Race

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

      by

      Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
      TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden pardons thousands with federal convictions of simple marijuana possession

      by

      Biden pardons thousands with federal convictions of simple marijuana possessionPresident urges governors to follow suit with state offenses in a step toward addressing disproportionate arrests for people of color President Joe Biden has announced a pardon of all prior federal offenses of simple possession of marijuana in a move welcomed as “long overdue” by criminal justice advocates.“There are thousands of people who have prior federal convictions for marijuana possession, who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result. My action will help relieve the collateral consequences arising from these convictions,” Biden said in a statement released on Thursday afternoon.“Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit. Criminal records for marijuana possession have also imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. And while white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates,” he added.Sadiq Khan launches commission to examine cannabis legalityRead moreAdministration officials said that the pardon could benefit about 6,500 people, the Hill reports.“It’s time that we right these wrongs,” Biden said.He went on to urge all governors to do the same with regards to state offenses, saying, “Just as no one should be in a federal prison solely due to the possession of marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either.”The president also called on the secretary of health and human services and the attorney general to begin the administrative process to review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law.Marijuana is currently classified in schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act under federal law. Drugs classified under this schedule have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”.This classification puts marijuana in the same schedule as for heroin and LSD and even higher than the classification of fentanyl and methamphetamine, two drugs that are fueling the ongoing overdose epidemic across the country.Advocacy groups praised Biden’s announcement, with Kassandra Frederique, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, saying the organization was “thrilled”, but adding “this is incredibly long overdue”.“There is no reason that people should be saddled with a criminal record – preventing them from obtaining employment, housing and countless other opportunities – for something that is already legal in 19 states and DC and decriminalized in 31 states.”The Rev Al Sharpton, the president of the National Action Network, said Biden’s “righteous action today will give countless Americans their lives back”. But he added, “The United States will never justly legalize marijuana until it reckons with the outdated policies that equated thousands of young Black men with hardened drug pushers.”The move also fulfils one of the top priorities of the Democratic nominee in one of their party’s most critical Senate races, as Pennsylvania’s, lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, has repeatedly pressed Biden to take the step, including last month when they met in Pittsburgh.Fetterman, in a statement, took credit for elevating the issue on Biden’s agenda and praised the decision, calling it “a massive step towards justice”.“This action from President Biden is exactly what this work should be about: improving people’s lives. I commend the president for taking this significant, necessary, and just step to right a wrong and better the lives of millions of Americans,” he said.The Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsBiden administrationDrugsDrugs policyRaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracy | Steve Phillips

      by

      How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracySteve PhillipsPeople forget that championing whiteness is what makes Trump powerful A growing chorus of voices is warning that our democracy is in grave danger, but there is much less discussion of the exact nature of the threat. Recently, President Biden emphasized the severity of the threat by going to the place where the constitution was signed to give what the White House described as “a speech on the continued battle for the soul of the nation”.Biden specifically named “Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans” as the ones carrying out the attacks, and that is accurate, on the surface. The deeper, more longstanding threat, however, was articulated by historian Taylor Branch in a 2018 conversation with author Isabel Wilkerson recounted in Wilkerson’s book Caste. As they discussed how the rise of white domestic terrorism under Trump was part of the backlash to the country’s growing racial diversity, Branch noted that, “people said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country”. He went on to add, “the real question would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”Whiteness is the deeper threat because championing whiteness is what makes Trump powerful. People forget that Trump was not particularly well-regarded before he started attacking Mexican immigrants and signaling to white people that he would be the defender of their way of life. In the months before he launched his campaign, he was polling at just 4% in the May 2015 ABC/Washington Post poll. After stirring the racial resentment pot, his popularity took off, growing exponentially in a matter of weeks and propelling him to the front of the pack by mid-July 2015 when he commanded support of 24% of voters, far ahead of all the other Republican candidates.As his support grew with each racially infused statement – such as banning Muslims from entering the US – Trump marveled at the unshakable passion of his followers, observing quite presciently that, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters … It’s like, incredible.”Trump’s 2015 discovery of the power of whiteness is the same lesson that Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace internalized in the crucible of southern politics during the civil rights movement in the 1950s. “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen,” Wallace said, adding, “Then I began talking about n—–s – and they stomped the floor.” After Trump began talking about Mexicans, and then Muslims, many white people from coast to coast stomped the floor and even stormed the Capitol to keep him in power, seeking to destroy the democratic tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.As Wallace’s words show, Trump is not the first leader of a movement to make America white again, and for more than a century we have consistently underestimated the political power of whiteness.The clearest example is the start of the civil war itself. A hundred and sixty years before the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the legislatures in one-third of the states passed laws rejecting the outcome of a presidential election and then issued a literal call to arms where hundreds of thousands of people picked up their guns and, in the name of defending whiteness, proceeded to shoot and kill hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans.In 1968, Alabama’s Wallace saw that the audience for white nationalism reached far beyond his state’s borders and mounted a presidential campaign that secured 13.5% of all votes cast. The strength of Wallace’s showing influenced Richard Nixon’s presidential administration to the extent that historian Dan Carter wrote: “When George Wallace had played his fiddle, the President of the United States had danced Jim Crow.”In 1990, an actual Klansman, former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke, mounted a bid for the US Senate and was initially dismissed as unable to win because of his unapologetic white supremacist views. Duke shocked the establishment by attracting the support of 44% of Louisiana’s voters.The good news is that the proponents of whiteness do not command majority support. The original Confederates themselves were in the minority and represented just 11% of the country’s white population. People who enjoy majority support have no need to unleash fusillades of voter suppression legislation in the states with the largest numbers of people of color. Yet, from the grandfather clauses of the 1800s to the restrictive voting laws passed last year in the south and south-west, we are seeing an unrelenting practice of trying to depress and destroy democracy by engaging in what the writer Ron Brownstein has described as, “stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change”.Just as the enemies of democracy know that they must destroy democracy in order to prevail, the clearest way to defeat them is to aggressively expand democratic participation. Mathematically there is a clear New American Majority made up of the vast majority of people of color in alliance with the meaningful minority of white people who want to live in a multiracial nation. With the sole exception of the 2004 election, that coalition has won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1992.In order to defend democracy and win the fight for the soul of the nation, two things must happen. One is to make massive investments in the people and organizations working to expand voting and civic participation. Coalitions like America Votes Georgia and Arizona Wins played critical roles in bringing hundreds of thousands of people of color into the electorate, helping to transform those former Confederate bastions.The second step is to directly challenge the nation to choose democracy over whiteness. When Taylor Branch posed his provocative question in 2018, it was in the wake of tragedies such as the killing of Heather Heyer, a white woman protesting the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, march of white nationalists incensed at plans to remove Confederate statues. Trump’s response to Heyer’s killing – she was intentionally struck by a car driven by a white supremacist – was to shrug and note that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the march.When he launched his presidential campaign in 2019, Biden explicitly invoked Trump’s post-Charlottesville embrace of whiteness, saying “We have a problem with this rising tide of white supremacy in America,” and went on to oust a defender of white nationalism from America’s White House. Far from being chastened, however, the enemies of democracy have only intensified their efforts. To ultimately prevail in this defense of our democracy, we must clearly understand the underlying forces imperiling the nation, name the nature of the opposition, and summon the majority of Americans to unapologetically affirm that this is a multi-racial country.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and is a Guardian US columnist. His book How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good will be published October 18th
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionDonald TrumpRacecommentReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting bill

      by

      The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting billSB202 is forcing officials and voting rights groups to use every resource to ensure elections run smoothly In 2021, the Election Integrity Act sent shockwaves across Georgia as citizens learned of new restrictions, such as curbing the way churches could provide pizza and water to voters. However, there are much broader effects of the bill being felt across the state as communities across Georgia prepare for midterm elections, the first major election since the signing of the controversial bill.The 98-page bill, also called SB202, impacts a litany of election elements ranging from voter ID laws to the distance at which food and water can be distributed to voters waiting in line. Election officials say they are being forced to use every resource at their disposal to navigate the bill and ensure this election season runs smoothly. But there is widespread concern that the new law will create fresh barriers to voters of color and the changing Georgia electorate.Kamala Harris says ‘everything on the line’ in midterm elections Read more“Internally, we are taking a multifaceted approach, strengthening leadership and expertise throughout departments, and working to beef up skillsets,” said Dele Lowman Smith, chair of the Dekalb county voter registration and election board. “Externally, we are expanding poll worker training and modernizing it to help better address voter concerns when they come up.”Lowman Smith, who was appointed to the position in July 2021, said it will take an all-out approach to ensure elections run smoothly in her county of more than 500,000 active voters.Although there were once 31 ballot drop boxes across the county in the 2020 election season, they are now allowed only six for the entire county as the bill prescribes one drop box per 100,000 voters. The time to request and return absentee ballots has dropped from 176 days to 59 days – more than 50% – forcing election officials to contend with a much quicker turnaround. Additionally, rather than completing absentee ballot applications solely online, voters must now include an original signature on their application, requiring access to a printer.Liza Conrad, deputy executive director of Fair Fight, a voting rights organization based in Georgia, said SB202 significantly burdens voters. “For voters who wish to vote by mail, many are now overcoming these barriers while attempting to make their voices heard,” she said. “If we look back to Georgia’s primary election in May, the rate of rejected vote by mail applications was much higher than that of 2020.”And while voter education once focused on civic engagement and political education, voting rights organizers such as Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, says engaging voters now has to include education around technology and intricacies of the law out of necessity.“What we have to do now is canvassing to really educate people about the process. We are trying to make sure people are still able to exercise their right to vote,” said Butler. “Every little thing seems to have had some kind of change. Even the secretary of state ‘my voter’ page [website] has changed, and now voters have to navigate through tabs instead of just having it all on one page, so we’re having to train voters on that now too.”Conrad, Butler, and Lowman Smith all think it is critical to note that the full breadth of the law goes well beyond absentee ballots, voter IDs and drop boxes. SB202 also limits poll workers’ ability to work at polls outside their county, limiting the capacity of many counties in Georgia as they struggle to find an adequate number of already dwindling poll workers.Shanice Amira Bennerson worked as a precinct manager for multiple elections between 2020 and 2022. However, after witnessing the impact SB202 changes had on voters during the May primaries, Bennerson decided not to continue her work as a poll worker.“Trying to help voters who were just so confused and dejected is heartbreaking. When you have limited precincts and voters who are confused by these changes, some voters just left. Tensions are high, and voters were understandably frustrated,” said Brennerson. “When you couple this with all of the new rules from [SB202] and the limited training we get, it almost feels like a disaster waiting to happen.”Voting organizations such as the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda and Fair Fight have sought ways to engage and encourage poll workers and election boards across the state to address capacity and education on a larger scale. Fair Fight is hosting a “Vote Gold Georgia” tour calling for intentional and expanded voting sites and voting times.Still, some voting rights organizations hope to call attention to the many changes prompted by SB202 by highlighting the voters most impacted by the law.“Anti-voter bills like SB202 are a response to Black, brown and young voters turning out and claiming their power in 2020,” says Conrad. “And so, we are working to continue to make sure that these communities continue to participate and make their voices heard and that the poll workers who keep our democracy functioning are empowered and protected.”Meredyth Yoon, litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta, also thinks the bill unjustly targets voters of color, and hopes to bridge the gap in access it could create.Her group is reallocating resources and shifting its voter education approach to fully educate its communities around changes in timelines, requirements and other recent election changes.“Overall, the impact of the bill is on voters of color, and it was not an accident or unknown to legislators that these communities would ultimately be affected,” says Yoon. “These sorts of tactics are traditionally the types of restrictions that are intended to impact voters of color on the assumption of how voters of color will vote.”TopicsGeorgiaUS voting rightsUS midterm elections 2022RaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem

      by

      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem Bill Keller, once editor of the New York Times, now with the Marshall Project, shows how the US came to imprison so many of its citizens, disproportionately Black and brown, and how such a gross injustice might yet be addressedThe statistics are familiar but remain startling: America’s incarceration rate per 100,000 is “roughly twice that of Russia’s and Iran’s, four times that of Mexico’s, five times of England’s, six times Canada’s” and nine times that of Germany. In addition, “parole and probation regulate the lives of 4.5 million Americans” – more than twice as many as are confined in prison.We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turnRead moreThese numbers come at the beginning of Bill Keller’s smart, short new book, in which he tries to explain how America became so addicted to mass incarceration, and how we might finally reform a system which houses a disproportionally Black and brown population.Keller is a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer for his first New York Times posting as a foreign correspondent, in Moscow as the Soviet Union collapsed. He went on to be executive editor and then a columnist, but in 30 years, criminal justice was never one of his specialties. That all changed when Neil Barsky, a journalist turned investor turned philanthropist, tapped Keller to be founding editor of The Marshall Project, an ambitious effort to produce great journalism about the “causes and consequences” of mass incarceration.Keller’s book highlights many of the best pieces by Marshall Project reporters, but he also uses plenty of his own reporting to illuminate this particularly dark side of American democracy.The “good news”: the incarcerated population has actually been in slow and steady decline, from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2020, including an unprecedented drop of 14% spurred by early releases because of Covid.America’s unfortunate exceptionalism on this subject is actually a fairly recent development. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the rate of incarceration mostly held steady at around 110 out of every 100,000 Americans. But it is nearly 500 today.Liberals and conservatives were equally responsible. A Democratic House speaker, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, sharply overreacted to the crack cocaine overdose of Len Bias, a Boston Celtics draftee, pushing through the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, “which imposed mandatory sentences, asset forfeitures and outlandishly severe sanctions on crack cocaine” favored by Black ghetto residents, while white consumers of powdered cocaine faced much more lenient penalties.As Keller writes, “Rehabilitation was denigrated on the right as coddling”. But a Democratic Senate judiciary committee chairman, Joseph R Biden of Delaware, made everything much worse by championing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only spurred a prison-building boom but also eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners enrolled in college courses. President Biden has acknowledged his mistake.It was President Reagan who inserted the profit motive into the prison business, allowing the Corrections Corporation of America to pioneer “the idea of privately run, for-profit prisons”. As Keller explains, “Since the new prison owners were paid the same way as hotel proprietors, by occupancy, they had no incentive to prepare prisoners for release.” Private prisons now house about 7% of state inmates and 17% of federal.Keller makes an unintentional argument for sending more Republicans to jail, by pointing out that three of the more unlikely advocates of prison reform are Republican officials who ended up in prison.Patrick Nolan was the minority leader of the California assembly when, in 1993, he was indicted on charges of racketeering and extortion. He served 25 months in a federal prison near San Francisco. When he was paroled, he was recruited by Charles Colson, a famous Watergate felon from Nixon’s White House who found religion “shortly before serving seven months himself in a federal prison”.Colson campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners. Nolan became director of a new Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation. Meanwhile, Bernard Kerik, Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner who then did three years in federal prison for tax fraud and other crimes, became an advocate for voting rights for ex-felons.It’s not all good news. By the end of Trump administration, Nolan had succumbed to a rightwing conspiracy theory that “billionaire George Soros was masterminding a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy to elect soft-on-crime prosecutors and bring down the entire criminal justice system”.Keller points to Norway and Germany as providing the best examples for systemic reform. While American prison guards rarely get more than a few weeks of training, Germans get two years of college courses in psychology, ethics and communication. American visitors to German jails are amazed to see unarmed guards “shooting baskets, playing chess, sharing lunch” and having conversations with prisoners.One reason Europe is so far ahead is its depoliticization of the criminal justice system: judges and district attorneys are appointed, not elected.A Fordham University professor, John Pfaff, has pointed out that in the US, during the 1990s and 2000s, “as violent crime and arrests for violent crime both declined, the number of felony cases in state courts” suddenly shot up. Because of political pressures, “tens of thousands more prosecutors” were hired, “even after the rising crime of the 1980s had stalled out”.A Question of Standing review: how the CIA undermined American authorityRead morePfaff attributed the racial inequality in numbers of prisoners to “an imbalance of political power – tough-on-crime prosecutors elected by suburban whites who see the community destruction of mass incarceration from a distance”.Keller reports the most effective ways to reduce the prison population are also the most obvious ones:
      Make low-level drug crimes “non-crimes”.
      Divert people into “mental health and addiction programs, or probation or community service”.
      “Abolish mandatory minimum sentences and encourage” judges to “apply the least severe punishment appropriate under the circumstances”.
      Give “compassionate release to old and infirm inmates” who don’t pose a real threat to the general population.
      The challenge is to get these common-sense ideas to prevail over the rhetoric of politicians who still rail against anyone who is “soft on crime” – the knee-jerk ideology which got us into this catastrophe in the first place.
      What’s Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration is published in the US by Columbia Global Reports
      TopicsBooksUS prisonsUS crimeUS domestic policyUS politicsPolitics booksRacereviewsReuse this content More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old

      by

      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old Kermit Roosevelt III, descendant of Theodore, sees lessons for today’s divided nation in Reconstruction and the civil rights era As with the climate, in politics we are running out of time. America’s retreat from democracy cannot persist. Though Native Americans, Black people, women and plenty others of us were excluded from America’s compact of equality and opportunity, many are still nostalgic for once upon a time. Some see even so flawed a quest for “a more perfect union” as admirable enough to deem it beyond reproach. After all, the argument goes, the American experiment always included and valued most. So that’s alright. All do not think that way.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreKermit Roosevelt III illuminates tumultuous today by examining the contentious beginning. With The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, he thoughtfully explains our growing confusion as to what the creation meant and means.How can so many, looking back to the intentions of the founders, be so misled now? How have we misinterpreted what America has always been about? Citing an evolution as profound as “an eye for an eye” metamorphosing to “God is love”, Roosevelt’s investigation gives lie to every originalist argument today. One might even be tempted to view the United States’ contradictory impediment of slavery like Christianity’s “blessing” of original sin, the absence of which, theologians say, precludes salvation.Roosevelt is a Penn law professor and a great-great grandson of the “trust-busting” 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. He is careful to give credit where credit is due. He notes his book was prefigured by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s powerful 2019 essay, Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.Created for the New York Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones’s piece relates: “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie … despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans … have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”Roosevelt endorses this sentiment by stating that the Declaration of Independence was not conceived as a document dedicated to impartiality. Au contraire. As he puts it, it protected the rights and interests of “insiders” from the striving and ambitions of “outsiders”, a push and pull, he says, that remains in effect.The nub of the Declaration, Roosevelt asserts, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. Ironically, it was only with the arrival of the civil war, rebelling southern states invoking the supposed tyranny of efforts to end their oppression of others, that America was redeemed.The result was not just a second revolution. It presented us with a second constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first constitution.And yet despite the indifference of that document to individual rights, Roosevelt writes: “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime – Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution – to which we are not the heirs … We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime”, who “defeated it by force of arms”.Abraham Lincoln appreciated this. So did Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Yet each strategically choose to give credence to the more broad appeal of the founding myth. Both the Gettysburg Address and the I Have a Dream speech do this. So many, their authors understood, find embracing an origin story based on the ideal of universal inclusion more palatable than our tainted reality.Moreover, the second constitution, contingent and evolving, requires both “the blood of patriots and tyrants” Thomas Jefferson proscribed to sustain liberty and the “eternal vigilance” he also recommended. To ward off neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, far-right Christians and the like takes the fortitude of activists like Black Lives Matter combined with the sacrifice of a Bobby, Martin, Malcom or John. There is no less grievous way.Realizing our promise, Roosevelt insists, requires completing the reform of Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Relics supporting the privilege of “insiders” – the electoral college, encumbrances of voting rights, pay-to-play election financing – all must be banished.The Nation That Never Was makes one all too aware of the ways insiders protect their advantage. Always they urge patience in what they see as a benevolent, color-blind system. Professing that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”, even King grew weary waiting.So have I. Concerned about the modest size of a newly protected historic district, Harlem residents were reassured by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission that they needn’t worry.“This is our opening salvo. We’ll be back to do more…”Their return only took 44 years.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead moreRoosevelt is at his poignant, tragicomic best when calling-out perennial efforts to rationalize and justify the biases of white supremacy into public policy and law. Did the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, really believe his 2013 ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act? He said racially motivated voter suppression was a problem of the past, that “the nation is no longer divided” into states with a recent history of voter suppression and those without.Plessy v Ferguson, the overturning of Roe v Wade, depriving the franchise to so many inhabitants. American history is not a saga of anomalous outrage. Every incident of persisting misogyny, homophobia or racism brings to the fore the problem Roosevelt seeks to address.No matter how familiar Laozi’s truism, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, some people today are just like those in all the other volumes I’ve reviewed here. Wether in Wilmington’s Lie, Learning From the Germans, The Other Madisons or The Groundbreaking, the common obstacle to change and healing is reluctance to even admitting that anything bad ever happened – much less that an injustice stands unamended.
      The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, is published in the US by University of Chicago press
      TopicsBooksUS politicsRaceCivil rights movementAmerican civil warHistory booksPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantled

      by

      Panel says Confederate memorial at Arlington cemetery should be dismantledThe commission presented its final report on Confederate-honoring military bases and assets that should be renamed An independent commission is recommending that the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.Panel members on Tuesday rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names.West Point’s Ku Klux Klan plaque should be removed, commission saysRead moreRetired Army Brig Gen Ty Seidule, vice-chair of the commission, said the final cost for all of its renaming recommendations will be $62.5m. The total for the latest changes announced Tuesday is $41m, and is included in that amount.The latest group of assets includes everything from the Arlington memorial, two Navy ships and some Army vessels to street signs, water towers, athletic fields, hospital doors and even decals on recycling bins, according to the panel.The bulk of the remaining costs – or $21m – would cover the renaming of nine Army bases, and about $450,000 for recommended new names at the US Military at West Point in New York.Seidule said the panel determined that the memorial at Arlington was “problematic from top to bottom”. He said the panel recommended that it be entirely removed, with only the granite base remaining.The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American south. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”The pedestal features 14 shields, engraved with the coats of arms of the 13 Confederate states and Maryland, which didn’t secede or join the Confederacy. Some of the figures also on the statue include a slave woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.And the Latin inscription translates to: “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato,” and was meant to equate the south’s secession to a noble “lost cause.”Seidule said the panel decided early on to propose new names only for the nine Army bases. It said that the Navy secretary has the authority to rename the two ships, which are the USS Chancellorsville and USNS Maury. The Chancellorsville was named for the civil war battle and the Maury was named after a Confederate soldier.He said the service secretaries can find new names for the handful of Army ships and the Air Force’s Fort Fisher Recreation Area in North Carolina. The panel recommended that the defense secretary rename Fort Belvoir, Virginia.The panel’s most sweeping recommendations were released in May, and laying out new names for nine US Army bases that commemorated Confederate officers: Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort AP Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama.The recommendations are the latest step in a broader effort by the military to confront racial injustice, most recently in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.For years, USmilitary officials had defended the naming of bases after Confederate officers. As recently as 2015 the Army argued that the names did not honor the rebel cause but were a gesture of reconciliation with the south.But in the aftermath of the Floyd killing, and the months of racial unrest that followed, the Pentagon and Congress pushed for a comprehensive plan to rename the military posts and hundreds of other federal assets such as roads, buildings, memorials, signs and landmarks that honored rebel leaders.The secretary of defense is expected to implement the commission’s plan no later than 1 January 2024.The panel also is recommending that the department set up a process to try and save money and efficiently change the names. And it said the secretary of defense should authorize the military service secretaries and other leaders to remove smaller items – such as portraits, plaques and awards – that honor the Confederacy or those who served in it.Created in 2020, the Naming Commission first met in March 2021 and began taking name recommendations from the public in September. Overall, the commission received more than 34,000 potential names for the nine Army bases.Seidule said that some of the names that were not used can be used by the service secretaries as they determine new names for roads and other base locations and assets.TopicsVirginiaUS CongressRaceUS politicsArlingtonnewsReuse this content More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Ad campaign targets Latino voters as key bloc for Democrats in midterms

      by

      Ad campaign targets Latino voters as key bloc for Democrats in midtermsNon-profit Voto Latino aims to challenge Republican ‘disinformation’ in key battleground states With midterm elections on the horizon, Americans are subject to a flurry of Democratic and Republican ads. As the second-largest voting bloc in 2020, Latino voters are expected to play a significant role in the 2022 elections. They are therefore a key target group.One non-profit, Voto Latino, aims to fight political disinformation and communicate with self-identified moderate Latino voters through a series of ads.Are Latino voters really moving right? The end of Roe may muddy the pictureRead moreAmeer Patel, vice-president of programs for Voto Latino, said: “We’ve seen a lot of Republicans make headway through disinformation campaigns targeting Latino voters, basically through disinformation narratives that are calling Democrats socialists who are trying to erode trust in institutions, calling Democrats unpatriotic.“We’ve seen a lot of inroads Republicans have made in some of those disinformation theories and so what we wanted to do was basically debunk some of those and promote Democratic messaging.”Based on a mid-May poll of 1,600 Latinos in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Voto Latino and Rising Tide Interactive, a political strategy company, developed 10 ads about issues voters said were most important to them.According to a Voto Latino memo reviewed by the Guardian, the issues include taxes, immigration, pandemic relief, small business relief, infrastructure, child tax credits and abortion rights.“There’s been a lot of political communication that comes across as overly promotional or polished,” Patel said. “We’ve seen those ads not have high effect sizes.”Patel said Voto Latino spent a month gathering stories from Latino voters. The resulting ads were tested in online mixed panels, with participants recruited through online ads. Respondents were initially limited to people self-identified as Latino, then to those who also self-identified as politically moderate.Patel said: “Basically we were trying to get them on the record to talk about issues that matter to them, what they see in politics … These are real people, these weren’t actors. Furthermore we wanted it to be a testimonial-style video instead of some of those voiceovers that are more polished.“For a lot of these people, they’ve never done that before. You can see [some of them] are visibly uncomfortable in front of the camera and so we feel that all of those things would basically contribute to the likelihood of success here and make that seem more genuine.”Each ad is 30 seconds long. In one ad, on taxes, a young man named Felipe wears a dark polo shirt as he looks into the camera and says: “My parents broke their back working multiple jobs just to make ends meet.“It made me angry that Republicans passed a law to give millionaires and billionaires a tax break while my parents paid real money … Your vote matters and when you vote for the Democrats, it helps hardworking families like mine to get by.”Voto Latino measured the effectiveness of each ad based on questions in three categories, compared to a placebo ad.The three categories were care, trust and vote choice. The questions concerned whether Democrats or Republicans truly care about the voter and his or her best interests more than the other party; whether the voter trusts Democrats or Republicans to deliver on issues that matter most to him or herself; and if the November 2022 general election were held today, would the voter vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate for US representative in their district.According to Voto Latino, the ads proved very effective at increasing Democratic favorability on trust, care and vote choice, especially when it came to abortion and religion.The group memo said: “In certain instances, these ads had a lift upwards of 26% compared to the placebo group. In general, results recommend using the “Abortion/Religion” or “Taxes” ads when communicating to moderate Latinos.The chief executive of Voto Latino, Maria Teresa Kumar, said: “The numbers we’re seeing are the kinds of results that can transform a race. Latino voters are positioned to help Democrats win some of the most important contests in November. The question is whether or not our groups decide to engage with them.“This is an unprecedented opportunity; we just need to take advantage of it.”TopicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022RaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More