Good morning, everyone!
Former senior advisor for President Obama, David Axelrod, writing for the Washington Post, says that after decades of reporting on issues relating to police brutality and after working on the campaigns of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and President Obama, he thought that he understood the struggles that black people face daily.
Now, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Mr. Axelrod admits that he does not and cannot understand that struggle.
When I left journalism for the life of a campaign strategist, I worked for Washington and spent more than two decades in politics working to tear down barriers to black and Hispanic candidates in places where they had not won before. I had the honor of helping to elect and reelect America’s first black president.
I thought all of this reflected a deep understanding of the struggle — a certification of my manifest commitment to justice and equal rights.
Despite my work, I was too often oblivious — or at least inattentive — to the everyday mistreatment of people of color, including friends and colleagues, in ways large and small.
Although I was reporting on the issues of police brutality and unequal justice as a journalist, I didn’t experience it. My kids didn’t experience it. And I never really engaged my black friends and colleagues about their own experiences. I never asked, so far as I can remember, about their own interactions with police or their fears for their children.
On the other hand, Harvard Law Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, writing for the New York Review of Books, understands that struggle all too well.
Aside from writing works of history, I teach Criminal Procedure at Harvard Law School. But the intricacies of the law at that moment in the car were the furthest thing from my mind. What mattered was my deep awareness of the raw power of the person who had a gun and who had pulled us over for crossing a line that did not exist. A person who asked for my identification to run a warrant search on me, though he had no reason to believe that I was dangerous or had been involved in any crime (or even a traffic infraction).
I handed him my identification. He did a warrant check. A few minutes passed. Then he let us go. Nothing violent occurred. Unlike Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others whose names are known because of tragic encounters with the police, I walked—or, rather, was driven—away from the event with no visible impairment. This whole episode could be seen as trivial, given that I came to no physical harm.
But the moment was deeply instructive. I had been on the receiving end of the power I’d discussed many times over the years with my students in cases and hypotheticals that presented similar situations. The event encapsulated for me many of the issues that have been raised in recent years and have come to a head in the past two weeks, about the nature of policing in America and the second-class status of black citizenship in the United States.
Renee Graham writes, for the Boston Globe, on the ties that bind Donald Trump and Mother Emanuel AME murderer Dylann Roof together.
Unlike mass shooters in a Pittsburgh synagogue, two New Zealand mosques, and an El Paso Walmart, Roof was not inspired by Trump’s hateful speech about Mexicans, Muslims, or his thinly veiled language about a great America as a white America. Yet Trump and Roof are bound by their affection for the crushed Confederacy, and its indelible stain — white resentment and racist violence.
In a photo found after his arrest, Roof holds a Confederate flag. Now Trump celebrates the losers who fought for it. Even NASCAR has now banned the banner from its events and venues. (For decades, the stars and bars were as common at races as a checkered flag.) Various state leaders are talking about removing statues of those who chose slavery over country; some activists aren’t waiting for official action, taking down or defacing the monuments themselves.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is demanding the removal of 11 Confederate statues in the US Capitol. For now, I guess, we’re skipping deeper conversations about how they’ve stood for decades as state-sanctioned emblems of white terrorism and the subjugation of Black people.
Rebecca Traister of The Cut says that the brazenness of racism and racists is a feature and not a bug.
These political shows of force are the hallmarks of the era in which we are living, reminders of what’s not so different from an American past many would like to think of as more undeniably racist than our present. But they recall something very present, very recent: the cold face of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, staring brazenly into the cell-phone camera held by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier as she captured the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin’s drive to stare straight into Frazier’s lens, to show this young Black girl that she and the camera she was pointing at him held no power over him as he took a Black life, is a particularly American performance of power.
It’s part of what the nation’s white political and economic systems (and the tactics used to police them) have been built around: open intimidation, the ostentatious display of cruelty and dominance, making an example of one to underscore the oppression of many. These exhibits are inherent to the country’s history of lynching, its open and unapologetic suppression of the Black vote, and the unrepentant rhetoric of its most racist political leaders. Even now, Klansmen and white supremacists are unafraid to do glossy photo shoots in full garb in their own homes, broadcasting their aggression as an affirmation of their power. And while these remorseless shows surely offer thrills to the tyrants, autocrats, and murderers performing them, part of that thrill is tautological: They can be cocky about their cruelty because of their certainty that they will be protected by the system they enjoy supremacy within. Their showiness makes their impunity even more real.
To give yet another example of the sheer brazenness of white supremacy, it was not lost on anyone that all the COVID-19 “liberate” Klan rallies started when public health officials finally began to reveal statistics that in many municipalities and states, black people and other people of color were more susceptible to contracting COVID-19 and dying from the virus than white people.
Lauren Kaori Gurley/Vice News
A new survey from May released Wednesday by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) about working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic confirms that corporate America has treated Black workers categorically worse than white workers during the pandemic. The poll found that Black workers are roughly twice as likely to have been retaliated against by their employer, for among other things, speaking up about health concerns and requesting time off work.
Indeed, many of the same companies calling for racial justice have done a laughable job protecting frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Census Bureau data from the 100 largest cities in the United States found that frontline workers were mostly people of color.) Amazon has fired Black and brown workers who have organized to demand stronger health and safety protections. Thousands of Instacart workers, many of whom are women of color, are still waiting for face masks and hand sanitizer promised months ago. Though New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and others have called the virus “the great equalizer,” COVID-19 has hit Black and brown communities far harder than white ones.
Martin Z, Braun, writing for Bloomberg, looks at the power of the police unions.
Police unions are a powerful political force to both parties, serving as allies of law-and-order Republicans and labor-friendly Democrats who run most major American cities and are under persistent pressure to keep down crime. Police unions have contributed more than $100 million to state officials alone since 2000, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, and make important contributions and endorsements locally.
There are signs that the political ground among Democrats may be shifting. This week, the Washington, D.C., council passed legislation that removes the police disciplinary process from the list of topics covered by collective bargaining. New York’s legislature bucked police unions by passing a bill that would repeal a decades-old law that kept officers disciplinary records secret.
On Wednesday, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said the department was withdrawing from contract negotiations with the police union and bringing in outside experts to review provisions, including use of force and disciplinary procedures such as grievances and arbitration.
“We’ve reached a turning point,” said Stephen Rushin, an associate professor of law at Loyola University Chicago who teaches criminal law, evidence and police accountability. “The public increasingly understands that even if you can generally support the rights of public employees to collectively bargain, it doesn’t mean you support leaders making bad deals that allow someone to engage in serious misconduct and keep their job.”
Hamilton Nolan, a labor reporter writing for the Guardian is through with it: kick police unions out of the labor movement.
Earlier this week, my union, the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), formally called upon the AFL-CIO – America’s largest union coalition, representing 55 unions, including us – to expel police unions from its ranks. (I am one of the 21 elected WGAE council members who unanimously voted to approve this resolution, but I speak here only for myself.) We do not dispute the right of anyone to have a union, but police unions are incompatible with the AFL-CIO’s mission “to vanquish oppression”. For centuries, the police have in fact been the tool of oppression wielded to crush working people. A common thread that runs from striking union members getting their heads bashed in to the tragedy of George Floyd is the presence of aggressive and unaccountable police.
It is worth noting that the AFL-CIO’s own constitution says that affiliated unions can be kicked out if their activities “are consistently directed toward the achievement of the program or purposes of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, terrorism and other forces that suppress individual liberties and freedom of association and oppose the basic principles of free and democratic trade unionism”. When I read those words, I conjure up the image of the combative riot police who unjustly arrested multiple journalists and WGAE members who were peacefully covering the recent protests against police violence.
Michael Tomasky of the New York Review of Books reports that the camps of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, are getting along...rather well, actually. (Pushing fair use on this one because of the specificity of detail...but this is a long essay.)
In fact, the lines of communication between the campaigns predated Sanders’s dropping out. As the virus descended in the first half of March, the two camps negotiated the mutual canceling of events; they agreed before the last pre-lockdown debate, on March 15, to replace a handshake with an elbow bump. Through late March, as the toll of illness rose, they generally kept each other apprised of their actions. After Sanders withdrew, the discussions between the two turned more toward substance—and the extent to which Biden would be willing to adopt pieces of the Sanders agenda. Thus were formed the six task forces that the Biden campaign unveiled on May 13. These eight-member groups cover the economy, health care, immigration, criminal justice, climate, and education, and each is co-chaired by one Biden supporter and one Sanders supporter.
The left-wing presence on many of them is remarkable. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez co-chairs the climate panel with John Kerry. Representative Pramila Jayapal of Seattle, a major Sanders backer, co-chairs the health care task force with Obama surgeon general Vivek Murthy. The economist Stephanie Kelton, a top Sanders adviser and proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that the government should pay for major new investments like the Green New Deal by printing more money, is on the economic task force. The task forces, I’m told, have a threefold mission: to publicly recommend the policy positions that Biden should run on, to guide the writing of the party platform, and to inform the transition, should Biden win the election (assuming there is an election, or an uncorrupted one). It stands to reason that some of the members of these task forces might also fill important slots in a Biden administration.
Of course, it’s in both sides’ interest to cooperate to defeat Trump. But what a difference this is from 2016, when, after losing to Hillary Clinton in the primaries in early June, Sanders allowed bitterness to fester well into the summer. The difference can be credited to a few factors: Biden and Sanders get along fairly well personally, and Biden understands that he needs to take the left seriously. But easily the dominant factor is the virus. Biden, by most accounts, has been a different man since the pandemic hit. Last year, he sometimes spoke of his presidency as a return to a pre-Trump era. Now, with unemployment nearing 15 percent and calls for change from protesters becoming more urgent—and with the crisis starkly laying bare the economic precarity in which so many Americans were living even before the virus hit—he sees himself in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, a leader who would rise to the vast challenge history has thrust upon him and introduce sweeping change. The change in Biden has sometimes been overstated. But it is real, and it makes the prospect of a Biden presidency (provided it’s combined with Democratic capture of the Senate) far more intriguing than it was just two months ago.
Frank Rich of New York magazine sounds off on...a lot of things, as usual, but I’m focused here on Rich’s comments relating to the Trump campaign’s election strategy.
What happened in Georgia’s primary election this week is as handy a preview as any of what’s in store. Georgia is turning blue. It has an anomalous two Senate seats up for grabs this year, when Mitch McConnell’s slender majority is on the line. It may be in play in the presidential contest as well. Since 2018, when Stacey Abrams lost Georgia’s governorship by 55,000 votes in a midterm election blighted by voter suppression, some 700,000 new voters, many young and nonwhite, have been added to the rolls.
The white supremacist party’s game plan to counter that threat was made clear this week: utter chaos. There was a breakdown in voting machines (purchased from a vendor with close ties to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp) that centered on black neighborhoods in Atlanta (including the one where Martin Luther King grew up), and a breakdown in mail voting that led to even Abrams herself receiving a defective ballot.
This is just a glimpse of what will be a national effort. Trump and his party will use any means they can to abridge the right to vote — whether it be this week’s vote by the Republican-majority senate in Iowa to restrict mail ballots, or White House inaction on Russian election interference, or the administration’s ongoing enabling of a COVID-19 second wave that can be exploited to sow further chaos into the electoral process right through Election Day.
Trump may or may not be at the tipping point. The country is.
Maresa Strano of Washington Monthly states that conservative governance at the state level is directly responsible for the surge in COVID-19 cases (yesterday, Florida posted its highest one day total of new COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic).
In the fight to improve public health, policymakers will have to tackle many related challenges, from structural racism to a broken medical system. But one of the most overlooked obstacles to creating a healthier America is preemption: where one level of government restricts or eliminates a lower level of government’s authority over a certain issue. For decades, progressive municipalities have tried to pass laws that better protect the health of residents. But with increasing frequency, red states seeking to rein in blue cities have stopped them from doing so. As a result, much of America is far more vulnerable to COVID-19 than it otherwise might be.
Traditionally, preemption was viewed as a politically neutral doctrine of federalism, used to resolve inter-governmental disagreements. But in the 1980s, as tobacco taxes and smoke-free ordinances popped up in cities all over the country, the tobaccoindustry began pushing states to outlaw these regulations, oftenproactively. The strategy worked, and other industry groups caught on quickly. Since the Tea Party-infused GOP swept the 2010 midterms, the party has overridden a range of citywide decisions aimed to improve health and well-being.
Dylan Scott of Vox writes about the surges in COVID-19 cases.
It is difficult to ignore that the places seeing surges in Covid-19 cases began to reopen businesses and other public spaces a few weeks ago. Because of those reporting lags that are innate to the virus, any changes in spread would only become evident now.
“The early opening with insufficient public concern for behavior change will undoubtedly lead to more problems ahead,” David Celentano, who leads the Johns Hopkins University’s epidemiology department, told me.
Arizona rolled back its stay-at-home order on May 16. North Carolina relaxed its order on May 22. Some of the other emerging hot spots — Texas, Arkansas, etc. — have been open for business since the beginning of May. Experts point out we are now a few weeks out from Memorial Day, which may have served as an unofficial end to self-quarantine for many people in the states where shelter-in-place is no longer in effect.
We should be cautious about interpreting the surges as a clear sign that reopening is increasing spread. Correlation is not causation. There are acute outbreaks in prisons and meat-packing plants that explain part of the spike.
Importantly, Scott notes that the spike in COVID-19 cases cannot be attributed to the George Floyd protest yet; it’s still too soon to fully measure the impact of the Floyd protests.
The 7:47 pm report in yesterday’s Washington Post live blog/Samantha Pell and Jacqueline Dupree
Twenty-one states saw an increase in their seven-day average of daily new coronavirus cases this week in comparison with the previous week, as new infections nationwide also surged.
Alabama recorded the biggest increase, a 92 percent change in its seven-day average, with 645 new cases daily. Oregon’s seven-day average was up 83.8 percent, while South Carolina’s was up 60.3 percent.
A dozen states hit their record-high seven-day-average of new cases: Alabama, Oregon, South Carolina, Florida, Alaska, Oklahoma, Arizona, Nevada, Arkansas, California, North Carolina and Texas. Five states reached new single-day case highs Saturday: Alabama (888), Alaska (29), Florida (2,581), Oklahoma (225) and South Carolina (785).
Saturday is usually one of the days of the week with the most reports of new cases, but the latest nationwide daily tally still stands out as the highest on a Saturday since May. There were 26,222 new cases reported Saturday, up from 23,881 a week ago.