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      'Don't take Black voters for granted': Milwaukee leaders and activists warn Democrats

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      Black voting power

      Milwaukee

      The pandemic forced the Democratic convention to go virtual, but some feel the party abandons the Black communities that get them elected

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      Black voting power: the fight for change in Milwaukee, one of America’s most segregated cities

      As protesters outside Wauwatosa’s city hall shouted “wake up, wake up”, to energize the crowd, activist Charley Frazier remarked how just miles away, the Democratic national convention (DNC) had kicked off on what was The People’s Revolution’s 81st night of demonstrations. The coalition of organizers are made up of young activists challenging the current political system and trying to force systemic change.
      “This is the Milwaukee they don’t want you to see,” she said. “[It’s] very segregated. You’re not even welcome out [in the suburbs], and when you do travel out there, you’re targeted.”
      More than 50,000 visitors were expected to descend on Brew City – as the largest city in Wisconsin is known – for its convention, but when the pandemic forced Democrats to go virtual, the fallout hit like a shockwave for a host city already reeling from the brunt of Wisconsin’s coronavirus outbreak and the recession that followed.
      An anticipated $200m economic boom instead spiraled into a substantial loss. The pivot also proved to be the final straw for many of the city’s African American residents. The coronavirus shutdown worsened national crises that disproportionately devastated Black Americans across the country, exacerbating racial inequalities in Milwaukee.
      “There’s this old saying from the Black community that ‘when America catches a cold, the Black community catches pneumonia,’” said Reggie Jackson, a columnist with the Milwaukee Independent, and historian with the National Black Holocaust Museum located in the city. More

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      How the South Won the Civil War review: the path from Jim Crow to Donald Trump

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      Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War is not principally about that war. Instead, it is a broad sweep of American history on the theme of the struggle between democracy and oligarchy – between the vision that “all men are created equal” and the frequency with which power has accumulated in the hands of a few, who have then sought to thwart equality.What she terms the “paradox” of the founding – that “the principle of equality depended on inequality”, that democracy relied on the subjugation of others so that those who were considered “equal”, principally white men, could rule, led to this continuing struggle. She draws a line, more or less straight, between “the oligarchic principles of the Confederacy” based on the cotton economy and racial inequality, western oligarchs in agribusiness and mining, and “movement conservatives in the Republican party”.More specifically, she writes that the west was “based on hierarchies”. California was a free state but with racial inequality in its constitution. Racism was rife in the west, from lynchings of Mexicans and “Juan Crow” to killings of Native Americans and migrants who built the transcontinental railroad but were the target of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.There, aided by migration of white southerners, “Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.” This ranged from western Republicans working with southern Democrats on issues like agriculture, in opposition to eastern interests, to shared feelings on race.Does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others?Once Reconstruction ended, and with it black voting in the south, Republicans looked west. Anti-lynching and voting rights legislation lost because of the votes of westerners, and new states aligned for decades more “with the hierarchical structure of the south than with the democratic principles of the civil war Republicans”, thanks to their reliance on extractive industries and agribusiness.For Richardson, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was thus not an electoral strategy but a culmination of a century of history between the south and west, designed to preserve oligarchic government in “a world defined by hierarchies”. Richardson sees Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the reaction against it as “almost an exact replay of Reconstruction”. What she terms the “movement conservative” reaction promoted ideals of individualism – but cemented the power of oligarchies once again.But isn’t America the home of individualism? Richardson agrees, to a point. The images of the yeoman farmer before the civil war and the cowboy afterwards were defining tropes but ultimately only that, as oligarchies sought to maintain power. Indeed, she believes, during Reconstruction, “to oppose Republican policies, Democrats mythologized the cowboy, self-reliant and tough, making his way in the world on his own”, notably ignoring the brutal work required and the fact that about a third of cowboys were people of color.These tropes mattered: “Just as the image of the rising yeoman farmer had helped pave the way for the rise of wealthy southern planters, so the image of the independent rising westerner helped pave the way for the rise of industrialists.” And for Jim and Juan Crow and discrimination against other races and women, which put inequality firmly in American law once again.The flame was never fully extinguished, despite the burdens of inequality on so manyYet ironically, as in the movies, the archetype came to the rescue: “Inequality did not spell the triumph of oligarchy, though, for the simple reason that the emergence of the western individualist as a national archetype re-engaged the paradox at the core of America’s foundation.” In the Depression, “when for many the walls seemed to be closing in, John Wayne’s cowboy turned the American paradox into the American dream.” (Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach marked the emergence of the western antihero as hero.)Indeed, the flame was never fully extinguished despite the burdens of inequality on so many. In Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans fought for equality for black people. The “liberal consensus” during and after the second world war promoted democracy and tolerance. Superman fought racial discrimination.In all it is a fascinating thesis, and Richardson marshals strong support for it in noting everything from personal connections to voting patterns in Congress over decades. She errs slightly at times. John Kennedy, not Ronald Reagan, first said “a rising tide lifts all boats” (it apparently derives from a marketing slogan for New England); she is too harsh on Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms; and William Jennings Bryan – a western populist Democrat who railed against oligarchy even as he did not support racial equality – belongs in the story. More

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      Trump orders crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it 'anti-American'

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      Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.The memo comes as the nation has faced a reckoning this summer over racial injustice in policing and other spheres of American life. Trump has spent much of the summer defending the display of the Confederate battle flag and monuments of civil war rebels from protesters seeking their removal, in what he has called a “culture war” ahead of the 3 November election.Meanwhile, he has rejected comments from Democratic nominee Joe Biden and others that there is “systemic racism” in policing and American culture that must be addressed.Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.Vought’s memo says additional federal guidance on training sessions is forthcoming, maintaining that “the President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States”.“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added. “The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.” More

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      'A political awakening': how south Asians could tilt key US elections

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      This article was published in collaboration with the JuggernautAround 2016, Aamina Ahmed found herself wondering why, for all the talk about getting out to vote, no one had been canvassing in her neighborhood in Canton, Michigan.Canton is a township between Detroit and Ann Arbor with a growing south Asian population. Ahmed, who is Pakistani American and works and volunteers for several civic engagement organizations, started to speak up about the absence of activity at local candidate forums. Intrigued, a worker at a voter outreach organization went back to their colleagues to inquire if they had visited these neighborhoods. It turned out that the field workers had skipped visiting voters with names they felt they couldn’t pronounce.“They were viewing it as, ‘Well, we don’t want to offend the person by mispronouncing their name versus you are actually excluding them from the opportunity to participate in democracy,” Ahmed said.Such is the kind of story that turns up when probing why south Asian Americans, who historically have high voter turnout rates and lean toward the Democratic party, might not cast their vote. Coupled with voter suppression tactics and difficulty understanding the complex US political process, targeted outreach has lagged, and some south Asians face issues related to language access and gender inclusion. These factors are hindering a burgeoning American political awakening, according to more than a dozen community organizers, researchers and political campaigners.But it would be a mistake to overlook the south Asian community’s political significance. Growing numbers among multiple south Asian communities underscore their strength within the Asian American demographic, the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the US electorate.The south Asian American population – those who trace their ancestry to the southern region of Asia – grew by 43% from 2011 to 5.7 million people in 2018, according to the American Community Survey, while the total US population grew by only 4.7% during that same time period. And about 2 million Indian Americans, the second largest immigrant group in the country, are eligible to vote in the US, according to Devesh Kapur, professor of south Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America. More

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      Anohni on her new track R.N.C. 2020: 'It's me, screaming in the past, for the present'

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      I watched the Republican National Convention last week. It’s becoming harder to put into words the dread that many of us feel.What’s really happening? Toxic levels of corruption and collusion are devouring the US. Christian extremists want to turn the country into a religious state straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.After bombarding us with media campaigns pressuring us not to wear masks in March and April, the US now accounts for 22% of all Covid-19 deaths worldwide. I personally know three New Yorkers who died in April, I believe as a result of this official guidance.Trump has stoked racist police violence in the US to even more atrocious heights. Scaring voters with fake tales of impending anarchy and “dark shadows”, he then promises that if re-elected he will crush BLM protesters and “restore law and order”. Is he getting this stuff from Steve Bannon or Mein Kampf? Probably both.Trump is hosting federal executions in the countdown to the election as another prong of his racist, fake “law and order” platform. Last Thursday, the US government defied Navajo tribal sovereignty and executed Lezmond Mitchell, injecting him with a massive quantity of pentobarbital in a death chamber in Indiana.Behind this curtain of carefully orchestrated chaos, the network of corporate lobbyists that form the core of the GOP pillage the US Treasury and dismantle scores of environmental regulations, driving the country and the world even more hopelessly into global boiling and mass extinction.Australian-born Rupert Murdoch blares his obscene propaganda into American homes, hypnotising viewers with lies, rage and fear-mongering. Meanwhile, 40,000 square miles of Australian wilderness burned last summer, killing over a billion animals. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef has collapsed in the last five years due to rapidly increasing ocean temperatures. The same kinds of awful, permanent losses are engulfing nature on every continent.For many people, economic suffering looms while Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Apple and others expand their global footprints, sucking dry local economies. Some of the CEOs pour the wealth of the world into colonial space programs. They fantasise that they might finally shed their dependence upon Mother Earth and become the heroic creators and patent-holders of life on Mars.Unlike the Koch brothers, who paid for the malevolent spread of climate change denial, today’s tech billionaires scent themselves with a pheromone of liberal philanthropy while monetising the dismantling of checks and balances that once helped to protect us. They take meetings with Trump, provide him with the viral platforms he needs to retain the presidency, advertise themselves as having done the opposite, and then hedge their bets in private. Huge swaths of California’s ancient redwood forests continue to burn around the perimeter of Silicon Valley.Incessant, nihilistic assaults on truth, empathy and the biosphere ensure that life on earth will become much, much worse.On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump’s team described him as the first presidential candidate since Harry Truman with “the guts” to “drop the bomb”. Trump stood there, grinning with pride, and a wave of nausea spread through me. I had the same feeling a few months ago, when I heard Trump utter the words “the Chinese virus”.What waits for us on the other side of this is a world undone by endless cataclysm and aching with senseless loss.The sound of this track, RNC 2020, is pretty rough. The loop is from a concert I did at a club in New York City in my early 20s. So that’s me screaming in the past … for the present.Can you visualize a different path forward? We all have to focus on this now, with everything we’ve got. More

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      Trump is trying to pin Kenosha on Biden – but he created the chaos and violence | Richard Wolffe

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      Donald Trump took a trip to a place called Biden’s America on Tuesday. It is a strange land where the president of the United States is a helpless guest, a doomed corner of his own country that is somehow ruled by a former vice president.It is a topsy-turvy place, this Biden’s America. Occasionally, the president can regain his magical ruling powers by summoning assorted minions in uniforms and incanting a spell with his thumbs to tweet the words LAW AND ORDER.But mostly our president is lawless and disorderly, wandering through a country that has been laid low by a virus from China, a candidate from Delaware, and a bunch of friendly questions from Fox News.It’s weird that the Republican party finds it so hard to see homegrown terrorists in places like KenoshaHe is as befuddled as anyone on Facebook about what the hell is going on around him. But rather than trying to fix this dysfunctional version of the land of the free, he prefers to scare the bejesus out of white voters so they might forget this historic pandemic and recession.To steady his wobbly step, Trump leaned on two men who best represent what he understands by “law and order”. Sitting on one side of our impotent leader was Chad Wolf, the illegally appointed acting secretary of homeland security, who likes to send unidentified paramilitaries to assault American citizens but insists that they are not “the Gestapo, storm troopers or thugs”.Sitting on the other side was Bill Barr, the totally impartial attorney general – who called Black Lives Matter protesters “essentially Bolsheviks” – driven by some kind of religious lust for power. Heaven knows that politics and religion are the kind of bedfellows this president would never lust for.Together, these three outlaws descended on a small outer suburb of Milwaukee and Chicago home to fewer than 100,000 souls, where the Bolsheviks have decided to stage a pivotal uprising against everything good.The facts can be tricky here on the mostly white shores of Lake Michigan, but one thing is clear: Trump cannot feel your pain in Biden’s America.His audience at what this White House called “a community safety roundtable” included a pointless smattering of local suffering – mere pimples on the face of a horrified nation.There were the owners of an office furniture store. “You got hit pretty hard. That’s all right,” said our discomforter-in-chief. “It’s going to get rebuilt.”There was the owner of a candle store. “That’s a very fancy name you have there,” said the man trying to scare white America to its core. “But I’ll bet it was beautiful. Is it – are you going to rebuild? Will you be rebuilding?”“We were not destroyed, very fortunately,” said the candle lady.“Well, we’ll be giving you some help,” Trump said anyway.You never know, the Bolsheviks might come tomorrow.Then there was the camera store guy, who has been in business for 109 years, according to Trump.“You’re insured, right,” he asked. Yes, said the camera guy. “And so they’re helping, and they’re being responsible?” Why yes, said the store owner.So much suffering caused by the strange revolutionary forces of Biden’s America, gathering on the shores of a great lake for no great reason.“To stop the political violence, we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence,” said our explainer-in-chief. “Reckless, far-left politicians continue to push the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist. They’ll throw out any word that comes to them.”It’s almost as if these politicians throw out words like bullets fired into the back of a father climbing into his car where his three children were waiting for him.You see, in Trump’s version of Biden’s America, violence springs like Athena from the head of Joe Biden, or AOC, or Lenin. It has no relationship to Jacob Blake, who was not named by Trump or his sidekicks at their community safety roundtable. It has nothing to do George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery.It doesn’t even have anything to do with Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with killing two protesters and injuring another in Kenosha, as part of a self-styled white militia that arrived from out of state. Somehow the town’s non-racist law enforcement turned a blind eye to Rittenhouse, walking the streets with his AR-15-style assault rifle, and his friends even after the shootings.Some types of radical ideology are good, and some are bad. The original Bolsheviks understood that distinction pretty well.There are many strange things that happen in Biden’s America. As Trump told Laura Ingraham of Fox News on Monday, there were people wearing black clothes on “a plane from a certain city this weekend” who were headed to the Republican convention that just ended. “A lot of people were on the plane to do big damage,” said the man tasked with protecting the constitution, as well as a nation of confused citizens.As if that isn’t bad enough, there are police who shoot unarmed civilians because they can’t take the pressure. It’s a bit like playing golf, Trump told the audibly horrified – but otherwise entirely supportive – Fox News interviewer.“You know, a choker, they choke,” Trump explained, somehow managing to dehumanize both the shooting victim and the police officer who pulled the trigger. “Shooting the guy in the back many times. Couldn’t you have done something different? … But they choke. Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot.”It’s weird enough that a Republican party that campaigned for so long on the war on terrorism finds it so hard to see homegrown terrorists in places like Kenosha. It’s weirder still that the party now blindly follows a man who likens shooting someone in the back to missing a putt.But the weirdest thing in Biden’s America is that Donald Trump can only echo Joe Biden. One of them said this week, “I know most cops are good and decent people. I know the risk they take every day with their lives.” The other said: “The vast and overwhelming majority of police officers are honorable, courageous, and devoted public servants.” Which candidate hates law enforcement again?The last Republican president to promise to keep us safe was George W Bush, running for re-election after 9/11. But every few days in Trump’s America, we lose more Americans to the rampant pandemic than to the terrorist attacks that traumatized this nation 19 years ago.That’s not just weird. It’s the symptom of a political sickness inflicted by three and a half years of a lawless and lying president. This is Trump’s America, and we just vote in it.• Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist More