Elisabeth Anker writes for The New York Times on the centrality of the concept of “freedom” to white racial identity.
Indeed, there is a long history of ugly freedoms in this country. From the start of the American experiment the language of freedom applied only to a privileged few. At the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, only 2 percent of the city’s population were qualified to vote. Slave codes allowed white property owners to possess Black humans — creating what the historian Tyler Stovall called “white freedom,” the “belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.” This freedom for the white master extended to torture, rape and lifelong control over the humans he (or she) owned.
In early American history, claims for men’s freedom permitted domestic violence against women, and a husband’s prerogative and privacy allowed him to beat his wife. In 1827 the jurist and legal scholar James Kent argued on behalf of husbands: “The law has given him a reasonable superiority and control over” the person of his wife, he wrote. “He may even put gentle restraints upon her liberty, if her conduct be such as to require it.” In other words: a woman’s freedom was at the discretion of her husband.
In the 20th century, racial segregation was justified as the freedom of white people to control public space and make their own business choices. In his infamous 1963 inaugural speech on segregation, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama couched his stance against integration as “our fight for freedom,” and justified it as “the ideology of our free fathers.” We can call that ideology white supremacy.
These are but a few examples of how claims for “freedom” have long suppressed the rights of nonwhites, women and workers. It is true the language of freedom was central to emancipation, suffrage and democratic movements of all kinds, but it has also justified violence and discrimination.
Dan Balz of the Washington Post has a warning not to underestimate the power of former President Donald Trump within the Republican Party.
Trump’s words no longer have quite the shock value they once had. His rallies don’t command live coverage on major cable networks. Having been banned from Twitter, his never-ending statements lack the power they once might have had. It can be easy to dismiss his rantings. But it would be foolhardy to ignore what he is saying or thinking.
If Trump were a spent force in politics, what he says now would matter less. But he wants to run for president again and has a $122 million political bank account at his disposal to carry him forward. He may have lost some support among some who think of themselves as Republicans, but he still holds a grip on the Republican Party. If the 2024 primaries were held today, it is difficult to imagine him not rolling over any and all challengers.
His hold on the GOP was never more obvious than on Friday, when the Republican National Committee voted to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) for their work on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. The censure resolution described the two Republicans as “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
The former president continues to claim the election was rife with fraud, despite the lack of evidence. What he is saying now provides a preview of how he might try to use his powers if restored to the Oval Office.
Kali Holloway of The Nation writes about the continuing “creep of anti-democracy.”
In the year since the Capitol siege, Republican lawmakers have continued their assault on democracy, not by condoning violent public rampages but via the codification of undemocratic laws. GOP legislators have passed 34 bills that suppress voting in 19 states; undertaken extreme gerrymandering to ensure the maintenance of conservative white political power; killed federal voting rights bills—with help from Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, unwavering supporters of a filibuster consistently used to oppose multiracial democracy; and in multiple states, are now working to make it perfectly legal to overturn free and fair elections. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue have each proposed the creation of law enforcement teams to police elections and, no doubt, to intimidate the kinds of voters who tend not to vote Republican. “History will judge them by their actions,” the old saw goes. But it does not hold here, since GOP legislators have also outlawed the accurate teaching of history in a dozen states.
Elsewhere, members of groups that invaded the Capitol are continuing to deform our politics. But instead of risking negative national attention, many of these groups have decentralized, inserting their members into political issues at the local level. Labeled “patriots” and “martyrs” by establishment Republicans, much of their “political” involvement involves physical intimidation.
Cleve R. Wootson, Jr. of the Washington Post writes about the (laughable) attempts of Trump and the Republican Party to claim that they are “victims” of racism.
After years of being branded a racist for his inflammatory comments and actions, Trump and some of his allies are attempting to turn that label back on their critics. In the process, they have wielded their own definition of racism, one that disregards the country’s history of racial exclusion that gives White people a monopoly on power and wealth. To make America more equitable, they argue, everyone must be treated equally — and, therefore, White men must not in any way be disadvantaged.
This diverging definition of racism — often coupled with imagery, symbolism and quotes from the civil rights and other movements — reflects deep and often partisan divisions about what, if anything, needs to be done to produce a more equitable America. [...]
Experts in political speech and critics on the left say there is more at play than a disagreement over whether White people can be victims of racism or a slanted understanding of the role race plays in America. Some see the desire to identify racism and label opponents “racist” as an effort to wield grievance and stoke animus for political gain — a tactic Trump and others have used in campaigns to anger and animate voters. It’s a sentiment steeped in beliefs among some voters that attempts at equity have gone too far and are punishing people who happen to have been born White.
Will Doran of the Charlotte Observer reports on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruling that the redistricting maps drawn by the North Carolina Republican Party are unconstitutional and what comes next.
The ruling divided the court along party lines. All three Republican justices dissented and said they would have allowed the maps to stand. But all four Democratic justices joined in the majority opinion, which struck down the maps for both the N.C. General Assembly and North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The justices ruled that the maps were skewed so far to the right that they violated the state constitution — specifically that they “are unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt under the free elections clause, the equal protection clause, the free speech clause and the freedom of assembly clause of North Carolina’s constitution.” [...]
The court’s full ruling is still to come, but the short version released Friday did give some important scheduling instructions, specifically on how the maps must now be redrawn.
The legislature will have a second chance to draw them, the justices ruled. And the job of reviewing those maps to see if they pass muster, unlike the current maps, will be up to the trial court that initially heard the case. That adds an extra layer of intrigue since that trial court panel has a Republican majority, which initially had ruled in favor of the legislature in this case, a ruling now overturned by the Supreme Court.
Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight writes that a federal court ruling striking down a redistricting map drawn by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature could expand Black political power in the South.
As a refresher, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering was a political question that federal courts should not adjudicate. However, they can still hear cases relating to racial gerrymandering — i.e., whether a map discriminates against voters of a certain race. Alabama poses just such a question. Back in November 2021, Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a new congressional map that created six majority-white districts and just one majority-Black district. Civil-rights advocates sued, arguing that Black voters in the state were entitled to a second district under the Voting Rights Act, the landmark law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
Under Section 2 of the VRA, it’s illegal to deny members of a racial minority equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. This has been widely interpreted to mean that, when possible, states must draw congressional districts where nonwhite voters are the dominant voting bloc, so as to reasonably ensure they can elect their preferred candidate, fundamental criteria for determining when this requirement kicks in, such as that a minority group must be large and compact enough to constitute a majority of a district and that voting in the area must be polarized by race.
And as maps proposed by the plaintiffs demonstrated, it is readily possible to draw two predominantly Black congressional districts in Alabama. For example, in the plaintiffs’ illustrative plan A, the 2nd District’s voting-age population (VAP) is 50.0 percent Black, and the 7th District’s VAP is 50.3 percent Black.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr of the Boston Globe writes about the bit of “extra labor” that all Black women in law go through.
Black women in law must perform work — actual mental and emotional work — that is not expected of our colleagues. This extra labor takes aim at our very dignity, but we must do it well and with a smile. The smallest mistake could not only harm our careers but also serve as justification for those who see us as mere affirmative action beneficiaries. We must do our jobs and continuously prove we deserve them.
“It is the way that racism, sexism, all of the various -isms that come together impact their everyday lived experience,” said sociologist Tsedale M. Melaku, author of “You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism.” “It’s not just the overt forms of racism, but the subtle everyday nuanced forms of racism that they have had to tackle.”
We already know that a multitude of factors, from poor investment in predominately Black schools to the racial wealth gap and disproportionate impact of student loan debt, put law school out of reach of too many Black girls. There is a reason that less than 2 percent of lawyers are Black women, and it has nothing to do with skill.
Helen Branswell of STATnews writes that new studies seem to show that a booster shot specifically tailored for the omicron variant of COVID-19 might be unnecessary.
A new study conducted in primates suggests there may not be a benefit from updating Covid-19 vaccines to target the Omicron variant at this time.
The work, by scientists at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s Vaccine Research Center, shows that animals boosted with the original vaccine had similar levels of protection against disease in the lungs as did primates that received an updated booster based on the Omicron strain. The work was done with Moderna’s licensed vaccine and a booster shot based on the Omicron variant.
Study of blood from the animals showed that many of the measurable immune responses — rises in neutralizing antibody levels, for instance — were not substantially different, regardless of which booster shot they were given.
“Therefore, an Omicron boost may not provide greater immunity or protection compared to a boost with the current [Moderna] vaccine,” the researchers concluded.
Damon Young, now writing for the Washington Post Magazine, wonders what he could have said or done to prevent a good friend from becoming a victim of COVID disinformation.
But how do you dead the most empathetic person you know? The person who’d let you drag them out of an exam cram session to roll with you to the club on a damn Wednesday, because they know you just had a breakup and want to get back out there and have too much anxiety, too much fear, too much I-can’t-go-there-’cause-what-if-she’s-there to go solo? What if it’s the same person who called on your birthday to tell you how proud they are of you because that’s what they always do? Even if your previous conversation wasn’t quite a conversation, more like you telling them they sound like a QAnon parrot and them responding with a bunch of stuff about “The Gates Foundation” and “dark interests in medicine.” And then you wondering, for the first time, if that’s the last time you’ll speak? What if you almost killed them on their birthday 10 years ago? You had too much to drink, and they got in the car with you after you told them you were “straight.” You made it to where you wanted to go, sure. But you blacked out — the memory of the drive escaped your body and still hasn’t returned. You were doing that too much back then. Drinking too much, and driving sometimes after drinking too much. They forgave you for what you did. And that grace stopped you from ever doing it again. They saved your life after you almost ended theirs.
And what if they stumped you once? Like that time in the spring you tried to convince them to get a vaccine. And they responded with something about how they don’t trust the government. And then you said they were being silly. And then they said, “You, a Black American, are asking me, a Black American, to trust the government, and I’m the silly one?” And then you had nothing to say. There are things you could’ve said, sure. Like maybe “Forget the government, but what about the dozens of our homies who are either MDs or science-related PhDs? People we know and love who know more about this stuff than we do. They’re lying to us too?” But my friend had a point.
This brings me back to my failure. Which is maybe, probably (definitely) egocentric. Because who am I to convince them to put something in their body? What makes me think I have that power? I’m their friend, though. And despite my own misgivings about how the medical industry treats us, about how America treats us, my desire to end this by doing the collective good is greater than my skepticism of and discomfort with it.
I will, perhaps, always wonder if there’s anything that I could have said to my first cousin (a victim of COVID disinformation who also, eventually, died of COVID) that could have changed his views.
Kelly MacNamara writes for Phys.org that climate change and population shifts due to climate change will drastically increase flood damage losses by the year 2050.
"Climate change combined with shifting populations present a double whammy of flood risk danger and the financial implications are staggering," said lead author Oliver Wing, of the University of Bath's Cabot Institute for the Environment.
Wing said the findings should be a "call to action" for both a reduction in emissions and efforts to adapt to accelerating climate risks "to reduce the devastating financial impact flooding wreaks on people's lives."
Researchers used nationwide property asset data, information on communities and flood projections to estimate flood risk across the US.
The study showed that poorer communities with a proportionally larger white population currently face the steepest losses.
But future growth in flood risk is expected to have a greater impact on African American communities on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
"The mapping clearly indicates Black communities will be disproportionately affected in a warming world, in addition to the poorer White communities which predominantly bear the historical risk," said Wing.
You can find the study, published in Nature Climate Change, here.
Ed Kilgore of New York magazine writes about the failure of the California State Assembly to pass bill AB 1400, which would enact a single-payer health care system in the state.
Single-payer health care is part of the California Democratic State Platform, and the state party’s Progressive Caucus has threatened to withhold endorsements from legislators who didn’t support it. It was backed by Newsom when he was elected in 2018, and by Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon this year. Like the measure that passed the California Senate in 2017 but died in the Assembly, the current bill, AB 1400, is all dessert and no green beans: it prospectively bans private health insurance and sets up a public single-payer system but puts off enactment the tax revenues (somewhere between $314 billion and $390 billion annually, according to legislative analysts) to pay for the new benefits.
Yet AB 1400’s principal sponsor, San Jose legislator Ash Kalra, yanked the bill earlier this week, arguing that he was far short of the votes needed to enact it and didn’t want to put his colleagues on the spot with a recorded vote. [...]
But it’s this last issue — taxes — that probably best explains the reluctance of Democratic legislators to put their money where their mouths are on single-payer. Some argue passing a bill like AB 1400 without including the taxes necessary to implement it is simply irresponsible. Others fear a tax revolt that could revive the moribund California Republican Party. That is particularly true on the brink of a midterm election in which the GOP may have the wind at its back across the nation, possibly extending all the way to the West Coast.
Philip Oltermann of the Guardian reports that for new German chancellor Olaf Scholz, the honeymoon is over.
While Angela Merkel rarely excelled as an orator or rhetorician, Scholz “seems to want to surpass her in the art of disappearance”, wrote weekly Der Spiegel, describing her successor’s performance over the last few weeks as “almost invisible, inaudible”.
A survey by pollster Infratest Dimap published on Thursday saw support for Scholz’s SPD drop to 22%, overtaken by the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 27%. His personal approval rating dropped by 17 percentage points in the same poll.
One factor that has undermined the chancellor’s authority in particular is the behaviour of his last centre-left predecessor in the chancellory – and former boss – Gerhard Schröder, who continues to comment on global affairs in his role as chair of Russian energy companies Nord Stream and Rosneft.
In his television interview, Scholz was urged to clarify that he was not taking the ex-chancellor turned lobbyist’s advice. “If I understand the constitution of the federal German republic correctly, there is only one chancellor and that is me,” Scholz said with characteristic understatement.
In related news, Gerhard Schröder has been nominated to the board of directors at the Russian state-owned energy firm Gazprom.
David Herszenhorn of POLITICO Europe writes that in lieu of NATO membership, Ukraine is forming a set of “smaller security and political pacts” with NATO member countries like Turkey, Poland, and the UK.
The emerging deals were on display this week, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan traveling to the Ukrainian capital to send a sharp message to Moscow: His country would help expand Ukraine’s supply of armed, long-range Bayraktar drones — a powerful weapon the Kremlin has warned Kyiv not to use.
The growing cooperation with Turkey is just one element of a broader Kyiv effort to develop smaller security and political pacts, given that Ukraine is facing a lengthy and uncertain path to NATO membership — if it happens at all. The country is also working to cement a new partnership with the U.K. and Poland, highlighted this week when leaders from the three countries met in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s potential NATO membership is at the heart of the current standoff between Russia and Western allies, with Russia claiming it won’t remove more than 100,000 troops massed along Ukraine’s border until it gets — among other things — a hard guarantee that Ukraine will never join the military alliance.
Finally today, British novelist Craig Stone writes for AlJazeera about the death of Swiss photographer René Robert on a street in Paris.
Today, I’m about to finish my fourth novel. I’m a freelance journalist. From being single, skint and living under a tree, I’m now a married father of two and people pay me for my words.
But I still remember what it feels like to be invisible. Which is why Swiss photographer René Robert’s recent death in Paris hit me hard.
Eighty-four-year-old René died from hypothermia in the middle of a busy street after he fell and was ignored by passersby for more than nine hours. René Robert did have a home. But for those nine hours, he appeared homeless, so he was invisible [...]
Today, in society, disconnection is rife. It is much worse than it was 20 years ago. Disconnection is an epidemic. And born from that disconnection comes a need for justification. In order to sustain disconnection, our minds fill the gaps in our knowledge with thoughts that explain our instinct for separation.
And this is never more evident than when those within society walk past, over, or around a homeless person. An everyday person will look up from their phone, see a homeless person, and immediately their thoughts will turn to whatever explains away – justifies – their indifference.
And, as Stone notes, that sense of “disconnection” even extends to those that were formerly homeless like himself. And me.
Everyone have a great day!