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Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History
White America has long sought to define racial categories — and who can belong to them.The audience of Black journalists was prepared for a combative exchange well before Donald J. Trump took the stage on Wednesday for an interview at their annual gathering in Chicago.Yet when Mr. Trump, just minutes in, began questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, there was an instant ripple of reaction — a low rumble that grew into a roar of disapproval.“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language, it was hardly surprising. The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended.The audacity of Mr. Trump — a white man — questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.And it evoked an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Trump to Address NABJ Conference Following Controversial Invitation
Former President Donald J. Trump will take questions on Wednesday in Chicago from members of the National Association of Black Journalists, appearing before a skeptical conference of reporters in the city that will host the Democratic National Convention in less than three weeks.The appearance of the Republican presidential nominee at 1 p.m. Eastern time has already divided the association, prompting a co-chairwoman of the convention, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, to step down from her post and eliciting a warning from a prominent member, April Ryan, that Mr. Trump’s White House was threatening to Black women.“The reports of attacks on Black women White House correspondents by the then president of the United States are not myth or conjecture, but fact,” Ms. Ryan, the White House correspondent for The Grio, a media company geared toward Black Americans, wrote on the social platform X.But leaders of the association said journalists should not shy from interviewing major party candidates for the presidency. The association also invited Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, but the group’s president, Ken Lemon, said Wednesday morning that she was not available.“We are in talks about virtual options in the future and are still working to reach an agreement,” he wrote.For Mr. Trump, there appears to be no downside: A hostile greeting would feed his efforts to play supporters off the media. A warmer welcome would help his outreach to Black voters.The conference’s description says the session will “concentrate on the most pressing issues facing the Black community.” Harris Faulkner, a Fox News anchor; Kadia Goba, a politics reporter at Semafor; and Rachel Scott, an ABC News correspondent, will moderate the session. The event is expected to be livestreamed on the organization’s YouTube and Facebook pages. More
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Nearly 1,000 Native Children Died at Boarding Schools, Interior Dept. Finds
An investigative report, which also documents widespread sexual and physical abuse in a program of forced assimilation, calls on the federal government to apologize and “chart a road to healing.”Nearly 1,000 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died while attending boarding schools that were set up by the U.S. government for the purpose of erasing their tribal ties and cultural practices, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Interior Department.“For the first time in the history of the country, the U.S. government is accounting for its role in operating Indian boarding schools to forcibly assimilate Indian children, and working to set us on a path to heal from the wounds inflicted by those schools,” Bryan Newland, the department’s assistant secretary for Indian affairs, wrote this month in a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that was included in the report.The report calls on the federal government to apologize and “chart a road to healing.” Its recommendations include creating a national memorial to commemorate the children’s deaths and educate the public; investing in research and helping Native communities heal from intergenerational stress and trauma; and revitalizing Native languages.From the early 1800s to the late 1960s, the U.S. government removed Native children from their families and homes and sent them to boarding schools, where they were forcibly assimilated.It spent nearly $25 billion in today’s dollars on the comprehensive effort, according to the investigative report released on Tuesday, including operating 417 schools across 37 states and territories where children were physically and sexually abused. They were also forcibly converted to Christianity and punished for speaking their Native languages.The report identified by name almost 19,000 children who attended a federal school between 1819 and 1969, though the Interior Department acknowledges there were more.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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3 Men With White Supremacist Ties Sentenced in Plan to Attack Power Station
Two of the men met through a neo-Nazi online forum and recruited other people to join their scheme, which was rooted in white supremacist ideology, prosecutors said.Three men with white supremacist ties, including two former U.S. Marines, were sentenced to prison last week after plotting to destroy a power station in the northwestern United States, the U.S. Department of Justice said.The men, Paul James Kryscuk, 38; Liam Collins, 25; and Justin Wade Hermanson, 25; received separate sentences on Thursday for charges related to what the Justice Department described as a racially motivated scheme to attack a power grid.The men gathered information on weapons and explosives, manufactured firearms and stole military gear, prosecutors said.Mr. Kryscuk, of Boise, Idaho, was found in October 2020 with a handwritten list of about a dozen places in Idaho and surrounding states that were home to components of the power grid for the northwestern United States, prosecutors said.The Justice Department did not disclose details about where the men wanted to carry out an attack or their ultimate goal. Sentencing documents on the public court system were not available.Mr. Collins, of Johnston, R.I., received the longest sentence of 10 years for aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms. Mr. Kryscuk was sentenced to six years and six months for conspiracy to destroy an energy facility. Mr. Hermanson, of Swansboro, N.C., was sentenced to one year and nine months for conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86
She wrote two books about multiple generations of her forebears, including her mother, Lena Horne.Gail Lumet Buckley, who rather than follow her mother, Lena Horne, into show business, wrote two multigenerational books about their ambitious Black middle-class family, died on July 18 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and film and television producer, said the cause was heart failure.Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history in the early 1980s, when her mother asked her to store an old trunk in her basement. It had belonged to Ms. Horne’s father, Edwin Jr., known as Teddy, and contained hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations, to Sinai Reynolds, who had been born into slavery around 1777 and who in 1859 bought her freedom and that of members of her family.“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times in a joint interview with her mother in 1986, as well as “speakeasy tickets, gambling receipts, college diplomas.”Those disparate paper fragments of history helped her structure “The Hornes: An American Family” (1986).Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history when she discovered, in an old trunk, hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations.Alfred A. KnopfWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Some Black Voters Say They Wonder if a Black Woman Can Win
President Biden’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket left some Black voters anxiously wondering whether Americans were ready to elect a Black woman to the nation’s highest office.“It’s kind of sad, but I don’t think Harris will do well nationwide,” said Kristy Smith, 42, who is from Atlanta and works in sales.As a Black woman herself, Ms. Smith said she thinks Ms. Harris is entering the race with two strikes against her. “America is just not ready for a woman president — especially not a Black woman president,” she said.“As much as I would love to see Kamala become president, I just don’t think it’s going to happen,” Ms. Smith said, adding that Ms. Harris could lose some voters who were with Mr. Biden until he decided to drop out.Don Johnson, a 65-year-old truck driver from Milwaukee, said he always supports Democrats and generally supports candidates who, like him, are Black. But he has his doubts about whether voters would back Ms. Harris.“Even in 2024, America is not ready for a Black, female president,” he said, adding that he would support Ms. Harris. “I think she’s a pretty good politician but overall it boils down to race and gender. And America is going to hold that against her.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Organizer of World Economic Forum in Davos Accused of Discrimination
A former employee sued the nonprofit, accusing it of denying professional opportunities because of her race and gender.A former employee of the World Economic Forum, the nonprofit organization behind the glittery annual gathering of business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, sued the group and its founder, Klaus Schwab, on Monday, accusing them of workplace discrimination.In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Topaz Smith, who is Black, said the organization embraced a “scofflaw approach to anti-discrimination laws” and oversaw a hostile atmosphere toward women and Black workers.She added that it denied her and other Black employees opportunities to advance professionally.The accusations are the latest black eye for the nonprofit, whose conferences — particularly the one in Davos in January — have become destinations for the global elite to meet and network under the auspices of saving the world. (The theme of this year’s forum in Davos was “Rebuilding Trust,” while last year’s was “Cooperation in a Fragmented World.”)An article in The Wall Street Journal last month, citing internal complaints and interviews with current and former employees, said workers had accused the organization of sexual harassment and racism.Those behaviors extended all the way to Mr. Schwab, the outgoing executive chairman of the organization, according to the article.The report was cited in the lawsuit by Ms. Smith, who said she had directly experienced discriminatory acts in her two years working for the group’s consulting arm. One executive told her to consider her boss “her master,” she said, and the organization did not pay for her to travel to the Davos conference to participate in panels she had organized. But, according to the lawsuit, it paid for white employees to do so.Ms. Smith accused the organization of essentially firing her this year after she returned to work from federally protected maternity leave, and of replacing her with a white woman who was not pregnant.In a statement, a representative for the World Economic Forum said, “While it’s disappointing to see such false claims being made, now that these matters are in court, the falsity of these claims will become evident.” More
