The Racist Killing Fields in the US: The Death of Sandra Bland by Henry A. Giroux

     

On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois, to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever-increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States. She was pulled out of the car by the police for allegedly becoming combative, and was pinned to the ground by two officers. A video obtained by ABC 7 of Bland’s arrest “doesn’t appear to show Bland being combative with officers but does show two officers on top of Bland.”[1]

A witness reported that “he saw the arresting officer pull Bland out of the car, throw her to the ground and put his knee on her neck while he arrested her.”[2] In the video, Bland can be heard questioning the officers’ methods of restraint. She says: “You just slammed my head to the ground. Do you not even care about that that? I can’t even hear.”[3] She was then arrested for assaulting an officer, a third-degree felony, and interned at the Waller County, Texas, jail. On July 13, she was found dead in her cell. Quite unbelievably, the police reported that she took her own life, and the Waller County Jail is trying to rule her death a suicide. Friends and family say that this scenario is inconceivable, given what they know about Sandra: She was a young woman starting a new job, who was eagerly looking forward to her future.

Sandra Bland was an outspoken civil rights activist critical of police brutality. She often posted videos in which she talked about important civil rights issues, and once stated: “I’m here to change history. If we want a change we can really truly make it happen.”[4]


Sandra Bland’s family and friends believe that foul play was involved in her death, and rightly so.[5] Their belief is bolstered by the fact that the head sheriff of Waller County, Glenn Smith, who made the first public comments about Bland’s in-custody death, was suspended for documented cases of racism when he was chief of police in Hempstead, Texas, in 2007. After serving his suspension, more complaints of racism came in, and Smith was actually fired as chief of police in Hempstead.”[6]

Bland’s death over a routine traffic stop is beyond monstrous. It is indicative of a country where extreme violence is the norm – a society fed by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration state, the drug wars and the increasing militarization of everything, including the war on Black youth. There is more at stake here than the fact that, as federal statistics indicate, the police are “31 percent more likely to pull over a Black driver than a white driver”[7]: Routine traffic stops for Black drivers contain the real possibility of turning deadly. This regular violence propels a deeply racist and militarized society. It is a violence that turns on young people and adults alike who are considered disposable.[8] This type of harassment is integral to a form of domestic terrorism in which Black people are routinely beaten, arrested, incarcerated and too often killed. This is the new totalitarianism of the boot-in-your-face racism, one in which the punishing state is the central institution for both controlling poor people of color and enforcing the rules of the financial elite. How much longer can this war on youth go on?

The United States has become a country that is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among the Republican Party’s right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice, and despise it. All that matters is that control – financial and political – serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. How many more young people are going to be killed for walking in the street, failing to signal a lane shift, looking a police officer in the eye, or playing with a toy gun? How many more names of Black men, women and young people will join the list of those whose deaths have sparked widespread protests: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones and Sakia Gunn, among many others – and now, Sandra Bland. Is it any wonder that one funeral director in Chicago stated that “young people in the city do not expect to live late into their adult life”?[9] 

Moreover, police violence in the United States is not only a direct manifestation of state violence, but also serves as a gateway to prison, especially for people of color and the poor.
Yet, the mainstream media is more infatuated with game shows, financial brutishness, celebrities and the idiocy of Donald Trump than they are concerned about the endless violence waged against poor children of color in the United States. This violence speaks clearly to a society that no longer wants to invest in its youth. And if one measure of a democratic society is how it treats young people, the United States has failed miserably.

The form that the “war on terror” has taken at home is a war on poor people of color, especially Black people. Racism and police militarization have created a new kind of terrorism, one in which extreme violence is being used against Black people for the most trivial of infractions. The killing of Black youth by the police – a norm that stretches back, in an unbroken line of terror, to slavery – takes the form of both routine affair and spectacle. 

Nowadays, acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by police take place increasingly in full view of the US public, who more and more are witnessing such lawlessness after it is recorded and uploaded onto the internet by bystanders.[10] New technologies now enable individuals to record such violence in real time and make it a matter of public record. While this public display of the deployment domestic terrorism is undeniably crucial, in that it makes visible the depravity of state violence, these images are sometimes co-opted by the mass media, commodified, and disseminated in ways that can exploit – and even attempt to erase – Black lives, as William C. Anderson argues.

In the current environment, racial violence is so commonplace that when it is perpetrated by the police against innocent people, justice is not measured by holding those who commit the violence accountable. The official measure of justice is simply that the presence of violence be noted, by the authorities and the mainstream media. Few of the most powerful people seem distraught by the ongoing shootings, beatings, and killings of African-Americans in a society in which a Black man is killed every 28 hours in the US by police, vigilantes or security guards.[11]

In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence becomes the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial or shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security or self-defense. State violence fueled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated, ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labeled as a form of domestic terrorism.[12] Terrorism, torture and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words also apply to democracy itself, which is lacking the civic oxygen that gives it life. The United States is a place where democracy cannot breathe.

This authoritarianism fueled by the mainstream press, which seems especially interested in stories in which it can (wrongfully) frame victims as assailants, as in the case of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, but is less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and Black culture cannot be invoked. When dominant forces cannot figure out a way to label victims of police violence “thugs”[13] – consider the case of Tamir Rice, who was only 12 years old when shot to death by a policeman who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as “unstable” – such acts of state terrorism often fade out of the mainstream view.

Why was there not a more sustained and mainstream public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young Black man who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island for than a one thousand days – two years of that time in solitary confinement – waiting for a trial that never happened? Shortly after being released he committed suicide.[14] Would this have happened if he were white, middle class and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him parallel to the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison?

Not surprisingly, the discourse of “terrorism” once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government – but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized, as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, is that the killing of unarmed African Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war on Black youth that is being waged on US soil.[15] The call for police “reform,” echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We don’t need revenge, we need justice – and that means structural change.

Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities, the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance has taken shape with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Million Hoodies, We Charge Genocide and other groups.[16]
A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the flood of intolerable police and state violence.[17] Millions of people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed and violated by the police and other security forces, simply because they are Black, Brown, young and/or poor, and therefore viewed as disposable. Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools – or any other areas in which the police can be found.


Footnotes:

1. Stephen A. Crockett, Jr. “Sandra Bland Drove to Texas to Start a New Job, so How Did She End Up Dead in Jail?,” The Root (July 16, 2015). Also, see Amy Goodman and Juan González, “Truthout’s Maya Schenwar and Former Prisoner Jason Hernandez Speak Out on Prisons and Policing,” Democracy Now! (July 17, 2015).

2. Aviva Shen, “Woman Dies in Jail after Being Roughed Up During Traffic Stop. Police Say it was Suicide,”
ThinkProgress (June 16, 2015).

3. Ibid. Stephen A. Crockett, Jr. “Sandra Bland Drove to Texas to Start a New Job, so How Did She End Up Dead in Jail?”

4. Jamie Stengle and Jason Keyser, “Family Says Woman found Dead at Texas Jail would not Kill Herself; Authorities investigating,” U.S. News and World Report (July 16, 2015).

5. Ibid., Jamie Stengle and Jason Keyser.

6. Shaun King, “Texas sheriff involved in the death of Sandra Bland fired from previous post for racism,” Daily Kos (July 16, 2015).

7. Ibid., Aviva Shen, “Woman Dies in Jail after Being Roughed Up During Traffic Stop. Police Say it was Suicide.”

8. On the issue of state violence, see Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015).

9. Daily Mail Reporter, “‘These Kids Don’t expect to lead a full life.’ Fears for Chicago teens as fatal shootings in city outnumber US troops killed in Afghanistan,” Dailymail.co.UK (June 19, 2012).
10. See Michelle Alexander, “Michelle Alexander on ‘Getting Out of Your Lane’,” War Times, Aug 28, 2013.

11. For instance, according to a recent report produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement entitled Operation Ghetto Storm, ‘police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra judicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012…This means a Black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours.’ See also: Adam Hudson, “1 Black Man Is Killed Every 28 Hours by Police or Vigilantes: America Is Perpetually at War with Its Own People,”

12. On domestic terrorism, see the important, work of Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009).

13. Jason Stanley, “The War on Thugs,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, [June 10, 2015].

14. Jennifer Gonnerman, “Kalief Browder, 1993-2015,” The New Yorker (June 7, 2015).

15. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Why We Won’t Wait,” CounterPunch, November 25, 2014

16. Arianna Skibell “We are fighting for our lives”: The little-known youth movement rising against police brutality,” Salon (February 25, 2015); Danielle Allen and Cathy Cohen, “The New Civil rights Movement Doesn’t Need an MLK,” The Washington Post (April 10, 2015).

17. Amy Goodman, “Michelle Alexander: Ferguson Shows Why Criminal Justice System of ‘Racial Control’ Should be Undone,” Democracy Now!, (March 4, 2015).
                                                                            ********
OneLove

Jam of the Day: - "Tombouctou" by Inna Modja

  


 During times of war , women and girls are very vulnerable .
They are easy targets in the North of Mali .

We want to be free . We want to be alive .

We want to be strong . We want to dream .
We want more .

Music gave me a voice . And I'm going to use it for My People .

The Night has fallen
Hunger is rising
Every single month of the year we are struggling
Everyday single day our People are being killed
The Endless War has just began
We won’t sit down and shut up
Let our country be conquered by intruders
They aim to conquer the North
They aim to conquer the South
They aim to conquer our souls

The Day is up
The sun is rising
They sweared they will never ever give us back Kidal
Our Country is broken
Hyenas have come into our homes and will have no Mercy on us
Our people are starting to rebel
We won’t unite with these intruders
They aim to break our Fathers
Force our mothers to surrender
They want to silence our voices

We will keep on fighting , The light is coming 

Desmond Tutu: Not Going Quietly

 

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the famous Nobel laureate, and one of the world's most respected church leaders, was a central figure in ensuring an end to white minority rule in South Africa. He was instrumental in the struggle against apartheid, also acting as chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). He has since gone on to play a role as one of Nelson Mandela's handpicked Elders along with others like former US President Jimmy Carter.The archbishop takes Sir David Frost on a tour of his beloved South Africa; he talks about his time in the anti-apartheid struggle movement, his work with the TRC, and his alarm over recent developments in the "rainbow nation".

 OneLove

From the KKK to Dylann Roof: White Nationalism Infuses Our Political Ideology by Chip Berlet

   

When Dylann Roof pulled a gun at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, his shots rang through history to the roots of the ideology of white supremacy, which justified genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of black people from Africa. We deny this at our own risk.

Roof attacked the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which by the early 1800s was at the center of black resistance to slavery in Charleston, according to African-American history scholar Gerald Horne. Black people, Roof feared, threaten the existence of the white race. Events in the church’s history play a role in Roof’s fear. Inspired by a slave rebellion that began in 1791 in what is now Haiti, Emanuel parishioner Denmark Vesey of Charleston began organizing an insurrection against slavery, using the Charleston AME church as a base.
Roof might have been unaware of the specific history of “Mother Emmanuel,” but he had immersed himself in a narrative that is deeply rooted in our nation’s history, a narrative that takes into account the history of Charleston’s historic congregation.

Roof told a participant in the Bible study, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Horne and other social scientists believe Roof inherited the fear of murderous blacks raping white women from a common historic narrative of white supremacy.

Horne says that after the bloody slave revolt, American newspapers were full of stories salaciously describing “marauding blacks with sugar cane machetes hacking the white slave-owners to death.” Regardless of their veracity, these stories informed a historic narrative that was seized upon by the founders and early members of the Ku Klux Klan.

After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan “was largely halted following federal legislation targeting Klan-perpetrated violence in the early 1870s,” said Klansville, U.S.A. author David Cunningham in a PBS documentary. In 1905, Thomas Dixon, Jr., wrote The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, later turned into the silent film The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The white supremacist frame of black men pillaging, raping, and murdering was returning to the mainstream.

Dylann Roof looked beyond our native anti-black texts. His website was The Last Rhodesian. Roof allied himself with the cause of Rhodesia because, according to the racist right, the failed struggle in the 1960s to preserve African white nationalist societies, including South Africa, was a warning about the communist conspiracy to use black people to pave the way for totalitarian tyranny. This thesis was purveyed by the John Birch Society, whose historic and current conspiracy theories are today utilized by Glenn Beck. A decade before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas joined the conspiracy theorists when he became affiliated with the Lincoln Institute, a right-wing think tank that embraced apartheid in South Africa as a bulwark against communism.

As the world is wired today, these theories are a click away. Jennifer Earl, the co-author of Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age, is one of several sociologists to have shown that the internet can mobilize people into movement participation. Right-wing groups from the militia to the neo-Nazi movements were early adopters of online technology, even before the internet created a world wide web of unedited communications that brought racist and anti-Semitic (and now anti-Islamic) rhetoric into our homes.

Roger Griffin studied terrorism for the British government. His Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning, describes the phenomenon of “heroic doubling,” which can turn a “normal” individual into someone who carries out acts of fanatical violence as a media-carried clarion call to arms to defend an idealized pure community under threat from a demonized “Other.”

Roof was influenced by the Council of Conservative Citizens. The CofCC’s racist rhetoric provides the most extreme versions of the demonization of blacks and white liberals, while a more muted—sometimes coded—version of white supremacy is routinely broadcast on cable news and AM radio talk shows. The first black president continues to provide a lightning rod for racist rhetoric.

White nationalism infuses our political ideology as a nation—from our major political parties to the armed extreme right. We need to confront the color line that bestows on white people unfair advantages. We need to revoke that grant of privilege by working to correct the injustice that still stains our nation with the spilling of blood. As Dr. King warned us, either we build community or we will face chaos.
                                                                    

                                                                           ******


OneLove

US Police Do Not Hire Intelligent People: Ex-CIA contractor

                                                             Not Too Bright



anyone could have guessed this! I would wager that this is not limited to the United States. People worldwide are getting their faces stomped on daily by local & state police officers who may not be operating with a full deck..... It's up to us, collectively, to turn this around.

OneLove

COULD A WORDLESS 1 MINUTE FILM WITH THE MUSIC OF RADIOHEAD CHANGE HOW YOU SEE THIS ANIMAL?

What you are seeing is from the state of Pará, Brazil, where animals await their fates fearing any human approach. In Brazil, an ox is killed every second but, through conscious choices, you can change this cruel reality. Find out more about veganism and animal rights. You have a choice.  

 OneLove

Love Liberates

 Deep lessons from the blessed Maya Angelou.... 

 OneLove

Pope Calls on World Youth to Rise Up Against Global Capitalism

The latest call for a youth uprising against global capitalism came not from grassroots groups, but from the leader of the Catholic Church, who on Sunday gave a rousing speech during which he told a crowd of young people in Paraguay that it is their time to "make a mess."

The address marked the end of Pope Francis' week-long pilgrimage to Latin America, during which he also assailed the prevailing economic system as the "dung of the devil," saying that the systemic "greed for money" is a "subtle dictatorship" that "condemns and enslaves men and women."

During Sunday's rally, which was held on the banks of the Paraguay River outside the capital Asunción, the Argentinian pontiff went off-script as he addressed tens of thousands of local youth.

"They wrote a speech for me to give you. But speeches are boring," Pope Francis said. "Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope."

He also encouraged those present to look at their less fortunate peers, some of whom he met earlier in the day during a visit to the Banado Norte shantytown, and spoke of the connection between authentic liberty and responsibility and the necessity of fighting for the right to lead a dignified life.

"We don't want young weaklings. We do not want young people who tire quickly, who live life worn out with faces of boredom. We want youths with hope and strength," Francis told the crowd.

Pope Francis' South American visit comes just week after the release of his Papal Encyclical, which many hailed as a "radical statement," in which he told leaders of the Catholic Church that there is a moral imperative for addressing climate change.

OneLove

The right-wing media’s vicious profiteering: How Donald Trump & Fox News are weaponizing hate by Chauncey DeVega

Right-wing domestic terrorist Dylann Roof killed nine African-Americans in a Charleston church because he felt that “his country” was being “stolen” from him by African-Americans and other people of color. Republican Presidential candidate and reality TV show star Donald Trump believes that “illegal” immigrants from Mexico are predators who are stealing jobs and resources from America while they rape and murder white women. Dylann Roof is an overt and unapologetic white supremacist terrorist. Donald Trump is a “belligerent, loudmouthed racist.” He is also a leading 2016 Republican presidential candidate.

The overt white supremacist websites that taught Dylann Roof his racist beliefs, and the more “polite” and “respectable” right-wing media outlets such as Fox News, are part of the same political communication ecosystem. Both Dylann Roof and Donald Trump are channeling the racist political values and talking points that are generated on a daily basis by Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine. There, ideas circulate back and forth between the “mainstream” media and its peers within the white supremacist political community. Talking points are refined and developed; the issue or controversy of the day is circulated; trolls (often hired by right-leaning public relations firms) are deployed to online comment sections in an effort to create the illusion of consensus on the part of the “silent majority” and “real Americans” on any given issue — all while silencing dissent and harassing those people they do not agree with.

Experts in political communication and media have described the denseness of ties, shared links, and the alternate reality created in the right-wing media(both traditional and digital) as exhibiting a condition of “epistemic closure.” What that means is this: Because contemporary conservatism has created a bizarre and twisted reality for those who consume its news media and other information sources, a state of extreme political polarization has been created. If citizens cannot come to agreement about basic facts, they are crippled in their ability to solve common problems of shared public concern. This crisis is made even more acute by how recent research has demonstrated that those people who listen to Fox News and other right-wing media outlets are more likely to hold erroneous beliefs about the nature of political and social reality. In essence, Fox News is not “news”—it functions as an organized disinformation campaign that propagandizes its followers into accepting right-wing lies and distortions as empirical fact.

The “conspiranoid” fantasies of your crazy uncle or well-intentioned but profoundly ignorant grandmother — who repeatedly forward you emails claiming that Obama was born in another country; or that the United States’ first black president hates white people; or about how the Democrats will create death panels to kill the elderly; that “White America” is a victim of “racism” by black and brown people; or that the United States military is planning to invade Texas — are not born of the ether. They are a product of an echo chamber, a product that is designed to derail, distract, and delegitimate the government.

In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstader famously wrote about the dangers posed by such an impenetrable bubble. Hofstadter’s essay was published during the 1950s, at the conclusion of McCarthy’s witch hunt, at the dawn of an ideological revolution that would manifest, in the short term, in movements such as the John Birch Society, and culminate decades later in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Now, in the age of Obama, this paranoid style has been mainstreamed and amplified by the 24/7 cable news cycle, the power of instantaneous communication offered by digital media, and a weak fourth estate that treats all ideas—however absurd, without empirical merit, or unmoored from reality—as “facts” to be debated and discussed.

Thus, movement conservatism and racism are unified in the post-civil rights era United States.

White racial resentment, white victimology, white identity politics, and white grievance-mongering are common to overt white supremacists such as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazis, and white nationalists, more broadly. The same values are mobilized by the Republican Party and Fox News media through symbolic racism, the use of coded racial appeals, and the now-infamous “Southern Strategy.” Overt white supremacists largely traffic in “old fashioned” racism; the contemporary Republican Party uses “colorblind” racism and claims about “bad culture” or “cultural pathologies” among blacks to legitimate and protect a system of white privilege and supremacy.

However, the divide between the old-fashioned racism of White Nationalists and the “modern” racism of the contemporary Republican Party is not fixed. White racial animus towards blacks and Latinos (and often other people of color) grows from the same soil: a belief that the United States is naturally a “white” country and that White America has a Herrenvolk birthright to its resources and opportunities before all other groups of people. Whether explicitly invoked or done through coded appeals, these shared beliefs help to make the cross-pollination of ideas within the right-wing echo chamber so efficient.

There are many examples of a convergence between the narratives generated by overt white supremacists and those of the “mainstream” right-wing “news” media. Moreover, many of the talking points that come to dominate the Fox News and its related media were first authored in white supremacist/white nationalist online spaces:

To wit:

The Fox News moral panic about roving groups of feral black young people attacking innocent white people in “knockout games” was a fantasy ginned up by overt white supremacists and mainstreamed by Fox News and its allies.

White supremacists in the United States and Europe have long been worried about changing demographics and “white racial extinction.” The right-wing media machine have repeatedly sounded a public alarm that white people should “make more babies” and that “traditional America” will be bred out of existence by non-whites.

The uprising by black youth in Baltimore and Ferguson against police thuggery was distorted by the right-wing media and overt white supremacists into “anti-white” riots, “black gang activity” and “black nationalists” targeting police and white citizens for reprisals.
White supremacists have developed the phrase “anti-racist is code for anti-white.” Fox News and the other elements of the right-wing echo chamber have used the same logic as personalities such as Bill O’Reilly have repeatedly stated that anti-racism initiatives and discussions of white privilege are somehow hateful acts of “racism” against white Americans.

In the same vein, Donald Trump’s newfound concerns about the tragic case of Kathryn Steinle, a white woman who was killed by Francisco Sanchez, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, is an act of obvious political opportunism. The combustible mix of race, immigration and white victimology was too tempting for Trump, and the white nativist impulses of movement conservatism, to resist.

This world of imperiled white people is a fantasy that is shared by both overt white supremacists and the mainstream right-wing media. It is a fantasy that ignores the following facts: Crime in the United States is at record lows. Most violent crime is intra-racial. Because of that reality, a given person is much more likely to be killed by a member of their own “racial” group than by someone outside of it. Moreover, most people are killed or otherwise assaulted by a person they know or who they are related to. Trump’s particular concerns about crime by undocumented immigrants are also specious—for a variety of reasons, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than other groups.

Although a veritable cottage industry has been created by the media with its obsession regarding missing and at-risk middle-class and rich white women (media analysts have described this as “missing white woman syndrome”), white women are in fact among the safest and most protected groups of people in the United States. First Nations, African-American, and Hispanic women are more likely to be victims of violent crime than are white women. Young black and First Nations women are also much more likely to be kidnapped or otherwise go “missing.” And in this present era of white-on-black police thuggery and violence, unarmed black women are much more likely to be killed by America’s police than are white women.

(In all, American white women (and women more generally) are much more likely to be killed, assaulted, or otherwise victimized by their husband or boyfriend than they are by Donald Trump’s nightmare dream of “illegal” Mexican immigrants.)

There is a larger meta-level assumption driving the right-wing hate media and Donald Trump’s false concerns about white people who are victims of crime by non-whites: the White Right believes that crime against white people is underreported by the mainstream news media. As with other matters, the facts are none too kind to the worldview held by American conservatives—in reality, crimes against white people are over reported relative to their actual percentages by the TV news, while crimes against black and brown people are grossly under reported.

The white right and its sealed alternate reality media bubble where white people are victims, and white women preyed upon by dangerous black and brown “outsiders,” is part of an old and very ugly type of white racial paranoia. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, white women were supposedly being lured into interracial sex and white slavery by the Chinese with their opium dens, Eastern and Southern Europeans who grabbed them off the street and sold them into prostitution, or “Mexicans” who waylaid and dragooned them. We can also not forget the particularly American habit of the lynching tree where obsessions with the “black beast rapist” and other false rumors and lies about black men having sex with white women (the vast majority of it willing, wanted, and mutually consensual) resulted in thousands of black men being tortured, vivisected, shot full of holes, and/or burned alive.

In the 19th and 20th century Donald Trump and the right-wing hate media’s obsession with imperiled white women such as Kathryn Steinle, or a crime wave by “illegal” immigrants from Latin and South America, would be generously described as “yellow journalism.” Fox News, the broader Right-wing echo chamber, and overt white supremacist media, are generating racial panics and white victimology screeds via Google, where they put in searches for words such as “white,” “black,” “victim.” and “crime.” From this piss-poor thinking and methodology they can then concoct a fantastical narrative of white people who are victimized en masse by black and brown criminals.

Dylann Roof and other white, right-wing domestic terrorists have been galvanized by Fox News and the broader right-wing media. Donald Trump, and the Right-wing media that are aiding and abetting his nativist lies, are encouraging vigilante violence in defense of white women (and white men who are now emasculated because they are unable to defend “their” mothers, daughters, sisters, kin, and community). And just as the right-wing media has done in the past when their exhortations to violence have born fruit, they will deny having ever encouraged such an outcome.

OneLove

A Lost Soul Meeting Death

A lost soul stumbles drunken through the city. In a park, Death finds him and shows him many things. This beautiful video takes a tender look at one soul’s attempt to bargain with death before finally succumbing. The animated short, by And Maps And Plans, a small Dublin-based studio, has raked in loads of awards and was even shortlisted for the 87th annual Academy Awards. Its title, ‘Coda,’ is fitting for a video about our ultimate end. 

  OneLove

F*ck That: A Guided Meditation for the Realities of Today's World

Put this on repeat and get to a better place...."Breathe in strength, breathe out bullshit."


OneLove

Powerful Message from Zulu Healer Credo Mutwa

Zulu Sangoma (healer) Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa calls on all human beings to awaken the mother mind, that part of human consciousness that feels what is happening in the world.

OneLove

Mass Extinction: It's the End of the World as We Know It by Dahr Jamail

     

Guy McPherson is a professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources and ecology at the University of Arizona, and has been a climate change expert for 30 years. He has also become a controversial figure, due to the fact that he does not shy away from talking about the possibility of near-term human extinction.

While McPherson's perspective might sound like the stuff of science fiction, there is historical precedent for his predictions. Fifty-five million years ago, a 5-degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures seems to have occurred in just 13 years, according to a study published in the October 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A report in the August 2013 issue of Science revealed that in the near term, earth's climate will change 10 times faster than during any other moment in the last 65 million years.

McPherson fears that we are well along in the process of causing our own extinction.

Prior to that, the Permian mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago, also known as the "Great Dying," was triggered by a massive lava flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global temperatures of 6 degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the atmosphere, those gases caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a period of approximately 80,000 years. The change in climate is thought to be the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet. In that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95 percent of all species were wiped out.

Today's current scientific and observable evidence strongly suggests we are in the midst of the same process - only this time it is anthropogenic, and happening exponentially faster than even the Permian mass extinction did.

In fact, a recently published study in Science Advances states, unequivocally, that the planet has officially entered its sixth mass extinction event. The study shows that species are already being killed off at rates much faster than they were during the other five extinction events, and warns ominously that humans could very likely be among the first wave of species to go extinct.

So if some feel that McPherson's thinking is extreme, when the myriad scientific reports he cites to back his claims are looked at squarely and the dots are connected, the perceived extremism begins to dissolve into a possible, or even likely, reality.

The idea of possible human extinction, coming not just from McPherson but a growing number of scientists (as well as the aforementioned recently published report in Science), is now beginning to occasionally find its way into mainstream consciousness.

"A Child Born Today May Live to See Humanity's End, Unless ..." reads a recent blog post title from Reuters. It reads:

Humans will be extinct in 100 years because the planet will be uninhabitable, according to Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, one of the leaders of the effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. He blames overcrowding, denuded resources and climate change. Fenner's prediction is not a sure bet, but he is correct that there is no way emissions reductions will be enough to save us from our trend toward doom. And there doesn't seem to be any big global rush to reduce emissions, anyway.

McPherson, who maintains the blog "Nature Bats Last," told Truthout, "We've never been here as a species and the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet."

Truthout first interviewed McPherson in early 2014, at which time he had identified 24 self-reinforcing positive feedback loops triggered by human-caused climate disruption. Today that number has grown to more than 50, and continues to increase.

A self-reinforcing positive feedback loop is akin to a "vicious circle": It accelerates the impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD). An example would be methane releases in the Arctic. Massive amounts of methane are currently locked in the permafrost, which is now melting rapidly. As the permafrost melts, methane - a greenhouse gas 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a short timescale - is released into the atmosphere, warming it further, which in turn causes more permafrost to melt, and so on.

As soon as this summer, we are likely to begin seeing periods of an ice-free Arctic. (Those periods will arrive by the summer of 2016 at the latest, according to a Naval Postgraduate School report.)

Once the summer ice begins melting away completely, even for short periods, methane releases will worsen dramatically.

Is it possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of the sort of process that led to the Great Dying?

McPherson, like the scientists involved in the recent study that confirms the arrival of the sixth great extinction, fears that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing feedback loops are already in play that we are well along in the process of causing our own extinction.

Furthermore, McPherson remains convinced that it could happen far more quickly than generally believed possible - in the course of just the next few decades, or even sooner.

Truthout caught up with McPherson in Washington State, where he was recently on a lecture tour, sharing his dire analysis of how far along we already are regarding ACD.

Dahr Jamail: How many positive feedback loops have you identified up until now, and what does this ever-increasing number of them indicate?

Guy McPherson: I can't quite wrap my mind around the ever-increasing number of self-reinforcing feedback loops. A long time ago, when there were about 20 of them, I believed evidence would accumulate in support of existing loops, but we couldn't possibly identify any more. Ditto for when we hit 30. And 40. There are more than 50 now, and the hits keep coming. And the evidence for existing feedback loops continues to grow.

In addition to these positive feedback loops "feeding" within themselves, they also interact among each other. Methane released from the Arctic Ocean is exacerbated and contributes to reduced albedo [reflectivity of solar radiation by the ice] as the Arctic ice declines. Tack on the methane released from permafrost and it's obvious we're facing a shaky future for humanity.

You talk often about how when major industrial economic systems collapse, this will actually cause a temperature spike. Please explain, in layperson's terms, how this occurs.

Industrial activity continually adds reflective particles into earth's atmosphere. Particularly well known are sulfates produced by burning coal ("clean coal" has a lower concentration of sulfates than "dirty coal"). These particles reflect incoming sunlight, thus artificially cooling the planet.

These reflective particles constantly fall out of the atmosphere, but industrial activity continuously adds them, too. When industrial activity ceases, all the particles will fall out within a few days. As a result, earth will lose its "umbrella" and rapid warming of the planet will ensue. According to a 2011 paper by James Hansen and colleagues, the warming will add 1.2 plus or minus 0.2 degrees Celsius. Subsequent research indicates the conservative nature of this paper, suggesting termination of industrial activity will add a minimum of 1.4 degrees Celsius to the global average temperature.

What indicators are you seeing that show the possibility of major economic collapses in the near future?

We cannot sustain the unsustainable forever, and this version of civilization is the least sustainable of them all. It teeters on the brink, and many conservative voices have predicted economic collapse this year or next. According to a June 2012 reportby David Korowicz for the Feasta group, a disruption of supply will trigger collapse of the world's industrial economy in as little as three weeks.

The supply disruptions to which Korowicz refers include water, food and oil. We can add financial credit to the list. In other words, credit could dry up as it nearly did in late 2008. Or the bond markets could trigger hyperinflation. California could have insufficient water to grow enough food to support much of the US, and not long from now. The list goes on.

Go into detail about what you're seeing as far as indications of abrupt climate change.

When I'm in the midst of a speaking tour, as I am now, I deliver a presentation approximately every day. Lately, I include a [different] indication of abrupt climate change [in] each presentation. In other words, I've been coming across evidence every day.

Recent examples include the June 19, 2015, paper in Science Advances: We are in the midst of the sixth great extinction. According to the abstract, the "sixth mass extinction is already under way." The lead author, in an interview, said, "life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on."

According to data from The Cryosphere Today, Arctic ice extent declined 340,000 square kilometers between June 17 and 18, 2015. Such an event is unprecedented. We could witness an ice-free Arctic by September of this year for the first time in human history.

How much temperature increase, over what period of time?

Depending upon the timing of economic collapse and release of the 50-gigaton burst of methane Natalia Shakhova warns about, earth could warm an additional 3 degrees Celsius within 18 months. The relatively slow rate of planetary warming we're seeing so far exceeds the ability of organisms to adapt by a factor of 10,000, according to a paper in the August 2013 edition of Ecology Letters.

We depend upon a living planet for our survival. We're killing non-human species at an astonishing rate. To believe we're clever enough to avoid extinction is pure hubris.

Is there an historical precedent for this phenomenon?

There is no historical precedent for ongoing planetary warming. We're dumping carbon into the atmosphere at a rate faster than the Great Dying from about 250 million years ago. That time, nearly all life on earth was driven to extinction.

What does this mean for humans? How do we cope and survive?

Astonishingly, against cosmological odds, you and I get to live. But not forever. And not much longer.

Coping with the reality of abrupt climate change and human extinction is hardly an easy undertaking. The message I've been delivering for several years is a heavy burden. I suggest fully absorbing the message that we get to live! Part of the process of living is death.

In addition to my latest book [Extinction Dialogs], co-authored by Carolyn Baker, I've developed other means for dealing with reality. Among these are a book for young adults co-authored by Pauline Schneider and a workshop co-developed and facilitated by Ms. Schneider. We signed a contract for the book in mid-June and the workshop is described at onlyloveremains.org.

What are some events of late you can point to as evidence that we are already experiencing abrupt climate change?

In addition to the information presented above, there's the ongoing collapse of the Larsen ice shelves in Antarctica, abundant evidence we're headed for a warmer year than 2014 (the hottest year in history), and numerous extreme weather events. These ongoing phenomena have been anticipated for years.

And now, they're here.

What are other factors you feel people should be aware of?

We're in serious human-population overshoot. We're driving to extinction at least 150 species each day. Nuclear power plants require grid-tied electricity, cooling water and people getting paychecks. Without all these, they melt down, thus immersing all life on earth in ionizing radiation.

There's more. Much more. But all the evidence points toward our individual deaths and the extinction of our species in the near future.

But most importantly, we get to live now.

                                                               **********8

OneLove

Plantation Tour Guide: “You Won’t Believe the Questions I Got About Slavery.”

 

  For the past six years, Margaret Biser was privy to unique insight on how Americans view slavery. As a tour guide at an undisclosed Southern historic site, it was her job to lead visitors around the plantation, telling them the stories of the lives of the more than 100 slaves who toiled there. But it wasn't the narratives she learned and shared that surprised Biser, who is white, the most. It was the misconceptions she frequently encountered from visitors and what they said about how they view race, both in the past and present. She shares them in an illuminating essay on Vox.com.

Among the things she learned was that there are many people who think slaveholders “took care” of slaves because they cared about them, and that the slaves should have been grateful for their efforts:

This view was expressed to me often, usually by people asking if the family was “kind” or “benevolent” to their slaves, but at no point was it better encapsulated than by a youngish mom taking the house tour with her 6-year-old daughter a couple of years ago. I had been showing them the inventory to the building, which sets a value on all the high-ticket items in the home, including silver, books, horses, and, of course, actual human people. (Remember that the technical definition of a slave is not just an unpaid worker, but a person considered property.) For most guests, this is the most emotionally meaningful moment of the tour. I showed the young mother some of the slaves' names and pointed out which people were related to each other. The mom stiffened up, raised her chin, and asked pinchedly, “Did the slaves here appreciate the care they got from their mistress?”

Biser also encountered many guests who felt that slavery wasn’t that bad an institution.

One important branch of this phenomenon was guests huffily bringing up every disadvantaged group of white people under the sun—the Irish, the Polish, the Jews, indentured servants, regular servants, poor people, white women, Baptists, Catholics, modern-day wage workers, whomever—and say something like, “Well, you know they had it almost as bad as/just as bad as/much worse than slaves did.” Within the context of a tour or other interpretation, this behavior had the effect of temporarily pulling sympathy and focus away from African Americans and putting it on whites.

In reflecting on her experiences, she realized that her guests were downplaying the horrors of slavery in an attempt to absolve themselves. “In many other cases, however, justifications of slavery seemed primarily like an attempt by white Americans to avoid feelings of guilt for the past,” wrote Biser, who left the plantation a few weeks ago. “We don’t want our ancestors to have done bad things because we don’t want to think of ourselves as being bad people. These slavery apologists were less invested in defending slavery per se than in defending slaveowners, and they weren’t defending slaveowners so much as themselves.”

Read her full essay here.

OneLove

The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Late this spring, the publisher Spiegel & Grau sent out advance copies of a new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a slim volume of 176 pages called Between the World and Me. “Here is what I would like for you to know,” Coates writes in the book, addressed to his 14-year-old son. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” 

The only endorsement he had wanted was the novelist Toni Morrison’s. Neither he nor his editor, Christopher Jackson, knew Morrison, but they managed to get the galleys into her hands. Weeks later, Morrison’s assistant sent Jackson an email with her reaction: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Morrison had written. “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Baldwin died 28 years ago. Jackson forwarded the note to Coates, who sent back a one-word email: “Man.”

Morrison’s words were an anointing. They were also a weight. On the subject of black America, Baldwin had once been a compass — “Jimmy’s spirit,” the poet Amiri Baraka had said, eulogizing him, “is the only truth which keeps us sane.” On the last Friday in June, the day after Morrison’s endorsement was made public and then washed over Twitter, Coates sat down with me at a Morningside Heights bar and after some consideration ordered an IPA. At six-foot-four, he towers over nearly everyone he meets, and to close the physical distance he tends to turtle his neck down, making himself smaller: “A public persona but not a public person,” explained his father, Paul Coates. Ta-Nehisi said he thought ­Morrison’s praise was essentially literary, about the echo of Baldwin’s direct and exhortative prose in his own. The week before, The New ­Yorker’s David Remnick had called the forthcoming book “extraordinary,” and A. O. Scott of the New York Times would soon go further, calling it “essential, like water or air.” The figure of the lonely radical writer is a common one. A writer who radicalizes the Establishment is more rare. “When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I’m always surprised,” Coates said. “I don’t know if it’s my low expectations for white people or what.”

It had been nine days since the young white supremacist Dylann Roof had massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, and Coates, whose great theme is the intractability of racial history, had helped to orient the debate, to concentrate attention on the campaign against the Confederate flag: Even casual tweets he sent out were retweeted hundreds of times. The television behind the bar was tuned to President Obama’s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, which was just about to start. The broadcast was muted, but Coates noticed the tableau: “There’s a sister over here to the left, she’s natural, no perm, and a very black dude, and then an African-American president.” Coates imagined how this would appear to a 4-year-old white boy: “That’s the world as he knows it,” Coates said. “So all these people saying that symbols don’t mean anything — that’s bullshit. They mean a lot.” Coates has often been a critic of the president from the left — of his instinct to submerge race in talk of class, of his moralizing to black audiences. “I’m going to make a prediction,” he said. “He’s going to say something incredible.”

When Obama began his first campaign for the presidency, Coates was all but anonymous, a journalist in his early 30s who had worked mostly at alt-weeklies and mostly for short stints. But in 2008, he was hired by The Atlantic — to write longer pieces, then to blog — and eventually his commentary formed a counterpoint to the White House line. Against the optimism of the Obama ascendancy, Coates offered a bleaker view: that no postracial era was imminent, that white supremacy has been a condition of the United States since its inception and that it might always be. “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” Coates writes to his son. While the president talked about the velocity of our escape from history, Coates insisted that the country was still stuck in its vise. Last year, he wrote an Atlantic cover story titled “The Case for Reparations,” probably the most discussed magazine piece of the Obama era, which detailed the persistence of structural racism — racism by government policy — into the present day. When Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and then Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Walter Scott in South Carolina, it was Coates who seemed to most adeptly digest the central paradox of the time: how, within an increasingly progressive era, a country led by a black president could still act with such racial brutality. In late December, when Funny or Die published a fake text-message chain between the president and his daughters, it had its fictional, radicalized Malia Obama coolly insisting, “I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates was my dad.”

The sudden shift after the massacre, in which southern politicians turned against the Confederate flag, filled Coates with both awe and perplexity. “I mean, I tweeted this out, but I didn’t expect it to happen: ‘You talk about how this makes you feel. Then take down the damn flag,’ ” Coates said. “And hell, they did it! It turns out that was actually what was in motion.” He shook his head. “Shit!”

That Sunday, the Times would give Coates a small role in focusing attention on the flag. More essential, the paper reported, were the public gestures of forgiveness that family members of the victims had offered to Roof. “I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you,” the daughter of a slain 70-year-old woman told her mother’s murderer at his hearing. These gestures had moved conservative Christians in a very religious state. Coates believes in the power of social structures, not in the politics of emotion. The consensus account — in which Strom Thurmond’s son State Senator Paul Thurmond looked into the eyes of black fellow citizens at a church service after the massacre and decided that he could no longer defend the flag — reeked of myth. Even the public forgiving, so soon after the slaughter, seemed unreal. “Is that real?” Coates said, watching the service. “I question the realness of that.”

Coates is not a Christian. The heavy force in Between the World and Me — what makes it both unique and bleak — is his atheism. It gives Coates’s writing urgency. To consider the African-American experience without the language of souls and destiny is to strip it of euphemism, and to make the security of African-American bodies even more crucial. It also isolates him from the main black political tradition. “There’s a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world — about whose side God is on,” he said. “Well, I didn’t have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.”

Coates was still wondering about the Charleston family members, Christians forgiving. He splayed his fingers over his brow and covered his eyes, so that as he talked he could not see. “Is it aspirational?” he wondered. “Like, I say, ‘I forgive you’ because I think I’m supposed to?”

On the mute television, something was happening. The ministers were standing up and smiling. To their left, the first African-American president of the United States had lifted his head. He was singing “Amazing Grace.”

Coates with his father on their Park Heights stoop. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates
The first time Coates met the president, at an off-the-record White House conversation with liberal opinion writers in 2013, he left disappointed in himself. “Everyone was too deferential, and I was too deferential, too,” he said. The second time, a few months later, he was determined to do better. Coates had been reading Baldwin’s 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, and as he left his home in Harlem for the train station, his wife, Kenyatta Matthews, said to him, “What would Baldwin do?” On the train to D.C., Coates thought about the off-the-record 1963 meeting that Baldwin had brokered between Robert Kennedy and leading black activists, at which Kennedy felt the full force of black anger. (“They seemed possessed,” Kennedy would later say.) Coates arrived at the White House late and, because he had not prepared for rain, wet. He was not wearing a suit but a blazer and jeans. The president was going around the room answering questions on a wide range of topics, handling each expertly, in Coates’s view.

“And the race aspect is not gone from this,” Coates said. “To see a black dude in a room of the smartest white people and just be the smartest dude in the room — it just puts into context all the stuff about ‘Let me see his grades.’ ”

Occupying Coates’s mind were the racial dimensions of universal health care. It had become apparent, as reporters dug through Census data, that as Republican governors opted out of the federal government’s expansion of Medicaid, blacks and Hispanics would be disproportionately left out because of where they lived. Coates wanted the president to take more targeted action to counter this — to make the policy acknowledge race and not just class. Obama said that progressives were doing the best they could. At a certain moment, Coates became self-conscious. “This dispute happens, and all the other journalists are saying, ‘Oh my God, the two black dudes are fighting.’ ”

As the meeting ended, Obama pulled Coates aside. On his blog, the writer had criticized the president for suggesting, during a speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, that many African-Americans had “lost our way” and calling for more personal responsibility. The president told Coates he had been unfair. As he was walking away, Obama turned back and said, “Don’t despair.”

Coates took the long walk back to Union Station and found himself thinking about Baldwin. The warm optimism of the early civil-rights movement (the insistence that the universe has a moral arc, the sense of destiny in the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome”) echoed in Obama, but Baldwin had not shared “all of this sentiment and melodrama; he was just so cold,” said Coates. “Baldwin was saying, ‘You should be aware that failure is a distinct possibility.’ That was so freeing.” Coates called Christopher Jackson and asked him why no one wrote like Baldwin anymore, and the editor suggested that he try. The book Coates eventually wrote wasn’t exactly that, though it borrowed its form from The Fire Next Time, part of which is addressed to his nephew. But it argued that what the president had called despair was actually the product of experience.

Coates was born in 1975 and grew up in Northwest Baltimore, in a sprawling family infused with black political consciousness. Paul Coates, who had briefly been a Black Panther and became a radical librarian and independent publisher, had seven children with four different women. Ta-Nehisi’s mother, Cheryl, a schoolteacher, was the last. Northwest Baltimore was sharply segregated — it basically still is — and so though Coates did not grow up poor, he did grow up in proximity to violence. “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world,” Coates writes in Between the World and Me. “The nakedness is not an error, nor the import of deviant culture. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of ­policy.” Coates’s first book, The Beautiful Struggle, published in 2008, was a memoir of growing up in this environment as a spacey, conscious kid, head deep in comic books, Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech on his Walkman. The book did not register widely, but the crime novelist Walter Mosley called Coates “the young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.”

In one way, at least, Coates earned that praise: He could express very deeply the dimensions of fear. He writes of the kids gathered around Mondawmin Mall, across the street from his house, in puffy ’80s Starter jackets: “I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers.” In this environment, the Black History Month ­invocations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the early civil-rights leaders seemed especially discordant: Nonviolence seemed like an impossible standard. Violence was a product of fear; it was also a tool against it. “My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.”

Coates arrived at Howard University in 1993, when he was 17 years old, as Afrocentrism was just beginning to lose strength as an intellectual force, a shift that complicated Coates’s own nationalism, in particular his veneration for Malcolm X. Coates was writing poetry then, and the effort pushed him into a circle of older black writers. They often told him how much more he had to learn. One mentor, the poet Joel Dias-Porter, quit his job and moved into a homeless shelter for two years so that he could spend each day at the Library of Congress, working through an impossibly long list of books he felt compelled to read. Coates developed a similar ritual — sitting down each morning at the Howard University library and requesting three books at a time, battling with the histories of nationalism and integration in his mind.

The happiest sections of Coates’s new book are set at Howard: It is where he met his wife and where he found a “base, even in these modern times, a port in the storm.” In the book he calls Howard “Mecca.” Eventually he dropped out to work as a journalist, first at the Washington City Paper and then at some other alt-weeklies, where he usually was assigned to the race beat, to write about black experience, and though this was in some ways diminishing it also gave him an angle on the world. When Coates was 24, he and Matthews had a son, Samori — whom they named after a West African military leader who routed the French colonists — and moved to Brooklyn. Coates’s personality, built for West Baltimore, was at times an ungainly fit in his new world: He writes of feeling himself swelling toward physical fights, of being conscious of his race, of not feeling comfortable. They did not have much money. For a while, Coates mainly stayed home with Samori. An essay of his from the period is titled “Confessions of a Black Mr. Mom.”

The fear that gives life to Between the World and Me is the fear of a parent for his child. Though the book went through many revisions, Coates said he was always sure that he would end it by describing his meeting with a woman named Mabel Jones, whose son, Prince, had been a friend of his at Howard and who was later killed by a police officer who tracked him from Maryland to Virginia in a case of mistaken identity — he had committed no crime. Mabel Jones was a sharecropper’s daughter who worked to become a radiologist, then sent her children to private schools and made sure to give them things like “jaunts off to Europe.” For Coates, Mabel Jones became not just an emblem of dignity, of “all of the odd poise and direction that the great American injury demands of you,” but also a signal of the impossibility of escaping the tragedies of race, even for well-off blacks. Her son was killed, and the police officer who shot him, a black man himself, was allowed to return to the force. Jones’s death so alienated Coates that when he watched 9/11, slightly stoned, on the roof of his Brooklyn building, he recalls that he felt nothing at all. “You must always remember,” Coates writes to Samori, “that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

Coates with his son, Samori, in the summer of 2001. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates has borrowed this language from feminist writing. For him, it contained a basic truth, that indignity is always physical. The vulnerability of African-American bodies has become a main theme of the racial protests over the past year under slogans like “I Can’t Breathe.” “Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed,” Coates writes. “Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.”

Coates’s first piece for The Atlantic was an essay criticizing Bill Cosby, who was then still an icon, for tearing into black audiences about values and responsibility. Soon, the magazine gave him his own blog. The form (intimate, open-ended, inquiring) suited him, and eventually he took up the personal project that had lapsed once he’d left Howard, a study of history. Reading new books, trading notes with his commenters, Coates sharpened his sense of the historical weight of white supremacy: The Civil War was fought over slavery and nothing else; the American Dream could not be separated from slavery because “slavery was the dream.” At the time, most young journalists were leaning on social science for authority — history had a human warmth. Coates noticed the good people on the wrong side of history, suggesting that individual virtue was a weak counter­weight to the pathologies of states. Had he been alive and had means, he tweeted, “I would have owned slaves too.”

A community grew in his comments section, but it was a community of a particular type: liberal, wide-eyed, pining for moral authority — and redemption. “Coates’s creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins,” the left-wing critic Fredrik deBoer sardonically described it. Last week on Twitter, a woman asked Coates about the pronunciation of his first name: “I’m really curious what the etymology is that makes the ‘hi’ a ‘hah’ sound?” Coates replied, “It’s an ancient, arcane dialect which we like to call ‘hood.’ ” One irony of Coates’s war on white innocence is that he has arrayed against it an army of white innocents.

In the fall of 2012, Coates told his editor at The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, that he wanted to make a case for racial reparations in the magazine. The case was formless then, but over the following months it took shape as an account of the experience of housing discrimination in Chicago and the way government policy deliberately fenced blacks into particular neighborhoods and denied them the benefits that went to whites nearby.

Coates’s hero was a 91-year-old man named Clyde Ross, who had left the segregated Mississippi Delta, where his family had been unable to keep white people from simply taking their possessions, and come north, only to be trapped by redlining and predatory banking into a home loan that he had no hope of repaying. Ross became an activist, but in Coates’s alchemy, he became a symbol of the presence of history, a physical reminder that these crimes did not happen so long ago. The great theme of the piece is plunder (the word appears 14 times) — of what was taken from African-Americans specifically because they were black and not because they were poor, and specifically because of government policy, and recently. Reparations were morally necessary, Coates argued, because the harm was so tangible. He wrote, “Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient.” The essay had a moral consequence too, to refocus the idea of reparations. Coates’s reparations weren’t about the country cleansing itself of original sin. They were restitution to be paid for property that continues to be taken. 

That article appeared two months before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Coates’s view of the world was growing starker. “It’s only in the last 18 months that he’s said he’s a nonbeliever,” said Jelani Cobb, a close friend of Coates’s since Howard and a historian at the University of Connecticut. If you did not believe in the soul, then police killings took on especially high stakes because the body was all you had. Coates said he would not have written Between the World and Me in 2008. His view was less bleak then, less concretized by history. “I have become radicalized,” he said.

Coates’s quarrel isn’t really with Obama, in the end, or with civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. It is instead with the metaphors through which they made a compromise with the country — Obama as the embodiment of hope and King the embodiment of dreams. These formulations gave white liberals a pass. Coates plays with both these words in his book, reconsidering them, twisting them around. In the very first scene, he disdains white Americans’ “reveling in a specious hope”; later, he urges his son to accept “the preferences of the universe itself,” among them the preference for “struggle over hope.” The Dream became a controlling metaphor for white innocence. “That what your ancestors did doesn’t matter,” Coates explained. “That you went out to the suburbs, and the houses grew from nothing and it’s not contaminated by anything. The idea that you’re entitled to it, and people who don’t have it are either pathological or lower than you. That nothing’s wrong.”

Part of what distinguishes Coates is that he is not interested in uplift. Obama’s insight into his own biography was that it revealed American progress. Coates saw far more stasis running in the background of his own life. When he spoke in Charleston, Obama took his metaphor from “Amazing Grace.” Through God’s grace, the president said, Americans could now see the legacy of brutality that the Confederate flag embodied clearly. Coates’s writing takes an almost opposite position: that religion is blindness, and that if you strip away the talk of hope and dreams and faith and progress, what you see are enduring structures of white supremacy and no great reason to conclude that the future will be better than the past.

“That’s the thing that linked Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,” Coates said. “People say Malcolm was a pessimist. He was a pessimist about America. But he was actually very optimistic. Malcolm very much believed in the dream of nationalism. He believed we could do it. And Martin believed in the dream of integration. He believed that black people could be successful if they did x, y, and z.” Coates did not share that optimism: African-Americans are a minority in America, and he sees limits to what they can control. “I suspect they were both wrong. I suspect that it’s not up to us.”

Coates with his son, Samori, in the summer of 2013. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Monday after the president’s eulogy in Charleston, Coates flew to Colorado for the Aspen Ideas Festival. Private jets were scattered over the tarmac, each sleek and bony as a fish skeleton. Aspen is a junket to end all junkets. Tickets cost up to $9,000; there are pop-up planetariums; at sponsor dinners, Atlantic writers sometimes stand up from their tables, forks clinking against glasses, and discourse for three minutes about, say, mass incarceration. The speakers are ideologically promiscuous. The collision of real intellectuals and real money is surreal.

The Atlantic invited Coates to the festival for the first time in 2008, when he was still a freelancer. He found it disorienting. At The Atlantic’s Publisher’s Dinner, he wound up talking with a very wealthy man who had made his money in department stores, who was telling a story about lending Peter Jennings his yacht. Coates liked him. “He was talking about how that morning he had gone out and taken his dog up into the mountains and seen a moose. And I was like, ‘Damn, that’s your life?’ Not in a mad way, I just did not know that this was what people did.”

Coates is more comfortable here now. That afternoon, he was wearing a red T-shirt that said MAKE CORNBREAD NOT WAR, which everyone complimented. He still notices the wealth, but it does not especially faze him; he has a theory about the ideological profile of the attendees (split between Republicans and Democrats, but with very few real conservatives); he knows which barbecue places are actually good and which restaurants will overcharge you. It was sunny and immaculate and the crowd was diverse in a way that made you, or at least me, think warmly about America. Soon Coates would walk toward a shuttle into Aspen for dinner, shortening his steps to keep behind the penguinlike form of Bill Kristol, also waiting for a ride. Coates gestured. “It would be very easy to come here and then complain about people making me have all these dinners and lunches with sponsors and how I’d much rather be out there standing with the people on 125th and Lenox,” Coates said. “But truthfully I’m very happy to be here. It’s very nice.”

The next morning, Coates debated Mitch Landrieu, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, on the sources of American violence. The exchange was moderated by Coates’s friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg. The mayor — shaven-headed, coachlike — had made crime in black neighborhoods a political focus. It was an issue on which he was accustomed to being the good guy. The search engine Bing had sponsored an app that allowed audience members to rate the speakers in real time. Landrieu said he hoped they liked him. Coates said, a little masochistically, he hoped they hated him.

Landrieu seemed mindful of all the ways a well-meaning white liberal in a situation like this might embarrass himself. He knew all the statistics about the scale of murders in African-American communities and mentioned them; he stated the problem in a way that focused on blacks as victims of violence rather than perpetrators; he told the audience that he had recently personally apologized for slavery; he said the core issue was “a pattern of behavior that has developed amongst young African-American men since 1980.” Coates asked if the change in 1980 wasn’t simply the increased prevalence of handguns. Landrieu said that was part of it. Then he talked about personal responsibility. “If you knocked me off the chair last week, that’s on you, but if you come back and I’m still on the floor this week, that’s on me.”

“It is my fault if I knocked you off the chair,” Coates said.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” said the mayor.

“No, it’s never not my fault that I knocked you off the chair.”

Landrieu started to talk about “black-on-black crime,” then retreated, saying he might be using the wrong words. Coates said the term didn’t offend him: “I think it’s actually inaccurate.” The plain fact, he said, was that when black people killed one another, the victims were their neighbors. They didn’t kill their neighbors because they were black. Inner-city violence, he said, had everything to do with the legacy of structural neglect in the inner city and nothing at all to do with culture. Even from the cheap seats, it was clear that Landrieu was struggling, that there was some turn in the politics of race that he had not fully comprehended, some way in which the old Clintonite phrasings were failing. In their place was a more radical language, of structuralism and supremacy. Now that language has a place in Aspen.

Coates’s book is, he said, “oddly conservative” in its sense of the futility of individuals confronting the structure of white supremacy, in its pessimism about what can be changed. Goldberg asked what he would do if he were in Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” He’d let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said.

There is a radical-chic crowd assembling around Coates. The oddity is that there is no obvious opposing force. Conservatives have not focused on him; the old anti-structuralist wing of liberalism has faded. In Aspen, even people who actually disagreed with him seemed to want to believe they did not. A woman in a nautical top (“Ta-Nehisi, I think you’re the greatest,” she began) asked Coates whether, in addition to structural solutions, black icons ought to do more to condemn crime. She mentioned “Oprah, Jay Z, whoever the kids relate to.” Coates patiently brought up the Charleston families forgiving the man who murdered their loved ones. “There’s no lack of effort on behalf of black people,” he said. “I think black folks are doing just fine.”

Late one evening at Aspen, Coates was in a lounge with some of the conference’s other speakers. Things were a little bit boozy. Melody Barnes, formerly the president’s domestic-policy adviser, sailed by. Goldberg monologued jokes from a couch. Everyone in the room was almost exactly equally famous — just a little bit famous — but somehow the evening seemed to hinge on when NPR’s Michele Norris would arrive. A friend of Coates’s was back from a conference-sponsored tour of a marijuana-grow operation, a little high and with product in her backpack. Coates inquired with interest about how she had procured it. The friend said that Coates had it all wrong, that this was Colorado in 2015 and no evasions were required, that all you had to do was go down to the store.

Progress was in the air — days after the Confederate flag had fallen and gay marriage had been legalized across the country, here we were in a place where you could buy marijuana by walking into a store. The changes seemed to speak to the great question of the late Obama era: Would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state? To Coates, the long arc of history was simply too strong, too rooted in human nature. From Baldwin’s writing, he had concluded that though struggle was essential, progress was not ordained. If white supremacy were ever eradicated, Coates said, he suspected it would simply be because the country had found “a new peon class,” someone else to kick around.

“Chaos is what we have,” he said. “That is what I believe. If to the end of its existence America harbors white supremacy, I don’t know how remarkable that would be. France has dealt with anti-Semitism since its inception.” America was built by humans, he said. “These things tend to have flaws.”

What a strange, dark, beguiling place America is. It killed Prince Jones. It reveres Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates said he would not have written Between the World and Me in 2008.“I have become radicalized.” Photo: Lyle Ashton Harris
Coates is leaving the country. In a few weeks, he’ll move to Paris with his wife and son for a year. Part of the attraction is simple pleasure. Part of it is the intellectual project of viewing state supremacy and race in another place, to discern whether America is truly exceptional or not. Part of it is the welcome exchange of one social mask for another: Because his French is not so smooth yet, he says, he is seen first as American in Paris rather than as black, and this is a relief.

Lately Coates has been putting himself through rituals of self-improvement: He has been learning to swim, and he has been learning French — conjugating verbs, aligning tenses. One Friday morning at the end of June, his instructor at the Berlitz school in Rockefeller Center asked him about the upcoming trip. In French, Coates said, “My wife tells me that when I am in France I am a different person.” Madame Danielle expressed surprise. “A different person,” he insisted. “Very extroverted. Very nice. Just different.”

Paris carries with it reminders of the black intellectuals who moved there before: Richard Wright, and especially Baldwin. “I think my exile saved my life,” Baldwin wrote in Esquire in 1961, “for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he’s able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.” To be clear, he added: “When I say ‘vision’ I do not mean ‘dream.’ ”


Coates’s vision is already clear. In the chapter of his book set in Paris, Coates finds himself ruminating on the old Baltimore codes that took him too long to shake. “What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible,” Coates writes to his son, about the allure of Paris. “I wanted you to see different people living by different rules.” Travel is an ordinary, bourgeois desire for one’s children: “I want him to see more than I saw,” Coates said. It is also the instinct of a survivor, who realizes his home is fundamentally inhospitable: to keep an eye on the exits, and to map out the routes of escape.

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