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Showing posts with label racial politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racial politics. Show all posts

December 15, 2025

"To commemorate the abolition of slavery, the [Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee] had recommended an image of Frederick Douglass on the obverse and shackled and unshackled hands on the reverse."

"To honor women’s suffrage, a World War I-era protester carrying a 'Votes for Women' flag. And to evoke the civil rights movement, a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, books in hand, helping to desegregate the New Orleans school system in 1960. [Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, authorized by law to make final decisions about coin designs] opted instead for the more general, and much whiter. For the Mayflower Compact, a Pilgrim couple staring into the distance. For the Revolutionary War, a profile of Washington. For the Declaration of Independence, a profile of Thomas Jefferson. For the Constitution, a profile of James Madison. And for the Gettysburg Address, a profile of Lincoln on the obverse, and on the reverse, a pair of interlocking hands. No shackles."

From "The War on ‘Wokeness’ Comes to the U.S. Mint/The Treasury Department unveiled new coins celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. They failed to include planned designs featuring abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement" (NYT).

It does seem that the celebration of the 250th anniversary should concentrate on things that happened around 250 years ago, not on later events, but even Bessent's 5 choices include 2 that are not from the era of the founding. The Mayflower Compact is over a century earlier, and the Gettysburg Address is almost a century later. 

This sentence bothered me:

December 4, 2025

"The court’s brief, five-paragraph order indicated that 'Texas is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the District Court committed at least two serious errors.'"

"Moreover, it added, the lower court 'improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.'"

Here's the opinion. There's a long dissent by Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, arguing for deference to the decision of the district court. Alito writes a concurring opinion, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch:

If the Minnesota fraud was so huge, why didn't government officials notice and take action?

The question is asked on today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily."

The answer is two-fold:

1. A group called Feeding Our Future accused the state of racism for "slow walking" their application. This wasn't long after the "national reckoning" that followed the death of George Floyd, and "at that time, nobody wanted to be called a racist, even it was wholly unfounded" and "that really had a paralyzing effect on people in state government who knew something funny was going on, but didn't really want to stick their necks out and stop it."

2. Money was cycling back to the Democratic Party. "Somali Americans have become politically quite powerful in the state... and... became important donors to their campaigns.... [S]ome democratic elected officials... worried that any action they took to question or intervene in a way that would maybe stop these schemes, could have alienated a really important constituency."

Now, the podcasters clearly wish the fraud problem could be solved by Minnesota. But Trump has jumped at the opportunity to emphasize what reads as racial. He forthrightly — brutally — connected the fraud problem to immigration from the wrong places:

December 3, 2025

"President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants... calling them 'garbage' he does not want in the United States..."

"... in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.... 'These are people that do nothing but complain,' Mr. Trump said at the tail end of a cabinet meeting at the White House.... 'When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,' Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement. He said Somalia 'stinks and we don’t want them in our country.' He described Representative Ilhan Omar... as 'garbage.'... 'She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage....'... Mr. Trump has used this kind of rhetoric throughout his rise in politics, including in his first term as president, when he demanded to know why the United States would accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, which he described as 'shithole countries'...."

I watched this performance live yesterday, and I believe I said out loud, "He's choosing to resonate with racists."

November 15, 2025

There are 3 groups where the majority approve of Trump — 2 are age groups and 1 is a racial group.

Rassmussen Reports this morning. I'll put it after the jump so you can enjoy puzzling and the surprise of being wrong about 2 of them... or maybe you won't be wrong now that I've nudged you to think twice:

October 3, 2025

These are all things the President of the United States posted on social media 8 hours ago.

Is it still hard to believe that the President of the United States posts things like this? He is taunting. He's giving material that will be snapped up and used to say (once again) that he's a racist. And — that last one — that he is grandiose. But this is what we have now. We (collectively) voted for it. He's not bland. And it is — all of it — comedy. He's keeping our spirits up. Some of us have a good spirit about it. They're laughing — maybe even laughing off the budget crisis. Others of us have inflamed spirits, angry spirits. And according to Trump, they come from hell. They've been giving him hell for years. He's entitled to laugh at them. I'd prefer more dignity, but that's more Trump 45, and what did that get him?

September 21, 2025

Should the widow stand back and know that her place is to quietly mourn and to express no opinions?

I'm reading The Washington Post: "Erika Kirk emerges as vocal public figure, redefining role of political widow/Vocal and stridently determined to advance her husband’s work, she has embraced her public role" (gift link).
In modern times, the number of women who have found themselves in this unenviable and tragic situation in the United States is small. The group is largely limited to the widows of the men slain in the tempestuous mid-1960s. Some biographers who chronicled the lives of those men — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and John F. and Robert F. Kennedy — are wary of drawing historical comparisons that might by extension elevate Charlie Kirk, who made numerous disparaging remarks about Black people...

Inflammatory characterization casually inserted. 

... to the stature of an iconic civil rights leader or a president. But they see important distinctions between the ways the widows of the ’60s acted in their unwanted roles and the ways Erika Kirk is defining it.

“It’s such a different era and the partisanship is so much more extreme now,” said David Margolick, who wrote a book on the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and whose journalism is being turned into a documentary about Coretta Scott King and the Kennedy widows flying RFK’s body home after he was killed. “And people are all in their respective political communities and have very little interaction with people on the other side. In [the era of the earlier widows], as partisan as it was — and some people really hated the Kennedys — there was respect for the presidency that crossed party lines. The mourning wasn’t red and blue.”

September 18, 2025

"Buttigieg 'would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man,' Harris writes in a passage of her soon-to-be-released book...'"

"'But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk. And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.'"

From "The Running Mate Kamala Harris Didn’t Dare Choose/'I love Pete,' she writes in her new book. But picking a gay man would have been too risky" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

What kind of leadership potential is this? She made the wrong decision, admits to not daring, and all because she presumes that we, the people, are prejudiced.

To take her at her word, she declined to pick the running mate she thought was the best because she thought we Americans were being asked "a lot" to accept her. But it was hard to accept her when she'd been pushed forward because of her identity and not because she was the best. Then she decides that we louts wouldn't accept a gay man even though he was the best.

What were she and Pete mutually sad about? How simultaneously hostile to minorities and eager to promote minorities we terrible Americans are?

August 27, 2025

"We cannot change what has happened. But we can take responsibility. Therefore, on behalf of Denmark, I would like to say sorry."

Said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, quoted in "Denmark Apologizes After Birth Control Scandal in Greenland/For years, Danish doctors inserted intrauterine devices in Greenlandic girls and women without their consent, part of a painful legacy of mistreatment" (NYT).
The practice went on for decades and many patients were never told what had been placed inside them. Some learned only years later when they had health complications. Some women were left infertile for life.... Denmark colonized Greenland more than three centuries ago.... The campaign started in the 1960s and affected thousands of Greenlandic women and girls but was brought to light only a few years ago. Danish doctors, who were running Greenland’s health care system at the time, inserted IUDs in women and girls with the intent of preventing pregnancies and controlling Greenland’s birth rate....

August 20, 2025

"The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis/The party is bleeding support beyond the ballot box, a new analysis shows."

That's the headline in the lead article at the NYT this morning. 

Here's a free access link. Excerpt:
There are still more Democrats registered nationwide than Republicans, partly because of big blue states like California allow people to register by party, while red states like Texas do not. But the trajectory is troublesome for Democrats, and there are growing tensions over what to do about it. Democrats went from nearly an 11-percentage-point edge over Republicans on Election Day 2020 in those places with partisan registration, to just over a 6-percentage-point edge in 2024.... 
It must be quite a crisis or I don't think the NYT would openly call it a crisis. They even used my favorite word, "flummox": "... Democrats are divided and flummoxed over what to do."

A big part of the problem is that they can't use nonprofits the way they used to:

June 28, 2025

"A stunning 51% of Hispanic, naturalized US citizens voted for Trump over Harris, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2024 election post-mortem."

"Trump, who on the campaign trail pledged to crackdown on illegal immigration and shore up the southern border, bested Harris among foreign-born Hispanics by 3 percentage points and performed 12 points better within the demographic than he did in 2020.... The Pew Research Center analysis... surveyed almost 9,000 voters in the weeks after the 2024 election.... The president carried 15% of Black voters (up from 8% in 2020), 40% of Asian voters (up from 30% in 2020) and maintained the same 55% support from white voters he received four years earlier...."

From "Trump won more than half of foreign-born Hispanics — still would have beaten Harris if every eligible person voted in 2024 election: analysis" (NY Post).

June 3, 2025

"[P]robably the most alarming single state in the country for Democrats is looking at the Republican gains all along the border in south Texas."

"And the county that jumps out to me, there is Starr County. Starr County is the county that has moved the most in the entire country from 2012 to 2024. Hmm. This is a county that Barack Obama won overwhelmingly in 2012, and that Donald Trump won comfortably in 2024..... It's moved continuously in the Republican direction, and the sum of that movement is 89 percentage points. And what's interesting is Starr County isn't just this county that has moved the most, it also is the most predominantly Latino county in America. And it's not just shifting away from the Democratic party, it's stampeding away from the Democratic party. And while Starr County is this one small county in the Texas border, what you see is that same type of movement in counties with broad Latino populations, whether you're talking about the Bronx in New York City, Queens, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, places with diverse populations have moved steadily to the right, even in a lot of them, where Democrats are still winning, they're winning by less and by a lot less. I mean, to use like a fancy political science term, we're talking about racial depolarization.... For, for a long time, one of the most important markers of how a person was going to vote in America was what race are you?"

From today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. Audio and transcript here (at Podscribe).

The guest is Shane Goldmacher, who wrote the NYT article "Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward" that we were talking about on May 27th, here.

May 24, 2025

"Their joke was about my 15-year-old son, 'Oh, how does he feel about minorities?' Like the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore he’s, he’s racist, my son."

"And like, you know, that was the big laugh. And then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff and, and I thought to myself, 'This is why you fuckers are losing elections'.... He’s 15. He thinks about World War II and gaming and playing linebacker, that’s his world. You’re deciding he’s a racist because he wants to be a cop. And why does he want to be a cop? He wants to be a cop because he wants to help people, you know, and he thinks that’s the best way he can help people. And that’s how the Democratic Party talks to men, not just white men, but men."

Said Jake Tapper, quoted in "Jake Tapper Says Liberal Podcaster Made Racism Jab After He Revealed Son Wants To Be a Cop: 'This Is Why You F**kers Are Losing Elections'" (Mediaite).

May 22, 2025

"White, college-educated voters shifted to the right, and by significantly more than White, noncollege voters did."

So it says here in "The 2024 election was even weirder than we thought/An expansive new report challenges early theories about how Donald Trump won" (WaPo).

That's a free-access link, so you can read the details and form an opinion over whether to trust this rather than all that other polling and poll analysis that found a "continued leftward march of White, college-educated voters," supposedly "the only major racial subgroup shifting left," which "reinforced existing fears among Democrats that they were increasingly appealing to educated White voters with their policies and message at the exclusion of other groups."

Other headings at that link: "The gender gap was real," "Democrats held up better with rural voters than with urban voters," and "Democrats gained ground with engaged voters."

I don't trust any of this material. The Democratic Party has a big problem and must rebuild itself, but how? By increasing its appeal to white, college-educated voters, because that's actually where the problem is? 

April 16, 2025

Donald Trump presents — without a word of commentary — Joe Biden, saying "colored kids."

What do we think of Joe here? It can't be that he's racist for saying "colored kids." It's not as though Biden is attempting to revive the old expression. It's not like what the other Joe — Joe Rogan — has been doing with the word "retarded." Biden is painting a picture of the past, when he was boy: "I remember seeing kids going by — at the time, called 'colored kids' — on a bus going by." Part of the memory is the memory of what the black children were called. It was the completely common speech of that time and, I believe, the preferred term. Not racist. To cling to it, after the 1950s, became problematic, but Biden isn't clinging to it. He's recreating his boyhood experience, sensing and learning. I think Trump knows all that, and by merely showing the speech and saying nothing, he avoids criticism. He just hangs it out there for people to react to, as if Biden's mere voicing of the now-disfavored words is the same as his actually using the word as his go-to way to refer to black people today. Many will take the bait.

March 28, 2025

Trump seeks to excise "divisive" ideology from the Smithsonian Institution.

Read the text of his "Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Restores Truth and Sanity to American History."  Excerpts:
The Order directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

What was happening at the zoo?! 

More generally, how do you decide what is "improper, divisive, or anti-American"? I'm sure some will say that it's improper, divisive, and anti-American to sanitize race out of the presentation of our history and culture.

Does the order step down from that abstraction and get specific as it discusses enforcement of the Trumpian vision?

March 12, 2025

"There's a sense that Denmark doesn't respect Greenland and that there's this long legacy of racism, exploitation, treating Greenlanders as second class citizens."

"And Greenlanders come from a different culture. They're part of this wider Inuit community that lives in the Arctic Circle in Alaska and Canada and parts of Russia. They have their own language, their own traditions, their own history of how they survive in this very hostile environment. And I met a number of people who said that they were mistreated, they were made fun of, that they were called racial slurs. I also heard a lot about the colonial legacy and things that Denmark had done when Greenland was a colony. They destroyed local traditions. They outlawed some of the religious practices that Greenlanders had been doing for centuries. And there was this scandal in the 1960s and 70s where Danish doctors were inserting IUD birth control devices into Greenlandic girls as young as, like, 12 in an attempt to keep the population down. And they did this to thousands of girls without them really understanding what was being done to them. And this was kept secret until just a few years ago. And when this scandal broke and the news spread that all these women in Greenland had been subject to this, it caused a lot of anger towards Denmark, all these things together. That's what brings us to this moment where just about everybody now wants independence."

From "Trump’s Bid for Greenland," yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. Audio and transcript here, at Podscribe.

And here's today's news from Greenland, as reported in the NYT: "In Trump’s Shadow, Greenland Votes for a New Government/President Trump has expressed a desire to 'get' Greenland, but the party that won Tuesday’s election is in no rush to change the status quo":