'When I Was White' Centers On The Formation Of Race, Identity And Self - NPR

When one thinks of American blackness, there is the unsaid ugly truth that nearly all American blacks descended from the historical African diaspora in America have one (or several) rapacious white slave owners in their family tree at some point.

Here, in the early days of the United States, was the invention of racism for economic necessity. From 1619 until 1865, white male Americans chose to breed a black enslaved workforce through the state-sanctioned rape of black women in order to build the new nation and support their white supremacist class. Race became the single unifying identifier — determining everything about one's life starting with this most basic division: enslaved or free.

The American law was that the "condition of the child followed that of the mother," backed up by the "one drop rule," the legal framework that dictated even one drop of blackness made an individual black, never white. The idea of blackness as a pollutant, a taint that would erode the purity of whiteness was seized by politicians around the world then, and now.

Because of this legacy of sexual violence and anti-blackness, black and white mixed individuals have long been considered black in America.

To a much larger degree than many people would like to admit, race still determines a vast part of one's life — social networks and mobility, birth and other medical care, employment opportunities and so on. Indeed, there is an entire genre of literature and film, popularized in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, composed of blacks "passing" for white to avoid this racism; some of the most famous examples are Nella Larson's 1929 novel Passing, James Weldon Johnson's 1912 opus The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and the 1959 film The Imitation of Life.

Sarah Valentine, the author of the memoir When I Was White, did not choose to pass for white. Her mother made the choice for her. So Valentine was raised as white by white parents in white middle-class communities — only to discover as a young woman that her biological father was actually black. As Valentine endeavors to explore what her new identity means to her, she searches for ways to connect to her blackness. For Valentine, learning that she is black is to reject whiteness; she cannot comprehend how the privileges of whiteness can be held hand in hand with the racism the black body is subject to.

Valentine has good reason to feel this way; her space of "passing" for white puts her in situations where, because they assume she is one of their own, she hears the racist things white people say when there are no black people around — starting with her own family; Valentine's pain when her mother refuses to let her attend a school dance because her date is black, dismisses black people as lazy welfare spongers who live in the ghetto, or bans Valentine from watching TV shows with black people, is palpable.

Due to her white mother's ongoing racism throughout her childhood, Valentine's first understanding of blackness is as other — as negative, dangerous and wrong. "I got the message that black was undesirable," Valentine writes.

At the center of When I Was White is this immensely complicated relationship between Valentine and her mother. As Valentine seeks to learn more about her biological father, her mother will only say: "Your father was a black man who raped me in college." Valentine tries to reckon with this, seeking more information from her mother — and in the aftermath of her mother's ever-changing narrative of Valentine's conception and constant refusals to answer Valentine's questions — she seeks answers from her mother's college friends as well. Valentine, torn between respecting her mom's trauma and wanting to connect with her biological father, struggles to come to terms with the many layers of the situation, navigating the line between the importance of believing women's accounts of rape and the awareness of the history of white women's false rape accusations against black men as an excuse for lynching and other racial violence throughout American history.

Valentine is at her best when we see her sift through this history, creating well-crafted scenes that resonate with depth and emotional weight in a commitment to get to the truth — even if paints her in a negative light. She reveals that everyone suspected she had black heritage — friends, teachers, even herself — but to prevent jeopardizing her family dynamic no one spoke of it. Scared, the young Valentine had also remained silent.

"I worried that acknowledging I was black and had a different father than the one I grew up with could shatter the unity of the family my parents had worked so hard to create," Valentine writes. Indeed, after taking a DNA test and finding out they are not biologically related, the man Valentine knew as her father moved out of the home he shared with Valentine's mother and into an apartment of his own 300 miles away.

Black and white biraciality in this country has long been understood as a type of blackness, and the presence of biracial individuals within blackness has added to the power of the black cultural block. Without biracial being considered black, for example, America would not yet have had its first black president.

But why, then, is biracial not also a type of white? If you look past the racist origins of the "one drop rule," what happens to our thinking of racial duality?

One wonders: Why is this mutually exclusive? Why must Valentine choose either black or white? One wonders, too: If the author was Latina and black or Asian and black, would discovering her blackness mean losing her Latinx or Asian identity? We are beyond black and white, beyond the "one drop rule," in American society. So, should our understanding of multi-racial identity evolve too? Can it evolve?

Or is the history and continued presence of white supremacy in our culture so virulent that whiteness cannot be held in the same conversation as other multi-racial identities?

These and other questions are tackled in When I Was White. But in a larger sense, Valentine's memoir documents an experience any black individual in the U.S. has had: From birth you have seen yourself as a normal human being, worthy of just as much respect and personhood as anyone in America. But then, upon that first pivotal experience with racism, you realize that in this society, because of your skin, you are seen as other; because of your skin you are seen as less than and treated accordingly — and always with the threat of violence against your body ready to rise.

As the United States continues to become more brown and black and less white — resulting in a xenophobic backlash against brown and black Americans and a nostalgia by some for white European immigrants — the ideas in When I Was White become even more necessary. Here, quite simply, is a masterful explication on the formation of self and identity — of learning to trust yourself instead of the lies other people, no matter how close, tell you about who you are.

---

Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan-American poet, essayist, and writer. She is a contributing editor for The Root, and has written for The Guardian, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, The Daily Beast, and Salon, among others.

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American Students Are Not Learning the Truth About Race - TIME

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Reading the Hidden Racial Life of American Fiction - The New York Times

WHITE FLIGHTS
Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination
By Jess Row

If you were looking for a primer on our nation’s ability to discuss its racial history, you couldn’t do much better than the remarks by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on the eve of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings in June on H.R. 40. If passed, the bill would allow the formation of a commission to study — just study — the possibility of reparations for slavery and subsequent racially discriminatory government policies. But McConnell couldn’t abide discussion. “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” he said at a news conference ahead of the hearings. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African-American president.”

McConnell’s remarks bear the rhetorical hallmarks of white America’s stunted engagement with race: the attempt to isolate anti-blackness to the institution of chattel slavery; the gesture toward self-exoneration through a rejection of personal culpability for slavery; and, most important, an insistence that discrete acts of atonement nullify the need for conversation about race. In his new essay collection, “White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination,” the novelist Jess Row trains his attention on moments like McConnell’s news conference, when American discourse on race addresses anti-blackness by not addressing it at all — or, at least, not in a serious way, one that would threaten white people’s place atop the nation’s racial hierarchy.

Row, whose 2014 novel “Your Face in Mine” satirized liberal desires to dissolve racial difference into a vague concept of “togetherness,” works like a Freudian analyst in these searching, loosely structured essays. Armed with a bevy of sources, from Flannery O’Connor to Eve Sedgwick, he casts his eye upon a diverse swath of American culture in order to suss out what it has to tell us about race — even, or especially, when it doesn’t mean to tell us anything.

“In these essays I’m only interested in confessions, proclamations of guilt, sudden or absolute or unquestioned epiphanies … to the degree they can be named, understood, redescribed, even satirized,” he writes, charting the critical ground he hopes to cover. Confession isn’t as generative for him as what he calls “the inner racial life of Americans,” an “unconscious life embodied in American fictions, which often sustains, and sometimes undermines, the political conditions of white supremacy the country still inhabits.”

If, as Row puts it, American fiction most often addresses race through silences and omissions, he wants to force these silences to speak, to reveal themselves as self-serving — meant to protect white supremacy. It’s a project that owes a debt to Toni Morrison’s 1992 book “Playing in the Dark.” Morrison wrote of an “Africanist” presence in American literature that amounted to no authentic black presence at all, only static figures representing “notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy or routine dread.” Row extends that analysis by turning his attention to the giants of postwar American literature, in whose work new forms of marginalization take root.

In wrestling with such fiction’s relationship to race, his collection draws its title and central concept from a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon: the exodus of white Americans from inner cities as the federal government experimented with integration policies and social unrest overtook communities across the nation. In his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that white flight was a socially engineered conspiracy, an attempt to maintain white political and economic domination at a moment when black activism and federal intervention threatened to erode both. For Row, there’s an analogue in contemporary fiction: white authors fleeing the problem of race. Literary white flight — into imagined worlds from which black people and the urgent questions their presence begs have been absented — is no less a matter of power.

Row demonstrates this through astute close readings in which he analyzes postwar fiction with a loving sternness that avoids didacticism even as he pingpongs among cultural artifacts, decoding everything from Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” to emo music. In the title essay, he considers the setting of nearly all Anne Tyler’s work: Baltimore, particularly the neighborhood of Roland Park. Tyler is a writer “rooted in a place that is so comfortable, unthreatening and familiar that it becomes almost featureless, a state of psychic stability that needs no explicit expression.” So, too, Roland Park is a site of timeless normalcy, a place where the white world “will never be significantly altered.”

Yet this normalcy depends on the general absence of black people. If Tyler were to give them a voice, they might recount stories like the one told by a former colleague of Row’s who grew up in Baltimore. “When I was young, our name for Roland Park was Hang-a-nigger,” he tells Row. “My parents made sure I knew never to go up there, not for any reason.”

The effect of literary white flight is to regulate the American imagination and reproduce racialized power. Flight allows whiteness to function as if it were universal, a stand-in for “human,” rather than a particular racial category that relies on blackness for its expression. What Row desires is fiction that acknowledges the ways in which Americans are entwined with one another physically, psychically and socially. In the ambitious experimental essay “Parts of Us Not Made at Home,” he attempts to model such writing by delving into his own interracial background. He writes of his great-grandmother Amy Brazil, a woman who passed as white but who was an immigrant from the Azorean island of Flores and was most likely mixed-race, as many Flores islanders are. In uncovering this history, and perhaps even extending it through fiction, Row hopes to reveal stories of racial purity as what they are — fictions that we must counter with new ones.

For all of these inventive and insightful readings, however, it’s unfortunate that Row does not suggest concrete strategies for intervening in the stalled conversation he picks apart. When he recommends specific texts — Theresa Cha’s experimental novel “Dictee,” James Alan McPherson’s classic story “Elbow Room” or James Baldwin’s “Another Country” — his glosses fail to identify what, on an aesthetic level, makes these titles worthy of admiration. In any case, it seems beside the point to uphold writers of color who do this work, as they have since the nation’s founding, when Row’s chief concern is that white writers should develop their own means for thinking critically about race.

It doesn’t help that the book includes some fumbling gestures. At one point, Row suggests that calling South Dakota’s Black Hills mountain range by the name the Lakota call it, “Khe Sapa,” might be a way of registering racial injustice. “Is it a self-conscious and ludicrous performance of guilt?” he muses. “Maybe I sound like Kevin Costner, in ‘Dancing With Wolves.’” Reading this, I can’t but feel that if one must wonder at such a thing, you should think twice about writing it.

In “Eating the Blame,” an essay that posits Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative writing” as an alternative to a facile liberalism, he announces that he will donate his book advance to a Native-owned art collective in South Dakota. It’s a strange gesture: The essay purports to be about aesthetics and racial justice in writing, only to mutate into a meditation on charity.

But perhaps such disconcerting moments are an inherent feature of Row’s project: How can a white author not stumble when addressing such a fraught topic? “There are only more or less awkward ways for me to name” racial injustice, Row says of the ongoing conversation he hopes we’ll join him in. Despite, or perhaps because of, these flaws and the discomfort they inspire, we should accompany Row through this important inquiry.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/review/white-flights-jess-row.html

The Note: Shootings bring rare clarity to Democrats' 2020 race - ABC News

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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/note-shootings-bring-rare-clarity-democrats-2020-race/story?id=64767376

Why Donald Trump is just following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps on race - Washington Post

Richard Nixon greets California Gov. Ronald Reagan, right, on Aug. 16, 1968. Reagan was there to confer with Nixon and his staff about their plans for the fall campaign. (Henry Burroughs/AP)

By Kyle Longley

Kyle Longley is the Snell Family Dean's distinguished professor of history and political science at Arizona State University, whose books include the edited works "Deconstructing Reagan: Conservative Mythology" and "America's Fortieth President and Reagan and the World: Leadership and National Security, 1981-1989" (with Bradley Coleman).

August 4 at 6:00 AM

Since his campaign, President Trump has pushed race to the center of American politics. It started with his stance on immigration and intensified with his response to the violence in Charlottesville. Over the past few weeks, he has sharpened the focus through attacks on minority members of Congress dubbed “the Squad,” as well as Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and the city of Baltimore.

It is easy for some to see Trump’s blatant and openly racist statements as an aberration for GOP politics. But the recent disclosure of a phone call between President Richard M. Nixon and California Gov. Ronald Reagan in October 1971 — during which Reagan referred to African leaders as “monkeys” who are “still uncomfortable wearing shoes” — challenges that narrative.

For Reagan, such rhetoric wasn’t an aberration, either, especially when you look at his long record. Along with advisers such as Pat Buchanan, he understood how to use racially coded language, derived from staunch segregationists such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace and deployed successfully by figures including Nixon to bring Southern voters and working-class urban whites in the Midwest into the Republican Party.

It didn’t stop with such coded language. His policy record on civil rights and racial issues explains why many African Americans continue to view the former president with great disdain. Although he is remembered fondly by the GOP, racist politics played a significant role in Reagan’s political success. The same is true of Trump.

Racial issues were central to Reagan’s political success during the 1966 California gubernatorial election. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while running radio ads referring to urban areas as “jungles.” Regarding fair housing, he emphasized: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” This resonated well with white conservative suburban voters in places such as Orange County, Calif.

As governor, he targeted African Americans to condemn, particularly activists such as Angela Davis. He joked publicly about Africans and cannibalism, and he verbally accosted an African American protester in 1968 at the Republican National Convention.

This boosted his national reputation as he became a darling of the conservative movement and crisscrossed the South and white working-class and suburban enclaves all over the country. Nixon understood racial politics as the root of Reagan’s appeal, noting how he played on the “emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place.’ ”

But as scholar Jeremy D. Mayer notes, Reagan’s anti-federalism gave him a “plausible deniability on race” that was “perhaps Reagan’s greatest appeal to many racist whites.” He understood how to frame race in terms of states’ rights rather than the blatant racist rhetoric of segregationists such as Thurmond and Wallace.

The goal, however, was the same: to appeal to white Southerners and other working-class whites, bringing this demographic into the GOP. During Reagan’s effort to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, this became apparent when he supported a constitutional amendment to end busing and denounced affirmative action.

That year, he also coined the term “welfare queen,” borrowing heavily from Wallace’s playbook to frame people of color as abusers of government programs. Without directly mentioning race, his campaign used the story of a Chicago welfare cheat to imply that whites were forced to turn over their hard-earned money to the government to subsidize the lazy lifestyles of people of color.

The race-baiting caused some backlash, however. One of Reagan’s few African American friends, Robert Keyes, backed Gerald R. Ford because of these race issues (on his deathbed in 1978, Keyes called Reagan, who refused to answer).

Although Reagan tempered his rhetoric somewhat in 1980, his actions continued to speak loudly. In one of his first general election campaign stops, he visited the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from Philadelphia, Miss., where racists killed three civil rights workers in 1964. There, he preached states’ rights, which his audience understood as a call to undermine civil rights protected by federal legislation.

During the campaign, Reagan also denounced the Voting Rights Act for humiliating the South. When it came up for renewal in 1982, he hoped to weaken it by granting an extension of 10 rather than 25 years. Only after the Senate passed the full extension 85 to 8 did Reagan reluctantly sign it.

He further alienated the African American community by supporting tax exemptions for “seg” academies (whites-only private schools that popped up after the Brown v. Board of Education decision) and questioning the creation of a national holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In private, the president wrote to a colleague who railed against King for being leftist and immoral that “I have the reservations that you have but there the perception of too many people is based on an image not reality. . . . We hope some modifications might still take place in Congress.” Despite Reagan’s tepid support, the holiday was approved.

These attitudes shaped foreign policy, too. Reagan supported the apartheid government in Rhodesia, and as president strongly backed the brutally repressive white minority South African government of P.W. Botha. By 1986, his position was so unpopular that Congress overrode his veto of a sanctions bill by a 3-to-1 margin.

Though some segregationists, including Wallace, eventually apologized for their racist records, Reagan never did. Wallace told an African American congregation in 1979: “I have learned what suffering means. . . . I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask for your forgiveness.”

But Reagan remained convinced he was not a racist, even though his actions showed otherwise. The recent release of the tape recordings featuring his blunt comments about Africans affirm this reality.

The link between Reagan and Trump is clear. As Buchanan recently emphasized, “Donald Trump is a conservative populist and direct descendant and rightful heir to Ronald Reagan.”

Trump may be more vocal and vindictive than Reagan ever was in his public comments. As historian Timothy Naftali highlights: “The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public.”

The taped conversation may shock us, but it shouldn’t. It reveals a fundamental if uncomfortable truth about Reagan and the shifts he and his allies triggered in the Republican Party. Far from an aberration, Trump is following in Reagan’s footsteps on racial politics.

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Why Donald Trump is just following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps on race - Washington Post

Richard Nixon greets California Gov. Ronald Reagan, right, on Aug. 16, 1968. Reagan was there to confer with Nixon and his staff about their plans for the fall campaign. (Henry Burroughs/AP)

By Kyle Longley

Kyle Longley is the Snell Family Dean's distinguished professor of history at Arizona State University. He is the author of "Senator Albert Gore, Sr.: Tennessee Maverick," and a forthcoming biography of Al Gore.

August 4 at 6:00 AM

Since his campaign, President Trump has pushed race to the center of American politics. It started with his stance on immigration and intensified with his response to the violence in Charlottesville. Over the past few weeks, he has sharpened the focus through attacks on minority members of Congress dubbed “the Squad,” as well as Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and the city of Baltimore.

It is easy for some to see Trump’s blatant and openly racist statements as an aberration for GOP politics. But the recent disclosure of a phone call between President Richard M. Nixon and California Gov. Ronald Reagan in October 1971 — during which Reagan referred to African leaders as “monkeys” who are “still uncomfortable wearing shoes” — challenges that narrative.

For Reagan, such rhetoric wasn’t an aberration, either, especially when you look at his long record. Along with advisers such as Pat Buchanan, he understood how to use racially coded language, derived from staunch segregationists such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace and deployed successfully by figures including Nixon to bring Southern voters and working-class urban whites in the Midwest into the Republican Party.

It didn’t stop with such coded language. His policy record on civil rights and racial issues explains why many African Americans continue to view the former president with great disdain. Although he is remembered fondly by the GOP, racist politics played a significant role in Reagan’s political success. The same is true of Trump.

Racial issues were central to Reagan’s political success during the 1966 California gubernatorial election. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while running radio ads referring to urban areas as “jungles.” Regarding fair housing, he emphasized: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” This resonated well with white conservative suburban voters in places such as Orange County, Calif.

As governor, he targeted African Americans to condemn, particularly activists such as Angela Davis. He joked publicly about Africans and cannibalism, and he verbally accosted an African American protester in 1968 at the Republican National Convention.

This boosted his national reputation as he became a darling of the conservative movement and crisscrossed the South and white working-class and suburban enclaves all over the country. Nixon understood racial politics as the root of Reagan’s appeal, noting how he played on the “emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place.’ ”

But as scholar Jeremy D. Mayer notes, Reagan’s anti-federalism gave him a “plausible deniability on race” that was “perhaps Reagan’s greatest appeal to many racist whites.” He understood how to frame race in terms of states’ rights rather than the blatant racist rhetoric of segregationists such as Thurmond and Wallace.

The goal, however, was the same: to appeal to white Southerners and other working-class whites, bringing this demographic into the GOP. During Reagan’s effort to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, this became apparent when he supported a constitutional amendment to end busing and denounced affirmative action.

That year, he also coined the term “welfare queen,” borrowing heavily from Wallace’s playbook to frame people of color as abusers of government programs. Without directly mentioning race, his campaign used the story of a Chicago welfare cheat to imply that whites were forced to turn over their hard-earned money to the government to subsidize the lazy lifestyles of people of color.

The race-baiting caused some backlash, however. One of Reagan’s few African American friends, Robert Keyes, backed Gerald R. Ford because of these race issues (on his deathbed in 1978, Keyes called Reagan, who refused to answer).

Although Reagan tempered his rhetoric somewhat in 1980, his actions continued to speak loudly. In one of his first general election campaign stops, he visited the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from Philadelphia, Miss., where racists killed three civil rights workers in 1964. There, he preached states’ rights, which his audience understood as a call to undermine civil rights protected by federal legislation.

During the campaign, Reagan also denounced the Voting Rights Act for humiliating the South. When it came up for renewal in 1982, he hoped to weaken it by granting an extension of 10 rather than 25 years. Only after the Senate passed the full extension 85 to 8 did Reagan reluctantly sign it.

He further alienated the African American community by supporting tax exemptions for “seg” academies (whites-only private schools that popped up after the Brown v. Board of Education decision) and questioning the creation of a national holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In private, the president wrote to a colleague who railed against King for being leftist and immoral that “I have the reservations that you have but there the perception of too many people is based on an image not reality. . . . We hope some modifications might still take place in Congress.” Despite Reagan’s tepid support, the holiday was approved.

These attitudes shaped foreign policy, too. Reagan supported the apartheid government in Rhodesia, and as president strongly backed the brutally repressive white minority South African government of P.W. Botha. By 1986, his position was so unpopular that Congress overrode his veto of a sanctions bill by a 3-to-1 margin.

Though some segregationists, including Wallace, eventually apologized for their racist records, Reagan never did. Wallace told an African American congregation in 1979: “I have learned what suffering means. . . . I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask for your forgiveness.”

But Reagan remained convinced he was not a racist, even though his actions showed otherwise. The recent release of the tape recordings featuring his blunt comments about Africans affirm this reality.

The link between Reagan and Trump is clear. As Buchanan recently emphasized, “Donald Trump is a conservative populist and direct descendant and rightful heir to Ronald Reagan.”

Trump may be more vocal and vindictive than Reagan ever was in his public comments. As historian Timothy Naftali highlights: “The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public.”

The taped conversation may shock us, but it shouldn’t. It reveals a fundamental if uncomfortable truth about Reagan and the shifts he and his allies triggered in the Republican Party. Far from an aberration, Trump is following in Reagan’s footsteps on racial politics.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/04/why-donald-trump-is-just-following-ronald-reagans-footsteps-race/

Local racing fans reflect on race track volunteer's death - WHP Harrisburg

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

1. Local racing fans reflect on race track volunteer's death  WHP Harrisburg
2. Spectator, 67, Killed After Race Car Flips Over Fence at Pennsylvania Speedway  PEOPLE.com
3. Speedway spectator, 67, killed when race car flips over fence in Pennsylvania  NBC News
4. Man killed while watching race at Williams Grove Speedway  ABC27
5. Williams Grove Speedway tragedy doesn't keep dirt-track racing fans away  York Daily Record
6. View full coverage on Google News

https://local21news.com/news/local/local-racing-fans-reflect-on-race-track-volunteers-death

Debates and More Debates: This Week in the 2020 Race - The New York Times

Every Saturday morning, we’re publishing “This Week in the 2020 Race”: a quick way to catch up on the presidential campaign and the field of 24 candidates for the Democratic nomination.

Debate Night 1: An ideological rift

The first night of this week’s Democratic debates in Detroit pitted the two leading liberals against lesser-known moderates, as CNN moderators pushed for ideological confrontations.

Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts were largely successful in driving the debate and shaking off accusations that they had made fanciful promises that could deliver President Trump a second term. Rather than attacking each other, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren more or less teamed up to defend their shared agenda on health care and other policy priorities.

No moment summed up the intraparty rift better than an exchange between Ms. Warren and former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who is polling at less than 1 percent nationally but was perhaps the loudest moderate voice onstage.

Mr. Delaney took an implicit shot at Ms. Warren, assailing “fairy tale economics.” Moments later, Ms. Warren fired back.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for the president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” she said.

• You can read our main story about the first night’s debate here. We put together some highlights here. And we rounded up expert analysis on who won here.

• We wrote about Marianne Williamson’s performance here and here. We also interviewed her about her past comments on mental illness and antidepressants, which have alarmed many mental health professionals.

Video

The second round of Democratic presidential debates showcased a widening rift between the party’s centrist and populist wings.CreditCreditBrittany Greeson for The New York Times

Debate Night 2: Biden attacked from all sides (again)

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. came under attack once again on Wednesday, and this time he struck back more forcefully at rivals like Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Although Mr. Biden was able to deliver pointed critiques of Ms. Harris and other challengers, he was also repeatedly forced to defend his record while fielding questions on the policies of the Obama administration. And once again, a divide emerged between populist liberal candidates and those with more centrist values — namely, Mr. Biden.

But Ms. Harris also found herself on defense for the first time as her rivals criticized her record as a prosecutor in San Francisco and as California’s attorney general, and her middle-ground position on health care.

Far from resolving anything, the debate seemed to showcase just how protracted the Democratic race is likely to be.

• You can read our main story about the second night’s debate here. We put together some highlights here. And we rounded up expert analysis on who won here.

What We Learned From the July Democratic Debates

With at least four candidates in strong contention for the nomination, the race is anyone’s to win.

Aug 1, 2019

Who will make the next debate?

If you thought you would get a break from debate chatter after this week, we’re sorry to be the bearers of bad news: It’s time to talk about September.

The third set of Democratic debates, scheduled for Sept. 12 and 13, is poised to cut the field in half. Twenty candidates participated in this week’s debates. Just eight have met the much more stringent criteria for the next ones, and only two to four others are within striking distance at all.

The candidates have until Aug. 28 to get 130,000 donors and at least 2 percent support in four polls. Here is who has qualified so far:

• Mr. Biden

• Mr. Booker

• Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.

• Ms. Harris

• Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota

• Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas

• Mr. Sanders

• Ms. Warren

The former housing secretary Julián Castro and the entrepreneur Andrew Yang will probably be there, too: They have met the donor threshold and gotten three qualifying polls apiece. An 11th candidate, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, just met the donor threshold, but she has only one qualifying poll.

After that, the odds get much longer. Only two other candidates — former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and the impeachment activist Tom Steyer — have even one qualifying poll, and Mr. Hickenlooper’s fund-raising numbers are so low that his chances of reaching 130,000 donors are tiny.

• Read our full rundown of the September qualifications here.

• And here is a look at when the primary field may start to shrink.

Sanders is crushing everyone else in donors

Mr. Sanders has far more individual donors than any other candidate, according to a New York Times analysis this week: an estimated 746,000 this election cycle, compared with 421,000 for Ms. Warren, who is in second place. The only places he isn’t dominating are the home states of opponents: Delaware (where Mr. Biden had the most donors), Indiana (Mr. Buttigieg), Massachusetts (Ms. Warren), Minnesota (Ms. Klobuchar), Montana (Gov. Steve Bullock) and Texas (Mr. O’Rourke).

You can read the full analysis here.

The numbers show just how well Mr. Sanders is doing with small donors. His lead in total money raised is smaller: He has collected about $36 million, and Mr. Buttigieg is in second place with $32 million. Ms. Warren is in third place by that measure.

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Senator Kamala Harris in Detroit on Thursday.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Harris takes a position on health care

“Medicare for all” has become a litmus test among the 2020 Democrats, separating those on the left from more moderate contenders.

On Monday, we got clarity on Ms. Harris’s position when she unveiled her own health care plan, stopping short of the complete overhaul Mr. Sanders has proposed.

In essence, Ms. Harris is making “Medicare for all” a long-term target while seeking to keep a significant role for private insurers, which Mr. Sanders’s plan would eliminate. Instead of creating a single-payer system, she would allow people to choose plans modeled on Medicare Advantage, which would be run by private insurers. But she would also offer a somewhat expanded version of traditional, government-run Medicare to all Americans.

“Essentially, we would allow private insurance to offer a plan in the Medicare system, but they will be subject to strict requirements to ensure it lowers costs and expands services,” Ms. Harris wrote on Medium. “If they want to play by our rules, they can be in the system. If not, they have to get out.”

In other policy news:

• It was a big policy week for Ms. Harris, who also released a plan to close the racial “opportunity gap” and introduced legislation with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to ensure that climate change policies benefit low-income communities. Her opportunity gap proposal includes $60 billion for STEM education at historically black colleges and universities and student loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients who start businesses in low-income areas.

• Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City proposed a series of tax increases on the rich, including a wealth tax on assets above $10 million and a 0.2 percent tax on stock trades. He also wants to reverse the Trump administration’s corporate tax cut, eliminate preferential tax rates for capital gains and add two new income tax brackets: a 50 percent marginal rate for income between $1 million and $2 million, and 60 percent above $2 million.

• Mr. Delaney released a plan to make a year of national service mandatory for all Americans when they turn 18. Options would include military service, community service, infrastructure apprenticeships and a climate corps. Participants would be paid and receive two years of free tuition at a public college or university; anyone who chose to serve longer would receive a third year of free tuition.

• Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington released a nine-part labor plan, titled “Organizing the American Dream,” that includes a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave and expanded union bargaining rights. He also announced a “community climate justice” plan that would establish a new Office of Environmental Justice, among other measures.

• Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio unveiled an “Industrial Plan for America.” It calls for the creation of a National Manufacturing Office that would develop and carry out a national manufacturing strategy.

• Mr. Yang rolled out a multipart veterans plan that, among other things, calls for a “reverse boot camp” at the end of military service to help reorient service members to civilian life.

Which Democrats Are Leading the 2020 Presidential Race?

There are more than 20 Democrats running for president. Here’s the latest data to track how the candidates are doing.

Jun 14, 2019

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How a Brutal Race Riot Shaped Modern Chicago - The New York Times

“The relation of whites and Negroes in the United States is our most grave and perplexing domestic problem.” So wrote the authors of “The Negro in Chicago,” a landmark 1922 study of a race riot that ripped through that city a century ago this summer. That conflagration, which began on July 27, consumed the city for three days and left 38 people dead and 537 injured. Whites set fire to scores of black-owned houses, leaving a thousand African-Americans homeless.

For several nights, gangs of white youth rampaged through black neighborhoods, targeting blacks who defended themselves by sniping back from behind makeshift street barricades. On Monday, July 28, the worst day of violence, white rioters pulled blacks off streetcars at busy South Side intersections and beat them with planks, pipes, bricks and fists. The next morning, a roving gang of whites, including soldiers and sailors in uniform, swept through the downtown streets of the Loop, killing two blacks and injuring many more. Large portions of the second-largest city in America became battlegrounds for open race war, which only rain and deployment of reserve guardsmen managed to quell.

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Rioters with bricks and stones in pursuit of an African-American man during the riots in 1919.CreditJun Fujita/Chicago History Museum, via Getty Images

The riots began after a weekend of racial skirmishes at a Lake Michigan beach, culminating in the drowning of a black teenager named Eugene Williams who had been stoned by a white mob incensed that he had swum into a “whites only” area. But that was just the spark; deeper factors were at work pushing the city toward violence.

Chicago was experiencing the first of several waves of migration — its black population doubled between 1915 and 1920, with most new arrivals coming from the South and settling in the neighborhoods below downtown. Almost overnight, the South Side emerged as a social, cultural and institutional center for African-Americans. That community would gestate modern blues, soul and gospel; landmark mass-market journalism; the largest black Protestant and nationalist churches; and, in time, the first black president.

In 1919, though, the South Side’s demographic revolution was seen as a threat by many of the city’s whites, many of them themselves recent arrivals from Europe. As black workers claimed industrial jobs in the South Side’s steel mills and stockyards, whites feared they would depress wages and undercut union power as strikebreakers.

Whites also worried about the black vote: Among the incentives to migrate from the Jim Crow South was the chance to cast a ballot. In April 1919, black voters, aligned with the Republicans since Reconstruction, provided the margin of victory for the party’s candidate in a divisive mayoral election — a result that, for many whites, confirmed their role as public enemy.

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Whites stoning an African-American man to death in 1919.CreditJun Fujita/Chicago History Museum, via Getty Images

Chicago was not yet completely segregated, but by 1919 black homeowners and renters were concentrated in a narrow band of the South Side that came to be known as the “Black Belt,” chiefly the blocks east and west of State Street from 21st to 47th Streets. Those few African-Americans wealthy or intrepid enough to breach those boundaries were subject to harassment, intimidation and even bombings.

The Hyde Park neighborhood just south of the Black Belt, the site of the Columbian Exposition in 1893 and home to the University of Chicago, was one of the most intolerant neighborhoods. Property owned by a wealthy black businessman named Jesse Binga was bombed six times. Mary Bryon Clarke, another black homeowner in greater Hyde Park, had her properties targeted by bombs three times, even though the previous owners of two of her buildings had run them as brothels.

Such outbursts along the border of black and white Chicago fed into a general racial hostility. White newspapers resorted to dialect and minstrel-like scenarios to demean blacks and discredit their claim to housing and job opportunities. Black papers stressed a worsening climate of racial violence locally and nationally — often to sensationalized extremes — and denounced the unwillingness on the part of city authorities, especially the police, to protect African-Americans’ rights.

These factors did not make the 1919 riot inevitable. Once the conflict started, though, they made its escalation unavoidable. The worst of the violence — whites pulling blacks off street cars, hunting them down in the streets — were led by members of so-called athletic clubs, with names like the Hamburgers, Ragen’s Colts, the Sparklers and the Emeralds. These groups, funded and, when needed, protected by local Democratic ward bosses, were bent on revenging their party’s defeat in the mayor’s election that year.

Richard Daley, the future mayor and political dynast, was a member of the Hamburgers and allegedly took part in the violence — accusations that only burnished his reputation, later on, as a loyal neighborhood son willing to fight for the “integrity” of his turf.

As the riot spread, it followed the paths laid out by previous episodes of violence along the emerging boundaries of the Black Belt, or centered on contested areas where blacks were buying and renting property, but were not yet securely established in numbers. The generalized terror of the rioting emboldened whites to establish a racial quarantine of sorts, using sudden, brutal mob action to lay down a border between white and black Chicago.

For whites who hesitated, unfounded rumors of a black “invasion” moved them to action: Stories of blacks breaking into armories and preparing to “clean out” white neighborhoods to the west were taken as justification for pre-emptive strikes.

The police played a crucial role as well. During the first few hours of the violence, 2,800 officers, out of 3,500 total, were deployed along the edges of the Black Belt, forming a cordon. The police claimed they were separating the antagonists, but their strategy left few officers to patrol the rest of the city. The Tuesday morning rampage through the Loop, for example, took place while only two officers were detailed to cover the entire downtown.

And the “dead line” cordon intended to separate the races worked only if the police were as committed to preventing white assailants from coming in as they were to keeping blacks from going out. This proved not to be the case: Much of the worst violence took place within the Black Belt itself.

In some cases, white officers rode along with the white gangs to shield them from arrest. In others, when officers responded to attacks on blacks, they failed to collect sufficient evidence from the scene, ensuring that few assailants were prosecuted (only 47 people were indicted) and signaling that they would turn a blind eye toward most violence. Although they made up two-thirds of the over 500 recorded casualties, blacks were indicted at double the rate of whites — the first clear instance of racial disparity in city criminal justice, but by no means the last.

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A police officer with black residents of the South Side who had left their homes shortly after the riots.CreditGetty Images

Chicago was not the only city to experience racial violence in mid-1919, a period that soon earned the name “Red Summer.” Nationwide, reported George Haynes, a black statistician with the Department of Labor, 38 racial disturbances took place that year. A week before, in Washington, white soldiers back home from Europe, fought black civilians in the streets for four days in the wake of sensational newspaper accounts of a sex crime. Reporters noted that, unlike in previous race riots, casualties mounted on both sides of the color line — evidence, many said, of a growing black militancy.

That same year Claude McKay wrote his classic poem “If We Must Die,” in which he captured a spirit of black self-preservation in the face of white violence. The poem implicitly aligned African-Americans with global currents of self-determination and nationalism swirling from Dublin to Prague to Jerusalem. Such gains in racial consciousness were limited, however, by the complexities and contradictions of race in America: While the violent experiences of 1919 left blacks more unified and “modern” in their self-determination, the same went for whites — in ways that fortified their resolve to go on exercising power and dominance, in spite of the progressive promise of the age.

If the 1920s saw an upsurge in black culture and awareness, it also saw a sustained, violent backlash by whites, from the rebirth of the Klan to an epidemic of lynching to housing segregation.

That backlash was on stark display in Chicago. The city’s white real estate agents helped pioneer new tactics in segregation. By 1927 the Chicago Real Estate Board had drafted its own version of a restrictive covenant, a binding contract enjoining white homeowners from selling property to nonwhites. Within a decade, such contracts governed three-fourths of Chicago’s residential property. Upheld routinely by municipal judges, restrictive covenants carried the force of law until overturned by the Supreme Court in 1948.

Other measures, including redlining, contract selling, mortgage discrimination and steering, maintained racial exclusion across much of Chicago long after the passage of national civil rights laws in the 1960s.

Together with continued discrimination against black renters, and an expansive public housing system dedicated to shifting poorer African-Americans out of the general housing market, these policies deepened racial separation in the city with each passing decade. By 1970, census data certified Chicago as a hyper-segregated municipality, a designation it would retain until the start of the new millennium. The collateral effects of this separation consigned blacks to grossly unequal resources and outcomes related to employment, education, housing, health and safety that inform the stark social problems of the city today.

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A memorial near the area where a black teenager, Eugene Williams, was struck in the head with a rock and drowned in Lake Michigan, setting off the 1919 race riots.CreditNoreen Nasir/Associated Press

Deepening segregation also institutionalized starkly disparate treatment by the police. As the riot demonstrated, personal prejudice among patrolmen had always been a problem, even though the city employed a surprising number of black officers. The existence of prejudice among individual police did not necessarily mean that Chicago’s police department was, institutionally speaking, racist. But that would steadily change. Measures intended to modernize the police force — car patrols, information technology as a tool for deploying resources — ended up focusing enforcement on black residential areas.

By the turn of this century, that approach had yielded some of the most egregious examples of police abuse in the nation’s history, including the pre-emptive execution of the Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969; the South Side torture scandal masterminded by Jon Burge, a Chicago police commander; and the crisis of officer-related shootings — which, by the first years of the 21st century, had cost the city over half a billion dollars in settlement payments.

Chicago’s 1919 Race Riot was a bridge toward, as well as a break from, a racial order. That order, the Riot and its aftermath revealed was rooted in sophisticated institutions, dynamic city growth, and unyielding separation and inequality. It baptized the modern American city in blood. As Germany, Italy and other nations whose destiny took a turn for the worse after 1919 demonstrated, “modern” could and did mean the opposite of “progressive.”

Commemorating the riot 100 years on, in the middle of another moment of racial tumult, requires more than sober acknowledgment of memories and losses. It also requires squarely facing its legacies, which have done so much to thwart progress toward true democracy as well as full equality, and leave us today at risk of falling ever further from these ideals.

Read more

Opinion articles on the events of 1919.

Opinion | Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

The Vicious Fun of America’s Most Famous Literary Circle

Jul 20, 2019

Opinion | Brian C. Black

The Most Important Road Trip in American History

Jul 7, 2019

Opinion | Ted Widmer

Was the Treaty of Versailles a Victory for Democracy?

Jun 28, 2019

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Further Reading: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot”; the Kerner report from the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; Simon Balto, “Occupied Territory: Policing in Chicago From the Red Summer to Black Power”; Arnold Hirsch, “Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960”; Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass”; Sharon McCloskey and Bruce Orenstein, eds., “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts in Chicago”; Cameron McWhirter, “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America"; Aldon Morris, “The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. DuBois and the Birth of American Sociology”; Beryl Satter, “Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America"; Flint Taylor, “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago”; William M. Tuttle, “Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919."

Adam Green is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of “Selling the Race: Culture and Community in Black Chicago, 1940-1955.”

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