Good morning.
I want to be very clear.
I was opposed to NBC reporter Ben Collins’ “toothache” Tweet-storm from the very first sentence.
“A quick story?”
You tell a quick story “about a man named Jeb.” Granted, the Buffalo shooter went to a supermarket but, as we already know, he wasn’t shootin’ at no damn food.
He was shooting at Black people. 10 Black people are now dead. Because they are Black and for no other reason.
At the end of of his Tweet-storm, Mr. Collins wants to go all Aesop with the moral to the story.
Disinformation is real. So are the problems that make it seductive.
Somehow, for some reason, a reporter for NBC News decided to turn his (legitimate) investigative findings about the Buffalo shooter into something resembling a Grimm Brothers fairy tale.
That was very offensive.
You know what’s “disinformation”?
White supremacy, period.
The whole and entire enterprise.
It’s been “seductive” since before the founding of this country; there’s no longer a need for elaborate excuses or complicated narratives.
And until most white people can admit that white supremacy is disinformation, we’re going to keep going around in circles about this fairy tale with the most immoral of endings.
Time for some pundits; I just needed to say that.
Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post writes that while the Buffalo media has done a superlative job with respect to the mass-shooting, the Buffalo media also overlooked a lot of racism.
The suspect “did not pick a Tops in Amherst or Lancaster or Orchard Park,” wrote News columnist Rod Watson, ticking off the names of some of Buffalo’s Whitest suburbs. No, the East Side supermarket was chosen, apparently, for one simple reason: “The Zip code has the highest percentage of Blacks of any neighborhood within reasonable driving distance of his home.”
Why is Buffalo among the most segregated cities in the nation? In part it’s because in the 1950s and 1960s, the city fathers decided to build an expressway — a brutally efficient path from downtown offices to the growing suburbs — that effectively cut off the Black community from the rest of the community. It destroyed a beautiful parkway designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and broke the back of Buffalo’s then-growing Black middle class.
The effects of this and other decisions like it — where to build a new pro football stadium? where to develop a huge new campus for the University of Buffalo? — have been profound. Because every one of those decisions directed the flow of dollars to places far from the inner city, deep into the grassy, monochromatic suburbs.
Thank to Ms. Sullivan, I looked up Jim Heaney of Investigative Post and saw this story about the growth of the radical right movement in western New York.
I’ll start with a reminder of a story we did last June in which Investigative Post reported only one county in the entire country had more of its citizens arrested on charges related to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol than Erie County.
Among those charged was an Amherst man who assaulted a Capitol Police officer, stealing his badge and radio, and a Cheektowaga man who damaged CNN camera equipment and invaded the Capitol building. They were among the 100 or so Western New Yorkers who traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the rally headlined by Donald Trump that precipitated the attempted insurrection.
At the time, Heidi Jones, a Buffalo attorney who researches local right-wing activity, told Investigative Post: “There’s intertwined networks that have been recruiting and been active for many years. The COVID pandemic has given such an opportunity to recruit more people into it with the strongly divisive political environment that we’re in.”
Cloee Cooper, a research analyst with Political Research Associates, told Investigative Post: “Erie County is kind of a hotspot for militia and far-right groups and local elected officials have been privy to some of that, or endorsed it in the past.”
Charles Blow of The New York Times writes that The Great Erasure of the summer of 2020 (which began with the murder of George Floyd) is underway—including the street art that was created.
I’ve learned not to expect much from America; it has a deep capacity for change but a shallow desire for it. I have embraced the “wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping,” as James Baldwin put it. But I worry about young people in all of this. It is their faith that’s most vulnerable to damage. They were the ones who most believed that change was not only possible but imminent, only to have America retreat and retrench.
Now not only are their allies reversing course on issues like police reform; the country is also facing a full backlash toward protest itself. Dozens of states have passed laws restricting the right to protest (just this week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida barred citizens from protesting outside private homes), and more than a dozen have now criminalized teaching full and accurate racial history.
The Great Erasure is underway, not so much an attempt to erase the uprising itself as an attempt to blunt its effects.
There is no example of this erasure more striking than the continual destruction, removal or slow vanishing of much of the street art produced in the wake of Floyd’s killing.
I saw that mohistory2 diaried about Chauncey DeVega’s essay at Salon about the opportunity that President Joe Biden missed in his Buffalo speech and I thought that maybe it deserved some more eyes.
But the opportunity Biden missed was extremely frustrating, and that is true of his response to the country's democracy crisis more generally. He could have spoken plainly and directly to white Americans about the true costs of white supremacy and racism — something that Barack Obama, Kamala Harris or any other Black or brown leader likely could never do. Such a conversation is essential: White supremacy is a particular and specific failure of white society. Black and brown people are clearly targeted for suffering by white supremacy, but they did not cause it and cannot correct it, nor should that be their responsibility. [...]
As seen in his Buffalo speech and throughout his presidency, Biden, like most other American leaders and mainstream public voices (Obama included), talks about racism and white supremacy in a general way, as if they were a weather system or a moral failure common to the entire society rather than a highly specific problem.
Definitions are critical here: Any group or individual can be prejudiced, bigoted, hateful, ethnocentric, nativist or otherwise intolerant. But racism and white supremacy are a function of power, not of skin color or some other phenotypical marker of difference. In American society, that type of group power, almost by definition, is exclusive to white people.
Adam Harris of The Atlantic notes that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to overturn precedents regarding affirmative action and environmental rights during this term.
Following the Supreme Court’s leak of a draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, many Court-watchers and pundits have pointed to same-sex marriage and access to contraceptives as rights now potentially at risk. And while in the long run the logic set forth in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could undermine those precedents, the Court may eviscerate other major areas of law far sooner—in fact, with cases on its docket this current term. Notably, the Court may soon declare the use of race in college admissions—affirmative action—illegal, and it may also massively constrain the power of the federal government to protect the environment.
The questions at hand in each case—Dobbs, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency—differ. But they all raise issues that have been the targets of conservative legal scholars for decades, and they will now be decided by a right-wing Court with seemingly little commitment to its own precedents.
Stephanie Musho writes for AlJazeera that the anticipated overturning of Roe v. Wade will put women all over the world in jeopardy.
As a human rights lawyer in Kenya, I too am watching the developments in Washington, DC with worry. This is not only because I feel for American women being forced to fight for their right to bodily autonomy, but also because case law in commonwealth jurisdictions such as Kenya is sometimes influenced by decisions taken in US courtrooms.
Consider the recent decision in Constitutional Petition E009 of 2020, which strongly affirmed that abortion care is a fundamental right under the Constitution of Kenya and outlawed arbitrary arrests and prosecution of patients and healthcare providers for seeking or offering such services. In its determination, the court cited and relied upon the principles set out in previous SCOTUS decisions including Roe v Wade; Griswold v Connecticut; Eisenstadt v Baird; and Rochin v California among others. Thus a move by the SCOTUS to overturn Roe v Wade would also put the right to abortion in further jeopardy in my own country.
Steven B. Schlozman writes for STATnews about the crisis in youth mental health care.
I have been a child psychiatrist for more than 20 years. I’ve worked in the city, in the suburbs, and in rural settings. I’ve seen patients in teaching hospitals and I’ve run a busy private practice. In all that time, I have never seen psychiatric suffering as pervasive and intractable as I have over the last 18 months. The lack of real change in our nation’s child and adolescent mental health infrastructure has fostered a pernicious and pervasive defeatism among patients and clinicians alike.
At its worst, this is manifest as a boarding crisis for young people with mental illnesses, who are simply being warehoused in general hospitals. Allowing children and adolescents to languish for days, and often weeks, while waiting in general hospitals for a psychiatric bed to become available is a recipe for patients and caregivers to lose all hope that things will ever improve.
This hopelessness is a major feature of the current emergency. It might even be the major feature. Things will not get better unless the approach to it can effectively remedy this deeply engrained pessimism. Mental health stigma has been impressively diminished. Now it’s time to overcome the ugly defeatism that fosters the ongoing inertia in mental health care.
Finally today, Anna Kaplan of Fortune reminds us that we are still in the midst of a Covid-19 pandemic with the highest case counts that we’ve had since February of this year.
Key Facts
The seven-day average of new cases hit 101,029, according to the CDC, up 42% from two weeks ago, when local health authorities reported an average of 71,099 new cases.
New cases doubled in at least 7 states and Washington, D.C., in the past two weeks, including Mississippi, which had a 157% increase in cases.
The CDC warned of high levels of community transmission in several counties in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.
Hospitalizations are also on the rise, with the seven-day average reaching 3,250 for the week ending May 17, up 24% from the week prior, according to the CDC.
The seven-day average of deaths is at 279, the lowest level since July 16.
Everyone have a good day!