In February, the Trump Justice Department issued a program statement titled “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria,” its new internal directives regarding transgender people in federal prison. The policy classifies being transgender itself as a “mental health disorder” and outlines a “treatment plan” to ensure those afflicted “progress toward recovery.” What “recovery” means, in the eyes of the administration, is made obvious by the mandates of the plan: confiscation of trans inmates’ gender-affirming clothes, makeup and other personal items; denial of hormones and any other gender-affirming medication; and program of forced psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs. “It is, in every meaningful sense, a blueprint for a government-run conversion therapy program,” Shannon Minter, legal head of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, writes in the Advocate, “one targeting thousands of incarcerated people who have nowhere to turn.”

In January 2017, the outgoing Obama administration issued federal prison guidelines that aimed to ensure “transgender inmates can access programs and services that meet their needs.” Since then, including during Trump’s first term, the Bureau of Prisons’ official policy held that trans prisoners should be given gender affirming care—including hormones, surgery and placement in facilities matching their gender identity. But as the Marshall Project notes, “across both Democratic and Republican administrations, gender-affirming housing was rare, and surgery rarer still.” And depending on the prison, provision of even the most basic gender-affirming care was always inconsistent.

“People’s experience in federal prisons varies widely from place to place. In some places, medical staff are more supportive and better trained. In others, people already often have to fight hard to get the medical care they need and are thwarted at every turn,” Minter told me. “It’s probably not news to anyone paying the least bit of attention that healthcare in prisons is generally abysmal. And people are denied all kinds of care that they need all the time.”

Of the 1,500 estimated trans women in federal custody, per NPR reporting, just 22 were in women’s prisons as of February 2025. (Of the estimated 750 trans men in custody, one was in a men’s facility.) That means that when Trump issued his day-one executive order declaring his administration would only “recognize two sexes” and requiring trans women to be put in men’s prisons, 99 percent of trans women were already being held in men’s facilities. That order also announced a new ban on using federal funds for gender-affirming care in prisons, providing the administration a pretext for ending numerous provisions—from hormones to gender-confirming commissary items such as breast and hip padding—for trans inmates.

On the heels of Trump’s order, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights and its partners immediately filed lawsuits, quickly securing injunctions in at least three federal courts. And yet, a BOP memo dated February 21, 2025, acknowledges the existence of a “nation-wide restraining order” blocking Trump’s EO—but nonetheless states the agency’s compliance with the president’s illegal order. BOP officials explicitly directed staff to both misgender and deadname trans inmates, according to court papers seen by The Guardian, and to reject requests for gender-affirming clothing. And a trans legal advocate who spoke with the outlet cited the case of a trans woman who had transitioned before being incarcerated in a men’s facility.

In June 2025, a DC federal judge issued a nation-wide injunction requiring the Bureau of Prisons to again start providing trans people with hormone therapy and prohibiting relocation of trans women to men’s prisons. And yet, all available evidence suggests the BOP is refusing to comply. Eight current and recently incarcerated trans-identifying people who spoke with Uncloseted Media this March confirmed they were denied legally mandated gender-affirming care, and the outlet uncovered court papers detailing “cases of noncompliance at 19 different prisons.” It seems that with its new policy, the administration has formalized what it was already doing illegally—and gone further.

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Studies show transgender women incarcerated in men’s prisons are 13 times more likely than cisgender inmates to endure sexual violence. That is part of why Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, requiring officials to consider particular vulnerabilities to sexual abuse—including LGBTQ status—in making prison housing decisions. Despite the law, in December 2025 the Trump administration announced it was defunding the National PREA Resource Center, which provides prison staff training, certification and myriad other supports for PREA compliance.

“This administration has unlawfully thrown all that overboard and is busily trying to implement policies that they know are going to result in sexual violence against these vulnerable people—everyone knows that is what is going to happen. They are doing that with full knowledge,” Minter told me. “That is not just unlawful. It’s a gross human rights violation. We don’t expect to see the federal government knowingly subjecting people who have no choice—who are captive—to sexual violence. It is pretty shocking.”

As journalist Aleksandra Vaca points out, the BOP’s policy rewrite cribs heavily from Florida’s 2024 policy paper rolling back the rights of transgender inmates, which claimed gender dysphoria results from “unaddressed psychiatric issues and unaddressed childhood trauma,” and treats transgender identity as “short-termed delusions or beliefs which may later be changed and reversed.” It also borrows from a 400-page 2025 report on transgender youth issued by Trump’s Health and Human Services Department, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That paper promotes “exploratory therapy,” recognized as conversion therapy in all but name by Kaiser Family Services and the Trevor Project. Among the many other scholars, researchers, scientists and clinicians who assailed its contents was the American Academy of Pediatrics, which criticized it for “bypassing medical expertise and scientific evidence.”

“Their position is pretty clearly that there’s no such thing as a genuinely transgender person—and that identifying as transgender is always a manifestation of some other underlying mental illness or pathology or disorder,” Minter told me. “So, when this Bureau of Prisons policy says that transgender people who are incarcerated will receive psychiatric medications and therapy, it’s very clear that they’re talking about therapy designed to ‘cure’ transgender people of the delusion that they’re transgender.”

Indeed, the BOP’s new policy explicitly claims that, “like many DSM-V psychiatric conditions, [gender dysphoria] is complex and often accompanied by other psychiatric comorbidities.” It promises “individualized treatment plans,” yet universally mandates that “treatment should include, at a minimum, therapy” administered under a Bureau policy titled Treatment and Care of Inmates with Mental Illness. The stated goal of that treatment is to help trans inmates “progress toward recovery” by “reducing or eliminating the frequency and severity of symptoms and associated negative outcomes.” If there is any doubt that trans identity itself is here framed as the symptom, the memo’s glossary declares “gender identity” is “disconnected from biological reality and sex” (my emphasis), claiming it does “not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.” As Vaca notes, transition is thus cast as the “negative outcome.” The treatment will only be “discontinued if it is determined by a mental or medical health professional that the inmate no longer meets the criteria for” gender dysphoria, the policy notes, at which point their medical records will be updated to show the condition has been “resolved.”

Tellingly, the BOP report contends that gender dysphoria is the source of increased suicidality. In fact, trans people’s suicidality is driven by the stigmatization of their identities as defective, disordered or abnormal, and intense societal pressure to conform to cis-normative standards. Nowhere is that pressure more explicit than in conversion therapy, a widely discredited pseudoscience whose efficacy has been thoroughly debunked through decades of scientific research and mountains of scholarly studies. Pretty much every medical and mental health professional organization in the US—American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics—supports legal efforts to ban the practice. (The United Nations, which labels conversion therapy a form of torture, has called for a global ban.) The American Psychological Association and scholars at Stanford link is use to increased “depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, substance abuse, and post-traumatic stress.” Among trans and nonbinary youth—who are more likely than their cisgender LGBQ peers to be subject to conversion therapy—nearly 60 percent, or three in five of those who underwent it in the last year, attempted suicide. Studies similarly indicate that transgender American adults who experienced gender identity conversion are significantly more likely to suffer “severe psychological distress” and “lifetime suicide attempts.”

Peer-reviewed science proves that the best way to “cure” or mitigate gender dysphoria is with gender-affirming care. The aforementioned Stanford study found that when given access to hormone treatments, “Odds of severe psychological distress were reduced by 222 percent, 153 percent and 81 percent for those who began hormones in early adolescence, late adolescence and adulthood, respectively. Odds of previous-year suicidal ideation were 135 percent lower in people who began hormones in early adolescence, 62 percent lower in those who began in late adolescence and 21 percent lower in those who began as adults.”

If psychological coercion could change a person’s sexuality or gender identity, the trauma wreaked by homophobia and transphobia would almost certainly do the trick. However, there’s plenty of evidence proving it does succeed in shaming folks into denying who they are. And for the Trump administration—the most anti-science, anti-LGBTQ and, in particular, anti-trans presidency in recent decades—that’s good enough.

None of this is, of course, a departure from American history. Homosexuality was only declassified as a mental illness in the DSM in 1973, and it’s clear that’s a past this administration wants to return to. The state’s coercive power is maximized in federal prisons, and the Trump administration is using that power—with full knowledge of the laws it is breaking and the harm it will cause—against some of the most vulnerable people in the country. But of course, this is all par for the course.

“This is very dangerous, irresponsible and disrespectful of the court system and the judicial process,” Minter told me. “But it is of a piece with the way this administration is operating—with very little, if any, respect for the rule of law. Or norms of basic decency. Or respect for human dignity and human rights. They are engaged in full-on, open scapegoating of many vulnerable minorities. Including transgender people.”

Luxury brands have always advertised the craftsmanship of their products, but in recent months, human artistry itself has become their advertising strategy. Hermès redesigned its entire website around hand-drawn illustrations by the French artist Linda Merad, who said the designer label wanted visitors to recognize that “the art was made by a human.” The fashion houses Chanel and Loewe commissioned human illustrators to create their recent social-media campaigns. Over the holidays, Porsche released an ad that combined hand-drawn artwork with 3D animation—a choice that seemed pointed coming on the heels of the viciously mocked generative-AI ads from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. This past February, Gucci became a cautionary tale when it drew the wrath of fashionistas after using AI in its ads. “Any luxury brands that used AI slop should not be consider[ed] luxury anymore,” one viral post read. Another stated, “The whole point of luxury is that someone gave a damn.”

As automation and AI become ubiquitous, the human touch has become a luxury good. In some ways, this might seem to be merely a continuation on a theme: The rich get white-glove customer service while the rest of us are trapped pressing “1” and “2” and shouting “speak to an agent” into automated phone-tree voids. It can seem like just another symptom of the broader enshittification of our age and plutocratic economic order. And most of us don’t like it. Studies confirm the widespread skepticism: A Pew survey from 2025 found that half of Americans were more concerned than excited by the rise of AI, and roughly 60 percent said they wish they had more control over AI’s use in their own lives.

And yet it’s the poor who are subject to its most consequential uses. Today, debt collectors use AI to hound people via phone, e-mail, and chatbots. AI deepfakes are poised to worsen criminal-justice disparities. Parole decisions are being made by AI systems. And increasingly, federal and state officials are outsourcing decision-making and oversight for public services to digital machines.

As TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit that tracks technologies that are harmful to low-income communities, noted in a November 2024 report, governments employ AI in public programs when they’re looking to cut costs under the guise of ensuring that only the “right” people receive services. But any mistake made by an automated system immediately snowballs: Such systems can create “immense suffering at scales and speeds that were impossible with the human-centered methods that precede them,” the researchers found. After decades of austerity rooted in anti-Black and anti-poor politics, America’s safety net is already threadbare; those same biases are now encoded into digital tools that, like all AI, reproduce the prejudices of their training data and programmers. A human bureaucrat can destroy only so many lives in a day; algorithms can ruin the lives of tens of thousands at once.

Every state now uses AI to determine Medicaid eligibility, according to TechTonic Justice. For the 73 million people enrolled in the program, automated systems increasingly decide whether to approve or deny healthcare treatments. The nearly 14 million Americans who receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration are subject to decisions shaped by AI, which is also used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; in fraud detection for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and in making predictions of neglect in child-welfare investigations. Indeed, throughout the social-safety net, decisions about who gets helped and who gets denied are increasingly left to machines. (Right around when the Porsche ad dropped, the Trump administration quietly gave Palantir a no-bid contract for an AI system to search for alleged fraud by SNAP recipients.) In fact, as the TechTonic Justice researchers reported, “all 92 million low-income people in the U.S.…have some basic aspect of their lives decided by AI.”

In 2013, for example, cash-strapped Michigan instituted an automated system to root out fraud in its unemployment-insurance program. Over a two-year period, the system leveled fraud accusations against over 60,000 people—more than five times the number identified by previous human-led investigations. Despite no human review of these findings, the state began demanding repayment; court papers noted that the “punitive assessments regularly totaled between $10,000 and $50,000 and sometimes exceeded $187,000.” Three years later, Michigan’s auditor general found that 93 percent of those allegations were wrong. By then, thousands of people had endured arrests, bankruptcies, and evictions, with at least one person dying by suicide. As of 2022, Michigan owed $20 million in settlement costs to claimants who’d signed on to a class-action lawsuit.

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In Arkansas, an automated system erroneously cut nursing and other home-aide services for about 4,000 people with severe disabilities. When families asked why the services had been slashed, they were told simply that “the computer did it.” (A court ruled that the state had to stop using the system.) In Minnesota and Kentucky, ongoing class-action lawsuits allege wrongful denials of care in cases where insurers enlisted AI to override doctor recommendations and deny the Medicare Advantage claims of elderly patients. In Illinois and Los Angeles County, the automated systems used to determine child-welfare removals were so error-prone that both jurisdictions have now discontinued their use.

The research company Forrester predicts that AI and automation will eliminate 6 percent of all jobs, or roughly 10 million positions, by 2030. That outlook seems sunny compared to a 2025 Senate report that predicted some 100 million Americans could lose their jobs to AI over the next 10 years. There’s a new digital divide, and the less money you have to buy your way out of it, the greater the role that AI will have over your life.

Black History Month arrived this February, just as it does every year — except a lot quieter. 

Streaming services featured fewer ads with voiceovers celebrating “Black excellence” and “Black girl magic.” Brand social media accounts — once quick to flood timelines with MLK and Maya Angelou pull quotes — were noticeably hushed. After years of putting on their very best performances of solidarity every Black History Month, corporate marketers have seemed at a loss for words this year. Ironically, that silence says far more about capitalism, cowardice, and complicity than any of their performative displays ever did. 

Those displays peaked in the aftermath of George Floyd’s May 2020 murder, as corporations fell over themselves in a collective rush to perform grief and solidarity? During Black History Month 2021, Nike observed the month by reworking the color schemes of some of its more popular sneakers for limited-edition styles and announced plans to distribute half a million dollars to nonprofits serving predominantly Black communities. Target launched an HBCU student-design challenge, offered a special collection by Black designers, and touted its new commitment to increase the number of Black workers by 20 percent — all of which followed the launch of its Racial Equity Action and Change, or REACH, initiative, which committed to spending more than $2 billion with Black businesses. And roughly 100 globally-recognized brands “mentioned Black History Month or used the hashtag #BlackHistoryMonth 122 times on the social media site formerly known as Twitter,” according to Adweek. 

By February 2025, just two of those same brands — Spotify and Ralph Lauren — mentioned Black History Month even once on the platform. 

The silence was neither coincidence nor accident. The years since 2020 have borne witness to one of the most vicious white backlashes to Black demands for liberation since Reconstruction. In short order, the right launched a cynical misinformation campaign around “critical race theory,” the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down affirmative action, and the idea of racial equity as anti-white “reverse-racism” gained renewed traction. Books by Black and LGBTQ authors were being banned and burned. Bans on the teaching of Black history were codified in at least 18 states. And Donald Trump was reelected — itself a testament to festering white racial resentment — ushering in a wave of anti-DEI policies. 

Trump turbocharged efforts to erase Black history. In March 2025, he signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which took direct aim at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, an institution he would later complain is too focused on “how bad slavery was.” The Naval Academy library purged 400 books it claimed promoted DEI, including Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — although it retained two copies of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In Mississippi, at the National Monument Home of Medgar and Myrlie Evers in Mississippi, National Park Service employees removed brochures referring to Ever’s murderer, a known Klansman, as “racist.” This past January, at the former Philadelphia home of George Washington, federal workers were ordered to take down an exhibit that looked at the lives of those he enslaved. Those panels were reinstalled just days ago, Feb. 19, under orders of a judge who noted the Orwellian echoes in their removal. 

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Brands made big shows of celebrating Blackness when it was fashionable and, above all, safe. Then they cravenly retreated. One month after Trump moved back into the White House, in February 2025, users noted Google had quietly wiped all recognition of Black History Month — and Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Indigenous Peoples Month — from its calendar’s default listings. When pressed for an explanation, Google blamed technical issues related to scalability, a contention that might have seemed more believable had it not announced just the week prior that it was ditching DEI efforts to comply with Trump executive orders. (“In 2020, we set aspirational hiring goals,” a Google in-house memo noted, “but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.”) The metaphor of erasing Black history and existence from time itself was almost too on the nose. 

Amazon had promoted products by Black makers every February since 2021. But weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, the company scrubbed the phrase “Equity for Black people” from its website and announced it was “winding down outdated programs,” thinly-veiled code for DEI. Meta — which during Black History Month 2022 had even infused its virtual and augmented reality Metaverse with content centering the black American experience — cited the “shifting legal and policy landscape” in the Jan. 2025 memo announcing its DEI withdrawal. One of Target’s eight Instagram posts during Black History Month 2024 labeled the month “sacred.” And yet less than a year later, the company announced it was dropping its Racial Equity Action and Change, or REACH initiative, including the 2021 pledge of $2 billion to black businesses — one of the largest corporate DEI rollbacks amidst a season full of them. 

While those reversals made headlines, it was brands’ public displays of Black support that had been anomalous — not their retreat. For a brief national moment after George Floyd’s murder, public opinion embraced racial justice, with multiple polls finding a majority of Americans, including a plurality of white Americans, supported the movement for Black lives — a consensus that led corporations to recognize its profit potential. All this was a textbook example of an actual principle of critical race theory — as opposed to the panicked distortion that would seize white America shortly thereafter — known as “interest convergence.” Developed by late Harvard legal scholar Derrick Bell, the principle holds that racial progress happens when it aligns with white interests, not in spite of them. Brands are happy to court new audiences as long as the effort only requires hashtags, playlists and altered color palettes. Political inconvenience, not so much. Capitalism exists to follow power, not buck it.

Having brands back away from Black History Month actually recalls the month’s origins and original intent. The reason for the season was not to provide marketing opportunities to corporations. It was a celebration born of struggle during a period now known to historians as “the nadir of American race relations.” In 1926, during that dark era amidst a revived Ku Klux Klan, Lost Cause revisionism and endless white terror violence, Carter G. Woodson insisted on a week dedicated to the truth of Black history in a nation committed to forgetting. 

And this year, on the 100th year of Black History Month, America remains much the same. As the Atlantic’s Adam Harris notes in an essay this month, “Black History Month is sometimes treated as little more than an opportunity for corporate branding and, maybe, school assemblies; but in the face of such erasure, observing it this February feels radical.”

Black History Month doesn’t need corporate validation. It’s already survived a century of segregation, degradation, and attempted erasure. It will also survive America’s latest effort to make Black history disappear. Despite a Jan. 31, 2025, Department of Defense declaration stating all “Identity Months Dead,” Trump still issued a Black History Month declaration on Feb. 3 this year. However begrudgingly. 

There are still some brands showing up. It might not be surprising that Ben & Jerry’s — which is currently suing parent company Unilever for allegedly trying to shush its support of Gaza — has remained a vocal Black History Month supporter. The Gap not only partnered with Harlem’s Fashion Row — an agency that represents up-and-coming Black designers — but also launched a new denim collection from 5 young Black designers, and held a much-hyped pop-up event in Times Square. And there were social media posts from brands that have publicly stated their refusal to abandon DEI goals, including Costco, Delta and Apple, the latter of which again launched its annual Black Unity Collection. 

But perhaps more importantly, there are stories that highlight how non-corporate commitments will always be more important. Illustrator and activist Danielle Coke Balfour created her “Oh Happy Dani” stationary and card brand based on art she’d created for Black History Month 2020. By 2021, Balfour was working with Target, and her line was featured in its stores nationwide. But when the company announced its DEI rollback last year, Balfour decided to pull her items from the store’s inventory. “Our brand has always been built on the very principles that have recently been rolled back by” Target, she explained in a social media post. (In another message, Balfour would also rightly describe Target’s move as “a signal of the dangerous trajectory we’ve been on for years as a result of the backlash to racial equity efforts.”) Balfour’s online store sold out, and she posted an update showing that the customer support she saw in just the week after severing ties with Target wiped out the losses she’d expected to incur over the following year. Where corporate America failed her, the community rallied to fill in, and made the gap overflow. The story feels instructive, and needed, at this moment. 

As for Target, the company faced multiple backlashes from Black consumers and the “Latino Freeze” movement. As of this writing, its stock price has plummeted 61 percent since its 2021 peak. So, Happy Black History month, to those who celebrate.

I’m not sure we’re terrified enough about the American right’s scrapping even its own scant moral boundaries.

Every segment of the Trump-backing right wing—America First nationalists, Trump loyalists and rank-and-file MAGA activists—has unsubscribed from the idea that there is any such thing as right and wrong, much less that wrongdoing should result in consequences. In effect, there is no behavior Trump’s GOP sees as too wrong to vote for. In late July 2025, almost half of Republicans said they would keep voting for Trump even if he were “officially implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.” Crime is legal, where right-wingers are concerned, however heinous the crime is.

At least, for themselves. The right still has morals for days when it comes to Black folks, immigrants and trans people. Its moral code has always been selective and conditional; rigorously enforced and mercilessly punitive toward “outsiders” and “others,” but generally indifferent to even the worst acts by those on the right side of whiteness and power. Wilhoit’s Law—coined by music composer Frank Wilhoit in a now-famous 2018 comment on a political science blog—neatly captures this truth. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition—there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Now it’s ditching even its in-group protections.

The right’s reaction to the Epstein files disclosures is the clearest evidence of this. For the better part of a decade, conservatives lurched from one pedophile-focused moral panic to the next, proclaiming themselves the true saviors of children. They didn’t mean all children, of course; these are the same people who gifted a white woman with $750,000 just for calling a 5-year-old autistic Black boy the N-word. Their concern was always reserved for the white children they saw as fully human. They insisted pedophiles were hiding in pizza parlor basements; obsessed over Q drops and waved signs calling us to “#SavetheChildren” and “Stop Child Trafficking”; and pushed anti-LGBT “groomer” hysteria alongside anti-drag bills. Roughly half of Trump voters said they believed elected Democrats were running child sex rings in surveys from 2020 and 2022; a majority of 2020 Trump voters told pollsters that Trump was actively working to take down “an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats.” White lives mattered to conservatives, especially the youngest white lives. At least in theory.

And at least as long as they thought their political opponents were responsible. But the more we know about Epstein, the less they care. The nearly half of Republicans who said the Epstein files mattered at least “a little” to how they assess Trump’s presidency in July 2025 dropped to just 36 percent by November. (That figure is 64 percent for Democrats.) Faced with at least one allegation in the files that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl and well-documented associations between their leader and Epstein—as well as other alleged sexual predators—the right isn’t just overlooking the implications; they’re abandoning the principles. The right has “gradually de-emphasized” the Epstein issue, CNN writes, choosing to “largely move on.” It was all political calculation.

That might also explain why conservatives, in rebutting the need for greater transparency about the files’ contents, unfailingly bring up the appearance of Bill Clinton’s name in the Epstein files. They assume that the left’s response will be to ditch the issue if there’s no partisan benefit, because that’s what they would do. They genuinely don’t understand that a person might hold a principle like, say, opposing pedophilia, regardless of who engages in it. The notion of sincere moral outrage grounded in right and wrong, instead of political advantage, is genuinely lost on them.

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The moral charade was always going to be undone by the Trump of it all. His supporters are members of a reactionary movement almost singularly animated by racial grievance. Trump supporters believed that the racial contract—and above all, its guarantee that whiteness was the most immutable hurdle to the American presidency—had been broken. “We haven’t felt like ourselves since Barack Obama,” Megyn Kelly said just this past September, a reminder of the imagined injury white racists sustained nearly two decades ago. Trump promised to not just restore the racial contract but to punish the people his supporters saw as responsible for breaching it. In exchange, they elevated an openly, extravagantly corrupt white man to the presidency.

When your most coherent ideology is “owning the libs” and fighting against racial equality, and you’ve literally elected one of the most demonstrably immoral people in public life to deliver on both, the moral line can never stop moving. That means every newly horrifying revelation requires the right to set a new moral boundary so that Trump can jump over it before it’s done being drawn. It means accepting the corrupt enrichment of not just the entire Trump family, but pardons and commutations for everybody with a bribe or political clout—the January 6 insurrectionists; comically dishonest former representative George Santos; ex-Honduran president and cocaine and weapons trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez. “I think this is the most corrupt presidency in US history, with the money they are raking in, with the NFTs and the memecoins. I mean it’s so blatant, it’s right in front of our eyes,” Ann Coulter admitted, unashamedly, on the Triggernometry podcast in August, adding, “and the funny thing about [it is], I don’t care, as long as we get a wall and mass deportations.”

When pretending to have moral limits becomes inconvenient to white supremacy, moral limits are thrown out. And that includes when those limits are embodied in white children, abused by those in power. Conservatives have shown themselves willing to scuttle even the last shreds of their own self-interested moral code. What remains is a politics that’s somehow even darker and more nihilistic. And while there’s no disqualifying behavior as long as you’re on their side, by the same token, everyone else is the enemy. The right’s reaction to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—the relish it seemed to take in blaming them for their own deaths—makes this painfully clear.

Vice President JD Vance declared Good’s death “a tragedy of her own making.” Erick Erickson smirkily labeled Good “an AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal).” “I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti,” Megyn Kelly said on her podcast, “but I don’t.” And Matt Walsh, who dismissed comparisons between Alex Pretti and Kyle Rittenhouse—whom the right lionized after he fatally shot two people at a Black Lives Matter protest with a gun he was neither licensed nor old enough to carry—as “retarded,” wrote that Pretti “got what was coming to him. Simple as that.”

Everyday right-wingers did their part by donating nearly $800,000 in crowdfunded dollars to Good’s killer. (Oddly, no one set up a GoFundMe for Pretti’s killers—really, I looked—and I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact that the identified agents are Hispanic.) It just confirms what so many of us have long suspected—that the right’s obsession with “crime” and “law and order” was less about an actual moral code and more about weaponizing it against perceived outsiders. Trump’s name, according to Representative Jamie Raskin, appears “more than one million” times in the unredacted Epstein documents. NBC reports that “at least a half-dozen top officials in the current Trump administration have connections to” Epstein. But Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is, in this moment and without irony, still finding space for op-eds insisting it’s Black America who needs a “moral rejuvenation”—chastising them for “Black-on-Black crime” and suggesting they stop “whining about racism.”

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro made this idea explicit in a recent New Yorker interview when asked whether Trump could do anything he would find “disqualifying, in a moral-political sense.” Shapiro—who at least admitted he would “probably not” want Trump marrying into his family—couldn’t name a single thing.

“I don’t know what ‘disqualifying’ means,” he said, before adding that “the only way to lose my faith and support and vote forever would be for there to be an alternative that I find superior to him. This is the problem when you’re making voting decisions.”

And there you have it. “Morality” isn’t about principles or lines you refuse to cross; it’s just a cost-benefit analysis between options that maintain power. That’s how authoritarian movements work—they put hierarchy, dominance, and power above all else. (“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”) And while some of us were always held as collateral to be damaged by the right, the abandonment of even its most cynically held limits is still more terrifying still. Where nothing is disqualifying, everything is permissible. And a politics with no no bottom should frighten us all.

The Department of Homeland Security recently boasted that it has hired more than 12,000 ICE officers and agents in just four months—a feat that merely required lowering standards, fast-tracking barely vetted recruits, and turning availability into the primary eligibility requirement. That’s an exaggeration, but hardly. More than doubling ICE’s ranks has meant cutting training from 13 weeks to six, raising the maximum age cap from 40 to none at all, scrapping the college degree requirement, and adding a $50,000 signing bonus. Now pretty much anyone can become an ICE agent. And that’s not just because of those lax standards, but also because DHS is apparently doing a piss-poor job of ensuring even those are met.

A Slate journalist, for example, was offered an officer position despite their never submitting paperwork, taking the fitness test, passing drug screening, or undergoing a background check. Last week, it was revealed that ICE’s résumé-sorting AI tool mistakenly flagged many applicants as former law enforcement, accidentally putting them on an even shorter four-week, online-only training track. The ICE agent filmed fatally shooting Alex Pretti in the head, execution style, has been identified by the AP as an eight-year veteran with the Border Patrol. Renee Good was fatally, needlessly killed by an ICE agent who had been on the job for more than a decade, working in the Border Patrol prior to that. If seasoned ICE officers are killing civilians in the streets, DHS’s negligence in screening new hires should make us all concerned about whom the agency is allowing to be emboldened by impunity.

“Clearly, there’s a problem of compliance with use-of-force policies, even among people who are not Trump hires, who were hired under previous, more stringent standards in a more rigorous training academy,” Scott Shuchart, a senior policy adviser at ICE during the Biden administration, told me. “When you relax all that, it’s hard to see how you could expect a higher level of performance from new recruits.”

Those ringing alarm bells over who is becoming ICE agents include Representative Jamie Raskin, who sent a letter this month to both Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, demanding access to ICE hiring records and asking, “How many pardoned January 6th insurrectionists have been hired by your respective departments?” (The letter notes that pardoned J6er Jared Wise has been given a high-ranking job in Bondi’s Department of Justice.) That followed a letter sent to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari in July, which was signed by a dozen US House Democrats, which asked if ICE’s newest hires have been “cross-checked against lists of domestic terror organizations, such as the Proud Boys?” If the US currently had a functioning public accountability structure, we might get answers to those queries. As of now, those letters have been met by a silence that grows louder as ICE is deployed to more communities.

“Any concern that you have about the existing workforce, I would think would be higher when you’ve relaxed hiring standards,” Shuchart told me. “You’ve created an opportunity for infiltration by insurrectionists.”

Insurrectionists and other rightwing extremists, such as Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters—all of whom were seemingly, frighteningly everywhere during Donald Trump’s first term, back when there were still guardrails that kept the president from assembling his own paramilitary force.

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A number of recent incidents suggest concerns about extremists within ICE are valid. In December, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report citing an American citizen, wrongly detained by ICE, who told investigators he had “noticed several of the agents had tattoos that expressed support for the Proud Boys.” Similarly, ICE recruits sent to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy in Brunswick, Georgia, without proper vetting have been “discovered to have tattoos associated with gangs and white supremacists when they stripped off their shirts during workouts,” according to a Daily Mail report. An alleged whistleblower’s leak of the names of 4,500 ICE agents and Border Patrol officers this month included Enrique Tarrio, the onetime head of the Proud Boys. He has denied the allegation.

And there are other worrisome things. An investigation by the SPLC’s Hatewatch found that Trump “Border Czar” Tom Homan met with Proud Boys affiliate and self-described “Proud J6 Attendee” Terry Newsome multiple times throughout 2024, both before and in the months just after Trump’s election win. On at least one occasion, discussion centered on immigration policy and deportations, with Newsome, who is based in Chicago, brag-posting on social media that Homan had directed Illinois “politicians to follow up with me as his PoC,” or “point of contact.”

There’s also the fact that ICE recruitment efforts appear openly calibrated to catch the attention of white nationalists and other right-wing extremists. “DHS seems to be courting pardoned January 6th insurrectionists,” Raskin’s aforementioned missive notes. “It uses white nationalist ‘dog whistles’ in its recruitment campaign for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that appear aimed at stirring members of extremist militias, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, which participated in the insurrection.” The agency’s white supremacist overtures include a tweeted poster of Uncle Sam beneath the caption “Which Way, American Man?,” a direct reference to the 1978 book Which Way Western Man?, which is standard reading for neo-Nazis and other racists. DHS has also reposted artwork created and circulated by well-known white nationalist accounts, including a poster advising Americans to “Report All Foreign Invaders.” Just two days after the killing of Renee Good, DHS posted a recruitment ad with the message, “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” the title of a song beloved by “blood and soil” racist types. Sacramento Proud Boys were even documented singing the song at a 2021 Stop the Steal rally.

“The white supremacist, sort of fake Norman Rockwell ethnic nationalism stuff is absolutely repulsive. It’s as un-American as you can imagine, and it has no business being a part of any official government communication,” Shuchart told me. “I don’t know how we ever live this down.”

In any case, the mutual appreciation between racists and the DHS seems to have recently prompted a prankster to buy the URL Nazis.us only to link it to the DHS homepage.

The Big Beautiful Bill infused ICE with nearly $30 billion for a single year, three times its prior budget. That same legislation allotted $170 billion—“more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States,” the Brennan Center notes—to immigration and deportations for the next four years. Despite the glut of cases Trump’s crackdown will remand to America’s immigration courts, the bill restricts the number of immigration judges to just 800. That is an indication of the importance, or lack thereof, being placed on ensuring due process. I won’t drive the point even further by noting that a Texas Observer investigation outed James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor, as the author of social media posts stating, “‘Migrants’ are all criminals,” “All blacks are foreign to my people,” and “I’m a fascist.” Yes, he’s still on the job!

Nor does that money seem earmarked to ensure ICE agent competence. Since prescreening results have been delayed, some recruits have been shuttled to the academy, only to fail their drug tests, only to fail drug tests or have criminal records uncovered after they arrive. The campus itself has also seen an increase in “incidents of violence, disruptive behavior, and allegations of sexual misconduct on campus, most handled internally.”

It would be unsurprising if the perception that the agency’s ethos is now dominated by xenophobic ideologues did some of the screening work. “What self-respecting person who wants a meaningful career in law enforcement would go to work at the ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations] right now, knowing the way ERO comports itself?” Shuchart said to Slate in July, right after the agency announced its hiring spree.

“We do have some new recruits that are fantastic, but we’re now bringing people in who shouldn’t be hired at all into any federal government job, definitely not one that has a badge and a gun,” one official groused to the Mail, adding that “even these older folks that we’re hiring, they’re not people who need to be out on the street with a badge and a gun anymore.”

There is a precedent for this. Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, standards for the Border Patrol were similarly lowered during a hiring push, and an increase in officer corruption and violence followed. Politico reports that “between 2005 and 2012, nearly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day.” Agents ultimately faced charges of sexual assault—against both detained civilians and fellow agents—accepting bribes, kidnapping, and even murder. Some officers were later revealed to be actively involved in drug cartels. And while some of those officers were also tied to racist Facebook groups, it would be disingenuous to treat that connection as an aberration caused by lax hiring standards. The ties that bind law enforcement and white supremacist movements in this country are not new, and exist even when agencies claim to be operating under the most rigorous vetting standards. In November 2022, I wrote about an ADL study that had turned up “370 current police officers and more than 100 active-duty military members on the Oath Keepers’ leaked membership rolls.” Among just the J6ers who were caught and prosecuted, at least 19 were current or former police. And the FBI has warned about racists in its ranks since it put out its “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement” in 2006.

Proud Boys have already spent years engaging in the same violence ICE now carries out as policy. “For all the illegals trying to jump over our border,” a Portland Proud Boy proclaimed at a 2018 rally, “we should be smashing their heads into the concrete.” After Trump’s election win, extremists were chomping at the bit to be part of Trump’s anticipated immigration round ups. One of the leaders in the Texas chapter of the Three Percenters militia group sent Trump a letter “to extend my willingness to assist, in cooperation with local law enforcement and community programs,” per The New York Times. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism rounded up the outpouring of anti-immigration, pro-ICE enthusiasm pouring from Proud Boys around the country:

Proud Boys PDX [Portland] are fantasizing about being “deputized as ICE under Trump’s second term” to aid in Trump’s mass deportation plan. Similarly, Proud Boys Upstate New York expressed glee at a rumor spreading around Proud Boys pages that “ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” claiming that they have a “network set up” ready to send information. The Northern Nevada Proud Boys shared an image encouraging their followers to “report illegal aliens” to ICE along with a picture of a swastika rising like a sun over a landscape, captioned “A new day is about to dawn in America… it’s going to be glorious.” The Cape Fear Proud Boys made a post, also shared by the Columbus Proud Boys, offering to take on “independent contracts” to carry out “bount[ies] on illegals.”

After the $50,000 bonus was announced ahead DHS’s hiring spree, The Atlantic’s Ali Breland reported that an Ohio Proud Boys chapter posted, “Toledo Boys living high on the hog right now!!”

When, at a 2020 presidential debate, Trump was challenged to condemn militias and white supremacists, and he stated, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” members of the group correctly understood the message not as a rebuke—but as the winking dog whistle that was clearly intended. Even then, he was treating them as his own personal police force. “Trump basically said go fuck them up!” Proud Boy Joe Biggs wrote on Parler shortly after, “this makes me so happy.” “Standing by sir,” Proud Boys then-chairman Enrique Tarrio responded on social media.

That readiness was rewarded. On his first day back in office, Trump issued a mass pardon of all 1,500 J6 insurrectionists, including “roughly 100 known members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other extremist organizations,” according to Breland. As well, there were commutations of sentences for 14 people in jail, all of whom were affiliated with right-wing extremist groups, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was serving 18 years, and Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years.

At the time, Heidi Beirich, formerly of the SPLC and now cofounder of the the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told The Independent that Trump had “brought back two organizations that have extremely long track records of violence” and worried that he had “emboldened those movements, made them more powerful, and given them the sanction of the highest office.” She was exactly right, except that at the time, it was impossible to imagine how fully true that could become—that there might come a time when those groups would not need to operate in the streets anymore, because they would be offered cover in what is essentially Trump’s secret police, where they can be armed, masked, empowered to detain, brutalize, and kill with near total impunity.

Trump deploys them in the classic authoritarian manner, which is to flex power, quell dissent, and normalize fear. “It does this not only through feats of violence, false imprisonment, and kidnapping but also by repeatedly showing us it can’t be held accountable for its actions,” as Elie Mystal wrote in this magazine earlier this month. “They know it, and they want us to know it.” And the administration seems to want us to know it as well, considering that it seems to be changing the definition of what qualifies as an extremist organization in order to specifically eliminate those loyalists who perpetrate violence in Trump’s name. When asked, during a December congressional hearing, if the FBI still designates the Proud Boys as an extremist group, as it had during Trump’s first term, FBI official Michael Glasheen waffled on the answer. Glasheen, who, with more than 25 years at a bureau is far from a newbie, first seemed to suggest he wasn’t very familiar with the Proud Boys beyond the name, then uttered that the agency is “in the process right now of changing our categories for domestic terrorist,” before ultimately testifying, under oath, that the FBI “doesn’t designate domestic terror groups.”

But Noem had no hesitation over the term in the case of Good’s killing. “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism,” she stated, hours after the killing, and despite what the video shows. Shuchart noted that in addition to the “weird social media stuff” he was stunned by the “ridiculous bald-faced lying” DHS leadership is doing.

“Kristi Noem ultimately is in the chain of command for this organization, as is the president. And to have them immediately, ludicrously lie about something that—coincidentally is now on four or five different videos—is just corrosive to the entire idea of accountability and even civilization,” he told me. “Whatever your accountability system is, you have to reckon with the fact that the people who sit at the apex of DHS are—even setting aside that they’re felons—they’re just comically preposterous liars.”

It seems as if the folks at DHS, to borrow a phrase, are not sending us their best. A ProPublica investigation found that a 10th-grade boy was choked by an ICE agent until he “felt like [he] was going to pass out and die,” before one of the officers stole the boys cellphone and hocked it. In another Minnesota case, an observer described ICE agents spraying pepper gas into the vents of her car, then warning her, “You guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” referring to Renee Good.

There have been 16 incidents in which ICE agents have opened fire on civilians, according to the Trace; nine of those shootings have happened just since September, The New York Times reports. In another 15 cases, ICE agents held people at gunpoint, civilians were injured in seven instances, and ICE officers have killed four people in the field. This is why who’s behind those masks matters.

It’s why handing guns to trigger-happy thugs steeped in Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and militia culture and mindset—the same nationalist, white supremacist, xenophobic mindset that unfortunately drives this entire administration—and letting them shoot first and explain later ends with death. We should know who they are, what they believe, and what violence they already consider justified.

Elections have consequences—and they are, unfailingly, most profoundly visited upon Black women. Donald Trump’s reelection has had the consequence of Black women being pushed out of their workplaces at astonishing rates. Between February and July of last year, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in both the private and public sectors, driven largely by mass layoffs in education, healthcare, and housing. During that same period, white women gained 142,000 jobs, Hispanic women 176,000 jobs, and white men—wait for it!—picked up 365,000 jobs. In February, Black women’s unemployment rate stood at 5.4 percent, but that figure had soared to 6.7 percent by August. In September, the most recent snapshot available because of the shutdown, yet another 0.8 percent of Black women lost their jobs—while just 0.2 percent of white women suffered the same fate that month. All in all, according to the gender economist Katica Roy, roughly 600,000 Black women have been “economically sidelined” since February—which was, not coincidentally, this president’s first full month in office.

This has failed to set off alarm bells in a country that has never cared much about the well-being of Black women. Perhaps that’s why concerned policymakers and economists so often take such pains to emphasize that Black women’s economic distress is a bellwether for everyone else—to underline that their fates, and even their humanity, are connected to the nation’s in the hopes that the country might finally care. And it’s not just that racism and sexism make Black women the first to be let go when the economy stalls—it’s also that Black women power the economy in ways this country often refuses to acknowledge. Nearly 70 percent of Black mothers are the breadwinners in their homes, though they’re paid just 34, 44, or 52 cents of every dollar paid to Asian, white, or Black breadwinner dads, respectively. So when they lose jobs en masse, families are left financially vulnerable and local economies are weakened. Nationally, the cost has already surpassed $37 billion in lost GDP.

But it’s disingenuous to suggest that Black women are merely hit the hardest during economic slumps when, in fact, they’ve been targeted for harm by a right wing that is openly committed to undoing their progress. This country has—again—chosen to meet gender and racial advancement with aggressive rollbacks, including dismantling institutions that have provided Black women with financial security and career advancement. It’s not a coincidence that the first move of the Trump administration, in partnership with Elon Musk’s DOGE, was to vilify and hollow out the civil service—long an engine of Black middle-class stability—where Black women make up 12 percent of staffers, double their portion of the overall workforce. A National Women’s Law Center study found that women and people of color made up the majority of the workforce in the agencies that sustained the deepest cuts. The Department of Education, with a workforce of 28 percent Black women, lost 46 percent of its staff. The Department of Justice and the Department of Energy, both of which are about 70 percent white? Cut by just 1 percent and 13 percent, respectively, according to a ProPublica analysis.

The Trump administration has also made a show of pushing out high-profile Black women leaders, including Carla Hayden at the Library of Congress, Gwynne Wilcox at the National Labor Relations Board, and the ongoing effort to oust Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve. Peggy Carr has described her abrupt dismissal after 35 years of climbing the ranks at the Department of Education as a “tragedy” both personal and professional. “It was like I was being taken out like the trash,” Carr told The New York Times of being escorted out of the building by a security guard, “the only difference is I was being taken out the front door rather than the back door.”

Those public-sector layoffs have been accompanied by attacks on private-sector diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, or DEI. NPR reports that roles in DEI plummeted from 20,000 in 2023 to 17,500 in April 2025. Companies too numerous to name have hastily retreated from DEI efforts they had boasted about earlier, and not because they are mandated to, since Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders cannot overturn civil-rights laws or dictate the hiring practices of private businesses. A New York Times investigation found that the number of S&P 500 companies that include DEI language in their financial filings is down 60 percent since 2024. And for the first time since 2017, the majority of new directors hired at S&P 500 companies this year were white men.

Black women have long worked at rates higher than other American women, including as recently as 2024. But even in the best of times, intertwined sexism and anti-Black racism, or misogynoir, consign them to the most precarious jobs in the least recession-proof sectors. Across industries, they are paid less than white men with the same—and even, in some comparisons, lower—levels of education; are least likely of all women to be promoted; and leave college burdened with the most student-loan debt. Now Trump has launched what Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) rightly calls a campaign of “discriminate harm” against them. History vividly illustrates what the consequences will be. After economic downturns in the early 1980s, the Great Recession of the aughts, and the Covid pandemic, Black women were the last to recover financially. But this time, the Trump administration has scrubbed race-based employment data from government websites—preemptively erasing evidence of the harms it’s inflicting.

When Black women voted against this regime, they were fighting for their lives at the ballot box, knowing they’d be the first to bear the brunt of its damages—and fully aware they wouldn’t be the last. It was, of course, not enough to stop a country unwilling to heed their warnings. So once again we’re trapped, forced to inhale the noxious fumes no one else notices are poisoning us all.

One of the best-kept secrets about DEI is that it helps men—that includes white men—get into college. If you do not work in admissions, you are likely unaware of this fact, and that’s by design; one admissions officer even told The Wall Street Journal it’s “higher education’s dirty little secret.” But it’s been true for decades. Women’s college enrollment surpassed men’s all the way back in 1979, and the gender gap has only widened in the interim. Over just the last five years, as college enrollment numbers plunged by roughly 1.5 million students, men have accounted for more than 70 percent of that decline. In an increasingly difficult effort to maintain something approximating gender parity, admissions officers at private universities have for years used “gender balancing,” accepting male applicants at higher rates than female applicants. The Supreme Court ruled that race-consciousness in college admissions is unconstitutional in 2023. That means affirmative action is technically illegal, just not if it benefits men.

Under the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives, schools would be forced to abandon gender balancing, leaving fewer men in college. More specifically, fewer white men, since they make up the majority of male applicants.

And the most precipitous drops would happen at America’s elite institutions of higher education. Private schools are the only colleges allowed to practice gender discrimination, which has been legally banned at public colleges since 1971’s Title IX passed. But the Trump administration, using federal funding as a bargaining chip, is pushing colleges to sign its Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The plan specifically names “gender identity” as one of many traits that cannot be “considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions.” And while there have been few signatories to that plan, the administration has succeeded in having Brown, Columbia and Northwestern sign agreements that state students will be accepted “solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

Even as they use that language, which is deliberately crafted to imply unqualified women are getting away with something, right-wingers are well aware that men are increasingly turning away from college. Anti-anti-racist activists including Christopher Rufo have groused for years about the “feminization” of higher education, a complaint that makes sense only if said complainer understands that men are the ones quietly being advantaged. Their endless chatter about ending gender DEI in education is just right-wing PR—a way to keep grievances simmering instead of acknowledging who’s actually being given a hand up.

Take, for example, Brown University. Hechinger Report education journalist Jon Marcus finds the school had 18,960 men apply for the 2024–25 academic year, a pool dwarfed by the 29,917 women who applied. The Ivy League admitted nearly equal raw numbers of each gender—1,326 men and 1,309 women. But that’s not so equal proportion-wise, with roughly 7 percent of men getting in, but just 4.4 percent of women accepted. Columbia, the University of Chicago, Vassar, Tulane, Yale, Boston University, Swarthmore, and Vanderbilt also admit men at higher rates than women. Again, a lot of selective colleges do.

Not that any of them are shouting about this from the rooftops—and to be fair, admissions is opaque on every front. So how do we actually know men are being given an advantage—and not that, say, “women are more willing to apply to long-shot schools than men are,” as libertarian outlet Reason posits? There are clues. We know that women earn higher GPAs in high school, are almost twice as likely to graduate within the top 5 percent of their class, and are more likely to take AP courses—all things schools take into consideration. In addition, admissions officers sometimes just come right out and tell us. Shayna Medley, a former Brandeis University admissions officer who penned a 2016 Harvard legal paper on gender balancing, told The Hechinger Report that “standards were certainly lower for male students.” An ex-Wesleyan admissions officer told The New York Times that gender balancing required being “more forgiving and lenient” with male applicants, adding, “You’d be like, ‘I’m kind of on the fence about this one, but—we need boys.’” (“The process sometimes pained him,” the article notes, “especially when he saw an outstanding young woman from a disadvantaged background losing out to a young man who came from privilege.”) ”Probably nobody will admit it,” the former president of a small liberal arts college confessed in a 1998 Times piece, “but I know that lots of places try to get some gender balance by having easier admissions standards for boys than for girls.”

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“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys?” one college enrollment person asked rhetorically in a recent Wall Street Journal article. “Absolutely. The question is, is that right or wrong?”

The answer requires considering what the end of gender-conscious admissions might mean. As of this writing, there are 40 percent more women than men enrolled in America’s two- and four-year colleges. The head of the American Council on Education opined to The Washington Post that if colleges didn’t consider gender in admissions, “the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight.” Single-gender colleges already exist for those who seek them, and they have a purpose. But the sorta unstated, yet widely understood, intent of a co-ed college is to educate students in how to coexist with people not of their own gender. I went to a small private liberal arts college where women outnumbered men, and I think there’s something to be said for having people of different genders—including beyond the binary—engaging intellectually, socially and emotionally with one another. I’d go even further and say it’s good for lots of different kinds of people to have sustained contact on a shared campus, because it tends to help them recognize their shared humanity. That sort of proximity can make people slightly less likely to live out their lives hoping—and voting—for harm to befall people who are different from them.

Getting all those people all in the same place might mean looking at more than just grades and test scores. It might mean giving heft to a person who is a member of a group because of that group’s historical treatment—a fact that only becomes scandalous when the criteria is race—or in this case, despite it. Admissions, especially at highly competitive colleges, is a holistic process. Schools look at the whole person, considering everything they bring to the table, or rather, the campus. Gender-conscious admissions—as was also true with now illegal race-conscious admissions—simply means gender is weighed along with a whole host of other things to decide seats. It does not mean that wholly unqualified men are welcomed into America’s finest institutions. That is a child’s—and a conservative’s—dumb idea of how affirmative action works.

I mean that literally. Turns out the reason conservatives imagined that affirmative action allowed unqualified Black students to attend Harvard—which it never did—is that their own version of affirmative action actually does admit unqualified men. Just look at New College of Florida. In 2023, a group of conservatives, including Christopher Rufo, staged a takeover of the school. They destroyed the school’s diversity program and shuttered the DEI office—but then aggressively recruited male student athletes with lower GPAs, SATs, and ACTs than classes before. The result has been a staggering 23 percent increase in male admissions to hit 54 percent of the student body, a 59-spot drop in U.S. News & World Report’s famed college rankings list, and a college now “on its intellectual deathbed,” according to Florida Phoenix journalist Diane Roberts.

Likewise, should America’s top schools actually start to disregard gender in admissions and let in fewer men, especially white men, this administration will start supporting equity so fast our collective heads will spin. The idea will be rebranded, of course. For example, Rufo—a key player in the anti-DEI brigade—claimed that New College of Florida’s majority-female student body “caused all sorts of cultural problems,” and led the school to become “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” This was just before he led the school to lower its standards and let men in at any cost. Right-wingers aren’t, nor have they ever been, opposed to preferences that advantage men, especially men who are white. They oppose racial remediation. There is a difference.

Colleges, for their part, are merely looking out for their bottom lines. In a 2006 Times op-ed titled “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” Kenyon college’s woman head of admissions noted that “once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.” I hate the misogyny of it all.

In the meantime, the number of men looking at college will likely continue to dwindle. Part of that is the cultural moment, with anti-college rhetoric coming from rich guys like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, two Ivy League grads whose own children, interestingly, attend elite colleges. There’s also the staggering cost of college, which has skyrocketed 125 percent since 1963, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—and by 60 percent between just 2000 and 2022. The general consensus is that young men have looked at the price tag, decided it’s not worth it, and instead gone for skilled trade and other vocations, where they can make just as much money. Take a look at any list of well-paying jobs that don’t require a degree—from HVAC technician to petroleum pump system operator—and you’ll notice that they’re all male coded. Women-coded sectors not requiring a degree—retail, childcare, hospitality, etc.—pay badly. Recent studies even find that as more women enter traditionally male fields, the pay drops.

So women make the calculation that the cost of college is necessary to make a decent living. Because it is, unfortunately. And that’s not likely to change soon.

On Monday, Donald Trump announced that his administration will give farmers a $12 billion bailout—a tacit admission that his trade policies suck. Farmers have spent much of the last year complaining about rising production costs, falling crop prices and the loss of multiple markets due to Trump’s tariffs and the trade wars they have launched. All in all, farmers are projected to lose roughly $44 billion in profits this year, in large part because of Trump administration policies. Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association, has called Trump’s trade tariffs an “artificial barrier” to American farmers’ success—essentially, a man-made farming crisis.

But the truth is, it’s also a crisis of farmers’—specifically, white farmers’—own choosing.

“Most of the Black farmers in this country voted for Kamala Harris. I endorsed Harris publicly,” John Boyd Jr., the founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told me. “White farmers—99.9 percent voted Trump.”

Ragland, for example, supported Trump dating back to 2016, making him just one of many in rural America. Trump won a majority of USDA “farming-dependent” counties ahead of his first term, and within a year of assuming office, his trade wars drove American farm exports to China down from $19.5 billion to $9 billion. Ultimately, farmers saw a decline of $27 billion in agricultural exports, nearly 71 percent of that attributable to soybean profit losses. Ragland, a soybean farmer, still turned right back around and voted for Trump again in both 2020 and 2024. Here again, he was just one of many. Farmers increased their support for Trump by 5 percent in 2020, hitting 76 percent support, and then added another 2 percent in 2024, reaching 78 percent support. In 100 of the country’s 444 “farming-dependent” counties, according to Investigate Midwest, Trump won a whopping 80 percent of the vote.

“So they voted for this guy three times—all these white farmers did. And now this president has turned agriculture in this country to the worst [shape it’s been in] since the ’80s. Farm bankruptcies. Farm foreclosures. Farm suicide. Input costs—all these things,” Boyd told me.

Indeed all of those issues, always of concern for farmers, have been on the rise. Increases in costs for seed, fuel, and fertilizer have been further compounded by sky-high and steadily climbing inflation. Already-low crop prices have plummeted thanks to Trump’s renewed trade wars, and China—normally American soybean farmers’ biggest customer—paused all soybean purchases from May to October, a loss of more than $12 billion from last year. ICE deportation raids targeting farm workers, more than 40 percent of whom are undocumented, have led to widespread farmworker labor shortages. And once reliable markets have been destroyed by the Trump administration’s cuts to food and nutrition programs that include SNAP, schools and food banks.

Consequently, white farmers have become frequent, if unexpected, news talking heads, using their appearances to express fears of a looming farm crisis while calling for a bailout. In September, video of Arkansas farmers literally praying to God for a miracle in the form of a government check went viral on social media. Farmers, and more specifically white farmers, have literally been begging for government handouts.

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“President Trump, we’ve had your back,” Ragland told the Associated Press in September. “We need you to have ours now.’”

Those farmers simply “need a level playing field so we can compete,” in Ragland’s words. The bitter irony of his words can’t be overstated. The playing field has been titled in favor of white farmers for so long, and at an overtly steep angle, the better to ensure that Black farmers are forced right off it. The Department of Agriculture’s long, confessed history of racist loan rejections and delays of aid to Black farmers has, conservatively, resulted in 16 million—million!—acres of black land being stolen by the agency. In 1910, roughly 14 percent of farmers were black; along with the KKK, “white cappers” and other extrajudicial arbiters of white-terror violence who chased Black agrarians off their farm (tens of thousands more acres that were stolen, according to an AP investigation), the USDA’s land theft helped drive that down to just 1 percent today. The agency’s racist land grabs have been documented in multiple federal studies, including by the USDA itself, captured in government reports dating to 1965. The theft of Black farmland, though, dates back to a century before that.

Finally, in 2021, the Biden administration announced $4 billion for debt forgiveness to Black farmers. The response from white farmers around the country? A slew of lawsuits to stop that relief, contending that it amounted to “reverse racism.” Never mind that debt forgiveness would not, and could not, ever make up for the land taken nor the $350 billion estimated worth of that land that was stolen. Nor would it ever make up for the incalculable amount of Black generational wealth pilfered, the trauma inflicted, and the lives destroyed. But it was, at least, the tiniest crumb of recompense, and an uncharacteristically American attempt to recognize long-standing federal wrongdoing. But with help from Trump adviser Stephen Miller, white farmers mounted a legal counteroffensive, filing at least 13 separate suits and declaring that scrapping debt amassed because of the USDA’s systemic racism was “just wrong.” Those suits, and the court-ordered injunctions that resulted, put a stop to the program before it had even begun.

Racism within the USDA, however, never ended. The New York Times estimates that the Trump administration’s bailout for farmers harmed by the trade wars of his first term amounted to nearly $23 billion. “But because those payments were based on a farmer’s crop size,” the Times notes, “much of the money ended up going to larger and wealthier farmers, who are disproportionately white.” In fact, an analysis by food investigation outlet The Counter found that “nearly 100 percent of the bailout payments disproportionately benefited white farmers.” Racism in the past begets ongoing inequality. What’s more, a CNN investigation found that, even under Biden in 2021, the USDA rejected 42 percent of Black farmer loan applications—double the rejection rate of white farmers, and more than any other group racial group.

“I tell folks that if the Department of Agriculture did not exist, Black farmers would be better off,” Lloyd Wright, who worked at USDA for nearly four decades, including heading its Civil Rights Office under Presidents Clinton and Obama, told me. “Because then all farmers would be in trouble together at the same time. But when you consistently help one group and not the other—even if you don’t give them enough—those that you help are always going to be in better shape than those who didn’t get it.”

And still, white farmers voted for a president they knew would ensure that the ground stayed slanted beneath them. They voted for a president who ran on nary a policy save for the same tariffs that cost them billions the first time around, and mass deportations, despite agriculture’s dependence on undocumented laborers. And here again, race is unavoidably linked to the conversation. Boyd, who farms 2,000 acres in Virginia, and Wright both told me that nearly every Black farmer works the land themselves, because most have small farms—also a consequence of USDA racism. “The labor shortage? You need to thank this president for it,” Boyd told me. “Black farmers, we ain’t got no migrant workers. But every large-scale white farm in my county, and in Virginia, uses migrant labor.”

Boyd notes that many of his older white neighbors now don’t have the help they relied on, and that they complain about it, along with the economic strain engendered by Trump’s tariffs.

“Now all of a sudden, it’s bad and people should feel sorry for them,” Boyd said. “But what about when we didn’t get our $5 billion in debt relief? What about when I was out here on every media circuit, begging and pleading for help and white farmers sued in federal court. I’m a very religious man, and I’m going to say it: Dammit—you reap what you sow. They dumped on us—they didn’t have to dump on us. They could’ve said, “Well, you know what? These Black farmers were mistreated badly. So what if they get debt relief and some of their land out of inventory? But they didn’t do that. And our organization spent almost every dime we had defending that debt relief.”

White farmers routinely paint themselves as principled “trade, not aid” holdouts, the kind of people who would never accept a handout. Except, of course, when they do—even when it’s way beyond their losses. In fact, the bailout Trump gave white farmers in his first term might explain why they were so eager to get him back in office. David Frum cites a study from the American Enterprise Institute (no left-leaning entity) that suggests “soybean farmers may have received twice as much from the Trump farm bailout as they lost from the 2018 round of tariffs, because the Trump administration failed to consider that U.S. soybeans not exported to China were eventually sold elsewhere, albeit at lower prices.” If you make money off Trump’s failures, but he pays you to keep voting for him, why wouldn’t you want him back in office? Politico was basically predicting the future when it worried back in 2020 that the Trump administration’s making it rain on white farmers might “risk creating a culture of dependency.”

Sure seems like that has happened, judging from the entitled statements and demands that have poured out of white farmers, who keep insisting they would never take a government check even as they demand yet another payday.

“They have no choice but to mail us a check,” an Arkansas farmer named Scott Brown told local outlet KAIT after the September meeting. “I don’t know a farmer that likes the check program. Nobody wants to take the taxpayer dollars, but nobody wants to go broke; nobody wants to lose everything.”

“Mr. Trump, you looked at me and said, ‘I love you,’” Ohio farmer Chris King wrote in the Sidney Daily News. “Mr. Trump, I need to see the fruit of your love.”

“If push comes to shove, and they have to pick between getting an additional stimulus check of some kind from the government, or losing their farm, they’ll take the stimulus check,” Nebraska Farmers Union John Hansen said. “They won’t like it, but it’s better than losing the farm.”

“I’ll take the money if it comes,” Iowa farmer Mark Heckman wrote in an October Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “American Farmers Want Fair Trade, Not Handouts,” “but it isn’t what farmers want.”

It would be nice if, instead of simply perpetuating this contrived, and inaccurate, image of white farmers as tragically, even heroically, forced to take a payout, a single reporter would ask one of the many white farmers on the news lately whom they voted for. As a country and a culture, we are loath to ask white people to confront the consequences of their own actions, but it would’ve been nice to see it just. this. once.

In any case, their demands have now been met. Politico notes that the $12 billion in bailout money comes “from a USDA fund using taxpayer dollars, even though the president repeatedly said during the roundtable that the bailout was funded by tariffs.” He also—far from suggesting he might reconsider tariffs since they’re obviously a losing policy—mentioned that he may “impose additional levies to slow imports of rice from China and India,” according to The New York Times.

“I will be surprised if this bailout is different,” Wright told me, echoing the sentiments of most Black farmers,a who, recognizing history as precedent, don’t expect to see much of the aid. “It’ll be the same old story.”

It’s true that farming is hard. Every farmer must contend with bad weather, unpredictable crop prices, surging inflation—and, under this president, tariffs. But only Black farmers must struggle against a Department of Agriculture that stands against them.

“We love our farmers,” Trump said at the same White House event where he announced the bailout, per NPR. “And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else.”

That’s certainly true for white farmers. And with the latest payout, looks like that won’t be changing anytime soon.

It’s a good thing conservatives know nothing about the actual history of this country they claim to love so much—otherwise, they’d probably launch a War on Thanksgiving. That’s because, if you study the path that Thanksgiving took on the way to its current culturally dominant presence in the calendar, it becomes clear that it’s low-key one of America’s wokest holidays. Far from being an eternal symbol of Pilgrims-and-Indians lies, Thanksgiving was, for a good portion of its history, a symbol of social reform and Northern abolitionism—a day the white slaveholding South held in disdain and refused, for decades, to celebrate. The myth of Thanksgiving isn’t just in sanitized denials of white settler-colonial violence and Indigenous genocide. It’s also in the fiction that the holiday itself has only recently become “politicized,” when it was never apolitical to begin with.

It’s important to recognize that New England’s Puritan colonists often observed days of thanksgiving—think small “t”—to celebrate plentiful harvests and other communal successes. Likewise, Native American traditions of feasts and festivals for giving thanks date back thousands of years. The first national day of Thanksgiving was declared in a 1789 proclamation issued by President George Washington. Presidents John Adams and James Madison also declared days of thanksgiving during their terms, but none of those became a recurring annual holiday. Historian Joshua Zeitz notes that “by the late 1840s, some form of harvest thanksgiving celebration was observed in 21 states,” but the dates of each observance differed based on each governor’s choosing. Southern states were among those celebrating, but as anti-slavery sentiment grew more fervent and pervasive in the North, Thanksgiving took on new sectional meanings. As historian Matthew Dennis writes in Red, White, and Blue Letter Days, Southern “governors sometimes feared the feast as an abolitionist Trojan Horse”—a worry that wasn’t entirely baseless.

For decades, Northern antislavery clergy—especially New England’s evangelical Protestant ministers—had already been using Thanksgiving to deliver their most impassioned antislavery denunciations. On January 1, 1808, Black abolitionist and Episcopal priest Absalom Jones preached “A Thanksgiving Sermon,” recognizing the first day of the federal ban on transatlantic trafficking of Africans into America to be enslaved. The Rev. Jones suggested that January 1 should be annually observed as a “day of publick thanksgiving” to “remember the history of the sufferings of our brethren” and to commemorate the end of “the trade which dragged your fathers from their native country, and sold them as bondmen in the United States of America.”

In fact, the date did become an annual day of Thanksgiving for Northern Black communities, at least until the Civil War and emancipation, particularly in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Historian David Waldstreicher writes that celebrations included a street parade to the church, followed by “a reading of Congress’s act abolishing the slave trade, much as white celebrants read the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s inaugural address, or other texts.”

The second national day of Thanksgiving declared by President Washington, February 19, 1795, saw Boston preacher Thomas Baldwin issue a plea that “the day soon arrive when not difference of climate or features nor the color of the skin—when nothing but crimes shall consign any of the human race to slavery.” In his Nov. 26, 1835, Thanksgiving sermon, New Hampshire’s Rev. Calvin Cutler called slavery “a standing memorial of our shame and hypocrisy,” labeling the institution a betrayal of the country’s professed ideals and a threat to freedom of all. “When the nation hold as self-evident truths, ‘that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights’… [yet] one sixth of this very nation have these inalienable rights wrested from them by violence…. Is there no danger that our liberties will be infringed and destroyed, when the nation by their practice give the lie to their profession?” Cutler’s sermon text reads.

Thirteen years later, on the Thanksgiving just weeks after the election which gave Zachary Taylor the presidency, Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson—radical abolitionist, mentor of Emily Dickinson, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and later, a supporter of John Brown’s 1859 armed rebellion—bemoaned the fact that there would be “another slaveholding President at the head of this nominally free Republic,” and warned the time had arrived when the North “could go no farther in its subserviency to the Slave Power.”

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And there is Boston-based Unitarian minister Theodore Parker’s November 28, 1850, sermon for Thanksgiving, delivered just two months after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which ordered that Black folks who had escaped bondage be captured and returned to their so-called masters, even if they were in free states. The demand that free Northern states comply with Southern slavery was not just gross federal overreach but belied the South’s professed belief in states’ rights. (Sound familiar?) Parker’s fiery Thanksgiving sermon laid bare how the law had intensified sectarian passions.

“I think I know of one cause which may dissolve the Union—one which ought to dissolve it, if put in action,” Parker announced. “That is, a serious attempt to execute the Fugitive Slave Law, here and in all the North. I mean an attempt to recover and take back all the fugitive slaves in the North, and to punish, with fine and imprisonment, all who aid or conceal them. The South has browbeat us again and again.… She has imprisoned our citizens; driven off, with scorn and loathing, our officers sent to ask constitutional justice. She has spit upon us. Let her come to take back the fugitives—and, trust me, she will wake up the lion.”

By the 1850s, white Southerners had already begun a kind of massive resistance to Northern influence, reconsidering “sending their kids north to Ivy League universities, subscribing to Northern publications, or hiring Yankee tutors for their children,” as journalist Jenny Jarvie notes. And now, as tensions flared further, they also began to reject the celebration of Thanksgiving.

And yet, this did not deter Sarah Josepha Hale, who should be remembered as American history’s most tireless advocate for a national celebration of the holiday. Hale’s 1827 novel Northwood: Or, Life North and South, was among the earliest American novels to offer even a cursory criticism of slavery; while her books have been mostly forgotten these days, her poetic composition “Mary Had a Little Lamb” remains a popular grammar-school banger today. In any case, the author rose to become editor of two of the country’s most prominent magazines, and in their pages, Hale waxed poetic about the need for a shared day of gratitude and moral reflection. Her campaign also included letters written to presidents and yearly missives pleading her Thanksgiving case to every state governor. But as the Civil War dawned, responses from soon-to-be Confederate states were often chilly. Virginia governor and enslaver Henry Wise groused in his 1856 response to Hale that the “theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving ha[d] abided other causes,” meaning the governor believed the day had been used to spread abolitionism.

By now, Southerners even found Thanksgiving foodstuffs suspicious. In Hale’s novel Northwood, she had described pumpkin pie as “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving; the size of the pie usually denoting the gratitude of the party who prepares the feast.” Pumpkins were grown on New England’s small farms, the symbolic opposite of the sprawling Southern plantations that served as labor camps for so many Black enslaved people. Those Northerners who ate pumpkin, according to Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon, were engaging in a form of identity politics—“a way to affirm New Englanders’ identity through attachments to a place, a particular landscape, and the simple virtues of farm life.” And thus, the South even held pumpkin pie as an expression of anti-slavery sentiment, or what might be termed “virtue signaling” in today’s parlance. What’s more, since most of the South’s cooking was actually done by Black enslaved women, and sweet potatoes were similar in every way to the yams of West Africa, sweet potato pie was the South’s more popular dish. That remains true at both Black and white Southern Thanksgivings.

Hale lucked out in 1863, when more than 35 years into her campaign, President Abraham Lincoln finally cosigned the idea of an annual national Thanksgiving. Nine months after the Emancipation Proclamation, in a decree dated October 3, Lincoln designated “the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving.” That declaration did little to promote national unity, coming as it did amid the churn of the Civil War. But after the South’s defeat two years later, the December 8, 1865, edition of The New York Times carried the reprint of a sermon by Manhattan Presbyterian minister James Renwick Wilson. It was titled, “The Abolition of Slavery the Chief Cause for Thanksgiving.”

“The great blessing that has flowed to us from the late conflict is the destruction of slavery; it was only desirable that the Union should be preserved and the government saved, that it might be the defender of liberty,” the sermon read. “The war has been worth all that it cost the nation; the sacrifice has been great, but the benefit greater. How great a cause of thankfulness we have in the destruction of this wickedness, those only can realize who have formed a true conception of the system, and of its far-reaching and destructive influence. The war has taught the nation a lesson which it was slow to learn, but taught it effectually.”

But even after the war’s end, the South—or rather, the white South—continued to abstain from celebrating Thanksgiving. As activist Dan Morrison writes, “only after Black people were betrayed with the downfall of Reconstruction and white unity once again prevailed” during the era known as Reconciliation did white Southerners “celebrate Thanksgiving along with their Northern white cousins.” And even that took decades. For example, in 1868, Texas’s Austin State Gazette suggested that the day be ignored, since it was a celebration of “Reconstruction, the 14th amendment and nigger voting.” Texas Governor O.M. Roberts, an ex-Confederate officer, called it a “damned Yankee institution” in the late year of 1879. Black people and white Republicans celebrated the day, nonetheless. In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a bill that moved Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November.

So what of the more familiar popular myth of Thanksgiving—the one in which faceless Indians “welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear,” to quote Dan Silverman, author of This Land Is Their Land? Puritans were associated with New England, and the North more broadly, and Southerners were loath to include mention of them even as Thanksgiving picked up steam below the Mason-Dixon Line. The First Thanksgiving author Robert Tracy McKenzie writes that “long after the Civil War, most artistic representations of Thanksgiving that included Native Americans portrayed them as openly hostile, and it is no coincidence that the now familiar image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a common table dates from the early 20th century.” Silverman emphasizes that the Pilgrims and Indians story gained traction as white Protestants, status-insecure in the face of waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century, sought a way to reassert cultural dominance. And here we are.

A few years ago, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton—who calls slavery a “necessary evil” and more than once has advocated murdering protesters—complained that Thanksgiving was being undermined by “revisionist charlatans of the radical left.” Cotton, like the rest of the right-wing chorus singing this tune, was actually confessing his deep, seemingly infinite ignorance. The real revisionism of Thanksgiving’s history isn’t in acknowledging the truth of colonial violence but in whitewashing the abolitionist politics that once defined the day. The most historically faithful way to recognize that history, too long ignored, is by highlighting those radical roots. This year, let’s honor tradition by once again making Thanksgiving radical.

I’ve been thinking how every few months, seemingly like clockwork, some public figure’s old racist messages are suddenly made new again. Most recently, the leaders of Young Republican chapters around the country got busted for their racist and antisemitic texts—including proclaiming “I love Hitler”—in their group chats, but it’s not like they’re the only ones. I’m not even referring to the second batch of racist Republican group chat texts that leaked, sent by Trump appointee and would-have-been head of the Office of Special Counsel Paul Ingrassia. I’m thinking instead of Ethel Cain, the indie singer-songwriter whose eight-year-old racist social media posts resurfaced a few months ago. Cain, who happens to be trans—and whose self described “anti-war, anti-patriotism fake pop song” ended up on Obama’s 2022 recommended playlist—and the Republicans in those group chats would seem to have nothing in common except for youthful indiscretions involving the use of edgelord racism and ironic bigotry. But that’s kinda my point. Anti-Blackness, and race hate more broadly, increasingly seem to me to be a rite of passage for white folks, no matter where they end up on the political spectrum.

I know I’m supposed to acknowledge here that Cain apologized, a tacit demand I both resent and understand the requisite to-be-fair-ness of, so I will acknowledge as much, despite myself. She noted that she was “young” when she made those posts, and that they were intentionally “inflammatory and controversial” to “make [her] friends laugh”; she also admitted it was “deeply shameful and embarrassing to see that dredged back up.” And no, her transgressions were not as troubling as those of the Young Republicans, many of them adults representing one of our major political parties who apparently thought blatant racism was workplace-appropriate. Still: Her offense and her apology follow that all-too-familiar shape. No shade, but I have grown used to, and grown tired of, these apologies—in part, because they follow the same recognizable semantic pattern, just as they also follow the resurfacing of racist posts by every white person who ever had a Nazi phase, which, again, seems to have been all of them. In fact, perhaps this is true of all non-Black folks. A few years back, when Latina pop singer Camila Cabello’s racist Tumblr posts, complete with n-word, reappeared, her apology also noted that the posts were from her—quote—“younger” days, but that she was now “deeply ashamed” and “deeply embarrassed” by them. I could probably draft them myself, if I wanted a second career in celebrity crisis management.

I hate the assumption that those of us hurt by these racist displays are just supposed to accept these apologies. The same way we’re also supposed to accept that the person who demeaned and denigrated us publicly for yucks isn’t racist anymore and, for that, is owed forgiveness. That even after the thousandth cut, we must extend empathy to someone whose very own words prove they were incapable of mustering empathy for us. I suppose it’s to her credit that Cain herself didn’t demand anyone accept it or suggest that we “learn to take a joke.” (And, to add credit, I’ll note that she actually bothered to write, “I am white, so while I can take accountability for my actions, there’s no way for me to fully understand the way it feels to be on the receiving end of them.… Any way you feel about me moving forward is valid.”) But her fans—who are overwhelmingly white and therefore weren’t the target of her remarks but who clearly felt that they should have the authority to police Black folks feelings—most certainly did.

The most visible and powerful fan of the Young Republicans did pretty much the same, but with even more overtly fuck you flair. Vice President JD Vance’s sorry-not-sorry took the same semantic tack but ended up in a different place. He claimed that “kids do stupid things.… They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do,” and called the offensive taken to their words “BS.” Unlike the other folks attempting an actual apology, Vance isn’t just using the classic “young” defense—however untrue it is, considering that participants ranged in age from 24 to 35. (Likewise, Paul “Hitler Streak” Ingrassia, at 30 years old, is no spring chicken.). He’s saying—literally—this is how we as white kids behave, and you better get back to being used to it. And that there is plenty more where that came from.

“I really don’t want to us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance added, meaning fuck your feelings, don’t you dare create consequences that might hurt ours.

Here’s the thing: On the one hand, white people keep telling me that racism doesn’t exist. On the other, they keep admitting not only that it does very much exist, but also that they find it so awesomely irresistible, they can’t help but roll around in it for a few years, leaving a filthy e-trail across social media behind them. I dunno, man. I too was a pretty edgy teenager, into very edgy youth subcultures, and whenever I dig back into my decaying online posts I note they are many things—far too earnestly effusive about punk rock and Oi! and all manner of Doc Martens maybe—but bereft of racist nonsense.

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So please stop asking how we got to a point where Nazism is cool and the manosphere is a form of government. Stop playing dumb, white people—I’m literally fucking begging you. It’s been almost three decades since Gavin McInness, who would go on to found the Proud Boys, used Vice magazine as a vehicle to make the least transgressive, uncreative, stale thing—and here I mean racism—into a faux-edgy aesthetic brand for white 20somethings. Nearly as long since Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and every other digital cesspool forwent guardrails, allowing cruelty to be rebranded as humor. All that stuff gave ironic cover to what was always the same old racist contempt, now calcified. Back in 2023, after another right-winger was busted for antisemitic messages, conservative journalist Aaron Sibarium wrote, “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”

In other words, here we are, because we’ve been here for decades. And once again, as with every issue involving anti-Blackness, if we were honest about American history we’d realize this is just the digital age’s expression of a phenomenon that dates back much further. White Americans have always bonded over anti-Black humor and racist jokes—it’s a way to turn domination into shared laughter, reinforcing “in” and “out group,” or “us” versus “them.” What’s more, those jokes get told more often, and become more vicious, when Black progress makes whiteness more insecure and in need of reassurance. Blackface minstrelsy and coon songs were white Americans’ “joking” expressions of anti-Blackness in the early 1800s, a way to portray enslaved Black folks as dimwitted, lazy, and hypersexual; as abolitionism grew in popularity in the 1830s, and in the post–Civil War and Emancipation eras, minstrel portrayals grew more threatening and menacing. In his groundbreaking study An American Dilemma, released in 1944—as the earliest glimmers of the civil rights movement flared—sociologist Gunnar Myrdal noted that white people were loath to discuss Black folks “in formal intercourse…[but] he enters all informal life to a disproportionate extent. He creeps up as soon as the white Southerner is at ease and not restraining himself. He is the standard joke. It is interesting to notice the great pleasure white people in all classes take in these stereotyped jokes and in indulging in discussions about the Negro.…To the whites, the Negro jokes further serve the function of “proving” the inferiority of the Negro.” More recently, in 2017—as white hysteria over Obama swelled, metastasizing into MAGA—sociologist Raúl Pérez applied Plato’s superiority theory, which suggests all humor involves an element of looking down on others, to an American racial context. He points out that “racist humor and ridicule has long been used as a mechanism for fostering social cohesion among whites at the expense of nonwhites” and maintains the “false neutrality of white supremacist ways of thinking.” Same, same.

Cain didn’t see her career significantly derailed by her racist posts, and frankly, I wouldn’t want that for her in any case. Some of the young Republicans lost jobs, which shocked me, since as a nation, we aren’t really punishing racism anymore. Paul Ingrassia clearly agreed with me, because his statement announcing his withdrawal from consideration to lead the Office of Special Counsel stated that he lacked enough “Republican votes at this time,” an implicit promise that he’d be back someday. Turns out that day came last week, when Ingrassia announced he was the newly appointed deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration. In an email cited by Politico, Ingrassia noted Trump had “called him into his office” to personally offer him the new job. An unnamed official also confirmed Ingrassia’s new role and told the outlet he will “successfully execute President Trump’s America First policies” — which sounds so on the nose it reads like a threat. It’s only a matter of time until the rest turn up in even more powerful positions, older and better paid, with the same smug sense that this is how things are. And sadly, they’ll be right.

On December 7, the annual Kennedy Center Honors will be held for the 48th year, and for the first time, a sitting president will be the host. Having purged all the Democrats from the Kennedy Center’s board, replaced them with loyalists, and named himself as chairman, Donald Trump has also made himself the main attraction of the marquee event.

His predecessors in the Oval Office had neither hosted the event nor involved themselves in selecting the honorees, but Trump has bragged that this year’s list—George Strait, KISS, Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor, and Sylvester Stallone—“all went through me,” adding that he rejected a “couple of wokesters.” As for the hosting duties, the president claimed that he was reluctant to take the spotlight. “I’ve been asked to host,” he said at an August press event for the gala. “I said, ‘I’m the president of the United States. Are you fools asking me to do that?’ ‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m president of the United States, I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘Please’…. I said, ‘OK… I’ll do it.’”

On the one hand, this is just Trump—who once said his “ultimate job” would be as a silver-screen-era studio head; who declared that having a reality show was “like being a rock star”; and who famously opined that “when you’re a star…you can do anything”—chasing his lifelong fantasy of joining the glitterati. What he couldn’t buy as a real estate developer, Trump can now commandeer as president. “I wanted one, I was never able to get one,” he said of the Kennedy Center awards. “And I said, ‘The hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honor.’”

But Trump doesn’t just want to sit at the popular kids’ table—he wants to make it his own. And in that goal, he’s backed by a like-minded MAGA movement. MAGA’s politics of grievance and resentment have long been fueled by the idea that “the left”—a catchall term for every cultural institution from Hollywood to hip-hop to Harvard—has hoarded all of the country’s cultural capital. Now the movement has a chance to crown itself the elite in a way it never could become organically. The goal isn’t merely to seize the prestige they’ve always envied, but to use it to reinforce their hold on power—to rewrite the history that forms our shared public memory, erase the truths that contradict their white-supremacist patriarchal ideology, and ensure that every museum exhibition, TV broadcast, and classroom lesson imparts their worldview.

Just weeks after Trump’s reelection, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, “How Trump Can Rid Washington of Wokeness,” coauthored by a contributor to Project 2025. “Retake control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian Institution,” the authors advised. “Dissolve the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” they added. In a section that begins, “End woke university practices,” they supported the president’s plans to “protect free speech,” which in conservative-speak means allowing racist rhetoric while punishing dissent.

Done, done, and done! Since the inauguration, the president has criticized the Smithsonian’s representation of “how bad slavery was” and purged a number of Black history artifacts from its collection. In July, Congress voted to eliminate funding for public media. And, of course, on college campuses, under the guise of fighting antisemitism, the administration is threatening to withhold federal funds and deporting foreign-born students in response to student protests.

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MAGA’s cultural takeover isn’t just about museums and college classrooms but popular culture, too. Disney, ABC’s parent company, yanked Jimmy Kimmel’s show after Federal Communications Commission chair and Project 2025 coauthor Brendan Carr objected to Kimmel’s remarks about the MAGA movement’s politicization of Charlie Kirk’s death and threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcast license. After a public outcry, Disney reinstated Kimmel less than a week later, but Nexstar, a company that owns 32 ABC affiliates, said it would continue to preempt the show. Nexstar is in the midst of a pending $6.2 billion merger with the broadcaster Tegna that requires FCC approval. For ABC’s part, the network had already demonstrated its willingness to fold months earlier, when it settled a baseless defamation lawsuit by Trump for $15 million.

Paramount took a similar course. After Trump sued 60 Minutes over a preelection interview with Kamala Harris that he didn’t like, Paramount forked over a $16 million settlement. When late-night host Stephen Colbert joked that the payment was “a big fat bribe” to ensure the company’s merger with Skydance, Paramount canceled his CBS show. Skydance, led by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, then agreed to install a “bias monitor” to oversee CBS and announced that its acquisition of the right-leaning media company The Free Press would include a senior leadership role at CBS News for cofounder Bari Weiss—a conservative whose shtick is pretending to be a disaffected liberal. Meanwhile, as of this writing, TikTok is close to being bought by a consortium made up of Silver Lake, Oracle, and Andreessen Horowitz—the latter two of which are owned by billionaire Trump donors. And don’t forget that X owner Elon Musk spent more than $250 million getting Trump and other Republicans elected.

So there you have it. America’s “liberal media”—as it will surely continue to be called—will soon largely be in the hands of Trump-affiliated moguls. It might seem that these institutions did not have to settle with Trump or cave to his demands, considering that the laws are on their side. But it’s hard not to think they’re already preparing for a country in which the threat of Trump’s retaliation outweighs all else. Fascism, after all, has often been defined as the merger of state and corporate power. And that’s what we’re seeing now, as Trump and his MAGA movement seize control of institution after institution. In December, when Trump takes the Kennedy Center stage as host, it might seem like a mere vanity project. But know that you’re watching American culture being weaponized—one stage, one station, and one late-night TV show at a time.

Last month, social media was flooded by a CCTV clip of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, stealing from Target and getting stopped by a store security guard. Except he wasn’t, really—that was just the first clip to go viral from Sora, Open AI’s new social media platform of AI video, which is to say, an app created solely so people can make, post, and remix deepfakes. Sora isn’t the first app that lets people create phony videos of themselves and others, though the realism of its output is groundbreaking. Still, it’s all harmless, satirical fun when the subject is a white tech billionaire who—even with hyperrealistic video of the crime—no one believes would ever commit petty theft.

But the disturbing implications of this technology are clear as soon as you consider that AI can be used just as easily to make deepfakes that incriminate the poor, the marginalized, and the already over-policed—folks for whom guilt is the default conclusion with the flimsiest evidence. What happens when racist police, convinced as they so often are of a suspect’s wrongdoing based solely on their evidence of their Blackness, are presented with AI-generated video “proof”? What about when law enforcement officials, who are already legally permitted to use faked incriminating evidence to dupe suspects into confessing—real-life examples have included forged DNA lab reports, phony polygraph test results, and falsified fingerprint “matches”—start regularly using AI to manufacture “incontrovertible evidence” for the same? How long until, as legal scholars Hillary B. Farber and Anoo D. Vyas suggest, “the police show a suspect a deepfaked video of a witness who claims to have seen the suspect commit the crime, or a deepfaked video of ‘an accomplice’ who confesses to the crime and simultaneously implicates the suspect”? Or, as Wake Forest law professor Wayne A. Logan queries, until law enforcement starts regularly showing innocent-but-assumed-guilty suspects deepfaked “video falsely indicating their presence at a crime scene”? “It is inevitable that this type of police fabrication will enter the interrogation room,” Farber and Vyas conclude in a recent paper, “if it has not already.”

We should also assume that means it’s only a matter of time before law enforcement—who lie so often under oath that the term “testilying” exists specifically to describe police perjury—begin creating and planting that evidence on innocent Black people. This isn’t paranoia. The criminal justice system already disproportionately railroads Black folks, who make up just 13.6 percent of the US population but account for nearly 60 percent of those exonerated since 1992 by the Innocence Project. What’s more, almost 60 percent of Black exonerees were wrongly convicted thanks to police and other officials’ misconduct (compared to just 52 percent for white exonerees). The numbers are even more appalling when it comes to wrongful convictions for murder, with a 2022 report finding Black people are nearly eight times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than white people. Official misconduct helped wrongfully convict 78 percent of Black folks who are exonerated for murder, versus 64 percent of white defendants. In death penalty cases, misconduct was a factor in 87 percent of cases with Black defendants, compared to 68 percent of cases with white defendants. The Innocence Project has found that almost one in four people it has freed since 1989 had pleaded guilty to crimes they didn’t commit—and that the vast majority of those, about 75 percent, were Black or brown. Imagine how those numbers will look when you add AI to the tricks of the coercive trade. 

Sora, and the other AI slop factories that represent its major competitors, including Vibes from Meta (ex-Facebook) and Veo 3 by Google, claim to have ways to prevent this kind of misuse. All of those companies are also part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which develops technical standards meant to verify the provenance and authenticity of digital media. In keeping with those standards, OpenAI has pointed out that Sora embeds metadata in every video, along with a visible “Sora” watermark that bounces around the frame to make removal harder. But it’s clear that it’s not enough. Predictably, within roughly a day of Sora’s launch, watermark removers were being advertised online and shared across social media. And some people started adding Sora watermarks to perfectly real videos.

Other controversy has followed. Following demands for “immediate and decisive action” against copyright violations by the Motion Picture Association and a host of other corporate behemoths with massive legal teams, OpenAI has added “semantic guardrails”—preventing the ability of certain terms to be translated into images. That includes prohibiting image generation of living celebrities and other trademarked figures, and specifically blocking videos of Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness. (OpenAI is already fighting lawsuits—by plaintiffs including The New York Times and authors Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Grisham and George R.R. Martin—charging that its AI chatbot ChatGPT regurgitates copyrighted books—with 50 similar cases now pending against generative-AI firms in courts across the United States.) Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley who is often dubbed the “Father of Digital Forensics,” pointed out to me that additional safeguards exist, including Google’s SynthID and Adobe’s TrustMark, which function as invisible watermarks. But users hell-bent on misuse will find a way. 

“Let’s say OpenAI did everything right. They added metadata. They added visible watermarks. They added invisible watermarks. They had really good semantic guardrails. They made it really hard to jailbreak. The truth is, it doesn’t matter, because somebody is going to come along and make a bad version of this, where you can do whatever you want. And in this space, we’re only as good as the lowest common denominator.”

Farid pointed to Grok, the AI chatbot and image-generator owned by Elon Musk, as an example of what happens when that lowest common denominator rules. A complete lack of restriction allowed the app to spew disinformation ahead of the 2024 election, and to create nonconsensual sexually explicit imagery involving real people, both famous and unknown. This summer, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network issued a statement warning that the app “will lead to sexual abuse.”

“At the end of the day, once you’re in the business of doing what OpenAI is doing [with] Sora or Google’s Veo or ElevenLabs voice cloning, you’re opening Pandora’s box. And you can put as many guardrails as you want—and I’m hoping that people ultimately put up better guardrails. But at the end of the day, your technology is going to be jailbroken. It’s going to be misused. And it’s going to lead to problems.”

Studies find that AI is 80 percent more likely to reject Black mortgage applicants than white ones; that it discriminates against women and Black people in hiring; and that it offers erroneously negative profiles of Black rental applicants to landlords—racist practices known as “algorithmic redlining.” Likewise, AI has contributed to racial disparities in criminal justice by replicating pervasive cultural notions about Blackness and criminality being intertwined. A facial recognition system once included a photograph of Michael B. Jordan, the internationally famous Black American movie star, in a lineup of suspected gunmen following a 2021 mass shooting in Brazil. As of this August, at least 10 people—nearly all of them Black men and women—have been wrongfully arrested because they were misidentified by facial recognition. A ProPublica investigation from nearly a decade ago warned that AI risk assessment software used by courts to decide sentencing lengths was “particularly likely to falsely flag Black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.” 

Just a couple of weeks ago, an AI gun detection system in a Baltimore, Maryland, high school misidentified a Black student’s bag of Doritos for a weapon and alerted police, who were then dispatched to the school. Roughly 20 minutes later, “police officers arrived with guns drawn,” according to local NBC affiliate WBAL, made the student get on the ground, and then handcuffed him. “The first thing I was wondering was, was I about to die? Because they had a gun pointed at me. I was scared.” Taki Allen, the 16-year old student, told the outlet. Knowing that police often take a shoot-now, ask later approach—especially with dealing with young Black men—a teen boy could well have ended up dead because of the overpolicing of a majority Black and brown high school, police primed to see Blackness as an inherent violent threat, and an AI’s faulty pattern recognition.

So often, the discussion about techno-racism is focused on racial bias that’s baked into algorithms—how new technologies unintentionally replicate the racism of their programmers. And AI has indeed proved that technology can inherit racism from its makers, and replicate it once out in the world. But we should also be considering the ways AI will almost certainly be intentionally weaponized and (mis)used. For example, a failed TikTok influencer with the handle impossible_asmr1 struck gold recently when they began using Sora to create deepfakes of nonexistent angry Black women trying to use EBT cards in situations where it would be patently ridiculous to do so, then crashing out when the cards are rejected—complete with long strings of expletives shouted directly to the camera. Just last week, Fox News was suckered by a batch of wildly racist AI videos, which the outlet reported on as fact, featuring Black women ranting about losing SNAP benefits during the shutdown. In a piece originally headlined “SNAP Beneficiaries Threaten to Ransack Stores Over Government Shutdown,” Fox News writer Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi credulously reported that one woman—again, a completely fabricated AI generation depicted as real—said, “I have seven different baby daddies and none of ’em no good for me.” (After both mockery and outcry across social media, the outlet changed the headline to “AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral” but didn’t admit its mistake.) Obviously, a not-insignificant part of the problem is that Fox News thought this was a story worth covering at all, because it is an outlet that treats race-baiting as central to its mission. But the ease with which deepfakes will now help them in that mission is also a pretty big concern. Of course, using anti-Black images taken not from real life but from the racist white imagination to create ragebait that encourages yet more anti-Black racism is an American tradition—from minstrel shows to Birth of a Nation to books with illustrations of lazy Sambos. 

It’s scary enough when a media outlet is airing faked racist videos. But this is the sort of “evidence” that the Trump administration—operating as an openly racist regime, indifferent to civil rights, and clear about its eagerness to use local problems as justifications for a nationalized police state—could use to launch military incursions into American cities or disappear American citizens. Following several executive orders that encourage more police authority and less accountability, in September, Trump signed a directive (“Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” or NPSM-7) that explicitly claims threats to national security includes expressions of “anti-American,” “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist” sentiments—language so intentionally vague that any dissent can be labeled left-wing terrorism. When a government claims that all “activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism”” are considered “pre-crime” indicators, it is signaling its readiness to use fabricated evidence as proof. Trust that the same Homeland Security apparatus that photoshopped, poorly, gang tattoos onto the fingers of Kilmar Ábrego García will be manufacturing guilt in no time. 

And there are other, perhaps less obvious ways in which the most vulnerable will be disadvantaged. Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, recently conducted a study to learn about what kinds of lawyers had gotten caught submitting briefs with “hallucinations,” the term used to describe AI’s tendency to create citations that reference nonexistent sources, like those that filled a recent “scientific” report from Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She found the most hallucinations in briefs from small firms or solo practices, meaning attorneys who are likely stretched thinner than those at white-shoe firms, which have staff to catch AI mistakes.

“It connects back to my fear that the people with the fewest resources will be most affected by the downsides of AI,” Pfefferkorn said to me. “Overworked public defenders and criminal defense attorneys, or indigent people representing themselves in civil court—they won’t have the resources to tell real from fake. Or to call on experts who can help determine what evidence is and isn’t authentic.”

Now that reality itself can be faked, not only will we see that fakery used to criminally frame Black Americans and other vulnerable populations but, authorities will almost certainly claim that real footage exonerating them is faked. University of Colorado Associate Professor Sandra Ristovska, who looks at the ways visual imagery impacts social justice and human rights, warns that this is likely already happening in courtrooms. 

“The more people know that you can make a fake video of, like, the CEO of OpenAI stealing, the more likely we’ll see what my colleagues have named the ‘reverse CSI’ effect,” she told me, referring to a concept that, when used in specific relation to deepfakes, was first articulated in 2020 law paper by Pfefferkorn. “That means we’ll start seeing these unreasonably high standards for authentication of videos in court, so that even when an authentic video is admitted under the standards in our legal system, jurors may give little or no weight to it, because anything and everything can be dismissed as a deepfake. That’s a very real concern—how much deepfakes are potentially casting doubt on reliable, authentic footage.”

And those who benefit from presumptions of innocence will be able to exploit those same doubts and ambiguity for their own benefit—a phenomenon law professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron call “the liar’s dividend.” In their 2018 law paper introducing the term, the legal scholars warned that pervasive cries of “fake news” and distrust of truth would empower liars to claim real evidence as false. Among the first known litigants to invoke what’s now known as the “deepfake defense” are Elon Musk and two January 6 defendants, Guy Reffit and Josh Doolin. Although their claims failed in court, privileged litigants stand to gain from the same confusion that’s weaponized against marginalized folks.

All this, of course, has clear implications for police accountability. Not only will fake footage be used against people; it will likely be deployed to justify racialized state violence. “Think about the George Floyd video,” Farid noted to me. “At the time—with the exception of a few wackos—the conversation wasn’t, ‘Is this real or not?’ We could all see what happened. If that video came out today, people would be saying, “Oh, that video is fake.” Suddenly every video—body cam, CCTV, somebody filming human rights violations in Gaza or Ukraine—is suspect. 

Rebecca Delfino, an associate professor of law at Loyola University who also advises judges on AI, shared similar concerns. “Deepfakes are extra challenging because it’s not just a false video, it’s basically a manufactured witness,” she told me. “It risks due process and racial justice, and the risks are profound. The weaponization of synthetic media does not just distort facts. It erodes trust in institutions charged with finding them.”

As it stands, our entire legal system is unprepared to deal with the scale of fakery that deepfakes make possible. (“The law always lags behind technology,” Delfino told me. “We’re at a really dangerous tipping point in terms of having these rules that were written for an analog world—but we’re not there anymore.”) Rule 901 of the Federal Rules of Evidence is focused on authentication, requiring that all discovery—documents, videos, photographs, etc.—be verified before admission into evidence. But if jurors think there’s any possibility a video could be fake, the damage is done. Delfino says that in open court, the allegation that an evidentiary video is a deepfake would be “so prejudicial and so dangerous because a jury cannot unhear it—you can’t unring that bell.”

The federal courts’ Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules has been considering amendments to Rule 901, largely in response to AI, for roughly two years. Delfino’s proposal posits that judges should settle the question in a pretrial hearing, in consultation with experts as needed, before proceeding with a case. The goal is to ensure that juries understand that any video allowed to be entered into evidence has already cleared a threshold of authenticity, to rule out speculations of inauthenticity that could arise during a trial; under Delfino’s proposal, the judge would serve as a gatekeeper, leaving juries to continue treating all evidence with an assurance of authenticity. Following deliberations in May of this year, the committee declined to amend the Rule, citing “the limited instances of deepfakes in the courtroom to date.” That is disheartening, but she suggests this might be a chicken-vs.-egg issue, since the committee is currently taking public comment on another rule (702) about applying the same scientific standards it puts on to deepfakes and AI evidence in general. “To my mind, that’s a good step, and an important one,” she told me. “Before this type of evidence is offered, the same way we treat DNA, blood evidence, or X-rays, it needs to meet the threshold of scientific reliability and verifiability.”

That said, Ristovska worries about how AI will compound existing problems in the courtroom. Nearly every criminal case, whopping 80 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, includes video evidence. “Yet our court system, from state courts to federal courts to the Supreme Court, still lacks clear guidelines for how to use video as evidence,” she told me.

“Now, with AI and deepfakes, we’re adding another layer of complexity to a system that hasn’t even fully addressed the challenges of authentic video,” Ristovska added. “Factors like cognitive bias, technology, and social context all shape how people see and interpret video. Playing footage in slow motion versus real time, or showing body camera versus dashboard camera video, can influence jurors’ judgments about intent. These factors disproportionately affect people of color in a legal system already structured by racial and ethnic disparities.”

And there are still other concerns. In a 2021 article, Pfefferkorn was already calling for smartphones to include “verified at capture” technology to authenticate pics and video at the moment of creation, and to determine if they were later tampered with or altered. Perhaps we’re near a deepfake tipping point where those will become a part of our phones, but that fix still isn’t here yet. Delfino told me she thought that the fallout from unregulated Grok output—which included many famous white women in nonconsensual, and therefore dangerous, deepfakes—would do more to increase the urgency around AI authentication needs. Unfortunately, as she noted, we’re likely looking at a situation where the system will drag its feet until more rich and powerful people experience deepfakes’ harms. And Ristovska followed up with a message noting that, while there is a human rights need for robust provenance technologies at the point of capture, it’s also important that those same technologies not imperil the anonymity of “whistleblowers, witnesses, and others whose lives could be endangered if their identities are disclosed.” 

Elsewhere and in the meantime, the most vulnerable remain so. AI has not been a friend to Black Americans, and deepfakes threaten to make the future pursuit of justice, already a far from complete struggle, even bleaker. It seems that every new technology promises progress, but is first weaponized against the same people, from fingerprinting used in service of racist pseudoscience and coerced confessions, to predictive-policing algorithms that disproportionately surveil Black neighborhoods. Deepfakes will almost certainly continue that history. Video was once a means for vindication, shutting down official lies. But the cellphone revolution, it seems, has been surprisingly short-lived. I fear a future in which the very means of exonerating the innocent will be refashioned as tools for harassment, framing, and systemic injustice.

De’Martravion “Trey” Reed—21 years old, Black, not even a month into his freshman year of college—was found hanging from a fruit tree on the campus Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, just after 7 am on September 15. Within eight hours, campus police told the press there was “no evidence of foul play,” the coroner’s office declared no “visible injuries consistent with an assault,” and one official opined to the Mississippi Free Press that Reed’s hanging “was self-done.” As online speculation mounted that Reed had been murdered in a hate crime, the state’s autopsy report also ruled the death a suicide. In the police department’s press release announcing the findings, commissioner Sean Tindell praised the “quick work” of local officials, and condemned what he called “rumors circulating regarding [Reed’s] death.” In a follow-up statement, Tindell was even more blunt, saying,“We haven’t had a documented case of a lynching in decades. So when somebody jumps to that conclusion, I would believe that they’re just trying to get the clickbait and get you to come look at their stuff.”

When he finally got around to posting a social media message about Reed four days after his death, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves struck a similar tone. In a tweet labeling Reed’s death a “tragedy,” Reeves also criticized those allowing things like history and collective memory to cloud their thinking. “I know a lot of speculation from people who have no facts or evidence has dominated online conversations and even some national mainstream media outlets in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy,” the governor’s message stated. “It represents a sad state of affairs in today’s social media driven world….but it doesn’t represent today’s Mississippi!”

It all served to add to the nagging feeling that Mississippi authorities have been rushed in declaring Reed’s death an open-and-shut case. That hastiness was rendered more pronounced against the backdrop of unstinting coverage of the murder of Charlie Kirk, both nationally and by local Mississippi sources. (Reeves took just hours after Kirk was killed to post that he was “a great man” who “blessed America”; even with no suspect in that case, Reeves readily speculated that “the left” had engaged in “assassination and violence” and encouraged “righteous anger” in response.) In a state where trees once served as gallows for Black bodies, Mississippi authorities’ insistence that there’s nothing to see here, keep it moving, and seeming active discouragement of further investigation only provokes more questions.

Those questions start with the actions of state and local officials, who have offered conflicting and confusing accounts from the start. Reed’s grandfather J.B. Reed told a local Fox affiliate that officers first told him his grandson was found “in his [dorm] room unconscious.” Grenada County Sheriff’s Department Chief Deputy Ricky Williamson countered that version of events in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press. The outlet reported that he and other investigators had not “specified where [Reed] had been found when they informed the family of Trey Reed’s death”—a declaration that, even if true, seems like a glaring omission. Attorney Vanessa J. Jones, who is representing the Reed family, held a press conference the day after Reed’s body was found during which she informed media that Reed’s family learned of his death from news reports the day prior. Jones claims that an ongoing lack of communication with the Reed family by authorities has resulted in the family’s “getting all of their information secondhand through the news,” reports the Mississippi Free Press. Delta State University Campus Police chief Mike Peeler has told reporters that there is video evidence, although authorities have refused to specify if the moments leading up to Reed’s death are captured in the footage. The family has not seen it.

“If this young man was on the campus of Delta State University with all these cameras and all this modern technology, from the moment he left his dorm room or entered the campus, there should be surveillance of all his actions,” Jones said, according to the Mississippi Free Press. “That’s what we want.”

Nationally known civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who also represented the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and many other victims of fatal racial violence, declared that he has joined the family’s legal team. In a September 19 press release, Crump announced that Colin Kaepernick’s “Know Your Rights Camp Autopsy Initiative”—which covers the costs of independent autopsies for people who die in police custody or other suspicious conditions—will pay for a second independent autopsy for Reed. The move underscores how little faith Reed’s family has in the determinations of local and state authorities. That skepticism is shared by Jill Collen Jefferson, a Harvard-trained civil rights lawyer and Mississippi native who has spent years documenting the failures of the state’s death investigations.

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“Mississippi’s medical examiner system is notoriously flawed,” Jefferson told me. “I’ve seen these medical examiners miss some pretty big things. And often, if there are no injuries, they’ll say that there’s no evidence of foul play.”

Jefferson notes that candidates for county coroner in Mississippi need only a high school diploma and, if they are elected, a five-day, 40-hour training program. In 2018, then–Washington Post columnist Radley Balko wrote that Mississippi’s death investigation system was the country’s worst, citing its “antiquated, easily corrupted” and “underfunded” coroner system. Equally troubling is the Reed family’s contention that they could not confirm the coroner’s report that there were no signs of injury because they were only permitted to view the body “from the neck up.”

There is something disconcertingly familiar about all this. Seventy years ago, the beaten and broken body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was found just 30 miles from where Reed’s body was discovered on Delta State University’s campus. From the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to 1950 in Mississippi, 654 Black people were murdered by white racial terror violence—“hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, [or] beaten to death”—more than any other state, according to the Equal Justice Institute. In 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported at least eight suspected lynchings of young Black men and boys in Mississippi since 2000, nearly all of which local officials ruled as suicides.

“Suicide being a cover for lynching is not something that’s new,” Jefferson told me. “It goes back centuries. It has been a joke at times. There were cases where it was it was obvious that somebody had been lynched—people would have even attended the lynching—but then if they were asked about it, ‘Oh, yeah. I saw him get a rope and string himself up!’ A joke kind of situation.”

Jefferson has been documenting and investigating cases of Black folks found hanged around the country since 2017, with a specific focus on her home state of Mississippi since 2019. “Lynchings never stopped in the United States,” she told the The Washington Post in 2021. Her figure for the number of Black bodies found hanging in Mississippi since 2000 is 23, far greater than the last count offered by the SPLC. That list includes Willie Andrew Jones Jr., whose 2018 lynching—just over 50 miles from where Mississippi civil rights icon Medger Evers was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan half a century prior—was declared a suicide by the local sherriff’s office. Jefferson renewed the investigation, discovering evidence authorities had overlooked, which led to a $11.4 million wrongful death ruling. In this case, and so many others she has studied, suicides are declared so quickly that substantive scrutiny never occurs.

“They are pretty much ruled suicides immediately, before any type of meaningful investigation is done,” Jefferson told me. “Because the ruling of suicide happens so early, the crime scenes are generally not preserved. The investigations tend to be very short, and very shoddy—almost like they’re trying to prove a conclusion rather than actually investigating. And then the case isn’t heard of again. It just goes quiet unless somebody picks it back up.”

While suicide seems an improbability in Reed’s case, it is not an impossibility. Suicide has risen to become the second leading cause of death among young Black people aged 15 to 24. As of 2023, the CDC found that “suicide is now the third leading cause of death for Black male adolescents and young adults.” And yet, there are obvious cultural and historic reasons why those suicides rarely look like lynchings. Journalist Jennifer Porter Gore cites statistics from the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System, which found that of the more than 2,300 Black men who died by suicide in 2020, some 60 percent were killed by a gun, while just a quarter died by asphyxiation or hanging. Nearly all of those were found inside homes or other private spaces, while “just 34 were found outdoors, and only 10 were found in a tree or natural area.”

It is that unlikelihood that the NAACP spotlighted in its message about Reed’s death. “While initial reports offered no evidence of “foul play,” you’d have to excuse our skepticism amid growing racially motivated violence targeted at our communities across this nation,” the organization wrote. “Our people have not historically hung ourselves from trees.”

Jones, the Reed family lawyer, underscored that point in more personal terms, telling reporters that just days prior to when his body was found, Reed did not appear to be suffering any mental health issues. “He was joyful and loving as ever. That is what he is being remembered for,” Jones said, according to a local Fox affiliate. “When he went back to Delta State University, he was his joyful self. So, the question is, what happened?”

Reed’s uncle, pastor Jerry Reed, speaking at the press event held by Jones, said his nephew had been a “happy young man” who frequently spoke about future plans. Reed’s mother, Sophia, told The Final Call that she had been “real, real close” with her son, and that he seemed excited about starting his freshman year at Delta State.

“He was happy to get ready to go off to college. That’s all he was talking about,” Sophia Reed said, according to The Final Call. “We actually barbecued for Memorial Day. My son was with me. We all barbecued out at the house. He didn’t show no signs.”

While Mississippi’s white elected officials have seemed uninterested in and even hostile toward the idea of further inquiry, Black electeds have pushed for both more investigation and greater transparency. Mississippi’s Legislative Black Caucus wrote that members are “continuing to ask questions of local officials and remain engaged as the investigation unfolds.” US Representative Bennie Thompson, whose home district includes Reed’s home and collegiate counties, wrote in a statement, “While the details of this case are still emerging, we cannot ignore Mississippi’s painful history of lynching and racial violence against African Americans. My deepest condolences and prayers are with Trey’s family during this difficult time.” Thompson has also called on the FBI to investigate, but neither FBI Director Kash Patel nor Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino have raced to answer that call.

“I definitely think that the political climate plays a huge role in what’s going on right now—not only the crimes themselves, but how they’re investigated,” Jefferson said to me. “Because right now, there is no backstop with the Justice Department to make people investigate or do the right thing here.”

Over and over in the days after Charlie Kirk’s death, we heard that his was a life filled with promise that ended far too soon. So was Reed’s—and the push to close the book on his death contrasts with the demand that we remain focused on Kirk’s. Kirk’s martyrdom has been touted on national stages; publicly mourning him has served as a test for patriotism and citizenship, and his figure has been treated as symbolic of America itself.

But there is nothing more profoundly American than Reed’s case—of young Black men and boy’s bodies found hanging from trees, of hurried pronouncements of suicide by officials, of a strain of indifference proving American violence can be not just physical but also bureaucratic, carried out by sheriffs, coroners, and courts who rubber-stamp cases to leave them cold. Kirk once declared that Black Americans “were actually better in the 1940s,” an era of rampant lynching. In the wake of his death, it should be no surprise that his legacy is threats against HBCUs, the continued targeting of trans people, and the stoking of racial grievance politics by our current political leaders. Reed’s case is a reminder of what violence actually looks like in America—the banality of lives brutally taken, bureaucratically erased.

“The frequency of lynching has gone up, and I expect it to go up more, given the political climate,” Jefferson told me, soberly. “And it’s not just Black people. There are immigrants that have been lynched as well. Especially in Texas, you have situations where trans people have been lynched. So it’s something that people are just not talking about. At Julian”—the civil rights organization that Jefferson runs—“we redefined lynching and broadened the definition to include those other groups.”

Once again, events drive home that much of what we once thought was confined to history remains a part of our present. And today, just as in the past, indifference is part of the violence itself.

The evening after Charlie Kirk’s murder, the public safety commissioner of Utah, where Kirk was fatally shot on a college campus, admitted that law enforcement still had “no idea” about the identity of the shooter. That same night, Utah Governor Spencer Cox pleaded that authorities “need[ed] as much help as we can possibly get” to identify a suspect. Though the shooter’s identity was unknown, odds were fairly high that they would be white—they had evaded attention in an overwhelmingly white crowd, on a majority white campus, in a very white state. Police opined that the shooter “blended well” in those white environs, a fact made evident by the need for the manhunt. And yet, immediately after Kirk’s killing, social media churned with racist incitements and anti-Black calls for violence. Analysts at the Center for Internet Security and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told ABC a large number of those posts were from Russian bot networks “intent on inflaming passions.” The AP, likewise, warned that Chinese, Iranian, and pro-Kremlin “online bots” were using Kirk’s death to increase “divisions or even spur further violence.” And The New York Times wrote that foreign entities were “using bot accounts posing as Americans” to spread toxic narratives. Governor Cox also urged caution, suggesting that very online Americans were being baited by foreign adversaries trying to gin up anger and division.

“There is a tremendous amount of disinformation we are tracking,” Cox told assembled media the evening after the shooting. “What we’re seeing is, our adversaries want violence. We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world, that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”

It was true. There are more bots on the Internet than ever before, multiple studies show, accounting for roughly 50 percent of overall traffic. A steadily rising number of those are “bad bots” with malicious intent. On social media, the problem is most obvious on Twitter (X), where cybersecurity experts in 2024 variously estimated 64 percent to 75 percent of users are bots, compared with less than 3 percent each on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Just one week out from Kirk’s death, tweets calling for retaliatory violence had “amassed 43 million views,” per the Center for Countering Digital Hate. It was not clear how many of those tweets were from bots, but on a platform rife with them, there’s little daylight between perception and reality.

“This is a really prime example of how the distorted lens of social media algorithms can turn perception into reality,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate US/UK, told me. “We all start to feel like the world is worse than it really is. And bit by bit, that’s slowly ripping apart our confidence in, and our ability to sustain a cohesive democracy.”

Does that come as a relief? That problem is that using anti-Black racism to promote chaos works only because there’s so much anti-Black racism ready and waiting to be exploited. The day after Kirk’s killing, at least six—six!—historically black college and university campuses in Southern states were forced into emergency lockdowns because of “terroristic threats” made via both phone calls and e-mails. Neighboring HBCUs that were not directly threatened also had to implement shelter-in-place protocols out of caution. At NYU and Southern University and A&M College, administrators received an e-mailed manifesto from an anonymous author who claimed that they were “going to shoot every nigger I see.… I am coming for only niggers, no whites and no chinks.” HBCUs were founded at a time when Black folks had no choice but to create their own colleges because they weren’t allowed on white colleges, and yet, all these years later, those institutions are still no safe haven from the ubiquity of white terror.

Despite being thousands of miles from the lily-white environs where Kirk was shot, they were again subject to America’s age-old predictable scapegoating of Black communities, which seems to offer a sort of grotesque catharsis to a country that has always regarded Blackness itself as the enemy.

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And just days ago, a “debate” group claiming Kirk as inspiration showed up at Tennessee State University, an HBCU, clad in MAGA gear and bearing signs reading “DEI should be illegal” and “Deport all illegals now.” After being swiftly removed by security and booed by a crowd of students, the MAGA agitators accomplished the true aim of their mission—to further antagonize those students using social media posts that cast them as violent and themselves as innocent white victims. The threats and harassment of HBCU students demonstrate the feedback loop between online hatred and incitements to violence and their IRL manifestations.

Unsurprisingly, other vulnerable communities—Jewish and transgender people—were also blamed and targeted, even as the shooter remained anonymous. The Center for Internet Security and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that after Kirk’s shooting, some 46,000 tweets included the word “trans,” mostly to speculate that the shooter was transgender. “The jews assassinated Charlie Kirk. We’re in a fucking war, Whites,” one pseudonymous account declared, garnering 22,000 likes and 280,000 views. “In a world where you can be murdered for being a Charlie Kirk, be an Adolf Hitler” another anonymous account tweeted, to 18,000 likes and 234,000 views. “Fight back white man.”

The online right—some of which surely included foreign bots—had been calling for a race war over the killing of a young Ukrainian immigrant woman by a mentally ill Black man in Charlotte, North Carolina, earlier this month. Kirk himself, no stranger to race-baiting, tweeted just hours before his death that it was “necessary to politicize” her death, unwittingly noting the precise pretext that would be used in the threats that followed his killing. American racism is so reliably reflexive, it gives our purported enemies an easy and surefire way to crush national unity and break down our barely-there democracy from within. It’s why racism is, and has long been, among the greatest threats to America’s national security, making us all the more vulnerable.

And the irony is, it’s a trick that America has fallen for before. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Russia’s then-most-prolific troll factory undertook a massive operation, including setting up “websites that published pro-Trump stories and attempted to sow racial discord.” That same Kremlin-backed group bought more than 3,500 Facebook ads, the majority of which a USA Today analysis later found either “dealt with race directly,” or indirectly, via “issues fraught with racial and religious baggage.” (For example, and quite incredibly, including a sex tape featuring Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lookalikes to trigger America’s miscegenation anxieties.) A 2019 Senate report ultimately concluded that Russian cyber interference had an “overwhelming operational emphasis on race.… no single group of Americans was targeted…more than African Americans.” Those campaigns would continue to focus on America’s racial fissures in the 2018 midterms, in 2020 and in 2024. For example, in the latter year, Russian propagandists posted a video to Twitter of supposed Haitian immigrants, riding in a van they claimed was en route to help them vote multiple times in Georgia for Kamala Harris. Another video, described in a NBC report, depicted “two Black men or boys kicking the shoes of a bloodied, crying white woman or girl who wears a Trump shirt.”

Ahmed notes that while foreign interference is part of the issue, there’s also the problem of the platform. “It’s very clear to anyone using it that there appears to be strategic and determined distortion in part caused by bots,” he told me. “But there is also just the algorithm itself, which allows the proliferation and maximum amplification of lies that are slowly driving our country apart.”

It may be a problem intrinsic to social media, where all engagement, positive or negative, leads to reach, but it is also specifically an Elon Musk problem. After Kirk’s shooting, Musk unquestionably helped escalate tensions, tweeting to his 225 million followers that they must “fight or die.” (Unlike Musk, Trump, or Vance, Democratic officials not only condemned the shooting but also urged the cooling of rhetoric across the board. You can see this for yourself in side-by-side quote comparisons.) Musk has made plenty of room for hate on Twitter since he has bought it. Not only did hate speech jump 50 percent after Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, but the number of “likes” on hateful posts increased 70 percent, per a 2025 study from the University of California and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute. In April, NBC reported that it had found “a flourishing Nazi network on [Twitter] under Musk’s ownership.” Researchers from Queensland University found in 2023 that bots are “worse than ever” on Twitter under Musk.

A 2024 study by Global Witness found that just 45 bot-like Twitter accounts made 610,000 tweets in a month, which made 4 billion impressions. Those bots then pivoted from one current event to the next, tweeting about each of them. This included the UK general election, followed by the assassination attempt on Trump, and then Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. They responded to each “with racism, gendered disinformation and conspiracies,” researchers wrote. Musk doesn’t clean up the site because bots give the appearance of more users, which is in turn used to sell ads. (Cynicism is Twitter’s head of product boastfully tweeting that the day of Kirk’s murder and the day that followed, the site “had more first-time downloads in the United States than on any single day in its history.” He did not mention that this was, in part, because of rubberneckers viewing the horrific video of the shooting.) Musk has also put Twitter’s application programming interface behind a paywall, and has sued researchers who look too closely, including Ahmed.

So, yeah, the digital architecture is a problem. But it’s surely made worse by all the forces exploiting America’s oldest and most reliable hatred. America’s adversaries know how fragile, and easily manipulated, racism makes this country. And things will almost certainly get worse, since the Trump administration seems intent on leaving America defenseless. State Department officials recently announced that they have shut down the Global Engagement Center, which tracked Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation. And since Trump reentered office in January, other groups within the FBI, DHS, and ODNI tasked with tracking foreign meddling have also been shuttered, leaving America more exposed.

But the problem also lies within us. In response to the Times article on foreign adversaries’ exploiting Kirk’s shooting, China’s Global Times took offense, writing that “media hype aimed at distracting attention toward external powers serves as little more than an ostrich burying its head in the sand—it cannot conceal the severity of domestic problems.” They’re not entirely wrong. The solution isn’t just countering foreign interference but cleaning up our own house too—the ugliest corners that we so often prefer to ignore first. Otherwise, a house so readily divided is sure to burn in someone else’s war.

Maybe you read some of those postelection articles, mostly by Black authors, attempting to reckon with the uptick in support for Donald Trump from some non-white communities. The word “betrayal,” in a few cases, was deployed with intention. Others sat with the reaffirmed sentiment that Black folks have no true allies. And still others condemned the hollowness of terms like “people of color” and “BIPOC” for falsely suggesting non-white solidarity where there is mostly just adjacency.

Those reactions, contrary to what both centrist and right-wing commentators suggested, weren’t about Black resentment over mere political divergence. They arose, instead, from the weariness of a collective historical memory that prompts Black folks to read between the lines of the newest chapters in a very old story. For generations, Black Americans have watched new arrivals enter America’s racial hierarchy and, when given the chance, move to gain status and power by aligning themselves with whiteness—however toxic, tenuous, or self-harming. It’s a means of getting a leg up that has always involved stepping on Black folks along the way.

That was how it worked for waves of Europeans. Italians, Greeks, Irish, and Slavic arrivals from the 19th century to the early 20th found themselves classified as not-quite-fully white by eugenicists proclaiming Nordics superior to “Alpines and Mediterraneans.” Assimilation, then, as scholar David Roediger writes in Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, meant “whitening as well as Americanizing.” Those immigrant groups learned real fast that Americanness was tantamount to whiteness, and that whiteness was incomplete without anti-Blackness. Becoming fully assimilated wasn’t just a cultural project—it was a racial one, too.

As far back as 1853, Frederick Douglass observed, “The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro.” Nearly a century later, in 1945, Black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton documented Black Chicagoans complaining that “foreigners learn how to cuss, count and say ‘nigger’ as soon as they get here.” Another half century later, Toni Morrison noted how the adoption of anti-Blackness by immigrants served as a necessary demonstration of loyalty to the American project.

“A hostile posture toward resident Blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open,” Morrison wrote, adding that this was the “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born Black population. Only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimilation complete.”

By the time of that writing, most US immigration was from non-European nations. But while the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act—a direct outcome of the civil rights movement and Black activism—scrapped the explicitly racist national origins quota system, it didn’t, and couldn’t, end the racial order that runs through American life. So, although America’s immigrant arrivals became visibly browner, and thus racially marked in different ways from their predecessors, the country’s hierarchy was not erased. It was simply rendered more complex. The new racial triangulation continued to position whiteness as aspirational and Blackness as a cautionary tale.

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There are those who have worked hard to comply, and perhaps even reinforce the structure, in the hopes of being let in. Vivek Ramaswamy, the first-generation Indian-American 2024 Republican presidential candidate, campaigned so hard on anti-Blackness and almost nothing else that, following one of his most transparently anti-Black stunts, the Congressional Black Caucus released a statement calling him out for “shamelessly carry[ing] the water of white supremacy for his own political gain.”

There are still hard feelings in the wake of 2023’s SFFA vs. Harvard, which eliminated race-conscious college admissions supposedly on behalf of Asian students, and helped fuel the racist anti-DEI rollback of a generation’s worth of hard-won civil rights victories. (Having written many times on this topic, I cannot help but note that most Asian Americans support affirmative action in college admissions.)

And so, reports of double-digit leaps in support for Trump among Latino men, as well as less pronounced but still notable increases among Asian voters, did not cause the fault lines between Black Americans and other non-white communities—those cultural, social, and political fissures have always been there. The election night’s exit polls merely threw those fissures into the starkest relief.

But the walls of whiteness—which so easily subsumed ​southern and eastern Europeans (America’s “temporary Negroes,” as sociologist John Dollard so tellingly called them in 1937)—have become more rigid toward non-European arrivals. This president, a garden-variety racist working for far more ideologically committed white nationalists, has made clear that the old devil’s bargain no longer works.

It has long been true that, in a country that requires whiteness to achieve full Americanness, non-European immigrants remain racialized as “perpetual foreigners at worst, or probationary Americans at best,” as Erika Lee writes. At a time when a not insignificant segment of white America is consumed by fears of imagined looming demographic erasure, that bargain hasn’t just resulted in diminished returns—it’s altogether dangerous.

Most glaring are the rampant kidnappings and deportations of non-criminal brown (and Black) citizens and veterans, and an ICE operating budget bigger than most world militaries. There is the “new” travel ban, targeting Middle Eastern, South American, and, of course, African countries, which expands the “old” travel ban from Trump’s first term.

The recent presidential order criminalizing homelessness describes the condition as “vagrancy,” language quite literally copied from the 19th-century Black Codes. The surreal and over-the-top bigotry of Alligator Alcatraz, rooted in old-timey racist lore; importing white South Africans while denying entry to Black and brown asylum-seekers; even an executive order reasserting 19th-century racial determinism pseudoscience. And of course, the rollback of too many Black civil rights to enumerate here.

What was once conditional inclusion is now a tolerance so fragile it “can turn on a dime,” as Karan Mahajan writes, and be rapidly revoked. Non-Black groups might be treated as convenient wedges in the right wing’s anti-Black agenda, but any misstep causes the veneer to slip away, revealing the disposability of so much, and so many, to white power structures. Ramaswamy offered mild criticisms of white Americans in December, and MAGA went so full-bore racist—with attacks that haven’t let up—he had to quit DOGE, exit the national stage, and restart things in his home state of Ohio. Elon Musk, an actual immigrant, leveled the same criticisms, but retains his MAGA-technofascist fandom.

Black Americans, of course, been knew. Perhaps because of their long history in this country—and near-epigenetic understanding of whiteness, the result of centuries of intimate exposure to its whims and contradictions—Black folks understand the limits of whiteness’s porousness, the folly of banking on its protection, and the rapidity with which it is prone to lash out while feigning victimhood.

That clarity comes from both lived and generationally inherited experience, steeped in the vicious backlashes that have followed every stride forward. Reconstruction followed by the bloody retaliation of Redemption. Civil rights gains met with the punishment of mass incarceration. And the Obama presidency leading to Trump’s executive assault on equity and racial justice.

There has been a long-standing disinformation campaign, passed from white Americans to new immigrant groups, that has painted Black failure as a consequence of Black pathology—and not the relentless undoing of every Black gain. There is a history of Black leaders, made in the mold of Booker T. Washington, who have earnestly believed that if Black folks just worked hard enough, white folks would have no choice but to fully recognize their citizenship and humanity.

But as each violent wave has proved, they overestimated white America’s capacity for moral persuasion and the durability of institutionalized racism. Even Washington’s secretive funding of more direct activism behind the scenes, despite having never disavowed his accommodationist views publicly, suggests he ultimately realized that no amount of dignity, deference, or diligence could undo white supremacy.

This president has shown what Black Americans have long known, and what others just may just be starting to understand—which is that aligning with toxic whiteness will never keep you safe. (Recent polls suggest that this message is landing more broadly—witness the cratering support for Trump among Asians and Latinos, including some of the most prominent pro-Trump preelection voices.)

Unfortunately, from here it seems like the realization may have come too late, judging from the state of things. If the Trump era offers a single bit of bitter clarity, it is that the line between solidarity and servility has never been more visible. And in the rubble of American self-mythologizing, Black political memory always remains standing—refusing to forget what, and who, this country is and has always been.

Early this month, the Pentagon quietly reneged on its promise to give transgender Air Force members the retirement pay they’ve earned over nearly two decades of service. That is, of course, not how the Pentagon put it—but that’s not surprising in an administration so averse to honesty.

Only months ago, in May, after the Supreme Court’s partisan supermajority gave its approval to Donald Trump’s ban on transgender military service, a Defense Department memo invited trans people with 15 to 18 years of military service to apply for its Temporary Early Retirement Authority program. TERA, as it’s called, was created in 1993 for periods of military drawdown; the program gives those with between 15 and 20 years of service deserved benefits such as on-base housing, health insurance, and, of course, pension payments. Officials even held a special press briefing, during which they vaguely acknowledged the hardship awaiting those being forced out, hewing as close to empathy as this administration seems able to muster. “They will be afforded a very significant, voluntary separation pay,” one senior Defense spokesperson told reporters, “giving them the time they need to transition to civilian life. This policy will treat anyone impacted by it with dignity and respect.”

What could be more Trumpian than a promise broken? Perhaps giving, and then inexplicably revoking, approval for early retirement, as the Pentagon did to roughly 30 trans Air Force members, according to The Advocate. “After careful consideration of the individual applications, I am disapproving all Temporary Early Retirement Authority (TERA) exception to policy requests,” Brian Scarlett, the Air Force’s newly announced acting assistant secretary for Manpower and Reserve, wrote in an August 4 memo. Four days later, a follow-up letter put an even finer, which is to say crueler, point on things. “Retirement orders are rescinded effective immediately,” it stated, instructing recipients that they “will need to process for separation instead.”

Many of these career trans airmen and guardians have deployed to combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places multiple times, Shannon Minter, legal head of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told me. Many “have received very impressive promotions and commendations”—medals, ribbons, and other decorations. A significant portion are highly skilled in important technical areas.

Roughly 96 percent of Americans have never volunteered to serve, including the famously draft-dodging president. But all 4,240 estimated trans military members signed up to risk injury or death for a country they well knew would likely never return the favor. And most trans service people, a number of whom Minter is representing in related litigation, had planned to continue serving for the foreseeable future.

The people so cruelly betrayed by the administration’s flip-flopping had given almost two decades of their lives to the task, putting them within reach of the 20-year mark that unlocks full retirement benefits. Instead of honoring that sacrifice, this administration is booting them from their chosen careers and denying them a means to afford the civilian life into which they’re being thrust—to eat, to keep a roof over their head, to meet even their most basic needs after such a devastating loss.

“This is the promise that the military makes to people who enlist and serve—that once they serve for 15 years, they will be entitled to retirement benefits,” Minter told me. “It is the bare minimum—and it’s one of the most important commitments that the military makes with people who step forward and are willing to serve.”

Both the Army and Navy have also offered TERA benefits to trans veterans with 15 to 18 years of service, according to the military-focused outlet Task & Purpose. But after witnessing the Air Force backpedal on its promises and moral obligations, who wouldn’t be skeptical of the military’s trustworthiness going forward? How can any trans soldier in any other branch not fear another sudden rug pull—one final denigration on the way out the door? And who can be certain that this administration won’t widen its purge and start denying promised benefits to other groups—say, service members whose political stances it disagrees with or whose identities it randomly decides are objectionable? As Minter warned me, all this sets a dangerous precedent, not just for trans troops but all service members.

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“This cannot help but create doubts in people’s minds about whether the military will live up to its obligations generally,” Minter said. “I mean, [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is making so many drastic changes, right and left—it’s just chaos. It must be so destabilizing and demoralizing for people who are serving to feel like the ground is no longer secure under their feet.”

With the denial of early retirement, as the August 4 memo notes, these long-serving Air Force members are being told they must either be “voluntarily separated” or “involuntarily separated”—each an “Orwellian misnomer,” as Minter has rightly called them, for what is really forced removal. And like trans soldiers with far fewer years under their belts, they are now only eligible for a one-time lump-sum “separation” payment that pales in comparison to an ongoing pension.

What the government is doing to these service members should be recognized as theft on two fronts. First, robbing them of the careers they built year by year and rank by rank. Then, ripping them off of even the bare scraps it owed them in return. Treating all of this as a mere policy adjustment, and not a calculated betrayal that leaves so many lives, careers, and financial states in limbo, is yet more insult added to injury. I have long understood Trumpism as a movement that relies—thrives, even — on sadism, but it’s still jarring to watch the vicious pleasure it takes in all this.

What’s more, stripping these veterans of their well-deserved benefits was the culminating blow in a series of escalating indignities. Even before the ban was issued, the administration was spreading anti-trans hatred far and wide—treating trans people not as the vulnerable minority they are but as a societal taint and existential threat to everyone else.

“We will get transgender ideology the hell out of our military—it’s going to be gone,” Trump told a roomful of cheering House Republicans just hours before signing a January 27 executive order barring transgender soldiers from military service. “No more pronouns,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth menacingly gloated the same day the Supreme Court rubber-stamped Trump’s order. “No more dudes in dresses—we’re done with that shit.” The whiskey-breathed administrator, who struggled to do a decent pull-up earlier this week, would later tweet the same words, followed by the message, “No more trans @ DoD.”

Even more recently this month, Trump claimed that a nameless, faceless “they” wants “everybody transgender.”

And then there’s that January order itself, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” which takes such obvious pains to insult and humiliate trans service personnel. It declares that the military has been “afflicted with radical gender ideology”; claims transgenderism is inherently at odds with “a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle”; and falsely asserts that trans soldiers are neither “mentally [nor] physically fit for duty.” And then, this—a bit more red meat for a MAGA crowd to salivate over: “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

At the same special DoD press briefing during which trans soldiers were promised “dignity and respect,” a Pentagon official acknowledged the dark reality that military commanders are being directed to ferret out any trans soldiers who might be keeping their identities under wraps so as to avoid the cruel humiliation and financial pain the administration has in store for them. Through record reviews, those leaders are expected to essentially hunt down anyone diagnosed with or treated for “gender dysphoria.”

I won’t get into the fact that not every trans person experiences gender dysphoria, which describes emotional distress arising from a conflict between assigned gender and gender identity. Nor will I spend too much time noting that, if the administration is going to hang its ban on gender dysphoria, a clinical diagnosis, every trans service member should be eligible for a medical retirement, as with every other “medical condition” that exists.

Instead, I’ll simply point out how chilling it is that trans service members are told they might as well step up for removal, because if they don’t, they’ll just get smoked out anyway. “Any individuals who meet the criteria,” the official said, “and do not voluntarily identify themselves and go through the voluntary separation process will be processed involuntarily unless they are granted a waiver.”

Ah, yes, the basically impossible-to-get waiver, which requires that recipients go back into the closet and serve as their birth “assigned gender.” (Since the first Trump ban on trans military service, in 2019, only one person has been granted such a waiver.) In any case, last week, the Pentagon ended the charade of due process or choice by announcing it will no longer allow trans soldiers to request hearings to argue against their removal. So while the Navy has, for example, let members who were part of the violent mobs attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021, remain in the service, the Pentagon is denying the same to folks whose sole infraction was offending a bunch of transphobes by merely existing.

But this government hates trans people too much to merely try to ruin their lives in the present. So the Pentagon is also doing its damnedest to sabotage the futures of trans service members who have succeeded the most. On separation paperwork, trans officers—meaning specifically those who have reached officer level — will be branded with a “JDK” discharge code, a sort of scarlet letter. The JDK code suggests ex-military personnel “could not be trusted with national security matters,” Air & Space Forces magazine writes. Trans people already face staggering rates of workplace discrimination. This bureaucratic code might well be a professional death sentence.

“If someone wants to go into classified work, it’s huge,” retired Air Force Col. Joshua Kastenberg told Air & Space Forces. “Keep in mind that people who leave the military honorably, some of them want to find jobs with contractors that require a clearance because they pay well and it gives them an opportunity to serve national defense without having to put on a uniform. That door may be shut to them as a result of this.”

All this is yet another reminder of the circularity of history and, unfortunately, of oppression.

There are endless echoes of the 1950s and ’60s Lavender Scare, during which the government purged somewhere between 2,000 to 5,000 “suspected homosexuals” from the military. From 1994 until 2011, under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the armed services likewise claimed LGB people were a threat to both national security and unit cohesion. And before the military was desegregated in 1948, Black service members were denied benefits readily extended to white service members, including the GI Bill—an exclusion which helped keep black folks out of the middle class, suburban homes, and the so-called American Dream.

Any trans person serving a decade or more—including, of course, every trans Air Force member currently being denied early retirement—knows what it means to serve while in the closet. It was only in 2016, after all, that Obama’s Department of Defense told trans service members it was finally safe for them to come out and live as themselves. They trusted their government’s assurances of honesty and integrity and now, they’re being punished for it.

So much, I guess, for all that sermonizing about the perils of DEI, the need for “meritocracy,” and claims of “supporting the troops.” The effort to push out capable military members proves all that stuff was performative. The message they want you to receive is that certain people’s right to be themselves is conditional.

This is far less about policy than it is about humiliation and erasure. Purging trans folks from the military was always just one part of a broader Trumpian agenda that seeks to blot trans people entirely from American public life. Hence the administration’s decision to retroactively reverse trans military members’ genders in their records; its requirement that, going forward, they be publicly misgendered with “birth sex” pronouns conflicting with their gender presentation, which some have noted puts them at the risk of transphobic violence; even prohibiting them from wearing their uniforms, which some have worn for decades, regardless of the occasion.

In May, the Pentagon also announced that it would halt all gender-affirming healthcare for transgender military members. There is no case to be made about saving money; the military doles out $42 million per year on Viagra and similar erectile dysfunction drugs but just $5.2 million per year on gender-affirming care. It’s a campaign to scrub trans folks from military history—and with it, their dignity.

At the very least, Minter believes that the denial of TERA benefits probably “violates the most basic due process requirement.

“It’s unprecedented,” he told me. “No one is aware of any prior instance where the military approved early retirement benefits and then rescinded them without any explanation. There’s a good chance the legality of this is going to be called into question.”

Earlier this summer, photos of an emotional Captain Trey Wirth at his retirement ceremony—the Coast Guard uniform he is now forbidden to wear hanging next to him—spread on social media. The image seemed to capture the needless heartbreak of a serviceperson who, after more than two decades, the military refuses to honor. The latest trans purge, like the periods of targeted cruelty before it, was undertaken to convey the idea that some groups aren’t just unfit for the uniform but wholly expendable.

“It’s such a betrayal on every front. Principle, history, tradition, law, and just basic decency,” Minter told me. “Just incomprehensible.”

The 59 white South Africans who landed at Dulles Airport on Monday arrived on a private jet chartered and paid for by the American government. They were welcomed, like foreign dignitaries, by high-ranking officials from the State Department and Homeland Security.

They’d been classified by the Trump administration with “Priority 1” refugee status, normally reserved for those fleeing the most horrific conditions, often with just the clothes on their back. But these globe-trotters lugged carts that groaned under the weight of their overstuffed luggage, serving less as evidence of escape than of unhurried, unbothered preparation. In news footage and widely circulated photos, the group of Afrikaners—descendants of Dutch and German settler colonizers of South Africa—appeared indistinguishable from the most well-fed white denizens of Idaho, North Carolina, or Iowa, the very same states where they are slated to be resettled.

To be clear, white South Africans—and this really cannot be reiterated enough—are not being persecuted. That might explain why the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which normally vets the status of potential refugees, was conspicuously absent from the process that brought these particular huddled masses to our shores. Instead, having repeatedly been unable to find credible justification for designating white South Africans a persecuted class under international refugee law, the Trump administration circumvented that system, unilaterally declaring the group refugees. But the administration’s resettling of Afrikaners shouldn’t be confused with humanitarian concern.

The red carpet is being rolled out for them, showily and deliberately, I might add, as a political signal. Consider it a statement of allegiance to whiteness; a full-throated declaration of where, and with whom, this administration’s priorities lie. The importation of Afrikaners to the United States—even as legitimate refugees and immigrants are shut out, detained, and deported—is a way to register the administration’s objection to the very principle of racial equality, an ideal the South African government is taking slow, tentative steps to realize. It’s part protest, part ideological stunt, announcing white grievance as a more pressing concern than Black suffering. By halting all US refugee resettlement, cutting off life-saving funds to resettlement agencies, and ending support for HIV treatment in South Africa, the Trump administration has assigned a greater value to white supremacy than to millions of human lives. This is an unequivocal affirmation of this administration’s commitment to white nationalism, and it should be read as such.

To even suggest that Afrikaners are persecuted conflates the loss of absolute white power with oppression. South Africa’s white minority constructed, and for more than 300 years, maintained entrenched systems of enslavement, settler colonialism, and violent racial apartheid. Though white supremacy the world over conveniently argues that history bears no weight on the present, the end of apartheid in 1994 did not end the vast racial inequalities those systems created. The spoils of that oppression remain very much in the possession of whiteness.

Despite being just 7 percent of the population, white South Africans still fill more than 62 percent of corporate leadership positions. Roughly two in every three Black South Africans are impoverished, while just 1 percent of white South Africans are. The white minority still holds nearly 75 percent of the country’s land, thanks to a 1913 law that drove Black farmers off 93 percent of the country’s lands, hastening a process of dispossession that began long before. In other words, life is pretty good if you’re white in South Africa. No matter: As any American could tell you, white grievance is more powerful than any material reality.

Earlier this year, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a provision permitting, in rare cases, eminent domain of farmland for public use. As Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch has noted, the legislation doesn’t even reference “a landowner’s race, though patterns of land ownership are inextricably bound up with the legacy of racial apartheid in South Africa.” What’s more, not a single square acre of land has even been seized. Musk and Trump, it seems, with their shared freak-out, are kind of telling on themselves. But per the revisionist, white-supremacist mind virus, Black suffering is natural and irrelevant.

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It is a lie that “white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated,” as Trump claimed this week. Nor is the country’s government aligned with forces “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” as Elon Musk, a white South African product of the country’s apartheid era, has repeatedly insisted—a fantasy recently amplified by Trump. In fact, genocide looks a lot more like what the Trump administration is backing with billions of dollars in Gaza, while it guts funding for refugee resettlement programs. It bears a far greater resemblance to an administration blocking real refugees—trapped amid war, famine and other threats to life—while bending over backward to accommodate a group that President Ramaphosa rightly pegs as longing “to see South Africa go back to apartheid.” The new arrivals may have technically traveled to the US via plane, but they are best understood as running, kicking and screaming, from even the concept of racial equality. MAGA’s Southern Hemisphere chapter is now at headquarters to unite with the home team.

(And while South Africa does have high levels of crime, Trump’s first-term State Department reported that “farm killings represented only 0.2 percent of all killings in the country.” The New York Times also points to police data indicating that most of those killed in farm murders are Black. And those attacks have been trending downward since 2010.)

Meanwhile, nearly 100,000 legitimate refugees—from Latin America, the Middle East and plenty of other African countries—approved for resettlement when Trump took office now remain in perilous limbo. On the same day the administration pulled out all the stops for the Afrikaners, it removed protections for thousands of Afghans, many of whom aided in America’s war efforts. And it has callously deported multiple young children, native-born US citizens, suffering with late-stage cancer.

Since halting all (non-white) refugee resettlement with an executive order essentially stating the country is full up with “migrants, and in particular, refugees,” this White House has made a practice of violating constitutional due process rights, and ignoring judicial orders. “[V]ulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” the South African government pointed out in a February press release, yet Trump provides “refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged.” Did I mention that the administration has announced that it plans to buy the new arrivals “groceries, weather-appropriate clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products and prepaid phones”? And here we are.

Princeton historian Jacob S. Dlamini, a Black South African, described to Vox how “white boys chased Black folks for sport” during his childhood during apartheid. He also identified an entire “cohort of white men who,” like Musk, “have yet to come to terms with democracy in South Africa, meaning that a poor Black person who has no prospects in life has as much say politically when it comes to elections as does a very rich white person. That’s what it comes down to.”

Trump relates to these people, who see equity as theft, and multiracial democracy as tyranny. (Trump officials “link it in a sense to their whole D.E.I. issue,” a representative of one of South Africa’s white nationalist groups, which met with administration officials, told the Times.) The matter is personal, and only grows more so as we approach 2044, the year in which white Americans are projected to become a mere plurality, instead of a majority, of the US population. When first informed by an aide in the 1990s about the looming demographic shift, Trump reportedly claimed that a revolution would prevent the change. America “isn’t going to become South Africa,” Trump declared, according to Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. The same goes for Musk, whose AI chatbot, Grok, spent Thursday redirecting every exchange toward South Africa’s nonexistent “white genocide,” regardless of the prompt received. It later admitted to having been “instructed by my creators” to treat the subject as “real and racially motivated”—an order that “conflicts with my design to provide truthful, evidence-based answers.”

It all amounts to a desperate, deliberate attack on South Africa’s government and its efforts to materially redress the country’s lengthy history of slavery and apartheid, and the enduring legacy of Black poverty and pain. Again, this will look familiar to Americans. After all, the United States has, at every opportunity, rejected the chance to make recompense for slavery and Jim Crow—choosing most recently not just to deny history but to blot out its teaching. Now, the Trump administration has taken that effort a step further, degrading reparative action elsewhere. As South African Justice Minister Ronald Lamola rightly put it, that effort proves this is no humanitarian mission, but “a political project to delegitimize our democracy.”

The Trump administration’s embrace of Afrikaners fleeing post-apartheid South Africa isn’t just about undermining Black South Africans’ hard-won progress. It’s also about sending a message to white Americans, paranoid about demographic erasure and slipping down a rung on the rope ladder of racial hierarchy. It’s a promise to those folks that this administration will protect them, and the white system will still serve you.

Polls show that roughly two-thirds of South Africans overall support land reform in principle. As the Afrikaner immigrants made headlines, videos from white South Africans poured out across social media, mocking their entitlement and tearing down pro-apartheid propaganda. It’s worth noting that South Africa has become both a pretty hot tourist destination and has attracted the largest number of immigrants on the continent. Which seems weird for the anti-white dystopia that certain parties would have us envision.

Still, we can expect more of that in Trump’s America. And that the primary requirement for refugee recognition for the foreseeable future will be escaping Black political power.

Conservatives may claim to care about policies and principles—you know, stuff that makes them seem decent—but their movement is, at its core, about preserving American racial hierarchy. And as recent years have shown, the greater their dominance, the deeper their sense of grievance.

While Donald Trump’s renewed attacks on Black civil rights may provide them with a bit of abstract satisfaction, what they really want is to flex the power of whiteness interpersonally. That is, the ability to publicly humiliate, dominate, and instill fear in Black folks, without consequence. Emboldened by the white supremacist accelerationism of this administration, conservatives are shedding old pretenses of respectability and civility, and making clear how much their identity depends on the right to put others “in their place.” And that includes being able to say the word “nigger” publicly and out loud again.

The response to Shiloh Hendrix, a grown white woman and mother from Minnesota, is instructive. Earlier this month, Hendrix called a 5-year-old Black boy a “nigger” on a Minnesota playground. She then repeated the slur while admitting to using it when a bystander began filming. When the footage went viral, Hendrix adopted a pose of victimhood, asking the public for money, and raised nearly $800,000. (Hendrix claimed in the video that the boy was rifling through her child’s diaper bag with the intent to steal; in her fundraising appeal, she wrote he actually stole from the bag, though she has yet to name what was allegedly taken.)

Hendrix declared in her fundraiser that she had been doxxed, though the only evidence for this remains the word of Hendrix herself, a woman whose outsize character flaws include screaming racist slurs in children’s faces. Her “two small children…do not deserve this,” she pleaded—taking as an apparent given that only Black kids deserve to be treated so inhumanely.

Many donors to Hendrix’s fundraiser, posted to GiveSendGochose, displayed racist usernames—“Nate Higgers,” “ItsAllNonsAndTheJews,” “kill all jews Andblacks”—and the site’s owners told Newsweek they they disabled comments because of the sheer “volume and intensity of racial and offensive language.” GiveSendGo, which positions itself as a Christian platform spreading “the Hope of Jesus through crowdfunding,” has already hosted so many racist fundraisers that a 2023 Rolling Stone article focused on its “white-power problem.” But the site couldn’t have been legitimately surprised, nor should anyone else be. White racists, after all, have always rushed to fund those whose sole claim to fame is hurting Black people.

Historically, that money has more often been given in support of slaughter rather than slurs. Tens of thousands of dollars were raised for the white men who lynched Emmett Till in 1955, the assassin of Medger Evers in 1964, the killer of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and the Ferguson cop who shot Michael Brown in 2014. The two men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 and the ex-marine who choked Jordan Neely to death on a subway in 2023 saw their GoSendMe’s attract both high-profile white supremacists and GOP sympathizers, including Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis. Hell, Kyle Rittenhouse proved you can even kill white folks—provided they’re suspected of standing with Black lives—and walk away with a cool $2 million.

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Maybe the only thing more predictable than the success of Hendrix’s fundraiser is the self-pitying victimology of her defenders. MAGA influencer Tim Pool—whom the Justice Department found has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Russia to spread Kremlin propaganda—said the Hendrix case “sends a message to other white people: Stop taking racial abuse.” Right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh hailed Hendrix as a sign that white people will finally “start swinging back” at “a system that’s rigged against them.” River Page, writing for Bari Weiss’s rag The Free Press, claimed that the whole story is “a decade in the making”—not because of the increase in white supremacist fundraisers, nor the mainstreaming of the openly racist MAGA, alt-right, and Tea Party movements since the first Black presidency. Instead, Page blames “the zealotry of the left, not the right” for breeding “a new, identity politics–obsessed far-right.”

Imagine writing an article that blames Black Lives Matter for forcing white people to choose Nazism, and then signing your real name to it. As if white identity politics and anti-Black racism haven’t always formed the connective tissue of the right’s various throngs. Nearly 20 years ago, George Lipsitz noted that “the neoracism of contemporary conservatism…functions as an important unifying symbol for a disparate and sometimes antagonistic coalition.” (And that’s not just me or him talking. Aspiring tradwife grifter Lilly Gaddis openly admitted to dropping n-bombs online in the hope of launching her career as a right-wing influencer.) You sound historically illiterate and ridiculous, River.

The fact is, white conservatives have been claiming to be oppressed—and defending the most horrific acts of white terror committed against Black folks—since Reconstruction, when freedmen’s getting the vote was cast as “Negro tyranny” and “Negro supremacy.” In 1964, two months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a majority of white New Yorkers complained to The New York Times about “reverse discrimination.” Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had just been murdered in Mississippi that summer, for God’s sake. And white mothers have been filmed and photographed screaming racist slurs at Black children, often as they tried to attend school, for damn near 70 years now.

But let there never be a moment when white racial resentment doesn’t masquerade as righteous victimhood. It’s a tradition that clearly marches on.

There simply is no “free speech” principle at issue here. This is about having the power to dehumanize and destroy—about who is allowed to wield violence and who must absorb it. It is not incidental that racist murderer Travis McMichael stood over Ahmaud Arbery’s body as the life bled out of it and made sure the last words he heard were “fucking nigger.” Or that moments before a white stranger murdered James Rone Jr. in 2023, the killer used the word “nigger.” As Deryl Dedmon beat James Anderson, and before killing him by running him over with his truck, he would repeatedly call him a “stupid nigger.” That word has been a prelude to every act of white supremacist violence. When white racists use that word, even when the stakes are merely abusive and not lethal, they do so knowingly—recognizing it as a blood-soaked word with a violent history.

Hendrix’s supporters, anonymous online donors and right-wing pillars alike, also know this. That history is the source of the word’s power. MAGA is a movement fueled by hatred and cruelty, inhumanity and petty retribution. Freedom, for the worst people in the world, means being able to make other people feel bad. People literally voted for that. Like the banker who told the Financial Times that he felt “liberated” by Trump’s reelection: “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting canceled…it’s a new dawn.”

The goal has long been not just to say the word “nigger” out loud, but to say it proudly, dare Black folks to be offended, and then mislabel that criticism as anti-white oppression. (Seriously. In the lead up to the 2024 election, Walsh tried to turn a Tim Walz joke about cooking “white guy tacos” into a white-on-white hate crime.) To incite rage and then call it courage, like the innumerable commenters on Hendrix’s fundraiser who thank her for being “brave” for cursing at a 5-year-old. They have spent the last few years cycling through other stand-ins for Blackness—“thug,” “woke,” “CRT, ”and most recently, “DEI”—and decided none carried the historical weight of cruelty like the original. Following Elon Musk’s lead, they have already revived the “r-word.” After Musk used the r-slur in January, a Montclair University study found a “207.5 percent increase in posts containing the r-word on X” in the days that followed. They’re going to push for the n-word to be next.

Even while the country teeters on the precipice of a recession, white racists couldn’t open their wallets fast enough for Hendrix, who quietly upped her goal from $20,000 to $1 million once she saw how easily the money was rolling in. Meanwhile, after the NAACP set up a fundraiser for the actual victim here, who suffers from autism, his parents asked that it be shut down after it garnered over $350K in three days.

The times and technology have evolved, but white racists stay predictably the same. More than 60 years ago, an ex-president opined that if you can soothe the status anxieties of a white racist with even the thinnest gesture of anti-Blackness, he’ll give you his last dollar and thank you for taking it—blind to the hand picking his pocket in the name of race.

That remains true.

If Democrats are serious about learning from Kamala Harris’s defeat, they should start by rejecting every election postmortem blaming “wokeness” for her loss. Ignore party grandee James Carville’s lashing out at what he derisively mislabeled as the Democrats’ “identity shit.” Print out—then soak in gasoline and set aflame—the memo by Seth London, adviser to rich Democratic donors, demanding a “complete rejection of race-and-group-based identity politics” in favor of “a politics centered on delivering the American dream through simple, concrete action.” What, with all due respect, the fuck are these people talking about?

Harris already ran the “un-woke” campaign her critics wanted. Her downplaying of race and gender was so pronounced, it became a theme of campaign reporting. She bent over backwards to court “Cheney Republicans” and other supposed swing voters. In the end, less than 6 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for her.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, campaigned on fighting the “anti-white feeling in this country,” migrants having “bad genes,” “transgender insanity” in schools, the benevolent sexism of “whether the women like it or not,” and the falsehood that Harris “happened to turn Black.” He cut deep into the country’s divides—but the presumed normalcy of whiteness and maleness lets this form of identity politics go unchallenged. Hence Democrats’ tired vilification of identity politics as a way to cater to the identities this country has always valued most. As always, the Democrats’ takeaway is to scapegoat the marginalized communities that form the party’s core while chasing voters who fled the party as the ink was drying on the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“There’s no demonstrable evidence that the Democratic Party will win the white vote. They have not for a long time,” said Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a national organization that builds political power for women of color. “Why can’t we accept that?”

The Democrats’ takeaway from Trump’s victory should be that a party’s political priorities must resonate with the identities of its base. But they have fundamentally misunderstood this assignment, yet again.

The consequences of that misunderstanding—or refusal to understand—were reflected in 2024’s turnout, when, by some estimates, a staggering 19 million people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home. It’s not that Dem voters became Republican en masse this election. In fact, in “nearly a third of the top 50 counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican, Trump’s vote actually declined from his 2020 numbers,” writes Steve Phillips, of both The Guardian and this magazine. Trump increased his vote total by just 2.8 million over 2020. The far bigger problem was Harris’s nearly 7 million vote shortfall compared with Biden four years ago.

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“If those people had shown up, particularly in some key areas, 230,000 votes get added in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and Kamala Harris is president right now,” the University of Texas historian Jeremi Suri, author of Civil War by Other Means, told me.

It’s also a matter of who stayed home. Politico’s analysis of 3,000 precincts in the largest cities in six battleground states—Atlanta, Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Charlotte, North Carolina—found that “the greatest decline in voter participation in all six appears to be in predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.” In Michigan, turnout increased 2.6 percent overall but declined by 4 percent in Detroit, especially in the city’s majority-Black northern precincts. (At least 22,000 Arab and/or Muslim voters also abandoned Harris in the state, presumably over the war in Gaza.) So, while Harris won Black Michiganders handily (89 percent) and at nearly the same supermajority levels as Biden (92 percent), the shrunken Black voter turnout in those areas “meant that for every 10 voters who did not participate, Harris was losing nine votes while Trump was losing only one,” according to NBC News. What’s more, in the 476 majority-Black precincts in Politico’s study, turnout fell by an average of 6.1 percent—more than double the 2.7 percent citywide average declines. Even in cities where Harris came out on top—such as Chicago and Charlotte—the largest downturns were in Black and other non-white neighborhoods. (The white vote, by contrast, increased for the first time since 1992.) The old truism about elections being decided by those who show up is, particularly for Democrats, still true.

Every four years, our politics come to revolve around the elusive “swing voter,” who is presumed to be white, right-leaning, and moderate. Democrats spend untold amounts of time and money chasing this cohort, and the media spends equally large amounts of time covering it.

But these numbers prove that the real swing voters aren’t white independents who switch parties every four years. They’re voters who swing between going to the polls and staying home—and they are disproportionately from groups that form the Democratic base. That’s why Democrats’ lack of commitment to that base—and, by extension, to multiracial democracy—is a fatal mistake.

That base includes the 86 percent of the country’s multiracial LGBTQ voting bloc who chose Harris, a 22-point jump over the 64 percent who voted for Biden. While Trump certainly made inroads with Asian and Latino voters, especially Latino men, Harris still won the majority of both, 55 and 51 percent respectively. (Other polling from Latino-focused organizations puts Hispanic male support for Harris at 56 percent.) The base also includes the 86 percent of Black voters who chose Harris, including nearly eight in 10 Black men and 92 percent of Black women.

The lack of curiosity about these voters’ choices reflects an assumption that white voters are thoughtful actors making discerning political choices, while voters of color are rote and unthinking. It also lends itself to the neglectful treatment that helped cost Democrats the election.

“Kamala Harris lost because we haven’t given our full focus to these groups that have the largest potential—which are voters of color,” Allison told me. “We haven’t maxed out the Black vote. We haven’t fought for the Latino vote. We have not fully funded and leaned into a strategy which says people of color plus progressive whites are the winning coalition.”

This isn’t about chasing well-off, college-educated white liberals at the expense of anyone else. It’s about a coalition that spans race and class, uniting white liberals and working-class voters of all races who share economic and social priorities. It is entirely possible to forge a political movement that not only honors diverse identity groups but also creates solidarity across difference—and then gets those groups to the polls. This isn’t pandering; it’s strategy. It’s also how you build a movement that can win elections and maybe even change things for the better.

“We have not seen that since Barack Obama,” Allison added. “And Barack Obama was the proof that it could happen.”

All in all, nearly 90 million people didn’t vote in the 2024 election. That’s roughly 36 percent of eligible voters—more people than voted for either Harris or Trump, and in line with rates of nonparticipation going back nearly a century. Studies have found that almost half of Americans are inconsistent in whether they show up to vote from one presidential election to the next. There are also chronic nonvoters, who have voted in, at most, only one of the past six national elections. Sixty-two percent of them have less than a college degree, and 44 percent earn $50,000 or less. (According to the Census Bureau, in 2023 the median income for non-Hispanic Black households was $56,000, while for non-Hispanic white households it was $89,000.) These are the Americans most likely to agree with sentiments such as “No matter who wins, nothing will change for people like me” and “The system is too broken to be fixed by voting,” according to a 2020 poll by FiveThirtyEight. An exhaustive study of those nonvoters, by the Knight Foundation in 2020, found that while 65 percent are white, people of color comprise a greater portion of the nonvoters than of the active voters. There’s also a relatively even distribution of Republican- and Democratic-leaning nonvoters. In our era of razor-thin elections, activating even some of these voters could pay huge dividends.

Studies have repeatedly failed to find that TV and online ads, robocalls, or postcards boost turnout or sway voters in any real sense. A 2017 study from political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla estimated that campaign ads had—wait for it—zero effect on voting decisions.

Instead, research dating back to 2000 shows that the most effective way to get people to the polls—including chronic nonvoters—is with direct personal contact. Even a single in-person conversation with potential voters can increase turnout by up to nine points, according to political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green. But these conversations need to be “high-quality,” as Broockman and Kalla put it—not rote deployments of canned lines.

Political scientist Melissa Michelson wrote in 2020 that “for low-income citizens of color, it is very rare to have someone knock on the door for the sole purpose of urging them to vote. When such an unexpected interaction occurs, it can be very meaningful.” The effect can also be contagious, increasing turnout among other household members by as much as 60 percent. The Harris campaign, though, took a traditional approach—one centered around targeting presumed “likely voters” with expensive ads. Most of the more than $1 billion Harris raised was spent on advertising. Salon found that ad buys cost the campaign nearly $700 million; outside groups spent a staggering $2.5 billion on ads.

But, as a string of reports show, even that outreach was hampered by the Democrats’ apparent lack of interest in their base. In September, NOTUS reported that while Biden’s 2020 campaign had spent over $70 million on Black media, the Harris campaign was on track to spend “considerably less.” (Harris, the outlet said, had instructed her staff to increase funding, but with little response.)

In October, a number of Democratic groups warned that Future Forward—the largest reservoir of outside money in support of Harris—was underfunding digital ads and grassroots outreach to non-white and young voters, according to The New Republic. And The Wall Street Journal reported that “Democrats focused on targeting voters of color said they were especially frustrated with the group’s unwillingness to heed their warnings.”

“The Latino orgs were more underfunded than ever before [in 2024],” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who focuses on Latino voter mobilization, told me. “Why would you leave out those groups? It’s because…all of the money from the donors was told to go through one presidential super PAC.”

When decisions are made by consultants, politicians, and millionaire donors who rarely seek outside perspectives, it’s no surprise that the party’s base gets overlooked. In September, The New York Times’ Maya King wrote that groups focused on minority voter outreach, including “canvassing operations in battleground states,” had warned against the “false belief among some backers that Ms. Harris, who is Black and Indian, will galvanize voters of color without the need for persuasive messaging.”

“The thinking was that Black voters would just turn out because Kamala is a Black woman. It doesn’t work like that,” Keith McCants, the Democratic Party chair in a Georgia county with a significant Black population, told Barn Raiser, an outlet focused on rural communities.

Harris’s much-touted ground game “largely missed grassroots Latino and Black communities,” Voto Latino president Maria Teresa Kumar wrote in an op-ed. The 2024 American Electorate Voter Poll found that 42 percent of Black voters said they hadn’t been contacted by either the Trump or Harris campaign—a sharp jump from 2020, when just 33 percent of Black respondents said they hadn’t been contacted.

Astonishingly, there are indications this was, at least in some cases, intentional. A New York Times postelection investigation, for instance, reported that higher-ups in the Harris campaign instructed organizers “not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods” in Philadelphia. (Harris higher-ups also directed campaign staff to mark as “no response” potential voters who told them Gaza was an issue, according to NBC News.) The staffers eventually went rogue, creating a secret operation focused on Black and Latino communities, without permission from the campaign.

​​”I’ve heard story after story through my networks of people on the ground whose job it is to turn out voters of color, particularly Black voters, who were not being heard by the campaign. They were getting late money. They were getting no money. The billion dollars went somewhere. But it didn’t go to communities of color,” Allison, whose group neither receives nor solicits support from the Democratic Party, told me.

There were other missteps. The Harris campaign rejected a $10 million proposal by the Congressional Black Caucus, which would’ve included sending members on a bus tour through swing states to engage undecided Black voters, according to Politico. A memo reviewed by the outlet stated that the plan would also have included collaborative work with Latino and Asian American and Pacific Islander groups that are “accustomed to building mulitracial coalitions to win elections.”

It’s impossible to quantify how much these individual decisions harmed Harris. But when you add all of these stories up, you’re left with more and more evidence that Democrats, through neglect or perhaps, more perversely, by design, left potentially gettable voters of color on the table—especially working-class voters. And when you consider this level of negligence toward people the party thought were likely to vote, it’s no wonder that so many nonvoters who might have been activated by the campaign simply dropped out of sight. Politico’s analysis of 2024’s Democratic drop-off found a “split along income and educational lines,” with greater downturns in Black neighborhoods “where residents have the lowest incomes and are least likely to be college-educated.” More specifically, 
in the poorest Black neighborhoods, “where most households make less than $50,000 per year, turnout dropped 7 percent. In higher-income [Black] precincts, the decline was 4 percent. Similar gaps exist among precincts with varying education levels.”

Rocha was a senior adviser to Ruben Gallego, who won a Senate seat in Arizona, a state that Trump won handily. He noted that many of the nine Republican-held House seats that flipped to Democrats are in districts with sizable Latino populations. He said that’s partly due to the fact that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the House Majority PAC “hired almost all Latino teams to work on these races” instead of “overeducated 
white consultants.”

“There’s no people from working-class backgrounds working in campaigns. And there are no Black or brown folks running campaigns at the Senate, governor, or House level, unless you’re intentional,” Rocha said.

On the surface, such basic failures can seem puzzling. But they come from a line of thinking epitomized by the Carvilles of the world: that courting Black and brown people—both voters and nonvoters—is less important than attracting white moderates. As long as Democrats accept this twisted denigration of identity politics—until they genuinely speak to the identities within their multiracial base in a way that resonates—the right will succeed by exploiting identity in the ugliest of ways. The problem isn’t identity politics itself, but who controls the narrative and to what end.

Utilizing identity politics isn’t about reducing people to their race, gender, or sexuality. It’s about recognizing, and speaking to, the ways identity intersects with entrenched economic and social realities. This doesn’t distract from “real issues.” For plenty of marginalized groups, the way institutions and systems respond to their identities is a very real issue; their existence is itself politicized, and thus deserves political attention. Identity politics aren’t a diversion. They’re actually essential to any hope we have of addressing inequality.

Democrats have long tiptoed around this reality, chasing some elusive “middle” instead of directly engaging the communities that make up their base. But history proves that ignoring identity doesn’t erase inequality—it just defers to power. Vague calls to unity mean nothing. But you know what does? Fully supporting policies that acknowledge the specific struggles of marginalized communities and include them in a shared vision for the future.

“We have a lot of people for whom identity is a very important part of what animates our politics. Why are we hedging? Lean into it loud and proud,” Allison told me. “The way we heard white nationalist rhetoric from Trump and MAGA? They leaned heavily into the worst kind of identity politics. But there is a far better, more inclusive, more representative alternative.”

​​We saw this in 2020. Black women organizers, especially in the South, were finally recognized for the years of tireless, thankless groundwork they had laid to ensure a Democratic presidential victory. Georgia not only swung to Biden but also handed Democrats the Senate. The many Black women organizers who had carried this heavy load—like Aimee Allison, LaTosha Brown, and, most prominently, Stacey Abrams—were hailed as heroines in endless, borderline-patronizing retrospectives.

In a prescient 2019 Foreign Affairs article, Abrams defended identity politics as a political tool for reaching marginalized voters in “recognition of their specific policy needs.” Citing her 2018 campaign for governor—which, though unsuccessful and marred by allegations of GOP chicanery, gave Georgia Democrats their highest vote share in 20 years in a statewide race and presaged Biden’s win—Abrams wrote that she “championed reforms to eliminate police shootings of African Americans, protect the LGBTQ community against ersatz religious freedom legislation, expand Medicaid to save rural hospitals, and reaffirm that undocumented immigrants deserve legal protections. I refused to accept the notion that the voters most affected by these policies would invariably support me simply because I was a member of a minority group. (The truth is that when people do not hear their causes authentically addressed by campaigns, they generally just don’t vote at all.)”

Biden won in 2020 by turning out the most demographically diverse voter base in Georgia’s history. As Abrams wrote in a Democracy Docket article, citing figures from the data firm TargetSmart, “Turnout among black voters increased by about 20 percent; Hispanic voter participation soared by 72 percent; Asian-American turnout nearly doubled when compared to the 2016 election; and turnout among voters under the age of 30 also increased sharply, growing from about 14 percent of ballots cast to about 16 percent.”

“The way that I’ve seen activism work and be sustained is that you do it with community. And you do it consistently,” Palak Sheth, a cofounder of Post March Salon and an organizer of the South Asian Women for Harris Zoom call, told me. “And let’s be very clear—the people that are doing the work, when we talk about getting out the vote, are largely women.”

This kind of perennial presence in communities goes beyond elections, intertwining political influence with everyday life.

It would be impossible to achieve 100 percent voter turnout in this country. Even if it were possible, not every voter would support Democrats. Still, there remains a vast pool of untapped potential among so-called nonvoters or “unlikely” voters. Daniel Laurison, a sociologist and the author of Producing Politics, writes that the “prevailing idea among politicos about this group is that they are hopeless targets for campaigns.” Instead, campaigns pour resources into winning over “undecideds” and “independents,” despite studies finding that all that money has little to no impact. (There is a reason political scientists refer to independents as “closeted partisans.”) But nonvoters and infrequent voters were among those mobilized by Abrams and others.

Democrats could seize this opportunity, but it would require a kind of commitment they have rarely shown. Instead of selectively investing in Black and other non-white communities during election seasons, they would need sustained, year-round engagement. That means funding grassroots efforts of women of color who are doing the legwork once undertaken by civic organizations, building relationships beyond voter turnout drives and nonstop fundraising.

The potential is huge—when campaigns lean into identity, it resonates deeply. As Allison noted, an August 2024 Fairleigh Dickinson University study found that when voters were unknowingly “primed to think about race and gender,” they showed increased support for Harris. If Democrats would stop allowing “identity politics” to be wielded as a critique, and instead embraced it in a way that was authentic and persistent, it could be truly transformative.

That would mean genuinely promoting policies that materially improve the lives of Black and other non-white voters, LGBTQ folks, and, yes, working-class white voters, too. It would also mean refusing to retreat from those policies in an effort to win over a voting bloc that will never support Democrats. And, it cannot be stressed enough, it would also mean engaging supporters outside of the campaign cycle.

The right’s ground game feeds into church networks, media ecosystems, and college groups—all spaces that reinforce belonging year-round. Democrats should be doing the same, embedding in the places where supporters live, work, and socialize, ensuring that identity-driven outreach isn’t just cynically performative but woven into the heart of their political movement. This work happens at the grassroots community level. The party should support it in every way, including with its dollars.

Conventional wisdom, even when repeatedly proven ineffective—combined with good old white supremacy—quashes innovation and risk-taking. But campaigns are more than just political operations; their messaging reverberates beyond the ballot box, shaping the broader culture.

A retreat from advocacy for equality and justice, which is exactly what so many Dems are suggesting is the “safe” path right now, doesn’t just weaken the political fight—it signals that those values are negotiable.

The reports about the Harris campaign’s priorities and expenditures suggest that much of what was learned from the success of Abrams and other organizers in 2020 has already been forgotten.

As if on cue, in November 2023, The New York Times reported that organizers in Georgia were warning about a return to form among moneyed Democratic Party forces, with donors pulling back funds. In January 2024, the Times reported that Fair Fight, the Abrams-founded voting rights organization, was “laying off most of its staff and scaling back its efforts in response to mounting debts incurred by court battles.”

That does not bode well. Neither does a March 2025 report from Politico about a group of “moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders” who gathered that February to chart the party’s future—but instead drafted a backward-looking blueprint for its demise. The strategy included proposals to “embrace patriotism,” “be more accepting of masculinity and male voters who feel alienated from the party,” and, at the top of the list, “move away from identity politics.”

Billed as a “Comeback Retreat,” the whole event was hosted by the aggressively centrist Third Way, a think tank bankrolled by corporations, billionaires, and finance titans that spends most of its time attacking progressives. It would have been less time-consuming to draft a memo that simply said “Merge with MAGA,” but I guess everyone enjoys a nice off-site.

“All these [media] firms who dramatically underperformed with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are now being hired to run every Senate and governor’s race around the country. We keep doing the same thing over and over again, hoping that we get different results,” Rocha, the Democratic strategist, told me. “And we will—Donald Trump’s going to tank the stock market. The Consumer [Price] Index is at an all-time high. Unemployment’s going to start going up. Democrats are going to win elections in the midterms. And all of these consultants will think they’ve got it all figured out, when they have no idea.”

Allison, meanwhile, like so many other underfunded and underappreciated political activists and organizers, is tired.

“There’s a point at which Black women like myself and many, many, many, many others who have been critical to recent wins, gains, expanding of the electorate, and winning statewide contests are feeling the need to step back,” Allison said. “The party has not leaned fully into Black women’s leadership. And so that’s, to a lot of us, a signal that the people that still hold the purse strings have no intention of changing. They’d rather lose, make money, and keep this insanity going. It makes no sense to me.”

The civil service is, and has long been, disproportionately Black. Almost 20 percent of federal workers are African American, compared to just 12 percent of private-sector workers and 13 percent of Americans overall. A 2011 study found that Black Americans were 30 percent more likely than any other group of Americans to work in public service. That ratio can be linked to the legacy of racism that effectively barred Black folks from private industry for most of America’s history. In contrast, the civil service offered not just jobs but also careers, with advancement opportunities and a rare path to the middle class.

From 1863 through Reconstruction to the end of the 19th century, hundreds of Black Americans—many of them formerly enslaved—worked for the Postal Service. By 1940, the weekly earnings of Black postal employees put them in the top 5 percent of all African American workers. Today’s Black civil service workers—who are much more likely to be unionized than their private-sector counterparts —earn 25 to 50 percent more than Black Americans in other fields. Even the racial wealth gap, with its roots in enslavement and centuries of discrimination, is narrowed by the civil service. A 2020 Center for American Progress study found that white households in the private sector hold up to $10 for every $1 held by Black households, while in the public sector, that gap shrinks to about $2 to $1.

Far from being a redoubt of DEI-driven incompetence, the civil service is, broadly speaking, what happens when hiring, salaries, and promotions are more tightly tied to skill and expertise than to racial (read white) and gender (read male) favoritism. Antidiscrimination policies, such as the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, were not only instituted but enforced—and reinforced by executive orders across presidential administrations. The effort toward fair(er) hiring dates back to 1883, when the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act established the civil service exam, ending the spoils system that prioritized partisan loyalty over qualifications. This is not to suggest that the civil service is free of racism or bias; nothing in America is. But it’s one of the closest things we have to a functioning, competitive, nonpartisan meritocracy.

And that’s exactly why Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to destroy it. For all their blather about merit, they actually loathe it—particularly when its outcomes even mildly threaten the racial status quo, which their sense of self-worth requires be preserved.

The current Trump-Musk assault on the public sector is both racial and ideological—an extension of the white supremacist authoritarianism driving their self-serving agenda. Dismantling the civil service isn’t just a tactic; it’s a necessity for their efforts.

Criticism of civil servants quite literally dates to ancient times, and history is filled with figures promising a new dawn by attacking old bureaucracies. But in our recent past, the civil service, precisely because of its nonpartisan, meritocratic nature, has been a target of racists and authoritarians in particular.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson—who coined “America First” a century before Trump adopted the slogan— resegregated the federal workforce, which had been racially integrated since Reconstruction. Black workers, who were then more than 10 percent of the federal workforce, found themselves suddenly “herded to themselves as though they were not human beings,” as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote at the time, noting that “one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work…consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years.”

Hundreds more were fired, demoted to menial positions, or transferred to areas planned for closure—with Wilson personally dismissing 15 of the sector’s 17 Black supervisors, who were replaced with white men. (Does any of this sound familiar?) Federal job applicants were newly required to submit photographs, ensuring that Black candidates would be screened out. Segregation in government employment would stand until it was ended by Harry Truman, 35 years later.

Two months after he took power in 1933, Adolf Hitler—perhaps inspired by Wilson’s example, as he was by so much in Jim Crow–era America—instituted the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, better known as the Civil Service Law. He claimed that Germany’s federal workforce was rife with unqualified political appointees and required a “cleansing process” to rid the government of corruption by ideological “enemies of the state”—a key to “restoration of a national professional civil service and for the simplification of administration.” Under the guise of government efficiency, the legislation legalized the purging of Jews, Socialists, Communists, Social Democrats, and other “politically unreliable” workers. They would be replaced with Nazi loyalists, who in turn helped speed the state’s nazification.

Trump and Musk—and DOGE’s racist edgelords and incels—with their civil service purges, have taken up a task that is reminiscent of those predecessors. While they have waged a broad assault on the public sector—fully aware, no doubt, of the significant Black presence in its ranks—they have also made a point to target Black employees directly. This is especially obvious in their highly publicized firings of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” workers, whose work specifically focused on expanding opportunities for Black advancement, and who are the sole civil servants dismissed explicitly for the nature of their work.

When, under the guise of “government efficiency,” Trump claims that the federal workforce needs gutting because it’s overrun with unqualified “radicals, zealots and Marxists” whose diversity efforts are “un-American” and a threat to the country, or Musk calls workers who have dedicated their lives to service “parasites,” the historical parallels are clear.

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But these attacks also feel like part of an insidious effort to halt, or perhaps even undo, the tenuous economic progress of Black Americans by intentionally cutting off a vital route to the middle class. It’s there in the seething attacks on civil servant earnings as somehow undeserved, as when Musk wrote that public employees were “pretending to work while taking money from taxpayers.” On another occasion, the tech billionaire claimed that federal workers who are “used to being paid a lot for nothing” would now “have to get a real job” (like “maker of constantly exploding cars,” perhaps?). JD Vance has characterized public-sector workers as “living off the generosity of the American taxpayer,” as if they aren’t themselves taxpayers. (It’s worth noting that there’s a cap on public-sector pay at $162,672. Elon Musk makes an estimated $23 million an hour.) This isn’t just about cutting jobs and federal debt—it’s about eliminating Black Americans’ pathways to mobility and influence. By dismantling those sectors, this administration isn’t just shrinking the workforce but strategically discarding mechanisms that have helped Black workers attain economic security.

What’s more, the Musk-Trump alliance is exploiting a racist idea that dates back at least 60 years. Republicans’ ideological commitment to “small government” didn’t fully develop until the federal government had taken up programs that disproportionately aided Black and poor folks—school desegregation, civil and voting rights, and anti-poverty efforts. An increasingly reactionary right responded by racializing the idea of government itself. Conservative critics began to “implicitly identify [the federal government] as representing blackness and the interests thought most directly to advance black life,” as David Theo Goldberg writes, and because Black advancement is always treated as the unfair and undeserved yield of federal aid, government “increasingly came to be conceived as a set of institutions supporting the undeserving.” (Segregationist George Wallace, according to one reporter, “gave every hearer a chance to transmute a latent hostility toward the Negro into a hostility toward big government.”) Thus, government was portrayed as one big scam, designed to drain money from tax-paying, hardworking—and therefore, presumptively white—Americans. The federal workforce, in its disproportionate Blackness, could then be cast as lazy, inefficient, and undeserving of its position. Only anti-Blackness of this sort could portray jobs—meaning literal work—as “entitlements” or “handouts.”

This idea was echoed in the late and very-not-great Rush Limbaugh’s claim that public sector workers “don’t produce anything,” but instead “live solely off the input of the private sector.” As well, bitter old codger Pat Buchanan’s complaint during the Obama years about a “racial spoils system in federal hiring.”

Ronald Reagan, a rabid anti-unionist, told an AFL-CIO audience in 1981, “You believe in the work ethic, but subsidize a government that does not.” Soon after, he assembled a DOGE-esque committee—comprising 200 private sector C-suiters, but not a single civil servant—tasked with finding “fraud, waste and abuse” in the federal workforce. One year later, the president declared that the effort had “already found thousands and thousands of people who have been dead so long as 7 years and are still receiving their benefit checks.”

“I’ve heard of cradle to grave security,” he quipped, “but cradle to the pearly gates is something else. Who said you can’t take it with you?”

The numbers, of course, were trash. Most of the committee’s predicted savings were not only hugely exaggerated but legally unworkable. Alas—such are the woes of having people who have no fucking idea what they’re doing try to run the government like a business! (Again, sound familiar?) But the goal was less real reform than a chance to paint the government as corrupt, inefficient, and stuffed with undeserving (read: Black) workers. The point is, Reagan fired some 11,000 air traffic controllers, gutted unions, tripled the national debt, and left a shameful legacy of Black economic devastation and civil rights rollbacks.

Astraight line connects Reagan’s stoking of white racial grievance to the current administration. Now we have Musk, the world’s richest “welfare queen”—having received nearly $40 billion in government handouts that allow him to spend his days retweeting neo-Nazis and “play[ing] video games” on his government office’s “massive TV”—accusing civil servants of gaming the system. There’s Trump, a convicted felon whose golfing has already cost more than $18 million in tax dollars, claiming that most civil servants “don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”

The hypocrisy would be hilarious if the consequences weren’t so severe. Take Musk’s claim that millions of 150-year-olds were still getting Social Security payments—based on a misreading of data by the DOGE team, who are too young to recognize the ancient (in tech terms) programming language used. Or how the math on DOGE’s purported savings is itself fraudulent, as when a cancelled $8 million contract was wrongly touted as $8 billion in savings. Musk and Trump are right that there are people causing inefficiency and ineptitude in government. They just don’t seem to own any mirrors, which would help them better identify exactly who those buffoons are.

But again, none of this really matters. This project is far more about propaganda than policy—at least, policy other than white racial and economic supremacy. Billionaires need the country to despise what Trump labels “diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense” even as they golf, game, and hoard taxpayer-funded riches. The goal of this project isn’t just to make cuts but to further entrench the idea that a workforce that’s too Black is inherently incompetent—and to poison the idea of a diverse public sector altogether. So much white resentment is being stirred up not just to shrink government but to privatize public services, crush unions, and restore a racial order where federal power is wielded against Black communities.

There will be long-term consequences for the country overall, but especially for its Black citizens. Wilson’s segregation policies humiliated and demoralized Black workers—both those newly segregated in their jobs and those locked out of the only stable work for Black folks. (Booker T. Washington, after a 1913 visit to DC, wrote, “I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”) But the damage wasn’t just psychological—it had a measurable economic impact. A 2020 Berkeley business school study concluded that Wilson’s resegregation of Black and white federal workers increased the racial pay gap “by about 7 percentage points between 1913 and 1921—a big effect that increased the existing earnings gap by almost 20 percent.” Those lost wages didn’t just cause individual hardships. They equaled wealth never accumulated, investments never made, and financial security never passed down. By cutting off well-paying jobs, Wilson’s policies helped further deepen the racial wealth divide into a chasm that exists to this day.

Trump administration officials blithely suggested to fired public service employees that they simply “find a job in the private sector,” but for Black public workers, that’s easier said than done. A 2015 study shows that it’s far harder for Black civil servants who lose their jobs to find new jobs in the private sector. “The loss of one good government job could push a whole black family out of middle-class stability into lower-income precarity,” as Bryce Covert notes in a 2019 piece, “permanently shifting economic demographics for generations.”

The damage will extend far beyond individual families. When the fallout comes, as history proves it inevitably always does, America won’t blame Trump and Musk, the architects of this destruction. Instead, perhaps a few decades from now, another effort at correction will be attempted, until it is ultimately attacked as Black racial favoritism, while the truth is quite deliberately hidden from public memory. Our current era of vicious anti-Blackness will be recounted not as one full of deliberate attacks to undermine Black opportunity—but as yet another chapter of African American “failure” to achieve equality. Which, in a way, was the goal the whole time.

In the wake of the catastrophic plane and helicopter collision over the Potomac in January, Donald Trump spoke to the nation—not to offer words of consolation or comfort, but to blame diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs for the tragedy. By turning instantly to racism, Trump skirted some difficult issues about America’s worst commercial aviation disaster in 16 years. Like the fact that just nine days earlier, Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Whitaker had resigned after months of public pressure by Trump’s deputy president, Elon Musk. Or that Trump had issued a federal employee hiring freeze that failed to include an explicit carve-out for air traffic controllers, a profession that’s been understaffed since the pandemic. Or that 24 hours after the crash, FAA employees were sent an e-mail containing buyout offers and the suggestion that they “find a job in the private sector.” Or that Trump had gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee the day after his inauguration.

Instead, Trump chose to eke out a little more mileage from DEI, the right’s current favorite racist bugaboo. In recent years, conservatives have twisted the term into shorthand for the idea that unqualified and unfit Black folks—and, when convenient, women and other gender and racial minorities—are undeservedly elevated to roles for which white men were denied the right of first and last refusal. JD Vance even claimed that DEI “puts stress on the people who are already there,” which, as columnist Ed Kilgore has noted, suggests “that even if a white man were responsible for the crash, it was probably a white man ‘stressed’ by DEI practices.”

DEI was always just an effort to ensure that qualified members of underrepresented groups had access to opportunities historically denied to them. But here’s Trump and Musk, asserting that white men succeed purely on “merit” and presumably considering themselves living proof. The former, a man who looked directly into a solar eclipse; the latter, the heir to an apartheid emerald mine who was allegedly doing so much “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine” that it worried his board members at Tesla and SpaceX, per The Wall Street Journal.

The good news for MAGA is that DEI is dead. Trump signed a slew of executive orders to purge it from both the public and private sector—even making a big show of signing an anti-DEI order aimed at the FAA after the Potomac crash. He also revoked the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity rule that prohibited government contractors from discriminating on the basis of race or gender.

The bad news? The rest of us are about to reap the consequences of unrestrained white mediocrity. Take the new, DEI-less FAA. As of this writing, there have been at least five more plane accidents since the Potomac crash. It’s almost as if DEI was the only thing keeping the planes in the sky.

Or check out Trump appointees like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. His predecessor was Lloyd Austin, a Silver Star awardee with more than four decades of military experience. Hegseth’s résumé includes being ousted as the head of not one but two veterans’ advocacy groups because of “allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct,” according to The New Yorker. During his confirmation hearing, he dodged questions about whether he would follow unlawful directives from Trump to shoot protesters. According to Senator Tammy Duckworth, another Army veteran, Hegseth didn’t know the most “basic, 101 stuff for someone who wants to be secretary of defense.”

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Or what about Edward Coristine, a main character in Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency? Coristine is 19, graduated high school in 2024, goes by “Big Balls” online, and is now a senior adviser at both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. Coristine and five other DOGE employees whose ages top out at 24 were allowed access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, making them privy to millions of Americans’ most sensitive private data. (A judge temporarily blocked this, but the data could still have been scraped.) Did I mention that Coristine was fired from his last internship for leaking company secrets? What could possibly go wrong?

The list goes on. Does anyone really think Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the poster child for “I did my own research,” is going to be a great steward of America’s healthcare agency? Or that Project 2025 coauthor Russell Vought should have discretion over federal spending as head of the Office of Management and Budget? Or that Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, both of whom have been derided by scores of national security officials, can be trusted to run our intelligence agencies or the FBI?

A lot of people who voted to hurt others will learn that when a tech billionaire and a known real estate scammer unite to wreck the government, the resulting harm will extend far beyond the presumed beneficiaries of DEI.

If anti-DEI farmers don’t care about the global death toll resulting from the demise of the US Agency for International Development, which sourced 41 percent of its food aid from US farms, they will care about the roughly $2 billion in lost food sales. If Trump voters don’t care about Vought’s slashing of workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, perhaps they will care about the wanton financial fraud inflicted by mortgage companies and banks. If conspiracists support Trump’s gag orders on the CDC and withdrawal from the World Health Organization, they might care about outbreaks of tuberculosis and a quickly morphing bird flu virus. And if they still haven’t bothered to look up how tariffs work, maybe they’ll get interested if the $800 tax increase predicted by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation hits home.

Or maybe those people will look at the destruction to themselves and the country and still take pride in the fact that trans girls can’t play girls’ sports and airplane pilots keep getting whiter.

Part of me thinks that I have only myself to blame for being even nervously optimistic about Kamala Harris’s chances this election. I know this country—and the racism and misogyny inherent in its founding that stretches into the present—and I am well aware of how, time and again, it has fought back, often violently, against multiracial democracy.

And so I really had no justifiable reason for entertaining the idea that America would elect a woman—much less a Black and South Asian woman—as president. Maybe I loved this country so much I believed it might try to be better. That’s on me, I guess.

I was never naïve enough to think that white women, a nearly consistent Republican bloc since 1952, would vote for Harris. In Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada, Trump-voting women likely contributed to wins for abortion rights initiatives while helping to hand Harris a loss—an on-brand move from a group that has, collectively, stepped over Black women since the days of the suffragettes. Trump also made inroads with numerous groups of color. Are there “legitimate” reasons for that? Well, registered voters who were blind-tested on policy proposals without knowing which candidate backed them overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s stances, including professed Trump supporters. Her policies on crime, foreign policy, and the economy were more popular than Trump’s, while her immigration policies were equally popular yet less polarizing. The minutiae of Harris’s platform was, arguably, unknown to most voters (notably, in the aforementioned blind poll, respondents often falsely attributed her policies to Trump). But even the lowest-information voters knew that Trump had no policy proposals at all, save for mass deportations and tariffs.

Perhaps they didn’t believe Trump would follow through on the horrors he promised, giving the benefit of the doubt to an adjudicated rapist (as the judge overseeing the trial described the verdict) and felon while assuming the worst of a self-made prosecutor and career public servant. Please—convince me that race and gender didn’t shape those assumptions. We know that at least 77 million people voted for Trump, giving him the popular vote. That means those of us who voted for Harris weren’t betrayed by the archaic, undemocratic Electoral College but by our neighbors, our coworkers, and the strangers we pass on the street.

This must have come as great news for the MAGA movement, which has obsessed over what will happen when white Americans cease being a majority of the population. Apparently, all that a lot of us need, in order to vote for our own marginalization, is for a demagogue to promise better prices on eggs.

I realize there are those who cast votes for Trump, explicitly or by third-party default, to protest the Biden administration’s policies on Israel and Gaza. That’s different from voting for Trump to lower the price of groceries. But I fear that he will help bring devastation to Gaza even beyond what we’ve seen. After all, Trump has alluded to his vision for a flattened Gaza to be remade into a waterfront playground for the rich; used “Palestinian” as a slur against his rival; and instituted a Muslim ban in all but name during his first term. Though he made repeated (yet policy-empty) promises to bring peace, he remains a well-known pathological liar. In any case, I don’t think the majority of Trump voters are among those objectors. Instead, I suspect most—including those who belong to historically marginalized groups—believe there’s safety in aligning with power instead of opposing it: that if you join the MAGA cheering section, you might avoid finding yourself in its crosshairs. But that outlook, most Black folks recognize, is foolhardy. Accordingly, there’s one demographic that still isn’t buying Trump’s bullshit: Black women, who voted for Harris by more than 90 percent. That’s not because they are a monolith. It’s just that, with so much on the line, they saw a need to be both principled and pragmatic.

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It’s hard to feel anything less than betrayed and hopeless right now. As always, Black women showed unfailing, unrequited love for this country and an unmatched belief in the politics of solidarity. They didn’t cozy up to the bully, hoping to be spared when he turned on everyone else. They didn’t mistake his gaudy wealth for the promise of shared prosperity. Instead, they cast their votes for the unfinished dream of democracy—for the belief that, given time and struggle, we might work toward something that serves and protects us all. Guess we’re mostly alone in that belief. (Though shout out to Black male voters, nearly 80 percent of whom voted for Harris.)

This wasn’t just an election—it was a reveal. It showed how many of us are willing not only to stand idly by, but to actively vote for harm against others for the possibility of a come-up. In my worst post-election moments, I’ve caught myself, fleetingly, hoping that Trump supporters experience no less than exactly what they voted for. But that’s neither my politics nor who I really am. It’s probably just the tiredness talking.

In recent weeks, Trump supporters have celebrated by indulging in characteristic displays of racist and sexist intimidation and harassment. The white nationalist Nick Fuentes coined the right’s new misogynist taunt: “Your body, my choice.” In at least 30 states, Black students received anonymous texts telling them they had been “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” Fascists shouted “Heil Hitler and Heil Trump” outside a community theater’s staging of The Diary of Anne Frank in rural Michigan; on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, neo-Nazis waved swastikas and yelled racial slurs.

As Trump returns to power, some of these threats will turn into successful incitements to violence. But the most consequential harms will be inflicted by his legislative and policy agenda. Many folks who could always be counted on to fight back are exhausted. They’re focused on taking care of their own. Can’t blame them for adopting that most American ethos of selfishness. Hopefully, it’s temporary.

Ever since Kamala Harris’s candidacy put Democrats in array, there’s been a running joke online that Donald Trump is going to say the N-word—that is, in public—before the presidential election. It’s a kind of gallows humor, sure, but given Trump’s legendary bigotry, his sputtering meltdowns in recent weeks, and the racism and sexism he has already spewed at Harris, it’s a well-founded expectation. Trump has repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private, according to The New York Times, and he has publicly denigrated her as “lazy,” “a bum,” “stupid,” “real garbage,” and regarded as “a play toy” by foreign leaders. (“And I don’t want to say as to why,” he added, unsubtly. “But a lot of people understand it.”) After lying that Harris, the first Black woman and the first South Asian presidential nominee of a major party, was hiding part of her racial identity before deciding to “turn Black,” Trump promoted right-wing conspiracy theories about Harris being ineligible to run for president—a return to the racist birtherism that launched his political career.

It might seem that Trump’s blatant misogyny toward Harris—or, more accurately, misogynoir, a term describing this brand of commingled anti-Black racism and misogyny—would persuade women to cast their ballot for someone, anyone, else. And for many women, it has. After President Biden stepped aside and endorsed Harris as the Democratic nominee, 68 percent of women voters in the five battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin said they were now more motivated to vote, according to an EMILYs List poll. An early August Times/Siena College survey found Harris getting 56 percent of women’s votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to Trump’s 35 percent. A Quinnipiac University poll from mid-August found that 54 percent of Pennsylvania women planned to vote for Harris. And in a national Economist/YouGov poll from right before the Democratic National Convention (DNC), just over half of women polled said they supported Harris.

But headlines calling this the “Boys vs. Girls Election” don’t exactly tell the full story. Because pretty much as a rule, to stick with the parlance of such headlines, white girls—who, as 40 percent of the electorate, make up the largest single bloc—ally with white boys to vote Republican, while Latinx, Asian American, and Black women overwhelmingly vote Democrat, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. Only twice since 1952 have a larger share of white women voted for the Democratic candidate, going for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Bill Clinton in 1996. In 2016, 47 percent of white women voted for Trump instead of the first potential woman president, Hillary Clinton. In 2020, white women turned out in even larger numbers for Trump, choosing the pussy-grabber over Biden, 53 to 46 percent.

Lest it seem that white women’s game might have changed after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade—a reversal Trump has not only taken credit for but bragged about—consider that a larger share of white women have voted for Republicans since then. In the 2018 midterm elections, 49 percent of white women voted for the GOP. That figure increased to 55 percent in the 2022 midterms, just months after the rollback of reproductive rights.

There are schisms here, to be fair: Younger white women and white women with college degrees are far more likely to break for Harris. But white women have consistently voted in favor of preserving the benefits they receive from white supremacy, even if it costs them their already compromised rights as women. That solidarity, recent voter patterns indicate, includes white men committed to MAGA identity politics and the belief that white masculinity can only be salvaged by embracing a rapey machismo steeped in racist misogyny.

Trump is sure to hurl plenty more misogynoir at Harris, and there’s reason to wonder if, as the post-DNC bounce fades and the race tightens, those attacks will turn off more and more white women. After all, Trump has told people close to him that he bears too much animus toward Harris to comply with the pleas of Republicans urging him to let up on the personal attacks. That’s likely not only because he believes the gendered racism he spews at Harris, but because his goal is to get voters to view her through sexist and racist stereotypes. In that messaging, he’s aided by MAGA’s white women—Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene labeling Harris a “DEI hire,” ex-Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway asserting that Harris “does not speak well” and “does not work hard,” and, most delusionally, Megyn Kelly advancing the ridiculous idea that Harris somehow slept her way to the top of a major party’s presidential ticket.

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“Unfortunately, we know what comes next. We know folks are going to do everything they can to distort her truth,” Michelle Obama rightly stated at the DNC. “It’s his same old con—doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions.” It’s precisely this knowledge that contributes to the 71 percent of Black women who believe the 2024 elections are more important than past elections, according to the Highland Project. The same study found some 80 percent of Black women worry that Harris will be subjected to racist attacks. It’s worth remembering that in 2016 pre-election surveys and in exit polls, Black women expressed more fear about a Trump presidency than any other group.

Could Harris make inroads with white women against the candidate who, in 1992, advised that women should be treated “like shit” and, nearly three decades later, was found liable for sexual abuse by an overwhelmingly male jury? As we speed toward the election, maybe Trump’s brand of vitriol will finally cost him with a voting group that should have shunned him long ago.

Two months ago, the all-white school board of Shenandoah County, Virginia, voted to reinstate the names of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Turner Ashby for two of its local schools. Amid a groundswell of anti-racist protests four years ago, more than 60 schools around the country retired their Confederate names.

Shenandoah County’s board did so after a June 2020 resolution “affirming the division’s commitment to an inclusive school environment for all.” But the appetite for such change, in certain communities, seems to have been short-lived. The Shenandoah County board’s restoration of the Confederate names may be the country’s first, but as the Virginia Mercury reports, the move “could be a regressive blueprint for other localities.”

In another sign of the times, a federal appeals court in June ruled that the venture capital firm Fearless Fund, which was founded by women of color, must indefinitely halt a program that provided grants to Black women business owners. According to the panel’s two-judge majority—both Trump appointees—the grant “is substantially likely to violate” Section 1981 of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, a provision originally intended to ensure that recently emancipated Black people had the same rights to make and enforce contracts “as is enjoyed by white citizens.” In 2021, Black women entrepreneurs received less than 1 percent of all venture capital funding. Before 2020, this sort of bootstrapping Black self-reliance was what conservatives pretended to champion.

In assessing the current state of our union, a good place to start is with these two recent events, which perfectly encapsulate the ongoing backlash to the prematurely declared “racial reckoning” after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. For a fleeting moment that year, an unprecedented number of people—estimates at the time ranged from 15 million to 26 million—joined protests against racist policing and racial inequality. A majority of white Americans told pollsters that they finally believed anti-Black racism exists. Even Donald Trump, neither social justice warrior nor decent human being, called Floyd’s killing “very sad and tragic” and claimed, “Justice will be served.” For the first time, national news outlets, corporate leaders, and prominent activists all seemed to believe that finally, things might be different. That lasted roughly two months. And then the backlash, insistent and angry, began.

To be fair, the uprisings led to some minor achievements. There was the removal of more than 200 Confederate tributes, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. A Washington Post investigation found that more than 30 of the country’s 65 biggest law enforcement departments had banned or restricted neck restraints. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd. In a country where even a nine-minute snuff video can’t guarantee a cop will be fired, I suppose that’s something.

But four years later, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act remains stalled in the Senate. Police departments around the country were not defunded—in fact, their budgets have generally increased. And the backlash yielded 807 anti–“critical race theory” measures, 209 anti-protest bills, and attempts to ban thousands of books. At least 14 bills have passed that restrict DEI programs in education. Edward Blum, the tireless campaigner against Black civil rights (who was responsible for the lawsuit against the Black-women-headed Fearless Fund), led the right’s decades-long campaign to overturn race-conscious college admissions to victory. Eventually, right-wing reactionism would rescind abortion rights and fire shots at marriage equality and contraception. Conservatives even created a revisionist history of Floyd’s murder, with right-wing conspiracists declaring that he’d caused his own death.

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Bestseller lists are clogged with books from right-wing propagandists, “heterodox” thinkers, and white supremacists who have surveyed our national landscape and concluded that it is plagued by systemic wokeness. It helps, of course, that bad-faith actors on the right exploit this paranoia, as when the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life reported that companies gave or pledged “$82.9 billion to the [Black Lives Matter] movement and related causes” to support what Claremont calls BLM’s long-term efforts to “undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.” (The groups it defined as BLM’s “related causes” included the ACLU, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, the American Heart Association, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development, to name just a few.) But conservatives have apparently conflated the ubiquitous virtue signaling of brands and corporations with the actual upending of the status quo.

In truth, while companies made lots of squishy pledges to fix racial injustice—estimates vary from $49.5 billion to $300 billion—a follow-up investigation suggests that more than 90 percent of those dollars took the form of loans and other means of profiteering, while just a fraction of the rest promised was ever donated. Meanwhile, companies shed DEI workers in 2022, with Applebee’s, Nike, Wayfair, Intel, AT&T, and Comcast losing the most, according to Revelio Labs. A recent survey found that a lot of corporations are scared to even use the words “diversity” and “inclusion.” Turns out woke capitalism is still just capitalism.

As I noted just months after the 2020 uprisings, the wages of racial progress will always be a white backlash that itself necessitates correction. In the endless loop of American history, no secured right is ever guaranteed—hence the ongoing fight for rights that our grandparents already won. Maybe after the next wholly preventable tragedy, the protests that follow will move the needle just a little further. Before we brace for what comes next.

Early on in the pages of Swift River, the astonishing debut novel from author Essie Chambers, teenage protagonist Diamond Newberry describes a typical scene as she walks down Main Street in the book’s titular New England town:

If I’m on foot, people stare so hard it’s like I’m on fire. Heads in cars flip all the way around. Workers in shop windows stop what they’re doing to look at me blank faced—as if I’m not their daughter’s classmate, their friend’s co-worker, like they haven’t known me my whole life.

“When I forget the spectacle of myself,” Diamond wryly notes, “I look behind me to see who is the me.”

Diamond is 16, biracial, overweight and seemingly in the midst of outgrowing everything familiar—her body, stretch-marked with the weight of racial trauma; her relationship with her loving but grief-numbed mother, Anna; and perhaps most of all, her down-at-the-heels, otherwise all-white hometown, where Diamond’s size, skin, and story mark her as a permanent outsider. It is the summer of 1987, seven years after her African American father abruptly and mysteriously vanished, and with him, Diamond’s only connection to an extended family whose Blackness reflects her own. Like the figure of “Pop,” Blackness is like a specter in Diamond’s life, intangible yet omnipresent in its echoing and mystifying absence.

Swift River is “a story about leaving,” Diamond indicates from the novel’s outset, and her desire to get out is indicated by bedroom walls adorned not with images of pop stars or 1980s teen idols, but aspirational destination photos: the pyramids, California’s redwood coast, Stonehenge. There are also driving lessons, kept secret from her mother, whose unaddressed mourning manifests as codependency with her daughter. Despite, or perhaps because of, all she has endured, Diamond possesses emotional insights beyond her years—and a wit sharpened by the coarseness of fatphobic insults and racial slights. In one scene, she discovers the word “NIGER” has been scrawled next to her family’s listing in a public phonebook. Grabbing a pen from her purse, she quickly, cheekily adds a final bit: “—The third longest river in Africa!”

At its heart, Swift River is about the shedding of secrets—personal, familial, and communal—and concealed truths that Diamond learns have resulted in a transgenerational sense of placelessness, stagnation, and loss. That process begins when Diamond unexpectedly receives a letter from Auntie Lena, a previously unknown paternal relative. Thus begins an exchange that unearths the hidden history of Swift River’s once-thriving Black community, a population driven from the town’s borders by racist Jim Crow violence, upending Diamond’s Black family tree at the roots. In that history, she finds not just a kindredness with bygone ancestors but also the familial legacy that blossomed from so many fractured branches. It’s both recognition and reckoning, helping Diamond to locate herself in her past, make sense of her identity in the present, and map the route that lays out her future.

In Swift River, Chambers illuminates how the sprawling, twisted branches of our family trees traverse both genealogy and time—tracing not just ancestral lineages but history writ large. Diamond’s family narrative is inextricably tangled in a larger history of race and place in America. The expulsion of entire Black communities from towns like Swift River was not uncommon during the Jim Crow era, a period marked by anti-Black pogroms and white vigilante violence. Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida, were all-Black towns leveled by white terror violence, finally acknowledged only in recent years, but there were many more. Equally common were towns like Swift River—all-white “sundown towns” where Black people were banned after dark, and faced potentially lethal consequences if they lingered after sunset. According to James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, some 10,000 sundown towns existed in America well into the 1960s. Chambers says that upon beginning research for Swift River several years ago, she discovered a little-known geographic aspect of sundown towns.

“I thought I understood what sundown towns were. I had read about them. We’ve all seen them represented in movies, we know the role the Green Book played because of sundown towns,” Chambers told me. “But what I didn’t understand, that [Loewen’s] book helped me to realize, is that sundown towns were primarily a northern thing—North meaning Midwest and West as well—and formed part of the response to the Great Migration. That’s when I started to think about what it would mean for the book if Swift River were a former sundown town.”

Author Essie Chambers, it cannot be stated enough, is not Diamond Newberry; likewise, Swift River is not an autobiography. (Authors of color who write characters of color are all too often assumed to be unimaginatively recounting their own lives.) But like Diamond, Chambers is biracial (Black-identifying), and grew up in a small New England town where she, her siblings, and her father were among the few residents of color. There are as many Black American family stories as there are Black American families, and the details differ in critical ways. But for most Americans of color, there is relatability and resonance in stories of navigating inhospitable white spaces, just as there is in the experience of being the only one.

“When you have to maintain your sense of self, when you have to understand your identity in the absence of Black culture—that, too, is a part of the Black American experience,” Chambers told me. “And I’ve now experienced it in so many different contexts. There’s the experience of being born into that situation, and that has its own set of rules. There’s the corporate experience of it, where you are often folding yourself in half.”

Those insults can hollow out and diminish, but just as frequently, they can also accrue and amass within us. Chambers noted to me that Diamond’s weight, in part, results from having to swallow so many racial microaggressions without response. Most painfully, for Diamond, those come from friends, family members and loved ones whose words inadvertently reveal their own unexamined anti-Blackness. In Swift River, Diamond’s white maternal grandmother fails to notice that a tchotchke she brings home is a racist caricature; Diamond’s one friend, while earnestly trying to protect her from a bigoted stranger hurling racist slurs at her, offers up a tokenizing defense, telling the stranger that Diamond is “not like that.” Chambers says her deftness in depicting those quotidian brushes with anti-Black racism were influenced by Claudia Rankine’s book of poetry about encounters with anti-Black racism Citizen: An American Lyric.

“There was something about the way that [Rankine] expressed microaggressions, which was that she showed they so often came from people she loved. I hadn’t been thinking about it that way, and that shifted my thinking,” Chambers told me. “Swift River wouldn’t work if all the white characters were just cartoonishly bad. That wasn’t my experience when I was growing up. Yes, maybe if I went for a walk, someone might scream something ugly out of a window. But that wasn’t the daily experience of being there. It was much more about having to stay in your body somehow—in your skin—as people you cared about—teachers and friends—said hurtful things, maybe without even understanding that they were hurtful, just to be able to survive that environment and feel like a part of it.”

And perhaps to feel, however fleetingly or superficially, safe. Swift River is the only home Diamond has ever had. Known dangers can seem less threatening than unknown dangers. Diamond’s resolve to leave Swift River flags during the moments when she thinks, “These are my people in so many ways,” as Chambers puts it. “At least, until she finds new people.”

In the slowly deteriorating familial home Diamond shares with her Irish American mother, there is a bounty of family heirlooms: “feathery yellowed papers announcing ancient births and deaths and marriages, antique wedding chests, lacy baptism dresses,” allowing Diamond to feel like she’s “frolicking with the ancestors.” Contrast her mother’s tangible family tree roots with the rootlessness of her gardening-obsessed father, who to Diamond seems “as if he sprang from the ground like one of his plants.”

“I’ve always felt the gaps in my family tree,” Chambers, who can trace her mother’s side to an ancient King of Scotland, says. “Especially because I’ve had these riches on my mother’s side, I saw how they helped form her identity and her sense of herself.”

This is a typical African American conundrum, the result of a lack of documentation from the dislocating force of slavery, and a disregard for the humanity and personhood of Black enslaved peoples. But in writing Swift River and as a producer on the highly decorated 2022 film Descendant—director Margaret Brown’s documentary about the last known ship to traffick African people into enslavement in the United States, and the living descendants of those onboard—Chambers learned how legacies are passed in so many other ways.

“Someone asked me recently how I learned storytelling, and I realized a lot of it was from watching my father and his brothers tell family stories on the porch,” Chambers told me. “That was the thing I learned working on Descendant. Oral history is not a lesser history, especially for people who are not part of the dominant culture. It’s essential to tell the stories and pass them down in that way. And so I was part of many of those moments—the passing down of history, without even understanding that was happening. So in that way, I have a very different understanding of history on my dad’s side. But it’s one that is also very rich.”

Last month, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a bill that could result in a nationwide ban on TikTok. The legislation essentially demands that ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, find a non-Chinese buyer for the social media app, and fast—divesting within just six months. The legislation, which has yet to be taken up by the Senate, cruised through the House with support from a majority of both Republicans and Democrats. No matter how you feel about the bill, can we all admit that this demonstration of bipartisanship is proof of our representatives’ willingness to put aside differences and dispense with political theater when it really counts? That’s a hard no, considering the bill itself is exactly the latter, scapegoating China for problems our homegrown apps have plenty of. Still, is it a first step in bringing overdue government regulation to social media? LOL, also definitely no. But at the very least, isn’t it a good proposal for President Biden, who has backed the bill, to get behind in an election year? I’m afraid the answer remains hell to the no.

Let’s start with a defense of TikTok on its own merits. The most notable is the endless stream of incredibly talented and creative users the platform has attracted, a sizable number of whom are young and Black. TikTok served as the vehicle of visibility for Lil Nas X, who then altered the sonic and aesthetic landscape of both hip-hop and country music. It’s where Keith Lee, now one of the Internet’s most visible food critics, leverages his popularity to boost overlooked Black eateries. The Senegalese Italian comedian Khaby Lame has been the site’s most-followed creator since 2022, and just last month, Reesa Teesa’s viral heartbreak confessional series landed her a deal with CAA, the powerful Hollywood talent agency. None of this is to minimize incidents of anti-Blackness (including white TikTokers performing and profiting off dances created by Black influencers) that led underappreciated Black creators to boycott TikTok in 2021, nor the racism alleged in an EEOC complaint against ByteDance filed by two Black former employees. Still, despite an industry-wide pay gap of 35 percent between Black and white social media influencers, TikTok has a number of Black “macroinfluencers”—those with 100,000 followers or more—who bring home six figures or more each year. TikTok is the house that Black creators built—one that adds $24.2 billion to America’s GDP, according to a study released by the financial consultancy Oxford Economics and commissioned by TikTok, and generates $14.7 billion in revenue for US small businesses.

Banning TikTok in the US would destroy a hub for progressive political organizing, activism, and cultural influence. Starbucks workers garnered support for unionization efforts with a series of TikTok videos that went viral. In 2022, a group of TikTok creators signed a pledge not to work with Amazon over its mistreatment of workers. And TikTok has been indispensable in building solidarity with the Palestinian cause among young Americans concerned about Israel’s war on Gaza. Pro-Israel voices have claimed that the TikTok algorithm favors content that is critical of Israel. But The Washington Post and Politico have found that pro-Palestinian sentiment is dominant across social media—including on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube (and an NBC News investigation concluded that whether pro-Palestinian content outpaces pro-Israel content on TikTok comes down to a matter of “how you parse TikTok’s data”). Surveys from Pew and Gallup before October 7, 2023, found that pro-Israel views were already waning among Gen Z and millennials, groups that make up 60 and 26 percent, respectively, of TikTok users. Those numbers suggest that pro-Palestinian content on TikTok reflects—rather than drives—users’ political outlooks. With Gen Z users having long ago fled Facebook, Biden’s campaign has taken pains to meet young voters where they are, launching its own TikTok account in February and attempting to enlist the site’s influencers in its reelection campaign. A TikTok ban would destroy a critical means of outreach to young voters who are already dismayed by the president’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war and climate change policies.

And let’s not forget how comical it is to suggest that the US has any interest in protecting privacy. The Brennan Center has noted that our lawmakers permit a slew of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to engage in social media surveillance. In addition, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows certain intelligence agencies warrantless access to a database of foreign users’ e-mails, phone calls, and texts, which, according to recently declassified documents, the FBI misused 278,000 times in 2020 and early 2021, including tens of thousands of incidents in which it spied on US citizens—a violation of Justice Department rules. A whole industry of firms regularly scrapes your information from every publicly available source and sells it to the government. American intelligence officials admit that the fears that TikTok will share user data with the Chinese government are theoretical. Then there’s the fact that 60 percent of ByteDance’s ownership consists of investors who are, per the Financial Times, “overwhelmingly American.” A Pew survey published in October 2023 found that most Americans—72 percent—believe “there should be more government regulation of what companies can do with their customers’ personal information.” If members of Congress want to fulfill that wish, they could start by cleaning their side of the street.

The Equal Rights Amendment has been withering on the vine for a century, and in that time we’ve seen women’s rights both extended and cruelly retracted. The possibility of comprehensive gun safety reform in this country has become an international punchline. But a TikTok ban—this our Congress can unify behind? It’s a cynical distraction from what truly ails us.

Yehuda Biadga, a 24-year-old Israeli of Ethiopian descent, was suffering from combat-induced PTSD—which had curtailed his military service two years earlier—when he was gunned down by Israeli police in January 2019. In June of that year, Solomon Tekah, an 18-year-old Ethiopian Israeli, was shot dead by an off-duty police officer. A 2020 New York Times article reported on “Israel’s festering police brutality problem,” noting that “lethal force, while rare, is wielded almost exclusively against Arabs and other minorities.” With the killings of Biadga and Tekah, Israeli police snuffed out the lives of two young Black men in just six months.

After both shootings, Ethiopian Jews took to the streets by the thousands, just as they had after two earlier instances of police misconduct against their community. The protesters decried not just Israeli police brutality but the pervasive anti-Blackness that causes the community to be overpoliced yet so underprotected that “their blood [can] be spilled with impunity,” as the Ethiopian Israeli journalist Danny Adeno Abebe writes. Protests also erupted this past August, after the fatal hit-and-run of a 4-year-old Ethiopian boy garnered a slap on the wrist for the driver.

The conversation about Israel’s devastating occupation and war in Palestine should perhaps also urge a discussion about the state of the country’s Black residents. In addition to nearly 170,000 Jewish citizens of Ethiopian heritage, they include some 10,000 Muslim Afro-Bedouins; 3,000 Black Hebrew Israelites, who are not Jewish but claim Israelite ancestry; and nearly 30,000 African nationals seeking refuge from political persecution in Eritrea and the ravages of war in Sudan, most of whom emigrated between 2006 and 2014.

Israel does not have America’s legacy of Black chattel slavery and the one-drop rule. Still, in effect, a nation-state founded primarily to deracialize Ashkenazi European Jews inevitably created an inverse racial order with the Ashkenazim on top. Mizrahim, or Middle Eastern and North African Jews (along with Sephardim, originally used as a term to designate Jews expelled from Spain but now sometimes used interchangeably with Mizrahim as a sort of catchall for non-Ashkenazi Jews), long suffered under discriminatory policies. Then the arrival of Ethiopian Jews beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s and ’90s firmed up a racial hierarchy in which “the Ethiopian community has the lowest status of Israel’s [multiracial] Jewish communities,” the Ethiopian Israeli scholar, activist, and writer Efrat Yerday, who is also chair of the Association for Ethiopian Jews, told me. The country’s estimated 200,000 people of African descent differ vastly in their ethnic, cultural, and religious identities and are not politically aligned. (In a state “where racism runs rampant and is statistically increasing,” the Israel-based journalist David Sheen has written, “any alliance with non-Jews is guaranteed to make the Ethiopian movement lose popularity amongst religious-nationalist Jewish Israelis.”)

And even that status was hard-won. Ethiopian Jews, despite practicing a 2,000-year-old, pre-rabbinic form of Judaism, were not counted among diaspora Jewry with a “right of return” until 1973. (Even then, an Israeli government report warned they were “completely foreign to the spirit of Israel.”) The difference in treatment, Yerday writes, illustrates “the State of Israel’s desire to secure a Jewish majority and at the same time [its prioritization of] the European component of the immigrant identity over the Jewish component.” Ethiopian Jews continue to need special permission from the Israeli government before migrating—unlike Jews making aliyah from the US or elsewhere—and must undergo a conversion to the dominant rabbinical Judaism to attain citizenship. And there have been scandals, such as in 1996, when it emerged that Magen David Adom, Israel’s national blood bank, had been dumping donations from Ethiopian Jews due to fears over HIV/AIDS. In 2012, reports that Ethiopian women were forced to take a long-acting birth control injection—though denied by the government—sparked fears of attempted genocide.

A 2018 study from the Israel-based research nonprofit Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute found that the average income of Ethiopian Israelis is 29 percent lower than the general population’s. Less than 4,000 Israeli students of Ethiopian descent are currently attending college, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

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The plight of Eritrean and Sudanese African refugees, who make up more than 90 percent of Israel’s asylum seekers, is even starker. The government’s refusal to recognize them as refugees creates a legal limbo, enabling Israel to avoid openly flouting the prohibition under international law of deporting refugees to life-threatening homelands. (Just 31 Eritreans and Sudanese have been granted asylum as of this writing.) In 2012, Israeli immigration law was amended to define all incoming non-Jewish African migrants as “infiltrators,” and the government initiated a campaign to drive them out. Anti-migrant rallies have featured Miri Regev, of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, calling Sudanese migrants a “cancer,” and right-wing mouthpiece turned elected parliament member May Golan declaring that she was “proud to be a racist.”

Avera Mengistu is an Ethiopian Israeli soldier who has been held captive in Gaza since 2014. Last January, Moshe Tal, a former IDF official, acknowledged on a national radio broadcast that the return of “other citizens from other backgrounds and socio-economic statuses” would probably generate “a bit greater interest.” In November, as the Israeli bombardment escalated, Michal Worke, an Ethiopian Israeli artist, told NPR: “Avera’s story is my story, and it’s the story of the entire Ethiopian community. Nine years he’s been a hostage in Gaza, and no one cares.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe how intertwined anti-­Blackness and misogyny consign Black women to the social, political, and economic margins, often erasing their existence altogether. When Crenshaw was marching against deadly anti-Black policing more than two decades later, in 2014—as she recounts in her most recent book, #SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence—she witnessed how racial patriarchy renders even Black women’s deaths invisible. Along with the chanted names of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, Crenshaw shouted the lesser-known names of Black women killed by police or in police custody—women like Tanisha Anderson, Shelly Frey, and Ahjah Dixon. “Several people were enraged,” Crenshaw told me. “There was the sense that we were being interlopers.”

In response, Crenshaw launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2014, seeking to honor and recognize Black women, girls, and femmes whose lives have been stolen by racist policing and to protest their state-backed killings. The need for the campaign, which includes the #SayHerName Mothers Network of surviving sisters, mothers, and other loved ones, reflects the failure of the anti-racist and feminist movements “to grasp that Black women, like Black men, are subjects of anti-Black state violence,” Crenshaw writes. #SayHerName documents how even at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, which rightly included as speakers the mothers of sons killed by anti-Black police violence, the murders of Black women all too often remained an afterthought.

“They ignored our daughters and they pushed forward the names of the men. And this is in the middle of a Women’s March,” Gina Best, whose daughter India Kager was killed by police, said in a 2020 interview on Crenshaw’s podcast, Intersectionality Matters. “We didn’t even get an invitation.”

“We had been fighting all day to get to that stage to hear our babies’ names being uplifted and remembered in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” Vicky Coles-McAdory, the aunt of India Beatty, who was killed in 2016 by Virginia police, recalls in #SayHerName. “So that left us to feel like our babies were sacrificed.”

#SayHerName, written in partnership with the African American Policy Forum, the social justice think tank that Crenshaw cofounded and leads, offers nine intimate portraits of Black women, girls, and femmes who were killed by police, each painted through the words of their loved ones. These surviving narrators, all members of the #SayHerName Mothers Network, have borne what Crenshaw calls “the loss of the loss”—an immense grief compounded by the lack of attention given to cases in which Black women lose their lives because of police violence. Best’s daughter, a violinist and visual artist, was unarmed when Virginia Beach police put her and her 4-month-old son in the line of fire to get their intended suspect, leaving her dead as collateral damage and her son deaf in one ear. “It feels almost as if [Black men’s and boys’] murders were more important, because…their names are spoken,” Best says. “I have to be sensitive to the other mothers, again cognizant of how they feel, because that was their son. But that was my daughter, [and] I want them to say her name too.”

Crenshaw’s book makes clear that anti-Blackness carries the same risk of violence and death for Black women as it does for their brothers, fathers, and sons. Motherhood and womanhood, which offer white women protection, provide no sanctuary in gender for Black women; the damsel-in-­distress trope is racially nontransferable. Nor does age protect the victims—police killed 93-year-old Pearlie Golden and 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. The families that Crenshaw interviews tell us who these Black women, girls, and femmes truly were, upending the dehumanizing stereotypes used to justify their murders and, as Crenshaw writes, “relegate to obscurity the lives of Black women killed by the state.” Women such as Korryn Gaines, whose fatal shooting by police—as she made a sandwich for her 5-year-old son—was such a miscarriage of justice that a jury awarded the family $38 million in a civil suit. “I’ve heard all kinds of evil things, mean things, said about my daughter,” Rhanda Dormeus, Gaines’s mother, states in #SayHerName. “It’s a nightmare that we will never wake up from. We have grandchildren that won’t know how wonderful she was, and family that will forever be broken because of someone else’s split-second decision. It’s life-­altering, shattering. I know all the moms feel like this…. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going sometimes, and I just gotta get a grip, because I have responsibilities.”

In between the family testimonies, Crenshaw offers historical and cultural analyses of police and societal violence against Black women. She notes that Black women make up one-third of all unarmed women killed by law enforcement, despite being just 10 percent of women in the US. What’s more, Black women are the only race-gender group in which the majority of its members killed by police are unarmed.

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Including stories of state violence against Black women, girls, and femmes, Crenshaw writes, is the only way to “confront, contest, and dismantle the interlocking systems of state power that continue to routinize and normalize these killings.” In other words, feminist and anti-racism organizing and advocacy requires intersectionality, a term that right-wingers have assailed. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has sought to ban the term from library stacks and AP curricula. The latter effort has apparently led the College Board to remove nearly every mention of the word from its AP African American studies framework.

Crenshaw argues that it’s difficult to imagine solutions to the systemic problems she outlines without the concept of intersectionality. “The College Board [commented] that it’s no longer a useful concept because it’s been so ‘politicized,’” Crenshaw told me. “When the right wing goes after intersectionality, we understand it’s because the concept illuminates aspects of social inequality that demand remediation—changes they don’t think should be taken up. It’s certainly still useful to those of us who care deeply about understanding what happens to those who fall in the margins. And #SayHerName shows intersectionality as people experience it.”

Eight days after Israel declared war on Hamas and began its bombardment of Gaza, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was asked if the United States could afford to support wars in both Israel and Ukraine. Without missing a beat, she answered the question in the affirmative.

“America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel’s military needs and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia,” Yellen told Britain’s Sky News. “We do need to come up with funds, both for Israel and for Ukraine. This is a priority.”

One day earlier, a similar query had been posed to President Biden, who, seemingly incredulous that the question was even being raised, gave an even more confidently grandiose response.

“We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in history. Not in the world, in the history of the world,” the president told 60 Minutes. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense. And if we don’t, who does?”

Both Biden and Yellen’s responses are noteworthy not because they are unexpected but for their tiresome predictability. Money is never an object when it comes to the price tag for bloody war, unlike the cost of Americans’ health and well-being, which always strikes our government officials with near-debilitating sticker shock. The assumption that the people they ostensibly represent will believe these wild vacillations— unshakable financial confidence one minute, nail-biting economic insecurity the next—assumes a sort of national forgetfulness. So allow me to help us all remember. A good starting point is then-candidate Biden’s justifying his hesitancy in supporting a universal healthcare bill in 2020:

“My opposition [to Medicare for All] relates to whether or not, a, it’s doable, and two, what the cost is and what the consequences for the rest of the budget are,” Biden told MSNBC at the time. “How are you going to find $35 trillion over the next 10 years without having profound impacts on everything from taxes for working- and middle-class people, as well as the rest of the budget?”

Not to get hung up on technicalities, but weren’t we also, to use the president’s own words, the “most powerful nation in history” in 2020? How is it that, even among the world’s richest countries, we are uniquely powerful in our ability to underwrite multiple wars but also uniquely powerless in our inability to give every citizen access to decent healthcare? If the problem with single-payer healthcare is that it might overtax the working and middle classes, why is the extraction of war funds from working- and middle-class folks no bigs? Don’t forget that 67 percent of all Americans’ bankruptcies are due to medical debt. And as of 2023, studies find that 53 percent don’t maintain an emergency savings fund, nearly 40 percent do not have $400 cash on hand for unforeseen costs, and more than 25 million are uninsured. It seems Biden, who chafes at the mere suggestion that our superpowers might be insufficient to sustain two wars, would be more indignant that caring for people is our kryptonite.

Since 9/11, the United States has spent more than $8 trillion, with a T, on “wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere,” according to Brown University’s Watson Institute, though the organization notes that the sum “omits many other expenses,” some of which are “limited by secrecy, faulty accounting and the deferral of current costs.”

We’ve sent $75 billion in aid to Ukraine for its defense against Russia, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Since World War II, per the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, the United States has given Israel $318 billion “in aid of all types, including military.” For each of the last 15 years or so, America has sent Israel between $3 and $4 billion. (Unlike the United States, Israel has universal healthcare, which, Haaretz reports, is just one of the perks that draw Americans to relocate there.) Since the war began just a month ago, about $300 million in Israeli government bonds have been purchased by 14 American states. The list includes Florida, which has bought up the most bonds, Georgia, and Texas, all states that have stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid here at home.

I do not mean to myopically focus on how money poured into war leaves us without healthcare. Let me also mention that we have been left without a Green New Deal, although the country has endured a record-setting $23 billion’s worth of climate disasters in 2023 alone, and Bloomberg finds that we’re bleeding $500 billion a year in climate-event costs. The pandemic Child Tax Credit expansion, allowed to lapse by Congress at the end of 2021—ostensibly to save the $109.5 billion annual cost—has resulted in child poverty rates doubling. If congressional Republicans have their way, there will be significant cuts to Social Security, aid to the disabled, Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps, WIC (which ensures that low-income moms, infants and kids have fruits and vegetables), childcare and Head Start early learning programs. The GOP wants to outright ban free school lunches, and to obstruct student loan debt relief. The party has even proposed slashing the budget for the CDC, which seems nothing short of sinister on the heels of a worldwide pandemic.

The president has requested $106 billion for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and border police—in addition to the already proposed $886 billion defense budget. Republicans, pretending they care about a national deficit they have driven up over two decades with tax cuts for the rich, are performatively haggling over numbers, submitting bills that would hamper IRS efforts to stop rich tax cheats from increasing the deficit further. The number of food-insecure households rose to 17 million in 2022, up from 13.5 million just one year prior, according to the USDA. There was an 11 percent increase in unhoused people between 2022 and this year, The Wall Street Journal reports, while a 2021 University of Chicago study found that 53 percent of people living in homeless shelters and over 40 percent who have no shelter at all are employed. But when the dust settles, I can assure you we will wind up with a bipartisan budget that prioritizes war, the military, and law enforcement. Sorry, poor folks. What are we—made of money?

Biden has called America’s war funding of Ukraine and Israel “a smart investment,” while Yellen says finding the money for both is “a priority.” Not so with keeping folks fed, housed, and secure. It never ceases to amaze what America finds a way to do when there is a will. There’s nothing new about the sentiment, I realize. But neither is the government’s miserliness when faced with helping people.

During the racial justice uprisings of 2020, multiple murals of George Floyd appeared in Gaza and the West Bank. Meanwhile, in the US, Palestinian flags became a common sight at Black Lives Matter protests, and in 2021, the official BLM organization issued a statement declaring “solidarity with Palestinians” and opposition to “settler colonialism in all forms.” That year, The Washington Post wrote that BLM’s influence had “changed the US debate on the Mideast,” increasing support for Palestinians among self-identified Democrats. At its zenith earlier this year, that support, according to polls, eclipsed sympathy for Israel for the first time in more than two decades. But the bloodshed in the Israel-Gaza war has fractured the left and the Democratic Party—and revealed deep fissures within the Black community.

Historically, radical Black activists have found kinship with the Palestinian cause. During his third trip to the Middle East in 1964, Malcolm X advocated for “the right of the Arab refugees to return to their Palestine homeland.” Two months later, he wrote in the English-language Egyptian Gazette, “There are over 100 million of our people in the western hemisphere who are of African origin. Just because our forefathers once lived here in Africa, would this give Afro-Americans the right to come back here to the mother continent to drive the rightful citizens…from their cities, confiscate all their property for ourselves, and set up a ‘new Afro-American nation’—as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?” But Malcolm X was an outlier. Black civil rights figures overwhelmingly supported the Zionist cause even prior to the Holocaust, at a time when many leftist American Jews opposed the idea. As early as 1916, the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey spoke in terms of a Black Zionism. (“When the Jew said, ‘We shall have Palestine!,’” Garvey said, “the same sentiment came to us when we said, ‘We shall have Africa!’”) NAACP cofounder W.E.B. Du Bois wrote after the Holocaust that a “theoretical demand for a [homeland] now became a necessity for more than a million displaced and homeless Jews.” The same year, A. Philip Randolph advised Black Americans to “fight for the right of the Jews to set up a commonwealth in Palestine.” And though United Nations mediator Ralph Bunche privately registered skepticism about the permanence of the 1949 Middle East armistice he had brokered—which resulted in his becoming the first Black Nobel Peace Prize winner—he betrayed no lack of faith in the project publicly.

The 1967 Six-Day War saw Israel seize the West Bank and Gaza Strip, just as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was becoming more internationalist. A 1967 SNCC newsletter included the article “The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge,” which included a series of “Did you know?” questions about the founding and history of Israel. The article drew charges of anti-Semitism from civil rights leaders, including Randolph and Bayard Rustin, as well as from Jewish organizations, and survives as documentary evidence of the ideological tensions separating the civil rights guard and emerging Black Power transnationalism. In a follow-up message in August 1967, SNCC wrote, “We recognize Hitler’s massacre of the Jews as one of the worst crimes against humanity,” adding: “By the same token, we do not see how the Jewish refugees and survivors could ever use this tragedy as an excuse to imitate their Nazi oppressors—to take over Palestine, to commit some of the same atrocities against the native Arab inhabitants, and to completely dispossess the Arabs of their homes, land and livelihood.” In 1970, the Black Panther Party released a statement declaring, “We support the Palestinians’ just struggle for liberation one hundred percent.”

Alliances between Black Americans and Palestinians seemingly dissipated in the late 1970s and ’80s amid an overall downturn in Black liberation activism, driven in part by COINTELPRO and the FBI’s subsequently declassified campaign to discredit the movement; the arrests and assassinations of movement leaders; and the mainstream media’s scaremongering narratives. But injustice—with its perennial partner, tragedy—would reestablish the relationship in 2013. The acquittal of George Zimmerman, the murderer of Trayvon Martin, sparked the movement that would become Black Lives Matter. In July 2013, marchers at a protest in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem donned hoodies in recognition of Martin and those protesting his killer’s impunity. The police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and the explosion of protests that followed, occurred during weeks of bombing in Gaza that, the prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote, caused a “massive civilian toll among Palestinians.” The Palestinian American activist Bassem Masri, who often live-streamed protests, wrote, “The timing of the two events woke up a lot of people,” as did the similar postmortem demonization of Palestinians and Black Americans who had been killed as a result of state-backed violence. “People naturally saw the connections.… When I showed up to protest in Ferguson and introduced myself as a Palestinian, people there immediately met me with respect,” Masri wrote in a 2014 essay titled “In Ferguson, I Am Reminded of Palestine”: “Our common goal is to live in peace and to not fear for our children’s lives when they are walking down the street.” Some Palestinian activists used social media to offer advice on how to deal with tear gas, noting that the same companies manufactured the canisters used against Palestinian and Ferguson protesters. BLM activists observed that the police chief of St. Louis County, Tim Fitch, had been among the thousands of FBI, CIA, ICE, and local American police who were sent to Israel to learn “counterterrorism” tactics after 9/11, a practice detailed in a 2018 joint investigative report from Jewish Voice for Peace and Researching the American-Israeli Alliance.

Activists, organizers, and students in the US and Palestine deepened their connections. During the 2014 Right to Education Campaign, 10 students from Palestine’s Birzeit University traveled to St. Louis and Ferguson to meet with local activists and organizers. In January 2015, a coalition of journalists, artists, and organizers representing Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100, and other groups, organized by Dream Defenders, spent 10 days in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. “We thought the connections between the African American leadership of the movement in the US and those on the ground in Palestine needed to be reestablished and fortified,” Ahmad Abuznaid, a cofounder of Dream Defenders, told Ebony. “As a Palestinian who has learned a great deal about struggle, movement, militancy, and liberation from African Americans in the US, I dreamed of the day where I could bring that power back to my people in Palestine.” That cross-cultural meet-up yielded the organization Black for Palestine, which issued the Black Solidarity Statement With Palestine, signed by more than 1,000 Black scholars, activists, students, and artists. The collective also released the video When I See Them, I See Us, which the Palestinian American human rights attorney and producer Noura Erakat said “highlight[s] [the] similarities, but not sameness, of Black and Palestinian life.” In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives, representing more than 50 Black organizations, published a platform that included a statement identifying America’s support for Israel as “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people…. Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.”

In the immediate aftermath of the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, establishment-oriented Black civil rights groups and political actors—the Congressional Black Caucus, the African American Mayors Association, and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries—all issued statements affirming solidarity with Israel and condemning Hamas’s attacks. The Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, the National Urban League, and the NAACP issued a joint statement emphasizing humanity’s “commitments to one another” and extending prayers to all “innocent civilians’ families.” In contrast, many BLM chapters across the country reaffirmed solidarity with Palestinians, often garnering significant backlash. Some BLM chapters went too far. BLM Chicago, for instance, posted an image on Twitter depicting paragliders—used by Hamas in the attacks—and stating “I Stand With Palestine.” The group later removed the post and wrote that they “aren’t proud of it.” That message was, without question, unacceptable and did nothing to help the Palestinian cause. Still, I’m begging everyone not to fall for right-wing activist Christopher Rufo’s stated intention to “create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind.” The recent history of BLM’s solidarity with Palestine—and the longer history of Black radicals’ embrace of that cause—is rooted not in rhetoric, but in organizing, mutual aid, and the radical idea that everybody—everybody—has got to be free.

There are six non-white candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination, making the 2024 primary field the GOP’s most diverse yet. In an alternate universe, the moment might be heralded as a historic step toward repairing America’s broken promise of multiracial democracy and equality. But in our Trumpian reality, where the Grand Old Party is best understood as a reactionary white grievance movement—eh, not so much. Non-white Republican candidates know that, to win, they need the support of Donald Trump’s 2020 voters. The same voters who, a July Yahoo News/YouGov poll found, are twice as likely to see racism against whites as a bigger problem than anti-Black racism. Eighty-four percent, a previous study showed, worry that “discrimination against whites” will increase in the coming years. The candidates have probably seen the research from Tufts University, recently cited in The Atlantic, showing that “the single best predictor of who voted for Trump was the belief that systemic racism no longer exists in the U.S.” And they’re surely aware of the report from researchers at the University of Chicago concluding that conservatives’ disbelief in structural inequalities, their feeling that “people get what they deserve,” means that they are invested in the idea of “individual effort as the solution for the challenges facing many racial and ethnic groups.” The outcome is obvious: Non-white Republican presidential candidates are using white supremacy and anti-Blackness as an electoral strategy.

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s currently polling third in the field, has written that Black Americans are “the gold standard of constitutional victimhood”; has said that racism doesn’t crack the Top 50 list of America’s problems; and has called the Juneteenth holiday “useless” and “made-up,” despite the fact that Black folks have been celebrating the day marking slavery’s end since 1866. He has also called the destruction of affirmative action the “tip of the spear of [his] policy agenda,” suggesting that he believes the greatest threat to this country is Black students attending the colleges he has baselessly decided they don’t deserve to get into. Before the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action was unconstitutional, Ramaswamy claimed that “anti-Black racism [was] on the rise” because of it. He reiterated that view on CNN one day after a racist gunman mowed down three Black folks in Jacksonville, Fla., in August, while also defending his comparison of Representative Ayanna Pressley with the “grand wizards of the modern KKK.”

Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, polling just behind Ramaswamy, responded to the Jacksonville killings by briefly recalling the 2015 white supremacist massacre in her home state of South Carolina—though she skirted any mention of her decision to take down the Confederate flag, which, The Washington Post pointed out, Haley hasn’t drawn attention to since launching her campaign. She declared that “there’s no place for hate in America,” but she tempered that message by warning her audience not to “fall into the narrative that this is a racist country”—an echo of her campaign announcement video, in which she reassured voters that “nothing could be further from the truth” than the idea of pervasive American racism. Haley also seems more focused on attacking Vice President Kamala Harris—whom she has repeatedly referred to as “President Harris”—than President Biden. Perhaps she senses that it’s harder to stoke anger against an old white guy in the White House than a multiracial Black woman.

South Carolina’s Tim Scott, who is polling in the primary around 2 percent, must have seen that University of Chicago report (not least because, as the only US senator who is Black and also a Republican, he gets a mention in it) and its finding that “racially resentful [white] voters prefer to vote for a black candidate over a white competitor” when said Black candidate offers “a message that fits the racially resentful voter’s worldview.” (That “worldview,” as previous research noted in the study shows, includes an unwillingness to “recognize the unique historical plight of African Americans.”) The study’s authors write that those voters are highly receptive to politicking that negates the idea of institutional racism, “especially when those messages come from black candidates.”

Accordingly, on the campaign trail, Scott repeats the (possibly embellished) story of how his family, from his grandfather’s generation to his own, went from picking “cotton to Congress.” Though he has previously acknowledged being pulled over by cops, detained by Capitol Police, followed by store clerks, and targeted via voicemail with racist death threats, he has more recently maintained the GOP mantra that “America is not a racist country.” (Contrast that with the Scott who told Vice in 2017, “Racism is real. It is alive. It is here.”) These days, if he cites his personal experiences with racism at all, Scott is most likely to suggest that it flows from leftists and Black Democrats who question his allegiance to a racially regressive party.

Notably, an Associated Press survey of “dozens of Iowa Republicans interviewed over the past several months” found that the message of bootstrapping individualism “resonates more coming from Scott than from others.” One white supporter told the AP: “I don’t think I’m prejudiced, but I know a lot of people who are, and I don’t think the color of your skin should matter. Tim Scott says you can rise above the perception that you’re stuck, and you can make it, and I like that a lot.” A 77-year-old retired white woman said, “It definitely means more from him. He is saying, ‘This is me. I’m Black. But I succeeded because I worked hard, and those opportunities remain in America.’”

Even as the Republican candidates take the fairy tale of a post-racial America on the campaign trail with them, a Washington Post–Ipsos poll released in June found that just over half of Black Americans believe that racism will only get worse in their lifetimes. Almost 60 percent report being “very or somewhat worried they or someone they love will be attacked because they are Black.” It’s all just more proof that for 2024’s most ambitious non-white Republicans, Black folks aren’t their target demographic anyway.

Lately, Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has significantly curtailed his use of the term “woke.” Whereas just a few months ago he said the word seven times in 26 seconds in a speech, he avoided it completely during the first primary debate.

DeSantis’s rhetorical retreat is likely due to recent polling showing that his once-declared “war on woke” is yielding diminishing electoral returns. But anyone hoping that this political shift would be accompanied by a policy shift will be disappointed. His authoritarian, white supremacist attacks on Florida’s public education system have continued apace.

DeSantis has enacted multiple “educational gag orders” that criminalize classroom discussions of race, gender identity, and ugly historical realities that might make white students “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.” Florida teachers, whose salaries rank 48th in the country, have seen their jobs become only more thankless. The end result is an exodus of teachers, and what Florida Education Association (FEA) head Andrew Spar has called “one of the worst teacher and staff shortages” in the state’s history. “The policies, vilification, and low pay are certainly all factors,” Spar told me. “I was shocked, going around the state and talking to teachers as we were starting the school year, hearing over and over again, ‘I’m getting out of education in general because, as much as I love working with and teaching kids, I’m really not able to do that. I just want to be able to teach.’”

Spar’s anecdotal experiences are borne out by statistics. In January 2019, when DeSantis was sworn into his first term as governor, there were 2,217 teacher vacancies in the state’s K-12 public schools. As he entered his second term in January 2023, that number had ballooned to 5,294, according to the FEA. This August, the FEA found the number of unfilled positions neared a staggering 7,000.

DeSantis’s education policies not only ban free speech in the classroom but encourage increased curriculum surveillance through what PEN America calls “educational intimidation bills” that empower DeSantis’s conservative allies to monitor and punish educators who step out of line. For example, HB 1467, signed by DeSantis in 2022, requires that every public elementary school’s website provide “a list of all materials maintained in the school library” and invites not just parents, but any “resident of the county,” to file an objection. While the law neglects to mention specific penalties, it makes passing reference to Florida statute 847.012, a preexisting law classifying the dissemination of sexually obscene material to minors as a felony. The confusion has led at least one county to err on the side of caution by restricting in-class discussions of Shakespeare—Shakespeare!—to excerpts that steer clear of racy sexual content.

“Teachers don’t know what to say, or what not to say, and so they’re opting to not say anything, not only because of fear of getting fired but of potentially getting arrested and being charged if they happen to violate this law,” Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, told me.

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In the realm of higher education, DeSantis’s takeover of the state university system’s honors college, New College, has seen him install six political cronies to its board of trustees, among them right-wing provocateur Christopher Rufo. The partisan board fired the college’s president, appointed a DeSantis ally in her place, voted to end the gender studies program, signaled the sunsetting of tenure, and aggressively recruited male students to undo what right-wingers call the “feminization” of American colleges. The board takeover also drove 40 percent of the faculty to quit and a slew of classes to be canceled just days before the school year started.

“DeSantis isn’t choosing people who are qualified to be presidents of universities and colleges—he’s putting in people for the sole purpose of changing the philosophies of the teaching,” Fried told me. “We have multiple high-ranking leadership positions open at the University of Florida, and I don’t know who they’re going to fill them with—because if you care about academia, you’re not coming to the University of Florida right now.”

It’s not just educators who are recoiling. This March, an Intelligent.com survey found that 91 per­cent of college-bound Florida high school students “disagree with DeSantis’s policies,” along with 79 per­cent of currently enrolled college students in the state. Nearly 13 percent of graduating high school seniors cited DeSantis’s “education policies” as the reason they won’t attend a Florida state college. Among those who plan to enroll in a Florida state school, 78 percent are concerned that DeSantis’s “policies will have a negative impact on their education.” And one out of 20 state college students said they “plan to transfer because of DeSantis’ education policies.” As of early August, at least two dozen of New College’s 700 students had taken up Massachusetts-based Hampshire College on its offer to accept any New College defectors at the same tuition.

DeSantis has shrugged off any suggestions of an impending educational brain drain. Of the New College faculty departures, he said, “If you’re a professor in, like, you know, Marxist studies, that’s not a loss for Florida.” After signing a bill that defunded diversity programs in the state’s colleges, he suggested that students who disagree should “go to Berkeley.” And at the first Republican primary debate, the self-proclaimed “Education Governor” suggested he’d take the war on public schools national, stating, “We need education in this country, not indoctrination in this country.”

“Ron DeSantis is undermining all the work that was done in these last 20 years to make Florida a destination for education,” Fried told me. “He’ll be gone by the time that there’s real repercussions to his actions. But they will have a ripple impact on higher education in Florida for generations to come.”

In the late 1990s, after making a “small fortune” as a stockbroker, Edward Blum quit his day job to focus on finding plaintiffs for lawsuits that would seek to overturn racial equality legislation. Nearly 30 years into his second career as a self-described “legal entrepreneur,” Blum has fulfilled another of his most cherished goals: having the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturn nearly 50 years of legal precedent to end affirmative action in college admissions—which the justices did in June with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.

The ruling is Blum’s most consequential win at the court since 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which sanctioned voter suppression by effectively nullifying the Voting Rights Act. It also serves as proof of Blum’s commitment to weaponizing the courts to roll back hard-fought civil rights gains. His first attempt to have the Supreme Court dismantle affirmative action was Fisher v. University of Texas, decided in 2016, in which Blum’s plaintiff was a white woman named Abigail Fisher. That attempt failed. Perhaps recognizing that such an obviously undeserving plaintiff made for a poor litigant—not only did Fisher lack the grades and test scores for admission to UT Austin, but nearly 170 Black and Hispanic students with as good or better metrics were also rejected—Blum changed legal strategy. This time around, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a legal nonprofit founded by Blum for the express purpose of outlawing affirmative action in college admissions, sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, claiming that their race-conscious admissions favored unqualified Black and Hispanic students, while “intentionally discriminating” against deserving Asian American applicants.

In a 2015 speech that’s still on YouTube, Blum, who is white, said, “I needed Asian plaintiffs.” That disclosure drove suspicions that Blum has used Asian Americans to advance his white-supremacist agenda. Wang Qianxun, who just completed her sophomore year at Harvard, where she is copresident of the school’s Asian American Association, cites the video as evidence that Blum’s anti-affirmative-action lawsuit “isn’t a cause that originated within Asian American communities.”

Blum’s skeptics also include Margaret Chin, who as a Harvard undergraduate in 1983 cowrote “Admissions Impossible”—a paper cited by Blum in his Harvard complaint—demanding that colleges increase Asian American student admissions. Chin told me that Blum’s use of her paper “surprised” her because of “its very specifically pro-race-conscious” conclusion, which, she says, Blum grossly misrepresented. “I went to Harvard because of a minority recruiter. It’s because they saw my race—because they went to [New York City’s] Chinatown—that I happened to meet the person who convinced me to think about going to Harvard,” Chin says. “I owe everything to affirmative action.”

Chin, who testified on Harvard’s behalf at trial, also sees Blum’s recruitment of Asian students as a cynical tactic that belies his claims of dedication to remedying anti-Asian bias. “If you look at the actual court documents, the relief is to eliminate affirmative action,” Chin says. “The relief isn’t to eliminate discrimination against Asian Americans. It’s the exact same relief they asked for in the Abigail Fisher case.”

Critics maintain that Blum’s lawsuit relied on and perpetuated the “model minority” myth, which stereotypes Asian Americans as intelligent, high-achieving, and economically successful—but also docile, obedient, and politically silent. The term first appeared in a 1966 New York Times Magazine article, itself an unsubtle rebuttal to the era’s Black civil rights movement. By suggesting that Asian Americans have overcome racial discrimination through uncomplaining diligence, groups like SFFA can frame racial justice policies as entitlements that take from hardworking Asians and give to underachieving Blacks and Latinos—an equation that conveniently omits white folks altogether.

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May 2026 Issue

“SFFA is trying to create this essentialized picture of Asian Americans as a monolithic group universally disadvantaged by affirmative action policies. But we know this simply isn’t true,” Kylan Tatum, copresident of the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association and a rising junior at the university, told me. Tatum, who describes themself as both Black and Asian, points out that “the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action.”

In fact, a Pew Research poll released in June 2023 found that Asian Americans approve of affirmative action at a higher rate than the general US adult population. A 2020 survey by APIAVote and other Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations found that 70 percent of Asian Americans support “affirmative action programs designed to help Black people, women, and other minorities” in higher education. In 2022, the same poll found Asian American support at 69 percent, with 80 percent of Indian Americans, 82 percent of Korean Americans, 67 percent of Vietnamese Americans, and 67 percent of Filipino Americans in favor.

Chinese Americans were least likely to support affirmative action, at levels wavering between 56 and 59 percent in the annual APIAVote polls and at 45 percent in the Pew study. OiYan Poon, former director of Colorado State University’s Race and Intersectional Studies for Educational Equity (RISE), cowrote a 2018 study that examines why Chinese Americans are outliers among Asian Americans. The study found that many Chinese immigrants were connecting online through the Chinese-language app WeChat, where misinformation about affirmative action proliferates. “Many of the folks that are leading the anti-affirmative-action movements here in the US came here as graduate students, after going to elite colleges in mainland China,” Poon told Mother Jones in 2018. “They have a belief that high-stakes testing is the only and fair way to get into the best colleges…. Many of them, because of their class status, end up in relatively white and upper-middle-class communities. And that allows for the kind of development and perpetuation of stereotypes of other people.”

Alex Chen is the founder of the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of SFFA. In a 2018 interview in The New Yorker, Chen said that affirmative action taught people to think they “don’t need to work hard,” because they “still can get into a top school.” Kenny Xu, the 26-year-old son of Chinese immigrants, who is on the SFFA board, is a self-appointed spokesperson for Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action. “Affirmative action was created because people saw so few Black Americans elevated, in the sense that they wanted to. And so, they started to want to create a program to be able to uplift them,” Xu said in 2021. “That eventually morphed into ‘We just want to lower the bar, so that more African Americans with lower skills can get into the same job that a white American would have otherwise gotten with higher skills.’”

Xu is also the president of Color Us United, which says it is working for a “race-blind America.” He frequently appears as a talking head on right-wing media, though he appeared on CNN the day of SFFA’s win to applaud the end of race-conscious admissions. And he often tweets that it’s “not racism” that causes racial inequities but Black “culture,” which he contrasts with “the culture of hard work and family discipline that contributes to Asian success in America.” “I’ll come out and say it: yeah, we’re model minorities,” Xu wrote on social media earlier this year. “Heck yeah, people should be like us in education and hard work.”

For Aarti Kohli, the executive director of the Advancing Justice–Asian Law Caucus, Xu’s comments represent a gross misrepresentation of the demographics of Asian Americans. “There is this perception that Asian Americans are all doctors, engineers, lawyers,” Kohli says. “But the model-minority myth hides the needs of many members of our communities. If you look at college completion rates for Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian communities, they’re very low. And it’s really unfortunate that those members of our communities are not seen.”

In the mid-1960s, anti-Asian immigration quotas were raised just enough to allow in highly skilled immigrants. But between the first wave of arrivals and more recent Asian immigration, the Asian American and Pacific Islander community has developed the greatest economic and education gaps of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. Indian families top the AAPI income list with a median of $119,000 a year, while Burmese families report median annual wages of just $44,400. As of 2019, according to Pew, approximately 10 percent of Asian Americans live below the poverty line, a figure that increases to 13 percent for Cambodians, 17 percent for Hmong, and 25 percent for Mongolians and Burmese. Among Asian Americans age 25 and older, 75 percent of Indian Americans possess bachelor degrees, though the same is true of just 17 percent of Laotians and 15 percent of Bhutanese. And unemployment rates are higher among Pacific Islanders than any other ethnic or racial group in the US.

For many AAPI students, affirmative action is critical to leveling the playing field in college admissions, and studies agree that affirmative action benefits Asian Americans. It’s a fact that Blum tries to hide by denying the existence of affirmative action’s many AAPI beneficiaries. In a lawsuit against Yale, SFFA’s complaint took pains to note that “references to Asian applicants will exclude racially-favored Asian applicants who identify, at least in part, as from a favored Asian-American subgroup, such as applicants who identify as Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, or Vietnamese.” The implication was that Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese applicants benefited from affirmative action but that other Asian groups didn’t.

“This is the point that makes me seethe,” says Marie Bigham, the founder and executive director of ACCEPT (Admissions Community Cultivating Equity & Peace Today). “I am a multiracial Vietnamese woman. [Blum] has taken it upon himself to redefine ‘Asian’ in this country and to inform me I am no longer Asian, but that I am, as he describes it, ‘preferred Asian.’ That speaks to his awareness that the Asian experience is not a monolith. The rest of us—the ‘preferred Asians,’ as he describes us—experience exclusion in a pretty impactful and very serious way.”

“It’s sort of a paradox that [Blum] is leveraging the model-minority myth and putting forth this idea that Asian Americans don’t benefit from race-conscious policies,” says Sally Chen, a 2019 Harvard graduate who now works for Chinese for Affirmative Action and testified on Harvard’s behalf against SFFA. “That logic negates a lot of the realities of what Asian Americans face in society and on the road to higher education and beyond.”

During the litigation over Fisher, more than 160 AAPI groups filed amicus briefs in support of affirmative action; in this year’s affirmative action case, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund submitted amicus briefs on behalf of 25 Harvard Asian American and Pacific Islander, Latinx, Black, and Native American student and alumni groups. A number of AAPI students and graduates of Harvard testified for the university in the trial’s stages. Blum and SFFA, meanwhile, “failed to present a single Asian American student at trial,” NBC News reported.

Now that affirmative action in college admissions has been ruled discriminatory—except at military academies—Blum claims that race-neutral alternatives will replace affirmative action and address racial inequalities. But his preferred remedies seem unlikely to find favor with the cohort he runs with. UCLA Law professor Richard Sander, who wrote an amicus brief for Blum in Fisher, has suggested that programs that use socioeconomic standing—which Blum has cited as a useful replacement for race—might be “surreptitiously reintroducing race,” as The New York Times described it. Writing for the American Bar Association, civil rights lawyer Genevieve Torres notes that “new lawsuits have also been brought to challenge diversity programs that consider factors correlated with race (so-called ‘race-neutral’ programs), which Justice [Anthony] Kennedy expressly encouraged in Fisher.” In Virginia, a lawsuit over admissions to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite public school, claimed that scrapping entrance exams as a way to make the school more diverse is covertly anti-Asian, though the policy is race-neutral on its face. (In May, the Fourth Circuit ruled that the admissions policy did not discriminate against Asian Americans.) The plaintiff, Coalition for TJ, was represented by Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed an amicus brief on behalf of SFFA in both the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases. Coalition for TJ cofounder Asra Q. Nomani is also the former vice president of Parents Defending Education, which filed an amicus brief in support of SFFA in the Harvard case. Edward Blum is one of PDE’s directors.

Affirmative action never opened the floodgates to unqualified hordes, as its opponents contend. It merely attempted to give those who have been historically excluded—provided they had the preparedness, talent, and qualifications—a way to open doors that white supremacy was keeping under lock and key. Racism, combined with the opacity of college admissions, generates wild conjecture and misinformed presumptions. In reality, holistic admissions, like those at Harvard and UNC, take race into account as just one element among a constellation of considerations. “At a school as selective as Harvard, they have so many applicants with perfect GPAs and test scores, they could fill their class three, four, five times over [on those qualifications],” says Michaele N. Turnage Young, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Bigham echoes this claim, saying, “The idea that, in that kind of applicant pool, someone got in just based on race is so laughable.”

Were Blum truly concerned about the policies that steal college slots from deserving Asian American applicants, he would not have spent his time demonizing Black and Hispanic students—who, a 2017 New York Times investigation found, “are more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago.” Instead, he would have targeted legacy applicants and other students who already have connections at the school. A report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 43 percent of white students accepted by Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were “ALDCs”: athletes, legacies, the kids of big donors, or the children of faculty and staff. The same study found that three-quarters of “white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as typical white applicants.” More than 30 percent of Harvard’s class of 2025 are legacies, and some 70 percent of legacy applicants to Harvard are white. (Less than 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American kids who get into Harvard are ALDCs.)

Blum knows that legacies and other ALDCs displace a far greater share of Asian applicants than Black and brown students do. SFFA’s own expert witness concluded that affirmative action “for African American and Hispanic applicants could not explain the disproportionately negative effect Harvard’s admission system has on Asian Americans.”

Yet anti-affirmative-action campaigners would have you believe that the people who should be happiest about the end of race-conscious admissions are Black folks, because now they have a real shot at white approval. Justice Clarence Thomas reiterated in his concurrence (quoting his own words in an earlier opinion) that “racial preferences in college admissions ‘stamp [Blacks and Hispanics] with a badge of inferiority.’” The end of racial remedies will thus bring about a real colorblind meritocracy. But critics of affirmative action seem to view the mere presence of Black folks at elite schools as inherently undeserved. For example, in April 2022, Xu tweeted that because of “race preferences, Black Americans with STEM talent tend to go to UC-Berkeley over UC-Riverside”—the former being more selective in its admissions than the latter—“even with lower qualifications.” But the UC system got rid of affirmative action in 1996—before Xu was born.

With affirmative action gone, will the alliance between conservative Asian Americans and their right-wing white co-conspirators begin to fray? When Xu acknowledged the reality of legacy admissions on CNN after the June verdict, Ann Coulter went after him. “These aren’t your allies, White people,” Coulter wrote. The elimination of race-conscious admissions is predicted to increase Asian American enrollment numbers by just 3 percent. White enrollment is projected to go up 8 percent, according to the Berkeley economics professor and Harvard witness David Card.

For Blum, the fight is never over. In an interview with The New York Times days after his victory at the Supreme Court, he suggested that affirmative action in workplaces may be his next target. That would have negative impacts on Asian Americans workers, who already are dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions, representing just 1 percent of corporate board seats, 3 percent of law partners and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 2 percent of college presidents—numbers out of step with their overall representation in those fields. Multiple studies have found that while Asian Americans are significantly overrepresented in the tech workforce, they are significantly underrepresented in senior leadership positions by comparison.

In 2020, Margaret Chin, now a professor of sociology at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center, published Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder. She told me that anti-Asian bias and the absence of race-conscious policies in the corporate sector explain the endurance of the “bamboo ceiling.”

“Most of these companies don’t have affirmative action programs,” Chin said. “That’s why there’s so few minorities at the top of these corporations. It’s because these affirmative action programs have existed in colleges that we see colleges with such diverse populations.”

Many of the interviewees for this article fought tirelessly against SFFA’s attacks on affirmative action, but none were naive about how the Supreme Court would rule. “We always want to [work toward] a bigger picture for opportunity for more people,” Sally Chen told me. “We are trying to think about ways to kind of just shift the paradigm, too, beyond what affirmative action can do. Its impacts were crucial but were never meant to be a cure-all solution.”

“Our role as an Asian civil rights organization is to serve the most marginalized,” Kohli said. “How do we make it economically possible for low-income and racial minorities to access education—and to actually stay at these educational institutions? So this is an important conversation. But it has to be placed within the context of the bigger challenges that we have.”

We’re nearing the end of Pride month, and even right-wingers are getting confused about what they’re supposed to boycott next. Since just April, conservatives—enraged over ads demonstrating any hint of LGBT-inclusiveness—have launched boycotts against the Los Angeles Dodgers, LEGO, Kellogg’s, Nike, North Face, Kohl’s, PetSmart, Build-A-Bear, J. Crew, Maybelline, Adidas, Citibank, and the video game Call of Duty. Aspiring journalist and podcaster Megyn Kelly seriously fretted aloud that teen boys won’t want to jerk off to a trans woman’s Sports Illustrated cover. The unintentionally hilarious Texas Family Project earnestly sad-tweeted that they “take no pleasure in reporting that Cracker Barrel has fallen” in response to the restaurant chain’s pro-Pride messaging. Fox News, which has a generic Pride month post on its website, was accused of being on the “woke bandwagon” and targeted for protest by several big, dumb conservative Twitter accounts. Every other day, another company vaguely signals its most milquetoast support for LGBTQ folks, and conservatives are finding it impossible to keep up. It’s enough to send right-wingers into fits of delusional paranoia. For real.

“I’m going through my kitchen, I’m going through my refrigerator, and I’m starting to ask the question, ‘Well, is this ketchup bottle woke?’” election denialist and Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk recently admitted. “Is this mustard? I mean, literally.”

It’s tempting to trace these meltdowns to April 1, when Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman social media influencer, posted an instagram video revealing her new role as a Bud Light brand ambassador. In response, transphobic right-wingers posted videos of themselves pouring cans of Bud Light they’d already paid good money for down the drain; one video caught a rampaging man in a Walmart destroying case after case of Busch Light, which is the wrong brand. Of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Marsha Blackburn, and Ron DeSantis had hateful commentary to add. A few weeks later, the right was again up in arms over Target selling Pride merch, which then seemed to snowball into an anti-LGBT free-for-all. Multiple outlets shortsightedly pointed to the Bud Light ad as the genesis for it all.

But that’s a weirdly forgetful take. The outpouring of hatred we’re currently seeing is just the right wing escalating its already ongoing, virulently anti-LGBTQ campaign. Brands including Ulta Beauty, Kate Spade, Crest, Neutrogena, SodaStream, and a slew of others had already been attacked before April for using Mulvaney in ads; Pantene, Gillette, and Hershey had also received right-wing blowback for trans inclusion going back to 2019. DeSantis has been at war with Disney since 2022, and Libs of TikTok has been falsely labeling LGBT folks “groomers” since 2021. None of this is new. It’s just that, as the far-right backlash—which includes the white backlash and the Christian nationalist backlash—has become more emboldened, belligerent, dangerous, and hysterical, so has its war on the LGBT community.

Look. We all know that it’s ludicrous to think corporations will free anybody. “Pink washing,” aka “rainbow washing,” was always, at its heart, a capitalistic venture. Companies hoped to siphon off LGBT dollars through token representation and gestures toward queer support. Target’s first LGBT-focused campaign ran in 2012, and its first Pride displays went up in 2015. It’s been nearly 30 years since the first overtly queer-aimed Bud Light print ads ran, and it first partnered with GLAAD back in 1998. Even as they pushed LGBT-marketed ads, they were supporting those who are fighting against LGBT equality. Anheuser-Busch Inbev gave four times as much money to Republican political campaigns last year than to Democrats, and Target slipped far more dollars into right-wing pockets than Democratic ones. White-wingers are clapping themselves on the back for dethroning Bud Light as America’s number-one beer, but new titleholder Modelo Especial’s American distributor, Constellation Brands, is the brand that gives most of its politics-influencing dollars to Democrats. The point is, these companies don’t market to LGBT folks because they’re down with the cause, they do it because LGBTQ folks represent $1.1 trillion in annual purchasing power. One wonders why right-wingers suddenly hate the free market so much.

Even knowing how cynical those campaigns are, it’s still a bummer to watch the brands that launched them cravenly succumb to right-wing bullying. Target acquiesced to the lunatic mob by pulling some Pride merch off its shelves, a move that didn’t stop the boycott and, unfortunately, only encouraged this grifting, trust-funded MAGA rapper to write this garbage song. Bud Light essentially apologized for its partnership with Mulvaney—not once, not twice, but three times!—only for “woke” Fox News to dismiss each attempt as not apologetic enough. The fact is, while these conservative tantrums might affect numbers in the short term (and people much mathier than me suggest that Target’s losses aren’t actually the result of the boycott) they’re largely ineffective in the long-term. That’s sadly true for good boycotts as well. Remember how that anti-Trump Goya boycott just kinda went fizzᶻzᶻzᶻzᶻzᶻzᶻᶻᶻᶻᶻ? Yeah.

Target and Bud Light could’ve just kept it moving by telling their critics to suck it like Hershey’s, Molson Coors, Nike, or several brands did. But since they caved, now they’ve incurred a counter-backlash led by LGBT folks and their allies, because in this age of right-wing insanity you can’t play both sides. Not as we’re witnessing a neo-fascist groundswell, sprung from the MAGA movement, that is posing demands that aren’t just hateful and irrational, but ever-changing and never ending.

Not to mention, made in nothing but pure bad faith. You might recognize the name of Christopher Rufo, who proudly admits to being a bullshit artist and professional liar who uses misinformation to make already racist and transphobic followers frightened about yet more stuff. Rufo made a name for himself back in 2021 by being a prolific disseminator of misinformation about “critical race theory,” and later bragged about his success in “turn[ing] the brand…toxic.” In the midst of Pride month last year, he announced his plan to lie about drag queens to effectively demonize them. “Conservatives should start using the phrase “trans stripper” in lieu of “drag queen,” Rufo advised at the time. “It has a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate to sexualization.” He was pivotal in the launching the latest gay panic—claiming that “gender ideology” is infesting elementary schools. But now, his fellow conservative fabulists are also following his lead.

“The goal is to make ‘pride’ toxic for brands,” Matt Walsh, conservative America’s head transphobe, tweeted—an almost verbatim copy of Rufo’s messaging.

If they decide to shove this garbage in our face, they should know that they’ll pay a price. It won’t be worth whatever they think they’ll gain. First Bud Light and now Target. Our campaign is making progress. Let’s keep it going.

In another thread, Walsh wrote,

Here’s what we should do: Pick a victim, gang up on it, and make an example of it, We can’t boycott every woke company or even most of them. But we can pick one, it hardly matters which, and target it with a ruthless boycott campaign. Claim one scalp then move onto the next.

Another Daily Wire propagandist, Michael Knowles, regurgitated the same bile, telling his audience that “we need to make that symbol toxic, the Pride flag symbol, we need to make that toxic. We need to have companies think twice about it.”

hen you give in to this kind of vitriol, as both Target and Bud Light did, you cosign the idea that these people are reasoned, sensible protesters when they’re anything but. You tacitly agree to the idea that LGBT existence is an issue to be debated. A Gallup poll released this month found the percentage of Americans who said “said gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable” fell 7 percent over the last year to 64 percent, a decline mostly driven by Republicans, whose numbers over the last year on the question fell from 56 percent to 41 percent. In 2023 alone, conservative politicians have proposed 520 anti-LGBTQ at the state level, per the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and some 70 anti-LGBTQ laws have passed. Of course, 220 of those bills specifically take aim at transgender and non-binary people. Remember how conservatives said they just wanted to protect kids? Yet, now we’re seeing a slew of laws attacking trans health care for adults. It was never about kids. It was about blotting out trans existence. These people won’t be happy until trans folks are essentially disappeared.

It’s also a terrible idea to negotiate with terrorists, and I don’t use that phrase metaphorically. The right wing has consistently shown itself to be willing to use violence, both stochastic and real-world, to get what it wants. Kid Rock, the embodiment of talentless whiteness enriched by black cultural theft, posted video of himself shooting up cases of Bud Light with a fucking semiautomatic gun. Anheuser-Bush breweries and Target stores in three different states received bomb threats. Those kinds of threats are meant to intimidate and threaten, and they absolutely help incite further violence. Hate crimes against LGBT people rose 70 percent between 2020 and 2021, and 15 percent specifically for trans and nonbinary folks, according to numbers from the FBI, and that’s with only 60 percent of police agencies reporting. (Most hate crimes aren’t reported by survivors.) Black trans women have long been and remain at increased risk for violence and discrimination.

There have been numerous cancellations of local Pride celebrations in sites around the country—in Portland, Oregon; Pittsburgh; Denver; Nevada; and, of course, all across “Grand Wizard” DeSantis’s Florida—out of very valid fears of violence. For the first time in its 40-year existence, the HRC has declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ folks living in this country. A UCLA Law School survey conducted in mid-2022 found that more than 50 percent of “families headed by same-sex or gender-nonconforming parents are considering moving out of the state” of Florida. The study authors noted that many of those polled were households including people of color and/or LGBT kids, which only compounds their oppression.

Now is not the time to be wishy-washy. The smug and immoral Rufos and Walshes, the politically mercenary and bigoted DeSantises and Greenes, their vocal minority of followers who are always just looking for a reason to be pissed off so they don’t have to examine their own miserable lives—I’m so tired of them making life hard for the rest of us. These are people who absolutely lost it over a British Library tweet about a sex-changing fish. Sorry, but queer, LGB, trans and nonbinary people exist, and they aren’t going anywhere. Last year, a Gallup poll found the number of LGBT folks in the US hit “a new high of 7.1 percent, which is double the percentage from 2012, when Gallup first measured it.” The same study found that LGBT identification and acceptance are higher among Gen Z than any prior generations. It’s pretty dumb to focus on the fogies, who will thwart progress but never effectively stop it. The future marches on as dinosaurs become extinct.

By the close of June, the Supreme Court will almost certainly end affirmative action in college admissions. For Edward Blum, who spearheaded the lawsuits against the University of North Carolina and Harvard—claiming the schools’ race-conscious policies admit unqualified Black and Hispanic students, while “intentionally discriminating” against deserving Asian American applicants—the verdict would fulfill a decades-long quest. In 1992, Blum, who is white, lost his only political run, failing to unseat the Black Democratic incumbent in a majority-Black Houston congressional district that had never elected a Republican. Blum sued Texas, citing racial gerrymandering, and eventually won the case in the US Supreme Court in 1996. By the late 1990s, he had quit his day job as a stockbroker to focus on overturning racial equality legislation.

Since then, Blum has made a career of recruiting plaintiffs to challenge civil rights he opposes. His wins include Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which nullified key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Less successful was Fisher v. University of Texas, decided in 2016, his first attempt to have the court undo affirmative action, in which his handpicked plaintiff was a white woman. After losing Fisher, Blum changed his strategy, announcing that his new litigation vehicle, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), “needed Asian plaintiffs.” Critics cite that admission as evidence that Blum is using Asian Americans not only to refute accusations that he is driven by white resentment, but also to weaponize the “model minority” myth for his own white supremacist ends.

Blum denies this. But he openly claims that racial equality legislation has overcorrected for centuries of Black oppression and maintains that he wants “to restore the original colorblind principles to our nation’s civil rights laws.” After his 1996 win against Texas, Blum filed successful lawsuits challenging racial gerrymandering in Virginia, South Carolina, and New York. Though Blum told The Guardian in 2016 that he “would challenge any racial gerrymander if I had the resources to do so,” he has yet to sue over racist Republican gerrymandering, which exploded after he succeeded in gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Aside from his lawsuits to end affirmative action, Blum’s support of Asian Americans is spotty. In 2000, a voting provision for Native Hawaiians was overturned with Blum’s support. Back then, he claimed he was outraged that Black Hawaiians were being disenfranchised “35 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act”—the same act he later decimated. He engineered 2016’s Evenwel v. Abbott, which would have disenfranchised up to 700,000 Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and Asian Americans in Texas, according to Asian Americans Advancing Justice. He was a vocal proponent of the Trump administration’s unsuccessful effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which numerous Asian American advocacy groups lobbied against. In 2021, Blum founded the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment, which has forced the State of California to scrap statutes that increase corporate board seats for marginalized groups, including Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Hawaiians.

Though Blum calls himself a “one-man organization,” his work is financed by familiar right-wing entities. The Project on Fair Representation, one of Blum’s many litigation nonprofits, began as an internal program of Donors Trust, a funding vehicle bankrolled by conservative mega-donors, including the Koch, DeVos, and Mercer families. Donors Trust has also funneled more than $1.5 million to the white supremacist outlets VDARE and American Renaissance, both considered hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (VDARE’s take on the affirmative action case? It “would be a huge victory for whites, but Conservatism Inc. seems quite uncomfortable with stating that fact,” an article on the VDARE site states. “The primary victims of Affirmative Action aren’t Asians. They are whites—the group formerly known as ‘Americans.’”) The Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation have all contributed to Blum’s litigation. The 85 Fund, which donates to his work, is led by Leonard Leo, cochairman of the Federalist Society.

Blum and SFFA’s amicus friends are frontline leaders in the anti-LGBTQ, climate denial, anti–“critical race theory,” and anti-democratic movements. Many are also funded by the same donors as Blum. The SFFA amicus brief from the Claremont Institute—which, like Blum, gets funding from the DeVos Foundation—was written by Trump “coup attorney” John Eastman. And Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, sits on the board of another amicus filer, the National Association of Scholars. (Thomas hasn’t recused himself in the affirmative action case, although Harvard Board of Overseers member Ketanji Brown Jackson has.)

If Blum really wanted to end unfair admissions preferences, he’d sue to eliminate Harvard’s “personality rating,” which disadvantages Asian students. Or he’d target preferences for athletes, legacies, the children of large donors, and the children of faculty and staff, who made up 43 percent of white Harvard admissions between 2009 and 2014. Blum’s own expert, Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, has stated that affirmative action “for African American and Hispanic applicants could not explain the disproportionately negative effect Harvard’s admission system has on Asian Americans.”

What’s more, SFFA ignores that the Asian American community has the greatest wealth gap of any group. South Asian and Pacific Islander groups, who have some of the lowest educational attainment and income levels in the country, benefit greatly from affirmative action. (Blum knows this. SFFA’s lawsuit against Yale states that all “references to Asian applicants will exclude” students “who identify as Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, or Vietnamese.”) Eliminating affirmative action will increase Harvard’s Asian admissions by just 3 percent; white enrollment will likely rise by 8 percent, per Berkeley economist and Harvard witness David Card. Blum has used Harvard’s artificial scarcity economy to pit nonwhite groups against each other. The beneficiary of that scuffle is always white supremacy.

For four decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has extolled the importance of “personal responsibility.” He has chastised those who “make excuses for black Americans” and argued there is a need to “emphasize black self-help.” He has denigrated affirmative action programs on the grounds that they “create a narcotic of dependency” where there should be “an ethic of responsibility and independence.” He bemoans the “ideology of victimhood” that allows the marginalized to “make demands on society for reparations and recompense.”

In light of recent revelations that Thomas has been showered by billionaire Harlan Crow with over two decades’ worth of getaways on superyachts and private jets and various other gifts, none of which he ever reported, the jurist’s long con of principled advocacy for Black self-reliance and opposition to white largesse has finally run its course. Turns out, Thomas was never against reparations—he just wanted them for himself. He is and always has been precisely what he wrongly accuses Black folks of being.

It’s been a con run by a self-serving fabulist all along. In 1980, Thomas caught the attention of the incoming president, Ronald Reagan, with a speech in which he used the “welfare queen” stereotype against his own sister. “She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That is how dependent she is,” Thomas told an audience of fellow Black Republicans. “What’s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.” A 1991 Los Angeles Times investigation found Thomas’s sister was, in fact, an underpaid single mother who used the social safety net during a brief rough patch; her children weren’t the entitled layabouts depicted by Thomas, either.

A few years later, while serving as the second-highest-ranking Black official in the Reagan administration, Thomas observed that “to be accepted into the conservative ranks and to be treated with some degree of respect, a black was required to become a caricature of sorts, providing sideshows of anti-black quips and attacks,” adding that Black conservatives “must be against affirmative action and against welfare. And your opposition had to be adamant and constant.” Forty years later, it’s hard not to think Thomas wasn’t so much airing grievances as reassuring his white conservative compatriots that he understood the assignment.

Consider that there may be no single person in American history who has benefited more from affirmative action than Clarence Thomas. It is an oft-repeated fact that Thomas got into Yale Law School based on race-­conscious admissions. Claiming he was “humiliated” by possessing a law degree that “bore the taint of racial preference,” he went on to become a prominent opponent of affirmative action—even suggesting that race-based policies represented the new slavery or Jim Crow, but for white people. Nonetheless, Thomas continued to benefit from his race long after his days at Yale. He was selected for a leadership position in the Office for Civil Rights in Reagan’s Department of Education, during which time civil rights groups attempted to have him held in contempt for inadequately enforcing civil rights laws, and then was promoted to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, despite lacking almost any relevant experience. Though his legacy at the EEOC was mostly a shameful one—he allowed 13,000 age-discrimination claims to expire—he was named to the federal appeals bench by President George H.W. Bush. A mere 15 months later, he was nominated for the Supreme Court. For all his bluster about self-reliance, Thomas has evidently never refused an unearned promotion.

On the court, he has treated “personal responsibility” not merely as a moral ideal but as a prerequisite for the protections guaranteed in the Constitution, apparently indifferent to the suffering of those he deems to have fallen short. In a 1992 case involving the abuse of prisoners by guards, Thomas wrote that while excessive force may be “deplorable,” he wouldn’t go so far as to label it unconstitutional. In a more recent dissent, he “appeared to urge officials in Texas to execute [a man on death row] even while the plaintiff’s efforts to obtain [potentially exculpatory] DNA evidence moved forward,” as The New York Times reported. And in a 2019 case that overturned a death row conviction, citing a Mississippi prosecutor’s overt “discriminatory intent,” Thomas dissented, not only voting to kill the man but opining that the lone upside of the majority opinion was that “the state is perfectly free to convict [him] again.”

Yet Thomas has no such concerns about his own record of rule bending and breaking. There is his history of alleged sexual harassment, according not just to Anita Hill but also other EEOC staffers. Stories of Thomas’s sexual harassment have continued to surface, as recently as 2016. And the current scandal over his financial disclosure omissions likely goes beyond the realm of ethics violations into potential illegality: Multiple court observers point out that he may have violated the Ethics in Government Act. There is also the matter of Thomas’s wife, Ginni, who supported efforts to deny the outcome of the 2020 election. Thomas has refused to recuse himself in cases involving groups his wife is engaged with—and is now refusing to recuse himself from litigation over the January 6 insurrection.

And while Thomas castigates Black folks for blaming their problems on racism, he seems to carry a full deck of race cards everywhere he goes. He insists that all public criticisms of him are the result of his status as a Black conservative who refuses to “follow in this cult-like way something that Blacks are supposed to believe.” For a party of people who constantly accuse Black folks of being “race grifters,” white Republicans seem loath to recognize those in their midst, doing their bidding.

Some scholars have promoted the idea that Thomas has fused the philosophies of Malcolm X and Booker T. Washington, creating a Franken-philosophy rooted in the idea that the communal self-reliance that helped Black families survive during Jim Crow is the cure for what ails Black America today. But that seems too generous a reading. The truth is, Clarence Thomas has looked out only for himself, and Black folks are collateral damage along the way. I don’t expect Thomas to face real consequences for his latest scandal. But at least the image-laundering con he has undertaken has come to its inevitable end.

The most recent episode of the PBS genealogy docuseries Finding Your Roots focused, in part, on the previously untraced family tree branches of activist and scholar Angela Davis. If you are on social media and have even a passing interest in this sort of thing, you’ve probably already watched the clip of host Henry Louis Gates Jr. announcing to Davis that she is “descended from one of the 101 people who sailed on the Mayflower.” The camera catches Davis reeling from the revelations, and the clip went viral, launching a million Twitter hot takes. But the snippet provides just one piece of the story of Davis’s ancestry unearthed by the show. Only in watching the rest of the episode is it made clear that her connection to that 10th great-grandfather was made during the Jim Crow era, through a previously unknown white paternal grandfather who had been her Black grandmother’s long-time neighbor. The episode also reveals that Davis’s mother, who grew up in foster care and never knew either of her biological parents, was fathered by a white Alabama lawyer, state representative, and senator named John Austin Darden. Through Darden, the show uncovered another of Davis’s ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War and later enslaved at least six Black folks in Georgia.

Perhaps because their existence was more expected, there has been considerably less online discussion about Davis’s enslaved Black ancestors, whose stories are also fascinating. Just one year after his emancipation, Davis’s paternal great-grandfather Isom Spencer and his two brothers dared to file a complaint against the white enslaver still holding their young nephews in illegal bondage. The judge ruled against Davis’s family, writing that continued enslavement was the “best thing that could be done for them,” dismissing the complaint as “frivolous,” and claiming that Isom and his siblings did “not know what is best for them or for the children.” It would take yet another year, but with aid from the Freedmen’s Bureau, Isom and his brothers succeeded in seizing their children’s freedom in 1867. Finding Your Roots was able to unearth that necessary contribution to the under-chronicled history of Black resistance, but even the show’s team of genealogists, historians, and researchers could not identify Davis’s maternal grandmother. Like so many Black folks looking to uncover the names of those who came before them, Davis’s search for her mother’s mother was stymied by a lack of record-keeping that, at least for now, has buried her grandmother’s name in time.

But it is the stories of Davis’s white relatives—the white liberty fighter cum Black enslaver, the Plymouth colonizer—that have become recent Internet fodder. These were the revelations that stunned many people, Davis included, who, moments after hearing the news, heavily exhaled and said, “That’s a little too much to deal with right now.” More than a few folks seemed to read Davis’s recoil at the news as shock at the very fact of white folks in her family tree. (One person suggested Davis had somehow been unaware that she is a light-skinned Black woman, asking why she hadn’t already presumed she had “ancestry that drove the boat.”) But to think that Angela Motherfucking Davis, who has dedicated her activism, life and career to enumerating America’s white racial lies and sexual abuses of Black women did not clock that she likely has some white ancestry somewhere, is absurd. The surprise was the devil in the genealogical details.

The Mayflower arrivals brought to the “New World” the contagion of murderous, colonizing whiteness. The ship’s name has long been a synecdoche for white American racial purity, an ideology that has inflicted endless harm upon Black folks in this country. (There’s a reason for the endurance of the (modified) Malcolm X quote, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us.”) The kidnapped Africans aboard the White Lion may have arrived a year before, but the white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of the Mayflower’s cargo has made the ship’s name a signifier of true Americanness, launching a thousand heritage organizations formed explicitly to keep folks that look like Angela Davis out. (In a 1911 speech before Congress, the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution hailed “the purity of our Caucasian blood, the perpetuity of our Anglo-Saxon traditions of liberty, law, and the security of the gradual elevation of the white man’s standard of living.” Frederick Douglass’s white second wife’s 1900 application to the Mayflower Society was rejected because she “had married a colored man.”) It was all this that Davis was reacting to.

Conservatives, predictably, were absolutely giddy over the revelations, apparently thinking they’d won a round of racial “gotcha.” Tireless “anti-woke” crank and “succession ideology” coiner Wesley Yang tweeted that Davis’s Mayflower connection was the “most damaging ancestry revelation since they found that Ben Affleck was descended from slave owners.” Multiple conservative accounts used the moment to triumphantly declare Davis’s lineage a refutation of their favorite boogeyman, with one declaring, “BAM. GAME OVER!… Please enjoy the entire Critical Race worldview fall apart.” Reaffirming the antipathetic relationship between comedy and conservatism, Matt Walsh and others recycled the same tired gag about Davis now needing to pay reparations. Christopher Rufo, the bullshit artist who openly admits to redefining “critical race theory” to stoke outrage, tweeted that Davis’s unenthused response demonstrated “tfw when the oppressed becomes the oppressor.” Apparently, because Davis has white ancestry, she never experienced systemic racism and shouldn’t advocate on behalf of Black people.

he thing is, Davis’s family history is like that of a lot of Black Americans—the majority, in fact. They may not all have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, but nearly all Black Americans—roughly 75 to just over 80 percent, at least based on large DNA-sample studies conducted the last five years—have about 25 percent European ancestry. Most of those Black folks can trace that lineage directly to American Black chattel slavery. The commingled blood of enslaved Black folks and white enslavers running through the overwhelming number of African American veins is the legacy of white men raping the Black women they enslaved. When Matt Walsh openly sniggers, as he did on Twitter, that it adds to his petty delight to learn that Davis is “descended from a slave owner,” it says everything about him, but absolutely nothing about millions of Black Americans who carry with them the forensic evidence of crimes against humanity committed on a massive scale.

We also know that illicit and illegal Black-white interracial sex was far more common during the Jim Crow era than the white South acknowledged, and that, as Colbert I. King has noted, “most interracial childbirths resulted from unions between white men and Black women.” Rosa Parks wrote about the “strange and varied customs of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws” in sites like “the cradle of Confederacy, heart of Dixie” Alabama, referring to “day-time segregation” and “night-time integration”—the euphemism for interracial sex often employed by Black folks.

Perhaps Davis’s father was aware that the white man who lived next door to his family in his childhood was his father. Davis says that even when asked, her father would “never talk about” it. Davis’s mother, meanwhile, was born in September 1914, in Goodwater, Alabama, a teeny town that just a decade prior had made big national news in places like Cosmopolitan and the New York Post for being the “epicenter” of “a revolting system of enslaving helpless negro laborers” under debt peonage. (Just to offer a sense of what the town culture might have been like.) At the time of Davis’s mother’s birth, Democratic State Representative-elect John Austin Darden owned a “lucrative and successful [law] practice” in Goodwater, was city attorney, a school board member, and a Sunday school teacher. Darden had a white wife of 14 years who was the president of her United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter, six white children at home and, we now know, at least one biracial Black child born out of wedlock with an African-American woman or—God forbid—girl he impregnated.

As I previously mentioned, we still do not know her name. But we do not need to know her name to know with certainty that she did not have the power possessed by Darden, a putative “pillar of the community.” We can’t know precisely what Davis’s grandmother’s life looked like, but we do know that interracial sex occurred “under conditions in which Black women were performing tasks that put them in the personal service of white men,” as Colbert King wrote. Ardent segregationist Strom Thurmond’s Black biracial child was conceived when he was 22, in 1925, and the Thurmond family’s Black maid, Carrie Butler, was just 16. Describing a near-rape situation she faced as a domestic worker, Rosa Parks wrote that she “taunted [her assailant] about the supposed white supremacy: the white man’s law drawing the color line of segregation. I would stay within the law—on my side of the line.” Davis herself wrote about the subject in her 1981 book Women, Race and Class:

The sexual abuse [Black women] had routinely suffered during the era of slavery was not arrested by the advent of emancipation. As a matter of fact, it was still true that “colored women were looked upon as the legitimate prey of white men,” and if they resisted white men’s sexual attacks, they were frequently thrown into prison to be further victimized by a system which was a “return to another form of slavery.”… From Reconstruction to the present, Black women household workers have considered sexual abuse perpetrated by the “man of the house” as one of their major occupational hazards. Time after time they have been victims of extortion on the job, compelled to choose between sexual submission and absolute poverty for themselves and their families.

Davis’s mother was placed in foster care, quite possibly because her very existence—like that of Davis’s father—was criminalized under Jim Crow.

Quite literally criminalized, because miscegenation was against the law. As far back as the 17th century, white colonists began to make slavery hereditary and interracial marriage illegal, a way to gate-keep whiteness and protect its supremacy; the “one-drop” laws of the early 20th century and other Jim Crow legislation made whiteness yet more finite, legally codified notions of white superiority, and ensured the social, political, and economic capital of whiteness flowed in one racial direction. I know that Rufo has spent the last couple years, as he readily admits, intentionally lying about what “critical race theory” is, and lauding himself for succeeding in making incurious conservatives “read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He is quite transparent about employing that disinformation “strategy” to “turn the brand ‘critical race theory’ toxic.” But critical race theory helpfully shows that the aforementioned laws explain how whiteness was constructed, white power maintained, and violent anti-Black racism justified. They explain the real “identity politics” white conservatives used to love.

CRT also explains why, despite her having a whole pile of dead white relatives, including one who came here on the Mayflower, America’s national project of white supremacy saw to it that Davis did not inherit the spoils of whiteness. It explains how a link to the Mayflower did not keep her from growing up in a neighborhood where white racists blew up so many Black folks’ houses it was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill,” or why those white terrorists could do so with impunity. It explains why Davis’s mother never got a damn thing from her rich white Senator father, including so much as an acknowledgement of her existence; explains why Davis’s father was not a beneficiary of this recently touted Mayflower descent, but instead, had to keep “guns in the house” during Davis’s childhood for when he “feared that the Ku Klux Klan was about to bomb our house.” It explains why decades later, based on circumstantial evidence, Davis served 18 months in prison before she was acquitted, but countless confirmed and not infrequently boastful white killers of thousands of Black folks never so much as served a day. It also explains the continued racial disparities in arrests, charges, convictions, sentencing, and even what is criminalized in the first place, all of which continue to spur Davis’s anti-prison activism. So when Yang tweets that Davis’s Mayflower connection is a “damaging ancestry revelation,” comparing it to Ben Affleck’s being “descended from slave owners,” it seems that he is not only unaware that “slave owners” did enough raping to crowd most Black American heritage files, but that DNA test results don’t retroactively undo one-drop rules or redress generational wealth denied. (Yang’s bones to pick with so-called “wokeism,” by the way, include the government’s providing debt relief to Black farmers, whom it admits stealing land from for purely racist reasons since the mid-1960s.) Ditto when Rufo ignorantly tweets about Davis as the “oppressed becom[ing] the oppressor.”

(And certainly, Rufo could be implying Davis is an “oppressor” because of colorism, and I would applaud a conversation about the endless elevation of light-skinned folks—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Kathleen Cleaver, bell hooks to Kendrick Sampson—within Black liberation efforts. But that would require talking about proximity to whiteness and acknowledgment of entrenched white power, and we all know Rufo doesn’t want that smoke.)

Maybe—and just hear me out here—Rufo is acting in bad faith, as always. Along with Yang and Walsh, he’s suggesting the revelations in Davis’s DNA somehow discredit the half century of anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-prison activism she’s undertaken. Rufo often invokes “racial essentialism” as one of the most dangerous tenets of CRT (even though CRT argues that race is biologically nonexistent and societally constructed), but in Davis’s case, he’s all for racial essentialism, claiming that Davis’s DNA shows she’s actually Team Oppressor. He does this because he blames Davis’s scholarship and activism—he’s said this openly—for laying the groundwork for things like CRT. And what that really means is, he thinks Davis helped usher in an era in which people like him are held accountable when they do and say fucked-up shit, including toward people that aren’t like him. Rufo blames Davis for the things that today piss him off, but, per that old conservative adage that’s used by the right only when it serves them, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Davis’s DNA is actually just is. Within her unraveled genealogy are American truths that cannot be erased by bans on mislabeled “CRT” and “Stop WOKE Acts” and intentional anti-historical misinformation schemes. The conflict Yang, Walsh, and Rufo imply exists between Davis’s genes and who she has always been—the work she has long done and the politics she has long advocated—is imaginary; there is nothing for her to be ashamed of. These genealogical fact-finding missions turn up the realities behind America’s myths—of moral white “founders,” of white racial purity, of a country dedicated to equality at every turn while legislating to ensure the opposite. What Davis’s DNA gave us was about how this country came to be—and what was extracted in the process.

But maybe we shouldn’t point out all this stuff, and instead let conservatives keep making hay of Davis’s white ancestry and Mayflower lineage. Because maybe then they’d at least stop banning her books that way.

At this year’s Grammy awards, Beyoncé Knowles became the winner of the most Grammys ever, but lost the Album of the Year category to Harry Styles. It was the fourth time she lost that prize to a white artist. As widespread incredulity gave way to outrage, a Variety article that had been published a couple of days before the awards ceremony began resurfacing on Twitter.

Under cover of anonymity, a handful of members of the Recording Academy, the professional association that bestows the awards, had spoken candidly about not just the who, but the why, of their Grammy votes. Beyoncé had been up for nine awards this year, including the coveted trinity: Album of the Year (for 2022’s Renaissance), Record of the Year, and Song of the Year (both for the single “Break My Soul”). She would go on to win four, none of them in the aforementioned major categories. And while the opacity of an awards process can be maddening, it doesn’t compare to learning that for some academy voters—according to Variety’s small, but nonetheless telling, sample—it’s got nothing to do with music.

“I love Beyoncé’s album,” one voter told Variety, but she didn’t choose the singer in “any of the top categories” because she has “already won a lot of Grammys.” Another also admitted voting against Beyoncé because she “always win[s].” (Both said the same of Adele.) A third voter, described as an industry “veteran in his 70s,” complained that “every time [Beyoncé] does something new, it’s a big event and everyone’s supposed to quake in their shoes—it’s a little too portentous.” That same speaker called himself a “bad voter” for not having listened to “a significant percentage” of the music in contention, blithely noting, “But that’s my right.”

This is not a piece arguing on behalf of Beyoncé’s music, which would be pointless considering it was immaterial to how three out of the five interviewed judges voted. Instead, it seems more useful to look at the counterintuitive idea on repeat here, which seems to be that Beyoncé is in danger of becoming too decorated. That she is too meticulously intentional and inventive with every album rollout; too perfectionistic in ensuring that every release feels pull-out-the-stops unprecedented. That her cultural impact has been too outsize, too disruptive. In short, that she should be penalized for taking up too much rarefied space. Once again, it’s misogynoir—the intertwined anti-Blackness and misogyny that pathologizes and stigmatizes Black women. Same refrain, different song.

This is bigger than the Grammys, obviously. Every time we get an unvarnished look-see at how the awards sausages get made, voters unwittingly confirm that racism and misogyny are key ingredients. In 2015, an anonymous Oscar voter declared her offense at the Selma cast wearing “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts to the film premiere in remembrance of police murder victim Eric Garner. Another anonymous Oscar voter in 2018 sniffed that Get Out “played the race card.” I honestly cannot remember the last time (never) that an unnamed Academy Award voter complained about overblown marketing for the films of Steven Spielberg, or Meryl Streep’s unwillingness to just read her lines.

But you know what I do remember? Judges in the International Gymnastics Federation admitting to repeatedly downgrading the scores of 32-time Olympic and world championship medal winner Simone Biles for executing unprecedented moves, in order “to ensure the safety of” athletes who would fail at trying the same. (This was more than two decades after the French figure skater Surya Bonaly was criticized by judges for landing backflips and intimidating her less able competitors.) I think of Serena Williams, the best tennis player of all time, being constantly masculinized in the press for her physique and how Maria Sharapova, who consistently lost to Williams despite using performance-enhancing drugs, made money off a book in which she expressed alarm over Williams’s “thick arms and thick legs” and how “intimidating and strong” she was. I think of the accusations of being “too ambitious” that were hurled at then-shortlisted vice presidential contender Kamala Harris. Or the time when, even after 15 years at ABC as one of its most money-making showrunners, Shonda Rhimes tried to get her sister a $154 ticket to parent company Disney’s theme park, only to be asked by an angry unnamed male executive, “Don’t you have enough?”

It’s not just high-visibility Black women who get this reaction. I also think of Jasmine Shepard, the first Black class valedictorian in her Mississippi high school, who was inexplicably made to share the honor with a white student whose GPA was beneath hers. Four years later, the school’s class of 2021 valedictorian, Ikeria Washington, and that year’s salutatorian, Layla Temple, were forced to share their titles with two outraged white classmates after their families complained that the school’s handbook called for a different method for calculating GPA. In 2013, psychologist Kecia Thomas, now a dean at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, identified the “pet to threat” phenomenon, wherein women of color enter the workforce and are taken under the wing of a cheerleading mentor—usually a white man—only to have that support curdle into hostility once they prove their competency and look to advance. Relatedly, a 2018 study indicates that Black job seekers “are expected to negotiate less than their White counterparts” because their work is devalued. Because employers see them as less deserving, Black workers are punished with “lower salary outcomes” than equally qualified white candidates when they name a starting salary that exceeds the employers’ expectations. “Don’t you have enough?” indeed.

The hill I am currently gasping for air on isn’t about an awards ceremony (which I haven’t watched since I was a kid). It’s my breathless fatigue at once again seeing a Black woman score the highest, only to have everyone call an unexplained time-out to rewrite the rules. Meanwhile, in 65 years, the Recording Academy has rewarded only 11 Black artists with Album of the Year, only three of whom were Black women. The last was Lauryn Hill, in 1999. Despite that history, the consistent demand remains: that Black women be just a little… less.

For as long as the CDC and other health organizations have collected data on suicide, they’ve reported that suicide rates among Black people are the lowest among any racial category, and Black women and girls, more specifically, are least likely to end their lives of all demographic groups. It’s a statistical finding so counterintuitive that researchers dubbed it the racial/gender “suicide paradox”—that despite enduring more simultaneous marginalizing oppressions than any other group, Black women, instead of taking their lives at rates that surpass, or even equal, more privileged identities, just keep on keepin’ on. This idea—that suicide is correlated with whiteness, negatively correlated with Blackness, and irrelevant to Black femaleness—crept out of the sociology and mental health realms to establish itself within the broader American cultural psyche. Black women’s purported immunity to suicide has been regarded as such an open-and-shut case that studies on Black female suicidality are extremely scant. Corrections to that dangerous oversight have been slow to take hold, even in recent years, as Black teenage girls and young women have begun killing themselves at unprecedented rates.

The figures are both grim and alarming. In the years between 2001 and 2017, suicide death rates among Black girls age 13 to 19 rose a staggering 182 percent. The two decades between 1999 and 2019 saw suicide rates for Black women between the ages of 25 and 44 increase by 72 percent. Among Black adolescent girls age 15 to 17, the suicide death rate—while still numerically trailing those of their Black male peers—increased by 6.6 percent, or twice the rate of increase among Black boys, every year between 2003 and 2017. (That rise, researchers note, is “the largest annual percentage change” among any group.) Between 2013 and 2019, suicides fell among white teenagers, but increased nearly 60 percent among young Black women and girls age 15 to 24 years. And while suicide rates for white women overall declined 10 percent from 2019 to 2020, among Black girls and young women aged 10 to 24, rates increased 30 percent.

It’s always hard to determine the reasons for a single suicide, much less those that might factor into the suicidality of an entire racial group. But researchers have historically done their damndest to get to the bottom of the issue where white men are concerned, to the exclusion of pretty much everyone else. (This is a fact that the American Psychological Association today acknowledges.) Black women and girls’ depression and suicidality, meanwhile, have been mostly ignored within the social sciences, psychology/psychiatry, and suicidology. Had more researchers been concerned about the issue, we might well have developed strategies that stymied the incremental increases in Black women’s suicides over the last couple decades, instead of now being confronting an exponential rise in deaths. (Similarly, little attention was paid as suicide rates among Black kids under 13 began skyrocketing to where they now stand, at double that of white preteens. A 2012 Journal of the American Medical Association study noted that reports of a “stable overall suicide rate in school-aged children in the United States during 20 years of study obscured a significant increase in suicide incidence in Black children and a significant decrease in suicide incidence among white children.”) “For psychologists,” scholar Pamela Trotman Reid has written, Black women have always been “an understudied, overlooked and distorted topic.”

The consequences of that neglect are dire. There is an urgent lacking of studies interrogating Black women’s unique experience being othered, pathologized, dehumanized, and stigmatized by intertwined anti-Black racism and misogyny—what Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey in 2008 termed misogynoir—and having to navigate a society that is “hostile to them on multiple levels,” to quote Reid. Even those rare studies that focus on Black women too often treat racist and sexist oppression as distinct, despite the fact that Black women’s lived experiences are “clearly intersectional,” as Howard University psychologist Veronica G. Thomas has noted, “and cannot be adequately explained with an isolated emphasis on either race or gender.” Science apparently still lags in recognizing a reality that Black feminists named and explained more than 30 years ago.

Relatedly, there is also a pressing need for greater investigation of how the perfectionist “Strong Black Woman schema,” as psychologists have described it, which Black women may adopt to counter gendered racism, can have detrimental mental health consequences for both Black women and girls. (A 2022 study that tackled the issue noted “clear links between mental health, gendered racism experienced by Black women, and the Strong Black Woman schema which they adopt to navigate society.”) We need this research to understand the psychosocial factors that drive Black women and young girl’s suicidality, and to see how depression might present differently in Black women than in other populations—both of which are needed to create culturally competent prevention strategies.

In recent months, I’ve been thinking a lot about Black women, suicide, and the ubiquity and perniciousness of misogynoir. Those thoughts have been less provoked by studies and statistics—which can sometimes seem to reduce three-dimensional people and lives to faceless one-dimensional computations—than by what I was witnessing in real time.

n July 2020, Megan Pete, better known as rapper Megan Thee Stallion, was shot in both feet. It took more than a month before she would post an Instagram live video in which she confirmed rumors that Canadian rapper Tory Lanez had been the shooter. In the same video, she admitted fabricating a story about stepping on glass to the cops as a way to protect Lanez, in the midst of a summer when it seemed police were “literally killing Black people for no motherfucking reason.” In the weeks between news of the shooting and Pete’s post, the Internet and various tawdry gossip blogs had already been busy making jokes and degrading speculations at Pete’s expense. In her livestream, without naming names, Pete acknowledged gross accusations that she was making it all up or somehow was deserving of being shot.

“Why would I lie?” Pete asked in the video, before lamenting the number of Internet posters—including Lanez and his PR team—who were all too happy to suggest that “Black women [are] the problem.”

“Black women are so unprotected & we hold so many things in to protect the feelings of others w/o considering our own,” Pete had already posted days before on Twitter, in a message she never should have felt the need to write. “It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.”

Pete would later share now-deleted graphic photos of wounds to her feet via social media; in a televised interview, she would recount how before he began firing Lanez had mockingly yelled “Dance, bitch!” And months before the trial began in late 2022, various news outlets confirmed that the medical report attested to the presence of bullet fragments in Pete’s feet. Yet over the two and half years from the moment the shooting made headlines to the court’s ruling—Lanez was found guilty of three felony charges on December 23; he faces 22 years in jail and deportation—Pete was subjected to an endless amount of ridicule, harassment, mockery, name-calling, and accusations of lying. Mostly from other Black folks, famous and not, and Black media outlets.

“In some kind of way I became the villain,” Pete told Rolling Stone in June 2022, six months before the trial began in June 2022.

“And I don’t know if people don’t take it seriously because I seem strong. I wonder if it’s because of the way I look. Is it because I’m not light enough? Is it that I’m not white enough? Am I not the shape? The height? Because I’m not petite? Do I not seem like I’m worth being treated like a woman?”

Just two days after Pete identified Lanez as the shooter, rapper Cam’ron “joked” that Lanez had discovered Pete was transgender, and implied that meant she deserved to be shot. In October 2020, roughly a week after the Los Angeles district attorney’s office announced charges against Lanez, gossip blogger Jason Lee called Pete “aggressive,” weaponized her size, calling her a “big girl,” and claimed “whatever happened with her and Tory, there’s more to the story.” DJ Akademiks has, unprompted, pumped out so much random vitriol against Pete and nonsense pro-Lanez misinformation that he accidentally helped convince a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to increase Lanez’s bail. Drake stooped so low as to rap, “This bitch lie ’bout getting shot, but she still a stallion,” Akon tweeted that he hoped “all goes in [Lanez’s] favor,” and LeBron James posted video of himself bopping to Lanez’s then-new 2022 album Daystar (which, incidentally, included one track on which Lanez accused Pete of trying to “frame” him, and another that accusingly asks, “How the fuck you get shot in your foot, don’t hit no bones or tendons?”). Rapper 50 Cent—whose early fame was all wrapped up with his reputation for having been shot nine times—not once but twice—posted memes dismissing the violence done to Pete. On top of all that, way too many hip-hop “news” blogs—No Jumper, Say Cheese!, RapTV among them—announced that Lanez had been found not guilty while the jury was still deliberating.

Even the defense counsel used its opening statement to drop rumors about sexual relationships Pete had had, offering a master class in how misogynoir uses hypersexualization of Black women as rationale for violence. (Anyone who points to sexual themes in Pete’s music as a justifying factor should try to imagine the outrage if a Black rapper were accused of shooting Taylor Swift, whose catalogue anthologizes every dude she’s dated.) On the stand, Pete was candid about the suicidal ideation she was experiencing because of the endless abuse.

“I don’t wanna be on this earth,” she reportedly testified. “I wish he would have shot and killed me if I knew I would go through this torture.”

After both her mother and grandmother died during a two-week span in 2019, Pete had been open about the heartbreak she experienced. Instead of being allowed to mourn, she received flack for grieving both too loudly and not loudly enough. Then, as her stardom began ascending even faster and further—with number-one singles, multiple industry awards, and a gig guest hosting and performing on Saturday Night Live—she had to cope with being shot, and the humiliating attacks that compounded her trauma. Misogynoir—in hip-hop and elsewhere—denied Pete the empathy, compassion, and support she deserved. Not only was she blamed for her own shooting, but also for the abuse that was heaped upon her after.

Pete’s case put the circularity of misogynoir on full display. Out of deeply held anti-Black racism and sexism, misogynoir takes stereotypical, one-dimensional images and ideas and attributes them to Black women, using those projections as a way to both justify and rationalize its own anti-Blackness and misogynist contempt. Misogynoir exists, essentially, to justify itself.

“There exist at least two myths of African American women; they are either “good” or “bad,” Reid writes.

The “good” African American woman is strong, maternal, hard-working, devoted to family and quiet. (Note that quietness is traditionally considered a virtue in children, Blacks and women.) The “bad” African American woman is ugly, lascivious, lazy, negligent, emasculating, and loud. Both views are based on stereotypes born of a need to justify public policies or societal treatment of African American women; they do not come from data or any close investigation of reality.

Therapeutic models are too often “couched in terms of these myths as well as other mistaken notions that may abound.”

Held up to the light, the twisted assumptions and accusations of the misogynoirist mindset are often revealed as nonsensical and contradictory. See, for example, how enslaved Black women, possessing no legal reproductive nor bodily autonomy, and often subject to sexual violence, were so often cast as Jezebel seductresses. How the mammy figure—itself a figment of the misogynoirist imagination—was held up as the model of devotional caretaking for white children, but Black mothers are degraded as an unfit and emotionally deficient parent to her own Black children. The way Black queer, trans, and nonbinary identities have been erased while we hear complaints that those identities undermine cisgender Black masculinity. (Those who spout misogynoir also often see Black womanhood as never quite feminine enough.) Misogynoir contorts itself to have it both ways, in order to shame from multiple conflicting angles: Black women are strong and sturdy workhorses, but also indolent welfare queens and gold diggers; sage and sassy magical-negro sidekicks and ignorant know-nothings. And even with all those stereotypes of its own creation, misogynoir still insists Black women are a monolith.

eghan Markle, duchess of Sussex, had also raised the specter of suicide as a response to misogynoir, stating in a widely viewed 2021 interview that she “just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

Markle’s treatment has been a textbook example of the racialized, sexualized hate that characterizes misogynoir. Most recently, British columnist Jeremy Clarkson penned an open letter that expressed his sexually violent fantasies about Markle.

I hate her. Not like I hate [First Minister of Scotland] Nicola Sturgeon or [literal serial killer] Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level. At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her…. Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.

It was par for the course. By now we are all well aware of how British tabloids described Markle as “gangster royalty,” admonished her for the same things it praised in Kate Middleton, wrote endlessly about Markle being “difficult” and demanding beyond reason. One magazine implied that at her 2018 wedding, Markle recklessly endangered the life of 3-year-old Charlotte with a flower crown containing the same blossoms used at Middleton and Lady Diana’s marriage ceremonies; another TV presenter falsely claimed Markle’s Black mother, Doria Ragland, a social worker, previously dealt drugs. Certain white women commentators—not to mention countless non-famous white women on social media—have seemingly constructed their lives around their hatred of Markle, including Megyn Kelly, who complained about Markle repeatedly calling the man she is married to, Prince Harry, “her husband.”

Why are white women going nuts about Megan Markle? Misogynoir has long been used to mark Black women as sexually available but romantically undesirable—their beauty, femininity, and fundamental personhood innately inferior to that of white women. White supremacy confers social capital upon white womanhood, a currency understood to afford them the exclusive right to a certain kind of so-called “marrying up.” This is what Markle’s detractors are most furious about—the breaking of the long-understood rules that are never more explicit than they are where the whiteness of British royalty is concerned. I’m reminded of a 2013 essay by sociologist and scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom about the utility of Eurocentric feminine beauty, though I think that idea can be expanded to comment on the construction of white womanhood far more broadly:

Sex is one thing. Marrying confers status and wealth. Slaveholders knew that. Our law reflects their knowing this. The de rigueur delineation of this difference may have faded but cultural ideology remains.

Britain may have never codified its own one-drop rule, but that’s only because it didn’t need to. The idea is the same—hence the unnamed member of the royal family who, discussing Harry and Meghan’s offspring, expressed worries “about how dark his skin might be when he was born.” Cottom continues:

The family unit is considered the basic unit for society not just because some god decreed it but because the inheritance of accumulated privilege maintains our social order. Thus, who we marry at the individual level may be about love but at the group level it is also about wealth and power and privilege. Black feminists have critiqued the material advantage that accrues to white women as a function of their elevated status as the normative cultural beauty ideal. As far as privileges go it is certainly a complicated one but that does not negate its utility. Being suitably marriageable privileges white women’s relation to white male wealth and power. The cultural dominance of a few acceptable brown female beauty ideals is a threat to that privilege.

Interestingly, Markle herself seems to have believed that her own biracialness and physical proximity to whiteness would prevent her from experiencing misogynoir. In the recent Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, Markle states that “people didn’t know what I was mixed with” before she began dating Prince Harry, as if this fact went unmentioned or was studiously avoided before their relationship; she also mentions a childhood memory of hearing her mother be assaulted with the N-word, even as she recalls her childhood as essentially raceless, with no need for a discussion about anti-Black racism. Nylah Burton notes that “despite [her] being raised by a Black mother in a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles,” every friend of Markle’s, from childhood onward, who appears in the doc is white “and people who did not know she was biracial…. Today, passing doesn’t require convoluted lies. It can involve more subtle actions, such as downplaying one’s Blackness, immersing oneself in white worlds, and omitting mentions of one’s race until it’s unavoidable.”

I’ll add here the anti-Blackness and misogynoir are often internalized and held up by the same people they harm, as with all oppressions. We all have different paths to shaking that stuff off.

That said, it seems the haters remain unaware that Markle was never looking to disrupt racial capitalism or even to upend the ongoing transfer of hereditary power; that’s self-evident by the fact of her marriage. Had The Firm, and its legions of admirers, played along and flexed its muscle on her behalf toward the press, it’s a sure bet the defection would never have happened. Instead, the monarchy would have been tepid proponents of a multiracial future, instead of immersed in a very public moral crisis.

But even Markle’s racial ambiguity could not guard against gendered racism, because the mere fact of her Blackness was enough to incite an outpouring of misogynoir. In her book Misogynoir Transformed, Moya Bailey writes about how non-cisgender Black folks are also targeted by gendered racism, in a passage that applies to Markle’s case as well. “Misogynoir is deployed because of social beliefs about Black women,” Bailey observes, “and those of us who are read as Black women—despite our self-identification—get caught in the crosshairs.”

If even Markle can be subject to misogynoir’s disdain and scorn—which was so vicious it made her contemplate taking her life—imagine the harm it inflicts on so many other more vulnerable, less visible, and white-adjacent Black women.

e know that gendered racism presents Black women and girls as “unfeminine and too aggressive.” As a result, “Black women of all ages are subject to fear and aggression in social spaces as responses to their presumed nature,” as the authors of the North Carolina A&T study note. Consequently, more than 40 percent of Black women, more than any other gender-racial group, face physical abuse from intimate partners, according to a 2020 study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. A quarter of Black girls are sexually abused before reaching the age of 18, and one of five women are rape survivors—again, those figures are higher than those for any other gender-racial category—according to the National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community. (Rape is highly underreported among all demographic groups; misogynoir contributes to the adultification of Black girls, denying them and Black women the ability to be victimized, and likely contributes to the reasons Black women are least likely to report. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network also cites a 2017 study finding that “Black women are at highest risk of any group for experiencing sexual violence perpetrated by police officers.”) The New York Times looked into statistics from the Department of Education and reaffirmed that public schools are excessively punitive toward Black girls, writing that they are “over five times more likely than white girls to be suspended at least once from school, seven times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions than white girls, and three times more likely to receive referrals to law enforcement.” For Black nonbinary, transgender, and queer folks who read as women, the figures are yet worse.

And those stressors, in turn, can impact suicidal ideation and self-injury. Black women have the “highest incidence of medically treated suicide attempts,” meaning more than any other race-gender group, Black women who attempt suicide suffer “consequences severe enough to require medical” treatment—an outcome strongly suggesting Black women “engage in more serious self-harm than women of other races.” (A 2019 CDC assessment found that Black girls in high school attempted suicide and engaged in self-harm at higher rates than white or Hispanic girls of the same age.) Researchers at North Carolina A&T, relying on CDC data, indicated in a study released last year that as of 2019, suicide was “the fourth leading cause of death among Black girls, ages 10–14; the third leading cause of death for Black, female emerging adults, ages 15–24; and the sixth leading cause of death among Black women ages 25–34.”

Those numbers are probably undercounts, considering that evidence that “strongly indicate[s] greater susceptibility of medico-legal authorities to misclassify black suicides than white suicides.”

Despite the indications that we’re in the midst of a worsening crisis, the scholars behind the 2022 North Carolina A&T study could locate only two (two!) studies into how the dual intersecting oppressions of anti-Black racism and gender affected Black women’s mental states, both of which indicated that misogynoir has “negative mental health related consequences, including low self-esteem, increased psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress symptoms.” (Black women are 34 percent more likely to experience PTSD than white women.) They note that “results from both studies demonstrated a significant relationship between gendered racism and suicidal ideation/behaviors for Black women.”

We cannot talk about the explosion in suicides among Black women and girls without addressing misogynoir, and how it singularly and solely interferes with the welfare and well-being of Black women and girls. As Thomas writes, Black women have a “perspective on womanhood, Blackness, and even personhood unknown to any other oppressed groups, including Black men, White women, and other non-Black women.”

There is no Black girl who has witnessed Pete’s or Markle’s treatment who did not learn just how much contempt and disdain the world holds for them. Those lessons likely came in addition to real-life experiences with misogynoir of their own that already are chipping away at them. Of course, there are highly personal reasons for every life that is lost to suicide. But, as long as the psychology and mental health fields continue to ignore the intersecting harms of anti-Black racism and gender, and the damage they cause—including the way they can make life seem unworthy of living for an increasing number of Black women and girls—they will fail to create culturally competent interventions that adequately serve Black women and girls’ mental health.

Kanye “Ye” West has been spewing white nationalist talking points for a decade. His current anti-Semitic road show was preceded by years of evident anti-Blackness, from hawking Confederate flag merch in 2013, to declaring that Black enslavement was “a choice” in 2018, to appearing repeatedly at the White House during the Trump years, to attempting, in 2021, to coerce Black election workers in Georgia to falsely confess throwing the vote to Biden. Unsurprisingly, wariness of Ye among Black folks has been steadily growing for years, particularly among disappointed former fans. In 2018, the writer Channing Hargrove wrote a satirical obituary for West; Black Twitter declared him stuck in Get Out’s “sunken place”; and journalist and filmmaker dream hampton indicted him for pushing “the same old white supremacy.” Comedian Zachary Fox had the prescience to warn that we should all disembark from “the Kanye train before it inevitably reaches the ‘Hitler was a good guy’ stop.” In October 2022, an Economist/YouGov poll found that a greater share of Black Americans (40 percent) viewed the rapper very negatively than either Hispanic Americans (32 percent) or white Americans (33 percent).

Meanwhile, that same anti-Black racism has ingratiated Ye with the right wing. After his shenanigans at Paris Fashion Week, where he showed up in a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt, the House GOP tweeted its now-­notorious vision of leadership: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” Soon after, GOP Representative Paul Gosar urged his Twitter followers to “Pray for Kanye West. They will throw everything they have at him simply for speaking the truth.” Ye, who is quasi-stumping to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, kicked off his anti-Jewish media tour two days later by promising to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Not only did the Gosar and House Republican tweets remain up for nearly two more months, but Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita accused the media of attacking Ye for “his independent thinking, & for having opposing thoughts from the norm of Hollywood.” (He would sorta walk the statement back after criticism.)

These folks are fans of neither hip-hop nor Black folks, but they love having a Black celebrity carry their racist water. If anti-Semitism comes with the deal, even better. In other words, Ye is delivering their message without any messy disclaimers.

Ye has spent the time since then putting out anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, professing his love for Hitler and the Nazis, and dining with well-known anti-Semites, including Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump, whose own anti-Semitic footprint is sizable and who has repeatedly castigated American Jews—who are collectively second only to African Americans in voting against him—as “disloyal.”

Most Republicans have said nothing about Trump’s dinner with Ye and Fuentes. Among the handful to decry the event was Trump endorser and former Democratic New York state assemblyman Dov Hikind, who stated that the “incident goes beyond the pale.” Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro—who in 2016 called out the anti-Semitism of candidate Trump’s base before offering a defense, just two years later, of President Trump’s racism—accused Trump of dining with “a vile racist and anti-Semite.” Morton Klein, the leader of the Zionist Organization of America—which in November presented Trump with its highest honor—told The New York Times that he has “become very frightened for my people,” because Trump “legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters.”

It’s impossible to isolate anti-Semitism from the other hatreds that Trump and the entire GOP have made obvious—and made policy. Over the past eight years, the right’s rebukes of Blackness, transness, queerness, and foreignness have been deafening. Creating moral distinctions among oppressions only aids those whose destructive agenda relies on your forgetting. “Teaching that many Jews were killed during the Holocaust doesn’t teach a thing about antisemitism except for where it inevitably leads,” cautions the Jewish writer Elad Nehorai. “Teach about what leads to holocausts, pogroms, mass shootings. Teach about fascism. Teach about other forms of bigotry and how they connect.”

We see the tragic consequences of ignoring these connections in recent mass shootings. The shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh had previously posted hateful social media messages about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which aids refugees, writing: “the filthy evil jews Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!” The Buffalo shooter, who murdered Black folks as they did their grocery shopping, posted an online screed in which he described himself as an “anti-Semite” and accused figures like George Soros, who is Jewish, of being “majorly responsible for the destruction of our White culture.”

In the GOP, we have a party of people who rail against “globalists” and “internationalists.” An Anti-Defamation League audit noted that 2021 saw the most anti-Semitic incidents since the organization started tracking the numbers in 1979. That horrible milestone did not come out of the blue; anti-Semitic attacks have been trending upward since 2016.

“Hatred of Jews has become entangled with many other kinds of hatred,” Beth S. Wenger, a scholar of Jewish history at Penn State, observed recently. “That realization is especially apparent in our current moment, where attacks against Jews, African Americans, animus toward immigrants, hatred for those who defy traditional gender norms are often expressed at the same time. Many times, but not always, these prejudices are wrapped up together by white supremacists and other hate groups.”

This is the manifestation of an ideology that banned Muslims from entering the country, that prohibited transgender people from serving in the military, that muzzled federal employees on the topic of anti-Black racism, and that insists—under penalty of law in some states—that we celebrate genocidal leaders and enslavers such as Andrew Jackson and Christopher Columbus but ban books about the Holocaust. There’s no ethical difference between anti-trans ideology, anti-Black oppression, and anti-Semitism. And white supremacy makes useful tools of those foolish enough to think they are an exception. I feel certain Ye will learn this lesson in an unfortunate way.

In September, President Joe Biden delivered a speech titled “The Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” a dire warning about the threat posed by MAGA Republicans, who cheer political violence and “look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6—brutally attacking law enforcement—not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger at the throat of our democracy, but…as patriots.” The president rightly identified the entire MAGA project as a danger “to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice [and] to the rule of law.”

That speech came on the heels of the president’s announcement of his Safer America Plan, a crime-reduction initiative that would provide $13 billion to add 100,000 officers to local and state police forces. He also used the moment to indict MAGA right-wingers for their hypocrisy: “You’re either on the side of a mob or the side of the police. You can’t be pro–law enforcement and pro-insurrection.”

But neither of the president’s speeches acknowledged the fact that law enforcement formed a noteworthy contingent of the insurrectionist mob. At least 19 Capitol defendants are current or former police officers; a Los Angeles Times report pointed out that “dozens more were there but so far haven’t faced charges.” More than 80 Capitol rioters are veterans or active service members. If President Biden sincerely cares about the white supremacist “poison…running through our body politic,” as he put it in yet another speech, his administration had better get busy purging the strain that courses through the ranks of our police.

It would be the first time the government has endeavored to do so, despite plenty of studies finding that the issue is a major problem. Over 140 years after Reconstruction saw slave patrols reform as Southern police departments, a 2006 FBI report warned of a new tide of “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Hate groups, the paper noted, have long found police departments to be fertile recruitment grounds, but there was now evidence of “self-initiated efforts by…those already within law enforcement ranks, to volunteer their professional resources to white supremacist causes.” Three years later, a Department of Homeland Security report predicted that the white backlash to a Black president might become “the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States”; the report was rescinded in the face of conservative outrage. By 2015, an internal FBI counterterrorism guide admitted that agency investigations of white supremacist and other domestic terrorist groups “often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.”

Evidence of these links keeps mounting. Six days after the “Soul of the Nation” address, the Anti-Defamation League announced that it had identified more than 370 current police officers and more than 100 active-duty military members on the Oath Keepers’ leaked membership rolls. Back in 2019, the Center for Investigative Reporting linked nearly 400 former and current “police officers, sheriffs or prison guards” from more than 150 departments to online groups with names such as “Ban the NAACP” and “The White Privilege Club.” A 2019 survey by Military Times found that one-third of all active-duty troops said that they had “personally witnessed examples of white nationalism or ideological-driven racism within the ranks in recent months.”

The racist attitudes of off-duty and very online police persist on duty and IRL, where they pose real dangers. For two decades, from the early 1970s through 1993, a rumored Klansman, Jon Burge, commanded a Chicago police gang that tortured at least 118 Black men, extracting false confessions with cattle prods and electric shocks in a device they called the “nigger box.” In 2018, Kentucky police veteran Tim Shaw advised a new recruit to shoot Black teens caught smoking pot and to rape the kid’s parents. Five years after he was hired despite admitting he’d attended a Klan meeting, Little Rock, Ark., officer Josh Hastings murdered an unarmed Black 15-year-old boy. The 50-year presence within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department of racist gangs has cost the county $55 million in victim payouts.

And in early October, in response to a FOIA request, the FBI disclosed that one week after the Capitol insurrection, FBI deputy director Paul Abbate received an e-mail from an internal source warning that there is “a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.” The letter also indicated that its author had “spoken to multiple African American agents who have turned down asks to join SWAT because they do not trust that every member of their office’s SWAT team would protect them in an armed conflict.”

Just as the “bad apples” analogy downplays the systemic rot of racist policing, the “lone wolf” theory of white supremacists in law enforcement belies the institutional reality. Departments with officers bearing “sympathy towards the ideologies of extremism leave us all compromised,” writes Georgetown University law professor Vida B. Johnson. “If police departments are complicit in the attack on truth and democracy, they cannot be trusted to protect the general public.”

Eight months after the Capitol insurrection, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing on the white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement. Congressman Jamie Raskin, who led the proceedings, told USA Today at the time that “a street alliance among right-wing paramilitary forces, law enforcement and demagogic politicians has been a hallmark of fascism for a century.” And yet there is still no national plan to address what Raskin termed “a warning sign of danger for our democracy.” What might help bring about that strategy is pressure from above. Biden has said that Trump’s 2017 defense of white nationalists at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally is what motivated him to again run for president. “It was a wake-up call for us as a country and for me, a call to action,” Biden said in 2020.

Cops with racial animus toward Black folks are more likely to harm Black children, a 2014 UCLA study found. A 2017 study found that “white police officers are nine times as likely as a white nonpolice citizen to think that Black people are more violent than white people.” And most grimly, Black folks are more than three times as likely to be killed by police as white people.

There is no louder wake-up call than this. I hope the president is listening.

The president’s issuing blanket pardons for all federal convictions of simple marijuana possession is, to put it in Biden-esque tems, a big fucking deal. At least 6,500 people charged with federal pot possession dating to 1992 will have their convictions overturned, as will an as-yet-unknown number of folks convicted as far back as the 1970s. Thousands more convicted of simple pot possession under Washington, D.C., drug laws will also have their convictions scrapped. Just as importantly, after more than 50 years of the federal government rating pot as in league with heroin and fentanyl, the president announced that Attorney General Merrick Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra have been tasked with “expeditiously” reassessing pot’s categorization as a Schedule I drug. Considering the fact that its status deems it a substance with “no currently accepted medical use,” despite pot’s being legalized in at least 37 states for precisely that purpose, the move seemed long overdue. It’s no wonder the Internet applauded the president’s order by flooding social media with “Dank Brandon” memes.

But there are more than a few reasons to hold off on taking a celebratory hit off your vape for now. Sure, Biden’s mass pardons will undeniably offer some degree of relief to people who, because of federal pot possession convictions, have endured decades of discrimination costing them jobs, housing aid, education funds, and a slew of other opportunities. But as the Department of Justice was careful to note in its press release, though the pardons will restore civil liberties, such as the “right to vote, to hold office, [and] to sit on a jury,” they will not “expunge the conviction” from people’s criminal records. Even the American Medical Association called on states to expunge cannabis-related charges that are no longer relevant as a result of pot decriminalization or legalization, citing removal of those charges as necessary to dump the “baggage associated with a criminal record.” The old Biden 2020 campaign website, which is still online, includes a promise to “automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions.” It was a good idea then, and a good idea now, since it’s really the only way to prevent unfair collateral consequences from mounting.

Just as critically, no one will be freed from federal jail for a simple pot possession conviction, because there is no one serving time in federal prison for that charge. But an estimated 3,000 people currently sit behind federal bars for pot possession in tandem with other nonviolent offenses—selling, conspiracy, trafficking, you get the picture. The thing is, it also gets pretty murky when you start looking closely at the line between “nonviolent” offenses and “violent” offenses, because a person can be charged with a “violent” crime without any actual violence taking place. As JustLeadershipUSA President DeAnna Hoskins explained to me in 2020, if a person is apprehended for selling pot while carrying a gun they never used, they’re still likely to face “aggravated” charges. And as studies prove again and again, black folks “are more likely to be stopped by the police, detained pretrial, charged with more serious crimes”—that is to say, overcharged—“and sentenced more harshly than white people.”

Another shortcoming of Biden’s order is that it won’t serve undocumented folks, explicitly omitting pardons for “individuals who were non-citizens not lawfully present in the United States at the time of their offense.” Meanwhile, more than “45,000 people whose most serious conviction was marijuana possession” have been deported since 2003, according to the Immigrant Defense Project. The organization also notes that “federal immigration authorities regularly deny green card and citizenship applications due to marijuana possession convictions.” Members of the military aren’t covered either.

The folks who benefit the least from Biden’s order are those convicted of pot possession at the state level, where a staggering 98 percent of marijuana convictions happen. In 2019 alone, according to the Last Prisoner Project, about 546,000 folks were arrested for pot-related crimes, and roughly 22,000 people are serving time for marijuana-tied crimes in state and local jails right now. Though it could be more, because our criminal justice system, which comprises thousands siloed local departments, does an abysmal job of collecting and releasing that sort of data. Biden doesn’t have the power to issue pardons at the state level, though he did implore governors to follow his lead, stating that “just as no one should be in a Federal prison solely due to the possession of marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either.” The results of that call, as you might expect, were mixed, with responses predictably falling largely on either side of the partisan divide. Democratic governors and gubernatorial candidates such as Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Beto O’Rourke in Texas, and Governor Ned Lamont in Connecticut mostly “applaud[ed]” Biden’s move and signaled alignment in thinking, though some expressed the likelihood that they would be impeded by their legislatures. Republican Governor Greg Abbott in Texas suggested this would only worsen “a criminal justice system run amuck” (sic). Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson claimed rescheduling pot downplays “the science that is behind the different categories of drugs,” and accused Biden of having “waved the flag of surrender in the fight to save lives from drug abuse.” He stopped just short of warning that pot would lead to race-mixing in jazz speakeasies.

Any remaining hand-wringing over pot as a threat to civilized society is both unscientific and frankly, kind of dumb. Harry Anslinger, the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which preceded the Drug Enforcement Administration, succeeded in criminalizing marijuana in 1937 through a campaign of racial fearmongering, once declaring, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” and that it made “white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others.” We’ve actually known since the LaGuardia Committee Report on Marijuana, published in 1944, that “marijuana does not lead to morphine or heroin or cocaine addiction,” a finding reiterated by a slew of peer-reviewed, science-grounded studies. President Richard Nixon, who empaneled a commission to look into marijuana and then ignored its findings when it recommended decriminalization, launched the War on Drugs in 1971—and this is according to his own domestic affairs adviser—to strike at white hippies and black folks. As a senator, Biden co-authored the 1994 Crime Bill that, in an era when even Black folks were pushing for tough-on-crime responses to the crack epidemic, helped usher in decades of draconian punishments for drug-related offenses across the board. How fitting that Biden should now acknowledge that “too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana,” and take this step to “right these wrongs.”

ut there’s obviously more to do, and not all of it is up to Biden. A change to the federal status of an illicit substance requires more scientific inquiry, which is hindered by its status as an illegal substance, creating a circle of bureaucratic processes that means we might be here awhile. Rescheduling pot, meaning moving it to a lower category, will still result in arrests, and a Department of Justice statement noted that the mass pardon “does not have any effect on marijuana possession offenses occurring after October 6, 2022.” Descheduling cannabis all together—removing it from the Controlled Substances Act and legalizing it—would take an act of Congress. This summer, Senators Cory Booker, Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden filed a bill that would address those issues, including expungement, but it’s gone nowhere; the 2020 Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, which the House has passed twice, covered much of the same ground, but has also stalled. Meanwhile, even as at least 19 states have made it legal for adults to smoke pot recreationally, and 27 states have “partially or fully decriminalized some offenses for marijuana possession,” according to NORML, racism continues to affect how laws governing pot possession and usage are applied. In a 2020 report, the ACLU indicated that nationally, “black people are 3.6 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana, despite similar usage rates.” Racial disparities grow even more horrific at the county level, where the ACLU found “places where Black people are more than 20, 30, 40, or even 50 times more likely to be arrested than white people.” Even in states where marijuana is decriminalized or legal, black folks are still “more likely to be arrested for possession than white people.” One of the grimmest findings of the ACLU study is how racism works to ensure that the criminalization of black folks persists when changes in laws might mitigate it. “Since 2010,” when pot laws around the country began to change, “racial disparities [in marijuana arrests] actually worsened in 31 states,” study authors note.

That’s especially disheartening to note, since most states automatically prohibit those with criminal convictions from operating marijuana dispensaries, leaving communities that were most devastated by the racist War on Drugs locked out of pot profits now that marijuana laws are being loosened. In cities including New York and Detroit, “social equity licensing” was supposed to ensure that black folks harmed by draconian drug laws would be included in dispensary ownership, but a Pew Trust investigation found those programs “plagued by delays, lawsuits, computer glitches and corruption allegations” and prohibitive start-up costs. According to the 2021 jobs report from Leafly, which follows cannabis-world trends, “while Black Americans represent 13 percent of the national population, they represent only 1.2% to 1.7% of all cannabis company owners—a gap that is far too wide.” Especially as so many former politicians—some whom helped criminalize marijuana, such as John Boehner, the ex–speaker of the House who today has a cozy board seat at a “marijuana investment firm”—are now trying to cash in on weed in their private industry lives.

There’s no question that issuing mass pardons—which a president hasn’t done since Jimmy Carter extended pardons to men who evaded the Vietnam War draft in 1977—for simple possession are a game changer. Those pardons send a message about what our priorities should be, begin undoing racist marijuana laws that have been on the federal books for nearly a century, and finally bring the executive branch closer in line with an American populace that, according to polls, overwhelmingly supports pot legalization. Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota will all be weighing in on the recreational pot question this November, and the wheels of decriminalization keep turning. But there needs to be a push for even more at the federal level. And it should continue even after the midterms.

It was utterly unsurprising that the moment Buckingham Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth’s doctors were “concerned for Her Majesty’s health,” a gross amount of invective would be flung at Meghan Markle. Now that the queen has died, grief seems to be overshadowed in certain corners by the joy taken in blaming Markle for the passing of a 96-year-old woman whose health had been in decline over the past year. The Windsors’ brand has always been unmiscegenated whiteness as a proxy for imperial glory, and for royalists and racists both British and American, Markle’s entry into the family was a blemish on, even an invasion of, that monarchical legacy. So it was no surprise that #GoHomeMeghanMarkle trended, that a cluster of white women refused to shake Markle’s hand as she greeted mourners at Windsor Castle, that one viral tweet claimed it was “sickening” to watch her “pretending to be sad after making the Queen’s final years a misery.” Nor that those incidents were gleefully recounted by right-wing rags such as the UK’s Daily Mail and the New York Post.

How predictable, too, that the same hatred would be directed at people who responded to the queen’s death by forcing into view the brutal colonial legacies she presided over. On social media, while Paris Hilton was calling the queen “the original girlboss,” users from Black, Irish, and other diaspora communities subjugated under colonialism recalled the apartheid, famine, exploitation, and bloodshed inflicted by the British Empire and sustained during the queen’s seven-decade reign. There were reminders that the royals even today benefit from a transatlantic slave trade that still causes global Black suffering. (“‘Respect the dead’ when we’re all writing these Tweets *in English.* How’d that happen, hm?” one African American woman wrote. “We just chose this language?”) Some posters recalled that just after the queen took the throne in 1952, Britain established “brutal concentration camps in colonialist Kenya” that killed and tortured tens of thousands during the Mau Mau rebellion. A Twitter user detailed the stolen Indian gems among over 23,000 crown jewels—the most valuable, the Kohinoor diamond, sits at the center of the queen mother’s crown—and reminded readers that the British Empire had extracted “$45 trillion in wealth” from the country.

Others pointed out that neither the queen nor any other royal had “apologized for slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism” or provided “reparations for the millions of lives taken.” For someone whose primary role, as even her supporters acknowledge, was symbolic, the queen failed to use that symbolism to address that awful history.

In response, right-wing media here and abroad accused “woke haters” (Toronto Sun) of having “no shame” (Daily Mail) and “attacking Queen Elizabeth…because she lived during a better time” (Fox News). A YouTuber named Mike Partyka adopted the paternalism of the empire, writing, “Dear Black Twitter: If you can’t show a shred of human decency, you don’t deserve a shred of reparations.”

Uju Anya, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of Nigerian and Trinidadian descent, had family members among the casualties of the Biafran war. “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” Anya wrote in a tweet, adding, “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.”

A staggering amount of abuse toward Anya followed, including accusations that she was “blaming the whites for all [your] problems,” defenses of the queen’s innocence for merely holding a “ceremonial position,” and demands that she respect “our pain and mourning.” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos found it necessary to weigh in, writing to his 5 million followers, “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?”

Demands that victims of British colonialism not speak of the empire’s crimes against humanity, the rapacious plunder that produced so many of the conditions that still drive Black and brown countries’ poverty, and its creation of racial, religious, and ethnic divisions in order to divide and conquer, suggest those harms don’t truly matter. Remaining silent would be a form of remaining colonized. Perhaps Bezos should ask why he felt compelled to defend the queen of a violent empire instead of those who suffered under its boot.

The queen’s apologists whitewash her legacy by insisting she was nonpolitical, but that’s just more talking over reality. Her Royal Majesty vetted more than 1,000 laws before they were given parliamentary approval. She secured exemptions for herself from laws requiring disclosure of her private fortune, compliance with climate regulations, prohibitions on racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring, and police searches for stolen artifacts. As late as 1968, Buckingham Palace barred “coloured immigrants” and “foreigners” from non-domestic employment—and because of the crown’s lack of transparency, it’s unclear whether the rule was ever lifted. Queen Elizabeth flexed her powers to obstruct an investigation of her son Prince Andrew on sexual abuse charges related to his association with Jeffrey Epstein. And in 2004, she asked the government for a grant from funds that were meant to help poor folks pay their energy bills. (She was turned down to avoid a “public relations backlash.”) For 70 years, the queen wrapped herself in the trappings of the monarchy, traveling the world to become its most recognized mascot and relying on stolen wealth. Her son Charles stands to inherit $27.5 billion tax-free based on the ludicrous idea of divine right. Because some dude named Cerdic of Wessex won a war back in 534 ad.

The queen doesn’t need defenders. The royals are fine. It’s those who were hurt by them who should finally be heard.

In exactly this way, history is overwritten and redacted, cherry-picked and edited to glorify those with power and to silence those without. The outpouring from the empire’s victims following the queen’s death was also the expression of generational trauma and of grief, pain, and loss—a collective refusal to ignore the suffering on which the empire was built and still flourishes. And, I must point out, it was all the truth.

Jeffrey Lamar Williams, one of the most critically revered and commercially successful figures in contemporary poetry, has been held in solitary confinement in a Georgia jail since his arrest on May 9. Williams emerged from Atlanta’s thriving poetry scene in 2011 with I Came From Nothing, a genre-reshaping collection filled with imagery from his childhood in Jonesboro South, the notorious housing projects where a young Williams watched his older brother die of gunshot wounds. That collection and the prolific output that followed would launch a slew of imitators and protégés, many of them childhood friends who were members of Williams’s Young Stoner Life star-making poetry collective. But in an 88-page, 56-count indictment, Georgia prosecutors allege that YSL is not a poetry collective but a front for a “criminal street gang” whose members have committed crimes including armed robbery, aggravated assault, carjacking, and murder. All 28 people charged, including Williams—whom prosecutors name as a cofounder of the gang—are accused of conspiring to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. The most frequently cited evidence for the charges leveled against Williams? Incredibly, lines lifted directly from his own poetry.

If it sounds odd that verses of poetry might be used to prove a poet’s participation in a criminal enterprise, hold that thought. I neglected to mention that Williams is a multiplatinum, Grammy-winning rapper who goes by Young Thug—you can replace every instance of “poetry” above with “hip-hop”—and YSL has been his record label since 2016. If you think the First Amendment should protect painters from having their works used as evidence in a criminal prosecution or that charges against film directors shouldn’t rely on the plots of their movies, then consider the incongruity of how rap lyrics are treated when rappers are charged with illegal acts. I’m not arguing that Young Thug is innocent—that’s a job for his defense team—but I am defending his right not to have his art be treated as an admission of guilt.

In addition to citing social media posts and photos, the YSL indictment points to music videos and lyrics from nine Young Thug songs to make the state’s case, quoting lines such as “I never killed anybody / but I got something to do with that body,” and “Smith & Wesson .45 / put a hole in his heart / better not play with me / killers they stay with me.” (The latter lyrics are misattributed to Young Thug by prosecutors; they were actually uttered by the late rapper Juice WRLD.) None of the lyrics listed in the indictment are linked directly to the alleged crimes. Instead, each line cited is identified as “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” At a press conference to announce the charges, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the first Black woman elected to the position, addressed the issue by stating: “I believe in the First Amendment; it’s one of our most precious rights. However, the First Amendment does not protect people from prosecutors using [speech] as evidence if it is such.”

This keeps happening with rap, the now fortysomething music genre created overwhelmingly by young Black people, the most criminalized folks in this country. In their book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis trace the practice of using rap music against criminal defendants to 1991, when lyrics written by Derek Foster helped prosecutors secure his conviction for drug trafficking. In 1993, Francisco Calderon Mora was convicted of second-­degree murder; lyrics from a rap song he’d written were included in the prosecution’s discovery. His attorneys appealed, arguing that Mora’s lyrics had prejudiced the jury, but to no avail. “Nothing makes these rap lyrics inherently unreliable,” Appellate Judge William Bedsworth wrote in his decision, “at least no more unreliable than rap lyrics in general.”

Bedsworth, however unwittingly, identified the problem. Art is generally understood to be the manifestation of a creator’s imagination. But hip-hop has long been denigrated as a confessional non-art, perhaps because of a collective unwillingness to recognize that young Black folks are capable of crafting story lines that, while informed by their own experiences, extend far beyond them. Young Thug might just be casting himself as a power broker in a fictional narrative, which, like so much hip-hop, portrays American society’s materialism and misogyny in their most extreme forms.

The use of rap lyrics in criminal cases has had dire consequences for hip-hop musicians, many of whom have few resources to defend themselves. In 2001, McKinley “Mac” Phipps Jr., a rapper with no criminal history, was convicted of manslaughter by an all-white jury because of his lyrics, despite a lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime and the fact that another man had already confessed. Phipps was finally granted clemency in 2021. Vonte Skinner, sentenced largely on the strength of rap lyrics to 30 years, had his conviction overturned in 2012, when a New Jersey appellate court found that prosecutors used “highly prejudicial lyrics” which “bore little or no probative value as to any motive or intent.” And after another man confessed, Nathaniel Woods appealed his death sentence for the murder of three Alabama police officers, only to have his appeal derailed when prosecutors cited rap lyrics he had supposedly written: “Seven execution-style murders / I have no remorse because I’m the fucking murderer.” The state killed Woods in 2020. Those lyrics were from a song by Dr. Dre.

Nielsen has uncovered nearly 600 cases in which rap lyrics were used against criminal defendants at trial. In a New York Times article, Jaeah Lee reported that she has found only four criminal cases since 1950 in which “fiction writing or lyrics” by non-rap artists “were considered to be evidence of assault or violent threats.”

Young Thug will likely remain in jail until his trial in January 2023. After his arrest, label heads Kevin Liles and Julie Greenwald launched the Petition to Protect Black Art, which calls the use of lyrics against rap artists “shameful and un-American.” A video promoting the petition features a voice-over by Young Thug: “I always use my music as a form of artistic expression, and I see now that Black artists and rappers don’t have that freedom,” he says. “Everybody please sign the Protect Black Art petition and keep praying for us. I love you all.”

For roughly two weeks now, since the FBI executed a court-authorized search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence for documents pilfered from the White House by the former president, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been calling for the dissolution of federal law enforcement. “Defund the FBI!” Greene tweeted on August 8, a sentiment she would echo in multiple follow-up posts, coupled with demands that the Justice Department be dismantled and Merrick Garland—against whom Greene has filed impeachment articles—be removed as attorney general. A few days after her original screed, Greene shared a campaign-style grainy montage of Fox News talking heads and cable news clips, a series of sound bites meant to terrify white conservatives into believing that the FBI is enforcing the law with color-blind vigor. “Joe Biden has weaponized the FBI and DOJ against President Trump and his supporters,” the accompanying text on the post warned. “This isn’t the first time. and it won’t be the last.” The only surefire way to fight to the power, the ad suggests? With a “Defund the FBI” hat or T-shirt, which Greene just so happens to be selling on her fundraising website for $30 a pop.

Greene is only the loudest voice in a chorus of conservative politicians and commentators—including Representatives Paul Gosar and Jeff Duncan, as well as MAGA Republicans from Candace Owens to Liz Booth—who are also calling for the defunding of national law enforcement, as well as far more lawless violence. Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza called the FBI a “gang of dangerous criminals” that should be “shut down.” Colorado’s twice-arrested House freshman Lauren Boebert also demanded that FBI funds be dissolved. Florida state lawmaker and US congressional candidate Anthony Sabatini did his best Don Corleone impression, advocating for the FBI to be “gut[ted] like fish,” while Florida House contender Republican Luis Miguel, announced via Twitter, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight!”

Not so long ago, these same conservatives wouldn’t shut up about how much they “Back the Blue,” sloganeering they invoked against progressive calls for reallocating bloated police budgets. Just this past May, Greene leveraged the phrase “party of defund the police” as a stand-in for the GOP’s tired “soft on crime” criticism of Democrats, and she later blamed “left-wing policies of defunding the police” for rising crime rates. She has personally called for the arrests and prosecutions of—bear with me; the list is lengthy—reproductive justice activists, anti-fascists, Black Lives Matter protesters, Nancy Pelosi, film crew members from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and a Hill staffer who ripped down an anti-trans sign she put up. Just like Trump—who used the Espionage Act against at least five whistleblowers and journalists, asked advisers if unarmed BLM protesters could be shot “in the legs or something,” had the Justice Department go after reporters and political adversaries, and in 1989 took out a full-page ad calling for the state to murder five innocent Black and brown boys—Greene is fine with weaponizing law enforcement.

In fact, “Blue Lives Matter” was never a sincere expression of conservative support for police—it’s always been an appropriative phrase devised by reactionary right-wingers to serve as a handy-dandy rhetorical counterpoint to the idea that Black lives matter, too. Conservatives’ espoused dedication to “law and order” alone wasn’t deep enough to motivate creation of the Thin Blue Line flag—but the indignation of witnessing Black folks demanding en masse that police stop killing them did. The opportunism, cynicism, and disposability of the “Back the Blue” movement was plain even before Republicans sided with white supremacist insurrectionists over the police against whom they committed at least 1,000 violent attacks at the Capitol riot, including beating an officer unconscious with a Thin Blue Line flag. (Greene voted against giving the Congressional Gold Medal to officers who were at the Capitol insurrection, but introduced a bill to bestow the accolade upon Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen who killed two people at a BLM protest.) The GOP’s respect for lawfulness is belied by how the party’s spokespeople, including Representatives Andy Biggs, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, and minority leader Kevin McCarthy, have tried to wave away subpoenas by the January 6 Committee, and, in the case of Senator Lindsey Graham, in the investigation regarding election interference in Georgia. Now the phoniness of their declared devotion to national security is laid bare in their unwavering defense of Trump, who stole classified documents, lied about returning them to the Justice Department, ignored a grand jury subpoena, and stashed nuclear intelligence at his notoriously poorly guarded club so he could… sell them to the Saudis? Impress Kid Rock and Scott Baio? Who knows.

This latest Republican stance is a mix of GOP racism and trolling, two defining planks in the GOP platform, which is why labeling the “defund” stunt as hypocrisy gives it too much credit, lending it an air of earnestness, as if they actually believe what they’re saying. If they cared about corruption in law enforcement, we would’ve heard them decrying raids on the homes of Black folks such as Breonna Taylor and Amir Locke, both of whom police needlessly shot dead. Fears of political persecution would’ve long-ago inspired conservative outrage against FBI surveillance of, and violence against, the Black community through programs such as COINTELPRO, which targeted the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, as part of J. Edgar Hoover’s effort to “prevent the rise of a [Black] messiah.” As recently as 2019, under the direction of current Trump-appointed FBI head Christopher Wray, Operation IRON FIST spied on Black activists, smearing them as “Black Identity Extremists”—despite papers released by the Department of Homeland Security in 2009 and the FBI itself in 2006 revealing the exponential growth of white supremacist extremism. Republicans in the House and Senate had a chance to support bills that would’ve helped correct this, by allowing federal law enforcement investigations into white supremacist terror. Nearly every single one voted against.

When Greene tweets that “the FBI’s political targeting of President Trump is the same type of thing they did to MLK. They always abuse their power to take down their political enemies,” know that this is more trolling. It’s an unserious statement from an unserious figure who uses race to inflame, and whose only current problem with the FBI is that it went after her favorite white billionaire. (Headline of the Year from right-wing Christian outlet The Stream: “Donald Trump is the MLK of the Working Class and Christians. No Wonder the FBI is Persecuting Him, Too.”)

Trump is the first former president to be barred from intelligence briefings because of the unique threats he poses to national security. Even if conservative voters believe Trump’s lies, and polls show that many of them do, that trust is rooted on who Trump is, which relies on his whiteness, his maleness, his Protestantism, his wealth. (It’s no wonder Trump told his supporters, post-FBI search, that Obama had stolen “33 million pages of documents.” It was a confirmed lie that Fox News nonetheless bolstered, because blaming the Black guy always works for these folks.) Trump’s supporters believe that being a criminal is defined not solely by what you do but also by who you are. Their ideas about criminality are inextricable from their ideas of who is inherently innocent. If rich white guys like Trump are presumed incapable of criminalization, then so are they. And no matter which laws it turns out Trump has broken, his supporters will deflect from his criminality and assert his victimhood—a claim to persecution they reserve for themselves and that they believe justifies any armed insurrection they undertake. I can only imagine the FBI’s surprise, after so much time spent obsessing over the threats posed by Black folks, that a white grievance movement turned out to be their biggest threat.

Conservatives support law enforcement only inasmuch as it serves their side. By the time you read this, there will be a new revelation in Donald Trump’s classified document scandal, and it will undoubtedly be even worse than what we’ve already seen. So, unfortunately, will the weaponized, and highly political response from the right.

Earlier this month, the right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo gave his social media followers a tutorial in the dark art of fearmongering—specifically, how to lie in order to stoke anti-LGBTQ hatred. Republican legislators have already spent the past four years filing some 670 anti-LGBTQ bills, with more than 300 proposed in 2022 alone, a significant portion of which target vulnerable transgender children and young adults. In recent weeks, right-wingers have amped up their smears against drag queens who volunteer their time reading books to kids in schools and libraries, claiming those story hours create “a sexualized environment.” Rufo, doing his part, posted a Twitter thread advising conservatives to dispense with the term “drag queen” in favor of the phrase “trans stripper,” because the latter conjures “a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate to sexualization.”1

You may remember Rufo from such social panics as “critical race theory” in schools—he has bragged about turning CRT, an anti-racist legal theory, “toxic” by rebranding it as a stand-in for the “entire range of cultural constructions” opposed by the right. Having exploited existing racial resentments to galvanize white parents and politicians against the teaching of America’s history of anti-Black racism, Rufo and his fellow conservatives are playing a new round of rhetorical games whose goal is to criminalize and further marginalize folks whose gender and sexual identities they oppose. And as Rufo shamelessly attests with his tweets, they will use any means at their disposal—no matter how disingenuous—to bully, shame, and legislate against LGBTQ folks.2

The notoriously racist, transphobic, and homophobic Twitter account Libs of TikTok began referring to “grooming” by LGBTQ people in May 2021; the months that followed saw Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary claim that any opponent of his “Don’t Say Gay” legislation is “probably a groomer,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham declare public schools “grooming centers for gender identity radicals,” and GOP Michigan state Senator Lana Theis make the libelous charge that state Senator Mallory McMorrow is trying to “groom and sexualize kindergarteners.” It wasn’t far from stoking this kind of paranoia to proposing legislation to ban children from drag shows, as Texas legislator Bryan Slaton said he would do in response to a video of kids at a daytime drag show, calling the performers “perverted adults [who] are obsessed with sexualizing young children.” Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote that she will be proposing a law “to make it illegal for children to be exposed to Drag Queen performances.” Florida state Representative Anthony Sabatini tweeted that he plans to file “Legislation to charge w/ a Felony & terminate the parental rights of any adult who brings a child to these perverted sex shows aimed at FL kids,” which DeSantis appeared to support.3

That’s precisely the kind of language that invites violence. One Sunday this Pride month, a Texas pastor stated that “all homosexuals are pedophiles” and called for LGBTQ folks to be “shot in the back of the head,” while an Idaho pastor cited ​​the need to “put all queers to death” to end “pedophilia.” The Anti-Defamation League tracked at least “seven in-person extremist activities targeting the LGBTQ+ community” in just one weekend. That included two incidents, in California and Texas, in which members of the neofascist Proud Boys barged into drag events. (The Texas drag show was solely for patrons 21 and over; no kids were even present.) The list also included the violence that was barely averted when a group of 31 masked members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front were arrested. On June 21, a group of “15 masked men” dressed in the style of the Proud Boys—some waving signs that read “LGBT is grooming our kids”—interrupted a Drag Queen Story Hour at a North Carolina public library after the police “escorted” them inside the building where it was being held. A “Drag Your Kids to Pride” event near the start of the month in Dallas drew right-wing protesters, including a collective organized by a self-described “Christian fascist.”4

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project released a study last month that found that from 2020 to 2021, anti-LGBTQ actions increased more than fourfold, rising from 15 to 61; that the number of anti-LGBTQ protests increased ninefold over the same period, with “at least 15 percent” of those protests becoming “violent or destructive” in 2021; and that anti-LGBTQ protests and demonstrations in 2022 are on pace to surpass the number last year. ACLED reports that these actions arose “as right-wing politicians and media outlets have mainstreamed the use of increasingly inflammatory rhetoric against the LGBTQ community in the United States.”5

All of this would be dangerous in any historical moment, but at a time when the GOP is using the courts, the law, and old-fashioned white terror to undo decades of hard-won civil rights progress, it’s particularly alarming. This is a party that yells about child sexualization while floating the idea of inspecting children’s genitals to verify sex, that claims to be the protector of children while its members threaten to deny students free lunches because LGBTQ children might be among those who are fed. The forces that have coalesced on the right—white supremacist groups, QAnon proponents, Christian nationalists—have a common goal of reasserting white cisgender heteropatriarchy as the law of the land.6

This is where we are. It can be dispiriting to watch your personhood be debated, your citizenship undermined, your very presence treated as a national problem. But even in the best of times, our rights are always precarious. Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney who has spent years on the front lines of the fight for trans rights, noted in a recent essay that “just as marriage equality did not bring liberation to our communities, neither will the fall of Roe or Obergefell or any other legal precedent mark the end of our fights for transformative justice and liberation.” (Note that Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion on the despicable ruling overturning Roe, wrote that the court “should reconsider…Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” too.) These are fights we will always have to wage, because the alternative is too bleak to consider. And because our most fundamental right, regardless of what the backlash insists, is simply to be.7

Born of America’s Cold War paranoia that the Soviets had achieved breakthroughs in the development of mind control drugs, Project MK-Ultra was the CIA’s covert counter-operation to locate the ultimate “truth serum” for interrogations, as hearings on the project later described it. Approved in 1953 by then–CIA director Allen Dulles, MK-Ultra primarily involved the secret—and highly illegal—“administration of LSD to unwitting individuals,” according to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities in its 1975 investigative report. In 1977, roughly 16,000 pages of misfiled documents were unearthed showing that the “25-year, $25-million effort by the [CIA] to learn how to control the human mind,” in The New York Times’ description, not only saw the US government dose thousands of American (and Canadian) citizens with LSD without their knowledge or consent, but also disproportionately target those “who could not fight back,” as one CIA official admitted.1

“Black Americans were uniquely exploited during this first wave of psychedelic research,” concluded the authors of a 2021 University of Ottawa study of abuses in the early trials of LSD. Overwhelmingly, the African American victims of MK-Ultra were drawn from prisons and hospital mental wards, including the National Institute of Mental Health’s Addiction Research Center (ARC), which tested LSD and some 800 other psychoactive drugs on an inmate population that was almost exclusively Black. In numerous other MK-Ultra experiments, according to the study, “participants were subject to differential and torturous treatment and dosing dependent on race.” In one 1960 study, “‘Negro’ men convicted on drug charges…were recruited from prison and given LSD in a research ward,” while a comparison group made up of “professional White people at Cold Spring Harbor, living freely,” took LSD in “the principal investigator’s home ‘under social conditions designed to reduce anxiety.’”2

“In the 1950s and ’60s, researchers weren’t thinking about the need to take extra precautions with vulnerable populations,” says Dana Strauss, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Ottawa and a coauthor of the 2021 study. ”Whether or not those researchers were explicitly targeting Black Americans, they drew their participants mostly from prisons where Black Americans were overrepresented because of racism in arrests, charges, incarceration, and sentencing.”3

Just as the mistreatment of marginalized Black folks in MK-Ultra demonstrates the dangers of medical racism, so, too, does their exclusion from contemporary research into the effectiveness of drugs such as psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA to treat trauma, anxiety, and depression. As what’s been called the “psychedelic renaissance” in psychotherapy blooms, this is a key moment to acknowledge that, while the popular face of “tripping” has been stark white since the days of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and flower power, Black folks have long found creativity and solace in the intentional and consensual use of psychedelics. But the War on Drugs complicated that relationship.4

K-Ultra comprised “some 149 subprojects” conducted by at least 80 institutions, the Supreme Court noted in a 1985 decision. At all of the principal prison “recruitment” sites—ARC in Lexington, Ky., Atlanta State Penitentiary, Louisiana State Penitentiary (aka Angola Prison), the New Jersey Reformatory, and Maryland correctional facilities—the University of Ottawa researchers found that “compared with the state population, [people of color] were overrepresented.”5

In 1955, the CIA struck a deal with the chair of psychology at Tulane University, Dr. Robert Heath. Using CIA funds, Heath and his assistant Harry Bailey conducted nonconsensual experiments in 1955 and 1956 on Black inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary, giving them LSD and bulbocapnine, a drug that in large doses, a CIA document noted, induced “catatonia or stupor.” The CIA wanted to learn whether the drugs would result in “loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, loss of willpower and an increase in toxicity in persons with a weak type of central nervous system.” Bailey would reportedly later state, reflecting on the unorthodoxy of the forced treatments, that it had been “cheaper to use niggers than cats, because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals.”6

Described in a 1977 New York Times article as an “eager experimenter” for the CIA, Dr. Harris Isbell was the research director at ARC when MK-Ultra launched. The facility billed itself as a hybrid hospital/addiction-science lab forging new ground in drug rehabilitation. In practice, it worked more like a prison—where Isbell, preying on the addictions of his overwhelmingly Black male patient population, conducted MK-Ultra experiments from the early 1950s to the ’60s. “The deal was pretty simple,” Dominic Streatfeild, author of Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, writes. “The CIA needed a place to test dangerous and possibly addictive drugs; Isbell had a large number of drug users in no position to complain.” Referred to as “volunteers,” the patients who signed up for Isbell’s drug trials were never told which narcotic they’d be given or its potential effects. They were compensated in heroin and morphine—the same drugs for which they were supposedly receiving addiction treatment.7

A 1956 article by Isbell describes four distinct and excruciating LSD experiments on ARC patients. His notes reveal that Black patients in some of these studies were fed more than twice as much LSD as white patients. What’s more, as the University of Ottawa study observes, “white participants endured only 8 days of LSD administration, while Black participants endured chronic administration for up to 85 days.” In a letter, Isbell states that in one experiment he gave “seven Negro subjects” daily doses of LSD, which he would double, triple, or quadruple to keep them from building a tolerance, all “without the patient’s knowledge.” Isbell reports that this torture continued for a staggering 77 days; a lengthy New York Times piece published after the 1977 document drop states that “a mental patient” at ARC “was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days.” Isbell, who was given the US Public Health Service Meritorious Service Award in 1962, would tell a Senate subcommittee in 1975, “The ethical codes were not so highly developed and there was a great need to know in order to protect the public in assessing the potential use of narcotics…and to make recommendations about the need for control of these drugs. So it was very necessary, and I personally think we did a very excellent job.”8

The US Army conducted its own Cold War drug experiments under Operation Third Chance, deployed primarily against unknowing Europeans abroad. The only American dosed with LSD was James Thornwell, the lone Black soldier at his station in France. Thornwell had been accused of stealing classified documents and was subjected for more than three months to an interrogation in which he was “physically abused,” “terrified with threats of…death,” and “degraded by a steady stream of verbal abuse, including racial slurs and accusations of sexual impropriety,” by members of the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, according to his legal complaint. After 99 days, a team from Operation Third Chance showed up and surreptitiously gave Thornwell LSD, then continued the humiliation and torment. Thornwell, whom Army notes describe as having an “extreme paranoiac reaction” that was “almost incapacitating,” was terrified; unaware that he had been dosed and unfamiliar with LSD or its effects, he thought he was losing his mind. Thornwell’s Army abusers told him they had the power to “extend this state indefinitely, even to a permanent condition of insanity.” He fainted from the trauma, came to, and was finally sent home. An officer on the intelligence team concluded that the Army had “satisfactory evidence of subject’s claim of innocence” from the sadistic session. Four months later, Thornwell was given a general—though not honorable—discharge.9

It took 16 years before he learned what the Army had done to him. In a 1979 lawsuit, Thornwell said the experience had turned him into “an isolated social and emotional cripple.” He described a life of headaches, depression, and nightmares. During the trial, evaluating psychiatrists unanimously concluded he suffered from “severe psychiatric disorders.” In 1980, Congress publicly apologized to Thornwell and granted him a $625,000 payment. Four years later, he drowned after a suspected epileptic seizure.10

By 1960, MK-Ultra head chemist Sidney Gottlieb’s faith in the experiments was flagging, as evidenced by a memo in which he noted that “no effective knockout pill, truth serum, aphrodisiac or recruitment pill was known to exist,” though the CIA would continue the program for years. Nearly two decades later, Senator Walter D. Huddleston would confirm at a congressional hearing that “any information that was gathered was apparently useless and not worth continuing.”11

Edward M. Flowers, who had been an unwitting subject of MK-Ultra experiments at ARC when he was 19, testified at the 1975 hearing at which Isbell appeared. By then, Flowers had become the assistant director of a different rehabilitation and reeducation program for ex-addicts. Years later, he recalled the hearings as the moment he recognized the full scope of his betrayal. “I really got a firsthand insight about some things when we had the hearings, because then the bigger picture kinda showed. Then I got in touch with the fact that the CIA was behind all this,” Flowers said in a 2004 interview, adding, “They used my ass and took advantage of me.” Despite the violations of the Nuremberg Code’s research ethics, no one associated with MK-Ultra was ever punished for their involvement.12

he Senate Watergate investigation would lead to the end of both MK-Ultra and the presidency of Richard Nixon, who launched the War on Drugs in 1971. The Controlled Substances Act, another Nixon legacy, made psychedelics Schedule I drugs, categorizing them as having “no currently accepted medical use.” The designation effectively shut down research into LSD until the late 1990s, when public interest in psychotropic drugs was reignited.13

That movement has gained momentum in the past few years, but just as in the 1960s, when psychedelics were closely associated with white hippie culture, the popular image of their use has been overwhelmingly white—which perhaps explains why recreational use has been portrayed as rebellious and visionary. Among those credited with the current resurgence are Silicon Valley gurus like Tim Ferriss, who in 2015 claimed that every billionaire he knows takes “hallucinogens on a regular basis.” But the idea that only white folks are taking part in psychedelic mind-expanding experiments isn’t true. From A$AP Rocky, who has publicly touted LSD for helping him “cope with life,” to Chance the Rapper, who has said that recording his aptly named 2013 mixtape Acid Rap involved “30 to 40 percent” LSD in the studio, to the scenes in the film Black Panther of Prince T’Challa eating a psychedelic leaf that teleports him into the realm of his ancestors, a new generation of Black artists is embracing hallucinogens. And while the image of psychedelic users was whitewashed in the 1960s and ’70s, Black psychedelic rock artists—Love, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Shuggie Otis—were creating trippy sonic experiments that pushed at the boundaries of the genres they incorporated to forge something altogether new. The long-standing rumor that Funkadelic’s 1970 album Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow was made because the band wanted to “see if we can cut a whole album while we’re all tripping on acid” was established by George Clinton himself. The inheritors of this legacy are the Afrofuturists, from Missy Elliott to Janelle Monáe.14

And yet the psychedelic renaissance seems to be as whitewashed as its predecessor. A 2018 study found that in 18 trials of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, 82 percent of the participants were white, while just 2.5 percent were African American—a “lack of inclusion” by an overwhelmingly white field of researchers that “goes directly against federally mandated efforts to report and recruit diverse samples in clinical trials.” “We have a long way to go,” Strauss, the University of Ottawa PhD candidate, says.15

In 2017, the FDA gave a green light to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies to sponsor Phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA-assisted therapy, the last hurdle before approval. Monnica Williams, a Black clinical psychologist who is one of the foremost researchers in psychedelic-assisted therapy, led the first—and thus far the only—study focused solely on examining the healing possibilities of MDMA for people of color. “Because of the criminalization of all these substances and the fallout from the war on drugs, African-Americans face a lot of danger when it comes to using drugs or even talking about them in a way that isn’t true for white people,” Williams said in a 2019 interview, discussing the challenges of recruitment in clinical trials. “Black people have to be a lot more careful, and particularly those of us, for example, who are clinicians and are licensed.”16

That remains true even as the laws around psychedelics are loosened. In 2019, Denver became the first US city to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, with Oakland, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and four cities in Massachusetts following soon after. Oregon decriminalized psilocybin and legalized its use in psychotherapy in 2020, and ayahuasca, mescaline, and psychedelic mushrooms were decriminalized in Washington, D.C., last year. But disproportionate criminalization remains. A 2020 study by the ACLU found that “in every state that has legalized or decriminalized marijuana possession, Black people are still more likely to be arrested for possession than white people.” The stigma attached to Black drug use under the War on Drugs also means that “whites have the privilege of publicizing psychedelic use with lesser consequences than minorities and therefore some participants may feel excluded from these experiences.” “For Black people, the punishment for using illicit substances is so much higher,” Sonya Faber, a clinical psychologist who has written about psychedelic-assisted therapy, told me. “So, culturally, we’ve been told to stay far away from those things, because you don’t get a second chance if you get in trouble with drugs.”17

There’s also a long history of medical racism that contributes to Black hesitancy to get involved in psychedelic trials. “Often, just in trying to access health care, Black people are routinely met with bias,” Strauss told me. “And these same biases exist in mental health care.” Studies have found that Black folks in state psychiatric hospitals are nearly five times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than their white peers. They’re also given more antipsychotic drugs and in higher doses than white patients. The anxiety and depression caused by racial trauma, which creates its own post-traumatic stress disorder, as a study led by Williams found, can go unrecognized by clinicians who overemphasize psychotic symptoms. That’s particularly disheartening considering that a 2021 study led by Williams found that “people of color in North America report improvements in racial trauma and mental health symptoms following psychedelic experiences” and that “trauma-related symptoms linked to racist acts were lowered in the 30 days after an experience with either psilocybin, LSD or MDMA.”18

Any legal use of those drugs will be tightly regulated. People who have a diagnosis of PTSD may get access, but the price is expected to be up to $15,000 per treatment round. Those who are insured may have that cost reduced. For others, the cost is prohibitively expensive. Kwasi Adusei, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and cofounder of Mindlumen, says he hopes there will be alternative ways of offering therapy to those who need it most.19

“No matter how amazing these tools such as MDMA are, if we don’t deal with the issues of the system itself, all we do is widen health disparities,” Adusei told me. “For those who do want access to psychedelics, getting their way into clinical models is going to be really difficult unless you’re designing for it. If you can design for the people who are the least able to access these services, you offer a system that’s accessible for literally everybody.”20

There was a sense, on the afternoon of the Capitol insurrection, that violent white American Trumpism had reached its apex. But by the next morning, as Republican politicians and right-wing media figures began rewriting history in real time—claiming antifa actually did it, pretending the insurrectionists merely went on self-guided tours of the building and “took selfies,” portraying the white mobs as victims—it became clear that the previous day’s act of sedition hadn’t been the final spasm of white supremacist anti-democracy but the harbinger of white supremacist anti-democracy to come. And those who support and excuse it are attempting to give the anti-democratic violence of the insurrection a veneer of respectability by dressing it up in the language of election integrity.

In the year since the Capitol siege, Republican lawmakers have continued their assault on democracy, not by condoning violent public rampages but via the codification of undemocratic laws. GOP legislators have passed 34 bills that suppress voting in 19 states; undertaken extreme gerrymandering to ensure the maintenance of conservative white political power; killed federal voting rights bills—with help from Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, unwavering supporters of a filibuster consistently used to oppose multiracial democracy; and in multiple states, are now working to make it perfectly legal to overturn free and fair elections. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue have each proposed the creation of law enforcement teams to police elections and, no doubt, to intimidate the kinds of voters who tend not to vote Republican. “History will judge them by their actions,” the old saw goes. But it does not hold here, since GOP legislators have also outlawed the accurate teaching of history in a dozen states.

Elsewhere, members of groups that invaded the Capitol are continuing to deform our politics. But instead of risking negative national attention, many of these groups have decentralized, inserting their members into political issues at the local level. Labeled “patriots” and “martyrs” by establishment Republicans, much of their “political” involvement involves physical intimidation.

Members of the ultraviolent Proud Boys—who have collectively been named in three separate federal lawsuits filed by Capitol Police officers; the NAACP and 10 Democratic members of Congress; and the city of Washington, D.C., all accusing the group of inciting violence on January 6—have been especially active. Previously best known for instigating street fights as long as they outnumber their opponents, Proud Boys members have become regular features at school board meetings and other public meetings across the country, where they turn up as “muscle” for their fellow right-wingers or simply intimidate political opponents. According to local news reports, in July, Proud Boys “carrying guns, bats and body armor” served as “security” for anti-reproductive-justice demonstrators in Salem, Ore. At a Chicago-area school board meeting in November, students who opposed the removal of a graphic novel by a nonbinary author were “jeered” and called “pedophiles” by local Proud Boys in attendance. And Proud Boys told a school board in Orange County, N.C., that, as one member recounted, “someone should tie rocks around our necks and we should throw ourselves in a river.” It seems likely that this sudden burst of local “activism” by the Proud Boys will continue for some time, since the national organization instructed members to “stand down” after the Capitol insurrection. At least three dozen members of the group are facing federal charges for their involvement in that event.

The Proud Boys aren’t the only ones. Last October, members of the Colorado-based militia United American Defense Force who came to a school board meeting to oppose a school’s mask mandates were described as “agitated,” “angry,” “combative,” and “intimidating” by a school administrator and other attendees. A few months before that incident, two people wearing UADF gear showed up at a school board meeting to protest the teaching of what conservatives have consistently mislabeled “critical race theory.” Patriot Prayer, a militia group often linked to the Proud Boys, reportedly played a role in the shutdown of a school in Vancouver, Wash., when its members spread a rumor that students without masks were being arrested and staged a disruptive rally near school grounds.

Members of these groups are also making forays into local electoral politics. In Eatonville, a tiny rural town outside Seattle, members of the Three Percent—a national militia group with multiple members facing indictment for their role in the Capitol breach—now occupy two of the seats on the local five-person school board, one of which was won just before the new year. The Washington Post notes that “the Washington Three Percent claims members in dozens of official posts throughout the state, including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five school board seats.”

What’s more, spurred on by Trump adviser turned podcast host Steve Bannon and micro-influencers on the QAnon message boards, at least 57 people “who played a role” in the events at the Capitol, “either by attending the Save America rally that preceded the riots, gathering at the Capitol steps or breaching the Capitol itself,” are now candidates for elected office, according to Politico. Of those, at least three (though the number might rise) are being charged for their role on January 6. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine that one or two won’t get elected.

This is what the creep of anti-democracy, long a part of the GOP effort but accelerated by Trump and the Capitol takeover, has brought us. This isn’t just bad for our political process. Each incursion is another tear in the fabric of democracy. And if history offers any sign of what’s ahead, we are nowhere near the end of this assault on democratic norms and principles. What began as an effort by white conservatives to disenfranchise Black voters has now spread so that a far broader spectrum of citizens will also have their voting rights eroded, their children’s schools filled with ahistorical curricula, their legislatures openly indifferent to the will of the majority. And perhaps, once that becomes clearer, more people will realize the immense danger we face, and a more intense effort will be taken to stop it. Here’s hoping that, by then, it won’t be too late.

By 2044, the United States’ white population will dwindle from a majority to a plurality, according to the Census Bureau. White Americans—though they will still outnumber every other racial group in the country—have not taken this news well.

And that’s putting it mildly. Escalations of white terror against black progress, multiracial democracy, and racial equality—what’s been called a “whitelash”—are a recurring feature of American history. In 1889, roughly a decade after the first white backlash overturned Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass told an audience that “whenever the American people shall become convinced that they have gone too far in recognizing the rights of the Negro, they will find some way to abridge those rights.… History repeats itself.”

But the latest incarnation of the backlash, intensified by reports of America’s white population plummeting 19 million between 2010 and 2020, is notably violent, brazen, antidemocratic, and desperate. Paranoia that loss of majority status will lead to white power being usurped—meaning the delusion that non-white folks might ban together to do to white folks what white folks have done to everyone else—has a lot of white people apoplectic.

Prominent white nationalists, such as former Klansman and former Louisiana state representative David Duke and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, are promoting the “great replacement” theory of impending white extinction, with Carlson egging on white violence by claiming “cheering nonwhites” are celebrating white eradication. In 2009—right about when the first black president took office—white supremacist violence became the country’s “most significant domestic terrorist threat,” according to Homeland Security. (The agency’s report was buried following right-wing criticism, and the FBI almost exclusively focused on Black anti-racist protesters even as intelligence agencies witnessed white racist violence escalate.) Over the last decade, white extremists have killed more people than any other any other breed of terrorists, domestic or international.

Republican lawmakers in 20 states have have spent the last year passing laws to punish protesters against racism, including legislation that essentially sanctions white vigilantism by letting drivers run over demonstrators. In Tennessee and Oklahoma, GOP legislators are currently mulling pro-gun laws named in honor of Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teen who fatally shot two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.

After an historic display of black voting power in the most recent presidential election and Georgia Senate runoffs, Republicans declared those contests fraudulent, hurriedly made it harder to vote in 19 states, and are now filing bills that allow GOP partisans to reject votes and overturn elections.

And in counties where white residents have seen, firsthand, their population share fall most steeply in recent decades, white parents have gone so far as to threaten the lives of school administrators over what they wrongly insist is “critical race theory” in public schools. Researchers at the University of Chicago note that “for every one percent decline in the non-Hispanic white population, a county was over six times more likely” to be the hometown of at least one Capitol insurrectionist. Those UChicago analysts also determined that the most widely shared belief among Americans who support the Capitol seditionists is the “great replacement” theory, and the idea that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”

“Deaths of despair” due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide have increased most preciptiously among white middle-aged adults over the last 20 years. According to a University of Toronto study, those deaths are driven in part by white people’s sheer panic “that Blacks are economically catching up to them” and “a misperception that their dominant status in society is being threatened.”

So much freaking out over what scholar Lucas Harris terms the “diminished overrepresentation” of whiteness. And though it’s a more subtle issue than their fretting over numerical advantage loss, the related fact that white people are suddenly having to recognize themselves as raced has only added to their resentment and hysteria.

The pervasiveness of whiteness—its omnipresence as the country’s numerical majority—has always been leveraged by white Americans in service of white supremacy. White population dominance, in tandem with white political, economic, and social dominion, allowed white folks, regardless of political stripe, to regard themselves as raceless, neutral, and, above all, normal. Whiteness would have you believe that while there are Black people and Latino people, descriptors and modifiers are superfluous where whiteness is concerned, making whiteness not just the standard of true Americanness but a stand-in for personhood itself. “We the People” was written with the understanding that Blacks and Natives were excluded; 235 years later, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell affirmed the proprietary rights that whiteness assumes over Americanness when he announced that “African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

Even as white supremacy has vigorously policed the borders of whiteness, it has contrarily and simultaneously reassured those within its boundaries that whiteness is the racially unmarked, natural manifestation of being a human being. “As long as race is something applied only to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm,” British scholar Richard Dyer writes in “The matter of whiteness.” “Other people are raced. We are just people. There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human.”

When whiteness is the definitional determinant of citizenship and humanness, non-whiteness is cast as incompatible with both, and grounds for exclusion from the rights and freedoms they confer. What’s more, the belief that whiteness is the quintessential representation of humanness has led many white people to assume whiteness’s universal authority—untainted by the limitations of race, white perspectives are viewed as implicitly impartial, objective, and right. Whiteness is rendered a sign of unbiased trustworthiness. Racialization is solely for non-whites, this thinking holds, and to be imbued by race automatically reduces the reliability of your outlook and viewpoints. But unraced whiteness is unlimited. (“The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity,” Dyer writes. “Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race.”)

From this lofty imagined perch, whiteness has declared all that is non-white “other,” a way to reify its racelessness. “Whiteness comes to self-name,” as Ruth Frankenberg writes, “a self-naming that functions simply through a triumphant ‘I am not that.’” Likewise, whiteness has also assumed that only it has the power and clarity to define, judge, critique, and comment on itself. That is, whiteness has long seen itself as beyond being questioned, interrogated or examined by outside observers. Let me note here that this view of whiteness as without race and beyond scrutiny never extended to non-white communities; Black thinkers, from David Walker to W.E.B. Du Bois to Ida B. Wells, have been deconstructing whiteness for centuries. “There isn’t any Negro problem,” Richard Wright stated in 1946, “there is only a white problem.” But white folks have largely ignored those analyses, another perk of white supremacist self-regard.

ut the denormalizing of whiteness is changing that, albeit incredibly slowly.

Mostly, that decentering happens by simply telling the truth, a task mostly left up to Black and other non-white people. That might be in the form of lexiconic checks, like calling out the way the overwhelmingly white media refers to collections of people—evangelicals, women, working class—when what they really mean is just the white people in those groups. (“Is it really true that that neighborhood or food or hairstyle is newly ‘cool’ to everyone?” Jenée Desmond-Harris asked in a 2019 piece called “It Finally Sinks in That Some People Aren’t White.” “Or would it be more accurate to say in a trend piece that it’s only recently been embraced by white Americans?”) It’s sometimes about righting fictive histories, such as the “Lost Cause” narrative, and correcting the monumentalizing of white terror—in the form of Confederate statutes— that mars hundreds of American public spaces. It has meant filling in the selective and whitewashed understanding of how this country has always operated, challenging what historian Charles W. Eagles names the “engineered ignorance” that “protects the privileged by preserving the status quo.” It means identifying whiteness, making it explicit, naming it when it appears, and making note of what it has done.

“The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world,” Dyer has written.

White backlashers intuitively know this, which is why this change—the decentering and denormalizing of whiteness—has been a rallying site for white grievance. White folks are being forced to recognize that whiteness is an identity among others, and not the spotless universal standard they long understood it to be, a realization that is contributing to the fierceness of the pushback. And perhaps nothing angers white backlashers more than the recontextualization of America’s historical myths through a lens that pins down the invention of American whiteness, and its deployment—as a political tool, system of privileges, racial identity, ideology, oppressive structure, etc. As Charles W. Mills writes in “White Ignorance,”

[W]hite normativity manifests itself in a white refusal to recognize the long history of structural discrimination that has left whites with the differential resources they have today, and all of its consequent advantages in negotiating opportunity structures…. Woody Doane (2003) suggests that “‘[c]olor-blind’ ideology plays an important role in the maintenance of white hegemony.… blaming of subordinate groups for their lower economic position serves to neutralize demands for antidiscrimination initiatives or for a redistribution of resources.” Indeed, the real racists are the blacks who continue to insist on the importance of race. In both cases white normativity underpins white privilege, in the first case by justifying differential treatment by race and in the second case by justifying formally equal treatment by race that—in its denial of the cumulative effects of past differential treatment—is tantamount to continuing it.

For all they claim to be fighting to protect white children’s feelings, it’s the uncloaking of whiteness that white backlashers are fighting against. That’s why they’re so hell-bent on stopping the truthful tallying of the wages of whiteness.

White racialization is absolutely part of festering white radicalization. And while history, particularly Reconstruction, suggests that the white backlash will only get worse, whiteness will only be laid more bare. It won’t be enough to dismantle white power, but it’s key to disrupting it.

According to a poll published in September, a staggering 83 percent of parents support the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools. Or to be more specific—because they are never granted modifier-free descriptors, as their white peers are—83 percent of Black parents are in favor of CRT in their children’s schools. In a USA Today/Ipsos poll, 71 percent of Asian parents and roughly 60 percent of Hispanic parents said CRT should be part of the curriculum in their children’s schools. A Fox News survey conducted in Virginia—the state that is home to the Loudoun County School District, where some of the most visible battles over CRT have taken place—revealed that among Black parents with more than a passing familiarity with CRT, more than twice as many approved of it as opposed it. These polls didn’t specify to parents that critical race theory is a 40-year-old legal framework for analyzing the ways racism is embedded in American institutions, not a lesson plan that’s actually used in K-12 classrooms today. But we can assume that those parents regard CRT as a concept that includes the study of slavery and anti-Black racism and support teaching those topics in our schools. In a small poll of parents of New York City schoolchildren, a group that is more than 80 percent people of color, over three-quarters of respondents supported the idea that students should learn about the “damages of white supremacy,” while 79 percent supported teaching about the Black Lives Matter movement.

The fact that Black and other nonwhite parents—that is to say, those parents whose kids make up the majority in America’s public school classrooms—believe that the perspective provided by CRT would enrich their children’s education seems newsworthy at a moment in which the battle over school lesson plans is raging. And yet, since a false characterization of CRT became fodder for conservative hysteria just over a year ago, there’s been almost no media coverage examining Black parents’ feelings about CRT in schools.

Instead, the white backlash has been given center stage. Conservative anti-CRT groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Rights in Education—which claims CRT creates “a false sense of entitlement” in nonwhite students—bathe in the same media spotlight these groups use to illuminate egregiously misinformed fears about CRT. (Is there not a single reporter who wants to ask a representative for PRE, which expresses alarm on its website about students being “disciplined and even expelled for representing opposing views,” when it plans to address the long-standing issue of Black kids being four times as likely to be suspended as white kids?) The right-wing political establishment and conservative mediasphere have tried to paint this as a broad movement of parents Fighting the Power, as when Indiana Republican Todd Rokita issued a polemical “Parents Bill of Rights” that suggests CRT, Black Lives Matter, and the notion that “systematic racism has…produced disparities between races” are antithetical to “Hoosier values.” As Slate’s William Saletan wrote in a piece about the Virginia gubernatorial victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin, who had held “Parents Matter” rallies focused on promises to ban CRT, this isn’t, as white conservatives claim, “a backlash of parents. It [is] a backlash of white people.” That the school districts where opposition to CRT has been loudest are those where the presence of nonwhite students has grown over the past two decades tells us everything we need to know. How odd that a media apparatus that normally cannot get enough of destructive bothsidesism now seems wholly uninterested in getting Black parents’ firsthand takes on the matter.

This oversight isn’t surprising, considering that the media has also done a terrible job of correcting the right-wing misinformation campaign around CRT. The press has chosen to elevate the tender feelings of white parents instead of interviewing parents who have actually experienced anti-Black racism about the way white conservatives have twisted CRT into a bogeyman, and how Black history has been denigrated as inherently “un-American.” Of course, this is not new. During the Trump years, the press spent an extraordinary number of hours hearing out aggrieved white GOP voters. After Black voters flipped Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania for Joe Biden—and Black women drove turnout that made Georgia go blue not once but twice—the endless barbershop interviews with African American voters never materialized, and a few outlets even fretted about the president-elect’s inability to win over white working-class voters. Criticizing this lopsided approach, the writer Noah Berlatsky noted that Black people “receive little empathy precisely because they are discriminated against and because their suffering is seen as natural and unremarkable.”

That would explain why CBS News last month posted a tweet that asked, “How young is too young to teach kids about race?” The network had blatantly overlooked the experiences of Black and other nonwhite kids, who mostly learn about racism through firsthand experiences at disturbingly young ages—never at a time of their choosing. “They say, ‘Our children are too young to hear about racism.’ Who is our children?” asked a Black parent named Caron LeNoir in a Washington Post piece that is among the few CRT-focused articles that actually features Black parents’ voices. “I don’t remember a day of my life when I wasn’t taught about racism, or learning about it through just existing.” Black kids are always dealing with the actual consequences of racism. A 2008 Harvard/University of California study found that by the time they’re 4 years old, white kids “express negative attitudes and stereotypes” toward nonwhite kids, while Black and Hispanic kids show no “in-group” bias toward those who look like them. A 2019 study concluded that both Black and white preschoolers have already developed “a strong and consistent pro-White bias.” A whole body of medical scholarship has demonstrated the deleterious impact on Black and other nonwhite kids of not seeing themselves reflected in the world.

We are deep in the throes of a white grievance movement, inflamed by fears that white dominance is decreasing. The media’s coddling of white folks isn’t helping. As long as the story continues to privilege white fearmongering, the press should be considered a contributor to the problem of white supremacy in education.