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      Looking back at 2020: a year like no other – podcast

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      A look back at how the Guardian covered a year that began with the outbreak of a pandemic, witnessed global anti-racism protests after the killing of George Floyd, and ended with the voting out of President Donald Trump

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      As we entered a new decade back in January, newspapers were full of stories about Australian bushfires, tensions between the US and Iran, and the British Conservatives were revelling in their 80-seat majority. But the World Health Organization was already dealing with news of a ‘novel coronavirus’ in Wuhan, China, a disease that was going to dramatically change the way we lived our lives. Covid-19 swept through Asia and into Europe and beyond, killing almost 2 million people and bringing the world’s economies to their knees. The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, joins Anushka Asthana to look back on a year in which reporters covered some huge breaking stories, including the killing of George Floyd and the global anti-racism movement Black Lives Matter. There was the US election in which the American people voted to remove Donald Trump. And there was the biggest story of all: the continuing climate crisis which, despite a pandemic-induced reduction in travel, only resulted in a 7% drop in global emissions. And all the while Britain hurtled inexorably towards an end-of-year Brexit. More

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      Biden cabinet: Marcia Fudge reportedly tapped for housing and Tom Vilsack for agriculture

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      Joe Biden has reportedly selected Ohio congresswoman Marcia Fudge as his housing and urban development secretary and and the former agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack to reprise that role in his administration.
      Fudge was first elected to Congress in 2008 to represent a district that includes Cleveland, and is a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Vilsack spent eight years as head of the US Department of Agriculture during the Obama administration and served two terms as Iowa governor. More

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      Joe Biden’s drive for diversity in top political jobs is only an illusion of change | Nesrine Malik

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      Joe Biden, you may have heard, is hiring a lot of women. During his campaign, he promised to appoint the most diverse cabinet in American history. So far, he has hired an all-female communications team and lined up several other women for senior jobs, some of which have never been filled by a woman before. As with the selection of his vice-president, Kamala Harris, the reception has been rapturous. What better way to fumigate Trumpism than by filling the executive with qualified women in senior positions? “There goes the old boys’ club,” says NBC. An article in the Washington Post lists four reasons why Biden’s cabinet should be 50% women: he owes it to them; it looks bad when other countries such as Finland and South Africa have got there first; qualified women are easy to find; and finally, it’s just about damn time.Behind the scenes, there is pressure on Biden to make good on racial diversity and appoint more people of colour in general. Some Democratic members of Congress have called for at least five more Latinos to be appointed to senior cabinet positions. Asian American and Pacific Islander lawmakers have written that it will be “deeply disappointing if several AAPIs are not nominated”. Like victors dividing the spoils of war, a diverse array of Americans is scrambling to stake a claim in the new administration.This could be the start of something positive. But it could equally be a dead end. Diversity has two paths. The first is one important means with which to address the structural inequalities that produce the marginalisation of those groups in the first place. The second is an end in itself. In a sort of identity relay race, women and people of colour are handed the baton, carry on running, and serve to bless and reinforce the racial and economic status quo.Increasingly, liberals are opting for the latter: a commitment to diversity that promises cosmetic changes without deeper transformation. This is part of an attitude that has already hurt the Democratic party severely among Asian Americans and Latinos – groups that have, electorally, been treated as monoliths and taken for granted.According to Harris, Biden’s words to her were a clincher when considering the job. “When Joe asked me to be his running mate, he told me about his commitment to making sure we selected a cabinet that looks like America – that reflects the very best of our nation. That is what we have done.”Biden’s diverse picks, the “very best of the nation”, are not representatives of the people who put them into office as much as they are figureheads. They are ambassadors with no brief other than to stand as proof of meritocracy – if you work hard and are “the very best”, you too can get a great gig. Diversity in government isn’t about solidarity, it’s used as proof of the soundness of the system: the elevation of women in particular as “girl boss feminists” who will not be interrupted, the reduction of the deeply serious business of government to inspiration politics.It’s irritating and it’s infantilising, but it can’t be dismissed. There is real value in inspiration politics. To be able to see people who look like you in exclusive places is undoubtedly important. It unlocks confidence and ambition. And there is political capital in caring about the brand of the party and its reputation as inclusive. But when it all stops there what we end up with is a counterfeit form of liberation politics that achieves little beyond letting parties (and businesses) get away with a smattering of new faces.In a clear-eyed piece on Harris in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Solomon Jones emphasises that after a disappointing eight years of Barack Obama, the black community needs to see more than just symbolic appointments. “We’ve seen this movie before,” writes Jones. “I am a registered Democrat, but I am also an avowed realist. Putting Black and brown faces up front while repeatedly uttering the phrase ‘racial justice’ does not stop discrimination in lending, employment, education, criminal justice, or any of the myriad systems that treat people of colour unfairly.”When people are hired to make a government “look” a certain way, by governing parties with conservative politics, it’s usually a way of making change so everything stays the same – or gets worse. Little demonstrates that more than the “most diverse parliament in history” that came to Westminster in 2019. The election of a number of female and black and minority ethnic MPs to the Conservative party, and their rise in the ranks of the cabinet, has produced a government that feels more comfortable in doubling down on policies such as the hostile environment, and where senior BAME ministers have been recruited to the task of denying structural racism.The clue to the lack of potential in Biden’s diversity drive is in the fact that these appointments so far have been received with relief as a return to business as usual. Brendan Buck, an ex-adviser to the former Republican House speaker, Paul Ryan, tweeted: “These Biden nominations and appointments are so delightfully boring.” Analysts at Politico wrote that Biden’s team picks so far are characterised by their belief in a “linear, plodding, purposeful and standard policy process”. We cannot forget that it was under the “standard” and comparatively “boring” Obama administration that the Black Lives Matter movement started. Diversity in this form is a phantom lever, a device that is unconnected to any mechanisms of power but gives the illusion of change.In the euphoria of Donald Trump’s defeat among liberals, I noted on social media an impatience with those who didn’t join in the festivities. “Some people are never happy,” the celebrants complained. If our expectations have been so severely lowered that we are to be grateful for the mere presence of visual diversity in regimes that have failed us for so long, then there is indeed very little to celebrate.• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Obama: Democrats need 'universal language' to appeal to moderate voters

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      Barack Obama has underlined his belief that Democrats should moderate campaign messaging in order to reach voters turned off by slogans including “Defund the Police”, telling a literary group: “If I spoke the language of James Baldwin as he speaks it on the campaign stump, I’m probably not gonna get a lot of votes in Iowa.”
      Baldwin, a leading 20th-century African American intellectual and the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, “didn’t have to go out and get votes”, Obama said in interview extracts released by PEN America, which will give the former president its 2020 Voice of Influence award next week.
      Obama also said he thinks there is an opportunity for more expansive racial dialogue in the US. But his remarks may add to controversy which welled up this week when he said candidates using “snappy” slogans such as Defund the Police risked alienating voters otherwise broadly sympathetic to liberal aims.
      Defund the Police became a rallying cry on the left this summer, amid national protests for racial justice following the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man, and similar incidents in Atlanta, Kenosha and elsewhere.
      Some senior Democratic party figures, including South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, have claimed the call to Defund the Police contributed to disappointing results in Senate, House and state races.
      Obama is promoting A Promised Land, his memoir of his rise to the White House and first few years in office. Speaking to Snapchat this week, he added his voice to the chorus.
      “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the Police’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it – which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” he said.
      “The key is deciding: do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”
      In his remarks to PEN America, which will be streamed on Tuesday, Obama contrasted discussions of race in the context of “politics and getting votes” with “truth-telling and the prophetic voice”. Politicians, he said, often need to speak a “universal language” as a way to reach voters resistant to more pointed discourse about racial injustice.
      But he also allowed that the racial upheavals of 2020, coupled with generational change, may herald an era in which race can be discussed in the political realm in less nuanced terms.
      “What I think has changed – and we saw this this summer – is, because of people’s witness of George Floyd, because of what seems like a constant stream of irrefutable evidence of excessive force against unarmed Black folks, that I think white America has awakened to certain realities that even 20 years ago they were still resistant to.
      “That creates a new opening for a different kind of political conversation.”
      PEN America will also give an award, for courage, to Darnella Frazier, a young woman who filmed the killing of Floyd.

      A recent poll by political strategist Douglas Schoen, previously an adviser to Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, found that Democrats should drop references to Defund the Police if they want to be competitive in the next midterm elections, in 2022.
      “The data says to me that if the Democrats go the progressive route they can lose the House and the Senate overwhelmingly in 2022,” Schoen told the New York Post. “The incoming Biden administration has to understand that unless they take a moderate path, that is a likely potential outcome for the Democrats.”
      Asked if Biden’s victory was a “mandate” for centrist or progressive policies, 62% of respondents to Schoen’s poll said centrist. The survey also found that Defund the Police hurt the party in down-ballot races, as 35% of voters said the issue made them “less likely to vote for Democrats” while 23% said it made them more likely.
      Obama’s comments have not found support among leading progressives. Legislators including Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were quick to reject his comments to Snapchat.
      “It’s not a slogan,” tweeted Bush. “It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.” More

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      Can dozens of new Republican congresswomen change the face of the GOP?

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      Kat Cammack was raised on a cattle ranch by a working class single mother. She was the third generation of her family to go into business as a sand blaster. And at 32, she is about to become the youngest Republican woman in the US Congress.“I think a lifetime of experiences has shaped me to be a Republican and a conservative,” said Cammack, elected to an open seat in Florida. “There has been a stereotype about the Republican party, that it was the Grand Old Party, that it was your grandfather’s political party of choice. The election in 2020 has definitely helped push back on that narrative.”Of the 12 seats in the House of Representatives that Republicans have flipped from Democratic control so far this year, nine were won by women, two by Latino men and one by an African American man. The trend represents a conscious effort by a party still dominated by white men: diversify or die.It also reflects the complexities of America’s voting demographics, which saw Trump make gains among Latinos in states such as Florida and Texas, win a majority of white women for the second time and improve his standing among African Americans. The counterintuitive data have been seen as a wake-up call for Democrats.Cammack argues that the Republican party was a natural choice for her after watching her mother try to run a small business while fending off intrusions from big government, and after the family lost their small cattle ranch in 2011 “due to an Obama-era housing programme”.She recalls: “That was really the turning point in my life where you find yourself homeless, you had a life plan and all of a sudden that is completely out the window and you have to make a choice. Do I put my head back in the sand? Do I rebuild my life and keep going down the path that I had envisioned for myself? Or do I do a hard right and get involved and try to fix the system?”Cammack duly went into politics at district and federal level and, seven years later, ran for Florida’s 3rd congressional district. She was endorsed as a “rising star” by E-Pac, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s political action committee dedicated to electing Republican women.A vocal supporter of Donald Trump, Cammack believes that Republicans’ pitch as the party of equal opportunity, not equal outcome, struck a chord whereas Democrats pushed a “government will take care of you” narrative and took some groups for granted. “Biden had several gaffes: most notably he said, ‘If you don’t vote Democrat then you’re not Black.’ What kind of ridiculous nonsense is that?“In 2016, I took heat from the left that because I was a young woman and I wasn’t supporting Hillary Clinton, I was a traitor of some sort. That is the most un-American, stereotypical sexist, racist nonsense I’ve ever heard. You should never discount someone’s individuality and basically say that they can only vote one way or for one party because they check a box.”When Cammack met other newly elected members of Congress earlier this month and swapped notes about their winning campaigns, she recalled, they all cited issues such as healthcare, the coronavirus and the economy. “We never once went out and said, ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman,’ or ‘Vote for me because I’m a millennial’.“It was always, ‘Vote for me because I’m the best person for the job and here’s why,’ and that is what is resonating with people. I think this narrative that if you are African American or if you are a minority or if you’re a woman you have to vote Democrat couldn’t be further from the truth and the results from this election prove that.”The Republican recruitment drive is starting from a low base. Eighteen months ago, just 13 of the party’s 197 House members were women. By contrast, 89 of 235 House Democrats were women and nearly 90 were Black or Latino. There is only one Black Republican in the Senate: Tim Scott of South Carolina.John Zogby, a pollster and author, said: “They’re still basically a lily-white party and they’re still a male-centered party, but let’s see if this is a formula for them. Frankly, if they have any hope at all, this is the only formula.”At least 36 Republican women will join the next Congress, beating the party’s record of 30 set in 2006. Of these, 28 will serve in the House, including at least 17 newcomers, based on results so far. Stephanie Bice, an Iranian American in Oklahoma, María Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American in Florida, and Michelle Steeland Young Kim, both Korean Americans in California, all defeated Democratic incumbents. More

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      Minnijean Brown-Trickey: the teenager who needed an armed guard to go to school

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      When Minnijean Brown-Trickey looks back at old pictures of 4 September 1957, she remembers the day her courage kicked in. “I look at the photos of the nine of us, standing there, in contrast to those crazy people,” she says. “And what I say is that they threw away their dignity and it landed on us.”Brown-Trickey, now 79, was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American children to go to the city’s Central high school in September 1957 – and in doing so, desegregate it. On the teenagers’ first day at the Arkansas school, white residents were so furious they amassed in a 1,000-strong mob at the gates. In preparation, eight of the teenagers had been instructed by Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to meet at her house, so they could travel to the school in a group. But one of the nine, Elizabeth Eckford, had no telephone and so was not told of the safety plan. Instead she was forced to run the gauntlet of the mob’s hatred alone. The pictures of the young girl encountering the baying crowd is the enduring image of that day for many. But to Brown-Trickey, despite its power, it cannot completely capture all nine children’s fear. “Still photos cannot show how we are shaking in our boots, sandwiched between the Arkansas National Guard and a mob of crazy white people,” she says.As they tried to walk into school, the children were subject to verbal abuse, spat on and denied admission. Three black journalists watching were also attacked. One, L Alex Wilson, was hit on the head with a brick, developed a nervous condition and died three years later aged only 51.It took a further three weeks for the students to actually step inside the building, thanks to fierce resistance from the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who used the mob as a pretext for barring the nine, putting the state’s National Guard in their way. Brown-Trickey recalls how he warned of “blood in the streets” should the children be allowed to go to school. More

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      Racial segregation on US inter-state transport to end – archive, 26 Nov 1955

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      Washington, November 25The Inter-state Commerce Commission ruled to-day that racial segregation on inter-state trains and passenger buses must end by January 10, 1956. It also ruled that segregation of inter-state travellers in public waiting-rooms is unlawful.These two rulings put an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine which had guided the commission’s rulings for many years. Two months after the commission was established in 1887 it had its first case on racial discrimination. It then held that segregation would be most likely to produce peace and order and to promote “dignity of citizenship” in the United States.In to-day’s opinion the commission said that “it is hardly open to question that much progress in improved race relations has been made since then.” When the Supreme Court outlawed compulsory segregation in state schools it ruled that segregation in itself excluded the concept of equality and imposed an inferior status on these American citizens. It is this new concept which has now prevailed with the commission.In to-day’s ruling the commission said:“The disadvantage to a traveller, who is assigned accommodations or facilities so designated as to imply his inherent inferiority solely because of his race, must be regarded under present conditions as unreasonable. Also, he is entitled to be free of annoyances, some petty and some substantial, which almost inevitably accompany segregation even though the rail carriers, as most of the defendants have done here, sincerely try to provide both races with equally convenient and comfortable cars and waiting rooms.”Commissioner Johnson, of South Carolina, in a dissenting opinion, said “It is my opinion that the commission should not undertake to anticipate the Supreme Court and itself become a pioneer in the sociological field.”Precautions in GeorgiaIt should be understood that to-day’s rulings apply only to travel between states. The rulings have no effect on travel within a Southern state. Mr Eugene Cook, Attorney-General for Georgia, said he would try to use all legal procedures to maintain racial segregation “on travel within Georgia itself.” He conceded the difficulties because it is often hard to separate inter-state travellers from those travelling within the state alone. However, he had asked his legal staff to study this problem while giving first priority to Georgia’s continued resistance to a unified public school system in the state.The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People also tried to have the commission end segregation in the lunch room at the Union Station in Richmond, Virginia. The commission said that this room was operated under lease by the Union News Company, which is not itself engaged in transportation, and therefore does not come within the commission’s jurisdiction. The commission also dismissed a complaint against the Texas and Pacific Railway Company because the evidence failed to show that the case involved inter-state travel.Ten years ago, the commission authorised Southern Railways to serve Negro passengers in the dining-car behind a curtain in seats reserved exclusively for them. This method of segregation aroused intense public criticism and it was finally outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1950. To-day’s rulings are a notable advance of those started by the Court in 1950. More

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      Gary Younge on minority voters and the future of the Republican party – podcast

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      A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans

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      Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters. It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016. • Read Gary Younge’s piece: Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote More