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      Jason Aldean’s Try That In a Small Town sums up the delusions of the right wing | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Jason Aldean is a country music star and a big fan of law and order. He loves the law so much, in fact, that he’s willing to take it into his own hands.If you come to his (imaginary) small town and disrespect a cop or engage in any sort of protest, you will regret it.Such is the theme of Aldean’s new song, Try That in a Small Town, which is all about how the singer and his pals will aggressively deal with unseemly behaviour on their turf. A sample extract: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face … Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road. / Around here, we take care of our own …”A little later in the song Aldean elaborates further on what might happen if lines are crossed. “Got a gun that my grandad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up. / Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck.” He is, it would appear, referencing a conspiracy theory that the government is going to confiscate Americans’ guns to impose martial law.Try That in a Small Town was released in May but when the music video came out last Friday it generated immediate controversy. The video leaves little doubt as to what Aldean is trying to communicate: it intersperses footage of him singing in front of Maury county courthouse in Tennessee – the site of the lynching of a Black man, Henry Choate, in 1927 – with footage from protests, looting and civil unrest. Small towns are wholesome, the message is. Full of “good ol’ boys” who were “raised up right”. Cities, meanwhile, are hotbeds of violence … and diversity.That last bit isn’t spelled out – it’s not like Aldean yells “I’m a massive racist!” in the middle of the track – but the dog whistles are difficult to ignore. The song has been called “a modern lynching song” by detractors and the video was pulled from Country Music Television (CMT) on Monday. (While CMT has confirmed the video was taken off rotation, it hasn’t put out a statement as to why.) Fellow country star Sheryl Crow has also voiced her disapproval. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence,” Crow tweeted on Tuesday. She further noted that Aldean should know better, “having survived a mass shooting”. Crow was referencing the shooting at Las Vegas’s Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017: the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in modern US history. Aldean was performing and got out unscathed. He was lucky. Sixty people were killed and 867 injured. Those people weren’t killed and injured by a Black Lives Matter protester. They were killed by Stephen Paddock, an angry white man from Iowa.Try That in a Small Town has generated a lot of criticism, but it also has fervent supporters. Including, of course, GOP lawmakers. “I am shocked by what I’m seeing in this country with people attempting to cancel this song and cancel Jason and his beliefs,” the South Dakota Republican governor, Kristi Noem, posted in a video on Twitter on Wednesday. The Tennessee house GOP leader, William Lamberth, similarly tweeted: “Loved this song since it was released and will continue to fight every day to spread small town values … Give it a listen. The woke mob will hate you for liking this song.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, also didn’t miss the chance to stoke a little culture war. “The Left is now more concerned about Jason Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals,” she tweeted.Aldean, for his part, is furious at insinuations there is anything racist in his song about shooting outsiders who come to his little country town.“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song,” Aldean tweeted on Wednesday, “and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage.”If Aldean isn’t trying to make a point about the Black Lives Matter protests, what is Try That in a Small Town about then? Community, apparently. “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other,’” Aldean wrote on Instagram when he launched the video. “It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost.”Perhaps you’re wondering which quaint small town Aldean grew up in. The answer is: he didn’t. Aldean is from Macon, Georgia – a city with a population of about 153,000 people. Now he lives in Nashville, a city with a population of approximately 700,000. The small town he’s singing about is a product of his imagination.But that’s conservatives for you. Last month Nikki Haley tweeted about how much better the US used to be back in the days before marginalized people had rights. “Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country,” she tweeted.Was the past really that easy for the former South Carolina governor? By her own admission things have got a hell of a lot better for people who, like her, aren’t 100% white. “Years ago I was disqualified from a pageant because they didn’t know whether to put me in the white category or the black,” she wrote on Facebook in 2012. “I was neither. Tonight I watched my daughter get first place in her school pageant. God has an amazing way of bringing things full circle.” God also has an amazing away of depriving people like Haley of self-awareness.Aldean’s song doesn’t just epitomize manufactured rightwing nostalgia, it also encapsulates rightwing paranoia. People on the right are obsessed with the idea that big cities are violent hotbeds of crime where you risk your life every time you nip out for a pint of milk. In reality, however, big cities tend to be safer than small towns. A 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania, for example, found the risk of death from an injury was more than 20% higher in rural small towns than in larger cities. “Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths in the US” one of the researchers told NBC News at the time.The pandemic, to be fair, saw a rise in violent crimes in cities. But even still, you’ve got a better chance of living a long, healthy life in a city. A 2021 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on mortality data from 1999 to 2019 found people living in rural areas die at higher rates than those living in urban areas. That’s because they have less access to healthcare and are more likely to live in poverty.So what’s next for Aldean? Well, I’ve got some good news for all the Republican lawmakers screeching about how unfair it is that Aldean has been cancelled by the woke mob: he’s going to be fine. Indeed, he’s going to be more than fine. Country music (and America) has a way of opening its arms to people accused of racism and making them feel right at home. Just look at Morgan Wallen, for example. In February 2021 TMZ published a video of the musician drunkenly yelling the N-word during a conversation with a friend. He was shunned from polite society for a few months but made a rapid comeback. He won album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2022. His song Last Night is currently in its 14th week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. If it sticks there a little longer he’ll beat the 19-week record currently held by Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, featuring Billy Ray Cyrus.While people on the right may be railing about Aldean being “cancelled”, the sad truth is that this will probably help his career. He’ll go on Fox News and yell about wokeness. He’ll wallow in his imagined victimhood. His song will probably be played in rallies for the next Republican nominee for president. Aldean hasn’t been cancelled or silenced – his message has been amplified. More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says

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      Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.Kennedy, who provoked anger last week when he was filmed falsely suggesting that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, is due to testify at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday.The Congressional Integrity Project, a political watchdog, called for Republicans to disinvite Kennedy after releasing a report that details his meetings with and promotion of racists, antisemites and extremist conspiracy theorists.“Kennedy embraces virtually every conspiracy theory in existence,” the report states. “His horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views are simply beyond the pale, and he has frequently met with and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracies go back decades and have had deadly real world consequences.”Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, is running against Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary and has drawn big and enthusiastic crowds and polled as high as 20%. But the Project’s document argues that Kennedy’s recent comments about Jewish and Chinese people, which were quickly hailed by neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers as “100% correct”, were not an aberration but fitted a long pattern.Earlier this summer Kennedy touted a meeting with Ice Cube, a rapper who issued bizarre antisemitic tweets, and publicly defended musician Roger Waters, who was embroiled in controversy after donning a costume intended to evoke Nazi attire at a concert in Germany.The report says Kennedy has also repeatedly promoted and praised fringe online broadcaster James Corbett, a Sandy Hook and 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has claimed that “Hitler and the Nazis were 100% completely and utterly set up”.Kennedy has often allied himself with the National of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, who regularly unleashed tirades about alleged Jewish control of media and government. Kennedy met Farrakhan at his Chicago home in 2015, with Farrakhan later tweeting that they discussed “a vaccine that is designed to affect Black males”.The Project details how Kennedy himself has frequently invoked Nazi Germany when pushing debunked theories about vaccines. He put out a video that showed the infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with a moustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and used the word “holocaust” to describe children he believes were hurt by vaccines in 2015.Last year, at a Washington rally organized by his group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of people sickened and killed by Covid-19. He said: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” He later apologised.For years, the document says, Kennedy has targeted a particularly dangerous form of vaccine denial at Black people. In 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, he released Medical Racism, a film that promoted disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines and explicitly warned communities of color to be suspicious of “sinister” vaccination campaigns.Several doctors and experts who participated in the film later denounced it and said they felt used and misled about the message of the documentary. Richard Allen Williams, founder of the Association of Black Cardiologists, called Children’s Health Defense “absolutely a racist operation” particularly dangerous to the Black community.In 2017, as a measles outbreak devastated Minnesota’s Somali-American community due to low vaccination rates, Kennedy continued to push his false claims that “science and anecdotal evidence suggest that Africans and African Americans may be particularly vulnerable to vaccine injuries including autism”.In a 2020 interview, Kennedy asserted without evidence that “People with African blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood. They’re much more sensitive.”The following year, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy recorded a webinar encouraging Black people to be skeptical of vaccines, claiming: “There has been abundant evidence … beyond any dispute that Blacks are disproportionately harmed by vaccine injury,” adding: “Blacks react completely differently to vaccines … we now know it’s just one huge experiment on Black Americans, and they know what is happening and they are doing nothing.”The report also argues that, from the earliest days of Operation Warp Speed, Kennedy has built “an anti-vaccine juggernaut” around opposition to Covid-19 vaccinations, which he has called “the deadliest vaccine ever made”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has sought to frame Covid vaccines as an elaborate conspiracy to enrich the medical establishment and big pharmaceutical companies. In a YouTube video, Kennedy accused Bill Gates of developing an “injectable chip” to enable the tracking of human movements and attempting to “genetically modify” humanity to “the flow of global information”.Kennedy has even accused his former anti-vaccine ally, Donald Trump, of selling out to Pfizer by developing vaccines.Such anti-scientific views go way back. Kennedy has claimed that fluoridated water is “drugging” children, HIV does not cause Aids and chemicals in the water are making people gay or transgender as well as pushing nonsensical conspiracy theories about wifi and 5G cellular networks.As the son of former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and nephew of former president John F Kennedy, Kennedy has caused anguish to one of America’s most storied political dynasties with his toxic views.In 2019 three relatives wrote an opinion column for the Politico website condemning his anti-vaccine advocacy, which they held partially responsible for a measles outbreak.The Congressional Integrity Project contends that Kennedy is a “Republican stooge” who is being embraced by the far right in an attempt to damage Biden. He has become a regular guest on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing outlets. Far-right provocateurs Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Michael Flynn have praised him.Now Republicans have invited Kennedy to Congress. On Thursday he is due to address the House of Representatives’ select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government during a hearing to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans”. The panel is chaired by the Trump loyalist Jim Jordan, who has been criticised for launching bogus investigations into Biden.Kyle Herrig, executive director of Congressional Integrity Project, said: “Giving RFK Jr a platform to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric is a new low for Jim Jordan – and that says something.“Jim Jordan should stop the charade and disinvite RFK Jr immediately. Allowing this hearing to go forward is shameless and beyond the pale. Maga Republicans’ desperation is on full display this week, proving once again that they have no credibility to conduct legitimate investigations.” More

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      California faces backlash as it weighs historic reparations for Black residents

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      As California considers implementing large-scale reparations for Black residents affected by the legacy of slavery, the state has also become the focus of the nation’s divisive reparations conversation, drawing the backlash of conservatives criticizing the priorities of a “liberal” state.“Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On,” commentator Jason L Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, as New York approved a commission to study the idea. In the Washington Post, conservative columnist George F Will said the state’s debate around reparations adds to a “plague of solemn silliness”.Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2022 polling from the Pew Research Center. Both found that more than 80% Black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed.Pew found that roughly two-thirds of Hispanics and Asian Americans opposed, as well.But in California, there’s greater support. Both the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be.When delving into the reasons why people resist, Tatishe Nteta, who directed the UMass poll, expected feasibility or the challenges of implementing large programs to top the list, but this wasn’t the case.“When we ask people why they oppose, it’s not about the cost. It’s not about logistics. It’s not about the impossibility to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery,” said Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It is consistently this notion that the descendants of slaves do not deserve these types of reparations.”In California, notions of deservedness may be tied to a commonly referenced facet of the state’s identity – that it joined the union as a free state in 1850.“The fact that supposedly serious people in San Francisco are considering a plan that would give $5,000,000 in reparations to every Black resident in their city in a state that never had slavery is a joke,” Republican representative Lauren Boebert tweeted in March.On Newsmax, Michael Reagan – son of President Ronald Reagan, who signed the 1988 bill apologizing and giving reparations to Japanese Americans for their imprisonment during the second world war – called reparations a “cash grab” and a “scam” that will force non-Black residents to “include the state in their will”.“No one should be taking this seriously at all. This is hilarious,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said of San Francisco’s proposal on The Five. “They don’t want this. What they want is to divide people, to create another commotion over race … White leftists do worse things to Blacks than the Aryan Nations ever could.”Under the Fox clip online, a comment with nearly 700 likes reads: “A state that never ALLOWED slaves wants to take billions of dollars from people who never OWNED slaves to give to people who never WERE slaves. Welcome to California.”But the state’s history is more complicated, said A Kirsten Mullen, co-author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century with William A Darity Jr, professor of public policy, African and African American studies and economics at Duke University. Both she and Darity – who is also her husband – are members of the expert team appointed by the task force.Even though the state constitution banned slavery, Mullen said, the Fugitive Slave Law allowed slaveholders to use violent measures to return enslaved people who entered California before its statehood. Many Confederates traveled west, too: brothers John and Joseph Le Conte, for example, became prominent early faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. John Le Conte, a physicist who espoused white supremacy, served as its first acting president.The task force’s final report, which follows last year’s 500-page interim report, lays out the state’s role in detail, from how enslaved people were brought to California during the Gold Rush to how prevalent KKK members were among city officials. It also looked beyond slavery to the harms and ancillary effects of other forms of racism, such as housing segregation, unequal education, medical experimentation and sterilization, mass incarceration and greater risk of death from Covid-19.“California, though it has this reputation, it’s not necessarily well deserved for being a more liberal place,” Mullen said. “Ultimately, what [the people of that time] learned was there was no place where Black people were treated with respect and had equality.”That history left a stark economic divide. For every dollar that white families earn today, Black families earn 60 cents, according to a report from the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan thinktank.“The racial wealth gap is a premier indicator of the cumulative effects of intergenerational racism in this country,” Mullen said.Those who oppose reparations for the wrongs of centuries past may not think modern recipients deserve compensation, Nteta said, but they also don’t think they deserve to be the ones responsible for compensation.“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, whose ancestry includes slave owners, told reporters in 2019. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president.”In recent research that he plans to investigate further, Nteta and his team found greater support for a range of reparations for victims of Jim Crow policies – many of those harmed are alive today, and so are their children.This recency is also likely a part of why the Civil Liberties Act, which offered $20,000, an official apology and other redress to Japanese Americans incarcerated during the second world war, saw success, Nteta said. It was co-sponsored by Congressman Norman Mineta, the nation’s first Asian American cabinet member, who was incarcerated with his family as a boy. While the legislation encountered its own hurdles, it eventually saw enough bipartisan support to make it to the desk of a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who signed the bill in 1988.In California, Mullen and the economists on the expert team were tasked with determining dollar figures for specific harms.The preliminary projection to address housing discrimination, for example, estimated up to $148,099 per Black resident, or $3,366 for each year in California from 1933-1977, the height of redlining practices. The estimate to address these harms could exceed $800bn, more than 2.5 times the state’s budget of $300bn. Restitution over time could take a variety of forms, such as cash payments, community investments, tuition assistance and housing grants, like the city of Evanston, Illinois, introduced in 2019.Cash payments are less popular than other types of compensation in the UMass polling data, and California governor Gavin Newsom has not endorsed the idea of large cash payments. For many in the reparations movement, Nteta said, the larger conversation goes beyond the payments themselves.“This is about recognizing one of the nation’s original sins, and the nation as a collective entity atoning for that and doing so substantively,” Nteta said.But backlash against progress towards racial equality is nothing new. Mullen said this is the human response to change, particularly when any majority’s station is challenged.It happened when newly emancipated Black people were denied 40-acre land grants, when the black codes restricted their rights following the end of the civil war, through Jim Crow and beyond. Historically, she said, punishments also extended to white allies who aided Black people.“There are still lots of ways that folks are protecting their hegemony,” Mullen said.What is new is the pervasiveness of discussion. She credits this to the expanded availability of information – documentation of more than 100 massacres between Reconstruction and the end of the second world war, online archives of Black newspapers, databases through the Library of Congress and more.“It’s impossible to read it, to learn it without at least having to question what you’ve been taught, what you’ve read, and wonder what the implications are,” Mullen said. “Some of it is our fear of what we stand to lose.”Both Nteta and state assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a member of the nine-person task force, noted that the size and influence of California – the nation’s largest economy – drives the volume of discussion about reparations.“As California goes, so goes the rest of the country,” Jones-Sawyer said. “I think that’s why there’s pushback, because people really do understand that if we’re able to resolve this in some fashion, it will start the resolution of a lot of these problems across the nation.”As the nation enters a presidential election cycle, Nteta expects the potential for political fallout to limit Democratic focus on reparations. Decades of scholarship, he said, makes the case that Democrats tend to lose national elections when they center the interests or experiences of African Americans.“I think this will go under the broad umbrella of ‘This is where “wokeness” gets you – to a place where you’re sending $5m to individuals simply because of the color of their skin,’” Nteta said. He expects to hear Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech used to make the case that reparations are antithetical to our overarching values – content of character – even though King himself supported reparations.For decades, the idea of studying reparations found little traction at the federal level. Beginning in 1989, Representative John Conyers opened each session of Congress with HR 40 – named after the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule for the newly emancipated – until his retirement in 2017.But public attitudes might be changing slowly for a number of reasons, Nteta said, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the work of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to the ways white supremacy surfaced during the years of the Trump presidency.Representative Sheila Jackson Lee has since revived HR 40 and, in 2021, Congress voted to advance the bill. It was met with unanimous opposition from Republicans on the House judiciary committee, who saw a panel’s findings as a foregone conclusion.But if any state could pass legislation, it’s California, Nteta said, since a large percentage of the legislature is progressive, many of whom can avoid fallout because their term limits are approaching, and it has a progressive governor who has sometimes bucked national trends. If it passes in California, it may hit the dominoes of states with similar political characteristics, like Massachusetts or New York.The task force’s final report makes a significant number of recommendations, including a formal apology, updates to the language of the state constitution, recruitment of more African American educators, declaration of election day as a paid holiday to increase access to the polls, expanded rights for incarcerated people and more.Jones-Sawyer and state senator Steven Bradford, also a member of the task force, will work to put forward legislation next year. He said he hopes it will serve as a blueprint for other marginalized people, too.“It is so critically important to do this for the welfare of the economy, the welfare of the social system, the welfare of public safety, the welfare of our educational system,” Jones-Sawyer said. “All of that benefits when we are not kept down.” More

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      ‘Thanks for visiting Florida’: one Black family’s road trip to a ‘hostile’ tourist trap

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      The sugary sand on Santa Rosa Beach is cool below the surface, sweet relief after a 10-minute hot-step from the parking lot with an armload of bulky chairs and a hangry toddler dragging me down. But by the third day of our family vacation, my young boys have settled in with their plastic shovels and left me cracking open a Michelob Ultra before noon. Drinking in the brew and the whooshing azure surf, I’m gobsmacked that this is what passes for adventure travel nowadays.On 20 May the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, noting a flagrant streak of contempt for and hostility toward Black, ethnic and queer communities; in a news release, the group quoted the state-sanctioned “war on woke” the Republican governor championed in a craven bid for his party’s presidential nomination. The NAACP board chair, Leon Russell, cited Ron DeSantis for “political grandstanding” and courting “a dangerous, extremist minority” – only to have conservatives mock Russell himself for living in Tampa.The advisory came weeks after we had plunked down a sizable non-refundable deposit for a trip to Florida’s Emerald coast – the resort paradise formerly known as the Redneck Riviera. My brother-in-law, a 28-year-old ad man, was flying down from New York. My two boys, aged three and 19 months, were so excited, my oldest racking his brain to understand what it meant to be “on vacation”. My wife, an ex-navy psychologist, had grand designs on a week of idle fun in the sun. We should have known that being Black in America could deprive us of something so innocent.Still: the idea of avoiding an entire state based on the fanatical policies of one man, even if he’s the top man, seemed a bit extreme – like avoiding computers just to stick it to Bill Gates. Let’s be clear here: even though the NAACP advisory never called for people to boycott Florida, that’s how the edict is being interpreted. The Republican senator Rick Scott’s own travel advisory last week, warning “socialists” and “communists” to stay away, has only made it easier for progressives to claim the moral high ground.While it’s true that Florida’s willfully ignorant conservative lawmakers have made the state more unsafe for anyone who dares to disagree with them, it’s also true that many more states have an equally shameful legacy of systemic racism and discrimination. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen another California school board ban critical race theory, an unarmed Michael Jackson impersonator choked to death on the New York City subway and affirmative action in higher education struck down by an activist supreme court that’s declared open season on reproductive rights protections. But no one is calling for a travel advisory against the whole of America, much less its plainly progressive states.There’s no doubt Florida’s latest political heel-turn has sunk its mass appeal to a low not seen since the 2000 presidential election. But it’s still home to the third-largest Black population among US states; that’s a lot of family, friends and hardworking folks left by the wayside. The more my wife and I thought about it, the more the reward of enjoying ourselves in Florida despite DeSantis outweighed the risk of offending the white parents at my kid’s school who considered the state a no-go.Over a recent weekend we loaded up the minivan and headed south from Atlanta to Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. At no point before setting off did I consider the five-hour drive might take us through Alabama. Had that state come with its own NAACP travel advisory, I might have called for one more pit stop in Georgia before testing my three-year-old’s potty training.Halfway through our journey, the GPS led us into Eufaula, Alabama, another resort town where great live oaks drape over pristine antebellum-era homes. But the southern gothic motif set off our inner klaxons. A web search confirmed our suspicions. The town played host to what may well have been the last civil war battle in 1865. Despite the promise of Reconstruction, white residents maintained control of Eufaula’s municipal offices five years after Alabama was forced back into the Union, even as Black residents held a two-to-one popular majority. My wife looked up from her phone, circumspect. I glanced down at the three-quarters full gas gauge, then over to my son squirming in his second-row car seat. “Hang with me for a few more miles, OK?”When a slew of ballot referenda on civil rights threatened a white power loss, a mob went guns blazing into a Black crowd at a downtown polling place, killing six, injuring 70 and deterring scores more from voting. A historical placard recognizes the tragedy as the election riot of 1874. But it’s a good 15 miles north-east from our traffic jam at the intersection of Eufaula Avenue and Broad Street, where a 35ft Confederate-soldier-topped obelisk stands proudly on the very spot the massacre took place. All we could do was shake our heads with resigned disbelief.The NAACP has only issued one other travel advisory in its 114-year history, in the summer of 2017, after Missouri lawmakers passed a bill rolling back state protections against discrimination. The local chapter of the NAACP was first to caution visitors over the civil rights violations that they risked by entering the Show-Me State . This was a year after a report from Josh Hawley’s state attorney general’s office found Black motorists had been stopped 75% more often than white drivers. The ACLU had issued a similar advisory for Texas that same year in response to a law that allowed traffic officers to interrogate the immigration status of people stopped for traffic violations.Still: it’s one thing to warn holiday-goers about predatory policing that could materially affect their travel plans, quite another to roadblock a borderline inescapable tourist trap. According to a 2020 analysis from the market research firm MMGY Travel Intelligence, Florida is the top destination for Black overnight travelers within the continental United States. What’s more, the state was nearly run by Andrew Gillum; in 2018, the Democratic Tallahassee mayor emerged as the first Black gubernatorial candidate in Florida history and came within a hair’s breadth of pipping DeSantis at the polls.Staying Black in America was a long-odds game well before DeSantis and Scott rolled up the red carpet. My family isn’t any less under siege in Atlanta – the American Wakanda hellbent on building the West Point of police academies – than on the Emerald coast, where 600 enslaved people joined forces with the Union army and fought their way across the panhandle to freedom near the civil war’s end.Immediately upon arriving in Santa Rosa Beach, we were struck by the conspicuous lack of Black faces. According to recent census data, Black people officially account for none of the town’s 5,700 residents. This is despite Santa Rosa Beach sitting on the same 20-mile stretch of state route that threads through Pensacola, Panama City and Destin; between the military air stations, MTV’s Spring Break and the nationally renowned jazz festival, this region – nicknamed 30A, for the state route, attracts all kinds. But after wrangling the kids all day, my wife and I couldn’t imagine exploring that scene, much less staying awake past 9pm. That didn’t stop my brother-in-law from bellying up to the Irish pub one block over.In his 2016 book This Land Was Ours, the University of Virginia professor Andrew Kahrl explains how Black southerners were redlined off the beaches to make way for a government-spurred tourism industry designed to enrich and serve whites.It’s a heartbreaking story that draws from a slew of oral histories with Black people who lived through that phase of Jim Crow – not least Lodie Marie Robinson-Cyrille, who recalled her experience working at a Florida resort. “They wouldn’t allow Black[s] to swim in the Gulf or be seen on the beaches,” she said. “The families could go and work in the hotels as cooks, as domestics, as maids, but they could not lounge or enjoy some of the same activities as, say, a tourist would enjoy.” Leisure time, at least in this country, has been a white privilege from the very beginning. But my three-year-old is none the wiser. One day while sipping a juice box while sitting by the pool in his swim vest, he asked: “Are we on vacation yet?”My wife and I, it seems, are always working hard when we’re supposed to be off. Too often when we were young, childless and still living in New York, we were the lone Black people in a restaurant, at Broadway shows or otherwise spending money to enjoy our hard-won downtime hours. We moved to the South Carolina Lowcountry expecting to fraternize with the region’s proud Gullah Geechee descendants (my wife is one, too), only to wind up surrounded by white pleasure-seekers who referred to enslaved people as “workers”, rushed to put up stakes in “plantation” communities and thought nothing of exploiting the tax code to further decouple foundational Blacks from coastal land they legally owned.The scenes are even more stark when we go on holiday; it doesn’t matter if we’re lazing around a spa in Scottsdale or biking around Belle-Île-en-Mer. We anticipate the wary smiles, the nervous laughter, and forward questions about what we do for a living. No matter how many times we’re forced, however politely, to justify our presence, the takeaway never changes : “Good for you,” they say.But the people of 30A didn’t interrogate our presence unless we were pitching our beach tent, which could get complicated depending on the size and the invisible lines in the sand that separate public access from resort seaside. And seeing the white parents hounding their kids about their manners, their sunscreen, the fact that “we didn’t spend all this money on a nice vacation for you to stare at a screen!” was another reminder that they’re not that different. We all come from the same country, where the sight of a C-130 cargo plane, roaring low enough over the coast that airmen’s faces are visible as they wave, isn’t cause for alarm. It’s an invitation to wave right back.Twice while schlepping the kids to the beach on bikes, we crossed a man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” shirt; he just smiled and kept moving. There was a thought that things might get political when we saw a young man standing outside the beach parking lot waving a giant Trump 2024 flag. But the boy, bless his heart, didn’t seem like he was from around there, given the Slavic accent that inflected his timid “hello”.The only time it seemed as if the vibe might shift on us was after sundown, while I hoofed around seeking a dinner spot with my wife and brother-in-law. Ultimately, we were drawn into a bustling Italian place. With white faces at every place setting and spilling out the door, we were fully prepared to be turned away by the two white schoolgirls behind the host stand. All the while, an older Black woman was stuck on the phone. But then she hung up.Before I could backtrack out of her way, she was snatching three menus, seating us at an open table and leaving us in the care of “our best waiter”, also Black. We were looked after, doted on; when our orders were up, the plates arrived via three different servers – all of them Black. It was as if every Black person in the joint was on a mission to go above and beyond to make us feel at home. Later, our waiter let slip that we were his first Black table in “weeks”. No, he wasn’t thrilled about the NAACP advisory scaring Black folk away, but he agreed with its intent because, well, Florida has become a hard place to be Black.By this point, the dinner rush had eased, the place had emptied out and we were in our own little world, just talking. But the kicker was when he learned my wife and I had come down from Atlanta. “I just moved away,” he said with a laugh. “It’s like Grand Theft Auto up there!” Here at least, he felt he could rely on the kindness of empathetic whites – but also, “they need us,” he said. “No one wants to work.”On the last evening of our trip, we took a self-guided tour through Alys Beach, a breathtaking sight. One woman who looked to be on a shift break greeted us with an eagerness that suggested we had already met – an assumption that’s easy enough to make in yet another Emerald coast town where Black people don’t live. Alys Beach isn’t just awash with white people; the town is quite literally made up of ivory towers meant to mirror the architecture of the old world.After a slack-jawed walk past the Grecian trellises, the Moorish arches and Dutch gables, we pulled over for a beer at a cafe across the street from a $20m beachside mansion. The idea that this cloister was just a car ride away from home, let alone part of the same highway system as Queens or Compton, simply beggared belief. It left me wondering about what other idylls conservatives were desperately trying to keep hidden. It made me want to push deeper down the Gulf coast, into Alabama and Mississippi. It convinced me that the NAACP’s travel advisory should have made the opposite statement: “Lookie what we have here!”Before my brother-in-law gave the boys one last squeeze and ducked into a cab, he told me about his long goodbye to the white regulars and staff at the pub – friends forever, apparently. “Thanks for coming to visit us,” one said, “despite … you know. Hopefully you felt welcome.”There is no question that venturing out to Florida was a risk in this fraught climate, but there’s also never been a better time to see the country while Black. The farther we wander out of our comfort zones, the more potential they have to expand – and that, son, is when the vacation really begins. Issuing a travel advisory against one state for its extreme politics doesn’t just play into the zealots’ hands, it gives the rest of the country a break it doesn’t deserve. More

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      North Carolina voting rights ‘still in five-alarm fire’ despite supreme court ruling

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      The US supreme court ruled in favor of North Carolina voting rights groups last week, which celebrated with one breath and with the next condemned the new election laws and political maps being pushed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.“We are still in a five-alarm fire here in North Carolina,” said Gino Nuzzolillo, campaign manager for the state’s Common Cause branch, which was one of the plaintiffs that won in the case the supreme court ruled on.North Carolina Republicans, including Tim Moore, the speaker of the state’s house of representatives whose name is on the case, Moore v Harper, had asked the supreme court to take up a highly controversial legal theory that would have given him and legislators around the country immense power over setting state-level federal election laws.Even though the high court rejected that theory in a 6-3 vote, preventing a nationwide shift in checks and balances over writing election laws, North Carolina’s Republican legislators can already act largely unchecked by the other branches of state government. They have a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature and the now Republican-controlled state supreme court signaled it would not act as a check on legislative power, including by taking the rare step to reverse two recent decisions by the previously Democrat-controlled court to re-allow partisan gerrymandering and require voter ID.Moore v Harper originated in state court as a partisan gerrymandering case, and as part of that litigation state courts put temporary maps in place for the 2022 elections. In a statement about the supreme court decision, Moore confirmed that the legislature will draw new maps.“We will continue to move forward with the redistricting process later this year,” Moore said.North Carolina is the only state where the governor cannot veto election maps drawn by the legislature, meaning that not even split-party leadership of the executive and legislative branches is a check on gerrymandering.For voting rights groups in North Carolina, this political reality makes the supreme court’s other voting rights decision this term that much more important. In Allen v Milligan, a case out of Alabama, the court rejected arguments from Republicans to do away with another part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This leaves an open lane to sue in federal court to overturn maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities.Even with the victories in these two cases, federal judicial protections for voting rights are still the weakest they’ve been since at least 2013, when the supreme court crippled the Voting Rights Act. Still, voting rights groups are celebrating these two rulings because they preserve what legal tools are left at the federal level to protect the significant gains in voting access and fair representation since the civil rights era.What’s nextMoore and his Republican colleagues are working on three election bills, which they have enough votes to pass and overturn a likely veto from the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, as long as no Republicans defect.S747 is an omnibus election bill that would make wide-ranging changes to voter access, including requiring all same-day registration voters to cast provisional ballots and changing the deadline for mail ballots.S749 would change the structure and powers of state and county boards of elections, making them deadlocked between parties, rather than having a majority vote favoring the party in control of the governor’s mansion, as it is now.H772 would change rules around poll observers, including the possible criminalization of elections officials who are found to interfere with observers.In the fall, the legislature will turn its attention to redistricting maps for seats in the US House of Representatives. North Carolina is a purple state, currently controlled by a Democratic governor but with a Republican supermajority in the legislature. Under the current map, North Carolina sent seven Democrats and seven Republicans to Congress.The redrawn map this fall will probably look similar to the map Republicans first proposed in 2021, which would likely have given Republicans a 10-4 advantage, according to Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper. He testified as an expert witness for Common Cause in state court that the congressional map, as well as the state map’s counterparts, were partisan gerrymanders.He anticipates that Democratic representatives Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickel will have their districts redrawn to favor Republican candidates.Leaders from Common Cause and the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, both groups that sued the state and won in the Moore v Harper case, said they oppose all three bills and will oppose redistricting that dilutes the votes of political or minority groups.Public polling by the Associated Press showed that a majority of people in both parties see gerrymandering as a major problem, and research shows it is a key driver of political polarization and protecting politically extreme candidates.Neither Moore nor Ralph Hise, chair of the state senate’s redistricting and elections committee, responded to emailed questions about how the public can participate in legislative action around the election bills or redistricting, about whether the legislature will consider racial data for redistricting or about limiting partisan bias in drawing maps.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2021, North Carolina Republicans wrote rules that they could not consider racial data when drawing political maps. At the time, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), whose attorneys represented Common Cause in the Moore litigation, argued they should have used racial data for fair representation.In light of the Allen v Milligan ruling, the coalition’s senior voting rights lawyer, Hilary Harris Klein, said the legislature will have to consider racial data this time or be in violation of federal law.Using racial data, or not, will be a key point in the development of possible federal litigation to challenge discriminatory maps. Klein stressed that the SCSJ will advocate for equitable maps during the drawing process because the organization does not want to resort to litigation.Weakness of democratic institutionsNorth Carolina Republicans have a long history of passing racially and politically discriminatory voting maps and election laws, according to several federal and state court judgments since 2013.Since 2016, voting rights groups have been able to turn back some of those laws with a Democratic-majority state supreme court. But as of 2022, Republicans control the court, and will at least until 2028.“The state courts are probably a closed avenue to any further vindication of voter’s rights under the state constitution,” Nuzzolillo said.Relying on federal courts has been made increasingly difficult by the US supreme court under its chief justice, John Roberts.“The court in the last 10 years has done extraordinary damage to democratic institutions,” said Carolyn Shapiro, professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. She wrote a brief to the supreme court in the Moore v Harper case supporting the voting rights groups.She points to the 2013 Shelby county decision, in which Roberts wrote the opinion to strike down the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act and allowed states to immediately pass laws aimed at voter suppression. In the Abbott v Perez and Rucho v Common Cause cases from 2018, the court made it harder to win racial gerrymandering cases and impossible to bring political gerrymandering cases in federal courts. Then, in 2021, in Brnovich v DNC, the court made it harder to bring vote denial claims, which are the claims voting rights groups could try to bring against the election laws that North Carolina’s legislature is currently considering.The reason voting rights groups saw this year’s rulings as huge victories was because expectations were so low, Shapiro said.That Moore v Harper and Allen v Milligan were even taken up is an aberration from the historically typical strategy of the supreme court, showing how far the court and political thinking has shifted, according to Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina.The rulings mainly kept precedent in place rather than adding any rights or protections, Su said. That responsibility would fall to Congress.“We held the line,” Klein said. “In this climate, that is a huge win.” More

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      Kamala Harris: supreme court rulings portend ‘attack’ on ‘hard-fought freedoms’

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      The US supreme court rulings which struck down the White House’s student debt relief plan, affirmative action in college admission and a Colorado law that protected LGBTQ+ rights portend “a national movement to attack hard-won and hard-fought freedoms”, Vice-President Kamala Harris has said.In an interview with National Public Radio’s Michel Martin, Harris declared that “this is a serious moment” for people “who believe in the promise of our country [but] understand we have some work yet to do to fully achieve that promise”.“Fundamental issues are at stake,” Harris said, as she called on Americans to vote – including in the 2024 presidential race – for political candidates who would work to shield rights rather than rescind them.Harris’s remarks came after the supreme court’s conservative supermajority on Thursday ended race-conscious admissions at universities across the US, defying decades of legal precedent to the detriment of greater student diversity on the nation’s campuses. The court on Friday also ruled that both a Colorado law which compelled businesses and organizations to treat same-sex couples equally as well as Joe Biden’s landmark student debt forgiveness plan were both unconstitutional.The decision on the Colorado law came on the last day of Pride month, which annually celebrates LGBTQ+ achievements and commemorates the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, a key moment in the community’s civil rights movement.That decision and the two others all were handed down a year after the supreme court eliminated the federal abortion rights which had been established by the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling.Harris said she and other members of Joe Biden’s administration have a role in mounting a counteraction to the supreme court rulings, which she characterized as “moments of great consequence and … crises”.In the early stages of his 2024 re-election run, as some Republicans call for national abortion restrictions, the president has pledged to work to enshrine abortion rights, among other reproductive health care protections.Biden also outlined a new student debt relief plan within hours of the supreme court’s striking down his previous one.But Harris told Martin that voters can also help plot the way forward. Besides voting all the way down ballots during local, state and national elections, they can organize against the political forces which planted the seeds for this week’s volley of supreme court rulings, the vice-president said while appearing at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans on Thursday and Friday, according to Nola.com.The supreme court’s shift to the hard right became possible after the Donald Trump presidency succeeded in appointing the ultra-conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.Harris predicted the week’s supreme court decisions would “have generational impact” and described herself “deeply concerned about the implications of this … to the future of our country”, Nola.com added.In her remarks at the Essence Festival, one of the US’s top annual showcases for Black culture, Harris said: “I feel very strongly that the promise of America will only be achieved if we’re willing to fight for it.” More

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      What was affirmative action designed to do – and what has it achieved?

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      The US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions on Thursday. The court ruled that race-conscious admissions violate the equal-protection clause under the US constitution.Envisioned as a tool to help remedy historical discrimination and create more diverse student bodies, affirmative action policies have permitted hundreds of colleges and universities to factor in students’ racial backgrounds during the admissions process. That consideration is supplementary, and taken in tandem with other factors such as applicants’ test scores, grades and extracurricular activities.Even with race-conscious admissions, however, many selective public and private colleges and universities struggle to enroll diverse student populations that accurately reflect society. At the University of North Carolina, for example, in a state where 21% of people are Black, just 8% of the school’s undergraduates are Black.Opponents of affirmative action, such as the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, argue that considering race as a factor in the admissions process amounts to racial discrimination – particularly against Asian Americans. SFA has brought cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, the nation’s first public university, to challenge their affirmative action policies, which the group contends favors Black and Latino students. Ultimately, it hopes that race considerations will be nixed from the admissions process entirely, and replaced by race-neutral or “color-blind” policies.What was affirmative action designed to do?The concept of affirmative action originated in 1961 when President John F Kennedy issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure that all Americans get an equal opportunity in employment. President Lyndon Johnson took it one step further in 1965, barring public and private organizations that had a federal contract from discriminating based on race, color, religion and national origin. The prohibition was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s assistant labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, who would eventually be known as the “father of affirmative action”, pushed for requiring employers to set “goals and timetables” to hire more Black workers. That effort, known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan, would later influence how many schools approached their own race-conscious admissions programs.The practice was challenged when Allan Bakke, a white man who was twice denied entry to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, sued the university, arguing that its policies, which included allocating seats for “qualified” students of color, discriminated against him. In 1978, the supreme court narrowly rejected the use of “racial quotas”, but noted that colleges and universities could use race as a factor in the admissions process. Justice Lewis Powell noted that achieving diversity represented a “compelling government interest”.What has affirmative action in college admissions actually achieved?After generations of near total exclusion of Black students and other students of color, colleges and universities began admitting more diverse groups in the 1960s and 70s, and soon thereafter incorporated race-consciousness into their admissions policies.Data shows that the rise of affirmative action policies in higher education has bolstered diversity on college campuses. In 1965, Black students accounted for roughly 5% of all undergraduates. And between 1965 and 2001, the percentage of Black undergraduates doubled. The number of Latino undergraduates also rose during that time. Still, the practice of factoring race into the admissions process faced repeated attacks. In 1998, during an era of conservatism, California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in any state or government agency, including its university system. Since then, eight more states have eliminated such race-conscious policies.What could happen next?The end of affirmative action at those state levels shows just how impactful the consideration of race in admissions has been: a UC Berkeley study found that after the ban in California, the number of applicants of color in the UC system “sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities”. Specifically, the number of Black freshmen admitted to UC Berkeley dropped to 3.6% between 2006 and 2010 – almost half of its population before the ban.In an amicus brief in the Harvard case, attorneys for the University of Michigan, which had to stop considering race in admissions in 2006, argued that despite “persistent, vigorous and varied efforts” to achieve diversity, it has struggled to do so without race-consciousness. The number of Black and Native American students has “dramatically” dropped since the end of affirmative action in the state.Though students of color remain underrepresented at selective colleges and universities today, institutions argue that their presence helps shape students’ on-campus experiences. The removal of race consideration from college admissions could set a precedent for a less diverse school system, which stands in stark contrast to an increasingly diverse world. More

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      The supreme court’s blow to US affirmative action is no coincidence | Eddie R Cole

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      On Thursday, in a 6-3 decision, the US supreme court ruled against affirmative action in American colleges and universities. The obvious concern now is whether the ruling will significantly reduce the number of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students enrolled at elite institutions. But a more dire reality undergirds the court’s decision: it reflects a decades-long drive to return higher education to white, elite control.That movement predates affirmative action by at least a century, because no entity impacts American life more than higher education. During the Reconstruction era following emancipation, Black people were allowed to advance in political and various other roles, but white powerbrokers drew a hard line at higher education. On 28 September 1870 the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, John Newton Waddel, declared: “The university will continue to be, what it always has been, an institution exclusively for the education of the white race.”Waddel was not alone in his appraisal. Following the civil war, many white academic leaders and faculty members believed higher education was designed solely to educate white people. Waddel and other white academics maintained that the University of Mississippi’s faculty “never, for a moment, conceived it possible or proper that a Negro should be admitted to its classes, graduated with its honors, or presented with its diplomas”.Over the past century, Black Americans’ struggles to secure equal educational opportunity have always been met with white resistance. The recent lawsuits filed by Students for Fair Admissions – an organization led by anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum – against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are not about academic merit or even the mistreatment of white or Asian American students; they are an extension of this movement to ensure American higher education can be used to maintain social norms.This is why, in defending affirmative action, the argument for campus diversity falls short. Rather than make wealthy, majority-white campuses more diverse, affirmative action was intended to acknowledge and address the nation’s history of racism and atone for past racial harms that disproportionately affected descendants of enslaved Black people.This was made plain in 1963 – one of the most racially tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. By summer, John F Kennedy – a Harvard University alumnus in his third year in the White House – was forced to take immediate action about racial segregation, in part because it had become a foreign policy embarrassment to the United States that belied the nation’s stated commitment to democracy.Kennedy sought assistance from many leading administrators in American higher education. “I write you personally to seek your help in solving the grave civil rights problems faced by this nation,” Kennedy wrote, on 12 July 1963, to select college presidents and chairs of trustee boards. “The leadership that you and your colleagues show in extending equal educational opportunity today will influence American life for decades to come.”Kennedy explained to academic leaders that the nation’s problems affected “both white and Negro students and their families”. He asked academic leaders to implement “special programs” to address said problems, but did not specify what the programs should be. He deferred to academic leaders to ensure initiatives were “carried out” toward that goal.Motivated by Kennedy’s appeal, Black and majority-white colleges and universities worked together to address racism. By October 1963, racial initiatives were discussed at meetings of the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. In April 1964, presidents and faculty from Black campuses met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which hosted a two-day conference on “Programs to Assist Predominately Negro Colleges and Universities”.The leaders of wealthy majority-white campuses committing to numerous programs, most of them focused on Black colleges and universities. The programs – supported by the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and other foundations – included new opportunities for Black college faculty to attend summer institutes and graduate schools and created exchange programs between faculty and students on Black and white campuses. Harlan H Hatcher, president of the University of Michigan, explained that his university’s partnership with the Tuskegee Institute “can help them in the development of a strong liberal arts program. They, in turn, will advise us on the [racial] programs.”For Michigan and its peer institutions, considering race in college admissions was part of a broad range of affirmative action practices launched in the 1960s. Affirmative action was a comprehensive set of programs that sought system-wide change to expand educational opportunity. The goal was not to ensure that some Black people could attend a few dozen of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, but instead that there be widespread investment in creating a more equitable higher education system – investing in the Black colleges and universities that long served the people most disenfranchised because of the nation’s history of racism.The blowback was immediate, however. By the 1970s, white academic leaders and foundation officers mostly abandoned their support of Black colleges and universities, and the lasting remnant of that era was racial consideration in admissions on select wealthy, majority-white campuses. That changed with the supreme court’s ruling this week.The ongoing racial backlash in this country extends beyond affirmative action. We’re witnessing a battle over ideology, and higher education is at the center. The efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; dismantle the faculty tenure system; restrict how aspects of Black history are taught; and withhold billions from Black universities are also part of this sinister movement. The movement limits Black presence, Black thought, and even Black control of Black institutions to return all of academia to white, elitist control. Those seeking control have no desire for higher education – the environment most concerned with solving complex problems – to have any role in redressing the legacy of racism.The dismissal of race and racism dialogue in higher education should alarm all Americans, because the supreme court decision is not about restricting unfair racial advantage in college admissions – it is about maintaining the social inequality that has long restricted most Americans, regardless of their race, while a few are allowed to preserve and maintain their privileged status in society. The result is a weakened university that does not solve racial problems but instead upholds them.
      Eddie R Cole is an associate professor of education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom More