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      Some Black Voters Say They Wonder if a Black Woman Can Win

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      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

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      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

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      Why More French Youth Are Voting for the Far Right

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      Most young people in France usually don’t vote or they back the left. That is still true, but support has surged for the far right, whose openly racist past can feel to them like ancient history.In the 1980s, a French punk rock band coined a rallying cry against the country’s far right that retained its punch over decades. The chant, still shouted at protests by the left, is “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National,” which cannot be translated well without curse words, but essentially tells the far right to get lost.That crude battle cry is emblematic of what had been conventional wisdom not only in France, but also elsewhere — that young people often tilt left in their politics. Now, that notion has been challenged as increasing numbers of young people have joined swaths of the French electorate to support the National Rally, a party once deemed too extreme to govern.The results from Sunday’s parliamentary vote, the first of a two-part election, showed young people across the political spectrum coming out to cast ballots in much greater numbers than in previous years. A majority of them voted for the left. But one of the biggest jumps was in the estimated numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who cast ballots for the National Rally, in an election that many say could reshape France.A quarter of the age group voted for the party, according to a recent poll by the Ifop polling institute, up from 12 percent just two years ago.There is no one reason for such a significant shift. The National Rally has tried to sanitize its image, kicking out overtly antisemitic people, for instance, who shared the deep-seated prejudice of the movement’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. And the party’s anti-immigrant platform resonates for some who see what they consider uncontrolled migration as a problem.Young people at an anti-far-right gathering in Paris after the results of the first round of the parliamentary elections. 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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      First African-Born Member of German Parliament Won’t Seek Re-election

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      Karamba Diaby, whose 2013 victory was considered a win for equality, said he wanted more time with his family. But he has also spoken of the death threats he has received.Germany’s first African-born member of Parliament said this week that he would not seek office again in next year’s general elections. Although he played down racism as a factor, he made the announcement a short time after his staff released the contents of a slew of hate mail and death threats that his office had received.The lawmaker, Karamba Diaby, a 62-year-old Senegal native first elected in 2013, said in a letter written to his colleagues that he wanted to make way for a new generation of politicians and that racism was “not the main reason” for his decision. But he has been outspoken about the abuse he has experienced, which has markedly increased in volume and tenor in recent years.Bullets were fired through the window of his district office in 2020, and the office was a target of arson last year.“I can’t wipe all this away,” Mr. Diaby was reported as saying in an interview, according to the Funke Media Group, a major German newspaper and magazine publisher. “These are not small things.”The election over a decade ago of Mr. Diaby, who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and emigrated to East Germany in 1985, was at the time hailed as a major win for equality. Mr. Diaby, who belongs to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats party, cited a desire to spend more time with family as a main reason for his departure.Yet the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as AfD, has been far outpolling his center-left party in his constituency.Mr. Diaby has blamed the rising AfD, whose populist platform won them second place in Germany in the recent European Union elections, for the spike in racism and threats.“In the last few years, I’ve faced several murder threats,” he said in a podcast interview with Politico.eu this week. “This has now overstepped the mark.”“The hatred that the AfD sows every day with its misanthropic narratives is reflected in concrete psychological and physical violence,” he added. “This endangers the cohesion of our society. We cannot simply accept this.”The city of Halle, which Mr. Diaby represents, is in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the eastern states where the nationalist and anti-immigrant AfD dominates.Just last year, Mr. Diaby struck a very different tone against those who had threatened him.“Over 42,000 people in Halle voted for me,” he said in an interview with Der Spiegel newsmagazine. “Quitting would mean giving their votes less weight than those of a hateful minority.”“I would never allow that to happen,” he added.Christopher F. Schuetze More

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      What’s a ‘Black Job’? Trump’s Anti-Immigration Remarks Are Met With Derision

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      Former President Donald J. Trump claimed during the presidential debate on Thursday that immigrants entering the United States illegally were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” a claim with little basis that Democrats immediately seized on as evidence that Mr. Trump and Republicans were not serious about cultivating support from voters of color.It also touched off a host of internet jokes and memes over what, exactly, a “Black job” is.“They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday, speaking of migrants crossing the southern U.S. border. He then repeated the reference during a campaign rally in Virginia on Friday, adding that Black Americans who have had jobs “for a long time” are losing employment to immigrants.Black political strategists, elected officials and heads of organizations quickly joined hundreds of social media users to post photos of themselves at their workplaces and to crack jokes about the reductive and racist nature of the former president’s comments.Among them was, Stacey Plaskett, the Democratic House delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, who posted a photo on X alongside two women in her congressional office on Friday that was captioned, “Another day in Congress doing our ‘Black jobs.’”Malcolm Kenyatta, a Black Pennsylvania Democrat and surrogate for Mr. Biden’s campaign, quipped: “Did we ever figure out what a ‘Black job’ is? Asking for me.”And Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., also criticized Mr. Trump’s remarks, writing on X that Black Americans “are not confined to any one #BlackJob.”Republicans, who have sought to take advantage of President Biden’s softening support among Black voters, have made the issue of immigration a cornerstone of their appeals to the bloc, whose turnout in November could decide the election. Mr. Trump has said migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and has repeatedly claimed that the migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are escapees from prisons and mental institutions, something the evidence does not support.Immigrants have made up an increasingly large portion of the American labor force in recent years, but economic experts say their presence has been healthy for the nation’s economy. And while Mr. Trump claims that migrant workers are taking jobs from American citizens, the population of foreign-born workers in the country is not large enough to offset the job creation of the last three years.Democrats have increasingly gone on the offensive. In a statement, Mr. Biden’s communications director Michael Tyler pointed to the online fray of responses to Mr. Trump’s comments, saying Black voters “dragged Trump throughout the night for his racist rant.”“They know Trump has done nothing for Black communities, so he tries to pit communities of color against one another as a distraction,” he said. “We aren’t distracted. We see Trump’s racism clearly, and it’s why Black voters will reject him this November.” More

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      Bowman Falls to Latimer in House Primary in New York

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      Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, one of Congress’s most outspoken progressives, suffered a stinging primary defeat on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, unable to overcome a record-shattering campaign from pro-Israel groups and a slate of self-inflicted blunders.Mr. Bowman was defeated by George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, in a race that became the year’s ugliest intraparty brawl and the most expensive House primary in history.It began last fall when Mr. Bowman stepped forward as one of the leading critics of how Israelis carrying out their war with Hamas. But the contest grew into a broader proxy fight around the future of the Democratic Party, exposing painful fractures over race, class and ideology in a diverse district that includes parts of Westchester County and the Bronx.Mr. Bowman, the district’s first Black congressman and a committed democratic socialist, never wavered from his calls for a cease-fire in Gaza or left-wing economic priorities. Down in the polls, he repeatedly accused his white opponent of racism and used expletives in denouncing the pro-Israel groups as a “Zionist regime” trying to buy the election.His positions on the war and economic issues electrified the national progressives, who undertook an 11th-hour rescue mission led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. But they ultimately did little to win over skeptical voters and only emboldened his adversaries.A super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby, dumped $15 million into defeating him, more than any outside group has ever spent on a House race.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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      Woman Tried to Drown 3-Year-Old Girl After Making Racist Comments, Police Say

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      A Texas woman tried to drown the child in the pool of an apartment complex last month, the police said. The child’s mother said her family was Palestinian and Muslim.A woman in Texas was charged with attempted capital murder after she tried to drown a 3-year-old girl in an apartment complex pool after making racist comments, officials said.Mustafaa Carroll, the executive director of the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said at a news conference on Saturday that the girl was attacked by a white woman who made the comments to the girl’s mother, who was wearing a hijab, a head scarf worn by Muslim women.Mr. Carroll called on national and state law enforcement officials to open a hate crime investigation into the attack, which took place on May 19 in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth.Witnesses told detectives that the woman, Elizabeth Wolf, 42, had tried to drown a child and had argued with the child’s mother, the Euless Police Department said in a news release.Ms. Wolf was initially charged with public intoxication as she tried to leave the area, the police said. The Tarrant County criminal district attorney’s office filed charges of attempted capital murder and injury to a child on May 23, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.Ms. Wolf could not be immediately reached for comment on Sunday, and it was not clear if she had a lawyer. She was released on bail a day after she was arrested in May, according to CAIR-Texas.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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      Arizona Man Plotted Mass Shooting to Trigger ‘Race War,’ Officials Say

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      Prosecutors said Mark Adams Prieto of Arizona planned to target Black concertgoers at an Atlanta venue. He was indicted on hate crime and firearm charges.An Arizona man who planned to commit a mass shooting at an Atlanta rap concert as a way of inciting a “race war” has been indicted by a federal grand jury on hate crime and firearm charges.The man, Mark Adams Prieto, hatched a plan in several discussions with two people working with the F.B.I. who posed as racist extremists to carry out a mass shooting targeting Black people and other people of color at a concert in Atlanta on May 14 and May 15, the Justice Department said on Tuesday.Mr. Prieto intended for the shooting to incite a “race war” before the presidential election, prosecutors said in a news release.Mr. Prieto, 58, was reported to the authorities last year by an acquaintance who said he had made concerning comments calling for mass shootings targeting Black people and others, according to officials.Mr. Prieto faces two counts of trafficking in firearms, one count of transfer of a firearm for use in a hate crime and one count of possessing an unregistered firearm.He faces a maximum 15-year prison sentence for each firearm trafficking and transfer charge and a maximum 10-year sentence for the unregistered firearm charge, prosecutors said. Mr. Prieto also could be fined $250,000 for each count.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