Tag: minority and ethnic groups

Thousands of Americans are leaving homes in flood-risk areas. But where are they moving to? | CNN

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For more than four decades, the US government has been paying cities and states to move homeowners away from areas that are at high risk of severe flooding.

When a hurricane or major flooding event devastates an area, a neighborhood can send a request for the local or state government to buy the impacted land and give residents money to start over someplace else.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s buyout program is a form of so-called “managed retreat” – a long process that relocates people, businesses, homes and infrastructure to an area that’s safer from the impacts of climate change-fueled weather events. But until recently, little was known about where people ultimately moved and whether their new location actually reduced their flood risk.

A new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters — which coincides with a managed retreat conference unfolding in New York City this week — provides a clearer picture of these home buyouts.

Data from thousands of home buyouts shows people aren’t moving that far from their original homes — and often they are moving within the same floodplain. But overall, their risk of flooding decreased after the move, a nod to the program’s success. Researchers also found that race has played a role in who is moving and where they’re relocating to.

“As climate change and rising insurance costs increase the pressures to retreat from the coast and flooded areas, we need to pay more attention to where people are going,” James Elliott, a professor of sociology at Rice University and a co-author on the study, told CNN.

The findings “point to how the program plays out differently in different types of communities and neighborhoods across the country,” he said.

Using flood risk estimates, housing values, race and income data from the US Census Bureau, and FEMA relocation data between 1990 and 2017, researchers from Rice University built a nationwide database to map out where nearly 10,000 Americans sold their flood-prone homes and where they moved.

They found people who have taken advantage of the FEMA buyouts typically did not move that far to reduce their risk, and usually stayed within the same floodplain.

On average, buyout participants reduced their future flood risk by up to 65%, Elliott said. The average driving distance between their former homes and their new ones was around seven miles, with almost 74% of homeowners remaining within 20 miles of their old, flood-damaged homes.

The findings were also racially segmented, Elliot said. About 96% of homeowners who relocated from a predominantly White neighborhood ended up moving to another majority White community.

In contrast, residents of predominantly Black and Hispanic communities were far more likely to relocate to a new neighborhood with a different demographic: Only 48 percent of Black homeowners who go through the buyout moved to predominantly Black neighborhoods.

The study also found that buyout areas with predominantly White homeowners had a nearly 90% chance of flooding by 2050, while majority-Black buyout areas had a roughly 50% chance, suggesting that White residents tend to only participate in buyouts when flood risk is much more intense.

Though the data suggests that homeowners in White neighborhoods have a higher tolerance for flood risk, 80% of the people who took advantage of the FEMA program previously lived in majority-White neighborhoods. This could be because White communities “are more successful at winning the opportunity and money to participate” in the FEMA program, Elliott said.

The home buyout program, which is the largest managed-retreat initiative in the country so far, is “disproportionately targeted toward Whiter residential areas,” Elliott said.

“Communities of color and lower income areas just have fewer options to move nearby, so they are less likely to participate in the managed buyout,” Elliott said. In Houston, he found in a previous study that most of the people participating in buyouts in racially diverse communities tend to be White homeowners.

“It’s sort of the last wave of White flight in those neighborhoods,” he added. And when “flood risks come, the final White residents begin to pull up stakes through the buyout program and move further out.”

Alexander de Sherbinin, a senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School and deputy manager of NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, said it’s not clear from the study that White homeowners are reluctant to move to racially diverse neighborhoods, and noted that there is evidence to the contrary.

De Sherbinin pointed out that there is a process of “climate gentrification” playing out in areas that have experienced climate disasters, “whereby more affluent households are moving into ethnically diverse neighborhoods that are less at risk of flooding, and are even displacing local residents.”

He pointed to Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood as an example of this phenomenon, where higher ground helps protect the neighborhood from sea level rise and higher storm surges.

“The research findings make sense in one regard, which is that whiter, more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to have the insurance coverage and resources to stay in place, despite rising risks,” de Sherbinin told CNN. “In other words, they’re able to rebuild, and possibly accommodate risks by raising their houses above flood lines.”

As the climate crisis advances, more homeowners and businesses will be forced to relocate, adding stress and vulnerability to new regions. Previous research has shown that climate migration will become more likely as the planet warms and people seek places they consider safer and more stable.

“We really need to think about how people relocate locally, what the options are, and how the ongoing racial segregation, especially in urban environments, is affecting those local retreats and people’s decisions and abilities not to retreat, because all we see are the people who actually say yes to the program,” Elliott said.

“That’s the classic thing with climate change — it’s not about ‘if’ people have to move from these places, but ‘when and how’.”

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June 21, 2023
One of the first Black Marines is seeking recognition decades after being wounded in World War II | CNN

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Decades after Lee Vernon Newby Jr. was one of the first Black recruits to break the color barrier in the Marine Corps, he and his family are still fighting for recognition.

The 100-year-old and his four children want him to be honored with a Purple Heart for his service but so far, he’s been denied one despite his extensive injuries.

“I was over there serving the government, serving this country. They put me in harm’s way, but still they didn’t give me the acknowledgment,” Newby told CNN.

Newby, who now lives at a senior living facility outside of Detroit, was just a teenager when he fought in World War II. He says he felt fortunate to serve his country despite being one of the few Black people in the Marine Corps.

After being drafted, Newby was assigned to Montford Point, a segregated training facility in North Carolina.

Newby headed to the Solomon Islands for the Battle of Guadalcanal, as fighting took place between 1942 and 1943. During that time, Newby’s family says he suffered fourth-degree burns after gasoline exploded in a hole. The burns covered more than 60% of his body, his family said.

“All of a sudden, something hit me right in my chest. Just all of a sudden, it just burnt the clothes off of me,” he said. “When I hit the deck and got up, all the skin was just laying out.”

Ellena Dione Newby-Bennette, one of Newby’s daughters, said her father received medical treatment for several months and later was sent back into action. “He wasn’t 100% healed,” she said.

Newby received an honorable discharge in 1946 and returned home, where he struggled with racism and Jim Crow laws, his family said. He found work as a janitor and chauffeur, and eventually started a family.

“America is one of the greatest countries in the world, but I didn’t get a fair deal,” he said. Newby is still hoping it will change.

Newby received a letter from President Joe Biden on his 100th birthday earlier this year, and he has been recognized by state and local officials. But last month, he received a letter from the Navy, telling him he is not eligible for a Purple Heart.

The rejection, Newby says, reinforced feelings that Black people have been “getting a short deal.”

The Purple Heart has specific criteria for when is awarded to US service members, and is limited to those who are wounded or killed in combat. It is described as one of the most respected military awards.

In the letter, shared with CNN, Navy officials said Newby is considered ineligible because he was not wounded “at the hands of the enemy.”

The letter states at the time, Newby was working with another service member who was attempting to kill rats by pouring gasoline from a cup down a hole next to a stump.

The unnamed service member threw the cup when it ignited and set Newby’s clothing on fire, the letter said.

Newby and his family said they are planning to appeal the decision. Newby’s daughters said their father doesn’t recall that rats were involved and “doesn’t understand where that story came from.”

The Pentagon further clarified the rules, noting there are two key conditions which both must be met for the Purple Heart to be awarded.

“First, the wound must have resulted from enemy action. Second, the wound must have been of such severity that it necessitated treatment, not merely examination, by a medical officer. If the wound does not meet both standards, the Purple Heart may not be awarded,” spokesperson Yvonne Carlock told CNN.

Newby’s children said he experienced PTSD symptoms and they grew up listening to stories of enemy planes flying overhead bombs being dropped, and friends dying due to their injuries.

“How much more of his heart did he have to give? More than half of his body was burned,” said Newby-Bennette.

Newby’s children hope their father and other Black Marines who did not live long enough to receive notoriety are honored for their service.

“He deserves to have his due,” Newby’s daughter Jannise Newby said.

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June 19, 2023
As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery | CNN
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Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.

The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.

She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”

“When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”

That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.

Juneteenth has since become known as “America’s Second Independence Day.” Now a federal holiday, it will be celebrated by parades, proclamations, and ceremonies throughout the US. Though it commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery and people like Cummins.

One of the biggest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and “The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln freed them. Black soldiers, for example, played a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. This new understanding of slavery has led to a rhetorical shift: It’s no longer proper to refer to people like Cummins as simply “slaves.”

“There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.

“There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”

Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.

“The enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans over a period of almost four centuries in the Atlantic slave trade was a tragedy of such scope that it is difficult to imagine, much less comprehend,” Albert J. Raboteau wrote in “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South.”

Here are three other myths about slavery that historians say persist:

There is a popular conception that the formerly enslaved were freed after the Civil War ended. But many had to continually fight for their freedom because so many Whites still tried to keep them in captivity and were willing to use deceit and violence to do so.

The author Clint Smith described this dynamic in his New York Times bestselling book, “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with The History of Slavery Across America.” Smith said the Juneteenth jubilation didn’t last for many formerly enslaved people. Former Confederate soldiers still tried to round up Black “runaways” to return them to their owners though that term no longer had any legal merit. And White vigilantes tracked down and punished formerly enslaved people.

Smith unearthed the narrative of a woman named Susan Merritt of Rusk Country, Texas, who recounted what happened when some people like Cummins in Texas tried to claim their freedom:

“Lots of Negroes were killed after freedom…bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away,” Merritt said. “You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.”

And then there was the practice of taking away Black freedom through other means, like convict-leasing programs and a corrupt justice system throughout the South that the historian Douglas A. Blackmon documented in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery By Another Name.”

The lesson from history: Slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Black people still had to literally fight for their freedom long afterward. Smith quotes the historian W. Caleb McDaniel who wrote:

“Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”

Mention slavery and it still evokes images of half-naked Africans stumbling onto the American shores, struggling to learn to read and write in a strange and alien land. The focus of many stories about the formerly enslaved is what was taken from them. But they gave plenty to America in ways that are still not appreciated.

Captive Africans who came here didn’t need to be civilized. They came to the US as fully formed individuals, not blank canvases, with their own cultures and specialized knowledge, says Leslie Wilson, a historian at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

The thumbprints of the culture that formerly enslaved people created are now stamped on virtually every facet of American culture, Wilson says. By the Civil War, Black people had already changed American concepts of architecture, burial, music, storytelling and medicine, Wilson says.

“Much of Southern culture is nothing more than blackness,” Wilson says. “It is the blues and jazz of the 19th century and the rock and roll of the 20th. It is the chicken and grits, the way that people rock in church or the cadence of the pastor.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider how much of Americans’ contemporary landscape is shaped by the legacy of the formerly enslaved:
The Statue of Liberty was originally created to commemorate freed enslaved people, not the arrival of immigrants.
An enslaved person called Onesimus changed the way Americans treated epidemics, pioneering a technique to prevent the spread of smallpox that he had learned from his native West Africa.

Country music owes much of its musical legacy to the influence of the formerly enslaved. The banjo, for example, is a descendant of an instrument that was brought to America by enslaved West Africans and many of the genre’s earliest hits were adapted from slave spirituals.

Bugs Bunny cartoons and other stories like Brer Rabbit featuring clever, talking animals were originally inspired by African folktales first told by enslaved people.
Black and White culture is so intertwined that the cultural critic, Albert Murray, declared in his book, “The Omni-Americans,” that “American culture is “incontestably mulatto.” White and Black people in the US “resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

“The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,” Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.”

In the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, there is a special exhibit of an artifact that is so rare that there are only a handful now in existence. It is what historians call a “Slave Bible.” It is a copy of a Bible that was used by British missionaries to convert enslaved African Americans. Published in 1807, the Bible deletes any passages that may inspire liberation – about 90% of the Old Testament is missing along with half of the New Testament.

“They literally blacked out, portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk,” says Leon Harris, a theology professor at Biola University in California.

There is misconception that Christianity was successfully used to create docile slaves who were conditioned to heed New Testament passages such as “slaves obey your earthly masters.” Malcolm X derided Christianity as a White man’s religion used to brainwash Black people to “shout and sing and pray until we die ‘for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter’” while the White man “has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!”

But historians like Harris say most slaves disdained the type of Christianity that was taught to them. Many instead discovered those missing passages in the Slave Bible, such as the Old Testament stories of God freeing the Israelites from Egyptian captivity. It’s no accident that many Black leaders who have led freedom struggles, from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were Christian ministers.

“Instead of Christianity being a religion of African oppression, many interpreted it as a religion of freedom,” Harris says.

The historical record shows that enslaved African Americans revitalized Christianity in other ways, historians say. They injected emotionalism and an emphasis on ecstatic worship into evangelical Christianity that can still be seen in how many White Pentecostal worship today. And Negro spirituals, often called the nation’s first musical form unique to America, continue to be sung throughout churches of all races and ethnicities today.

Former slaves remade Christianity – it didn’t remake them, says Raboteau, author of “Slave Religion.” He wrote that it had a “this-worldly” impact:

“To describe slave religion as merely otherworldly is inaccurate, for the slaves believed that God had acted, was acting, and would continue to act within human history and within their own particular history as a peculiar people just as long ago he had acted on behalf of another chosen people, biblical Israel,” Raboteau wrote.

This year, Juneteenth comes at a time when White educators and politicians are passing laws that ban the teaching of Black history in schools that could make White students or others feel “discomfort.” How many students will be able to learn about the resilience of the formerly enslaved?

That’s a question that no holiday celebration can answer. But one historical debate has been settled:

Even as the stories of the formerly enslaved are forgotten by history, we live in a contemporary America that was profoundly shaped by how they resisted captivity – whether some of us care to know it or not.

John Blake is a Senior Writer at CNN and the author of “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”
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June 18, 2023
FBI arrests 19-year-old suspected of making antisemitic threats and planning violence against Michigan Jewish community | CNN

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A 19-year-old from Pickford, Michigan, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly making antisemitic threats on Instagram.

Seann Pietila was charged in a criminal complaint with “transmitting a communication containing a threat to injure another,” US Attorney Mark Totten announced Friday in a news release.

“Antisemitic threats and violence against our Jewish communities – or any other group for that matter – will not be tolerated in the Western District of Michigan,” Totten said.

According to a probable cause affidavit, Pietila had conversations with another Instagram user about committing a mass casualty or mass killing. Pietila told investigators that he didn’t plan on following through with the mass killings he discussed, the affidavit says.

Investigators found the name of an East Lansing synagogue, a date and a list of weapons – including bombs, Molotov cocktails and guns – in the notes app of Pietila’s phone, according to the affidavit.

His home was searched on Friday and among the items found were ammunition, magazines, a shotgun, rifle, various knives and a Nazi flag, Totten said.

Beth Lacosse, Pietila’s public defender, declined to comment, saying she had just been appointed to the case.

Pietila made his first court appearance on Friday and his detention hearing is set for June 22, according to court documents.

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June 16, 2023
Celebrate Juneteenth by promoting Black health, wealth and joy | CNN

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June 19, 2023 is the third annual observance of Juneteenth. The federal holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their emancipation two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although Juneteenth has recently become more widely recognized, the date has long been a deeply spiritual time of remembrance and celebration for the Black community.

Across the country, African Americans have rejoiced with fireworks and cookouts, sipping red drinks – a nod to ancestors’ bloodshed and endurance.

“We know the horrors that we went through,” explained Kleaver Cruz, writer of the forthcoming book “The Black Joy Project” and creator of a digital initiative of the same name. “It’s always concurrent: the joy and the pain. We use one to get through the other.”

On a particularly joyous note, this June 19, CNN and OWN (both properties of Warner Bros. Discovery) will simulcast Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom at 8 PM Eastern time. The concert will feature artists across multiple genres including Charlie Wilson, Miguel, Kirk Franklin, Nelly, SWV, Davido, Coi Leray, Jodeci and Mike Phillips. CNN will kick off pre-show coverage at 7 PM Eastern time, highlighting Black advocates, trailblazers, and creators.

“We get to celebrate our freedoms; we get to celebrate the dismantling of things and lean into what we want in the future,” Cruz said of Juneteenth observance. “We want more of that space and less of the one that harms us.”

The Black community still struggles with pain and inequity. Impact Your World has gathered ways you can help reject the pathology of racism and thoughtfully celebrate Juneteenth through non-profits that support Black health, wealth, joy, and overall empowerment. You can donate to those charities here.

For Black Americans, the end of slavery was just the beginning of a 158-year quest for equality. Along the way, the cumulative effect of institutional and systemic racism fomented stark disparities in income, health, education, and opportunity.

“Those that came before us were physically free but were unable to earn livable wages or receive an education without its share of defeating challenges,” said Marsha Barnes, Founder of The Finance Bar.

Data collected by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System shows that in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average Black household’s net worth was about one-fourth that of the average White household.

“Taking the time to address the racial wealth gap highlights many of the roadblocks we as Black Americans currently face,” explained Barnes, a certified financial therapist. She sees the well-documented connection between financial literacy and financial wellness as a key to enhancing wealth in the Black community.

“We still are at a disadvantage, but it’s important we become comfortable with having to learn while playing the game,” Barnes told CNN.

HomeFree-USA is a non-profit aiming to close the racial wealth gap by improving financial education, homeownership, and opportunities. Their Center for Financial Advancement (CFA) recruits, trains, and places Historically Black College and University students into internships and careers with mortgage and real estate companies. The goal is to enhance diversity in the financial sector, expose students to credit and money management and help them become savvy consumers and future homeowners.

The African American Alliance for Homeownership is a non-profit counseling agency that helps families obtain, retain, maintain, and sustain their homes. The organization offers HUD-certified counselors who support first-time homebuyers and foreclosure prevention. The group recently expanded its services to help homeowners with estate plans, resource navigation, home repairs, and energy-efficiency upgrades.

Former NFL Player Warrick Dunn started Warrick Dunn Charities in 1997 to help single parents buy homes by providing $5,000 down payments and home furnishings.

“The more I learned, we wanted to get into the business of giving people the potential to break their cycle of poverty,” Dunn explained in a 2021 interview with CNN.

The non-profit has expanded its priorities to include financial literacy, health and wellness, education attainment, workforce development, and entrepreneurship support.

The National Urban League is committed to the advancement of African Americans through economic empowerment, equality, and social justice. The organization champions education, job training, workforce development, and civic engagement through community and national initiatives.

The legacy of racism in America continues to fuel health and healthcare inequities for Black people.

“We’re seeing diseases that, when I was in medical school, I thought to be diseases that would start to develop in people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I’m seeing these diseases sometimes in teenage years,” said Dr. Barbara Joy Jones, an Atlanta-based family medicine physician.

According to the CDC, five health conditions particularly affect the Black community at higher rates: cardiovascular disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), metabolic syndrome, colon cancer, and mental health conditions.

“I consider hypertension, Diabetes, and obesity the triad,” said Jones.

The leading contributor to that triad is what you eat.

“Diet is 80% of health, and just access to quality food and education about food has been very hard,” Jones explained.

“When you go back and look at slavery, the foods we had to eat were the last scraps, so through the passing down of culture, you’re eating foods that are not the healthiest because it was simply for survival,” said Jones.

According to Feeding America, eight of the ten US counties with the highest food insecurity rates are at least 60% Black and one in every four Black American children is affected by hunger.

Addressing food insecurity, nutrition education, and better food access can make a difference.

Feeding America runs a network of food banks in those mostly Black hard-hit counties.

Share Our Strength runs a program called Cooking Matters offering cooking classes, grocery store tours, and digital content to help marginalized families across the country shop and cook with an eye towards health and budget.

The African American Diabetes Association uses targeted outreach projects to help Black people prevent or delay type 2 diabetes.

Despite progress over the years, racism continues to impact the mental health of African American people.

“The stress and microaggressions that happen daily for a person of color in the work environment and everyday life add up, and unmitigated stress can lead to disease,” Jones told CNN.

The Black Mental Health Alliance and the Trevor Project, provide training and networks of mental health providers specifically supportive of the Black and Black LGBTQ communities.

In 2019, the CDC found that Black people comprised 41% of the new HIV infections in the US. The Black AIDS Institute was founded in 1999 to mobilize and educate Black Americans about HIV/AIDS treatment and care. The Black AIDS Institute advances research, support groups, and education and runs a clinic catering to BIPOC and underserved communities.

As recently as the 1990’s, unethical medical research was conducted on Black Americans. The Tuskegee Study is one of the most widely recognized examples of the racist practice that led many Black people to distrust the healthcare system and avoid doctors altogether.

Beyond investing in cultural sensitivity training and prioritizing preventative care, Jones said, “For anti-doctor people, find someone that looks like you; representation matters.”

“Half of the getting to know your part of medicine is to know why psychosocial and economically you are where you are, and having a doctor that looks like you can support that.”

Only about 5.7% of US physicians identify as Black or African American, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The White Coats Black Doctors Foundation is working to increase diversity in the medical profession, supporting educational preparation to become a doctor and helping offset the costs associated with applying and transitioning to residencies.

Black joy has been essential for survival, resistance, and self-development for centuries. But these days, it’s often exploited and misunderstood.

“I see the ways that Black joy at this moment is being commercialized or co-opted to make it feel like it’s Black people smiling,” lamented Cruz. “It’s much, much deeper than that.”

Cruz launched the Black Joy Project as a photo essay on social media in 2015 following the deaths of Michael Brown and Sandra Bland to help the Black community process its collective pain.

“I posted it on Facebook in the stream of consciousness and said, ‘Let us bombard the internet that joy is important too, and as people are sharing these traumatic videos, we have to make space for joy.’ And it was an invitation for anybody else that wanted to do that.”

Enslaved Black people knew they weren’t free but still hoped their future generations would be. That empowering optimism gave them the will to press forward, no matter the circumstance.

“This (joy) is just a continuation of those practices,” Cruz said. “Joy is intrinsic. It’s something that can’t be taken from us because it comes within us; it’s always ours to have.”

Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom, culture, and history, and it’s important to uplift non-profits that positively nourish the arts, music, and all the things that foster Black joy.

The Robey Theatre Company was founded in 1994 by actors Danny Glover and Ben Guillory to tell the complex stories of the Black experience. The theater showcases and develops up-and-coming actors and playwrights to sustain Black theater.

The Debbie Allen Dance Academy uses dance, theater, and performance to enrich, inspire and transform students’ lives.

As some states are moving to block Critical Race Theory and Black history from public education, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration gives visitors an interactive history lesson on the harsh repercussions of slavery and systemic racism in the US. The immersive exhibition carries visitors through the transatlantic slave trade up to the current mass incarceration of Black people. The museum occupies a site in Montgomery, Alabama where enslaved Black people were historically auctioned off.

“If we’re being serious about Black joy, that means we’re being serious about Black lives, period,” Cruz concluded.

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June 16, 2023
‘Systemic problems’ at Minneapolis Police Dept. led to George Floyd’s murder, Justice Department says | CNN Politics

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Three years after George Floyd was murdered by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the Justice Department issued a blistering report Friday of the city’s police department, detailing racial discrimination, excessive and unlawful use of force, First Amendment violations and a lack of accountability for officers.

“Our investigation found that the systemic problems in MPD made what happened to George Floyd possible,” the report states.

The Minneapolis Police Department has, for years, used dangerous “techniques and weapons” against people who had committed a petty offense or no offense at all, “including unjustified deadly force,” it adds.

“MPD used force to punish people who made officers angry or criticized the police,” the report says, and “patrolled neighborhoods differently based on their racial composition and discriminated based on race when searching, handcuffing, or using force against people during stops.”

In its investigation, the Justice Department reviewed hundreds of police body-worn camera videos, incident and police reports, hundreds of complaints filed against officers and dozens of interviews with city leaders, community leaders and police officials.

“As I told George Floyd’s family this morning, his death has had an irrevocable impact on the Minneapolis community, on our country and on the world,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference Friday.

“George Floyd should be alive today,” Garland added.

Chauvin was convicted in Floyd’s death and pleaded guilty for violating Floyd’s civil rights.

In a review of the 19 police shootings that took place between 2016 and the summer of 2022, the investigation found that “a significant portion of them were unconstitutional uses of deadly force” including officers shooting at individuals without determining any immediate threat and MPD officers using deadly force against “people who are a threat only to themselves,” the report says.

In one example cited by the report, a woman had been shot by an officer after she reportedly “spooked” him as she came to his police car.

On May 25, 2020, Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck and back for over nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and gasping for air. According to the DOJ’s report, at the time, neck restraints were used by Minneapolis police officers 197 times between 2016 and 2020. Nearly a fourth of those were used in cases where no arrest was made.

Three years on: reflections on the legacy of George Floyd

Officers would “frequently used neck restraints without warning” and used the restraints against individuals – including teenagers – accused of low-level offenses, passively resisted arrest, posed no threat or “had merely angered the officer.”

MPD officers, the investigation found, also used takedowns, strikes, tasers, chemical spray and other methods of force in ways that violated individuals’ rights.

The department now prohibits neck restraints, “no-knock” raids and requires approval for officers to use certain crowd control weapons without approval from the chief of police.

The investigation also found that MPD officers disproportionately stop and use force against Black and Native American people.

“During stops involving Black and Native American people, MPD conducts searches and uses force more often than it does during stops involving white people engaged in similar behavior,” the report, which reviewed data of roughly 187,000 pedestrian and traffic stops says.

“We estimate that MPD stops Black people at 6.5 times the rate at which it stops White people, given their shares of the population. Similarly, we estimate MPD stops Native American people at 7.9 times the rate at which it stops white people, given population shares.”

During these stops, the DOJ found that MPD officers unlawfully discriminated against Black and Native American people in both searches and use of force.

After Floyd’s murder in 2020, many police officers in the department stopped listing the race or gender of individuals in their reports in violation of the department’s policy, according to the investigation.

The report also found evidence of some officers, including those in leadership positions, have made racist or discriminatory comments to other officers.

During one of the protests following Floyd’s murder, an MPD lieutenant said a group of protesters were likely mostly White because “there’s not looting and fires.”

Other MPD employees told the Justice Department about similar discriminatory comments made by their colleagues, including comments about how “you don’t have to worry about Black people during the day ‘cuz they haven’t woken up—crime starts at night.”

The investigation found that officers were often only held accountable for biased conduct after public calls of outrage.

How the fatal arrest of George Floyd unfolded

Garland outlined several incidents where MPD officers were not held accountable for racist conduct until public outrage surfaced.

“For example,” Garland said Friday, “after MPD officers stopped a car carrying four Somalian-American teens, one officer told the teens, ‘Do you remember what happened in Black Hawk Down. When we killed a bunch of your folk? I’m proud of that. We didn’t finish the job over there. If we had, you guys wouldn’t be over here right now.’”

According to the Justice Department’s report, MPD officers also violated people’s First Amendment rights, including journalists, and found that officers “regularly retaliate against people for their speech or presence at protests – particularly when they criticize police.”

“MPD officers frequently use indiscriminate force, failing to distinguish between peaceful protesters and those committing crimes,” the report says. “For example, MPD officers regularly use 40 mm launchers – firearms that shoot impact projectiles, like rubber bullets – against protesters who are committing no crime or who are dispersing.”

The investigation found that in the protests following Floyd’s murder, officers had pepper sprayed a journalist in the face after pushing the reporter’s head to the pavement.

Other incidents cited in the report include police officers retaliating against individuals who were recording the officers by illegally grabbing phones, destroying recording equipment or using force – including pepper spray – against them.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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June 16, 2023
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, enters the 2024 GOP primary | CNN Politics

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CNN
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South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Monday formally entered the Republican presidential primary, promising to take on “the radical left” and bring faith and conservative, business-friendly policies to the White House, as he seeks to upend a contest that has so far been dominated by coverage of former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to enter the fray in the coming days.

The most prominent Black figure in the Republican Party, Scott addressed supporters at his alma mater, Charleston Southern University, in his hometown of North Charleston.

“I’m the candidate the far-left fears the most. You see, when I cut your taxes, they called me a prop. When I refunded the police, they called me a token. When I pushed back on President Biden, they even called me the ‘n-word,’” Scott said. “I disrupt their narrative. I threaten their control. The truth of my life disrupts their lies.”

Following the announcement, Scott heads to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina – states he frequented on his “Faith in America” tour in the run-up to his announcement – before returning to the Hawkeye State next week for GOP Sen. Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” gathering.

Scott, 57, is no stranger to pathbreaking campaigns. In 2010, he became the first Black Republican elected to the US House of Representatives from South Carolina in more than a century. Years later, after being appointed to his Senate seat (he won a special election to retain the seat), Scott made history as the first Black US Senator from his native South Carolina.

Ahead of his entry into the presidential race, senior campaign officials briefed reporters on their view of the path forward, acknowledging he will need to win over support from Trump and DeSantis, but vowing – in a veiled dig at both – that his candidacy will strike a more optimistic tone and condemn the culture of victimhood and grievance that, as his aides described it, has taken over both parties.

“Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing,” Scott said. “Victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness? I choose freedom and hope and opportunity.”

Trump and his team will avoid going after Tim Scott for now, two sources close to the former president told CNN. The directive from Trump has been to stay away from attacks on the South Carolina senator at the moment.

Last week, the Trump-aligned super PAC, MAGA, Inc., weighed in on Scott’s looming announcement, but used it to level an attack on DeSantis, not Scott.

The former president used that approach on Monday as he wished Scott “good luck” while taking a shot at DeSantis.

“Good luck to Senator Tim Scott in entering the Republican Presidential Primary Race. It is rapidly loading up with lots of people, and Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable. I got Opportunity Zones done with Tim, a big deal that has been highly successful. Good luck Tim!,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The South Carolina senator received a boost on Sunday, less than 24 hours before his kick-off event, when news broke that his colleague Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, planned to endorse him.

“I think he’d be a great candidate. I’m excited about it. I’ve been encouraging him,” Thune previously told CNN. “I think he’s getting a lot of encouragement from his colleagues. He’s really well thought of and respected.”

Cory Gardner, the former Republican senator from Colorado and leader of Scott’s aligned super PAC, also argued that his old colleague posed a unique threat to liberal Democrats.

“I think they’re terrified of him, and he’s right to say that, because he defies every narrative they have,” Gardner said. “And this is exciting for conservatives who believe that they have a candidate who carries their values, can implement their values and do so in a way that will make all Americans proud.”

In pictures: Presidential candidate Tim Scott

A senior campaign official said Scott will continue to invest resources and time in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, as the campaign ramps up.

Though Scott hails from South Carolina, they won’t count on it as a firewall, according to one senior campaign official, who emphasized Scott will have to compete as a top-tier candidate in other early primary and caucus states like New Hampshire and Iowa.

Even before the official launch, Scott revealed plans to pluck from his deep campaign coffers – with millions now transferred over from his Senate account – through a series of big-dollar ad buys in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The initial $5.5 million TV ad buy – including broadcast, cable satellite and radio – will air statewide starting Wednesday and run through the first GOP debate in August.

During the same period, Scott will also launch a seven-figure digital ad campaign.

“The biggest thing going for Tim Scott right now is $22 million in the bank. He is getting ready to spend $6 million in Iowa and New Hampshire that will garner tremendous name ID, and it’s gonna be a key factor that many of the other candidates are not doing right now,” said Dave Wilson, a South Carolina conservative strategist and former president of the Palmetto Family Council.

Though he is only officially entering the race now, Scott has already gotten caught in the churn of the campaign season. Shortly after announcing an exploratory committee last month, he was tripped up by questions over his position on a potential national abortion ban.

After initially sidestepping the matter and refusing to say whether he would back a 15-week ban, Scott told WMUR he would support restrictions beginning at 20 weeks. Days later, though, Scott said in an interview with NBC News that he “would literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation that they can get through Congress.”

Pressed on what precisely that meant, given he had applauded DeSantis for signing a six-week ban in Florida, Scott demurred – saying it was a decision for the states to make.

“I’m not going to talk about six (weeks) or five or seven or 10,” Scott said.

Back at the senator’s home church near Charleston, there are hundreds of worshipers that see him most weekends.

“I’ve heard him talk about hope and opportunity for 25 years. It’s who he is. It’s a part of his story. And so I don’t think he’s going to change,” said Greg Suratt, founding pastor of Seacoast Church.

“I think a misconception that people might have about him is that his niceness, his humility, translates as weakness. And they don’t know the Tim Scott I know, I would like to kind of see it as an iron fist in a velvet glove,” Suratt added, noting that even people who disagree with his politics tend to like him as an individual.

Scott’s faith and his humble beginnings will be a central theme in his campaign, an aide said. Scott grew up in a single parent household in North Charleston, where his mother worked long hours to keep their family afloat.

“Think about the kid whose grandmother has to open the stove to heat the home in the middle of the winter. I think to myself, it kind of feels like that now,” Scott said at a town hall in New Hampshire this month. “So many people with our energy prices doubling in just the last couple years, are experiencing a crisis similar to the one that I had when I was just a kid.”

On his listening tour, Scott said that between the ages of 7 and 14, he “kind of drifted,” failing world geography, civics, English and Spanish in his freshman year of high school. But through the “tireless” encouragement of his mother and mentor, the late John Moniz, a Chick-fil-A manager, Scott says he was able to graduate from Charleston Southern University. He would eventually open his own insurance agency affiliated with Allstate.

Scott credits Moniz with teaching him that anyone can “succeed beyond their circumstances” if they take responsibility for themselves – a message he repeated in North Charleston.

“John taught me that anyone, from anywhere, at any time, can rise above their wildest expectations and imagination,” Scott said after giving roses to Moniz’s widow and his own mother at the beginning of his speech. “But first, I had to take responsibility for myself. He told me in the most loving way possible to look in the mirror and to blame myself.”

Scott’s political career began in 1995, when he ran in a special election to the Charleston City Council, winning a seat he would keep for nearly 15 years. After one term as a state lawmaker, Scott won a US House seat representing South Carolina’s 1st district.

Fellow presidential candidate and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley then appointed Scott to the US Senate in 2012 to fill a vacancy left by Sen. Jim DeMint’s retirement. He retained the seat in a 2014 special election, was re-elected to a full term in 2016 and later won for a third time last year.

“To every single mom who struggles to make ends meet, who wonders if her efforts are in vain, they are not,” Scott said after being appointed by Haley.

During his time in the Senate, Scott has amassed a strictly conservative voting record, but has also led bipartisan police reform talks alongside New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat.

Those talks have gone on for years now, beginning in the summer of 2020 with then-California Sen. Kamala Harris also involved, but hopes for a comprehensive deal were effectively abandoned in 2021. (The conversations reportedly continue, but there is no legislation currently in the offing.)

In 2017, his “Investing in Opportunity Act,” which had some Democratic support, was included in the controversial Republican tax cut bill. The provision called for the establishment of “Opportunity Zones,” which would create tax incentives for businesses that invested in parts of the country struggling with poverty and stalled economies.

“I was one of the lead authors of the Republican tax reform bill that slashed taxes for families, brought jobs and investment back from overseas, and created my signature legislation, the ‘Opportunity Zones,’ that’s brought billions of dollars into the poorest communities that have been left behind,” Scott said in his speech. “That was just one bill. Imagine what we could do with an entire agenda.”

Still, Democrats in South Carolina welcomed Scott to the race with harsh words about his political record – and an attempt to tie him to the GOP’s far right.

“We know how dangerous Tea Party extremist Tim Scott is,” South Carolina Democratic Party chair Christale Spain said in a statement. “From promising to sign the most conservative abortion ban possible as president, to doubling down on his role as ‘architect’ of the 2017 GOP tax scam that pushed tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy at the expense of working families, Scott has proven himself to be just as MAGA as the rest of the 2024 field.”

Though Scott has expressed more openness to working with Democrats than most Republicans in Washington, he also owns one of the most conservative voting records in Congress. He rarely broke with Trump during the latter’s presidency, though he did criticize Trump’s response to White supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

“What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority,” Scott told Vice News at the time. “And that moral authority is compromised.”

Scott largely backed off that line, though, after a meeting with Trump in the White House.

“(Trump) was certainly very clear that the perception that he received on his comments was not exactly what he intended with those comments,” Scott told CBS News.

This story has been updated with additional reporting and reaction.

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May 22, 2023
W. Kamau Bell found inspiration at home for ‘1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed’ | CNN

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CNN
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W. Kamau Bell isn’t the only star in his home.

The comedian and television host credits his three daughters, Sami, Juno and Asha, with inspiring his latest project, “1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed.”

Sami and Juno both appear in the HBO documentary about the experiences of multiracial children and their families.

Bell told CNN he thought about what life would be like for his children even before they were born.

“I’m Black, my wife’s white, and before even Sami, our oldest daughter, was born, we sort of knew that she was going to have an experience that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to relate to a hundred percent, because she was going to be mixed,” he said. “Luckily, we live in the Bay Area, so we had mixed folks in our lives.”

It was definitely a pivot for Bell and his wife, Melissa.

While he is well known for his Emmy award-winning CNN series, “United Shades of America,” Bell’s family has been less visible.

“We’ve always sort of tried to keep them out of the spotlight and they understood that,” Bell told CNN. “But once the opportunity came to make a documentary about mixed-race kids, we knew our kids had something to say.”

Bell talks to a few of his eldest daughter’s friends and their parents in the documentary, as well as some adults who are multiracial.

There are plenty of moments of introspection, including for Bell, who recounted asking Sami about what she sees when she looks in the mirror.

“I was asking her a question that was literally about skin tone in my mind and she said, ‘I don’t think mirrors tell you everything. I don’t think mirrors show everything’ and she’s talking about who she is inside,” he recalled. ” And it’s that moment of like, she went way deeper than I was expecting. I can’t take all the credit, but it felt like a moment of thank God this kid is deeper and more thoughtful than I even realized.”

Bell hopes more conversations will be sparked by “1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed.”

“The kids are inspiring. I don’t often make things that end on a hopeful message,” he said. “I was happy to make something that felt lighter and feels more like ‘Everybody sit down [and watch]’.There is definitely some moments, some difficulty and the word trauma is used multiple times … but I definitely feel like these kids can provide hope.”

The film is currently streaming on HBO Max, which like CNN is part of Warner Bros. Discovery.

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May 19, 2023
Myanmar junta travel restrictions are holding up vital aid to cyclone-hit communities | CNN

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Myanmar’s military junta is holding up humanitarian access to some cyclone-hit communities in western Rakhine state after Cyclone Mocha devastated the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the poorest parts of the country.

United Nations agencies said Thursday they were still negotiating access to parts of the state four days after Mocha slammed into Myanmar’s coast on Sunday as one of the strongest storms ever to hit the country.

Hundreds of people are feared to have died and thousands more are in urgent need of shelter, clean water, food and health care as a clearer picture of the devastation is beginning to emerge.

While rescue groups have warned of “a large scale loss of life,” the exact number of casualties is hard to know due to flooding, blocked roads, and downed communications.

Widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure has been reported throughout Rakhine, home to hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

Storm damage has hampered efforts to access rural and hard-to-reach areas while pre-existing travel restrictions imposed by the junta have delayed the delivery of vital aid to communities in urgent need.

“Humanitarian actors have made clear that the need to secure travel authorization is impeding their response to the cyclone,” said Tom Andrews, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Myanmar.

“It seems that many agencies haven’t even been able to conduct needs assessments, let alone deliver aid, because SAC (junta) officials have not granted travel authorization. This is extremely worrying.”

The UN’s humanitarian office (OCHA) said it was still waiting for access to be granted by the junta to reach communities in Rakhine state in order to “start coordinated field missions to gauge the full scope of the humanitarian situation.”

“The bureaucratic access constraints are affecting all partners, including the UN and NGOs,” said Pierre Peron, UN OCHA’s regional public information officer. “To deliver, we will need access to affected people, relaxation of travel authorization requirements and expedited customs clearances for commodities.”

About 5.4 million people in Rakhine and the northeast are estimated to have been in the path of the cyclone, which crashed into the state as an equivalent category 5 hurricane, with winds of over 200 kilometers per hour (195 mph). Of those, more than 3 million people are most vulnerable, according to UN OCHA in its latest update.

The priority is to assess the damage in Kyauktaw, Maungdaw, Pauktaw, Ponnagyun, Rathedaung and Sittwe townships, it said.

“The road between Yangon and Sittwe has now reopened, potentially providing a transport route for much-needed supplies, if approved. It is also hoped the Sittwe airport will reopen on Thursday,” UN OCHA said.

Another roadblock to relief efforts is a severe lack of funding, with a $764 million humanitarian response plan less than 10% funded.

“Colleagues simply will not be able to respond to these additional needs from the cyclone and continue our existing response across the country without more financial support from donors,” said UN OCHA’s Peron.

Medecins Sans Frontieres told CNN it had a number of travel authorizations already in place for staff for the month of May, “which has allowed us to be fully operational so far and focus on life-saving activities in areas most affected.”

“Travel within Rakhine state is restricted with the exception of Sittwe, the state capital. Permission is always necessary. All aid agencies are required to apply for travel authorizations to implement activities one month prior to travel,” said Paul Brockmann, MSF’s operations manager for Myanmar.

Brockmann said the scale of the medical humanitarian needs created by the cyclone are “enormous” and fast approvals of import permits and travel authorizations is “of life-saving importance, considering that 17 townships have been declared disaster zones by the authorities.”

“The needs are widespread and beyond the capacity of any one organization to respond to,” he said.

Concerns are high because Rakhine is a largely impoverished and isolated state, which in recent years has been the site of widespread political violence.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced in the state due to the protracted conflict, many of them members of the stateless Rohingya minority group, long persecuted in Myanmar.

Rohingya in Rakhine are mostly confined to camps akin to open air prisons, where authorities place strict controls on their movement, as well as access to schooling and health care.

Access for certain aid groups and journalists to these areas is heavily restricted.

Aung Saw Hein, a resident of a displacement camp in the Rakhine capital Sittwe, told CNN the storm has “made us refugees again.”

“We have been refugees for almost 11 years now… We are not able to access health care, not able to take a rest… we are not able to support our family members with basic needs like food,” he said. “And now this storm completely destroyed our life and brought us on the road again.”

Myanmar authorities have a long history of impeding access to aid for vulnerable communities.

In the wake of a brutal and bloody military campaign that forced 740,000 people to flee to neighboring Bangladesh from 2017, aid activities in the north of the state were suspended and authorities denied humanitarian actors access to communities in need, mostly the Rohingya population, according to aid groups.

Following the 2021 military coup, the junta and its security forces imposed new travel restrictions on humanitarian workers, blocked access roads and aid convoys, and destroyed non-military supplies, Human Rights Watch reported at the time.

Rohingya adviser to Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government Aung Kyaw Moe tweeted the junta is “blocking aid agencies in Rakhine” and “must not play the same game” as a previous junta administration did in 2008, when after Cyclone Nargis it prevented international disaster relief teams and supplies from reaching those in need. An estimated 140,000 people died.

“This is their basic MO,” said UN Special Rapporteur Andrews.

“In Rakhine state, in addition to access challenges, the restrictions on freedom of movement imposed on the Rohingya have further impaired their ability to access aid and services, including medical treatment.”

In a statement, the IFRC said “access in Rakhine and the northwest remains heavily restricted” but the Myanmar Red Cross has a “presence in every affected township through its branches and volunteers.”

A spokesperson for Partners Relief & Development, which has been working in the camps since the initial violence in mid 2012, said they have had few restrictions on their activity during that time and have a “strong local network carrying out our relief efforts.”

However, “access has been much more difficult in the past three years and the current government restrictions are now making it more complicated to reach the affected areas,” the spokesperson said.

“Our hope is that unimpeded access is provided and that the local authorities will not only facilitate access for aid but also contribute assistance and treat the Rohingya with care and dignity.”

CNN has reached out to Myanmar’s military junta for comment on the restrictions to access and aid in Rakhine following the cyclone.

Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing has been quoted by state media Global New Light of Myanmar as saying “relief teams must be sent to the storm-affected areas to carry out rescue and relief tasks as well as rehabilitation.”

State media showed Min Aung Hlaing visiting cyclone-affected areas in Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site famed for its ancient temples. It also carried reports of the junta’s deputy prime minister Adm. Tin Aung San visiting towns and villages around Sittwe to oversee the delivery of water tanks, food supplies, and cash assistance.

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May 18, 2023
The demographic makeup of the country’s voters continues to shift. That creates headwinds for Republicans | CNN Politics

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Demographic change continued to chip away at the cornerstone of the Republican electoral coalition in 2022, a new analysis of Census data has found.

White voters without a four-year college degree, the indispensable core of the modern GOP coalition, declined in 2022 as a share of both actual and eligible voters, according to a study of Census results by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in electoral turnout.

McDonald’s finding, provided exclusively to CNN, shows that the 2022 election continued the long-term trend dating back at least to the 1970s of a sustained fall in the share of the votes cast by working-class White voters who once constituted the brawny backbone of the Democratic coalition, but have since become the absolute foundation of Republican campaign fortunes.

As non-college Whites have receded in the electorate over that long arc, non-White adults and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Whites with at least a four-year college degree, have steadily increased their influence. “This is a trend that is baked into the demographic change of the country, so [it] is likely going to accelerate over the next ten years,” says McDonald, author of the recent book “From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

From election to election, the impact of the changing composition of the voter pool is modest. The slow but steady decline of non-college Whites, now the GOP’s best group, did not stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency in 2016 – nor does it preclude him from winning it again in 2024. And, compared to their national numbers, these non-college voters remain a larger share of the electorate in many of the key states that will likely decide the 2024 presidential race (particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and control of the Senate (including seats Democrats are defending in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.)

But even across those states, these voters are shrinking as a share of the electorate. And McDonald’s analysis of the 2022 results shows that the non-college White share of the total vote is highly likely to decline again in 2024, while the combined share of non-Whites and Whites with a college degree, groups much more favorable to Democrats, is virtually certain to increase. The political effect of this decline is analogous to turning up the resistance on a treadmill: as their best group shrinks, Republicans must run a little faster just to stay in place.

Especially ominous for Republicans is that the share of the vote cast by these blue-collar Whites declined slightly in 2022 even though turnout among those voters was relatively strong, while minority turnout fell sharply, according to McDonald’s analysis. The reason for those seemingly incongruous trends is that even solid turnout among the non-college Whites could not offset the fact that they are continuing to shrink in the total pool of eligible voters, as American society grows better-educated and more racially diverse.

Given that minority turnout fell off, the fact that the non-college White share of the total 2022 vote still slightly declined “has to be a huge cause for concern for Republicans at this point,” says Tom Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic political targeting firm. If more of the growing pool of eligible minority voters turn out in 2024, he says, “it is not unreasonable to expect” that the non-college White voters so critical to GOP fortunes could experience an even “steeper decline” in their share of the total votes cast next year.

That prospect remains a central concern for the dwindling band of anti-Trump Republicans who fear that the former president has dangerously narrowed the GOP’s appeal by identifying it so unreservedly with the cultural priorities and grievances of working-class White voters, many of them older and living outside of the nation’s largest and most economically productive metropolitan areas.

McDonald’s “data support what is self-evident: that Trumpism peaked in 2016, and that it leads to a dead end,” says former US Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. “We saw this in 2018 when Republicans lost the House; we saw it in 2020 when they lost the presidency and the Senate, and we saw it in last year when Republicans were supposed to have big gains in both chambers and [did not]. All of these failures can be attributed to Trumpism. These data just confirm what is visible to the naked eye.”

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, says these slow but steady long-term changes in the electorate leave him convinced that the ceiling for Trump’s potential support in 2024 is no more than 46% of the vote. But Democrats, he believes, still face the risk that the clear majority in the electorate opposed to Trumpism will not turn out in sufficient numbers or splinter to third-party options if they do. Both dangers, he argues, are most pronounced for the diverse younger generations that have never found President Joe Biden very inspiring and have not received sufficient messaging and organizing attention from Democrats.

The political impact of those younger voters, he warns, could be blunted by the proliferation of red state laws making it more difficult to vote and Democrats focusing too much “on chasing this mythical [White] swing voter that doesn’t look like that Millennial or Gen Z voter we are relying on.”

Overall voter turnout in 2022 was high compared to almost all previous midterms, but below the peak reached in 2018, when a greater share of eligible voters turned out than in any midterm election since 1914, according to McDonald’s calculations.

Turnout last year fell most sharply among minorities: while 43% of all eligible non-White voters showed up in 2018, that slipped to just 35% last year, McDonald calculates. Turnout among eligible college-educated White voters also dropped from an astronomical 74% in 2018 to just over 69% last year. White voters without a four-year college degree actually came closest to matching their elevated 2018 performance, slipping only slightly from just over 45% then to about 43% last year.

But turnout is only one of the two factors that shape how large a share of actual voters each group comprises, which is the number that really matters in determining election outcomes. The other factor is how large a share of the pool of potential eligible voters each group represents. Turnout, in effect, is the numerator and the share of eligible voters the denominator that combined produce the share of the total vote each group casts during every election.

As McDonald found, the long-term trends in the eligible voter pool – the denominator in our equation – continued unabated in 2022. Whites without a college degree fell to just over 41% of eligible potential voters. That was down 3.2 percentage points from their share of the eligible voter population in 2018 – which was itself down exactly 3.2 percentage points from their share in 2014. In turn, from 2014 to 2022, college-educated White voters slightly increased their share of the eligible voter pool and minorities significantly increased from 30.5% then to nearly 35% now.

Netting together both the turnout results and these shifts in the eligible voter pool, McDonald found that working-class White voters in 2022 declined as a share overall, whether compared either to the last few midterm elections or the most recent presidential contests.

In 2022, Whites without a college degree cast 38.3% of all votes, he found. That was down from 39.3% in 2018 and more than 43% in 2014, according to his calculations. That finding also represented a continued decline from just over 42% of the vote when Trump won the 2016 presidential election and 39.9% in 2020 – the first time non-college Whites had fallen below 40% of the total presidential electorate in Census figures.

Whites with at least a four-year college degree were the big gainers in 2022: McDonald found they cast nearly 36% of all votes last year, compared to a little over-one-third in both 2018 and 2014 and a little less than that in the 2020 presidential year. Burdened by lower turnout, the non-White share of the total vote slipped to just over one-fourth, down slightly from 2018, but still higher than in the 2014 midterms. The minority share of the total vote was considerably larger in 2020, reaching nearly three-in-ten in Census figures.

All of this extends very consistent long-term trends. Census data analyzed by the non-partisan States of Change project show that non-college Whites have fallen from around two-thirds of the total vote under Ronald Reagan, to about three-fifths under Bill Clinton, to less than half under Barack Obama, to the current level of just under two-fifths. Over those same decades, college-educated Whites have grown from about two-in-ten to three-in-ten voters, while minorities have increased from a little over one-in-ten then to nearly three-in-ten now.

Other respected data sources differ on the share of the total vote comprised by these three big groups: the Pew Validated Voter study and the estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, both put the share of the vote cast in 2020 by non-college Whites slightly higher, in the range of 42-44%.

But both also show the same core pattern as the Census results do, with the share of the total vote cast by those non-college Whites declining by about two percentage points every four years. The Edison Research exit polls conducted for a consortium of media organizations, including CNN, changed its methodology in a way that makes long-term comparisons impossible. But, similarly to McDonald, the exits found the non-college White share of the total vote declining to 39% in 2022 from 41% in 2018, with minorities also slightly falling over that period, and college-educated Whites growing.

The trend lines that McDonald documented for last year suggest it’s a reasonable prediction that non-college Whites will again decline as a share of total voters by two points over the period from 2020 to 2024. That would push their share of the national 2024 vote down to below 38%, with more minority voters likely filling most of that gap and the college-educated Whites growing more modestly to offset the rest.

McDonald says the basic dynamic reconfiguring the voting pool is that many Baby Boomers and their elders are aging out of the electorate. That’s both because more of them are dying or they are reaching an advanced age where turnout tends to decline, either for infirmity or other obstacles. Those older generations are preponderantly White (about three-fourths of seniors are White), and fewer have college degrees, which were not as essential to economic success in those years, McDonald points out. Meanwhile, a larger share of young adults today hold four-year degrees, and the youngest generations aging into the electorate every two years are far more racially diverse. According to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank, young people of color now comprise almost exactly half of all Americans who turn 18 and age into the electorate each year.

“We are right now at the teetering edge of the influence of the baby boomers,” says McDonald. “They are just starting to enter those twilight years in their turnout rates, while other [more diverse] groups are maturing. So we are right at that cusp – that critical point of where things are going to start changing.”

The impact of these changes on the outcomes of elections, as McDonald says, is very incremental, “like the proverbial frog in the boiling water.” One way to understand that dynamic is to assume that Whites without a college degree on the one hand, and minorities and college-educated Whites on the other, all split their vote at roughly the same proportions as they have in recent elections. If the former group declines as a share of the electorate by two points from 2020-2024 and the latter groups increase by an equal amount, that change alone would enlarge Biden’s margin of victory in the two-party vote from 4.6 percentage points to 5.8, Bonier calculates. Republicans would need to increase their vote share with some or all of those groups just to get back to the deficit Trump faced in 2020 – much less to overcome it.

Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic electoral analyst who has become a staunch critic of his party, argues exactly that kind of shift in voting preferences could offset the change in the electorate’s composition – and create a real threat for Biden. Even though Biden is aggressively highlighting his efforts to create blue-collar jobs through “manufacturing and infrastructure projects that are starting to get off the ground,” Teixiera recently wrote, a “sharp swing against the incumbent administration by White working-class voters seems like a very real possibility.”

Teixeira, now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also maintains Democrats face the risk Republicans can extend the unexpected gains Trump registered in 2020 with non-White voters without a college degree, especially Hispanics.

Curbelo, the former congressman, shares Teixeira’s belief that Democratic liberalism on some social issues like crime is creating an opening for Republicans to gain ground among culturally conservative Hispanics. “If they are not careful, they can jeopardize their potential gains from Republicans doubling down on Trumpism by alienating themselves from minority voters who may identify with some of the [Democrats’] economic policies but who do not necessarily identify with the party’s victimhood narrative about minorities,” Curbelo says.

Still, Curbelo warns that Republicans are unlikely to achieve the gains possible with minority voters so long as they are stamped so decisively by Trump’s polarizing image. And polling has consistently found that while many non-college Hispanic voters hold more moderate views on social issues than college-educated White liberals, those minority voters are not nearly as conservative as core GOP groups, like blue-collar Whites or evangelical Christians.

As Teixeira has forcefully argued in recent years, such demographic change doesn’t ensure doom for Republicans or success for Democrats. Among other things, that change is unevenly distributed around the country, and the small state bias of both the Electoral College and the two-senators-per-state rule magnifies the influence of sparsely populated interior states where these shifts have been felt much more lightly.

Yet, even so, the long-term change in the electorate’s composition, along with the Democrats’ growing strength among white-collar suburban voters, largely explains why the party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections – something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828.

And even though Whites without a college degree exceed their share of the national vote in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, their share of the vote is shrinking along the same trajectory of about 2-3 points every four years in those states too, according to analysis by Frey. Meanwhile, in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, more rapid growth in the minority population means that blue-collar Whites will likely comprise a smaller portion of the eligible voter pool than they do nationally.

Trump, with the exception of his beachhead among blue-collar minorities, has now largely locked the GOP into a position of needing to squeeze bigger margins out of shrinking groups, particularly non-college Whites. It’s entirely possible that Trump or another Republican nominee can meet that test well enough to win back the White House in 2024, especially given the persistent public disenchantment with Biden’s performance. But McDonald’s 2022 data shows why relying on a coalition tilted so heavily toward those non-college Whites becomes just a little tougher for the GOP in each presidential race.

While Trump or another Republican certainly can win in 2024, Bonier says, “he has reshaped the party in such a way that they have a very narrow path to victory.”

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May 15, 2023
Bangladesh and Myanmar brace for the worst as Cyclone Mocha intensifies | CNN

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CNN
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Aid agencies in Bangladesh and Myanmar say they are bracing for disaster and have launched a massive emergency plan as a powerful cyclone barrels toward millions of vulnerable people.

Since forming in the Bay of Bengal early Thursday, tropical Cyclone Mocha has intensified to a the equivalent of a Category 5 Atlantic hurricane, with sustained winds of 259 kilometers per hour (161 mph) and gusts of up to 315 kph (195 mph).

The storm is moving north at 20 kph (12 mph), according to the latest update from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center on Sunday.

Mocha is expected to make landfall Sunday afternoon local time (early Sunday morning ET), likely across Rakhine State in Myanmar and southeastern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, host to the world’s largest refugee camp.

Outer bands are already impacting Myanmar and Bangladesh bringing rain and strong winds to the region. Conditions are expected to deteriorate further leading up to landfall, which brings the threats of flooding and landslides.

Disaster response teams and more than 3,000 local volunteers who have been trained in disaster preparedness and first aid have been put on standby in the camps, and a national cyclone early warning system is in place, according to Sanjeev Kafley, Head of Delegation of the IFRC Bangladesh Delegation.

Kafley said there are 7,500 emergency shelter kits, 4,000 hygiene kits and 2,000 water containers ready to be distributed.

In addition, mobile health teams and dozens of ambulances are ready to respond to refugees and Bangladeshis in need, with specially trained teams on stand by to help the elderly, children and the disabled, Arjun Jain, UN Principal Coordinator for the Rohingya Refugee Response in Bangladesh, told CNN.

“We expect this cyclone to have a more severe impact than any other natural disaster they have faced in the past five years,” said Jain. “At this stage, we just don’t know where the cyclone will make landfall and with what intensity. So we are hoping for the best but are preparing for the worst.”

Evacuations of people in low-lying areas or those with serious medical conditions had begun, he said.

In Myanmar, residents in coastal areas of Rakhine state and Ayeyarwady region have started to evacuate and seek shelter at schools and monasteries.

Hundreds of Red Cross volunteers are on standby and the agency is relocating vulnerable people and raising awareness of the storm in villages and townships, the IFRC’s Kafley said.

The last storm to make landfall with a similar strength was Tropical Cyclone Giri back in October 2010. It made landfall as a high-end Category 4 equivalent storm with maximum winds of 250 kph (155 mph).

Giri caused over 150 fatalities and roughly 70% of the city of Kyaukphyu was destroyed. According to the United Nations, roughly 15,000 homes were destroyed in Rakhine state during the storm.

About 1 million members of the stateless Rohingya community, who fled persecution in nearby Myanmar during a military crackdown in 2017, are living in the sprawling and overcrowded camps in Cox’s Bazar.

Most live in bamboo and tarpaulin shelters perched on hilly slopes that are vulnerable to strong winds, rain, and landslides.

Jain said the shelters can only withstand wind speeds of 40 kph (24 mph) and he expects winds from Cyclone Mocha to exceed that.

“Low lying areas of the camps are likely to flood rapidly, destroying shelters, facilities such as learning centers, as well as infrastructure such as bridges that have been constructed with bamboo,” he said.

The cyclone adds to an already disastrous year for the Rohingya, and without more funds from the international community, Jain said they won’t have enough to rebuild.

“They faced a 17% cut in their food rations earlier this year due to funding cuts and we expect a further cut in their rations in the coming months. 16,000 refugees lost their home in a devastating fire in March. And now they must deal with the cyclone. Unfortunately, we don’t even have the funds to help refugees rebuild their homes and facilities if the devastation is severe,” he said.

There are also concerns for 30,000 Rohingya refugees housed on an isolated and flood-prone island facility in the Bay of Bengal, called Bhasan Char. The UN refugee agency said volunteers and medical teams are on standby and cyclone shelters and food provisions are available for those living on the island.

In Myanmar, about 6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in Rakhine state and across the northwest, with 1.2 million displaced, according to the UN humanitarian agency.

The past few decades have seen an increase in the strength of tropical cyclones affecting countries in parts of Asia and recent research predicts they could have double the destructive power in the region by the end of the century.

While scientists are still trying to understand ways climate change is affecting cyclones, a slew of research has linked human-caused global warming to more potent and destructive cyclones.

Tropical cyclones (also known as hurricanes, typhoons and tropical storms depending on ocean basin and intensity), feed off ocean heat. They need temperatures of at least around 27 degrees Celsius (80 Fahrenheit Fahrenheit) to form, and the warmer the ocean, the more moisture they can take up.

The waters in the Bay of Bengal are currently around 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit Fahrenheit), about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than average for May.

As the climate crisis pushes up the temperatures of oceans – which absorb around 90% of the world’s excess heat – it provides ideal conditions for cyclones to gain strength.

Warmer oceans also increase the chances of cyclones rapidly intensifying, according to recent research.

Climate-change fueled sea-level rise adds to the risks, worsening storm surges from tropical cyclones and allowing them to travel further inland.

Bangladesh and Myanmar are particularly threatened because they are low-lying, as well as being home to some of the world’s poorest people.

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May 13, 2023
Authorities in northeast India give ‘shoot-at-sight’ orders after violent skirmishes over tribal rights | CNN

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New Delhi
CNN
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Authorities in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur have issued “shoot-at-sight” orders after violence broke out this week between tribal and non-tribal groups that saw properties and vehicles set ablaze.

The state’s governor, Anusuiya Uikey, issued the order on Thursday in a bid to “maintain public order and tranquility,” a statement from Manipur’s home department said.

Shoot-at-sight orders were authorized for “extreme cases whereby all forms of persuasion, warning, reasonable force etc. had been exhausted” and the situation “could not be controlled,” according to the statement.

Skirmishes broke out on Tuesday after thousands of tribal people took part in a rally organized by the All Tribal Students Union of Manipur, against the potential inclusion of the state’s majority Meitei ethnic group in India’s “Scheduled Tribe” grouping.

The Meitei community, who make up about 50% of the state’s population, have for years campaigned to be recognized as a scheduled tribe, which would give them access to wider benefits including health, education and government jobs.

Scheduled tribes are among the most socio-economically disadvantaged groups in India and have historically been denied access to education and job opportunities.

If the Meitei community are given scheduled tribe status, other tribal groups say they fear they will not have a fair chance for jobs and other benefits.

On Tuesday, clashes reportedly broke out between the Meitei community and some tribespeople. Video and photos broadcast on local television showed vehicles and buildings set on fire, with thick black smoke billowing from the streets.

Manipur’s government announced the suspension of mobile internet services for five days, while troops from the Indian army have been deployed to violence-affected areas of the hilly state and are carrying out evacuation operations.

Former boxer and Olympic medalist Mary Kom, who is from Manipur, told CNN affiliate News 18 that the situation was “very bad.”

“From the bottom of my heart, I appeal to the central (federal government) and state governments for ensuring the safety of everyone,” she said.

About 25% of India’s population of 1.4 billion are grouped under the scheduled castes (Dalits) and scheduled tribes (Adivasis) in India’s constitution.

India’s caste system was officially abolished in 1950, but the 2,000-year-old social hierarchy imposed on people by birth still exists in many aspects of life. The caste system categorizes Hindus at birth, defining their place in society, what jobs they can do and who they can marry.

Adivasis are indigenous Indians who have been socially and economically marginalized for centuries.

Both groups have long endured social isolation, and jobs that Dalits and Adivasis have been forced to take for centuries include cleaning, manual scavenging and waste picking.

Many Adivasis do not have national ID cards, which are required to access many government schemes including getting subsidies and direct cash transfers, and health insurance under the prime minister’s health project, as well as to open a bank account.

“It has been seen that most Dalits and Adivasis, find it difficult to get these government ID cards … or ration cards. Either the information doesn’t reach them, or the enrollment camps to get biometric IDs are never set up in their villages and mostly they are asked to pay huge bribes to get these IDs made,” Alladi Devakumar, executive secretary of Dalit Bahujan Resource Centre, told CNN in 2020.

And poverty makes these groups more vulnerable during emergencies, according to the findings of a 2013 study by the International Dalit Solidarity Network, a network of international human rights groups fighting Dalit discrimination.

For example, after the 2004 Asian tsunami, Dalits were forced to remove bodies and debris, for very little if any pay, and weren’t offered any psychological support.

Some Dalits and Adivasis also reported an increase in social isolation and discrimination during the coronavirus pandemic, with no social safety net to ensure they don’t fall deeper into poverty.

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May 4, 2023
A Texas family fought for weeks to regain custody of their newborn. Experts say the case shows how Black parents are criminalized. | CNN

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CNN
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A Black Texas couple has been reunited with their newborn daughter after authorities removed the baby and placed her in foster care last month citing a doctor’s concerns about how they were treating a jaundice diagnosis.

Rodney and Temecia Jackson of DeSoto, Texas, regained custody of their daughter, Mila, on April 20 following a nearly month-long battle with the state’s Child Protective Services, according to The Afiya Center, a reproductive justice advocacy group.

A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Family Protective Services, which includes CPS, confirmed to CNN that the office had recommended a dismissal of the case to an assistant district attorney. Mila’s release was granted on Thursday, according to a court filing.

The Jacksons had been pleading for Mila’s return in videos posted to social media, and news conferences as reproductive justice activists protested and rallied behind the family.

The removal, the Jacksons say, was sparked by their decision to let their midwife treat Mila’s jaundice instead of taking her to the hospital for care as their doctor had recommended. Temecia Jackson said during a news conference earlier this month that she gave birth to Mila at home on March 21 with the help of a midwife and wanted that same trusted midwife to provide medical care for her baby. But Mila’s pediatrician disagreed with this decision and ultimately contacted CPS, Temecia Jackson said.

“We’ve been treated like criminals,” Rodney Jackson said during the news conference. “This is a nightmare that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

Reproductive justice advocates say Mila’s removal is just the latest example of the criminalization of Black parents, who lose their children to the child welfare system at disproportionate rates. In the US in 2018, Black children made up 23% of youth in foster care, but only 14% of the nation’s child population, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Additionally, one study found that between 2003-2014, 53% of Black children were the subjects of child welfare investigations by the time they reached age 18.

Marsha Jones, executive director of The Afiya Center – a Dallas, Texas, based non-profit that advocates for Black women and girls – said there is a systemic problem with the child welfare system that unfairly targets Black parents. In many cases, Black families have their first experiences with the criminal justice system in family court, Jones said.

“It’s almost unspoken and unseen because there is just this thought that Black women are not good parents and that we are criminalized because of poverty,” Jones told CNN. “This is not new.”

Jones said the center stepped in last month to support the Jackson family and put pressure on public officials to return Mila home. She believes this played a role in reuniting the family last week.

“There’s no reason this baby should have been removed from her home,” Jones told CNN. “This family was not being heard. The Black midwife wasn’t being heard.”

Rodney and Temecia Jackson could not be reached for comment.

In a letter to CPS obtained by CNN affiliate WFAA, the family’s pediatrician, Dr. Anand Bhatt, who is with the Baylor Scott & White healthcare system, wrote that while the Jacksons “are very loving and they care dearly” about Mila, “their distrust for medical care and guidance has led them to make a decision for the baby to refuse a simple treatment that can prevent brain damage.”

“I authorized the support of CPS to help get this baby the care that was medically necessary and needed,” the letter continued.

CBS News, which obtained a copy of the affidavit filed by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, reported that Bhatt reached out to a DFPS investigator on March 25 and indicated that Mila’s bililrubin test showed levels of 21.7 milligrams.

A bilirubin test can screen for jaundice and other conditions. That level was “cause for a lot of concern,” Bhatt told the investigator, according to CBS News, and could lead to brain damage, he said, “because the bilirubin can cross the blood brain barrier.”

Bhatt said he reserved a bed for Mila at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas and asked the Jacksons to take her there or he would call police for a welfare check, according to court documents obtained by CBS News. WFAA reported that Bhatt wanted Mila to receive phototherapy – a common treatment for jaundice.

But court documents, according to CBS News, say Rodney Jackson told Bhatt he and Temecia Jackson planned to treat their baby “naturally” and didn’t believe in “modern medicine.”

The midwife, Cheryl Edinbyrd, told CBS News the family had ordered a blanket and goggles to provide light therapy to treat Mila’s jaundice.

When the Jacksons didn’t show up at the hospital, a CPS investigator and police went to the Jackson’s home at 4 a.m. on March 25 but Rodney Jackson declined to speak with them, according to court documents obtained by CBS News. An hour later, authorities returned with an ambulance and fire truck and Rodney Jackson still denied them entry.

Authorities returned to the home on March 30 with a warrant and arrested Rodney Jackson on charges of preventing the execution of a civil process, according to CBS News. Police entered the home and took Mila from Temecia Jackson. According to CBS News, the Jacksons’ other two children were not removed.

Temecia Jackson said in a press conference that when she asked to see the affidavit, she noticed it had the name of a different mother on it.

“Instantly I felt like they had stolen my baby as I had had a home birth and they were trying to say that my baby belonged to this other woman,” Temecia Jackson.

Marissa Gonzales, a spokesperson from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said in an email to CNN that her department was given an incorrect name for the initial affidavit. The mistake, she said, was corrected in the case filings.

Gonzales declined an interview with CNN to discuss the case further, citing “state confidentiality restrictions.”

“It is always the goal of DFPS to safely reunite children with their parents,” Gonzales also said. “The decision about when that happens rests with the judge who ordered the removal.”

CNN’s request to interview Bhatt was also denied by Baylor Scott & White.

“In respect of patient privacy, it is inappropriate to provide comment on this matter,” the health system said in an emailed statement. “We do abide by reporting requirements set forth in the Texas Family Code and any other applicable laws.”

Advocates say the racial bias of professionals such as teachers, doctors and social workers has created inequity in the child welfare system.

Dorothy Roberts, a law professor and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said decisions to report neglect and abuse are largely shaped by racist stereotypes of Black families.

The child welfare system, she said, needs to consider the trauma inflicted on children when they are separated from their families.

“We have to ask whether there is a better way of addressing children’s medical needs instead of the system we have now where doctors are reporting suspicions, which we know is highly biased, and investigating families, which we know is very traumatic,” said Roberts, author of “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” “Hospitals should not be places of fear for parents.”

Roberts said there is also a longstanding cultural conflict between the healthcare system and midwives who are often devalued. Black midwives provided care for mothers for hundreds of years, delivering the babies of enslaved women and even slave owners’ wives. But as medicine became more professionalized in the late 1800s, male doctors wanted to take control of childbirth, with some suggesting midwives were unfit, according to a report by Vox.

Monica Simpson, executive director of Sistersong, a reproductive justice organization advocating for women of color, said many Black women are choosing midwives because they have lost trust in doctors and hospitals.

Much of that is driven by the harrowing statistics: Black women are 2.6 times likelier to die of pregnancy-related complications than White women, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Black infants also die at more than twice the rate of White infants, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Simpson said the child welfare system is broken. She said racism has played a part in the continued criminalization and separation of Black families.

“There’s been this narrative that Black women can’t parent their children properly,” Simpson said. “We have been battling these narratives for decades. The way that Black women are criminalized around their motherhood, it’s horrible.”

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April 24, 2023
A Black teen’s murder sparked a crisis over racism in British policing. Thirty years on, little has changed | CNN

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London
CNN
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Neville Lawrence sometimes imagines walking through London and looking at buildings his son Stephen might have worked on, had he lived long enough to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect. The closest he ever got to that was building a miniature.

“He did his work experience with an architect and he built a model of a building down in Deptford. So, every time I pass Deptford and see the building, it reminds me of him,” Lawrence told CNN, referring to a neighborhood in southeast London. It’s been 30 years, but he still gets emotional speaking about Stephen.

Stephen Lawrence was murdered when he was just 18 years old in a racially motivated attack on April 22, 1993. His killing and the subsequent failure of the London Metropolitan Police Service to properly investigate the crime sparked a national outcry. It culminated in a landmark official inquiry that concluded the force was institutionally racist.

But despite decades of promises, reviews and reforms, a new government report published last month, just four weeks before the 30th anniversary of Stephen’s murder, reached the same conclusion. The Met is still institutionally racist.

Raju Bhatt, a civil liberties lawyer who has dedicated his career to representing people making claims of wrongful conduct against the police, said nothing in the new report – the Baroness Casey Review – came as a surprise.

“What our clients see is a machinery which just doesn’t want to hear what they have to say and as a result, what happens is a failure to address the cultural problems, that culture of impunity, which arises when police officers know that they won’t be brought to account – when [they] know that whatever they do, their managers will be there to back them up, or, at the very least, their managers will look away,” he said.

The Met Police chief Mark Rowley has acknowledged “systemic” problems in the force but has so far declined to use the word “institutional.”

For Bhatt, the Casey report was just the latest development in a familiar cycle of events that began when he graduated from university in 1981.

That summer, racial tensions in Britain boiled over and sparked violent clashes between mostly Black protesters and the police, in south London’s Brixton neighborhood and elsewhere. Bhatt worked as a community volunteer, helping people who were arrested during the protests.

An official government inquiry into the riots and the police response concluded there was an “urgent need for changes in training and law enforcement and the recruitment of more ethnic minorities into the police force.” It also found that there was “evidence of harassment of minorities by some policemen.”

Stephen Lawrence was murdered 12 years after the Brixton riots. Within days of his killing at a bus stop in southeast London, five White teens were identified as being involved. They were arrested, but none was successfully prosecuted at the time.

It took years of campaigning by the Lawrence family — and public support from the likes of Nelson Mandela and the national press — to get the investigation moving. A 1997 inquest into Lawrence’s death found that he was unlawfully killed in a “completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths.”

A wave of protests forced the then-government to commission an inquiry into the murder and the Met’s handling of it, which concluded in 1999 that “professional incompetence, institutional racism and failure of leadership by senior officers” was to be blamed for the botched investigation.

The review, known as the Macpherson report, made 70 recommendations on how to improve the police force and increase the public’s trust in the force. They included recruiting more Black and other minority ethnic officers to make sure the force reflects the communities it serves, taking steps to tackle disparities in the use of police powers against people from minority groups and developing specific guidelines on how to investigate and tackle racist crimes.

The Macpherson report was damning, but like the Brixton riots review, it failed to result in lasting and substantive reform of the Met Police.

As a Black man who grew up in 70s and 80s Britain, Leslie Thomas says he knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of police racism. He recounts how he has been racially profiled and stopped and searched by officers several times in the past, including once when he was driving with his wife and baby in the back of his car and once when he was just 14 years old.

“I was 14, in school uniform, coming home from school and a police van pulls up alongside me. Four officers jump out [and say] ‘you look suspicious’,” he said.

Like Bhatt, Thomas is a lawyer who has spent decades representing people in claims against the police and other public authorities. And, just like Bhatt, he has little faith that the latest report will lead to much change.

“Here’s the thing. You can’t hit a target unless you acknowledge the target itself. The Metropolitan Police have said, ‘oh, we want to be a more inclusive organization,’ but steadfastly, they refuse to acknowledge through their leadership that they’ve got a problem with institutional racism,” Thomas said.

“If it were just a few bad apples, then you wouldn’t expect, as we have seen, repetition after repetition, generation after generation,” he added.

The Met has not yet responded to CNN’s request for comment. But speaking to the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee last month, Rowley refused to label the Met Police “institutionally” racist, saying the word “institutional” is ambiguous and politicized.

In a statement released when the Casey report was published, Rowley said it “must be a catalyst for police reform” and “needs to lead to meaningful change.” He added: “I want us to be anti-racist, anti-misogynist and anti-homophobic. In fact, I want us to be anti-discrimination of all kinds.”

Thomas specializes in representing families of people who have died in police custody – an issue that disproportionately affects people of color.

Black people in the UK are seven times more likely to die from police restraint than White people, according to statistics compiled by Inquest, a charity that focuses on deaths in police and prison custody, immigration detention, mental health settings and other state settings.

The legacy of Stephen Lawrence’s murder, 30 years later

Thomas represented the family of Sean Rigg, who died in 2008 after being pinned down in a police arrest while experiencing a mental health crisis. While an initial investigation by then-police watchdog the Independent Police Complaints Commission cleared the police of any wrongdoing, the Rigg family kept fighting.

In 2012, an inquest jury found that Rigg died of cardiac arrest after being restrained in a prone position for approximately eight minutes and said the level and length of restraint used by the police was “unsuitable” and “unnecessary” and that this “more than minimally” contributed to his death.

In light of the findings, the police watchdog re-examined the case. But a police misconduct panel cleared five officers of gross misconduct in connection to Rigg’s death in 2019. One of those officers had earlier been acquitted of perjury relating to his account of events on the night Rigg died.

Marcia Rigg, Sean’s sister, is still fighting. She and her family have spent years watching CCTV footage of Sean’s last moments, trying to piece together what really happened. The process has been deeply upsetting and it hasn’t, so far, led to the justice she wants for her brother.

“It was four years before we had an inquest. And basically myself and my family, particularly me and my brother Wade, we had to become investigators ourselves … to see your loved one being treated in that way by officers that should be helping us. It’s traumatizing, it makes you angry,” she told CNN.

Rigg said she still dreads the police. “I hate the sound of (the sirens), I hate the sight of the uniform, what it represents.”

The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 brought back all of the trauma for Rigg. Like Sean, Floyd was held face down by police in a prone position. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes and was ultimately found guilty of murdering him.

But it also made her even more determined to fight. “When George Floyd died, and everybody witnessed that murder, (British politicians) were on the side of the people, (saying) that this can’t happen. I said, well, they need to look in their own backyard,” she said.

Deborah Coles, Inquest’s executive director, said the struggles of the Lawrences and the Riggs to get justice for their loved ones mirror the experiences of nearly everyone she’s worked with.

She said the “cultures of denial and defensiveness and delay” within official government agencies, as well as victim blaming and the tendency to demonize the victim’s family and community, add to families’ suffering in such cases, as does “this ongoing institutional denial about the fact that institutional racism is a live and enduring issue.”

Successive governments and police chiefs have dismissed the severity of the issue, she told CNN. “We’ve always said that one of the problems is that when it comes to looking at deaths (in custody), they see them as isolated incidents, rather than being evidence of a systemic, enduring issue. This is a systemic issue across police forces.”

The UK’s largest police force commissioned the latest independent inquiry in 2021, after a serving Metropolitan Police officer was convicted of the kidnapping, raping and murdering Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old London woman. The eventual Casey report was damning, finding the Met not just institutionally racist, but also institutionally misogynistic, sexist and homophobic.

According to a separate parliamentary report published last year, Black people are more than nine-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched than White people, even though the vast majority of “stop and search” actions don’t result in any further action.

The Met is still overwhelmingly White, with only 17% of officers identifying themselves as non-White in 2022, despite the city they police being far more diverse.

While that is more than the 3% figure recorded in the early 2000s, it is still well below its own targets and not at all reflective of the communities the police serve.

“We see time and again critical reviews, inquiries, inquest findings, coroner’s recommendations, a whole wealth of potentially lifesaving recommendations, but also very critical recommendations about structural changes needed. And yet there is no enforcement of those recommendations,” Coles said.

Inquest and other organizations are calling for a new oversight mechanism that would follow up and report on whether correct actions have been taken in response to the numerous inquiries, she added.

As the Lawrence family and their supporters mark the 30th anniversary of Stephen’s killing, they are still fighting for his killers to face justice.

It wasn’t until 2012, 19 years after the murder, that two of the five attackers – Gary Dobson and David Norris – were finally convicted and sent to prison. It took a change in law that allowed for a retrial in cases where new evidence is found.

To date, the other three people allegedly involved in the killing have not been brought to justice.

Neville Lawrence remains determined to keep fighting – although he said that the publication of the Casey report has made it clear to him, once again, that the family is on its own in this.

“If you want justice, you have to try and fight for it yourself, you don’t have anybody who is going to be doing it the way they should be doing it,” he said.

After years of being consumed by grief and anger, Lawrence decided to move back to Jamaica, where his son is buried. “I accept the situation where I had to leave this place so I can have some peace,” he told CNN.

“I couldn’t even bury my son here because of the vandalism that would have taken place. The amount of times that they vandalized the (memorial) plaque where he fell, that they had to put a camera on it to stop people going there and desecrating it … so just imagine Stephen, if he was here, what they would have done,” he said.

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April 22, 2023
Opinion: Mifepristone saved my life | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
—

The ruling earlier this month by a Texas federal judge to suspend the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a drug that is used frequently for medication abortions, is very personal for me.

That’s because I took mifepristone years ago during a miscarriage, and it saved my life.

When I was prescribed mifepristone, it had not yet taken center stage in America’s abortion wars. I did not have to make a rushed road trip across state lines to get my medicine, unlike many women who need the drug but live in one of the many states that have restricted access to medication abortion or passed near-total bans on abortion.

I was not forced to set up a secret meet-up with a stranger in order to buy my medicine on the black market, as several women I spoke to recently said they planned to do. Nor did I have to order mifepristone online and find myself navigating the many scammers taking advantage of the current patchwork of state abortion laws in the US.

Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in a medication abortion and the other, misoprostol, was not subject to the ruling by the Texas judge. The two drugs can be administered to someone having a miscarriage, allowing them to terminate the pregnancy when the fetus is not viable.

It happened some years ago: After experiencing more than a day of hemorrhaging during the first trimester of my pregnancy, I visited my ob-gyn, who explained after examining me that my blood pressure was dropping rapidly and the heavy bleeding I was experiencing was an unmistakable sign of a miscarriage.

For many women, being prescribed mifepristone is part of their routine medical care. Not so in my case: As my doctor explained, I was facing a dire medical emergency. I was grateful for the medication that saved my life.

My miscarriage took me by surprise. I had loved being pregnant the first time around, about a decade earlier. And as a healthy woman, I had no reason for fear when I became pregnant again. By the time I was administered mifepristone, I was losing a life that I had already begun to love. And like many other women, despite my level of education or economic status, I could not outrun the statistics that put Black women at higher risk.

Up to one in four known pregnancies will end in a miscarriage. And for Black women, the numbers are alarmingly higher. According to an analysis of 4.6 million pregnancies in seven countries, the risk of a miscarriage for Black women is 43% higher than for White women.

In the Black community, women have traditionally been taught to bear their burdens silently — keep your business to yourself — even after something as devastating as pregnancy loss. We are conditioned to do as I did back then, and keep it moving as we try to outrun the long list of statistics that tell us our lives are in danger from every direction, whether it be from health care risks to societal injustices or other stressors.

During my miscarriage, I was a woman who was afraid, hemorrhaging and in excruciating pain, in desperate need of safe, emergency medical care. Thanks to the administration of mifepristone, I was allowed dignity during my miscarriage. It’s what every woman deserves — whether it be facing a potentially life-threatening miscarriage or seeking an abortion.

I learned from my experience that every miscarriage matters. Women must have access to whatever medicines and counseling we need to help us heal and that includes mifepristone. What we don’t need is to be criminalized by politicians and punitive reproductive laws that have long been out of step with public opinion. Despite the continuing political attacks on women’s reproductive rights, more than 61% of US adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Center.

After the US Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary order to preserve the status quo, ensuring access to the drug while giving the justices more time to study the issue.

I am hoping the justices can put politics aside and focus on the science surrounding the safety of mifepristone, a drug that, thankfully, I had access to when my life was in danger. Mifepristone, a synthetic steroid, is even safer than common prescription drugs including penicillin and Viagra.

Following the science demands that, regardless of where you stand on the issue of abortion, consideration must be made for cases like mine and the millions of other women who for years have safely used this medication for complications surrounding miscarriages.

We do not know how the legal fight over medication abortion will unfold. But women across the nation – in blue and red states alike – are watching. Punitive laws like the one signed last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seek to criminalize reproductive care providers. And worse, they are stripping us of rights that men take for granted – it’s unlikely they will be prohibited by the law from making health care decisions about their own bodies.

It must end. And I’m betting that whether it be with our voice or our votes, women will have the last word.

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April 18, 2023
Racial disparities are working against disaster recovery for people of color. Climate change could make it worse | CNN

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CNN
—

People of color in the US face heightened risks of harm from climate-induced disasters. Now, non-profits are pushing to remedy that disparity with more equitable approaches to disaster preparedness, response and recovery.

“Until we really address the root issues of climate injustice, we’re going to continue to see a disproportionate impact as it relates to disasters in Black and historically excluded communities,” said Abre’ Conner, Director of Environmental and Climate Justice for the NAACP.

A report by the EPA’s Office of Atmospheric Programs looked at four vulnerable social groups: people living on low-income, racial minorities, those with no high school diploma, and seniors over age 65. Of those four groups, the study found minorities are most likely to live in areas projected to be impacted by climate change.

Moreover, Black people are 40% more likely than non-African-Americans to live in areas with the highest projected increases in mortality rates due to changes in extreme temperatures.

It’s a dire warning for the future, based on an inequitable past.

Many marginalized people, Black in particular, have faced socioeconomic factors that relegate them to living in environmentally hazardous areas or substandard housing structures. So, when a natural disaster hits, they are ill-equipped to withstand the impact.

That was the situation this past March 24 when a severe tornado leveled much of the Black-majority rural town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, killing 26 people. Racial disparities existed in Rolling Fork for decades. Many residents there were poor, had low access to information or internet service, were priced out of insurance coverage, and lived in mobile homes that weren’t retrofitted to withstand severe weather conditions. With the nearest tornado shelter over 15 miles away, it set the perfect storm to leave people displaced and scrambling for aid and assistance, which was very slow to arrive.

“The tendency is to ignore and exclude, and that’s a violation of human rights,” said Chauncia Willis, CEO and founder of the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management (I-DIEM).

Willis’ group deploys equity response teams before and after disasters to help community organizations integrate equity into all facets of disaster policy and practices. She started I-DIEM after spending over 14 years in disaster management.

“I’ve witnessed the disparities, and it hits a little different when the people look like you,” Willis said in an interview with CNN.

Almost three weeks after the tornado, Rolling Fork’s mayor said about 500 people – roughly a third of the town’s population— remained displaced, leaving victims with questions and concerns. To provide some answers, FEMA, MEMA (Mississippi Emergency Management Agency), the Small Business Administration, and the American Red Cross are holding a series of town halls, the first of which took place Tuesday at South Delta Elementary School.

Housing is a major concern at the present. “It wasn’t just Rolling Fork; it was all of those other communities surrounding that were also impacted by the tornado,” said Willis. “That’s going to be the difference between life and death in the future.”

The future is concerning; marginalized communities historically endured long-term effects from disasters.

Remnants of destruction are still visible In New Orleans’ primarily Black 9th ward 18 years after Hurricane Katrina.

Although natural disasters don’t discriminate, the response can, especially when the lingering effects of structural racism hamper relief.

In Katrina’s aftermath, Louisiana instituted a “Road Home” program, disbursing emergency funds based on appraised home values rather than actual rebuilding costs. But after decades of discriminatory economic practices including redlining, homes in historically White communities typically appraised far higher than comparable houses in Black neighborhoods.

Also, New Orleans’ White neighborhoods tend to sit on higher ground with less risk of flooding and easier access to jobs and resources. The circumstances after Katrina ended up forcing many Black families out of the city.

“Poverty should not hinder survival from disasters. Being a person that is not White shouldn’t limit your survival,” said Willis.

But there is growing awareness of the unfairness and concerted efforts to fix it. Sally Ray from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy says racial and socioeconomic disparities are key factors guiding where her organization deploys funding.

“I think we need to quit being uncomfortable talking about the intersection of climate change, racism, and disasters,” Ray told CNN. “The reality is we have long systemic racist problems across our country, and because of these things, when a disaster comes, it’s much more devastating.”

A growing body of research spotlights the historical inequity in federal disaster response.

One 2018 study by sociologists from Rice University and the University of Pittsburgh looked at counties that each suffered the same amount ($10 billion) in hazard damage. In those events, Black survivors’ wealth decreased by an average $27,000 while White survivors’ average wealth increased $126,000.

In 2020, FEMA’s advisory council acknowledged the inequities and called for the agency to address the issue.

On January 20, 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 13985 to advance racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government. Since then, FEMA has undertaken initiatives to expand access and reduce barriers to their response, recovery, and resilience programs.

In an email to CNN, FEMA spokesman Jeremy Edwards said, “Recognizing this and the realities of historically underserved communities, FEMA—under the leadership of Administrator Criswell—has undertaken a number of initiatives to reduce barriers, so all people, including those from vulnerable and underserved communities, are better able to access our assistance.”

The agency has simplified the eligibility process, expanded the ways survivors can verify home occupancy, and prioritized casework for vulnerable populations.

FEMA says these changes have enabled 124,000 survivors to access over $709 million in assistance they would have previously been ineligible to receive.

But non-profit leaders want FEMA to do more.

“I think that in earnest they are trying to correct, but we can still do better in pushing to ensure these recoveries are equitable,” said Arthur DelaCruz, CEO of Team Rubicon. This veteran-led humanitarian organization assists global communities before, during, and after disasters and crises.

Grassroots activists insist equitable disaster planning and response must start with local voices.

“The future of disaster management is actually going to be at the local level with the locals as the lead rather than the federal government or state government,” explained I-DEIM’s Willis.

Inherent distrust of authorities after years of racist and discriminatory practices is one reason why. Another reason is simple pragmatism.

“Who knows the community better?” asked Willis, whose group helps set up Community Resilience Hubs and local-led facilities to support neighbors, coordinate communication and provide emergency management training.

Willis emphasizes that these types of initiatives, and more, need to be done before disasters strike. “When people are not prioritized before a disaster, those same people will bear the brunt.”

For a long time, non-profit organizations have been counted on to plug gaps that the government had yet to fill in disenfranchised communities. And increasingly, non-profits are doing things differently to address racial disparities in disaster management.

For Team Rubicon, that means using tools like the CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index. The index, launched by the Center for Disease Control and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, uses 16 variables to help emergency planners and officials identify vulnerable communities before, during, or after disasters. Those variables include social factors like poverty, lack of transportation, and crowded housing. The databases and maps generated by the tool help estimate supplies required, emergency personnel needs, evacuation procedures, and even whether an area needs emergency shelters.

“As we see a disaster strike an area, that is where we try to deploy because we know that’s where the greatest need is,” explained DelaCruz.

The Center for Disaster Philanthropy focuses on identifying a diverse pool of applicants in their grantmaking, pushing more funds to organizations supporting struggling communities of color, and listening to the needs of the affected people on an individualized basis.

“We work really at the local grassroots level to get to know the community,” said the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Sally Ray, who spoke to CNN from Oklahoma City, which was hard-hit by tornadoes last year. She and her team are on the ground, accessing lingering issues and working on proactive ways to support the town throughout this year’s tornado season.

“Our goal has always been to leave a community in a better place and be there for the long-term commitment to that, Ray added.

Meanwhile, many non-profits, especially at the local level, are overstretched as major disasters become more frequent and destructive.

“There are communities that have suffered disaster after disaster after disaster, and the toll on the people and the community increases each time that happens,” said DelaCruz.

“We need to start integrating community-based organizations into the global emergency management structure,” said Willis.

Disasters destabilize communities as well as economies. That is why much of the conversation among emergency management leaders lately has focused on building an inclusive approach to disaster resilience.

“In Rolling Rock, there’s been a disaster. Now is the time to rebuild with the proper strategy, with forethought, a focus on resilience, and a focus on life-saving equity,” Willis from I-DIEM explained. She said these resilience efforts must include disaster preparedness and infrastructure improvement and awareness of socioeconomic issues impacting marginalized communities.

FEMA says they are committed to helping Mississippi recover.

To date the agency says they have visited 1,400 homes in Sharkey County alone, interacting with over 2,400 survivors and registering hundreds for assistance. They’ve also provided more than $5.4 million to Mississippi households since the deadly tornadoes struck earlier this year.

The agency also implemented some grassroots efforts like non-financial direct technical assistance to help build community-wide resilience in 20 communities, tribes, and territories.

Nonprofits continue to play a crucial role. But the problem looms large, and when it comes to disaster response for historically marginalized communities, there’s more than enough workload to go around.

“There is no value in not directly preparing communities of color,” Willis said. “The government already underserves them. Do they also need to be underserved by humanity?”

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April 14, 2023
Silicon Valley Bank collapse renews calls to address disparities impacting entrepreneurs of color | CNN Business

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CNN
—

When customers at Silicon Valley Bank rushed to withdraw billions of dollars last month, venture capitalist Arlan Hamilton stepped in to help some of the founders of color who panicked about losing access to payroll funds.

As a Black woman with nearly 10 years of business experience, Hamilton knew the options for those startup founders were limited.

SVB had a reputation for servicing people from underrepresented communities like hers. Its failure has reignited concerns from industry experts about lending discrimination in the banking industry and the resulting disparities in capital for people of color.

Hamilton, the 43-year-old founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital, said that when it comes to entrepreneurs of color, “we’re already in the smaller house. We already have the rickety door and the thinner walls. And so, when a tornado comes by, we’re going to get hit harder.”

Established in 1983, the midsize California tech lender was America’s 16th largest bank at the end of 2022 before it collapsed on March 10. SVB provided banking services to nearly half of all venture-backed technology and life-sciences companies in the United States.

Hamilton, industry experts and other investors told CNN the bank was committed to fostering a community of minority entrepreneurs and provided them with both social and financial capital.

SVB regularly sponsored conferences and networking events for minority entrepreneurs, said Hamilton, and it was well known for funding the annual State of Black Venture Report spearheaded by BLK VC, a nonprofit organization that connects and empowers Black investors.

“When other banks were saying no, SVB would say yes,” said Joynicole Martinez, a 25-year entrepreneur and chief advancement and innovation officer for Rising Tide Capital, a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 to connect entrepreneurs with investors and mentors.

Martinez is also an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council, an invitation-only organization for business and career coaches. She said SVB was an invaluable resource for entrepreneurs of color and offered their clients discounted tech tools and research funding.

Minority business owners have long faced challenges accessing capital due to discriminatory lending practices, experts say. Data from the Small Business Credit Survey, a collaboration of all 12 Federal Reserve banks, shows disparities on denial rates for bank and nonbank loans.

In 2021, about 16% of Black-led companies acquired the total amount of business financing they sought from banks, compared to 35% of White-owned companies, the survey shows.

“We know there’s historic, systemic, and just blatant racism that’s inherent in lending and banking. We have to start there and not tip-toe around it,” Martinez told CNN.

Asya Bradley is an immigrant founder of multiple tech companies like Kinley, a financial services business aiming to help Black Americans build generational wealth. Following SVB’s collapse, Bradley said she joined a WhatsApp group of more than 1,000 immigrant business founders. Members of the group quickly mobilized to support one another, she said.

Immigrant founders often don’t have Social Security numbers nor permanent addresses in the United States, Bradley said, and it was crucial to brainstorm different ways to find funding in a system that doesn’t recognize them.

“The community was really special because a lot of these folks then were sharing different things that they had done to achieve success in terms of getting accounts in different places. They also were able to share different regional banks that have stood up and been like, ‘Hey, if you have accounts at SVB, we can help you guys,’” Bradley said.

Many women, people of color and immigrants opt for community or regional banks like SVB, Bradley says, because they are often rejected from the “top four banks” — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.

In her case, Bradley said her gender might have been an issue when she could only open a business account at one of the “top four banks” when her brother co-signed for her.

“The top four don’t want our business. The top four are rejecting us consistently. The top four do not give us the service that we deserve. And that’s why we’ve gone to community banks and regional banks such as SVB,” Bradley said.

None of the top four banks provided a comment to CNN. The Financial Services Forum, an organization representing the eight largest financial institutions in the United States has said the banks have committed millions of dollars since 2020 to address economic and racial inequality.

Last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told CNN’s Poppy Harlow that his bank has 30% of its branches in lower-income neighborhoods as part of a $30 billion commitment to Black and Brown communities across the country.

Wells Fargo specifically pointed to its 2022 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report, which discusses the bank’s recent initiatives to reach underserved communities.

The bank partnered last year with the Black Economic Alliance to initiate the Black Entrepreneur Fund — a $50 million seed, startup, and early-stage capital fund for businesses founded or led by Black and African American entrepreneurs. And since May 2021, Wells Fargo has invested in 13 Minority Depository Institutions, fulfilling its $50 million pledge to support Black-owned banks.

Black-owned banks work to close the lending gap and foster economic empowerment in these traditionally excluded communities, but their numbers have been dwindling over the years, and they have far fewer assets at their disposal than the top banks.

OneUnited Bank, the largest Black-owned bank in the United States, manages a little over $650 million in assets. By comparison, JPMorgan Chase manages $3.7 trillion in assets.

Because of these disparities, entrepreneurs also seek funding from venture capitalists. In the early 2010s, Hamilton intended to start her own tech company — but as she searched for investors, she saw that White men control nearly all venture capital dollars. That experience led her to establish Backstage Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in new companies led by underrepresented founders.

“I said, ‘Well, instead of trying to raise money for one company, let me try to raise for a venture fund that will invest in underrepresented — and now we call them underestimated — founders who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ specifically,’ because I am all three,” Hamilton told CNN.

Since then, Backstage Capital has amassed a portfolio of nearly 150 different companies and has made over 120 diversity investments, according to data from Crunchbase.

But Bradley, who is also an ‘angel investor’ of minority-owned businesses, said she remains “really hopeful” that community banks, regional banks and fintechs “will all stand up and say, ‘Hey, we are not going to let the good work of SVB go to waste.’”

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April 13, 2023
Opinion: The way to respect starts with raising your voice | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
—

“Use your voice.” That’s what Mom always said to do when I was confronted by an injustice or a bully, as was often the case for me growing up.

No easy lesson, especially for a scrapper like me who was used to righting all my worldly wrongs with my fists.

But then, you grow older, the bullies get bigger, and more stealthy at systemically devaluing your humanity. You discover that the injustices are entrenched in society — whether they come from teachers, coaches, the police or a political system that exploits communities like yours.

You get two choices: Give up and stay angry at the world or find the power in your voice to fight for what’s right.

That lesson played out last week as two big news stories unfolded, both involving voices confronting power and the question of race in America.

In Tennessee last week, three Democratic lawmakers used the power of their voices to protest for gun reforms after a shooting at a Nashville Christian school left six dead — three 9-year-olds and three adults. Citing rules against breaking House decorum, the legislators of the majority-Republican body shockingly voted to expel only the two Black politicians — Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis, both in their 20s. The third lawmaker, Rep. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a 60-year-old White woman, was not expelled.

These are democratically elected voices who dared to challenge the status quo and were immediately shut down by the most draconian of measures. Two were kicked out of the legislature, one saved by only one vote.

Asked after the vote why she was not expelled, Johnson called it like she — and many others — saw it:

“It might have to do with the color of my skin,” she said.

Jones and Pearson have both vowed to continue to lift their voices against gun violence and lead the fight for swift action on substantive gun reform in their state. And Johnson, for her part, is asking for the community to stand by Jones and help to get him back in the House.

Then of course, there was the dust-up between 20-year-old LSU women’s basketball champion Angel Reese and first lady Jill Biden about a White House visit.

Reese initially had refused to visit the White House — a 150-year-old tradition that began with President Andrew Johnson — after she (and many others) felt insulted by the suggestion from the first lady (who attended the final in person) to invite the losing team, Iowa, as well “because they played such a good game.”

Reese spoke up for her own dignity and sparked a necessary conversation about the pervasive racial bias in both politics and sports media. The LSU star quickly found herself in the middle of a media storm about race in sports: LSU is a majority-Black squad. Iowa, which lost the championship, is a largely White team led by basketball phenom Clark.

After LSU defeated Iowa, controversy erupted over how Clark and Reese — both athletes at the top of their game who bring the swagger and trash talk to the court — earned very different treatment from media and fans. The idea floated by Biden — to invite the losing team too — was rightly interpreted in most corners of the sports universe, and by many Black women across the country as a staggering insult to the joy of victory LSU, led by Reese, had duly earned.

Even after the first lady’s press secretary attempted to clarify that only LSU would be invited, Reese held her ground, telling two podcast hosts, “I don’t accept the apology because you said what you said. … You can’t go back on certain things that you say. … They can have that spotlight. We’ll go to the Obamas. We’ll go see Michelle. We’ll see Barack.”

Not surprisingly, Reese, who never had her school’s support for her plan to skip out on the White House visit, was on ESPN on Friday morning using her powerful voice this time to de-escalate the White House controversy.

Reese, dubbed the “Bayou Barbie,” was uncharacteristically somber as she announced her about-face on the visit.

“I’m a team player,” Reese said. “I’m going to do what’s best for the team, and I’m the captain. I know the team would love it.”

Reese’s reasons for wanting to skip out on the White House visit resonated with many in the Black community, who also felt Biden’s idea was disrespectful to Reese. However, her critics were also vocal, and at times toxic. They objected loudly to her tone with the first lady.

So, no doubt many people believe that Reese’s gesture of concession for her team was the right move. But that shouldn’t be the end of the story.

That’s because nothing about what prompted Reese to speak out has been addressed. She tried to speak an authentic truth about how she and her teammates were treated, a truth that resonated with so many Black women whose feelings, experiences and priorities have been marginalized again and again.

And typically, those with power do what they do best — ignored her voice and her concerns. What matters is why Reese recoiled at the suggestion to include the runners-up. What matters is why she instead wanted to go to what she perceived to be a safer space and visit the Obamas.

Addressing her concerns would have meant acknowledging and validating her truth and engaging in a dialogue with a specific demographic, young Black women, about what matters to them.

My mother’s advice is a difficult path to follow, no matter your age. As the expelled representatives Jones and Pearson found last week, along with Reese, speaking truth to power often comes at a high price, especially if you are Black. How many times will we as a nation accept the status quo when those in power try to silence young voices, specifically Black or brown Americans who try to practice my mother’s sage advice and use their voice?

Too many Americans are hard-pressed, for instance, to see how their lives have improved when Democrats hold political power in this country. They are frustrated by the lack of progress they see on issues ranging from voting rights and police reform to school safety, gun reform, even the much talked about slavery reparations President Joe Biden spoke about while campaigning.

Pearson and Jones are continuing to speak. And no matter how Reese plays it — whether she visits the White House or not — she’s already won just by raising her voice to demand the respect she deserves.

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April 9, 2023
Opinion: Expulsion of the ‘Tennessee Three’ is a chilling echo of Jim Crow | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Jemar Tisby, a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the books “The Color of Compromise” and “How to Fight Racism.” He writes frequently at JemarTisby.Substack.com. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
—

I teach African American history at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically Black college (HBCU) in Louisville. This week, we’ve been studying the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow period of US history.

In the late 19th century, White, Southern Democrats (then the party of White supremacy and segregation) dubbed themselves the “Redeemers,” a group whose goal was to “save” the South from Northern carpetbaggers and newly freed Black people.

The so-called Redeemers took over state legislatures with the primary goals of disenfranchising Black voters, barring Black people from holding political office, and establishing a politics that would render the White power structure impervious to disruption.

When Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives voted this week to expel two Black members — Justin Jones and Justin Pearson — they revealed their resemblance to the anti-democratic, authoritarian Redeemers of more than a century ago.

In 1868, White legislators in Georgia voted to expel the 33 Black men elected to state government.

Henry McNeal Turner, a well-known leader in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination, was one of the men expelled from his position by the Georgia politicians.

In remarks during the proceedings, he stated, “[White legislators] question my right to a seat in this body, to represent the people whose legal votes elected me. This objection, sir, is an unheard of monopoly of power. No analogy can be found for it, except it be the case of a man who should go into my house, take possession of my wife and children and then tell me to walk out.”

Even though the Black lawmakers were soon reinstated, the actions of the White lawmakers in Georgia were just a foretaste of the political machinations to come.

In 1890, the state of Mississippi called for a new convention to rewrite the state’s constitution. It had already adopted a new and relatively progressive constitution after the Civil War, but with the onset of Redemption, White lawmakers took control of the state government and began dismantling the rights Black people had only recently gained.

In the newer version of the constitution that was later ratified, White Mississippi lawmakers installed measures to prevent Black people from voting. But because of the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution that guaranteed equal protection under the law and the right of Black men to vote, White Redeemers had to find new ways to repress Black people without making laws explicitly about race.

So they used policies such as the poll tax, which most Black people could not afford to pay. They instituted the “understanding clause” — a selectively applied measure where potential voters had to interpret a passage from the state constitution to the satisfaction of a White registrar.

The “grandfather clause” stipulated that a person’s grandfather had to be eligible to vote in order for their descendants to exercise the franchise. Of course, this excluded most Black people whose grandparents had been enslaved and thus, ineligible to vote.

By the early 1900s, nearly all the former Confederate states had followed Mississippi’s example.

In class, my students listened with stunned incredulity as they learned about the cruel and ruthless politics of the Redeemers. Unfortunately, the historical parallels to present-day events are too obvious to ignore.

The actions of Republicans in the Tennessee legislature resemble the attempts of White Southern Redeemers to take back the South at the end of the 19th century.

These new Redeemers are using their power as a tool of intimidation. What other conclusion can be drawn from the inappropriate and disproportionate response to a decorum infraction?

Expulsion is the most severe consequence the legislature can enact against another member of that body. Since the Civil War, only three other members of the Tennessee state legislature have been expelled — and for much more serious offenses.

The new Redeemers are not confined to one state, either.

Attempts to strip local officials in the city of Jackson — where more than 80% of the population is Black — of their authority to monitor the city’s water system, police force and courts are underway in Mississippi.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act” into law, which was intended to prevent teachings or mandatory workplace activities that suggest a person is privileged or oppressed based necessarily on their race, color, sex or national origin. “In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida,” DeSantis said.

And, of course, the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021 by supporters of former President Donald Trump was the most egregious example of how far right-wing factions are willing to go to subvert the political process.

The era of Redemption cemented decades of Jim Crow segregation. More than 4,000 “racial terror” lynchings occurred throughout that period, the Equal Justice Initiative has documented.

Substantial change only came with the onset of the Civil Rights movement. Years of nonviolent direct action protest, constant lobbying in state and political governments and the martyrdom of many activists including Martin Luther King, Jr., finally interrupted traditions of segregation and White supremacy.

It could be that a similar movement is necessary to disempower the Redeemers of today.

When all the standard means of change — namely the democratic process itself — have been co-opted and subverted by authoritarians, then the people are only left with protest.

If the goal of the Tennessee GOP was to intimidate people into acquiescence with their expulsion of Pearson and Jones, their tactic backfired in a spectacular way.

Far from instilling fear, their expulsions and their stirring words in response have raised them to national prominence.

Instead of dissuading Tennesseans from their calls for gun control, Republican legislators seem to have energized the people and motivated them to resist even more vigorously.

With the rise of social media and other digital forms of information sharing, movements can be mobilized in moments.

Although there were constant attempts throughout the years, it took decades for people to mount the resistance necessary to topple Jim Crow. In today’s environment, action might occur more swiftly.

Those words, redemption and redeemer, are significant.

This is Holy Week in the Christian religion. Events such as Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday culminate in the observance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. These liturgies commemorate the redemption — Jesus paying the price for humanity’s sin.

In many Christian traditions, redemption is a sacred theological principle that undergirds the hope of salvation. It is likely that many of the Tennessee Republican lawmakers will attend church this Sunday to celebrate the redemption that Easter heralds.

Easter provides the perfect opportunity for these lawmakers to ponder the true meaning of redemption and which redeemer they are following.

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April 8, 2023
The Fed could easily drive Black unemployment much higher than the overall jobless rate | CNN Business

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New York
CNN
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Millions of jobs could be on the chopping block this year, as the Federal Reserve continues its rate-hiking campaign to tame inflation. But the effects of that action likely won’t reverberate evenly across the economy.

The Fed has seen some success: Inflation has cooled for eighth consecutive months, according to the February Consumer Price Index. The Producer Price Index shows a dramatic drop in wholesale prices in February. And the Fed’s favored inflation gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, has also started to moderate.

But the job market has proved to be a formidable force, humming steadily in the face of climbing rates meant to slow its growth. After adding more than half a million jobs in January, the US economy then added 311,000 jobs in February, with an unemployment rate of 3.6% — just above a half-century low — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

However, the jobless rate isn’t expected to be that low for long.

At its most recent policy-making meeting, the Fed released projections for the year ahead that showed unemployment could jump to 4.5%, representing another 1.5 million job losses, by the end of the year.

While that’s a small improvement from the central bank’s previous 4.6% jobless rate estimate, economists say it’s possible the unemployment rate could rise above the Fed’s expectations. Moreover, they say that historically disadvantaged groups could be disproportionately affected by the central bank’s stringent monetary policy.

While some groups often sidelined in the job market have seen benefits from this hot job market — women have seen a faster pace of job gains than men in recent months, for example — others, including Black women and Latino men, have seen slower recoveries in jobless rates since the onset of the Covid pandemic.

Recession fears gained traction last month when the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent markets wobbling, raising concerns about the economy’s ability to handle more stress. Goldman Sachs revised its estimate of the United States entering a recession over the next 12 months to a 35% chance, up from its estimate of a 25% chance before the banking sector turmoil.

That’s of particular concern to certain demographic groups: Jobless rates for Black and Hispanic Americans often increase by more than those of their White counterparts during recessions, said Rakesh Kochhar, a senior researcher focusing on demographics and social trends at the Pew Research Center.

History makes that discrepancy clear.

A Pew Research Center report comparing two recessions in recent decades shows how Black and Hispanic Americans experience disproportionate effects on their jobless rates during periods of economic downturn. From the second quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2009, during the Great Recession, the unemployment rate rose 6.5 percentage points for Black Americans. The Hispanic unemployment rate climbed 6.3 percentage points. For White workers, it increased 4 percentage points.

And from the first quarter of 1990 to the first quarter of 1991, the unemployment rate climbed 1.4 percentage points for Black Americans and 2.1 percentage points for Hispanic Americans. The White unemployment rate rose 1.3 percentage points.

Economists say it’s hard to guess the trajectory of the unemployment rate this year, noting it could very well exceed the Fed’s estimate.

“There’s just tons of momentum, and once you slow the economy enough to get the unemployment rate moving up, it’s very hard to sort of turn that cruise ship back around,” said Josh Bivens, research director and chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

As such, the Fed’s tightening efforts could easily drive the Black unemployment rate much higher than the overall jobless rate, said William Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and chief economist to the AFL-CIO.

“If the Fed continues to use unemployment as its measure of labor force slack, and thinks they want a 4.5% unemployment rate — to make that happen, the Fed would have to induce net job loss in the labor market,” Spriggs told CNN in an email. “If we go through two months of negative job growth, all bets are off. The Black unemployment rate will easily get to 9% in that scenario.”

One other likely consequence of growing unemployment is slowing wage growth, Bivens said.

Like rising unemployment, stunted wage growth tends to hit marginalized groups harder. A 2021 Economic Policy Institute report shows that a 1 percentage point increase in overall unemployment correlates with about 0.5% slower wage growth for White median hourly wages. Wage growth falls by roughly 0.8% for Black median hourly wages.

“A lot of people have this idea that in a recession, if unemployment rises by a couple of percentage points, as long as you’re not one of those unlucky people to lose the job, you’ve dodged the bullet,” Bivens said. “And that’s not true at all.”

Still, a robust labor market isn’t a permanent solution to bridging employment disparities, even if the Fed does keep rates lower, says Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

The job market’s recent strength is unsustainable, she said. The US economy needs about 75,000 net job gains a month to keep stable and is currently adding about 350,000 net job gains a month on average, according to Edelberg.

“[The Fed is] right to be confident that one of the things that’s going to have to happen to get inflation back down to a normal, stable level is to get job growth to a normal, sustainable level,” Edelberg said. “But if the Fed’s actions resulted in a slower labor market, then inflation stayed high — that would be a disaster.”

The March jobs report from the Department of Labor, due to be released Friday at 8:30 a.m., is expected to show the US economy gained 240,000 positions last month. ADP’s private-sector payroll report, generally seen by investors as a proxy for the trajectory of Friday’s number, fell short of expectations, with just 145,000 jobs added. Economists had expected private hiring would rise by 200,000 positions last month.

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April 5, 2023