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    Trump Pushes Pro-Police Agenda, With a Big Exception: His Criminal Cases

    Long a loud supporter of the police, Donald Trump is floating new protections for them. At the same time, he is raging against law enforcement officials who have brought felony charges against him.Former President Donald J. Trump has long spoken admiringly of police officers who use aggressive force on the job. For years, he has pointed to his unwavering support for local law enforcement, presenting himself as a “law and order” candidate who would help the police tackle violent crime.But now, as Mr. Trump campaigns again for the White House, he has added a new promise to his speeches on the trail: to “indemnify” police officers and protect them from the financial consequences of lawsuits accusing them of misconduct.“We are going to indemnify them, so they don’t lose their wife, their family, their pension and their job,” he said during a speech this month in New York.Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s proposal — which he first raised in an interview in October and has floated five times this month — would have little effect and would largely enforce the status quo. Police officers in most jurisdictions are already protected from being held financially responsible for potential wrongdoing. They also benefit from a legal doctrine that can shield officers accused of misconduct from lawsuits seeking damages.Since entering politics, Mr. Trump has often pledged his allegiance to the police as a way to attack Democrats, accusing them of being more concerned about progressive ideas than public safety. For decades, he has batted down calls for police reform, arguing that such changes hinder officers from using aggressive crime-fighting tactics.His promise to indemnify officers also reveals a contradiction at the heart of his current campaign. Even as he proclaims his steadfast support for rank-and-file officers, he has been raging against federal and state law enforcement officials who have led the four criminal cases against him, resulting in 91 felony charges.Two Capitol Police officers who were injured during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, have sued him, accusing him of inciting violence, and Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled this week that there was enough evidence that he engaged in insurrection to disqualify him from holding office again.Those realities have not stopped Mr. Trump from courting the police, meeting with law enforcement groups on the trail and posing with officers who are part of his motorcade. He and his aides often post photos and videos of the interactions on social media.Supporters of Mr. Trump at an event in Edinburg, Texas, last month honoring service members who were working on the border over the Thanksgiving holiday.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesDuring a speech on Sunday in Nevada, he proudly told the crowd that he “shook so many hands of policemen” before arriving. Later, when he promised to indemnify officers, he called them out: “All those policemen that were shaking my hand back there, you better be listening.”Mr. Trump frequently criticizes Democrats as too critical of law enforcement. He conjures up images of big cities as lawless and unsafe, laying the blame on liberal politicians whose calls for police reform, he says, have deterred officers from carrying out their duties. The police, he has argued in recent speeches, are being “destroyed by the radical left.”“They’re afraid to do anything,” Mr. Trump said recently. “They’re forced to avoid any conflict, they’re forced to let a lot of bad people do what they want to do, because they’re under a threat of losing their pension, losing their house, losing their families.”But legal scholars who have studied the issue say that police officers are already largely shielded from personal financial consequences when it comes to lawsuits brought against them.“The idea that officers need indemnification is frankly absurd,” said Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “Because they already have it.”Indemnification, in a legal context, refers to a process by which one party agrees to cover the liability of another party, essentially agreeing to pay for any wrongdoing by the second party.In the case of policing, many state and local governments have laws in which they agree to indemnify police officers for lawsuits. In other cases, police unions obtain indemnification agreements as part of their bargaining.Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a study in 2014 looking at lawsuits against the police in 81 jurisdictions over six years. She found that 99.98 percent of the money paid to plaintiffs in these cases came from local governments or their insurance companies — not from the officers themselves.“Officers virtually never pay anything in settlements or judgments entered against them,” Ms. Schwartz said in an interview.Mr. Trump, as is often the case, has been vague about the specifics of his plan, making it difficult to know whether such a move would be feasible, though experts say that enacting it might require legislation from Congress rather than an executive order.In Nevada on Sunday, Mr. Trump said the government would pay the police “for their costs, for their lawyers.” Earlier this year, he said he would protect states and cities from being sued, a remark that suggested a broad expansion of existing legal protections for police officers accused of violating constitutional rights.Under a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, someone who accuses the police of using excessive force or discriminating against them must not only show that misconduct occurred, but also generally be able to cite a closely similar previous case in which officers were held responsible.Critics say that qualified immunity offers blanket protections that prevent officers from being held accountable. Policing groups say these protections are necessary to keep officers from being so worried about personal liability that they fail to do their jobs.Mr. Trump has long expressed staunch support for qualified immunity for police officers, particularly during his 2020 re-election bid, when the nation was racked with protests after the murder of George Floyd. Several major police unions endorsed him during that campaign.A rally for Mr. Trump in Latrobe, Pa., during his re-election bid in 2020, when protests over George Floyd’s murder made policing a front-and-center political issue. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn 1989, well before he entered the political arena, Mr. Trump bought advertising in New York claiming that concern over civil liberties had hampered the police and led to a rise in crime.In a newspaper ad, he wrote of being young and watching “two young bullies” harass a waitress in a diner. “Two cops rushed in, lifted up the thugs and threw them out the door, warning them never to cause trouble again,” he wrote. In 2017, when Mr. Trump was president, he urged the police not to be “too nice,” telling them not to protect the heads of people suspected of being gang members when putting them into squad cars. Law enforcement authorities across the country criticized those remarks.In 2020, as protests rocked Minneapolis, Mr. Trump called the demonstrators “thugs” on social media and wrote, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was criticized for encouraging violence against protesters. Mr. Trump later said he meant to convey that looting generally led to violence, an interpretation that ignored the phrase’s racist history.As the protests spread across the country, he threatened to send the military to cities and states if he believed their leaders were failing to maintain order.This year, at a gathering of Republicans in California, Mr. Trump said he thought shoplifters should be shot on their way out of stores. “If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said, to which the crowd responded with uproarious applause.Then, after calling for the extrajudicial shootings of petty criminals, Mr. Trump returned to a familiar message.“You know, our law enforcement is great,” he said. “But they’re not allowed to do anything.”Kitty Bennett More

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    Supreme court rejects Chauvin’s appeal of George Floyd murder conviction

    The US supreme court rejected on Monday a conviction appeal for the former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd.The decision affirms Derek Chauvin’s conviction for second-degree murder and sentence of more than 20 years in prison.In October, Chauvin’s legal defense requested the highest court in their nation take up their client’s case, arguing he was denied a fair trial in 2021 because of prejudice in the pretrial due to publicity.They also argued juror misconduct, alleging that it was in the jurors’ best interest to find Chauvin guilty to avoid threats of violence from the public.The supreme court did not provide comment on its decision to refuse Chauvin’s appeal.Floyd, who was Black, was killed by police on 25 May 2020, igniting global protests calling for his murderers to be brought to justice and an end to police brutality and racism worldwide.Chauvin, a white officer, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes outside the convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill.A video captured by a bystander showed Floyd’s final moments as he called out for his mother and said, “I can’t breathe,” which became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.Three other former officers involved in Floyd’s murder – J Alexander Kueng, Tou Thao and Thomas Lane – received lesser state and federal sentences.Chauvin is separately appealing his conviction on federal civil rights charges. More

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    FBI broke own rules in January 6 and BLM intelligence search, court finds

    FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when they searched a vast repository of foreign intelligence for information related to the January 6 insurrection and racial justice protests in 2020, according court order released Friday.FBI officials said the thousands of violations, which also include improper searches of donors to a congressional campaign, predated a series of corrective measures that started in the summer of 2021 and continued last year. But the problems could nonetheless complicate FBI and justice department efforts to receive congressional reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program that law enforcement officials say is needed to counter terrorism, espionage and international cybercrime.The violations were detailed in a secret court order issued last year by the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, which has legal oversight of the US government’s spy powers. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence released a heavily redacted version on Friday in what officials said was the interest of transparency.“Today’s disclosures underscore the need for Congress to rein in the FBI’s egregious abuses of this law, including warrantless searches using the names of people who donated to a congressional candidate,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.“These unlawful searches undermine our core constitutional rights and threaten the bedrock of our democracy. It’s clear the FBI can’t be left to police itself.”At issue are improper queries of foreign intelligence information collected under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the government to gather the communications of targeted foreigners outside the US.That program, which is set to expire at the end of the year, creates a database of intelligence that US agencies can search. FBI searches must have a foreign intelligence purpose or be aimed at finding evidence of a crime. But congressional critics of the program have long raised alarm about what they say are unjustified searches of the database for information about Americans, along with more general concerns about surveillance abuses.Such criticism has aligned staunch liberal defenders of civil liberties with supporters of Donald Trump, who have seized on FBI surveillance errors during an investigation into his 2016 campaign. The issue has flared as the Republican-led House has been targeting the FBI, creating a committee to investigate the “weaponization” of government.In repeated episodes disclosed on Friday, the FBI’s own standards were not followed. The April 2022 order, for instances, details how the FBI queried the section 702 repository using the name of someone who was believed to have been at the Capitol during the January 6 6 riot. Officials obtained the information despite it not having any “analytical, investigative or evidentiary purpose”, the order said.The court order also says that an FBI analyst ran 13 queries of people suspected of being involved in the Capitol riot to determine if they had any foreign ties, but the justice department later determined that the searches were not likely to find foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.Other violations occurred when FBI officials in June 2020 ran searches related to more than 100 people arrested in connection with civil unrest and racial justice protests that had occurred in the US over the preceding weeks. The order says the FBI had maintained that the queries were likely to return foreign intelligence, though the reasons given for that assessment are mostly redacted.In addition, the FBI conducted what’s known as a batch query for 19,000 donors to an unnamed congressional campaign. An analyst doing the search cited concern that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but the justice department said only “eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard”.Officials said the case involved a candidate who ran unsuccessfully and is not a sitting member of Congress, and is unrelated to an episode described in March by congressman Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, who accused the FBI of wrongly searching for his name in foreign surveillance data.Senior FBI officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to reporters under ground rules set by the government, attributed the majority of the violations to confusion among the workforce and a lack of common understanding about the querying standards.They said the bureau has made significant changes since then, including mandating training and overhauling its computer system so that FBI officials must now enter a justification for the search in their own words than relying on a drop-down menu with pre-populated options.One of the officials said an internal audit of a representative sample of searches showed an increased compliance rate from 82% before the reforms were implemented to 96% afterward. 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    ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Kimberlé Crenshaw warns against rightwing battle over critical race theory

    ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Kimberlé Crenshaw warns against rightwing battle over critical race theory Exclusive: Author and academic cautions pushback against racial justice education feeds revival of segregationist policiesThe professor who is a leading voice on critical race theory has warned that the rightwing battle against racial justice education not only threatens US democracy, but encourages a revival of segregationist values and policies.‘Cowering to politics’: how AP African American studies became the most controversial course in the USRead moreKimberlé Crenshaw is among top American academics and authors recently stripped from the latest draft of the advanced placement (AP) African American studies course being piloted in US high schools, after Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, led an aggressive backlash against it.The Columbia University and UCLA law professor and co-founder of the African American Policy Forum thinktank, believes that the escalations against racial history teaching, in Florida and elsewhere represent “the tip of the iceberg” of rightwing efforts to retract the progress since the civil rights era and push America towards authoritarianism.“Are [schools] on the side of the neo-segregationist faction? Or are [they] going to stick with the commitments that we’ve all celebrated for the last 50, 60 years?” Crenshaw asked, referring to headway made on equal opportunities since the 1960s.“The College Board fiasco, I think, is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of interests that have to make this decision,” she said.The College Board, the organization that administers college readiness exams and AP courses for high schoolers to earn college credits, denied bending to political pressure amid accusations that the curriculum has been watered down.But in what many viewed as a response to DeSantis’s ban, the work of Crenshaw and other high-profile progressive Black figures, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, were relegated from required reading to “optional” within the course.Several topics, including intersectionality, queer studies and the Black Lives Matters movement, were downgraded. The new version of the course now suggests Black conservatism as a research project idea.DeSantis, who will probably run for president in 2024, claimed the course violated state law and “lacks educational value”.Even apart from outrage at states moving to ban the course outright, if the edited version ends up being the course’s final form when it is set to launch fully in 2024, Crenshaw cautions that states teaching the significantly pared-down version will see its students earning the same credits as those studying the fuller version that includes the kind of contemporary and intersectional material she views as vital.Making such core topics optional “is exactly the same structure of segregation”, she said. “It’s like ‘we’re going to create this so that the anti-woke [camp] will permit states to decide whether they want the segregated version, or whether they want a more fully representative and inclusive version,’” said Crenshaw.Crenshaw is widely known for her activism and scholarship on two essential schools of thought on anti-Black racism. She is a trailblazer in critical race theory, which explores the persistence of systemic racism in US legal institutions, pioneered by law professor Derrick Bell. And she coined the term intersectionality, in 1989, describing how different identities such as race, gender and sexuality cut across each other and overlap.And from the previous draft last fall to the current version of the AP course, the key word “systemic” disappeared entirely and the word “intersectionality” went from several to a lone mention.Crenshaw said that the “frightening” choice in the new AP course to make contemporary lessons optional follows a similar logic to how corporations navigated Jim Crow segregation.Crenshaw noted that Donald Trump and the right’s Make America Great Again (Maga) extremism is directly linked to the College Board’s decision – and further back to strategies used during decades of racial segregation laws that prevailed from post-Reconstruction to the 1960s.“One of the truly, bone-chillingly frightening things about the aspiration to ‘make America great again’ that’s amplified by what’s happening with the College Board is that one of the most sustained features of segregation in the past was the fact that businesses were not only enablers, they facilitated segregation,” she said, driven by the profit motive and the white supremacy movement.“So when businesses and segregation were aligned, it was a chokehold on Black freedom aspirations,” she said.Crenshaw spoke to the Guardian from the sunlit living room of her New York home. A nearby desk that Crenshaw calls the “graveyard” is stacked with commonly banned books – books that Crenshaw herself hands out as part of her Books Unbanned tour, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.She urges a stronger, concerted pushback to this latest manifestation of racist history. “What was brilliant about the civil rights movement is that they really pressured national interests, corporate interests, to break with their policies of simply facilitating segregation in the south,” she said.Crenshaw believes that the College Board development reflects just one part of a continuous strategy from the right to target and disenfranchise minority groups.“It’s called ‘make America great again’. So what is it about this America now that this faction finds wanting?” she asked.“The energy and power structure of the Maga [movement] is really this desire for a time where there isn’t a sense of ‘I have to share this country with people who don’t look like me, [and] what we are born into was never an even playing field,’” she said.So when the “idea of greatness” harks back to the time of racial tyranny, she noted, far-right forces attempt to forgo the teaching of said history, so that “future generations have no tools, no exposure, no ability to critique the present as a reflection of the past”.Today’s most influential Republicans have made inclusive education a target and taken the supreme court further to the right, undermining other democratic institutions, as well as playing down the 6 January 2021 insurrection where extremist Trump supporters tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump and some carried Confederate flags inside the US Capitol after breaking in.In Crenshaw’s view, this is all with the goal of transforming the “decades-long journey towards greater social justice” into what the right admonishes as “wokeness” – which is in fact the encouraging of racial justice and equity.“Wokeness has become the oppression, not the centuries of enslavement and genocide, and imperialism that has shaped the lives of people of color, in ways that continue into the present,” said Crenshaw.Crenshaw traces the aggressive disinformation campaigns about critical race theory to a September 2020 executive order passed by then president Donald Trump that restricted federal agencies and contractors from providing diversity and equity training.“When that happened it was a five star alarm for me. Because if this can happen with the stroke of a pen, it means that our entire infrastructure that we’ve built since Brown [v Board] is weakened,” said Crenshaw, noting the landmark supreme court case that prohibited segregation in US public schools, adding that several elite universities rushed to comply with Trump’s mandate.Soon after, she became acutely aware that Trump and activist Republicans were twisting the term critical race theory and critiquing Black history taught in schools, or slamming research such as the New York Times’ 1619 project in order to spread moral panic.“The ban on anti-racism is so profound, that even the story of a kindergarten or first grade integrating an all-white school runs counter to [the new laws],” said Crenshaw, referring to the memoir of activist Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate an elementary school in the American south in 1960.“So, white kids’ feelings are more important than black kids’ reality.”She continued: “They got their marching orders and into the school boards they went, and into the legislatures they went.”She warned: “If parents can be convinced that there is a wrong happening in public schools, they might be convinced to agree to the dismantling of public education across the board.”Colleges and universities have faced similar assault, Crenshaw noted, as professors are targeted under state laws.Crenshaw further laments the risks of conservatives’ steady takeover of the supreme court and the dismantling of federal voting rights protection and threat to affirmative action in higher education.“This court stands poised to really gut the entire civil rights infrastructure that was built by blood, sweat and tears,” said Crenshaw.Overall, Crenshaw exhorts Democrats and the media to employ much more vigor and urgency in addressing escalating attacks on US institutions, noting that many news outlets frame “the push towards authoritarianism as a [mere] rebrand”.“It was wishful thinking to believe that once the campaign was over, this was going to go away,” said Crenshaw, referring to the Biden-Harris victory in the 2020 election.But Crenshaw remains buoyed by hope that the next generation can overcome attempts at retrenchment from the far right: “This is the next generation’s lap to run. And we’ve got to hand them a baton that they can carry.”In the meantime, Crenshaw says there must be more acknowledgment of what’s at stake.“At some point, there has to be a recognition that we’re fighting for the soul of the country,” she said.TopicsUS politicsUS educationToni MorrisonRon DeSantisDonald TrumpThe far rightFloridafeaturesReuse this content More

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    Dining across the divide US special: ‘I read an article he wrote about being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest’

    Dining across the divide US special: ‘I read an article he wrote about being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest’One is centre-right, the other 100% Democrat. Where do they stand on immigration, defunding the police, and closing Guantánamo?Atam, 74, San Francisco, CaliforniaOccupation Retired nuclear engineerVoting record 100% Democrat for the past 40 yearsAmuse bouche Atam is a lifetime member of both the Sierra Club (a conservation organization) and the American Nuclear SocietyDon, 38, the Bay Area, California, and Reno, NevadaOccupation Freelance journalist and urban studies studentVoting record Mostly centre-right. Was Republican, but now identifies as independentAmuse bouche Voted for Trump in 2020 because he didn’t want him to win – “I have a tendency to vote for the loser, so I hoped that would help”For startersAtam My first impression was that he was 30 minutes late and didn’t say sorry. But I was happy waiting at the restaurant; my daughter-in-law had been the pastry chef there.Don By default, I like to listen to what people have to say. He talked about his family and how he liked to travel. We talked about Reno, where I’m from, and how he used to go there to ski.Atam I had two starters: a crab salad and some trout. Most of the food on the menu I try to avoid for health reasons.Don I had crab salad and fried chicken.The big beefAtam We talked about Guantánamo Bay. He thinks it should remain open and that the detainees shouldn’t be put on trial. He believes that if one of them gets released, they’ll go back and start another war against us.Don These people are enemy combatants. I don’t believe they are due a trial because of their special criminal status. Atam said everyone should be allowed a trial regardless of status.Atam Don’t we have a system where we presume innocence until proven guilty? I said we’re causing more harm in the world than good by holding people without trial. There were 750 detainees and there are 30 or 40 left and we’re spending half a billion a year to hold them.Don He was very knowledgable on the numbers, but I stuck to my position. These are wartime combatants and it’s not a normal situation.Atam There didn’t appear to be any facts behind his position; it seemed to be all based on feeling.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSharing plateAtam A country needs immigrants from all different backgrounds – that’s what’s given the US its strength.Don Immigration is a good thing when it’s done correctly. But our southern border is porous and broken; we need to stop the influx of people from South and Central America. We need more immigration judges and personnel to track those who come across. People from other countries must wait in line.Atam It’s partly our policies in Central America that have given us the drug lords and dictatorships that people are fleeing from. We should be more open to those leaving. There’s also a huge shortage of workers in our country.For aftersAtam I looked Don up before we met, and read an article he wrote about being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest. I wanted to know more about it and understand how it had affected him. I went to three protests myself. One was in my neighbourhood, which I will say is the whitest neighbourhood in San Francisco, and there was not a single Black person in the protest. The message from that was that all of society had woken up and realised something was wrong.Don I was covering a BLM protest for a local news outlet and it turned violent. A pair of hooligans who were ransacking Reno city hall beat me up for filming them. I understood why they were protesting, but I didn’t think it was necessary for them to turn to violence. The incident softened me to both the protesters and the police. It also made me aware of the fact that I’m Black in America. Atam understood why I didn’t support the Defund the Police movement.Atam To me, Defund the Police means we need to spend more money on the root causes of crime rather than putting more people with guns on the street. San Francisco has more than 20 police for every 10,000 people and crime is still high.Don The intentions behind Defund the Police are good, but the follow-through is not. I get what they are trying to do – fund services that help minority communities – but I’m not in favour. It won’t work, it’s too extreme.TakeawaysAtam It was a very civil conversation, but I don’t think we clicked. He suggested we share contact details, but I don’t think we’ll be meeting up.Don We got on very well. We didn’t find common ground, but I got an understanding of where he was coming from on a few issues.Additional reporting: Kitty Drake Atam and Don ate at Nopa in San Francisco.Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take partTopicsLife and styleDining across the divide US specialSocial trendsUS politicsUS policingBlack Lives Matter movementUS immigrationfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Ron DeSantis’ academic restrictions show he hopes to change history by censoring it | Francine Prose

    Ron DeSantis’ academic restrictions show he hopes to change history by censoring itFrancine ProseFlorida’s Stop Woke Act and ban on African American studies will only deprive students of the right to think and learn For some time now, conservative groups have pressured libraries and classrooms to remove certain “controversial” books from their shelves and their syllabi. These are texts that tell uncomfortable or unpopular truths about our nation’s origins, including inequality, race, history, gender, sexuality, power and class – a range of subjects that a small but vocal group of Americans would prefer to ignore or deny.Ron DeSantis bans African American studies class from Florida high schoolsRead moreThese efforts achieved one of their most notable successes last April when the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Stop Woke Act, which prohibits in-school discussions about racism, oppression, LBGTQ+ issues and economic inequity. Books that have not been officially vetted and approved must be hidden or covered, lest teachers unknowingly break an ill-defined law against distributing pornography – a felony.On 1 February, these pernicious restrictions on academic freedom spread beyond Florida, when the College Board announced its decision to severely restrict what can and cannot be taught in the newly created advanced placement class in African American studies. Cut from the curriculum (or in some cases made optional) was any discussion of Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, police brutality, queer Black life and the Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. Writers who have been removed from the reading list include bell hooks, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates.These decisions are alarming and disturbing on so many levels that it’s hard to decide which aspect is the most damaging and insidious. At risk are our foundational principles of free speech, our conviction that educators – and not politicians – should be writing up our lesson plans and deciding what transpires in our classrooms, our belief that students can (and need to) consider complicated issues.As someone who has taught for decades, I can hardly imagine abruptly cutting off class discussions that have veered (as they inevitably will) into these now forbidden areas. Must we fear that our students will report us as insurrectionists and felons for having mentioned the grotesque racial disparities in our prison populations? I believe that education not only involves the transmission of hard information but also helps students to think for themselves, to weigh opposing arguments and to make informed decisions. How can these goals be accomplished when we are being told to (quite literally) whitewash our nation’s history, to deny that we are walking on appropriated land in a country built by kidnapped and enslaved people, when we are being encouraged to lie about the very ground beneath our feet?Students aren’t as stupid as the Florida legislature seems to think, and by adopting these new regulations, we are only encouraging them to distrust their teachers and the system that so blatantly misrepresents the realities they so clearly observe around them.In the past, authoritarianism – and the indoctrination that sustains it – has used educational systems to further its agenda. We can recall images of first-graders wearing little red kerchiefs and saluting the eastern bloc dictators, of students let out of class to welcome the Führer to town. We know that democracy depends on the free and open exchange of ideas, on conversations that begin early in the life of its citizens – and that fascism thrives when only one point of view is permitted. DeSantis’s rulings, and the campaigns that have engendered them, are inherently anti-democratic.We cannot change history by censoring it. We cannot pretend that we were never a slave-holding society, that racism ceased to exist when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. We cannot erase the past, or influence a young person’s gender and sexuality by removing a book from the library. Students are not political pawns or ideologues-in-training. They are our future and it’s frightening to imagine a future populated by citizens who were forbidden to argue and debate, to hear about a historical event from multiple perspectives and to learn to make the critical judgments and necessary distinctions that will help them navigate our increasingly complex and challenging world.It’s been noted that Ron DeSantis graduated with a degree in history from Yale, where he was presumably encouraged to engage in – and to learn from – the open debates that he is now attempting to stifle. Presumably, too, he learned what a good education is, what it means to be taught to think – and that is precisely what he is denying students who are less privileged than he and his Yale classmates.It’s a political decision designed to win over the Trump supporters that the governor will need in his bid for the presidency – that is, white working-class Americans who don’t understand that their own children are also being denied the education that will help them overcome the class divisions that perpetuate our economic inequality. Private school students will still be able to study history in depth, to learn to reason, to process and assess the accuracy of what they are being told. It’s the public school kids who will be funneled into the low-paying jobs, the dim futures for which their schooling has (not accidentally) prepared them.‘We’ve moved backwards’: US librarians face unprecedented attacks amid rightwing book bansRead moreUltimately, what’s most troubling about the new restrictions and proscriptions is that historical facts are being recast as snowflake propaganda. The truth is being distorted or omitted at a moment when we, as a nation, have never so desperately needed to maintain our grip on reality.Without being taught to distinguish truth from fiction, without being asked to think, without learning how this country evolved – a history not just of heroism and noble principles but of theft, brutality and crime – our students will be easy prey to every conspiracy theory that comes along. They will find it far more difficult to imagine and implement the important ways in which we hope to become a more equitable, less racist – and better educated – society.
    Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
    TopicsLibrariesUS educationUS politicsRace in educationRaceBlack Lives Matter movementcommentReuse this content More

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    The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas review – why it pays to talk in a polarised world

    The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas review – why it pays to talk in a polarised world The US journalist and TV pundit has written an engaging and provocative study of the dangers of political purityIt is a mark of the problem that The Persuaders seeks to describe that I had to force myself to sit down and read it. Anand Giridharadas, well known in the US as a journalist and TV political pundit, has written a thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already – namely, the feedback loops, filter bubbles and interference of Russian bot farms that have led to extreme polarisation in the US and beyond. Giridharadas describes this state of affairs as “Americans’ growing culture of mutual dismissal”, leading to a mass “writing-off from a distance” and the inability of anyone to change their minds about anything. In overview, it looks like a book borne of Twitter discourse, and who needs that?As it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read.Which is not to say it didn’t annoy me. That’s the point, I suppose. The clever thing about Giridharadas’s approach is that while dissecting the prejudices of others, he flushes out your own kneejerk reactions, a dynamic from which the author himself isn’t spared. In the chapter on the Women’s March, the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, one of the organisers, describes how alienated she was by the movement’s roots in “white feminism”. There are readers who, presented with other names from the Women’s March leadership team, will have an equally forceful recoil, thanks to their perceived links with antisemitic figures.The concern around white feminism is given many pages of thoughtful discussion. The latter worry, triggered by support among some march organisers for Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, is given half a sentence. One requires understanding; the other is largely dismissed. The effect of this, deliberately or otherwise, is to underscore the need for everyone to consider the alternative view. Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: “Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.”Loretta Ross, a pioneering activist and theorist in Black radical feminist tradition, puts it this way: “I think the 90-percenters spend too much time trying to turn people into 100-percenters, which is totally unnecessary.” She means those ostensibly on the same side who say: “If you’re not working on my issue from my angle, then you’re erasing my issue. If you’re championing economic justice, you’re problematic for minimising race. If you’re championing racial justice, you don’t post enough about the ills of capitalism. If you’re focused on long-term climate change, you’re neglecting the here-and-now needs of poor communities.” These fights only hurt the progressive cause. It’s OK to call people out, but understand what you’re reaching for, she says. “You can’t change other people. You can’t even change the person you’re married to. You can help people. You can expose people to different information and help them learn – if you do so with love.”What this means in some contexts, argues Giridharadas, is shelving what feels good for what actually works. One chapter studies a fascinating programme trying to stop rapists reoffending by educating them on feminism, which requires a huge emotional effort on the part of the female educators to overcome what Ross calls “the justified instinct to focus on those hurt by the problem, not those perpetrating it”. Who wants to put resources into engaging with a rapist at the expense of funding his victims? But if it’s the most effective way to reduce rape, it’s at least worth considering.The most skippable stretch of the book is a long, Wikipediaesque biography of Ocasio-Cortez, all well-rehearsed information by this point. And there are occasional, inadvertently funny passages. An account of a consciousness-raising group of white people trying to become better educated about their own race privilege contains a testy back and forth over whether the description “recovering racist” implies that they are, in fact, racist, that is pure Monty Python.By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning. Shenker-Osorio points out that when people get frightened, they skew right; when they feel compassion and common cause with their fellow humans, they skew left. The left has often made the mistake of tailgating on the right’s framing of a discussion, piping up “We too are tough on law and order!” rather than calling out the right’s way of sowing disagreement between groups. “What is it about winning that is distasteful to you?” she says drily to a campaigner fixated on small differentials in language. She also counsels the left to cheer up. “Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to ‘Boy, have I got a problem for you!’” – proven to be a big downer at the polls. “You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.”Exacerbated by new technology, these are, nonetheless, very old problems. As Saul Bellow put it in The Adventures of Augie March: “That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real.” This enjoyable, helpful read may, paradoxically, suspend our solipsism for long enough to better prosecute that recruitment.TopicsPolitics booksThe ObserverBlack Lives Matter movementFeminismAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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    ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

    Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
    Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More