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    Trump will not stop until every American relic reflects his imaginary world view | Kellie Carter Jackson

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    Last week, Donald Trump issued another executive order, this one aimed directly at the Smithsonian Institution, and called for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. He contended that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and that it advocates “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. Specifically, the order targeted American history and art that focused on stories of race and racism.Being responsible for the distillation of the nation’s narrative is no small thing. The Smithsonian oversees 21 museums, libraries, research centers and the National zoo. Every year millions of people visit various sites that are free to the public. The collection of museums represents the pinnacle of public history and the story America tells the world about itself.But Trump’s executive order is not about restoring the truth. Quite the opposite. It creates false narratives and myths that promote the supremacy of whiteness. This executive order has the potential for harm because erasure is violence; it robs the public of the truth. Because there is no way to explain slavery and segregation as not “inherently harmful and oppressive”, Trump would rather not explain it at all.One of the most popular Smithsonian sites is the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), affectionately known by Black people as the “Blacksonian”. The museum was conceived of as early as 1915 by Black veterans who fought during the civil war and wanted recognition for their service and valor. These soldiers were not only left out of national memorials and ceremonies, but also faced tremendous discrimination often culminating in deadly violence when they returned home. They wanted a space and memorial that would honor their achievements and pivotal contributions.It was impossible to separate the story of Black military service and valor from racial discrimination and violence. Similarly, one cannot separate out the “good” from the “bad” in creating an honest narrative about the United States. Accordingly, the NMAAHC holds a special place in America, one where the complexity of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are recognized as founding fathers and slaveholders. There is no abolitionist movement without slavery. There is no suffrage movement without women’s denial. There is no civil rights movement without racism and oppression. These are the facts. Museums exist to collect, preserve and exhibit the past as it happened. Archivists and curators care deeply about their mission to be accurate and authentic.An America that will re-erect statues and rename military bases after Confederate generals, while simultaneously stripping the evidence of race and racism from the Smithsonian history museums isn’t correcting the historical record. That nation is whitewashing the political record to legitimize the actions of those in power. Slavery is a fact. Jim Crow is a fact. Racist and exclusionary immigration laws are a fact. Japanese internment is a fact. Native American removal and extermination is a fact. Mexican and Mexican American expulsion is a fact. Removing them from the sight of the public doesn’t change the facts, it only changes one’s perspective on and relation to them politically.Museums offer cautionary tales, hard lessons about where the country has been and where we hope to never be again. They hold a great deal of public trust, perhaps more than schools, media, newspapers or even films. Patrons get to experience first hand documents, letters, original photographs and artefacts. Museums are public time capsules of where we have been. I will never forget seeing Emmett Till’s casket, Harriet Tubman’s shawl, Nat Turner’s Bible or an early flag of the First Republic of Haiti. These artefacts do more than defy the odds by still existing; they tell a powerful story about who people were during the times that they lived. Museums should not be party to culture wars. Our history is a collective memory whether Trump likes it or not.A nation that cannot reckon with its past, triumph and tragedy, is ultimately a weaker one; puffed up with its own delusions of grandeur. There is more power in the truth than there is in a lie. The efforts in the last 50 years to give the powerless a place politically, academically and legally is not from a revisionist view of American history, but rather a move to make all of America the democratic nation it claims to be.Moreover, key features of the NMAAHC reflect optimism, spirituality and joy because anti-Blackness is not the totality of the Black experience. The museum showcases Black food pathways, artistry, music, sports, film, ingenuity and technological advancements. It is a celebration of achievement despite the barriers and challenges racism presents. But even if museums solely focused on slavery, they still deserve a right to exist. America has been a land with enslaved people longer than it has been a county without slavery.Are museums contested spaces? Absolutely. No one space can include everything and offer an exhaustive history of a country, person or movement. But what is included or not included is painstakingly considered. Museums are bipartisan sites where everyone can grapple with the good, bad and the ugliness of nation making. But Trump will not stop until every American relic reflects his imaginary world view, a place where few can see their lived experiences on full display. More

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      As Trump rewrites even America’s history, institutions have two choices – submit or find ways to resist | Charlotte Higgins

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      It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the “corrosive ideology” that has fostered a “sense of national shame”. The institution has, reads the order, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum’s board. He is charged by Trump to “prohibit expenditure” on programmes that “divide Americans based on race”. He is to remove “improper ideology”. The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. George Orwell lived too soon.The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump’s insertion of himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center was a one-off, attracting the president’s ire for personal reasons, were deluding themselves about the scale of Trump’s ideological ambition. Picked out for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and an exhibition titled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum.I visited the Museum of African American History for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It is a vast book of a museum, heavy with text. It was full, when I visited, of mostly Black families seeking out an encounter with a narrative that has long been a footnote to, or erased completely from, the main national story. You could spend days absorbing the web of stories that the museum offers, beginning in its basements with the transatlantic slave trade, where one of the most moving objects is, unexpectedly and profoundly, a piece of iron ballast that took the place of a human body after a ship’s cargo of enslaved people had been disgorged on the triangular route between Africa, the Americas and Europe. The whole strikes a fascinating balance between an unflinching gaze on systems of oppression, and a sense of Black achievement and cultural richness that has nevertheless effloresced.Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the museum, gave a talk at the House of Lords in 2011 about the institution, which was still in the planning, and would open five years later. I can still recall how moving it was to hear about the difficulties of making a museum – a place where a story is told through objects – from communities traditionally poor in material things. The institution had put out a call for loans and donations. Precious, carefully treasured objects – a bonnet embroidered by someone’s enslaved grandmother, for example – were arriving into the new collection.Fast forward to the present, and Bunch is in charge of the entire Smithsonian Institution. This is a man who believes, as he told Queen’s University Belfast last year, that history can be used to “understand the tensions that have divided us. And those tensions are really where the learning is where the growth is, where the opportunities to transform are.” That compassionate vision of the past, as a means through which the citizens of the present can better understand each other, is completely opposed to the monolithically triumphalist spirit of Trump’s executive order, in which history is reduced to “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness”. How much easier it is, to sink into this pillowy, comforting notion of glorious progress than to grapple with the kind of knotty, often upsetting and confronting history that the Museum of African American History offers its visitors. But it makes me wonder: can the museum survive this government?I visited, too, the American Art Museum, whose show The Shape of Power is targeted in the executive order as emblematic of the Smithsonian’s decline into “divisive, race-centered ideology”. The exhibition, which was years in the careful making, points out what is surely obvious, once it has been given a moment’s thought: that race is not an inherent and prepolitical category, but rather a constructed set of ideologies that served (and still serve) a set of economic and political interests. (One way to tell that race is a socially constructed category, in fact, is by looking to the Greeks and the Romans – the people who established, in the minds of many on the US right, “western civilisation”. They were xenophobic in their own way, and enslavement was a fact of their societies. But as is obvious from their literature, whiteness and Blackness were for them simply not operative categories.) The exhibition is an eye- and mind-opening look at how race ideology has translated into and been reinforced, or deconstructed, by sculpture – that peculiarly lifelike and thus “truthful”-seeming artform.The catalogue quotes Toni Morrison, who once wrote that “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.” Such intellectual adventuring is not what is wanted by the White House now. Trump’s world is more like Viktor Orbán’s, under whose government the school history curriculum has been rewritten to glorify Hungary, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, where the novelist Elif Shafak, as she recalled in a Guardian Live event last week, was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”, her lawyer obliged to defend in court the views of her fictional characters. The Smithsonian and all who work there have an unenviable choice, one that has already been put before other great or formerly great institutions such as Columbia University: to comply with Trump’s dark demands; or to find ways to defy them.

      Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer More

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      Nikki Haley’s comment on the US civil war was no gaffe | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Nikki Haley’s feigning of staggering ignorance about the cause of the US civil war unintentionally revealed her quandary in the Republican party. It was not a gaffe. Though it was a stumble, it was not a mistake, but a message she has delivered for years and that has served her well until now. Her carefully crafted and closely memorized garble was a deracinated version of an old lie, which she had used before to attempt to mollify hostile camps in order to skid by. Some in the past praised her evasive formula as governor of South Carolina as her finest moment. It lifted her star. Yet one simple question instantly produced panicky rapid eye movements that are the telltale sign of a person desperately cornered, followed by an unstoppable stream of blather that she hoped would make it all evaporate into a meaningless ether but instead this time slid her into an abyss. Her performance, the most memorable of her entire career, was so devastating that even Ron DeSantis, the paragon of political aphasia, in the most cogent remark of his campaign, indeed his life, commented: “Yikes.” Nikki Haley turned Ron DeSantis woke.“What was the cause of the United States civil war?” a man asked Haley at a campaign town hall in North Conway, New Hampshire. She reacted as if she were being physically threatened. Haley immediately turned her back to the questioner, breathed fast and heavy into the microphone, and walked quickly away. When she swiveled to face the crowd, she did not speak at first. Gaining her composure, she replied with an accusatory edge: “Well, don’t come with an easy question.”Of course, the answer is an easy one for any eighth grader. But for Haley it went to the molten core of the history and politics of South Carolina, where she had been governor, to the southern strategy that realigned the Republican party, and to its hard crystallization in Trump’s party. She retreated as if struck, not because she didn’t know the obvious answer, but because she knows that it is more fraught than it has been in decades.“I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley began haltingly. Then she stopped.“What do you think the cause of the civil war was?” she asked her questioner. He replied that he was not running for president and wished to hear her thoughts. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley continued, and continued, and continued. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”She looked to her questioner in the hope that her flood of verbosity had overwhelmed him. “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” he said. She shot back with her own question, as if in a spat: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” She wanted the townsman to answer for her. “You’ve answered my question, thank you,” he said. With that, he had won his point. Haley shifted again, and said: “Next question.”Haley’s whole possibility of success in her contest with Trump depends upon winning New Hampshire, and within that open primary, unlike the closed primaries that follow it, she is relying on drawing independent voters. Her recoil from the question about the civil war was an ingrained instinct. She keeps trying to pass the southern test.Her language in New Hampshire was the same as the rhetoric she honed in South Carolina. The Wall Street Journal editorially praised her in 2010 for an interview she gave to a neo-Confederate group, the Palmetto Patriots. “‘You had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition, and I think you had another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change,’ she said. She did not use the word ‘slavery’ but hinted at it, saying that ‘everyone is supposed to be free.’” The Journal noted approvingly: “She pledged to retain a political compromise that gave the Confederate flag a place of prominence in front of the State House, a position that puts her within the mainstream among GOP leaders in the state.”Haley’s answer was an attempt to repeat her balancing act in the birthplace of secession, offering ‘lost cause lite’. Her rationale was a muffled echo of that of Confederate leaders justifying secession. Jefferson Davis, in his speech resigning from the Senate on 9 January 1861, before assuming the Confederate presidency, appealed to “the principles upon which our Government was founded”, and his “high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited”. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice-president and framer of the Confederate constitution, in his speech of 21 March 1861 proclaiming slavery as its “cornerstone”, stated that it “secures all our ancient rights, franchises, and liberties”. The Confederates consistently described opposition to their insurrection as “coercion”, to which Lincoln gave one of his many answers on 18 April 1864: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.”It may not have occurred to Haley that there are no Confederate monuments in New Hampshire. There are nearly 100 in the state to the Union cause. One-tenth of the population of New Hampshire at the time served in the Union army: 32,750 men, of whom nearly 5,000 died, 130 in Confederate prisons. The fifth New Hampshire volunteer infantry had the highest casualty rate of any Union regiment. About 900 soldiers from New Hampshire fought at Gettysburg, suffering 368 casualties, many of whom are buried at the cemetery there, where Lincoln delivered his address explaining their sacrifice for a “government of, by and for the people”. The monument to the fifth New Hampshire is one of five monuments to Granite state units at the Gettysburg battlefield.If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction, and the history that both preceded and followed it, which has been apparent in her efforts to soften and cover it up.Surely, when she entered her office as governor in the state capitol of South Carolina in Columbia, Haley recognized the larger-than-life brass statue of John C Calhoun, ideologue of the master class and leader of nullification, who declared slavery to be a “positive good”, standing in the middle of the rotunda. The Confederate battle flag that flew above the capitol was raised by an act of the legislature in 1961 as a protest of defiance against civil rights and waved there when she was elected governor.On 17 June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi, murdered nine Black members of the Bible study group of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, intending to ignite a race war. In the aftermath, after a contentious debate in the legislature, the Confederate flag was removed from the capitol. Haley favored its lowering. In 2020, another John C Calhoun statue, which had stood on a pedestal 115ft above central Charleston for 120 years, was removed.Since the controversy over the Confederate flag, Haley has defended neo-Confederates who see it as a symbol of their “heritage” while trying to separate it from Dylann Roof. “For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble – traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,” she stated as governor. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and loser.”In a Washington Post op-ed, she wrote that the flag was “a symbol of slavery, discrimination, and hate for many people”. But, she added: “Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mistaken. They must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist. The tragedy of all of this is that it makes compromise far less possible.” In New Hampshire, she gave a blander argument, forgetting the false equivalence between those against slavery and those for “heritage”.Lee Atwater, the most adept Republican political consultant to emerge from the south in his generation, did not try to parse his self-justifications. He was also a voracious reader of books on the civil war, especially James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Atwater, of course, knew the cause was slavery. In the mid-1980s, when I was a reporter for the Washington Post, I had long discussions with him on the civil war. He was the one who gave me a tour of the capitol in Columbia and showed me the Calhoun statue.Atwater began as a protege of Strom Thurmond, who invented the modern southern strategy. In 1948, Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, ran for president as a segregationist on the Dixiecrat party ticket. Elected to the Senate, he switched parties to become a Republican. His support for Richard Nixon in winning the Republican nomination at the convention in 1968 was crucial. Thurmond brought in Atwater to run his 1976 re-election campaign, beginning Atwater’s ascent. In 1984, working for the Reagan re-election campaign, when I first met him, he drew a chart in my reporter’s notebook to diagram the populist-establishment dichotomy along party lines.Race was always the seam that Atwater mined. In 1988, as the campaign director for George HW Bush, he was behind the exploitation of Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of murder in Massachusetts, who on a weekend furlough program raped a white woman. The program had been instituted under a Republican governor, but Horton had been released while the governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic opponent, had been in office. Atwater publicly promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate”.Atwater explained in 1991 the evolution of race as a political weapon in the southern strategy. “Y’all don’t quote me on this,” he said. “You start out in 1954 by saying: ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”That same year, Atwater died of brain cancer, but not before, seeking redemption, he issued a deathbed apology to Dukakis for his “naked cruelty”.Haley came on the South Carolina scene post-Thurmond and post-Atwater, certainly aware of those who had turned the state Republican in the southern strategy. Her lowering of the Confederate flag has been her chief credential of moderation. Then Trump came down the escalator. Atwater was the partner in the consulting firm with Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, who unlike Atwater never has had any use for apologies.Posed a question about the civil war, Haley tried to repeat her old balancing act, but she lost her equilibrium. Even if she had not been stunned and was instead fluent, she could not bridge the gap in the party of Trump with ‘lost cause lite’. Scrambling belatedly to say the questioner was “a Democratic plant” and that the civil war was about slavery after all did not solve her problem. Trump has now dispensed with the code words and symbols of the southern strategy. He has gone to a darker place, railing about “vermin” and “poisoning of the blood”.The unexpected incident showed Haley to be slight, frightened and cowardly. Her deeper problem is that she is a slave to her party.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Nikki Haley declines to say slavery was cause of US civil war

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      Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declined to specify that slavery was a cause of the civil war on Wednesday, wading into an area of history that continues to reverberate and in some ways define US politics nearly 160 years after it concluded.Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, where the first shots of the north-south conflict were fired by Confederate soldiers in April 1861, was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the war but didn’t mention slavery in her response.Instead, Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “basically how the government was going to run” and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do”.The questioner said they were astonished she did not mention slavery.“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And we will always stand by the fact that I think the government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people,” said Hayley at a town hall event in Berlin, New Hampshire.“It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom.”The Republican presidential candidate, who served as US ambassador to the UN under the Trump administration, then turned the question back to the man who had asked it.The unnamed questioner replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer. Haley went into an expanded explanation about the role of government, individual freedom and capitalism.“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” the questioner responded, prompting a retort from Haley.“What do you want me to say about slavery?” she asked.On Thursday, amid wide reporting of her response and in apparent damage limitation mode, Haley said in a radio interview: “Of course the civil war was about slavery.”According to the Washington Post, Haley told The Pulse of NH radio show: “I want to nip it in the bud. Yes, we know the Civil War was about slavery. But more than that, what’s the lesson in all this?“That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”Wednesday’s exchange comes less than a month before the New Hampshire primaries on 23 January. Recent polling has placed Haley in second place to Donald Trump among Republican voters in the state.The Biden campaign later posted a clip of the question on the X social media platform and text saying: “It was about slavery.”After Wednesday’s town hall meeting, Christale Spain – elected this year as the first Black woman to chair South Carolina’s Democratic party – said Haley’s response was “vile, but unsurprising”.“The same person who refused to take down the Confederate Flag until the tragedy in Charleston, and tried to justify a Confederate History Month,” Spain said in a post on X. “She’s just as MAGA as Trump,” Spain added, referring to Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJaime Harrison, current chair of the Democratic National Committee and South Carolina’s party chair during part of Haley’s tenure as governor, said her response was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor”.“Same person who said the confederate flag was about tradition & heritage and as a minority woman she was the right person to defend keeping it on state house grounds,” Harrison posted Wednesday night on X. “Some may have forgotten but I haven’t. Time to take off the rose colored Nikki Haley glasses folks.”A poll last week placed Haley within four points of the former president, though the poll was conducted across a small number of people and its results have not been replicated in other surveys that give Trump a commanding lead.Haley has frequently said during her campaign that she would compete in the first three states before returning “to the sweet state of South Carolina, and we’ll finish it”.Haley’s campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment on her response. The campaign of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, another of Haley‘s GOP foes, recirculated video of the exchange on social media, adding the comment: “Yikes.”Issues surrounding the origins of the civil war and its heritage are still much of the fabric of Haley’s home state, and she has been pressed on the war’s origins before.As she ran for governor in 2010, Haley, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as the Palmetto Patriots, described the war as between two disparate sides fighting for “tradition” and “change” and said the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist”.During that same campaign, she dismissed the need for the flag to come down from the statehouse grounds, portraying her Democratic rival’s push for its removal as a desperate political stunt.Five years later, Haley urged lawmakers to remove the flag from its perch near a Confederate soldier monument after a mass shooting in which a white gunman killed eight Black church members who were attending Bible study. At the time, Haley said the flag had been “hijacked” by the shooter from those who saw it as symbolizing “sacrifice and heritage.”.South Carolina’s ordinance of secession – the 1860 proclamation by the state government outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union – mentions slavery in its opening sentence and points to the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as a reason for the state removing itself from the Union.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘We were on the brink of an uncomfortable conversation’

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘We were on the brink of an uncomfortable conversation’They are both Democrats, but what subjects – from Ukraine to defunding the police – would leave them at odds?Jordan, 30, Providence, Rhode IslandOccupation Works at the progressive Jewish Liberation Fund, which aims to make Jewish philanthropy more effective. Captain of the US cross-country running championship teamVoting Record Progressive Democratic – about “as far left as you can go, but stopping short of radical or revolution”Amuse bouche Regularly meets up with a couple of Japanese housewives to practise his JapaneseJudith, 65, Branford, ConnecticutOccupation Retired professor of contemporary literature at Yale. PoetVoting record DemocratAmuse bouche Designs pocket parks in her home townFor starters Jordan I had duck confit, lobster pasta, chocolate cake, chamomile tea. We found a lot of common ground on teaching more about slavery in schools. Judith thinks we should focus on how humans have been cruel to each other over time, but for me it’s more important to focus on the history in America and how that helps us understand the world we live in now. In a lot of places slavery wasn’t so racially codified as it was here.Judith I had nougat de foie gras, bass, Grand Marnier souffle for dessert. It was delicious. He was more focused on contemporary discussions of the American experience that I was. The longer, worldwide historical context was more important to me.Jordan It’s important to teach about chattel slavery. I’m not saying it was worse for us than, say, the Japanese enslaving Koreans, but the racial codification of slavery in America still affects what our world looks like and the narratives that equate people of a certain race to negative habits and stereotypes.The big beef Judith Jordan believes we should take money from the police and give it to other types of social workers to help deal with crime. I don’t. If you want a society based in law that has arisen out of constitutional democracy, you need some way of enforcing the law. The combination of underfunding and lack of respect for the law has exacerbated tendencies we don’t like in the police.Jordan It doesn’t feel like lack of resources is the issue. I’m from St Louis. Look at Ferguson. Look at Milwaukee. The police that killed Tyre Nichols in Memphis were part of one of these highly trained units. The police should be in a public safety department so they aren’t self-supervised.Judith We should increase police funding, but it should be based on more stringent training and education, to make it a profession with salaries to match. I would have national regulation of local police. The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black, so there’s something else going on. Those officers were totally unqualified for a job that puts the power of life and death in their hands. That’s not a racial issue.Jordan We were on the brink of an uncomfortable conversation. Judith was saying we live in a violent society and there are cultural differences between groups. Judith grew up in a more working-class background; mine is more bourgeois. But I don’t think she experienced a reckoning of concentrated poverty and trauma, and how that affects and drives people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSharing plateJudith My grandparents fled Ukraine during the pogroms. We need to look at Ukraine as fighting for the ideals we have now and give them support.Jordan It’s complicated. I don’t think we should be diverting funds, and Russia is clearly a bad actor. But I find the lack of dissent a little surprising. The left-wing progressive space is generally anti-war, so we should be thinking about this.For aftersJudith We got into some interesting things, like do you want a national police force so you don’t have these little islands of police where the culture is leaning toward violence? That makes me uncomfortable because wherever there is a national police force, there is a potential for danger.Jordan Whatever our public safety force looks like, it shouldn’t be the free-for-all it is now. As Jewish people, we agreed a national public force could be a scary thing. It doesn’t feel like police forces have a lack of resources. I don’t qualify as a police abolitionist but I have serious questions about police departments and what they look like right now.TakeawaysJordan Judith reminded me of my grandma, which I loved. But I disagreed with this idea of cultural differences being one of the causes of crime.Judith Jordan is a very delightful person. These questions are complex, and we need more context and nuance. We’re always focused on the minute-to-minute catastrophe. Additional reporting: Kitty Drake Jordan and Judith ate at Union League Cafe, New Haven, Connecticut. Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take partTopicsLife and styleDining across the divide US specialSocial trendsUS politicsUS policingDemocratsSlaveryfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘She tried to educate me on why AR-15s aren’t really military-style weapons’

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      Dining across the divide US special: ‘She tried to educate me on why AR-15s aren’t really military-style weapons’ One is anti-abortion and pro-guns. The other is pro-choice and thinks ‘war tools’ shouldn’t be in the hands of the public. Could they agree to disagree?Heidi, 62, Price, UtahOccupation Retired school teacherVoting record Usually DemocratAmuse bouche Heidi is an enthusiastic archaeologist and anthropologist. “We can learn a lot about how to use the land and protect it,” she saysJanalee, 59, South Jordan, UtahOccupation Campaigner for God, guns and urban green spaceVoting record Has previously voted Democrat or Independent. Now straight-ticket RepublicanAmuse bouche Janalee’s grandfather, Jesse, had five wives and 44 children. She has 80,000 cousins, she says, “like a multilevel marketing scheme”For startersJanalee We shared an appetizer of loaded rock chips, then I had an omelet with vegetables, bacon and sausage. I was worried we were going to fight. I told Heidi I lost my best friend over Donald Trump, but she wasn’t mean to me about supporting him. It never felt confrontational. We weren’t representing corporations; we were there as grandmothers who care.Heidi I had a Reuben sandwich and fries. Janalee told me she’s a Trump person. I said that’s OK. She said something about a stolen election. I thought, “Oh good grief.” I don’t think the election was stolen. A lot of people like Trump because of his personality, but that’s the reason I don’t like him.The big beefHeidi Janalee tried to educate me on why AR-15s aren’t really military-style weapons. I don’t have a problem with handguns, shotguns and rifles, but these new fancy guns – the ARs, the Uzis that became a problem in 90s – should not be in the hands of the public. It’s a war tool and we just don’t need it. I said no to guns in the classroom, absolutely not.Janalee I prefer to talk about people violence not gun violence. A gun doesn’t do anything – it can just sit on a table fully loaded for 1,000 years. An AR-15 isn’t a military weapon. We have a constitutional right to own them. We did agree that schools should have some kind of sign, maybe like: “Warning to criminals: we protect our children”. We agreed that the news media is irresponsible in the way they report stories about guns.Heidi I agree that some news channels only focus on the group that watches them. That’s true on the left and right. They fearmonger and rile people up.Sharing plateskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJanalee Abortion was the subject that scared us both the most. She said women should be able to get an abortion. So I said: “What’s your understanding of the supreme court ruling?” She said: “To turn it back to the states.” I said: “Yes, it did.” Heidi asked if I could bend on abortion. She said: “Maybe we could agree on 10 weeks?” I said: “OK, maybe we can agree on 10 weeks, but the methods used to kill babies are still barbaric.”Heidi Janalee is totally against abortion. I think every women should have the right to make that decision, and there should be a federal right to abortion up to 10 weeks to ensure the safety of the woman. Most women know they’re pregnant by eight weeks. If you go beyond that, then you have to decide to keep the baby or give it up for adoption. There needs to be more support for women to make that decision privately.For aftersJanalee Heidi is a teacher so I listened and learned a lot from her about how slavery is taught in schools. We learned about it in elementary school. Heidi said high school students probably need a refresher course. I remembered that in school we created a slave cell as a classroom exercise. Someone would be the enslaver and someone the slave. It was really powerful. I said: “Why don’t we do role play about the civil war? One side fights to keep slavery, and the other to end it.” Because America ended slavery. It’s not the evil empire. But I’m sure slavery still exists, like in China.Heidi We have to learn about slavery and other bad things that happened in this country, so we don’t repeat them. Janalee said: “Well, what about other countries?” I said that can be done in a world history class. I just stressed: teach the facts. I want students to think on their own. But we shouldn’t be doing slavery role play.TakeawaysHeidi We live in a conservative state, but we’re pretty mellow about it. People have different opinions, but we’re not going to get in your face about it. We respected each other’s opinions and considered each other’s proposals. Sometimes you have to give a little to get what you want.Janalee Heidi was delightful. We agreed that we need to come together as Americans and stop being divided. We felt like some kind of power is trying to separate us and keep us fighting. We wondered, why is this happening? Additional reporting: Kitty Drake Heidi and Janalee ate at Balance Rock Eatery & Pub in Helper, Utah.Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take partTopicsLife and styleDining across the divide US specialSocial trendsUS politicsAbortionWomenSlaveryfeaturesReuse this content More

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      US House votes to remove bust of judge who wrote Dred Scott decision defending slavery

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      US House votes to remove bust of judge who wrote Dred Scott decision defending slaverySupreme court justice Roger Taney wrote 1857 decision justifying slavery, widely regarded as one of worst rulings in history The US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to remove from the Capitol a bust of Roger Taney, the supreme court justice who in 1857 wrote the Dred Scott decision, justifying slavery and denying that Black people had rights any “white man was bound to respect”.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreIf the new measure is signed into law by Joe Biden, the bust will be removed from outside the old supreme court chamber and replaced by a bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice.The measure that passed the House by voice vote was reduced from one which would also have removed statues of Confederates who fought the civil war to protect slavery and which was re-introduced in the aftermath of the Capitol riot of 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters carried Confederate flags into the Capitol.On Wednesday, Zoe Lofgren, a House Democrat from California, said she would have preferred to remove Confederate statuary too, but to remove the Taney bust was literally about “who we put on a pedestal”.“The United States Capitol is a beacon of democracy, freedom and equality,” said Lofgren, a member of the January 6 committee. “What and who we choose to honor in this building should represent our values. Chief Justice Taney … does not meet the standard.”The Dred Scott case concerned an enslaved man who lived in Illinois and the Louisiana territory, where slavery was forbidden, then with his wife sued for freedom when taken back to Missouri, a state where slavery was legal.The court ruled 7-2 for Scott’s enslaver, John Sandford, an army surgeon.Taney wrote that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit”.The text of the bill to remove the bust of Taney called the ruling “infamous”, adding that its the effects “would only be overturned years later by the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution of the United States”, thereby “render[ing] a bust of his likeness unsuitable for the honour of display to the many visitors to the Capitol”.David Blight on Frederick Douglass: ‘I call him beautifully human’Read moreIt also quoted the withering judgment of Frederick Douglass, the great writer and campaigner who escaped slavery in Taney’s native Maryland in 1838.In May 1857, Douglass lamented “this infamous decision of the slave-holding wing of the supreme court”, which “maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the constitution of the United States, property … in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property”.On Wednesday Chris Van Hollen, a senator from Maryland, said: “We should honour those who advanced justice, not glorify those who stood in its way.“Sending this legislation to the president’s desk is a major step in our efforts to tell the stories of those Americans who have fought for a more perfect union – and remove those who have no place in the halls of Congress.”TopicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsWashington DCAmerican civil warRaceSlaverynewsReuse this content More

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      House votes to remove statues of white supremacists from US Capitol

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      The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to remove statues of white supremacists and Confederate leaders who advocated for slavery from the US Capitol.The vote passed 285 to 120 with every Democrat present and 67 Republicans voting in favor of the legislation, which directs the removal of “all statues of individuals who voluntarily served in the Confederate States of America or of the military forces or government of a State while the State was in rebellion against the United States”.Representative Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, said that honoring these men sent a message in the US Capitol that Black people’s lives are not valued.“It’s personally an affront to me as a Black man to walk around and look at these figures and see them standing tall, looking out as if they were visionaries and they did something that was great. No, they did something that was very hurtful to humanity,” Johnson said.The legislation specifically calls for the removal of statues of three men who supported slavery and segregation: the North Carolina governor Charles Aycock, Vice-President John Calhoun and the Arkansas senator James Clarke.It also orders the replacement of a bust of Roger Taney, who owned enslaved people and wrote the 1857 supreme court decision that denied enslaved people citizenship. The bust would be replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, who became the first Black supreme court justice in 1967 and who previously won a landmark supreme court case which said school segregation was unconstitutional, Brown v Board of Education.Some Republicans in the debate highlighted that Democrats represented the south during the civil war. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, said he supported the bill but emphasized “all the statues being removed by this bill are statues of Democrats.”A similar bill passed the House last year but the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, declined to bring the measure to a vote. It is more likely to be introduced to the Senate now that Democrats have a slight majority. For the legislation to succeed, 10 Republican senators would have to vote in favor of it with every Democrat because of the filibuster rule.The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, reintroduced the legislation in May and said: “It’s never too late to do the right thing, and this legislation would work to right a historic wrong while ensuring our Capitol reflects the principles and ideals of what Americans stand for.”The majority of Confederate memorials were put up decades after the civil war, according to a database created by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The period which saw the biggest spike in the creation of these statues was in the 1900s, when southern states enacted Jim Crow laws that limited the rights of Black people after a period of integration.The push to remove Confederate symbols from public places has been going on for decades and ramped up last year during civil rights protests. In 2020, at least 160 Confederate symbols were taken down or removed from public spaces, according to the SPLC database. More