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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

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      AOC criticizes Manchin over apparent targeting of Biden’s nominees of color

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has stepped into the intensifying dispute around the treatment of women and people of color nominated to top jobs in the Biden administration, as the confirmation process in the US Senate begins to sour.The leftwing Democratic congresswoman waded into the debate amid growing concerns in progressive circles that Joe Biden’s nominees from minority backgrounds are being singled out for especially harsh scrutiny.Several women of color are facing daunting hurdles to confirmation with Republicans withholding backing and the Democratic majority in the Senate imperiled by the opposition of the conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin.The senator from West Virginia announced on Friday he would oppose the candidacy of Neera Tanden to become the first Asian American woman to fill the post of budget director. On Monday he also indicated that he was having doubts about Deb Haaland, who would become the first Native woman to take a cabinet seat.With the Senate evenly divided at 50-50 seats, Manchin’s no vote can only be overturned if moderate Republicans can be found willing to back the nominees. So far, however, such cross-aisle support has been hard to find, with Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and Rob Portman of Ohio all expressing likely opposition to Tanden.In a tweet on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez turned the spotlight onto the record of Manchin himself. She pointed out that the Democratic senator had voted to confirm Jeff Sessions as Donald Trump’s first attorney general despite the fact that the former senator from Alabama was dogged with accusations of racism throughout his career.“Jeff Sessions was so openly racist that even Reagan couldn’t appoint him,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that as attorney general, Sessions went on to preside over the brutal family separation policy at the US border with Mexico.“Yet the first Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?” she posted.The apparent targeting of Biden’s nominees of color has started to generate mounting frustration and anger. Judy Chu, a Democratic congresswoman who leads the Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus, told Politico that “there’s a double standard going on” in the treatment of Tanden whose prospects of leading the Office of Management and Budget are now dwindling.The president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, told Politico that the outcome of the confirmation votes would make clear “whether or not those individuals who are women or people of color are receiving a different level of scrutiny. I hope we will course-correct, quickly, and not allow that to be a legacy of the Senate”.The sense of unequal treatment has been heightened by the heavy focus by Manchin and others on Tanden’s Twitter feed. In her current role as president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, she frequently posted spiky and direct tweets without mincing her words, more than 1,000 of which she has since deleted.Tanden notably called Collins, one of the Republican senators who has declined to come to her rescue, “the worst”.Yet Manchin was content to confirm some of Trump’s nominees with highly controversial social media histories, while Trump himself made many racist and sexist tweets and is now permanently suspended from Twitter.“We can disagree with her tweets, but in the past, Trump nominees that they’ve confirmed and supported had much more serious issues and conflicts than just something that was written on Twitter,” the Democratic congresswoman Grace Meng told Politico. More

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      'The past is so present': how white mobs once killed American democracy

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      Hours after Georgia elected its first-ever Black and Jewish senators, a mob of white Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. They set up a gallows on the west side of the building and hunted for lawmakers through the halls of Congress.People around the world watched in shock: was this the United States?As he monitored the attack from his home in South Carolina, the local historian Wayne O’Bryant was not surprised. He recognized the 6 January attack as a return to the political playbook of white mob violence that has been actively used in this country for more than a century. Mobs of white Americans unwilling to accept multi-racial democracy have successfully overturned or stolen elections before: in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 and New Orleans in 1874, and, in Hamburg, South Carolina, in 1876.O’Bryant, who lives just five miles from the ruins of Hamburg, once a center of Black political power in South Carolina, has become an expert on the 1876 massacre. He has relatives on both sides of the attack: one of his ancestors, Needham O’Bryant, was a Black Hamburg resident who survived the violence, while another, Thomas McKie Meriwether, was a young white man killed while participating in the mob.O’Bryant has spent years researching how the Hamburg massacre unfolded, and how, despite national media coverage and a congressional investigation, the white killers were never held accountable. Now, he is watching history repeat itself. The attack on the Capitol, he said, was “almost identical” to the way white extremists staged a riot in Hamburg during the high-stakes presidential election of 1876.The Hamburg attack and other battles successfully ended multi-racial democracy in the south for nearly a century. Black Americans, who had filled the south’s state legislatures and served in Congress after the civil war, were forced out of power, then barred from voting almost altogether, as white politicians reinstituted a full system of white political and economic rule. The south became a one-party state for decades.It would take Black Americans until the 1960s to win back their citizenship.Now, as Republicans have shut down any attempt to hold Trump and other politicians accountable for inciting the attack, historians like O’Bryant are warning of the known dangers of letting white mob violence go unchecked, and about the fragility of democracy itself.The effects of the white terrorism of the 1870s lasted into O’Bryant’s own childhood: he vividly remembers the day his great-grandmother, grandparents and mother voted for the first time. It was in Charleston in 1968, and he was eight years old.The reason American history is marked by repeated incidents of white mob violence is because the violence works, O’Bryant, 60, said.“When you adopt a political strategy and you’re successful at it, you might as well continue.”‘We took the government away from them’By the summer of 1876, a presidential election year, some white citizens in South Carolina had reached a crossroads: they realized they would never again hold power in a state with fair elections.Benjamin Tillman, one of the leaders of South Carolina’s white mob attacks, identified the “arithmetic” problem for white supremacists: “In my State there were 135,000 negro voters or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters,” he said later. “With a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it?”Since they did not have the votes, white supremacists decided to take control of the South Carolina government through terrorism. There were white terror attacks across the southern US that year, all aimed at preventing Black citizens from casting their votes in national and state elections.The first major attack in South Carolina came in July, in Hamburg, a growing center of Black political power. In Hamburg, the mayor was Black. The sheriff was Black. Most of the city officials were Black. Several prominent Black lawmakers elected to the state legislature also lived in Hamburg.“These same slaveowners that once told you what to do – they might ride through Hamburg, and you might be the sheriff, and you might tell them to pick up their trash off the street,” O’Bryant said.The rise of Black politicians such as Prince Rivers – a man who had liberated himself from slavery, served as a sergeant in the Union army and gone on to be a mayor, state representative and judge in Hamburg – undermined white supremacists’ arguments that Black Americans were unready for political power.On the Fourth of July in 1876, two white men staged a confrontation with Black soldiers outside of Hamburg. The white men then went to court and tried to get a judge to take away the Black soldiers’ guns.When the Black soldiers refused to disarm, they were attacked by a crowd of hundreds of white men, who even wheeled in a cannon to fire at the Black soldiers as they took refuge in a government building. Some Black residents were killed in the initial attack, and others were captured later and then executed in cold blood. Hamburg’s Black sheriff was also killed and mutilated, according to some accounts: the white men cut out his tongue. In all, one white man and seven Black men died during the massacre.As with the 6 January attack at the Capitol, the rioting in Hamburg in 1876 appeared spontaneous, but had been carefully planned in advance by white extremist groups, O’Bryant said. The South Carolina groups called themselves “Red Shirts” or members of local “rifle clubs”. O’Bryant said he saw them as the equivalents of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers militia today.The violence sparked national outrage, O’Bryant said. There were official investigations of the massacre and in-depth coverage from the New York Times. Ninety-four white men, including a former Confederate general and other veterans and prominent citizens, were indicted for murder for their roles.Worried that jailing the white defendants might spark another attack, court officials let all of the men out on bail, O’Bryant said, and the decision was made to postpone the trial until after the 1876 election, because of the “climate of violence”.As the November election approached, white violence in South Carolina escalated: two months after the Hamburg massacre, another series of white terror attacks in Ellenton, South Carolina, killed dozens of Black citizens, by some estimates as many as a hundred.One of O’Bryant’s own ancestors, Needham O’Bryant of Hamburg, later testified before the Senate about the constant attacks and threats, describing a white man firing shots at his house, and having to flee and hide when posses of armed white men rode by.In the 1876 election, one marked by murder and outright fraud – the county where Hamburg was located ended up logging 2,000 more votes than it had registered voters, O’Bryant said – white Democrats took control of the South Carolina government.The continuing violence also “wore down northern commitment to enforcing the law in the south,” the historian Eric Foner said. “In the beginning, President Grant sent troops into South Carolina in order to crush the Ku Klux Klan. But over time, the willingness to intervene to protect the rights of Black people waned.”After political negotiations over the contested presidential election of 1876, the federal government ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the south.With white supremacists once again in control of the state government, Rivers, like other Black politicians, was accused of corruption and quickly forced out of public office. He ended up working once again as a carriage driver at a white hotel, the same work he had done when he was enslaved.O’Bryant has records of one of his ancestors on the South Carolina voter rolls in 1868, and a record of another relative serving as an elections manager in 1876. After that, there is no record of them voting for 92 years. His family members, a long line of educators and academics, worked hard and were deeply involved in their communities. They faced the risk of being fired, he said, if they even tried to participate in an election.Meanwhile, one of the men indicted in the Hamburg murders, Benjamin Tillman, rose to a position of national power, continuing to brag about having “shot negroes and stuffed ballot boxes” on his way to becoming South Carolina’s governor, and then serving for nearly a quarter-century as a US senator.None of the perpetrators of the Hamburg massacre was ever prosecuted or convicted.“We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it,” Tillman said in a speech in the Senate in 1900. “If no other senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity.”What Tillman and others had won through terrorism they later codified into law, writing a new South Carolina constitution explicitly designed to keep Black citizens from voting.“We are not sorry for it,” Tillman said. “We of the south have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men.”‘This is America’Anti-democratic beliefs, white nationalism, and the glorification of violence have always been a “powerful strand” in American history, Foner, one of the most influential historians of America’s post-civil war period, said.It is time to push back against the shocked statements of television pundits on 6 January “saying, ‘This is not America,’” Foner said. “It is America, actually. Not the whole picture of America, but it is part of the American tradition. And we need to face that fact.”In the footage from the 6 January invasion – a giant Confederate flag being paraded through the halls of Congress, a gallows and noose being set up outside, furious white crowds chanting about hanging politicians – the echoes of post-civil war violence are unavoidable.“Whether or not these men and women [who broke into the Capitol] are aware of how their actions replicated what has already happened in history, it’s so present – the past is so present,” Kellie Carter Jackson, an American historian who studies 19th-century political violence, said.That does not mean that the violence is at the same level as it was directly after the civil war, Carter Jackson said. In 1895, Robert Smalls, a Black army veteran who became a South Carolina congressman, estimated that 53,000 Black Americans had been killed by white terrorists since the end of the civil war.“That’s 1,766 murders annually, or five per day,” Carter Jackson said. “I don’t think we are at those levels of such open racial violence and hostility.”In the the wake of the Capitol invasion, the problem facing the United States is often framed as one of “disinformation”: how were so many Americans convinced to attack the government based on claims that simply were not true?Much of the media and political reaction has taken the invaders’ claims at face value: they believed the lies of Trump and Republican politicians that the election had been stolen. They sincerely thought Democrats were undermining democracy. Some had been radicalized by the lurid claims of the QAnon conspiracy theory about a cabal of powerful pedophiles torturing children.But some experts argue the insurrection should be labeled a white supremacist attack, even if many of the attackers themselves did not talk explicitly about race. Trump’s evolving web of claims about election fraud, which were rejected by judges in lawsuit after lawsuit his supporters brought, revolved around the idea that the vote counts for Joe Biden in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, which all have large Black populations, were somehow fraudulent.The former president’s repeated claims that he got the majority of “legitimate” votes suggested that the African Americans who cast decisive votes for Biden were inherently illegitimate.Trump’s big lie about the stolen election was built from the same lies propagated by the white supremacists in the south: that majority-Black cities were corrupt, that Black politicians could not be trusted.South Carolina’s white supremacists not only put up giant statues of the murderers who had stolen the state government, they also wrote history books for school children that described the state’s brief era of Black political participation as “the darkest days in the state’s history”, an era of rampant corruption and mismanagement, O’Bryant said. Those were the books he grew up studying.After the victories of the civil rights movement, many Americans were taught a more triumphant version of their own history, with the arc of American democracy redrawn as a slow but inevitable march towards racial equality.O’Bryant is proud of the legacy of the civil rights movement: he met Martin Luther King as a small child, attended marches in diapers, sat in the background at movement meetings in his home and at church. But he has also spent years spreading public awareness about the flourishing multiracial democracy that was ended through violence in the 1870s.“If they had prosecuted and punished the perpetrators of the Hamburg massacre, they would have set a precedent that we won’t stand for these types of crimes,” O’Bryant said. “There would have been no need for me to have marched if they had done the right thing in Hamburg.”The ruins of HamburgToday, the site of the Hamburg massacre is part ruin, part golf course. There is no marker there to the seven Black men who were murdered in 1876, just neatly maintained turf, fences and a few disintegrating buildings in the woods.America’s civil war battlefields are the sites of intense, even obsessive, memorialization: hundreds of thousands of people visit the site of the battle of Gettysburg every year, and the government and private donors annually spend millions of dollars to maintain the town’s thriving complex of statues and museums. Gettysburg is remembered as the bloody turning point, the moment where the north, at great cost, began to win the war.But the battlefields where America’s multi-racial democracy was lost just a decade later have not been preserved in the same way. Most of the memorials that exist were erected by white supremacists to mark their victory.There is massive statue of Ben Tillman at the South Carolina statehouse, and an obelisk dedicated to Meriwether, the one white man killed during the Hamburg massacre, at the heart of North Augusta, the town closest to Hamburg.Hamburg itself had been built next to the Savannah River, in an area prone to flooding, and while the army corps of engineers built a levee to protect Augusta, the white town on the other side of the river, the government left the Black town unprotected, O’Bryant said. After a particularly devastating flood in 1929, the town was abandoned. Today, all that is left on the site are a few ruins deep in the woods.But Hamburg has survived in other ways. Forced out by flooding, the town’s Black residents moved to higher ground and built a new town, Carrsville.“They didn’t have the money to buy lumber,” O’Bryant says, citing interviews with elderly residents who could recall the move. “They took their houses apart, brought the wood uphill, and reconstructed them.”In 2016, after advocacy by O’Bryant and other local residents, North Augusta finally dedicated a historical marker and memorial to all eight people killed at Hamburg, including the seven Black victims. The place they chose for it was not the empty ground in Hamburg, but in Carrsville.O’Bryant does not see it as an accident that Black primary voters in South Carolina, led by Jim Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement, picked Joe Biden as the safest choice for the Democratic presidential nominee, or that Black voters in Georgia and other swing states turned out to help secure Biden’s victory.Black voters fully understood the dangers of a second Trump term, O’Bryant said.“It felt to us like it was life or death, not just for African Americans. It felt like it was life or death for the country.” More

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      Merrick Garland vows to target white supremacists as attorney general

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      At his Senate hearing on Monday, attorney general nominee Merrick Garland will pledge to prosecute “white supremacists and others” who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January, in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat.The pledge was contained in Garland’s opening testimony for the session before the Senate judiciary committee, released on Saturday night.“If confirmed,” Garland said, ‘I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January – a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”Five people including a police officer died as a direct result of the attack on the Capitol, before which Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” against the result of the presidential election. Trump lost to Joe Biden by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. More than 250 participants in the Capitol riot have been charged. As NPR reported, “the defendants are predominantly white and male, though there were exceptions. “Federal prosecutors say a former member of the Latin Kings gang joined the mob, as did two Virginia police officers. A man in a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt took part, as did a Messianic Rabbi. Far-right militia members decked out in tactical gear rioted next to a county commissioner, a New York City sanitation worker, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist.”In his testimony, Garland made reference to his role from 1995 to 1997 in supervising the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a white supremacist atrocity in which 168 people including 19 children were killed.Trump was impeached for a second time on a charge of inciting an insurrection but was acquitted after only seven Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate in voting to convict, 10 short of the majority needed.“It is a fitting time,” Garland said, “to reaffirm that the role of the attorney general is to serve the rule of law and to ensure equal justice under the law.”The 68-year-old federal appeals judge was famously denied even a hearing in 2016 when Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell blocked him as Barack Obama’s third pick for the supreme court.Biden’s selection of Garland for attorney general is seen as a conciliatory move in a capital controlled by Democrats but only by slim margins, the Senate split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote.In his testimony, Garland said he would be independent from Biden, being sure to “strictly regulate communication with the White House” and working as “the lawyer … for the people of the United States”.Trump pressured his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do his bidding, then saw his second, William Barr, largely do so, running interference on the investigation of Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow. If confirmed, Garland will face sensitive decisions over matters including Trump, now exposed to criminal and civil investigation, and Hunter Biden, the new president’s son whose tax affairs are in question as he remains a target for much of the right.Some on the left have expressed concern that Garland might be too politically moderate. Black Lives Matter founder LaTosha Brown, for example, told the Guardian: “My concern is that he does not have a strong civil rights history … even when Obama nominated him, one of the critiques was that he was making a compromise with what he thought was a ‘clean’ candidate to get through.”In his testimony, Garland said justice department civil rights work must be improved.“Communities of colour and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system,” he said, “and bear the brunt of the harm caused by pandemic, pollution, and climate change.”Garland is expected to be confirmed. More