Race

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares40 Views

    US right capitalizes on fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina

    by

    The random and unprovoked killing of a young woman in North Carolina several weeks ago has become a viral video, a political football, and a powerful rightwing talking point – even as the horror and anger her death has provoked obscures what experts say is a vital story about the failures of the American mental health system.The alleged perpetrator, Decarlos Brown Jr, 34, has a long history of problems with the law and mental health issues. He had been arrested 14 times and served a five-year stint for armed robbery. Brown had also come to believe that there was something alien and malevolent inside him – a “man-made material”, he told people, possibly a computer chip implanted by the government that was fighting him for control of his body.Brown was riding a light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month when he allegedly stood up with a pocket knife, abruptly stabbed a nearby woman, then walked away. The victim, Iryna Zarutska, was a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who worked at a pizza parlor and hoped to become a veterinary assistant. Haunting security-camera footage shows her curled up weakly as she bleeds to death in her restaurant uniform. In a phone call from jail after his arrest, Brown, who reportedly has schizophrenia, told his sister that Zarutska had been trying to read his mind.Initially a tragedy covered by mostly local news outlets, Zarutska’s death has grown in recent days into a cause célèbre on the American right. In more centrist conservative accounts, Zarutska’s killing is a symbol and symptom of a lax criminal justice system that should never have allowed Brown to freely walk the streets. In more inflammatory, far-right discourse, the story of a formerly incarcerated Black man’s killing of a defenseless blond woman has become racist fodder for sinister theories about white persecution and Black criminality.On X, Elon Musk has tweeted or retweeted dozens of posts about the story, many arguing that the media would have covered the story more aggressively if a white person had attacked a Black victim, and contrasting it with the media attention given to cases like that of Daniel Penny, a white man who was arrested in New York in 2023 for killing an unhoused Black man with mental illness on the subway in what he described as self-defense. (He was acquitted in trial.)Viral content online has claimed that Brown targeted Zarutska specifically because she was white, though as of now there is no evidence that he did. Some rightwing accounts have noted with pointed irony that a photo that has circulated of Zarutska appears to show a Black Lives Matter poster in the background. Musk and others have pledged money to a campaign to put up George Floyd-style murals of her across American cities.Outrage has reached the highest levels of the US government. Donald Trump has declared on social media that the “ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY.”View image in fullscreenJD Vance, the vice-president, called Brown a “thug” and noted his lengthy arrest record. “It wasn’t law enforcement that failed,” Vance wrote. “It was weak politicians … who kept letting him out of prison.” Earlier this year Brown was arrested for allegedly making unfounded 911 calls, and released after signing a written promise to reappear in court.Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has announced federal charges against Brown – despite the strong possibility that Brown is mentally ill and could thereby be deemed not culpable by reason of insanity, and despite the fact that the federal government would not typically become involved in the prosecution of a tragic but random act of local violence.Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African American studies at Sewanee, the University of the South, said that Zarutska’s death is an undeniable tragedy but has become politicized in a way with obvious racial overtones.“Donald Trump has a history of calling for the death penalty, in particular for Black and brown people,” he said – most famously in the case of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers who were imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a woman jogging in New York. Although they were later exonerated, Trump has never apologized.Experts on mental health and criminal justice believe the true story of this case is less sensational than tragic, and indicative of a fraying American mental health system that failed to protect Zarutska in part because it first failed to protect Brown from himself.“When I hear people define this as [solely] a criminal justice problem or lack of being ‘tough on crime,’ I think: ‘Let’s be real. Let’s define the problem as what it is,’” Sheryl Kubiak, the dean of the school of social work at Wayne State University, said. “We have a mental health crisis in this country, and we need to address it with appropriate mental health resources.”Jails, she said, were not created for treating mental illness, nor equipped to do so.Although Brown had a long history of reckless behavior, his mental problems seemed to get worse after he was released from prison in 2020, members of his family have told the news media. He walked around talking to himself and was given to unexpected angry outbursts.Like many people with seeming severe mental illness, Brown was offered treatment but resisted accepting it. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his mother told ABC, but refused to take medication. She and other members of the family repeatedly tried to get him help. At one point she asked a hospital to admit him but was told, she said, that the hospital could not “make” a person accept treatment. At another point a mental health facility kept him for in-patient treatment but released him after two weeks.Kubiak and other experts note that cases like Brown’s illustrate two longstanding and overlapping debates about the treatment of mental illness. One concerns “institutionalization”, the treatment of serious mental illness in dedicated institutions segregated from larger society, and the other concerns “involuntary” treatment of those who need treatment but refuse it.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States built large, then state-of-the-art mental hospitals across the country to house and treat patients. But institutionalization fell out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s, due to changing cultural and legal attitudes, advances in medication, and a fear that institutions were overused and risked abuse. Mental health practices instead emphasized treating people within their communities. Civil libertarians also lobbied for the bar for involuntary treatment to be stricter. Many of the hospitals were shuttered.View image in fullscreenYet the government has not properly funded and organized a system to replace the older one, Jeffrey Swanson, a sociologist and professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, said. Where someone with severe mental health problems might have previously had access to dedicated, long-term treatment facilities, they are now likely to end up in a revolving door of jails, ERs, and psychiatric wards with too many patients and too few beds.“Now we have probably more people with serious mental illnesses on any given day in one of our massive big city jails, like Cook county jail in Chicago or the Los Angeles county jail or Rikers Island [in New York], than we ever had in these asylums,” he said. “And it’s really a scandal.”Some progressives are opposed to involuntary treatment, casting it as a violation of consent. Mental health experts tend to take a more nuanced view, Swanson said, particularly in the case of patients whose illnesses are severe and defined by “anosognosia,” a term that means that someone doesn’t recognize that they are ill.A well-known argument for involuntary treatment, he added, says: “We wouldn’t let our grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease wander around and sleep in the subway just because she doesn’t know that she needs treatment; that’d be inhumane. So why do we tolerate that for young adults with schizophrenia?”His own opinion, he said, is complicated by the inadequacies of the current mental health system. “If you’re going to coerce someone into treatment for their own good, you have to have the system capacity to provide those services. I mean, otherwise, it’s really ironic to say: ‘We’re going to force you into treatment that doesn’t exist. We’re going to force you, but we don’t have a bed for you.’”Zarutska was buried in Charlotte on 27 August. Family members who were also in the US as refugees attended the funeral, but her father, who cannot leave Ukraine due to wartime restrictions, had to watch by video call.The Ukrainian embassy offered to help repatriate her body for burial, according to an uncle who spoke to People, but her family chose to inter her in the US; she had fallen “so much in love with the American dream”, he said.Her death is something “I would wish on no one,” Riley, the professor of political science, said. Yet until the US has better systems for treating mental health, “this will be a repeated cycle.” More

    More stories

    • 163 Shares52 Views

      in US Politics

      Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

      by

      Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
      If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

      If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

      Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

      If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
      On debate
      We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
      – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

      Prove me wrong.
      – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
      On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
      Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
      – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

      The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
      – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

      We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
      On gun violence
      I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
      – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
      On immigration
      America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

      The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

      The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
      On Islam
      America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

      We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
      On religion
      There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

    • 188 Shares161 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Racist as hell’: Trump’s cabinet is almost all white, and he keeps firing Black officials

      by

      A day after Donald Trump announced that he was firing Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, the White House proudly released a photo. It showed Trump, his cabinet and other officials giving a thumbs-up. Of the 24 people in the Oval Office, only one was Black.For those who have studied the US president’s long and troubling history of racism, the two events were more than mere coincidence. They were indicative of a man who has recently brought white nationalist perspectives from the margins back to the mainstream.Trump has vehemently denied that he is a racist, pointing to a modest increase in support among African American voters in last year’s election, when his opponent was a Black woman. But critics suggest that his effort to oust Cook fits a pattern of purging diverse voices from the higher ranks of leadership.“He chose to fire her out of all the governors because she’s a Black woman,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the organisation Black Voters Matter. “His goal is to get control of the Federal Reserve and for that to no longer be an autonomous, independent body. But what he does recognise is that in America everything is about race. It is as lethal as a nuclear bomb.”Cook taught economics and international relations at Michigan State University, and was previously on the faculty of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She was a Marshall scholar who received degrees from Oxford University and Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta.Cook dedicated much of her scholarship to examining how racial discrimination and targeted violence created barriers to economic advancement for African Americans. She also advised the Nigerian and Rwandan governments on banking reforms and economic development.In 2022 she was confirmed to the Fed’s board of governors by the Senate in a party-line vote. Republicans argued that she was unqualified and found her research overly focused on race; Democrats brushed off such critiques as unfounded.On Monday, Trump said he fired Cook after the director of a housing regulatory agency, whom the president appointed, alleged that she committed mortgage fraud. She refused to resign and filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump has no power to remove her from office.Trump’s order aligned with his effort to expand his power across once independent parts of the federal government and broader economy and culture. It also marked another potential high-profile removal of a Black leader from the federal government amid Trump’s broader crusade against diversity and inclusion policies.Brown observed: “He knows that racism and sexism is a very effective tool to cast doubt and that’s the pathway. Lisa Cook isn’t even the chair of the board. So why would you pick her?“He picked her because he is betting that, in an industry that is probably 90% or more white male, his odds of removing her are greater than the odds for removing others from the board. That in itself is rooted in the history and how insidious racism is built into the fabric of how we see people of colour in this country.”Over the past seven months Trump has targeted other prominent Black leaders. He fired Gen Charles Q Brown Jr, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the second Black man to serve in the position. Brown had delivered speeches about racial discrimination and issued policies that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in the military.The president dismissed Carla Hayden, the first Black person to serve as librarian of Congress, after a conservative advocacy organisation accused her of being a “radical”. He ousted Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to sit on the National Labor Relations Board, which hears private-sector labour disputes.View image in fullscreenTrump’s critics argue that his life and career have given succour to white supremacists. In 1973 he and his father were sued for housing discrimination in New York; in 1989 he took out full-page ads in several newspapers calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, Black and Latino youths who were later exonerated.Trump broke through in national politics with the “birther” conspiracy theory, falsely claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the US and therefore ineligible to be president. After a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”.He has reportedly described Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”, has called Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu”, and, on the campaign trail last year, said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, echoing the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.Since returning to the White House, Trump has imposed a travel ban on many of the world’s poorest countries even as the US granted refugee status to about 50 white South Africans, claiming they were victims of racial persecution and “white genocide”.He issued executive orders to curb DEI initiatives in the federal government and even sought to blame DEI for an air crash. He is seeking to purge “divisive, race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian Institution museums, suggesting that there is too much focus on “how bad Slavery was”.The attempt to fire Cook is the most dubious move yet, prompting an outcry from Democrats and civil rights groups, who pointed to her gender and race as vital factors.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCongresswoman Nanette Barragán of California posted on the X social media platform: “If you haven’t noticed yet – this is a disturbing pattern for Trump. Fire or drive out smart, competent women, in particular women of color, from high ranking positions and fill many of these positions with white men.”Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said: “Dr Cook’s credentials outshine Trump’s entire cabinet. This president simply cannot stomach Black excellence when it reveals his failures, particularly those in positions of power. In reality, this is about bending the Federal Reserve to Trump’s will, and he’s using racism as a tool to do it.”But Trump’s actions are being cheered on by white nationalists. Far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have been quoted as saying that they no longer need to take to the streets to demonstrate because the president has so comprehensively adopted their talking points and embraced their agenda.Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist, observed: “When you have white supremacists who are holding key roles in government and you have leaders in this country who come and play footsie to their drumbeat they don’t have to resist because what they want is laid out for them in the form of a buffet.”Trump has been quick to point to Black allies when politically expedient, such as Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, the representative Byron Donalds of Florida and Alveda King, a niece of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King. But critics note there is no guarantee this will translate to policies that address racial injustice.Nor has it manifested in significant representation at the heart of government. Towards the end of the first Trump presidency, the Washington Post identified 59 people who had held cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs. Only seven were people of colour and only one – the housing secretary, Ben Carson – was Black.In his second term, Trump has picked only one Black person to serve in his cabinet: Scott Turner, the secretary of housing and urban development. Joe Biden, by contrast, appointed the most diverse cabinet in history with more women and people of colour than any that had come before.Seawright said: “We went from generational progress to generational rollback, and what this president and this administration has done in seven months could take 70 years at least to replenish. It should be a friendly reminder for all people, but particularly African Americans, that all progress is not permanent.”Trump’s cabinet includes Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with no experience of running a major organisation, at the Pentagon; Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, at the health department; and Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive, at the education department. The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has associated with white nationalist thinkers and groups and is the architect of his hardline immigration policy.Rashad Robinson, a civil rights leader and former president of the group Color of Change, added: “We live in a very diverse country, a country with many different types of people that come from many different backgrounds, and the president exhibits his values by who he puts in office.“This is not simply that Donald Trump has put only one Black person in his cabinet. It’s that Donald Trump has gone out of his way to find some of the most unqualified and ill-equipped people to put in those jobs as a way to actually avoid having to put Black people in his cabinet.”For Brown, the voting rights activist, Trump’s cabinet picks demonstrate that he is “as racist as hell”. She added: “Quite frankly, I’m glad he doesn’t have a whole lot of Black people in his cabinet because that would be deeply embarrassing to me. Who would work in that mess?” More

    • 163 Shares147 Views

      in US Politics

      Why Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian matters | Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley

      by

      In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12 August, the Trump administration announced its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive” or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and “constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project. Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights racist voter suppression measures, among others.The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every day. The federal occupation of Washington DC, the crackdown on free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents, the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack on American museums, education and memory, along with his weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial conditions of possibility.Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on the construction of a mythic past. The mythic past is central to fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on democracy.From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed, as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a kind of treason.The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact, the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.It is clear that the Trump administration understands this relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban “improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a human invention”.The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project. A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMuseums allow us to reckon with the brutality of the American legacy as well as expose our citizens to the people, institutions and strategies that charted a different course towards becoming a “more perfect” union. Fascist erasures like Trump’s hide behind the claim that truthful encounters with the past inflame and divide. This instinct is the opposite of the truth. A functioning democracy does not restrict perspectives to those of the dominant group, much less make it illegal to teach alternative ones.A people who cannot remember their past are a people who cannot resist a fascist future. Knowing our history can give us the weapons and wherewithal to battle Trump’s efforts to catapult us back to a time when the majority of Americans lacked both the civic and economic power that we have now. The fight for our museums and for our memory is a critical bulwark against the unraveling of American democracy. It is vital that we fight to protect our repositories before it’s too late.

      Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues

      Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

    • 175 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      NAACP sues Texas over congressional redistricting, saying it strips Black voters of political power

      by

      Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.The lawsuit, joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, names Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and secretary of state, Jane Nelson, as defendants. It asks a federal judge for a preliminary injunction preventing the use of the redrawn maps, arguing that the redistricting violates the US constitution by improperly reducing the power of voters of color. It also argues that the maps violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.“We now see just how far extremist leaders are willing to go to push African Americans back toward a time when we were denied full personhood and equal rights,” the president of the Texas NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, said in a statement. “We call on Texans of every background to recognize the dangers of this moment. Our democracy depends on ensuring that every person is counted fully, valued equally and represented fairly. We are prepared to fight this injustice at every level. Our future depends on it.”Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map on Saturday, with the expected result of an increase in Republican representation by five seats in the next Congress. Democratic state legislators are a minority in both chambers of the Texas legislature, leaving them with few options to block it. A group of state house representatives spent nearly a month away from the state to deny Republicans a quorum. That maneuver ended last week, after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the state legislature began a process to counter the Republican gerrymander with a Democratic gerrymander of their own.“The state of Texas is only 40% white, but white voters control over 73% of the state’s congressional seats,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”Democrats in Texas promised lawsuits out of the gate.The League of United Latin American Citizens – a group of 13 Texas voters – filed suit within hours of the redistricting bill’s passage. The map “eviscerates minorities’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in four key areas of the state”, the filing states.Other challenges are likely to follow. Republicans, however, believe that they are operating on favorable legal ground, hoping to overturn key sections of the Voting Rights Act as the lawsuits work their way through the courts.The US supreme court will hear a re-argument of Louisiana v Callais in the term to come. In that case, the court will be asked to upend the core tenet of the Voting Rights Act and hold that the use of racially identifying voter data to prevent voters of color from being able to select a candidate of their choice is actually an act of racial discrimination.Without that protection, Republican state lawmakers across the country can be expected to redraw maps for increased partisan advantage by cutting Black-majority districts into ribbons.Meanwhile, Donald Trump said the Department of Justice would sue California for its redistricting. Last week, the Democratic-led legislature placed a measure to redraw the state’s district lines on the 4 November ballot.In a sharp break against longstanding progressive efforts to turn redistricting over to neutral commissions, the NAACP said today that it “is urging California, New York and all other states to act immediately by redistricting and passing new, lawful and constitutional electoral maps” to counter expected efforts in Texas and other states to redraw maps for midterm advantage. More

    • 150 Shares107 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century-old myth

      by

      It should surprise no one that former cast members from reality shows that ran for more than 15 seasons are running out of new material. Days ago, Donald Trump, former star of NBC’s The Apprentice and current US president, posted a lengthy Truth Social rant in which he (again) threatened the country’s leading cultural institutions to adhere to his political ideology. The target was one he has had in his crosshairs before – the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) – which Trump called “OUT OF CONTROL” in his post. “Everything discussed [in NMAAHC exhibits] is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” Trump unloaded. “WOKE IS BROKE,” he continued through his customary use of all caps and misplaced capitalization of common nouns. “We have the HOTTEST Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”The tirade left many wondering what exactly Trump saw as the upsides of slavery, but also where they had previously heard this recycled talking point. The comment seemed to echo comments made just days prior by his fellow reality show bully Jillian Michaels, a former trainer on NBC’s The Biggest Loser, the weight-loss competition show that launched alongside The Apprentice in 2004. Michaels had been making her rounds in media and public appearances, rebranding from verbally abusive fat shamer to Maga influencer.On CNN’s NewsNight, the host Abby Phillips moderated a roundtable discussion on Trump’s months-long overreach into cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the NMAAHC. Michaels hijacked the conversation into a lament about slavery’s prominence in the massively popular museum’s displays on US history. “[Trump] is not whitewashing slavery, he’s not,” Michaels said. “You cannot tie slavery to just one race, which is what every single exhibit [at NMAAHC] does.” Turning towards the representative Ritchie Torres, who was seated beside her, Michaels unloaded popular far-right talking points. “Do you realize that only less than 2% of white Americans owned slaves?” she continued. “Do you realize slavery is thousands of years old? Do you know who was the first race who tried to end slavery?”Torres’s interjections that slavery was a system of white supremacy, not a set of individual white acts, went unaddressed by the TV star. (From 20% to 50% of the white population in southern US states owned enslaved people, and all white people nationwide benefited from slavery’s racial order. Michael’s false claims prompted Phillips to later post a public correction.)The tirade was an escalation of Trump’s previous open declarations to “restore truth and sanity to American history”, an effort to overhaul exhibits and installations across federally operated museums and galleries and politicize their content, with the NMAAHC locked squarely in the administration’s sights for what it called “corrosive ideology”. Previous edicts about the museum, lovingly nicknamed “The Blacksonian” by many of its patrons, had not specifically identified slavery as the White House’s gripe. But Trump’s Truth Social post more directly reflected a return to a century-old tactic to minimize chattel slavery as “not that bad”.If we have learned anything from reality television, it is that every narrative is scripted. No matter how easily their claims were debunked, both Michaels and Trump were in lock step in their effort to vindicate white people from their role in slavery, both by insisting that slavery’s conditions and aftermath are overblown, and refuting that it played a major role in US history.These assertions are a refresh of a century-old “lost cause” myth spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an organization of more than 100,000 white women who set out to make slavery respectable again by rebranding the Confederacy’s bloody image. The “genteel ladies” campaign euphemized slave trading as a “celebration of memory” and “a southern way of life”. Like Michaels, Trump and like-minded slavery deniers, proponents of “the lost cause” promoted an outlandishly misleading account of history in which slavery was both irrelevant as the cause of the American civil war, and benevolent because Christianity and plantation life, they said, benefited African-descended people who were otherwise unfit for civilization.UDC members capitalized on their social status as wives and mothers to indoctrinate children, notably through catechisms, the control and production of school textbooks, essay and scholarship contests, and their spinoff organizations, like the Children of the Confederacy. Their purported concern for white children provided a gender-appropriate cover for their goals to terrorize Black people in the south. They took full advantage of the threat of lynching that loomed over any Black person, including children, who dared to challenge a white woman. Confederate statues and memorials, which UDC lobbied to have strategically placed outside courthouses and in public squares, parks and other spaces, were meant to intimidate African Americans who were merely engaging in civic life.Trump’s obsessive preoccupation with the Smithsonian’s 19th installation signals that history is repeating. Since its 2016 opening, the NMAAHC has welcomed more than 10 million in-person visitors, with families and school groups driving much of that number. Across seven floors and 12 galleries, the museum offers a remarkably comprehensive deep dive into the story of Black life in the US. It is as accessible to grammar school pupils as it is impressive to nationally celebrated historians.On his initial tour in 2017, Trump lauded the institution as “a shining example of African Americans’ incredible contributions to our culture, our society and our history”. Today, the museum serves as a go-to supplement for the Black history curriculums that many American public school systems have stripped or disbanded under Republican state legislatures’ “anti-woke” policies.Trump’s Truth Social post went on to announce that he had instructed his attorneys to “go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities”, comparing the funding cuts the administration has wielded over university curricula and research to an overhaul of NMAAHC’s exhibits relevant to slavery.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s a play right out of the UDC’s book: the daughters understood that they had lost the war but could win the battle for the national narrative if they could successfully undermine Black progress and Black accounts of slavery in educational institutions. Vindication, as the organization deployed it, was a tool for vengeance, not justice – divorced from all reality and set on a narrative in which they insisted they were the victims of the very war their families provoked. They perfected a manipulation of public memory that controlled the racial hierarchy by controlling education.The late sociologist and historian James Loewen, who studied Confederate monuments across the US, once explained that the past is what happened, history is what we say about the past, and some of us believe that should be the same thing. We are locked in a battle, however, with those who seek to pervert history and replace it with a fiction that absolves their present-day wrongdoing.UDC members continued to lobby for revisionist school curricula and the placement of Confederate memorials well into the 20th century, where they fought against Black progress in the civil rights movement. Ultimately, backlashes against Confederate monuments successfully removed nearly 100 of them in the protests following the state murder of George Floyd. Still, hundreds more remain, including those Trump has recently replaced. He is clinging to a century-old storyline hoping to be renewed for another political season. But it’s old material that isn’t nearly as effective when your opponents already know the playbook.

      Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man More

    • 138 Shares198 Views

      in US Politics

      Not just Braveheart: black Scots become TikTok hit among African Americans

      by

      It began with a good-natured rant about the Scottish summer weather and has developed into a global conversation about history, diaspora and diversity on both sides of the Atlantic.Last week, Torgi Squire uploaded a TikTok post that any Scottish parent could relate to: why is it, he asked, that without fail the washout summer weather always improves the week that the kids go back to school?The 43-year-old high school teacher from Glasgow ended with his usual sign-off, wishing everyone “a belter of a day”, and thought nothing more of it. The internet had other ideas.The post was picked up by a US weather reporter and Squire’s comments were suddenly filling with African Americans expressing their amazement and delight at discovering a black man with a strong Scottish accent. But it didn’t stop there: black Scots on TikTok found themselves flooded with questions from their American cousins and seized the opportunity to respond with high calibre banter, as #blackscottishtiktok generated thousands more posts.“It’s been a whirlwind,” says Squire, who teaches design and technology. His original post has racked up nearly 4m views, and he’s since welcomed more than 200,000 new followers.“Americans are kept in a bit of an echo chamber by their media, and their only point of reference for Scotland is either Braveheart, Brave or Shrek. They don’t seem to have much awareness of the diaspora, particularly when it comes to the UK, which is maybe why they’ve reacted with so much curiosity.“But it’s not just Americans. I’ve had comments from people in England too, so there’s still surprise at a black person with a Scottish accent on both sides of the Atlantic.”View image in fullscreenScotland is certainly more diverse than when he was growing up in the 1980s – “of the 1,400 kids at my secondary school, only four were black and three of them were related to me”.“In my experience Scotland is a welcoming place and while there is still racism, it’s isolated and Scottish people are very good at calling it out. Perhaps because there are far fewer black people than somewhere like America, we tend to treat each other more like community.”When Ellie Koepplinger, who posts about race and politics on TikTok, saw the initial interest in Squire’s content, she thought: “This is going to be huge.”“Then other black Scottish people started to chime in and it was really exciting.”Koepplinger, who grew up in Glasgow and lived in the US for nine years, added her own post about being mixed heritage in Scotland: “It feels like finally people are understanding that we have our own racial politics.”But the interest from across the Atlantic has a more practical edge, she suggests: “Trump has made America so hostile to black people that having so many people talking about their positive experience in Scotland has got a huge amount of interest from people who are really keen to leave the States.”The flurry of content has also prompted some fruitful conversations among black Scots themselves, she adds. “It’s been really interesting to hear other Scottish people talk about the racism and the challenges they’ve experienced in Scotland. The black community in Scotland is fairly fragmented because it’s small, but it’s a population that’s excited to grow.”View image in fullscreenManny Daphey, a 20-year-old student, soon found his own content getting pushed by the TikTok algorithm, doubling his following as Americans flocked to his videos. “I was pretty blown by surprise, suddenly everyone was interacting and it felt like speaking to my long-lost cousins.”A few negative comments have been vastly outweighed by a barrage of positivity, he says: “Lots of Americans are very intrigued about living in Scotland, saying they want to visit.” Perhaps inevitably, there are also some women who appreciate a handsome face with a Scottish accent. American women can be “very direct” he says.When Roy Wood Jr, comedian and host of CNN’s Have I Got News For You US, arrived in Edinburgh a few days ago, he was ready to take in some shows at the festival. Instead, he’s been diverted on to a TikTok odyssey, travelling across the central belt to interview black Scots and prove to his fellow Americans they do indeed exist.In one of his posts Wood makes the point that part of the reason why black Americans don’t know about black Scots is because their schools “barely teach them about black people in America”.“People can laugh about dumb Americans not knowing there are black people in Scotland but this tells us a lot about the differences between education systems and what governments define as history.”In his interviews with Scottish creators, Wood says a common thread is the sense that black Scots are suddenly able to connect online in a way that wasn’t so familiar in the real world. “Coming from the States, I found there’s no black neighbourhood, no exclusive cultural enclave for black people in Scotland, so there was a common feeling of ‘now we’ve found each other’.”Wood tracked down Squire in Glasgow and the pair made a post together. “It’s an opportunity for black people across the whole diaspora to converse with one another.”“The conversations I’ve had in the past week have really enriched my life,” adds Squire. “It makes me happy that people are coming together.” More

    • 100 Shares198 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump administration’s anti-woke campaign targets seven flagship museums

      by

      Amid the Donald Trump administration’s heavy-handed review of Smithsonian museums, the Guardian has seen a document compiled by the White House that details examples of how the widely visited cultural institutions have overly negative portrayals of US history.The document, based on public submissions shared with the administration, points to what it says are problematic exhibits at seven different museums, including a Benjamin Franklin exhibit that links his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people and a film about George Floyd’s murder that it says mischaracterizes the police.“President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable,” a White House official said. “Until we get info from the Smithsonian in response to our letter, we can’t verify the numbers of artifacts that have been removed because the Smithsonian has removed them on their own.”Trump announced the initiative on Truth Social earlier this week, writing: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”The seven museums that have so far been flagged for review include the National Museum of American History, National Museum of the American Latino, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African Art, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Asian Art.The administration argues exhibits at these museums focus excessively on oppression rather than American achievements. At the National Museum of American History, the document flagged the ¡Presente! Latino history exhibition for allegedly promoting an “anti-American agenda” by examining colonization effects and depicting the US as stealing territory from Mexico in 1848.Examples from the document also shames the museum’s Benjamin Franklin exhibit for linking his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people, and the Star-Spangled Banner display for focusing on American historical failures and controversies rather than celebrating national achievements.The National Portrait Gallery is being singled out for focusing on how the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist immigration laws contradicted the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming message. The African art museum is targeted over the George Floyd film. And the Asian art museum is flagged for exhibitions for claiming to impose western gender ideology on traditional cultures.Last week, the White House budget director, Russ Vought, sent letters to eight museums demanding information about exhibits within 30 days and instructing officials to implement “content corrections” including replacing “divisive” language.The review follows similar Trump administration pressure on universities, which resulted in institutions paying hundreds of millions to the government and walking back diversity initiatives.Separately, the Smithsonian has already made changes to exhibits referencing Trump, removing all mention of his impeachments from a presidential power display at the American history museum in July, leaving only generic references to three presidents facing potential removal from office.The Smithsonian Institution did not immediately respond to requests for comment. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration mastermind – podcast

      by

      Stephen Miller is the man behind Donald Trump’s most controversial immigration policies, from separating children and their parents at the southern border to the sharp rise in arrests now being made by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.The journalist and writer Jean Guerrero explains to Nosheen Iqbal that Miller’s hostility towards immigrants was evident from a young age and over the years key figures have shaped the tactics and language he now uses.The pair discuss the power that Miller holds today, the importance of Miller to the Trump administration and what lies behind his political longevity.Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More