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      'Our community is bleeding': Asian American lawmakers say violence has reached 'crisis point'

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      Asian American lawmakers and leaders warned that violence and discrimination targeting their community have reached a “crisis point” following the shootings in Atlanta this week that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.The hearing, the first to examine anti-Asian discrimination in more than three decades, had been scheduled weeks ago amid a surge in violence against the Asian community since the pandemic began. But it took on heightened urgency after the mass shooting that left Asian Americans in Atlanta and across the country shaken and afraid.“What we know is that this day was coming,” Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told a subcommittee of the House judiciary committee on Thursday. “The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.”Grace Meng, a Democrat of New York, said: “Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help.”Meanwhile police in Atlanta revealed new details about the investigation. At a press conference, Charles Hampton, deputy chief of the Atlanta police, said “nothing was off the table”, including whether the killings were motivated, at least in part, by race or gender.“We are looking at everything to make sure that we discover and determine what the motive of our homicides were,” he said, adding that they were still determining whether the murders constituted a hate crime.The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Long, who is white, told police that he had a sex addiction and targeted the spas to eliminate “temptation”, denying any racist motivations.Hampton said on Thursday that Long had “frequented” two of the spas where four women of Asian descent were killed. Four more people were killed at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor, on the outskirts of the city.The Cherokee county sheriff’s department announced on Thursday that Capt Jay Baker had been replaced as the spokesman on the investigation.Frank Reynolds, the sheriff, expressed regret amid widespread outrage over comments Baker had made a day earlier. Baker drew criticism for saying Long had had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did”. Reynolds released a statement on Thursday acknowledging that some of Baker’s comments stirred “much debate and anger” and said the agency regretted any “heartache” caused by his words.“Inasmuch as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,” Reynolds said in a statement, adding that Baker “had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his 28 years in law enforcement”.In response to the shootings, the White House announced that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were canceling a political event in Atlanta on Friday as part of their Help is Here tour to promote the administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. Instead, they will spend their visit meeting with local leaders and elected officials from the city’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community.Biden on Thursday ordered flags at the White House and all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff through sunset on Monday to honor the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings.At the hearing on Capitol Hill, Meng was joined by experts and advocates who told the panel that the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fueled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” the “China plague” and the “kung flu”.Nearly 3,800 hate incidents, spanning the spectrum of verbal harassment to physical assault, have been reported against Asian Americans nationwide since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Asian American women reported nearly twice as many incidents as men, at nearly 70%.During the hearing, the subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen, recounted a number of brutal incidents that included a Filipino man being slashed across the face with a box cutter and an 89-year-old Asian American woman being lit on fire.“All the pandemic did was exacerbate latent anti-Asian prejudices that have a long, long and ugly history in America,” he said.In a particularly impassioned exchange, Meng confronted one of the panel’s Republican members, the Texas congressman Chip Roy, who said, after a lengthy exhortation of China’s handling of the coronavirus, that he was concerned the hearing amounted to a “policing” of free speech.“Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want,” Meng said through tears. “But you don’t have to do it by putting a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”“This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions – and we will not let you take our voice away from us,” she said.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      'We're making our way': how Virginia became the most progressive of the US’s southern states

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      Having lived in Virginia most of his life, Larry Sabato can remember racially segregated schools and systematic efforts to stop Black people voting. Now 68, he observes a state that has diversified, embraced liberal values and shifted from symbol of the old south to symbol of the new.“I have to admit, as a young man I would never have believed it was possible for Virginia to move in such a strong progressive direction,” said Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “I worked for candidates back then who were progressive. I used to joke, ‘If I work for you, you’re going to lose, you have to understand that’. And they always did.“Virginia has taught the country and the world that America can change, and sometimes can change rapidly, and in a very progressive direction.”Two dramatic examples came last month when the state general assembly voted to abolish the death penalty – an extraordinary reversal for a state that has executed more people than any other – and to make Virginia the first southern state to legalise marijuana for adult recreational use.These followed a flurry of measures that put the commonwealth, as it is known, in the vanguard on racial, social and economic issues in the American south. Last year it passed some of the strictest gun laws, loosest abortion restrictions and strongest protections for LGBTQ+ people in the region, as well as its highest minimum wage.Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 10 points in Virginia in 2020. Its two US senators are Democrats, its governor is a Democrat and last year Democrats took full control of the general assembly for the first time in a quarter of a century.Such a monopoly would once have been unthinkable. Sabato reflected: “It was almost a one-party Republican state.It was Barack Obama in 2008 that finally got hundreds of thousands of young people registered and voting“Virginia had been edging a little bit closer to the Democratic party because of population growth in northern Virginia and Hampton Roads and even the Richmond area. But it was Barack Obama in 2008 that finally got hundreds of thousands of, not just minorities, but also young people registered and voting and we haven’t gone back since.“The Republican party has drifted further to the right. Instead of responding to the changes and bouncing back to the middle, they’ve decided to double down. They’ve lost every single election in this state from 2010 onwards.”Sabato was speaking from his office in Charlottesville, looking out on a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third president who, like the first, George Washington, was a Virginian. Both founding fathers owned enslaved people on sprawling estates – Monticello and Mount Vernon – that have gone far in recent years to confront that legacy for tourists, historians and children.Virginia’s long and painful history would later include Confederate generals Robert E Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson fighting to preserve slavery and destroy the union. The state capital, Richmond, was the capital of the Confederacy. The south lost the civil war but Virginia remained a bastion of Jim Crow laws that maintained racial apartheid.By the 1990s, however, Virginia had elected the first African American governor in the US and political realignment was being fuelled by growing suburbs. The expansion of Washington spilled into northern Virginia, where voters are more likely to be immigrants, college educated and liberal. Other cities have expanded and diversified. The mayors of Richmond and Charlottesville are African American.Few changes are as totemic as the demise of capital punishment. Virginia had executed nearly 1,400 people since colonial days, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, when the US supreme court reinstated the death penalty, it had carried out 113 executions, second only to Texas. But in voting to abolish it last month, Virginia’s general assembly noted that it is applied disproportionately to people of colour, the poor and the mentally ill.The march of progressive values is neither uniform nor irreversible. Virginia’s reforms have provoked resentment in rural areas. Tens of thousands of gun rights activists descended on Richmond last year to protest.A white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was a stark reminder of the potential for backlash. Four years later, the statue of Lee at the centre of the protest still stands. Despite last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, a giant Lee monument in Richmond also remains intact.Juli Briskman, a district supervisor in Loudon county, northern Virginia, said: “You don’t have to drive very far to start seeing Trump flags and Confederate flags, and often you see them together. We still have the ‘Don’t tread on me’ licence plate. I’m trying to figure out how we can take that out of the system. So Virginia still has a little ways to go but I think as a ‘southern state’ it is really leading the way right now.I’m thankful that Virginians stuck with me“We’re the first state to pass the Voting Rights Act in the south and that is sitting on the governor’s desk right now. We’ve made a lot of strides in abortion access: last year the general assembly repealed a law that would have required women to get an ultrasound and have certain types of counselling before getting abortion care. We’ve passed a number of gun sense laws in ’20 and ’21, so we’re making our way.”‘He faced the storm’Perhaps no one personifies the often uncomfortable, but seemingly inexorable, transformation of Virginia more than Ralph Northam, the 61-year-old governor. Two years ago the Democrat was engulfed in scandal over a blackface image in his 1984 medical school yearbook. In one disastrous press conference, he seemed ready to accept a reporter’s challenge to perform Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” dance until his wife interjected that these were “inappropriate circumstances”.Northam faced demands to resign but with his potential successor facing sexual assault allegations, managed to survive. He vowed to focus on racial equality and confronting his own white privilege. He has enthusiastically signed many of the progressive bills passed by the general assembly.Briskman, a Democrat who shot to fame by giving Trump’s motorcade the middle finger while cycling near his golf course, was among those who called for Northam to quit but now believes he has redeemed himself.“If he had resigned, we might not have gotten as much done,” she said. “It goes a long way toward reconciliation when somebody like Governor Northam can say he faced the storm and decided that he was going to turn it around and do something about it.”In an interview with the Guardian on Friday, Northam acknowledged the blackface incident had been a watershed moment.“That was a difficult time for Virginia and I’m thankful that Virginians stuck with me,” he said. “We had worked on a lot of equity issues prior to February 2019 but it really allowed me to travel around: I had listening tours and meetings and I learned so much from various people across Virginia.“The more I know, the more I can do, so we’ve really been able to put a stronger focus on equity and I made it clear to our administration, to our cabinet secretaries, that whether it be agriculture or education or health or whatever, we would address the inequities that continue to exist in our society today.”Then, in 2020, came the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a nationwide uprising against racial injustice.“That was an awakening for a lot of people that look like me that hadn’t really ever thought through it in such detail,” Northam said. “So I kind of had a head start before that tragedy but I think it was an awakening. People said this just this is not right and we need to make changes.”Northam grew up in a conservative rural area and was in sixth grade when his school became racially integrated. When he got involved in politics, around 2006-07, he recalls, Virginia was still a red state but turning purple. The “blue wave” truly began with resistance to Trump’s election in November 2016, which prompted Northam to run for governor.“It’s diversity that really makes this country and, in our case, makes Virginia who we are,” he said. “We’re becoming more diverse every day and so we need to have our lights on and our doors open and make people feel welcome.In the smaller cities and in the country, it is quite conservative“We’ve really used that theme to support our base and also to draw more people to our party and supporting common sense policies. If you compare where we are today versus back in 2016, 2017, we’re essentially a blue state now.”‘Representation matters’Northam will soon return to work as a doctor, since state rules prevent him seeking a second consecutive term. Among the Democrats vying to succeed him in November are Terry McAuliffe, governor from 2014 to 2018, and two African American women: Jennifer Carroll Foy and Jennifer McClellan. Victory for either would be another historic breakthrough.Carroll Foy, 39, who became a member of the Virginia house of delegates in 2017, said: “I can’t speak about what happened in the past but what I can say is I know the man today, and the Ralph Northam today will go down as one of the most progressive governors that Virginia has ever had, delivering on the promises of getting us to expand Medicaid to 500,000 Virginians and helping to reform our criminal justice system.“I passed a bill to prohibit the use of chokeholds by law enforcement officers. We have just done such incredible things. I carried legalisation of marijuana for several years and now it’s passed in Virginia and that is under Governor Northam leading the charge and taking seriously his commitment to racial reconciliation.”Carroll Foy was one of the first African American women to graduate from Virginia Military Institute and is aware what message electing a woman of colour as Northam’s successor would send. “It is absolutely imperative for us to make good on what we’ve been saying,” she said. “Representation matters and for millions of little girls it’s hard to be what you can’t see. We are yet to have a Black woman lead this nation and we’re yet to have a Black woman lead in a state in this country and, while people have applauded Black women for delivering the White House and helping us win Congress, it’s not enough to thank us.“You also have to support us when we’re ready to lead, and we are ready. Now is our time. You don’t just need bills and pledges for Black women; we need them written by Black women. And I’m excited that as the next governor, I will be able to continue on the legacy that Governor Northam has started in addressing the inequities throughout all of our systems so we can ensure that Virginia’s future is better than its past.”John Edwin Mason, who moved to the state in the mid-1990s and teaches history at the University of Virginia, said: “It is a remarkable change. If you had told me that Virginia was going to legalise marijuana and outlaw the death penalty, I would have been very surprised in 1995 and probably would have told you that you had been drinking a little too much to think that that would be possible.“It was not simply a largely Republican state when it came to electoral politics, but it felt very conservative and it doesn’t quite feel that way on the whole now, although of course in the smaller cities and in the country, it is quite conservative.”Mason noted that Virginia Republicans seem to be embracing Trumpism, even after the state comprehensively rejected the president in 2020. Democrats hope other southern states will do likewise.Mason added: “I think that if you are an optimistic Democratic political operative, you’re probably saying that Virginia is the harbinger of things to come.“You would point to Georgia which just elected two Democratic senators in a very similar dynamic to the way that our two Democratic senators and Democratic governor have been elected in a state that is very split along regional lines. It is a big change and, of the states of the old confederacy, Virginia is by far the bluest.” More

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      The Guardian view on women and the pandemic: what happened to building back better? | Editorial

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      One year into the pandemic, women have little cause to celebrate International Women’s Day tomorrow, and less energy to battle for change. Men are more likely to die from Covid-19. But women have suffered the greatest economic and social blows. They have taken the brunt of increased caregiving, have been more likely to lose their jobs and have seen a sharp rise in domestic abuse.In the UK, women did two-thirds of the extra childcare in the first lockdown, and were more likely to be furloughed. In the US, every one of the 140,000 jobs lost in December belonged to a woman: they saw 156,000 jobs disappear, while men gained 16,000. But white women actually made gains, while black and Latina women – disproportionately in jobs that offer no sick pay and little flexibility – lost out. Race, wealth, disability and migration status have all determined who is hit hardest. Previous experience suggests that the effects of health crises can be long-lasting: in Sierra Leone, over a year after Ebola broke out, 63% of men had returned to work but only 17% of women.The interruption to girls’ education is particularly alarming: Malala Fund research suggests that 20 million may never return to schooling. The United Nations Population Fund warns that there could be an extra 13 million child marriages over the next decade, and 7 million more unplanned pregnancies; both provision of and access to reproductive health services has been disrupted. In the US, Ohio and Texas exploited disease control measures to reduce access to abortions. The UN has described the surge in domestic violence which began in China and swept around the world as a “shadow pandemic”. Research has even suggested that the pandemic may lead to more restrictive ideas about gender roles, with uncertainty promoting conservatism.Coronavirus has not created inequality or misogyny. It has exacerbated them and laid them bare. Structural problems such as the pay gap, as well as gendered expectations, explain why women have taken on more of the extra caregiving. The pandemic’s radicalising effect has echoes of the #MeToo movement. Women knew the challenges they faced, but Covid has confronted them with unpalatable truths at both intimate and institutional levels.In doing so, it has created an opportunity to do better. Germany has given parents an extra 10 days paid leave to cover sickness or school and nursery closures, and single parents 20. Czech authorities have trained postal workers to identify potential signs of domestic abuse. But the deeper task is to rethink our flawed economies and find ways to reward work that is essential to us all. So far, there are precious few signs of building back better.Around 70% of health and social care workers globally are female, and they are concentrated in lower-paid, lower-status jobs. They deserve a decent wage. The 1% rise offered to NHS workers in the UK is an insult. The government also needs to bail out the childcare sector: without it, women will not return to work. It has not done equality impact assessments on key decisions – and it shows. The budget has admittedly earmarked £19m for tackling domestic violence, but Women’s Aid estimates that £393m is needed. And the UK is slashing international aid at a time when spending on services such as reproductive health is more essential than ever. Nonetheless, as a donor, it should at least press recipient governments to prioritise women in their recovery plans.Overworked and undervalued women have more awareness than ever of the need for change, and less capacity to press for it. Men too must play their part. Some have recognised more fully the demands of childcare and housework, and seen the potential benefits of greater involvement at home. Significant “use it or lose it” paternity leave might help to reset expectations both in families and the workplace. There were never easy solutions, and many look harder than ever. But the pandemic has shown that we can’t carry on like this. More

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      'It's a moral decision': Dr Seuss books are being 'recalled' not cancelled, expert says

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      A leading expert on racism in children’s literature has said the decision by the Dr Seuss Foundation to withdraw six books should be viewed as a “product recall” and not, as many claim, an example of cancel culture. Philip Nel, a professor of English at Kansas State University, is the author of Was The Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. He told the Guardian the six titles by Theodor Geisel published between 1937 and 1976 that Dr Seuss Enterprises said it would cease printing contained stereotypes of a clearly racist nature.“Dr Seuss Enterprises has made a moral decision of choosing not to profit from work with racist caricature in it and they have taken responsibility for the art they are putting into the world and I would support that,” Nel said.The titles in question are And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer. Dr Seuss books have sold some 700m copies globally.They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell themAfter this week’s announcement, amid uproar eagerly stoked by conservatives in the media and Congress, Dr Seuss books swiftly dominated sales charts. On Friday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, went so far as to share a video of himself reading from Green Eggs and Ham, a perennial strong seller.“I still like Dr Seuss, so I decided to read Green Eggs and Ham,” McCarthy said, inviting viewers to respond “if you still like him too!”Geisel’s stepdaughter, Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, told the New York Post there “wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body”, but also said suspending publication of the six titles was “a wise decision”. But the controversy left many perplexed, since the decision was made by Dr Seuss Enterprises and not as a result of public pressure that has preceded other such decisions.Nel said the decision to no longer publish titles including caricatures of people of African, Asian and Arab descent showed just one way to address problematic material.“[The books are] not going to disappear,” he said. “They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell them.”Geisel died in 1991. Later in life, he made efforts to tone down racial stereotypes in some of his books. Such revisions “were imperfect but will-intentioned efforts that softened but did not erase the stereotyping”, Nel said, noting that Geisel also made a joke of the changes, “which served only to trivialise the importance of the alterations”.Moves to correct dated or offensive cultural material take different forms. Turner Classic Movies, for example, has introduced Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror, a series devoted to “problematic” films. TCM identified 17 films that five hosts will discuss, among them Gone With the Wind, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Tarzan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Searchers and Psycho.“We are hearing more and more from audiences about moments they are really puzzling over, if not downright offended by, in light of all of the broader cultural and political conversations we are having,” the University of Chicago cinema studies professor Jacqueline Stewart, a Reframed host, told Variety.TCM’s decision to seek to contextualise the films but not alter or drop them may reflect the importance of the works and a more mature target audience. Nel said placing contentious work in a larger context and inviting discussion can be risky when the work is directed at a younger consumers.“Children understand more than they can articulate,” he said. “If you inflict racist images on them before they can express what they’re articulating they may endure a harm they cannot process.”In the case of Dr Seuss, Nel said, that “is itself a reason to withdraw the books or to bring in books or art that counter stereotypes with truth.”He pointed to statistics that show the publishing industry still has a way to go. According to a recent Diversity in Children’s Books study, only 22% of children’s books published in 2018 featured non-white characters.Nel pointed to The Indian in the Cupboard series by Lynne Reid Banks, Penguin Random House titles about a toy figure of a Native American that comes alive, first published in 1980, as an example of a book that remains in print without comment or apology.“There’s a lot of examples of contemporary as well as older work that the publishing industry should address,” he said, “and there are different ways to do that. There’s a debate on what the response should be but there should be a response.”Merely putting the question of what a child can or cannot see to parents would not be an adequate solution, Nel said.“Parents may not have training in anti-racist education,” he said, “or may not know how to have these conversations. So in the case of Dr Seuss it’s a way of addressing the gap in what one might hope a responsible adult would know and what we can expect a responsible adult to know.“Either way, children’s book publishing is facing a reckoning, as indeed it has been for some time. This decision, and all the attention it has received, I hope will create a broader reckoning in the publishing industry – the need for more diverse books and to address the problems in current books being published.” More

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      What if liberal anti-racists aren’t advancing the cause of equality? | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      Americans are talking more and more about racism and inequality, and that should be a good thing. It’s not just policing and incarceration – black Americans suffer disproportionately from every aspect of our unjust social system. They’re more likely than white Americans to deal with poverty, housing insecurity, joblessness, go without health insurance, or face regular bouts of hunger.After years of embracing the “post-racial” rhetoric of figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, mainstream Democrats are coming around to acknowledging how much the 1960s civil rights revolution left unfinished. And yet, years into a “great awokening” that has drawn attention to these issues, it’s worth asking whether anything is changing.Indeed, we should ask: are liberal anti-racists advancing the cause of equality? Could they even be setting it back?Unlike mid-century movements for justice, much of today’s advocacy around racial justice places the onus on individual actors and the private-sector to address problems that are really best fixed through collective action and social legislation.Biases and interpersonal hostility, of course, still negatively impact the lives of people of color. A Harvard Business Review survey found that “since 1990, white applicants received, on average, 36% more callbacks than black applicants and 24% more callbacks than Latino applicants with identical résumés.” That’s a strong case that even if we equalize opportunities for advancement, there will be a need for affirmative action policies, however inadequate they might be.However, even affirmative action wasn’t brought about through the proliferation of White Fragility reading groups and self-contemplation about one’s own privilege. Rather, it was a demand that emerged from a labor-backed political coalition. As the scholar Touré F Reed reminds us, the phrase “affirmative action” first appeared in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 – the single-most important piece of labor legislation passed in the United States. The extension of affirmative action to issues of racial discrimination was initially part of a social democratic coalition that saw a government role in bringing about greater equality.That’s a far cry from today’s emphasis on private sector activity not mandated by the state – through anti-racist trainings at workplaces and the like – to foster diversity and inclusion. For starters, “diversity” and “inclusion” aren’t synonymous with “equality” and “justice” and trainings themselves don’t appear to be effective, even on their own terms. But even if they did work, the best we could expect from them is a more sensitive working environment for minorities lucky enough to be employed or for those customers who patronize them. If you don’t have a job, or don’t have any money, you’re out of luck.Why is there so much emphasis on these trainings, then? Part of the story is the budding industry emerging around them – expert guidance through “honest and raw discussions of white supremacy and implicit bias and an analysis of racial hegemony” doesn’t come cheap, and is a job creation program of its own. But there are other reasons why even seemingly apolitical brands like Gushers and Fruit by the Foot, who make delicious varieties of candy, are jumping on the liberal anti-racism bandwagon.First, it might satisfy younger staffers who want to feel like they’re working for companies that are stalwarts of anti-racism. Second, some consumers might like such anti-racist gesturing. Third, showing a commitment to diversity and arranging for a diversity consultant to come in is cheaper than dealing with an anti-discrimination lawsuit, having to deal with a Twitter-led consumer boycott for a misstep, or paying black and brown workers more.Better to have Kendall Jenner in a BLM-themed Pepsi ad than paying more in taxes to help working-class peopleYet even if corporations aren’t driving the race-conscious awakening, they’re willing to adapt to the new environment because the political demands flowing from activists are increasingly compatible with corporate profit-making and governance. Corporations are also more than happy to monetize the new social justice interest. Just think of Hollywood – which once blacklisted socialist actors and directors in the cold war – rushing to make films with watered-down accounts of Black Panther leaders like Fred Hampton (who was a Marxist) or the Chicago Seven (all of whom were radical anti-capitalists at the time).Similarly, companies like Apple, where workers in the secretive Chinese complex that manufactures iPhones attracted global concern after a spate of suicides, just brought out a special edition $429 Black Unity Apple Watch that was marketed for Black History Month. Apple says: “The Black Unity Sport Band is inspired by the pan-African flag and made from soft, high-performance fluoroelastomer with a pin-and-tuck closure laser-etched with ‘Truth. Power. Solidarity.’” Where is the power or solidarity for the workers toiling in factories in China, one might wonder? Or for child workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo who toil and die in mines extracting raw materials like cobalt that are used in iPhones. One doesn’t hear anything about that kind of material injustice affecting the working class from the global south when corporations make their self-congratulatory PR statements around inclusion.They would rather focus on symbolism and racial-justice-themed commodities and products than contend with more expansive state oversight of private employment decisions, like an affirmative action program. Better to have Kendall Jenner appearing in a schmaltzy BLM-themed Pepsi ad than paying more in taxes to help working-class people in the form of an expanded welfare state and cash transfers.*It must come as a relief to the most class-conscious of executives that popular ire and media scrutiny has often fallen upon individual people rather than the system and corporations responsible for unprecedented inequality. It’s convenient for the enemy to be a white worker committing a microaggression on the job while earning $12 an hour and voting for Donald Trump than a chief executive spouting platitudes about diversity while earning $12 a second and donating to Republican Super Pacs.Nowhere is the new anti-racism embraced with more zeal than at elite universities. Smith College, where a liberal arts education will cost you around $78,000 a year, has become the most famous example lately. In the summer holidays of 2018, a black student at the school was eating lunch in a building that was meant to be closed when she was questioned by a campus security officer about what she was doing there. She saw this as an act of racial animus and went to social media with her concerns. The incident came to the attention of Smith’s president, Kathleen McCartney, who offered an immediate apology and reportedly suspended a janitor without even speaking to the workers involved.The student allegedly wasn’t satisfied, and posted photographs, names and email addresses of Mark Patenaude, a long-time Smith College janitor who wasn’t even working at the time, and Jackie Blair, a cafeteria worker who wasn’t actually the one who called security, on Facebook, accusing them of “racist and cowardly acts”.Blair, an older worker who has lupus, said her condition flared up as a result of the stress, and had to go to hospital. She got death threats, had her car vandalized, and had threatening notes placed in her mailbox saying things like “You don’t deserve to live” and “RACIST”.Patenaude told the New York Times’s Michael Powell: “We used to joke: don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone.”There’s nothing special here: a boss throws a worker under the bus to satisfy the angry customers (in this case wealthy students and donors) that keep her employed. The only unusual part is that instead of demanding due process for the workers and an investigation, grassroots sentiment at a progressive institution called for even more sweeping actions. Student groups staged walkouts, while a pressured administration shifted more and more attention to beleaguered employees, calling upon Blair to go into meditation with the student, what McCartney called “restorative justice”.Months later, a 35-page report was issued on the incident, which cleared all workers of wrongdoing, yet those affected were issued no public apology from McCartney or anyone else at Smith. In fact, an even greater scrutiny was placed on their thoughts and behavior. As McCartney put it: “It is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.” As such, cafeteria workers and other staff were subjected to intrusive and humiliating educational sessions led by outside consultants, where they were forced to speak about their childhoods, their racial backgrounds, and their political and social beliefs. It’s a high price to pay to serve rich kids food.There was far less outcry months later, when Smith University furloughed Blair and hundreds of other workers during the pandemic.*The 2018 incident has gotten a lot of extra attention since the February 2021 resignation of Jodi Shaw, a former employee. Shaw detailed the ways in which the racial bias trainings at Smith, along with the workplace culture, meant that white employees could not bring grievances to the college about the nature of those trainings without being accused of “white supremacy”. But her own rhetoric and route to redress is a profoundly private one. Shaw, a white woman, is likely to sue the school for being a “racially hostile workplace”, and she’s been soliciting funds through GoFundMe. Shaw, whatever the merits of her case, is seeking justice via newfound internet celebrity, claims of racial discrimination, and the courts, rather than through collective action.Now, an aggrieved individual might have no other viable option in this environment. But her case offers a neat parallel to what the university administration and some students are doing: trying to usher about anti-racism through psychological training rather than material redistribution.But there is another way outside of the existing culture war – the union option. Smith workers aren’t completely without protections, because they are largely unionized: housekeeping workers are organized in SEIU Local 211 and other support staff are members of SEIU Local 263. Both unions, however, only have about 100 members, and assets roughly equaling what the average student pays for a year of tuition. They’re simply not in a position to do battle with the administration or a hostile campus to assert their rights as workers. The recent furlough of 230 employees will only weaken their bargaining power.That’s a shame, because unlike diversity trainings and “white accountability” Zoom sessions, unions have been shown to increase pay and job security for working people and decrease disparities between women and men and between people of color and white workers. They foster an environment where those of all backgrounds can find their common interests and realize through struggle that they are more powerful united. The wage scales cemented in collective bargaining agreements erode the racialized stratifications often created when individual employees bargain with their bosses.A year of privatized solutions and bitter polemics in the media have yielded nothingWhat’s more, the shared struggle for improved conditions can foster new forms of solidarity. A 2020 paper, not surprisingly, finds that white workers are less likely to hold racist views if they’re in a union, and that white union members also tend to have greater support for not only universal social goods, but for policies like affirmative action.Mainstream unions weren’t always bastions of racial justice. In 1919, the socialist A Philip Randolph could call the American Federation of Labor “the most wicked machine for the propagation of race prejudice in the country”. But through years of political struggle, they transformed themselves into powerful vehicles for the advancement of black and brown workers and a linchpin of a New Deal coalition that took the power of organized labor at the firm level and began to guarantee important economic rights at the federal level.It’s not just that today’s emphasis on privilege, and the rush to condemn working people as racists, are distractions from the politics that can actually help change the United States. It’s that they run the risk of alienating potential allies and creating a subculture out of activism.Where does this leave the rest of us, those likely on the outside of even an expanded labor movement? A working-class politics isn’t a way to ignore struggles against oppression, but it creates space for social movements to grow and an environment where anti-racist demands naturally shift from cultural representation to material redistribution. We might not all be able to join unions, but we will all be able to take part in those fights and support candidates who will improve the lives of black and brown workers through state action.Campuses, even at elite colleges like Smith, can take part in such a transformation too. In 2016, hundreds of Smith students marched – not to call for the disciplining of cafeteria workers but in solidarity with them. They showed the campus administration that they were going to morph whatever privilege and power they had to help others fight back.A year of privatized solutions and bitter polemics in the media have yielded nothing. Neither anti-woke commentators like Bari Weiss or the Robin DiAngelos of the world have a plan to change the conditions that produce racism and inequality. But the combination of union representation in the workplace and universal, social goods guaranteed by the state gives us a way to actually do that.Don’t let either side of the culture war – from the liberal anti-racists who would have us all confess our thought crimes in front of our bosses, or the conservative anti-anti-racists who would just have us shut up about discrimination – obscure how another path exists: one that is tried and tested. More

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      Vernon Jordan, civil rights leader and adviser to Bill Clinton, dies aged 85

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      Vernon Jordan, a leading civil rights activist who became a close adviser to President Bill Clinton, has died. He was 85.Jordan worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and campaigned for voting rights before becoming president of the National Urban League.“Today, the world lost an influential figure in the fight for civil rights and American politics,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, in a statement.“An icon to the world and a lifelong friend to the NAACP, his contribution to moving our society toward justice is unparalleled. In 2001, Jordan received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for a lifetime of social justice activism. His exemplary life will shine as a guiding light for all that seek truth and justice for all people.”In their own statement, Bill and Hillary Clinton said: “From his instrumental role in desegregating the University of Georgia in 1961, to his work with the NAACP, the Southern Regional Council, the Voter Education Project, the United Negro College Fund, and the National Urban League, to his successful career in law and business, Vernon Jordan brought his big brain and strong heart to everything and everybody he touched. And he made them better.“He was never too busy to give good advice and encouragement to young people. And he never gave up on his friends or his country. He was a wonderful friend … in good times and bad. We worked and played, laughed and cried, won and lost together. We loved him very much and always will.”Jordan advised Bill Clinton in his run for the presidency in 1992, while governor of Arkansas. He also endorsed Hillary Clinton in her run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 and her run for the White House in 2016.In 1999, Jordan became entangled in the impeachment drama over Bill Clinton’s sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern whom Jordan helped find a job.Alongside Lewinsky and Sidney Blumenthal, another close adviser to Clinton, he became a key witness in impeachment proceedings which ended in acquittal.On Tuesday, the Rev Al Sharpton, another leading civil rights activist, said he was “saddened at hearing of the passing of Vernon Jordan, a true civil rights giant. He made a difference. I’ll always treasure his guidance.”Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate who now campaigns for voting rights, wrote on Twitter: “Mourning the passage of my friend, the extraordinary Vernon Jordan. He battled the demons of voter suppression and racial degradation, winning more than he lost. He brought others with him. And left a map so more could find their way. Love to his family. Travel on with God’s grace.”The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said Jordan’s “leadership took our nation closer to its founding promise: all are created equal. May it be a comfort to his family that so many across America mourn with and pray for them at this time.”Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “From civil rights to business, Mr Jordan demonstrated the highest quality of leadership and created a path forward for African Americans where there were none. He will be missed.”CNN first reported Jordan’s death. Jordan’s daughter, Vickee Jordan Adams, told CBS News: “My father passed away last night around 10pm surrounded by loved ones, his wife and daughter by his side.” The cause of death was not immediately known.“We appreciate all of the outpouring of love and affection,” NBC News quoted Jordan Adams as saying.Following roles as field secretary for the Georgia NAACP and executive director of the United Negro College Fund, Jordan became leader of the National Urban League and thus the face of Black Americans’ fight for justice and jobs.Having grown up in the Jim Crow south, under segregation, he was the first attorney to lead the Urban League, which prior to his tenure was mostly led by social workers. During his time in this role, the League expanded by 17 chapters and its budget increased to more than $100m. It also expanded its work to include voter registration efforts and conflict resolution between the Black community and law enforcement.“My view on all this business about race is never to get angry, no, but to get even,” Jordan told the New York Times in 2000. “You don’t take it out in anger; you take it out in achievement.”In 1980, Jordan was shot outside a hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, after a speaking engagement. He underwent five operations. During a three-month recovery at hospital, he was visited by President Jimmy Carter.Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who attacked African Americans and Jews in a killing spree across the US from 1977 to 1980, ultimately admitted the shooting. More

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      'Lynching was treated as a celebratory event': Adrian Younge on the history of US racism

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      “I’m sacrificing myself to deliver a message,” says the composer, multi-instrumentalist and now podcast-maker Adrian Younge. “We aren’t aware enough of black history, nor of the integral role black people have played in building America. There is an educational sterilisation going on and it’s my duty to make people understand that history of racism – something America has pioneered.”With more than 400 years to cover since US slavery began, Younge’s project to educate the public is a vast and complex one. Yet, speaking on a video call surrounded by analogue recording equipment in his LA studio, it is a story Younge believes he has spent his life and career building up to. “This is my What’s Going On project, my record talking about why we are in the place that we are in,” he says. “It’s as if James Baldwin hooked up with Marvin Gaye to make a record produced by David Axelrod. It’s psychedelic soul but it is very professorial at the same time. There’s so many layers to it.”Indeed, there are. The resulting project comprises a 26-track album, written, played and recorded entirely by Younge, entitled The American Negro, a four-part podcast – Invisible Blackness – hosted by Younge – and a short film, again written and directed by Younge himself.Racism is a learned behaviour, one America developed through building its nation on the backs of slave labourSuch auteurship could seem somewhat egotistical but Younge – a 42-year-old musician who has made his name in collaboration with the likes of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Kendrick Lamar – sees it as necessary. “Pre-Covid, I was travelling the world performing and I was shocked at how little people understood about racism and its history,” he says. “Racism is a learned behaviour and one America developed through building its nation on the backs of slave labour and those economic gains. America is a slavocracy: it is a nation founded on bigotry, and those principles continue today. People might think racism no longer exists because there is no longer a slave system, but they don’t realise the laws that enabled the slave system still put us in a position where we have to jump over insurmountable handicaps to just become equal.”It is an incendiary argument and one that has found an increasing foothold in historical scholarship. The writer Edward E Baptist recently argued that the expansion of slavery during the first decades of American independence was foundational in enabling the country’s modernisation, while film-makers such as Ava DuVernay have convincingly plotted the continual subjugation of African Americans through the legal and penal system.While Younge’s album puts luscious orchestral arrangements and spoken-word interludes to use in creatively unfurling the development of structural racism in the US, it is through the podcast Invisible Blackness that he most comprehensively lays out his thesis. With guests including Public Enemy’s Chuck D, the trumpeter Keyon Harrold – whose son was recently in the headlines after being falsely accused of stealing an iPhone – and Digable Planets rapper Ladybug Mecca, Younge explores how his guests’ creation of socially conscious hip-hop influenced his own understanding of inequality. He also uses his previous career as a professor of law to authoritatively detail the origins of this American “slavocracy”.“I use the phrase of the show’s title to illustrate that we all have invisible blackness, this sense of ‘otherness’ inside us, because we are all descended from the first human being in Africa,” Younge says. “It all means that we are radically equal. And I have black radicals on the podcast, like Chuck D, to find out what he had to go through to educate others about this. We’re all looking at the past to understand what’s happening now, to inform people so they can ultimately make their own opinions with all the knowledge at their disposal.”Lynching was a form of bigotry porn: it is the galvanising of a group by emotion, rather than thoughtIt is a measured approach, yet not one without moments of visceral, emotional charge. Most strikingly, the cover art for The American Negro album is a black-and-white image of Younge being lynched, in the fashion of a “lynching postcard”. “Lynching was a form of bigotry porn: it is the galvanising of a group by emotion, rather than thought, as it’s easier to act without thinking,” he says. “Lynching was a celebratory event, one where people would pay to take ‘souvenirs’ like a thumb or an eyeball and they would then send each other postcards to say: ‘I was here’. So when you look at the album cover, which represents one of these postcards, I want to highlight how we were seen as the symbols of evil in America. And viewing the image now, we symbolise the American problem of racism. I want people to have a personal experience when they see it; I want them to see me as any other person of colour that can be killed with no judicial reprisal. I want people to see that I am real and I want them to see themselves in me.”It is a powerful image, one that calls up the horrors of history while referencing its grim modern iteration: filmed police brutality against people of colour. In fact, the May 2020 police killing of Minnesotan George Floyd occurred while Younge was at the beginning of recording his album. “George Floyd’s death didn’t affect the progression of the record at all and that’s what’s sad, right?” Younge says. “It’s the same thing; before that you had Eric Garner and before that, you had so many black people dying without judicial reprisal. That is what makes the world complacent towards the treatment of black people, because it’s so commonplace.”However, the global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by Floyd’s death did augur something different. “Part of me is happy that Trump was president because, while he has inspired more bigots, his lack of reaction to these police killings and white supremacy has also launched the greatest global protest that we’ve seen regarding race. He’s removed complacency,” says Younge. “I have two daughters and I see how young people are so much more woke than they were before now. There’s 12-year-olds on TikTok explaining racism because of him.”Despite the centuries of ingrained inequality laid out in Younge’s project, is it still possible to hope for a future change? “We’re in a better place now than we have been for decades,” he says. “America has been forced to acknowledge there is a problem but there is a deferred commitment to solving it. Our governments have the power to make those changes and so they need to make it happen – and soon.”Until then, Younge is keeping occupied. “Right now, I am the busiest I’ve ever been in my life,” he says, “but I’m doing something good and so it feels good. I’m giving so much of myself because this is an ongoing fight. This project is something that people could look back on 50 years from now and still have more to say.”The podcast Invisible Blackness is available now on Amazon Music. The American Negro by Adrian Younge is out on 26 February. More

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      'Tired of getting slapped in the face': older Black farmers see little hope in Biden's agriculture pick

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      James “Bill” McGill has been a farmer for 40 of his 76 years. He can’t remember the year his 320-acre farm was put up for sale by the same man from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) he’d gone to for a loan to help him keep it. He can sum up the loss succinctly: “The government took it away. It has always been that way for us.”His treatment by the USDA over the years, it turns out, has conditioned him to have an easier time raising 60 or so pigs for slaughter on property in Bakersfield, California, he inherited from his parents. “I don’t get attached to hardly nothing any more,” he said. “So much hard luck over the years as a farmer, you learn.”Most older Black farmers like McGill have stories of being disregarded by the USDA, regardless of the administration, or who holds the title of agriculture secretary. They’re disillusioned to the point that it seems wise not to get too invested in USDA affairs, smart not to hold out hope for change. McGill didn’t even know that Biden had nominated Tom Vilsack, who was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday. “It doesn’t really mean a whole lot,” he said.A change of some sort would have come if Ohio congresswoman Marcia Fudge, a senior member of the House agriculture committee, was selected, as had been anticipated – she would have been the first Black woman to serve as agriculture secretary (she was instead selected to be secretary of housing and urban development). Vilsack, who has spent the time between his two stints as agriculture secretary in a high-paying job in big ag, is more of the “same ol’, same ol’”, as McGill put it. He served two terms in the same role in the Obama administration. Many of Biden’s cabinet picks have been praised by progressives; Vilsack’s nomination was met with confusion at best, disappointment and anger at worst.In what could be seen as a response to the backlash, Biden nominated Jewel Bronaugh, currently Virginia agriculture commissioner, as Vilsack’s second-in-command. If confirmed, she would be the first woman of color to serve as deputy secretary of the department.Black farmers peaked in number in 1920 when there were 949,889; today there are only 48,697; they account for only 1.4% of the country’s 3.4 million farmers (95% of US farmers are white) and own 0.52% of America’s farmland. The acreage they have managed to hold on to is a quarter the size of white farmers’ acreage, on average. All of this is the result of egregious discrimination from the USDA that Black farmers faced for decades.Vilsack’s first term should have offered some hope – he was appointed by the first Black president, who also oversaw the 2010 $1.25bn settlement of Pigford II, the second part of a 1999 class-action lawsuit that alleged that from 1981 to 1997, USDA officials ignored complaints brought to them by Black farmers, and that they were denied loans and other support because of rampant discrimination. Instead, a two-year investigation by reporters at the Counter found that during Vilsack’s eight-year tenure under Obama, fewer loans were given to Black farmers than during the Bush administration, and the USDA foreclosed on Black farmers who had discrimination complaints outstanding, despite a 2008 farm bill moratorium on this practice.Many of those complaints were left unresolved. The report states that from 2006 to 2016, Black farmers were six times as likely to be foreclosed on as white farmers.This disappointment is compounded by Vilsack’s kneejerk firing in 2010 of Shirley Sherrod, a longtime Black farmer advocate and civil rights activist who was serving as the Georgia state director of rural development for the USDA, when a deceptively edited clip that made her appear racist towards a white farmer was circulated by the rightwing propagandist Andrew Breitbart. Vilsack later apologized and offered her a different high-level USDA role, which she declined.About an hour east of Oklahoma City in Wewoka, George Roberts farms 500 acres with his two brothers. A third-generation farmer, he was pulling for Fudge. “She could have understood what we were up against, she’s walked in our shoes. Pretty sure Vilsack never has,” he said.Roberts is familiar with why many Black farmers call the USDA the “last plantation”.“Because we are still answering to ‘boss’. Can we do this, can we do that? They still have their hand over us, saying: no, you can’t.”His father tried a few times for USDA loans, but “he didn’t have much luck,” Roberts said. “You get tired of getting slapped in the face. Hate beggin’. The more you beg the worse they treat you.”Roberts got a USDA loan of about $80,000 in 1982 – “That was rare especially back then. I was one of very few,” he said, referring to the chances of a Black farmer getting a loan. Today, instead of “going through all that red tape” and facing disappointment, he has set up a GoFundMe to hire labor for work he and his brothers, now each in their 60s, can no longer do. Meanwhile, they’ll keep farming one way or another, “because land is something they don’t make any more”, he said.Older Black farmers who mentored Thelonius Cook when he was just starting to farm in 2015 cautioned him against expecting any government help.“They told me don’t waste your time. And I get it,” he said of the older generation’s disillusionment. Still, Cook utilized USDA grant programs to help him purchase high tunnels and hoop houses, among other essentials, for his 7.5-acre plot of land in Virginia.“The younger generation is more willing to seek out what is available. I’ll take my reparations any way I can,” he said. “It’s never going to be enough. Aside from giving us land after so much was taken. That’s the ultimate goal. That’s how we can balance that deficit.”Karen Washington, who co-founded Rise & Root Farm in Chester, New York, six years ago, also understands the disappointment experienced by previous generations. “Older Black farmers have been hurt,” she said. “They’re throwing their hands up and saying, they’ve never done anything for us in the past, why would the Biden administration change anything?”But she said it was important to hold Vilsack accountable; she suggested he start by making amends with Sherrod, whose firing Washington said she felt personally betrayed by. “He needs to offer her a position,” she said. “Then, sit down with Black leaders to hammer what they want, not just what they need – which is capital for machinery, land, money to expand their operations,” she said. “Then put the resources and money – I mean millions – behind that.”In a prepared statement to the Senate agriculture committee, Vilsack wrote he would “take bold action” to address discrimination across USDA agencies and root out systemic racism, but failed to say how, nor was he pressed on it by any member of the committee during his hearing on Tuesday.Vilsack said in his opening remarks: “It’s a different time, and I’m a different person.” A new set of eyes will be watching for proof.“The younger generation of Black and brown farmers may have to carry the elders here,” Washington said. “Our numbers may be small, but our voices can be huge.” More