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    Black History Month is a reflection of the political moment, so how do we revamp it?

    It’s Black History Month in the UK, and it feels like it’s time for a rethink. Over the years, an event that started out as a celebration and reminder of history, culture and the connections between global Black communities, has taken on a corporate feel, expanding to include events where Black people are paid to talk to white audiences about “unconscious bias” and “allyship”. The 2020s Black Lives Matter protests created a surge in the business of demonstrating racial awareness. But even that moment has passed. The wave has crested, leaving a sort of hollowed out legacy of what raising awareness is for.The history of Black HistoryView image in fullscreenOriginally observed in the US and Canada, Black History Month was conceived in 1962 as “Negro History Week” by African American historian Carter G. Woodson with seven days of commemoration and observance in the second week of February. Black History Month grew out of this movement and was officially launched in 1970. Today it is observed not only in the US and Canada in February, but also in October in the UK, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.The month has evolved since those days, focusing less on the histories of transatlantic enslavement and civil rights battles, and more on prominent Black figures in politics, culture, and activism, and broadly celebrating the contribution Black people have made to shape the country. It is in schools where Black History Month is most regularly observed, with talks and cultural events. But the way the month is celebrated is a reflection of the political moment. How it evolves is a good lesson in how co-option leads to dismantling: the reshaping of Black History Month has stymied the point of it, which is to address systemic and institutional racism.A jarring momentView image in fullscreenLittle demonstrates how important it is to rethink Black History Month more than the particular moment in which it falls this year. In the UK, a resurgent right in the shape of the Reform party is leading the polls. In the summer we witnessed the largest far-right rally in British history. Kemi Badenoch, the Black leader of the Conservative party, is a firm opponent of Black Lives Matter, and we are in a place where a member of parliament feels emboldened to say that “not seeing any white faces” in parts of a city is a cause for alarm. Meanwhile, far-right parties are surging in Europe as a whole.In the US, a colossal assault against DEI and affirmative action has been taken, often successfully, to the highest courts of the country. A campaign to scrub Black history and experience from the archives is under way. One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders targeted the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian Institution, accusing them of a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” by portraying America “as inherently racist”.Against this backdrop, the month symbolises how little it can be impactful if it is limited to either dutiful corporate observances, or politically neutered celebrations of contributions in the past, rather than challenging the conditions of the present. It also demonstrates how its restricted time span means that it is detached from the wider consistent effort that is needed. Denise Miller, a prof at University of Greenwich, put it best when she raised concerns about the temporary “tokenism” of the month. “The problem with taking a tokenistic approach”, she wrote, “is that it often means that Black History Month becomes a fleeting performance rather than a catalyst for change.”Rethinking, but not jettisoningskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenFiguring out how to adjust, modify and expand efforts for racial equality and recognition in such moments of dejection and worry is a treacherous thing. There is a temptation to just do away with things like Black History Month altogether, thinking they are simply not fit for purpose, or are relics of an era that has not worked.But despite everything, Black History Month, and in fact the entire extended network and legacy of racial movements – grassroots Black Lives Matter organisations, diversity equity and inclusion initiatives, and yes, even those talks to businesses – constitute an infrastructure that a lot of work has gone into. It is there not just to decay as the politics moves on (and in fact, regresses), but to be a living breathing thing.So what would a new dynamic Black History Month look like? Well, first, it would be not just one concentrated month: something that is spread out through the year (as some institutions are already beginning to do), parts of its content (particularly around historic Black characters) incorporated into school curriculums. It would also be a period that does not shy away from politics, and leaves space for people, particularly young people, to air their fears and experiences. What use is mere awareness of the past when it doesn’t reckon with the present reality of far-right rallies in the street? Institutions who observe it should not be comforted with the passive language of “unconscious bias” and alertness to “microaggressions”, but confronted with the risks that face all if anti-racism is not taken seriously. In short, Black History Month should be made current, urgent, and reactive. Perhaps an entire name rebrand is in order – Black History is Now Month. More

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    US leaders are erasing Black history. That threatens our future | Stacey Abrams and Esosa Osa

    Democracy flourishes when Black Americans advance. The evidence is clear: birthright citizenship, constitutional due process, anti-discrimination laws from education to housing to employment and equitable small business investments, are all byproducts of the systemic corrections known today as DEI. Yet, in recent years, DEI has been used as a smokescreen by cynical politicians and activists to roll back progress and consolidate power. Across classrooms, museums, boardrooms and federal agencies, the key pathways to opportunity and success are under attack through a coordinated disinformation campaign of erasure, distortion and suppression.The impact of these tactics is concrete and undeniable. Since the start of this year, Onyx Impact’s research has found, 306,000 Black women have lost their jobs and $3.4bn in grant programs investing in Black communities has been slashed – including $9.4m in sickle cell disease research, $42m in programs designed to address Black maternal mortality and $31m in cuts to address asthma rates and air pollution harming Black children.Concerted attempts to stifle the progress of Black communities is not new; however, history has proven that when progress for Black people is erased, everyone suffers. During Reconstruction, Black Americans made extraordinary strides – holding office, building businesses and founding schools. Less discussed is how other oppressed communities, from white sharecroppers to Latino gauchos, also benefited from increased access to legal and economic systems. When Black people faced a century of Jim Crow and state-sanctioned discrimination, other communities saw a similar retreat on their access to full citizenship. When the civil rights movement sought to eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow, its practices of nonviolent civil disobedience expanded freedom and opportunity not just for Black Americans, but for communities of all backgrounds. From the Native American movement to the advancement of gay rights to women’s economic empowerment, Black civil rights opened the aperture for expanded human rights.Nevertheless, every time Black communities gain ground, forces threatened by change work to push us back. As we face the current regime, DEI is the bulwark that guarantees a pluralistic democracy. Its power is rooted not in politics, but in the promise of America itself: that all people are created equal and deserve a chance to thrive. Defending DEI, accurate historical education and equitable access to opportunity protects the very principles that allow our nation to live up to its highest ideals. Authoritarians and their acolytes despise DEI because it secures the rights of all.And when we do not recognize this, the consequences are immediate and real. The newly released Onyx Impact report, Blackout: The Real-World Cost of Erasing, Distorting, and Suppressing Black Progress, documents more than 15,000 instances, in just nine months, where Black lives, histories and pathways to success have been directly harmed or erased by the Trump administration and their legislative and judicial cronies. This report provides not only a stark account of harm but also a way forward. Its rigorous, data-driven analysis empowers citizens, journalists and policymakers to recognize the instances and patterns of erasure, distortion and suppression.We must, though, understand these attacks as part of a deliberate campaign. The goal is to rewrite our nation’s story and restrict the futures of Black Americans, and by extension, any American deemed unworthy. We can be tempted to view their actions in isolation, but that is by design.Distortion is one of the most insidious tactics. It reshapes reality in ways that narrow our expectations and cements bigotry as policy. Scholarships and education programs are being cut, leaving Black students with fewer chances to pursue a quality education. These cuts also affect Native American students and served as a predicate for attacks on Hispanic students. Black families continue to live in districts with underfunded schools due to historical patterns of segregation and inequality, and the concomitant effect of slashing services disproportionately harms all low-income children and disabled people. Support for Black-owned businesses and vital health initiatives have been slashed, leaving our nation without the data necessary to address systemic disparities in our economy and healthcare system. The follow-on effect will undermine research and investment for women across racial categories. By rewriting who counts, who is valued and what histories are taught, these policies compound the barriers that communities have fought for centuries to overcome.Erasure and suppression work in tandem, and practitioners predictably start with Black America. Those seeking to cripple democracy have removed Black stories from curricula, exhibits and public memory, costing us the lessons of confrontation, remediation and redemption. Rising autocracies know to pressure schools, universities, corporations and government institutions into silence. Together, these tactics do more than harm Black communities – they hollow out our democracy itself. Civic trust erodes, economic opportunity narrows and our national narrative becomes dangerously incomplete.The question before us now is: what will we do in response? Will we allow fear, disinformation and autocracy to write the next chapter? Or will we act, fiercely and deliberately, to defend the truth, honor Black progress and protect the right to opportunity for every American? The answer will shape not just this moment, but the very future of our country.Protecting and defending the historic progress we’ve made is a moral imperative, one that demands concerted civil action. As the struggle for liberation has taught us, when we fight for freedom, we win. We absolutely face coordinated attacks on truth, which are intended to sow despair or lead to inaction – but we cannot allow that. The 10 Steps campaign, a nationwide mobilization effort to protect democracy, provides a clear playbook for understanding the threat that faces our country and the roadmap for action, helping individuals and communities navigate this moment and demand freedom and power. Additionally, Onyx Impact documents information threats, amplifies truth and equips communities to resist the harmful false narratives that are used to rationalize the dismantling of our democracy.When linked, these initiatives show that protecting Black history and progress is a shared responsibility if we are to defend America – a responsibility that demands action from every corner of society.Our nation’s future will not arrive on its own. Its success or failure will be determined by what we choose to do and resist today.America’s story began by deciding that from many, we could become one. E pluribus unum is the essence of DEI, the lived reality of the Black experience and the proof that we can build something bigger than fear and despair. Together, we can preserve opportunity, honor truth and strengthen our democracy for generations to come.

    Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022, is the founder of American Pride Rises, a group dedicated to defending the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)

    Esosa Osa is the founder and CEO of Onyx Impact, an organization created to fight digital harm, amplify Black voices and create healthier online ecosystems More

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    North Carolina Republicans advance map to secure another seat in Congress

    North Carolina Republicans in the state senate passed a new congressional map on Tuesday, intent on contributing more Republicans to the US Congress as the national redistricting battlefield widens.Currently, North Carolina has a 10-4 partisan split in favor of Republicans in Congress. The new map would result in an 11-3 split, replacing congressman Don Davis, a Democrat, with a Republican.State law does not give North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, a veto of redistricting legislation. The state house, controlled by a large majority of Republicans, will receive the redistricting legislation, and is expected to pass it quickly – likely on Wednesday, said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina GOP.The recourse for critics of partisan gerrymandering is to replace state representatives by winning elections, Mercer said. The maps are a product of the time, and the shoe has been on the other foot for North Carolina Democrats, he added.“I think Democrats are just kind of setting up this loser mentality where ‘we’re never gonna win’,” Mercer said. “Well, Republicans won in 2010, with maps that the Democrats specifically drew to give themselves more power. It’s about the moment, good candidates and good campaigns, and also convincing the voters of your choice.”Davis’s seat in the north-east corner of the state had already been precarious. Shifting as few as 3,152 votes in the state’s first congressional district would have given his Republican opponent, Laurie Buckhout, the victory in 2024, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.Davis’s term has been marked by bipartisanship, said state congressman Rodney Pierce, a Democrat representing counties in the district. Redrawing a map to force Davis out is an attack on bipartisanship, Pierce said. “What does it say to the public at large?” he asked. “What does it say to Republicans who may want to work across the aisle with Democrats? What does it say to Democrats?”Donald Trump won 50.9% of votes in North Carolina in 2024. Democrats hold half of its statewide elected offices, including the governor, secretary of state and attorney general. In 2024, 46% of votes for Congress went to Democratic candidates.State law – and a state supreme court controlled by Democrats – had prevented extreme gerrymanders in the past. But Republicans elected a majority of North Carolina supreme court justices in 2022.Buoyed by Rucho v Common Cause – a 2019 US supreme court case from North Carolina that ruled partisan gerrymandering was effectively legal – North Carolina immediately replaced a court-mandated congressional map. That move split the state’s delegation 7-7, with one drawn by Republican legislators that elected 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats in 2024.The loss of those three seats represents the entire margin of partisan control of Congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans left the first congressional district in competitive territory, hoping to avoid a legal challenge on the basis of racial gerrymandering. The first district holds all eight of North Carolina’s majority-Black counties and has long been represented by a Black Democrat.But the US supreme court is considering a challenge to the Voting Rights Act that could effectively end protections from gerrymandering for Black voters.Much of the district is impoverished. About 45% of Halifax county residents receive Medicaid benefits, Pierce said. He would not expect a Republican to approach the problems of rural healthcare in poor, Black counties the way a Democrat might, Pierce said, quoting former North Carolina congresswoman Eva Clayton.“I’ll say what she says. It’s not that I don’t think that they’re capable of it. They certainly are. Will they do it is another question.” More

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    BBC reporters cannot wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts in newsroom, says Tim Davie

    BBC journalists cannot wear T-shirts in the newsroom supporting the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, the corporation’s director general has said.Tim Davie said the BBC stood against racism but it was “not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“You cannot have any assumption about where people are politically. You leave it at the door, and your religion is journalism in the BBC. And I tell you: the problem I’ve got is people react quite chemically to that.“So you can’t come into the newsroom with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt on. We stand absolutely firmly against racism in any form.“I find some of the hatred in society at the moment utterly abhorrent, personally, really upsetting, but that is a campaign that has politicised objectives. Therefore, it is not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“And, for some people joining the BBC, that is a very difficult thing to accept. And it has not been an easy thing to get done this, and we wrestle with it every day.”Speaking about diversity and impartiality at the BBC at the Cheltenham literature festival, Davie also drew a parallel with impartiality when reporting on mainstream political campaigning.“I feel very, very strongly that if you walk into the BBC newsroom, you cannot be holding a Kamala Harris mug when you come to the election – no way, that’s not even acceptable,” he said.The BBC director general also said his “number one priority” was “trying to navigate a course where you are impartial” and that required “elements of diversity”, adding that “socioeconomic diversity” was something that “hadn’t been talked about enough”.He added: “It is absolutely a big battle, and I’m getting questions: ‘Why are you giving a voice to Reform?’, ‘Why are you doing this?’ We’re not giving a voice, we’re covering – covering what people are interested in, covering the reality of what people feel.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDavie was also asked whether he felt safe when he had been shouted at and people had come into his personal space.He said: “It’s not for the faint-hearted; these jobs in public life now, I mean, they are really quite demanding. I’m no great Californian hippy, but you have to look after yourself, you really have to.” More

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    The podcast showing what resistance looks like under Trump 2.0: ‘Where’s the progressive Project 2025?’

    In a recent episode of Unnamed and Unbound: Black Voters Matter Podcast, the co-host Cliff Albright spoke with his guests about the power of resilience and community building during a time of uncertainty. Resilience takes different forms, he said, such as mutual aid drives or Washington DC protests featuring go-go music during the national guard’s continued deployment in the capital. “As food is becoming more expensive, and as food programs are being cut, whether it’s Snap or Meals on Wheels, you’ve got a lot of organizations and Black communities that are looking at: ‘How do we feed ourselves?’” Albright, the co-founder and executive director of the voting rights and community empowerment organization Black Voters Matter, said. “The best of our resistance has always included some form of taking care of ourselves.”After the presidential election in November, the Black Voters Matter team got to work. In late January, Albright, his co-founder LaTosha Brown, and the group’s legal director and chief of staff April England-Albright launched the podcast about voting rights and organizing to help keep Black communities informed. Their goal is also to dispel misinformation by engaging people who may be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s propaganda, Albright said, and need some “persuasion in terms of how to interpret what’s going on around us”. For England-Albright, she’d like for activists to build coalitions that learn from the shortcomings of past movements. Ultimately, Brown hopes that listeners feel a sense of belonging in the podcast and that they are encouraged to build community.Some of their guests have included Jennifer Wells from the community organizing group Community Change, Ife Finch Floyd from the policy advocacy organization Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, and Deante’ Kyle, host of the pop culture and politics podcast Grits and Eggs.In addition to the podcast, Black Voters Matter has also given nearly $4m in grants to local organizations including churches, neighborhood associations and NAACP chapters to help organizers canvas and mobilize voters this year. The organization also provides technical support to grassroots groups, such as training them on how to send out mass political text messages. A documentary about Black Voters Matter, titled Love, Joy and Power: Tools for Liberation released this year followed the organization’s work in 2020. Its use as a blueprint for progressive organizers, Albright said, “is critical towards the work that we’re doing now and to understand how we can win” in future elections.“I think that there is a sobering reality of millions of people in this country that in order to create the nation that we desire, we deserve,” Brown said, “it cannot, under any circumstances, be built on the same foundation of corporate greed and race and white supremacy.”The podcast’s inception began shortly after the election results poured in the morning after the 2024 presidential race. Brown sat immobile in her hotel kitchen in Washington DC, in shock that Donald Trump won after she sounded the alarm for years. Prior to the election, she and the Black Voters Matter team had travelled throughout the country to engage voters in an effort to build political power among Black communities.A wave of emotions ranging from betrayal to bitterness and then fear washed over her. “I just felt all of the weight of this Black woman being rejected when she was the best and the most prepared. She was the most patriotic. She was the most transparent,” Brown said. “It was like white privilege, dancing in your face.”“Do we not know what we’ve done?” Brown recalled wondering as she continued to watch the election results come in. She wanted others to know that they weren’t alone in their sense of despair. “I see our podcast like a lighthouse in the storm,” Brown said. It provides a space to discuss organizing strategies in the current sociopolitical environment.Ultimately, current movement builders are creating more clandestine networks similar to the Underground Railroad, said Brown.“What we’ve decided is we’re going to focus on our own wellbeing and creating alternatives for our community and for those who really want to see a multiracial democracy. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to keep building. We’re organizing, and when the time is right, you will know we’re there.”For England-Albright, the podcast helps amplify Black Voters Matter’s coalition building by hosting guests from other community empowerment organizations. “So often in this country policy has not exemplified that we matter,” England-Albright said. “We’ve always wanted to serve as a beacon of hope and light that we do matter in this country, regardless of policy.” Her personal experience working in the government has informed her view on Trump’s second term.As a former supervising attorney for the Department of Education’s office for civil rights during Trump’s first term, she said that she has an insider’s view into how the Trump administration has weaponized the powers of the executive branch in his second term. Project 2025, a conservative agenda published by the rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, laid the blueprint for the Trump administration “to radically reduce the civil servants for the federal government and replace them with individuals who would pass a loyalty test,” England-Albright said. “The reason why he did that was because civil servants played a major role in essentially preventing and halting some of the darker things he wanted to do originally.”To survive Trump’s second term, England-Albright said that activists must build coalitions unlike “we’ve ever had before”. In the past, organizations were often singularly focused on issues, such as saving the environment or protecting voting rights. But this time requires an amalgamation of forces, she said: “We have to find a way to merge all of our individual desires or top button issues to become one, to create the kind of wall that is going to be necessary in this moment.”She wants to see progressives create a long-term strategy that ensures their policies survive in rightwing administrations. “Where is the progressive Project 2025?” She asked. “We have to create permanent laws, whether it comes in constitutional amendments, I don’t care, but we’ve got to do something that makes sure that our voices are permanent in this country.”Amid his disappointment about the current state of politics, Albright retains a sense of optimism by acknowledging that a fight is needed to get through the turbulence and pain. In the fifth and sixth episodes of Unnamed and Unbound: Black Voters Matter Podcast released earlier this year, Albright spoke to guests at a gathering at Alabama’s Dallas county courthouse to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. On 7 March 1965, Dr Martin Luther King Jr led thousands of nonviolent civil rights marchers who were brutally beaten by law enforcement as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. “When I say love, you say power,” Albright said in a call and response with attendees. Love and power, Albright told the audience, is at the center of his work at Black Voters Matter. That weekend, Selma residents discussed their hopes and fears, focusing on the effects of gun violence on their community.“I personally often will call on Dr King’s quotes about love and power: ‘Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice,’” Albright said. “So as long as we can be rooted in that; not the sentimental and anemic love, the love that’s bolstered by power, then we can get through this.” More

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    Vermont Republican lawmaker resigns over racist and antisemitic group chat

    A Vermont state lawmaker has resigned over racist and antisemitic chat messages that circulated within the Young Republican political group, another substantial consequence in a scandal that on Friday saw the New York state Young Republicans’ charter revoked.State senator Samuel Douglass, the only elected official known to have taken part in the leaked group chat exposed by Politico, resigned Friday over his participation.In a statement posted online, the 26-year-old Douglass said he was “deeply sorry for the offense” caused by his comments. He added that his decision to step down, effective Monday, “will upset many, and delight others, but in this political climate I must keep my family safe”.Douglass had been under pressure from Vermont governor Phil Scott and state senate minority leader Scott Beck to step aside since Politico obtained and published the chats online.In one exchange, Douglass replied to a message about a “very obese Indian woman” by saying: “She just didn’t bathe often.” In another, Douglass was said to have described how a Jewish person may have made a procedural error. His wife, Brianna Douglass, also on the chat, responded with an antisemitic remark, Politico reported.Other messages in the chat reflected factional infighting in the Young Republicans that included calling Minnesotan members a slur for gay men and other LGBTQ+ people, Nebraskans “inbred cow fuckers” and members from Rhode Island “traitorous cunts”. There was a reference to a “fat stinky Jew” along with comments and jokes about gas chambers, torture and rape, according to Politico.In his resignation statement, Douglass said the comment “was an unflattering remark about a specific individual, absolutely not a generalization” – and said he hoped to “mend bridges to the best of my ability”.His statement also said that he and his wife, who have recently welcomed their first child, had received “some of the most horrific hate one could imagine”, including threats of violence.Political violence has been a dominant topic in the US in part because of the 10 September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and the 14 June shootings that killed Minnesota’s former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and wounded state senator John Hoffman – her fellow Democrat – and his wife, Yvette.Douglass said he had also “reached out to the majority of my Jewish and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color] friends and colleagues to ensure that they can be honest and up-front with me”.Douglass and his wife had earlier resigned from their positions from the Vermont Young Republicans.On Tuesday, after Politico reported on the Telegram chat, governor Scott said, “there is simply no excuse” for “the vile, racist, bigoted, and antisemitic dialogue”.He added that “those involved should resign from their roles immediately and leave the Republican party – including Vermont state senator Sam Douglass”.JD Vance downplayed the exchanges as “edgy” and “offensive jokes” told by “kids”, though most members of the group were between the ages of 24 and 35. Vance pointed to leaked messages sent by Jay Jones, a Democrat running for attorney general in Virginia, who suggested a political opponent deserved “two bullets to the head”.“I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance said, after in September he demanded consequences for those who made comments about Kirk’s death that he found to be offensive.On Saturday, Beck said Douglass’s resignation marked the end of a “difficult week” in Vermont.“Senator Douglass’ resignation is the first step in Vermont’s healing, and his family’s healing,” Beck told the Washington Post More

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    ‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America

    “From the vantage point of the newsroom, the first story is almost never the full story,” writes Jelani Cobb. “You hear stray wisps of information, almost always the most inflammatory strands of a much bigger, more complicated set of circumstances.”The dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York could be reflecting on the recent killing of the racist provocateur Charlie Kirk. In fact, he is thinking back to Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American student from Florida who was shot dead by a white Latino neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012.“The Martin case – the nightmare specter of a lynching screaming across the void of history – ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president, and in a dizzying moment of self-congratulation, began to ponder on editorial pages whether the nation was now ‘post-racial’,” Cobb writes in the introduction to his book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025.Many of the essays in the collection were written contemporaneously, affording them the irony – sometimes bitter irony – of distance. Together they form a portrait of an era bookended by the killing of Martin and the return to power of Donald Trump, with frontline reporting from Ferguson and Minneapolis along the way. They make a compelling argument that everything is connected and nothing is inevitable about racial justice or democracy.As Cobb chronicles across 437 pages, the 2013 acquittal of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, became a catalyst for conversations about racial profiling, gun laws and systemic racism, helping to inspire the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement.Three years later, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, attended a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, then opened fire and killed nine Black parishioners. Cobb notes that Roof told police he had been “radicalised” by the aftermath of Martin’s killing and wanted to start a “race war”.View image in fullscreenSpeaking by phone from his office at Columbia, Cobb, 56, says: “It was a very upside-down version of the facts because he looked on Martin’s death and somehow took the reaction to it as a threat to white people and that was what set him on his path. Roof was this kind of precursor of the cause of white nationalism and white supremacy that becomes so prominent now.”Then, in the pandemic-racked summer of 2020, came George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times. Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets with demands to end police brutality, invest in Black communities and address systemic racism across various institutions.Cobb, an author, historian and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, continues: “It was the high tide. A lot of the organising, a lot of the kinds of thinking, the perspective and the work and the cultural kinds of representations – these things had begun eight years earlier with Trayvon Martin’s death.“This was an excruciating, nearly nine-minute-long video of a person’s life being extinguished and it happened at a time when people had nothing to do but watch it. They weren’t able to go to work because people were in lockdown. All of those things made his death resonate in a way that it might not have otherwise. There had been egregious instances of Black people being killed prior to that and they hadn’t generated that kind of societal response.”Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles reallocated portions of police budgets to community programmes; companies committed millions of dollars to racial-equity initiatives; for a time, discussions of systemic racism entered mainstream discourse. But not for the first time in US history, progress – or at least the perception of it – sowed the seeds of backlash.“It also was a signal for people who are on the opposite side of this to start pushing in the opposite direction and that happened incredibly swiftly and with incredible consequences to such an extent that we are now in a more reactionary place than we were when George Floyd died in the first place,” Cobb says.No one better embodies that reactionary spirit than Donald Trump, who rose to political prominence pushing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace and demonising immigrants as criminals and rapists. His second term has included a cabinet dominated by white people and a purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.Trump lost the presidential election a few months after Floyd died but returned to power last year, defeating a Black and south Asian challenger in Kamala Harris. According to Pew Research, Trump made important gains with Latino voters (51% Harris, 48% Trump) and won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% in 2020.What does Cobb make of the notion that class now outweighs race in electoral politics? “One of the things that they did brilliantly was that typically politics has worked on the basis of: ‘What will you do for me?’” Cobb says. “That’s retail politics. That’s what you expect.“The Trump campaign in 24 was much more contingent upon the question of: ‘What will you do to people who I don’t like?’ There were some Black men who thought their marginal position in society was a product of the advances that women made and that was something the Republican party said overtly, which is why I think their appeal was so masculinist.”Trump and his allies weaponised prejudice against transgender people to attract socially and religiously conservative voters, including demographics they would otherwise hold in “contempt”. “I also think that we tended to overlook the question of the extent to which Joe Biden simply handing the nomination to Kamala Harris turned off a part of the electorate,” Cobb says.He expresses frustration with the well-rehearsed argument that Democrats became too fixated on “woke” identity politics at the expense of economic populism: “They make it seem as if these groups created identity politics. Almost every group that’s in the Democratic fold was made into an identity group by the actions of people who were outside.“If you were talking about African Americans, Black politics was created by segregation. White people said that they were going to act in their interest in order to prevent African Americans from having access. Women, through the call of feminism, came to address the fact that they were excluded from politics because men wanted more power. You could go through every single group.”Yet it remains commonplace to talk about appealing to evangelical Christian voters or working-class non-college-educated voters, he says: “The presumption implicit in this is that all those people see the world in a particular way that is understandable or legible by their identity, and so there’s a one-sidedness to it. For the entirety of his political career, Trump has simply been a shrewd promulgator of white-identity politics.”That trend has become supercharged in Trump’s second term. He has amplified the great replacement theory, sought to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and complained that museums over-emphasise slavery. His actions have built a permission structure for white nationalists who boast they now have a seat at the top table.Many observers have also expressed dismay at Trump’s concentration of executive power and the speed and scale of his assault on democratic institutions. Cobb, however, is not surprised.“It’s about what I expected, honestly,” he says, “because throughout the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump mainly campaigned on the promises of what he was going to do to get back at people. They’re using the power of the state to pursue personal and ideological grievances, which is what autocracy does.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens.“The constitution gave Black people the right to vote but, if you voted, you’d be killed and this was a known fact,” he says. “This went on for decade after decade after decade. You can call that a lot of things. You can’t call that democracy. It was a kind of racial autocracy that extended in lots of different directions.”He adds: “We should have been mindful that the country could always return to form in that way, that its commitment to democracy had been tenuous. That was why race has played such a central role in the dawning of this current autocratic moment. But it’s not the only dynamic.“Immigration, which is tied to race in some ways, is another dynamic. The advances that women have made, the increasing acceptance and tolerance of people in the LGBTQ communities – all those things, combined with an economic tenuousness, have made it possible to just catalyse this resurgence of autocracy in the country.”It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”Cobb’s own employer has been caught in the maelstrom. In February, the Trump administration froze $400m in federal research grants and funding to Columbia, citing the university’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment” during Gaza protests last year. Columbia has since announced it would comply with nearly all the administration’s demands and agreed to a $221m settlement, restoring most frozen funds but with ongoing oversight.Cobb does not have much to add, partly for confidentiality reasons, though he does comment: “In life, I have tended to not grade harshly for exams that people should never have been required to take in the first place.”He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion.“The cover story was that Columbia and other universities were being punished for their failure to uproot antisemitism on their campuses. But it’s difficult to understand how you punish an institution for being too lenient about antisemitism and the punishment is that you take away its ability to do cancer research, or you defund its ability to do research on the best medical protocols for sick children or to work on heart disease and all the things that were being done with the money that was taken from the university.“In fact, what is being done is that we are criminalising the liberal or progressive ideas and centres that are tolerant of people having a diverse array of ideas or progressive ideas. The irony, of course, is that one of the things that happens in autocracy is the supreme amount of hypocrisy. They have an incredible tolerance for hypocrisy and so all these things are being done under the banner of protecting free speech.”That hypocrisy has been on extravagant display again in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman on a university campus in Utah. Trump and his allies have been quick to blame the “radical left” and “domestic terrorists” and threaten draconian action against those who criticise Kirk or celebrate his demise. The response is only likely to deepen the US’s political polarisation and threat of further violence.Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.” More

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    The US supreme court appears ready to nullify the Voting Rights Act | Moira Donegan

    The last remaining piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – section 2, which empowers the federal government to protect voters from racial gerrymandering meant to dilute Black political power – appears headed for an untimely end. At oral arguments in Louisiana v Callais on Wednesday, the US supreme court appeared ready to strike down section 2, effectively completing the gradual nullification of the Voting Rights Act that it has pursued for over a decade.The case stems from new congressional districting maps that were drawn in Louisiana after the 2020 census, which found both that the state was eligible for six seats in the House of Representatives and that its population was about one-third Black. The state initially drew maps that featured only one majority-Black congressional district, rejecting seven more racially fair maps; voters sued, and federal courts ordered Louisiana to comply with the Voting Rights Act by drawing new maps in which Black voters would be a majority in a second district, thereby reflecting their share of the population and giving Black Louisianans an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.But now, a group of people identifying themselves as “non-African-American voters” have sued to get those racially proportionate maps thrown out, arguing that enforcement of the VRA violates their own rights under the 14th and 15th amendments. They claim the maps drawn to remedy racial discrimination against Black people in fact constitute racial discrimination against non-Black (read: white) people. The court seems likely to side with them.If they do, it will mark the end of the Voting Rights Act, widely considered the crowning achievement of the civil right movement, which the supreme court, under John Roberts, has been dismantling for years. In 2013’s Shelby county v Holder, the court struck down much of section 5, which had required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get federal preclearance for changes to its voting laws.In subsequent cases, the court has repeatedly narrowed the conditions under which litigants can bring voting rights claims and expanded states’ leeway to make voting laws that would have previously been deemed discriminatory. Writing for the majority in Shelby, Chief Justice Roberts claimed that racial animus and inequality had diminished enough that such a regime was not necessary, and indeed violated the rights of states. As states imposed a slew of new voting restrictions in the aftermath, the gap between Black and white voter participation rates grew dramatically. It expanded twice as much in districts that had previously been subjected to the section 5 preclearance regime.On Wednesday, the court seemed determined to apply the same logic that it used in Shelby county to section 2, demanding that Janai Nelson, the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, justify why section 2 should still be efficacious and should not be considered to have somehow expired. Justices Kavanaugh and Alito asserted that the racial gerrymander was justified if it was intended as a partisan gerrymander – that is, that the lawmakers’ stated or professed intentions was what mattered, and not the racially discriminatory impact of the gerrymander.Previous supreme court precedent, as well as ample evidence from the congressional record, has said that discriminatory impact, rather than intent, is sufficient to constitute illegal racial discrimination – but at oral argument, the Republicans on the court, along with those representing the litigants, did not seem to think that this should matter. As she rebutted these arguments in the guise of asking questions from the bench, one could hear the exhaustion in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s voice. The remedies, she sputtered, “are so tied up with race, because race is the initial problem!” Jackson has been the court’s most passionate and articulate advocate for the Reconstruction amendments and for the legacy of the civil rights movement, but she seemed to know that her colleagues were not listening to her.The case reflects two major trends of the Roberts court: hostility to racial justice claims brought by minorities, and a willingness to invert civil rights law and the Reconstruction amendments alike to create interpretations in which these legal traditions function to entrench, rather than challenge, historical hierarchies of race and gender. Louisiana’s attorney general – who has switched sides in the case since it was initially argued last year, joining an opposition to the Voting Rights Act – claimed that to assume that Black voters would vote differently than white voters – which in Louisiana, they overwhelmingly do – would be to unconstitutionally impose a racial stereotype. This facile fiction elicited exasperation from Justice Kagan.But the attorney general knew his audience. Roberts has long been an enemy of practices that attempt to remedy historical and ongoing racial discrimination, claiming that the law mandates that state and private actors alike take no interest in such projects and attempt facially race-blind policies in everything from voting rights enforcement to college admissions – no matter how racially discriminatory against Black Americans such practices prove to be in reality. “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he once memorably said, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” – that is, to stop trying to account for or combat racism with official policy. The result will be that if the court rules in Louisiana’s favor, it will no longer be illegal, in practice, to racially gerrymander congressional districts to minimize and dilute Black voter power. But it will be illegal to use race to redistrict in such a way that restores Black voter power.It is apparently through this fanciful and motivated reasoning that Roberts and his colleagues have decided that any move to secure Black Americans’ voting rights and equality in fact violates the very constitutional amendments that were meant to secure their voting rights and equality. The Voting Rights Act does not violate the 15th amendment; it enforces it, and gave the United States, during the 60 years or so of its enactment, its only plausible claim to being a real democracy. To say that the VRA contradicts the 15th amendment is more than just bad reasoning. It is bad faith. But bad faith, increasingly, is what the supreme court operates under.If the supreme court rules in favor of the “non-African-American” voters and vacates what is left of the Voting Rights Act, as they are expected to, then a decision will probably come down sometime in June, just a few months before the November 2026 midterms. The resulting racial gerrymanders are expected to net Republicans 19 House seats.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More