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      ‘Affirmative action for the privileged’: why Democrats are fighting legacy admissions

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      In the aftermath of the supreme court’s decision to strike down race-conscious admissions at universities in June, progressive Democrats have turned their outrage into motivation. They are now using their fury to power an impassioned campaign against a different admissions practice that they consider unjust and outdated: legacy admissions.The century-old practice gives an advantage to the family members of universities’ alumni, a group that tends to be whiter and wealthier than the general pool of college applicants. Critics argue that legacy applicants already enjoy an unfair leg up in the admissions process and that university’s preference toward those students exacerbates existing inequalities in higher education.As the country adapts to a post-affirmative action world, progressives are ramping up the political and legal pressure on universities to scrap their use of legacy admissions. A Democratic bill, introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York, and a civil rights inquiry at the Department of Education could represent a serious threat to legacy admissions.“Though the supreme court gutted race-conscious college admissions, make no mistake, affirmative action is still alive and well for children of alumni and major donors, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding it,” Merkley told the Guardian.The origins of legacy admissions policies date back to the 1920s, when Jewish and immigrant students began attending America’s elite universities in larger numbers. Concerned over this growing trend, college leaders implemented a range of admissions preferences, such as legacy status, designed to benefit the white Protestant applicants who had populated university classrooms for centuries.Despite the ignominious roots of legacy admissions, the practice persists at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including every member of the Ivy League. Colleges defend the practice as beneficial for building strong alumni communities across generations and encouraging financial contributions, even though one analysis found “no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving”.Progressives have mocked legacy admissions as “affirmative action for the privileged”, and the supreme court’s decision against race-conscious admissions has reinvigorated their efforts to end the widely unpopular practice altogether. According to one Pew Research Center survey conducted last year found, 75% of Americans believe alumni relations should not be considered in the admissions process.“Many of the legacy kids simply would not have gotten in had they not had legacy [preference],” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “This is the result of a system that was designed to operate exactly the way it’s operating.”Last month, Merkley and Bowman reintroduced their bill, the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, to prohibit universities participating in federal student aid programs from giving an admissions advantage to the relatives of alumni or donors. Noting the financial advantages legacy students often enjoy in the college admissions process, Merkley suggested those applicants do not require additional assistance to gain entry to elite universities.“As the first in my family to go to college, I know the struggles facing students whose parents have never been through the process,” Merkley said.According to an analysis conducted by the Harvard research group Opportunity Insights, legacy students were only slightly more qualified than the average applicant to elite private colleges, but were nearly four times more likely to be admitted than those with the same test scores. The boost appears to disproportionately harm students of color, as one study found that white students account for 40% of Harvard’s total applicant pool but nearly 70% of the university’s legacy applicants. Opportunity Insights’ research also concluded that legacy applicants are more likely to come from wealthy families, giving them more access to resources like private education and preparation courses for standardized tests.“Children of donors and alumni may be excellent students, but they are the last people who should get reserved seats, enabling them to gain admission over more qualified students from more challenging backgrounds,” Merkley said.The battle over legacy admissions has now also attracted the attention of the Department of Education. Last month, the department opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard’s use of legacy admissions following a complaint filed by the group Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of three racial justice organizations. The complaint accused Harvard of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by giving an admissions edge to the children of donors and wealthy alumni.“We know that schools like [Harvard] set students up for success – and for great success – and introduce them to new innovative ideas and a great network,” said Michael Kippins, a litigation fellow with Lawyers for Civil Rights. “They should reflect the type of diversity that we see in our communities the same way that we would want fair access for anything else.”Olatunde Johnson, a professor at Columbia Law School, viewed lawsuits against colleges’ legacy admissions policies as somewhat inevitable after the supreme court’s decision on affirmative action.“The supreme court opened the door to that challenge by leaving legacy and donor preferences untouched while it got rid of race-conscious affirmative action, so it made it kind of an easy target,” Johnson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe predicted other universities would be closely watching the outcome of the civil rights inquiry into Harvard as they reconsider their own legacy admissions policies.“People might wait to see how this challenge is resolved because some of the broad contours of this complaint are going to mirror what people would do in future cases,” Johnson said. “Whatever kind of ruling there is, it’s going to have implications more broadly for other institutions, even without separate complaints or lawsuits.”Some colleges aren’t waiting on the federal government to make the change. The liberal arts college Wesleyan University announced last month that it would scrap its legacy admissions policy, joining other private institutions like Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. The practice is already prohibited at a number of public colleges, including all schools in the University of California and the California State University systems.The trend of abandoning legacy admissions policies may accelerate in the face of mounting criticism from political leaders, including some Republicans. After the supreme court’s decision in June, South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott praised the ruling and simultaneously suggested universities needed to revisit their legacy preferences.“I think the question is, how do you continue to create a culture where education is the goal for every single part of our community?” Scott told Fox News. “One of the things that Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs.”Robinson is somewhat skeptical that a bipartisan coalition will materialize to meaningfully challenge legacy admissions, and the Republicans in control of the House have so far shown little appetite to take up Merkley and Bowman’s bill.But even if legacy preferences do come to an end, Robinson believes much more will need to be done to build a truly just college admissions process. After all, he said, the practice of legacy admissions is only one piece of a much broader system that disadvantages students of color.“Racism is like water pouring over a floor with holes in it. It will always find the cracks. So, yes, we should deal with legacy admissions. But I want to make sure that we don’t think that this is some sort of silver bullet,” Robinson said.“We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those who are working every day to shut the doors of opportunity and access to those who have been excluded are not going to find other ways to to hold the side door open for people who look like them.” More

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      Al Sharpton on 60 years since the civil rights march on Washington – podcast

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      On 26 August, Rev Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, and other civil rights activists will commemorate the 1963 march on Washington, which was organised to advocate for civil and economic rights for African Americans.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland sits down with Sharpton to discuss why he believes Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech has been abused by some on the right, why he is still fighting for police reform, and how James Brown was so influential on his life

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Why Ron DeSantis’s slavery curriculum is so dangerous | Saida Grundy

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      In the mid-20th century, a generation after the civil war, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to rebrand the image of slavery. The group, composed of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, was fixated on returning the country’s social order to its antebellum racial hierarchy. It sought to reimagine slavery as a benign institution, and to glorify the “lost cause” of white southern insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the government in slavery’s defense. The place that served as ground zero for the UDC’s revisionist-history effort? Schools.In one of its most successful campaigns, the UDC called for the widespread adoption of textbooks that trivialized the horrors of slavery. As a result, a 1954 middle school textbook titled History of Georgia claimed that a typical slave owner “often had a barbecue or picnic for his slaves. The [enslaved] often had a great frolic. Even while working in the cotton fields they sang songs.” (It is no coincidence that the book was published the same year the NAACP won the supreme court case to desegregate public schools.) And while most contemporary school texts have since moved towards acknowledging that slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era were reprehensible, organized efforts against teaching accurate racial history continue to occur.The UDC’s legacy of revision emerged again in Florida recently, when the Republican governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis introduced legislation that would de-emphasize racism in the state’s public education curricula. Last week, DeSantis announced that Florida texts will teach students that slavery benefited African Americans who “gained skills” that “eventually parlayed … into doing other things in life”. Civil-rights leaders, educators, and scholars were quick to criticize this minimization of slavery’s cruelty as ignorance at best and deliberate misrepresentation at worst. Vice-President Kamala Harris even reacted, calling the policy an attempt “to replace history with lies”.The backlash to DeSantis’s move is warranted and necessary, but most of the critiques miss the mark on identifying the Florida law’s deeper insidiousness. What the architects of this legislation are really attempting to do – as the UDC attempted a century before – is galvanize a political right and hold on to conservative white rule in a country with rapidly changing demographics. By denying the true ills of slavery, DeSantis is working to release the American government from the obligation of correcting for its present-day inequalities. The violence of slavery is not just limited to a series of heinous acts that happened in the past, it also includes a deliberate process of disinformation that enables future generations to maintain the power yielded by that violence.Though DeSantis’s career has relied heavily on making power gains by denying violence, the political strategy is not his invention. The practice of violence denial has long been a hallmark of the modern world’s most oppressive regimes. Take, for example, the British empire. During her 21st birthday address in 1947, the heir apparent Elizabeth II memorably declared that her life would be lived in “service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”. Her characterization of upholding Britain’s unrelenting and exploitative colonial system as “service”, and her assertion of an “imperial family” that included subjugated African, Asian and Caribbean people, are examples of the same whitewashing tactic employed by DeSantis. Even his efforts to ban “controversial” texts were cribbed – the British crown consistently prohibited books that challenged colonial rule in conquered territories.Another world power that has sought to subvert the historical record is Turkey, with regard to the government’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. To aid in its denial, Turkey spent millions of dollars to control the massacre’s narrative and enacted laws that criminalized anyone who accurately used the term “genocide” in reference to the killing, starvation and forced removal of an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians in the country from 1915 to 1916. Even today, Turkish loyalists dismiss dissenters who speak up about the genocide as having an agenda or being backed by foreign agitators.Ultimately, regimes exploit disinformation about the past because the truth threatens their grip on power. But it should surprise no one when those tactics to win a political advantage also spill over into present-day issues. DeSantis’s war on reality doesn’t stop at slavery. During the pandemic, his administration also banned mandates on masks, quarantines and vaccines, and suppressed facts about the ballooning number of Covid cases, even as the death toll for Floridians soared ahead of other states.Calling out the information that DeSantis and his supporters are distorting in textbooks and other messaging is important. However, it is just as important to not lose sight of the larger threat that violence denial poses for societies. Organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation. More

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      Into the Bright Sunshine: how Hubert Humphrey joined the civil rights fight

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      Seventy-five years ago this month, at a fractious Philadelphia convention, Hubert Humphrey delivered a famous challenge: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”In a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, Samuel G Freedman helps explain the influences and experiences that led Humphrey, then a 37-year-old midwestern mayor, to take on segregationists in his own party.Humphrey won passage of a bold civil rights platform, triggering southern delegates to nominate Strom Thurmond as a “Dixiecrat” candidate for president. The same year, Humphrey won a race for Senate from Minnesota, launching a national career that culminated in his nomination for president, and defeat by Richard Nixon, in 1968.Freedman describes how Humphrey, who was born in South Dakota, saw Jim Crow up close as a graduate student at Louisiana State University.“Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law,” Freedman writes. “Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness.”A sociology professor and German émigré, Rudolf Heberle, had a particularly important role in shaping Humphrey’s outlook. As Freedman recounts: “The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to ‘mass support … from middle layers of society’. Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen and heard it during his fieldwork.”Heberle was suggesting that “the Jew in Germany was the Black in America”.After LSU, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis, where two locals – one Jewish, one Black – helped stiffen his resolve: Sam Scheiner, an attorney who led the Minnesota Jewish Council, and Cecil Newman, founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.“There were people from throughout [Humphrey’s] life who recognized something in him – skills, yes, but something larger, a kind of destiny – more than he recognized it in himself,” Freedman writes. “He was their vessel and their voice, the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation whose soul was very much at stake.”Minneapolis’s track record on race has been in the news again. Last month, the US justice department said the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was part of a “pattern or practice” of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against African Americans.Nearly 80 years earlier, Humphrey tried to combat racism and antisemitism in the city.Minneapolis was infamous for antisemitism. In the 1930s, Freedman points out, a homegrown fascist group, the Silver Legion of America, called for “returning American Blacks to slavery and disenfranchising, segregating and finally sterilizing American Jews”. In 1946, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams, called the city “the capital of antisemites”.After running for mayor in 1943, Humphrey mounted another run in 1945. In the year American soldiers defeated Hitler’s forces in Europe, gangs attacked and robbed Jews in Minneapolis, sometimes yelling “Heil, Hitler!” Local leaders were ineffective. But Humphrey, Freedman writes, “plainly shared the Jewish community’s belief that the problem went way deeper than mere hoodlums. For the first time in Minneapolis’s decades-long history of racism and antisemitism, a political candidate was placing those issues at the center of a campaign.”Humphrey offered a five-point plan, including the creation of an organization to combat bigotry. He won. Two months into his term, he was confronted with the wrongful arrest of two Black women. Newman, the Black newspaper publisher, called Humphrey at home. The mayor ordered the women released and the charges dropped.Later, Humphrey won passage of an anti-discrimination law and established a council on human relations, to investigate discrimination against racial and religious minorities. For his efforts, he faced an assassination attempt and threats from Nazis. But Humphrey turned the city around.“Minneapolis stood as virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally,” Freedman writes.Humphrey used such work as a springboard, championing civil rights for the nation.“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late,” he said at the 1948 convention, adding: “This is the issue of the 20th century.”In a 2010 documentary, Hubert H Humphrey: The Art of the Possible, former president Jimmy Carter, who was 23 when Humphrey spoke in Philadelphia, called the speech “earth-shattering, expressing condemnation of the racial segregation that had been in existence ever since the end of the civil war. And he was the only one that was courageous enough to do so”.When Humphrey got to Washington, he found himself ostracized by southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. As he recalled, “After all, I had been the destroyer of the Democratic party, the enemy of the south. Hubert Humphrey, the [N-word] lover.’ … I never felt so lonesome and so unwanted in all my life as I did in those first few weeks and months.”But he continued to champion equal rights, an effort that culminated, as majority whip, with breaking a southern filibuster to help win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Humphrey became vice-president, to Lyndon Johnson, then ran for president himself. But “for the rest of his life,” Freedman writes, he “kept the tally sheet on which he had marked the senators’ vote on cloture, the procedure that ended the filibuster and brought the bill to its successful enactment.”
      Into the Bright Sunshine is published in the US by Oxford University Press
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of books including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      Tucker Carlson says ‘being racist is not a crime’ but if he was he would ‘just say so’

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      In a new biography, the far-right former Fox News host Tucker Carlson denies being racist – but says if he was, he would “just say so”.“Being racist is not a crime,” Carlson says in Tucker, by Chadwick Moore. “Maybe [it is] a moral crime, but not a statutory crime – so if I was racist, I would just say so.”Carlson has long been accused of pushing racist invective and conspiracy theories during six years as the dominant Fox News primetime host. He has stirred up numerous controversies including pushing the racist “great replacement theory”, saying immigrants had made America “poorer and dirtier” and once suggested a Black Democrat politician spoke like a “sharecropper”.In an investigation published last year, the New York Times said Carlson “constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news – and also, by some measures, the most successful”.Carlson’s new comments on the subject come in a biography that will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Carlson was interviewed extensively for the book, which will hit stores as he continues to broadcast from Twitter, amid a standoff with Fox, which took him off the air in April.Carlson’s discussion of racism and whether he is racist comes during a section of Moore’s book about how Carlson believes Fox sought to tilt the media narrative against him, “releas[ing] a slew of behind-the-scenes emails, blogposts, and off-the-record transcripts featuring Carlson at his most free-spoken”.In May, Fox News demanded that Media Matters stop publishing such material. The progressive watchdog refused.On the page, Moore details the “most notable” such story, reported by the New York Times and about a text message containing allegedly racist language.Describing watching footage of three Trump supporters attacking one leftwing protester, Carlson was revealed to have written: “It’s not how white men fight.”The Times said Fox leaders were “alarmed”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCarlson now tells Moore: “Fox told the New York Times they pulled me off because I was racist. But I’m not racist, actually. I’m not insecure about that. If I was racist, I’d just say so. But I’m not.“Being racist is not a crime – maybe a moral crime, but not a statutory crime – so if I was racist, I would just say so.“What I said is that’s not how white men fight, which as far as I’m concerned is true. I am a white man. I’m the son of a white man. I’m the grandson of a white man. So, if anyone’s qualified to speak on the subject, it would be me.”Carlson continued: “And that’s not how white men fight is what I was raised to believe. In the culture I grew up in, you’re not allowed to fight that way. I believe that, and I’m not embarrassed of that at all. But that was somehow translated to, I’m evil or I’m a racist or something.”The former host of a primetime show which aimed harsh invective at Democrats, progressives and other critics of conservatism also claims to have made his now infamous comment while “counseling one of my producers to not let politics define other people.“Because it’s unhealthy. It’s un-Christian. It’s wrong.” More

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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