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      'We all know hate when we see it': Warnock rejects FBI chief's view of Atlanta shootings

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      Law enforcement officials including the director of the FBI have said the shootings in Atlanta in which eight people were killed do not appear to have been racially motivated, but the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday: “We all know hate when we see it.”Six women of Asian descent, another woman and a man were killed on Tuesday, in a shootings at spas in the Atlanta area.Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, was charged with the murders. He told police his actions were not racially motivated, and claimed to have a sex addiction.Speaking to NPR on Thursday, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, said: “While the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.”But such conclusions are rejected by protesters who see a link to rising attacks on Asian Americans in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China, and racially charged rhetoric from former president Donald Trump and others.Warnock, a Democrat, took office in January as the first African American elected to the US Senate from Georgia. On Saturday he and his fellow Democratic senator Jon Ossoff spoke to protesters near the state capitol in Atlanta.“I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, ‘We see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,’” Warnock said, to cheers.On Sunday, he told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I think it’s important that we centre the humanity of the victims. I’m hearing a lot about the shooter, but these precious lives that have been lost, they are attached to families. They’re connected to people who love them. And so, we need to keep that in mind.“Law enforcement will go through the work that they need to do, but we all know hate when we see it. And it is tragic that we’ve been visited with this kind of violence yet again.”Warnock also cited a Georgia hate crimes law passed amid outrage over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a young African American man, and which prosecutors may decide to use against Young.“I’ve long pushed for hate crimes laws here in the state of Georgia,” Warnock said. “It took entirely too long to get one on the books here. But thankfully, we do have that law on the books right now.”Calling for “reasonable gun reform”, Warnock also linked official responses to the Atlanta shootings to efforts by Republicans to restrict voting among minority groups.“This shooter was able to kill all of these folks the same day he purchased a firearm,” Warnock said. “But right now, what is our legislature doing? They’re busy under the gold dome here in Georgia, trying to prevent people from being able to vote the same day they register.“I think that suggests a distortion in values. When you can buy a gun and create this much carnage and violence on the same day, but if you want to exercise your right to vote as an American citizen, the same legislature that should be focused on this is busy erecting barriers to that constitutional right.”Young bought a 9mm handgun at Big Woods Goods. Matt Kilgo, a lawyer for the store, told the Associated Press it complies with federal background check laws and is cooperating with police, with “no indication there’s anything improper”.Democrats and campaigners for gun law reform said a mandatory waiting period might have stopped Young acting on impulse.“It’s really quick,” Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told the AP. “You walk in, fill out the paperwork, get your background check and walk out with a gun. If you’re in a state of crisis, personal crisis, you can do a lot of harm fairly quickly.”According to the Giffords Center, studies suggest purchase waiting periods may bring down firearm suicides by up to 11% and homicides by about 17%.David Wilkerson, the minority whip in the Georgia state House, said Democrats planned to introduce legislation that would require a five-day period between buying a gun and getting it. More

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      Atlanta spa shootings: Georgia hate crimes law could see first big test

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      A hate crimes law passed in Georgia amid outrage over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery could get its first major test as part of the murder case against a white man charged with shooting and killing six women of Asian descent at Atlanta-area massage businesses this week.Prosecutors in Georgia who will decide whether to pursue a hate crimes enhancement have declined to comment. But one said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian American community”.Until last year, Georgia was one of four states without a hate crimes law. But lawmakers moved quickly to pass stalled legislation in June, during national protests over racial violence against Black Americans including the killing of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was pursued by several white men and fatally shot while out running in February 2020.The new law allows an additional penalty for certain crimes if they are motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender or mental or physical disability.Governor Brian Kemp called the new legislation “a powerful step forward”, adding when signing it into law: “Georgians protested to demand action and state lawmakers … rose to the occasion.”The killings of eight people in Georgia this week have prompted national mourning and a reckoning with racism and violence against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. The attack also focused attention on the interplay of racism and misogyny, including hyper-sexualized portrayals of Asian women in US culture.Many times Asian people are too silent, but times changeRobert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with the murders of six women of Asian descent and two other people. He told police the attacks at two spas in Atlanta and a massage business near suburban Woodstock were not racially motivated. He claimed to have a sex addiction.Asian American lawmakers, activists and scholars argued that the race and gender of the victims were central to the attack.“To think that someone targeted three Asian-owned businesses that were staffed by Asian American women … and didn’t have race or gender in mind is just absurd,” said Grace Pai, director of organizing at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Chicago.Elaine Kim, a professor emeritus in Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said: “I think it’s likely that the killer not only had a sex addiction but also an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sex objects.”Such sentiments were echoed on Saturday as a diverse, hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a park across from the Georgia state capitol to demand justice for the victims of the shootings.Speakers included the US senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and the Georgia state representative Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American in the Georgia House.“I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, we see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,” Warnock said to loud cheers. “We’re all in this thing together.”Bernard Dong, a 24-year-old student from China at Georgia Tech, said he had come to the protest to demand rights not just for Asians but for all minorities.“Many times Asian people are too silent, but times change,” he said, adding that he was “angry and disgusted” about the shootings and violence against Asians, minorities and women.Otis Wilson, a 38-year-old photographer, said people needed to pay attention to discrimination against those of Asian descent.“We went through this last year with the Black community, and we’re not the only ones who go through this,” he said.The Cherokee county district attorney, Shannon Wallace, and Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, will decide whether to pursue the hate crime enhancement.Wallace said she could not answer specific questions but said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian-American community”. A representative for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.The US Department of Justice could bring federal hate crime charges independently of state prosecutions. Federal investigators have not uncovered evidence to prove Long targeted the victims because of their race, two unnamed officials told the Associated Press.A Georgia State University law professor, Tanya Washington, said it was important for the new hate crimes law to be used.“Unless we test it with cases like this one, we won’t have a body of law around how do you prove bias motivated the behavior,” she said.[embedded content]Given that someone convicted of multiple murders is unlikely to be released from prison, an argument could be made that it is not worth the effort, time and expense to pursue a hate crime designation that carries a relatively small additional penalty. But the Republican state representative Chuck Efstration, who sponsored the hate crimes bill, said it was not just about punishment.“It is important that the law calls things what they are,” he said. “It’s important for victims and it’s important for society.”The state senator Michelle Au, a Democrat, said the law needed to be used to give it teeth.Au believes there has been resistance nationwide to charge attacks against Asian Americans as hate crimes because they are seen as “model minorities”, a stereotype that they are hard-working, educated and free of societal problems. She said she had heard from many constituents in the last year that Asian Americans – and people of Chinese descent in particular – were suffering from bias because the coronavirus emerged in China and Donald Trump used racial terms to describe it.“People feel like they’re getting gaslighted because they see it happen every day,” she said. “They feel very clearly that it is racially motivated but it’s not pegged or labeled that way. And people feel frustrated by that lack of visibility and that aspect being ignored.” More

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      White people, black authors are not your medicine | Yaa Gyasi

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      In 2018, two other novelists and I were being driven back from a reception in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to our hotel in downtown Detroit, when we saw a black man getting arrested on the side of the road. The driver of our car, a white woman who had spent the earlier part of the drive ranting about how Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, had ruined the city, looked at the lone black man surrounded by police officers with their guns drawn and said: “It’s good they’ve got so many on him. You never know what they’ll do.”
      Two years before, I had published my first novel, Homegoing, a book that is, among other things, about the afterlife of the transatlantic slave trade. The book thrust me into a kind of recognition that is uncommon to fiction writers. I was on late-night shows and photographed for fashion magazines. I did countless interviews, very little writing. The bulk of my work life was spent touring the country giving various readings and lectures. I spent about 180 days of 2017 either at an event, or travelling to or from one. By the time that car ride in Michigan came around, I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that makes clear the hollowness of the reverence.
      The next morning, I delivered my address to a room full of people who had gathered for a library fundraiser, an address where I insisted, as so many black writers, artists and academics have before me, that America has failed to contend with the legacy of slavery. This failure is evident all around us, from our prisons to our schools, our healthcare, our food and waterways. I gave my lecture. I accepted the applause and the thanks, and then I got into another car. It was a different driver, but it was the same world.
      I was thinking about that driver’s words again last summer as news poured in about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. I was thinking about the way in which white people, in order to justify their own grotesque violence, so often engage in a kind of fiction, an utterly insidious denialism that creates the reality it claims to protest. By which I mean an unwillingness to see the violence that is actually happening before you because of a presumption of violence that might happen, is itself a kind of violence. What exactly can a man with a knee on his neck do, what can a sleeping woman do to deserve their own murder? To make room for that grotesqueness, that depraved thinking, to believe in any murder’s necessity, you must abandon reality. To see a man with several guns aimed at him, his hands on his head, as the problem, you must leave the present tense (“It’s good they’ve got so many on him”) and enter the future (“You never know what they will do”). A future, which is, of course, entirely imagined.

      I make my living off my imagination, but this summer, as I watched Homegoing climb back up the New York Times bestseller list in response to its appear­ance on anti-racist reading lists, I saw again, with no small amount of bile, that I make my living off the articulation of pain too. My own, my people’s. It is wrenching to know that the occasion for the renewed interest in your work is the murders of black people and the subsequent “listening and learning” of white people. I’d rather not know this feeling of experiencing career highs as you are flooded with a grief so old and worn that it seems unearthed, a fossil of other old and worn griefs.
      When an interviewer asks me what it’s like to see Homegoing on the bestseller list again, I say something short and vacuous like “it’s bittersweet”, because the idea of elaborating exhausts and offends me. What I should say is: why are we back here? Why am I being asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s? I read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for the first time when I was a teenager, and it was so crystalline, so beautifully and perfectly formed that it filled me with something close to terror. I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t fathom how a novel could pierce right through the heart of me and find the inarticulable wound. I learned absolutely nothing, but some minor adjustment was made within me, some imperceptible shift that occurs only when I encounter wonder and awe, the best art.
      To see my book on any list with that one should have, in a better world, filled me with uncomplicated pride, but instead I felt deflated. While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm. The Bluest Eye was published 51 years ago. As Lauren Michelle Jackson wrote in her excellent Vulture essay “What is an anti-racist reading list for”, someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading.
      And it’s this question of “the business of reading”, of how we read, why we read, and what reading does for and to us, that I keep turning over in my mind. Years ago, I was at a festival with a friend, another black author, and we were trading stories. She said that the first time she did a panel with a white male author she was shocked to hear the questions he was asked. Craft questions. Character questions. Research questions. Questions about the novel itself, about the quality and the content of the pages themselves. I knew exactly what she meant. More

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      This is the Fire review: Don Lemon's audacious study of racism – and love

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      Don Lemon’s new memoir is an audacious and improbable book by a remarkable man. “We must summon the courage to love people who infuriate us, because we love the world we share,” he writes, near the start.

      Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams.
      Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.
      For one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. But he realized he was a “double negative” – gay and Black – living in the south, undoubtedly confused by childhood sexual assaults at the hands of a friend of his mother. He overcame all of this but one media instructor later told him: “I don’t know why you’re here. You’ll never be a newscaster.”
      But he was, and he took off. And then, around 2014, he seemed to change. Out of the blue, he was hectoring Black youth on air to “pull up their pants!” Denouncing a rebel fashion which endures on account of its effectiveness at pissing off old people, particularly old white authority figures? One wondered, was he embracing Bill Cosby’s “respectability” political stand? Admonishing youth about the importance of being married before starting a family, even endorsing the value of New York’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing, many reasoned Lemon must be trolling for ratings from the enemy. Some denounced him as an “Uncle Tom”.
      The change of Lemon’s disappointing trajectory began before Trump. Certainly the threat the former president posed helped to radicalize someone who often seems happiest finding and presenting both sides. Trump’s recurring slur of “stupid”, alternating with, “the stupidest!”, was consistently met with good-natured laughter and ever more incisive analysis. Trump was Lemon’s trial by fire. White-hot, through it he was refined. From a mere Black pundit he was transformed into a tested, un-cowed combatant in the struggle for civil rights.
      Beginning with a cautionary letter to his nephews and nieces with his white fiance, Tim Malone, Lemon purposefully emulates his hero, James Baldwin. Explaining the killing of George Floyd, Lemon deliberately imitates a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963. It is a preamble to a plea to learn all one can about the past. He warns of the omnipresence of patriarchal white supremacy, the west’s original sin.
      “Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing throughout the land ever since Columbus showed up,” he states, making an excellent argument for replacing all memorials to Columbus with tributes to Frank Sinatra.
      Elucidating on the extent to which the wealth and might of America was derived from land appropriated from Native Americans and labor coerced from red, brown and especially enslaved Black Americans, he notes that even enterprises not directly involved in slavery benefited from the exploitative system. More

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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