The best Zoom holiday party is happening Saturday and we want you to join us! As 2020 comes to a close, join Dorian Warren and Melissa Harris-Perry, co-hosts of the System Check podcast from The Nation, for a very special, live event: The System Check Book Club. Beginning at 5 pm Eastern on Saturday, December 19, Dorian and Melissa sit down with the authors of some of their favorite books from 2020, including Maria Hinojosa, Rumaan Alam, John Nichols, Jeanne Theoharis, and Scott Farris, and preview terrific titles coming in 2021. This has been a difficult year, but there is plenty to salvage for the fight ahead, so tune in to the System Check Book Club for a holiday feast of words and wisdom. Remember, the most important system we have is the system of ideas. So join Melissa, Dorian and the authors who are reshaping the world of ideas for the better.

If you like the show, subscribe to System Check on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes every Friday, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates.

The System Check Book Club is produced in partnership with Community Change Action, Anna Julia Cooper Center, and the New York Public Library.

Lights are blinking. Alarms are blaring. The dashboard of our democracy is warning us that it is time to check our systems. That’s exactly what Melissa Harris-Perry, the Maya Angelou presidential chair at Wake Forest University and a longtime Nation contributor, and Dorian Warren, the president of Community Change and a Nation board member, are setting out to do with their new Nation podcast, System Check.

Unapologetically rooted in Black culture, politics, and intellectual traditions, System Check is a weekly show that asks important questions, offers provocative commentary, and welcomes insights from unexpected sources. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes every Friday.

MHP: Do you remember when we met?

DW: It was 1999, and we were both attending the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Atlanta. I was in the midst of my PhD at Yale, and you had just finished up at Duke. We had a heated discussion about whether it was possible to use the academic field of political science as a justice tool in Black communities.

MHP: That was 21 years ago, which means our friendship is now old enough to legally drink.

DW: We have been doing that since Day One!

MHP: True! We have been drinking and talking and writing and arguing for a very long time, which is what has made this friendship such an enjoyable journey. It is why I am thrilled to be cohosting a new podcast with you.

DW: There’s nobody else with whom I’d want to cohost System Check. It’s going to do what we do best: bring together layered political analysis, a unique roster of guests, and meaningful cultural connections—all with the freedom that comes with our own unfiltered podcast.

MHP: Of course, even this freedom is relative. Did we ever get final word about whether we can say “fucked up”? We are still part of systems with rules. And those systems are exactly what motivates this new project of ours. Checking the system is not just an intellectual exercise. It’s about how it feels to try to live and breathe and be and thrive inside of broken systems.

DW: Wait, are the systems broken? Or are they working exactly the way they were designed?

MHP: Fair point. We can say our system of criminal punishment accomplishes what it was designed to do: create a permanent Black underclass subject to constant surveillance and control.

DW: Right, and our systems of market-based health care and child care or segregated public schools or monopolistic labor markets are all designed in ways that deepen inequality and limit access. So if inequality is designed, we can reimagine and redesign systems of freedom. But this doesn’t just happen.

MHP: Right. We can’t forget the long history of these powerful systems being put in check by the very people they were designed to crush. Ida B. Wells checked the system of lynching, Fannie Lou Hamer checked the system of disenfranchisement. John Lewis checked the system of Jim Crow.

DW: The Movement for Black Lives is checking state violence. The Dreamers are checking an unjust immigration system. Mothers of color are checking an inadequate child care system. Young climate justice activists are checking the rapacious fossil fuel companies.

MHP: Not “rapacious”! You are still such a nerd. Are you going to use big words on the podcast, too?

DW: More important than big words, let’s commit to finding big ideas, the ideas that help us find a little more freedom, a little more space, a little more humanity within the systems and that allow us to dismantle and—dare I say it?—reconstruct them.

MHP: I feel like this is where we started 21 years ago—trying to find the big ideas that matter and can be useful. And the best part is, because we are having this conversation together, I know it will also be a lot of fun.

Subscribe to System Check on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for new episode every Friday.

Black on Campus was always operating on two levels: At one level, it was a journalism program focused on reporting the stories of contemporary African-American students on college campuses. At the same time, it was always an experiment in training college journalists.

Think of a college class. You probably imagine a male professor standing in front of a classroom delivering an erudite lecture on an obscure topic to a large crowd of students in rows of stadium seats. Maybe younger learners have dispatched with this model, replacing it with new visions of swift, smart, shareable informative videos—delivered by male professors using engaging graphics as they make obscure topics more decipherable. College learning is distant and sterile compared to our imaginations of, say, a kindergarten class. Blocks! Circle time! Stories! Sandboxes! Teachers who know your name! All while learning important skills with people who are not just your peers or classmates—but your friends.

For nearly two decades I have been trying to inject a bit more of the ethics of kindergarten learning into college classrooms by carving out programs where students can develop key scholarly and professional skills in the context of genuine relationships with faculty and mutual—often complicated—bonds of cohort learning. Dr. Sherri Williams, assistant professor of communication at American University, has been my co-conspirator and partner in this work, where she has taught me to adapt cohort learning to train emerging story tellers.

Black on Campus used technology, travel, text messaging, and the sheer force of will to build community as we learned to meet deadlines. Black on Campus became and remains something more than a class. Many of the young reporters are now in their first professional roles. They are working in major cities for print and broadcast outlets. They share each others work, amplify one another’s voices, offer professional advice—and make jokes.

As we encourage Nation readers to revisit the valuable original reporting of the Black on Campus cohort, I decided it was a good time to assess how some of the young reporters thought about their Black on Campus experiences. I sat down with Savannah West. West is now finishing her final semester at Clark Atlanta University. She is a journalism major from Chicago. Though she was active in the program, Savannah also had a tough spring semester and did not complete an independent byline in the first round of reporting. Still, she was a touchstone for the group. I wanted to learn more about her journey through college and the Black on Campus experience as a way of revealing broader truths for students like her.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Of all the Black on Campus students, none had more pure school pride than you. Why do you think that is?

Savannah West: My path to college was not an easy one. I didn’t know what to expect when I got to college. I never actually thought I’d make it here. Black girls are stereotyped and criminalized from a very young age in public school systems. Our creativity is deemed unruly, our inquisition is seen as argumentative, and [our] passion is regarded as misbehavior. Being a black woman who made it to college not only means that I defied the odds that were never in my favor, but that I survived. I graduated high school with less than a 2.0, a criminal record, and no college acceptance letters. I’m about to graduate from the university of my dreams with a degree and experience that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I’ve had amazing, incomparable opportunities that were only afforded to me because I am a black woman in college. Clark Atlanta University has molded me into the woman my grandma always told me I could be. Making it to—and through—college made me who I am.

MHP: Savannah, when I wrote the introduction piece to our Black on Campus series, some readers responded that the “solution” to campus racial bias is simply to attend an HBCU. You are an HBCU student. Is it that simple?

SW: Because my institution is not racially diverse, there is not much racial bias. So I cannot say that I have experienced all of the same injustices as the rest of my cohort. However, there is a great deal of sexism, elitism, and colorism that occurs at HBCUs across the country. DeAsia Paige reported about the lack of black female representation in student government at white schools, and we have the exact same problem. Women of color make up over 70 percent of undergraduate enrollment at CAU. There hasn’t been a woman elected as SGA president in years.

There have been many student movements for justice and equality like #WeKnowWhatYouDid and #SayTheirName calling out rapists and demanding justice for sexual assault. CAU students have been pushing administration for years to create more policies to protect the student body. Some members of administration put the schools’ reputation over the safety of the students and irresponsibly sweep issues under the rug. Ironically, we are in Atlanta, home of the civil-rights movement. Even in this “black mecca,” there is still a price to pay for black activism, just like Devan and Lauren reported from DC. So no, everything is far from perfect.

MHP: You aspire to be a storyteller. Why do the stories of black folk matter?

SW: Our stories are what drive the movement. Fierce reporting and unapologetic storytelling have often been the driving force behind achieving social justice and civil rights. My favorite quote is, “Until the lion learns to write, the story will always glorify the hunter.” As journalists, I believe that it is our responsibility to hold people accountable and amplify unheeded voices. This is exactly why Black on Campus matters. It is imperative, now more than ever, to document the lived experiences of marginalized people. Everyone may not have access to the platforms that we do as writers, but their stories are still important. Their voices matter.

MHP: You had a lot of travel as part of the Black on Campus experience! In addition to conferences in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and New York City, you also had the chance to visit both Washington, DC; and Los Angeles. What did you learn in those experiences?

SW: When I traveled to DC for the Black Journalists Roundtable at the Education Trust, I literally had a seat at the table. I never imagined that I’d be in the same room as activists, journalists, and politicians who actually wanted to hear what I had to say. I learned what the Education Trust is about and the role that journalists play in the fight for education equity. Everyone at Ed Trust is brilliant and back their passion with real policy to invoke change. I left DC with a fire inside of me to become more civically engaged and to do my part has as a journalist to advocate for things that I care about.

I traveled to LA to attend an event for Stacey Abrams, who is now the first black female Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia. Her political positioning is monumental for so many reasons. However, I had no idea just how much of a national impact local elections could have. I got to hear Leader Abrams address aspects of her platform and gain the support of influential non-Georgia residents willing to donate to her campaign. I interviewed celebrities like Rashida Jones, Erika Alexander, and Chris Bosh. They all stressed the importance of being politically aware and involved, especially as a black college student.

Black on Campus has given me a unique opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with thought-leaders and activists who I otherwise may not come in contact with.

MHP: Dr. Sherri Williams and I have been working for some time on a theory of cohort learning in journalism. What was the value of a cohort learning experience for you?

SW: This cohort experience is unlike anything I have ever been a part of. I go to an HBCU, so I am always surrounded black excellence, but these fellows are rare. Black on Campus has connected me with some of the most intelligent, impressive black student journalists I may ever have the pleasure of knowing. The 10 of us are spread out all over the country, yet we are connected by our shared experiences of matriculating while black. It has been awe-inspiring to watch the stories in this series progress from pitches to well-written, nationally published pieces. Between the GroupMe, our weekly WebEx calls, and e-mails, we have all been in constant communication. We share frustrations, jokes, everyday struggles, and offer genuine support and congratulations when they’re in order. You and Dr. Williams are some of the most busiest, most involved women I know. You both wear so many hats and still devoted and distributed your time and expertise to all 10 of us. I can’t even begin to thank you both for that. Black on Campus owes me nothing.

MHP: I remember thinking one of the most special opportunities for the young women in the cohort was the opportunity to have an in-depth conversation with the 2018 Anna Julia Cooper lecturer, Dr. Brittney Cooper, during her visit to Wake Forest University. What did you take away from that conversation?

SW: The main thing I took from our conversation with Brittney Cooper is not to be loud and wrong. As passionate as she is, she said she never walks into a room “guns blazing.” Ms. Cooper explained to us the importance of actively listening, thinking about the tactics we’re going to use and having a few different modes of engagement. She said, “If you’re going to be loud, that’s fine. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about.” Brittney Cooper unapologetically displays her eloquent rage whenever she deems necessary, and rightfully so! She said, “The only reason I have this much bravado is because I can,” then quoted Beyoncé saying, “I talk like this ’cause I can back it up.”

MHP: Ha! We always find our way back to Beyoncé, don’t we? Savannah, when do you find your eloquent rage?

SW: I find my eloquent rage when I find myself having to justify my choice in where to go to college. People will say, “You’re so smart, you could have gone anywhere, why an HBCU?” My internal response is immediately rage. White students are never deterred from attending predominantly white institutions due to lack of diversity—so why me? Why do I have to explain the significance of wanting to be surrounded by like-minded individuals with similar lived experiences? Having to explain the historical significance and beauty behind black colleges is annoying, to say the least. In order to not appear as an angry, dark-skinned black girl, I convey my point intelligently and eloquently. They might not feel me, but I want to make sure that people always hear me.

tay woke is a call to consciousness, awareness, skepticism, and action. Last week, however, it became more than a figurative admonition when Lolade Siyanbola, a black graduate student at Yale University, was reported to campus police by a white female student for the suspicious action of napping in a dormitory common room. Like generations of hard-grinding Ivy League scholars, Siyanbola had succumbed to the exhaustion of finals week. But her inability to stay awake—a literal failure to stay woke—resulted in a 20-minute encounter with police officers who insisted she verify her right to be on campus.

I first learned about the Yale incident when Prof. Sherri Williams of American University shared the news with the Black on Campus GroupMe chat. The GroupMe is one of the key tools that Dr. Williams and I use to communicate with a cohort of 10 student journalists. The Black on Campus fellows attend colleges and graduate schools throughout the country. Since January they have been meeting, studying, traveling, and writing together in a program jointly sponsored by the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University and The Nation as they document the lived experiences of today’s black college students.

The Black on Campus cohort barely reacted when Dr. Williams shared word of the Yale incident. They may have been outraged, but racial shock is exceedingly rare among these young reporters. After all, their academic year began with white supremacists wielding flaming tiki torches as they marched through the grounds of the University of Virginia chanting “You will not replace us.” On a near weekly basis, we’ve shared stories of campuses inflamed by symbolic racism, discursive violence, or bodily harm against black students in predominantly white spaces. We reeled when Howard University was caught in a funding scandal, suggesting that even the nation’s premier historically black university was a place where students experienced intentional institutional harm.

For Black on Campus fellows, these stories were not distant or disconnected. Fellow Lauren Lumpkin and Dr. Williams study and work at American University, where bananas and nooses were found hanging in trees one year ago. The wounds of white-supremacist violence are still fresh at the University of Virginia, where fellow Alexis Gravely is a junior. Wake Forest fellow Bri Reddick was trying to study for midterms when she found herself at the center of a campus racial controversy making national headlines.

Together we have been a loosely connected but distinct cohort of faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students following multiple interconnected threads of black life on American college campuses, as we seek to understand what it now means to be Black on Campus.

Campus Awakening

Today’s black college students have spent their baccalaureate years navigating campus hate speech, dodging constantly changing DACA rulings, and living with the real consequences of repealing affirmative action and Title IX enforcement. The new class of college seniors started school in the fall of 2015. That semester, graduate student Jonathan Butler stopped eating to protest inaction and ineffective administrative responses to racial incidents at the University of Missouri. He refused to resume eating until the system’s president, Tim Wolfe, resigned. Four days into his hunger strike, Butler was joined by 30 Missouri football players who announced they would boycott football activities until Wolfe resigned. Within weeks both the campus chancellor and Wolfe were gone, and the effects of the Mizzou protests were still being felt for years after they began. In 2017, The New York Times reported on plummeting enrollment and a budgetary crisis at the University of Missouri as students remained wary of a campus where racial clashes had reached such a fever pitch. It is impossible to determine the precise nature of the correlation—whether the protests effected these new campus realities—but there is no question that the events at Mizzou continue to resonate across the landscape of American higher education.

Mizzou was a turning point. Within weeks, black students organized massive demonstrations on Ivy League campuses and flagship state universities. Activists decried the racial climate on campuses in the South, Northeast, Midwest, and California. They demanded change at schools small and large, on campuses with conservative or liberal reputations. Echoing tactics employed by student demonstrators in the 1960s and ’70s, they held vigils and rallies and staged takeovers of administrative offices, articulating systemic, symbolic, and structural concerns about their experiences of being black on campus. Yale students resisted faculty who declared racially insensitive Halloween costumes to be protected speech. Princeton students demanded the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from campus buildings in light of his troubling racial legacy. Harvard Law students discovered photos of black faculty members that had been defaced in the halls. Suddenly these experiences no longer seemed isolated, but were linked as part of a larger movement against institutional racism in higher education.

Many stood in solidarity with the student protesters, but others were exasperated by their actions and in some cases implied that personal discomfort, or even interpersonal experiences of racism, were a steep but necessary price to pay for a college education. Even within black communities, there were intergenerational divides born from the painful disappointments of seeing college—long a kind of symbolic promised land—decried as yet another space of racial violence and rejection. It can seem inherently revolutionary to nurture black intellect in a country built on the surplus value extracted from nonconsensual physical and reproductive black labor. Viewing higher education as a pathway to equity, African-American families and communities have made enormous sacrifices to send black kids to college. It was painful to see that golden ring turn to brass.

Substance of Things Hoped For

In March 1960, Ebony magazine profiled “Richmond’s Genius Twins” in a multipage spread about William and Wesley Harris, who were poised to graduate from segregated Armstrong High School and become the first in their family to attend college. Ebony described Wes and William as “sons of a restaurant owner who died in 1955 and a Richmond seamstress who is a chronic arthritic and earns $35 a week doing home sewing and making slipcovers.” Knowing her sons’ departure for college would significantly reduce her household’s already meager income, Rosa Harris told Ebony she was nonetheless determined that “the boys will go to college!” in spite of the difficult sacrifices it required. Black parents, grandmas, papas, aunties, congregations, Masonic lodges, sorority chapters, and fraternal orders have echoed the determination to ensure that the children in their communities make it to college to earn a coveted degree.

A college education has always been a rare commodity. Prior to World War II, only a small fraction of white people attended college. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that the GI Bill and a changing domestic labor market made college a more common experience for white Americans. In 1960, only 10 percent of white men older than 25 had completed four years of college; by 1990, that share had grown to nearly one in four white men. Today, more than a third of white Americans over 25 have college degrees.  

For black folks, the barriers to college have been far higher and more aggressively guarded. In 1960, 2.8 percent of black men and 3.3 percent of black women over 25 had completed four-year college degrees. Today, one in five black Americans is a college graduate. For much of the 20th century, the vast majority of black students obtained degrees at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. HBCUs have proud legacies but have never boasted the robust resources of their predominantly white peers.

It is worth remembering that George Wallace did not stand in the doorway of a primary school or high school. Rather, in 1963, he blocked the entrance to a state land-grant university as he sought to keep Vivian Malone and James Hood from entering the University of Alabama—thus ensuring, Wallace hoped, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Is it any wonder, then, that black folk have developed a tradition of boisterous, thunderous, celebratory enthusiasm during college graduations? Each and every graduate marching, striding, shouting, and hopping across the stage as they accept the parchment so rarely passed into black hands is a repudiation of Governor Wallace. And is it any wonder why black people were appalled to witness the white graduation marshals at the University of Florida aggressively push, pull, and nearly tackle black graduates as they attempted to dance their way across the commencement stage this month? In a way, those marshals were reimposing the segregationist barrier; they saw neither the depth of the sacrifices that made these graduations possible nor the historical context in which they were achieved.

No Evidence for the Things We Hoped to See

The racial inequities in American higher-education outcomes are shocking. During the past 50 years, the gap between black and white high-school graduation rates has narrowed, but the racial gulf for attaining a bachelor’s degree has widened—doubling from 6 to 13 percent since 1964.

Higher education is not a great equalizer. The struggle, sacrifice, and effort it takes for black students to earn a degree often pays meager long-term economic dividends, while extracting enormous emotional costs. The median wealth return for college graduation for white families is $55,869, while black families enjoy a median return on college graduation of only $4,846. This results from the crushing debt carried by black graduates. Compared to their white peers, black students are more likely to borrow to pay for college, less likely make repayment progress within 12 years, and much more likely to default.

Employment prospects improve for African Americans when they graduate from college, but a degree does not eliminate the racial inequities of the labor market. Compared to their white counterparts, black college graduates in their late 20s are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed. Even amid the economic recovery of 2016, black college graduates aged 24–29 experienced an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent—a rate higher than the 9 percent unemployment rate that young white college grads suffered at the peak of the recession.

Colleges and universities are not ivory towers tucked away from the real world or able to avoid controversy at will. These institutions are embedded in our communities and in our consciousness. To be black on campus is to be black in America.

But despite these depressing statistics, there is still something powerfully compelling about being black on campus. When global superstar Beyoncé chose to frame her earth-shattering 2018 Coachella performance with one aspect of black cultural life, she chose black college life. Though she did not attend college, Beyoncé offered up a citational riff on collegiate blackness, from HBCU drum majors and drum lines to black sororities and pledge lines. Despite its all too frequently amounting to four painful years, Beyoncé celebrated the experience of being black on campus.

The Legacy

William and Wes Harris, Ebony’s “genius twins,” both became college graduates. In fact, both became college professors. William finished at Howard University, earned a PhD at the University of Washington, then returned to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he taught for more than 20 years and served as the first dean of African-American affairs. Wes made history as the first black man to earn an engineering PhD from Princeton and later chaired the Department of Aeronautical Engineering at MIT. His historic accomplishments began at UVA, where he was the first African-American student to live on the Lawn.

Sending the twins to college required their mother to make enduring sacrifices, but Prof. Wes Harris remembers his experiences at UVA in the early 1960s being marked by racial exclusion, threats, and violence.

Dr. Harris’s story is not entirely dissimilar from the one recounted by Lauren Lumpkin, the Black on Campus fellow, last week when she served as the American University School of Communication undergraduate student speaker. Lauren’s brief but affecting address began by acknowledging the parents and teachers whose efforts made her own success possible. She spoke of her teenage longing to attend American University and then of her broken heart when the campus was marred by ugly racial incidents. Lauren explained it was her awakening to the need for diverse voices telling diverse stories in the wake of these experiences that led her to the School of Communication and to her chosen career as a journalist.

More than five decades separate the college careers of Wesley Harris and Lauren Lumpkin. Still, they are intertwined. Wes and William Harris are my uncle and father. Lauren is one of my students. Their stories matter. We must understand what it has meant, historically, and assess what it means now, to be black on campus.

For the next several months The Nation will bring you reporting from the talented young writers of the Black on Campus cohort as they follow in the example of Ida B. Wells—righting wrongs by shining the light of truth upon them.

At the University of Virginia, Black Students Are Still Recovering From August 11
By Alexis Gravely

Are Social Media Normalizing Campus Racism?
By Noëlle Lilley

The Costs of Campus Activism
By Lauren Lumpkin and Devan Cole

Why Are There So Few Black Women Leaders on College Campuses?
By DeAsia Paige

As a Black College Student, Poverty Was My Everyday Life
By Aaron Coleman

What Does Diversity Look Like at HBCUs?
By Deja Dennis

We Need to Include Black Women’s Experience in the Movement Against Campus Sexual Assault
By Candace King

It’s Time for HBCUs to Address Homophobia and Transphobia on Their Campuses
By Sherri Williams

For Black College Students, Balancing Activism and Mental Health Takes Work
By Brianna Reddick

‘I Want People to Hear Me’: An Interview With Savannah West
By Melissa Harris-Perry

Looking Back at ‘Black on Campus’
By Sherri Williams

Black lives matter. America understands this as a movement rooted in the breathtaking sadness of George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal in the brutal murder of Trayvon Martin; necessitated by the enraging refusals to indict police officers in Ferguson and Staten Island for the murders of black men in 2014; and amplified by the unrelenting videos of black vulnerability and death out of South Carolina, Ohio, and Texas throughout 2015. These moments caused activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi to assert that black lives matter.

But for us, James and Melissa, Black Lives Matter began as a public movement a decade ago, on August 29, 2005; and it was our neighbors, friends, beloveds, and coworkers who formed the first modern corps of Black Lives Matter activists. Before Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Sandra Bland, it was more than 1,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of displaced New Orleanians who forced America to confront black vulnerability and to understand how that vulnerability indicts a system of national inequality.

Hurricane Katrina did not hit New Orleans directly, and the city would have recovered swiftly from the extensive but manageable damage caused by winds and rain alone. But in the hours after the storm hit, several critical levees failed as powerful storm surges swept against decades of inadequate infrastructure. This part of the Katrina story is old and simple: By refusing to invest adequately in the public infrastructure needed to protect the most economically vulnerable and racially marginalized communities, the federal, state, and local governments left New Orleans open to massive devastation and long-term economic losses that affected every single neighborhood.

A decade later, we remain locked in maddening partisan battles as our public infrastructure crumbles beneath us—as if the consequences are irrelevant, or distant, or easily contained. ­Katrina already taught us that the fate of black lives cannot be separated from that of whole communities. Black lives matter.

Ten years ago, broken levees unleashed lake waters with frightening force and speed. In vulnerable neighborhoods, there was little warning and no means of escape. Stranded Americans waited for relief and rescue that did not come for days. The power went out, and the floodwaters rose. Food and water became scarce. The city’s shelters became centers of disease, hunger, and death. Despite aggressive and continuing coverage of the destruction on cable news, it seemed that the federal government refused to recognize what was happening in New Orleans. This part of the Katrina story cannot be forgotten: Video footage does not ensure justice.

Even though the disaster deepened before the nation’s eyes, black people were forced to publicly grapple with the question of whether they were American citizens worthy of fair treatment and swift help. The slow and militaristic response to black suffering was as visible in the Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 as it would be nine years later in Ferguson.

Tens of thousands of African-American men, women, and children were labeled “refugees,” as if the disaster had occurred not on American soil but in a distant country. The same media reported that armed, roving gangs of young black males opportunistically profited from the tragedy. Reports suggested that these men were stealing from electronics from stores, raping women trapped in evacuation centers, and trying to assassinate relief workers. Later evidence revealed that these reports were untrue. In fact, young black men were organizing to assist other survivors who were unable to find supplies: the elderly, the sick, and people with children. This narrative returned in the shaming disgust with which Ferguson protesters were met when their grief and anger exploded in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death. Black lives matter.

On the Danziger Bridge, Americans encountered the deadly consequences wrought by police who frame unarmed black people in need of assistance as threats in need of elimination. It’s a lesson we learned again with Jonathan Ferrell, Renisha McBride, Miriam Carey. Black lives matter.

In the months following the disaster, black New Orleanians displaced by the storm demanded the right to remain enfranchised, to choose their own elected officials, and to set the course of their own destiny. Municipal elections arrived less than nine months after the storm. Many New Orleanians were still living in contingent, transient, and economically insecure circumstances, but they refused to allow that reality to keep them from the polls. They demanded absentee ballots, satellite voting locations, and extended voting hours. Long before the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, unleashed a wave of suppressive laws, and forced activists to redouble their discursive and organizing efforts to protect the vote, the people of New Orleans showed that black votes matter.

Ten years ago, the people of New Orleans were faced, dramatically and intensely, with many of the economic, political, social, and racial issues that have come to define our national reality during this decade: unpredictable educational circumstances, devastated housing stock, sharply limited economic opportunities, acts of violent policing, and a system of criminal injustice.

Much recovery has come about since the flood. New Orleans has been ground zero for some of the nation’s most innovative, community-led examples of problem-solving. Asset-based thinking is inherent to the city. During these years, community-based nonprofit organizations, political activists, residents, students, and elders have created strategies for urban farming, housing and hospital construction, education reform (albeit controversial), neighborhood renewal, and artistic revitalization.

However, 10 years later, it takes no more than a 10-minute tour of the Lower Ninth Ward or a short drive through New Orleans East to know that success remains elusive. In these neighborhoods, homes remain unrebuilt. Crime is rampant. Businesses continue vacant. The public-education system is hard to navigate.

After Katrina, investment has been centered in New Orleans’s upper-income white neighborhoods. Ten years later, black residents protest the lack of focus and meaningful funds devoted to their neighborhoods. The moment that America’s collective attention shifted away from the Lower Ninth Ward, so did investment. If no one is looking, do lives matter?

As we consider the standing of vulnerable communities in the decade since Katrina and the year since Ferguson, a few things are clear. Progress for vulnerable communities is challenging, slow, and elusive. Movements on behalf of these communities are afforded no respite. The moment we stop reminding the world that black lives matter, black lives will no longer matter.

In these excerpts from an interview with Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP who resigned amid accusations that she lied about her racial identity, explains her relationship with the black experience. Watch the second part of the interview below.

What responsibilities do journalists have when reporting on sexual assault? In the past few weeks, two high-profile cases have ignited a heated debate on just that question. One of those cases is an alleged rape case at the University of Virginia first reported by Rolling Stone, the details of which have since been thrown into question by an article in The Washington Post pointing out possible inaccuracies in the magazine’s reporting. The second case involves the numerous allegations of sexual assault made against Bill Cosby. Salamishah Tillet, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, joined Melissa Harris-Perry to discuss her latest Nation piece, Why It’s So Hard to Write About Rape. She explains, “[There is] that skepticism that journalists are supposed to always have when it comes to covering a story. And then we have this kind of inherent skepticism, not inherent, a socialized skepticism against the stories of rape survivors. And when they come together as this moment has produced, there’s a sense to kind of restore the integrity of journalism without necessarily protecting the rights of victims.”
—N’Kosi Oates

The St. Louis County grand jury that declined to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown failed miserably to uphold justice last week. But as Melissa Harris-Perry says in her heartfelt message to Lesley McSpadden, Brown’s mother, “I want you to know, your son’s life did matter. No decision by any jury, anywhere, can ever change that truth.”
—N’Kosi Oates  

Last week, the public got a glimpse of the attitude some administrators at the historically black Lincoln University are taking toward sexual assault. In a video shot in September of a convocation delivered to an all-female audience, the university’s president, Robert Jennings, says, “We have, we had, on this campus last semester three cases of young women who after having done whatever they did with young men and then it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to turn out, guess what they did? They then went to Public Safety and said, ‘He raped me.’ ”

His remarks ignited a firestorm of criticism, and Jennings has since released a letter to the students at Lincoln apologizing for his insensitive remarks. In this clip, Melissa Harris-Perry explains just how serious such attitude toward sexual violence really is.
—N’Kosi Oates

President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law in March of 2010, and it’s been dogged by right-wing attempts to reverse it ever since. Last Friday, the Supreme Court announced it would hear another challenge to the ACA, this time in the case King v. Burwell. Depending on how the judges come down, they could end up outlawing some of the federal tax subsidies that are helping people buy individual insurance policies.

Dorian Warren, an associate professor in Political Science at Columbia University, argues that doing away with these subsidies will be “taking money out of people’s pockets and taking away their health insurance coverage.”
—N’Kosi Oates

At the onset of Ferguson’s protests, Amnesty International USA deployed observers to monitor police interactions with the demonstrators. On October 24, the human rights organization released “On the Streets of America: Human Rights Abuses in Ferguson,” detailing the human rights concerns raised by the actions of law enforcement and public officials during the initial protests. The report highlights the excessive use of militarized policing, including tear gas, loud sirens and rubber bullets, and how these tactics posed real threats to the demonstrator’s right to protest. Melissa Harris-Perry and her panel—including Aisha Moodie-Mills, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Jelani Cobb, associate professor at the University of Connecticut, attorney Raul Reyes and civil rights attorney Lisa Bloom—discuss the Amnesty report and the Ferguson protests’ ongoing legacy.

—N’Kosi Oates

A month ago, Latandra Ellington wrote a letter to her aunt from the Lowell Correctional Institution in Florida, saying, “He told me he’s going to beat me death. He was all in my face, then he grabbed his radio and said he was going to bust me in the head with it.” The 36-year-old African American inmate was extremely afraid of one of the people whose job it was to keep her safe during her imprisonment: a correctional officer. Ten day after she wrote the letter, on October 1, the mother of four was dead.

Though the circumstances of her death are still unclear, a private autopsy revealed that Ellington suffered from force trauma in her abdomen consistent with being kicked or punched. Appearing on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show,Miami Heraldinvestigative reporter Julie Brown dives into the details of the case, explaining that Ellington was just one of four inmates to die while in the state’s custody at Lowell in 2014. 
—N’Kosi Oates

Thomas Duncan was the first person to die from Ebola on American soil. He was also a 42-year-old Liberian immigrant, and his nephew Josephus Weeks argued in an open letter in The Dallas Morning News that, because his uncle was a man of color with no health insurance, “Thomas Eric Duncan was a victim of a broken system.” As Melissa Harris-Perry explains, “America does not have one healthcare system. It has many.”

—N’Kosi Oates

Over the last few months, videos chronicling aggressive interactions between police officers and black people have gone viral. From chokeholds to taserings, to being shot and killed, the police have been caught again and again subjecting black Americans to disproportionate violence. But, as Melissa Harris-Perry explains, all citizens are protected by the fourth amendment, which states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” Are these videos doing anything to guarantee this right?  
—N’Kosi Oates

It has been more than sixty days since the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. This past weekend, thousands of protesters took to the streets for the beginning of Ferguson October, a series of events meant to kick off an organized movement against police violence. On Saturday, Mychal Denzel Smith joined the Melissa Harris-Perry show with editor-in-chief of GlobalGrind.com Michael Skolnik, and the author of Impolite Conversations, Cora Daniels, to discuss the movement building in Ferguson. “Justice is not just confined to whether or not Darren Wilson is arrested and whether or not he is indicted,” Denzel Smith explained. “Justice is the other demands—how we shift police culture and how the interactions between young black people and the police go from here forward and I think that’s the bigger movement.”
—N’Kosi Oates

“We need more voices out there telling their stories,” says Roxane Gay, author of the New York Times bestseller Bad Feminist, “no matter what those stories are, whether they fit a convenient narrative or not.” On Sunday, Gay joined Melissa Harris-Perry to discuss pop culture, race and embracing an imperfect feminism.
—N’Kosi Oates

Last week, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was indicted for reckless or negligent injury to a child after using a wooden switch to spank his 4-year-old son, prompting conversations about the morality—and efficacy—of corporal punishment. In America, corporal punishment isn’t illegal: In fact, it’s legal in every state. Nineteen states permits corporal punishment in schools. Roughly 70 percent of Americans support the use of corporal punishment. Although physical disciplinary actions are common throughout the US, the ramifications are rarely highlighted. On Sunday, Melissa Harris Perry and her panel, including Camilo Ortiz, the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis and Stacey Patton, explored why so many parents still rely on corporal punishment.
—N’Kosi Oates

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the groundbreaking choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. The author of that acclaimed work, Ntozake Shange, joined Melissa Harris-Perry on Sunday morning to share her thoughts on the Ray Rice controversy and her groundbreaking piece, and says that since the time of her poem, “domestic violence has gotten worse.”
—N’Kosi Oates

Since footage emerged of Ray Rice physically assaulting his then-fiancée Janay Rice in a casino elevator, we have heard the voices of the Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Yet in the wake of such attention, Janay Rice’s voice has been almost entirely unacknowledged by the media. On Saturday, Melissa Harris-Perry and her panel discussed domestic violence, sports and privacy.
—N’Kosi Oates

Nation contributor and Knobler Fellow Mychal Denzel Smith joined Nancy Giles and Karen Finney on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show this weekend to discuss his cover story for The Nation on youth movements fighting for racial justice. Smith invoked the killings of Michael Brown in St. Louis, Oscar Grant in Oakland and Trayvon Martin in Florida to argue that a more connected, national movement is required to seriously combat America’s racist policing attitudes and policies. “You have to upend the entire system of racism and white supremacy that is the defining characteristic of American philosophy and government,” said Smith. He praised groups like the Black Youth Project and the Dream Defenders for getting out in the streets and forcing elected officials to address issues, like privatization of juvenile detention facilities and racial discrepancies in marijuana arrests, that have devastating consequences for youth of color and their communities.
— Hannah K. Gold

The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed teen Michael Brown were Barack Obama’s fault.

This is not a claim about law enforcement’s continued militarization under his administration. The federal government has been engaged in arming local police with the weapons of war for more than a decade. Further, the White House must be credited with announcing a decision to review the distribution of army surplus to local police forces and to consider limiting it in the future.

This is also not a claim about the president’s decision to remain ensconced on the golf courses of Martha’s Vineyard as unrest exploded in Missouri’s streets. The optics of a vacationing president set against the breathtaking images of local police bearing down on American citizens with riot gear were discordant and deeply troubling. So too were the president’s lukewarm equivocations. But the administration must be credited with deploying Attorney General Eric Holder to the scene. Holder’s visit successfully conveyed the seriousness of federal authorities seeking both to calm the immediate crisis and to pursue justice in the case of Michael Brown.

This is not a claim about the president’s inability to rein in the provocative choices of his fellow Democrat, Governor Jay Nixon. Surely Obama must have known that imposing a curfew on protesters and calling up the National Guard would ignite the righteous rage of organizers. Perhaps he bears political culpability for not dissuading the tone-deaf Missouri governor from escalating the crisis. But, ultimately, if any national Democrats are responsible for foisting Jay Nixon into the office from which he could make those choices, it’s Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been public supporters of Nixon and cozy partners with him for years.

Still, despite Obama’s equivocations—and also somewhat against his will—the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, were his fault. And he should be proud.

The people of Ferguson and those in solidarity with them took to the streets within a context of racial repression broader than just one horrific shooting. Between 2005 and 2012, African-Americans have been killed by white police officers at the rate of nearly twice a week. In the month preceding Brown’s slaying, police in this country killed at least four unarmed black men. And in a state like Missouri, African-American drivers are the targets of 92 percent of vehicle searches conducted by police, even though illegal items are found in less than 25 percent of these searches.

The fact that Barack Obama is the president of the United States is the most tangible daily reminder that black people are full citizens of the United States, endowed with the same inalienable rights as their fellow Americans, and capable of exerting their political will to bring forth the political and policy outcomes they prefer. President Obama is the contemporary embodiment of the astonishing possibilities of black citizenship. He can be faulted—or rather credited—with helping ignite the refusal of black citizens to be relegated to second-class status in the wake of Brown’s slaying.

Senator Obama was a long shot when he chose to challenge the powerful Clinton machine for the Democratic nomination. He triumphed because of strategy, audacity and the overwhelming support of ordinary black voters, even when they chose him against the advice of their longtime elected officials, who remained firmly in Clinton’s camp. That experience was an object lesson for black Americans: they could choose for themselves. Perhaps that memory was embedded in those who resisted the curfew imposed by a Democratic governor as their black congressman stood at his side.

During the 2008 general election, Senator Obama rarely spoke about racism directly, but he endured it and bore up under it. Indeed, he inspired a multiracial, intergenerational coalition that included states of the former Confederacy to carry him into the White House. He brought along with him the symbolic possibility of full inclusion. In 2012, President Obama’s re-election in the context of massive efforts to suppress African- American voters made it clear that black people were unwilling to cede the ground they had gained in asserting their political will.

No matter what his policies, his politics or his public pronouncements, Barack Obama changed the relationship of African-Americans to the American state. Even as they were forced to endure the images of Michael Brown’s lifeless body lying in the street for hours, many black Americans see in President Obama’s living presence in the halls of power a stark reminder that another outcome is possible for black men if their communities refuse to be silenced.

Since his early days on the national scene, many have wanted Barack Obama to serve as a role model for black people. Obama himself has embraced this calling, launching My Brother’s Keeper as his presidential legacy project [see Dani McClain, in this issue]. Through My Brother’s Keeper, he hopes to model a careful conformity to the narrow rules of good behavior: commitment to education, decent employment and other middle-class achievement markers. But along the way, he has modeled something he may not have intended.

The election of Barack Obama is a model of what’s possible when black people refuse to stay in their assigned places, when they demand more say in the system. He is president less because of his individual accomplishments than because his community was determined to see him assume a position of power. They mobilized repeatedly on his behalf even when they were told not to. (Emanuel Cleaver and John Lewis both backed Hillary Clinton in 2008 and were overcome by their constituencies.) Michael Brown’s community learned these lessons well.

Despite his best efforts to be the embodiment of respectability, it turns out Barack Obama is a role model for resistance. Yes we can.

Read more from our special issue on racial justice

Mychal Denzel Smith: “How Trayvon Martin’s Death Launched a New Generation of Black Activism”

The Editors: “Renewing the Struggle for Racial Justice, Post-Ferguson”

Paula J. Giddings: “It’s Time for a 21st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement”

Rinku Sen: “As People of Color, We’re Not All in the Same Boat”

Dani McClain: “Obama’s Racial Justice Initiative—for Boys Only”

Frank Barat: “A Q&A With Angela Davis on Black Power, Feminism and the Prison-Industrial Complex”

Over the past decade, white police officers have repeatedly slaughtered unarmed black men—Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, was one of many. On MSNBC, Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry named nine black men who were gunned down while defenseless in the last ten years, before going on to explain that between 2006 and 2012, white police officers killed a black person at least two times a week. She then noted that in 1857 Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney declared in a court opinion that African-Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—an idea that many white police officers in America clearly still hold true.

—Hannah Harris Green

Reproductive rights advocates warned of intimidation and violence in the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to eliminate fixed buffer zones around abortion facilities. It’s a reasonable response given a history of physician assassinations, bombing of medical facilities and harassment at clinic entrances. The decision in McCullen v. Coakley, handed down on June 26, pays lip service to the idea that patients should not be subject to harassment, encouraging localities to implement narrowly tailored laws to prevent it. But the decision is not only a threat to women’s safety when seeking medical care. It is also an insidious attack on their personhood.

Distinguishing between rowdy protesters and supposedly reasonable “petitioners,” Chief Justice John Roberts imagines a more civil and deliberate process, writing that “petitioners wish to converse with their fellow citizens about an important subject on the public streets and sidewalks—sites that have hosted discussions about the issues of the day throughout history.” He laments that “petitioners at all three clinics claim that the buffer zones have considerably hampered their counseling efforts.”

I experienced an early version of these “counseling efforts” when I volunteered as an escort for women seeking abortions. We would hold their hands and shield their faces as they walked the gantlet of ghoulish dead-infant photos, bloody crosses and obscene taunts of “baby murderer.” The experience was terrifying for patients and volunteers.

According to the Court’s decision, buffer zones don’t thwart this kind of harassment—they cause it. Roberts implies that women are subjected to these threatening displays because anti-choice advocates can’t get close enough to patients to whisper gently. “Petitioners are not protestors,” he writes. “They seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion, but to inform women of various alternatives and to provide help in pursuing them. Petitioners believe that they can accomplish this objective only through personal, caring, consensual conversations…. If all that the women can see and hear are vociferous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively stifled petitioners’ message.”

Roberts explains further that buffer zones make it hard to tell which people on a public street deserve to be approached by strangers wishing to offer their unsolicited advice. The zones have “made it substantially more difficult for petitioners to distribute literature to arriving patients,” Roberts notes, adding that “because petitioners…cannot readily identify patients before they enter the zone, they often cannot approach them in time to place literature near their hands—the most effective means of getting the patients to accept it.” In short, if the state attempts to protect pregnant women and their right to privacy by shielding them from intrusive curbside observers, it will infringe on the First Amendment rights of their would-be counselors.

This decision has, in the end, unleashed something far more insidious than the danger of a few extremists having greater access to kill or maim. The Supreme Court has decided—unanimously—that the First Amendment protects the right of every single American to approach and intimately “counsel” any pregnant woman. There is no requirement that such counselors have medical licenses, counseling degrees or any other professional credentials. There is no requirement that the literature they distribute be accurate.

The Court’s decision erodes the ability of pregnant women to enjoy the rights of autonomy and privacy that are necessary for full citizenship. In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. the United States, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness…. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

This comprehensive right helps establish who is inside or outside the circle of full citizenship. People who are presumed not to have autonomy include slaves, prisoners and children. Before Roe v. Wade, pregnant women were similarly limited. Some states forced women to obtain counseling and permission from strangers before allowing them to terminate their pregnancies. The result was an incredible invasion of privacy. For example, in the late 1960s, women in Washington State could receive “therapeutic” abortions if they managed to convince a panel of doctors that the procedure was medically necessary. Psychologist Samuel Goldenberg listened as women pleaded with strangers for the right to end unwanted pregnancies by explaining the emotionally difficult, financially contingent and sometimes domestically violent circumstances of their lives. Goldenberg, a licensed counselor, was deeply troubled as he watched these panels force women to carry pregnancies against their will. His experiences put him at the forefront of the Referendum 20 movement, which legalized first-trimester abortions in Washington a full three years before Roe established a right to privacy for pregnant women.

These days, conservative lawmakers have set about eliminating legitimate sources of information and care. Under the guise of protecting women’s health, states are passing restrictive TRAP laws (short for “targeted regulation of abortion providers”) aimed at closing facilities that offer abortions, by forcing them to comply with arbitrary rules about standard hallway widths and physician admitting privileges.

By one reading, the Roberts Court’s buffer-zone ruling is narrowly tailored, allowing states to impose other restrictions on anti-choice protesters. By another reading, however, the Court’s decision spells out the terms for gutting pregnant women’s access not only to abortion, but to their full rights as citizens.

Yesterday, Melissa Harris-Perry appeared on All In with Chris Hayes to discuss the birth of the interracial Moral Mondays movement. She told Hayes that this initiative goes against many Northern liberals’ perception of the South, which they see as “so utterly backward and so utterly racially divided.” The reality is more complicated, she explains: “There is a level of intimacy, interracially in the US South that hasn’t always led to equality but has meant that there have been moments when interracial political movements could emerge.” This history of fusion movments since the aboliton of slavery should keep us from seeing Moral Mondays as game-changing, says Harris-Perry,”there are strategic partnerships, but we probably should not expect enduring, long-term coalitional change.”
—Hannah Harris Green

Three weeks ago the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria was treated as merely the latest in a line of attacks in that country by the religious extremist group Boko Haram—noted briefly, and just as quickly forgotten until tireless campaigning by the girls’ families and an accompanying social media campaign forced action. Nigeria’s president, previously silent on the kidnappings, has promised to secure the girls’ return. The state department offered the Nigerian government its assistance. Protests at the UN and in Nigeria are helping to keep global attention on the plight of these young women. “You have not been forgotten,” Melissa Harris-Perry told the girls in an open letter on her show this weekend. “We are sorry it took us so long to pay attention, but we are watching now. We are pounding the drums because each of you matter.”
—Corinne Grinapol

This spring, African-American students at Harvard captured national media attention with their “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign. The organizers described their goals, writing, “Our voices often go unheard on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is questioned—this project is our way of speaking back, of claiming this campus, of standing up to say: We are here. This place is ours. We, TOO, are Harvard.”

This year, Harvard admitted a record number of black students, and it boasts the highest black graduation rate in the Ivy League. The faculty, facilities and programming budget at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute make it the envy of the American academy. There is an active, thirty-seven-year-old Black Students Association on campus. The Hutchins Center houses a hip-hop archive and publishes the well-regarded Du Bois Review. The president and first lady of the United States are both graduates of Harvard Law School.

By meaningful measures of resource commitment, academic outcomes and historical legacy, Harvard could easily claim to be the best campus in the country for black students. So how should we understand a student-led effort emerging from a sense of racial alienation?

The I, Too, Am Harvard campaign is driven by a politics of recognition, not resources. In my 2011 book Sister Citizen, I show that people from marginal social groups desire recognition for their group, and they also want recognition of their individuality. Many African-Americans bristle at the idea of color blindness, because it makes race irrelevant to identity. At the same time, black people do not want to be reduced to their racial identity alone. W.E.B. Du Bois explained the feeling of being reduced to a category, asking, “How does it feel to be a problem?”

These students are not arguing that Harvard has failed to invest adequate resources; they are revealing that as black students they are routinely “misrecognized” and subjected to micro-aggressions, such as presumptions about having lower intelligence, which diminish their ability to act as full citizens of the Harvard community. This struggle is not limited to a single Cambridge campus. It is also at the heart of an ongoing debate about the meaning of racial politics in the Obama era, initiated most recently by the April 7 cover story of New York magazine, “The Color of His Presidency.”

Written by Jonathan Chait, the piece asserts that if you “set out to write a social history of the Obama years, one that captured the day-to-day experience of political life, you would find that race has saturated everything as perhaps never before.” Chait defines this racial saturation of political life as the effect of the Obama presidency on debates between white liberals and white conservatives. He points to dueling paranoias about racism and racial innocence that infuse every policy conversation and media moment. Chait’s argument is not wholly inaccurate: he offers evidence that white elites indeed talk more about race in the Obama era. However, any claim that race as a framework for political and policy debates emerged in 2008 must necessarily rest on ignoring black political life. This is nothing new. Gone are black people from the “day-to-day experience of political life.”

Writing in Slate, Jamelle Bouie argues that Chait’s piece renders black politics invisible and racial politics “a story of mutual grievance between Americans on the left and right, with little interest in the lived experiences of racism from black Americans and other people of color. It’s a story, in other words, that treats race as an intellectual exercise—a low-stakes cocktail party argument between white liberals and white conservatives over their respective racial innocence.”

In an interview with Chait on my MSNBC show, I later argued that a story of white racial attitudes is valid, but that it hardly counts as a robust description of American political life. To tell the story of race in America, black people must be included as agents, not just as subjects. Chait indicated that both Bouie and I were missing the point, and that we were asking him to write about an entirely different topic.

It is difficult to watch a smart, prominent political writer nonchalantly erase black people from the story of American political life. It’s even more difficult to read his hopeful assertion that “the passing from the scene of the nation’s first black president in three years, and the near-certain election of its 44th nonblack one, will likely ease the mutual suspicion.” Maybe Chait is right that with the end of the Obama years, the primary political framework of black people will subside into obscurity for white Americans, but that should be interrogated, not celebrated.

When writers erase blackness from the political discourse, they violate the right of recognition that black Americans share alongside our white counterparts. The consequences extend beyond a violation of democratic norms. Misrecognition has material consequences. The deaths of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis are eminent examples. Martin, wearing a hoodie, is misrecognized as a criminal; Davis, listening to loud hip-hop, as an assailant. When not seen accurately by their fellow citizens, black people can pay with their lives.

Perhaps this is what Ta-Nehisi Coates means when he writes in The Atlantic, “For black people, this conversation is not an abstract thought experiment or merely a stimulating debate, after which we may repair to our lounges and exchange quips over martinis…. These are our lives. When you are black, no matter how prosperous, the war is right outside your door—around the corner, a phone call away, at a family reunion.”

I, too, am America.

The estimated $300 billion in anticipated tax refunds this year is irresistible to predatory preparers targeting the poor. Stephen Black, director of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility at the University of Alabama, appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry to discuss this “wild west” of an industry that leeches money from impoverished communities. Families expecting the earned income tax credit, in need of help with tax preparation but without access to the certified CPAs that do taxes for the wealthy, turn instead to shady pop-up operations that sprout during tax season. “The average single mother working at Walmart making $19,000 a year, raising two kids, goes into one of these places,” says Black, “and will come out $300” poorer.
—Corinne Grinapol

“How do we express a rage about the lack of progress while also acknowledging that our circumstances are not that of our forebearers?” asks MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry of a panel that includes Nation.com blogger and Nation Institute fellow Mychal Denzel Smith. Smith, whose recent Nation.com post, “The Function of Black Rage” is used as a focal point for the segment, responds, “We do just that.” While it is a good thing black people in America are no longer slaves, says Smith, “we have so much more to do,” pointing to issues like mass incarceration and food insecurity that often go unacknowledged as “racism, that are the products of white supremacy.”
—Corinne Grinapol

It’s surprising that Congressman Paul Ryan has been so roundly condemned for blaming a culture of laziness for inner-city poverty. On March 12, Congressman Ryan said on Bill Bennett’s radio program that “Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on…this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work; and so there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

Congresswoman Barbara Lee described Ryan’s comments as a “thinly veiled racial attack.” Progressive commentators used Ryan’s remarks as an opportunity to bludgeon “culture of poverty” conversations that obscure urban isolation, government disinvestment and racial discrimination. The backlash was so effective that Ryan was forced to agree to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus and to offer a tortured explanation of his comments as “inarticulate.”

I am no fan of Congressman Ryan. I have called him to task repeatedly for his draconian poverty policy proposals, but in this case I feel bad for the guy. He must be wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, his comments have been the mainstream view of the Democratic Party for decades.

It was future Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan whose 1965 report argued that a tangle of pathology, typified by female-headed households, was responsible for reproducing poverty among urban African-Americans. Like Paul Ryan, Moynihan leaned on academics such as anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who argued that poverty produced value systems that prevented those born into poverty from working their way out. Then, in the 1990s, Democratic President Bill Clinton declared “the end of welfare as we know it.” He cited the influence of William Julius Wilson (who ultimately opposed Clinton’s reforms), the pioneering black sociologist whose acclaimed 1996 text, When Work Disappears, argued that while policy-makers and private industry initially caused economic decline in urban areas, this disinvestment led to cultural patterns that devalued labor in poor black communities.

Smart academics, many of whom are African-American and endowed with the legitimacy of elite American universities, continue to debate the role of culture in poverty and policy. As recently as May 2010, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science published a special edition called “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty.” These academic findings about how historical racism, modern institutions and collective cultural practices contribute to poverty are often argued with nuance, but policy-makers use sound-bite versions of research “over at Harvard” to bolster contrived explanations of social phenomena. For the most part, social scientists have proved unable or unwilling to intervene when lawmakers misuse research findings that they barely comprehend.

It was in the gap between robust academic reflection and trite political polemic where I most hoped President Obama would intervene. Although passing good legislation is nearly impossible in the face of Tea Party opposition, the president retains the power to lead public conversations.

But our current Democratic president has not offered a new narrative. His script seems borrowed. Just in February the White House launched a new initiative, “My Brother’s Keeper,” which targets young men of color. “No excuses,” announced President Obama. “Government, and the private sector, and philanthropy, and all the faith communities, we all have a responsibility to help provide you the tools you need…. But you’ve got responsibilities too.”

Ryan must feel aggrieved that his words drew so much fire when they could have been lifted from a presidential press release. He argued on Bennett’s program that “you can’t just say: I’m paying my taxes, government’s gonna fix that…. You need to get involved yourself—whether through a good mentor program or some religious charity, whatever it is—to make a difference. And that’s how we help resuscitate our culture.”

“My Brother’s Keeper” was announced just days after a Florida jury was unable to convict Michael Dunn of first-degree murder for shooting into a car of unarmed black teens after a dispute about hip-hop music. Jordan Davis was shot to death because of Dunn’s assumptions about the meaning of his cultural expression. And “My Brother’s Keeper” launches under the long shadow cast by the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin in a trial that put the teen culture of the dead boy—from his clothing to his Twitter account—on trial in both the courtroom and the media. The White House responded by launching an initiative to intervene with young black boys.

The shootings of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, and the Florida juries’ response, might suggest that the culture in need of intervention is that of white men who carry firearms. But social science has spent little time debating the tangle of pathology that ensnares the privileged. We are trained to intervene with those who lack resources, to find the problems there, and to ignore the perpetrators of the inequality. Even our thoughtful, well-meaning, African-American, Democratic president reacts according to these assumptions.

It is perfectly reasonable to point out that Congressman Ryan is wrong. Private charity is insufficient to counter structural inequalities, and poverty is evidence of a deficit of resources, not a deficit of character. It is also reasonable to point out to President Obama that the achievement gap didn’t kill Jordan Davis, and that Trayvon Martin’s loving, present father was no bulletproof vest.

Since publicly identifying as a trans woman in 2011, Janet Mock has been deeply involved in transgender activism, and her new memoir, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, carries forward that work. As she explains in this clip on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry show, this memoir reaches out to an audience of young people facing experiences similar to hers. In the book, Mock describes her path toward realizing her identity and finding love: "I wanted to show that we can be lovable and we as trans women, as marginalized women—period—of color that we can exist in the daytime and live a very full life and write our stories."

—Corinne Grinapol

Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer at The Nation, joined Princeton professor Yolanda Pierce, Newsweek editor David Cay Johnson and political strategist Joe Watkins on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry show to discuss the links between marriage and economic security. Though many prominent Republican politicians are now advocating marriage as a means of eradicating poverty, Goldberg insists that the opposite is actually true: economic instability causes people to get divorced or avoid getting married altogether. "What's dissolved is not the moral underpinning of marriage but the financial underpinning," Goldberg said.
—Allegra Kirkland 

A voting station in Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday, November 3, 2009. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

This article originally appeared at MSNBC.com.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, is devastating, but not definitive. This court has done significant damage to the most important piece of civil rights legislation in our modern history, but there is still hope to fight back and restore protective laws that ensure all eligible Americans can access the ballot.

First, the good news: This does not change who has a right to vote.

I have received panicked e-mails from friends asking if the right to vote for African-Americans is in jeopardy. Strictly speaking, it is not. The right to vote for men, regardless of race, is protected by the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment states that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Black women were added to constitutional citizenship through a combination of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibits disenfranchisement based on sex.

Today’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder does not strip black men and women, or anyone else, of the right to vote. However, it does incalculable violence to the primary tool necessary to ensure that state governments honor these constitutional rights.

Now, some bad news: the history of our nation demonstrates that the constitutional right to vote is not enough to ensure that citizens can exercise this right.

Although the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments forbade states from simply declaring African-Americans ineligible to vote, they did not protect black voters in practice. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Southern states innovated a menu of presumably race-neutral policies that effectively kept black Americans from voting. Grandfather clauses, poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, and intimidation at the polls were strategies enforced with state-sanctioned violence to effectively disenfranchise generations of black Americans.

It was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that finally put a stop to these practices. It was Section 5 of that Act that has protected those gains for decades.

So here is the really bad news: Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has been rendered moot, at least for now.

Before 10 am on Tuesday, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided that certain states and localities with a particularly egregious history of racial restrictions and racial violence around voting were required to “preclear” proposed changes in voting or election procedures through the Department of Justice. The provision covered many, but not all, of the states that had enacted the most vicious Jim Crow practices in the nearly 100 years leading up the the VRA’s passage. Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act determined which areas were covered by Section 5.

But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4, saying that the formula for determining which states had to ask permission to change their voting procedures and practices was unconstitutional. By striking down Section 4, the Court made it impossible to implement Section 5, at least in the short term. The majority opinion described the formula as “obsolete” and seems to argue that states must have a kind of assumed equality as members of our union.

The Court is wrong.

As Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar argues, the Fourteenth Amendment provides a model, embedded in our constitution, for treating states differently when they show a history of egregious violations against humanity and democracy. Amar points out that “states with abysmal track records of rights-enforcement and democratically deficient voting rules were not allowed back into Congress to sit alongside states with minimally acceptable track records, and these same democratically deficient states were also not allowed to resume full powers of state self-governance enjoyed by their nondeficient sister states.”

It is entirely consistent with our Constitution to require states with pathetic track records to meet a higher standard of self-governance than those without those histories.

So, what can we do?

1. Litigate.

Section 5 pre-clearance ensured that many states had to ask permission before passing new legislation that affects voting. Now those states can—and will—pass laws without an automatic review. But citizens can still force the courts to determine if these laws are unfair by bringing suit against them. This significantly shifts the burden and makes if much harder to protect fair voting practices. But who said democracy was easy? Pre-clearance was an effective deterrent to discriminatory practices, but threat of swift litigation can also deter those who seek to create barriers to voting. We will need the commitment of an army of civil rights lawyers to begin to bring these cases.

2. Vote in 2014!

As devastating as this ruling is, it is also a sign of weakness on the part of the Court. Unwilling to simply declare Section 5 unconstitutional, they struck down the formula for enforcing it. But they left the door open for Congress to write a new formula. If you want a renewed Voting Rights Act, you are going to have to vote for a new Congress. American voters cannot afford to sit out these midterms as they did in 2010, only a significant effort to turn the tide in the 114th Congress can ensure a fair formula that puts teeth back into this civil rights legislation.

3. Watch Mount Holly.

But watch out, because even if Congress suddenly discovered a latent, bipartisan commitment to equal ballot access, it might have a hard time crafting an acceptable formula for pre-clearance. The Supreme Court will soon decide a case known as Mount Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, Inc. This will allow the Court to decide if it is constitutional to determine if a policy is discriminatory based on “disparate impact.” In other words, Mt. Holly will decide if it is enough to be able to show that a policy has a strong, negative impact on communities of color, or if you must also show that the policy makers have a racist intent. Depending on how the Court decides Mt. Holly, it may be impossible to keep lawmakers from restricting access to the polls, unless you can prove they were purposefully racist in their intentions.

4. Constitutional Amendment.

No American citizen has a positive right to vote ensured by the Constitution. Go back and read that language from the Fifteenth Amendment again. See? All it says is that a state can’t abridge your right to vote. The Voting Rights Act and the pre-clearance rules are necessary only because the right to vote and the rules of how you cast your ballot all reside with the states. Tuesday’s decision shows just how fragile our rights are when they are vested in this way. Now may be the time to introduce and begin to build support for a constitutional amendment ensuring the right to vote and setting out a national standard for ballot access.

Most importantly, don’t give up hope. Remember, the struggle continues. Victories for fairness must always be defended with democratic vigilance. This nation’s founding declaration proclaims the self-evident nature of human equality and of the righteousness of self-government. Our job is to ceaselessly work to realize that vision.

Take Action: Tell Congress to Guarantee the Right to Vote

The Supreme Court may have struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, but, according to Ari Berman, there’s something the court still doesn’t understand about the VRA.

Protestors Alex Corona (C) and David Milligan (R), partners who say they wish to get married if the Defense of Marriage Act is overturned, rally in support of gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, March 27, 2013. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
 
In his essay “Message in the Stars,” the American Presbyterian writer and theologian Frederick Buechner conducts a thought experiment. What if God decided to prove—dramatically, irrefutably and publicly—that God does exist by writing across the night sky. Buechner imagines the heavenly author arranging the stars to read—GOD IS—and the subsequent hope, terror, regret, joy and utter astonishment that such a message would bring. He fantasizes that God would write the message in all the different languages of the world, so that on any given night one might go outside, look up and see, in French, Mandarin or Arabic: GOD IS.

He invites us to envision the sense of relief that would come with the utter certainty that God exists. Then he imagines this:

Then the way that I would have it end might be this. I would have a child look up at the sky some night, just a plain, garden-variety child with perhaps a wad of bubble gum in his cheek…. and then I would have the child turn to his father, or maybe, with the crazy courage of childhood, I would have him turn to God himself, and the words that I would have him speak would be words to make the angels gasp. “So what if God exists?” he would say. “What difference does that make?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question of “so what, what difference does that make?” in recent months, never more so than this week. As the Supreme Court prepared to hear challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and to Proposition 8, the substance of their eventual judgment seems less and less relevant. This Court may offer the watershed legal justification for marriage equality, or it may erect one final barrier to this bundle of civil rights for gay couples. But it no longer seems to matter much.

Marriage equality has won. Democrats are flocking to a pro-marriage position in the most rapid case of mass evolution in history. Virginia’s Mark Warner, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller, Montana’s Max Baucus and South Dakota’s Tim Johnson are among the more than a dozen legislators who changed their minds and now express support for same-sex marriage. President Obama “evolved” and then so did Bill and Hillary Clinton. Even Republican Rob Portman got on the marriage-equality bandwagon after his son came out to him. And conservatives unprepared to embrace full marriage equality are inching toward civil unions as the new default position.

These elected officials like to tell stories of resetting their inner moral compass after wrestling with ethical dilemmas and discovering compassion for gay friends and relatives. But it is hard to ignore the likely reality that their change of heart has been precipitated by the stunning change in opinion among Americans. Just days before the Court heard oral arguments, Pew reported that 70 percent of Americans born after 1980 support same-sex marriage. And though justice delayed is justice denied, whether the Roberts Court upholds or strikes down these particular provisions seems almost irrelevant given this cultural and political paradigm shift. Marriage equality, the stars seem to be telling us, is just a matter of time.

Those of us who have struggled as principals or allies to bring this moment into being are feeling a bit like the awe-struck citizens of Buechner’s story, standing with our mouths agape and hearts full of wonder as we look up at the sky and realize this is real. But soon the astonishment will give way to the question asked in Buechner’s text: What difference does that make? What do we believe marriage equality will do?

Marriage equality will extend a basic civil right and allow a broader swath of Americans to opt into the bundle of economic protections and cultural privileges associated with matrimony. But this year, which has seen such tremendous movement toward marriage equality, also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Surely progressives have not forgotten her key insight: that marriage is wholly inadequate to ensure public equality or personal fulfillment. If we are to move beyond mere jubilation at the message in the stars—MARRIAGE EQUALITY IS—and provide a deeper answer to the question of what difference it will make, advocates may have to shift their tactics fairly radically.  

The successful, pragmatic strategy of gay activists has been to assert that same-sex marriage will not change the institution itself. Their argument is that there is no need to defend marriage against loving same-sex couples, because these couples don’t want to alter it; they just want to participate in it. But as we race to a victorious finish, it is time to begin forcefully articulating that, in fact, maybe we do want to change marriage—because while marriage should be a choice, it should not be an imperative. For decades, LGBTQ communities have generated new forms of family built on foundations of shared commitments, collective responsibilities, nonconjugal love and parental devotion not predicated on shared genetics. Shut out of social-normative options for making families, they queered the very idea of family. It would be tragic to allow marriage equality to destroy or marginalize the pioneering work of queer families who have taught us that family is more complicated and more fulfilling than traditional models of marriage can ever capture.

It is astonishing to be alive in this moment when marriage equality is written in the stars, but I hope we will be like the child who asks what difference it really makes. Because I suspect the goal of achieving this right is less about the ceremonies, the flowers, the love or even the economic benefits. I suspect the real goal is to achieve a more inclusive recognition of the authentic and enduring ways that we connect ourselves to one another, without needing the words “husband,” “wife” or even “spouse.” The difference we want this movement to make is bigger than that.

Laura Flanders ponders: What is about the marriage ceremony that makes a critic of the institution get teary-eyed? 

Who ends up being most affected by urban schools closings? On her Sunday show, The Nation’s Melissa Harris-Perry speaks with a panel of guests, including Nation writer Ari Berman and parent activist Zakiyah Ansari from New York’s Alliance for Quality Education, about the racialized impact of school closings and turnarounds. Ansari is an organizer for the national “Journey for Justice” campaign, which will be meeting with Education Department officials this Tuesday.

—James Cersonsky

For background on the Journey for Justice campaign, visit TheNation.com’s Extra Credit blog.  

AP Images
 
Inaugurations are symbolic events, this year’s most of all. The pomp and circumstance was wholly symbolic because there was no transition of power, and the president and vice president had taken the official oath of office the previous day. The inauguration also neatly symbolized the layers of America’s racial history, as the country’s first black president was re-inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day, 150 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Infused with powerful and fraught symbols at every turn, January 21, 2013, was more a poetic text than a government event. 

It would be easy to dismiss the president’s inaugural address as wholly symbolic as well, as just seductive rhetoric that lacks substance. Political oratory is a poor substitute for public policy, but symbolism is not entirely divorced from political outcomes. There was one moment in particular in President Obama’s speech that deserves to be considered as a substantive contribution to our democracy, even if no direct policy changes emerge from it: 

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth.

When the president name-checked the watershed moments of the women’s rights, civil rights and LGBT equality movements, he offered a powerful moment of official recognition. And recognition matters, even if there is no explicit policy agenda immediately attached to it. I am not implying that the Obama administration lacks a policy agenda to advance the social, legal and economic equality of those groups. And I am not suggesting that this speech is sufficient to realize that end, or that these rhetorical flourishes liberate the Obama administration from political accountability to these constituencies. 

Still, we can judge the value of this statement as a symbol separate and apart from any subsequent policy outcomes. It matters, in and of itself, because recognition is intrinsically valuable in a democracy. As I argue in my latest book, Sister Citizen, mutual affirming recognition is the practice that allows citizens to operate as equals. 

Typically, we think about justice in terms of distribution: how many economic resources, educational opportunities or political pathways, for example, are available to various groups and individuals. This is a reasonable but limited way to think about fairness. Citizens want more than a fair distribution of resources; they also desire—and are willing to sacrifice for—accurate, meaningful and mutual recognition of their humanity and uniqueness. 

I cringe at metaphors implying the similarity of the state and the family, but recognition is usefully framed in a familial context. Children experience connection to and fairness within the family in terms of opportunities for recognition, even if all children are given the same material resources. Fair parents observe, engage and recognize all their children just as surely as they feed, shelter and educate them. Members of a national body share a similar desire to be seen and recognized by the state. A system is not fair if citizens do not enjoy equal opportunities for public recognition. 

And this means recognition of all their identities, both the ones with which we are comfortable and the ones that make us anxious. All presidents use inaugural addresses to reflect on the American people. But naming citizens solely by their national identity ignores how identities like gender, race, class and sexual orientation profoundly shape what it means to be an American. For marginal and stigmatized groups, public life threatens the opportunity for accurate recognition. W.E.B. Du Bois characterized the recognition issue for black Americans by asking, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Ralph Ellison described it as being an “invisible man.” Betty Friedan lamented it as “the problem that has no name.” Gay Americans have long identified it as “the closet.” In each case, the challenge is the same: a lack of fair and accurate recognition. 

Our collective work is to provide space for that just recognition to occur. President Obama did so on a chilly January morning. Previous presidents have asked marginalized Americans to read themselves into the national story, but President Obama actively wrote these groups into our history. Obama positioned Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall as the fulfillment of a nascent promise in Jefferson’s declaration, and thereby recognizes the deeply American narrative embedded in these moments. 

Fair recognition and just distribution are not alternatives; they are companions in political struggle. The civil rights movement from which Martin Luther King Jr. emerged was as much a movement of recognition as it was of redistribution. Black people were organized for integration of schools, economic opportunity and political power, but they used a recognition strategy to get there. Marches, sit-ins and boycotts used black bodies in new ways. Segregated labor, housing, education and public space allowed black life to occur in the shadows, far from the consciousness of most white Americans. The civil rights movement forced the country to recognize the accomplishments, the sufferings and the humanity of black people by making their experiences starkly visible and claiming the right to be recognized. Being seen was part of the struggle. Being seen is still part of the struggle. President Obama’s inaugural address is yet another step in the long march toward fairness.

Now that the president has spoken out for collective action, solidarity, social justice, we’d better make him act on it. See this week’s lead editorial, “Obama’s Shout-Out to Freedom.”

Haiti has received $13.34 billion dollars in public donations marked for 2010–20. But 55 percent of Haitians are still living on less than $1.25 a day, and 50 percent of the population is 18 years old or younger. Why aren’t Haitians reaping the benefits of foreign aid? As Melissa Harris-Perry and guests discuss on her show, we have to hold to account NGOs and opportunistic foreign governments.

—James Cersonsky

For more on the Haitian crisis, read Amy Wilentz’s analysis of its new maquiladora economy in the most recent issue of The Nation.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This week, Melissa Harris-Perry asks us “to have a conversation not only about the poor but with people who are themselves living in poverty.” That’s because the war on poverty has too often been a war on the poor themselves. Watch the full clip to hear how we can take full stock of how this war has been waged from Clinton through Obama. 

—James Cersonsky

For more on America's domestic warfare, read Melissa Harris-Perry column in this week's print edition of the Nation. 

A US flag flies at half-staff in honor of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, Wednesday, Decmber 19, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
 
I was a panelist on an MSNBC show during the noon hour of December 14. When the show began, we had information about a school shooting in Connecticut. We believed there were three people hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries and a gunman who had committed suicide. Scary stuff, but probably a story that would occupy our attention for the proverbial fifteen minutes. But by the end of the hour, we’d heard reports that at least eighteen children under the age of 10 had been murdered in cold blood as they huddled in their classrooms.

It was a brutal hour, and one I’ll never forget. We had come to one of those moments by which we measure the end of an era: before the misery, grief and terror of this event, and after. Even as the initial reports came in, those of us on the set called for action. We didn’t quite know what had happened, but we knew it was awful. Something must be done!

As the details of Adam Lanza’s murderous spree became clearer, many more Americans took up that call. In the first seventy-two hours after the massacre, 150,000 people signed a petition on the White House website calling for legislation limiting gun access. No previous topic on the site had ever received so much support. Something must be done!

During his remarks in Newtown on that Sunday evening, President Obama also spoke of the need to act. “In the coming weeks,” he said, “I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.” Though he declined to offer any policy specifics, it was clear the president also felt: something must be done!

This is because the Newtown murders were not just tragic; they were an act of terrorism. The slain first-graders and their teachers were not targeted because of their national identity, as were the victims of the 9/11 attacks. They were not murdered because of their race, as was the case in the decades of unchecked American lynchings. They were not killed because of their religious beliefs, like the Sikh victims of a mass shooting in Wisconsin just a few months back. In fact, their undisputed innocence and relative privilege are part of what makes their deaths so horrifying—so terrorizing. It is also what makes me nervous about the calls for action that are on everyone’s lips, including mine.

After 9/11, we were caught in a state of national post-traumatic stress. We not only mourned having lost so many; we were terrified at the loss of our sense of security. On September 10, 2001, we knew we lived in a dangerous world. But we were Americans, and some things just don’t happen here… until they do. On December 13, 2012, we knew we lived in a country where thousands of people are murdered by guns—30,000 in 2011 alone—but we thought young children attending schools in prosperous, peaceful communities were immune. Some things just don’t happen there. Until they do.

And this is the aspect of the tragedy that makes it so terrifying. It undermines our belief that there is a safe place to be, to live, to send our kids to school. It is a bloody beacon of our inherent vulnerability. Nothing is harder to bear than that collective realization, so we feel we must act.

While I agree with the need for action, I also urge us to reflect before we act. Remember what we did after 9/11? We let government officials with their own agendas shape our ill-defined enemies into specific targets, some of which had no connection to the attacks. In our terror, far too many surrendered civil liberties by supporting the Patriot Act, ran our national economy aground by cheering the war in Afghanistan, and damaged our status in the world by pushing “pre-emptive” aggression in Iraq.

If we’re not careful, we could end up repeating these mistakes of trauma-laden, terror-driven policy-making.

Yes, we need common-sense gun legislation. No, we do not need a national registry of those with mental illnesses. Privacy and medical confidentiality must be protected, but that is unlikely to happen in an environment where the public becomes convinced there’s a strong correlation between mental illness and gun violence, even if that link is tenuous or false. Yes, we need to address the pervasive violence in our communities. No, we do not need to limit or censor rap music, video games or violent films. We can certainly stop supporting violence with our consumer dollars, but the impulse toward censorship tends to have more deleterious effects than positive ones. I’m not suggesting we do nothing. I’m suggesting that we recognize our current state of emotional trauma and act with caution, lest we worsen the very problems we hope to ameliorate.

No modern thinker has contributed as much to our understanding of the inscrutable realities of evil and terror as Hannah Arendt. Writing as a German Jew in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Arendt had a unique proximity to existential vulnerability. Yet her observation of the Adolf Eichmann trial produced not a polemic on the need to hold a small group of men responsible for their crimes, but rather an insight into the “banality of evil.”

“I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer which made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives,” she later wrote in The New Yorker. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer…was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither monstrous nor demonic.”

This is the insight we must cling to. Evil can emerge from routine actions, especially when they’re motivated by fear and enacted in a haze of terror. Those young lives were cut short by guns that we allow to circulate legally. But nothing we do will bring the children back or ease our vulnerability. Yes, we must act. But we must act deliberately, or we risk compounding the evil we hope to eradicate.

If Congress can’t reach a deal by New Year’s, 2.1 million people will be kicked off unemployment benefits. Not only would that be catastrophic for millions of low-income families across the country, it could strike a huge blow to our economy. Cutting support for the jobless would mean a loss of 48 billion in economic revenue. Nation blogger Greg Kaufmann joins Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry on her MSNBC show to raise the alarm about the real looming cliff—the one facing families unable to find work.

—Christie Thompson

For more on the threat to unemployment benefits, check out Greg Kaufmann’s coverage here. And watch the Melissa Harris-Perry show each week for her “Below the Line” segment, focusing on poverty in the United States.

On Black Friday, hundreds of Walmart workers protested the superstore’s unfair labor practices and “Always Low Wages” policy. While Walmart’s bottom-line business model has made the Walton family billions, their employees in California were 40 percent more likely to need public assistance. Walmart is not only slashing prices on flat-screen TVs—they’re suppressing wages and costing tax payers millions of dollars. Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry checks the numbers to see why the Walton’s “Live Better” math—which claims their low-price model benefits all families—doesn’t quite add up.

—Christie Thompson

For more on the fight against corporate greed, check out Allison Kilkenny’s coverage of “Occupy Walmart.”

Obama’s use of drone warfare is a key conflict in any progressive support for the president. And as the number of civilian casualties mounts, our nation’s “kill list” only grows longer. Nation contributor Allison Kilkenny and Nation editor-at-large Chris Hayes join Melissa Harris-Perry to debate the unprecedented extrajudicial killings under President Obama. As Harris-Perry points out, drones aren’t the only way the American government is killing American citizens—just look to communities of color in our own backyard. 

—Christie Thompson

For more on the use of drones under president Obama, check out Jeremy Scahill's interview with Progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

Contrary to conservative conspiracy theories, Barack Obama won by a bigger margin than JFK, Nixon, Carter and George W. Bush. But what are voters trying to tell him about their hopes for his second term? As TheNation.com executive editor Richard Kim put it, “They rejected the Romney/Ryan agenda…they rejected the idea that society is made of takers and givers.” He joins Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry to piece apart what Obama’s new mandate means for the future of progressive policy.

—Christie Thompson

For more on four more years, check out Robert Scheer on why Obama's second term is our responsibility.

With less than a week until Election Day, the Associated Press has reported the presidential race could come down to just 106 counties. In a final push, President Obama has been a broken record asking decided voters to get to the polls early, while Romney is calling for a last-minute turnout on November 6. Melissa Harris-Perry breaks down the final-countdown strategy of each candidate, as both fight to reserve their seat in the Oval Office.

—Christie Thompson

Despite the suppression efforts of Tea Party Republicans, Florida voters are already getting to the polls. Check out Brentin Mock's coverage here. 

Although Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are currently neck and neck, a recent NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll says the president is leading among women voters by eight points. Suddenly, reproductive health and pay equity have become key questions of this election. But “women's issues” is a misnomer for what are really economic policies that impact everyone. Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry asks: Will Romney and Ryan be held accountable for their proposed rollback of women’s rights?

—Christie Thompson

For more on the role of women in this election, check out Bryce Covert on Mitt Romney’s flip-flop ongender equity.  

One of the most tenacious myths of the Obama presidency is that he has a problem with black voters. Before a single vote was cast in the 2008 primary, pundits focused on the fact that Hillary Clinton enjoyed the support of high-profile members of the black establishment and wondered whether Obama was “black enough” to attract African-Americans. But once these voters had an opportunity to cast their ballots, their support for Obama was indisputable.

This myth has continued to dog Obama’s presidency, as the mainstream media repeatedly report faulty polls showing a steep decline in his black support. But a sober assessment shows that Obama has enjoyed robust, unwavering and unprecedented approval ratings among African-Americans. This was evidenced most starkly by the recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that measured black support for Mitt Romney at zero percent.

The question is not whether the president enjoys the backing of black voters—he does. The question is not whether this support matters—it does. Black voters in states like Ohio, Virginia and Florida are crucial to his re-election. The question is: What difference does it make to black voters if Obama is re-elected?

The impact of an Obama presidency on black Americans is better answered by partisanship than race. Since the 1960s, African-Americans have fared better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. Most of the value of an Obama second term over a Romney presidency is captured by this partisan difference. But race is not inconsequential. For African-Americans, having a black president matters in terms not fully captured by policy outcomes.

When Obama became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, he was asked about the historic nature of his election. A young Obama replied, “Although…I think people can say my election symbolizes some progress…I think it’s real important to keep the focus on the broader world out there…. For a lot of kids, the doors that have been opened to me aren’t open to them.” The quote is more than twenty years old, but the sentiment is still relevant to his presidency today.

No matter what policies he pursues, the president’s racialized embodiment stands as a symbol of triumphant black achievement. By embodying the American state in blackness, President Obama stitches together the double consciousness identified by W.E.B. Du Bois: “two souls…two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” For many black observers, there is a certain wonder in the simple reality that President Obama has not been rent in two by the sheer force of embodying both blackness and Americanness.

But there is a danger inherent in Obama’s ability to stand in this unusual gap. Simply by being elected, Obama trumpets a postracial individualism that threatens to undermine the very structures of opportunity that made his accomplishments possible. He recognizes this danger. It is why, even in 1990, he redirected attention to the “broader world out there.” The only way to resist false racial triumphalism is with a consistent and clear examination of the structural inequities that continue to shape opportunities for the majority of African-Americans.

Black children suffer the highest rates of poverty and food insecurity. African-Americans continue to have strikingly lower literacy, high school graduation and college completion rates. African-American unemployment remains nearly twice that of whites, while black incarceration tracks at six times that of whites.

As the election campaign draws to a close, Obama’s defeat or victory seems equally likely. As with so much of his career, his success or failure will not be his alone; it will be a shared racial marker. But his re-election does not ensure, in any direct or easy way, that the doors of opportunity will be opened any wider for future generations of black Americans.

It was with full awareness of this complicated relationship that I sat down with President Obama in the Oval Office. I had been asked by Ebony magazine to conduct an interview with the president on the issues facing black communities and what he planned to do for those communities if re-elected.

Some aspects of the conversation were unsurprising. The president argued that race-neutral policies that help all Americans have a specific impact on black people. He discussed, for example, how the Affordable Care Act will particularly benefit African-Americans, who are the least likely to be insured. He emphasized education as the key to long-term racial and economic equality. When pushed, the president was willing to engage on more racially specific concerns, like the scourge of urban gun violence. But his preference was to think about the racially positive effects of race-neutral policies.

At one point Obama wistfully reflected on the age of President Lincoln, saying, “In some ways, I think it used to be easier. Abraham Lincoln used to have just an open office…folks would just line up outside—they’d walk in, they’d petition him for something.”

I reminded him that Lincoln did have to deal with a civil war. “Yes,” President Obama laughed, “that’s a good trade-off.”

It was a light moment, and I was pleased that I got the president to laugh. But it was also a moment of insight for me. In his romantic vision of Lincoln’s open-door White House, it seemed the president had forgotten the raging battle that divided the nation. It made me wonder if he could still see the brutal structural circumstances most black citizens face. Only a second term can answer this question.

One thing is clear: black voters will determine how much race, policy and history weigh in their calculation to turn out for President Obama. Only they—not the campaign, not the media—will dictate their interests in this moment. It is the irony of democracy that they have greater power to hold the door open for President Obama than he has to hold the door open for them.

In “What Race Has to Do With It,” Gary Younge says the current election has posed a challenge of self-control for Republicans raised on a diet of welfare queens and Willie Horton.

Though activists are celebrating a slate of recent victories against voter ID laws, the fight isn’t over. Republicans in Florida are purging eligible voters from registries, and using intimidation tactics to convince Sunshine State citizens of their political inefficacy. Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry breaks down why voting rights can never be a partisan issue: they are crucial to our national social (and mental) well-being.

—Christie Thompson

For more voter suppression coverage, check out The Nation and Colorlines.com’s joint project, Voting Rights Watch 2012.

A large group of public school teachers marches past John Marshall Metropolitan High School on Wednesday, September 12, 2012 in West Chicago. Teachers walked off the job Monday for the first time in twenty-five years over issues that include pay raises, classroom conditions, job security and teacher evaluations. (AP Photo/Sitthixay Ditthavong)
 
Rolisa is a married mom with four kids. Two of them are successful graduates of Chicago’s public schools—her eldest graduated from college in 2011, and the second is a college junior. Her younger kids are in the fourth and sixth grades at a small public school on the South Side. The class sizes are at the city average, and the test scores are above the state average. Her kids are pretty happy there. Or at least they were, until the standoff between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Rahm Emanuel transformed them into students of Rolisa’s makeshift kitchen table school.

As the strike loomed, Rolisa secured a curriculum from her kids’ teachers, coordinated with other working parents and enlisted her eldest daughter. But even with this preparation, the strike was a harrowing time for her. Rolisa suffers from COPD, a serious breathing condition. As a result, she works from home, which made her impromptu home school possible but not easy. In addition to the exhausting days and the financial burden of hosting and feeding neighborhood kids every day, the uncertainty of when and how the strike would end kept everyone on edge. Rolisa worried about the dangers teens in her community might encounter during days of unstructured idleness. Like the majority of Chicago parents, she sided with the teachers, but she was frustrated and worried about her children’s short- and long-term prospects.

“As a sixth grader, my son is facing very high-stakes testing this year,” Rolisa told me. “We were hoping he could gain admission to one of the high school prep programs. That would give him access to the best public high schools. We needed every minute of class time before those tests. Every day they are out of school, he gets further from that prep program, further from the best high schools, further from college.”

Listening to Rolisa describe her son’s future in such precarious terms made me realize just how lucky I was to be born when I was—in the early 1970s. It was a moment when the civil rights and women’s movements opened new job opportunities for my parents. I started kindergarten when it was still the norm for all parents in the neighborhood—even those with more disposable income—to send their kids to the local public school. There was a private school in town, but I’m not sure who went there.

It was the South, but this was just before white flight became a perfected strategy of resegregation, so I learned in racially and economically integrated classrooms. My teachers were paid a living wage, so they worked just one job, not two. They had time to offer extra help after school. In high school I had art, orchestra and sports—none of it cost extra. These were neighborhood schools, so I could walk or take a bus, and my single mom didn’t have to take time from work to get me to and from school and events. The schools weren’t great, but they were safe, and there were just enough extraordinary teachers to keep me challenged. Local businesses sponsored the football team, but no corporation sought profits from competing with our public schools.

I ended up with a full scholarship to college, because universities still had affirmative action. I graduated into an expanding economy. I worked hard, but it’s obvious that the dumb luck of my birth year undoubtedly contributed to my professional and personal accomplishments.

I’m not alone. As Brian Miller and Mike Lapham argue in The Self-Made Myth, successful people are only partly responsible for their accomplishments. Publicly financed infrastructure, property laws, favorable tax structures and social safety net programs are all crucial for entrepreneurs. In addition to these factors, personal accomplishment is also strikingly influenced by the random luck of when you’re born. Drawing on research from Malcolm Gladwell, Miller and Lapham report that “of the 75 richest people in all human history, 14 were Americans born between 1831 and 1840.” When we are born determines whether we come of age in a recession or in an expanding economy, during peacetime or in the midst of a draft, at a moment when our identities limit our civil rights—or not.

The conditions I faced as a schoolchild felt ancient, natural and permanent, but they were not. Widespread, integrated, quality public schools existed for only a brief moment. They were decimated by the original “school choice” movement—when middle-income white families fled cities for suburbs and public schools for private ones. School evaluations were once the subject of heated PTA meetings; now they come from remote bureaucrats who make demands from on high without providing adequate resources. As a nation we are paralyzed by the complexity of measuring achievement, and we’ve retreated to the blunt tool of high-stakes standardized tests.

Which brings me back to Rolisa’s kids and their 350,000 peers. At press time, the Chicago Teachers Union voted to end the strike, tentatively agreeing to a new contract. Chicago’s children will soon be back in class—but the underlying issues are far from resolved. Reformers will continue to push for teacher evaluations based on student test scores; teachers will argue that such assessment tools must account for the poverty, dislocation, violence and incarceration that affect so many of the kids they teach. We can expect what happened in Chicago to repeat itself in other cities.

We may eventually find our way through the fog of the school reform wars, but I’m worried that our solutions will come too late for too many. This generation of children may become hard-working, courageous adults who nonetheless are relegated to life sentences of poverty and underachievement. They are stuck because they were born in a time of war—not just the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, not just the heavily armed wars in their own streets, but the wars between the leaders and teachers who are supposed to have their best interests at heart but who seem willing to allow this generation to be lost.

Also in this issue, Pedro Noguera details “What’s Missing From the Chicago Strike Debate.” Earlier this year, in our special Occupy the Safety Net issue, Noguera wrote about the struggles of a West Oakland school, hit by the double whammies of poverty and austerity.

It’s been just one year since protesters took over Zuccotti Park, yet some are already writing Occupy’s obituary. While the Tea Party movement has pushed Republicans even further to the right, Occupy has produced no political candidates or parties. But as Nation blogger Allison Kilkenny points out, it’s Occupy’s strategy (not shortcoming) to organize outside the political system. She joins Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry to highlight why progressives need to get to the polls and take to the streets this November.

—Christie Thompson

In 2011, nearly 5.7 percent of Americans struggled to put food on the table. But with an overwhelming focus on the middle class at both national conventions, rising poverty went largely unmentioned. Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry and Nation blogger Ari Melber ask, Why has a real conversation about America’s poor been mostly missing from this election?

—Christie Thompson

New Orleans hurricane disasters are who we are.
 
We met in the aftermath of Katrina, both giving speeches about race and recovery at a fair-housing conference. We attempted our first date during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, but the requisite preparations and family evacuations for Hurricane Gustav made it impossible to connect with each other. On our second date, at President Obama’s inauguration, we co-authored a commentary arguing that his election was possible because the televised suffering of Katrina survivors dramatically changed American public opinion toward President Bush and the Republican Party. We were in love by the time President Obama made his first presidential visit to New Orleans. We took the opportunity to write together again, claiming that the lessons of post-Katrina New Orleans offered a blue print for rebuilding our national economy.

That’s how nerd love works… at least in New Orleans.

Hurricane Isaac, by striking the Gulf Coast on the seven-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, reminds us that while some things have changed, much remains the same.

Much has changed for us. We are no longer dating; we are happily married. This time there were two sets of parents to evacuate. This time there was a fifth grader’s school schedule to consider. This time there were two houses to secure. There is the little shotgun in the 7th ward where we live; we just celebrated the full post-Katrina restoration of that home earlier this year. It stood strong in the storm. Across the street was the other home. It had been ravaged by Katrina and Gustav, but we’d just closed on it a few weeks ago, hoping to fully restore it and make it our home so our family would have room to grow. Isaac took it on Wednesday morning, exactly seven years after Katrina.

This time we could share the emotional despair and deferred dreams as never before.

But the changes since Katrina are not just personal. This is a different country. We have a Democrat in the White House. President Obama, working with Congress, has led the federal government in constructing a state-of-the-art federal levee and water pumping system to protect the New Orleans metropolitan area. This time, the levees held. And thank goodness they did: Katrina’s disastrous legacy is due mostly to the failure of the federal levees and subsequent flooding of 75 percent of historic New Orleans.

Still unchanged is the devastation and dashed hopes that are left in the hurricanes’ paths. Like Katrina, Isaac destroyed homes, separated families and left people stranded on rooftops. Our dream home, which had stood for more than 100 years, is gone. Even that loss is minimal compared to the massive losses of personal property and memories that so many of our neighbors in Plaquemines Parish have suffered.

Also unchanged is Republicans’ uncanny ability to demonstrate just how out of touch they are with the suffering on the Gulf Coast. Recalling President George W. Bush’s ignominious flyover seven years ago, Republicans partied and danced the night away in Tampa, Florida, voicing only fleeting concern for those in Hurricane Isaac’s path. But as most conservatives celebrated the Romney-Ryan government rollback ticket, one up and coming Republican leader rebutted a fundamental conservative premise.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal asked for the federal government to do more. He has been a standard bearer against so-called “Obamacare” and has railed against federal stimulus dollars, but as the winds and rain of Isaac devastated his state, Governor Jindal reached out for Washington’s help. The president had declared a state of emergency, thereby allowing the governor and the people of Louisiana access to federal support to “alleviat[e] the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population…to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe.” Jindal, concerned that this might be insufficient, wrote to the president: “…the state’s original request for federal assistance…included a request for reimbursement for all emergency protective measures. The federal declaration of emergency only provides for direct federal assistance.”

It was the right move. In the wake of disaster, communities need support that can only be provided by the collective support system that federal government provides. The request, however, runs afoul of party stalwarts. From Ron Paul to Eric Cantor, Republican leaders have called for the defunding of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These agencies lead and manage government response to disasters and track hurricanes and predict their paths so that Americans can prepare appropriately. In fact, even as Hurricane Irene struck Cantor’s district, he refused to support full funding for FEMA and NOAA.

During Hurricane Isaac, only one levee failed. It was a levee in Plaquemines Parish built using private resources. It was constructed because local members of Congress, citing cost concerns, refused to fund construction of a federal levee to protect the low-lying parish.

The failing private levees supports the notion that there are some things that private corporations and rugged individualism simply are not designed to handle. Surviving disaster requires support that can be provided only by the collective. Our collective tax dollars allow the National Hurricane Center to warn us of impending hurricanes. Our collective tax dollars fund federal interstates that allow evacuation. Our collective tax dollars fund emergency response agencies that help disaster victims in need.

So while Republicans dance the night away in Tampa, we remain in New Orleans. Our home collapsed, and our neighborhood has been without electricity since Tuesday. For once, we stand in agreement with Governor Jindal. We need more government, not less. Too bad Governor Jindal won’t be in Tampa to spread the word.