Racial Disparities

#Sarah Remick, "Double Exposure," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020. 

"From the antebellum period until the end of Jim Crow, countless black Americans crossed the color line to pass as whites -- to escape slavery, or threats of racial violence, or to gain access to the social, political, and economic benefits conferred by whiteness."

#Luke Mogelson, "The Uprising," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"Today, Minneapolis appears on lists of the 'best places to live,' even as its racial disparities ran among the worst in the country. The medium annual income of black residents in the Twin Cities is less than half that of whites, and, though about seventy-five percent own their homes, only about a quarter of black families do."

#Jelani Cobb, "American Spring," The New Yorker, June 22, 2020.

"Today, the weight of grief and poverty in this country still falls disproportionally on black shoulders." "Race, to the degree that it represents anything coherent in the United States, is shorthand for a specific set of life probabilities." "Seventy-one per cent of white Americans now say that racial discrimination is a 'big problem.' "

#Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, "It's All Out in the Open," Mother Jones, September/October 2020.

Part of that underlying cadence is white supremacy, the foundational injustice of our country and the core of our president's reelection message." "His [Trump's] determination to enrich himself and his cronies at the country's expense is so brazen, it has made visible what previously hid behind a veneer of legality." "Yes, our political system's were designed by and for the advantage of the rich, white, and well-connected."

#Patricia Williams, "The Color of Contagion," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020.

"One may wonder, in other words, why minority's disproportionally lower survival rates couldn't be more accurately attributed to homelessness or dense living or lack of health insurance or inadequate food supplies or environmental toxins or the ratio of acute care facilities to the numbers of residents in the ghettoized locations that have become such petri dishes of contagion." "Needless to say, Black and Latinx patients with the same symptoms as their white counterparts, end up being referred for specialized care much less often." "The reconfigured overlay of race as a debilitating, resource- consuming morbidity risk worsens the situation."

#Charlotte Alter, "Down the Rabbit Hole," TIME, September 21-28, 2020.

"When enslaved people were freed after the Civil War, they had  reason to expect that the government would grant them land as delayed payment for generations of labor exploitation. The phrase '40 acres and a mule' derives from General William T. Sherman's 1815 field order to distribute 400,000 acres of land to newly freed families in 40-acre plots." "Everyone involved carefully avoided using the  word 'reparations,' even though [there was a reparations law from 1988,] in which Congress awarded $20,000 to each Japanese American who was forced into an internment camp during World War II."

ADDENDUMS:

*Lara Friedman, president of the non-profit Foundation for Middle East Peace, is pessimistic about a Biden administration's willingness to listen to pro-Palestinian activists.

*A Jama Cardiology study published in July suggested that many recently recovered patients have lingering heart abnormalities, with inflammation the most common.

*The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute demanded [in early September] that President Trump's reelection campaign stop using Reagan's name and likeness to solicit funds. The campaign was issuing commemorative coins to those who donated $45 or more.

*Adam Ramsay, "Scotland would fare better alone," THE WEEK, August 7, 2020. "When Scotland held its independence referendum in 2014, 55 percent voted to remain part of the U.K. Now, 54 percent of Scottish voters back secession..."

*"Back to School," The Nation, September 7/14, 2020. "Of 13 countries analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation -- including Germany, South Korea, and Israel -- all but two had positivity rates below 4 percent when they resumed classes. In the US the rate was approaching 8 percent as schools began to reopen, with some states -- including Georgia, Florida, and Arizona -- topping 10 and even 15 percent."

Japanese Internment, Somalian Patriotism, and Etc.

I. Japanese Internment
Nikiko Massamoto, "My Grandfather's Shovel," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"In 1942, with  no evidence of criminal espionage or proof that the Japanese-American community posed a threat, the US government imprisoned my jiichen [grandfather] and his family without trial in Arizona. The concentration camp was built on the Gila River reservation of the Pima Indians, and that they had been forced onto -- two histories of confinement. "When the removal orders came, Japanese-Americans could take only what they could carry and all other property was sold for dirt cheap. Families hat owned farms were forced to  sell  everything."

II. Somalian Patriotism
Julia Harte, "Minority Report," The Nation, March 16/23, 2020.
"In 2014, the refugee center at Boston Children's Hospital surveyed 120 young people of Somalian descent and found that more than a quarter experienced some kind of contact with police in the past year." Although the Somalian youth were widely feared to be "potential terrorists," only two Somalians were convicted of plotting or committing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 to 2015, according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute.

"As long as marginalized minorities are the targets of counter-extremism programs, their mistrust of the government will persist. And as long as they mistrust the government, the authorities will continue to see in them the potential for violent extremism."

III. The Rape of the Tongass
Michael Brune, "Vandals in the Chapel," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"Every hour, human activities destroy 6,000 acres of rain forest around the globe." "Since 2001, many of the Tongass's old-growth trees have been spared from logging by the federal Roadless Rule, which limits road construction and reconstruction, as well as timber harvesting in national forests. Now, the Trump administration wants to repeal that rule for the Tongass."

"According to the Taxpayers for Common Sense, it costs US Forest Service more money to administer timber sales in the Tongass than the agency receives in revenue from the sales, meaning that we are spending at least $30 million a year to cut  down trees that shouldn't be cut down in the first place."

IV. "Black Book" Jingoism
Hilton Als, "Seeing Things," The New Yorker, February 3, 2020.
" 'The Black Book' was intended, like 'The Bluest Eye,' to combat the 'Black is beautiful'  jingoism of the time, and to show real lives from the ghastly slave ship of the sixteen-hundreds to America in the twentieth-century." "The point is not to soak in some warm bath of nostalgia about the good old days -- there were none! -- but to recognize those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity that were such a part of our past, and so useful to us and to the generation of blacks now growing up...To create something that might last, that would be witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every PH.D dissertation, and the focal point of all the mindlessness that seems to have joined the smog of California's movie world."

ADDENDUMS:
*New Mexico became the 18th state to approve a red flag law that allows firearms to be temporarily seized.

*According to Chad Boin of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the average tariff on imports from China will be 19.3%, up from about 3% when Trump took office. The first phase of the agreement says nothing about government subsidies to Chinese firms,and the operation of state-owned enterprises.

*Attorney General William Barr is using a process known as "certification," a historically little-used power of the attorney general's office, that allows him to overrule decisions made by the Board of Immigration Appeals and set binding precedent. He is using it as a check on immigration.

*ICE is targeting "sanctuary cities" with increased surveillance.