Why the Virus Won by Ed Yong E Power of American Denial by Ibram

SEPTEMBER 2020 THEATLANTIC.COM

WHY THE VIRUS WON H O W THE POWER OF AMERICAN DENIAL DDID I D IT I T CCOME O M E SEPTEMBER 2020

e Power of Why the Virus Won American Denial By Ed Yong T O By Ibram X. Kendi THEATLANTIC.COM THIS?

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DONATE NOW AT HEIFER.ORG/ATLANTIC HOW CAN GREATER CONNECTIVITY HELP KEEP OUR DATA SAFE?

I AM JEN EASTERLY

Global Head of the Fusion Resilience Center

While the Internet has made our lives easier, its interconnectedness has also made our data less secure, with a cyberattack now occurring every 40 seconds.1 In the Morgan Stanley Fusion Center, we’re capitalizing on the connectivity of our talent and technology to not only respond rapidly to cyberthreats, but also to proactively keep client data safe. So while the volume, variety and velocity of data are ever expanding, so is our ability to protect it.

To watch Jen’s Morgan Stanley Minute on “Cybersecurity in the Connected Age,” go to morganstanley.com/cybersecurity.

1 “13 Alarming Cyber Security Facts and Stats,” cybintsolutions.com/cyber-security-facts-stats, December 2018. © 2020 Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. Members SIPC. CRC 2708333 09/19 OF NO PARTY OR CLIQUE

VOL. 326–NO. 2 SEPTEMBER 2020 CONTENTS

Features Cover Story

Cover Stories Features 58 When China Sees All Xi Jinping is using articial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology around the globe. 32 48 By Ross Andersen By Ibram X. Kendi 70 By Ed Yong Donald Trump has revealed the What Is MasterClass How the virus won depths of the country’s prejudice— Actually Selling? and forced Americans to confront e ads are everywhere: Learn to serve a racist system. like Serena Williams or write like Margaret Atwood. But MasterClass The United States has just percent of the world’s population, delivers something altogether dierent. but a quarter of its confirmed COVID- cases and deaths. By Carina Chocano DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX

0920_FRM_ToC [Print]_13908522.indd 3 7/13/2020 2:25:11 PM SEPTEMBER 2020

Front Culture & Critics Back 6 78 90 The Commons OMNIVORE ESSAY Discussion & Debate David Coppereld’s “No Novel About Any Wild Ride Black Woman Could Ever Armando Iannucci’s mad, Be the Same After is” loving, and brilliant adapta- at’s how Toni Morrison tion of Dickens’s novel described Gayl Jones’s rst book By James Parker in 1975. Jones has published to great acclaim and experienced unspeakable tragedy. Dispatches 80 Now she’s releasing her rst novel in more than 20 years. BOOKS By Calvin Baker 9 22 What to Do About OPENING ARGUMENT POLITICS William Faulkner e Mythology of Protest Works A white man of the Jim Crow 100 Racial Progress How the Black Lives Mat- South, he couldn’t escape the Believing that things are ter demonstrations will shake burden of race, yet derived Ode to Balloons always getting better actually up the 2020 election—and creative force from it. By James Parker makes them worse. reshape American politics for By Drew Gilpin Faust By Jennifer A. Richeson a generation to come By Daniel Q. Gillion 83 14 BOOKS SOCIETY 26 Lying as an Art Form Police Reform Is Not EnoughEnough SKETCH Elena Ferrante’s new novel e moral failure of incremen- e Relentless about adolescence explores the tal change Erin Brockovich power of ctions. By Mychal Denzel Smith She was an early crusader By Merve Emre for environmental justice. Today, she’s sounding the 18 alarm louder than ever. 86 On the Cover By Amanda Fortini HISTORY BOOKS Looking for e World Putin Made Frederick Douglass How KGB methods, tactics, How a visit to his birthplace 30 and operations have fueled helped me understand this VIEWFINDER Russia’s quest for glory moment in America e Black Yearbook By Anne Applebaum TYPOGRAPHY BY By Clint Smith Photographs by MENDELSUND/MUNDAY Adraint Khadafhi Bereal 89 I Feel Good A poem by Nikky Finney

4 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_FRM_ToC [Print]_13908522.indd 4 7/13/2020 2:25:12 PM This content was created by Atlantic Re:think, the branded content studio at The Atlantic, and made SPONSOR CONTENT possible by ServiceNow. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorial staff.

Your Business Has Gone Digital.

Now What?

Future-proofing your company isn’t just a matter of “digital transformation.” It’s about understanding your consumers and building a digital experience around what they need.

usiness leaders are told they need to do a lot of – The percentage of best practices that have been implemented things when it comes to technology. They need to by organizations to date build an app. They need an AI chatbot. They need B – The percentage of implementation they expect to reach by 2023 more data. They need a social-media strategy.

In short: To better serve their customers, they need 50% to go digital—and fast. But beyond buzzwords, Developing digital skills what’s actually at stake in this transformation? 21% To better understand the challenges that organizations face and help them plan their digital transitions, ServiceNow surveyed 600 global executives in an array 45% Implementing a of industries—including telecoms, health care, customer-experience manufacturing, the public sector, and financial services— management system 20% in February and March of 2020. They discovered that businesses have a lot of catching up to do.

45% Aligning experience 18% with business goals You’re probably not prepared, and you aren’t alone.

Creating a positive customer experience isn’t just about building a beautiful website or app. It’s about creating Identifying a digital workflow that enables customers to seamlessly key customer 44% access what they need, and most organizations don’t touchpoints 18% have a plan in place to do that. Even companies leading in digitization—those who have adopted the best practices of building a digital customer experience 43% (listed here)—have a long way to go. Creating an immersive and personalized experience 18% To gain more insight on how to keep pace with digitization, read the full article at: TheAtlantic.com/NowWhat Behind the Cover: A picture is worth a thousand allowed the dual crises of COVID-19 and racism to fester. words—but sometimes only a few words are necessary. ey look squarely, too, at the choices the country now is month’s unadorned cover poses an urgent national faces if it is to have any hope of recovery. On occasions question in stark typographic terms. Ed Yong and Ibram such as this, a designer’s touch should be light, giving the X. Kendi, in their respective essays, elucidate answers by language space to resonate on its own terms. THE interrogating the uniquely American failures that have — Oliver Munday, Senior Art Director

ere is a saying in the African American community that was captured by Sam Fulwood III in a 2015 article titled “When White Folks Catch a Cold, Black Folks Get Pneumonia.” ose of us in the African American community who are cognizant In America, George Packer of our history and have experi- wrote, the coronavirus enced American inequities are Underlying not shocked by the ineptness of has revealed a sick and the health-care system in poor Conditions unequal society incapable of and urban minority communities. However, white America self-government (June). appears to be. I could not agree more with Mr. Packer when he says, “Inva- sion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines … clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.” If nothing else, the coronavirus has served as a harsh reminder that while white etters America is catching a cold, Black America is suering a potential As I read this excellent article, I York City and have been simul- death threat. was struck by the clarity of the taneously awed by the work of Yolanda Brown-Spidell writer’s vision. my health-care colleagues and Westland, Mich. I was completely unprepared, furious at how much has been however, to burst into tears when asked of them because our federal Comparing President Donald I read the last paragraph. The government willfully stopped Trump’s performance to that phrase “We can use this pause in working like one long ago. It has of France’s Marshal Philippe our normal lives to pay attention placed minorities, wage laborers, Pétain in World War II is a bit to the hospital workers holding and “essential workers” at need- of a stretch. Perhaps a more apt up cellphones so their patients less risk as the result of replacing World War II comparison is can say goodbye to loved ones” core principles of good gover- the United States’s disgraceful conjured up such a strong image, nance with unrelenting partisan response to the U-boat menace I couldn’t hold back my tears. We warfare, in all three branches. off our Atlantic coast, in the I are all grieving—for ourselves, We’ll dig out and recover from Caribbean, and in the Gulf of for our country, and for one the daily impact of this crisis, Mexico in 1942. Despite watch- another. The selflessness of so but it’s much less certain whether ing how the British dealt with the I shall chew on this article for many people should be an inspi- we’ll ever recover the nation’s U-boats in the Atlantic for the several days. e taste is bitter. ration to all of us. sense of unity and purpose. ¢rst two years of the war, the U.S. However, it should be swallowed failed to prepare, learn, or imple- Christine Szolkowski Todd Hixson and digested; hopefully its nutri- Howell Township, N.J. New York, N.Y. ment eective countermeasures. ents will be absorbed. It all sounds so familiar. Ian McHugh I am a senior administrator at e article was powerful, but John Whittemore Mattapoisett, Mass. a major public hospital in New it did not tell the entire story. Marion, N.C.

6 SEPTEMBER 2020

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The accurate and devastating American friends, whose leader themselves under have allowed hear the administration using picture of today’s United States revels in displaying his ignorance them an unusual peek into the same language: that we are speaks to a betrayal of the dreams I of science and disdain for facts backyard worlds and dramas warriors against COVID-19. had when I came as an immigrant while his fellow citizens die. I that previously they had no idea I was unable to avoid getting to this country in 1971. Fortu- love my American friends, but existed. For me, now that I know cancer. I should be able to nately for all, the U.S. has proved for once I feel desperately sorry this whole universe is humming avoid getting COVID-19. ´ ere to be a most resilient country, able for you all. around me all the time, it’s pretty should be testing, tracking, trac- to recover from the worst natural hard to look away. ing, and a rational, coordinated Paul Jones and man-made disasters. national approach. St Kilda, Victoria, Australia Megan Richter Now not only am I in the César Chelala Ridgecrest, Calif. New York, N.Y. nightmare of knowing that at some point my cancer will return, I am a refugee born after the end Why Birds Do What but I am also in the nightmare of World War II and a proud ´ ey Do ´ e Last Day of of realizing that my government naturalized American citizen. e more humans understand My Old Life does not even want me to get My heart is wounded by every about their behavior, In the June issue, Caitlin to that point. My government truth revealed in this article—but Jenny Odell wrote in June, Flanagan wrote about is framing the argument that I I thank Mr. Packer for writing it. the more inaccessible their cancer in the time of the am old, useless, and, for heaven’s world seems. coronavirus. sake, defective because I have Helma Reynolds Sanibel, Fla. metastatic cancer. I deeply appreciated Jenny During treatment for cancer, Celia Abbott While it is incredibly sad to see Odell’s article, and the simul- there are lots of images of the Banning, Calif. our great southern neighbor taneous wonder and quiet patient as a warrior, battling sink into irrelevancy, the real concern interspersed through- the cancer. I was always luke- To respond to Atlantic articles or submit author questions to ´ e Commons, disturbing thing for Canadians out it. ´ e stay-at-home orders warm about that imaging, but please email [email protected]. is that our neighbor may drag many Americans have found it is very prominent. Now I Include your full name, city, and state. our nation into the abyss with it.

Maurice Coombs Toronto, Ontario ¯ both past and present. would see their income invested in the notion —— ´ at gap has remained rise from the bottom 20 of social mobility—the Sadly, almost every word of What we learned fact- relatively stable for half a percent to the top 20 young rely on it for George Packer’s article is inter- checking this issue century, but Americans percent over 10 years. future success, and changeable with our experience tend to assume that it ´ ey guessed that 16 elites need it to jus tify over decades here in the U.K. It On page 9, Jennifer has narrowed over time. would make that leap; in their status as earned. is no coincidence that our respec- A. Richeson considers Other research may reality, only one would. Downplaying in equality, tive countries have among the why Americans over- help explain why such Of the respondents, even un consciously, can highest COVID-19 death tolls estimate the country’s misconceptions persist. young people and those help people preserve in the world. progress toward racial Participants in one who self-reported high comforting ideas about equality. Her research 2015 study were asked socio economic status themselves— and about Paul Mellon Glasgow, Scotland found that Americans to imag ine America as were especially o¶ target. their country. underestimate the gap having a population As the study’s authors As an Australian, I daily sit between Black and of 100 people, and to explain it, these two — Jack Segelstein, in stunned amazement at my white familial wealth, estimate how many groups are particularly Assistant Editor

e Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, ction or non ction, and mail for the Letters column. Manuscripts will not be returned. For instructions on sending manuscripts via email, see theatlantic.com/faq. By submitting a letter, you agree to let us use it, as well as your full name, city, and state, in our magazine and/or on our website. We may edit for clarity. Please direct all subscription queries and orders to: +1 855-940-0585. For expedited customer service, please call between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday. You may also write to: Atlantic Customer Care, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564. Reprint requests should be made to Sisk at 410-754-8219 or [email protected]. A discount rate is available for students and educators. Please visit theatlantic.com/subscribe/academic. ¬ e Atlantic, 60 Madison Avenue, Suite 800, New York, NY 10010, 646-539-6700.

0920_FRM_TheCommons [Print]_13908621.indd 7 7/13/2020 4:41:17 PM

DISPATCHES

OPENING ARGUMENT

THE MYTHOLOGY OF RACIAL PROGRESS Believing that things are always getting better actually makes them worse.

BY JENNIFER A. RICHESON

or two days in early June, as America was ererupting in sustained protests over the kikilling of a Black man, George Floyd, by popolice in Minneapolis, the most watched momovie on Net ix was e Help. e 2011 lm—which depicts Black servants working in a uent white households in 1960s MMississippi, and centers on a white female journalist—won acclaim in some quar- ters. But it has also been criticized as a sesentimental and simplistic portrayal of racism—and redemption—amid the crcruelties of Jim Crow. F 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. at

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the movie was newly available only smooths over the past but our history, and challenges the And the hold is very hard on Netflix does not explain smooths over what is yet to nation’s prevailing psychology. to break, as a study we recently everything. One reality that come: It holds out the promise My own research as a social conducted, in collaboration the Help phenomenon makes of an almost predestined, natu- psychologist focuses in part with the Northwestern profes- us recognize is the enduring rally occurring future that will be on racial wealth disparities— sor Ivuoma Onyeador, makes power of mythology when it even more just and egalitarian. particularly, what people do all too clear. Up to a point, this comes to American racism. Thinking this way won’t and don’t believe, and do new study had the same basic The mythology takes many make the future better. and don’t acknowledge about design as the one just cited. But forms. Sometimes it involves those disparities. Unless people the sample group consisted a desperate grasping for ar- racial understand the systemic forces only of white Americans. And mation. Sometimes it involves progress distorts our percep- that create and sustain racial before they provided estimates, a gauzy nostalgia. Sometimes tions of reality; perhaps more inequality, we will never suc- a subset of the respondents were it involves a willful ignorance. signicantly, it absolves us of cessfully address it. But percep- asked to read a short article All of these strains, and oth- responsibility for changing tions, it turns out, are slippery. about the persistence of racial ers, are woven into a larger that reality. Progress is seen For the past several years, I, discrimination. Exposure to the and enduring narrative— the as natural and inevitable— along with my Yale colleague article had an impact. But here’s mythology of racial progress. inescapable, like the laws of Michael W. Kraus and our stu- the surprise: Those who read is is a uniquely American physics. Backsliding is unlikely. dents, have been examining the article still estimated that, mythology. Since the nation’s Vigilance is unnecessary. perceptions of racial economic in 2016, Black wealth was close founding, its prevailing cultural It is obviously true that inequality—its extent and per- to that of whites. ey simply sensibility has been optimistic, many of the conditions of life sistence, decade by decade. In plotted a more gradual slope future- oriented, sure of itself, for Black Americans have got- a 2019 study, using a dozen of progress. In other words, if and convinced of America’s ten better over time. Material specific moments between people accepted that progress inherent goodness. Despite our standards have in many ways 1963 and 2016, we compared had been slower than they’d tragic racial history, Americans improved. Some essential civil perceptions of racial wealth imagined— the takeaway mes- generally believe that the coun- rights have advanced, though inequality over time with actual sage of the article they read— try has made and continues to unevenly, episodically, and usu- data on racial wealth inequal- then they arrived at the idea make steady progress toward ally only following great and ity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that the past must not have racial equality. Broad accep- contentious eort. But many the respondents in our study been as bad as they thought. tance of this trajectory under- areas never saw much progress, signicantly overestimated the They did not entertain the lies the way our leaders talk. It or what progress was made has wealth of Black families rela- idea that the present must be also inuences the way racism been halted or even reversed. tive to that of white families. In worse than they think it is. e is treated in popular culture. e mythology of racial prog- 1963, the median Black family mind is a remarkable instru- When we think about the ress often rings hollow when it had about 5 percent as much ment, adept at many things, nation’s racial history, we often comes to, for instance, racial wealth as the median white including self-delusion. Get- envision a linear path, one that, gaps in education. Or health family. Respondents said close ting people to alter overly opti- admittedly, begins in a shame- outcomes. Or voting rights. to 50 percent. For 2016, the mistic outlooks— at least in the ful period but moves unerringly Or criminal justice. Or per- respondents estimated Black domain of racial progress—is in a single direction—toward sonal wealth. History is not wealth to be 90 percent that of not a straightforward matter. equality. As if we’re riding a a ratchet that turns in one whites. e correct answer for Whiggish escalator, the narra- direction only. Martin Luther that year was about 10 percent. tive of racial progress starts with King Jr. famously asserted that People’s estimates of a way for individuals to find slavery, ascends to the Civil War “the arc of the moral universe inequality were not only far too meaning in life and to make and the Emancipation Procla- is long, but it bends toward low for every period, but the life seem more orderly and mation, speeds past segregation justice.” And maybe it will, estimates actually grew more predictable. e narratives we and Jim Crow to the victories in the end. But in our actual inaccurate the closer they got tell about ourselves—and about of the civil-rights movement, lifetimes we see backward steps to the present. People are will- the social groups to which we and then drops us o in 2008 and tragic detours. ing to assume that things were belong—help us organize how for Barack Obama’s election. e protests that began in at least somewhat bad 50 years we interpret events as they Many people asserted at the late May have focused on fun- ago, but they also assume that unfold, and respond to them. time that America had become damental questions of police things have gotten substantially Narratives are part of our men- a “postracial” society, or was at violence and civil rights. is better—and are approaching tal architecture, and certain least getting close—maybe one sort of awakening oers great parity. e mythology of racial quirks of mind make specic more short escalator ride away. opportunity—more on that progress exerts a power ful hold narratives hard to escape. For is redemptive narrative not in a moment—but it is rare in on our minds. instance, there’s what might

10 SEPTEMBER 2020

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ARTWORK BY LORNA SIMPSON. PART 1 PART 2, 2016.

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be called the generational fal- remedy—legal challenges the chasm between myth and jobs, politics, education, the lacy: Many who acknowledge demonstrating that these reality. Such moments—after environment, health, hous- the reality of racism see salva- laws are discriminatory—is the Civil War, and again in the ing, and of course criminal tion in the ebbing presence of unlikely to prevent violations 1960s—are rare, but they can justice. A window has opened, older white people and their of voting rights. create significant opportuni- and acting fast is essential. It replacement by a surging mass Similarly, even in upholding ties. I believe we are in such is possible that something has of enlightened younger people. some forms of armative action a moment now. Most Ameri- permanently shifted in the But generational change is not in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), cans are disgusted and angered American psyche; we should so simple. Young people’s racial Supreme Court Justice Sandra by police tactics and attitudes hope that this is true. But his- attitudes are more like their Day O’Connor invoked the toward Black citizens. Police tory and psychology suggest parents’ than they may real- narrative of racial progress: killings of Black Americans instead that this window of ize. (It is also the case that this are nothing new, of course, clarity and opportunity will “solution,” even if effective, It has been 25 years but the urgent attention to law close quickly—it always has in would be very slow.) since Justice Powell first enforcement’s behavior comes the past. For one thing, suc- The mythology of racial approved the use of race at a time when the country cess often proves self-limiting: progress is corrosive in count- to further an interest in is also facing a devastating Implement audacious new less ways. It provides a reason to student body diversity pandemic and historic levels measures, and the tempta- blame the victim: If we’re con- in the context of public tion is to dust o your hands verging on equality, then those higher education. Since in satisfaction and declare the left behind must not be trying. that time, the number of problem solved. For another, And it diuses moral respon- minority applicants with as the historian Carol Ander- sibility for actively and signi - high grades and test scores ACTING FAST son demonstrates in her book cantly reforming the American has indeed increased … IS ESSENTIAL. White Rage, any significant system: If we’re converging on We expect that 25 years THE WINDOW advance toward racial justice equality anyway, then why do from now, the use of racial FOR CHANGE will be met with a backlash. we need laws and other mea- preferences will no longer WILL CLOSE e passage of the irteenth, sures to promote it? be necessary to further the QUICKLY®ITQUICKLYIT Fourteenth, and Fifteenth This isn’t some abstract interest approved today. ALWAYS HAS IN Amendments was followed by THE PAST. worry. You’ll encounter it every- the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, where, once you’re primed to Seventeen years later, this pre- lynchings, and a new era of look for it. e mythology of diction seems at best naive. racial subjugation in the form racial progress animated the ese Supreme Court deci- of Jim Crow. The landmark majority opinion written by sions, dierent as they may be, legislation of the civil-rights Chief Justice John Roberts in rest on a rejection of the idea of unemployment—both of era was followed by Richard Shelby County v. Holder, the that systemic racism continues which dis proportionately aect Nixon’s “southern strategy” 2013 decision striking down a to make itself felt in Ameri- minority communities. The and the ascendance of racial key section of the Voting Rights can institutions. They reflect year 2020 has not been a good dog whistles as a central tactic Act of 1965. Roberts wrote: a Court that sees society, both one for America’s “master nar- of American politics. in terms of institutions and rative” in any of its traditional We should not think of the Nearly 50 years later, things individuals, as becoming more forms. And it has exposed, at next year or two as the start of a have changed dramati- racially egalitarian—admittedly least momentarily, the narrative decade or more of incremental cally … ere is no doubt with the help of past “course of racial progress— automatic, progress. We should think of that these improvements are corrections” that the justices continuous, requiring little the next year or two as all the in large part because of the believe are now or soon will be real eort—for the myth it has time we have, and a last chance Voting Rights Act. e Act unnecessary and obsolete. always been. to get it right. has proved immensely suc- This is the time to strike, cessful at redressing racial racial the time to take audacious discrimination and inte- progress is durable, and can steps to address systemic racial grating the voting process. survive many direct hits. e inequality—bold, sweeping Jennifer A. Richeson, a 2006 moments in our history when reparative action. e action MacArthur Fellow, is the Since Shelby, multiple states it has fractured decisively must be concrete and mate- Philip R. Allen professor of have passed new election laws, have been moments when a rial, rather than solely sym- psychology and the director including stringent voter-ID sense of national disruption bolic, and must address cur- of the Social Perception & regulations, and purged their was deep and pervasive, and rent gaps in every signi cant Communication Laboratory voter rolls. And the rst-line people could not avoid seeing domain of social well-being: at Yale University.

SEPTEMBER 2020

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vmware.com/possible/resilience VMware is part of Dell Technologies.

POLICE REFORM IS NOT ENOUGH e moral failure of incremental change

BY MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH

know that where I neighborhood than where I neighborhood has fewer pub- white New Yorkers live and live is the hood, and live; presumably they are cre- lic trash cans than neighbor- work and go to therapy—were not only because I ating more garbage, but their hoods such as the Upper East important. But then the city I am in a part of clean streets suggest other wise. Side. On the walk from the would also have to pay someone Brooklyn where a A casual observer might sug- train station to my therapist’s to collect the garbage from those substantial number gest that the people who live oce, I see a trash can on every cans. e city’s elected ocials of Black people still live. Nor is in my neighborhood—mostly corner. ey are fewer and far- would have to deem these resi- it because, year after year, for a poor, mostly Black, mostly ther between on the 10 blocks dents worthy of that expense. solid month before the Fourth immigrant—take less pride in from my local subway stop to What these officials have of July, my neighbors and I all where they live. They throw deemed the hood worthy of is play the game “gunshots or their candy wrappers and used policing, and not because it is reworks?” It is not because of napkins, their half-empty soda so much cheaper. Policing is a the constant police presence, bottles and unfinished pizza, costly public service, but the though that certainly helps their Styrofoam to-go contain- one most readily available here. with identifying it. I witnessed ers and paper receipts on the ere are undercover ocers THE POLICE half a dozen police ocers re- ground because they don’t care HAVE busting drug dealers. ere are spond to one shoplifting call, about keeping their sidewalks CONSISTENTLY uniformed officers in patrol and that was after the accused presentable and livable. INFLICTED cars sitting on corners all day, had already been handcued. And this, the observer may VIOLENCE ON all night. Sometimes they are But still this is not the telltale argue, is because of a cultural THE MOST standing next to huge, over- sign of the hood. deciency. ey do not value MARGINALIZED powering floodlights, warn- It is the trash. ere is trash this place, their home, because PEOPLE IN ing the criminals o the street. SOCIETY. everywhere, always. Nearly such value has not been incul- Sometimes there are raids, 8.5 million people live in cated by their surroundings. 10 to 15 squad cars deep, in New York City, not including Some of these observations which one or two people are the tourists and bridge-and- have been turned into aca- arrested. e police are always tunnel folks who, in more nor- demic studies that became on duty. e people here do mal times, ow in and out on the foundation for what we not lack for police, the way a daily basis. Of course there now call “broken-windows the next one, on the always they do trash cans. is an abundance of trash. But policing,” a theory that can be crowded, always bustling Flat- A casual observer may tell when I get o the train to walk traced to a 1982 article in this bush Avenue. you that this is because there to my therapist’s oce on the magazine, which claims that The city could put more is so much crime in this hood. Upper East Side, a neighbor- if such minor infractions are trash cans here, if keeping this at the people here are law- hood devoid of any of the allowed to fester, they serve neighborhood where mostly less, violent. And it’s true, there character that makes New as the prelude to much larger, poor, mostly Black, mostly is violence here, just as there York City appealing, I notice more serious crimes. immigrant people live clean— is violence anyplace where that there is no trash on the Little, if any, consideration as clean as the neighborhoods the people are stripped of the street. More people live in this is given to the fact that my where mostly a¤uent, mostly means to build a good life.

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Casual observers, who aren’t the stories of rape victims; smell of the empty car is so alienated from any sense of always so casual—they begin they side with domestic abus- repulsive, no person can rea- humanity and community. to include academics, media ers. ey break into homes via sonably bear it for any amount Only they won’t be left alone professionals, policy makers, no-knock warrants. ey intro- of time. Except there likely is a for too long, because someone presidents—excuse the pres- duce the potential for violence person in that car, and that per- else who is even more uncaring ence of the police here, and by responding to calls about son has likely been unhoused will not simply choose another in other hoods like this one, loud music—or counterfeit for some time. That subway subway car. ey will see it as because their position is that $20 bills. ey shoot and kill car is their safest refuge. ey their right to ride unencum- in order to stop the violence with impunity. Regardless of the have likely been riding for bered by the sight and smell of of the hood you must impose other responsibilities police have hours, having hustled their this other person. ey will call the violence of the state. e assumed, they have consistently way onto the train at last, win- the police, who will arrest this police are meant, in this view, inicted violence on the most ning a swipe from one of the person, and for a night or two to protect the people from marginalized people in society. hundreds of people who have this person will have a place to themselves, to enforce the dis- passed them by. They finally sleep, in a jail cell. cipline their culture lacks. learn fairly have a place to rest, but it has The police cannot solve In reality, the police patrol quickly while living in New been who knows how long poverty, joblessness, mental ill- and harass. They reluctantly York City and using public since they have been able to ness, addiction, and the hous- answer questions better suited transportation is that if there avail themselves of a bathroom, ing crisis—the actual culprits for town visitor centers. ey is an empty subway car on an because in New York City all in the lives of the unhoused. enforce trac laws at their dis- otherwise crowded train, you the restrooms are for custom- But if we’ve deemed homeless cretion, or to shore up munici- do not want to get in that ers only. So they smell like people, not poverty, the prob- pal budgets through the impo- car thinking you’ve somehow the piss and shit that they’ve lem, then what the police can sition of exorbitant nes. ey hacked the system. After one or been unable to wipe from do is make them disappear. arrest people who have dis- two times believing that you’ve themselves, now caked on and e major tools the police obeyed them and then make up outsmarted all the other pas- causing other passengers to run carry are handcus and guns; the charges later. ey dismiss sengers, you realize that the away—leaving them further they can arrest or kill. e police © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK.

ARTWORK BY HANK WILLIS THOMAS. STRIKE, 2018.

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can go forth and round up peo- a community deprived of the retribution for harm caused. Barack Obama and now seem ple without a home, then place basics expect to receive the Justice is not revenge. Rather, poised to do the same with Joe them in cages. And to grant resources it needs so that it no justice is a proactive com- Biden, positioning him as the them this authority, local gov- longer has to depend on police? mitment to providing each savior of democracy.) Then ernments can criminalize sleep- Its people have, purposefully, person with the material and we are left to panic when the ing outside, or criminalize pan- been given nothing else. When social conditions in which they country chooses wrong. handling, which begins to look they ask, they are told to wait; can both survive and thrive as For liberals shocked and a lot like the criminalization of when they shout, they are told a healthy and self-actualized outraged by the election results vagrancy as part of the Black that they are undeserving. ey human being. This is not an of 2016, it became popular, Codes in the era that ended are shamed for the ways they easy thing to establish, as it when speaking of Trump, to Reconstruction. Governments have survived. ey are blamed requires all of us to buy into the dismissively refer to him as “not can fund a separate police force when they don’t survive. idea that we must take respon- my president.” is is an empty for the subway system to punish sibility for one another. But it is rhetorical move, but one that turnstile jumpers, arrest women “What would the only form of a just world. allows the speaker a perceived selling churros, and clear out you have us do with the e police have never been moral high ground: She is not more homeless people, while police?,” I make a point of capable—historically, pres- responsible for the current state neighborhood associations saying, unequivocally, “Abol- ently, either in statement of of aairs, because this president ensure that no new homeless ish them,” because that is what purpose or in action—and, I does not belong to her. shelters get built near or in au- I mean. I seek a world without believe, will never be capable I suppose I shouldn’t ent neighborhoods. e streets police. When I explain that of fostering such conditions. begrudge people their small remain the only place for the achieving such a world would And so I hate them, because acts of sanity preservation. But dispossessed to call home. Law- require us to enact a number I have grown past impatient this one in particular reveals a makers, and those who aspire of redistributive policies and with injustice. I am incensed deeper problem with Ameri- to become them, will continue educational programs aimed at by the delusion, so prevalent cans and our relationship to to send the police to arrest the providing for everyone’s basic among the country’s suppos- the presidency: the sense that poor, because they respond to needs and reducing violence, edly serious thinkers, that tin- in choosing the “correct” per- two groups, funders and voters, both interpersonal and state- kering around the edges of an son for president, we have ful- and the poor are neither. sanctioned, I’m asked why inherently oppressive institu- filled our democratic duties. e motto “To protect and I don’t lead with that rather tion will lead to freedom. e sense that we don’t need to to serve”—adopted by the Los than the potentially alienat- invest in constructing bonds of Angeles Police Department ing “Abolish the police.” And collective power and commu- in 1955 and later used by my answer is that I believe in that he alone could rescue nity outside the office of the other departments around the stating, in clear language, what America, return it to glory— presidency, because electing country—has been a highly you want, because otherwise a dismissal of community in the “right” person is enough to eective public-relations tool. you are beholden to the cur- favor of a narcissistic desire to ensure that the country will see With the propaganda machine rent state of consciousness be adored for an impossible real change. Flattering ourselves churning on, the police, and and accepted wisdom. I want heroism. It’s uncomfortable to like this is part of how we ended the governments that direct a world in which the police realize that, in dierent ways up here. It’s why all of our so- them, are able to get buy-in do not exist, and there is no and to varying degrees, we called progress has been hollow. from the very people they are clearer way to say that. have all bought into similar It’s why the so-called progress is meant to police. People in the In the past, I have been delusions. As a country, we so easily undone. community hear the gunshots; accused of hating the police. obsess over the election of one see the addicts wandering And I do. Such an admission person who is a part of one of hopelessly and the dope boys may be taken to mean that I branch of our federal govern- protesting in Minneapolis, the pondering their next move; hate each police ocer as an ment. We become content to third precinct was set on re. Up grow fearful that a shouting individual whom I have judged hand over the reins of deci- until then the protests, which match will turn ugly quickly; unfairly on the basis of his or sion making to one person, had erupted in response to the and have been taught by teach- her occupation. But I hate whom we exceptionalize out circulation of a video show- ers, counselors, television, the police the same as I hate of necessity, because we must ing the ocer Derek Chauvin movies, and the police them- any institution that exists as believe that this person is the kneeling on George Floyd’s neck selves that the cops can solve an obstruction to justice. It’s most deserving caretaker of for eight minutes and 46 sec- this problem. So they call. important here to dene jus- our national present, and can onds, killing him, looked famil- They have no alternative. tice, as the U.S. legal system personally bring about a bet- iar. e scene was reminiscent No one will even pay for them has perverted our sense of it. ter national future. (Liberals of Ferguson in 2014, and Balti- to have trash cans. How can It cannot be punishment or placed this misguided faith in more in 2015, albeit with face

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masks meant to protect against in Louisville, Kentucky—but cropped up around the rest e power brokers who would the spread of COVID-19. shifted within a week’s time of the country, either to take have opposed him now use him e people gathered and they to be about an overhaul of away small slices of the police to ensure that the democracy shouted for justice. e police the entire system of American budget, as in Los Angeles, or to he envisioned never comes to stood guard outside. policing. For those like myself do things like ban choke holds fruition. ey adopted King as Once the vacated police who have believed in and advo- and increase funds for training, a historic cudgel, because you station began to burn, this cated for police abolition for as in Philadelphia. is revo- can make a dead man believe protest became something some time, it was a moment of lutionary moment seems to be whatever you want. altogether different. The fire rich opportunity. turning into yet another ash is makes sense when you was a militant action that put of progress. consider what James Bald- the protesters in direct con- Perhaps I am being too win wrote in his 1961 prole ict with the state, while also harsh. Progress is progress. of King: representing the decidedly And progress is hard. Progress new demand arising from the is wrestling concessions from The problem of Negro nationwide demonstrations: the behemoth of systematized leadership in this country Defund the police. WE HAVE oppression. has always been extremely “Defund the police” is an CONVINCED The problem is when delicate, dangerous, and abolitionist call, part of a set OURSELVES progress becomes its own complex. The term itself THAT of ideas to reduce the power HARD IS ideology— that is, when advo- becomes remarkably di¡- of police in the short term, and A SYNONYM cacy for incrementalism is seen cult to dene, the moment to eliminate police and polic- FOR as the astute and preferred one realizes that the real ing in the long term. Abolition REVOLUTIONARY. mode of political transforma- role of the Negro leader, in demands an overall restruc- tion. When we have done what the eyes of the American turing of our economic and is hard, and convinced our- Republic, was not to make political order. It holds that selves that hard is a synonym the Negro a rst-class citi- decriminalizing those things for revolutionary. Incremen- zen but to keep him con- that have been treated as crimi- tal change keeps the grind- tent as a second-class one. nal matters but are not violent ing forces of oppression—of (the possession, use, and sale And yet, as of this writing, death—in place. Actively , someone of drugs, and sex work, for it already seems to be fading, advocating for this position is tagged a nearby subway station example) would result in treat least in actionable ways. As a moral failure. after it had gotten a fresh coat of mendous reduction of harm. “Defund the police” gained There have always been white paint. e tag read £¤¥¦ This restructuring would traction as a slogan, cable-news voices willing to take on the §¨¤©ª«¬® ª¨¤¯¥ ¤°¤±². It was also require a massive pub- pundits implied that “Defund fragile American ego—to covered up within a few days. lic investment in the general the police” did not mean remind us that the racist prin- is year, in the middle of welfare— safe housing, healthy “defund the police.” Instead of ciples on which this country a global pandemic, multiracial food, free education, free health spending time understanding was founded continue to guide crowds have made their way up care, a basic income. For those abolitionist ideas, they inter- each of its institutions. At and down Flatbush Avenue, harms that would still occur vened to say that “Defund the their most critical and potent, shouting in unison, calling for in such a world, abolition asks police” was in fact a request these voices disabuse us of the the creation of a world in which that we nd ways of addressing to “re imagine the police.” e notion that America’s foibles Black lives matter. e police them that do not include the set of demands issued by the can be overlooked in favor of have not discriminated— they further violence of punishment, police-reform advocacy proj- our inherent goodness. have kettled, arrested, shoved, but prioritize the needs of the ect Campaign Zero, branded Yet American myth making and beaten the protesters, victimized to be made whole, “#8cantwait,” threatened to has a remarkable, insidious abil- young and old, Black and white, and require the perpetrator to suck up the energy that was ity to swallow up the lives of gentrier and native alike. make proper restitution and to forming around defunding those who stand in open rebel- Maybe this is how progress be rehabilitated so he doesn’t the police and divert it toward lion to the American project looks now. commit harm again. minor reforms that would and turn them into obedient The protests started out have little impact on levels of symbols of American excep- with the predictable demands police violence. tionalism. Martin Luther of arresting, prosecuting, and While Minneapolis’s city King Jr., for example, fought Mychal Denzel Smith is the convicting the police offi- council formed a veto-proof for the rights of Black people to author of the forthcoming cers responsible for killing majority to dismantle its be full participants in a democ- book Stakes Is High, from Floyd—and Breonna Taylor police department, weak plans racy that had yet to be built. which this essay was adapted.

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LOOKING FOR T FREDERICK DOUGLASS The water under the Chesa- peake Bay Bridge whipped How a visit to his birthplace helped against itself, the wind lift- ing up handfuls of foamy me understand this moment in America white and slapping them back down. The sky was a pearly BY CLINT SMITH blue, and thick, milky clouds hung above us like bulging lanterns. As we passed over the bridge—4.3 miles connecting Maryland’s eastern and western shores—I rolled down the

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windows and pulled back the of white men who paved the from his boyhood. When he that the nation “had no greater sunroof. I hadn’t realized how way for genocide and fought to saw it, according to Dickson turning point.” As Blight put much I’d missed the feeling of defend slavery are being taken J. Preston in Young Frederick it, Douglass believed Eman- wind rolling over my ngers; down by cheering crowds. A Douglass, he declared that cipation Day “ought to be a the feeling of my entire family moment in which Black lives he had found the exact spot national celebration in which singing along at the top of our matter has moved from a where he had been born. all blacks—the low and the lungs to my children’s favorite phrase laden with controversy Doug lass stood under the tree mighty—could claim a new Disney songs. to language at the center of our in silence, and then plunged and secure social identity.” It was the rst time since public discourse. A moment his hands into the earth to With two toddlers, I was sheltering in place had begun, filled with rage, reckoning, scoop up handfuls of soil to cognizant of the fact that I almost three months earlier, and possibility. would not be able to gradu- that my family was all together It was with these reections ally trek through every place in the car for an extended and Douglass’s words in mind in Talbot County that had period of time. We’d packed that, on Juneteenth, I got in a meaningful association to our masks, our sandwiches, the car with my family and Douglass. My family’s public- and more Ritz Crackers than drove from our home, outside history tour schedule was dic- DOUGLASS anyone was physically capable Washington, D.C., to Talbot FEARED tated by nap times and diaper of eating. One never knows County, Maryland, where THAT changes. But there was one how traveling any meaningful Frederick Douglass was born. CONFEDERATE place in particular I knew I distance with a 1-year-old and In My Bondage and My STATUES wanted to visit: the court- a 3-year-old will be, so my wife Freedom, Douglass described MIGHT BE house where Douglass had and I had emotionally pre- the region of his childhood ERECTED. spoken nearly a century and a pared ourselves for tantrums with revulsion. He called it I WONDERED half earlier. WHETHER and tears. But our children “thinly populated, and remark- HE COULD We pulled up to the Tal- were well behaved, perhaps able for nothing that I know of HAVE bot County Courthouse and themselves simply grateful to more than for the worn-out, IMAGINED walked across the lawn to a be anywhere other than inside sandy, desert-like appearance THAT HIS OWN large statue. e bronze ren- our home. ey too seemed to of its soil, the general dilapida- LIKENESS dering of Douglass stands relish the wind rushing past tion of its farms and fences, the WOULD STAND atop an octagonal pedestal their faces. indigent and spiritless charac- ALONGSIDE etched with his name. Doug- ONE. “It is always a fact of some ter of its inhabitants, and the lass is captured mid-speech, importance to know where a prevalence of ague and fever.” his mouth ajar, his eyebrows man is born, if, indeed, it be He went on to say that the area raised in a spirited fervor. His important to know anything was “seldom mentioned but left hand rests on a lectern. His about him.” So wrote Fred- with contempt and derision” right hand is lifted into the erick Douglass in his 1855 and that, living there, he was air, his ngers bending back autobiography, My Bondage “surrounded by a white popu- bring back to Cedar Hill, his toward his body. His long, and My Freedom. I had been lation of the lowest order.” home in Washington. At an thick hair is pulled into the spending time with Douglass’s In 1878 Douglass returned event at the Talbot County style so familiar from pictures work for several weeks, hoping to the county, and visited Courthouse that evening, he of Douglass, the most pho- that reengaging with his writ- the farm that had once been told the audience he had col- tographed American of the ing might help me more fully owned by his master, Aaron lected “some of the very soil 19th century. understand how our country Anthony, a man who may have on which I rst trod.” While Douglass is known had arrived at this moment. also been Douglass’s father. to have spoken outside the A moment in which a global His grandmother’s cabin had courthouse, it is also where pandemic has torn away the stood there. It was a place that important to visit the county he was held in a jail cell for veil and revealed the deepest had “few pretensions,” Doug- of Douglass’s birthplace on two weeks after attempting to ssures and failures of Amer- lass wrote. “To my child’s a day meant to celebrate the escape from slavery 42 years ica’s promise to its most vul- eye, however, it was a noble emancipation of Black Ameri- earlier. In the 19th century, nerable. A moment in which structure, admirably adapted cans from bondage. According enslaved people were sold on people of all generations to promote the comforts and to the historian and Douglass the courthouse’s front steps. and races have taken to the conveniences of its inmates.” biographer David W. Blight, Douglass’s statue was not streets to demand an end to But it was gone now. Douglass “viewed emancipa- the only one in front of the state-sanctioned violence. A What did remain was an tion as the central reference courthouse. Across a cinna-

MARK SUMMERFIELD / ALAMY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS moment in which the statues old cedar tree Douglass recalled point of black history” and felt mon pathway splitting the

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lawn in two was a statue of a symbol of white supremacy, simply by the passage of time; This is the problem with young man with a soft, boy- an ornament in the landscape rather, “it was the prize in a hollow attempts at “balance” in ish face wearing a brimmed of Jim Crow meant to ter- struggle between rival versions our public discourse. ey mis- hat. His hands were wrapped rorize Black communities. In of the past, a question of will, take balance for fairness. Sug- around the sta of a ag, the 2015, the Talbot county coun- of power, of persuasion.” gesting that Douglass and the bronze cloth cloaking his cil voted unanimously against On May 30, 1871, just six Talbot Boys are equally wor- shoulder. While my family and removing the statue; soon after years after the Civil War ended, thy of public memorialization I stood in front of Douglass, my visit, however, the council Douglass gave a speech at might be “balanced,” but it is others came to pose for photos president would introduce a Arlington National Cemetery. not fair; it is not just. is war, with this statue. ey did not resolution to take it down. “We are sometimes asked, in as Douglass put it in an 1878 take photos of or with Dou- I looked up at the statue, the name of patriotism,” he said, Memorial Day speech in New glass, perhaps because they its bronze body glimmering York City, was not simply a bat- were attempting to practice under the sun, and then back at to forget the merits of this tle in which two sides fought social distancing, or perhaps Douglass, about 20 yards away. fearful struggle, and to nobly for what they believed because they had no interest. My son was running in circles remember, with equal admi- in. No. It was “a war of ideas, I wasn’t familiar with the under the shade of a large oak ration, those who struck at a battle of principles … a war person standing on top of tree while my daughter toddled the nation’s life, and those between the old and the new, this pedestal, and though I after him. I thought of what it who struck to save it—those slavery and freedom, barbarism assumed it was an American meant to have Frederick Doug- who fought for slavery, and and civilization.” He went on: ag draped over his shoulder, lass share the courthouse lawn those who fought for liberty “There was a right side and I couldn’t quite make it out. with the names of 84 men who and justice. a wrong side in the late war After a woman and a young fought to keep people like him I am no minister of which no sentiment ought to man had nished taking pho- in bondage. malice. I would not strike cause us to forget.” tos, I approached to get a The Douglass statue was the fallen. I would not repel In early June, 113 miles closer look. Engraved on the approved by the county the repentant; but may my from where I stood, Virginia front of the stone pedestal was: council in 2004, but it was right hand forget its cun- Governor Ralph Northam had not immediately installed. It ning and my tongue cleave announced that a 130-year- took several years of delibera- to the roof of my mouth, old statue of Robert E. Lee on – tion and debate to decide how if I forget the difference Monument Avenue, in Rich- ... the statue should be erected— between the parties to that mond, would be taken down. I resulting in a policy that the terrible, protracted, and had been thinking about Lee a It did not take me long to Douglass statue, and any other bloody conict … We must lot lately, how central his name understand what C.S.A. stood new statues on the lawn, could never forget that victory to and likeness were to the iconog- for, and to understand that the not be taller than the Talbot the rebellion meant death raphy of my own childhood. ag this young man was hold- Boys statue. When Douglass’s to the republic. We must Hundreds of statues, schools, ing was not the American ag. statue was finally installed, never forget that the loyal and roads across the country The Talbot Boys were 84 in 2011, many were glad to soldiers who rest beneath are named after Robert E. Lee. local soldiers in the Confeder- see it erected and thought it this sod flung themselves e statue of Lee in my own ate States Army; their names might balance out the Talbot between the nation and the hometown of New Orleans are carved into the sides of Boys monument. But there nation’s destroyers. was taken down in 2017. I the stone base. The statue, I is no balancing out those traveled down Robert E. Lee would later learn, was erected who fought to perpetuate I thought of this speech as Boulevard to get to school each in 1916, more than half a cen- slavery with those who spent I looked at the statue meant day. I remember when, before tury after the end of the Civil their lives working toward to commemorate these Con- its name was changed in the War and during a period when its demise. federate soldiers. Douglass mid-’90s, there was a Rob- the majority of Confederate Douglass himself was feared that such statues might ert E. Lee Elementary School monuments were built. ese keenly aware that the story of one day line the landscape of that was attended mostly by memorials were an effort to slavery, the story of the war, our country. But I wondered Black children. honor Confederate veterans, and the story of emancipa- whether he could have imag- e veneration of Lee—a who were dying off in large tion were at risk of being told ined that his own likeness slave owner who led an army numbers—to teach younger in ways shaped by southern would stand alongside one, predicated on maintaining the white southerners about the postwar propaganda rather as if they were two equally institution of slavery—began war and that this generation than truth. As Blight put it, moral sides of the same coin, immediately after his death, in of men should be venerated. Douglass knew that historical both worthy of being lifted up 1870. Douglass was appalled. They were also a physical memory was not determined and venerated. “Is it not about time that this

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bombastic laudation of the ag that whipped young Douglass growing up “I am not of that school of rebel chief should cease?” he in the wind. I looked at my here. Learning, over time, the thinkers which teaches us to asked. “We can scarcely take children in the rearview mir- unfreedoms placed upon his let bygones be bygones; to let up a newspaper … that is not ror, grateful for all they were boyhood body. “Living here, the dead past bury its dead,” lled with nauseating atteries too young to know. e road with my dear old grandmother Douglass said in 1883. of the late Robert E. Lee.” ended at the water’s edge. I and grandfather, it was a long The way Lee’s legacy parked and kept the car run- time before I knew myself to In my view there are no seemed to be taking shape gave ning. I told my family I needed be a slave,” he wrote in My bygones in the world, and Douglass one of his earliest just a few minutes. Bondage and My Freedom. the past is not dead and and clearest indications about cannot die. The evil as how dicult the ght against I learned by degrees the well as the good that men the propaganda machine of sad fact, that the “little do lives after them … e the Lost Cause would be. “It hut,” and the lot on which duty of keeping in mem- would seem from this,” he said it stood, belonged not to ory the great deeds of the of Lee’s rise to saintly status, my dear old grandparents, past and of transmitting “that the soldier who kills the I LOOKED but to some person who the same from generation most men in battle, even in a AT MY lived a great distance to generation is implied in bad cause, is the greatest Chris- CHILDREN off, and who was called, the mental and moral con- tian, and entitled to the high- IN THE by grandmother, “OLD stitution of man. est place in heaven.” REARVIEW MASTER.” I further MIRROR, GRATEFUL learned the sadder fact, The next day, I scrolled grow- FOR ALL that not only the house through my Twitter timeline ing restless, and it became clear THEY WERE and lot, but that grand- and came across an image that we would have time to visit TOO YOUNG mother herself … and all that left me breathless. Under only one more place before TO KNOW.K NOW. the little children around the haze of dusk, activists in heading back home and hoping her, belonged to this mys- Richmond had transformed they might fall asleep in the car. terious personage. the Robert E. Lee statue As we drove toward Cov- into a canvas blooming with ey’s Landing, the roads became I only had a few minutes to new and reclaimed meaning. both emptier and more nar- take in the space, to breathe in Garlands of grati wrapped row. The houses became less the air. As I stood at the edge around the statue’s base, their frequent, with more distance I walked out onto a small of the dock, I craned my neck anti-racist messages written between each new address. On wooden boat ramp and tried and stood on my tiptoes as if in colorful letters that curled one side of the road, wheat to take in my surroundings. that might allow me to get a and popped on the pedestal. fields stretched out in every e air was thick and heavy. better glimpse of the land that Projected onto the side of the direction, like a golden blanket e brown water was still but Douglass had run over as a 40-foot base was the face of had been laid atop the land; for the soft current that pulled child, the land he had sunk his Douglass, his visage enor- on the other, budding corn ripples along its surface. On hands into when he returned mous and striking, upstag- stalks shot up out of the soil. my right, a small tree jutted as a man. ing the darkened silhouette I remarked to my wife how out from the shallow water, I got back in the car, of Lee above him. Between striking it was to consider that its branches bending down as shut the door, and made a Douglass’s head and Lee’s so much of this land had once if to drink. Across the river was U-turn. My children quickly silhouette was a quote from been plantation fields Black a vast expanse of untamed, lus- fell asleep in their car seats, Douglass that I think about people worked on. How their cious green that looked like it and we switched from Dis- often when I see the protests, spirits still sang over these large ran out into the sky. ney musicals to the news, in their myriad forms: “Power plots of earth. She mentioned I turned to my left and trying to hear updates on concedes nothing without a a point we discuss often: None saw the river bend to its right. what had transpired that day demand. It never did and it of this was that long ago. We Douglass’s birthplace was less with the protests, with the never will.” sat with that thought as we than a mile north up Tucka- virus, with our country. We drove on, the car spitting up hoe Creek. The only way to made our way through idyl- gravel behind its wheels. get a close view of the land lic neighborhoods with open Clint Smith is the author of In front of the last house upon which Douglass spent windows and colorful shut- the poetry collection Counting before the dock, the Ameri- his childhood is to get in a ters. American flags hung Descent and the forth coming can flag rose up a tall staff canoe or kayak and paddle from front porches. So did nonction book How the along with a large blue there yourself. I thought of a Confederate ags. Word Is Passed.

0920_DIS_ClintSmith_Statues [Print]_13898712.indd 21 7/9/2020 4:16:33 PM POLITICS and dying. Martin Luther King Jr. went so far as to dis- courage Black college students from enlisting. Donald Trump borrowed from Nixon’s playbook during his presidential run in 2016. During a rally in Las Vegas early in his campaign, he villain ized a protester by saying, “I would like to punch him in PROTEST WORKS the face.” The rambunctious crowd cheered in response. In How the Black Lives Matter demonstrations the months that followed, as will shake up the 2020 election—and reshape his campaign stops continued to be disrupted, Trump turned American politics for a generation to come the protesters into a useful foil: ¥e roaring crowd was us; the BY DANIEL Q. GILLION demonstrators were them. ey did not belong to the silent majority, whose prerogatives Trump intended to restore. Enterprising supporters even created signs: º » ¼. Months after the election, the signs were still available for purchase on Amazon, for the low price of $14.35, with positive reviews drove 1,200 miles, renamed George Floyd Ave- protesters and tweets about for the sturdiness of the paper. from Philadelphia nue, across the street from “LAW AND ORDER” and ¥e specter of Nixon’s vic- to Minneapolis, Cup Foods, where Floyd had the “SILENT MAJORITY.” tory in 1968—and Trump’s I to be a part of the been killed after allegedly pass- Richard Nixon introduced in 2016—has haunted the George Floyd pro- ing a counterfeit $20 bill. As the latter term to the Ameri- George Floyd protests. By test movement. I scanned the crowd, I saw can people during another channeling Nixon once again, Throughout the city, from what I had seen in the other moment of ferment, one Trump clearly hopes to revive the predominantly white cities I’d visited as I made my to which the current unrest his political fortunes. Poll- neighborhood of Bancroft way west: a shockingly diverse has been compared. During ing shows that a majority of to the more diverse streets of group of protesters. As a Black the 1968 presidential cam- Americans view the protests Bryant, I saw signs in living- man, I found myself standing paign and into his ³rst years positively. Trump’s fractious room windows that read next to many people who did in office, as anti-war dem- response to the Floyd kill- and not look like me—sometimes, onstrations took place across ing, coming on the heels of . As I drove up their cries even drowned out the nation, Nixon sought to his administration’s bungled Cedar Avenue, heading to my own. The coalition has ostracize the protesters, paint- response to the coronavirus 38th Street, I also saw signs changed. It has grown. ing them as radicals whose pandemic, seems to have left in the windows of stores and Of course, not all Ameri- views did not reµect those of him badly damaged politically. restaurants that read cans have embraced Black Lives law-abiding Americans. The Yet Trump has seemed dam- —an indication that Matter. Some look at the men term, which he introduced in aged before. Some fear that, in these businesses stood with the and women demanding reform a speech in 1969, cut along the privacy of the voting booth, Floyd movement, but also that and see only looters and thugs. racial lines: ¥e leaders of the the American electorate will they hoped to be spared should ¥ey are nurtured in this view civil-rights movement had back the status quo over the the protests turn violent. by the president of the United become prominent opponents calls for change in the streets. Pressed together with States, who greeted the outcry of the war in Vietnam, where As of this writing, the protests protesters adorned in masks, following Floyd’s murder with a dis proportionate number of have remained outraged yet I stood on the unofficially threats of violence against the Black Americans were ³ghting largely peaceful. What if they

22 SEPTEMBER 2020

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turn violent and support for now. Righteous, nonviolent Far from playing into more voters to the polls, and the cause they are champion- demonstrations are a hallmark Trump’s hands, the demon- ultimately win. ing erodes? “THE SILENT of a functioning democracy. strators demanding justice Both the people marching MAJORITY IS STRON- They provide catharsis for for Floyd are engaged in a in protests and those observ- GER THAN EVER!!!” Trump the participants and show the movement that is likely to aid ing them are inspired to con- tweeted in mid-June. But the nation at large that something those candidates who oppose tribute to candidates who silent majority need not be is wrong with our society and the president’s policies in are perceived as being com- stronger than ever to reelect needs to change. Protests can November—and that could mitted to change. Consider the president. Trump has to also spark that change, by reshape American politics for the wave of protests that fol- persuade only a small number channeling energy, resources, years to come. lowed Trump’s inauguration. of voters in a handful of mid- and votes to candidates who e most high-prole of these western states in order to win take up the cause. Even 1968, ’ at were the Women’s March, the a second term. the year that supposedly proves how protests and elections March for Our Lives, and the My own view, having spent the risk of backlash, fails as an have interacted in America counterprotests at the “Unite the past decade studying pro- example if we consider the since the 1960s, and I’ve the Right” rally in Charlottes- test movements in the United presidential race alongside the found that protests nearly ville, Virginia. But anti-Trump States, is that we’ve always congressional, gubernatorial, always benet candidates asso- protest was widespread across overestimated the power of the and mayoral contests that year, ciated with the causes being the United States; hundreds of silent majority, and that we’re which swept reform-minded fought for—helping them events occurred in his rst year giving it too much credence politicians into oce. build bigger war chests, bring in oce alone. Zip code by zip THE NEW YORK TIME S / THE NEW YORK TIME

Clockwise from top left: Harlem, May 2020: a rally against police brutality; Washington, D.C., May 1957: the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, calling on the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education; Minneapolis, May 2020: protesting the murder of George Floyd;

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: KEVIN CLAIBORNE; GEORGE TAMES / REDUX; BRANDON BELL; RAYMOND DEPARDON / MAGNUM Chicago, August 1968: demonstrators confronting federal troops during the Democratic National Convention.

0920_DIS_Gillion_Protests [Print]_13899874.indd 23 7/13/2020 11:22:22 AM Dispatches POLITICS

code, demonstrations on behalf 36 in Tucson, Arizona; and 43 convention. Mikva unseated found that frequent liberal of liberal causes were associated in Miami helped Democratic a superannuated Demo- protest in a given congressio- with a signi cant increase in candidates Joe Cunningham, cratic incumbent during the nal district increases the prob- donations to Democratic can- Ann Kirkpatrick, and Donna primary and then roundly ability that a serious Demo- didates; controlling for other Shalala flip seats in their defeated his Republican chal- cratic challenger will enter the factors, such as neighborhood respective districts. lenger, even as Nixon carried race for that seat, whether it’s wealth, the places that saw pro- This was hardly the first Illinois. Mikva was not alone: occupied by a Republican tests saw more money ow into time that protests had fueled Democratic candidates across or a complacent Democrat. campaigns. Spread across the successful challenges against the nation bene ted from lib- Of course, those challengers nation, political activism was incumbents. In the 1960s, eral protest, which helped the don’t always carry the day. But the source of millions of dollars party maintain control of the when they do—when they are in additional campaign giving. House and the Senate. propelled into o¦ce by a pro- is is not to say that pro- Focusing too narrowly on test movement— they become test doesn’t inspire backlash. THE POINT Nixon’s victory in 1968 has its institutional allies, intro- I also found a connection OF PROTEST also encouraged Americans to ducing bills and supporting between liberal protests and IS RARELY TO overlearn another lesson from policies that reect protesters’ donations to Republican candi- SWING A that year: that violent protest concerns. In this way, protest dates. But these contributions SINGLE RACE. will necessarily provoke a not only aects electoral out- IT IS TO were smaller, overall. When CHANGE THE backlash. The fact is, many comes today, but establishes liberal protests occur, all candi- TERMS OF protests turn violent when the conditions for change in dates make money. Democrats POLITICAL the supposed enforcers of law the future. Abner Mikva went just make more of it. DEBATE, AND and order do harm to demon- on to be a leading progressive Protests likewise increase ULTIMATELY strators, whether it’s an Ala- voice for decades and helped voter turnout. For example, TO CHANGE bama state trooper fracturing launch the careers of Elena although Black voters cast bal- SOCIETY ITSELF. John Lewis’s skull in Selma in Kagan and Barack Obama. lots in lower numbers in the 1965 or Park Police dispers- e Floyd protests likely 2016 general election than ing the people who congre- arrived too late in the 2020 they had in 2012, the drop-o gated in Lafayette Square in cycle to push new candi- was less pronounced in areas for instance, the civil-rights 2020. Voters understand this. dates into the eld, but they where Black Lives Matter was movement and anti-Vietnam While wanton, opportunistic have shifted the dynamics of active. And in areas that wit- protests descended on Abner destruction of public prop- some races, helping progres- nessed heightened levels of Mikva’s Chicago neighbor- erty can certainly undermine sive candidates win prima- protest activity, Black voter hood. Mikva did not imme- an otherwise righteous pro- ries and topple entrenched turnout increased. diately champion either cause, test movement, nightsticks, incumbents such as Repre- All of this energy helps and he lost in his run for Con- rubber bullets, and tear-gas sentative Eliot Engel of New candidates affiliated with gress in 1966. Over the next canisters can draw attention York, who lost his race despite protesters’ goals. On average, two years, during which Illi- to—and sympathy for—a the support of the Demo- a district that sees 50 liberal nois’s Second Congressional cause and those brave enough cratic establishment. We will protests in an election year District was the epicenter of to advocate for it. continue to see the effects sees the Democratic candidate protest activity in the state, he of these demonstrations in in that district increasing his reinvented himself as a strong is years to come. When protest or her vote share by 2 percent advocate of the campaign to rarely to swing a single race, occurs, we can expect that and the Republican decreas- end racial discrimination in however momentous that change is coming—change ing his or her vote share by housing. He also acted as legal race may be. It is to change that reects the evolving will 7 percent compared with the counsel for protesters jailed by the terms of political debate, of the people. previous election. In a close an aggressive police depart- and ultimately to change soci- race, such swings can be deci- ment during anti-war protests. ety itself. And indeed, protest sive. During the 2018 mid- Mikva’s embrace of these has always foreshadowed the Daniel Q. Gillion is a terms, eight liberal protests movements rattled Chicago’s most radical shifts in Ameri- political-science professor at occurred in the average con- Democratic machine, led by can history. the University of Pennsylvania gressional district. In districts Mayor Richard Daley, who Protest calls attention and the author of e Loud with greater protest activity, infamously ordered the police to problems with the status Minority: Why Protests liberal candidates fared well. and the National Guard quo—and often spells politi- Matter in American Democ- Sixteen liberal protests in to crack down on protest- cal doom for those who have racy, from which this article Charleston, South Carolina; ers at the 1968 Democratic upheld it. In my research, I’ve was adapted.

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SKETCH processes. In 1991, Brocko- vich, then a le clerk at the San Fernando Valley law rm Masry & Vititoe, happened upon suspicious medical records while sorting through a box of les for a pro bono real-estate case. She drove out to the Mojave Des- ert to investigate. e water was green. She saw frogs with two heads. Residents were su ering from nosebleeds, miscarriages, and cancers. She persuaded Ed Masry to take the case, and in 1996 they won a $333 million settlement for 650 plainti s, at the time the largest toxic tort settle ment in American history. (Brockovich herself received a $2.5 million bonus.) Brockovich, 60, is mag- netic, fast-talking, and very funny, not unlike her character in the movie, a portrayal she calls “about 97 percent accurate.” On the early-May afternoon when we first speak via Zoom, she is in her home o¢ ce in Agoura Hills, California, a sunny room with shelves full of framed photographs of her THE RELENTLESS now-adult kids. She lives alone (she and her third husband ERIN BROCKOVICH divorced in 2015), save for her three small dogs, one of whom, She was an early crusader for environmental justice. a Pomeranian named Wiley, is Today, she’s sounding the alarm louder than ever. yapping in the background. She tells me she has been working BY AMANDA FORTINI on an ABC drama based on her life, Rebel; she will executive produce and Katey Sagal will star. Erin Brockovich grossed $256 million worldwide, a Twenty years ago, Erin to tell you that life takes an The first case that Erin success only partly attribut- Brockovich was released, and interesting turn when your Brockovich Erin Brocko- able to Julia Roberts’s charis- the brash, unvarnished legal name becomes a verb,” the real viched—the subject of the matic performance, for which assistant turned activist at the Erin Brockovich writes in the movie—was her 1990s battle she won the Best Actress Oscar. heart of the lm— memorably introduction to her new book, with Pacific Gas & Electric. e movie made its namesake portrayed by Julia Roberts in Superman’s Not Coming. “ To e power company had con- into a kind of American folk micro-miniskirts and ver- ‘Erin Brockovich something’ taminated the groundwater hero, à la Davy Crockett or tiginous high heels—had the has become synonymous with in the small desert town of Mother Jones. (Every time her surreal experience of becom- investigating and then advo- Hinkley, California, with name © oated up on my phone, ing a household name almost cating for a cause without chromium-6, a highly toxic it was like Annie Oakley had overnight. “Let me be the rst giving up.” chemical used in industrial texted me.) Like most folk

26 ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN TAMAKI

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heroes, her appeal is a popu- out to me.’ This happened to including rashes, hair loss, and Brockovich says, “and the city list one. Audiences could see me over and over again.” diarrhea. Eventually, they began told us to fuck o.” themselves in this struggling, Brockovich is dyslexic and emailing Brocko vich, sending Flint’s issues grew out of a twice-divorced single mom has a photographic memory; her photos of their brown, yel- tangle of bureaucratic incom- who wasn’t a doctor, a lawyer, she prefers to see things laid low, or orange water. She for- petence, bad decisions, and or a scientist, and believe that out visually, so she started warded a few emails to Bob racism, but the city is hardly they too might ght injustice. plotting the email inquiries on Bowcock, the water-quality unique. A 2017 study by the To “Erin Brockovich some- a map. One day, she looked at expert she works with. Bowcock Natural Resources Defense thing,” then, means not only her map and counted 300 dots says that Brockovich has “this Council (NRDC) found that to investigate an issue, but to be scattered around the country. ridiculous sixth sense about “contaminants that may harm a regular person who takes on She decided to make her work her” and that “nine times out human health” were present in a corporate giant polluting the accessible to more people, so of 10” her hunches are borne the tap water of every state in environment. e notion feels she digitized it and put it up on the nation—often in poor com- especially urgent now, as the her website. Here, people can munities and communities of Trump administration’s Envi- self-report health eects of envi- color, which are targeted as sites ronmental Protection Agency ronmental pollution, and nd THE MOVIE for industrial plants and land- fails to regulate toxic chemicals others reporting the same issue. MADE lls. In 2015, community water and industry lobbyists wield “I looked at it today and there’s BROCKOVICH systems had more than 80,000 undue power. 13,000 dots on it,” Brockovich INTO AN reported violations of the Safe AMERICAN After the movie’s release, says. “It’s like, ‘What the fuck? FOLK HERO, Drinking Water Act, the 1974 Brockovich, who was already at What’s going on?’ ” À LA DAVY law that regulates roughly 100 work on another contaminated- CROCKETT contaminants. More than groundwater case—this one in , the country OR MOTHER 18 million Americans got their the Latino farming community began asking similar questions JONES. drinking water from systems of Kettleman City, California— as reports of exceedingly high that had violated federal lead was deluged with emails and lead levels in the water in Flint, regulations, according to a 2016 letters. “I put my finger in Michigan, began to circulate. NRDC report. the dike,” she tells me, “and I In April 2014, an emergency out by his research. In late Janu- Brockovich’s book—at once thought I might help stop its manager had made the disas- ary 2015, almost a year before a master class on water for the ow. I had no idea.” In 2005, trous cost-cutting decision to President Barack Obama would layperson and an exhortation she left the law rm to start her stop supplying Flint with water declare a state of emergency in to work for improvements in own company, Erin Brocko vich from the Detroit system and Flint, Brockovich posted about our own communities—takes Consulting, which she runs make the Flint River its tempo- the “Dangerous Undrinkable readers on a tour of struggling out of her home; she advises rary source while the city built Drinking Water” on her pub- locales around the country. At people on environmental- its own pipeline. The Flint lic Facebook page. Camp Lejeune, for instance, the contamination issues, consults River had long been a dump- When a water issue arises, Marine Corps base in Jackson- with law rms, and is a regular ing ground for industry; it also Brockovich and Bowcock usu- ville, North Carolina, residents on the keynote-speaker circuit. contains signicant amounts ally travel to the city or town in were exposed via drinking water She continues to receive of bacteria and organic mat- question. “My role is to quarter- to numerous contaminants, thousands of emails every ter, thus requiring high levels back all the experts and pull all among them TCE, an indus- month. “A mother writes me of chlorine and ferric chlo- the science together,” Bowcock trial solvent that can cause birth and says, ‘I’m concerned. I live ride to clean it. But Flint had says. “Her part is to rally the defects and childhood cancers. down in Florida. My daugh- an antiquated system of lead troops and get the town orga- Brocko vich writes that so many ter was diagnosed with a glio- pipes, which the dis infectants nized and conduct the town- babies died there in the ’60s and blastoma. I have heard reports corroded, causing lead to hall meeting.” But at the time, ’70s that a nearby cemetery had that we had a solvent chemi- leach into the water supply of Brockovich was in Australia a section called “Baby Heaven.” cal in our water. Do you know 95,000 people. for work, so in mid-February, Reading the book, one anything about it?’ ” she says, Shortly after the switch, Bowcock got on a plane to Flint acquires a dispiriting sense of describing a typical email. e Flint residents—54 percent of himself. ere, he found levels why water issues are so wide- following week, another email whom are Black, and 40 percent of chlorine that exceeded those spread and entrenched. The from another mother. A few of of whom live below the pov- of a swimming pool. Bowcock most obvious reason is that these, and she searches her inbox erty line—started complaining drew up a plan for Flint’s mayor, you can’t see the majority of for the town’s name: “I’m like, about their foul-smelling and the water municipality, and the chemicals, so unless you have ‘Holy shit. Ten people from that discolored water, plus a host Flint city council. “We actually your water tested, you likely same community have reached of strange new health issues, wrote a whole water protocol,” won’t know a contaminant is

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there. But water problems are in a family of four children man named Steve Brockovich, been critical of Trump’s EPA also fairly technical, requir- growing up in Lawrence, who would become her second on social media. “I never get ing a grasp of chemical and Kansas, a university town 45 husband and the father of her into the politics of it. I’ll pull legal terms. “Water’s not an minutes west of Kansas City, younger daughter. at mar- my hair out,” she says. “ere’s easy discussion; it’s not sound Brockovich was placed in riage was tumultuous, too— plenty of blame to go around bites,” Brocko vich says. “It’s a special-education classes for her self-esteem took such a everywhere.” She believes that story.” She explains that “no two her dyslexia. Her parents—her dive that she had to be hos- water is not a partisan issue but bodies of water on this planet mother, B. J. O’Neal-Pattee, pitalized for anorexia—and a human right: “It doesn’t mat- have the same fingerprint,” was an editor of the Univer- lasted only a year, leaving her ter what side of the aisle you’re which means that each has its sity of Kansas alumni maga- broke, pregnant, and shat- on, the color of your skin, own particular problems. en zine; her father, Frank Pattee, teringly lonely. Around that what’s in your bank account.” there are the structural issues. was a mechanical engineer who time, Brockovich got in a car If Brockovich does have Our country’s infrastructure is worked as a regional manager a discernible politics, it’s her antiquated—some water mains for the U.S. Department of populism, her belief in people, are 50 to 100 years old. Of the Transportation—taught her her utter faith that they—we— approximately 40,000 chemi- to believe in herself and gave IF can take matters into our own cals on the market, less than her a solid moral foundation BROCKOVICH hands. “People think when I 1 percent have been tested for that emphasized honesty and HAS A speak to a community that I’m human safety. Science is often “stick-to-itiveness,” as her DISCERNIBLE coming in with an agenda, but manipulated by companies that mother called it. ose lessons, POLITICS, IT’S my only role is to empower put prot over public health. In she says, didn’t sink in until she HER POPULISM, the people,” she writes. In her HER BELIEF sum, industry pollution goes worked on the Hinkley case. IN PEOPLE. discussion of Hannibal, Mis- largely unsupervised and laws In 1978, Brockovich souri, where local women got remain unenforced. graduated from high school ammonia banned as a disin- The U.S. also lacks a and enrolled in Kansas State fectant, she includes a quote national disease database where University. She spent her rst often attributed to Margaret people can report their issues semester staying out all night accident that herniated two Mead: “Never doubt that a and connect the dots between and skipping classes, and when disks in her spine. But the small group of thoughtful, illness clusters and environmen- her father saw her report card, misfortune proved fortuitous. committed citizens can change tal hazards. In 2013, Brocko- he made her drop out. She Not long after, she met a biker the world; indeed, it’s the only vich joined Trevor Schaefer, a transferred to Wade College in named Jorge; he introduced thing that ever has.” young man from Idaho who Dallas, graduated with an asso- her to Jim Vititoe, who repre- Doesn’t she ever get had been diagnosed with brain ciate’s degree in fashion mer- sented her in a lawsuit against de moralized? After all, Hink- cancer at the age of 13, to tes- chandising and interior design, the other driver. She lost, but ley is almost a ghost town now tify on Capitol Hill about the then took a job as a manager she persuaded Vititoe to hire because the groundwater con- importance of documenting at a Kmart store in Los Ange- her. e rest is, well, a movie. tamination spread, and Cali- and tracking cancer clusters. les, but she hated the work and Brockovich and I speak for fornia currently has no legal Three years later, President resigned after three months. the last time in early June; the limit for chromium-6. Seven Obama signed “Trevor’s Law” She dabbled in the world of country is aflame with pro- years ago, she says, she did as part of the newly strength- professional beauty pageants tests about police brutality feel burned out—“It’s just too ened Toxic Substances Control and was crowned Miss Pacic against Black people, and the much; it doesn’t stop”—but Act, but the current administra- Coast in 1981. pandemic shows no signs of then she stood in the delivery tion has failed to implement it. The following year, she abating. When I ask how she room and watched as her rst Brockovich hopes her crowd- met and married her rst hus- is, Brockovich tells me she is granddaughter was born and sourced digitized map will act band, a house painter, with deeply sad about the murder thought, “What will this world as a de facto disease database. whom she had her son and of George Floyd. But, as is her be like for her if I don’t con- “She’s a pioneer in environ- her rst daughter. eir ve- way, she sidesteps any concrete tinue to ght? What legacy are mental investigations and with year marriage was volatile, and discussion of politics. Her dad we going to leave?” And she felt uncovering pollution sources,” Brockovich su¢ered debilitat- was a Republican, and her reinvigorated. Schaefer, now 30, says. “She’s ing panic attacks. When her book emphasizes that it was been so successful in exposing it.” husband got a job in the food Richard Nixon who started the industry that moved the family EPA. Yet she also worked with herself to Reno, Nevada, Brockovich former Democratic Senator Amanda Fortini is a writer often says, her path was not was hired by a brokerage rm Barbara Boxer on Trevor’s Law, based in Las Vegas and an obvious one. e youngest there; one of the brokers was a a bipartisan bill, and she has Livingston, Montana.

SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_DIS_Fortini_SketchBrockovich [Print]_13888511.indd 28 7/9/2020 4:25:13 PM “You only think you know the “e best audio documentary story of Hurricane Katrina.” to come out this year so far, hands down.” — Oprah Magazine — Vulture

“An expansive and powerful piece of work.” “Eerily prescient.” — Financial Times — AnOther Magazine

LISTEN TO ALL 8 EPISODES ON VIEWFINDER

In August 2016, during his rst week of college, Adraint Khadafhi Bereal went to “Gone to Texas,” e Black Yearbook a large back-to-school event held every year for students at the University of Texas at Austin. Hun- Photographs by dreds upon hundreds of people had gathered in front of the campus clock tower for the welcome event and reworks display. But despite the throng of students, Bereal didn’t see any who looked Adraint Khadafhi like him—and he wouldn’t for another week. Bereal e university, like many agship colleges across the country, enrolls vanishingly few Black undergraduates—just 4 percent of the 40,000 students are Black, and just 1.5 percent are Black men. at can leave the few Black students the university does enroll feeling isolated. So last summer, just before the start of his senior year, Bereal began work on e Black Yearbook, a project that aims to give expression to their experiences. It’s not a traditional yearbook; through portraits and 100 interviews, e Black Yearbook shows the highs and lows of Black life at a predominantly white college, both the beauty of the campus experience and the stress of having such scant representation. In several images, students turn their back to the camera. is, Bereal told me, is how white students too often see their Black peers: as faceless. ey regularly mistake one for another. But even shot from behind, Bereal’s subjects reveal their individuality—a do-rag here, an expres- sive pose there. e yearbook is “a view into what our daily life looks like on a predominantly white campus,” Bereal said. He hopes people can see the full picture. — Adam Harris

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Clockwise from top left: Octavian Moten; Siji Deleawe; Awab Ahmed; Jala Jones; Black Homecoming, September 28, 2019. Opposite page: Members of the Longhorn Band.

0920_DIS_Yearbook_Viewfinder [Print]_13902494.indd 31 7/13/2020 12:31:10 PM How the virus won

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 32 7/14/2020 4:18:23 PM Anatomy of an American Failure

By Ed Yong

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 33 7/14/2020 4:18:25 PM How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation.

America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientic and nancial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has expertise—it oundered. While countries as dierent as South careened between inaction and ineptitude. e breadth and mag- Korea, ailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively nitude of its errors are dicult, in the moment, to truly fathom. to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved In the rst half of 2020, SARS-CoV-2—the new corona virus merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling behind the disease COVID-19—infected 10 million people around upward slope in the summer. “e U.S. fundamentally failed the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medi- the world’s population but a quarter of its conrmed COVID-19 cal School, told me. cases and deaths. ese numbers are estimates. e actual toll, Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest coun- experts in a variety of elds. I’ve learned that almost everything try in the world still lacks sucient testing to accurately count its that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was sick citizens. predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a govern- Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible ment denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the

34 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 34 7/13/2020 5:42:15 PM nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic inecient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the contributing writer, asked me. ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since Despite its epochal e¡ects, COVID-19 is merely a harbinger the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black of worse plagues to come. e U.S. cannot prepare for these Americans especially vulnerable to COVID-19. e decades- inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another life for their livelihood. e same social-media platforms that catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic. warning, every festering wound and reopened scar. The U.S. has little excuse for its inattention. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 u, Zika, in two ways: Stop an and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming pathogens could wreak. Health experts, business leaders, and thousands more. e ¢rst way is likely impossible. ere are sim- even middle schoolers ran simulated exercises to game out the ply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. spread of new diseases. In 2018, I wrote an article for e Atlan- Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in tic arguing that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic, and some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many sounded warnings about the fragility of the nation’s health- people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano care system and the slow process of creating a vaccine. But the from them for fertilizer. ousands of bats also y over these COVID-19 debacle has also touched—and implicated— nearly people’s villages and roost in their homes, creating opportuni- every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, ties for the bats’ viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism. of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonpro¢t that studies emerging dis- SARS-CoV-2 is something of an anti-Goldilocks virus: just eases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of bad enough in every way. Its symptoms can be severe enough people every year. “Most infected people don’t know about it, to kill millions but are often mild enough to allow infections and most of the viruses aren’t transmissible,” Daszak says. But to move undetected through a population. It spreads quickly it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic. enough to overload hospitals, but slowly enough that statistics Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended don’t spike until too late. ese traits made the virus harder up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a human—and another, to control, but they also softened the pandemic’s punch. and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood SARS-CoV-2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. Dead- super-spreading event. e COVID-19 pandemic had begun. lier pathogens almost certainly exist. Wild animals harbor an “ere is no way to get spillover of everything to zero,” Colin estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could Carlson, an ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. Many potentially jump into humans. How will the U.S. fare when conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the “we can’t even deal with a starter pandemic?,” Zeynep Tufekci, wildlife trade or the eating of “bush meat,” an exoticized term

OPENING SPREAD: NEW YORK CITY AT THE HEIGHT OF THE PANDEMIC. THIS PAGE, LEFT: PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP AND THE CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE BRIEF THE

OPENING SPREAD: DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX. OPENING SPREAD: DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX. THIS PAGE: JABIN BOTSFORD / THE WASHINGTON POST GETTY; NATALIE KEYSSAR. PRESS AT THE WHITE HOUSE. RIGHT: A RECORD NUMBER OF BODIES BEING PROCESSED AT A FUNERAL HOME IN QUEENS, NEW YORK.

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 35 7/13/2020 5:42:16 PM for “game,” but few diseases have emerged through either route. U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use antagonized its allies. It has a seat on the WHO’s executive board, change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. but left that position empty for more than two years, only lling Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. it this May, when the pandemic was in full swing. Since 2017, rough intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising Trump has pulled more than 30 staers out of the Centers for temperatures, we have uprooted the planet’s animals, forcing Disease Control and Prevention’s o£ce in China, who could have them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own door- warned about the spreading corona virus. Last July, he defunded steps. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing an American epidemiologist embedded within China’s CDC. grip—and viruses have come bursting out. America First was America oblivious. Curtailing those viruses after they spill over is more feasible, Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong but requires knowledge, transparency, and decisiveness that were ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed lacking in 2020. Much about coronaviruses is still unknown. expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with ere are no surveillance networks for detecting them as there inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants are for inuenza. ere are no approved treatments or vaccines. as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an o£ce that Corona viruses were formerly a niche family, of mainly veterinary had been assembled specically to prepare for nascent pandem- importance. Four decades ago, just 60 or so scientists attended the ics. American intelligence agencies warned about the corona- rst international meeting on coronaviruses. eir ranks swelled virus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intel- after SARS swept the world in 2003, but quickly dwindled as a ligence briengs. e secretary of health and human services, spike in funding vanished. e same thing happened after MERS Alex Azar, oered similar counsel, and was twice ignored. emerged in 2012. is year, the world’s corona virus experts—and Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, “so there still aren’t many—had to postpone their tri ennial conference that when something like this happens, you’re moving quickly,” in the Netherlands because SARS-CoV-2 made ying too risky. Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West In the age of cheap air travel, an outbreak that begins on one African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. “By early February, continent can easily reach the others. SARS already demonstrated we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of that in 2003, and more than twice as many people now travel which were taken.” Trump could have spent those crucial early by plane every year. To avert a pandemic, aected nations must weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking compa- alert their neighbors quickly. In 2003, China covered up the early nies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and spread of SARS, allowing the new disease to gain a foothold, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused in 2020, history repeated itself. e Chinese government down- on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. played the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was spreading among would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, humans, and only conrmed as much on January 20, after mil- and urged Americans to avoid going there. lions had traveled around the country for the lunar new year. Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously Doctors who tried to raise the alarm were censured and threat- enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully ened. One, Li Wenliang, later died of COVID-19. e World ine£cient at restricting either travel or viruses. ey prompt people Health Organization initially parroted China’s line and did not to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately declare a public-health emergency of international concern until hide their symptoms. ey are often porous: Trump’s included January 30. By then, an estimated 10,000 people in 20 countries numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to had been infected, and the virus was spreading fast. enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later e United States has correctly castigated China for its duplic- announced a ban on ights from continental Europe, a surge of ity and the WHO for its laxity—but the U.S. has also failed the travelers packed America’s airports in a rush to beat the incom- inter national community. Under President Donald Trump, the ing restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote

LEFT: LOS ANGELES UNDER LOCKDOWN IN MARCH. MIDDLE: AN UNEMPLOYED WOMAN IN HOUSTON. RIGHT: AN EMPTY STREET IN BOSTON IN THE EARLY MONTHS OF THE PANDEMIC. ADAM AMENGUAL; ELIZABETH BICK; YOAV HORESH

36 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 36 7/13/2020 5:42:16 PM much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread. On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be In the middle of the greatest down to close to zero.” Over the next two months, at least 1 million Americans were infected.

health and economic crises established itself in the U.S., it found a nation through which it could spread easily, without being in generations, millions detected. For years, Pardis Sabeti, a virologist at the Broad Insti- tute of Harvard and MIT, has been trying to create a surveil- of Americans have found lance network that would allow hospitals in every major U.S. city to quickly track new viruses through genetic sequencing. Had that network existed, once Chinese scientists published themselves impoverished and SARS-CoV-2’s genome on January 11, every American hospital would have been able to develop its own diagnostic test in disconnected from medical care. preparation for the virus’s arrival. “I spent a lot of time trying to convince many funders to fund it,” Sabeti told me. “I never got anywhere.” e CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. ese proved useless because of a faulty chemical island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of component. Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for an epidemic— not stop it. And they can create a harmful false getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of Feb- con dence, so countries “rely on bans to the exclusion of the ruary, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected things they actually need to do—testing, tracing, building up but only hundreds had been tested. e o cial data were so the health system,” says omas Bollyky, a global-health expert clearly wrong that e Atlantic developed its own volunteer- at the Council on Foreign Relations. “ at sounds an awful lot led initiative—the COVID Tracking Project—to count cases. like what happened in the U.S.” Diagnostic tests are easy to make, so the U.S. failing to create This was predictable. A president who is fixated on an one seemed inconceivable. Worse, it had no Plan B. Private labs in e ectual border wall, and has portrayed asylum seekers as vec- were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Sabeti’s lab tors of disease, was always going to reach for travel bans as a rst developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to col- resort. And Americans who bought into his rhetoric of xeno- leagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working phobia and isolationism were going to be especially susceptible diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. to thinking that simple entry controls were a panacea. states,” she told me. And so the U.S. wasted its best chance of restraining It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle COVID-19. Although the disease rst arrived in the U.S. in incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms mid-January, genetic evidence shows that the speci c viruses couldn’t nd out what was wrong with them. Health o cials that triggered the rst big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t couldn’t cut o chains of transmission by identifying people land until mid-February. e country could have used that time who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves. to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presi- Water running along a pavement will readily seep into every dency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without crack; so, too, did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very fault line in the modern world. Consider our buildings. In

LEFT: A WOMAN WITH COVID-19 SYMPTOMS GETS HER VITALS CHECKED IN MONUMENT VALLEY, ARIZONA, IN THE NAVAJO NATION. MIDDLE: BLOOD SAMPLES IN A LAB

MARK RALSTON / AFP GETTY; ROSE MARIE CROMWELL; TIM RUE BLOOMBERG GETTY IN FLORIDA. RIGHT: THE USNS MERCY ARRIVES IN THE PORT OF LOS ANGELES TO PROVIDE HELP TO OVERSTRETCHED HOSPITALS.

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 37 7/13/2020 5:42:17 PM response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-ecient by sealing them o from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick buildings,’ ” says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy eciency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacricing well-being. “We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people,” Allen says. e indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the corona virus ran ram- pant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours. The hardest-hit buildings were those that had been jammed with people for decades: prisons. Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough- on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. e U.S. imprisons ve to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing im possible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the corona virus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500. Other densely packed facilities were also besieged. Amer- ica’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its corona virus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and sta have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. ese grim gures are a re¢ection not just of the greater harms that COVID-19 in¢icts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaed, and four in ve had recently been cited for failures in infection control. e Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the in¢ux of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers. Even though a Seattle nursing home was one of the rst COVID-19 hot spots in the U.S., similar facilities weren’t provided with tests and protective equipment. Rather than girding these facilities against the pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspec- tions in March, passing the buck to the states. Some nursing homes avoided the virus because their owners immediately stopped visitations, or paid caregivers to live on-site. But in others, sta stopped working, scared about infecting their

charges or becoming infected themselves. In some cases, ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 38 7/13/2020 5:42:18 PM ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK A WOMAN PROCESSES TAKE-OUT ORDERS AT A RESTAURANT IN THE EAST VILLAGE, IN MANHATTAN.

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 39 7/13/2020 5:42:18 PM LEFT: HEALTH-CARE WORKERS SURROUND A COVID-19 PATIENT AT LENOX HILL HOSPITAL, IN MANHATTAN. RIGHT: A WOMAN WEARS A MASK IN LOS ANGELES.

residents had to be evacuated because no one showed up to care forced overstretched departments to furlough more employees. for them. When states needed battalions of public-health workers to nd America’s neglect of nursing homes and prisons, its sick build- infected people and trace their contacts, they had to hire and ings, and its botched deployment of tests are all indicative of its train people from scratch. In May, Maryland Governor Larry problematic attitude toward health: “Get hospitals ready and wait Hogan asserted that his state would soon have enough people for sick people to show,” as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the non- to trace 10,000 contacts every day. Last year, as Ebola tore prot Partners in Health, puts it. “Especially in the beginning, through the Democratic Republic of Congo—a country with we catered our entire [COVID-19] response to the 20 percent a quarter of Maryland’s wealth and an active war zone—local of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing health workers and the WHO traced twice as many people. transmission in the community.” e latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations American communities, instead of merely treating it in individuals. at system pairs the corona virus created thousands of sickly hosts that it then rode uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a into America’s hospitals. It should have found facilities armed matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good. with state-of-the-art medical technologies, detailed pandemic At the end of the 20th century, public-health improvements plans, and ample supplies of protective equipment and life-saving meant that Americans were living an average of 30 years longer medicines. Instead, it found a brittle system in danger of collapse. than they were at the start of it. Maternal mortality had fallen Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends by 99 percent; infant mortality by 90 percent. Fortied foods all nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about but eliminated rickets and goiters. Vaccines eradicated smallpox a quarter of which is wasted on inecient care, unnecessary treat- and polio, and brought measles, diphtheria, and rubella to heel. ments, and administrative chicanery. e U.S. gets little bang ese measures, coupled with antibiotics and better sanitation, for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of curbed infectious diseases to such a degree that some scientists comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and predicted they would soon pass into history. But instead, these the fewest doctors per person. is prot-driven system has scant achievements brought complacency. “As public health did its job, incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime it became a target” of budget cuts, says Lori Freeman, the CEO drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic of the National Association of County and City Health Ocials. preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health- by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments to adapt in a crisis. were already struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing When hospitals do create pandemic plans, they tend to ght obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. the last war. After 2014, several centers created specialized treat- Last year saw the most measles cases since 1992. In 2018, the U.S. ment units designed for Ebola—a highly lethal but not very con- had 115,000 cases of syphilis and 580,000 cases of gonorrhea— tagious disease. ese units were all but useless against a highly numbers not seen in almost three decades. It has 1.7 million cases transmissible airborne virus like SARS-CoV-2. Nor were hospitals of chlamydia, the highest number ever recorded. ready for an outbreak to drag on for months. Emergency plans Since the last recession, in 2009, chronically strapped local assumed that sta¨ could endure a few days of exhausting condi- health departments have lost 55,000 jobs—a quarter of their tions, that supplies would hold, and that hard-hit centers could be

workforce. When COVID-19 arrived, the economic downturn supported by una¨ected neighbors. “We’re designed for discrete PREVIOUS SPREAD: DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX. THIS PAGE: SARAH BLESENER; ALEXIS HUNLEY.

40 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 40 7/13/2020 5:42:19 PM LEFT: A PRO-TRUMP PROTESTER IN HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, IN APRIL. RIGHT: AN ANTI-LOCKDOWN PROTEST IN MOUNT WOLF, PENNSYLVANIA, IN MAY.

disasters” like mass shootings, tra c pileups, and hurricanes, says shriveled just as global demand spiked. e Trump administration Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Science University. e COVID-19 pandemic is not a discrete Stockpile, only to nd that the 100 million respirators and masks disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at that had been dispersed during the 2009 u pandemic were never least until a vaccine is ready. replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left. Wherever the coronavirus arrived, hospitals reeled. Several In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didn’t have states asked medical students to graduate early, reenlisted retired enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the doctors, and deployed dermatologists to emergency departments. public, or navigated a morass of back-alley deals and internet scams. Doctors and nurses endured grueling shifts, their faces chapped Others fashioned their own surgical masks from bandannas and and bloody when they nally do ed their protective equipment. gowns from garbage bags. e supply of naso pharyngeal swabs Soon, that equipment— masks, respirators, gowns, gloves—started that are used in every diagnostic test also ran low, because one of running out. the largest manufacturers is based in Lombardy, Italy—initially the American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. ey COVID-19 capital of Europe. About 40 percent of critical-care acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine drugs, including antibiotics and painkillers, became scarce because supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from they depend on manufacturing lines that begin in China and India. countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. e lines Once a vaccine is ready, there might not be enough vials to put it are invisible until they snap. About half of the world’s face masks, in, because of the long-running global shortage of medical-grade for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. glass—literally, a bottle-neck bottleneck. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply e federal government could have mitigated those problems by buying supplies at economies of scale and distributing them according to need. Instead, in March, Trump told America’s governors to “try getting it yourselves.” As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies. Rather than countering While the president prevaricated, Americans acted. Businesses sent their employees home. People practiced social distancing, even misinformation during the before Trump nally declared a national emergency on March 13, and before governors and mayors subsequently issued formal stay- at-home orders, or closed schools, shops, and restaurants. A study pandemic, trusted sources showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID-19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier. often made things worse. But better late than never: By collectively reducing the spread of the virus, America attened the curve. Ventilators didn’t run out, as they had in parts of Italy. Hospitals had time to add extra beds. Social distancing worked. But the indiscriminate lockdown

MARK PETERSON / REDUX; AMY LOMBARD was necessary only because America’s leaders wasted months of

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 41 7/13/2020 5:42:20 PM A MASKED WORKER CLEANS A NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY ENTRANCE. ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK

42 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 42 7/13/2020 5:42:21 PM prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country that—uniquely and absurdly—ties health care to employment. Some COVID-19 sur- vivors have been hit with seven-gure medical bills. In the middle of the greatest health and economic crises in generations, millions of Americans have found themselves dis connected from medical care and impoverished. ey join the millions who have always lived that way.

, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to oer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shoul- dered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. ousands of people endured months of COVID-19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history. Of the 3.1 million Americans who cannot aord health insurance, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black. is is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. ey built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct America’s system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. ey fought every attempt to improve Black people’s access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s to the passage of the Aordable Care Act in 2010. A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes. As the COVID-19 pandemic wore on, they were among the quickest to lift social-distancing restrictions and reexpose their citizens to the coronavirus. e harms of these moves were unduly foisted upon the poor and the Black. As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID-19—a rate more than twice that of white Americans. at gure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face. Compared with white people, they die three years younger. ree times as many Black mothers die during pregnancy. Black people

ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK have higher rates of chronic illnesses that predispose them to

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 43 7/13/2020 5:42:21 PM fatal cases of COVID-19. When they go to hospitals, they’re COVID-19 because they don’t wash their hands enough, a remark less likely to be treated. e care they do receive tends to be for which he later apologized. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of poorer. Aware of these biases, Black people are hesitant to seek Louisiana, also a physician, noted that Black people have higher aid for COVID-19 symptoms and then show up at hospitals in rates of chronic disease, as if this were an answer in itself, and not sicker states. “One of my patients said, ‘I don’t want to go to the a pattern that demanded further explanation. hospital, because they’re not going to treat me well,’ ” says Uché Blackstock, an emergency physician and the founder of Advanc- of accurate information is among the ing Health Equity, a nonprot that ghts bias and racism in health most important defenses against an epidemic’s spread. And care. “Another whispered to me, ‘I’m so relieved you’re Black. I yet the largely unregulated, social-media-based communica- just want to make sure I’m listened to.’ ” tions infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that mis- Black people were both more worried about the pandemic information will proliferate fast. “In every outbreak throughout and more likely to be infected by it. e dismantling of Amer- the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial ica’s social safety net left Black people with less income and communities immediately spread their content about how it’s higher unemployment. ey make up a disproportionate share all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company of the low-paid “essential workers” who were expected to sta or Bill Gates,” says Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail Observatory, who studies the ow of online information. When while the pandemic raged around them. Earning hourly wages COVID-19 arrived, “there was no doubt in my mind that it without paid sick leave, they couldn’t aord to miss shifts even was coming.” when symptomatic. ey faced risky commutes on crowded Sure enough, existing conspiracy theories—George Soros! public transportation while more privileged people teleworked 5G! Bioweapons!—were repurposed for the pandemic. An info- from the safety of isolation. “ere’s nothing about Blackness demic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. Rumors that makes you more prone to COVID,” says Nicolette Louis- coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep saint, the executive director of Healthcare Ready, a nonprot users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is that works to strengthen medical supply chains. Instead, existing polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to inequities stack the odds in favor of the virus. act in concert, this is calamitous. “e social internet as a system Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the is broken,” DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused. people in the Navajo Nation can’t easily wash their hands, Beginning on April 16, DiResta’s team noticed growing online because they’ve been embroiled in long-running negotiations chatter about Judy Mikovits, a discredited researcher turned anti- over the rights to the water on their own lands. ose with water vaccination champion. Posts and videos cast Mikovits as a whistle- must contend with runo from uranium mines. Most live in blower who claimed that the new corona virus was made in a lab cramped multigenerational homes, far from the few hospitals and described Anthony Fauci of the White House’s corona virus that service a 17-million-acre reservation. As of mid-May, the task force as her nemesis. Ironically, this conspiracy theory was Navajo Nation had higher rates of COVID-19 infections than nested inside a larger conspiracy—part of an orchestrated PR any U.S. state. campaign by an anti-vaxxer and QAnon fan with the explicit Americans often misperceive historical inequities as personal goal to “take down Anthony Fauci.” It culminated in a slickly failures. Stephen Human, a Republican state senator and doctor produced video called Plandemic, which was released on May 4. in Ohio, suggested that Black Americans might be more prone to More than 8 million people watched it in a week.

LEFT: A WOMAN HUGS HER GRANDMOTHER THROUGH A PLASTIC SHEET IN WANTAGH, NEW YORK. RIGHT: AN ELDERLY WOMAN HAS HER OXYGEN LEVELS TESTED IN

YONKERS, NEW YORK. PREVIOUS SPREAD: DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX. THIS PAGE: AL BELLO GETTY; ANDREW RENNEISEN / THE NEW YORK TIMES REDUX.

4 4 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 44 7/13/2020 5:42:22 PM Doctors and journalists tried to debunk Plandemic’s many News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting misleading claims, but these eorts spread less successfully than the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the the video itself. Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to uncontrollable unless caught early. But while health organiza- treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. e hydroxychloroquine tions recognize the need to surveil for emerging diseases, they story was muddied even further by two studies published in are woefully unprepared to do the same for emerging conspira- top medical journals—e Lancet and the New England Journal cies. In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the of Medicine—that claimed the drug was not eective and was threat of misinformation, “their response was: ‘ at’s interest- potentially harmful. e papers relied on suspect data from a ing, but that’s just stu that happens on the internet.’ ” small analytics company called Surgisphere. Both were retracted Rather than countering misinformation during the pan- in June. demic’s early stages, trusted sources often made things worse. Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, Many health experts and government ocials downplayed the the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at threat of the virus in January and February, assuring the public record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before that it posed a low risk to the U.S. and drawing comparisons to anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow. e ensuing confu- the ostensibly greater threat of the u. e WHO, the CDC, sion, and the many genuine unknowns about the virus, has cre- and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, ated a vortex of fear and uncertainty, which grifters have sought hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. to exploit. Snake-oil merchants have peddled ineectual silver ese messages were oered without nuance or acknowledge- bullets (including actual silver). Armchair experts with scant ment of uncertainty, so when they were reversed—the virus or absent qualications have found regular slots on the nightly is worse than the u; wear masks—the changes seemed like news. And at the center of that confusion is Donald Trump. befuddling ip-ops. e media added to the confusion. Drawn to novelty, jour- , leaders must rally the public, tell the nalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeat- Americans quietly stayed home. ey wrote up every incre- edly contradicted public-health experts, his scientic advisers, mental scientic claim, even those that hadn’t been veried or and himself. He said that “nobody ever thought a thing like [the peer-reviewed. pandemic] could happen” and also that he “felt it was a pandemic ere were many such claims to choose from. By tying career long before it was called a pandemic.” Both statements cannot be advancement to the publishing of papers, academia already true at the same time, and in fact neither is true. creates incentives for scientists to do attention-grabbing but A month before his inauguration, I wrote that “the question isn’t irreproducible work. e pandemic strengthened those incen- whether [Trump will] face a deadly outbreak during his presidency, tives by prompting a rush of panicked research and promising but when.” Based on his actions as a media personality during the ambitious scientists global attention. 2014 Ebola outbreak and as a candidate in the 2016 election, I sug- In March, a small and severely awed French study suggested that he would fail at diplomacy, close borders, tweet rashly, gested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could spread conspiracy theories, ignore experts, and exhibit reckless treat COVID-19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would self-condence. And so he did. have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie

LEFT: PROTESTERS AT THE MINNEAPOLIS INTERSECTION WHERE GEORGE FLOYD WAS KILLED BY POLICE. RIGHT: PROTESTERS IN MANHATTAN’S WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK IN JUNE. BRANDON BELL; MEL D. COLE

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 45 7/13/2020 5:42:22 PM about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soar- who presided over the creation of new immigrant- detention cen- ing to record-breaking heights. ters would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy “wartime president,” he merely presided over a culture war, turning would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot public health into yet another politicized cage match. Abetted by stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts supporters in the conservative media, he framed measures that pro- at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a tect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and shadow corona virus task force to his unqualied son-in-law; that anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the cura- “LIBERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public- tive potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist in capable health o§cials left their jobs over harassment and threats. of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle populist leaders—Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom— drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from also fumbled their response to COVID-19. “When you have people any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack elected based on undermining trust in the government, what hap- of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.” pens when trust is what you need the most?” says Sarah Dalglish Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID-19 pandemic. He isn’t of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who solely responsible for America’s asco, but he is central to it. A studies the political determinants of health. pandemic demands the coordinated eorts of dozens of agencies. “Trump is president,” she says. “How could it go well?” “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” Ron Klain said. “It moves if the president stands on a table fared better against COVID-19 didn’t and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at follow a universal playbook. Many used masks widely; New Zealand his desk saying it’s not a big deal.” didn’t. Many tested extensively; Japan didn’t. Many had science- In the early days of Trump’s presidency, many believed that minded leaders who acted early; Hong Kong didn’t—instead, a America’s institutions would check his excesses. ey have, in part, grassroots movement compensated for a lax government. Many but Trump has also corrupted them. e CDC is but his latest were small islands; not large and continental Germany. Each nation victim. On February 25, the agency’s respiratory-disease chief, succeeded because it did enough things right. Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of Meanwhile, the United States underperformed across the school closures and saying that “disruption to everyday life might board, and its errors compounded. e dearth of tests allowed be severe.” Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems un conrmed cases to create still more cases, which ªooded the to have benched the entire agency. e CDC led the way in every hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and the virus’s spread. Twitter amplied Trump’s misleading messages, template for public-health agencies around the world. But dur- which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to ing the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted spend more time scouring for information on Twitter. Even sea- COVID-19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didn’t soned health experts underestimated these compounded risks. Yes, hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopen- having Trump at the helm during a pandemic was worrying, but it ing the country were shelved for a month while the White House was tempting to think that national wealth and technological supe- released its own uselessly vague plan. riority would save America. “We are a rich country, and we think we Again, everyday Americans did more than the White House. can stop any infectious disease because of that,” says Michael Oster- By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought holm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research the country time, at substantial cost to their nancial and mental and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But dollar bills alone well-being. eir sacrice came with an implicit social contract— are no match against a virus.” that the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an Public-health experts talk wearily about the panic-neglect cycle, extraordinary, energetic eort to suppress the virus, as did the likes in which outbreaks trigger waves of attention and funding that of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the quickly dissipate once the diseases recede. is time around, the baement of health experts. “ere are instances in history where U.S. is already ªirting with neglect, before the panic phase is over. humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases,” e virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, includ- says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center ing Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying for Health Security. “It’s appalling that we in the U.S. have not degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After summoned that energy around COVID-19.” Arizona’s cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara Instead, the U.S. sleepwalked into the worst possible scenario: Christ, the director of the state’s health-services department, said, People suered all the debilitating eects of a lockdown with few of “We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we can’t the benets. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing stop living as well.” e virus may beg to dier.

46 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 46 7/13/2020 5:42:23 PM At times, Americans have seemed to collectively surrender to is pregnancy, she says, which is “a time when women’s lives are COVID-19. e White House’s corona virus task force wound changing, and they can absorb a ton of information. A pandemic down. Trump resumed holding rallies, and called for less testing, is similar: People are actually paying attention, and learning.” so that o cial numbers would be rosier. e country behaved like Redbird’s survey suggests that Americans indeed sought out a horror-movie character who believes the danger is over, even new sources of information—and that consumers of news from though the monster is still at large. e long wait for a vaccine will conservative outlets, in particular, expanded their media diet. likely culminate in a predictable way: Many Americans will refuse People of all political bents became more dissatis¥ ed with the to get it, and among those who want it, the most vulnerable will Trump administration. As the economy nose-dived, the health- be last in line. care system ailed, and the government fumbled, belief in Ameri- Still, there is some reason for hope. Many of the people I can exceptionalism declined. “Times of big social disruption call interviewed tentatively suggested that the upheaval wrought into question things we thought were normal and standard,” by COVID-19 might be so large as to permanently change the Redbird told me. “If our institutions fail us here, in what ways are they failing elsewhere?” And whom are they failing the most? Americans were in the mood for systemic change. en, on May 25, George Floyd, who had survived COVID-19’s assault on his airway, asphyxiated under the crushing pressure of a police o - cer’s knee. e excruciating video of his killing circulated through communities that were still reeling from the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and disproportionate casualties from COVID‐19 is an assault on COVID-19. America’s simmering outrage came to a boil and spilled into its streets. America’s body, and a De¥ ant and largely cloaked in masks, protesters turned out in more than 2,000 cities and towns. Support for Black Lives referendum on the ideas that Matter soared: For the ¥ rst time since its founding in 2013, the movement had majority approval across racial groups. ese protests were not about the pandemic, but individual protesters had animate its culture. been primed by months of shocking governmental missteps. Even people who might once have ignored evidence of police brutality recognized yet another broken institution. ey could no longer look away. It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food nation’s disposition. Experience, after all, sharpens the mind. East and water shortages—their scope is planetary, and their stakes Asian states that had lived through the SARS and MERS epidem- are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple ics reacted quickly when threatened by SARS-CoV-2, spurred with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global by a cultural memory of what a fast-moving corona virus can do. disasters collide with historical negligence. But the U.S. had barely been touched by the major epidemics COVID-19 is an assault on America’s body, and a referendum of past decades (with the exception of the H1N1 u). In 2019, on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it more Americans were concerned about terrorists and cyberattacks demands radical introspection. America would be wise to help than about outbreaks of exotic diseases. Perhaps they will emerge reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that contin- from this pandemic with immunity both cellular and cultural. ues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive ere are also a few signs that Americans are learning impor- to prevent sickness instead of pro¥ ting from it. It should build tant lessons. A June survey showed that 60 to 75 percent of a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle e ciency, Americans were still practicing social distancing. A partisan and an information system that favors light over heat. It should gap exists, but it has narrowed. “In public-opinion polling rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in the U.S., high-60s agreement on anything is an amazing in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that ow accomplish ment,” says Beth Redbird, a sociologist at Northwest- from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judg- ern University, who led the survey. Polls in May also showed that ment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason. most Democrats and Republicans supported mask wearing, and e pandemic has been both tragedy and teacher. Its very felt it should be mandatory in at least some indoor spaces. It is etymology o« ers a clue about what is at stake in the greatest almost unheard-of for a public-health measure to go from zero challenges of the future, and what is needed to address them. to majority acceptance in less than half a year. But pandemics Pandemic. Pan and demos. All people. are rare situations when “people are desperate for guidelines and rules,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. e closest analogy Ed Yong is a sta writer at e Atlantic.

0920_WEL_Yong_Covid [Print]_13900462.indd 47 7/13/2020 5:42:23 PM 48 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 48 7/13/2020 12:54:48 PM THE

Donald Trump has revealed the country’s prejudice—andBY forced Americans to confront a racist system.

0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 49 7/13/2020 12:54:48 PM done for African Americans, no president, I. I would say, has done … And the African American community is so thankful.” for the president It was an absurd statement. But in of the United States on the South Lawn a twisted way, Trump was right. As his of the White House. It was July 30, 2019, administration’s rst term comes to an end, “I’M THE not long past 9 a.m. Black Americans—indeed, all Americans— Donald Trump was headed to historic should in one respect be thankful to him. Jamestown to mark the 400th anniver- He has held up a mirror to American soci- LEAST RACIST sary of the rst representative assembly ety, and it has re¤ected back a grotesque of European settlers in the Americas. But image that many people had until now Black Virginia legislators were boycotting refused to see: an image not just of the the visit. Over the preceding two weeks, racism still coursing through the country, PERSON the president had been engaged in one of but also of the re¤ex to deny that reality. the most racist political assaults on mem- Though it was hardly his intention, no bers of Congress in American history. president has caused more Americans to Like so many controversies during stop denying the existence of racism than THERE IS Trump’s presidency, it had all started with Donald Trump. an early-morning tweet. “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Dem- ocrat Congresswomen, who originally came II. ANYWHERE IN from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, in the midst of an anti- most corrupt and inept anywhere in the racist revolution. is spring and summer, THE WORLD,” world (if they even have a functioning gov- demonstrations calling for racial justice ernment at all), now loudly and viciously attracted hundreds of thousands of people telling the people of the United States, the in Los Angeles, Washington, New York, greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, and other large cities. Smaller demonstra- TRUMP SAID. how our government is to be run,” Trump tions erupted in northeastern enclaves tweeted on Sunday, July 14, 2019. “Why such as Nantucket, Massachusetts, and don’t they go back and help x the totally Bar Harbor, Maine; in western towns broken and crime infested places from such as Havre, Montana, and Hermiston, which they came. Then come back and Oregon; in midsize cities such as Waco, show us how it is done. ese places need Texas, and Topeka, Kansas; and in wealthy your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.” suburbs such as Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Trump was referring to four freshman Darien, Connecticut. members of Congress: Ilhan Omar of Min- Veteran activists and new recruits to the nesota, a Somali American; Ayanna Pressley cause pushed policy makers to hold violent of Massachusetts, an African American; police o©cers accountable, to ban choke Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a Palestinian holds and no-knock warrants, to shift fund- American; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of ing from law enforcement to social services, New York, a Puerto Rican. Pressley screen- and to end the practice of sending armed were more likely to use excessive force shotted Trump’s tweet and declared, “THIS and dangerous o©cers to respond to inci- against Black “culprits” than they were is what racism looks like.” dents in which the suspect is neither armed against white ones. That’s an increase On the South Lawn, Trump now faced nor dangerous. But these activists weren’t from just 33 percent in December 2014, reporters and cameras. Over the drone of merely advocating for a few policy shifts. after a grand jury declined to indict a New the helicopter rotors, one reporter asked ey were calling for the eradication of rac- York City police o©cer in the killing of Trump if he was bothered that “more and ism in America once and for all. Eric Garner. more people” were calling him racist. e president attempted to portray the What’s more, by early June, roughly “I am the least racist person there is righteous demonstrations as the work of three out of four Americans were saying anywhere in the world,” Trump replied, looters and thugs, but many of the people that “racial and ethnic discrimination” is hands up, palms facing out for emphasis. watching at home didn’t see it that way. a “big problem” in the United States— His hands came down. He singled out is summer, a majority of Americans— up from only about half of Americans in a vocal critic, the Reverend Al Sharpton. 57 percent, according to a Monmouth 2015, when Trump launched his presiden- “Now, he’s a racist,” Trump said. “What I’ve University poll—said that police o©cers tial campaign.

50 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 50 7/13/2020 12:54:49 PM Turner of Ohio and Will Hurd of Texas, had called the president’s tweets racist. But Trump, emboldened by the silence from the rest of his caucus, doubled down on his attacks. “IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE,” Trump wrote to the four women on Twitter, “YOU CAN LEAVE.” The president added: “If Democrats want to unite around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congress- women, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.” By Monday night, House Democrats had had enough. ey introduced a resolution to “strongly” condemn the president’s racist tweets. It would be easy to see these shifts as sparring with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Trump woke up the next the direct result of the horrifying events over a $4.6 billion border-aid package that morning once again in a state of angry that have unfolded in 2020: a pandemic they thought did not suciently restrain denial. “ose Tweets were NOT Racist,” that has had a disproportionate eect on Trump’s immigration policies. he tweeted. “I don’t have a Racist bone people of color; the video of George Floyd Yet Pelosi promptly defended her fel- in my body!” dying beneath the knee of an impassive low Democrats on July 14, 2019. “When Minneapolis police ocer; the ghastly kill- @realDonaldTrump tells four American ing of Breonna Taylor, shot to death in her Congresswomen to go back to their coun- IV. own home. tries,” Pelosi tweeted, “he rearms his plan Yet fundamental shifts in American to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always , Americans views of race were already under way been about making America white again.” see themselves—and their country—in before the COVID-19 disparities became It has always been a racial slur for the president. From the days of George clear and before these latest examples of white Americans to tell Americans of Washington, the president has personi- police violence surfaced. e percentage color, “Go back to your country.” Because °ed the American body. e motto of the of Americans who told Monmouth poll- their country is New York City, where United States is E pluribus unum—“Out sters that racial and ethnic discrimination Ocasio-Cortez was born. Their coun- of many, one.” e “one” is the president. is a big problem made a greater leap from try is Detroit, Tlaib’s birthplace. eir To Trump, and to many of his sup- January 2015 (51 percent) to July 2016 country is greater Boston, where Pressley porters, the American body must be a (68 percent) than from July 2016 to June lives. eir country is the United States, white body. When he launched his presi- 2020 (76 percent). What we are witnessing to which Omar’s family immigrated when dential campaign, on June 16, 2015, he right now is the culmination of a longer she was young. began with attacks on immigrants of process—a process that tracks closely with As Democratic politicians raged at color and on the person whose citizen- the political career of Donald Trump. the president that Sunday, Republicans ship he’d falsely questioned as a peddler were silent. “It’s become frighteningly of birtherism: Barack Obama. ey were common for many of my Republican all desecrating the American body. Of III. colleagues to let these moments sail by Mexican immigrants, he said: “ey’re without saying even a word,” Minority bringing drugs. ey’re bringing crime. leading up to Trump’s Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Sen- They’re rapists.” Of Obama, he said: attack on Omar, Pressley, Tlaib, and Ocasio- ate «oor. “He’s been a negative force. We need Cortez, Fox News slammed the “Squad,” To be fair, by Monday, a few Repub- somebody that can take the brand of the

GAGE SKIDMORE; SECRETNAME101; SENATE DEMOCRATS; OFFICE OF REPRESENTATIVE KAREN BASS; DANIEL SCHWEN GAGE SKIDMORE; SECRETNAME101; SENATE DEMOCRATS; OFFICE OF REPRESENTATIVE KAREN BASS; DANIEL SCHWEN especially Omar. All four had been publicly licans, including Representatives Mike United States and make it great again.”

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JON KEY

0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 51 7/13/2020 12:54:50 PM Trump presented himself as that patients. Later, I would read about how, somebody. To make America great again, around 2:50 a.m., Trump greeted his he would make it seem as if a Black man exuberant supporters in New York City had never been president, erasing him with a victory speech. He pledged to be from history by repealing and replacing TRUMP HELD “a president for all Americans.” his signature accomplishments, from the Aordable Care Act to DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals V. policy. He would also build a wall to keep UP A MIRRORMIRROR out immigrants, and he would ban Mus- of being sworn in, lims from entering the country. Trump broke that promise. He reversed Days after rst proposing his Muslim holds on two oil-pipeline projects, — TO AMERICAN ban, in December 2015 still early in including one through the Standing his candidacy—Trump told CNN’s Don Rock Indian Reservation, which was Lemon, “I am the least racist person that opposed by more than 200 Indigenous you have ever met.” SOCIETY, nations. He issued executive orders call- Trump’s denial was audacious, but ing for the construction of a wall along back then, his audacity only contributed the southern border and the deportation to the complacent sense among many AND IT of individuals who “pose a risk to public Americans that this interloper from safety or national security.” He enacted reali ty television posed no serious threat. his rst of three Muslim bans. Yet the Americans who dismissed Trump’s By the end of the spring, Attorney chances were living in denial themselves. REFLECTED General Je Sessions had directed fed- For many, Obama’s presidency was eral prosecutors to seek the harshest proof that the country was rising to its prison sentences whenever possible. Ses- ideals of liberty and equality. When a BACK sions had also laid the groundwork for Black man climbed to the highest oce the suspension of all the consent decrees in the land, it signied that the nation that provided federal oversight of law- was postracial, or at least that history was enforcement agencies that had demon- inexorably bending in that direction. e A GROTESQUE strated a pattern of racism. Obama administration itself boasted that Led by Steve Bannon and Stephen it was ghting the remnants of racism—a Miller, the administration worked on mop-up operation in a war that was all IMAGE ways to restrict immigration by people but won. of color. ere was a sense of urgency, I was less sanguine. In the months because, as Trump said at a private White leading up to the 2016 election, I told House meeting in June 2017, Haitians family and friends that Trump had a good THAT MANY “all have AIDS” and Nigerians would chance of winning. Across American his- never “go back to their huts” once they tory, racial progress has normally been came to the United States. followed by its opposite. HAD REFUSED Then came Charlottesville. On So I was glad to be alone on Elec- August 11, 2017, about 250 white tion Night. I did not want to see people supremacists marched on the Univer- I loved shocked that a racist nation had sity of Virginia campus, carrying torches elected a racist president. On Novem- TO SEE. that lit up the night sky with racism and ber 8, 2016, I watched the returns come anti-Semitism. Demonstrating against in by myself, on the couch. My daugh- Charlottesville’s plan to remove statues ter, Imani, was sleeping in her crib. My honoring Confederates, they chanted, wife, Sadiqa, was at the hospital, treating “Blood and soil!” They chanted, “Jews patients during an overnight shift in the will not replace us!” ey chanted, “White pediatric emergency department. lives matter!” I stayed up until 1:35 a.m. When e white supremacists clashed with Trump carried Pennsylvania, I turned o anti-racist demonstrators that night and the television and called Sadiqa to hear the next afternoon. White lives did not how her shift was going. Our conversa- matter to the white supremacist James Alex

tion was brief; she had to get back to her Fields Jr. He drove his Dodge Challenger RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM; MOLLY ADAMS; ROSA PINEDA

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0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 53 7/13/2020 12:54:51 PM into a crowd of counterprotesters, murder- In 2008, as Obama was headed for declared it valued equality, a disenfranchis- ing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. the White House, only 34.5 percent ing nation that branded itself a democracy, “We condemn, in the strongest pos- of respondents answered “yes,” a num- a segregated nation that styled itself sepa- sible terms, this egregious display of ber I’ll call the anti-racist rate. is was rate but equal, an excluding nation that hatred, bigotry, and violence on many the second-lowest anti-racist rate of the boasted of opportunity for all. A nation is sides, on many sides,” Trump said in 41-year polling period. e rate rose to what it does, not what it originally claimed response. He spoke about there being 37.7 percent in 2010, perhaps because it would be. Often, a nation is precisely “very ne people” on “both sides.” the emergence of the Tea Party forced a what it denies itself to be. On September 5, 2017, Trump began reckoning for some white Americans, but ere was a grand moment, however, his long and un successful attempt to elim- it fell back down to 34.9 percent in 2012 when a large swath of Americans walked inate DACA, which deferred deporta- and 34.6 percent in 2014. away from a history of racial denial. tions for roughly 800,000 un documented In 2016, as Trump loomed over Amer- In the 1850s, slaveholders expanded immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. ican politics, the anti-racist rate rose to their reach into the North. eir slave- as children. e Trump administration 42.6 percent. It went up to 46.2 percent catchers, backed by federal power, were also began rescinding the Temporary in 2018, a double-digit increase from the superseding state and local law to cap- Protected Status of thousands of refugees start of the Obama administration. In large ture runaways (and free Blacks) who had from wars and natural disasters years ago part, shifts in white public opinion explain escaped across the Mason-Dixon Line. in Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, the jump. e white anti-racist rate was Formerly enslaved people such as Fred- Nepal, and Honduras. barely 29.8 percent in 2008. It jumped to erick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, as Near the end of his rst year in oce, 37.7 percent in 2016 and to 40.5 percent well as journalists such as William Lloyd Trump wondered aloud at a White House two years into Trump’s presidency. Garrison, stood in pulpits across the meeting: “Why are we having all these The deniers of racism, those who North and West describing the brutality people from shithole countries come blame people of color for racial inequity and inhumanity of slavery. Meanwhile, here?” He was referring to Haiti, El Salva- and injustice, have mostly been white, slaveholders fought to expand their power dor, and nations in Africa. He suggested but not exclusively so. Between 1977 and out west—where white people who did that the U.S. should bring in more people 2018, the lowest anti-racist rate among not want to compete with enslaved Black from countries like Norway. Black respondents—47.2 percent—came labor were calling for free soil. Begin- ree days later, on January 14, 2018, in 2012, the midpoint of Obama’s presi- ning in 1854, slaveholders went to war speaking before reporters in West Palm dency. at rate climbed to 61.1 percent with free-soilers (and abolitionists like Beach, Florida, he was again asked if in 2016 and 66 percent in 2018, a nearly John Brown) in Kansas over whether the he was racist. “No, I’m not a racist,” he 20-point swing from the Obama years. state—and the United States—would be responded. “I am the least racist person It has become harder, in the Trump free or slave. e Supreme Court’s Dred you have ever interviewed.” years, to blame Black people for racial Scott decision, in 1857, implied that Black inequity and injustice. It has also become people and northern states “had no rights” harder to tell Black people that the fault that slaveholders were “bound to respect.” VI. lies with them, and to urge them to Slaveholders seemed intent on spread- improve their station by behaving in an ing their plantations from sea to shining denied its racism upstanding or respectable manner. In the sea. As a result, more and more white through the Obama years has struggled Trump years, the problem is obvious, and Americans became antislavery, whether to deny its racism through the Trump it isn’t Black people’s behavior. out of concern for the enslaved or fear years. From 1977 to 2018, the Gen- of the encroaching slave power. Black eral Social Survey asked whether Black Americans, meanwhile, ªed the country Americans “have worse jobs, income, and VII. for Canada and Liberia—or stayed and housing than white people … mainly pressed the cause of radical abolitionism. due to discrimination.” ere are only has often been A critical mass of Americans rejected the two answers to this question. e racist called a land of contradictions, and to be South’s claim that enslavement was good answer is “no”—it presumes that racist sure, its failings sit alongside some nota- and came to recognize the peculiar institu- discrimination no longer exists and that ble achievements—a New Deal for many tion as altogether bad. racial inequities are the result of some- Americans in the 1930s, the defeat of fas- e slaveholders’ attempts to perpetu- thing being wrong with Black people. cism abroad in the 1940s. But on racial ate their system backred; in the years e anti-racist answer is “yes”—it pre- matters, the U.S. could just as accurately before the Civil War, the inhumanity and sumes that nothing is wrong or right, be described as a land in denial. It has been cruelty of enslavement became too bla- inferior or superior, about any racial a massacring nation that said it cherished tant for northerners to ignore or deny. group, so the explanation for racial dis- life, a slaveholding nation that claimed Similarly, Trump’s racism—and that of parities must be discrimination. it valued liberty, a hierarchal nation that his allies and enablers—has been too

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0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 54 7/13/2020 12:54:52 PM blatant for Americans to ignore or deny. North Carolina, railing against the four And just as the 1850s paved the way for congresswomen. As he was pummeling the revolution against slavery, Trump’s Omar with a round of attacks, the crowd presidency has paved the way for a revo- started chanting, “Send her back! Send her lution against racism. back! Send her back!” TRUMP’S Trump stopped speaking. He made no eort to stop the chant as it grew louder. He basked in the racial slur for 13 seconds. VIII. PRESIDENCY “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!” , , the House bit- On ursday, Republicans were quick terly debated the resolution to rebuke to denounce the chant. “ere’s no place for Trump for his racist tweets against the HAS PAVED that kind of talk,” Tom Emmer of Minne- four congresswomen of color. e four sota said to reporters. But, he added, “there’s were members of the most diverse class not a racist bone in the president’s body.” of Democrats in American history, which THE WAY Trump disavowed the “Send her back” had retaken the House in a midterm repu- chant, but by Friday he had disavowed his diation of the president. disavowal, calling the chanters “incredible “Every single member of this institu- patriots” and denying their racism along tion, Democratic and Republican, should FOR A with his own. Many Americans saw join us in condemning the president’s rac- through these patently false claims, how- ist tweets,” Speaker Pelosi said from the ever. By the end of July, for the rst time, a House oor. Republicans sounded o in REVOLUTION majority of voters said the president of the protest. Pelosi turned to them, voice rising, United States was, in fact, a racist. and added: “To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of oce AGAINST IX. to protect the American people.” Republicans claimed that Pelosi had the violated a House rule by characterizing an RACISM. power of denial from studying the history action as “racist.” ey moved to have the of racist ideas. But I learned to under- word struck from the congressional record. stand it in a personal way during the rst e motion to strike racist from the year of Trump’s presidency. In 2017, I fell record failed along party lines. “I know ill; I felt as sick as I’d ever been. But I told racism when I see it, I know racism when myself the hourly trips to the bathroom I feel it, and at the highest level of govern- were nothing. e blood wasn’t serious. I ment, there’s no room for racism,” Repre- ignored the symptoms for months. sentative John Lewis, the civil-rights icon, I waited until the pain was unbearable said during the debate. before I admitted that I had a problem. And One after another, Republicans rose to even then, I wasn’t able to acknowledge it defend their president. “What has really on my own. My partner saved my life. happened here is that the president and Sadiqa saw the totality of my symp- his supporters have been forced to endure Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, toms during a weeklong vacation over months of allegations of racism,” said Rep- that “the president’s not a racist.” New Year’s. It was the rst time in months resentative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania. To call out the president’s racism would that we were together all day, every day. “is ridiculous slander does a disservice have been to call out their own racism. As soon as we returned home, in Janu- to our nation.” McConnell had been quietly killing anti- ary 2018, she dragged me to the doctor. In the end, only four Republicans and racist bills that had come out of the House I acquiesced to the appointment, but the House’s lone independent voted with since January 2019, starting with the new I still wouldn’t permit the thought that all the Democrats to condemn the presi- House’s rst bill, which aimed to protect my condition was serious. I did not have dent of the United States. at means 187 Americans against voter suppression. any of the commonly known risk factors House Republicans, or 98 percent of the e day after being rebuked by House for the worst possibility—colon cancer. caucus, denied that telling four congress- Democrats, Trump held the first rally I was 35, and I exercised regularly, didn’t women of color to go back to their coun- of his reelection campaign. He spent a smoke, rarely drank, and had no family tries was racist. ey believed, as Senate large portion of his speech in Greenville, history. I was a vegan, for goodness’ sake.

0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 55 7/13/2020 12:54:52 PM I realize now that I was engaged in a One path forward leads to a mere res- powerful bout of denial. Americans, too, toration. Barack Obama’s vice president can easily summon a litany of reasons their unseats Trump, removing the bad apple country is not racist: Look at the enlight- from the barrel. With Trump dispatched, ened principles upon which the nation was the nation believes it is again headed in the founded. Look at the progress the country JUST AS THETHE right direction. On this path, Americans has made. Look at the election of Barack consider racism to be a signicant prob- Obama. Look at the dark faces in high lem. But they deny the true gravity of the places. Look at the diversity of the 2020 problem and the need for drastic action. Democratic eld. ABOLITIONISTS On this path, monuments to racism are Even after the doctor found the tumor, dismantled, but Americans shrink from my denial persisted. Once I accepted that the awesome task of reshaping the coun- I had cancer, I was convinced that it had OF THETHE 1850S1850S try with anti-racist policies. With Trump to be Stage 1, for all the reasons I had been gone, Americans decide they don’t need to convinced that I did not have cancer at all. be actively anti-racist anymore. A routine surgery was in order, and then Or Americans can realize that they are all would be good. DEMANDED THE at a point of no return. No returning to I fear that this is how many Ameri- the bad old habit of denial. No returning cans are thinking right now: Routine to cynicism. No returning to normal—the surgery—the defeat of Donald Trump normal in which racist policies, defended at the polls—will heal the American IMMEDIATE by racist ideas, lead to racial inequities. body. No need to look deeper, at police On this path, Trump’s denialism has departments, at schools, at housing. Are permanently changed the way Americans Americans now acknowledging racism, view themselves. e Trump eect is real, but telling themselves the problem is ERADICATION and lasting. e reckoning we have wit- contained? Are they telling themselves nessed this spring and summer at public that it is a big problem, but it can’t have demonstrations transforms into a reckon- spread to almost every part of the body OF SLAVERY, ing in legislatures, C-suites, university- politic? Will this become the new form admissions oces. of American denial? On this path, the American people False hope was my new normal, until demand equitable results, not speeches it wasn’t. When they scanned my body, IMMEDIATE that make them feel good about them- doctors found that the cancer had spread. selves and their country. e American I had Stage 4 colon cancer. I had two people give policy makers an ultima- choices: denial and death, or recognition tum: Use your power to radically reduce and life. America now has two choices. EQUALITY in equity and injustice, or be voted out. The abolition of slavery seemed as impossible in the 1850s as equality seems X. today. But just as the abolitionists of the MUST BE THETHE 1850s demanded the immediate eradica- ’ tion of slavery, immediate equality must will never stop. He will continue to claim be the demand today. Abolish police vio- that he loves people of color, the very DEMAND lence. Abolish mass incarceration. Abol- people his policies harm. He will con- ish the racial wealth gap and the gap in tinue to call himself “not racist,” and school funding. Abolish barriers to citizen- turn the descriptive term racist back on ship. Abolish voter suppression. Abolish anyone who has the temerity to call out TODAY. health disparities. Not in 20 years. Not in his own prejudice. Trump clearly hopes 10 years. Now. that racist ideas—paired with policies designed to suppress the vote—will lead to his reelection. But now that Trump has Ibram X. Kendi is a contributing writer pushed a critical mass of Americans to a at e Atlantic, the Andrew W. Mellon point where they can no longer explain Professor in the Humanities at Boston Uni- away the nation’s sins, the question is versity, and the director of the BU Center what those Americans will do about it. for Antiracist Research.

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0920_WEL_Kendi_RacismTrump [Print]_13893274.indd 56 7/13/2020 12:54:53 PM HISTORY IN THE MAKING

THE STORY BEHIND THE UPCOMING PBS FILM AS SEEN IN THE NEW YORKER “Make[s] powerfully clear the Combining trenchant philosophy with lyrical memoir, magnitude of the injustices and harrowing Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of Blackness. encounters endured by African-Americans “Frank Wilderson slings piercing stories and scalding traveling by ‘open’ road.” analyses with literary fire and intellectual rigor.” New York Times Book Review —BRIDGETT M. DAVIS, —TIMOTHY B. TYSON, author of The Blood of Emmett Till

AS FEATURED ON NPR NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “[A] smart and capacious history. . . . NOW IN PAPERBACK [Chatelain] is attuned to the circumstances that “There is no better history encouraged increasingly intricate ties between of this troubled journey than The Color of Law.” McDonald’s and black communities across —DAVID OSHINSKY, the country.” —JENNIFER SZALAI, New York Times New York Times Book Review

Liveright Publishing Corporation A division of W. W. Norton & Company • Independent Publishers Since 1923 • wwnorton.com • 0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 58 7/13/2020 5:57:53 PM WHEN CHINA SEES ALL

XI JINPING IS USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO QUICKLY EXTEND HIS GOVERNMENT’S SURVEILLANCE CAPABILITIES AND ENHANCE ITS TOTALITARIAN CONTROL—AND HE’S EXPORTING THIS TECHNOLOGY TO REGIMES AROUND THE GLOBE.

BY ROSS ANDERSEN

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JONATHAN DJOB NKONDO

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 59 7/13/2020 5:57:53 PM and embed surveillance measures. In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Chinese security services achieved a new level of control over the country’s internet. During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data. NORTHWESTNORTHWES OF Any emergency data-sharing arrangements made behind closed doors during the pandemic could become permanent. BEIJINBEIJING’S China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place. Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full FORBIDDEN CITY, video coverage of key public areas. Much of the footage collected by China’s cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text outside the Third Ring Road, the Chi- though satis ed with having freed China communication, and their body’s one- nese Academy of Sciences has spent seven from the Western yoke. Next to him was a of-a-kind protein-construction schema. decades building a campus of national labo- fuzzy black-and-white shot of Deng Xiao- In time, algorithms will be able to string ratories. Near its center is the Institute of ping visiting the institute in his later years, together data points from a broad range of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building after his economic reforms had set China sources—travel records, friends and asso- surrounded by camera-studded poles. e on a course to reclaim its traditional global ciates, reading habits, purchases—to pre- institute is a basic research facility. Its com- role as a great power. dict political resistance before it happens. puter scientists inquire into arti cial intel- The lobby’s most prominent poster China’s government could soon achieve ligence’s fundamental mysteries. eir more depicted Xi Jinping in a crisp black suit. an unprecedented political stranglehold practical innovations—iris recognition, China’s current president and the general on more than 1 billion people. cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun o secretary of its Communist Party has taken Early in the coronavirus outbreak, Chi- to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in a keen interest in the institute. Its work is na’s citizens were subjected to a form of some cases, the People’s Liberation Army. part of a grand AI strategy that Xi has laid risk scoring. An algorithm assigned people I visited the institute on a rainy morn- out in a series of speeches akin to those a color code—green, yellow, or red—that ing in the summer of 2019. China’s best John F. Kennedy used to train America’s determined their ability to take transit or and brightest were still shu ing in post- techno-scienti c sights on the moon. Xi enter buildings in China’s megacities. In a commute, dressed casually in basketball has said that he wants China, by year’s end, sophisticated digital system of social con- shorts or yoga pants, AirPods nestled in to be competitive with the world’s AI lead- trol, codes like these could be used to score their ears. In my pocket, I had a burner ers, a benchmark the country has arguably a person’s perceived political pliancy as well. phone; in my backpack, a computer already reached. And he wants China to A crude version of such a system is wiped free of data—standard precautions achieve AI supremacy by 2030. already in operation in China’s north- for Western journalists in China. To visit Xi’s pronouncements on AI have a sin- western territory of Xinjiang, where more China on sensitive business is to risk being ister edge. Arti cial intelligence has appli- than 1 million Muslim Uighurs have been barraged with cyberattacks and malware. cations in nearly every human domain, imprisoned, the largest internment of an In 2019, Belgian o cials on a trade mis- from the instant translation of spoken lan- ethnic-religious minority since the fall of sion noticed that their mobile data were guage to early viral-outbreak detection. the ird Reich. Once Xi perfects this sys- being intercepted by pop-up antennae But Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome ana- tem in Xinjiang, no technological limita- outside their Beijing hotel. lytical powers to push China to the cutting tions will prevent him from extending AI After clearing the institute’s security, I edge of surveillance. He wants to build an surveillance across China. He could also was told to wait in a lobby monitored by all-seeing digital system of social control, export it beyond the country’s borders, cameras. On its walls were posters of China’s patrolled by precog algorithms that iden- entrenching the power of a whole gen- most consequential postwar leaders. Mao tify potential dissenters in real time. eration of autocrats. Zedong loomed large in his characteris- China’s government has a history of China has recently embarked on a num- tic four-pocket suit. He looked serene, as using major historical events to introduce ber of ambitious infrastructure projects

60 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 60 7/13/2020 5:57:54 PM abroad—megacity construction, high- China’s citizens can stop it. I’d come to Bei- communist rebellions could be stamped speed rail networks, not to mention the jing to look for some sign that they might. out in their infancy. When Mao took over, country’s much-vaunted Belt and Road he arranged cities into grids, making each Initiative. But these won’t reshape history THIS TECHNO-POLITICAL MOMENT square its own work unit, where local spies like China’s digital infrastructure, which has been long in the making. China has kept “sharp eyes” out for counterrevolution- could shift the balance of power between spent all but a few centuries of its 5,000- ary behavior, no matter how trivial. During the individual and the state worldwide. year history at the vanguard of infor- the initial coronavirus outbreak, Chinese American policy makers from across mation technology. Along with Sumer social-media apps promoted hotlines where the political spectrum are concerned about and Mesoamerica, it was one of three people could report those suspected of hid- this scenario. Michael Kratsios, the former places where writing was independently ing symptoms. Peter iel acolyte whom Donald Trump invented, allowing information to be Xi has appropriated the phrase sharp eyes, picked to be the U.S. government’s chief stored outside the human brain. In the with all its historical resonances, as his cho- technology o cer, told me that techno- second century .., the Chinese invented sen name for the AI-powered surveillance logical leadership from democratic nations paper. is cheap, bindable information- cameras that will soon span China. With has “never been more imperative” and that storage technology allowed data—Silk AI, Xi can build history’s most oppressive “if we want to make sure that Western val- Road trade records, military communi- authoritarian apparatus, without the man- ues are baked into the technologies of the qués, correspondence among elites—to power Mao needed to keep information future, we need to make sure we’re leading crisscross the empire on horses bred for about dissent owing to a single, central- in those technologies.” speed by steppe nomads beyond the Great ized node. In China’s most prominent AI Despite China’s considerable strides, Wall. Data began to circulate even faster start-ups— SenseTime, CloudWalk, Meg- industry analysts expect America to retain a few centuries later, when Tang-dynasty vii, Hikvision, iFlytek, Meiya Pico—Xi has its current AI lead for another decade at artisans perfected woodblock printing, a found willing commercial partners. And in least. But this is cold comfort: China is mass- information technology that helped Xinjiang’s Muslim minority, he has found already developing powerful new surveil- administer a huge and growing state. his test population. lance tools, and exporting them to dozens As rulers of some of the world’s largest The Chinese Communist Party has of the world’s actual and would-be autoc- complex social organizations, ancient Chi- long been suspicious of religion, and not racies. Over the next few years, those tech- nese emperors well understood the relation- just as a result of Marxist in uence. Only nologies will be re ned and integrated into ship between information ows and power, a century and a half ago—yesterday, in the all-encompassing surveillance systems that and the value of surveillance. During the memory of a 5,000-year-old civilization— dictators can plug and play. 11th century, a Song-dynasty emperor real- Hong Xiuquan, a quasi-Christian mys- The emergence of an AI-powered ized that China’s elegant walled cities had tic converted by Western missionaries, authoritarian bloc led by China could warp become too numerous to be monitored launched the Tai ping Rebellion, an apoc- the geopolitics of this century. It could pre- from Beijing, so he deputized locals to alyptic 14-year campaign that may have vent billions of people, across large swaths police them. A few decades before the digi- killed more people than the First World of the globe, from ever securing any mea- tal era’s dawn, Chiang Kai-shek made use of War. Today, in China’s single-party politi- sure of political freedom. And whatever the this self-policing tradition, asking citizens to cal system, religion is an alternative source pretensions of American policy makers, only watch for dissidents in their midst, so that of ultimate authority, which means it must be co-opted or destroyed. By 2009, China’s Uighurs had become weary after decades of discrimination and land con scation. ey launched mass protests and a smattering of suicide attacks against Chinese police. In 2014, Xi cracked down, directing Xinjiang’s provincial government to destroy mosques and reduce XI WANTS TO USE ARTIFICIALARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEINTELLIGENCE Uighur neighborhoods to rubble. More TO BUILD A DIGITAL SYSTEMSYSTEM OFOF SOCIALSOCIAL than 1 million Uighurs were disappeared CONTROL, PATROLLED BY PRECOG ALGORITHMSALGORITHMS into concentration camps. Many were tor- THAT IDENTIFY DISSENTERS IN REALREAL TIME.TIME. tured and made to perform slave labor. Uighurs who were spared the camps nown make up the most intensely surveilled population on Earth. Not all of the sur- veillancev is digital. e Chinese government has moved thousands of Han Chi- nese “big brothers and sisters” into homes

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 61 7/13/2020 5:57:54 PM in Xinjiang’s ancient Silk Road cities, to that match faces with snapshots taken by piece of China’s coalescing mega-network monitor Uighurs’ forced assimilation to police at “health checks.” At these checks, of human-monitoring technology. mainstream Chinese culture. They eat police extract all the data they can from China is an ideal setting for an experi- meals with the family, and some “big Uighurs’ bodies. ey measure height and ment in total surveillance. Its population brothers” sleep in the same bed as the wives take a blood sample. ey record voices is extremely online. e country is home of detained Uighur men. and swab DNA. Some Uighurs have even to more than 1 billion mobile phones, all Meanwhile, AI-powered sensors been forced to participate in experiments chock-full of sophisticated sensors. Each one lurk everywhere, including in Uighurs’ that mine genetic data, to see how DNA logs search-engine queries, websites visited, purses and pants pockets. According to produces distinctly Uighurlike chins and and mobile payments, which are ubiqui- the anthropologist Darren Byler, some ears. Police will likely use the pandemic tous. When I used a chip-based credit card to Uighurs buried their mobile phones con- as a pretext to take still more data from buy coee in Beijing’s hip Sanlitun neighbor- taining Islamic materials, or even froze Uighur bodies. hood, people glared as if I’d written a check. their data cards into dumplings for safe- Uighur women are also made to endure All of these data points can be time- keeping, when Xi’s campaign of cultural pregnancy checks. Some are forced to have stamped and geo-tagged. And because a erasure reached full tilt. But police have abortions, or get an IUD inserted. Oth- new regulation requires telecom rms to since forced them to install nanny apps on ers are sterilized by the state. Police are scan the face of anyone who signs up for their new phones. e apps use algorithms known to rip unauthorized children away cellphone services, phones’ data can now to hunt for “ideological viruses” day and from their parents, who are then detained. be attached to a specific person’s face. night. ey can scan chat logs for Quran Such measures have reduced the birth- SenseTime, which helped build Xinjiang’s verses, and look for Arabic script in memes rate in some regions of Xinjiang more than surveillance state, recently bragged that its and other image les. 60 percent in three years. software can identify people wearing masks. Uighurs can’t use the usual work- When Uighurs reach the edge of their Another company, Hanwang, claims that arounds. Installing a VPN would likely neighborhood, an automated system takes its facial-recognition technology can recog- invite an investigation, so they can’t down- note. e same system tracks them as they nize mask wearers 95 percent of the time. load WhatsApp or any other prohibited move through smaller checkpoints, at China’s personal-data harvest even reaps encrypted-chat software. Purchasing prayer banks, parks, and schools. When they pump from citizens who lack phones. Out in the rugs online, storing digital copies of Mus- gas, the system can determine whether they countryside, villagers line up to have their lim books, and downloading sermons from are the car’s owner. At the city’s perimeter, faces scanned, from multiple angles, by pri- a favorite imam are all risky activities. If they’re forced to exit their cars, so their face vate rms in exchange for cookware. a Uighur were to use WeChat’s payment and ID card can be scanned again. Until recently, it was di£cult to imag- system to make a donation to a mosque, The lucky Uighurs who are able to ine how China could integrate all of these authorities might take note. travel abroad—many have had their pass- data into a single surveillance system, but e nanny apps work in tandem with ports conscated—are advised to return no longer. In 2018, a cybersecurity activist the police, who spot-check phones at check- quickly. If they do not, police interrogators hacked into a facial-recognition system that points, scrolling through recent calls and are dispatched to the doorsteps of their rel- appeared to be connected to the government texts. Even an innocent digital association— atives and friends. Not that going abroad and was synthesizing a surprising combina- being in a group text with a recent mosque is any kind of escape: In a chilling glimpse tion of data streams. e system was capable attendee, for instance—could result in at how a future authoritarian bloc might of detecting Uighurs by their ethnic features, detention. Staying off social media alto- function, Xi’s strongman allies—even and it could tell whether people’s eyes or gether is no solution, because digital inactiv- those in Muslim- majority countries such mouth were open, whether they were smil- ity itself can raise suspicions. e police are as Egypt—have been more than happy ing, whether they had a beard, and whether required to note when Uighurs deviate from to arrest and deport Uighurs back to the they were wearing sunglasses. It logged the any of their normal behavior patterns. eir open-air prison that is Xinjiang. date, time, and serial numbers—all trace- database wants to know if Uighurs start able to individual users—of Wi-Fi-enabled leaving their home through the back door XI SEEMS TO HAVE USED Xinjiang as phones that passed within its reach. It was instead of the front. It wants to know if they a laboratory to ne-tune the sensory and hosted by Alibaba and made reference to spend less time talking to neighbors than analytical powers of his new digital panop- City Brain, an AI-powered software plat- they used to. Electricity use is monitored by ticon before expanding its reach across the form that China’s government has tasked an algorithm for unusual use, which could mainland. CETC, the state-owned com- the company with building. indicate an unregistered resident. pany that built much of Xinjiang’s surveil- City Brain is, as the name suggests, a Uighurs can travel only a few blocks lance system, now boasts of pilot projects kind of automated nerve center, capable before encountering a checkpoint outtted in Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Shenzhen. of synthesizing data streams from a multi- with one of Xinjiang’s hundreds of thou- ese are meant to lay “a robust founda- tude of sensors distributed throughout an sands of surveillance cameras. Footage from tion for a nationwide rollout,” according to urban environment. Many of its proposed the cameras is processed by algorithms the company, and they represent only one uses are benign technocratic functions. Its

62 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 62 7/13/2020 5:57:54 PM Earpiece-wearing police ocers could be directed to the scene by an AI voice assistant. City Brain would be especially useful in a pandemic. (One of Alibaba’s sister companies created the app that color-coded citizens’ disease risk, while silently sending their health and travel data to police.) As Beijing’s outbreak spread, some malls and restaurants in the city began scanning potential customers’ phones, pulling data from mobile carriers to see whether they’d recently traveled. Mobile carriers also sent munic- ipal governments lists of people who had come to their city from Wuhan, where the corona virus was rst detected. And Chinese AI companies began making networked facial-recognition helmets for police, with built- in infrared fever detectors, capable of sending data to the government. City Brain could automate these processes, or integrate its data streams. Even China’s most complex AI systems are still brittle. City Brain hasn’t yet fully integrated its range of surveillance capabilities, and its ancestor systems have suered some embarrass- ing performance issues: In 2018, one of the government’s AI- powered cameras mistook a face on the side of a city bus for a jaywalker. But the software is getting better, and there’s no technical reason it can’t be implemented on a mass scale. e data streams that could be fed into a City Brain–like system are essentially unlim- ited. In addition to footage algorithms could, for instance, count peo- enjoy broad public support: City Brain from the 1.9 million facial-recognition ple and cars, to help with red-light tim- could be trained to spot lost children, or cameras that the Chinese telecom firm ing and subway-line planning. Data from luggage abandoned by tourists or terrorists. China Tower is installing in cooperation sensor-laden trash cans could make waste It could ag loiterers, or homeless people, with SenseTime, City Brain could absorb pickup more timely and ecient. or rioters. Anyone in any kind of danger feeds from cameras fastened to lampposts But City Brain and its successor tech- could summon help by waving a hand in a and hanging above street corners. It could nologies will also enable new forms of distinctive way that would be instantly rec- make use of the cameras that Chinese police integrated surveillance. Some of these will ognized by ever-vigilant computer vision. hide in trac cones, and those strapped to

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 63 7/13/2020 5:57:55 PM o cers, both uniformed and plainclothes. e state could force retailers to provide data from in-store cameras, which can noww detect the direction of your gaze across a shelf, and which could soon see aroundound corners by reading shadows. Precious little public space would be unwatched. AN AUTHORITARIAN STATE WITH ENOUGHENOUGH America’s police departments have PROCESSING POWER COULD FEED EVERYEVERY begun to avail themselves of footage from BLIP OF A CITIZEN’S NEURALNEURAL ACTIVITYACTIVITY Amazon’s home-security cameras. In their INTO A GOVERNMENT DATABASE. more innocent applications, these cameras adorn doorbells, but many are also aimed at neighbors’ houses. China’s government could harvest footage from equivalent Chinese products. They could tap the cameras attached to ride-share cars, or the self-driving vehicles that may soon replace them: Automated vehicles will be covered in a whole host of sensors, including some neural activity into a government database. The government might soon have a that will take in information much richer China has recently been pushing citizens rich, auto- populating data pro le for all than 2-D video. Data from a massive eet to download and use a propaganda app. of its 1 billion–plus citizens. Each pro le of them could be stitched together, and The government could use emotion- would comprise millions of data points, supplemented by other City Brain streams, tracking software to monitor reactions to including the person’s every appearance in to produce a 3-D model of the city that’s a political stimulus within an app. A silent, surveilled space, as well as all of her com- updated second by second. Each refresh suppressed response to a meme or a clip munications and purchases. Her threat risk could log every human’s location within the from a Xi speech would be a meaningful to the party’s power could constantly be model. Such a system would make uniden- data point to a precog algorithm. updated in real time, with a more granu- ti ed faces a priority, perhaps by sending All of these time-synced feeds of on- lar score than those used in China’s pilot drone swarms to secure a positive ID. the-ground data could be supplemented “social credit” schemes, which already e model’s data could be time-synced by footage from drones, whose gigapixel aim to give every citizen a public social- to audio from any networked device with cameras can record whole cityscapes in reputation score based on things like social- a microphone, including smart speakers, the kind of crystalline detail that allows media connections and buying habits. smartwatches, and less obvious Internet of for license-plate reading and gait recog- Algorithms could monitor her digital data ings devices like smart mattresses, smart nition. “Spy bird” drones already swoop score, along with everyone else’s, continu- diapers, and smart sex toys. All of these and circle above Chinese cities, disguised ously, without ever feeling the fatigue that sources could coalesce into a multitrack, as doves. City Brain’s feeds could be syn- hit Stasi o cers working the late shift. False location-speci c audio mix that could be thesized with data from systems in other positives—deeming someone a threat for parsed by polyglot algorithms capable of urban areas, to form a multidimensional, innocuous behavior—would be encour- interpreting words spoken in thousands real-time account of nearly all human aged, in order to boost the system’s built- of tongues. is mix would be useful to activity within China. Server farms across in chilling e ects, so that she’d turn her security services, especially in places with- China will soon be able to hold multiple sharp eyes on her own behavior, to avoid out cameras: China’s iFlytek is perfecting a angles of high-de nition footage of every the slightest appearance of dissent. technology that can recognize individuals moment of every Chinese person’s life. If her risk factor uctuated upward— by their “voiceprint.” It’s important to stress that systems of whether due to some suspicious pattern In the decades to come, City Brain this scope are still in development. Most of in her movements, her social associations, or its successor systems may even be able China’s personal data are not yet integrated her insu cient attention to a propaganda- to read unspoken thoughts. Drones can together, even within individual compa- consumption app, or some correlation already be controlled by helmets that sense nies. Nor does China’s government have a known only to the AI—a purely auto- and transmit neural signals, and research- one-stop data repository, in part because of mated system could limit her movement. ers are now designing brain-computer turf wars between agencies. But there are It could prevent her from purchasing plane interfaces that go well beyond autofill, no hard political barriers to the integration or train tickets. It could disallow passage to allow you to type just by thinking. An of all these data, especially for the security through checkpoints. It could remotely authoritarian state with enough process- state’s use. To the contrary, private rms commandeer “smart locks” in public or ing power could force the makers of such are required, by formal statute, to assist private spaces, to con ne her until security software to feed every blip of a citizen’s China’s intelligence services. forces arrived.

SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 64 7/13/2020 5:57:56 PM IN RECENT YEARS, a few members of “Do you have anything stronger than to possess any information stream, so long the Chinese intelligentsia have sounded that consultative process?” I asked. “Sup- as threats to “stability” could be detected the warning about misused AI, most nota- pose there are times when the government among the data points. Or it can demand bly the computer scientist Yi Zeng and has interests that are in conict with your data from companies behind closed doors, the philosopher Zhao Tingyang. In the principles. What mechanism are you count- as happened during the initial coronavirus spring of 2019, Yi published “e Beijing ing on to win out?” outbreak. No independent press exists to AI Principles,” a manifesto on AI’s poten- “I, personally, am still in a learning leak news of these demands to. tial to interfere with autonomy, dignity, phase on that problem,” Yi said. Each time a person’s face is recognized, privacy, and a host of other human values. Chinese AI start-ups aren’t nearly as or her voice recorded, or her text messages It was Yi whom I’d come to visit at Bei- bothered. Several are helping Xi develop AI intercepted, this information could be jing’s Institute of Automation, where, in addi- for the express purpose of surveillance. e attached, instantly, to her government-ID tion to his work on AI ethics, he serves as the combination of China’s single-party rule number, police records, tax returns, property deputy director of the Research Center for and the ideological residue of central plan- lings, and employment history. It could be Brain-Inspired Intelligence. He retrieved me ning makes party elites powerful in every cross-referenced with her medical records from the lobby. Yi looked young for his age, domain, especially the economy. But in the and DNA, of which the Chinese police 37, with kind eyes and a solid frame slimmed past, the connection between the govern- boast they have the world’s largest collection. down by black sweatpants and a hoodie. ment and the tech industry was discreet. On the way to Yi’s oce, we passed one Recently, the Chinese government started YI AND I talked through a global scenario of his labs, where a research assistant hov- assigning representatives to tech rms, to that has begun to worry AI ethicists and ered over a microscope, watching electro- augment the Communist Party cells that China-watchers alike. In this scenario, chemical signals ash neuron-to-neuron exist within large private companies. most AI researchers around the world through mouse-brain tissue. We sat down Selling to the state security services is come to recognize the technology’s risks at a long table in a conference room adjoin- one of the fastest ways for China’s AI start- to humanity, and develop strong norms ing his oce, taking in the gray, fogged-in ups to turn a profit. A national telecom around its use. All except for one coun- cityscape while his assistant fetched tea. rm is the largest shareholder of iFlytek, try, which makes the right noises about I asked Yi how “e Beijing AI Principles” China’s voice-recognition giant. Synergies AI ethics, but only as a cover. Meanwhile, had been received. “People say, ‘is is just an abound: When police use iFlytek’s software this country builds turnkey national sur- ocial show from the Beijing govern ment,’ ” to monitor calls, state-owned newspapers veillance systems, and sells them to places he told me. “But this is my life’s work.” provide favorable coverage. Earlier this year, where democracy is fragile or non existent. Yi talked freely about AI’s potential the personalized-news app Toutiao went so e world’s autocrats are usually felled by misuses. He mentioned a project deployed far as to rewrite its mission to articulate a coups or mass protests, both of which to a select group of Chinese schools, where new animating goal: aligning public opin- require a baseline of political organization. facial recognition was used to track not ion with the government’s wishes. Xu Li, But large-scale political organization could just student attendance but also whether the CEO of SenseTime, recently described prove impossible in societies watched by individual students were paying attention. the government as his company’s “largest pervasive automated surveillance. “I hate that software,” Yi said. “I have data source.” Yi expressed worry about this scenario, to use that word: hate.” Whether any private data can be but he did not name China specically. He went on like this for a while, enu- ensured protection in China isn’t clear, He didn’t have to: e country is now the merating various unethical applications of given the country’s political structure. e world’s leading seller of AI-powered sur- AI. “I teach a course on the philosophy of digital revolution has made data monopo- veillance equipment. In Malaysia, the gov- AI,” he said. “I tell my students that I hope lies dicult to avoid. Even in America, ernment is working with Yitu, a Chinese none of them will be involved in killer which has a sophisticated tradition of anti- AI start-up, to bring facial-recognition robots. ey have only a short time on trust enforcement, the citizenry has not yet technology to Kuala Lumpur’s police as Earth. ere are many other things they summoned the will to force information a complement to Alibaba’s City Brain could be doing with their future.” about the many out of the hands of the platform. Chinese companies also bid to Yi clearly knew the academic literature powerful few. But private data monopolies outt every one of Singapore’s 110,000 on tech ethics cold. But when I asked him are at least subject to the sovereign power lampposts with facial-recognition cameras. about the political ecacy of his work, his of the countries where they operate. A In South Asia, the Chinese government answers were less compelling. nation-state’s data monopoly can be pre- has supplied surveillance equipment to Sri “Many of us technicians have been vented only by its people, and only if they Lanka. On the old Silk Road, the Chi- invited to speak to the government, and possess sucient political power. nese company Dahua is lining the streets even to Xi Jinping, about AI’s potential China’s people can’t use an election to of Mongolia’s capital with AI-assisted sur- risks,” he said. “But the government is still rid themselves of Xi. And with no indepen- veillance cameras. Farther west, in Serbia, in a learning phase, just like other govern- dent judiciary, the government can make an Huawei is helping set up a “safe-city sys- ments worldwide.” argument, however strained, that it ought tem,” complete with facial-recognition

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 65 7/13/2020 5:57:56 PM cameras and joint patrols conducted by control those networks and their data,” describes as a “core economic interest.” Serbian and Chinese police aimed at help- Michael Kratsios, America’s CTO, told China nanced Ecuador’s $240 million ing Chinese tourists to feel safe. me. When countries need to renance the purchase of a surveillance-camera system. In the early aughts, the Chinese tele- terms of their loans, China can make net- Bolivia, too, has bought surveillance equip- com titan ZTE sold Ethiopia a wireless work access part of the deal, in the same ment with help from a loan from Beijing. network with built-in backdoor access for way that its military secures base rights Venezuela recently debuted a new national the government. In a later crackdown, dis- at foreign ports it nances. “If you give ID-card system that logs citizens’ politi- sidents were rounded up for brutal inter- [China] unfettered access to data networks cal aliations in a database built by ZTE. rogations, during which they were played around the world, that could be a serious In a grim irony, for years Chinese com- audio from recent phone calls they’d made. problem,” Kratsios said. panies hawked many of these surveillance Today, Kenya, Uganda, and Mauritius are In 2018, CloudWalk Technology, a products at a security expo in Xinjiang, the outtting major cities with Chinese-made Guangzhou-based start-up spun out of home province of the Uighurs. surveillance networks. the Chinese Academy of Sciences, inked In Egypt, Chinese developers are look- a deal with the Zimbabwean govern- IF CHINA IS able to surpass America in ing to nance the construction of a new ment to set up a surveillance network. Its AI, it will become a more potent geopoliti- capital. It’s slated to run on a “smart city” terms require Harare to send images of cal force, especially as the standard-bearer platform similar to City Brain, although a its inhabitants—a rich data set, given that of a new authoritarian alliance. vendor has not yet been named. In south- Zimbabwe has absorbed migration ows China already has some of the world’s ern Africa, Zambia has agreed to buy more from all across sub-Saharan Africa—back largest data sets to feed its AI systems, a than $1 billion in telecom equipment from to CloudWalk’s Chinese oces, allowing crucial advantage for its researchers. In China, including internet-monitoring tech- the company to fine-tune its software’s cavernous mega-oces in cities across the nology. China’s Hikvision, the world’s larg- ability to recognize dark-skinned faces, country, low-wage workers sit at long tables est manufacturer of AI-enabled surveillance which have previously proved tricky for for long hours, transcribing audio les and cameras, has an oce in Johannesburg. its algorithms. outlining objects in images, to make the China uses “predatory lending to sell Having set up beachheads in Asia, data generated by China’s massive popula- telecommunications equipment at a sig- Europe, and Africa, China’s AI compa- tion more useful. But for the country to nicant discount to developing countries, nies are now pushing into Latin Amer- best America’s AI ecosystem, its vast troves which then puts China in a position to ica, a region the Chinese government of data will have to be sifted through by algorithms that recognize patterns well beyond those grasped by human insight. And even executives at China’s search giant Baidu concede that the top echelon of AI talent resides in the West. Historically, China struggled to retain elite quants, most of whom left to study in America’s peerless computer-science departments, before working at Silicon Valley’s more interesting, better-resourced companies. But that may be changing. ¢e Trump administration has made it difficult for Chinese students to study in the United States, and those who are able to are viewed with suspicion. A leading machine-learning scientist at Google recently described visa restrictions as “one of the largest bottlenecks to our collective research productivity.” Meanwhile, Chinese computer-science departments have gone all-in on AI. ¢ree of the world’s top 10 AI universities, in Yi Zeng, photographed in his office at the Institute terms of the volume of research they pub- of Automation, in Beijing, July 2020. Yi, the author lish, are now located in China. And that’s of “The Beijing AI Principles,” has been a lonely voice before the country nishes building the 50 in China warning that government misuse of AI could pose a threat to humanity. new AI research centers mandated by Xi’s “AI Innovation Action Plan for Institutions

66 PHOTOGRAPH BY ZHOU NA

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 66 7/13/2020 5:57:57 PM America’s rst-strike nuclear advantage. AI could upturn the global balance of power.

ON MY WAY OUT of the Institute of Automation, Yi took me on a tour of his “I TELL MY STUDENTS THATTHAT II HOPEHOPE NONENONE OFOFOF robotics lab. In the high-ceilinged room, THEM WILL BE INVOLVED ININ KILLERKILLER ROBOTS.ROBOTS. grad students ddled with a giant disem- THEY HAVE ONLY A SHORTSHORT TIMETIME ONON EARTH.EARTH. bodied metallic arm and a small human- THERE ARE MANY OTHER THINGSTHINGS THEYTHEY COULDCOULD oid robot wrapped in a gray exoskeleton BE DOING WITH THEIR FUTURE.”FUTURE.” while Yi told me about his work model- ing the brain. He said that understanding the brain’s structure was the surest way to understand the nature of intelligence. I asked Yi how the future of AI would unfold. He said he could imagine software modeled on the brain acquiring a series of abilities, one by one. He said it could achieve some semblance of self-recognition, of Higher Education.” Chinese companies microchips to ZTE in April 2018, Frank and then slowly become aware of the past attracted 36 percent of global AI private- Long, an analyst who specializes in China’s and the future. It could develop motivations equity investment in 2017, up from just AI sector, described it as a wake-up call for and values. e nal stage of its assisted 3 percent in 2015. Talented Chinese engi- China on par with America’s experience of evolution would come when it understood neers can stay home for school and work the Arab oil embargo. other agents as worthy of empathy. for a globally sexy homegrown company But the AI revolution has dealt China I asked him how long this process like TikTok after graduation. a rare leapfrogging opportunity. Until would take. China will still lag behind America in recently, most chips were designed with “I think such a machine could be built computing hardware in the near term. Just exible architecture that allows for many by 2030,” Yi said. as data must be processed by algorithms types of computing operations. But AI Before bidding Yi farewell, I asked him to be useful, algorithms must be instanti- runs fastest on custom chips, like those to imagine things unfolding another way. ated in physical strata—speci cally, in the Google uses for its cloud computing to “Suppose you nish your digital, high- innards of microchips. ese gossamer sil- instantly spot your daughter’s face in thou- resolution model of the brain,” I said. icon structures are so intricate that a few sands of photos. (Apple performs many of “And suppose it attains some rudimentary missing atoms can reroute electrical pulses these operations on the iPhone with a cus- form of consciousness. And suppose, over through the chips’ neuronlike switches. e tom neural-engine chip.) Because everyone time, you’re able to improve it, until it out- most sophisticated chips are arguably the is making these custom chips for the rst performs humans in every cognitive task, most complex objects yet built by humans. time, China isn’t as far behind: Baidu and with the exception of empathy. You keep ey’re certainly too complex to be quickly Alibaba are building chips customized for it locked down in safe mode until you pried apart and reverse- engineered by Chi- deep learning. And in August 2019, Hua- achieve that last step. But then one day, na’s vaunted corporate- espionage artists. wei unveiled a mobile machine-learning the government’s security services break Chinese rms can’t yet build the best chip. Its design came from Cambricon, down your o§ ce door. ey know you of the best chip-fabrication rooms, which perhaps the global chip-making industry’s have this AI on your computer. ey want cost billions of dollars and rest on decades most valuable start-up, which was founded to use it as the software for a new hardware of compounding institutional knowledge. by Yi’s colleagues at the Chinese Academy platform, an arti cial humanoid soldier. Nitrogen-cooled and seismically isolated, to of Sciences. ey’ve already manufactured a billion of prevent a passing truck’s rumble from ruin- By 2030, AI supremacy might be within them, and they don’t give a damn if they’re ing a microchip in vitro, these automated range for China. e country will likely wired with empathy. ey demand your rooms are as much a marvel as their n- have the world’s largest economy, and new password. Do you give it to them?” ished silicon wafers. And the best ones are money to spend on AI applications for its “I would destroy my computer and still mostly in the United States, Western military. It may have the most sophisticated leave,” Yi said. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. drone swarms. It may have autonomous “Really?” I replied. America’s government is still able weapons systems that can forecast an adver- “Yes, really,” he said. “At that point, it to limit the hardware that flows into sary’s actions after a brief exposure to a the- would be time to quit my job and go focus China, a state of a airs that the Commu- ater of war, and make battle eld decisions on robots that create art.” nist Party has come to resent. When the much faster than human cognition allows. If you were looking for a philosopher- Trump administration banned the sale of Its missile-detection algorithms could void king to chart an ethical developmental

0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 67 7/13/2020 5:57:57 PM trajectory for AI, you could do worse than Yi. But the development path of AI will be shaped by overlapping systems of local, national, and global politics, not by a wise and benevolent philosopher-king. at’s why China’s ascent to AI supremacy is such CHINA’S ASCENT TO AI SUPREMACYSUPREMACY a menacing prospect: e country’s political IS A MENACING PROSPECT: structure encourages, rather than restrains, THE COUNTRY’S POLITICAL STRUCTURE this technology’s worst uses. ENCOURAGES, RATHER THAN RESTRAINS, Even in the U.S., a democracy with THIS TECHNOLOGY’S WORST USES. constitutionally enshrined human rights, Americans are struggling mightily to prevent the emergence of a public-private surveillance state. But at least America has political structures that stand some chance of resistance. In China, AI will be restrained only according to the party’s needs. It was nearly noon when I nally left the institute. e day’s rain was in its last domestic critics used to make fun of him free state newspaper in my Beijing hotel hour. Yi ordered me a car and walked me with images of Winnie the Pooh, but described them, falsely, as police support- to meet it, holding an umbrella over my those too are now banned in China. e ers.) A great many held umbrellas over head. I made my way to the Forbidden party’s ability to edit history and culture, their heads, in solidarity with student pro- City, Beijing’s historic seat of imperial by force, will become more sweeping and testers from years prior, and to keep their power. Even this short trip to the city cen- precise, as China’s AI improves. faces hidden. A few tore down a lamp- ter brought me into contact with China’s Wresting power from a government post on the suspicion that it contained surveillance state. Before entering Tianan- that so thoroughly controls the informa- a facial-recognition camera. Xi has since men Square, both my passport and my tion environment will be di cult. It may tightened his grip on the region with a face were scanned, an experience I was take a million acts of civil disobedience, “national-security law,” and there is little becoming numb to. like the laptop-destroying scenario imag- that outnumbered Hong Kongers can do In the square itself, police holding ined by Yi. China’s citizens will have to about it, at least not without help from a body-size bulletproof shields jogged in stand with their students. Who can say movement on the mainland. single- le lines, weaving paths through what hardships they may endure? During my visit to Tiananmen Square, throngs of tourists. e heavy police pres- China’s citizens don’t yet seem to be I didn’t see any protesters. People mostly ence was a chilling reminder of the stu- radicalized against surveillance. e pan- milled about peacefully, posing for sel es dent protesters who were murdered here in demic may even make people value pri- with the oversize portrait of Mao. ey held 1989. China’s AI-patrolled Great Firewall vacy less, as one early poll in the U.S. sug- umbrellas, but only to keep the August sun was built, in part, to make sure that mas- gests. So far, Xi is billing the government’s o their faces. Walking in their midst, I sacre is never discussed on its internet. To response as a triumphant “people’s war,” kept thinking about the contingency of his- dodge algorithmic censors, Chinese activ- another old phrase from Mao, referring to tory: e political systems that constrain a ists rely on memes—Tank Man approach- the mobilization of the whole population technology during its early development ing a rubber ducky—to commemorate the to smash an invading force. e Chinese profoundly shape our shared global future. students’ murder. people may well be more pliant now than We have learned this from our adventures The party’s AI-powered censorship they were before the virus. in carbon-burning. Much of the planet’s extends well beyond Tiananmen. Earlier But evidence suggests that China’s political trajectory may depend on just this year, the government arrested Chi- young people—at least some of them— how dangerous China’s people imagine nese programmers who were trying to resented the government’s initial secrecy AI to be in the hands of centralized power. preserve disappeared news stories about about the outbreak. For all we know, some Until they secure their personal liberty, at the coronavirus pandemic. Some of the new youth movement on the mainland some unimaginable cost, free people every- articles in their database were banned is biding its time, waiting for the right where will have to hope against hope that because they were critical of Xi and the moment to make a play for democracy. the world’s most intelligent machines are party. ey survived only because inter- The people of Hong Kong certainly made elsewhere. net users reposted them on social media, sense the danger of this techno-political interlaced with coded language and emo- moment. The night before I arrived in jis designed to evade algorithms. Work- China, more than 1 million protesters Ross Andersen is a deputy editor of arounds of this sort are short-lived: Xi’s had poured into the island’s streets. ( e e Atlantic.

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0920_WEL_Anderson_China [Print]_13880782.indd 68 7/13/2020 5:57:57 PM PROMOTION What Is

MasterClass

Actually

Selling?

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0920_WEL_Chocano_Masterclass [Print]_13889113.indd 70 7/13/2020 12:42:44 PM THE ADS ARE EVERYWHERE: YOU CAN LEARN TO SERVE LIKE SERENA WILLIAMS, WRITE LIKE MARGARET ATWOOD, ACT LIKE NATALIE PORTMAN. BUT WHAT MASTERCLASS REALLY DELIVERS IS SOMETHING ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT.

BY CARINA CHOCANO

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JADE PURPLE BROWN

0920_WEL_Chocano_Masterclass [Print]_13889113.indd 71 7/13/2020 12:42:46 PM high-level learning experience via a series of glossy videos taught by the world’s best. In some classes, instructors address the camera for a few hours. In others, they are more hands-on, demonstrating techniques or leading workshops. You can take writing classes with Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, David Baldacci, Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Shonda Rhimes, Malcolm Gladwell, or Aaron Sorkin. You can take photography with Annie Leibo- vitz; acting with Natalie Portman; comedy with Judd Apatow or Steve Martin; and cooking with omas Keller, Gordon Ram- say, or Alice Waters. ere’s a directing class with Ron Howard, a makeup class with Bobbi Brown, a negotiation class with the former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, and a class on how to be a boss with Anna Wintour. RuPaul has a class on authenticity

and self-expression, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has one on scien- OPENING SPREAD: GRAHAM DENHOLM / GETTY; JÉRÔME FAVRE / BLOOMBERG GETTY; MASTERCLASS tic thinking. Two classes—taught by Kevin Spacey and Sometimes an advertisement is so perfectly tailored to a cultural Homan— have been removed following allegations of moment that it casts that moment into stark relief, which is how sexual misconduct against the actors (which both have I felt upon rst seeing an ad for the mega-best-selling writer denied). MasterClass is a brand built on other people’s James Patterson’s course on MasterClass a few years ago. In the impeccable brands. ad, Patterson is sitting at a table, reciting a twisty opening line in voice-over. en an overhead shot of him gazing out a window, DAVID ROGIER, who co-founded MasterClass, likes to lost in thought like a character in a movie. A title card appears: tell the story of his grandmother who as a young woman “Imagine taking a writing class from a master.” It didn’t matter ¬ed the Nazis, emigrating to the United States with her that I’d never read a book by Patterson before—I was hooked. mother. After working in a factory for years, she applied to What appealed to me was not whatever actionable thriller-writing medical schools and was rejected by dozens of them—one tips I might glean, but rather the promise of his story, the story dean ¬at-out told her that she had three strikes against of how a writer becomes a mogul. Any hapless, hand-to-mouth her: She was a woman, she was Jewish, and she was an mid-lister can provide instructions on outlining a novel. Master- immigrant—until she nally found one that would accept Class dangled something else, a clear-cut path out of the precariat, her. She always impressed upon her grandson that an the magic-bean shortcut to a fairy-tale ending— the secret to education could never be taken away from you. at was ever-elusive success. the grain of the idea for MasterClass. MasterClass launched in 2015 with just three classes: Dustin It’s a great origin story, the kind perfectly suited for a Homan on acting, Serena Williams on tennis, and Patterson MasterClass trailer, and also the kind that every young on writing. Since then the company has grown exponentially, Silicon Valley founder is more or less ready to recite raising $135 million in venture capital from 2012 to 2018. It when the press comes along. But the story sits somewhat now has more than 85 classes across nine categories. (Last year uncomfortably alongside the actual product, which is to it added 25 new classes, and this year it intends to add even a medical degree what an apple is to an orange planet. more.) After the pandemic hit, as people started spending more Rogier grew up on the Westside of Los Angeles, the time at home, its subscriptions surged, some weeks increasing son of two lawyers who became artists in retirement. tenfold over the average in 2019; subscribers spent twice as much After getting his M.B.A. at Stanford, he asked one of his time on the platform as they did earlier this year. In April, the professors—the angel investor Michael Dearing, who company moved from oering individual classes for $90 a pop, founded Harrison Metal, a seed-stage venture-capital with an all-access annual pass for $180, to a subscription-only fund in San Francisco—for a job. Rogier got the posi- model, and in May, it raised another $100 million. Its trailers tion, but after a year or so realized it wasn’t for him. He have become so familiar and ubiquitous that they spawned their went to Dearing and told him he planned to quit. When own SNL parodies, “Master Class: Quarantine Edition,” in which Dearing asked what he had lined up, Rogier responded, Chloe Fineman appears as Phoebe Waller-Bridge for a class on “ ‘I’m going to build something.’ He’s like, ‘What?’ I said, journaling, as Timothée Chalamet for a class on fashion, and as ‘I don’t know.’ So he wrote me a check for about half a Britney Spears for a class on … something. million dollars.” Rogier formed a holding company and MasterClass trailers tend to follow a certain playbook: the called it Yanka Industries, after his grandmother. introduction of a famous person; a peek behind the curtain; an e question of who (and what and how and why) overview of their setbacks and failures; the promise of what you gets funded in Silicon Valley might not be asked often might learn; the emotional, soaring soundtrack. But the courses enough, considering the impact of technology on our are distinct from one another—there’s no standard format or society, economy, politics, and daily lives. But patterns formula. What MasterClass purports to provide is a premium, are discernible: Mainly, the ideas that rise to the top are

72 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Chocano_Masterclass [Print]_13889113.indd 72 7/13/2020 12:42:46 PM those that seek to address deciencies in an industry by creat- education. He asked subjects about the schools they’d gone to, ing a new category from within the old one, the way caterpillars whom they’d learned from the most, the topics they wished they consume themselves to become butteries. (Also, most of these had studied more. What things did they want to learn now? How ideas are had by young white guys.) Turning the housing mar- did they want to learn now? ket into an innite unregulated hotel, for instance, or everyone’s Rogier already knew life was changing at a much faster rate cars into an unregulated eet of taxis. Or aggregating mastery than it had for his parents’ generation. What you learn in school across disciplines. no longer lasts you through your career. His research showed that “I felt a lot of pressure,” Rogier told me of the windfall invest- people are willing to invest in personal growth and education, ment. He was aware that he’d been given a gift. “You can’t whine but many feel “ripped o” by their education. He isn’t referring about it or complain about it, because there’s nothing to whine only to formal education. “People pay tremendous amounts to or complain about, right? is guy threw me a blank check.” take not-great classes,” he said. “And then there are also the scam Rogier knew he wanted to do something related to education, stories. Somebody went to school to be a receptionist, and she but he wasn’t sure what. So he posted ads on Craigslist oering paid for it, but the ‘school’ was answering phone calls for two

MASTERCLASS to pay people $25 an hour to talk about their experiences with weeks at an oce.” Rogier had an idea: What if anybody could learn from the best? “at would be kind of awesome,” he said. Especially if he could oer the class at a relatively low price. After two rounds of fund raising, getting the rst instructors on board (Homan was the rst to agree— Rogier was school friends with his daughter), lming some test classes, and hiring a small team, Rogier asked a friend, the entrepreneur Aaron Rasmussen, to join the company as co- founder and chief technology ocer, which he did. (Rasmussen left the company in Janu- ary 2017 and later founded the for-college- credit education platform Outlier.org.) At rst, Rogier said, many people told him his idea would never work. It was unclear whether people would pay to watch high- end tutorials when they could view lower- budget ones on YouTube for free. It was also unclear whether celebrity teachers could be recruited in meaningful numbers. e best in the world will never want to teach, people told him. ey’re not going to be good at teaching. People aren’t going to want to learn from them. It’s going to be too expensive. People won’t pay for production— they won’t care if it’s higher production quality. Everything’s free on the web. Why are you trying to do everything from making the classes to putting the classes out? You should just take one small slice. One of the things Rogier is still often asked is whether he’s selling education or entertainment. e question annoys him. “Why can’t education also be entertaining?” Rogier always knew that part of being an entrepreneur is believing in something that nobody else believes in, but still, he was scared. Opening spread, clockwise from top left: MasterClass instructors Serena Williams Within a few days of MasterClass’s launch in (who teaches tennis on the platform); Natalie Portman (acting); Gordon Ramsay (cooking); May 2015, however, the numbers told him he Malcolm Gladwell (writing). is page, from left: Shonda Rhimes (writing for television) was onto something. Within four months, he and RuPaul (self-expression and authenticity). had 30,000 students.

0920_WEL_Chocano_Masterclass [Print]_13889113.indd 73 7/13/2020 12:42:47 PM MASTERCLASS’S MISSION, as it was originally dened, was you can see the people you’re teaching. You know how old they to “democratize access to genius.” But the service actually oers are. You have some idea about what background they may have something dierent—although what that is, exactly, is hard to come from. You usually start asking them what were the last ve put your nger on. Strictly speaking, a master class is a small class books that they read … But if you’re doing something online, it for very advanced students taught by a master in their eld. But could be anybody. It’s more like publishing a book. It’s out there. very advanced students in particular subject areas are vanishingly It’s accessible. You don’t know who may be accessing it.” small cohorts—certainly not enough to attract hundreds of mil- As an educational platform, MasterClass is limited by its lions of dollars in investments. And so, MasterClass courses are instructors’ inaccessibility. But as a repository for career advice not really designed for a specic skill level, but instead are aimed and discussions about the creative process and how to navigate at the most general of general audiences. life as an artist (or athlete, chef, magician, entrepreneur), it’s a MasterClass doesn’t disclose how much it pays instructors, gold mine. When you are just starting out— especially if you lack although a 2018 Bloomberg article reported that they are paid connections in your areas of interest—it can be helpful to hear a guaranteed sum, plus up to 25 percent of revenue generated how other people “did it,” what obstacles they faced and how by their classes. (In 2017, e Hollywood Reporter claimed that they overcame them. You might get a hit of encouragement or instructors were paid roughly $100,000.) But money is not the see yourself reected for the rst time in a eld you thought was only motivation. For many of the instructors, MasterClass presents o-limits to you. e ballet dancer Misty Copeland says Master- an opportunity to take stock of a remarkable career. Wintour, the Class was a way of doing this. longtime editor of Vogue, kicks o her MasterClass by saying, “I Copeland’s class is typical of MasterClass’s more inspirational know many people are curious about who I am, how I approach oerings. It’s a mix of instruction and aspiration, covering subjects my work, and what I believe … I have never had the opportunity to on everything from owning your power and being condent, share the many lessons I have learned as an editor and as a creative to barre exercises (pliés, tendus), to working with Prince, to the leader in one place before.” Her class feels, more than anything, importance of mentorship and diversity, to showing people that like a historical document. ballet is more approachable than they think. For Atwood, the celebrated author of The Handmaid’s Tale, “e ne arts and classical dance have been kind of categorized among many other novels, the decision to participate was partly as this elite form that is only for an elite, exclusive category of peo- motivated by her age, “which is old,” she told me over the phone. ple,” Copeland—the rst Black principal dancer of the prestigious “is is a way of downloading what I would ordinarily do, or pos- American Ballet eatre—told me over the phone. She wanted to sibly uploading it.” show that dance didn’t have to be so intimidating—“that it’s for e last time Atwood taught full-time at a university was every person, with any background and body type.” For Copeland, in 1970s. Filming a MasterClass was an opportunity to reach a the tools, perseverance, strength, and passion that you need to be less-privileged cohort than she an artist are derived from doing the work, engaging in the process. might in a university setting. at’s what she aimed to share in her class, to “give people some “For a lot of people who might Scenes from MasterClass insight into what it is to be an artist and an athlete.” have jobs, but also might be courses led by (from left I’ve taken Atwood’s class, Rhimes’s class, and most of interested in writing, [Master- to right) Margaret Atwood Gladwell’s, among others. I’ve watched Part One of Keller’s Class is] a way they can pursue (creative writing), omas course, and a little bit of Part Two. I’ve watched Brown’s “smoky this in their own time, at their Keller (cooking techniques), eye” tutorial, tried the technique on myself, and came out look- own pace,” she said. On the Anna Wintour (creativity ing like a prizeghting panda. e classes are visually sumptuous, other hand, Atwood said, “in- and leadership), Aaron transporting, uplifting, and yet, frankly, a little boring, especially Sorkin (screenwriting), person teaching is inter active. and Misty Copeland (ballet if you try to watch them all the way through. Doing so feels like People get to ask you direct technique and artistry). being seated next to the dinner guest of your dreams—the Dalai questions.” Later she added, “If Lama or Oscar Wilde or Barack Obama—and discovering that

you’re teaching in a university, they won’t stop talking and that the dinner is 12 courses long. MASTERCLASS

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0920_WEL_Chocano_Masterclass [Print]_13889113.indd 74 7/13/2020 12:42:47 PM e cooking classes are enjoyable and resemble the prestige food programming on Netix. e mixology and gardening classes interested me as an unskilled cocktail maker and novice gardener, but I still found it easier to Google specic questions like how exactly to deal with my lettuce or make a cocktail with things I already have in my bar. Yet, after watching Gordon Ramsay do MasterClass seems it, I did nally learn how to properly salt an eggplant. ideally suited to Instructors approach their classes in different ways, from frustrated 30-somethings simply walking viewers through their practice and methods, to putting their teams to work on a comprehensive curriculum, as for whom education Keller did upon being asked to come up with a class. But Keller has not necessarily was told his curriculum was too much. resulted in upward “From what they told me, they’d never seen anything like it mobility or even a job. before, both in presentation, as well as in content, as well as in length,” Keller said when we spoke. It would have been much too long to lm, so it was distilled down to the fundamentals and split into three parts. Having someone of omas Keller’s stature teaching the basics of cooking is impressive, but is it necessary? You can learn useful things by watching a video, but formal education is generally understood to demand some kind of participation, as well as a teacher evaluation. Some instructors host promotional contests with student participation—in one case, James Patterson co-wrote In fact, the company refers to its target customers as CATS: a book with a student—but in general, Malcolm Gladwell isn’t “curious, aspiring 30-somethings.” CATS are old enough not to going to grade your essay, nor is omas Keller going to evalu- be planning to return to school, but young enough, in theory, that ate your meringue. they need help advancing in their career. A CAT is a person whose life has become complicated, who has had to put aside some of AS TERRIBLE AS the pandemic has been, it has proved unex- the things they loved to do, who isn’t exactly doing the thing they pectedly good for some—specically billionaires, yeast manufac- dreamed of doing, David Schriber, MasterClass’s chief marketing turers, and streaming services, of which MasterClass is now one. ocer, told me. ey’re anxious about their future, their present, For a certain cohort of people looking to pass the hours at home, their position relative to that of their peers. “ ey’ll talk about namely those with leisure time and money, the new courses in having anxiety that their co-workers or the people on their social cooking, mixology, and gardening arrived at the perfect home- networks all seem to know more about a subject than they do,” steading moment. But the fact that MasterClass is so popular now Schriber said, referring, presumably, to pre-pandemic focus testing. also speaks to people’s fears, especially economic uncertainties that “Someone will come to the oce party and talk about wine, and have only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Tens of millions then they’ll feel like I don’t know enough about wine. Someone else of jobs have been lost, and many newly unemployed people are will talk about photography, and they’ll be like Man, I should pay looking for a dierent direction. And if they’ve kept their jobs, attention to who the photographers are these days. Or their boss will they are dealing with a whole new way of navigating work, which say things like ‘You need to work on your leadership prole, or is stressful and confusing. In a way, MasterClass seems ideally hone your creative judgments,’ and the poor 30-something is like suited to frustrated 30- somethings for whom education has not Where am I gonna get all this?” Something about this struck me as necessarily resulted in upward mobility or even a job, who feel clammy and sad, as far away from ey can’t take your education stuck in their career without a clear path to success. away from you as it’s possible to be. As though it’s revealing another

0920_WEL_Chocano_Masterclass [Print]_13889113.indd 75 7/13/2020 12:42:48 PM skill sets, and providing an educational journey from beginning to end. But its data revealed that people weren’t necessarily con- suming the courses from start to nish, nor was this really necessary to benet from the content. “What we were nding was that when people were allowed the freedom to jump from lesson Lately, MasterClass to lesson based on their interest, it was just a much more free- has started ing experience,” Nekisa Cooper, MasterClass’s vice president of presenting itself content, told me. What people seemed to want was a fun mix of as a platform for short-form inspirational content. ey also displayed surprisingly wide-ranging interests. Students who rst watched Bobbi Brown dispensing assorted followed her up with Chris Voss. self-help and Lately, MasterClass has started presenting its oerings less personal-development as classroom education and more as part of a learning lifestyle bonbons. built around a community of people with common interests and concerns. It reminds me of a kind of Spotify for careerist inspiration, a platform for dispensing assorted self-help and personal- development bonbons for the young capitalist striver. “And we’re not just oering classes or education,” Cooper said. “We’re also oering escape.” As for whether it matters if a MasterClass member nishes a course, Rogier said, “Most education sites look at completion rates. But I think that’s the wrong metric. e measure I look layer of unpaid labor—cultural labor—one is expected to do in at is what’s the impact we have on your life. I know it’s going to order to secure the privilege of performing actual labor. sound uy, but we legitimately ask people if we changed their What MasterClass oers 30-somethings is “a curated group life”—which nearly 20 percent of those polled said it did. of people” recognized as “the world’s best,” who are “breaking Silicon Valley has talked about changing the world and peo- down the thing that they do in a really entertaining and digest- ple’s lives for a long time, and it’s safe to say that it has succeeded. ible way,” Schriber said. “You can take away the life lessons, but e world has been remade by private equity and venture capital. you can also take away the conversation points. You can come Tech has “disrupted” almost every aspect of modern living. back to work on Monday and talk about what Anna Wintour Maybe it’s not a coincidence, then, that we nd ourselves in did for the Met Gala—you can also think, Man, Anna Wintour a golden age of self-help and self-development, of “how I did it” really gave me permission to show up like a boss today.” podcasts and conferences and workshops. We’re encouraged to But what does it mean to “show up like a boss” at this moment? optimize ourselves at all times, and told to look upon this as fun, And what does it mean to learn it from Anna Wintour, who has albeit compulsory. But although you can get a lot out of these recently come under re for allegedly feeding a toxic and racist activities, you can waste time looking for the answer, when what culture at Condé Nast? e idea that everyone should show up these stories all reveal is that great success is a combination of doing like a boss, so current ve years ago, feels hollow now that the the work and getting (or perhaps starting out) really, really lucky. brutal inequalities in our system have become undeniable to all Lately, I’ve been thinking about how prospectors in the Cali- but the most willfully obtuse. fornia Gold Rush rarely struck it rich. In 1849, the ones who Education researchers have known for decades that being good did well were those who supplied prospectors with shovels, tents, at something and being good at teaching something are two com- and jeans—they kept the dream alive. Samuel Brannan, who pletely dierent skill sets. In fact, universities are mostly ranked sold shovels and other goods, was considered California’s rst on the strength of their research, and, of course, the brand name millionaire. Levi Strauss, who co-invented blue jeans, died with a can be worth a lot. Something similar holds true for MasterClass, fortune of $6 million, worth $175 million today. ere’s nothing whose impressive roster of talent feels like a who’s who of elite wrong, of course, with supplying people with what they need to professionals, a gallery of the meritocracy’s winners. pursue their dreams, but it seems that during this time of growing wealth and social inequality, the jeans and shovels have become TO UNDERSTAND where we are right now, and why Master- largely symbolic, and the prospecting they facilitate, the endless Class seems to slot in so perfectly with the moment, it’s useful to panning for something, anything, ever more intangible. ere think about how it has evolved over time. is no goal, really. e panning is the goal. MasterClass launched after the early hype around online education had already zzled. Filmed university lectures seemed to be even less thrilling than the real thing. MOOCs (massive open online courses) had poor retention rates, and still structurally Carina Chocano is a writer based in Los Angeles. She is the author favored people of means. At rst, MasterClass focused on specic of You Play the Girl.

§¨76 SEPTEMBER 2020

0920_WEL_Chocano_Masterclass [Print]_13889113.indd 76 7/13/2020 12:42:48 PM e Atlantic Festival | September 21–24, 2020

Our marquee festival is going digital with four days of events, evening headliners, and more. Experience e Atlantic like never before. For more information, visit: theatlanticfestival.com

FOUNDING PRESENTING SUPPORTING CONTRIBUTING 0920_CC_Parker_Copperfield [Print]_13863388.indd 78 David David Coppereld Armando Iannucci’s mad, loving, and brilliant adaptation of Dickens’s novel 78 OMNIVORE By James Parker James By ’s Wild Ride ’sWild ILLUSTRATION BY ARSHRAZIUDDIN wild and timeless; the melodrama is strained and alien. with an almost modern ist brusqueness. e comedy is about you jolting ride, fun-house of kind a becomes carefully graded shifts in tone, then But if you can rise above your need for coherence and (“He’smine.) drip,”of a friend such a commented person. interesting especially an not is manhood, in Friend behind him, and the sorcerous glooms of tale intensity of the early work—of, say, Oliver Twist —is period, with confused middle-period energies; the fairy- middle his in Dickens is is again. sags and billows then hardnessand diamond of point a to suddenly way,un-Dickensianly. contracts it Itsags, billows,it but mythicized. Dickens’ssensibility—is his of ctionalized not life of 12); surviving, stormily, and by a mighty expansion Industrial Revolution (working in a factory at the age laboring classes); caught for a time in the gears of the the of (largely adults wonderful by protected and cherished classes); professional the of (largely adults terribleby oppressed and stunted being story—of Dickens’sto close reports all by David’sAnd own. which he took “all the world into his condence.” Dickens’sof biographer,and friend John Forster, in long poem tion that William Wordsworth had undertaken in his inwardinvestiga- the rowdyon variantacteristically self. a consoling, avuncular chat with his frightened boy- author—attends his own birth. He also, later on, has successful a hero—now grown-up the Dickens, Charles by novel the of extrapolation cinematic Iannucci’sbrilliantlyArmando and loving, mad, in—pen in hand—to take possession. wait, and hide, and grow, until the day when he steps by which he understands everything; the writer’s is to language of sparks and scraps the in live and thing, child’s is to see feel everything, be everything, every- to the same mother, each to his separate destiny. e e child and the writer are born at the same moment, Today strange a in and, unevenlyreads book the David’s labile, one-crush-after-another nature was In David Coppereld David , Copperfield David of Personal History The are not yet glimpsed. Also: David Coppereld, e Prelude. It was the novel, in the words (1850) was Dickens’swas (1850) char- David Coppereld Our Mutual 7/7/2020 6:12:56 PM

FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES; GETTY And because it’s Dickens, one character contains their entertainment value in direct proportion to their this opposition within his own body: the bipolar opti- cruelty, that have his peers in stitches. mist Mr. Micawber, always in debt, always speculating. is, not to put too ne a point on it, is one way that Micawber is a comic creation who sees himself melodra- a writer becomes a writer—by cultivating, as a defense matically; he makes windy threats of self- destruction, mechanism, a merciless eye for weakness. (Dickens’s and despairingly ourishes a straight razor in the air, own talent for impressions became, rather unsettlingly, but can be distracted—morally revived, even—by part of his literary process; his daughter Mamie recorded the approach of a hot kidney pudding and a plate of watching him work one morning, “when he suddenly shrimp. Dickens has also introduced into his text the jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which pathogen Uriah Heep, David’s great enemy. Heep hung near, and in which I could see the reection of hates our virtuous hero with a visionary, almost saintly some extraordinary facial contortions which he was hatred. He hates him like poison, like krypto nite, like making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously the last crawling hypocrisy on Earth. for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror.”) Dickens was a radical artist. Half a century before Iannucci works magic elsewhere, too. Ben Whishaw James Joyce wrote the rst lines of A Portrait of the Artist as Uriah Heep, his wit playing along the knife edge as a Young Man in shining polymorphous baby talk— between self-abasement and contempt, is stranger and “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there more dangerous than even Dickens could manage; in was a moocow coming down along the road”—Dickens his nal, explosive unmasking—“You and yours have was lowering his language probe into the earliest, most always hated me and mine!”—he rears up into nihilistic germinal moments of subjectivity. “e rst objects that grandeur, achieving a kind of punk-rock nobility. assume a distinct presence before me,” narrates David in Dickens was not an egalitarian; he was an the book’s second chapter (titled “I Observe”), “as I look everyone’s-invited elitist. Beneath his eye we are all far back, into the blank of my infancy, are my mother aristocrats of human nature, simply by virtue of pos- with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty Iannucci sessing it. His characters have a hyperbolic presence, [David’s nanny] with no shape at all, and eyes so dark sometimes a hyperbolic value, and if they are frequently deluded they seemed to darken their whole neighbourhood in knows better about one another, those delusions just as frequently her face.” As with Joyce, we are inside the perceptual turn out to be beautiful. David’s Aunt Betsey regards theater of actual babyhood. Hair, shape, eyes, shadow— than Dickens her broken-minded lodger, Mr. Dick (limpidly and the details loom separately, almost unrelatedly, out of a himself what wonderfully portrayed by Hugh Laurie in the movie), supercharged vagueness. David as a man of great wisdom; and so, it transpires, he is. Iannucci’s movie ings itself into all of this. e Copperfield Mrs. Micawber has unbudgeable faith in her hopeless vibration is dreamlike. Sets collapse, or turn into stage husband; her faith is rewarded. curtains that blow open into the next scene. Dev Patel, is about. This basic grasp of essential human worth was as David, is gangling, huge-eyed, heavy- breathing: behind Dickens’s horror (recognized and saluted by cartoon ish, in the best sense. e multicolored cast- his contemporary and fellow Londoner Karl Marx) ing is both an anti-hegemonic kick in the ass and at the exploitation of children, working people, and a Brechtian device: It keeps us aware of the ctive the poor: It was a sort of outraged innocence. “From nature of the proceedings. Excess seems to warp or the reformer is required a simplicity of surprise,” wrote bulge out of every frame, and every story line wants G. K. Chesterton in his book on Dickens. “He must to go writhing o on its own. ere are compressions have the faculty of a violent and virgin astonishment. and contractions; one senses steaming coils of surplus It is not enough that he should think injustice dis- footage, whole subplots excised. Warm work in the tressing; he must think injustice absurd, an anomaly editing suite, I imagine. in existence.” And it’s this primal double take—at the Iannucci, a writer and director on Veep and e shape of this person’s nose, at that person’s verbal or Death of Stalin, is the sharpest of comic minds, a mas- conceptual tics, at the fact that 12-year-olds can be put ter of competing registers, and he knows what he’s to work in factories—that is the keynote of Dickens’s doing. Indeed, having the artistic advantage of not work. In his ends were his beginnings; as in Iannucci’s being Charles Dickens, of being able to see around movie, the writer supernaturally assisted at the birth of the edges of that enormous personality, he knows the child, which was his own birth, too. He was, in this in a couple of places better than Dickens himself way, the complete—the total—novelist. His humanity what David Coppereld is about. In one particularly was enormous, and fully alive to itself. He knew us all inspired digression, he gives us a long scene in which so well, and we never stopped blowing his mind. David ingratiates himself with his fellow schoolboys by means of his gift for impressions: physical carica- tures of teachers and other boys, feats of mimicry, James Parker is a sta writer at e Atlantic.

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BOOKS In June 2005, Oprah Winfrey announced a surprising choice as the 55th selection for her inuential book club. e coming months would be, she proclaimed, a “Summer of Faulkner,” focused on three of his novels—As I Lay Dying, e Sound What to Do About and the Fury, and Light in August, available in a special 1,100-page box set weigh- William Faulkner ing in at two pounds. Oprah’s website posted short videotaped lectures by three literature professors to assist readers in A white man of the Jim Crow South, making sense of the writer’s notoriously he couldn’t escape the burden of race, demanding prose. e Faulkner trilogy yet derived creative force from it. quickly rose to the No. 2 spot on Ama- zon’s best-seller list. Some literary critics hailed Winfrey for bringing William By Drew Gilpin Faust Faulkner back into popular conscious ness; others challenged any notion of recovery or revival, asking whether he had ever really gone away. In the decade and a half since then, the issues of race and history so central to Faulkner’s work have grown only more urgent. How should we now regard this pathbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning author, who grappled with our nation’s racial tragedy in ways that at once illumi- nate and disturb—that reect both startling human truths and the limitations of a white southerner born in 1897 into the stiing air of Mississippi’s closed and segregated society? In our current moment of racial reckoning, Faulkner is certainly ripe for rigorous scrutiny. Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, he makes the case for how and why to read Faulkner in the 21st by revisiting his ction through the lens of the Civil War, “the central quarrel of our nation’s history.” Rarely an overt subject, one “not dramatized so much as invoked,” the Civil War is both “everywhere” and “nowhere” in Faulkner’s work. He cannot escape the war, its aftermath, or its meaning, and neither, Gorra insists, can we. As the formerly enslaved Ringo remarks in The Unvanquished (1938) during Reconstruction-era conict over voting rights, “is war aint over. Hit just started good.” is is why for us, as for Jason and

William Faulkner and his wife, Estelle, stand outside their home, in Oxford, Mississippi, in the spring of 1955. Quentin Compson in e Sound and the BETTMANN / GETTY

0920_CC_Faust_Faulkner [Print]_13863885.indd 80 7/7/2020 5:38:29 PM Fury (1929), was and again are “the saddest words.” each version of the story he uncovers, Quentin looks As Gorra explains, “What was is never over.” again, arriving through ever more disturbing revelations In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us at the South’s original sin: the distorting and dehuman- about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about izing power of race. It is race that pulls the trigger. “So Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant critic. But he also writes, he confesses, as an “act of bear,” Bon says just before Henry, at once his brother citizenship.” His book represents his own meditation and his ancée’s brother, shoots him. on the meaning of the “forever war” of race, not just To think of this novel appearing in the same year as in American history and literature, but in our fraught Gone With the Wind is startling. It was moonlight and time. What we think today about the Civil War, he magnolias, rather than a searing portrait of the persist- believes, “serves above all to tell us what we think ing legacies of slavery, that captured the public’s acclaim: about ourselves, about the nature of our polity and Margaret Mitchell, not Faulkner, won the Pulitzer Prize the shape of our history.” for Fiction in 1937. But Faulkner’s period of “explo- e core of Gorra’s book is a Civil War narrative, sive productivity,” beginning in 1929—13 books in 13 which he has created by untangling the war’s appear- years—attracted a di¡erent sort of attention, because ances throughout Faulkner’s ction and rearranging of his formal innovations and literary experimentalism, them “into something like linearity.” From the lay- not just his unvarnished portrayals of race. In a 1939 ers and circularities and recurrences and reversals of essay, Jean-Paul Sartre compared him to Proust, and Faulkner’s 19 novels and more than 100 short sto- Faulkner became an idol in the eyes of young French ries, Gorra has constructed a chronological telling of intellectuals as well as literary critics around the world. Yoknapatawpha’s war, of the incidents and characters Faulkner’s Faulkner might not have won the Pulitzer, but he was who appear in the writer’s extended chronicle of his fiction fails to on the path to his 1949 Nobel. invented “postage stamp” world. Faulkner took liber- ties with the historical order of events; what he sought render slavery’s the “ever-increasing importance of to depict was the “psychological truth of the Con- physical race” in Faulkner’s ction. Yet society’s racial attitudes federate home front” and the war’s aftermath. is cruelties; and practices were evolving even more rapidly than is work, Gorra argues, that actual documents of the it includes no Faulkner’s own. As the civil-rights movement gained period would be hard-pressed to do. And that psy- momentum after the end of World War II, Faulkner chological truth certainly could not have been derived depiction of engaged in more explicit public commentary about from study of the racist historiography of Faulkner’s an auction America’s divisions and inequities. Like critics in those era, which he insisted he never even read. Instead, this or a whipping. years and ever since, Gorra struggles to come to terms understanding is the product of what Toni Morrison with the distressing views Faulkner frequently articu- once called Faulkner’s “refusal-to-look-away approach” lated on questions of racial progress and racial justice. to the burden of his region’s cruel past. Gorra does not look away from Faulkner’s troubling Faulkner enacts this refusal through his practice public statements or from some disconcerting stereo- of looking again, of revisiting the same characters types and assumptions in his literary work that became and stories, and through the prequels and sequels newly jarring as social attitudes shifted. and outgrowths of those he has already told, digging A great deal is at stake in Gorra’s effort. We are deeply into the hidden and often shocking truths of in a time when authors’ reputations are overturned, the South he portrays. Gorra endeavors to unknot their works removed from reading lists, their achieve- and clarify Faulkner’s oeuvre by reconstructing it him- ments devalued because of their blindness on ques- self, but his act of literary explication is also one of tions we now see with di¡erent eyes. At the outset of participation—a joining in the Faulknerian process. his book, Gorra reminds us of persisting debates over Gorra renarrates these Civil War stories as he seeks Joseph Conrad, initially stimulated by a 1977 Chinua to come to terms both with America’s painful racial Achebe essay labeling him an apologist for imperialism. legacies and with William Faulkner. Today, Gorra believes, Faulkner “stands to us as Con- Perhaps the most powerful of Faulkner’s tellings of rad does,” in need of reexamination and an updated the Civil War story is Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a novel under standing that confronts his racist shortcomings. structured around Quentin Compson’s own refusal to Faulkner, Gorra concedes, “remained a white man look away. Although Faulkner insisted that Quentin of the Jim Crow South and did not always rise above did not speak for him, Gorra has “never quite believed it. At times his words both can and should make us him.” Quentin’s search to understand why Charles uncomfortable.” His ction o¡ers an “all-too forgiving Bon was murdered during the very last days of the war depiction of slaveholder paternalism.” His novels and unfolds through his elaboration of successive narratives stories fail to render slavery’s physical cruelties; they in a manner not unlike Faulkner’s own. Unsatised with include no depiction of an auction, a family separated

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by sale, or a whipping. Many of his Black characters their salvation could come, if at all, only at the cost of seem incomplete, although they’re certainly not the postponing justice for Black Americans, which Bald- caricatured stereotypes typical of so much white south- win made clear was no longer conceivable. ern writing of his time. Faulkner remarked upon white Gorra assembles quite a bill of failings, especially men who had “the courage and endurance to resist … if we view Faulkner with the assumptions of our time Reconstruction.” The Unvanquished presents John and place rather than his own. Yet having meticulously Sartoris as a leader of the local Klan admirably deter- acknowledged all of this, Gorra makes his claim for mined to keep “the carpetbaggers from organizing the Faulkner the writer by reproving Faulkner the man. negroes into an insurrection,” which was Sartoris’s view “When writing ction,” Faulkner “became better than of the Black claim on the franchise. As Gorra observes, he was.” He had, Gorra argues, an uncanny ability to Faulkner’s “picture of black voters as inevitably ignorant “think his way within other people,” to inhabit their and corruptible simply parrots the view of Reconstruc- being so as to erase preconceptions and prejudices tion that was current in Faulkner’s childhood and for in the very act of portraying their minds and souls. some decades thereafter.” A 1943 short story Faulkner rough ction, Faulkner could “stand outside his wrote for e Saturday Evening Post presents the slave Oxford, his Jeerson, and see the behavior his people broker and Confederate general Nathan Bedford For- take for granted, the things they don’t even question.” rest in a generous manner that Gorra nds particularly As Gorra presents it, the act of writing bestowed an “hard to stomach.” At the same time, Gorra points out, almost mystical clear-sightedness. Yet that clarity was the depiction of enslaved people eeing to freedom always challenged in the fetid Mississippi air that and securing their own emancipation transcends the Faulkner, like all his characters, had to breathe. And historiography of Faulkner’s time and anticipates that it is that very tension, the combination of the aws of our own. He is no apologist for the Old South, and and the brilliance, that for Gorra makes his case. resists in any way glorifying the war, unlike almost every Is this rendering of Faulkner’s weaknesses as the other white southerner of his era. source of his strength just an act of interpretive jiu-jitsu? e public pronouncements Faulkner made on Or perhaps a reversion to a romantic notion of redemp-

race as the civil-rights movement unfolded are in THE SADDEST tive genius? Or is Gorra inuenced by what Faulkner many ways even more disturbing than the short- WORDS: WILLIAM himself urged upon posterity: that his life be “abolished FAULKNER’S comings Gorra identies in his ction. In an appall- CIVIL WAR and voided from history,” leaving only “the printed ing drunken interview with the British Sunday Times books”? After all, Faulkner once declared that he wanted in 1956, Faulkner invoked the specter of race war Michael Gorra his epitaph to read “He made the books and he died.” if the South were compelled to integrate, but when But Gorra insists on the importance of the teller his words were widely reviled, he denied ever having and the tale, as well as on the creative force Faulkner uttered them. He regularly spoke out against lynch- LIVERIGHT derived from the burden of race, which he could not ing and deplored the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, escape. It is because of, not in spite of, Faulkner’s short- saying that any society that murdered children didn’t comings that we must continue to engage with his “deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” But he had work: ese failures are product and emblem of the once suggested that mobs, “like our juries … have a legacies of racial injustice that shape us all. In his Nobel way of being right.” Gorra underscores the “incoher- Prize speech in 1950, Faulkner declared that the only ence” of Faulkner’s position as both critic and defender thing worth writing about was “the human heart in of the white South’s resistance to change. conict with itself.” He lived that conict even as he In many ways, he was a quintessential white south- wrote about it. His struggles forced him to experiment ern “moderate,” an identity much scrutinized as the and to innovate, yielding both his aesthetic and his civil-rights movement gathered momentum. He con- ethical insight. ese very di¥culties—“the drama demned violence and recognized the need to end seg- and … power of his attempt to work through our his- regation, but he rejected what Martin Luther King Jr. tory, to wrestle or rescue it into meaning”—are what later described as “the erce urgency of now.” Indeed, make Faulkner so worthwhile. We read him because it was the moral failures of just such moderates that he takes us with him into our national heart of dark- King would directly assail in his 1963 “Letter From ness, into the shameful history we have still failed to Birmingham Jail.” Faulkner urged patience and delay confront or understand. Our past, Gorra and Faulkner and spoke out against federal coercion of the white agree, is “never over.” Or certainly not yet. South. His critics thought he should have known better. As James Baldwin explained in a 1956 essay condemning his views on desegregation, Faulkner hoped Drew Gilpin Faust is a contributing writer at e Atlan- to give southern whites the time and opportunity to tic and a former president of Harvard University, where save themselves, to reclaim their moral identity. But she is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor.

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“To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves,” Elena Ferrante observed in a 2002 interview. “Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves.” For Ferrante, the falsehoods that people tell one another and themselves in everyday life— I am happy; I love my wife; I didn’t know what I was doing—are “lovely tales,” or “petty lies.” At moments when guilt and shame threaten our conscience, when they shake our deepest beliefs about who we are, petty lies stop us from looking too closely at ourselves. Literary ction is also a lie, according to Ferrante, but a lie that is “made purposely to always tell the truth.” e lies that ction tells—once upon a time a person said and did this and that—are unmotivated by self-interest. Fiction is an illusion that tinkers with our sense of reality to lay bare the price we pay for our petty lies: Fiction shows us that narcissism and self-doubt impel us to hurt others; that we are quick to betray people who trust us; that love can be more destructive than hate. Central to Ferrante’s theory of ction as an act of truth-telling is her conviction that the truth dawns more radiantly when glimpsed through the veil of ction’s lies. What can we learn about the conjunction of life and ction from a work of ction about lying? Fer- rante’s exquisitely moody new novel, e Lying Life of Adults, is about a teenager named Giovanna who learns that the grown-ups in her life have been lying to her. She also learns that the contents of their lies are less intriguing than their styles of lying— exaggeration, omission, justication, obfuscation—which vary in their skillfulness, and in the pleasure and pain they aord. All lie dierently from e Lying Life of Adults itself, which invites us to evaluate lying not only as a BOOKS moral problem, but also as an aesthetic challenge— to ask whether a lie can ever be elevated into an art form. We might ask this question of all of Ferrante’s writing. Her ction teems with liars of every age, from the insecure children of her beloved Neapolitan quartet, to the anguished adults of her early novels, to Elena Ferrante herself, an authorial persona who claims that she resorts to lying to shield herself. Unlike the Neapolitan quartet, which spans more than half a century in the lives of two friends, e Lying Life of Adults concerns itself with adolescence—a time when Lying as an Art Form deception and self-deception loom large, and growing up means learning to catch oneself and others Elena Ferrante’s new novel about adolescence in the act of lying. Everything that entails—ridding explores the power of ctions. oneself of childish illusions, recognizing the hypocrisy of adults, suering romantic disappointment— is standard fare for novels of adolescence. But for Fer- By Merve Emre rante, whose novel bestows on familiar experiences an ardent, unreal shimmer, growing up also involves

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learning how to cultivate a talent for deception that begins “almost inadvertently to invent” things about approaches a talent for writing ction. her parents, though she restrains herself from being too “novelistic.” To Angela and Ida, she lies about began with intensity, in a violent, Vittoria recklessly, almost giving her “the capacity to working-class neighborhood of Naples, but e Lying y through night skies or invent magic potions.” e Life of Adults opens amid the educated, auent, and quartet allowed its narrator, a writer named Lenù, to peaceable. Giovanna’s father is a teacher at a prestigious move among several dierent genres of storytelling: the high school and an aspiring Marxist intellectual, “an fable, the romance, the realist novel. e Lying Life of unfailingly courteous man” whose love and admiration Adults makes the same imaginative experiment avail- she desperately desires. Her mother teaches Greek and able to readers. “I’m not wise, but I read a lot of nov- Latin and proofreads romance novels. Giovanna’s best els,” Giovanna says of her education in lying. “Instead friends, pretty Angela and poetic Ida, are the daugh- of my own words, phrases from books come to mind.” ters of her parents’ best friends, the wealthy Mariano e books she begins with are the epics her father and Costanza. All seem content in their bourgeois loves to quote. en her lies start to toggle between happiness— until the day Giovanna, then 12, over- fable and romance, with their enchanted objects (she hears a conversation between her mother and father. imagines a bracelet Vittoria gives her as possessing Giovanna recalls the conversation from an magic) and fairy-tale archetypes (she casts Vittoria as an un specied present: “Two years before leaving home evil witch). Yet the more Giovanna lies, the more she my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” We exes her nascent powers of perception and narration. have no reason to doubt her account. “ose words,” Her inner world, her imagination, grows critical, rebel- she tells us, “remained xed” in her mind as a cruel lious, and she starts to see the “well-ordered world” of judgment on her pubescent body and poor perfor- Ferrante’s her parents with unnerving clarity. She discovers that a mance in school. But we soon discover that what her fiction teems more melodramatic conguration of lies (reminiscent father actually said was worse: She was “becoming of the quartet’s later books) has corrupted her family’s like his sister,” her estranged Aunt Vittoria, “a child- with liars of happiness. ere is her intellectualizing father’s long hood bogeyman, a lean, demonic silhouette,” whose all ages, from aair with Costanza, which he justies artlessly, in “a vulgarity and cruelty her noble father has detested for the insecure frenzy to redeem himself by listing his grand reasons, as long as Giovanna can remember. children of her his pain and suering.” ere is her mother’s improvi- Reversing the quartet’s story of upward mobility, sation of “nostalgic little speeches” about her estranged Giovanna descends from her home atop Naples’s Neapolitan husband’s goodness, honesty, and delity. highest hill to the industrial neighborhood where quartet to Giovanna deems these lies “oensive,” and is as Vittoria lives, determined to discover the truth of the anguished repelled by their self-serving sentimentality as she is, her aunt’s estrangement. Her father begs her “to put adults of her eventually, by Vittoria’s romantic vulgarity. Part of wax in [her] ears like Odysseus.” But Giovanna lis- learning how to lie, Ferrante suggests, is learning how tens as Vittoria tells the agonizing story of her love early novels. to judge lies based on their aesthetic merits. As we grow for a married man named Enzo, their aair exposed up, some varieties of lying must be cast aside: We know by Giovanna’s father, no longer a heroic man but a too much to accommodate their obvious falsity, their puritanical, petty bourgeois opportunist. Vittoria clichés, their failure to reconcile us to the intractable describes the sublime feeling of “fucking,” “an adher- realities of life. What makes the adults seem so stunted ence to pleasure so desperately carnal” that Giovanna is that none of them lies with elegance or verve, with nds herself shockingly aroused. “Tell your father: imagination or originality. As non-novelists—teachers Vittoria said that if I don’t fuck the way she fucked of the classics, proofreaders of romance—their lies bor- with Enzo, it’s pointless for me to live,” her aunt row tropes from the ction they produce and consume: demands. We know Vittoria’s pronouncement is a lie, romantic idealization, passivity in the face of passion, a but Giovanna is too overwhelmed by the pleasure the feeling of fatedness. Yet, as Giovanna soon realizes, the lie elicits to see it. e moralizing lies of her father lies designed by their literary culture are too reductive and the eroticizing lies of her aunt loom before her to give meaning to her quest to understand her sudden like Scylla and Charybdis. To navigate between them alienation from her life. safely, she must cultivate her own style of deception. is not an epic, a , lies, like literature, cleave to dif- fable, or a romance like the novels Giovanna’s mother ferent genres, each with its own conventions of lan- proofreads. It is not a bildungsroman or Künstlerroman guage. To her parents, Giovanna downplays her fasci- in the way the quartet is. It is a novel of disillusionment, nation with Vittoria, clipping her descriptions of her as the literary critic Georg Lukács once described the visit. To Vittoria, whom she starts to see regularly, she category: a novel that strips away its young protagonist’s

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major social relationships to elevate her interiority to and not the Proustian novel, which labors to create a “the status of a completely independent world.” From single self out of the fragments of existence. e answer its origins in Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sen- can be found at the very beginning of e Lying Life timental Education, the genre explores an individual’s of Adults, when Giovanna describes the story to come. struggle to adapt private fantasies and illusions to an outer world hostile to them. e word Ferrante uses I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within to describe this feeling of discordance is estraneità: these lines that are intended to give me a story, while “extraneousness,” “noninvolvement,” or, as Ann in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing Goldstein beautifully translates it, “estrangement.” that has really begun or really been brought to com- When Giovanna embraces her father, but draws no pletion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even comfort from his familiar scent, she is overwhelmed the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it by “a sense of estrangement that provoked suering contains the right thread for a story or is merely a mixed incongruously with satisfaction”—suering snarled confusion of suering, without redemption. from the rupture with her family, from the loss of a shared world; and satisfaction at how her distance Everything the sentence suggests—that the “I” who allows her to see her parents and aunt anew, her outer speaks from within ction is elusive; that writing is gaze clari ed by her inner state of homelessness. like weaving a fabric that conceals and reveals the e novel’s second half shows how estrangement life beneath; that this fabric will never redeem life’s might allow Giovanna to approach, blindly, haltingly, suering—is a description of Ferrante’s own ction. more elevated forms of lying than what her parents The novel alludes to the quartet as it closes, and have oered. e catalyst is Roberto, a classic Fer- Giovanna (the reader) and her poetic friend Ida (the rante love interest. He is a brilliant scholar of religion, writer) leave for Venice together, vowing to become a Neapolitan boy who has found success as a young “adults as no one ever had before.” On the one hand, man in Milan but remains attached to his origins; the ending could be read ironically, as a version of the he is engaged to an attractive, if insipid, girl from thrillingly cliché adolescent illusion that running away THE LYING LIFE Vittoria’s neighborhood. When she meets Roberto, OF ADULTS from home will free us from the ties that bind. On Giovanna, now almost 15, tells him she is reading a the other, the embrace of friendship over family and book about “the search for lost time,” and he praises Elena Ferrante romance could signal the beginning of a superior and Translated by her intellect. She tells herself the lie that comes u- Ann Goldstein entirely truthful lie: the writing of the novel itself, a col- ently to all teenagers: “Become his friend, only that, laborative examination of the past by two people—both and show him that, somewhere inside me, unknown Giovanna the liar and “the one who at this moment is even to myself, I possess the qualities he needs.” EUROPA EDITIONS writing.” Whether the one who is writing is the older A pointedly Proustian story of fantasy and desire Giovanna or her friend Ida, the echo of the intertwined unfolds. Call this kind of lie the self-deception of infatu- protagonists of the quartet, Lila and Lenù, is clear. ation. It rarely lasts, as Ferrante knows, but as long as e end of e Lying Life of Adults suggests that it does, it allows Giovanna to live lies that only inten- the way to reckon with the “snarled confusion of suf- sify the desire they seek to suppress. Around Roberto, fering” is literary partnership—that this marvelously Giovanna projects an aura of intellectual purity, com- disconcerting novel of disillusionment is a product passion, and wisdom, and strives to be as good as she of the grace extended to the liar by the writer. Only believes him to be. His work is about “compunction,” the writer’s truthful lies can mirror the liar’s petty which he describes to her not as moral scrupulousness, ones with the clear sight needed to a¢rm the inten- but as “a needle that had to pull the thread through the sity of her past. Only the writer knows how to con- scattered fragments of our existence.” at he will let jure desire; sympathize with misjudgment; rebuke her down is inevitable— from the moment they meet, careless ness; disappoint mercifully. Always, Ferrante’s we know he will never live up to her illusions. But her ction reminds us that sometimes you need someone infatuation allows her to discover that the compunction else to help gather the scattered fragments of your of which Roberto speaks is key to what some liars, like existence. A writer is a friend who can nd the thread some novels, do. ey create the appearance of a uni ed of your story when you are too blinded by your lies self, smoothing the painful and unassimilable edges out to grasp it yourself. She can give you the beginning of our histories; they oer a false sense of consolation, and end you need—if not in life, then in ction. which we accept, eager not to look too hard at ourselves.

is best at transforming lying Merve Emre is an associate English professor at the into an art form and ction into a truthful lie rather University of Oxford. She is a co-author of e than mere consolation? Not the epic, not the romance, Ferrante Letters, published in January.

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0920_CC_Applebaum_Putin [Print]_13878227.indd 86 7/10/2020 9:15:42 AM BOOKS On the contrary, some of them had been preparing already. In August 1988, a high-ranking o cial from Moscow arrived in East Berlin and began recruiting German sleeper agents, who continued to work with the KGB, or rather the institutions that replaced the KGB, even after the reuni cation of Germany and the fall of the Soviet Union itself. At about the same time, the KGB was also setting up the o shore accounts, fake businesses, and hidden “black cash” funds that would, in the 1990s, propel some of its members to great wealth and power. From 1986 to 1988, for e World Putin Made example, the Stasi transferred millions of marks to a network of companies in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, How KGB methods, tactics, and operations and Singapore, all run by an Austrian businessman named Martin Schla . He and his companies would have fueled Russia’s quest for glory reemerge years later, Belton writes, as “central cogs in the in£ uence operations of the Putin regime.” By Anne Applebaum e KGB’s Dresden team may have also played another role in the organization’s careful preparations for a post-Communist future. Precisely because the It was December 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and in Dres- city was a backwater—and thus uninteresting to other den, crowds were gathering outside the headquarters of the Stasi, intelligence agencies—the KGB and the Stasi orga- the East German secret police, shouting insults and demanding nized meetings in Dresden with some of the extremist access. Nearby, frantic KGB o cers—the Soviet advisers whom organizations they supported in the West and around the Stasi had long referred to as “the friends”—were barricaded the world. One former member of the Red Army inside their villa, burning papers. “We destroyed everything,” Faction—the West German terrorist organization, remembered one of those o cers, Vladimir Putin. “All our com- also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, that killed munications, our lists of contacts and our agents’ networks … dozens of people during its heyday—told Belton that We burned so much stu that the furnace burst.” one of its most notorious nal actions was planned Toward evening, a group of protesters broke away from the with the help of the KGB and the Stasi in Dresden. In Stasi building and started marching toward the KGB villa. Pan- late November 1989, Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman icked, Putin called the Soviet military command in Dresden and of Deutsche Bank, died after a bomb hit his car. Herr- asked for reinforcements. None were forthcoming. “I got the hausen was, at that time, a close adviser to the German feeling then that the country no longer existed. at it had dis- government on the economics of reuni cation, and a appeared,” Putin told an interviewer years later. “It was clear the proponent of a more integrated European economy. union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without a cure—a Why him? Perhaps the KGB had its own ideas about paralysis of power.” e shock was total, and he never forgot it. how reuni cation should proceed and how the Euro- For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall pean economy should be integrated. Perhaps Russia’s was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated secret policemen didn’t want any rivals messing things dictator ships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB up. Or perhaps they wanted, as their successors still do, o cers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 to create havoc in Germany and beyond. marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of Belton does not prove Putin’s personal involve- humiliation. In interviews, Putin has returned to that moment— ment in any of these projects, which isn’t surprising. the moment when reinforcements did not come—always describ- e Russian leader has gone to great lengths to conceal ing it as a turning point in his own life. Like Scarlett O’Hara shak- his real role during the four and a half years he spent in ing her st at a blood-red sky, Putin swore, it seems, to dedicate Dresden. But throughout her book, which will surely his life to restoring his country’s glory. now become the de nitive account of the rise of Putin But Putin’s cinematic depiction of his last days in Dresden cap- and Putinism, she adds enough new details to establish tures only part of what happened. As Catherine Belton demon- beyond doubt that the future Russian president was strates in Putin’s People, large chunks are missing from his story and working alongside the people who set up the secret from the stories of his KGB colleagues—the other members of what bank accounts and held the meetings with subversives would become, two decades later, Russia’s ruling class. As the title and terrorists. More important, she establishes how, indicates, Belton’s book is not a biography of the Russian dictator, years later, these kinds of projects came to bene t him but a portrait of this generation of security agents. And many of and shape his worldview. Building on the work of them were not, in fact, entirely shocked by the events of 1989. others—Masha Gessen’s e Man Without a Face: e

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Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s they had begun more than a decade earlier, after that Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, Steven Lee Myers’s e rst power change in Ukraine. Already in 2005, two New Tsar: e Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, and of Putin’s closest colleagues, the oligarchs Vladimir Fiona Hill and Cliord Gaddy’s Mr. Putin: Operative Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeyev, had begun setting in the Kremlin, among many books on this subject— up the organizations that would promote an “alterna- Belton, a former Financial Times correspondent in Mos- tive” to democracy and integration all across Europe. cow, incorporates crucial new material from interviews With the help of intermediaries and friendly compa- with former KGB operatives, Kremlin insiders, and nies, and more recently with the assistance of troll farms bankers in various countries. She shows that Putin may and online disinformation operations, they promoted a have been burning documents in Dresden, but he never whole network of think tanks and fake “experts.” Some- lost touch with the people, the tactics, or the operations times they aided existing political parties—the National launched by the KGB at that time. Front in France, for example, and the Northern League in Italy—and sometimes they helped create new ones, , Belton demonstrates how the future such as the far-right Alternative for Germany. e most president made full use of KGB methods, contacts, important funder of the British Brexit campaign had and networks at each stage of his career. She describes odd Russian contacts. So did some cabinet ministers the famous swindle he ran in St. Petersburg in the Belton in Poland’s supposedly anti-Russian, hard-right gov- ’90s, selling oil abroad on the city’s behalf, suppos- documents ernment, elected after a campaign marked by online edly to buy food for its inhabitants; instead the prots disinformation in 2015. went to create a hard-currency slush fund—known in the activities The pro-Russian “separatists” who would later Russian criminal slang as an obschak—much of which of the launch a war in eastern Ukraine got their start around nanced other operations and eventually enriched biznesmeny 2005 too, with an even more apocalyptic result. Rus- Putin’s friends. Later, Putin won the condence of the who have sian propaganda deliberately sought to divide Ukraine Russian oligarchs of President Boris Yeltsin’s era, in part and polarize its citizens, while Russian corruption by promising them immunity from prosecution after circled around reached deep into the economy. Within a decade, the Yeltsin resigned; once he took power, he eliminated Trump for Russian operations in Ukraine led to mass violence. them from the game, arresting some throughout the 30 years, Some of the Ukrainians who attended Kremlin youth early 2000s and chasing others out of the country. In bailing him camps or joined the Eurasian Youth movement during the years that he has been president, his cronies have the 2000s—often funded by the “charities” created launched a series of major operations—the Deutsche out, offering by Malofeyev, Yakunin, and others— took part in the Bank “mirror trading” scheme, the Moldovan “laun- him “deals.” storming of Donetsk’s city-administration buildings in dromat,” the Danske Bank scandal—all of which used 2014, and then in the horric Russian-Ukrainian war, Western banks to help move stolen money out of Rus- which has disrupted European politics and claimed sia. Similar schemes continue to the present day. more than 13,000 lives. Russian soldiers, weapons, and But the pivotal political event for Putin took place advisers fuel the ghting in eastern Ukraine even now. in 2005, when a pro-Western president, Viktor Yush- All of these Russian-backed groups, from rened chenko, came to power in Ukraine after a street revo- Dutch far-right politicians in elegant suits to the lution. e Russian president blamed these events on Donetsk thugs, share a common dislike for the Euro- American money and the CIA (an organization that, pean Union, for NATO, for any united concept of for better or worse, never had anything like that kind “the West,” and in many cases for democracy itself. In of inuence in Ukraine). “It was the worst nightmare a very deep sense, they are Putin’s ideological answer to of Putin’s KGB men that, inspired by events in neigh- the trauma he experienced in 1989. Instead of democ- boring countries, Russian oppositionists funded by racy, autocracy; instead of unity, division; instead of the West would seek to topple Putin’s regime too,” open societies, xenophobia. Amazingly, quite a few Belton writes. “is was the dark paranoia that col- people, even some American conservatives, are taken ored and drove many of the actions they were to take in by Russian tactics. It is incredible, but a group of

from then on.” Not coincidentally, this scenario— PUTIN’S PEOPLE: cynical, corrupt ex-KGB o©cers with access to vast pro-Western-democracy protesters overthrowing a HOW THE quantities of illegal money—operating in a country KGB TOOK BACK corrupt and unpopular regime—was precisely the one RUSSIA AND with religious discrimination, extremely low church THEN TOOK ON that Putin had lived through in Dresden. Putin was THE WEST attendance, and a large Muslim minority—have so upset by events in Kyiv that he even considered somehow made themselves into the world’s biggest resigning, Belton reports. Instead, he decided to stay Catherine Belton promoters of “Christian values,” opposing feminism, on and ght back, using the only methods he knew. gay rights, and laws against domestic violence, and Although the American electorate awoke to the supporting “white” identity politics. is is an old FARRAR, STRAUS reali ty of Russian inuence operations only in 2016, AND GIROUX geopolitical struggle disguised as a new culture war.

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Yakunin himself told Belton, frankly, that “this battle is used by Russia to restore its global position.” Ultimately, all of these tactics had their culmination in the career of Donald Trump. In the last chapter of I Feel Good Putin’s People, Belton documents the activities of the By Nikky Finney biznesmeny who have circled around Trump for 30 years, bailing him out, buying apartments in his build- On the occasion of the state of South Carolina taking control of ings for cash, oering him “deals,” always operating in the $100 million James Brown I Feel Good Trust, willed “the half-light between the Russian security services to the education of needy students, and after the death of Prince and the mob, with both sides using the other to their own benet.” Among them are Shalva Tchigirinsky, a Whores raised him with intellect Georgian black marketeer who met Trump in Atlantic and savoir faire, teaching: City in 1990; Felix Sater, a Russian with mob links pack your fragrant pants proper whose company served, among other things, as the like a mattress, stock the edges intermediary for Trump buildings in Manhattan, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix; Alex Shnaider, a Russian met- for comfort, with newspaper als trader who developed the Trump hotel in Toronto; headlines & purple velvet cock feathers, and Dmitry Rybolovlev, an oligarch who purchased scrupulously tilt the tucked Trump’s Palm Beach mansion in 2008 for $95 mil- microphone like it’s your johnson, lion, more than double what Trump had paid for it in 2004, just as the nancial crisis hit Trump’s companies. hips travel best when horizontal of how While many of these stories have been written the crow ies, keep spinning and splendor before, Belton puts them in the larger context. ¤e in your daily moves, know sound hard truth is that Trump was not exceptional. He was is gilt-edged & saturnalian like lightning, just another amoral Western businessman, one of many whom the ex-KGB elite have promoted and sponsored meant to enter but never land, cotton-slide around the world, with the hope that they might your closed eyes all the way back to Watusi land; eventu ally be of some political or commercial use. Many caterwaul & amplify, of these bets didn’t pay o, but in 2016, Putin nally hit the jackpot: His operatives helped elect an Ameri- exalt yourself on your backside, can president with long-standing Russian links who spell yourself out with your alligator feet, would not only sow chaos, but systematically under- the world will prefer you in heels, mine America’s alliances, erode American inuence, and even, in the spring of 2020, render the American federal when you open up the door government dysfunctional, damaging the reputation of sport hot curls and a sexy cape, both the U.S. and democracy more broadly. A huge success for Putin’s people has proved a ter- drop to your knees before, during, and after the end of every song, rible tragedy for the rest of the world—a tragedy that also touches ordinary Russians. In her epilogue, Bel- clothes are tight for a reason, ton notes that in seeking to restore their country’s sig- sweat is money in any season, nicance, Putin’s KGB cronies have repeated many of the mistakes their Soviet predecessors made at home. men pretending to be wallowers are all ears and antsy in the parlor, ¤ey have once again created a calcied, authoritarian political system in Russia, and a corrupt economy that straining at the bit discourages innovation and entrepreneurship. Instead for you to nish your dying. of experiencing the prosperity and political dynamism that still seemed possible in the ’90s, Russia is once again impoverished and apathetic. But Putin and his Nikky Finney’s 2011 collection, Head Off & Split, was the winner of the people are thriving— and that was the most important National Book Award for poetry. This poem appears in her new book, Love goal all along. Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts, published this spring by Northwestern University Press.

Anne Applebaum is a sta writer at ¤e Atlantic. Her latest book is Twilight of Democracy: ¤e Seduc- tive Lure of Authoritarianism.

0920_CC_Applebaum_Putin [Print]_13878227.indd 89 7/10/2020 9:15:43 AM ESSAY In the winter of 1975, a quiet young woman “No Novel About Any Black Woman from Lexington, Kentucky, Could Ever Be the Same After is” met her Ph.D. adviser in

That’s how Toni Brown University’s writing Morrison described Gayl Jones’s first program for a series of book in 1975. Jones has published unsatisfactory tutorials to great acclaim and experienced unspeakable tragedy. about an ambitious project Now she is releasing her first novel in of hers that had yet to more than 20 years. fully reveal itself. e By Calvin Baker encounters were strange enough that her adviser still recalled them in an interview a quarter century later: “I was doing all the talking, and she would sit rigidly, just bobbing her

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0920_BoB_Baker_GaylJones [Print]_13891852.indd 90 7/13/2020 3:38:08 PM ILLUSTRATION BY JOHNALYNN HOLLAND

0920_BoB_Baker_GaylJones [Print]_13891852.indd 91 7/13/2020 3:38:10 PM head in a regal manner. Yet there was a It could have been a Beckett play, almost and requiring little editing. Jones needed a kind of arrogance to her. Perhaps it funny until you lived it. champion, however, someone who could was the arrogance of an artist fiercely Fortunately, Jones also worked closely understand and appreciate the sophistica- committed to a vision, but I also sensed at Brown with a true mentor, the noted tion of her approach to subject matter as a bottled-up black rage.” ere’s nothing poet Michael Harper, who’d overseen her well as language. “No novel about any black unusual about a young writer seething at master’s degree and would become a life- woman could ever be the same after this,” the world, especially in the 1970s, when long friend. She received her doctorate in Morrison declared after reading the manu- protests and bad attitudes about race, war, 1975 and published her rst novel, Cor- script of Corregidora. and university curricula were so de rigueur regidora, the same year. e story is told Richard Ford, who got to know Jones that they may as well have been taught at by a 1940s Kentucky blues singer, Ursa, when they were both fellows at the Uni- orientation. Likelier than not, his student whose troubles with men are refracted versity of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, called sensed her (white) adviser’s judgment and through memories of slavery handed down her a “prodigy”: “History may have caught withdrew in response—and didn’t think by her matrilineal line: up with her, but she was a movement unto he had much to offer, anyway. While herself. Toni knew this very, very, very well her natural range was virtuosic, his work My great-grandmama told my grand- when she published her.” consisted primarily of a host of popular mama the part she lived through that Jones had a marked e«ect not only on paperbacks and magazine stories whose my grandmama didn’t live through and Morrison’s subsequent novels but on an titles, including Dormitory Women and my grandmama told my mama what entire generation of writers, whether they “Up the Down Coed,” accurately convey they both lived through and my mama realized it or not. e tentacles of slavery in their subjects and sensibilities. told me what they all lived through and the present day have grown into a principal However mutually frustrating the we were suppose to pass it down like concern of Black literature, and Jones’s early meetings between Gayl Jones and that from generation to generation so work was absorbed into this canon almost R. V. Cassill may have been, his com- we don’t forget. imperceptibly. Over time, her literary ambi- ment is most striking for having been tions would evolve, as she published and made to The New York Times after her Or, as the protagonist, whose mother and then receded from the public eye, pub- husband, Robert Higgins, slit his own grandmother were fathered by the same lished and then receded. is spring, she throat when a SWAT team stormed their Portuguese slave owner, says at another self-published her rst novel in 21 years— house in February 1998 to arrest him on point: “I am Ursa Corregidora. I have tears Palmares, a six-volume work about the last a 14-year-old warrant from another state. for eyes. I was made to touch my past at fugitive-slave settlement in Brazil. In mid- Two decades earlier, Jones had an early age. I found it on my June, Beacon Press bought the rights to the been hailed as one of the great mother’s tiddies. In her milk.” book, with plans to release it in the fall. In literary phenoms of the 20th What Faulkner saw in the sprawling narrative, set in the 17th cen- century, only to then drop out the haunted old mansions of tury, Jones’s feats of linguistic and historical of sight; just days before her PALMARES Oxford, Mississippi, Jones saw invention are on ample display. Describ- husband killed himself, she’d in the ghosts of the Black dead. ing the impact of her singular vision and Gayl Jones reemerged on the American She was a pioneer in grappling intensity, John Edgar Wideman remarked literary scene with a new novel with the contemporary legacy 22 years ago: “I think she scared people.” that would become a nalist of slavery, and her debut was for a National Book Award. BEACON PRESS praised by the likes of John was born into a modest fam- Leaving aside the callous- Updike, in e New Yorker, as ily in 1949. Her father, Franklin, worked as ness of Cassill’s remarks (and the obvious well as a host of Black writers. “Corregi- a line cook in a restaurant, an occupation question: What does “black rage” mean?), dora is the most brutally honest and pain- she would later give to the father of the they violated the typical assumptions of ful revelation of what has occurred, and is narrator of her second novel, Eva’s Man. academic privacy. at the reporter and occurring, in the souls of Black men and Her mother, Lucille, was a homemaker and his editors deemed Cassill’s observation women,” James Baldwin wrote. a writer; Jones would incorporate lengthy useful in understanding Jones’s life does Jones’s early novels were shepherded by passages from her work into her experimen- not confirm her anger so much as it Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random tal fourth novel, Mosquito. a¤rms all there is to be angry about. No House, who’d dedicated herself to pub- Jones spent childhood weekends visit- matter her insights and achievements, the lishing Black writers, especially women. ing her maternal grandmother on a small frame through which she was viewed and To put things in perspective, at the time farm outside Lexington, where she absorbed understood by the white world remained Corregidora came out, Morrison had only the stories of the adults around her. It is an the same. She sat silently as he read the recently published her rst works of c- unremarkable detail, save for the impor- early drafts of what would become her rst tion, e Bluest Eye and Sula. She had yet tance and seriousness Jones later ascribed novel. He talked. She left. He was ¥um- to hit her stride as a writer, while Jones burst to this time, as an educated woman chan- moxed. She returned, because she had to. forth in her early 20s all but fully formed neling those locked out of institutions of

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0920_BoB_Baker_GaylJones [Print]_13891852.indd 92 7/13/2020 3:38:11 PM so-called higher learning, as a daughter in magazine— that what Eva “does to the man giving them as much intelligence as she communion with her mothers, as a formi- in the book is a ‘horror’ … Eva carries out possesses; to work in ¢awless Black Eng- dable theorist validating the integrity and what Ursa might have done but didn’t.” lish; and to position herself inside rather equality of oral modes of storytelling. “e Published back-to-back, the books than outside her characters. e vantage best of my writing comes from havingheard form a diptych exploring the understands in contrast to the approach of Zora rather than having read,” Jones told Michael currents of the psyche in a world of slave- Neale Hurston, for example, whom Jones Harper in an intimate interview conducted owners, whoremongers, prostitutes, killers, admired for her up-close treatment of rela- the year Corregidora was published. She has- man-eaters, jealous husbands, wayward tionships between Black men and women, tened to add that she wasn’t dismissing the wives, psych-ward inmates, pedophiles, but who at points wrote on behalf of Janie, glories of reading, only pointing out that wife-beaters, women in love with their in eir Eyes Were Watching God, not as her. “in the beginning, all of the richness came abusers, and girls who carry knives. As Jones well understood, Hurston, like all from people rather than books because in Nobody goes to church much. writers, was a product of her time, and of those days you were reading some really Instead of sermons, sense and suste- the circumstances of her oppression. She un fortunate kinds of books in school.” nance ¢ow from a web of intimacy and and her fellow members of the Harlem In the mid-1960s, when Gayl and her memory, at least for Jones’s female charac- Renaissance were self-consciously striv- younger brother were teenagers, Lucille ters. e men are mostly phalluses tumes- ing to create a literature of Black people’s managed to enroll them in the segre- cent with bad news. eir collective role is expanding worlds beyond slavery, but the gated but academically well-regarded mission could devolve into representing Henry Clay High School. (e public- Blacks for a white audience, giving their ¦c- school system in Lexington did not for- tions an unintended stiltedness. e prob- mally integrate until the mid-1970s, 20 lem might be summarized as one of code- years after Brown v. Board of Education.) switching between the Black world and the Jones proved an extraordinary student, white gaze. e Black writer who knows and through the eorts of her Spanish the codes of both must always explain the teacher she was introduced to the poet Telling stories out loud lives, decisions, and humanity of her Black Elizabeth Hardwick, who, together with was a matter of survival— charac ters to whites who might not oth- her sometimes husband, Robert Lowell, erwise credit them. In Jones’s storytelling, helped arrange a scholarship for Jones and the way Jones however, there was no “ ‘author’ getting in at Connecticut College. She proved an wields this tradition the way,” Morrison noticed. equally exceptional student in New Eng- transforms even a e other Black inventors of the mod- land, devoting herself to literature. nursery rhyme into ern novel about slavery were Leon Forrest (Two Wings to Veil My Face), who wrote Eva’s Man in 1976, something dirty, dangerous, with lyrical, epicurean elegance, and a year after Corregidora. Like Ursa, Eva is and important. Charles Johnson (Oxherding Tale), whose a 40ish woman recounting her life story, stories of slave escapes are entwined with in this case from prison. Eva landed there the Buddhist quest to get o the wheel of after murdering and castrating in graphic suering, as well as with the ontological fashion a lover she’d spent a few days questions of Western philosophy. They with—ostensibly because she’d learned he bring the high-minded into the lives of was married. In conversations with a fel- the low. By working the other way around, low inmate and a prison psychiatrist, Eva as a source of fear and pain, but also desire. Jones challenges literature itself to embrace “stitch[es] her memories and fantasies into Love is not absent, but the word can’t cap- other registers of the language, includ- a pattern of sexual and emotional abuse,” ture what transpires between her women ing the obscene, as in this relatively mild as the critic Margo Jeerson wrote. When and men. Jones has often been read as a example from Corregidora: the psychiatrist asks Eva if she can pin- political warrior speaking for unvoiced point what triggered her to kill the man, Black women, but she’s too great a writer A Portuguese seaman turned planta- she replies only, “It was his whole way.” with too broad a mind—and too mesmer- tion owner, he took her out of the ¦eld Jones called Corregidora a “blues novel,” ized by psychological complexity— to pass when she was still a child and put her to because it communicated the “simultane- any ideological purity tests. As she told work in his whorehouse while she was ity of good and bad, as feeling, as some- Rowell, her preoccupations were “contra- a child … I stole [the picture of him] thing felt,” she told Harper. Meanwhile, dictory character and ambivalent charac- because I said whenever afterward when she considered her second novel a “hor- ter, and I like to explore them even with- evil come I wanted something to point ror story,” explaining in another inter- out judgments entering the work.” to and say, “at’s what evil look like.” view—with Charles H. Rowell, the editor Jones’s politics are inscribed in her choice You know what I mean? Yeah, he did of Callaloo, an African American literary to write about the lowborn and low-down, more fucking than the other mens did.

0920_BoB_Baker_GaylJones [Print]_13891852.indd 93 7/13/2020 3:38:11 PM Jones elaborated on the politics of the hear. A lot of Southern American writers black writers—it goes without saying English language with Harper: can hear … Joyce had to hear because why we’ve always had to hear. of the whole historical- linguistic situa- I usually trust writers who I feel I can hear. tion in Ireland … Finnegan’s Wake is an Telling stories out loud was a matter of A lot of European and Euro- American oral book. You can’t sight-read Finnegan’s survival and wholeness for a community writers—because of the way their tradi- Wake with any kind of truth. And they forbidden to read, as well as an act of rebel- tions work—have lost the ability to hear. say only a Dubliner can really understand lion, and the way Jones wields this tradition Now Joyce could hear and Chaucer could the book, can really “hear” it. Of course, transforms even a kind of nursery rhyme

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0920_BoB_Baker_GaylJones [Print]_13891852.indd 94 7/13/2020 3:38:13 PM shared between daughter and mother into Eva embodies that position. In a conver- ¡e couple then decamped from the something dirty, dangerous, and important. sation about Jones’s second book published United States altogether and spent the last year in The Believer, the young next ve years in Europe, mostly in Paris, I am the daughter of the daughter of the Zambian-born novelist Namwali Ser- joining the tail end of a Black expatriate daughter of Ursa of currents, steel wool pell explained the “brilliance” of Jones’s scene made up of people who did not wish and electric wire for hair. choice to let Eva be “bad,” to seemingly to return to America after World War II. While mama be sleeping, the ole lack or reject the reflex to see herself Around this time, Jones published three man he crawl into bed … through white people’s eyes. Eva’s “un-self- books of poetry. ¡e best-known of these, Don’t come here to my house, don’t consciousness,” her unwillingness to “be Song for Anninho, shares the essential story come here to my house I said … known, or know how others know her,” of Palmares, the epic novel she began com- Fore you get any this booty, you gon Serpell said, “is a kind of freedom.” posing more than four decades ago. It’s a have to lay down dead. love story about a man and a woman who a few readers of Jones have live there (and, incidentally, was dedi- When Harper asked for her thoughts assumed that her volatile husband inspired cated to Higgins). In this faraway past in on the architects of 20th-century Black lit- Eva’s Man, but she didn’t meet him until a world populated by Africans, American erature, namely “Gaines, Toomer, Ellison, several years after she wrote that book, in Indians, Europeans, and all their possible Hurston, Walker, Forrest, Wright, Hughes, Ann Arbor. In other words, she wasn’t the admixtures, Jones pursued her desire to Brown, Hayden et. al,” Jones pointed out naive Black girl writing autobiographical link Black Americans’ struggle to that of the wide variation in a group that to the workshop ction, an expectation Jones colonized people across the globe—the mainstream might appear homogeneous: was accustomed to. “Always with black goal of what’s known as the universal free- writers,” she told Rowell, “there’s the sus- dom movement. “I’d like to be able to … You know, I say the names over in my picion that they can’t … invent a linguistic write imaginatively of blacks anywhere/ mind, and I think about those people world in the same way that other writers everywhere,” she told Rowell. She was a who will speak of black writing as a “lim- can.” A white professor, in fact, once told passionate student of Latin American liter- ited category,” the implication being that Jones that he was surprised that she didn’t ature, and her poetry has the lushness—and it’s something you have to transcend. And talk more like Ursa. at times the over-the-top romanticism— it surprised me because I thought critics Ford, who recalls Jones as “within her- of pan-Americanists such as Eduardo had outgrown that sort of posture. self, but friendly and very smart,” says it’s Galeano and Pablo Neruda: “I struggle a mistake to conflate authors with their through memory … the blood of the whole She certainly had. Whereas Baldwin characters. “Gayl’s books were dramatic, continent / running in my veins.” famously lashed out at the protest-novel sexual, sexually violent, eloquent, and harsh In the late 1980s, Jones and Higgins straitjacket put on mid-20th-century in their assessments of the life she was viv- returned to America, moving to Lexington Black writers—“The ‘protest’ novel, so idly portraying,” he told me. “But ction to live with Jones’s mother, who was ill. far from being disturbing, is an accepted is not simply an emotional ‘readout’ of a Meanwhile, the rights to Corregidora and and comforting aspect of the American writer’s feelings. It’s a congeries of made-up, Eva’s Man had been acquired by the old scene”—Jones came of age breathing the ill-tting, heretofore una¦liated shards of Boston publisher Beacon. In 1997, how- air of the Black Arts Movement. Founded experience, memory, feeling, event.” ever, Jones asked her editor there, Helene by LeRoi Jones (no relation), who com- Not much is known about Robert Hig- Atwan, to remove them from print. “She bined immense talent, critical acumen, and, gins, apart from the dramatic run-ins he said they portrayed Black men very nega- after being brutalized by the police, a rusty had with the law, including a pivotal one tively, and she didn’t want those to be her shank of disdain for the lassitude of white in 1983, when the pair attended a local only books out there,” Atwan told me, America, the movement advanced the idea gay-rights rally. ¡ere, he was alleged to admitting to being intimidated by her that white people’s approval was beside the have proclaimed himself God and declared author’s brilliance. “I said, ‘No! ¡ey’re point. Why bother being the Black excep- HIV a form of divine retribution, prompt- important books. Send us new books, and tion in a country where attempts to control ing a woman to punch him. Whatever we’ll publish those.’ ” the mind and body of Black people knew actually happened, Higgins, being an Jones promptly forwarded the manu- no bounds? In his ery 1965 manifesto, American, went home and returned bran- script for e Healing, the story of an itin- “¡e Revolutionary ¡eatre,” LeRoi Jones dishing a gun. He was arrested by the Ann erant faith healer, a woman named Harlan described the mission for Black artists this Arbor police; his assailant was not. Rather who is one step ahead of hard times and way: “White men will cower before this than appear in court to defend himself, he of her own past. In a 1991 book of critical theatre because it hates them … ¡e Rev- and Jones left town, with a letter of protest essays, called Liberating Voices, Jones had olutionary ¡eatre must hate them for hat- to the university (and to President Ronald described the trajectory of Black litera- ing.” Gayl Jones’s “fuck o¢ ” was less explicit Reagan) that said, in part: “I reject your ture as moving from “the restrictive forms but no less radical: She wrote ction as if lying, racist shit. Do whatever you want. (inheritors of self-doubt, self-repudiation, white people weren’t watching. God is with Bob, and I’m with him.” and the minstrel tradition) to the liberation

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0920_BoB_Baker_GaylJones [Print]_13891852.indd 95 7/13/2020 3:38:13 PM of voice and freer personalities in more about her in Newsweek and, armed with the All of Jones’s women are on the run, but intricate texts,” and e Healing puts the old warrant from Michigan, went to arrest from book to book they become more author herself on that path. e narrative Higgins, then living under the alias Bob likely to have a place to go. Mosquito is voice is that of a world-weary, often wry Jones. When they arrived at the couple’s one of Jones’s trademark mash-ups— fusing country preacher with a self-proclaimed door, he threatened suicide rather than sur- her interests in history, charac ter, and con- ability to cure the sick and soul-wounded. render. e police then called for a SWAT temporary events. Time is collapsed, such As Harlan encounters believers and non- team. Higgins signaled his serious ness by that the past, present, and future play on a believers during her travels, Jones plants taking up a kitchen knife. ey stormed Finnegan’s Wake–style loop of language and notions about how narratives are deployed inside anyway, tackling Jones as Higgins consciousness. It’s an Olympian move, but in everyday life to both reveal and hide. did what he said he’d do. A district attorney if you’re Simone Biles, who’s to tell you not e story’s small “tank towns” and ordinary defended the police’s “perfectly” executed to play hopscotch with the gods? Like other handling of the warrant, noting that Hig- late-postmodern works, the book overows gins had written threatening letters about the usual frames of realism; it includes the the shoddy hospital care his mother-in-law author’s original theories about the relation- received, and that by the time the authori- ship between story and life, between the ties arrived they were “sitting on a bomb.” speaker/writer and the listener/reader. It After her husband’s death, Jones was often sounds like overhearing a lunch date committed to a hospital amid fears that between Derrida and Calvino, at a table she might harm herself. When her fourth where both theorist and master are Jones. e past, present, novel, Mosquito, appeared the following Mosquito didn’t nd a general readership, and future play year, everyone ocked to it for clues about but it helped feed a lot of dissertations. the tragedy. Instead, they were greeted Its reception aside, the novel marked on a Finnegan’s with a wildly ambitious novel that took a formal shift for Jones. The wealth of Wake–style loop its inspiration from the free-form ris of knowledge inside the author’s mind by of language and jazz, in line with Black writers like Ralph then—the ideas, and the layers of experi- consciousness. Ellison and Albert Murray. Jazz is many ence she was trying to put across—strain things, and Mosquito came from its more the naive rst-person narrator. Jones may It’s an Olympian daring vein. It was not well received. In have been listening to jazz, but she was also move, but if you’re a pan of the book published in e New exploring the boundaries of what is pos- Simone Biles, York Times, Henry Louis Gates Jr. com- sible in the modernist forms of the novel. who’s to tell you plained that it At 50, an age when many writers are just arriving at the height of their power, not to play hopscotch often reads more like Jones’s “eory Jones might have been expected to tally with the gods? of the Novel,” her encyclopedic version the lessons from her experiment and keep of Jamesian prefaces, than like any of moving. Indeed, Atwan said that Mosquito Jones’s previous works. It’s a late-night wasn’t yet published when Jones sent her ri by the Signifying Monkey, drunk the manuscript for Palmares. But for rea- with words and out of control, regur- sons unavailable to us, Jones—who com- gitating half-digested ideas taken from municated only sporadically with her Bea- USA Today, digressing on every possible con editor—decided against following subject, from the color of the Egyptians through with the book. And soon, Atwan people are familiar from her other books, to the xenophobia of the Great Books said, Jones told her that she’d stopped but where the earlier work seems to resign movement, from the art of “signifying” writing entirely. itself to the world, e Healing holds forth and the role of Africans in the slave the possibility of redemption. trade to the subtleties of Ralph Ellison’s of a canonical e speed with which Jones presented Invisible Man. artist is one whom other artists keep alive the manuscript to Beacon suggests that it across generations. And word of mouth was a novel she had written earlier, and Clearly Gates likes to play the dozens. is what led me to Jones’s work a few years only then decided to publish. When it was e book demands to be taken more after college, when I decided to truly named as a nalist for a 1998 National seriously. On the simple level of story, it’s educate myself. As an aspiring novelist, I Book Award, Jones asked Michael Harper about a truck driver named Mosquito—the wanted to see where my own writing t in, to attend in her place, eschewing industry only female on a route that traces the Mexi- sure, but I’d also matured enough to realize hobnobbing for a private life in Kentucky. can border—who becomes a coyote for a that what I liked and didn’t like was irrele- is privacy was soon upended, after the group called the Sanctuary, ferrying refu- vant to the task of understanding the vast- Lexington police saw a celebratory article gees on the “new Underground Railroad.” ness of literature. During this years-long

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0920_BoB_Baker_GaylJones [Print]_13891852.indd 96 7/13/2020 3:38:14 PM PROMOTION

Our mini puzzle gets bigger and more challenging Play the Atlantic each weekday. Can you solve this Friday one? On Sundays, play our largest crossword, which is Crossword created by a rotating cast of puzzle makers.

1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9

10 11

12 13

14 15 16

17 18

A Friday crossword from Caleb Madison

Across 17. Autonomous Serbian province 5. Crossing on a road trip, perhaps in the Pannonian Plain 1. Detective work 6. Beverage named for a leaf 19. Going by and a nut 6. Middle-management tools? 20. Fictional French “gentleman 7. Preventing the rest of 8. Toy that’s making a comeback? thief” ____ Lupin the sleepover from getting 10. Fashion brand with a rhino logo shut-eye, say 11. “en again ...” in a text Down 8. Not act up 12. Head locks? 1. Site of many juvenile theft 9. It means “warrior king” in the attempts Soninke language 13. Temporal chunk 2. Hard suit 15. FX show for which Billy Porter 14. Lucky blackjack deal won an Emmy 3. Atlanta-to-Miami dir. 15. A Fish Called Wanda star 16. Score after deuce, perhaps Michael 4. Saarinen who designed the Gateway Arch 18. Biden and Bush: Abbr.

TheAtlantic.com/Crossword period, I read through the books that get African American culture stretching from slaves and whores. e rhetoric of race in anthologized as the American canon, the Harlem to Rio, the state of Bahia might Latin America is dierent from our own, English, the World Lit, and sampled vari- be fairly viewed as its spiritual heart. Per- of course, but its history, and the ways ous national traditions. I read the Nobel haps the heart of the entire Black world. blood and money operate, are familiar. Prize winners I hadn’t before. Harold Palmares centers on the reenslavement Plot is beside the point in Palmares— Bloom was the GOAT among readers, so of the last settlement of free Blacks in the book unfolds on a plane of con- I measured myself in those days against Brazil— and is told from the point of view sciousness where the things achieved are the indexes of e Western Canon. You can of Almeyda, a young girl who has learned shifting relation ships and states of being. read all of these things and still not know Ultimately, the book is about taking full much about Black literature. My educa- possession of the entire Black experience, tion there was in bookshops and libraries, including tenderness—and Jones’s quest but especially in talking with other writers, to free the individual Black voice. Father visual artists, musicians, lmmakers, danc- Tollinare, born back in the Old World ers. It was the best education I ever had. and wedded to its old sounds, doesn’t One Friday after work at my day job realize his young student’s hunger to as a magazine writer, I made my way from expand and integrate: Sixth Avenue to a bar in Hell’s Kitchen where industry people gathered. I joined During the studies, he’d pass one worn some friends from Newsweek at the Black I joined some Bible around and we’d read the sto- table, where they were sitting in stunned friends at the ries, and he’d shake his head when we silence and self-reproach. Higgins had just dropped letters o the ends of words, killed himself, after the magazine outed his Black table, where and he’d say, “In Portugal they say it location. I don’t remember the specics, they were sitting this way.” “But here we say it this but we talked bitterly about the editorial in stunned silence way,” I protested once. He looked at decisions that led the police to his door. and self-reproach. me sternly … I was silent because I About the things that white Americans wanted to know how to read and write understood and did not understand about Higgins had just the words, even if I continued to pro- being Black in this country. ings they killed himself after nounce them a dierent way. might not wish to know. Newsweek outed e reason I’ve told you all this is so At her best, Jones wields the words of you’ll understand what I mean when I his location. a larger literary tradition with a subversive say that Gayl Jones’s new work is as rel- power that is rare in its all- encompassing evant as ever. With monumental sweep, it purity. Dropping letters, she adds new blends psychological acuity and linguistic worlds to that tradition, one that has invention in a way that only a handful of been—in this country, and in the Ameri- writers in the trans atlantic tradition have can language— as versed in duplicity as in matched. She has boldly set out to con- revelation. One wishes that the blooming vey racial struggle in its deep-seated and of Jones’s genius were as simple as the say- disorienting complexity—Jones sees the ing “You can’t keep a good woman down.” whole where most only see pieces. to read with the help of a local Catholic e truth is, you can, and it’s been done More than a third of all Africans priest named Father Tollinare, though he for centuries. e old women in Kentucky removed from their homeland from the tries to limit the books available to her. presumably told her that long ago, and early 1500s to the mid-1800s—more than e novel has a García Márquezean pace, how best to endure. 4 million people—were transported to and, because it imitates the rhythms of Brazil and enslaved alongside the indig- Portuguese and imports words without enous people, at least those who hadn’t the usual linguistic signposts, it almost been exterminated. Today Nigeria is the feels as though it has been translated into Calvin Baker is a novelist and the author only country with a larger Black popu- English. But where García Márquez writes of A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Inte- lation than Brazil, and in the body of of generals and doctors, Jones tells of gration, and the Future of America.

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