whether school officials are listening is an open question.

In Winooski, students and recent graduates haggled for months with administrators over the language of their demands, which — after several rounds of revisions — the school board voted unanimously to adopt Wednesday night. In a statement, board chair Tori Cleiland said the vote means Winooski can better “[combat] racism in all its forms,” and ensure all students “are truly afforded life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Indra Acharya, a Bhutanese American alumnus who helped craft the demands, said change is long overdue.

“I’m beyond happy that the Board passed our demands last night, [although] approval of our demands is just the beginning,” he said. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

Asked about the reforms, a school spokeswoman emailed a copy of a public letter, authored by Winooski’s top school officials, that thanked Acharya and his fellow reformers.

Winooski “is incredibly proud of the student voice and activism that has emerged these past two months,” the letter read. “We applaud the passion, collaboration, advocacy and strength demonstrated by students . . . to ensure that we as a community move quickly to become an anti-racist school district.”

But Winooski is a bright spot. In Omaha, top school officials, including the superintendent, agreed to meet with members of WYCD — and allowed them to hold a socially distant rally at a high school — but have done little else, said Amoah and Mekhi Mitchell, 18, another Central graduate and WYCD founder.

The two teenagers came away from most meetings feeling the adults weren’t really listening. Every request for change was met with insistence, Mitchell said, that the school was already tackling the issue.

“They pretty much claim they already have this stuff, or they’re working for it,” Mitchell said.

“Well, where is it?” Amoah interrupted. “And where was it when I was in school?”

Omaha Public Schools did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Although Amoah and Mitchell are both slated to head to college soon, they plan to keep asking for reform until they get it. “I think they think we’ll forget about this,” Amoah said. “But we won’t.”

At Belmont Hill School in Massachusetts, Ugbaja said, officials’ response was a mixed bag. After he and two friends penned a public “Call to Action” — which asked for the removal of the bell, as well as more Black authors and Black history taught in classrooms — the head of school requested a meeting.

During the get-together, the head of school seemed passionate, “like he wanted to fix this,” Ugbaja said. Still, the head of school also warned that not all of the requested changes could happen right away, according to Ugbaja. A curriculum renovation, for example, is underway but will not be finished in time for Ugbaja’s senior year.

A Belmont Hill spokesman said in a statement that student and alumni voices “have accelerated progress on our Diversity Action plan, which includes commitments to improving multicultural curriculum,” examining the school’s history and hiring a more diverse staff. The bell, at least, is on its way out.

Donated by a wealthy family in the “early days of Belmont Hill,” according to a recent letter to families, the bell has been a fixture of campus for decades. In July, Belmont Hill’s school board voted unanimously to remove it because of its “direct ties to slavery” and because “the lessons from our history are eclipsed by the need to make our environment more comfortable and inclusive for all of our students,” according to the letter.

Ugbaja will be glad to see it go. Sometimes, he said, White classmates rung the bell. As the chimes died away, they turned and stared at him, the only Black person in the room.

That used to feel intimidating.

“But after all this, I feel — no, I know — I have a lot more to say than I did before,” Ugbaja said. “Being one of the only Black kids at the school is not a hindrance now. It is a power.” BASTIEN 'This is the reality of Black life': Santa Clara University professor, her brother racially profiled by campus guards ABC News, by Dion Lim, August 25, 2020

At one point, a guard allegedly accused Carlos had "been in the bushes" and appeared to be homeless.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (KGO) -- It doesn't matter that Danielle Morgan is an Ivy League educated a professor at Santa Clara University or that her brother is a classically trained musician who has performed at Carnegie Hall.

What does matter is that they were racially profiled, questioned and harassed by campus security who wanted proof Danielle lived in her home.

"One of the officers said to me, 'You don't own this house. This house doesn't belong to you,"' said Danielle in her first television interview about the incident with ABC7 News. "This is the reality of Black life in the United States."

That was just the tip of the iceberg. As documented in a series of tweets that have gone viral, Danielle describes the emotional trauma she and her brother Carlos, who was visiting for the weekend experienced.

At one point, a guard allegedly accused Carlos had "been in the bushes" and appeared to be homeless.

"As small and petty a statement that is, it had much broader implications. He was reminding me we didn't belong here," Danielle said.

The president of the university, Kevin O'Brien, issued this apology over the weekend, condemning the incident and stating that "racial bias or profiling has no place on our campus."

Monday evening O'Brien released a second statement, saying in part, the school was dedicating resources to an investigation, the campus safety officers involved would be put on administrative leave and there would be an evaluation of "past and present" safety policies and records.

Because of the ongoing investigation, Danielle is choosing to, instead of comment on the school's response, move forward and use her platform to hopefully make an impact change.

"It needs to be a broader conversation around racism in the U.S. I would hope that for one this centers the voices of students on both Santa Clara's campus and elsewhere who have had these experiences," she said. ALEXANDRE P. The Mask Dilemma for Black Men medpagetoday.com, by Tamara Jessica Brown, August 23, 2020

A nurse discusses the problem African American men encounter when wearing face masks

On April 3, the CDC made a statement encouraging all Americans to wear cloth face coverings upon leaving their homes. In response, Black men expressed concern about such a recommendation, based on fears of racial profiling and harassment from law enforcement officers. An example of such concern can be seen in the Twitter posting of Aaron Thomas, a Black man living in Ohio, reacting to the CDC's recommendation:

"I don't feel safe wearing a handkerchief or something else that isn't CLEARLY a protective mask covering my face to the store because I am a Black man living in this world. I want to stay alive but I also want to stay alive." This tweet has been reposted more than 18,000 times since its original posting. Based on his statement, Thomas decided to not wear a mask so that he can "stay alive."

This concern has not been unwarranted. Less than 3 weeks before the CDC's recommendations, two Black men posted a video of themselves on YouTube being escorted out of a Walmart in Wood River, Illinois by a police officer allegedly for "wearing surgical masks." One of the men stated that: "[The policeman] followed us from outside, told us that we cannot wear masks. This police officer just put us out for wearing masks and trying to stay safe."

The chief of the Wood River police, Brad Wells, stated later in a news release that the officer in the video "incorrectly" told the men that a city law prohibited the wearing of masks. Wells went on to say: "This statement was incorrect and should not have been made. The city does not have such an ordinance prohibiting the wearing of a mask. In fact, I support the wearing of nonsurgical mask or face covering when in public during the COVID-19 pandemic period." As a result of the two men filing a complaint, Wells told the Washington Post that an internal investigation of the incident had begun with the assistance of the local NAACP branch. Nikema Williams, a Democratic state senator in Georgia, wrote a letter to the state's governor, Brian Kemp (R), urging him to temporarily suspend anti-mask laws in the state. She explained that her husband, who is African American, 6'3", and weighs 300 pounds: "was telling [her] how uncomfortable it was to wear a mask in stores because folks get intimidated and look at him like he's up to no good."

Black men have also experienced racial profiling when not wearing a mask. In April, a video from Philadelphia filmed a Black man being removed with force by four police officers one day after the city's transportation authority required all riders of buses, trolleys, and trains to wear face coverings. After the incident, the transportation authority temporarily suspended the requirement.

Both Black men who follow and do not follow the CDC recommendation to wear a face covering have experienced episodes of harassment. Already at an increased risk of contracting the virus, Black men in particular are faced with this dilemma of whether to wear a mask.

The NAACP has also urged states to indefinitely stop any anti-mask laws. "No person should be fearful of engaging in lifesaving measures due to racialism," Marc Banks, the NAACP's national press secretary, said in a statement.

Melanye Price, a political science professor at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, told the New York Times that the well-intentioned recommendation to wear masks or bandanas actually can put African Americans at greater risk of racial profiling. According to Kevin Gaines, a professor of civil rights and social justice at the University of Virginia, Black men are already being profiled by the police on a regular basis, but wearing masks heightens such risks of profiling.

Given the risks of racial profiling, some Black men have changed their style of dress in an effort to appear less threatening. STAT correspondent Usha Lee McFarling reported that Black men have attempted to "tone down their appearance to lower suspicion." Examples of such "toning down" comes in the form of wearing college T-shirts and "dressing like prospects, not suspects." This has even been found in their choice of mask colors and patterns, choosing floral prints or plain white masks over others. Vickie Mays, a professor of heath policy and management at University of California Los Angeles, has been attempting to track situations in which Black men wearing masks have suffered harassment. Mays told STAT that Black men should wear masks despite the risk of racial profiling in order to, foremost, protect their health. However, she suggested that such masks not be dark in color or "ominous looking." Instead, she recommended they be bright in color or have traditional African prints. Mays also urged health officials to swiftly procure professionally made masks for Black communities just as they would any other commodity like food or water as this population has been reportedly experiencing greater rates of COVID-19 infection than non-minority groups. TANCREDE Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals The New York Times, by Debra Kamin, August 25, 2020

Companies that value homes for sale or refinancing are bound by law not to discriminate. Black homeowners say it happens anyway.

Abena and Alex Horton wanted to take advantage of low home-refinance rates brought on by the coronavirus crisis. So in June, they took the first step in that process, welcoming a home appraiser into their four-bedroom, four-bath ranch-style house in Jacksonville, Fla.

The Hortons live just minutes from the Ortega River, in a predominantly white neighborhood of 1950s homes that tend to sell for $350,000 to $550,000. They had expected their home to appraise for around $450,000, but the appraiser felt differently, assigning a value of $330,000. Ms. Horton, who is Black, immediately suspected discrimination.

The couple’s bank agreed that the value was off and ordered a second appraisal. But before the new appraiser could arrive, Ms. Horton, a lawyer, began an experiment: She took all family photos off the mantle. Instead, she hung up a series of oil paintings of Mr. Horton, who is white, and his grandparents that had been in storage. Books by Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison were taken off the shelves, and holiday photo cards sent by friends were edited so that only those showing white families were left on display. On the day of the appraisal, Ms. Horton took the couple’s 6-year-old son on a shopping trip to Target, and left Mr. Horton alone at home to answer the door.

The new appraiser gave their home a value of $465,000 — a more than 40 percent increase from the first appraisal.

Race and housing policy have long been intertwined in the United States. Black Americans consistently struggle more than their white counterparts to be approved for home loans, and the specter of redlining — a practice that denied mortgages to people of color in certain neighborhoods — continues to drive down home values in Black neighborhoods. Even in mixed-race and predominantly white neighborhoods, Black homeowners say, their homes are consistently appraised for less than those of their neighbors, stymying their path toward building equity and further perpetuating income equality in the United States.

Home appraisers are bound by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to not discriminate based on race, religion, national origin or gender. Appraisers can lose their license or even face prison time if they’re found to produce discriminatory appraisals. Title XI of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, enacted in 1989, also binds appraisers to a standard of unbiased ethics and performance.

“My heart kind of broke,” Ms. Horton said. “I know what the issue was. And I knew what we needed to do to fix it, because in the Black community, it’s just common knowledge that you take your pictures down when you’re selling the house. But I didn’t think I had to worry about that with an appraisal.”

Appraisals, by nature, are subjective. And discrimination, particularly the subconscious biases and microaggressions that have risen to the fore in white America this summer following the death of George Floyd, is notoriously difficult to pinpoint.

Ms. Horton shared her experiment in a widely circulated Facebook post, earning 25,000 shares and more than 2,000 comments, many of which came from Black homeowners and carried the same message: This also happened to me.

In each comment, a repeated theme: Home appraisers, who work under codes of ethics but with little regulation and oversight, are often all that stands between the accumulation of home equity and the destruction of it for Black Americans.

After the first appraisal came up short on his house in an affluent, racially mixed suburb of Hartford, Conn., Stephen Richmond, an aerospace engineer, took down family photos and posters for Black movies and had a white neighbor stand in for him on a second appraisal. He was hoping to refinance; with the second report, he saw his home’s value go up $40,000 from the initial appraisal just a few weeks earlier.

In 2000, the American actor and comedian D.L. Hughley had an appraisal on his home in the Montevista Estates neighborhood of West Hills, a primarily white area in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Despite a steady uptick in the housing market and the addition of a pool and new hardwood floors, the house was appraised for nearly what he had bought it for three years earlier — $500,000.

In Mr. Hughley’s case, his bank flagged the report.

“They were like, this has to be some kind of mistake because in order for your house to have come in this low; it would have to be in some level of disrepair,” Mr. Hughley said.

The bank ordered a new appraisal, which came back $160,000 higher, and Mr. Hughley went on to sell the home for $770,000.

Mr. Hughley talks about the experience in his book, “Surrender, White People!”, a satirical look at white supremacy, which was published in June by Harper Collins and examines racial inequality in the United States across education, health care and the housing market.

“People always tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. But what if you remove the straps?” he said. “You’re invested in the American dream, you have capital, you have a chip in the game. And the fact that somebody could summarily minimize my wealth just because of a bias, it seemed crazy to me.”

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, a federal ruling issued in March allowed appraisals for homes that were being sold to be done remotely in certain circumstances, temporarily pausing the need for interior home inspections. Those looking to refinance, however, still must complete an in-person appraisal.

In Mr. Hughley’s case, the appraiser was fired. Ms. Horton has filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development; when contacted about her case, HUD said it had been assigned to the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission. The agency added that it receives a handful of similar complaints each year.

In 2018, researchers from Gallup and the Brookings Institution published a report on the widespread devaluation of Black-owned property in the United States, which they discussed in a 2019 hearing before the House Financial Services Subcommittee. The report found that a home in a majority Black neighborhood is likely to be valued for 23 percent less than a near-identical home in a majority-white neighborhood; it also determined this devaluation costs Black homeowners $156 billion in cumulative losses.

Many appraisers, both during the hearing and in the weeks after, defended their practice, noting that it’s their job to report on local market conditions, not set them.

“Is there a problem with poor and underserved communities in the United States? Yes. Is it the appraisal profession’s fault? No,” wrote Maureen Sweeney, a Chicago-based appraiser in a letter to the house subcommittee following the hearing. “It’s like blaming the canary for the bad air in the coal mine, or blaming the mirror for your bad hair day. Appraisers reflect the market; we do not create it.”

But what about a Black homeowner in a white neighborhood whose property is appraised for less than his neighbor’s? Whether appraisers are devaluing Black homes or entire Black neighborhoods, the core issue is the same, said Andre Perry, one of the writers of the Brookings Institution report and the author of “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities.”

“We still see Black people as risky,” Mr. Perry said. “White appraisers carry the same attitudes and beliefs of white America — the same attitudes that compelled Derek Chauvin to kneel casually on the neck of George Floyd are shared by other professionals in other fields. How does that choking out of America look in the appraisal industry? Through very low appraisals,” he said. GUILLAUME Study finds racial bias in the government’s formula for distributing Covid-19 aid to hospitals statnews.com, by Casey Ross, August 7, 2020

The federal government has systematically shortchanged communities with large Black populations in the distribution of billions of dollars in Covid-19 relief aid meant to help hospitals struggling to manage the effects of the pandemic, according to a study published Friday.

The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the funding inequities resulted from a formula that allocated large chunks of a $175 billion relief package based on hospital revenue, instead of numbers of Covid-19 cases or other health data.

The effect was to distribute more money through the federal CARES Act to large hospitals that already had the most resources, leaving smaller hospitals with large numbers of Black patients with disproportionately low funding to manage higher numbers of Covid-19 cases.

“We are finding large-scale racial bias in the way the federal government is distributing” the funds to hospitals, said Ziad Obermeyer, a physician and a co-author of the study from the University of California, Berkeley.

“If you take two hospitals getting the same amount of funding under the CARES Act, the dollars have to go further in Black counties than they do elsewhere,” he said. “Effectively that means there are fewer things the health systems can do in those counties, like testing, buying more personal protective equipment, or doing outreach to make sure people are being tested.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which was responsible for distributing the funding, said in a statement that the department allocated the money in a “data-driven manner” in order to provide relief to hospitals swiftly in the weeks after the legislation was passed. “In choosing to act quickly, HHS adopted revenue as a measure of how to distribute funds across health care facilities and providers of different sizes and types,” the statement said. “While other approaches were considered, these would have taken much longer to implement.”

The spokesperson added that while Congress did not direct the department to examine the finances of the recipients, it recognizes the financial hardship many hospitals are facing and will make targeted distributions to those disproportionately impacted.

The study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that communities with large numbers of people of color are getting hit harder during the pandemic, with higher rates of infection than wealthier white communities. Not only do those communities have higher numbers of cases, but their hospitals already have less money to pay for additional clinical resources to care for patients and fund education and prevention efforts.

The CARES Act was passed in March to counteract the economic devastation wrought by the rapid spread of the coronavirus. In addition to direct cash payments to Americans and increased unemployment benefits, the $2.2 trillion stimulus package also included $175 billion in relief aid to hospitals.

The money was meant to bolster the balance sheets of hospitals that were hit hard by the pandemic. In addition to the increased costs of treating infected patients, hospitals also lost huge sums of money because of canceled elective procedures and a sudden drop in visits to their facilities.

The study published Friday found, however, that the federal funding formula resulted in allocations that were largely unrelated to the level of need in counties around the country. The most influential factor used in the funding formula was past revenue received from Medicare. While that makes sense on one level — the biggest hospitals with the most patients would get more money — it results in a distortion when the funding is compared to the actual health needs on the ground.

The researchers compared the funding provided to communities with more granular county-level data, including numbers of cases and deaths due to Covid-19; rates of illnesses such as kidney disease and high blood pressure that tend to exacerbate the effects of the virus; and data on the underlying financial health of the hospitals in the counties. Overall, the study found, disproportionately Black counties received $126 per resident more funding than other counties, but that differential was generally not enough to offset the higher level of need in those places. Among counties that received the same funding, disproportionately Black counties had a higher level of Covid-19 disease burden, higher rates of chronic illness, and worse hospital finances.

“In all the categories, the funding was not well-aligned with those needs because of the choice to allocate proportional to revenue,” Obermeyer said. “Reallocating that funding according to where it’s most needed would be more equitable in the sense that it would get more money to Black counties. It would also be more economical because you’d be getting the resources to where they’re most needed.” JULIEN 'The worshipping of whiteness': why racist symbols persist in America The Guardian, by Alexandra Villarreal, June 30, 2020

Tributes to a checkered past exist all over the US, even as Confederate statues are removed and brands reconsider racial stereotypes

In life, the seventh US president, Andrew Jackson, and his family accrued their wealth at the expense of hundreds of enslaved people. Now, even in death, Jackson still wields the power to haunt Black Americans whenever they pull a $20 bill from their wallets.

“Racism isn’t always abrupt. It isn’t always in your face. Sometimes, it’s very insidious,” said Franklin Eugene Forbes II, an architect and urban planner. “Why am I, a Black person, using a bill where a man who believed I was inferior to somebody else as a way to buy things, the same way people that look like me were bought by him?”

For weeks now, historic protests against systemic racial inequity and injustice have also reinvigorated passionate debate around the most obvious memorials to slavery, white supremacy and racism across the United States. A growing number of the nearly 800 Confederate statues and monuments in the US have been removed, alongside a few toppled or defaced homages to founding fathers who profited from slavery.

Brands such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s and Cream of Wheat are reconsidering the racial stereotypes emblazoned on their packaging. Gone With the Wind was temporarily pulled from HBO Max, and Nascar devotees no longer have the green light to unfurl Confederate battle flags at races.

But plenty of other symbols persist.

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman was supposed to supplant Jackson on the $20 bill. Then came the Trump administration.

The redesigned bill with Tubman’s portrait was originally expected to debut in 2020. But last year, the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, announced that the unveiling had been delayed. He has since said the new version won’t be released for another decade and may not even feature Tubman.

“Maybe every single time you pay for something, you’re not thinking, ‘oh goodie, there’s Andrew Jackson, my hero.’ But in a way, that’s kind of the point, right?” said Alvita Akiboh, an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan.

When Akiboh taught in Chicago, her students assumed that the local park in a majority Black and Latino neighborhood was named for Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist. It was instead a salute to Stephen A Douglas, an Illinois senator whose political machinations enabled slavery, and who is quoted saying: “I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men.”

Similar tributes to a checkered past exist all over the US, from streets named for Confederate officers and slave traders to congested highways originally designed to reinforce segregation and eliminate Black neighborhoods. When sports fans attend baseball or football games, they turn to the American flag and sing a national anthem penned by Francis Scott Key, a slave owner who abused his authority as district attorney to persecute Black men and abolitionists.

“I hope at least that the questioning that has started with monuments, because they’re visible, because they’re large, and because they’re easy to remove, will continue to happen as we start to re-evaluate the symbols on money, on our stamps,” Akiboh said. “The flags and other symbols that we use. The songs that we sing for our patriotic anthems. And that definitely, we will get to re-evaluate our K-12 curriculum.”

The attorney general, William Barr, recently came under fire when he casually quipped that “history is written by the winners”. For centuries, white Americans have always had the position and privilege to shape the country’s historical record.

“The American story has been a story of progress, of triumph, of victory, right? Of liberty and freedom,” said Daina Ramey Berry, Radkey professor of history at the University of Texas. But “enslaved people don’t fit well into that narrative”. nor do other racial minorities who have suffered because of the American experiment. “That is the story of America, to have Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama simultaneously. To have Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and 4 million people enslaved simultaneously. That paradox is the American narrative,” said Rhae Lynn Barnes, an assistant professor in Princeton University’s history department.

Aspirational depictions of a city upon a hill and liberty and justice for all lose their luster when they’re juxtaposed against the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples, or an intricate slave-based economy rubber-stamped by revolutionaries fighting for their own freedom. But more dated history textbooks rarely provide that level of insight around how minority communities were treated during the country’s early years, and slavery gets all but erased – “there’s no discussion of what life was like in the United States prior to 1860, or if it is, it’s just African Americans were enslaved in this country, and the civil war freed them,” said Berry.

It’s this inconsistent retelling that has allowed for the veneration of deeply flawed characters, whose biographies are often cherry-picked for effect. Many of the founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders, despite waxing poetic about how the institution was a “moral depravity”. Even Benjamin Franklin, revered as an early abolitionist, owned enslaved people for much of his life and ran ads selling others in his newspaper.

Champions of these men often attribute their moral failings to the sociopolitical environment in which they lived. But “just because slavery was accepted among white elites or even the broader white population at the time does not mean it was accepted by everybody, because everybody includes Black people who were enslaved, indigenous people who were pushed off their lands in order to expand plantation slavery,” said Akiboh.

A different logic has been used to justify the Confederate shrines that commemorate men who committed treason in an effort to uphold slavery. Defenders, including Donald Trump, decry “the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart”. But the monuments they are trying to protect aren’t usually civil war artifacts; they were instead erected decades after the conflict ended, as “a reminder for Black and brown people to remember their place”, said Akiboh. Meanwhile, book publishers, songwriters, Madison Avenue advertisers and Hollywood studios immortalized the racist caricatures and racial stereotypes such as Aunt Jemima that have recently fallen under scrutiny, said Karen Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Even Mickey Mouse, a beloved American staple, rose to prominence in 1928 with a tune from blackface minstrelsy, Barnes said.

“The racism and white supremacy is our national sin,” said Cox. “It doesn’t belong to the south.”

Much like currency, larger objects and icons have often been resistant to change, despite public repudiation of them; as recently as last year, more than 1,700 publicly sponsored symbols of the Confederacy still appeared everywhere from Maine to Washington state, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Almost any relic’s retirement seems to get blowback from subgroups of Americans, for reasons ranging from historical preservation to outright bigotry.

“It’s all about shoving this down people’s throats and erasing the history of the white people, and I think that’s wrong,” Virginia state senator Amanda Chase recently exclaimed in a video.

When earlier this month Nascar hosted the first major sporting event with fans since the coronavirus pandemic, a plane with a gargantuan Confederate battle flag flew across the skyline to protest against the new ban. Far from an isolated incident, overt tributes to the Confederacy and acts of racial terror are still common in the US.

At least 34 Confederate monuments have been dedicated since 2000. In the last few years, high school students in states such as New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Minnesota and California have been caught donning blackface, sometimes alongside a racial slur or Confederate flag.

But even the US’s bloated catalogue of racist iconography barely scratches the surface of a more general “built environment” and way of seeing that’s deeply embedded in the country’s infrastructure, suggested Sherwin K Bryant, an associate professor of African American studies and history at Northwestern University.

“Every single arena and area of American life is dominated by a kind of worshipping of whiteness,” he said. “And so this is inescapable.” GREGOR Trump stokes division with racism and rage – and the American oligarchy purrs The Guardian, by Robert Reich, June 14, 2020

The president is the best thing that ever happened to the corporate elite, a distraction on the lines of the old Jim Crow

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, took the knee last week before cameras at a branch of his bank. Larry Fink, CEO of giant investment fund BlackRock, decried racial bias. Starbucks vowed to “stand in solidarity with our black partners, customers and communities”. The Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO, David Solomon, said he grieved “for the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and countless other victims of racism”.

And so on across the highest reaches of corporate America, an outpouring of solidarity with those protesting brutal police killings of black Americans and systemic racism.

But most of this is for show.

JPMorgan has made it difficult for black people to get mortgage loans. In 2017, the bank paid $55m to settle a justice department lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against minority borrowers. Researchers have found banks routinely charge black mortgage borrowers higher interest rates than white borrowers and deny them mortgages white applicants would have received.

BlackRock is one of the biggest investors in private prisons, disproportionately incarcerating black and Latino men.

Starbucks has prohibited baristas from wearing Black Lives Matter attire and for years has struggled with racism in its stores as managers accuse black patrons of trespassing and deny them bathrooms to which white patrons have access.

Last week, Frederick Baba, an executive at Goldman Sachs who is black, criticized managers for not supporting junior bankers from diverse backgrounds. Meanwhile, behind the scenes – in the halls of Congress and the corridors of statehouses, in fundraisers and in private candidate briefings, in strategy sessions with political operatives and public-relations specialists – the CEOs who condemn racism lobby for and get giant tax cuts and fight off a wealth tax.

As a result, the nation can’t afford anything as ambitious as a massive Marshall Plan to provide poor communities world-class schools, first-class healthcare and affordable housing.

The CEOs resist a living wage and universal basic income. They don’t want antitrust laws jeopardizing their market power, thereby requiring consumers pay more. They oppose tighter regulations against red-lining or prohibitions on payday lending, both of which disproportionately burden black and brown people.

Perhaps most revealingly, they remain silent in the face of Donald Trump’s bigotry. Indeed, many are quietly funding the re-election of a president whose political ascent began with a racist conspiracy theory and who continues to encourage white supremacists.

This goes beyond mere hypocrisy. America’s super rich have amassed more wealth and power than at any time since the “robber barons” of the late 19th century – enough to get legislative outcomes they want and organize the system for their own benefit.

Since the start of the pandemic, the nation’s billionaires have become $565bn richer, even as 42.6 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. Job losses have disproportionately affected black Americans, and America’s racial wealth gap continues to grow.

The rich know that as long as racial animosity exists, white and black Americans are less likely to look upward and see where the wealth and power really has gone.

They’re less likely to notice that the market is rigged against them all. They’ll cling to the meritocratic myth that they’re paid what they’re “worth” in the market and that the obstacles they face are of their own making rather than an unjust system. Racism reduces the odds they will join together to threaten that system.

This is not a new strategy. Throughout history, the rich have used racism to divide people and thereby entrench themselves.

Half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr observed much the same about the old southern aristocracy, which “took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.”

Trump is the best thing ever to have happened to the new American oligarchy, and not just because he has given them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

He has also stoked division and racism so that most Americans don’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, won’t notice giant tax cuts and bailouts for big corporations and the wealthy while most people make do with inadequate schools and unaffordable healthcare, and don’t pay attention to the bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.

The only way systemic injustices can be remedied is if power is redistributed. Power will be redistributed only if the vast majority – white, black and brown – join together to secure it.

Which is what the oligarchy fears most. LOUNES Trump’s convention is the ultimate gaslighting exercise The Washington Post, by Jennifer Rubin, August 24, 2020

Be prepared for the convention from Earth 2. In this parallel universe from which Republicans will beam out their messaging, President Trump created the greatest economy ever. Trump did better than anyone on the planet in handling covid-19. And he has been the best president ever for Blacks — well, other than maybe Abraham Lincoln. Back on Earth 1, it is an entirely different story.

Even before the novel coronavirus hit, Trump’s economic performance was underwhelming. Steven Rattner, former car czar in the Obama administration, reminds us in a New York Times op-ed that in the pre-pandemic period, the economy was “weaker than during the last three years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Almost exactly 1.5 million fewer jobs were created on Mr. Trump’s watch than during Mr. Obama’s final three years.” Even with a misguided tax cut that blew up the debt, Rattner writes, “annualized growth under Mr. Trump ranked seventh among his 11 predecessors. And growth actually slowed during each of Mr. Trump’s three years.”

Trump’s coronavirus performance has left us with more than 170,000 dead. While much of the West is now reopened and conducting in-school education, we are limping around, watching the virus surge in the Midwest and the South. We have more coronavirus deaths by far than any country. We have 4 percent of the world’s population and more than 20 percent of the world’s covid-19 deaths.

Moreover, as BBC reports, “When you look at deaths per capita — as a proportion of each country’s population — the US is no longer top of the list, but remains in the top 10 worst- hit countries.” Unlike European countries such as Germany, we have no effective national testing and tracing program. We know it is not effective because the virus in the United States has not abated. Johns Hopkins reports: “[S]everal countries effectively controlled the spread of the virus through testing programs that had a far lower number of tests per capita than the U.S. Meanwhile, despite having the highest rate of tests per capita, the U.S. faces the largest outbreak in the world and new cases continue to trend upwards in many states.” The United States remains the only advanced country to have “suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months," the New York Times’s David Leonhardt writes. “In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.” Trump played down the pandemic, refused to avoid shortages and price hikes for personal protective equipment by fully activating the Defense Production Act, goaded states into opening too soon and disparaged mask-wearing.

Perhaps most ludicrous is Trump’s regular claim that he is practically the best president ever for Blacks. He has a single Black Cabinet official, and his senior staff is almost entirely devoid of African Americans. He has not nominated a single African American to an appellate court. (As Bloomberg Law reports: “Just one of Trump’s 53 confirmed appeals court judges is Hispanic and none are Black. That compares to about 27% of President Barack Obama’s and roughly 15% under President George W. Bush, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis of Federal Judicial Center data.”)

Trump and many of his Cabinet officials have denied there is systemic racism in the United States. Trump continues to spew racist rhetoric, plays to Whites’ fears of integration and defends symbols of white supremacy. He has declined to pursue police reforms designed to decrease police abuse, which falls heavily on African Americans. The Post also reports that the administration has “severely curtailed” pattern-or-practice cases against police forces designed to address discriminatory behavior “along with other efforts to force broad police reforms or quell civil unrest — as the Justice Department’s posture has shifted to one that is far more deferential to law enforcement.”

Blacks have suffered far more than Whites with regard to the pandemic. On a per capita basis, Blacks are 2.6 times as likely to contract the coronavirus, 4.7 times as likely to be hospitalized and 2.1 times as likely to die from it.

Economically, Trump has been terrible for Blacks. “By almost every metric, Black Americans have fared far worse than whites, including higher rates of closure of Black- owned businesses,” Rattner says. “And that’s after struggling under the Trump administration since long before the virus hit — Black median household incomes, which were 66.5 percent of those of white households in 2016, had dropped to 62.4 percent of the level of white households by 2018.” As of last month, the unemployment rate for Blacks was 14.6 percent, compared with 9.2 percent for Whites.

Trump retains the distinction as the only recent president to lose jobs on net during his watch, the most incompetent world leader in fighting covid-19 and the worst president for Blacks since before the civil rights era. The notion that he has excelled on jobs, the coronavirus and racial equality is farcical. MIANGALY A GOP convention surprise: Trump goes all-in on race politico.com, by Maya King & Sam Mintz, August 24, 2020

The president tried hard to soften his image on race. But can four nights of testimonials make up for four years of stoking racial divisions?

Tim Scott waxed about his family arc — "from cotton to Congress in one lifetime" — and invoked George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Nikki Haley spoke of her Indian roots and alluded to her decision to take down the Confederate flag. Herschel Walker said he's seen "racism up close" — and it's not Donald Trump.

For a president credibly accused of stoking racial fears and divisions throughout his term, Trump, with his choice of speakers, leaned hard into the topic during the first night of his convention on Monday. One Republican after another defended Trump’s record on race, while highlighting Joe Biden's race-related gaffes and history pushing the 1994 crime bill.

All told, it was a surprising amount of attention paid to an issue typically associated with Democrats.

But even as speakers such as Scott and Haley attempted to soften Trump's image on race — while essentially making the case that the racial justice movement has gone too far in its views of policing — others took a harder-edged tack that undercut the message of inclusion. In an ominous presentation that warned suburbanites that their safety is at risk if Democrats win, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their home in St. Louis, made clear that the president's outreach would go only so far.

“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country,” Patricia McCloskey said. “Make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America."

The Republican convention opened amid another round of mass protests over a police shooting of a Black man, this time in Kenosha, Wis. With voters of color backing Biden by staggering margins, most Black speakers downplayed criticisms of Trump poor record on race by recounting their own personal experiences with him.

“Growing up in the Deep South, I’ve seen racism up close, I know what it is, and it isn’t Donald Trump,” said Walker, the former NFL player, who said he has known the president for 37 years, when the then-business mogul bought the New Jersey Generals pro football team.

Walker said that Trump cares about social justice, and “keeps right on fighting to improve the lives of Black Americans.”

Georgia state lawmaker Vernon Jones, a self-proclaimed lifelong Democrat, also vouched for the president and maintained that his support is growing among Black Americans who feel they're not being served by Democratic politicians.

“The Democratic Party does not want Black people to leave their mental plantation,” Jones said. "I have news for Joe Biden: We are free, we are free people with free minds, and I'm part of a large and growing segment of the Black community who are independent thinkers, and we believe that Donald Trump is the president that America needs to lead us forward."

Republicans pointed to Trump's accomplishments on issues affecting Black Americans, such as increasing funding for historically Black colleges and universities, supporting minority-owned small businesses and signing into law the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill pushed by his administration.

Polls show Biden with a 75-point lead over Trump among Black voters on average, and Trump is polling at 8 percent among Black voters. But if he can close the gap with Biden even slightly, the president's advisers think it could make the difference in several swing states.

Republicans also seized on Biden's gaffes and generalizations on the campaign trail as examples of Democrats' ineptitude. “Joe Biden said if a Black man didn‘t vote for him, he wasn't truly Black. Joe Biden said Black people are a monolithic community. It was Joe Biden who said poor kids can be just as smart as white kids,“ Scott said, before pointing to Biden‘s leading role in crafting the 1994 crime bill, which contributed to mass incarceration.

Trump, meanwhile, “signed into law historically high funding for [historically Black colleges and universities], as well as a bill to give them permanent funding for the first time ever,“ Scott said in the final speech of the night.

Haley, a fellow South Carolinian who served as governor and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, also challenged Democrats‘ views on race.

“In much of the Democratic Party, it‘s now fashionable to say that America is racist,” she said. “That is a lie. America is not a racist country.”

“The American people know we can do better. And of course we value and respect every Black life.“

Kim Klacik, who is running for the Congress in the Baltimore district long held by civil rights advocate Elijah Cummings, sounded a similar note, saying that the “days of blindly supporting Democrats are coming to an end.”

“Joe Biden believes we can’t think for ourselves, that the color of someone’s skin dictates their political views,” Klacik said, condemning Democrats' leadership in Baltimore (a frequent target of Trump).

Yet it's far from clear that a four-night convention can counter four years of fodder Trump has provided to critics. Just last week, POLITICO reported on a recording of a private meeting in 2017 at which Trump acknowledged that lower turnout among Black voters benefited him in the2 election.

“Many Blacks didn’t go out to vote for Hillary ’cause they liked me,” he told a room of civil rights leaders. “That was almost as good as getting the vote, you know, and it was great.” MAHO A Confederate statue graveyard could help bury the Old South Jordan Brasher and Derek H. Alderma - 26 juillet 2019, The Conversation

An estimated 114 Confederate symbols have been removed from public view since 2015. In many cases, these cast-iron Robert E. Lees and Jefferson Davises were sent to storage. If the aim of statue removal is to build a more racially just South, then, as many analysts have pointed out, putting these monuments in storage is a lost opportunity. Simply unseating Confederate statues from highly visible public spaces is just the first step in a much longer process of understanding, grieving and mending the wounds of America’s violent past. Merely hiding away the monuments does not necessarily change the structural racism that birthed them. Studies show that the environment in which statues are displayed shapes how people understand their meaning. In that sense, relocating monuments, rather than eliminating them, can help people put this painful history into context. For example, monuments to Confederate war heroes first appeared in cemeteries immediately following the Civil War. That likely evoked in visitors a direct and private honoring and grieving for the dead. By the early 1900s, hundreds of Confederate statues dotted courthouse lawns and town squares across the South. This prominent, centrally located setting on government property sent an intentionally different message: that local officials endorsed the prevailing white social order. So what should we do with rejected Confederate monuments? We have a modest proposal: a Confederate statue graveyard. Lessons from the Soviet past Our research as cultural geographers recognizes that Confederate monument controversies – while typically considered regional or national issues – are in fact part of global struggles to recognize and heal from the wounds of racism, white supremacy and anti-democratic regimes. The idea of a Confederate monument graveyard is modeled after ways that the former communist bloc nations of Hungary, Lithuania and Estonia have dealt with statues of Soviet heroes like Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. Under communist Soviet rule between 1945 and 1991, Eastern European countries suffered mass starvation, land theft, military rule and rigid censorship. An estimated 15 million people in the Soviet bloc died during this totalitarian reign. Despite these horrors, many countries have opted not to destroy or hide their Soviet-era monuments, but they haven’t left them to rule over city hall or public plazas, either. Rather, governments in Eastern Europe have altered the meaning of these politically charged Soviet statues by relocating them. Dozens of Soviet statues across Hungary, Lithuania and Estonia have been pulled from their pedestals and placed in open-air parks, where interested visitors can reflect on their new significance. The idea behind relocating monuments is to dethrone dominant historical narratives that, in their traditional places of power, are tacitly endorsed. A statue graveyard The Eastern European effort to create a new memorial landscape has been met with mixed public reaction. In Hungary, some see it as a step in the right direction. But, in Lithuania, people have expressed that re-erecting the statues of known dictators is in “poor taste” – an affront to those who suffered under totalitarianism. The relocation of Soviet statues in Estonia has taken an even more interesting turn. For the past decade, the Estonian History Museum has been collecting former Soviet monuments with the intention of making an outdoor exhibition out of them. For years it kept a decapitated Lenin and a noseless Stalin, among other degraded Soviet relics, in a field next to the museum. The statues weathered Eastern European winters and languished in a defunct, toppled state. Weeds grew over them. The elements took their toll. Travel writer Michael Turtle, who visited the museum in 2015, called the field a “statue graveyard.” “Everything here seems to fit into some kind of purgatorial limbo,” he wrote on his blog. “The statues are not respected enough to be displayed as history but are culturally significant enough to not just be destroyed.” To this we would add that these old statues, when repurposed thoughtfully and intentionally, have the potential to mend old wounds. Confederate monument graveyard What if the United States created its own graveyard for the distasteful relics of its own racist past?1256 We envision a cemetery for the American South where removed Confederate statues would be displayed, perhaps, in a felled position – a visual condemnation of the white supremacy they fought to uphold. Already crumpled monuments, like the statue to “The Boys Who Wore Grey” that was forcefully removed from downtown Durham, North Carolina, might be placed in the Confederate statue graveyard in their defunct state. One art critic has even suggested that old monuments be physically buried under tombstones with epitaphs written by the descendants of those they enslaved. We are not the first to suggest relocating Confederate statues. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, for example, has proposed that toppled Confederate statues be housed in a history museum – “where they belong.” That has proven challenging for curators. When The University of Texas moved a statue of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis from its pedestal on campus to a campus museum, some students criticized the ensuing exhibit’s “lack of focus on racism and slavery.” One suggested that the statue’s new setting inadvertently glorified Davis, given the inherent value conferred on objects in museums. And since statues in museums are typically exhibited in their original, upright position, Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee still tower over visitors – maintaining an imposing sense of authority. We believe felled and crumpled monuments, in contrast, would create a somber commemorative atmosphere that encourages visitors to grieve – without revering – their legacy. A carefully-planned and aesthetically sensitive Confederate monument graveyard could openly and purposefully undermine the power these monuments once held, acknowledging, dissecting and ultimately rejecting the Confederacy’s roots in slavery. Planning a Confederate monument graveyard will prompt many questions. Where should it be located? Will there be one central Confederate monument graveyard or many? Who will design and plan the graveyard? Answering these questions would not just be part of a conversation about steel and stone but about the serious pursuit of peace, justice and racial healing in the nation — and about putting the Old South to rest. LUC-ANDRE Atlanta's confederate monuments: how do ‘context markers’ help explain racism? Khushbu Shah – The Guardian - Sat 3 Aug 2019

Atlanta’s monuments to its Confederate past cannot be taken down by law. But the city is now moving to provide much-needed historical context on the realities of slavery, the civil war and the era of Jim Crow segregation that followed. Homages to Atlanta’s history crop up in many cemeteries and parks. Little context accompanies those stone memorials with engraved plaques referring to “heroic efforts” and the south’s soldiers’ efforts to “unite” the country after the civil war. There is no mention of racism or slavery and segregation. But now, Atlanta is placing four new context markers near some of the statues and monuments that will offer a fuller and more honest accounting of the south’s history and its legacy of slavery and racism. One marker will go up near the 1935-constructed Peachtree Battle Avenue monument, a simple stone engraved memorial commemorating an 1864 civil war battle stressing peace between the north and south. The new additional panel next to it will point out flaws in the monument’s inscription by saying: “[It] describes the United States after the civil war as a perfected nation. This ignores the segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans and others that still existed in 1935.” Another marker, at the Peace monument, built in 1911 in the midst of one of Atlanta’s most popular parks, is a large statue of a Confederate soldier halted by an angel. The original plaque explains how a Confederate-era city militia was on a peace mission to unite America after the civil war. The added marker explains how it excludes 200,000 African Americans who served in the US army. Both monuments stress unity between the north and south in the wake of the civil war, but neither plaque commemorating the Confederacy mentions the reason for the war: pro- slavery southern states advocated for secession, wanting to continue the enslavement of African Americans. Both were erected not during the civil war or shortly after, but during the era of Jim Crow laws, enforcing racial segregation. “There’s a lot of people don’t understand these monuments were not really put up right after the civil war,” Heidi Bierich, the director of the Innocence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, explained. “[Confederate monuments] were assertions of when white people were gaining more power under Jim Crow, or the Klan in the 1920s. So, it was a big old, you know: ‘I reject civil rights, I reject black rights.’” Two other monuments in the Oakland cemetery – the Confederate obelisk and the Lion of the Confederacy – will also have markers to contextualize their continued placement on state-owned property. Advocates for these new markers, like Bierich, say the new information panels are more truthful because now visitors won’t see a Confederate monument without having some other narrative. They are necessary because a local political struggle over the fate of the monuments ended with them being protected by law, even as some other southern communities took down their Confederate statues. However, Atlanta’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president Richard Rose said the city shouldn’t have compromised on the monuments. “You can’t contextualize racism or compromise on racism,” he said, adding that these markers “establish that racism is valid”. In 2017, the city’s then mayor Kasim Reed formed a committee to review street names and city-owned monuments, just months after white nationalists rallied in Charlottesville in protest at the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee. Some of those marching had carried white power symbols as a car smashed into anti-racism protesters, killing Heather Heyer. Though the debate around memorials to Confederate history has continued since the violent rallies in Virginia, the 2015 shooting by Dylann Roof at a black church in South Carolina ignited the debate after the gunman posted pictures with the Confederate flag. South Carolina removed the flag from its statehouse grounds, but kept its monuments. The committee advised that Confederate monuments in Georgia be moved to storage, but a recent law signed by Republican governor Brian Kemp makes it illegal to remove any monument on property owned by the state. The NAACP denounced the law, saying the monuments “glorify treason and a hateful history of black subjugation, reinforced through domestic terrorism”. Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, according to the SPLC, also have similar laws in place to protect Confederate monuments from removal. Of the seven states banning the removal of Confederate monuments, Atlanta is the only city within them to add context via plaques. Sheffield Hale, president and chief executive of the Atlanta History Center, said the markers – paid for in part by the center – help address the issue, but they are not a permanent solution. “I do think it gives [people] a starting point, which is sorely needed right now, in our society, as a way to deal with contentious issues. The final line to be added alongside the Peace monument is certain to do just that. “This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood; rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights,” it says. But just miles from downtown Atlanta, the largest memorial of the Confederacy in the US still looms over the city with no context and a laser light show highlighting the state’s most visited attraction. That is Stone Mountain, where families picnic under the gaze of a gigantic carving of Confederate leaders. JOHAN What Should Happen to Confederate Statues? A City Auctions One for $1.4 Million The New York Times, by Sarah Mervosh, June 22, 2019

Left, a statue of Robert E. Lee was put in storage by the city of Dallas before being sold at auction. Right, a Confederate monument in Nashville was recently vandalized.

It happened by city decree in the dark of night, or by civic demand at the hands of protesters. When the movement to reckon with Confederate symbols swept the nation, monuments that had long stood in city parks and on college campuses were suddenly dismantled. There was often no clear plan for the future, and few long-term solutions have emerged. “They end up in warehouses and people don’t really know what to do with them,” said Heidi Beirich, who leads the intelligence project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which estimates that at least 114 Confederate symbols have been removed from public spaces since 2015. Now, one city has settled on an unusual answer: Sell the statue to the highest bidder. Dallas, unable to find a suitable new home for a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback that had sat in a city park until 2017, recently sent the artifact to an online auction. It sold for more than $1.4 million, with one crucial condition: The statue cannot be displayed publicly in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The auction is among the first of its kind since the movement to remove Confederate monuments picked up speed, first in 2015, after a white supremacist killed nine black congregants at a church in Charleston, S.C., and then in 2017, when a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., led to the death of a counterprotester. But while the Dallas case may offer other cities a potential way forward, it also highlights the logistical and ethical challenges of transplanting statues that are often physically enormous and remain viscerally controversial. This week, a Confederate monument in Nashville was sprayed with graffiti that read, “They were racists.” Students and demonstrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill surrounded a plinth where the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier nicknamed “Silent Sam” once stood in 2018.CreditJonathan Drake/Reuters What happened in Dallas? Many Confederate statues being debated today did not originate during the Civil War era, when Southerners built obelisks in cemeteries and other tributes with themes of mourning. The towering figures of individual soldiers and monuments in public squares generally came later, historians say, during the rise of Jim Crow laws and subsequently during a backlash against desegregation. “That is when you are simultaneously seeing the dedication of these monuments,” said Christy Coleman, the chief executive of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va. “They are not separate things. They are a reassertion of the ideal.” In Dallas, the Robert E. Lee monument, which was unveiled in a 1936 ceremony attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was part of the “Lost Cause” movement, a postwar ideology that played down slavery’s role in the Civil War and romanticized the Confederacy as noble and heroic. “It shall stand here on this busy corner of our city as a perpetual memorial to the character, valor and achievements of this matchless leader of our own Lost Cause,” the mayor of Dallas said at the time, according to a copy of the dedication program. The city ordered the statue’s removal in 2017 amid a national wave of unrest over Confederate statues. Initially, a task force recommended that the statue be donated to a museum or educational site, where it could be displayed in full context. But no local options proved appropriate, said Jennifer Scripps, the director of the office of cultural affairs in Dallas. Ultimately, the city decided to sell the statue, which was made by Alexander Phimister Proctor. “It was clearly worth money,” Ms. Scripps said. “To put it in a crate for perpetuity, was that the best use of a taxpayer asset? But I think you have to do it very carefully.” Officials set the price at $450,000, the amount it cost to remove the statue. A bidding war broke out among online buyers, driving the price over $1.4 million. The winner was identified as Ron Holmes, a local real estate lawyer bidding on behalf of his firm. He did not return requests for comment, and it is unclear whether he bought it for himself or a client. But that wasn’t a deal breaker for city officials, who plan to use the money to reimburse costs and pay for the removal of another Confederate monument. Whatever the new buyer chooses to do with it, Ms. Scripps said, “it does not have the backing of the government, uplifting it as worthy of an honorific.” What is happening in other cities? In one instance in Kentucky, a Confederate monument was moved to another, more welcoming town. In Winston-Salem, N.C., there are reportedly plans to move a Confederate monument to a cemetery. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, officials still haven’t decided what to do with “Silent Sam,” nearly a year after the statue was toppled by protesters. Baltimore is asking for a detailed plan from anyone interested in acquiring Confederate monuments that city officials had removed under the cover of darkness in 2017. The city wants to know who the new owner will be and what that person or institution plans to do with it, including where it will be stored and how it will be put in historical context, said Eric Holcomb, the executive director of Baltimore’s historical and architectural preservation commission. “It’s really important to us that these monuments get into the right hands where they can be used for a discussion for healing,” he said. It hasn’t been easy. The city has received requests from “pro-Confederate institutions,” whose approach runs counter to the commission’s goal of placing the artifacts in full context, Mr. Holcomb said. He said other groups had expressed interest as well, but acknowledged that it was a difficult issue and that “a lot of organizations are not very receptive right now.” In Memphis, the fate of Confederate statues is tied up in court. Tennessee is among the few states with laws shielding Confederate tributes, but two statues in Memphis were removed after the city transferred ownership of the land to a nonprofit group, Memphis Greenspace. The statues are in “an undisclosed location” while that decision is challenged in court, said Van D. Turner Jr., the president of the group, who is also a commissioner in Shelby County, Tenn. Mr. Turner hopes to send the statues to a Civil War memorial park in the state. He said he had also received a request from the historical home of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the original grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who is depicted in one of the statues. “Ultimately, I would prefer a location which showed all sides of the Civil War,” Mr. Turner said. Images What about museums? And what are the other options for cities? Museums are often suggested as an ideal location to preserve and contextualize Confederate statues. But even that solution has proved tricky. The American Civil War Museum has had to turn down requests for it to accept Confederate statues, which are expensive to care for and already fill the museum’s hallways, Ms. Coleman said. “Frankly, we really need to balance out our collection as it is,” she said, noting that the museum’s mission is to explore the war from multiple perspectives. There are also practical considerations: Some monuments are huge and do not easily fit indoors. Paul C. Gramling Jr., the leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has sued to protect Confederate statues, is opposed to removal in all cases. Saying that Confederate monuments honor the dead, he suggested that discussions about what to do with them were like asking: “We took the tombstone off your grandfather’s grave, now what do you think we should do with it?” But if a statue cannot stay up, he said, it should be offered to the descendants of the Confederate soldiers to which it paid tribute. For Ajume H. Wingo, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies democracies, the fate of the statues matters less than how they are removed. “Justice must be seen to be done,” said Dr. Wingo, who argued that the statues should not be taken down covertly, but rather in public ceremonies that are as prominent as their original unveilings. He suggested a symbolic, if not literal, torching of Confederate statues. “That is how you take the power of it,” he said. Of course, not everyone agrees that the statues could be rendered powerless, and some would like to melt the statues for good. A short-lived campaign in Dallas raised money for that purpose. But Sheffield Hale, the chief executive of the Atlanta History Center, which advises that Confederate monuments should be explained in accurate historical context if they are not removed, said destruction would limit options for future generations. Perhaps a good place for removed monuments, he said, is where many have been all along: In storage. “Put them on ice,” he said, “and then bring them back out when there is more of a consensus.” JOSUA Charlottesville’s Confederate statues still stand — and still symbolize a racist legacy By Paul Duggan - August 10, 2019 – The Washington Post

Two years ago, when white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, organizers of the Unite the Right rally said they were defending a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which the city planned to remove from a public park. The deadly street violence and outpouring of racist and anti-Semitic venom on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, continue to haunt the national psyche. But what about the sculpture that prompted the angry gathering, a huge bronze rendering of Lee astride his beloved steed? Well, it’s still standing, as is a towering bronze equestrian statue of rebel Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, which the city also wants to remove. And the two Old Dixie icons won’t be going anywhere in the foreseeable future amid a seemingly endless legal fight over their historical meaning. While supporters contend that the statues, installed in the 1920s, are simply memorials to the Confederacy’s war veterans, the city argues that the monuments “were intended to, and did, send messages of intimidation, exclusion and hostility to African Americans.” The question of whether the statues “were part of a regime of city-sanctioned segregation” appears headed for Virginia’s Supreme Court. No matter how the statues are interpreted, though, Charlottesville’s history of Jim Crow apartheid is undeniable. When the Jackson and Lee sculptures were dedicated, in 1921 and 1924, respectively, this college community, like the rest of the South and much of the country, was steeped in institutionalized racism. Eight months before the Jackson monument was unveiled, local citizens of privileged color were aghast at a subversive wish list published Feb. 12, 1921, in the black-owned Charlottesville Messenger, and reprinted, for shock value, on the front page of the city’s white-run paper, the Daily Progress. Titled “The New Negro,” the article called for “Teachers’ salaries based on service not on color;” a four-year high school for black students; “Better street facilities in Negro districts”; a voice for blacks in municipal government; and the abolition of “ ‘Jim Crow’ street cars.” The Daily Progress, appalled by the manifesto, echoed its flabbergasted readers in an editorial warning that “the negroes” should remember their place: “The circulation of such absurd tirades and impossible proposals … only serve to make the problem of the law-abiding and respected element among the colored people that much harder, [and] if trouble ensues, its greatest weight will ultimately fall on them.” After a month of threats and denunciations, the Messenger’s editor, John G. Shelton, mollified whites with an editorial of his own, disavowing, point by point, the radical ideas advocated by the author of “The New Negro,” a Charlottesville native who was head of the St. Louis Urban League. “Having thus clearly stated our position,” Shelton concluded apologetically, “we will consider the incident closed and bid farewell to the so called New Negro, and jog along in our accustomed way, well content with the old ones with whom we have thus far journeyed in peace, happiness and a slight measure of success.” Such was Charlottesville. 'Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’ The statues, in the city’s Court Square area, were donated by Paul Goodloe McIntire, a philanthropist whose slave-owning father had been financially humbled by the Civil War. McIntire, who was not quite 5 years old when the South surrendered in 1865, amassed a fortune in Chicago and New York before retiring in his hometown and becoming a civic benefactor. “The princely giver of princely gifts,” as he was called, commissioned the monuments in the late 1910s, hiring New York sculptors Henry Shrady (for Lee) and Charles Keck (for Jackson). Both statues were expected to be finished by about 1921. At the time, though, Shrady was immersed in his most ambitious creation, the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial near the U.S. Capitol, and he fell behind on the Lee project. After Shrady died in 1922, another sculptor took over the job. That was why Keck’s rendering of Jackson — a lesser demigod than Lee — went up three years before the statue of the South’s top military commander, regarded by Confederate apologists as unrivaled in fortitude and chivalry. On Oct. 19, 1921, the day of the first unveiling, Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, addressed a crowd of thousands in front of a 10-foot sculpture atop a 13-foot pedestal. “To the city of Charlottesville, and, in a high spiritual sense, to the valiant souls now living who fought beneath the Stars and Bars,” Alderman said, he was presenting the Jackson statue “in the belief that it will stand here forever.” By then, the Confederacy’s defense of human bondage had been supplanted in popular thought by a gauzy fiction, the myth of the Lost Cause. This version of history held that the insurrection had been a second American Revolution, a righteous uprising against federal economic tyranny, and that the men who waged the rebellion should be revered for their patriotism and sacrifice. “To call it treason is to add viciousness to stupidity,” Alderman told the gathering in Jackson Park, awash in moonlight-and-magnolias nostalgia. The ex-rebel soldiers attending the ceremony belonged to a dying generation that had witnessed 12 years of black suffrage and biracial governance in the South during postwar Reconstruction. After the demise of federally enforced political equality, the culture and legal bulwark of Jim Crow were established, excluding blacks from civic life and denying basic entitlements such as those sought by “The New Negro.” A majority of the Confederate monuments in the United States today were installed between 1900 and 1930. Whether the statues were erected only to honor vanishing heroes, or also symbolized the restoration of white power, made no practical difference to Charlottesville’s African Americans living under Jim Crow. Most of them bore daily oppression and ridicule silently while fearing for their safety. “KU KLUX KLAN ORGANIZED HERE,” a headline said, the summer before the Jackson dedication. The Ku Klux Klan was dead. The first Hollywood blockbuster revived it. Lynchings and other forms of racial terrorism were rampant in the South in the early 20th century. In 1915, filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s lurid box-office smash, “The Birth of a Nation,” glorified the murderous, long-dormant Klan of the Reconstruction era and helped fuel a vast resurgence of the Invisible Empire. New chapters, or klaverns, were popping up all over the country, including in Charlottesville. A notice began appearing on public bulletin boards around the city in June 1921, reflecting the nation’s anti-immigration fervor as well as ancient animus toward blacks: “Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian Religion, Free Schools, Free Speech, Free Press, Law Enforcement, Liberty and White Supremacy? Can you take a MAN’S OATH? Drop a line to M.N.T., General Delivery, Charlottesville.” Signed, “Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” The local klavern was designated Klan No. 9, and the Daily Progress gave its meetings and cross-burnings favorable coverage. “No man can subscribe to tenets like the following and fail to become a better and bigger and more patriotic citizen,” one article declared, citing Klan No. 9’s central principle: “Rigid preservation of white supremacy. The destinies of America shall remain with the white race; they shall never be entrusted to the black, the brown, the yellow, or to the unclean hands of hybrids and mongrels.” The story added, “The Charlottesville Klan is not the largest in Virginia, but it numbers among its members many of our able and influential citizens, and it is here to stay.” ‘Lee statue on the way’ Charlottesville, population 48,000, is four times as big now than when the statues were erected. Today’s electorate, largely white, votes decidedly blue, and two of the City Council’s five members, including Mayor Nikuyah Walker (I), are African American. A lawsuit aimed at saving the sculptures was filed in March 2017 — five months before the violent white-supremacist rally — and the litigation in Charlottesville Circuit Court has gone in favor of the 13 plaintiffs, all Confederate heritage enthusiasts. In rulings this year, Judge Richard E. Moore decided that the hulking effigies are war memorials protected by a 1904 Virginia preservation law. The next step for the city is an appeal to the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Lee monument, 26 feet high including its pedestal, stands where it always has, in a small park donated by “the princely giver,” which folks in the 1920s knew was for whites only. In 1924, three months before the statue was unveiled, Virginia passed its Racial Integrity Act, barring interracial marriage. The law (struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case) was cheered in Charlottesville by U-Va.’ s Anglo-Saxon Club. The group hosted public lectures on the perils of miscegenation, including one by a university biology professor and eugenicist named Ivey F. Lewis. “The mixing of the whites with the blacks was the cause of the fall of the civilizations of Rome, Greece, Egypt and India,” a local reporter wrote, summarizing Lewis’s speech under the headline “Virginia Again Leading the Nation.” The article said: “With the mixing came a laxness of morals and a crumbling of culture. America faces the same danger.” Then, two weeks later, on April 17, exciting news: “LEE STATUE ON THE WAY” The dedication was set for May 21, coinciding with the 1924 reunion of the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans of Virginia, a week-long festival of Old Dixie pride that was coming to Charlottesville. The city, preparing to welcome the gathering of aged rebs, festooned itself in the Stars and Bars. The anonymous “able and influential citizens” of Klan No. 9 — not to be confused with Klan No. 5, the U-Va. campus klavern — celebrated by burning a giant cross on the evening of May 16 and the next night marched through Charlottesville in their hoods, accompanied by a brass band. “Thousands lined the sidewalks,” the press said, “in eagerness to see the parade.” In an interview with local historians in 2005, an African American woman recalled the march. She was a youngster in 1924, visiting one of her grandfathers, who had been born into slavery. “He told all of us grandchildren to quickly get into the house and stay there,” she remembered. “He went out to the front gate of the house and watched a parade of Ku Klux Klan men, completely covered in white sheets, as they marched down West Main Street. Afterwards he came in and said, ‘I recognized every single one of them!’ He was their barber and knew them all by their shoes!” On the afternoon of the unveiling, the Rev. Henry W. Battle, known for his stirring orations, rose before the multitudes in Lee Park and extolled the gray-bearded veterans on hand. Hundreds of them had mustered in the city from all over Virginia, their ranks thinned by time, “cherishing deathless devotion to a cause as precious to them in old age as it was when, in their glorious youth, they trod with the proud bearing of kings.” The pastor said nothing about human chattel. He said nothing about the forsaken ideals of Reconstruction or the rise of Jim Crow. There was no mention of the aspirations of “The New Negro” in Battle’s grandiloquent gusts. Then he directed his remarks to the younger people in the crowd, “the sons and daughters of the Confederacy,” whose “noblest heritage” had descended “from such men as are these venerable fathers.” To the newer generations, he issued a sacred charge that would carry down the century, echoing now in a lawsuit by true believers in the Lost Cause. “Their supreme duty,” Battle declared, will be “to keep the record of Confederate heroism free from the stain of calumny.”