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      This election shows Democrats are not doomed after all | Steve Phillips

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      The New York Times released a poll on Monday showing Donald Trump beating Joe Biden in several key states, and progressives across the country started to panic. The next day, actual voters in actual states cast actual ballots, and suddenly Democratic prospects don’t look nearly as bleak. In state after state, Democrats and progressives swept to victory, affirming the findings from decades of demographic and electoral data showing that the majority of Americans prefer the more multiracial and inclusive vision of Democrats to the angry and punitive policies of the Republicans.At the heart of the Times poll was the suggestion that African Americans and Latinos were gravitating in large and significant numbers to support Trump. According to the poll, 71% of Black voters and just 50% of Latinos backed Biden. If accurate, those numbers would represent a historic collapse of Democratic support among people of color. Since exit polling by racial groups began in 1976, African Americans have supported the Democratic nominee for president with 88% of their votes, on average. In 2020, Biden got 87% of the Black vote, and in the 2022 midterms, Democratic candidates received 86% of the Black vote. As for Latinos, Biden secured 65% support in 2020.Rather than question the findings of a poll that contradicted decades of prior electoral evidence, much of the media ran with the findings and prophesied doom for Democrats. But then a funny thing happened on the way to a second Trump administration. Voters went to the polls this week and elected Democratic candidates and passed progressive policies.In Kentucky, a state Trump won by 26 points, the Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, handily defeated the Trump acolyte Daniel Cameron. The fact that Cameron is African American and yet still performed poorly undermines the narrative that Black voters are donning Maga hats in large numbers. As the professor Jason Johnson tweeted on Tuesday: “Cameron is a Black Republican candidate w/ Trump’s endorsement in a deeply Red State and he’s going to lose. Can we stop w/ the ‘Trump is gaining ground with black voters’ narrative? Because this should’ve been the test case.”There is literally no state more historically intertwined with the Black experience in America than Virginia. It is where Africans were first brought in 1619, and it was the capital of the Confederacy during the civil war. In 2021, the Republican Glenn Youngkin won the gubernatorial election, and his party flipped control of the house of delegates, occasioning a spate of articles about the shifting political tides in the commonwealth. But activists and organizers led by groups such as New Virginia Majority steadily registered and mobilized voters of color in large numbers, resulting in Democrats maintaining control of the state senate and recapturing a majority in the house of delegates. Come January, in the same building where the Confederates attempted to organize their white nationalist rebellion, an African American, Don Scott, will become the speaker of the house.In Ohio, a state carried twice by Trump, Democrats backed a pro-choice ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to give individuals the “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions”. The measure swept to a resounding victory, 57% to 43%. Buckeye state Black voters supported the amendment with 83% of their ballots, sharply refuting the premise that Black support for progressive causes is dissipating.Other states and cities also rode the progressive wave this week, with Democrats winning a contest for a seat on the Pennsylvania state supreme court and also prevailing in a key race in Allegheny county.This week’s election results affirm a few fundamental truths about American politics. Truths proven by this week’s results and nearly 50 years of electoral results, annual census reports and biennial exit polls.There is no more immutable law of politics than the fact that African Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. This is less the result of a particular partisan affinity than the logical reaction to the reality that the fuel of the Republican political machine is white racial rage and resentment. No Democratic nominee has received less than 83% of the Black vote. In terms of African Americans, the question is not who they will vote for, but whether they will vote. That is the real challenge facing progressives in 2024. And that relates to the second fundamental truth, the changing composition of the country’s electorate and the implications for political contests.In the 1960s, people of color comprised just 12% of the US population. Today, the nation is far more racially diverse, with 41% of the population identifying as people of color as the demographic revolution continues apace. In a country defined by the ongoing existential battle over whether this will be a white nationalist society or a multiracial democracy, the majority of people reject the idea of making America white again. Most people in America prefer the Democrats’ vision of a multiracial America (however halfheartedly it may be expressed at times) to the raw, unapologetic white nationalism espoused in coded and not-so-coded ways by Republicans. With the sole exception of the 2004 presidential election, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote in every single presidential election over the past 30 years.Republicans understand this reality better than Democrats which is why they ferociously focus on suppressing the vote far more than Democrats emphasize expanding voting. From Florida to Texas to Georgia, Republican legislatures and governors have passed draconian laws designed to make it harder to vote.The most important lesson coming out of this week’s election (beyond ignoring aberrant polling data from august institutions) is that maximizing voter turnout is the key to victory. Biden and the entire progressive movement must both inspire the multiracial New American Majority by fighting for unapologetically social justice policies and also invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the kind of voter turnout machine required to surmount suppression and manifest the power of the true majority.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

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      Billion-dollar prisons: why the US is pouring money into new construction

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      At a time when the US has narrowly skirted a recession, and people around the country are still struggling with the cost of living, a curious number of states have found billions of dollars for one thing: building prisons and jails.In September, Alabama announced that a new prison, currently under construction, would have a final cost of $1.082bn. The same month Indiana broke ground on a $1.2bn prison. Nebraska is spending $350m on a new prison, while some in Georgia are lobbying for $1.69bn for construction of a jail in Fulton county.The willingness to spend vast amounts of money on locking people up, particularly in states like Alabama, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, is staggering. It’s also wrong-headed, experts say.“Any money spent on caging human beings is not money well spent, period,” said Carmen Gutierrez, an assistant professor in the department of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research specializes in the connection between punishment and health.“We have decades of research showing that incarceration does not improve public safety, and that it in fact harms individuals who themselves are incarcerated. It also harms their families and it harms the communities that they come from. So the damage outweighs any potential benefit.”The US has an incarceration rate of 664 people in every 100,000, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, far higher than other founding Nato countries. (The next highest is the UK, where 129 out of every 100,000 people are behind bars.)That amounts to 1.8 million people incarcerated across the country, but the numbers are not spread evenly. In Alabama, Georgia and other southern states about one in every 100 people is incarcerated in prisons, jails, immigration detention and juvenile justice facilities.The number of people being locked up has declined, somewhat, since the middle of the last decade, but some facts about incarceration remain the same: not all races are incarcerated equally.Black people make up 13% of the US population, but 38% of the prison, jail and other detention facility population, according to Prison Policy Initiative data. White people are far less likely to be caged: despite 60% of the US identifying as white, they also account for 38% of incarcerated people.“Incarceration is a highly gendered and racialized phenomenon,” Gutierrez said. “People who are males make up around 90% of people who go to jail and prison, and people who are black and brown – typically people who are Latino or Indigenous – are making up those who are disproportionately incarcerated.”The mammoth US prison population can be traced to the 1970s, with Richard Nixon’s “tough on crime” and “law and order” rhetoric, but it really exploded in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president.The Fair Fight Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration and systemic racism, says there are a multitude of reasons why the US cages so many people – including the disastrous “war on drugs”, mandatory minimum sentences, exorbitant bail and a lack of mental health services.The tough on crime rhetoric has endured to this day. Violent crime was a huge focus for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterm elections, while Donald Trump has taken to describing big cities as “cesspools of bloodshed and crime”.Trump, who lives in a spa resort in Florida and generally travels only for political rallies or court appearances, has offered no evidence for his claim.Despite the raft of research showing incarceration does more harm than good, few states are seriously attempting to reduce the number of people in jail.In January, Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, introduced new laws concerning how inmates could earn early release for good behavior, in a move critics said would lead to more overcrowding in the state’s prisons. Ivey has also been a key driver behind the state’s costly new prison.“The new prison facilities being built in Alabama are critically important to public safety, to our criminal justice system and to Alabama as a whole,” Ivey said in September.Alabama, which was ranked as the seventh poorest state by US News, has the fifth lowest household income in the country and is a place where a child born in 2020 could expect to live to be only 73 years old.It is also one of 10 largely Republican-led states that has declined to use federal government resources to expand Medicaid – a healthcare program for low-income residents – to more residents, which Gutierrez said can lead to people ending up in incarceration, or being re-incarcerated.“To deny Medicaid expansion in a state is to exacerbate the health and wellbeing issues of poor people who are the ones cycling through jails and prisons due to their poverty and poor health,” she said.“Folks who are formerly incarcerated, their health status may be determining their likelihood of going to jail and prison in the first place. Because if I’m sick, and I’m not working because I’m sick, and if I have mental illness or a substance use disorder, I’m more visible to the police, I’m more visible to punishment, and that thus increases my chances of being sent to jail or prison.”In Georgia, which has also opted out of expanded Medicaid, officials are attempting to source $1.7bn for a new prison near Atlanta, with little sign that politicians are considering spending the money elsewhere. Indiana’s $1.2bn facility is scheduled to open in 2027.One thing most can agree is that conditions in many of America’s jails are dire.Earlier this year, Atteeyah Hollie, deputy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the Guardian there “are daily horrors that are happening” in Georgia’s Fulton county jail – which the new facility would replace.The Department of Justice opened an investigation into the jail in July, citing reports that “an incarcerated person died covered in insects and filth, that the Fulton county jail is structurally unsafe, that prevalent violence has resulted in serious injuries and homicides”.In Alabama, a majority of prisons don’t have air-conditioning, which the Montgomery Advertiser reported made conditions “hell” during a summer where the heat index reached 115F (46C).Both states have committed to improving conditions, but it is hard to shake the sense that the billions being spent on new prisons and jails would be better used elsewhere.Jacob Kang-Brown, senior research fellow at Vera Institute, which works to end over-criminalization and mass incarceration, said the funds should be put towards education and affordable housing, and supporting robust access to healthcare.“The social welfare safety net in the US has been underinvested in for decades. That is part of the reason why we have such a huge investment in incarceration. It’s really a negative cycle,” Kang-Brown said.As president, Trump signed the bipartisan First Step Act, a prison and sentencing reform bill which expanded rehabilitative opportunities for incarcerated people, increased the possibility of early parole for good behavior and reduced mandatory minimum sentences for a number of drug-related crimes.At the time, the act was championed by Republicans, Democrats and advocates.But in the 2022 midterm elections, amid a rise in some forms of violent crime, Republicans began to distance themselves from the First Step Act, while Trump, despite his role in the legislation, would not say whether he still supports it when asked by the New York Times. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival for the GOP presidential nomination, has said he would repeal it.“There are a lot of concerns about public safety, and politicians want to throw money at that problem often, as opposed to thinking hard about what that might mean and how to best address those problems,” Kang-Brown said.“Many people are seemingly more comfortable with investing in law enforcement and prisons to address those things, other than the real kind of investments, like affordable housing, for instance, that can actually improve public safety in a real substantive way.” More

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      Bayard Rustin review: fine portrait of a giant of protest and politics

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      At only about 200 pages, Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is a pleasure to read, 23 contributors giving their take on the great civil rights advocate. Edited by the scholar Michael G Long, it is a must for those who want to better understand the complexity of a Black hero who was also an imperfect man.Rustin, the Obama-produced feature film airing on Netflix, is the most prominent example an industry of emergent Rustin scholarship. A spate of Rustin essays, Rustin books and Rustin docuseries round out the genre. They commemorate the 60th anniversary of Rustin’s foremost achievement: the March on Washington of 1963, a great protest for African American civil and economic rights.The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 was among its results. Long explains how, with this peaceful demonstration as a template, “millions of protesters … would similarly march on Washington for women’s rights, labor rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more. No protest in US history has been more influential and consequential.”What is it that makes the book Long has edited so special? It is its economy. Without spending a long time, from several angles you get a good picture of who Rustin was.I never met Rustin, but I did meet and was befriended by Walter Naegle. Legally adopted by Rustin so no one could contest his eventual bequest, in any real sense Naegle is Rustin’s widower. They met in 1977 and were together for the final decade of Rustin’s life.“He had a wonderful shock of white hair,” Naegle writes. “I guess he was of my parents’ generation, but we looked at each other and lightning struck.”When he moved to New York in the late 1930s, Rustin joined the 15th Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Any source one consults emphasizes how imperative his Quaker upbringing was. He was reared not by his unmarried teenaged mother but by his maternal grandmother. Her beliefs inspired his highly moral sense of ethics.Naegle writes: “Bayard always credited Julia [Edith Davis Rustin] with having the most profound impact on his early development. She attended West Chester, Pennsylvania’s Friends School. Her education stressed ‘human family oneness, equality, integrity, community, and peace through nonviolence’. It was this Quaker nonviolence, enhanced by Gandhi’s version, that Rustin studied in India, which he taught to Rev Martin Luther King. This was how King’s movement changed history.”I always assumed that as a boy Rustin followed a trajectory similar to that followed by his grandmother. I envisioned him interacting with white Quakers with ease. But Naegle relates something else. When she married, Rustin’s grandmother joined her husband’s African Methodist Episcopal church. Notwithstanding the strong Quaker identity they shared, neither she nor Bayard were welcome to attend the West Chester Friends Meeting. Far from the “Peaceable Kingdom” I pictured, Rustin experienced a grimmer youth. Replete with racial segregation, there was even a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.All the same, Rustin’s Quaker beliefs led him to pacifism. A conscientious objector during the second world war, he received a two-year prison term. He sought to serve fellow inmates, organizing them to protest for better conditions. Earlier, at Wilberforce University, Rustin had been expelled for organizing students – and for being gay. Jail authorities didn’t hesitate to use his sexuality against him. To be queer was to be perceived as deviant and depraved. Confessing his sexuality to his grandmother, he had only been admonished: “Never associate with anyone who has less to lose than you do.” In prison it was a different matter. Black or white, on learning about Rustin’s sexuality, most prisoners wanted nothing to do with him.Being deemed deviant and illegal haunted Rustin’s life well after his release in 1946. One friend stood by him steadfastly. A fellow socialist, Asa Philip Randolph, had established America’s first Black labor union, the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin’s capabilities as an organizer, orator and agitator impressed Randolph early. Their first big protest, a 1941 march on the capital, was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt desegregated war production contracts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy 1960, the worst sex scandal of all threatened to break into public. Envious, Harlem’s Black congressional representative demanded that King cancel a demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention. In his contribution to A Legacy of Protest and Politics, John d’Emilio tells us how the Rev Adam Clayton Powell Jr promised: “If King did not call off the protests … Powell would [claim] that King and Rustin were having a sexual affair. King immediately canceled the demonstrations.”Three years later, before the March on Washington, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina attempted to kill it by reading an old Rustin arrest into the record. It backfired. People laughed. Thanks to Randolph, Rustin was back. Some 250,000 people were safely transported to the Lincoln Memorial. The sound system worked and so did the portable toilets. Despite an overwhelming police presence, no one was shot.Rustin was multifaceted but fallible. In this insightful book, several observers contend that no one else could have done as well. Others are impressed by how Rustin combated oppression and injustice around the world. He helped normalize radical solutions to enduring problems like unemployment and inequality. His endorsement of a two-state solution in the Middle East was tact itself. However, chided by Malcolm X, Rustin’s nonviolent stance evolved. Addressing the Watts riots, he noted somberly: “If negro rioting is to be avoided in the future, it will be because negroes are enabled to get out of the vicious cycle of frustration that breeds aggression; because this country proves that it is capable of creating a new economic way of life without unemployment, without slums, without poverty.”This book makes clear that Bayard Rustin, a man for his time, is a man for our time too.
      Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is published in the US by New York University Press More

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      US supreme court allows delay in redrawing Louisiana map that dilutes Black voters’ power

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      The US supreme court said on Thursday it would not immediately lift a lower court’s order blocking a judge from holding a hearing to consider a new congressional map for Louisiana that increases the power of Black voters. The decision could mean that Black voters in Louisiana will have to vote under a map that has been found to illegally weaken their votes for a second time.The decision, which had no noted dissents, is the latest step in an increasingly complex legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional maps. A federal judge last year ordered the state to redraw its six districts to add a second district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice. Black voters currently represent about a third of Louisiana’s population but have a majority in just one district.The US supreme court put that decision on hold while it considered a similar case from Alabama. After the court upheld a ruling requiring Alabama to redraw its maps in June, it allowed the Louisiana case to move forward.In a highly unusual move, a split three-judge panel from the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit issued an order in late September blocking a judge from holding a hearing on a remedial map. The two highly conservative judges in the majority, Edith Jones and James Ho, said the lower judge had not given Louisiana Republicans enough of a chance to defend themselves or prepare a legally compliant map.The challengers in the case immediately appealed to the US supreme court, warning that putting off the hearing could mean that Louisiana might not get a new congressional map until after the 2024 election. Such a ruling would mean that Black voters in the state would have to be subject to two federal elections under maps that illegally weakened their votes.“The writ issued by the panel risks injecting chaos into the 2024 election cycle by leaving in place a preliminary injunction barring use of the map the legislature adopted in 2022, while casting doubt on whether or when a lawful remedial map can be promptly developed and implemented,” lawyers for the challengers wrote.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, part of the liberal wing on the US supreme court, wrote a concurring opinion saying that the court’s decision not to get involved should not be seen as condoning the decision from the fifth circuit panel “in these or similar circumstances”.She also noted that she understood the panel’s ruling to halt proceedings until Louisiana had had an opportunity to draw its own maps. The state, she noted, had conceded in a court filing that it would not draw maps while the case was pending, clearing the lower court to “presumably resume the remedial process” while the full fifth circuit considered an appeal of the case.Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, noted that Louisiana won’t hold its congressional primaries until November 2024, so there should still be plenty of time to hold a full trial on the maps and get new ones in place before then. “The real question is whether any appeals after that trial mean that the redrawing gets put on hold pending appeals,” he wrote in an email.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the supreme court’s ruling made it “somewhat less likely” there would be a new map before 2024, but added: “It’s still a real possibility that there’ll be a new map in time.”In addition to Alabama and Louisiana, observers are closely watching Georgia and Florida, where lawsuits seek to give Black voters a chance to elect their preferred candidate. Because voting in the US south is often racially polarized, any districts designed to give Black voters an opportunity to elect their preferred candidate is likely to benefit Democrats. More

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      ‘Live out loud’: US Black queer activists fight against ‘tactics of erasure’

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      On the 60th anniversary of the 1963 march on Washington this summer, a few Black queer advocates spoke passionately before the main program about the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. As some of them got up to speak, the crowd was still noticeably small.Hope Giselle, a speaker who is Black and trans, said she felt the event’s programming echoed the historical marginalization and erasure of Black queer activists in the civil rights movement.However, she was buoyed by the fact that prominent speakers drew attention to political efforts from the right to turn back the clock on LGBTQ+ rights, like the attacks on gender-affirming care for minors.And despite valid concerns around the visibility of Black queer advocates in activist movements, some progress is being made in elected office. This month, Senator Laphonza Butler made history as the first Black and openly lesbian senator in Congress, as she filled the seat held by the late Dianne Feinstein.Rectifying the erasure of Black queer civil rights giants requires a full-throated acknowledgment of their legacies, and an increase of Black LGBTQ+ representation in advocacy and politics, several activists and lawmakers told the Associated Press.“One of the things that I need for people to understand is that the Black queer community is still Black” and faces anti-Black racism as well as homophobia and transphobia, said Giselle, communications director for the GSA Network, a non-profit that helps students form gay-straight alliance clubs in schools.“On top of being Black and queer, we have to also then distinguish what it means to be queer in a world that thinks that queerness is adjacent to whiteness – and that queerness saves you from racism. It does not,” she said.In an interview with the Associated Press, Butler said she hopes that her appointment points toward progress in the larger cause of representation.“It’s too early to tell. But what I know is that history will be recorded in our National Archives, the representation that I bring to the United States Senate,” she said last week. “I am not shy or bashful about who I am and who my family is. So my hope is that I have lived out loud enough to overcome the tactics of today.”“But we don’t know yet what the tactics of erasure are for tomorrow,” Butler said.Black LGBTQ+ political representation has grown by 186% since 2019, according to a 2023 report by the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute. That included the election of now former New York representatives Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres, who were the first openly gay Black and Afro-Latino congressmen, after the 2020 election, as well as former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot.These leaders stand on the shoulders of civil rights heroes such as Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray and Audre Lorde. In accounts of their contributions to the civil rights and feminist movements, their Blackness is typically amplified while their queer identities are often minimized or even erased, said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a LGBTQ+ civil rights group.Rustin, who was an adviser to the Rev Martin Luther King Jr and a pivotal architect of the 1963 march on Washington for jobs and freedom, is a glaring example. The march he helped lead tilled the ground for the passage of federal civil rights and voting rights legislation in the next few years. But the fact that he was gay is often reduced to a footnote rather than treated as a key part of his involvement, Johns said.“We need to teach our public school students history, herstory, our beautifully diverse ways of being, without censorship,” he said.Some believe the erasure of Black LGBTQ+ leaders stems from respectability politics, a strategy in some marginalized communities of ostracizing or punishing members who don’t assimilate into the dominant culture.White supremacist ideology in Christianity, which has been used more broadly to justify racism and systemic oppression, has also promoted the erasure of Black queer history. The Black Christian church was integral to the success of the civil rights movement, but it is also “theologically hostile” to LGBTQ+ communities, said Don Abram, executive director of Pride in the Pews.“I think it’s the co-optation of religious practices by white supremacists to actually subjugate Black, queer and trans folk,” Abram said. “They are largely using moralistic language, theological language, religious language to justify them oppressing queer and trans folk.”Not all queer advocacy communities have been welcoming to Black LGBTQ+ voices. The Minneapolis city council president, Andrea Jenkins, said she is just as intentional in amplifying queer visibility in Black spaces as she is amplifying Blackness in majority white, queer spaces.“We need to have more Black, queer, transgender, nonconforming identified people in these political spaces to aid and bridge those gaps,” Jenkins said. “It’s important to be able to create the kinds of awareness on both sides of the issue that can bring people together and that can ensure that we do have full participation from our community.” More

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      Supreme court to review whether South Carolina map discriminated against Black voters

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      When South Carolina Republicans set out to redraw the state’s seven congressional districts after the 2020 census, they had a clear goal in mind: make the state’s first congressional district more friendly for Republicans.In 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham won the seat in an upset. In 2020, Republican Nancy Mace barely won it back. Now, Republicans wanted to redraw the district, which includes Charleston and stretches along the south-eastern part of the state, to be much safer. There was an easy way to do this – change the lines to add reliably Republican areas in three different counties to the district.But there was a problem. The old district was about 17.8% Black and the new additions would make it 20% Black, enough to make it politically competitive. So the mapmaker Republicans tasked with coming up with a new plan began removing Black voters in Charleston from the first district, placing them in the neighboring sixth district, which is represented by Democrat Jim Clyburn. Ultimately, he removed more than 30,000 Black voters – 62% of Charleston’s Black population in the district – out of it. Mace comfortably won re-election in 2022.Whether or not that removal was constitutional is at the center of a case the supreme court is set to hear on Wednesday called Alexander v South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.A three-judge panel ruled in January that Republicans had undertaken an “effective bleaching” of the district, deliberately sorting Black voters based on their race. That kind of racial sorting violates the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. It was “more than a coincidence” that the new, more-Republican configuration of the first district had the exact same percentage as Black voters as the old one. The court said Republicans had adopted a racial target of a 17% Black district and drawn the lines to meet it.Any decision striking down the lines is likely to make the first congressional district more competitive for Democrats, who are seeking to cut in to the razor-thin majority Republicans hold in the US House next fall.But South Carolina Republicans say their decision to move voters was based on partisan motivations, not racial ones. The mapmaker, Republicans say, didn’t even consider racial data when he was drawing the plans. The map South Carolina Republicans enacted is the only plan offered that increases the Republican vote share while all the ones proposed by the plaintiffs turned it into a majority-Democratic district, lawyers for the state wrote in their briefing to the supreme court.“If left uncorrected, the decision below will serve as a roadmap to invalidate commonplace districts designed with a political goal,” lawyers for the state wrote in their briefing to the supreme court.While the US supreme court has long prohibited racial gerrymandering – sorting voters into districts based on their race with no legitimate purpose – it said in 2019 that there is nothing the federal courts can do to stop gerrymandering for partisan aims.The South Carolina case is being closely watched because a ruling approving of the state’s redistricting approach could give lawmakers much more leeway to use partisanship as a pretext for unconstitutionally moving voters based on their race. That could be a boon to lawmakers in the US south, where voting is often racially polarized.While the current conservative court has been extremely hostile to voting rights in recent years, litigants have had some success in similar racial gerrymandering cases. In a 2017 case, for example, the court struck down two North Carolina congressional districts because Republicans in the state had relied too much on race with no legitimate purpose.“The sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a footnote in the majority opinion.“This case stands for the proposition that you cannot use partisanship as a guise to harm Black communities,” said Antonio Ingram II, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), which is representing the challengers in the case. “You cannot use political goals or interests in order to harm Black voters. Black voters cannot be collateral damage to craft partisan gerrymanders.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo bolster their argument, the challengers retained a statistical expert, Harvard professor Kosuke Imai, who produced 10,000 simulated maps that did not take race into account. None of those 10,000 simulations produced a Black voting age population in the first congressional district than the plan Republicans adopted.Another expert witness for the plaintiffs analyzed the areas that were moved from the first congressional district to the sixth to see if there was any correlation between race or partisanship and the likelihood it would be moved. The analysis found that the racial makeup of an area was a better predictor of whether it would be moved than its partisan composition.There are also allegations that Clyburn, one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, condoned adding Black voters to his district and assisted the legislature in coming up with a plan to do so. Clyburn has strongly disputed those allegations and filed a friend of the court brief urging the supreme court to uphold the lower court’s finding and strike down the first congressional district.The justice department also filed a brief urging the court to uphold the lower court’s ruling and strike down congressional district 1. “The court permissibly found that race predominated in the drawing of CD1 because mapmakers relied on race to achieve their partisan goals,” Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general, wrote in a brief.Ingram, the LDF attorney, said that the map South Carolina Republicans had implemented would ultimately make it harder for Black voters along the coast of the state to get someone to advocate for them on issues like climate change. He noted that voters in Charleston, near the coast of South Carolina, who were being attached to CD-6, were being annexed into a largely inland district.“This is about Black voters not having champions in their own communities that are responsive to their needs that are influenced by their electoral power to really advocate for federal allocation of resources without things that will improve their quality of life.” More

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      Hughes Van Ellis, one of last Tulsa race massacre survivors, dies aged 102

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      One of the last known survivors of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 has died, his family has confirmed in a statement.Hughes Van Ellis died from cancer Monday night at the age of 102, his family said.He was one of the most outspoken activists for reparations over the massacre and fought for them on behalf of Tulsa’s Black community for decades. But, his grandnephew Ike Howard told CNN: “He died waiting on justice.”The family’s statement added: “Two days ago, Mr Ellis urged us to keep fighting for justice. In the midst of his death, there remains an undying sense of right and wrong. Mr Ellis was assured we would remain steadfast and we repeated to him, his own words, ‘We are one,’ and we lastly expressed our love.”The Tulsa race massacre was one of the deadliest cases of racist violence in US history. It began when a white mob stormed an area of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, referred to as “Black Wall Street” because it was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the US at the time.More than 35 city blocks of homes, businesses and churches were in ruins after the mob looted them and set them on fire. Historians estimate up to 300 people died.Black Wall Street was never able to rebuild. And by the end of the 20th century, any hopes of doing so were squashed by city planners who claimed eminent domain on the land.Known to his loved ones as “Uncle Red”, Ellis survived the massacre as a baby after escaping the mob with his family.He grew up to be a proud military veteran, having fought with a racially segregated US army battalion in the second world war. His family called him a “loving family man”.In 2021, Ellis testified in Congress with other survivors about the effects the massacre from a century earlier inflicted on his family and his community.Speaking before a House judiciary subcommittee to demand reparations for the massacre, Ellis said: “You may have been taught that when something is stolen from you, you can go to the courts to be made whole. You can go to the courts to get justice. This wasn’t the case for us. The courts in Oklahoma wouldn’t hear us. The federal courts said we were too late.“We were made to feel that our struggles were unworthy of justice. That we were less valued than whites, that we weren’t fully American. We were shown that in the United States, not all men were equal under law. We were shown that when Black voices called out for justice, no one cared.”He added: “Please do not let me leave this earth without justice, like all the other massacre survivors.”Shortly after, Joe Biden declared 31 May 2021 a day of remembrance for the Tulsa Race Massacre 100 years earlier.Although Ellis was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and seven other defendants demanding restitution for the massacre, the case was dismissed by an Oklahoma judge in July. And no financial reparations have been awarded to the massacre survivors, their descendants or the victims’ descendants.Furthermore, “not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level: municipal, county, state, or federal,” according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum.The last two known survivors of the massacre are Ellis’s older sister, 109-year-old Viola Fletcher, with whom he escaped; and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108. More

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      in US Politics

      Fascism in America: a long history that predates Trump

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      Pro-Nazi propaganda, courtesy of the US post office? This unlikely scheme was hatched by George Sylvester Viereck, a German-born American who between 1937 and 1941 sought to marshal US sentiment against intervention in Europe. Those who heeded him included prominent members of Congress, such as Burton Wheeler of Montana and Rush Holt Sr of West Virginia, anti-interventionist Democratic senators known for speeches that prompted accusations of antisemitism. Viereck’s contacts on Capitol Hill allowed him to place anti-interventionist speeches in the appendix to the congressional record. Thanks to friends in high places, he could order inexpensive reprints and have German-American groups mail them out on government postage.If this sounds out of place in the land of the free, it shouldn’t – according to an illuminating new anthology, Fascism in America: Past and Present, edited by Gavriel D Rosenfeld and Janet Ward. In 12 chapters plus an introduction and epilogue, the co-editors and their contributors make the case that fascism has existed on US soil for well past a century and remains disturbingly present today.“We don’t sufficiently teach civics or democratic awareness [in high schools], how fascism and far-right extremist movements have a long history in the US,” Rosenfeld said. “We think we’re an exception, that America fought ‘the good war’ to defeat fascism and Nazism. We patted ourselves on the back for many decades as ‘the greatest generation’ – a useful myth for American public life that blinded us to darker undercurrents in our society.”Ward mentions history from even further back, “eugenics-based scientific standards” that “informed opinions and policies on what it meant to be included not just as fully American, but as fully human” in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, subsequently influencing Nazi laws regarding race.Rosenfeld is president of the Center for Jewish History in New York and a professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut. From the UK, Ward is a history professor at the University of Oklahoma; she is a past president of the German Studies Association and was an American Council on Education fellow at Yale. Both are scholars of Germany, including the second world war and the Holocaust. (Rosenfeld authored a chapter in the anthology, on alternate histories of the war, from The Plot Against America to Watchmen.) Both editors became alarmed by developments during the Trump administration that suggested parallels with the rise of Nazism and hinted at a reawakening of homegrown fascist sentiments lying dormant for decades.“We redirected attention on our own backyard and applied the same kind of lens to a place that had not been subject to the same kind of scrutiny, the vulnerabilities in our own kind of democratic institutions,” Rosenfeld said. “We reached out to scholars in related fields – American studies, Black studies – to see what we could learn from the American experience … We were equally concerned about the present-day democratic backsliding.”Ward said: “More than one country has turned toward populism and the extreme right. It began to worry a lot of us, not just academics but cultural commentators.” The resulting volume is “very much part of a new awareness of the way in which traditional academics circulate to a broader public”.Collaborators include the New York University history professor Linda Gordon, who incorporated findings from a forthcoming project and The Second Coming of the KKK, her 2017 book about the years after the first world war. Ousmane K Power-Greene, an African American scholar at Clark University in Massachusetts, examined Black antifascist activism from the 1960s to the 1980s, by activists such as Angela Davis and H Rap Brown.Trump comes up repeatedly. Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, compares “Anarchy and the State of Nature in Donald Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany”. Marla Stone of Occidental College researched Trump-era detention facilities for migrant children. Her chapter title: “Concentration Camps in Trump’s America?”“It’s not just that we wanted to determine for ourselves, is Trump a fascist or not, is Trumpism fascist or not, is Maga-ism fascist or not,” Rosenfeld said, noting that such questions are frequently posed by scholars, journalists and readers. “We try to trace the evolving debate, the historical shift over time – of course, after the Charlottesville Unite the Right march in 2017 … [Trump’s] defending the Proud Boys at the 2020 debate, obviously after January 6 … it’s been a moving target.”Yet, Rosenfeld said, “ever since January 6, more people are inclined to believe that even if Trump is not a dogmatic fascist, so many of his followers are willing to use violence to overturn the rule of law, the constitution, to make it very concerning for people. At a certain point, you want to be safe rather than sorry, err on the side of caution, to believe we’re in a potential fascist moment.”The book suggests fascism in America might date back as far as the late 19th century, amid Jim Crow laws in the south and nativist fears over immigration from Europe. In the early 20th century, the US enacted infamously high immigration quotas, while domestic white supremacist groups thrived: the Ku Klux Klan during its 1920s resurgence, followed by Depression-era proto-fascist militant groups such as the Silver Legion, under William Dudley Pelley. While the interwar years witnessed clandestine German-backed attempts to mobilize Americans against intervention, the book makes it clear fascism needed no foreign encouragement.“Ultimately, this is an American story,” Ward said. “You can’t – you shouldn’t – look at fascism solely as an outside influence into the US … it needs to be looked at from within, as well as something coming in from without.”She noted that she received her doctorate from the University of Virginia, the campus on which the Charlottesville riots occurred six years ago.“The August 2017 events of Charlottesville pinpointed it for a lot of people,” Ward said. “The open demonstration of violence, the coming together of racism, antisemitism and white supremacy all at once through that ugly moment.”As to whether America is on the precipice of another such ugly moment, the co-editors are hoping democracy holds firm, just as it did in the second world war.“I’m going to be an optimist,” Ward said, “with education, with informed voices like the contributors to our book, with discourse and engagement [to prevent] a doomsday scenario with the new presidential election coming up.”Rosenfeld agreed, but could not help recalling a sobering lesson.“We know now that Franklin Roosevelt was still dealing with a nearly 20% unemployment rate on the eve of world war two,” he said. “Only billions and billions of dollars in military spending got us out of debt. All the isolationists got on board against the Nazis and Japan. Rightwingers were forced into silence.“It’s clear in retrospect,” he added, “that world war two did make the US a great power on the world stage. It also spared us the kind of fascism that Vichy France and Germany experienced, that many other countries experienced. We were spared the same thing – but it was a close call. We shouldn’t be complacent.”
      Fascism in America is published in the US by Cambridge University Press More