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Why I’m Cheering Tuesday’s Results
I am overjoyed by the results of the midterm election so far, not just because there was no overwhelming Republican wave, but also because America rejected, generally speaking, the path to its own demise.It rejected punditry.The election underscored how meaningless and misleading so much of the prognosticating on competitive races has become. So much of it is just chatter, people guessing, people spinning data into hard facts.Too many pundits want to be the smart one who sees something in the numbers that others miss. They want to be diviners, but end up being deliverers of misinformation. And their misdirection is infectious. Group-think sets in as pundits begin to absorb and repeat what they’ve heard from other pundits. For the public, the preponderance of sources and repetition of the same tired points lends credence to assumptions that are baseless.We were led to believe that momentum had shifted decidedly toward Republicans in the last few weeks. It hadn’t. There was no Red Wave. There were no massive gains for Republicans. We are still waiting to see if they will take control of the House, and the Senate may stay in Democratic hands.We were led to believe that Hispanics were defecting from Democrats in shocking numbers. The truth appears to have been more nuanced. According to exit polls, which we always have to take with a grain of salt, the slippage may have been about 5 percent in some parts of the country, but some candidates (like Beto O’Rourke in Texas) held on to Hispanics at the same rate President Biden did in 2020, or even increased that level of support (like Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada).We were led to believe that Black men were also drifting away from the Democrats. That’s not entirely true. Look at Georgia, where the great fear was that Black men wouldn’t vote for Stacey Abrams: A slightly higher percentage voted for her in this election in that state than voted for Biden in 2020, according to exit polls.We were told that Biden and the Democrats had made a huge mistake by focusing so much attention on abortion and a fragile democracy at the expense of crime and the economy. That, too, was wrong. Abortion was a tremendously animating issue in this election, and voters rebuffed many prominent election deniers in the night’s biggest, most competitive races.In fact, you could say that voters rebuffed Trumpism itself — and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. It may be too optimistic to say the fever broke, but Tuesday night, we saw enough people in enough states shake it off, allowing us to imagine a day when Trump no longer dominates the Republican Party.That day may come soon. Ron DeSantis rode his horrendous “anti-woke” campaign to a solid victory in Florida, and, sensing Trump’s weakness, will most likely be emboldened in his efforts to challenge him in 2024. To be clear, DeSantis is no improvement from Trump. In many ways, he could be worse. But I also doubt that he can scale the theatrical intolerance he is practicing in Florida up into a national campaign capable of beating the Democrats.DeSantis is still fighting a battle against the 2020 summer of protests. That will feel incredibly stale and out of touch by 2024. His fame is rooted in bullying schoolteachers, students and librarians. And although I never underestimate the cynicism of many voters, Trump has a sinister charisma that DeSantis lacks. The camera hates DeSantis. I don’t believe he can exert the galvanizing effect that Trump could. And finally, as a person who strongly believes that Black people have a real chance to consolidate political power in Southern states and dramatically alter the political landscape, it was incredibly encouraging to see so many Black candidates come so close to victory (like Cheri Beasley in North Carolina) or even win (like Wes Moore in Maryland).The Black people in these states are feeling their power, and they are applying pressure at the polls. Do I believe Beasley — and other Black Democrats like Stacey Abrams — should have won this time? Yes. But am I also encouraged by what their narrow losses portend for the future? Absolutely.Black people keep moving from cities in the North and West back to the South. Eventually, in spite of voter suppression efforts, the hurdle will be cleared. There will be more candidates like Wes Moore, the first Black governor of his state in the South, and that is where the truly transformative change will begin.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More
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Black, Christian and Transcending the Political Binary
Justin Giboney is a lawyer and political strategist in Atlanta who grew up in the Black church. He says his theological foundation came from his grandfather, who was a bishop in a Black Pentecostal denomination. Giboney is also the president and a co-founder of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization meant to represent people of faith who do not fit neatly into either political party.I’ve written before about how I’m intrigued by people and movements that defy our prescribed ideological categories. The AND Campaign, which is based in Atlanta and has 15 chapters across the United States, is one of those. Led almost entirely by young professionals, artists, pastors and community leaders of color, the group advocates voting rights and police reform, leads what it calls a “whole life project” dedicated to reducing abortion and supporting mothers, endorses a “livable wage” and champions other issues that break left and right, in turn.As we approach the midterms, Giboney graciously agreed to speak with me about the state of our politics from the perspective of a person of faith who is also a person of color — what it’s like to embrace traditional Christian theology while also opposing the political stances of many white evangelicals, and what it’s like to be committed to social justice in ways that differ from those of many secular progressives. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.How do voices of faith that are also voices of color fit into the American political conversation now? Do you feel represented?I don’t feel fully represented. In part, that’s because the culture war has set a framework in which progressivism and conservatism, as defined in white majority spaces, are billed as the only two legitimate options. That framework has been so effective that a lot of people can’t even discuss politics outside of this “progressive versus conservative” framework.But that’s not, historically speaking, how many Black Christians have engaged. Our view of social justice is often different than the secular progressive view. It’s not about individual expression. It’s about liberation through civil rights, equity, full citizenship and making sure that we have an impartial system. That’s not to say there’s no overlap. But, on the whole, the roots of the secular progressive view are in your 1970s counterculture movement, whereas ours come from an Exodus motif of liberation.There’s no better example than Georgia’s senatorial race.You have Herschel Walker, who I think is completely missing the social justice component found in the Black church.And then Raphael Warnock, who has endorsed the secular progressive kind-of -donor-class view of social issues. These values deal primarily with expressive individualism, such as far-left positions regarding gender identity, abortion and pushback on parental consent. Jonathan Haidt has described them as WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) values. He says, “they hold that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs and preferences” that should be supported unless they directly hurt others. These cultures largely focus on an ethic of autonomy. This is counter to an ethic of community.In my opinion, Warnock is far more qualified than Walker. But neither of them truly represents the constituency in the way we would hope.When I was running campaigns, it became very clear to me that there was this false dichotomy in politics. If you cared about social justice, you went all the way to the left. And if you were a Christian, that meant you left some of your convictions aside.If you cared about what we would say is “moral order,” then you would go all the way to the right. And we know that when you look at the Moral Majority and things like that, compassion just was not there.Looking at the Black church historically, it touched on both those things, but very differently. Why are social justice and moral order separate? Why is our conception of love and truth completely separate? Because when I look in the Gospels, they’re not separate. They’re interdependent. They’re not mutually exclusive.As parties become more polarized, are we leaving behind voices of color?I think voices of color are being left behind. The two extremes on both sides — devoted conservatives and progressive activists — are like 6 percent and 8 percent of the population, but they’re both white and wealthy. And they control the dialogue.On the Democratic side, you could say, “We have all these conversations about inclusion and representation,” but Democrats don’t just welcome all Black people with open arms. You have to be willing to fit into this secular, progressive mold.While people like to use civil rights and Black church symbolism and rhetoric, they don’t want the faith and the precepts that are attached to it. So I think it’s up to us to kind of step up and say: “No, here we are. We are a force to be reckoned with.”What would it look like for parties to do a better job of including people of faith who are people of color? What would you say to white conservatives and white liberals?On the right, you have to stop harboring and pandering to racists. I think there’s a group in the Republican Party — you saw this in the Trump campaign, you saw this with what Senator Tuberville recently said — who feel like they need these votes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like the Southern strategy has ever completely died.You cannot continue to use race to motivate people who are bigoted. And when you don’t speak up against that, racism will remain in your party.On the left, I think it’s about not demanding ideological purity. As long as everyone has to fit these donor class values, then you’re not going to let in people who have nuanced views. You’re only going to allow people to rise up to high office and party leadership that already fit what you want. Which kind of makes the representation and inclusion rhetoric disingenuous, right? True pluralism and true inclusion are more than just accepting different flavors of progressivism.When you really appreciate Black people, that means you don’t just tolerate the Black people who say exactly what you would have them say on social issues or on any other issue. You can use identity politics to say, “Here, that’s your representation.” But that’s not my representation if that person had to jump through your hoops and contort herself to fit a framework that doesn’t fit her community.Do you feel like Black people of faith are politically homeless today?I absolutely do. I mean, you look at somebody like Fannie Lou Hamer or William Augustus Jones. These are activists who fought hard, but because of their beliefs on some social issues, they wouldn’t be accepted into leadership or given exposure within the Democratic Party today. Fannie Lou Hamer was pro-life and William Augustus Jones promoted a Christian sexual ethic and family values in general. These are civil rights legends who in today’s iteration of the party would not be accepted based on their more moderate or traditional values on social issues.Do you understand yourself to be a moderate?We’re not trying to find some squishy middle. We’re just not going to say we’re always with progressives or always with conservatives. If that makes me a moderate, because I’m not always on one side, then so be it. But I’m going to evaluate issues based on my own framework and beliefs.The conservative and progressive approaches are not the only way to approach politics. Everything that doesn’t fit isn’t illegitimate. Once we realize those aren’t the only two approaches, then we open up space for people of color, people of faith and others who are politically homeless to really have a voice and help heal something that’s been broken and won’t be fixed by either of those two sides.What is your hope for politics?My biggest hope is that people of faith who want to engage in politics faithfully would find the AND Campaign to be a place where they can find resources to do that and have on-ramps to getting engaged in that way. And that we would — even though we’re coming from this Black church context — be able to bring the church together, to work together and put partisanship aside.And lastly, that we would be able to promote a sort of civic pluralism. To say: “Hey, it’s not just about Christians winning. It’s about human flourishing in general.” How can we work with others while maintaining our convictions? How can we work with others to do democracy better?Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.” More
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As Republicans Campaign on Crime, Racism Is a New Battlefront
As Republicans seize on crime as one of their leading issues in the final weeks of the midterm elections, they have deployed a series of attack lines, terms and imagery that have injected race into contests across the country.In states as disparate as Wisconsin and New Mexico, ads have labeled a Black candidate as “different” and “dangerous” and darkened a white man’s hands as they portrayed him as a criminal.Nowhere have these tactics risen to overtake the debate in a major campaign, but a survey of competitive contests, particularly those involving Black candidates, shows they are so widespread as to have become an important weapon in the 2022 Republican arsenal.In Wisconsin, where Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, is the Democratic nominee for Senate, a National Republican Senatorial Committee ad targeting him ends by juxtaposing his face with those of three Democratic House members, all of them women of color, and the words “different” and “dangerous.”In a mailer sent to several state House districts in New Mexico, the state Republican Party darkened the hands of a barber shown giving a white child a haircut, next to the question, “Do you want a sex offender cutting your child’s hair?”And in North Carolina, an ad against Cheri Beasley, the Democratic candidate for Senate, who is Black, features the anguished brother of a white state trooper killed a quarter-century ago by a Black man whom Ms. Beasley, then a public defender, represented in court. The brother incredulously says that Ms. Beasley, pleading for the killer’s life, said “he was actually a good person.”Appeals to white fears and resentments are an old strategy in American elections, etched into the country’s political consciousness, with ads like George Bush’s ad using the Black convict Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in 1988, and Jesse Helms’s 1990 commercial showing a white man’s hands to denounce his Black opponent’s support for “quotas.”If the intervening decades saw such tactics become harder to defend, the rise of Donald J. Trump shattered taboos, as he spoke of “rapist” immigrants and “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. But while Republicans quietly stood by advertising that Democrats called racist in 2018, this year, they have responded with defiance, saying they see nothing untoward in their imagery and nothing to apologize for.“This is stupid, but not surprising,” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Republican Senatorial Committee, whose ads in North Carolina and Wisconsin have prompted accusations of racism. “We’re using their own words and their own records. If they don’t like it, they should invent a time machine, go back in time and not embrace dumb-ass ideas that voters are rejecting.”Amid pandemic-era crime increases, legitimate policy differences have emerged between the two parties over gun violence, easing access to bail and funding police budgets.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Florida Governor’s Debate: Gov. Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist, his Democratic challenger, had a rowdy exchange on Oct. 24. Here are the main takeaways from their debate.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.Last Dance?: As she races to raise money to hand on to her embattled House majority, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in no mood to contemplate a Democratic defeat, much less her legacy.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.But some of the Republican arguments could scarcely be called serious policy critiques.This month, a Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, said Democrats favored reparations “for the people that do the crime,” suggesting the movement to compensate the descendants of slavery was about paying criminals. And Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, made explicit reference to “replacement theory,” the racist notion that nonwhite, undocumented immigrants are “replacing” white Americans, saying, “Joe Biden’s five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you.”Such language, as well as ads portraying chaos by depicting Black rioters and Hispanic immigrants illegally racing across the border, have prompted Democrats and their allies to accuse Republicans of resorting to racist fear tactics.“I think that white people should be speaking out. I think that Black people should be speaking out,” said Chris Larson, a Democratic state senator in Wisconsin who is white and has denounced Republican ads against Mr. Barnes. “I think that all people should be speaking out when there is vile racism at work.”When former President Donald J. Trump rallied for Representative Ted Budd in Wilmington, N.C., last month, he made a joke about “the N-word,” saying it meant “nuclear.”Jonathan Ernst/ReutersDemocrats themselves are dealing with intraparty racial strife in Los Angeles caused by a leaked recording in which Latino leaders are heard using racist terms and disparaging words toward their Black constituents.But it is Republicans’ nationwide focus on crime that is fueling many of the attacks that Democrats say cross a line into racism.The conservative group Club for Growth Action, backed by the billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Diane Hendricks and Jeff Yass, pointed with pride to the crime ads it has run against Ms. Beasley. “Democrats across the country are getting called out for their soft-on-crime policies,” said the group’s president, former Representative David McIntosh. “Now that their poor decisions have caught up with them, they’re relying on the liberal media to call criticisms of their politically inconvenient record racist, and it won’t work.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The 2022 midterms include the most diverse slate of Republican congressional candidates ever, competing against Democratic candidates who would add to the House’s representatives of color and improve on the Senate’s lack of diversity. But it is also the first cycle since Mr. Trump’s presidency, when he set a sharply different tone for his party on race.It was at a rally with Mr. Trump in Arizona this month that Mr. Tuberville and Ms. Greene made their incendiary comments. At another rally in Wilmington, N.C., late last month with a Senate Republican candidate, Representative Ted Budd, Mr. Trump told the audience that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had mentioned “the N-word. You know what the N-word is?” When the audience hooted, he corrected them, “No, no, no, it’s the nuclear word.”Representative Alma Adams, Democrat of North Carolina, who is Black, said, “Donald Trump is fueling this fire.”Still, a rise in violence recently has given openings to both parties.Cheri Beasley, a Democratic candidate for Senate in North Carolina, addressed supporters and patrons during a campaign stop in Charlotte last month.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesIn North Florida, a flier distributed by a Democratic group depicts the face of a Black Republican, Corey Simon, who is challenging a white state senator, on what Republicans have called a shooting target and Democrats call a school easel, with bullets shown strewn underneath. The message was about gun control and school shootings, staples of Democratic campaigns, and identical mailers targeted two other Republican candidates, who are white and Latino.Republicans say their attacks are capturing voters’ anxieties, not feeding them. Defending Mr. Tuberville, a former football coach at Auburn University, Byron Donalds of Florida said crime had become a leading issue because of “soft-on-crime policies and progressive prosecutors in liberal cities.” Mr. Donalds, one of two Black Republicans in the House, added, “As a coach and mentor to countless Black men, Tommy Tuberville has done more to advance Black lives than most people, especially in the Democratic Party.”Ms. Greene and Mr. Tuberville did not respond to requests for comment.Then there is the Republican mailer in Wisconsin that clearly darkened the face of Mr. Barnes.“If you can’t hear it when they pick up the bullhorn that used to be a dog whistle, you can see it with your own eyes,” said Mr. Larson, the Wisconsin state senator.The darkening of white hands in a stock photo of a barber on a Republican mailer in New Mexico prompted outrage there. The New Mexico Republican Party said that Democrats were trying to divert attention from their record on crime. A Republican leader in the state House of Representatives, Rod Montoya, told The Albuquerque Journal that the hands were darkened to make the fliers “gloomy.”Some liberal groups do seem intent on discerning racism in any message on crime. After Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who is white, ran an ad opening with a clip of Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, who is Black, calling for defunding the police, Iowa Democrats called it racist because Ms. Reynolds’s Democratic challenger, Deidre DeJear, is also Black, and, as she has said, bears a resemblance to Ms. Bush.Progressive groups say their concern is merited.“Crime in America has always, at least in modern times, been racially charged,” said Christopher Scott, chief political officer at the liberal group Democracy for America. “The ads aren’t getting to policy points. They are images playing on their base’s fears.”But the policy differences between the two parties are real. Democrats have pushed for cashless bail, saying the current system that requires money to free a defendant before trial is unfair to poor people. Republicans say cash bail is meant to get criminals off the streets. Democrats have expressed solidarity with racial justice protesters and helped bail out some who were arrested after demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd turned destructive. Republicans have said those actions condoned and encouraged lawlessness.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made explicit reference to “replacement theory,” the racist notion that nonwhite, undocumented immigrants are “replacing” white Americans.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesSkin color is beside the point, said Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Mr. Budd’s campaign in North Carolina, as he defended the blitz of crime advertising against Ms. Beasley. One ad toggles between images of white children — victims of brutal crimes — and the face of Ms. Beasley, her expression haughty or bemused.“The images used in the ad match up to the victims of the criminals she went easy on,” Mr. Felts said. “Are you suggesting the ad makers should make up fake victims, or are you suggesting she shouldn’t be held accountable for her judicial and legal record?”In fact, the judicial and legal records portrayed in at least one of the ads have been determined to be distorted, at best. The first version of the Republican Senatorial Committee’s ad, which portrayed child crime victims from different races, was pulled down by North Carolina television stations in June after they agreed that some of the assertions were false. In a later version, the committee made slight word changes to satisfy the channels but added a more overt racial contrast.“All communities are concerned about public safety,” said State Representative Brandon Lofton, a Democratic Black lawmaker whose South Charlotte district is largely white. “There is a way to talk about it that is truthful” and does not cross racial lines, he said.The campaigns themselves have steered clear of charging racism.Dory MacMillan, a spokeswoman for Ms. Beasley, said, “Our race remains a dead heat, despite Congressman Budd and his allies’ spending millions of dollars to distort Cheri’s record of public service.”In Wisconsin, a spokeswoman for Mr. Barnes, Maddy McDaniel, similarly declined to go further than to say that “the G.O.P.’s fear-mongering playbook failed them last cycle, and it will fail again.”Mr. Barnes, for his part, seemed to make playful use of his portrayal in one of the Republican attack ads as “different” during his first debate with Senator Ron Johnson, the two-term incumbent. He was, indeed, different, Mr. Barnes said, “We don’t have enough working-class people in the United States Senate.” More
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Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction
I write frequently about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War not to make predictions or analogies but to show how a previous generation of Americans grappled with their own set of questions about the scope and reach of our Constitution, our government and our democracy.The scholarship on Reconstruction is vast and comprehensive. But my touchstone for thinking about the period continues to be W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” published in 1935 after years of painstaking research, often inhibited by segregation and the racism of Southern institutions of higher education.I return to Du Bois, even as I read more recent work, because he offers a framework that is useful, I think, for analyzing the struggle for democracy in our own time.The central conceit of Du Bois’s landmark study — whose full title is “Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880” — is that the period was a grand struggle between “two theories of the future of America,” rooted in the relationship of American labor to American democracy.“What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?” Du Bois asks. “Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color?” And if not, he continues, “How would property and privilege be protected?”On one side in the conflict over these questions was “an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power”; on the other was an “abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men.”The term “abolition-democracy” began with Du Bois and is worth further exploration.Abolition-democracy, Du Bois writes, was the “liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists” who saw “the danger of slavery to both capital and labor.” Its standard-bearers were abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and radical antislavery politicians like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stephens, and in its eyes, “the only real object” of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery and “it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.”It was also clear, to some within abolition-democracy, that “freedom in order to be free required a minimum of capital in addition to political rights.” In this way, abolition-democracy was an anticipation of social democratic ideology, although few of its proponents, in Du Bois’s view, grasped the full significance of their analysis of the relationship between political freedom, civil rights and economic security.Opposing abolition-democracy, in Du Bois’s telling, were the reactionaries of the former Confederate South who sought to “reestablish slavery by force.” The South, he writes, “opposed Negro education, opposed land and capital for Negroes, and violently and bitterly opposed any political power. It fought every conception inch by inch: no real emancipation, limited civil rights, no Negro schools, no votes for Negroes.”Between these two sides lay Northern industry and capital. It wanted profits and it would join whichever force enabled it to expand its power and reach. Initially, this meant abolition-democracy, as Northern industry feared the return of a South that might threaten its political and economic dominance. It “swung inevitably toward democracy” rather than allow the “continuation of Southern oligarchy,” Du Bois writes.It’s here that we see the contradiction inherent in the alliance between Northern industry and abolition-democracy. The machinery of democracy in the South “put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”This — the extent to which democracy in the South threatened to undermine the imperatives of capital — was simply too much for Northern industry to bear. And so it turned against the abolition-democracy, already faltering as it was in the face of Southern reaction. “Brute force was allowed to use its unchecked power,” Du Bois writes, “to destroy the possibility of democracy in the South, and thereby make the transition from democracy to plutocracy all the easier and more inevitable.”In the end, “it was not race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.” What killed Reconstruction — beyond the ideological limitations of its champions and the vehemence of its opponents — was a “counterrevolution of property,” North and South.Why is this still a useful framework for understanding the United States, close to a century after Du Bois conceived and developed this argument? As a concept, abolition-democracy captures something vital and important: that democratic life cannot flourish as long as it is bound by and shaped around hierarchies of status. The fight for political equality cannot be separated from the fight for equality more broadly.In other words, the reason I keep coming back to “Black Reconstruction” is that Du Bois’s mode of analysis can help us (or, at least, me) look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on what matters most: the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts with one another.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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Kari Ann Lake’s Hijacking of Martin Luther King
Meet Kari Lake. She is the election-denying, antisemite-endorsing former television news anchor who is the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona.She is Donald Trump in lipstick. But she delivers her divisiveness in the calm and measured tones of a person reading the news rather than a man who froths at the mic.She parrots Trump’s disgusting generalizations about immigrants, saying last month: “The media might have a field day with this one, but I’m going to just repeat something President Trump said a long time ago, and it got him in a lot of trouble. They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime, and they are rapists, and that’s who’s coming across our border. That’s a fact.”Like Trump, she refuses to commit to accepting the result of the Arizona election — unless she wins. All she would say last week when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether she would accept the outcome was, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” Well, of course.In the same way that Trump sought to brand Hillary Clinton a racist — calling her in 2016 “a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future” — Lake is telling CNN that her opponent Katie Hobbs is “a twice-convicted racist.”Convicted? If racism were a crime for which one could be convicted, America wouldn’t have enough prisons to hold the guilty, and Lake’s buddy Trump would be the mascot of the cellblock.Now Lake is joining Trump in invoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in self-serving ways. On Martin Luther King Day in 2020, Trump tweeted: “It was exactly three years ago today, January 20, 2017, that I was sworn into office. So appropriate that today is also MLK jr DAY. African-American Unemployment is the LOWEST in the history of our Country, by far. Also, best Poverty, Youth, and Employment numbers, ever. Great!” Trump will always find a way to make things about himself.But Lake one-upped Trump in disrespecting King’s legacy, at a campaign event on Tuesday with the failed Democratic presidential hopeful (and now former Democrat) Tulsi Gabbard.Gabbard said during their exchange that she became a Democrat because she was “inspired” by the “party of Dr. Martin Luther King” and John F. Kennedy, “a party that said we respect your individual freedoms and civil liberties and a government of, by and for the people.” But, she added, “unfortunately that party no longer exists today.”Let’s stop here and start to set the record straight. The Democratic Party is not the party of Dr. King. He was devoted to principles and policies, not parties. In fact, he once said: “I don’t think the Republican Party is a party full of the almighty God, nor is the Democratic Party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either.”He was, however, bound to the idea of equality, fairness and truth, things that are anathema to the modern Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, are fighting for voting rights, which King championed, even as Republicans rush to suppress voting.Gabbard is obscene in her obtuseness, but what else can you expect from her?After Gabbard’s distortions about the Democratic Party of her youth disappearing, Lake chimed in, saying, “I’m a true believer that if M.L.K., Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were alive today, if J.F.K. were alive today, if our founding fathers were alive today, they would be America First Republicans.”Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that the founders worried and wrote endlessly about their fear of demagogues like Trump, whom Lake supports and whose lies she propagates.Let’s set aside the fact that Kennedy railed against core Republican policies that remain relatively unchanged, saying in a 1947 speech that the “Republican policies that brought disaster to the country in the late ’20s are good enough for the Republicans of today” and describing their agenda as “stringent labor laws, which strangle labor’s freedom by restraint” and “tax reductions which benefit the prosperous at the expense of the poor, at a time when the buying power in the upper ranges of income is abnormally high, while the buying power in the lower ranges of income is abnormally low.”Let’s instead focus on what has become a standard tactic for Republicans: co-opting King’s legacy, saying that he would have supported people who now stand for exactly what he opposed.It is a brazen act of blaspheming, an attempted theft of moral authority being conducted in broad daylight. And it’s not new. It has been happening for at least a decade, and writers and researchers have long been writing about it. What is striking to me is not that it happened but the consistency and longevity of the fraud.This is not an extemporaneous error but a concerted, coordinated effort to distract and deceive, to claim the antithesis of their political position as their own political avatar.So I say to Lake and all Republicans invoking King while working against his ideals: Keep Dr. King’s name out of your mouths!The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More
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There Is a Way to Make America Safe for Democracy
Many Americans believe there’s something not quite right about majority rule — something threatening, something dangerous. It just feels wrong.We might be comfortable with decision-making by majorities at our P.T.A. meetings or when deciding on the theme for the next vacation Bible school, but we’re uneasy with the prospect when it comes to our politics. And our political lexicon is stocked with phrases and aphorisms that highlight the danger of majoritarian systems and even rebuke the concept outright.There are the usual warnings about the “tyranny of the majority”; there is the quip, commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, that democracy is “two wolves and a lamb, voting on what to have for lunch”; and there is the oft-heard assertion — and I’ll admit a personal bête noire — that the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” and that democracy would be the ruin of American liberty. We are taught to imagine ourselves as potentially being at the awful mercy of most of our fellow citizens.Our collective suspicion of majority rule rests on the legitimate observation that a majority can be as tyrannical as any despot. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, where it is exercised in a monarchy or in a republic, I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.”Americans take for granted the idea that our counter-majoritarian Constitution — deliberately written to constrain majorities and keep them from acting outright — has, in fact, preserved the rights and liberties of the people against the tyranny of majority rule, and that any greater majoritarianism would threaten that freedom.Well, what if that’s not true? Yes, majorities acting through our representative institutions have been overbearing and yes, the Supreme Court has occasionally protected the rights of vulnerable minorities, as well as those of the people at large. But there have been just as many, if not more, examples of the reverse: of majorities safeguarding the rights of vulnerable minorities and of our counter-majoritarian institutions freeing assorted bullies and bosses to violate them.I’ve written about some of these episodes before (and I’m hardly the only person to have drawn attention to them): how the court gutted both the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution and the laws written to secure the lives of Black Americans, free and freed, from discrimination, violence and exploitation.If allowed to stand in full, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — passed by only the third U.S. Congress to have Black members, who were elected in some of the first truly free elections in the South — would have outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like railroads, steamboats, hotels and theaters and prohibited jury exclusion on the basis of race. But the court, in an 1883 opinion, decided that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals.The advent of Jim Crow, similarly, had less to do in the beginning with a nefarious majority of voters rushing to the polls to subjugate their Black neighbors than with a long campaign of violence meant to neutralize Black voters and intimidate their white allies. The men who pioneered Jim Crow in Mississippi, for example, were by no means a majority, nor did they represent one in a state where a large part of the public was Black. As the historian C. Vann Woodward summarized it in “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” “In spite of the ultimate success of disfranchisement, the movement met with stout resistance and succeeded in some states by narrow margins or the use of fraud.”There was, however, a majority vote to protect the rights of voters in the South. But that vote — the vote to pass the 1890 Federal Elections Bill, which would have empowered the national government to supervise elections in the former Confederate states — failed to overcome a Senate filibuster.We cannot know how American history would have unfolded in the absence of our counter-majoritarian institutions. But the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead.It is an insight we can apply to the present. It’s not the national majority that threatens the right to vote or the right to bodily autonomy or that wants to strip transgender Americans of their right to exist in civil society (on that last point, 64 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, support laws or policies that would “protect transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces”). If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Even the legislative victories most Americans rightfully admire — like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — were possible only with a supermajority of lawmakers assembled in the wake of a presidential assassination.If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it.Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation.If majoritarian democracy, even at its most shackled, is a better safeguard against tyranny and abuse than our minoritarian institutions, then imagine how we might fare if we let majoritarian democracy actually take root in this country. The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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En Los Ángeles, la política es más compleja que el escándalo racista
El audio filtrado de líderes latinos que usan un lenguaje racista también expuso su ambición de acumular más poder. Sin embargo, en el distrito más latino de la ciudad, han apoyado a candidatos negros.LOS ÁNGELES — Aunque en algún momento llegó a ser un sinónimo de la cultura negra, el sur de Los Ángeles ha experimentado un cambio demográfico dramático.Ahora hay misas católicas en español en el teatro donde Duke Ellington solía presentarse. En los pasillos de la escuela secundaria Thomas Jefferson, cuyos famosos exalumnos negros incluyen a Alvin Ailey y Dexter Gordon, aproximadamente nueve de cada 10 estudiantes son hispanos. En la histórica Central Avenue, la música ranchera resuena en las tiendas de comestibles.Pero en el Noveno Distrito de la ciudad, que abarca el tramo de Los Ángeles que alguna vez se conoció como South Central, hay un elemento que no ha cambiado: los votantes han elegido candidatos negros para integrar el Concejo Municipal durante casi seis décadas, incluido su actual concejal, Curren Price.En una grabación filtrada que ha trastornado la escena política de Los Ángeles este mes, se escuchó a cuatro líderes latinos discutiendo sobre cómo rediseñar los distritos políticos para su beneficio, usando términos racistas y palabras despectivas que fueron ampliamente condenadas. El audio también expuso las frustraciones de que no haya más latinos en cargos electos, en un momento en que representan la mitad de la población de la ciudad.Décadas de acuerdos y decisiones políticas han dado como resultado la composición actual del Concejo Municipal, donde los líderes blancos y negros ocupan más escaños de lo que podrían sugerir los datos demográficos. La divulgación de la grabación también ha abierto un debate sobre cuánto importan las políticas de bloques raciales de generaciones anteriores.La participación electoral en el Noveno Distrito es baja y algunos residentes dijeron que prestan poca atención a la política de la ciudad, a pesar de sus preocupaciones cotidianas por los delitos y la falta de vivienda. Mientras llevaba a casa a su hijo de 8 años que había salido de la escuela en el sur de Los Ángeles, María Robles, de 30 años, se preguntaba qué harán los políticos locales para resolver los problemas.“No voto, simplemente no lo hago”, dijo. “No creo que ningún político esté representando a los latinos. No nos defienden”.Sin embargo, en los círculos políticos de la ciudad, la brecha entre la población latina y su nivel de influencia ha sido un viejo problema. En ninguna parte es más evidente que en el Noveno Distrito, donde el 80 por ciento de los residentes son latinos.“La gente se siente incómoda hablando de esto, pero los latinos en Los Ángeles están subrepresentados”, dijo Fernando Guerra, director del Centro para el Estudio de Los Ángeles en la Universidad Loyola Marymount. Guerra realiza encuestas y grupos de discusión con residentes de la ciudad, y dijo que “cuando hablamos con los latinos en esas comunidades, les gustaría tener representación latina”.En la década de 1980, aumentó la cantidad de inmigrantes latinos que se mudaron al sur de Los Ángeles, huyendo de las guerras civiles centroamericanas y la perturbación económica de México. Al mismo tiempo, los trabajos de manufactura estaban desapareciendo, la violencia de las pandillas y las drogas proliferaba, y la clase media negra se estaba mudando a otros lugares. Para 1990, según los datos del censo analizados por SocialExplorer.com, por primera vez más de la mitad de los residentes de la zona eran latinos.María Robles, de 30 años, y su hijo Alex Salgado, de 8, caminan por el Noveno Distrito de Los ÁngelesLauren Justice para The New York TimesA menudo, la representación política va a la zaga del cambio demográfico, y Los Ángeles no ha sido la excepción. En algunos casos, los líderes latinos llegaron a acuerdos de beneficio mutuo para preservar los límites del distrito que protegían a sus colegas negros. En otros, el movimiento laboral mayoritariamente latino de Los Ángeles ha respaldado a los líderes negros confiables y establecidos por encima de los contrincantes latinos que no habían ocupado cargos públicos. Los miembros del sindicato brindan el apoyo voluntario y económico necesario para atraer votantes a las elecciones locales en las que, de otro modo, la participación podría ser mediocre en una ciudad grande y transitoria.Ahora los residentes latinos constituyen el grupo étnico más grande en 10 de los 15 distritos municipales de la ciudad, según datos de las autoridades. Pero su participación en la población votante elegible es menor que su participación en la población general, una brecha que reduce su poder electoral.Incluso antes de que Nury Martinez, una demócrata latina, renunciara como presidenta del Concejo Municipal y dejara su escaño en el Concejo la semana pasada debido al alboroto por la grabación de audio, solo cuatro de los quince escaños del Concejo estaban ocupados por latinos.La conversación filtrada ha tenido el efecto de reducir el poder de los latinos, al menos temporalmente. El martes, Martinez fue remplazada como presidenta por Paul Krekorian, un armenio estadounidense. Los otros dos miembros que se escuchan en la grabación, Gil Cedillo y Kevin de León, han sido despojados de sus tareas de comité y no han asistido a las reuniones durante una semana.El Noveno Distrito era considerado un escaño latino en la década de 1950, cuando Edward R. Roybal se convirtió en el primer concejal latino de la ciudad desde fines del siglo XIX. Cuando Roybal fue al Congreso en 1962, se nombró a Gilbert W. Lindsay, un organizador comunitario negro con fuertes lazos laborales, para remplazarlo. Lindsay se convirtió en uno de los políticos más poderosos de la ciudad, rigió durante tres décadas y se autodenominó como “el Emperador del Gran Noveno”. Sus tres sucesores en el Concejo han sido negros.Curren Price ha representado al Noveno Distrito desde 2013.Tracy Nguyen para The New York TimesCuando Price, un demócrata a favor de los trabajadores y exlegislador estatal, se postuló por primera vez para el escaño del Noveno Distrito en 2013, el millón de dólares que recaudó en contribuciones directas a la campaña se complementó con unos 700.000 dólares que los grupos laborales gastaron de forma independiente para apoyarlo.Los líderes laborales han respaldado a Price, para consternación de los retadores que pensaron que había llegado el momento de la representación latina.“Le dije a la gente que me iba a postular y me miraron como si tuviera covid”, dijo Jorge Nuño, de 45 años, activista local y propietario de una pequeña empresa que creció en el Noveno Distrito y perdió ante Price en la elecciones de 2017. “Me dijeron: ‘No, hombre, no lo hagas, los sindicatos van a quedarse con Curren’”.Dulce Vasquez, de 36 años, administradora universitaria y demócrata progresista que lo desafió este año, recibió más de 500.000 dólares en apoyo total, pero fue solo alrededor de un tercio de lo que consiguió Price, y no pudo competir con los bancos telefónicos del sindicato y los activistas que lo respaldaban.Price también recibió el respaldo de sus cuatro colegas latinos en el Concejo en su campaña contra Vásquez. Ganó abrumadoramente su tercer mandato en junio.Sin embargo, al caminar por las comunidades, Nuño y Vasquez dijeron que encontraron una sed genuina de conexión cultural entre los votantes latinos. “La gente quiere ver un liderazgo que se parezca a ellos”, dijo Nuño. “Quieren a alguien que, por ejemplo, pueda ir a sus salas de estar y tomar pan con café”.Ambos predijeron que los líderes sindicales respaldarán a un candidato latino cuando Price, de 71 años, deje el cargo. El veterano político está entrando en su mandato final de cuatro años bajo las reglas de límites de mandato de la ciudad. En otra grabación filtrada, Ron Herrera, quien desde entonces renunció como titular de la Federación del Trabajo, se refirió a esa posibilidad. Cuando se le preguntó acerca de encontrar un candidato latino para suceder a Price, dijo: “Tenemos a alguien”.Price, un abogado educado en Stanford y oriundo de Los Ángeles que también trabajó en el Concejo Municipal de Inglewood, dijo que el cuarto de millón de personas que viven en el Noveno Distrito lo han mantenido en el cargo porque comprende sus problemas básicos.La semana pasada, afuera de su oficina en Central Avenue, un mercado de agricultores ofrecía fresas, tarros de miel, cartones de huevos y consejos sobre el compostaje. El concejal dijo que expandir el mercado fue idea suya para traer productos y brindarles a las personas un lugar para reunirse y encontrar información sobre cupones de alimentos y recursos comunitarios.Al otro lado de la calle, todos los días, hay un mercado informal donde los comerciantes latinos venden mazorcas de maíz, bolsas de duros, ropa y juguetes alrededor del estacionamiento de una tienda departamental de descuento. Mientras paseaba por esa zona, Price los miró y dijo que también eran bienvenidos.Señaló carteles que presentan detalles en inglés y español sobre puntos de referencia del apogeo del área como un centro próspero para la comunidad negra: el Teatro Lincoln en la calle 23, apodado el “Apolo de la Costa Oeste” en referencia al famoso lugar de entretenimiento negro en Harlem. La Asociación de Ahorros y Préstamos de Liberty, una empresa de propiedad negra que ofrecía hipotecas a los residentes locales cuando los prestamistas blancos no lo hacían.“No es solo para los negros”, dijo Price sobre los hitos históricos. “También es para que la gente morena entienda nuestra historia”.La joya de la corona fue el Hotel Dunbar, donde grandes artistas como Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne y Ellington se hospedaron cuando atraían multitudes de personas afroestadounidenses a sus presentaciones en Los Ángeles, pero no se les permitía quedarse en hoteles para blancos. Dunbar sirve ahora como vivienda asequible para personas mayores.Tiendas de campaña para las personas sin hogar junto a la Iglesia de Jesucristo Judá.Lauren Justice para The New York TimesSin embargo, José Andrade, un músico de mariachi, se quejó de que el ayuntamiento no había respondido a las solicitudes para instalar topes de velocidad en las calles residenciales para impedir las carreras callejeras. “Estos muchachos corren como si estuvieran en la autopista”, dijo, “y nadie está haciendo nada al respecto”.Nacido en El Salvador, Andrade dijo que emigró con su esposa, Iris, a Los Ángeles en 1983 y se establecieron en el Noveno Distrito porque no podían pagar los alquileres en otros lugares de la ciudad.“Había pandillas en cada esquina”, dijo sobre esos días, mientras paseaba por los pasillos de una tienda de comestibles en Central Avenue y hablaba sobre la música mexicana. “Vivías con miedo de que te asaltaran o te robaran”.Las familias negras pudientes empacaron sus pertenencias y se mudaron a San Bernardino o Antelope Valley, donde las casas eran más grandes y las calles más seguras. Llegaron más inmigrantes, atraídos por los precios más bajos de las viviendas en la localidad. La economía comenzó a mejorar, impulsada por el auge tecnológico de California. Y, por diversas razones, las tasas de criminalidad cayeron.Para el año 2000, Andrade había comprado una casa de tres dormitorios por 170.000 dólares que alguna vez estuvo ocupada por una familia negra. Plantó árboles de limón, aguacate y mango y construyó dos apartamentos en la parte de atrás, que alquila a inmigrantes. Tres de sus cuatro hijos adultos han dejado el vecindario para ir a la universidad y dedicarse a sus carreras profesionales.Andrade se convirtió en ciudadano estadounidense hace unos años y dijo que no votó por Price porque no confiaba en el concejal.Leobardo Juan Camilo, carnicero en Laguna Market, uno de muchos comercios latinos en la Avenida Central Avenue en el Noveno DistritoLauren Justice para The New York TimesPrice reconoció que satisfacer las necesidades de su distrito ha sido un trabajo inacabado. De alrededor de 100.000 votantes registrados en el distrito, solo unos 12.500 votaron en las primarias de febrero en las que fue elegido.“Muchas veces, la gente dice: ‘Oye, tengo que asistir a mi tercer trabajo, no tengo tiempo para ir a una reunión, o no tengo tiempo para presentar una queja porque, de todos modos, nada va a pasar’”, dijo Price.Elmer Roldán, un guatemalteco estadounidense, se instaló en el vecindario en 1989. Dijo que durante mucho tiempo los residentes del Noveno Distrito han deseado más parques y tiendas de comestibles, y que sentía que la zona de la ciudad cerca de la Universidad del Sur de California recibía muchos recursos y atención.Sin embargo, Roldán comentó que la raza de su concejal no tiene nada que ver con el estado del vecindario. Dijo que los residentes latinos deberían asociarse con las personas negras “que tienen más cosas en común con nosotros, tanto política como económicamente”.“Los latinos no creen que no están recibiendo ayuda porque Curren Price sea negro”, dijo Roldan, quien votó por Price. “Sienten que los políticos, sin importar quiénes sean, no responden a las necesidades del vecindario”.“No creo que tener un integrante latino del Concejo cambie estas condiciones”, agregó.Mientras Price volvía caminando a su oficina, los electores que le hicieron señas tenían mucho que decir. Una mujer que vendía pozole y mojarras fritas afuera de una tienda que ofrece clases de zumba le informó que una luz urbana se había apagado cerca y estaba preocupada por la seguridad. Otro estaba preocupado por un farol de otra cuadra y quería que se instalara un semáforo.Le hablaban en español. Una vocera, que caminaba con Price, le tradujo lo que decían los vecinos.Corina Knoll es la jefa de la corresponsalía en Los Ángeles. Fue reportera en la sección Metro y antes trabajó más de una década en The Los Angeles Times, donde colaboró con dos Premios Pulitzer y participó en la investigación sobre cómo una lista secreta de oficiales problemáticos de un alguacil de condado obstruyó la justicia. @corinaknollShawn Hubler es corresponsal en California con sede en Sacramento. Antes de unirse al Times en 2020, pasó casi dos décadas cubriendo el estado para Los Angeles Times como reportera itinerante, columnista y escritora de revista. Compartió tres premios Pulitzer con el equipo Metro del periódico. @ShawnHublerMiriam Jordan es corresponsal en la sección Nacional. Cubre el impacto de la migración en la sociedad, la cultura y la economía de Estados Unidos. Antes de unirse al Times, cubrió inmigración por más de una década en el Wall Street Journal y fue corresponsal en Brasil, Israel, Hong Kong e India. More
