Race

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Barack Obama: ‘Donald Trump and I tell very different stories about America’

      by

      If you’re a former US president, there’s one guaranteed way to be remembered fondly – make sure you’re followed by a truly awful successor. It certainly worked for Barack Obama: you only had to mention his name these last four years to send millions of Americans (and others) into a reverie of nostalgic longing. The gulf in calibre between Donald Trump and his predecessor was so wide that each day Trump sat in the Oval Office, Obama’s reputation shone a little brighter.Not that he needed the comparison. Even before Trump took office, Obama left the White House with unusually high approval ratings: 59% of Americans thought well of him, according to Gallup – and that figure has held ever since. Outside the US, Obama recently displaced Bill Gates as the world’s most admired man, according to YouGov, which is handy as Obama is married to the world’s most admired woman.If you had to construct the unTrump, Barack Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral and well-read; deliberative; self-critical to the point of self-doubt; a faithful husband and conspicuously devoted father. He was a chief executive whose team was so functional that, over the course of eight years, there was scarcely a leak; not a single person was forced to resign in disgrace, let alone face legal proceedings. The closest the Obama White House got to scandal was when he wore a pale “tan” suit in 2014, a look some considered unpresidential. Not for nothing did they call him “no drama Obama”.If you had to construct the unTrump, Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral, well-read and self-criticalThere is much to criticise in his record, whether it be a covert drone war that saw 10 times the number of strikes as were authorised under George W Bush, resulting in the loss of as many as 800 civilian lives in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen – or a failure to enforce his supposed “red line” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, a failure that Bashar al-Assad seemed to read as a licence to keep killing his own people. You can criticise Obama for failing to do enough for small-town and postindustrial America, so that people who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. Still, and even taking all that into account, from the vantage point of 2020 the Obama presidency looks like a calm, flat sea before the roiling tempest of Trump.The outgoing president features only a little in Obama’s 751-page memoir, A Promised Land, which covers the period from the author’s entry into politics – winning a seat in the state senate of Illinois in 1995 – until the moment that may have ensured his re-election: the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. A second volume will address the rest. The book is written in the same voice that made Dreams From My Father a bestseller, letting the reader in on the author’s inner monologue – as Obama observes his own life as it plays out, questioning his motivations, noticing his hypocrisies.Trump’s cameo role is that of villain, the lead proponent of “birtherism”, spreading the racist smear that Obama was not really born in the US, “a conspiracy theory he almost certainly knew to be false,” Obama writes. Trump also makes an appearance as the butt of Obama’s jokes on the fateful night in 2011 when, delivering the traditional comic turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president mocked Trump as a man whose idea of an important decision was choosing between the boys’ and girls’ teams on Celebrity Apprentice. Was it that humiliation that stung Trump into seeking the presidency, just to get even? More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Why are politicians suddenly talking about their 'lived experience'? | Kwame Anthony Appiah

      by

      Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris told a TV interviewer the other day that she had promised Joe Biden that she would always share with him her “lived experience, as it relates to any issue that we confront”. That sounded comforting, but should it? This expression has a fairly standard application among qualitative sociologists, where it comes up in work that explores individual subjectivity. How to record and communicate “lived experience” has been a topic of earnest professional debate, sometimes involving appeals to the philosophical traditions of phenomenology. Yet the future vice-president assuredly wasn’t promising a former vice-president to deliver the results of a technical sociological method applied to her own case.
      Needless to say, the expression has, over the past decade or so, escaped the academy and assumed a somewhat different set of meanings. At first, it tended to designate firsthand experiences that were specific to women, minorities and other vulnerable groups. During last year’s Democratic primaries in the United States, one supporter of Julián Castro (who served in Barack Obama’s cabinet) was quoted saying: “It is important to have somebody who has the lived experience of being a brown person in this country on that stage – a dark-skinned Latino man.” Yet semantic sprawl had already set in; it turns out that “ordinary people” could be in possession of lived experience, too. Elizabeth Warren, before her run in the primaries, said that politicians such asBarack Obama, being overly impressed with hopeful economic statistics, were blind to “the lived experiences of most Americans”. Pete Buttigieg, another contender, remarked that when Democrats were over-focused on Trump-bashing, “it didn’t seem like we were talking about the lived experience of Americans”. If you were the sort of person who felt estranged from the coastal elites, it emerged, you, too, might have lived experience.
      And what made the phrase so powerful was the unappealable authority it seemed to represent. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, that most American of poems, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” You can debate my sociopolitical analyses – those facts and interpretations are shared and public – but not my lived experience. Lived experience isn’t something you argue, it’s something you have.
      Yet if lived experience was once viewed as a way to speak truth to power, power has learned to speak “lived experience” with remarkable fluency. Consider what happened when, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Senate Republicans set out to counter a Democratic bill for police reform with a milder proposal of their own, one backed by Senator Tim Scott, from South Carolina. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, declared: “It’s a straightforward plan based on facts, on data and lived experience” – the lived experience evidently supplied by Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate. Somehow the lived experience of Cory Booker, the black senator who introduced a Democratic police reform bill, offered different lessons.
      Experience, alas, is never unmediated and self-interpreting. Ideology, though it can be shaped by experience, also shapes our experiences. The twins Shelby Steele and Claude Steele – a former professor of English and a professor of psychology – draw on their lived experience to produce opposite pictures of the black American condition. Claude has emphasised the detrimental effects of racial stereotypes; Shelby sees the real threat in efforts, such as affirmative action, to remedy racial disparities. Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, draws from his lived experience to confirm a bootstrapping position (If I can make it, so can you), just as the late Congressman John Lewis, hero of the civil rights left, could do so to confirm the need for social intervention (I almost didn’t make it). There’s no guarantee what message people will take from their experience: no guarantee that we’ll all be singing the Song of Myself in the same key.
      When we’re thinking about policy, then, how much weight should we give to private experience? Pressed to explain what she had in mind, Harris listed some elements of her biography: growing up a black child in the US, serving as a prosecutor, having a mother who was a teenage immigrant from India. There’s no doubt, of course, that these are the sorts of experiences from which a person could learn a great deal. And stories drawn from our own experience can be powerful ways of recounting what we have learned. But identities are too multiple and complex to allow any individual’s experience to count as truly representative.
      Take being black. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an immigrant because she was studying at Berkeley, and she went on to be a university professor at McGill in Canada. Her father, born in Jamaica, is an emeritus economics professor from Stanford. Harris has doubtless experienced racial discrimination: in the US, that’s almost guaranteed for a person from an ethnic minority who spends any time out of the house. But her upper-middle-class upbringing, not to mention the fact that she spent five years of her teens in Canada, means that being black has affected her differently than it would someone who came from a background of modest education and means.
      The point isn’t that being middle class means you’re not an “authentic” black person. It’s that, as with all of us, her experience has been particular. People who have served as prosecutors will be found on the left, the centre, and the right. And the children of some Indian immigrants to the US will have voted enthusiastically for Donald Trump. There isn’t a black experience, shared by all black people, or an Indian immigrant experience, shared by the children of immigrants from India, or even a prosecutor’s experience, shared by all prosecutors.
      What makes the invocation of lived experience such a powerful move – the fact that it’s essentially private, removed from inspection – is exactly what makes it such a perilous one. No doubt a story about an injustice you’ve experienced, or a positive story about a state school or a public hospital, may be more powerful than some abstract evocation of equality. Still, people across the ideological spectrum will have their own perceptions of injustice, their own stories of public-sector success or failure. And so I hope the vice-president-elect will offer, alongside her lived experience, her considered judgment. We go wrong when we treat personal history as revelation, to be elevated above facts and reflection. Talk of lived experience should be used not to end conversation but to begin them.
      Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University and author of In My Father’s House More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      'Whatever it takes': how Black women fought to mobilize America's voters

      by

      [embedded content]
      Even before networks projected the presidential race for Joe Biden last Saturday, Wanda Mosley, a 50-year-old organizer based in Atlanta, Georgia, began to prepare to mobilize voters for her state’s two critical Senate runoff elections on 5 January.
      After one of the most turbulent presidential elections in US history, the two races in the battleground state will determine if the balance of power in Washington will fall to the president-elect once he is sworn into office. Georgia has yet to be called for Biden, a Democrat, though he currently leads Donald Trump, which motivates organizers such as Mosley who until early December will continue to register voters planning to vote in the January runoffs.
      “We understand fully how important these races are,” says Mosley, the senior state coordinator for Georgia’s Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement.
      “We’re still here. We’re still working,” Mosley said.
      Democrats have long pointed to Black voters, more specifically, Black women, as a crucial voting bloc, decisive to elections since former president Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s. But this November, successfully flipping the southern, Republican-led state of Georgia to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years has drawn attention to the organizational power of Black women, whose large-scale mobilization efforts appear to have resulted in massive turnout among people of color in those cities, experts say.
      “What might have been different is the greater role of on the ground mobilization and voter registration efforts in states like Georgia, and I think that that was the effort that was largely built by Stacey Abrams and others on the ground,” said Jamil Scott, an assistant professor in the government department at Georgetown University.
      Rather than rely on outside political consultants swarming into battleground states, Abrams, who lost to the Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2018, led that charge in Georgia this year, says Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a national network advocating for women of color in politics. There was a 69% increase in voter turnout among women of color in Georgia this year compared to 2016, according to Allison, who cites data She the People analyzed from progressive data firm Catalist.
      “You have a group of voters of Black women who are the most effective organizers on the ground because they are trusted voices and are working in organizations year round. They don’t come in six weeks before and kind of rent out a storefront, they’re actually invested in, long-term, empowering the community through civic and political action,” she said.
      In America, this election year has not played out in a vacuum. Rather, it has been met with – and compounded by – America’s year of reckoning with police brutality and systemic inequality, which has driven even more people to vote.
      Thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths earlier this year as the Black community also shouldered the disproportionate impact of Covid-19. The meeting of those moments spurred political mobilization among Black voters, says Tim Stevens, the CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, a non-profit voting rights organization based in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, where Trump was swiftly defeated last week.
      “The tragedies … made what was already present in the heart of Black people and people of color even more evident and more urgent,” said Stevens.
      Those mobilization efforts were evident as ballots were counted in diverse urban centers in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania where large populations of Black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia helped push Biden towards victory.
      Then there were a number of prominent Black women in leadership roles – like Abrams, Nikema Williams, who took on John Lewis’s congressional seat and is chair of Georgia’s state Democratic party, and Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms – helped fuel mobilization efforts among Black women this election, suggests Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and the chair of the department of Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.
      One organizer in Pennsylvania points to the most prominent: the first Black and south Asian American vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. “We had the same feelings we had when Obama was first elected,”says Brittany Smalls, the Pennsylvania state coordinator for Black Voters Matter. “We just never thought we would see the day that a woman in leadership looks like us.”

      Kamala Harris
      (@KamalaHarris)
      I want to speak directly to the Black women in our country. Thank you. You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy. We could not have done this without you.

      November 9, 2020

      Now, as Americans across the country shift their attention away from the presidential race and to the runoff elections in Georgia, organizers like Mosley say they are keen to build on their success, in an election that could ultimately determine what kind of presidency Joe Biden will have.
      “This is the culmination of years and years and years of work, when other people didn’t think it was possible,” said Mosley. “We know how important the Senate is, and so if we can play a role in getting one – or possibly two seats – to try to shift that balance of power, you need to understand that Black women will do whatever it takes.”
      This piece was published in partnership between the Guardian and The Fuller Project. More

    • 213 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      With Donald Trump gone, Brexit Britain will be very lonely on the world stage | Afua Hirsch

      by

      After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, an American friend compared the nativist populism of the United States with the state of Brexit Britain. “You think it’s bad that Britain voted to leave the EU,” he told me. “America has voted to leave itself.”
      Four years later, things look a little different. Having indeed taken leave of its senses, America has now been rescued – not for the first time – by its citizens of colour. Polling data shows that without minority-ethnic voters, many of whom had to overcome deliberate and systemic attempts to suppress their participation – the nation’s constitutional and political integrity would have endured a further four years of Trump’s wrecking ball.
      Under cover of the past four years of regression, the British government has been running riot. However badly our leaders behaved, though, they knew there was a larger, more powerful democracy behaving even worse. Conservative attacks on the independence of the judiciary, for example, may represent an unprecedented assault on our constitution. But for Trump, lashing out personally at individual judges on Twitter became routine.
      The British government’s relaxed attitude about violating international law has prompted the condemnation of nearly all living former prime ministers. But Trump led the way in tearing up international agreements and withdrawing from multilateral organisations.
      And then there is race. In Britain we have had to endure an equalities minister who suggests anti-racism reading materials are illegal in school, a foreign minister who derided Black Lives Matter as a Game of Thrones spoof, and Boris Johnson himself, as ready to insult black children in Africa as he was the black president in the White House. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris is said to “hate” Johnson for claiming Obama held a grudge against Britain because of his “part-Kenyan” heritage. The prime minister’s comments have not aged well.
      The Kenya reference was not accidental. Much of Johnson’s political strategy rests on foundations of imperial pride and colonial nostalgia. That was compatible with the “special relationship” when the American president was, like him, similarly smitten by an imagined great white past. Lamenting the decline of this relationship has become a national pastime in Britain – traditionally at just such moments as this, when a change of guard in the White House threatens the status quo. What is clear is that, insofar as the special relationship does exist, it’s rooted in “shared cultural values”. This phrase, whenever deployed by Britain, is almost always code for: “We colonised you once, and how well you’ve done from it.”

      But empires, inconveniently, have a habit of striking back. And so the victims of British colonial abuse in Ireland have, through a twist of fate, lent their ancestral memory to the new US president. When Joe Biden visited County Mayo in 2016, he heard how his home town experienced the worst of the potato famine – even by the catastrophic standards of the nation as a whole – the entire population “gone to workhouse, to England, to the grave”.
      Kamala Harris’s heritage gives her more in common with many British people than it does with most Americans. Her grandfather worked for the British colonial government in India, where he strived for independence from the white supremacist ideology of the British empire. The power behind this empire earlier pioneered the enslavement of Africans that led Harris’s father, Donald Harris, to be born in Jamaica.
      Tories pumped with pride from this same history – gloriously bragging in song that “Britons never shall be slaves” – are unlikely to find its seductive power holds much sway within the incoming US administration. The government ignored British ethnic minorities when we offered the truth of our own lineages to counter this propaganda. Ignoring the president and vice-president of America is slightly harder to pull off.
      That leaves Johnson looking particularly fragile and exposed. This week one of his predecessors, John Major – no stranger to strained relations with America when he was in office – warned that “complacency and nostalgia are the route to national decline”. Britain needed a reality check, Major cautioned. “We are no longer an irreplaceable bridge between Europe and America. We are now less relevant to them both.”
      Much of Britain’s decline is structural, set in motion long before Johnson took office. But if you wanted to exacerbate it, you’d struggle to find a more effective path than the one we are currently on. We have never in modern times endured anything quite as extreme as the toxic assault on America’s political culture left behind by Donald Trump. As usual, ours is a poor imitation. And like all cheap fakes, it’s not built to last.
      • Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist More

    • 213 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump has lost the election – yet Trumpland is here to stay | Aditya Chakrabortty

      by

      Perhaps one day Donald Trump will be dragged out of the Oval Office, his tiny fingernails still dug deep into that fat oak desk. But Trumpland, the country that ignored the politicians and the pollsters and the pundits and gave him the White House in 2016, will outlast him; just as it emerged before he even thought of becoming a candidate. And for as long as it is here it will warp politics and destabilise the US.
      I first stumbled upon Trumpland in 2012, a time when it bore no such name and appeared on no maps.
      I was reporting in Pittsburgh that autumn, as Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney while cruising to a second term as president. The big US broadsheets wrote up the Republicans as if they were an endangered species , while thirtysomethings in DC gazed deep into their spreadsheets or West Wing boxsets and foretold permanent Democratic majorities, gaily handed to them by a rainbow coalition of black, Latino and granola-chewing graduate voters.
      Except I kept meeting people who lived in an alternative country. People like Mike Stout and his family. He’d worked for decades in the local steel mills and had been a fiery union leader. Now he spent every spare hour as a reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, carrying a guitar along with memories of standing in 2009 on Washington’s Mall to watch Obama’s inauguration, his breath freezing in the January air as the first black president was sworn in . “It was like a new world had opened up, just for an afternoon,” said his wife, Steffi.
      But it was their far more subdued daughter, Maura, who troubled me. The steelworks of her dad’s day was long gone, so she’d gone to university and then spent two years hunting for a job. Now the 23-year-old was doing the accounts for a hotel, a non-graduate position paying $14 an hour, which Mike recalled as the same rate he’d earned at the steelworks in 1978 – without, of course, three decades of inflation. Among Maura’s year of about 500 graduates, she counted as one of the lucky ones.
      “I don’t think I’m ever going to earn as much as my parents,” she said. “I don’t think my husband and I will ever have the same life as they did.”
      We were in Pennsylvania, often painted as a land of blue-collar aristocracy and true-blue Democrats. But the political economy that had underpinned those ballot-box majorities was as rusted as an abandoned factory. Instead, Maura saw a political system that had failed her and her generation, in which every new day was worse than yesterday. And while the Stouts were leftwing, they had little in common with the party they supported. In their eyes, their home had been gutted of manufacturing and bilked by foreign trade deals, and appeared nowhere on the Clinton/Obama ideological map.

      Sure enough, four years later Pennsylvania became one of the rustbelt states that won Trump the White House.
      Trumpland is not the same as the old Republican heartlands, even if they overlap. What the dealmaker saw more clearly than the Bushes, the Romneys and the McCains was that there was a new electoral coalition to be forged out of downwardly mobile white voters. “The people that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned,” he called them in Ohio in 2016. “I am your voice.”
      And so he completed the great inversion of American politics: he turned the Republicans into a party whose future is tied to Trumpland. Even Trump’s rivals accept that. This summer, Texas senator Ted Cruz said: “The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true. Today’s Republican party are Ohio steelworkers, today’s Republican party are single mums waiting tables…”
      Whatever promises Trump made on the threshold of the White House, once inside he spent four years giving billions in tax cuts to rich people and trying to deprive millions of low-paid Americans of decent healthcare. For the poor whites who put him in power, Trump had nothing to offer apart from racism.
      However grossly used by its leader, Trumpland is more than an imagined community. It has its own society and economics and politics ­– and they barely resemble the rest of the US. The 477 large and densely populated counties won by Biden account for 70% of America’s economy, according to new calculations by the Brookings Institute ; Trump’s base of 2,497 counties amount to just 29% (a further 1% is still to be counted). Brookings describes Trumpland as “whiter, less-educated and … situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many.”
      These people haven’t been left behind so much as cut loose from the US. Between 2010 and 2019, the US created nearly 16m new jobs but only 55,000 of them were suitable for those who left school at 16. Inequality this deep is not just economic, it is social and psychological. It is also lethal.
      Two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, have found that working-age white men and women without degrees are dying of drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide at unprecedented rates . In 2017 alone, they calculated that there were 158,000 of these “deaths of despair” ­– equal to “three fully loaded Boeing 737s falling out of the sky every day for a year”.
      As Case and Deaton point out, African Americans have still harder lives. They die younger, and are less likely to go to college or get a job. Yet over decades their prospects are improving. For poor white Americans, on the other hand, the trends point straight down. The result, according to a new study by Andrew Oswald and former Bank of England rate-setter David Blanchflower, is that middle-aged, white American school leavers are now suffering an epidemic of “extreme mental distress”.
      When you live in a zero-sum economy, in which you always lose while the other guy wins, then you too might subscribe to zero-sum politics – in which the Democrats aren’t just opponents but enemies, and democratic norms are there to be broken. “These people are hurting,” says Blanchflower. “And when you’re hurting you’ll buy what looks like medicine, even if it’s from a snake-oil merchant.”This is where Biden’s kumbaya politics, all his pleas to Americans to join hands and sing, looks laughably hollow. You can’t drain the toxicity of Trumpism without tackling the toxic economics of Trumpland. And for as long as Trumpland exists, it will need a Trump. Even if the 45th president is turfed out, he will carry on issuing edicts and exercising power from the studio set of any TV station that will have him.
      Eight years after meeting Mike Stout, I spoke to him this week. He didn’t have much good news for me. Maura lost her hotel position last year and is now working from home in the pandemic, phoning up people deep in debt and pressing them to repay their loans. His son, Mike, lost his job just a few weeks ago for the second time in five years, and now has no medical insurance while his wife has stage-4 cancer.
      “They’ve been pushed off the shelf straight into the gutter,” he told me. “I don’t see any party out there willing to protect my children’s lives: not Democrat, not Republican.”
      • Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      ‘I need to make sure I’m heard’: the hurdles young Texans overcame to cast their votes

      by

      Isaiah Rendon was certain that he had registered to vote by the deadline. But when he went to the polls in San Marcos, Texas, on election day last week, the 21-year-old was only offered a provisional ballot.
      It was Rendon’s first time voting. He hadn’t been interested in politics before. But this year, amid so much party infighting, he felt the urge to speak up.
      “I need to go ahead and make sure I am heard,” he said, “for what I believe in.”
      Confronted with a faltering economy, systemic racism, the accelerating climate crisis and a global pandemic, young Americans showed up to vote this fall, far exceeding turnout from four years ago. Youth, especially from communities of color, were one of the key constituencies that propelled Joe Biden to victory. And nowhere did they generate more buzz than in Texas, as Democrats aggressively pushed – but ultimately failed – to turn the red stronghold blue.
      During early voting, more than 1.3 million Texans under age 30 helped drive surprisingly high voter participation in a state infamous for chronically low turnout. However, consistent with a long history of voter suppression, young people still got caught in onerous laws and frustrating bureaucracy, even after doing everything by the book.
      “There’s just a lot of confusion on the ground, especially for first time voters, of what is their right, what is the law, and how can they vote,” said Catherine Wicker, a deputy field organizer for Texas Rising and graduate student at Texas State university.
      In Hays county, Wicker’s home base, Texas State dominates the city of San Marcos with a majority-minority student body nearly 38,000 strong. Hays flipped for Biden last week, but not everyone from the area was onboard: San Marcos recently made headlines after a caravan of Trump supporters literally drove a Biden campaign bus out of town. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Can Joe Biden and Kamala Harris unite America after Trump – video explainer

      by

      When Joe Biden formally takes over the presidency in January he will face some of the greatest crises to hit the US in recent history: a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, a devastated economy, a rapidly overheating climate and a deeply fractured nation.
      The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino looks at how Biden and the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, plan to ‘heal’ the country after four years of Trumpism – and the challenges they will face with the prospect of having to navigate these times without a majority in the Senate
      How Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the fight for America’s soul – video More