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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Fascism in America: a long history that predates Trump

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

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    Majority of Black Americans say they are depicted unfairly in news – study

    A majority of Black Americans say that their communities are unfairly depicted in news coverage, according to a sweeping new survey on Wednesday.Nearly two-thirds of respondents observed that their community received more negative coverage than other racial and ethnic groups, the Pew Research Center survey found. Roughly four in 10 surveyed said that the media not only stereotyped Black people but also felt that they saw racist and racially insensitive coverage sometimes or fairly often.The center’s findings reflect the shortfalls of a so-called racial reckoning that swept through newsrooms across the United States in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, when news outlets focused on hiring for roles centering diversity and inclusion and reporters and editors focused on covering communities traditionally underrepresented in news coverage.The latest survey indicates that the so-called reckoning inside newsrooms has struggled to reach the communities that they are meant to serve, including as the news business continues to experience layoffs, and failed to change the way communities feel about the coverage they receive.Charles Whitaker, dean of the Northwestern University’s Medill school of journalism told the Associated Press he was unsurprised by the findings.He echoed the lack of nuance in coverage as a longstanding feeling among Black Americans who feel they are often portrayed as either victims of crimes or those who commit them. “We’ve known both anecdotally, and through my personal experience with the Black press, that Blacks have long been dissatisfied with their coverage,” he said.The center surveyed nearly 5,000 adults over the winter to get their opinion on how Black Americans felt about how their communities are covered in the news media. The feelings of unfair coverage cut across political lines with Black Democrats and Republicans feeling very similar about how news coverage stereotyped Black communities.More than two-thirds of Black adults surveyed noted that educating journalists about the history and context surrounding the issues facing their communities played a vital role in helping to improve coverage.What’s more, a majority of Black Americans also noted that including more Black people as sources in news coverage would also heighten feelings of fairness in coverage for them. A majority also found that hiring more Black people in leadership positions helped to make news coverage about their communities more fair.At least four in 10 people surveyed also found that hiring more Black reporters would make such coverage more fair. What’s more, they saw it was crucial that race and racial inequity coverage came from Black reporters, though just over half said it mattered as much for overall news coverage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRichard Prince, a columnist for the Journal-isms newsletter, told the Associated Press that the findings reinforced the idea that Black Americans, like other groups, “want to be portrayed as having the same concerns as everybody else. Still, he acknowledged that progress had been made in the upper echelons of newsrooms at a time when the industry experiences layoffs, adding: “We’re integrating an industry that’s shrinking.”Few of those surveyed, no matter the age, say they were confident that their communities will be covered fairly over the course of their lifetimes. More

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    ‘We have to come to grips with history’: Robert P Jones on The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy

    How did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election despite the Access Hollywood tape? How did he gain even more votes in 2020 despite an administration of chaos, lies and pandemic blunders? How can he be running neck and neck with Joe Biden for 2024 despite four indictments and 91 criminal charges?Future historians will surely debate such questions and why so many Americans saw themselves in a tawdry tycoon and carnival barker. One of the most persuasive theories is captured in a single word: race.Trump won white voters without a college degree by 32 points in 2020. A glance at his rallies shows the lack of diversity in his notorious “base”. His signature slogan, “Make America great again”, is a thinly disguised appeal to nostalgia for postwar suburbia.In his books The End of White Christian America and White Too Long, Robert P Jones has steadily built the argument that this movement is animated by shifting demographics. He points out that in 2008, when Barack Obama, the first Black president, was elected, 54% of Americans identified as white and Christian. By the end of Obama’s second term, that share had fallen to 47%. Today it is 42%.“It’s just a continued slide,” says Jones, 55, sitting at his desk at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), where he is founder and president, in downtown Washington. “Most importantly, moving from majority to decisively non-majority white and Christian has set off a kind of ‘freak out’ moment among many white Christians.”In The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, effectively the third book in an unofficial trilogy, Jones traces the roots of Trumpism back more than 500 years.He explains: “Go back and understand they really do believe that this country was divinely ordained to be a promised land for European Christians.“That idea is so old and so deep it explains in many ways the visceral reactivity. Why are we fighting today about AP African American history? Arkansas’s banned it, Florida’s been fighting it, and it’s because it tells this alternative story about the country that’s not just settlers, pioneers – a naive mythology of innocence.”Jones examines that mythological origin story and its promised land. He spotlights the “Doctrine of Discovery”, a little-known or understood series of 15th-century papal edicts asserting that European civilisation and western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races and religions. For Jones, it is “a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the deep structure of the European political and religious worldviews we have inherited in this country”.The initial edict, issued by Nicholas V in 1452, granted the Portuguese king Alfonso V the right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”.Jones says: “Then there’s a series of these documents that get issued between 1452 and 1493, each of which build on this idea but essentially all say the same thing: that if the land is not occupied by Christian people – and that Christian identity is the thing that determines whether you have your own human rights or not – then the Christian kings and queens have the right to conquer those lands and take possession of everything that they can in the name of the state and the church.”This provided convenient theological justification for the first European powers that came into contact with Native Americans to seize lands and exploit resources. Spreading the gospel by the sword was married with huge economic incentives.From this perspective, the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but a continuation of genocide and dispossession justified by papal doctrine. The New York Times’s 1619 Project was a long-overdue corrective to established narratives but it was not the final word.Jones reflects: “The 1619 Project was very important culturally in the US because it at least did move us out of this room with white people gathered around a table like you see on the postage stamp or the paintings of the beginning of the country and took us back to a different story: the story of enslaved people in the country.“But if we really want to understand our present we have to go back and tell the whole story and that’s European contact with Indigenous people before it is enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade. That all comes from the same source. It is this cultural idea that there is a kind of superiority to European culture that’s justified by Christianity that sets up, in the Doctrine of Discovery, this entire project.”Jones sees connections between the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 and the killing and expulsion of Choctaws forced to walk the Trail of Tears, starting in 1831; between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth in 1920 and the mass execution of 38 Dakota men in Minnesota in 1862.When history is put in silos, he contends, such threads are missed. “You don’t get a society that tortures and kills a 14-year-old boy in Mississippi on the basis of whistling at a white woman without this sense of entitlement, of superiority and permissive violence stemming from the Doctrine of Discovery. That was the thing that pushed people into the Mississippi territory, forcibly removing Choctaw Creek Native Americans from their lands, killing many, forcibly removing the others.“If you don’t understand that history, you end up with this shocking, ‘Well, how could a society be this way that this would happen, and then they [Roy Bryant and JW Milam, the white men who killed Till] would get acquitted by their peers, who deliberated for only an hour after the trial?’ But when you understand this longer history, that becomes a little bit less of a mystery.”When Jones visited these sites of trauma, he found communities working across racial lines to seek the truth, build memorials and museums and commemorate their histories in ways unthinkable in the last century. The US is currently in a great “Age of Re-evaluation”, according to Scott Ellsworth, a scholar of the Tulsa race massacre.Jones comments: “For all of these what I thought was fairly remarkable is how recent these moves are in the US to try to tell a different story, a more inclusive story about what happened. In none of these cases do they predate 2000. It’s all in the last 20 years that any of these movements have happened.“If you had driven down through the Delta in Mississippi in 2000, you would not have come across any signs or anything. Even though the whole world knows the story of Emmett Till, you would not have known that it happened in Tallahatchie county, in the Delta. There was nothing there on the ground. A group of citizens about 20 years ago got together and said, ‘No, we should change this, and we should try to tell the truth about the story.’”Till’s casket is displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; his story was told in the 2022 film Till; and in July, Joe Biden signed a proclamation designating an Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley national monument in Illinois and Mississippi.The 46th president urged America to face its history with all its peaks and troughs, blessings and blemishes. He told an audience in the White House grounds: “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.”Biden added, a little bleakly: “We got a hell of a long way to go.”Jones believes that Biden gets it. “He’s been fairly remarkable on these issues of racial justice. He, for example, has been one of the only presidents who has used the words ‘white supremacy’ consistently in addresses – and not just before Black audiences. If you look at Biden’s speeches and you search for ‘white supremacy’, he’s not just talking about that in Tulsa during the commemoration speech.“He’s using it, and understands it as one of the deep problems of American history that we currently have to wrestle with. He’s been very clear and seems very genuine about that being something that he’s leaving as part of his legacy. It’s also part of why he made the pronouncement about the Emmett Till national monument, so this becomes a permanent part of the story that we tell about ourselves.”Trump, however, has a polar opposite worldview that Jones says explains why history has become the new frontline in the culture wars. Just over a third of self-identified Democrats are white and Christian; about 70% of self-identified Republicans are. PRRI polling finds that two-thirds of Democrats say America’s culture and way of life has changed for the better since the 1950s; two-thirds of Republicans believe it has changed for the worse.Jones writes how white Christians can “sense the tectonic plates moving” in the demographics of their neighbourhoods, the food in their grocery store, the appearance of Spanish-language local radio and roadside billboards, and the class photos on the walls of their public schools.He says: “I’ve always thought that, in Trump’s Maga slogan, the most powerful word is not about America being great; it’s the ‘again’ part. It’s this nostalgia tinged with loss. What have we lost and who’s the ‘we’ that have lost something? If you just ask those questions, it’s pretty clear. It’s the formerly dominant white Christians who were culturally dominant, demographically dominant, politically dominant and are no longer.“It’s that sense of loss and grievance that Trump has been so homed in on and so astute at fuelling and setting himself up. You hear him say things like, ‘I am your voice’, ‘I alone can fix it’, ‘If you don’t elect somebody like me, we’re not going to have a country any more’. Those kinds of phrases tell you what he’s appealing to.“If we look at the insurrection at the Capitol, it’s so chilling the last frame that the January 6 House select committee showed in their video has two people – it looks like something out of Les Mis – up on a barricade and they’ve got two flags. One is a Trump flag and the other is a Christian flag that they’re flying on the barricades.”Jones has skin in the game. Growing up a Southern Baptist in Jackson, Mississippi, he went to church five times a week and earned a divinity degree. His family Bible, printed in 1815, has generations of births and deaths and marriages handwritten between the Old and New Testaments. Some online genealogical research revealed slave-owners among his ancestors.“My grandfather was a deacon at a church in Macon, Georgia, and one of his jobs on Sunday morning was to make sure no Black people entered the sanctuary. He was literally a bouncer on the outside of the church to keep non-white people out. That was an official role as a deacon in the church. It wasn’t like some wink, wink, nod, nod – that was his assignment for Sunday morning.“It’s been tough, but, on the other hand, one of the things you hear often with these anti- so-called critical race theory bills and with ‘woke’ is ‘not making white people uncomfortable’. But I would rather know the truth, even if it’s an uncomfortable truth, then be ignorant and comfortable.”He quotes James Baldwin, the transcendent and trenchant African American writer: “All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history … which is not your past, but your present. Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.”Jones comments: “There’s a kind of liberation, freedom and growth that can come from facing this history and moving somewhere better together. That’s the invitation, and the reason for doing the work isn’t at all just to feel bad or beat yourself up over what your family did or whatever.“If we really want to live up to this promise of being a truly pluralistic, multi-religious, multiracial democracy, it’s going to take us coming to terms with that history and putting into place something different than we’ve had in the past. There’s no way we can do that if we don’t even understand why we’re in the dilemmas we’re currently in.”Another of his favourite Baldwin quotations describes “white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing”.Jones continues: “Such a great line, and if you think about this impossibly innocent history that we have told ourselves, that we were always upstanding, that we always treated other peoples with dignity and respect, it just isn’t true. In order, again, to right the ship and come to a new place together, we have to have to come to grips with that history.”Only then, Jones says, can America, a nation that likes to claim exceptionalism, be sincere about its unique experiment.“Our current generation is the first that has been asked whether we truly believe what we often claim: that we are a pluralistic democracy.“Before, many white Christian Americans who are part of the dominant culture could pay lip service to that, knowing that they had enough numbers at the ballot box, knowing that they had enough control on business, enough control of local institutions, that they still had a lock on power. This is the first generation where that’s not true.“The question is called in a way that’s new and that’s why there’s so much visceral reaction, because there’s a way in which we’ve never honestly had to answer the question. But now it’s being put in a way that we’re going to have to answer it.”
    The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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    The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy review: necessary chronicle of US racist history

    Robert P Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), holds a divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Seminary and a doctorate in religion from Emory University. He is a son of the south, pained by the nexus between Christianity and slavery. In White Too Long, published in 2020, he wrote of church stained-glass windows that paid homage to Confederate generals, Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The deadly shooting at a Dollar General in Florida last week was just one more reminder that the past is always with us.In his new book, Jones draws a straight line between religion and European migration to North America and slavery and the subjugation of Indigenous people. He identifies and repeatedly criticizes the “doctrine of discovery”, as prime culprit and enabler.Enunciated in 15th-century papal decrees, adopted in 1823 as part of US common law through the supreme court case Johnson v M’Intosh, the discovery doctrine offered theological and legal justification for conquest and its aftermath. Jones extensively quotes Robert Miller, a law professor at Arizona State University and a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.“In essence, the doctrine provided that newly arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights over the inhabitants without knowledge or consent of the indigenous peoples,” Miller wrote, in 2012.Jones adds: “Despite its near-total absence from white educational curricula … Native American scholars have been highlighting the impact of the doctrine of discovery for at least half a century.”He meticulously details events that further scar US history. It is a first-rate chronicle of horror. Jones lays out the lynchings of three Black circus workers in Minnesota, in 1920, and of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. He recounts the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the destruction of “Black Wall Street” and the deaths of 300 African Americans.He also delves in detail into the US government-sanctioned execution of 38 Dakota males in Mankato, Minnesota, in December 1862. It remains the single largest event of its kind in US history. Abraham Lincoln played a central role.On the page, Jones lays out his pathway to a “shared future”. He advocates “reparations” for the descendants of enslaved Black people and argues for “restitution” to Native Americans.“This is a tall order,” he acknowledges. But he remains undeterred, writing: “We cannot shrink before the difficulty of the task … the creativity of our solutions is directly proportional to, and a measure of, the strength of our convictions.”With a significant exception – support from three-quarters of African Americans – the public holds a negative view of reparations, according to a 2021 survey. Nearly 70% are opposed, including 80% of whites, 65% of Asians, 58% of Hispanics and 49% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners. That’s a lot of hearts and minds to persuade.This fall, the Democratic-dominated California legislature will consider a reparations plan. After the US supreme court rejection of race-based affirmative action, and a similar rejection by Californians in 2020, the legislature may want to tread lightly.Jones can be swept away by his convictions. In 2016, in The End of White Christian America, he wrote an “obituary” and recited a “benediction” for what he perceived as the passing of white Protestantism. To say the least, he jumped the gun.Donald Trump’s election showed that primacy lost is not the same as extinction. Even in its lessened state and amid the rise of religious “nones”, Christianity remains a force in American life. As mainstream Protestantism slides and younger evangelicals leave the fold, the landscape of Sunday morning is being reshaped.“American megachurches are thriving by poaching flocks,” an Economist headline blared. “Denominations are out. Brand identity and good vibes are in.” There is plenty to like about community and ice cream. Doctrinal orthodoxies have not fared well in the marketplace of US religion.Jones has refused to fully quit “defund the police”, the protest slogan that flourished after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in May 2020 but which Republicans predictably seized on to depict Democrats as soft on crime. Jones has also tweaked James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, for emphasizing class over race.“We can’t continue to paper over racial injustice with economic policy,” Jones wrote in 2021, in the aftermath of the Republican Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in the Virginia governor’s race. Riffing off Carville’s famous 1992 campaign message for Bill Clinton, about the economy, Jones delivered his own: “‘It’s the culture, stupid’ – or less euphemistically, ‘It’s the white supremacy, stupid’ – must be the new mantra of political analysts today.”That’s a lousy bumper-sticker. Besides that, the data reflects that inflation, jobs, the economy and healthcare are the most pressing priorities for American voters. Only 6% place discrimination top of their list of concerns. By the numbers, it looks like Carville got it right.Jones also implicitly criticized Carville for calling the “defund the police” movement “lunacy”, writing: “I agree with Carville that ‘defund the police’ has been unhelpful. It’s neither a savvy political slogan nor an accurate depiction of what most police reform advocates actually want to do.”Not a “savvy political slogan” and “unhelpful” are understatements. Last year, after Republicans took back the US House, James Clyburn of South Carolina, a member of Democratic leadership, put it this way: “‘Defund the police’ is killing our party and we’ve got to stop it.”New York City and San Francisco have experienced major exoduses. Safe streets and thriving tax bases are necessities for vibrant urban centers. Heading for 2024, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are locked in polling dead heats. Despite his many indictments, Trump retains traction. Racial resentments helped propel him into the White House in 2016. They may do so again.
    The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More