WorldAffairs: How White Supremacy Fueled the Attack on the Capitol

 For months, the domestic terrorist attack on the US Capitol was planned in plain sight on social media. So why weren’t we ready for it? This week, former FBI special agent Michael German explains why the bureau deprioritized the threat posed by white supremacists… and why the Department of Homeland Security says they pose “the most persistent and lethal threat to the homeland.” Then, historian Nell Irvin Painter breaks down how a legacy of racism in the United States brought us to this moment. Can we change our trajectory? She argues that the Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020 could bring lasting, positive change to this country.

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CityLab: How Fear Took Over the American Suburbs

 In his book, “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001,” Kyle Riismandel, a senior university lecturer in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, argues that suburbanites of this era engaged in “productive victimization,” using their imagined and real fears as a means to hoard power and exert local control. It’s a phenomenon he observed growing up in the suburbs of Wanaque, New Jersey — 30 miles away from New York City, 12 miles away from Newark, “but in many ways a world away” — later, at graduate school in D.C., and now, from his home back in the New Jersey suburb of Montclair.

Over those three decades, cultural and political phenomena served to make suburbanites feel less like they were living in a bucolic paradise, and more like in a land constantly under assault — with threats ranging from toxic waste and cancerous household products; to burglaries and kidnappings; to satanic cults and explicit music. Riismandel traces the reaction to these perceived threats, through the weaponization of the environmental movement as a means to offload hazards to poorer communities, the rise of NIMBYs who feared overdevelopment in their backyards, and the advent of vigilantism as a response to crime and disorder. The book captures what Riismandel identifies as a growing anxiety that undergirded white suburban life. “Things aren’t necessarily happening” to suburbanites of the time, he says, “but there’s always a sense they they will.” [...]

This continued production of threat — even without the materiality or the reality of the threat being so big — is in part because it allows people to do things. It’s facilitated by the broader political culture of the rightward turn of the Reagan era and the New Right, saying, you should be scared; that we need more cops on the street. But also in response, you can exert more control as a homeowner, or as a parent, and you can police streets more effectively, or more privately. You can do all these things that allow you to work with, or even replace, the police or the state. [...]

Part of the privilege of living in the suburbs is controlling local space, not being victimized by an actual crime. That you might be victimized by the threat of crime, and the idea of crime, but that you should be able to live free from that fear. This is why I call it the suburban crisis, because it's really just a crisis of privilege. It is not the “urban crisis,” which is, you know, deeply-rooted and systemic and structural, that we see elucidated by a number of scholars, most famously, Thomas Sugrue’s book. They're quite different. One is one of systemic racism and disinvestment. Another is one of privilege and expectation.

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UnHerd: How Big Slave ruled Britain

 Throughout, the forces of Big Slave have the nation in their grip, bound with a tithe on every barrel of sugar brought from the West Indies — money that affords the plantation owners a £20,000 annual marketing budget to promote the titular Interest in the press and politics. This was lobbying, pure and simple. As detailed and devious as anything Bell Pottinger ever cooked up, served with much the same shrug of corporate amorality. Thus, for every Anti-Slavery Monthly Review, there are plenty of journals like the popular Quarterly Review, in which Regency Richard Littlejohns bash out punchy jeremiads against the wet snowflakes of abolitionism. [...]

In his opposition to emancipation, Canning was joined, often for quite different reasons, by figures as grand as Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, and the future prime minister William Gladstone, himself the son of a wealthy slave owner. Cardinal John Henry Newman, recently canonised by Pope Francis, called on slaves to be content with their situation. [...]

When non-white guests came to dine at Wilberforce’s society, Taylor reminds us, they had to sit at the other end of the table, behind a screen. Macaulay deplored “miscegenation”, and the anti-slavery barrister George Stephen announced he would not help a family of “halfcastes”. Who could have predicted none would have the mores of a 2020 Goldsmiths grad student?

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New Statesman: Munira Mirza: the former radical leftist advising Boris Johnson

Those who know Mirza describe her as an independent thinker, intelligent, intellectually curious, reasoned, articulate and unflappable. Far from being a strident right-wing Tory, she once flirted with Marxism and is now a libertarian. Like Cummings, her fellow Downing Street iconoclast, she is not a Conservative Party member and is said to harbour no political ambitions of her own. [...]

Mirza does not deny that racism exists in Britain, but she argues that racial inequalities are the result of cultural and socio-economic factors more than institutional racism. She contends that efforts to promote racial equality through diversity programmes and “box-ticking multiculturalism” serve merely to deepen divisions, stoke tribalism and foster a “culture of grievance”. She rejects identity politics based on race and religion in favour of a universal humanity or “universalism”. [...]

Through PX she published “Living Apart Together” (2007), a paper that argued multiculturalism had encouraged Islamic extremism in Britain by dividing people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines instead of promoting a national identity. [...]

She was a principal author of the Tory party’s manifesto for the 2019 general election. As a northerner, like Cummings, she champions the idea of “levelling up”. There has been speculation, given her libertarianism, that she may have encouraged Johnson’s costly reluctance to impose the coronavirus lockdown last spring. True or not, she certainly would not have expected to be overseeing government interventionism on a scale unprecedented since the Second World War.

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New Statesman: Keir Starmer’s quest to reshape Labour

 Like Cameron, Starmer inherited a party that had made a habit of losing elections: in terms of seats won, the 2005 election was the third-worst in the Tories’ modern history, and the 2019 election Labour’s worst since 1935. In both 2005 and 2019, the incumbent government had a large but not unassailable majority in the Commons, which nonetheless caused most people to write the opposition’s chances at the next election off long before it started.[...]

Starmer and Cameron share a recognition that many of Britain’s socially liberal voters are also economically conservative. Cameron sought to woo the socially liberal middle classes. He wanted to persuade those who were in sympathy with Tory economic objectives that they could have both social liberalism and traditional right-wing economies (the “double liberalism” championed by the Economist). Starmer’s aims run the other way: he wants to woo voters who are socially and culturally conservative but are economically on the left. Cameron wanted voters to know that he would “hug a hoodie”; Starmer wants them to know that he would make sure that the hoodie felt the full force of the law.[...]

Since becoming leader Starmer has appealed to the preoccupations and priorities of the new Tory-voting, Brexit-supporting working class. His tactical silences have been notable too. There have been small but significant gestures: opposition frontbenchers taking care to tweet their respects on the anniversary of the soldier Lee Rigby’s murder; Starmer’s support for retaining “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Rule Britannia” at the Proms. And there have been larger ones, such as Starmer’s vocal opposition to the Black Lives Matter campaign to abolish the police. Starmer is positioning himself against Corbyn on cultural matters. [...]

For Starmer and his inner circle, a more economically and socially liberal Labour might do better electorally, but it would be at the expense of the party’s soul. Winning back seats Labour lost in 2019 and 2017 is not just about achieving power, but about what type of party it is. As one of his close allies put it to me, “we’re not the Democrats” (meaning a loose coalition of social liberals, big-city progressives and some trade unions). Labour is a party of the labour interest, of working people and the trade unions movement. It is this Labour Party’s desire to revive that historic identity that distinguishes it both from its recent Corbynite past and its electorally successful New Labour days. It’s not just victory Starmer aims for, but to save Labour as we know it.

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UnHerd: Hypocrisy is not the worst thing on earth

 Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing. [...]

Another weakness with charges of hypocrisy is that using someone’s failure to uphold their standards as a means of discrediting those standards is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy, or, in British English terms, playing the man and not the ball. I don’t want to be too much of a debate nerd. Such accusations can reveal some things about those standards — not least that they are hard to keep. But it does not prove that they are wrong to hold. [...]

Again, this does not mean that charges of hypocrisy are worthless. For example, the enthusiasm with which many leftists greeted Black Lives Matter protests in the midst of lockdowns they had tended to ferociously support might not have proven anything about coronavirus but it was a powerful indictment of their priorities. Yet the Right should recognise their limits, since their opponents use charges of hypocrisy too. Long before the #metoo’d male feminist, the Christian moralist with a colourful sex life, for example, has been a classic archetype, as Jerry Falwell Jr. recently reminded us.

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WorldAffairs: White Supremacy, at Home and Abroad

 The outrage of the last two weeks has made it clear that we are at a moment of national reckoning. The Black Lives Matter movement is calling to abolish the police and redirect police funding toward education and public services. Ideas that once seemed radical are now being discussed by politicians both on the local and federal level. On this week’s episode, historian Nell Irvin Painter and anthropologist Christen Smith join Ray Suarez to talk about the global Black Lives Matter movement, policing in the Western Hemisphere and why it’s important to understand the role white supremacy has played in building our institutions.

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UnHerd: Has BLM picked the wrong target?

This feeling of disrespect has been articulated by Alicia Garza, the activist co-founder of BLM: “Black Lives Matter is not just concerned with what happens in policing. The disregard, disrespect, and lack of dignity for black life transcends through the fabric of our society.” Meanwhile, a recent CNN survey showed that 49% of black Britons have experienced disrespectful treatment from the police, compared to 26% of whites.

How literally we should be interpreting subjective evaluations of ‘respectful treatment’ might be an issue for debate, but what ultimately matters for race relations is that these feelings are out there. Public opinion on any issue hinges on popular perceptions. What the poll also revealed was that black Britons are significantly more likely to see racism as a major problem in Britain than other ethnic minorities. [...]

Whether it is Libyans selling black Africans into slavery, which is happening right now, Chinese people contemptuously discriminating against blacks in China, or Indians doing same in India, a general low regard for black people across the world does seem to be a constant. In fact, the reason we focus on racism in the West and not elsewhere is because western societies are the most responsive to black opinion. As a general rule, the Chinese, Indians and Arabs don’t seem to care very much whether we consider them racist or not. Their societies are openly assertive of their felt superiority. [...]

This reactive construct of Africanness resembles very much the construct of global blackness offered by the BLM school of thought. The problem with this approach is that it appears more interested in portraying the present vulnerability of the black collective as a moral virtue rather than focusing on eliminating that vulnerability. It obsesses over the appeal and power of whiteness, instead of trying to figure out how to make blackness more appealing and powerful.

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The Guardian: The power of crowds

While many of us were missing crowds, the realities of Covid-19 meant they had taken on a completely new meaning. Gathering with others was suddenly, paradoxically antisocial: it suggested you were careless about viral transmission of a deadly disease, more interested in your own short-term social needs than the lives of strangers. The very sight of a crowd suddenly seemed alarming. We shook our heads at rumours of parties, and shared pictures of Cheltenham festival or the Stereophonics’ Cardiff gigs as if they were clips from horror films. Festivals, congregations, assemblies, raves, processions, choirs, rallies, demonstrations, audiences in stadiums, halls, clubs, theatres and cinemas – gatherings of any kind became fatal. As lockdown begins to ease, people are again gathering to socialise in parks and on beaches, and to rail against injustice in Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests, but crowds as we used to know them won’t be coming back for many months to come. [...]

Crowds have always had a bad rap: there is no gentle mob, no friendly pack. The same disinhibition that allows for moments of great joy can also enable grotesque crimes. The people who gathered to watch lynchings in the US, or recent attacks on Muslims by groups of Hindu nationalists in India, were not just bystanders but participants. Their presence and acquiescence helped make the violence possible. And just as the people at the back of the crowd empower those at the front, the reverse can be true. The hooligan firm leader who throws the first cafe chair across a moonlit plaza on a balmy European away day makes it easier for more timid members of the crowd to cross their own “cooperation threshold” and join in. [...]

The power of crowds has long fixated religious and secular leaders alike, who have sought to harness communal energy for their own glorification, or to tame mass gatherings when they start to take on a momentum of their own. Ehrenreich records the medieval Christian church’s long battle to eradicate unruly, ecstatic or immoderate dancing from the congregation. In later centuries, as the reformation and industrial revolution proceeded, festivals, feast days, sports, revels and ecstatic rituals of countless kinds were outlawed for their tendency to result in drunken, pagan or otherwise ungodly behaviour. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, there were “literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to outlaw carnival and popular festivity from European life,” wrote Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. [...]

“What we need to recognise is that from a scientific perspective, classical [crowd] theory has no validity,” says Stott. “It doesn’t explain or predict the behaviours it purports to explain and predict. And yet everywhere you look, the narrative is still there.” The reason, he argues, is straightforward: “It’s very, very convenient for dominant and powerful groups,” Stott says. “It pathologises, decontextualises and renders meaningless crowd violence, and therefore legitimises its repression.” As Stott notes, by shifting the blame to the madness of crowds, it also conveniently allows the powerful to avoid scrutinising their own responsibility for the violence. Last week, when the US attorney general blamed “outside agitators” for stirring up violence, and Donald Trump referred to “professionally managed” “thugs”, they were drawing on exactly the ideas that Le Bon sketched out in the 19th century.

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Facts vs feelings in the BLM debate

The most important fact is that there is no single black minority. Over recent decades some ethnic minority groups have been climbing the ladder faster than others. That divergence story can now be told about Britain’s black minority itself, which in recent decades has generally experienced less good outcomes than most other big UK minorities. [...]

Black children now slightly outperform whites in the Government’s Progress 8 school measures. Young black people are more likely to go to university than whites, 41% to 31%, albeit only 9% go to elite Russell Group universities compared to 12% of whites. Black people are well represented at the top in sport, music the arts, and the public sector, while under-represented in business and academia. [...]

There is, however, a substantial minority of the black population stuck to the bottom of British society, (14% of black people live in households with persistent low income compared with 8% of whites). They are likely to live in public housing in inner city London or other big cities. Their lives are shorter, more violent, poorer and less healthy than other black people and almost all other groups in Britain. It is their pain, and anger, that is easily connected to a narrative of slavery and humiliation, to historic white stereotypes of inferiority, as well as to more recent stories of police brutality. [...]

To repeat, none of these people say there is no black racism here. But they would, I think, challenge the BLM story in three main ways. First, if you want to help disadvantaged black people focus on practical solutions to inner city problems: more investment in anti-knife crime units; more black police officers (just 1% at present); greater efforts to deal with obesity levels and chronic bad health; a national volunteering scheme for inner-city school mentors. Second, do not ignore the self-inflicted wounds of violent crime, fatherless families, anti-educational “acting white” culture. Third, reject victim culture which can discourage young blacks from aiming higher, using racism as an excuse for any setback.

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UnHerd: The mother of all protests

The Arab Spring challenged the stability of long-standing dictatorships that many scholars and pundits saw as unassailable — either because the dictators had apparently mastered the political techniques of authoritarianism, or because they simply enjoyed the luxury of living in a region that did not value democratic principles. When Francis Fukuyama asked in 1989 whether humanity had reached “the end of history” with the universal acceptance of liberal democracy, cultural relativists offered the so-called incompatibility between Islam and democratic values as a rebuttal to his argument. But even though dictatorship mostly endured in the region (although specific rulers like Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak fell), the tens of millions of people who came out into the streets showed that authoritarianism was contrary to the will of the people. [...]

The Arab Spring’s demonstration of widespread support for democracy also highlighted the role of youth in the movement. The Middle East is experiencing a youth bulge, and these young people are technologically savvy and significantly more educated than their parents. But they are also frustrated by mass unemployment and the lack of the political freedoms they are able to observe in other parts of the world. Using both old-fashioned mobilisation techniques and social media, these young people drove the push for democracy and freedom in their countries. More recent protests in countries like Lebanon and Iraq show that this desire for change has not abated. [...]

Beyond their effects on mainstream politics, both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement shaped the nature of protests that have proliferated across the world in the last decade. The Arab Spring successfully merged 21st century, youth-led social media activism with old-fashioned, ‘to the streets’ protests. Whereas ‘hashtag activism’ threatened to undermine more substantive forms of mass political action — why carry a sign and perhaps risk arrest when you could simply forward a tweet? — the Arab Spring used various media, social and otherwise, as tools to complement and magnify the crowds that gathered in the streets and public squares to demand change. [...]

As we enter 2020, the legacy of 2011 has morphed into seemingly countless movements around the world. But as in any uprising, counter-revolutions have also materialised. The backlash has taken the form of governments and powerful conservative forces responding to the outpouring of often young, often leftist or radical protestors. The outpouring of progressive anger has created a conservative backlash — not just with fringe Right-wing populist groups, but within mainstream politics as well. Although Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ascended to the top of their respective opposition parties, they remain far from number 10 or the Oval Office.

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FiveThirtyEight: People Are Changing Their Views On Race And Gender Issues To Match Their Party

A huge body of research has shown that voters were more divided by race and gender views in the 2016 election than they were in previous elections. But it turns out that rather than voters supporting the party that best represents their views about race and gender, the effect may more often work the other way — the parties may be shaping voters’ personal beliefs. Candidates and elected officials can drive a person to change their views, or loyalty to a party may dictate both a person’s beliefs and their candidate preferences.[...]

But voters’ views of specific racial issues, rather than their broader feelings about minority groups, were more likely to follow their candidate preferences. A study by Peter Enns at Cornell University found that Trump and Clinton voters changed their views on controversies like the Black Lives Matter movement to match their candidate’s views, rather than choosing their candidate based on their views about this issue. [...]

Although media attention has largely focused on Trump voters, a working paper showed that it was actually Clinton voters who underwent the more dramatic partisan shift in 2016 (echoing other findings). The largest changes in views of race and gender occurred among white liberals; their perceptions of racial and gender discrimination increased, their feelings toward minorities improved, and their support of policies aimed at increasing diversity, like affirmative action and allowing more immigration, rose. Voters who consistently voted Democratic moved to the left on these questions, especially young voters. That means studies that show an increased association between Trump support and conservative views on race and gender might in part actually reflect Democrats becoming more liberal on these questions.

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FiveThirtyEight: Charlottesville And The Rise Of White Identity Politics

What is different about this iteration of white nationalism is how the movement is framing its ideas, and the place those ideas occupy in U.S. politics. One of the chants white nationalists repeatedly turned to as they marched in Charlottesville on Friday night and Saturday was “white lives matter” — a direct response to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that emerged after the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police in August 2014 and the resulting protests. [...]

That context is important to understand this moment in American politics — the events in Charlottesville and the “alt-right” generally. There are two competing narratives about race and racism at the center of today’s discussions. One perspective — most directly expressed by Black Lives Matter activists but also shared by many Democratic politicians, the media and other elite institutions — is that a “Black Lives Matter” movement is necessary because, by a lot of metrics, America has left blacks behind. The wealth of the average white family still dwarfs that of the average African-American family. The black jobless rate is about double that of the white one. Black men are disproportionately killed by police officers. Black children are more likely than white ones to attend high-poverty schools.

The Black Lives Matter movement is also part of a broader push on the left for promoting gender equality, expanding rights for gay and transgender Americans and ensuring workplaces and universities have more “diversity,” which usually means adding to the number of black, Latino, Asian and other non-white employees, along with women of all races. [...]

It’s easier for many whites to convince themselves that the problem isn’t racism, it’s “reverse racism.” (Affirmative action, which gives African-Americans and other minority groups an advantage in college admissions, hiring and other areas, comes under particular fire from many conservatives.) This strain of white identity politics, which sees white people as the group in need of special protection, is relatively new. In 2005, 6 percent of both Republicans and Democrats thought white Americans experienced “a great deal” of discrimination, according to a Pew Research Center survey.2 In 2016, the share of Republicans had jumped to 18 percent, while Democrats ticked up only slightly to 9 percent.3 Forty-nine percent of Republicans — compared to just 29 percent of Democrats — said whites face at least “some” discrimination.

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Vox: Living While Black and the criminalization of blackness

The incidents also speak to the persistence of residential segregation and isolation, particularly of whites, and how that isolation simultaneously maintains and heightens white mistrust of nonwhite groups. And with many of these calls leading to requests for police intervention, they highlight the use of law enforcement to “manage” the behavior of African Americans. That’s fraught with menace because of the racial disparities in police use of force that make people of color more likely to encounter violence or harassment. [...]

At its core, Living While Black is about racial profiling, the concept that a person’s race or ethnicity makes them an object of suspicion and heightened scrutiny from law enforcement. From the use of slave patrols to lynching to legal segregation, and in modern iterations like stop and frisk, racial profiling has long been used to maintain white authority by singling out the presence and behavior of people of color — especially African Americans — as requiring punishment. These systems rely on the participation of bystanders and observers to alert authorities to those deemed “suspicious.” [...]

Robin DiAngelo, a sociologist and the author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, says these videos make it much more difficult for white people to deny that profiling has occurred. “These incidents have always happened, but white people do not always believe it because it doesn’t happen to us,” DiAngelo told me. “The only real difference we have now is that we are able to record it in a way that makes it undeniable.” [...]

The request to “justify my existence,” and the frustration that this sort of request creates, lies at the core of these incidents. Academics have noted that people of color, especially black people, are often asked to provide justification and proof when they enter spaces where they are in the minority. Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson explains that there is a difference between “white spaces,” where black people are often not present or exist in a limited number, and “black spaces,” communities and spaces occupied by larger numbers of black people.

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Crooked Media: Wilderness The Backlash

How do we fight for justice and equality in the face of racism? The struggle to break the cycle of progress and backlash that defines race and politics in America. 

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Vox: The latest protests against the Chicago police are about more than one shooting

It’s not, then, just about this police shooting. It’s also a reaction to the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It’s about the US Department of Justice investigation, released in 2017, which found that the Chicago Police Department repeatedly used excessive force and often treated people, particularly minorities, “as animals or subhuman.” And it’s the decades of incidents before that, including a scheme under which a police detective tortured hundreds of people to force confessions out of them. [...]

This is reflective of the broader national story with Black Lives Matter since 2014: While one incident may trigger protests — like the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, or Tamir Rice in Cleveland — the fallout speaks to a much longer history. And that history involves not just police killings of black people but also other abuses, from petty traffic stops to downright torture, hand in hand with a lack of police attention to black communities when they actually need the help of law enforcement. [...]

In the days since the shooting, the police department has defended its officers, noting in a July 15 press conference that Augustus was armed and that he did not have a concealed carry permit for his weapon. Community members and activists meanwhile, have countered that the mere presence of a gun does not justify the shooting. They noted that Augustus was licensed to own a firearm and that it would be impossible for officers to know about Augustus’s lack of a permit when the initial stop occurred. [...]

Local activists and policing experts alike have noted that there are a lot of things still unanswered when it comes to the Augustus shooting. One of the first is exactly why Augustus was stopped for appearing to be armed, given that the state allows for concealed carry. Activists have also noted that video of the shooting shows Augustus attempting to pull what looks like an Illinois Firearm Owners’ Identification card from his wallet shortly before being grabbed by an officer, leading them to question why the interaction escalated so quickly. [...]

For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts. The Justice Department described this as an example of how “residents in black neighborhoods suffer more of the harms caused by breakdowns in uses of force, training, supervision, accountability, and community policing” routinely seen across the police department.

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The Atlantic: The Left and the Right Have Abandoned American Exceptionalism

One difference lies in the way they talk about America. Obama consistently acknowledged America’s racist history. He would never have declared, as George W. Bush did in his second inaugural that, “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this Earth has rights and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and Earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.” I suspect Obama would have gagged on the words. [...]

Ocasio-Cortez does not. She depicts American history less as an arc of progress than as a circle, in which America repeats—rather than rises above—its past. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE’s) treatment of people of color, she told The Intercept, continues an American tradition: “The very first immigration policy law passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s, and so the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy, the very beginning of it was a policy based on racial exclusion.” She told New York magazine that, “child separation is a barbaric new iteration of what is going on, but for a very long time.” [...]

What explains the change? One obvious answer is Donald Trump. When Obama spoke about American history as a narrative of unfolding progress, his own election served as Exhibit A. And while he acknowledged the conservative backlash it sparked, he described that backlash as temporary, a “fever” that would eventually “break.” But Trump shows that, far from breaking, the fever has intensified. Which raises the possibility that the real historical aberration was not the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency, but his presidency itself. [...]

In different ways, Obama and Bush both spoke about America as embodying a set of ideas. Now neither Republicans nor Democrats are as likely to do so. Donald Trump doesn’t care about human rights. For him, America isn’t an idea; it’s a nation. And when it pursues universal ideals—by admitting refugees, eschewing torture, agreeing to environmental norms or aiding other nations—it gets ripped off. For Ocasio-Cortez, human rights matter intensely, but the United States has no special claim to embodying them. It’s hard to imagine her saying, as Obama often did, that “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

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Jacobin Magazine: The Torture of Solitary

In recent years, city officials have introduced a series of reforms intended to reduce overcrowding and curtail abuse, including the provision of therapeutic programs for prisoners and a ban on the use of solitary confinement on sixteen- and seventeen-year-old prisoners. This week, the city reached a deal with the US Justice Department that includes adding thousands of new surveillance cameras to the prison and developing a computer system to track use-of-force incidences. [...]

A 2013 report from the Government Accounting Office found that the federal system holds about 7.1% of its 217,000 prisoners in some form of solitary confinement, and “from fiscal year 2008 through February 2013, the total inmate population in segregated housing units increased approximately 17% — from 10,659 to 12,460 inmates.” [...]

More recent studies have been similarly arresting. One looking at California’s prison system discovered that almost half of all suicides were prisoners in solitary confinement. Another examining the federal prison system “found that 63 percent of suicides occurred among inmates locked in ‘special housing status,’ such as solitary or in psychiatric seclusion cells.” [...]

Most of the available data regarding the mental and physical health repercussions of solitary confinement corroborate Gassian’s conclusions. In some cases, the effect of this isolation on people’s mental health is irreversible, persisting even after they’ve been released. Often those prisoners are juveniles, many whom are already at risk of developing mental health issues stemming from things like poverty and abuse.

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Vox: What most Americans get wrong about Islamophobia

Essentially, it’s that even though Islamophobia animates a modern form of bigotry ... the essence of the hate is not new. It’s deeply rooted in American political discourse. It’s deeply rooted in American law. It’s deeply rooted in American framings of who was a citizen and who was not. But it’s been given a new face — a new caricature — as a consequence of the war on terror, and then intensified by the rhetoric of, mainly, President Trump. [...]

Yeah, definitely. Islamophobia, largely on account of it being so closely tied and tethered to Trump, is caricatured as exclusively a form of hate that comes from people on the right. We almost conflate Islamophobia with right-wing politics, which is really simplistic. It glosses over the idea that you have individuals on the left engaging in and propagating Islamophobia. [...]

Islamophobia intersects with Black Lives Matter in dynamic and distinct ways. A large number of African Americans are Muslim; we know that anywhere between 25 and 33 percent of the entire Muslim population here, in the states, [is] black. When we think about violent policing, we think about these issues that the Black Lives Matter movement has committed to addressing and dismantling.

I think it’s also important to frame Islamophobia as another aspect of white supremacy. Specifically, war on terror programming, when we think about the state-sponsored Islamophobic programs that I talk about in the book, whether it be counter-radicalization in the Patriot Act, the Muslim ban, and so on.

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CityLab: When Teens Protest, Race Matters

In the spring of 2016, African-American children as young as 11 marched in protest against the gun violence in their Miami neighborhood of Liberty City. The low-income area had lost 13 teens and children so far that year to guns. The kids demanded the right to play outside safely; they held signs and chanted slogans like “We want to live” and “We want to see another day.” Phillip Agnew, leader of the Florida-based Dream Defenders, a youth-led group fighting for racial justice, said the demonstration didn’t get much attention from the national media at the time.

Liberty City is about 40 miles from Parkland, Florida, site of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks ago. But it’s been hard not to notice the difference between how youth-led protests against gun violence in these two communities were received. Since the Parkland tragedy, the national news has been filled with the school’s student survivors, who rose up to protest school shootings and demand—in eloquent and defiant terms—tighter gun legislation. Across the country, teens have been walking out of class in solidarity, often standing together in silence for 17 minutes, one for each of Parkland’s victims. National walkouts are planned for March 14, the one-month anniversary of the shooting, and April 20, which will mark 19 years since the Columbine High School massacre. [...]

In contrast, teens and adults of color have often faced very different responses when protesting gun violence. Indeed, while youth of color have been confronting the issue for years, the protests and actions associated with the Movement for Black Lives have often been criminalized, greeted with police repression and public scorn, or simply ignored.

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