More stories

  • in

    Herschel Walker’s Son Is No Hero

    This week, Herschel Walker’s 23-year-old son, Christian Walker, took a starring role in the elder Walker’s Georgia Senate campaign — to burn it to the ground.Christian published a blistering rant on social media, condemning Herschel for his lies after The Daily Beast published a report claiming that Herschel — who supports a complete ban on abortions with no exceptions — had not only urged a woman he was dating in 2009 to get an abortion, but paid for it.As a gentlemanly hypocrite, Herschel also sent her a “get well” card with a steaming cup of tea on the front — how apropos in retrospect — and signed with the message, “Pray you are feeling better,” according to The Daily Beast.Walker, of course, has denied this account. His lawyer told The Daily Beast the report is a “false story” and that he’s being targeted because he’s a Black conservative.No, sir. The verb you may be looking for is not “targeted,” it’s “exposed.”I have no way to independently verify The Daily Beast’s reporting, but Christian appears to believe it.In a message posted on social media after The Daily Beast’s story was published, Christian said:“The abortion card drops yesterday. It’s literally his handwriting in the card, they say they have receipts, whatever. He gets on Twitter, he lies about it. OK, I’m done. Done! Everything has been a lie.”Yes, it has all been a lie. Even before The Daily Beast’s report, Herschel Walker’s entire candidacy was a back-patting product of Donald Trump’s binary, friends-or-enemies approach to Blackness. Trump handpicked him to run because he was the anti-Colin Kaepernick: a Black football player who wouldn’t resist but acquiesce, one who wouldn’t campaign for Black lives but against them, one who wasn’t articulate and principled but unintelligible and fraudulent.Herschel spoke at the Republican National Convention during the summer of 2020, as Trump continued a more than three-year war against kneeling players “disrespecting” the flag and the national anthem. Herschel said in his R.N.C. speech:“Growing up in the Deep South, I’ve seen racism up close. I know what it is and it isn’t Donald Trump. Just because someone loves and respect the flag, our national anthem, and our country doesn’t mean they don’t care about social justice. I care about all of those things. So does Donald Trump. He shows how much he cares about social justice in the Black community through his actions, and his actions speaks louder than stickers or slogans on a jersey.”Herschel helped give cover for Trump’s racism in the heat of his re-election bid, so Trump rewarded him by supporting him for Senate.Of course, Trump issued a statement defending Herschel from the abortion claims, saying Herschel had “properly denied the charges” and that he had “no doubt” Herschel was “correct.”But Christian adds an interesting wrinkle in this narrative. He seems angry. And hurt.In his video, Christian spoke directly to the right:“And so, for the right to say I’m being suspicious for saying, ‘Hey, I’m done with the lies,’ when you all have been calling me saying, ‘Is this true about your dad? Ah, we’re not going to win Georgia.’ [unintelligible] That’s been you. You have no idea what I’ve been through in my life. You have no idea what me and my mom have survived. We could have ended this on Day 1.”Of course, Christian is a complicated character, and that’s being charitable. More accurately, he’s come across as a nasty piece of work.He is an election denier who opposes Black Lives Matter (he has called it a “terrorist organization” and “the K.K.K. in blackface”), as well as gay pride (even though, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, “Walker has said he is not gay but is attracted to ‘big, strong, muscular men.’”). He is also anti-body positivity (He said on Instagram, “I’m tired of all these models who look like they’ve never seen a treadmill in their life”), anti-feminist (he said on Instagram, “Maybe men aren’t trash, and maybe you feminists should shave your armpit hair”), and he rages against Covid protocols (as he said when complaining about Covid restrictions, “I don’t care about your grandma, at all. I don’t.”).As someone who is Black and queer, allow me to borrow from that vernacular, and say in a tone dripping with disdain: “Child, please.”Christian says he could have stopped Herschel’s campaign from the beginning. But he didn’t. And neither was he passively disengaged. He was an active participant in the fraud. He knew when his father launched his campaign whatever Herschel had put him and his mom through, and he still actively supported him on social media and even sold campaign merchandise.Maybe, as he said on Tuesday, the lies just became too much for him as new revelations came to light. But to me his comments reveal some striking situational ethics on Christian’s part. He’s not opposed to lying, he’s just opposed to lying that personally affects him.He was perfectly OK with Trump’s lies. He even seemed to have bought into the lie of a stolen election and even the fake electors scheme, saying after the election:“The electors might have cast their vote today. They’re not counted until Jan. 6, when Congress meets. And for your information, seven states sent their GOP electors to vote for Trump today: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico. This preserves President Trump’s right to remedy the fraud with his own electors.”In fact, on the day of the 2020 elections, Christian posted a picture of him with Trump and wrote in the caption, “I’m so proud to know you and cherish my families relationship.” (I assume he meant to write about cherishing his family’s relationship with Trump.)In December, Christian spoke at a campaign event for his father held at Mar-a-Lago, and captioned his post about it, “Just a casual Wednesday with Uncle Don.”If Christian was truly offended by lies, he would have rejected Uncle Don long before he rejected his own father. And that’s not all. Christian revealed the root of his objection at the end of his social media rant: “Me, my mom, as we’re chased down by the media, terrorized, all these different things. People are questioning my authenticity. I’m done.”Herschel’s conduct, understandably, has touched Christian’s life for years, but Christian only spoke out with this kind of fervor after people started to question him — and doubt his authenticity.Listen, I’ll accept help from anyone willing to prevent the abomination of Herschel Walker being elected a senator from Georgia. And I’m not discounting any pain that Christian might feel.I am saying, though, that victims can also be villains. I am saying that one person’s trauma can spur another’s cruelties. I am saying that having a hard life doesn’t give you the right to make life harder for others. I am saying that the idiom remains true: Hurt people hurt people.Christian Walker is young. He has a lot of living to do. But he’s an adult. And if he’s old enough to act in ways that harm others, he is old enough to be called out for it.He has existed up to this point largely as an internet provocateur in a social media market that can reward self-aggrandizement with self-enrichment and social capital. He was all in. He threw flames like a pyromaniac.Now, he wants credit for calling out a sham campaign that he had participated in. But there are no laurels for him. He is a lot of things, but a hero isn’t one of them.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

  • in

    There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without

    The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in several categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.“Red states are now less healthy than blue states, a reversal of what was once the case,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, argue in a paper they published in April, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death.”Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus-0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus-0.69 in 2016 and –0.64 in 2020. States classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”There are, Graham argues,long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.In contrast to non-college whites, Graham continued,minorities, who had unequal access to those jobs and worse objective conditions to begin with, developed coping skills and supportive community ties in the absence of coherent public safety nets. Belief in education and strong communities have served them well in overcoming much adversity. African Americans remain more likely to believe in the value of a college education than are low-income whites. Minority communities based in part on having empathy for those who fall behind, meanwhile, have emerged from battling persistent discrimination.Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks. There is also a phenomenon among urban Black males that has to do with longer term despair: nothing to lose, weak problem-solving skills, drug gangs and more.The role of race and gender in deaths of despair, especially drug-related deaths, is complex. Case wrote in an email:Women have always been less likely to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol, or by suicide. However, from the mid-1990s into the 20-teens, for whites without a four-year college degree, death rates from all three causes rose in parallel between men and women. So the level has always been higher for men, but the trend (and so the increase) was very similar between less-educated white men and women. For Blacks and Hispanics the story is different. Deaths of Despair were falling for less educated Black and Hispanic men from the early 1990s to the 20-teens and were constant over that period (at a much lower rate) for Black and Hispanic women without a B.A. After the arrival of Fentanyl as a street drug in 2013, rates started rising for both Black and Hispanic men and women without a B.A., but at a much faster rate for men.In their October 2014 study, “Economic Strain and Children’s Behavior,” Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, found a striking difference in the pattern of behavioral problems among white and Black children from demographically similar families experiencing the financial strains of the 2008 Great Recession:Specifically, we found that economic strain exhibited a statistically significant and qualitatively large association with White children’s internalizing behavior problems and that this relationship was not due to potentially correlated influences of objective measures of adverse economic conditions or to mediating influences of psychosocial context. Furthermore, our data provide evidence that the relationship between economic strain and internalizing problems is meaningfully different across White and Black children. In marked contrast to the White sample, the regression-adjusted relationship between economic strain and internalizing behaviors among the Black sample was of small magnitude and was statistically insignificant.Kalil elaborated on this finding in an email: “The processes through which white and Black individuals experience stress from macroeconomic shocks are different,” she wrote, adding that the “white population, which is more resourced and less accustomed to being financially worried, is feeling threatened by economic shocks in a way that is not very much reflective of their actual economic circumstances. In our study, among Black parents, what we are seeing is basically that perceptions of economic strain are strongly correlated with actual income-to-needs.”This phenomenon has been in evidence for some time.A 2010 Pew Research Center study that examined the effects of the Great Recession on Black and white Americans reported that Black Americans consistently suffered more in terms of unemployment, work cutbacks and other measures, but remained far more optimistic about the future than whites. Twice as many Black as white Americans were forced during the 2008 recession to work fewer hours, to take unpaid leave or switch to part-time, and Black unemployment rose from 8.9 to 15.5 percent from April 2007 to April 2009, compared with an increase from 3.7 to 8 percent for whites.Despite experiencing more hardship, 81 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress,” compared with 59 percent of whites; 45 percent of Black Americans said the country was still in recession compared with 57 percent of whites. Pew found that 81 percent of the Black Americans it surveyed responded yes when asked “Is America still a land of prosperity?” compared with 59 percent of whites. Asked “will your children’s future standard of living be better or worse than yours?” 69 percent of Black Americans said better, and 17 percent said worse, while 38 percent of whites said better and 29 percent said worse.There are similar patterns for other measures of suffering.In “Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019,” David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick in Britain, note that “the proportion of the U.S. population in extreme distress rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among low-education midlife white persons, the percentage more than doubled, from 4.8 percent to 11.5 percent.”Blanchflower and Oswald point out that “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”Employment prospects play a key role among those in extreme distress, according to Blanchflower and Oswald. A disproportionately large share of those falling into this extreme category agreed with the statement “I am unable to find work.”In her 2020 paper, “Trends in U.S. Working-Age non-Hispanic White Mortality: Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences,” Shannon M. Monnat, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, explained that “between 1990-92 and 2016-18, the mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites increased by 9.6 deaths per 100,000 population among metro males and 30.5 among metro females but increased by 70.1 and 65.0 among nonmetro (rural and exurban) males and females, respectively.”Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over this same 28-year period, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25-44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men saw 45-64 deaths rates per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45-64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.In a separate 2017 paper, “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.Three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson of M.I.T., the University of Zurich and Harvard, reported in their 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” on the debilitating consequences for working-class men of the “China shock” — that is, of sharp increases in manufacturing competition with China:Shocks to manufacturing labor demand, measured at the commuting-zone level, exert large negative impacts on men’s relative employment and earnings. Although losses are visible throughout the earnings distribution, the relative declines in male earnings are largest at the bottom of the distribution.Such shocks “curtail the availability and desirability of potentially marriageable young men along multiple dimensions: reducing the share of men among young adults and increasing the prevalence of idleness — the state of being neither employed nor in school — among young men who remain.”These adverse trends, Autor, Dorn and Hanson report, “induce a differential and economically large rise in male mortality from drug and alcohol poisoning, H.I.V./AIDS, and homicide” and simultaneously “raise the fraction of mothers who are unwed, the fraction of children in single-headed households, and the fraction of children living in poverty.”I asked Autor for his thoughts on the implications of these developments for the Trump electorate. He replied by email:Many among the majority of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree feel, justifiably, that the last three decades of rapid globalization and automation have made their jobs more precarious, scarcer, less prestigious, and lower paid. Neither party has been successful in restoring the economic security and standing of non-college workers (and yes, especially non-college white males). The roots of these economic grievances are authentic, so I don’t think these voters should be denigrated for seeking a change in policy direction. That said, I don’t think the Trump/MAGA brand has much in the way of substantive policy to address these issues, and I believe that Democrats do far more to protect and improve economic prospects for blue-collar workers.There is some evidence that partisanship correlates with mortality rates.In their June 2022 paper, “The Association Between Covid-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States,” Neil Jay Sehgal, Dahai Yue, Elle Pope, Ren Hao Wang and Dylan H. Roby, public health experts at the University of Maryland, found in their study of county-level Covid-19 mortality data from Jan. 1, 2020, through Oct. 31, 2021, that “majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people.”The authors cites studies showing that “counties with a greater proportion of Trump voters were less likely to search for information about Covid-19 and engage in physical distancing despite state-level mandates. Differences in Covid-19 mortality grew during the pandemic to create substantial variation in death rates in counties with higher levels of Trump support.”Sehgal and his colleagues conclude from their analysis that “voting behavior acts as a proxy for compliance with and support for public health measures, vaccine uptake, and the likelihood of engaging in riskier behaviors (for example, unmasked social events and in-person dining) that could affect disease spread and mortality.”In addition, the authors write:Local leaders may be hesitant to implement evidence-based policies to combat the pandemic because of pressure or oversight from state or local elected officials or constituents in more conservative areas. Even if they did institute protective policies, they may face challenges with compliance because of pressure from conservative constituents.For the past two decades, white working-class Americans have faced a series of economic dislocations similar to those that had a devastating impact on Black neighborhoods starting in the 1960s, as the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson described them in his 1987 book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.”How easy would it be to apply Wilson’s description of “extraordinary rates of black joblessness,” disordered lives, family breakdown and substance abuse to the emergence of similar patterns of disorder in white exurban America? How easy to transpose Black with white or inner city and urban with rural and small town?It is very likely, as Anne Case wrote in her email, that the United States is fast approaching a point whereEducation divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.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

  • in

    Republican Group’s Ads Take On Fetterman Over Gun Incident Involving Black Jogger

    The super PAC affiliated with the Republican Jewish Coalition is beginning a significant ad buy in Pennsylvania that aims to draw attention to a 2013 incident in which John Fetterman, now the Democratic nominee for Senate, moved to detain an unarmed Black jogger.The $1.5 million buy includes two ads on the subject aimed predominantly at the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh markets. They will run on broadcast television and are intended to reach Black voters, according to Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican group. The ad campaign will begin on Tuesday and run through Election Day, he said.The strikingly negative ads focus on a moment that Mr. Fetterman’s Democratic opponents pummeled him over in the primary. When Mr. Fetterman was the mayor of Braddock, Pa., he brandished a shotgun to stop and detain an unarmed Black jogger, telling police he had heard gunshots and saw the man running, according to the police report.In the new set of ads, narrators — both of whom are Black — relay aspects of the incident and express outrage.“My message to Black voters: Do your homework about John Fetterman,” says one narrator. “He didn’t even apologize. And now he wants our vote? Not a chance.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.Democrats’ House Chances: Democrats are not favored to win the House, but the notion of retaining the chamber is not as far-fetched as it once was, ​​writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Latino Voters: A recent Times/Siena poll found Democrats faring far worse than they have in the past with Hispanic voters. “The Daily” looks at what the poll reveals about this key voting bloc.Michigan Governor’s Race: Tudor Dixon, the G.O.P. nominee who has ground to make up in her contest against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, is pursuing a hazardous strategy in the narrowly divided swing state: embracing former President Donald J. Trump.“Why did John Fetterman see a Black man and do that?” asks another narrator. “He knows why. And our community does too.”A spokesman for Mr. Fetterman did not immediately respond to a request for comment when told about the substance of the ads. .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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.A different pro-Oz group began airing spots on the same subject in Pennsylvania last month.Mr. Fetterman, who is now Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, has emphasized that he initially ran for mayor to stop violence. He has strongly disputed any notion that he acted out of bias in 2013, telling PhillyVoice in 2016 that “this had nothing to do with race. The runner could have been my mother for all I knew, thanks to what the jogger was wearing.”No charges related to the incident were brought against Mr. Fetterman, who has said he saw someone “dressed entirely in black and a face mask” running in the direction of an elementary school soon after the Sandy Hook shooting.“I believe I did the right thing,” Mr. Fetterman told WTAE-TV at the time. “But I may have broken the law during the course of it. I’m certainly not above the law.”Part of that sentence — “I may have broken the law” — is featured in the ads.The jogger, Christopher Miyares, who in 2018 was charged with multiple felonies in a separate incident, told The Philadelphia Inquirer in a letter from a state prison in 2021 both that Mr. Fetterman “lied about everything” and that he hoped Mr. Fetterman “gets to be a senator.”Still, during the primary campaign, Mr. Fetterman faced sharp criticism for how he handled and discussed the 2013 incident. While he won that race handily, some Democrats worried that Republicans would use the incident to weaken Black turnout in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the general election.Mr. Brooks disputed the idea of that being the goal of the ad campaign.“I would say it’s the exact opposite,” he said. “We’re trying to change opinions and to maximize the turnout in the African American community for Dr. Oz.”The ads, though, do not mention Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate. Polling for the Republican Jewish Coalition found that Mr. Fetterman had an overwhelming lead with Black voters, according to a survey conducted Aug. 29- Sept. 1.But the survey also found that “just 6 percent of Pennsylvania voters, including only 4 percent of Black voters, have seen, read, or heard ‘a lot’” about the 2013 incident, and that message testing showed that “key Democratic audiences react negatively to information regarding the incident at gunpoint.”“There is clearly an opportunity to litigate this issue, especially among the Black community and within urban areas,” the memo said. More

  • in

    America Has a Ginni Thomas Problem

    Clarence and Virginia (Ginni) Thomas don’t discuss their dueling efforts to destroy our democracy when they come home from a day of wreaking havoc.That’s what Ms. Thomas, a conservative activist and an adherent to the lie that Donald Trump won the last election, wants us to believe. That’s essentially what she told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol when it interviewed her last week.I don’t believe that any more than I believe Trump can declassify documents with his mind.Why does this matter? Because Ms. Thomas pressed the White House and various state legislators to overturn the 2020 election, and her husband has refused to recuse himself from election-related cases. In fact, Justice Thomas was the Supreme Court’s lone dissent when it rejected Trump’s efforts to withhold documents from the Jan. 6 committee.In March, The National Law Journal spoke with several experts who agreed that Justice Thomas should have recused himself from the case. One called his refusal to do so “arguably unprecedented.”Ms. Thomas didn’t just encourage people to overturn the election; she was at the Stop the Steal rally from which the insurrection sprang on Jan. 6, although she told The Washington Free Beacon that she returned home before Trump took the stage.In other words, Ms. Thomas is a one-woman constitutional crisis.According to The New York Times, during her testimony before the committee, Ms. Thomas repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. That is a lie. She knows it, and we know it.Because she is repeating this lie, I can’t believe anything she says without proof. Therefore, her claim that she never discussed her election subversion activities with her husband rings hollow.Did she also not share with him her seemingly deranged Facebook posts framing the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting as “dangerous to the survival of our nation” or espousing the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wiretapped Trump?Is the Thomas household just silent, filled only with the hum of grievance and betrayal? Or do these spend their time talking in trivialities, reminiscing about their polar opposite upbringings — him born in the predominately Black, Gullah community of Pin Point, Ga., her born in predominantly white Omaha, Neb., which at the time was facing its own racial tensions?Maybe they share maleficent chuckles recalling how he rebuffed questions at his confirmation hearing in 1991 over the allegations that he sexually harassed Anita Hill, calling it, absurdly, a “high-tech lynching,” or how Ms. Thomas in 2010 left a voice mail message for Hill, demanding that she apologize to her husband.According to The Times, the message was: “Good morning, Anita Hill. It’s Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”What?! Ma’am, if you don’t stop playing on that lady’s phone!The ask was brazen. It was disrespectful. It was delusional. But that’s Ginni Thomas.Sure, maybe the woman with the audacity to call her husband’s accuser and ask that person to apologize to the man she says abused her is too bashful at home to raise her most recent antics with her husband. But it seems unlikely; for years, journalists have documented how close and forthright Justice and Ms. Thomas are with each other. As early as 1991, the year he was confirmed, one of his longtime friends, Evan Kemp, told The Washington Post that she was the one person he really listened to.In the same article, one of Ms. Thomas’s aunts is quoted as saying Justice Thomas “was so nice, we forgot he was Black.” She added, “And he treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being Black.”Can you imagine? How must it feel to marry into a family where people think of your Blackness as a weight on the wrong side of the scales and you have to achieve at the highest level to balance it out? Of course, Justice Thomas may not object to that characterization. But he and his wife may still spend their quiet time unpacking it.Ms. Thomas is not a minor player and outside agitator. She is connected and influential. According to The Times, she led a group of hard-right activists in a White House meeting with Trump where “members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.”According to the paper, one of the people the group asked to have at the meeting was an assistant Ms. Thomas hired after the conservative group Turning Point USA fired the person for texting a colleague, “I hate Black people.”Since Ms. Thomas is married to a Black man, I can’t make any of that make sense. Maybe, like her aunt, she forgot Justice Thomas was Black.But the major issue remains: The wife of a Supreme Court justice has been actively engaged in trying to overturn an election, and the justice won’t recuse himself from any cases related to that issue. They are Mr. and Mrs. Mutiny.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

  • in

    Ron DeSantis’s Race Problem

    In July, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida appointed Jeffery Moore, a former tax law specialist with the Florida Department of Revenue, to be a county commissioner in Gadsden, the blackest county in the state.On Friday, Moore resigned after a picture emerged that appeared to show him dressed in Ku Klux Klan regalia.Neither Moore nor DeSantis have confirmed that Moore is in fact the man in the picture. When Politico reached out to Desantis’s office for comment, his communication director responded, “We are in the middle of hurricane prep, I’m not aware of the photo you sent but Jeff did submit his resignation last week.” This is not the first, shall I say, “awkward” racial issue DeSantis had encountered. But throughout, he has had much the same response: Instead of addressing the issue directly, he — or his office — claims to be oblivious. That’s the DeSantis M.O.In a 2018 gubernatorial debate, the moderator asked DeSantis why he had spoken at several conferences hosted by David Horowitz, a conservative writer who the Southern Poverty Law Center says is a “driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-Black movements.” Horowitz once said that President Barack Obama was an “evil man” who “will send emissaries to Ferguson for a street thug who got himself killed attempting to disarm a police officer, resisting arrest.”There, too, DeSantis claimed obliviousness, responding, “How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement someone makes?”It was in that debate that his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum said, “Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”The problem, of course, is that DeSantis’s unfortunate associations keep stacking up.In 2018, he appointed Michael Ertel, then a county elections supervisor, to be his secretary of state. The following year, Ertel resigned after a picture emerged of him in blackface wearing a T-shirt that read “Katrina Victim.” He appeared to be mocking Black women in particular, because he wore fake breasts, a scarf wrapped around his head and large gold earrings.Hurricane Katrina killed more than a thousand people, a slight majority of whom were Black.DeSantis responded to the controversy by saying: “It’s unfortunate. I think he’s done a lot of good work.” He continued, “I don’t want to get mired into kind of side controversies, and so I felt it was best to just accept the resignation and move on.” Not a word of condemnation for the act or sympathy for the victims of the storm. Also, not a word of his own personal regret for appointing him.Now, maybe the pool of possible Republican appointees in Florida is hopelessly polluted with white men who like to dress in racist costumes. That’s damning, if true. Maybe DeSantis is simply doomed by appalling options. That could well be the harvest of the Republican Party sowing hatred. Or maybe DeSantis is just too dense to do his homework. That may well be true, although I have no sympathy for it.This is a man who championed and signed Florida’s ridiculous “Stop WOKE Act,” restricting how race can be discussed in the state’s schools and workplaces. You can’t live in the dark on race and then try to drag your whole state into the darkness with you.I have always thought of DeSantis as reading the rules of villainy from a coloring book and acting them out. Nothing about him says clever and tactical. He seems to me the kind of man who must conjure confidence, who is fragile and feisty because of it, a beta male trying desperately to convince the world that he’s an alpha.But there is a way in which race policy reaches far beyond being merely racist-adjacent. DeSantis, for instance, has actually tried to strip Black Floridians of their power and voice.In 2010, Florida voters, by a strong majority, approved a constitutional amendment rejecting gerrymandering. The amendment made clear that “districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.”Yet Florida’s Republican-led Legislature produced a gerrymandered map anyway. In 2015, the state Supreme Court struck down much of the Legislature’s proposed map, and demanded that eight House districts be redrawn. Among them was the Fifth District, which at the time snaked up the state from Orlando to Jacksonville. The redrawn map allowed Black voters to elect four Black representatives.In the decade between 2010 and 2020, there was a 14.6 percent increase in the population of the state, nearly twice the rate of growth of the country — and enough to earn Florida a 28th congressional district.But when the Legislature drew its map this cycle, it didn’t increase the number of minority districts, even though minorities had driven 90 percent of the population growth in the state — growth that had earned Florida its new district. (Most of that growth was among Hispanics.)As the staff director of the Florida Senate’s Committee on Reapportionment told The Tampa Bay Times, state legislators initially set out to keep the number of Black- and Hispanic-majority districts the same as they had been for the past few years.That wouldn’t have been fair, but at least the number of minority seats wouldn’t be cut. That wasn’t enough for DeSantis. He submitted his own redistricting map that cut the number of Black-controlled districts in half, taking them from four to two. The legislature went along and approved DeSantis’s map.DeSantis may pretend to be oblivious to the racial acts and statements of the people he associates with and appoints, but eliminating Black power and representation was a conscious act.Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying this: He has targeted Black people, Black power and Black history.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

  • in

    Stacey Abrams Painted as Enemy by Flier in Georgia County With Racist History

    ATLANTA — After a digital flier featuring the logo of the Republican Party of Forsyth County, Ga., urged residents to rally against Stacey Abrams, alarming and infuriating local Democratic leaders who said its message sounded dangerously evocative of the county’s notoriously racist past, the Forsyth Republican Party announced that it was calling the rally off. Using inflammatory language as if Ms. Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, were an invading enemy, the flier issued a “call to action” encouraging “conservatives and patriots” to “save and protect our neighborhoods.” It emerged this week in response to news that Ms. Abrams would be campaigning alongside other members of the Democratic ticket in the area on Sunday.“The moment is at hand,” the flier read, calling Ms. Abrams and Senator Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Georgia Democrat seeking a full term, “the designers of destructive radicalism and socialism” and warning that they would be “crossing over our county border” and into the county seat, Cumming. It said they would appear at “OUR FoCal Center,” referring to a county arts building.Mr. Warnock is not expected to appear alongside Ms. Abrams, Democratic officials said.Cumming, about 40 miles north of Atlanta, is more than 75 percent white. It owes its racial homogeneity in large part to a violent campaign by Forsyth County’s white residents in 1912 that pushed out thousands of Black residents.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe text of the flier surfaced on Wednesday on a local online conservative news outlet, which said it had spotted it on the Forsyth G.O.P. website, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the flier Friday morning after county Democrats circulated it to journalists.As of midmorning Friday, the flier did not appear on the Forsyth Republican Party’s website or Facebook page.Reached by text message late Friday afternoon and asked four times whether the county party had produced or distributed the flier, Jerry Marinich, the group’s chairman, did not answer. He said only that the party “does not plan on participating in any rally on Sunday.”Late Friday evening, the party issued a statement saying it would no longer hold the rally. “We will always strive to make choices that honor and protect Forsyth County,” it wrote, calling it a “proud and diverse county with conservative values.” It went on, “In the interest of all involved, we will err on the side of caution and withdraw our planned rally.”Instead, according to the statement, members will redirect their efforts to prepare for a campaign event with Gov. Brian Kemp the following day. Ms. Abrams’s campaign declined to comment except to confirm that she would be attending the Forsyth event, though it was not listed on her weekend campaign schedule.Cumming, about 40 miles north of Atlanta, is more than 75 percent white, as is Forsyth as a whole. It owes its racial homogeneity in large part to a violent campaign by Forsyth County’s white residents in 1912 that pushed out thousands of Black residents through intimidation and deadly force.The legacy of that campaign and the racist thinking that gave rise to it persisted as late as 1987, when a group of civil rights activists were attacked while trying to mark the 75th anniversary of Black residents’ initial expulsion from the county.“We strongly condemn the dangerous and embarrassing rhetoric of the Forsyth County, Georgia, Republican Party,” Melissa Clink, chair of the county’s Democratic Party, said in a statement on Friday before the rally was canceled. “Forsyth County’s history of racial cleansing and being a documented sundown town make this line especially incendiary, disgusting and shameful,” she said, using a term for places that discriminate, often severely, against nonwhite residents.The Republican Women of Forsyth County, seeking to avoid condemnation by association, issued a statement Friday underlining its status as a private club independent of the party organization.“We do not condone nor engage in tactics that are intended to intimidate, harass or silence people who hold different political views,” the group said, adding that conservative ideals “are best exemplified when we engage in civil discourse, allowing all sides to be heard.” More

  • in

    How We Think About Politics Changes What We Think About Politics

    When so many voters — a majority, in fact — say that they prefer consensus to conflict, why does polarization continue to intensify?In a paper that came out in June, “Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980 — 2020,” Elizabeth Suhay and Mark Tenenbaum, political scientists at American University, and Austin Bartola, of Quadrant Strategies, provide insight into why so much discord permeates American politics:Scholars who research polarization have almost exclusively focused on the relationship between Americans’ policy opinions and their partisanship. In this article, we discuss a different type of partisan polarization underappreciated by scholars: “belief polarization,” or disagreements over what people perceive to be true.The concept of belief polarization has been defined in a number of ways.In their May 2021 paper, “Belief polarization in a complex world,” Alan Jern, Kai-min Kevin Chang and Charles Kemp — of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Melbourne — write: “Belief polarization occurs when two people with opposing prior beliefs both strengthen their beliefs after observing the same data.”There is, they continue, “ample evidence that people sustain different beliefs even when faced with the same information, and they interpret that information differently.” They also note that “stark differences in beliefs can arise and endure due to human limitations in interpreting complex information.”Kristoffer Nimark, an economist at Cornell, and Savitar Sundaresan, of Imperial College London, describe belief polarization this way: “The beliefs of ex ante identical agents over time can cluster in two distinct groups at opposite ends of the belief space.”Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, professors of philosophy at Vanderbilt, argue in their 2019 paper, “How Does Belief Polarization Work”:Part of what makes belief polarization so disconcerting is its ubiquity. It has been extensively studied for more than 50 years and found to be operative within groups of all kinds, formal and informal. Furthermore, belief polarization does not discriminate between different kinds of belief. Like-minded groups polarize regardless of whether they are discussing banal matters of fact, matters of personal taste, or questions about value. What’s more, the phenomenon operates regardless of the explicit point of the group’s discussion. Like-minded groups polarize when they are trying to decide an action that the group will take; and they polarize also when there is no specific decision to be reached. Finally, the phenomenon is prevalent regardless of group members’ nationality, race, gender, religion, economic status, and level of education.Talisse, writing separately, observes:The social environment itself can trigger extremity shifts. These prompts need not be verbal, explicit, or literal; they can be merely implicit signals to group members that some belief is prevalent among them — hats, pins, campaign signs, logos, and gestures are all potential initiators of belief polarization. Further, as corroboration is really a matter of numbers, those with the power to present the appearance of widespread acceptance among a particular social group of some idea thereby have the power to induce extremity shifts among those who identify with that group.Perhaps the most salient recent illustration of belief polarization is the diametrically opposed views of Trump loyalists and of their Democratic adversaries over the legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump supporters are convinced it was stolen; Democrats and independents are certain that Joe Biden is the legitimate president.Similarly, politicians on the right — and Fox News — are treating the F.B.I. raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago on Monday as a corrupt politicization of federal investigative authority, while liberals — and CNN — counter that the raid demonstrates that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.Suhay and her colleagues expand the scope of belief polarization to look at the differences between Republicans and Democrats over the causes of inequality:We illustrate large, and increasing, partisan divides in beliefs regarding whether an unequal society, or unequal behavior, is the cause of socioeconomic inequality. Republican politicians and citizens are optimistic about the American dream and pessimistic about poor people’s behavior; Democratic politicians and citizens are pessimistic about the dream and optimistic about poor people’s ability to succeed if given the chance.These patterns, Suhay and her collaborators continue,hold for beliefs about economic inequality along both class and race lines. Variation in societal versus individual blame is consistently associated with views on social welfare, taxation, and affirmative action. We conclude that Americans’ beliefs about the fairness of the economy represent a crucial component of a redistributive versus anti-redistributive ideology that is increasingly associated with the two political parties.Suhay writes:The Democratic Party has long justified its left-leaning economic policies with two central claims: significant economic inequality exists between individuals and social groups, and these great inequalities are unfair because society, not individuals, are to blame for them. The latter proposition is especially important. It is difficult to deny that many harsh inequalities exist in the United States. Exorbitant wealth as well as homelessness are plain to see. However, such inequalities might be tolerated if they are viewed as the outcome of a meritocratic system. Democrats argue instead that “the American dream” — success via hard work — is not a reality for many. Thus, low-income people deserve government assistance.Conversely, Suhay continues, Republicans emphasizeaggregate economic growth and downplay the extent of inequality. Second, Republicans argue that existing inequalities are fair — successful people have achieved success via hard work or ingenuity, and those facing difficult economic circumstances are to blame for them. Third, in response to Democrats’ instinct to use government to combat inequality, Republicans argue government efforts to intervene in business affairs, redistribute wealth, and assist those in need often do more harm than good, depressing the economic output of both firms and individuals. These narratives justify Republicans’ conservative economic agenda by insisting that the status quo is fine: inequality is minimal; inequalities that do exist are “just deserts”; and, even if one wished to help, government intervention in fact undermines individual and aggregate prosperity.Suhay, Tenenbaum and Bartola cite data from American National Election Studies and the Pew Research Center to track the increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats on various questions, which require respondents to agree or disagree with statements like these: “one of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance”; “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard”; and “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”In 1997, 68 percent of Republican and 43 percent of Democratic survey respondents chose “have it easy,” a 25-point difference. By 2017, 73 percent of Republicans said the poor “have it easy,” while 19 percent of Democrats shared that view, a 54-point difference.In an email, Suhay noted thatmany social scientists today are focused on misinformed and extreme beliefs in the Republican Party, including Republicans’ greater likelihood of rejecting climate science and Covid-19 vaccination and their embrace of Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election.But, Suhay wrote, many of those same scholars “are missing growing extremity on the political left. It may be more benign or even beneficial in some cases, but it is still a phenomenon worth study.” In addition to “a surge of claims on the left that the economy is extremely unequal and that this is because our country does not provide equal opportunity to all of its inhabitants,” there has been a parallel surge among liberals on the issue of “racial justice — in both the economic and criminal justice arena.”A third development on the left, Suhay added, and onewhere we have seen the most rapid change, is around gender identity. Democrats increasingly say society ought to protect the rights of transgender people and the expression of transgender identity because gender fluidity is a natural part of the human condition and trying to curb its expression causes people harm. The popularity of each of these views has surged on the left recently.There is further evidence that even people who are knowledgeable about complex issues are sharply polarized along partisan lines.Nathan Lee at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth, Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter and D.J. Flynn at IE University in Madrid argue in their paper “More Accurate, but No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public” that while “political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public,” the “increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policymaking.”Lee, Nyhan, Reifler and Flynn assessed the views of elites through a survey in 2017 of 743 “elected policymakers, legislative staffers, and top administrative positions in local and state government in the United States.” Three-quarters of the sample held elective office. The survey tested belief accuracy by partisanship and elite status on eight issues including health care, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, climate change and voter fraud.Their conclusions run counter to assumptions that elites are less polarized than the general public because “they tend to be more knowledgeable, which is associated with greater belief accuracy” and because they “possess domain expertise in politics and public policy that could reduce the influence of cognitive biases.”In fact, Lee and colleagues counter, “belief polarization can be unchanged or widen when belief accuracy increases.”I asked Nyhan about the consequences of the findings and he wrote back by email:The most important contribution of our study is to challenge the assumption that we will disagree less about the facts if we know more. Elites are better informed than the public on average but Democrats and Republicans still are still deeply divided in their beliefs about those facts. In some ways, the conclusion of our study is optimistic — government officials are better informed than the public. That’s what most of us would hope to be true. But the findings do suggest we should avoid thinking that people becoming more informed will make the factual divides in our society go away. Belief polarization is a reality that is not easily overcome.One theme that emerges repeatedly in looking at belief polarization is the role race plays as a central factor:Peter K. Enns and Ashley Jardina, political scientists at Cornell and Duke, make the case in their October 2021 paper, “Complicating the role of White racial attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” thatMost of the research on the relationship between white racial attitudes and Trump support is part of a tradition that assumes that racial attitudes are fairly stable predispositions that form early in life and then later become important for political reasoning. Implied in this line of research is that politicians or political campaigns do not change levels of prejudice, but they can prime these attitudes, or make them more or less salient and therefore more or less politically relevant.Enns and Jardina write that in contrast to this view, over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign “many whites shifted their survey responses on questions related to race and immigration to align with their support for Trump or Clinton.”To test their argument, the authors used “a unique panel data set from surveys conducted by YouGov of more than 5,000 respondents interviewed at multiple points during the 2016 presidential election campaign.” From that study, they found:The strong link between white attitudes toward Black Americans and Trump support observed in prior studies is likely due as much to white Trump supporters updating their survey responses to report opinions more consistent with Trump’s as it is to Trump drawing support from more racially antagonistic white voters. Similar results emerge with respect to whites’ immigration opinions.They found, for example, that from January 2016 to August 2016, the percentage of Trump supporters voicing strong opposition to Black Lives Matter grew by roughly 15 percentage points.In an email, Enns contended thatregardless of the precise underlying mechanisms (and multiple mechanisms could be at work), the evidence suggests that Trump’s rhetoric had a meaningful effect on the views his supporters expressed about these issues. We are definitely arguing that the attitudes individuals express can be changed by what candidates they support say and do. Although we cannot observe actual beliefs, to the extent that expressing previously unexpressed beliefs has a reinforcing effect, that would also provide evidence of a deepening or potential changing of racial attitudes.The strong association between Trump support and whites’ views on racial issues, Enns and Jardina argue in their paper,was not merely a result of Trump attracting racist whites by way of his own racist rhetoric or a reflection of partisan racial sorting that had already occurred; it was also a result of white Trump supporters changing their views to be more in line with Trump’s over the course of his presidential campaign. In other words, Trump not only attracted whites with more conservative views on race; he also made his white supporters more likely to espouse increasingly extreme views on issues related to immigration and on issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and police killings of African Americans.Andrew M. Engelhardt, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, developed a similar line of analysis in his January 2020 paper, “Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens.”In an email, Engelhardt wrote:Part of the reason White Democrats and White Republicans hold increasingly different views about Black Americans is due to their partisanship. It’s not just that Democrats with negative views became Republicans, or Republicans with more positive views became Democrats. Rather, people are changing their attitudes, and part of this, I argue, is due to how politicians talk about Black Americans. Republicans, for instance, could have internalized Trump’s negative rhetoric, and increasingly held more negative views. Democrats, similarly, hear Trump say these negative things and they move opposite, holding more positive views.In his paper, Engelhardt wrote that undergirding past studies of the role of race in politics and policymakingis an assumption that racial animus feeds political conflict. I turn this conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that political conflict can shape racial attitudes — people’s views and beliefs about groups understood to be racial. Political scientists have failed to examine this possibility, perhaps because racial attitudes are seen as persistent and influential predispositions that form during childhood, long before most Americans become political animals. According to this line of reasoning, individuals use these early formed attitudes to make sense of politics; racial attitudes lead to partisanship.The ever-growing divide between left and right extends well beyond racial issues and attitudes. In his email, Engelhardt wrote that his results are “suggestive of partisanship motivating changes in other orientations which we might presumably see as more stable and core to individuals.” He cited research showing that “partisanship influences religiosity and religious affiliation” and other studies linking “political concerns to changes in racial self-identification.” Engelhardt added that he has “some unpublished results where I find partisanship leads Democrats to hold more positive views of gay men and lesbians, transgender individuals, and feminists, over time, with Republicans holding more negative views of these groups in the same period (data range 2016-2020).”In their January 2022 paper, “The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas about U.S. Parties,” Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas Valentino, political scientists at the Universities of Virginia and Michigan, make an interesting argument that, in effect, “Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts.”Zhirkov and Valentino continue:Beginning in the 1970s, Democratic candidates in presidential elections started to attract large shares of nonwhite voters whereas Republicans increasingly relied on votes of racially conservative whites. Over the same period, voters’ positions on seemingly nonracial political issues have gradually become more intertwined with racial resentment.Overall, the two scholars write,the growing racial gap between the Democratic and Republican support bases leads to formation of racialized stereotypes about the two parties. Specifically, a non-trivial share of American electorate currently views the Democratic Party as nonwhite and the Republican Party as white, though in reality whites continue to be a majority of both parties.This “imagined racial coalition of each party,” in the view of Zhirkov and Valentino,carries profound implications for the ongoing discussion in the discipline about affective polarization in American politics: whites feel colder toward the Democratic Party when they imagine its coalition to be more heavily made up on nonwhites and feel warmer toward the Republican Party when they perceive it to be dominated by their racial group. As a consequence, rather than a cause, they may then come to accept a more conservative issue package advocated by the modern Republican Party.Racial attitudes, the authors argue persuasively, “are now important predictors of opinions about electoral fairness, gun control, policing, international trade and health care.”There are, Zhirkov and Valentino note, long-range implications for the future of democracy here:As soon as ethnic parties start to compete for political power, winning — rather than implementing a certain policy — becomes the goal in and of itself due to associated boost in group status and self-esteem of its members. Moreover, comparative evidence suggests that U.S. plurality-based electoral system contributes to politicization of ethnic cleavages rather than mitigates them. Therefore, the racialization of American parties is likely to continue, and the intensity of political conflict in the United States is likely to grow.I asked the authors how they would characterize the importance of race in contemporary American politics. In a jointly written email, they replied that in research to be published in the future, “we show that race is at least as strong, and often stronger, than cleavages such as religion, ideology, and class.”The pessimistic outlook for the prospect of a return to less divisive politics revealed in many of the papers cited here, and the key role of racial conflict in driving polarization, suggest that the ability of the United States to come to terms with its increasingly multiracial, multiethnic population remains in question. This country has been a full-fledged democracy for less than 60 years — since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the changes wrought by three additional revolutions: in civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. These developments — or upheavals — and especially the reaction to them have tested the viability of our democracy and suggest, at the very least, an uphill climb ahead.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

  • in

    Colombia’s First Black Vice President Spotlights Afro-Caribbean Fashion

    The wardrobe of Francia Márquez, Colombia’s first Black vice president, is the creation of a young designer at the center of an Afro-Colombian fashion explosion.CALI, Colombia — At a premier fashion event in the coastal city of Buenaventura this year, a pair of towering models strutted down the boardwalk, one in a red minidress with a fluted top inspired by an open seashell and the other wearing a blue-and-gold gown fit for a modern queen.The models were Black and the fabrics imported from Africa — unusual for a major fashion show in Colombia. But what most distinguished them was the designer himself: Esteban Sinisterra Paz, a 23-year-old university student with no formal design training who is at the center of an Afro-Colombian fashion explosion.“Decolonization of the human being,” is the aim of his work, he said, along with showing the world an expansive view of “the elegance of identity.”Mr. Sinisterra is the man behind the wardrobe of Francia Márquez, an environmental activist and lawyer who on Sunday will become Colombia’s first Black vice president.The wardrobe of Francia Márquez, who on Sunday will become Colombia’s first Black vice president, is largely designed Mr. Sinisterra, a 23-year-old social work student with no formal design training who is at the center of an Afro-Colombian fashion explosion.Federico Rios for The New York TimesIn a nation where race and class often define a person’s status, Ms. Márquez, 40, has made a remarkable leap from profound poverty to the presidential palace, emerging as the voice of millions of poor, Black and Indigenous Colombians.In a matter of months, she has not only pushed racism and classism to the center of the national conversation, she has also revolutionized the country’s political aesthetic, rejecting starched shirts and suits in favor of a distinctly Afro-Colombian look that she calls a form of rebellion.Natural hair. Bold prints. Dresses that highlight her curves.But Ms. Márquez and Mr. Sinisterra are just the most visible ambassadors of an Afro-Colombian aesthetic boom that proponents say is part of a larger movement demanding greater respect for millions of Black Colombians.Mr. Sinisterra with some of the pieces that he uses to create a distinctly Afro-Colombian look.Nathalia Angarita for The New York TimesIn a nation where 40 percent of households live on less than $100 a month — a percentage that has grown during the pandemic — Afro-Colombians are among the poorest groups, with the regions where they predominate, including the Pacific Coast, some of the most neglected by generations of politicians.Officially, Black Colombians make up between 6 to 9 percent of the population. But many say that is an undercount that perpetuates a lack of recognition.“Colonization tried to erase Black people,” said Lia Samantha Lozano, 41, who began outfitting her hip-hop and reggae band, Voodoo Souljahs, in African fabrics more than a decade ago, positioning her as a pioneer in the movement.In 2014, she became the first Black woman with a runway show at Colombiamoda, the country’s biggest fashion event. Today, politically oriented Afro-descendant brands have proliferated on the internet, and in shops across Cali, a major hub of Afro-Colombian culture, with Black celebrities, models, politicians and activists increasingly using clothing as a political tool. And the Petronio Álvarez Festival, an annual celebration of Afro-Colombian culture that draws hundreds of thousands of people to Cali, has emerged as the movement’s fashion week. Ms. Lozano now sells a bright, hip-hop inspired line at a major shopping mall in the capital of Bogotá.“A big part of the plan was to make us feel ashamed of who we are, of our colors, of our culture, of our features,” she went on. “To wear this every day, not as ‘fashion,’ not to dress up for a special occasion, but as a way of life, as something you want to communicate every day — yes, it is political. And, yes, it is a symbol of resistance.”Mr. Sinisterra at a fashion show in Buenaventura with a model wearing one of his designs, which he called “Royal Imperialism.”Augusto GalloAmong the movement’s signatures are bright patterned fabrics called wax, which are wildly popular across West, East and Central Africa and famous for telling stories and sending messages through their pictures and designs. (Prints can celebrate everything from pop culture to religion and politics, featuring tubes of lipstick, the faces of religious figures or portraits of politicians and celebrities.)Afro-Colombian aesthetic often references nature — Mr. Sinisterra has a dress with sleeves like wings inspired by Colombia’s famous butterflies — and can incorporate elaborate beaded jewelry and woven bags by artists from Colombia’s many Indigenous communities.The movement’s leaders include not just Ms. Márquez, but also Emilia Eneyda Valencia Murraín, 62, a mentor of Mr. Sinisterra’s who in 2004 started Weaving Hope, a multiday celebration of Black hair in Cali.Emilia Eneyda Valencia Murraín, 62, is a mentor of Mr. Sinisterra’s.Nathalia Angarita for The New York TimesColombia’s sartorial moment is years, many would say centuries, in the making, drawing on activism in Latin America, Africa and the United States; the baggy street style of hip-hop and the sparkly astral vibes of Afrofuturism; the turbans of Colombian market women; the mermaid silhouettes of Senegal and Nigeria; and even the influence of Michelle Obama, who famously used clothing to make political statements.The aesthetic is also expansive and fluid, including everyday clothing — like tunics from the brand Baobab by Consuelo Cruz Arboleda — and showpieces like Mr. Sinisterra’s Royal Imperialism, a tight, ruffled strapless gown whose grandeur he said embodies the modern-day cultural empire that the descendants of Africa have constructed in the Colombian Pacific.“We are transforming the image that we have of power,” said Edna Liliana Valencia, 36, a popular Afro-Colombian journalist, poet and activist.Edna Liliana Valencia is an Afro-Colombian journalist, poet and activist.Nathalia Angarita for The New York TimesMr. Sinisterra is among this movement’s newest stars. Born into a poor family in the small town of Santa Bárbara de Iscuandé, near the Pacific Ocean, his family was forcibly displaced by armed men when he was 5, among the millions of Colombians victimized by the country’s decades-long internal conflict.In the nearby town of Guapi, and later in the port city of Buenaventura, Mr. Sinisterra learned to sew from his aunt and grandmother, whom he called “the designers of the neighborhood.”“Esteban African,” he said of his clothing line, “began out of a necessity to bring money home.”Mr. Sinisterra wanted to study fashion, but his father thought that was only for girls, so he entered university as a social work student.But he began building a name designing increasingly elaborate pieces for a growing list of customers, finding inspiration online and selling his work on Instagram and Facebook. Then, in 2019, Ms. Márquez called. She had been referred to him by a mutual friend and needed an outfit. Mr. Sinisterra is in his seventh of eight semesters at university. When he’s not in class, he sews the vice president’s outfits in a windowless room in his small apartment in Cali. His boyfriend, Andrés Mena, 27, is a former nurse who switched careers to become general manager of Esteban African.Mr. Sinisterra with his boyfriend, Andrés Mena, left.Nathalia Angarita For The New York TimesAmong the brand’s best known items are two pairs of earrings. One features the map of Colombia, etched with its 32 departments. A second looks like two gold orbs meant to evoke the mining pans Ms. Márquez used as a child miner in the mountains of Cauca, near the Pacific Coast, long before she became a household name.Ms. Márquez once slept on a dirt floor beside her siblings. She later worked as a live-in maid to support her children, went to law school and eventually won a prize known as the environmental Nobel.In an interview, she called Mr. Sinisterra’s work a critical part of her political identity. “He’s showing young people that they can succeed, using their talent, they can get ahead,” she said.Mr. Sinisterra has never been to Africa. A visit is his dream, along with studying fashion in Paris and “building a school where the children of the Pacific can have alternatives,” he said, “and their parents, unlike mine, will not think that sewing and cutting and making clothes is only for girls.”Today, he said, his father is proud of his work.Lately, he has been barraged by media and customer requests, and he manages his newfound fame by working around the clock.One day in July, barefoot and sweating, he laid a pair of fabrics on the floor, cut them freehand, then stitched them together using a new Jinthex sewing machine he’d bought with his now improving wages. He was making another dress for Ms. Márquez.On Election Day in June, he outfitted her in kente cloth, a Ghanaian print whose interlocking lines evoke basket weavings, to symbolize vote collection.Ms. Márquez wearing a kente cloth dress on Election Day in June.Federico Rios for The New York TimesThe dress had a ruffle down the front, representing the rivers in Ms. Márquez’s home region, and the jacket on her shoulders, all white, symbolized peace, he said, “in this country so torn up by political postures.”He’s made three outfits for inauguration day. “Whichever she chooses is fine with me,” he said.As he ironed the newly stitched piece, he said he was both excited and anxious about Ms. Márquez’s ascension to power.In the last few months, he has come to feel like a part of her political project, and she has made enormous promises to transform the country after decades of injustice.“The responsibility is going to grow,” he said.“My responsibility, Francia’s responsibility, backing this process so that the people — our people — don’t feel betrayed.” More