Group items tagged

The judge scheduled conferences Thursday to "discuss a new trial date," indicating that he expects prosecutors to try Porter again. Williams gave Porter the option to appear Thursday, but he declined.

During arguments, prosecutors focused on what they said was Porter's failure to take care of Gray while he was in custody by not getting him medical care or buckling his seatbelt.

"In the coming days, if some choose to demonstrate peacefully to express their opinion, that is their constitutional right," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said. "In the case of any disturbance in the city, we are prepared to respond. We will protect our neighborhoods, our businesses and the people of our city."

Porter, who took the stand in his defense, said that Gray was "unable to give me a reason for a medical emergency" and that it was not his duty to fasten the seatbelts of people who have been arrested in the van.

And in the meantime, Baltimore worked to rebuild and remember.

"With the eyes of the world on Baltimore City, we must ensure that any protests that take place are peaceful, and we must ensure that the process of healing our community continues. We must continue to channel our emotions into strong, positive change, so that, as a city, we truly see our young men of color before it is too late," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, said in a statement. "This is the road to more equal justice in our community."

"I think it went botched, I don't feel as if the prosecution was at tight as it needed to be by virtue of the fact that the jury still had a whole lot of unanswered questions," he said. "To be clear that they were deadlocked on all four charges and got no clarity or consensus on any of them. So I hope that in this retrial they'll be more clear about how it is they present the case."

ers should remain calm. He described the mistrial as "a bump on the road to justice."

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

Among the cities that were still in the running for Amazon’s dangled plum was Washington. Amazon had already developed a conspicuous presence in the nation’s capital: It had vastly increased its lobbying presence there, it was doing major business in selling its cloud services to the federal government and homeland-security industrial complex, and Jeff Bezos had not only purchased the local newspaper, he also picked Washington’s largest private home, a $23 million mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood, to which he added $12 million in renovations.

These were streets in East Baltimore that were once home to blocks after blocks of working- and middle-class families, white and Black, including many who worked at Beth Steel. For the better part of a century, those jobs, and those homes, had sustained a stable existence for countless families and undergirded economic vitality for the city as a whole.Now, like Sparrows Point before it, that segment of Baltimore’s built landscape, and the history it represented, was slowly disappearing. And the dismantling of one town was being used to prop up another, with new residents — some of them likely arriving for high-paid jobs at Amazon’s HQ2 — blithely purchasing the facade of a false past.

Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.

Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. McNamara affirms Morris' framing of lesson 7 in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: "We see what we want to believe."

Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. McNamara says that, even though the United States is the strongest nation in the world, it should never use that power unilaterally: "if we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasoning."

We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.

we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.

War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.

If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.

Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.

We failed then—and have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

Therefore, it can be hard to accept at face value any promises made or policies articulated.

violent revolt has often been the catalyst for change in this country and that nonviolence, at least in part, draws its power from the untenable alternative of violence.

We can’t rush to label violent protesters as “thugs” while reserving judgment about the violence of police killings until a full investigation has been completed and all the facts are in.

We can’t condemn explosions of frustration born of generations of marginalization and oppression while paying only passing glances to similar explosions of frustration over the inanity of a sports team’s victory or loss or a gathering for a pumpkin festival.

Nonviolence, as a strategy, hinges on faith: It is a faith in ultimate moral rectitude and the perfectibility of systems of power.

The time that any population will silently endure suffering is term-limited and the end of that term is unpredictable, often set by a moment of trauma that pushes a simmering discontent over into civil disobedience.

in those moments, America feigns shock and disbelief. Where did this anger come from? How can we quickly restore calm? How do we instantly start to heal?

That is because America likes to hide its sins. That is because it wants its disaffected, dispossessed and disenfranchised to use the door under the steps. That is because America sees its underclass as some sort of infinity sponge: capable of quietly absorbing disadvantage, neglect and oppression forever for the greater good of superficial calm and illusory order.

Zora Neale Hurston: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

“Bernie’s still being given a bit of a free pass by the national media,” he says. “I do not believe that he would be a strong candidate for our party in the fall. And, except for three months out of every four years, he’s not even of our party.”

Some such stories, he says, feature in another manuscript, written with the guidance of the late Richard Ben Cramer, the author of What It Takes, “the definitive book about the 1988 presidential race” in which Hart flew so high then fell. Its title is Baltimore: A Memoir and a piece of it is out there on the web. Some want O’Malley to rewrite it, he says, to tie his own story more closely to the idea he was the model for the mayor of Charm City played by Aidan Gillen in The Wire, David Simon’s groundbreaking HBO series. He’s not keen.

Of course, much of the energy that delivered such victories was determinedly progressive, akin to or directly supportive of Sanders and his transformative effect on the liberal cause. But O’Malley is as much a pillar of the party as Sanders is not.

e smiles. “Do you want me to speak more frankly?”

Here’s a guy who has been a kind of stalwart of the National Rifle Association, a man who said immigrants steal our jobs right up until he ran for president,

Such focus seems timely: with the federal government in Trump’s sclerotic grip, cities in particular have begun to take a lead. On climate change, for example, some US mayors have reacted to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal by saying they will simply pursue its aims themselves.

The Gonzaga gathering, O’Malley says, is a friendly one, a chance for the old boys “to ask, ‘Hey, how are you doing? How’s your wife? How’s your kids? What are you up to?’

“We recognized each other from the Sunday shows and having served together. We shook hands … but it was not a moment for me to simply say, ‘Hey, how’s work?’ I know how work is with him.

om Perez, once the Maryland secretary of labor, ended up in the role but O’Malley supported a young mayor from the Republican heartlands: Pete Buttigieg, now a challenger in the presidential primary.

But in an echo of the frustrations of 2016, O’Malley criticises the way the DNC has run the primary, particularly the way debate qualifications based on polling data and donor numbers – changed this week – have kept the likes of the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (“a friend” to whom O’Malley has donated) and the Montana governor Steve Bullock firmly out of the spotlight.

I was out there rattling the tin cup, from county square to county square.”

“All of that’s part of the process. But at the end of the day, we have to nominate someone who can defeat him and who can bring our country together and govern.”

Baltimore County Executive John A. Olszewski, Jr., said, “leaders across Maryland have been forced to scramble to meet with our legal teams, health officials, and neighboring jurisdictions to understand how this impacts our own executive orders and to determine if and how to use our own local authority moving forward.”

Maryland ranks in the middle of states in the percentage of its people who have been given at least one vaccine dose, according to a New York Times database, and somewhat above average in the number of new cases it has been reporting lately relative to its population — 13 per 100,000 residents. All three of the variants of the virus that are being tracked by the C.D.C. have been reported there, but only one in significant numbers: B.1.1.7, which was first identified in Britain and is more transmissible and possibly more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.

"Everybody passes the buck," said MacCallum. "I'm waiting for a leader to say we made a mistake," she added, playing a tape of de Blasio accusing the MTA of "fear-mongering" about subway safety issues and remarking that such alleged behavior is happening "at the instruction of the governor."

"The last wave of gun violence was stopped in New York City by proactive policing: Intense, meticulous, proactive policing. I want to bring back stop-and-frisk in a constitutional way," Rivera said. 

After all, this is the same President who called places such as Haiti "shithole countries," excoriated four congresswomen of color by telling them to "go back" to "the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came," and pointedly dismissed majority-black Baltimore as a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess."

"Lynching is a reprehensible stain on this nation's history, as is this President," Sen. Kamala Harris of California tweeted on Tuesday. "We'll never erase the pain and trauma of lynching, and to invoke that torture to whitewash your own corruption is disgraceful."

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey: "Lynching is an act of terror used to uphold white supremacy. Try again."

"How careless white America has been with black pain," The Washington Post's Karen Attiah tweeted on Tuesday. "The same careless spirit that allows Trump to compare lynching to a constitutional process. The same spirit that sees slave plantations as romantic venues. That spirit that loves black forgiveness after white violence."

That said, Trump is perhaps the most obvious, most cavalier offender: Regardless of the past -- including his own -- the former reality television personality will always find a way to make himself the star of the story.

Clinton Foundation gathering in Morocco at the behest of its king, who had pledged $12 million to the charity.

“She created this mess and she knows it,” a close aide, Huma Abedin, wrote of Mrs. Clinton in a January 2015 email.

Founded in 1997, when Mr. Clinton was still president, the foundation has raised roughly $2 billion to fund projects around the world, helping African farmers improve their yields, Haitians recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake and millions of people gain access to cheaper H.I.V./AIDS medication, among other accomplishments.

At the time, she was beginning to exert influence at the foundation, expressing concerns that Mr. Band and others were trying to use the charity to make money for themselves, and accusing another aide in her father’s personal office of installing spyware.

One such donor, Laureate International Universities, a for-profit education company based in Baltimore, was paying Mr. Clinton $3.5 million annually “to provide advice” and serve as its honorary chairman

Chelsea Clinton helped enlist an outside law firm to audit the Clinton Foundation’s practices.

the foundation “ensure that all donors are properly vetted and that no inappropriate quid pro quos are offered to donors in return for contributions.”

In August, the foundation said it would no longer accept foreign donations should Mrs. Clinton win the White House.

Russian government’s efforts to use cyberattacks to influence the election in favor of the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

asked whether Mrs. Clinton’s name would be used in connection with the foundation, which is formally known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. “It will invite press scrutiny and she’ll be held accountable for what happens there,”

a lawyer and top aide, said she discussed with Mrs. Clinton various “steps” to take to adjust her relationship with the foundation, including her resignation from the foundation’s board.

Mr. Band, who helped Mr. Clinton build the foundation, clearly felt irritated by Chelsea Clinton’s stream of implications that he had padded his own pockets from his work for her father.

“As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far,” he wrote. “A kiss on the cheek while she is sticking the knife in the back, and front.”

We now know that no individual, no matter how singular, can bend the moral arc of the universe. Not even Dr. King could.

In his last book, in 1967, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” Dr. King warned that the movement was already hobbled by delusion. “The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro,” he wrote. “They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

He urged us to become “creative dissenters” and hold the country “to a higher destiny.”

So what does creative dissent look like in a post-assimilation America?

We must recognize that institutions are far more powerful than individuals, no matter how many people of color can be counted in leadership.

In addition, history matters. Black people in charge of, or embedded in, institutions that have not atoned for their history of racism can make it easier for those institutions to ignore or dismiss present-day claims of racial bias. That’s because the path to leadership has often meant accepting institutions as they are, not disrupting them.

Consider what black Harvard Business School alumni told the journalist Ellis Cose: A key to success is “never talk about race (or gender) if you can avoid it, other than to declare that race (or gender) does not matter.”

As the failure of the black political leadership in Baltimore to protect black lives and the limited ability of black police chiefs to curb brutality in their own departments demonstrate, people of color can inherit or perpetuate structures of inequality

Diversity and inclusion policies, therefore, should grow out of truth and reconciliation practices as well as strategic hiring plans.

Intentional transformation, even reparations, one government agency, one company, one college at a time moves us past the denial and the empty promises

Georgetown University’s decision to make reparations for its past is a powerful expression of creative dissent. Last year, after its president met with descendants of the enslaved African-Americans owned by the university he declared, “We cannot do our best work if we refuse to take ownership of such a critical part of our history.” Georgetown will provide preferential admissions to descendants, akin to legacy status for the children of alumni.

We should judge transformation by how our institutions behave on behalf of individuals rather than the other way around.

Mr. Obama himself seems ready to move on from the era of assimilation

he acknowledged, for the first time, the very real threat of racism to our democracy and the contingent nature of racial progress.

In a revision to the American creed, he added, equality may be self-evident but it has “never been self-executing.”

he listed specific areas where systemic racism needed to be uprooted, which he hadn’t done in his State of the Union addresses or inaugural speeches: “If we’re going to be serious about race going forward, we need to uphold laws against discrimination — in hiring, and in housing, and in education and in the criminal justice system.”

The future is no longer about “firsts.” It is instead about the content of the character of the institutions our new leaders will help us rebuild.

The report is likely the Justice Department’s last major investigation before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, the Justice Department has aggressively investigated nearly two dozen police departments and pushed for reform, particularly after high-profile police killings. But Trump and his attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, have voiced skepticism of the investigations, suggesting that the Trump administration will do less to hold local police departments accountable through the Justice Department.

We found that officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone — including unarmed individuals.

Yet just 1.3 percent of complaints over racist language between 2011 and March 2016 were sustained by internal investigators, the Justice Department found.

CPD has not provided officers with adequate guidance to understand how and when they may use force, or how to safely and effectively control and resolve encounters to reduce the need to use force

But it’s not just tolerance; at times the police department appears to engage in an active cover-up — particularly through “a code of silence” and by hiding evidence.

One particularly striking statistic: More than 30,000 complaints are made against the Chicago Police Department every year. But while the department sustains less than 2 percent of those complaints, most are never investigated at all.

Still, it’s worth emphasizing that these findings may not be exclusive to Chicago. Whether it’s Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans, or Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.In that sense, it’s not just Chicago policing that’s flawed, but American policing as a whole.

But that correlation might exist because some of the factors in the way bail is set are likely related to guilt—so correlations found between bail and convictions have been hard to interpret in the sense that past studies have not been able to pinpoint whether those negative outcomes are really due to bail being assigned.

This randomness is ideal for what economists call a natural experiment

being assigned money bail increases the probability of conviction by about 6 percentage points and also causes a 4 percentage point increase in the risk that someone would go on to commit another crime.

: That paper used the same data set from Philadelphia, and concluded that pretrial detention led to a 6.6 percentage point increase in the likelihood of conviction.

“Many of these convictions appear to be the result of guilty pleas by detained persons,” says Ethan Frenchman, a public defender in Baltimore and co-author of the study. “Our paper further demonstrates how the American money-bail system is not only grossly unfair and irrational, but imposes far greater harms on defendants and the public than we realize.”

One reason, he theorized, is that 20- and 30-somethings are having a harder time finding the full-time jobs they need to afford their homes and real estate taxes. Nationwide, he said, the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who own homes has declined sharply.

Unless downtowns become livelier, he said, the island’s “long-term sustainability” will be hurt because new businesses will not locate in places where they cannot attract young professionals.

the city is safer and more energized than it was a generation ago, and its allure has grown. Cities like Baltimore, Washington and Boston have also revitalized rundown or desolate neighborhoods.

But he said there is also survey data that seems to show “that younger adults are becoming more drawn to denser, more compact urban environments that offer a number of amenities within walking distance of where they live.” And, he said, more ethnically mixed communities — with more rental housing and immigrants — are gaining population.

His theory is that young people are marrying later and moving to the suburbs later. Others say that young people seem to be taking more time finding themselves, and are willing to flounder at home for a time, pushing the traditional arc of adult life into the future. Continue reading the main story 21 Comments “Parents used to be 35ish, now they’re 45ish,” Mr. McCormack said. “What we’re seeing is not so much an exodus as a later arrival.”

“Part of white fragility is to assume that when we talk about racism, we are calling someone out as being individually a racist,” he said. “So if you say we're going to talk about racism, white people think you're going to call them a name. But for most people of color it's a system. And we're talking about dealing with a structure so the real problem is the system.”

When separate groups of people are using the same word with different implied meanings then problems will persist.

These are not rational decisions. These are fear-based politics that create avoidable disasters in which all suffer. This new wave of segregation fear is surging across the country. In response to the continued white fragility panic of 2008, conservative political movements are set to capitalize on the cycles of manufactured hysteria. “We are watching the repeal of the 20th century,” Wise said.

The fear is that if someone seeks to define and fix racism, many white people feel like they’re being directly attacked. So instead of waiting for the attack, white fragility promotes protection by putting punitive restrictions on “the others.”

The Obama era has been an interesting petri dish of white fragility. On the heels of a moderate economic recovery, we’ve seen sweeping new state laws aimed at social issues: voting rights restrictions, defunding of Planned Parenthood, anti-gay legislation, Stand Your Ground bills, and restrictive union laws to weaken their bargaining power. These laws have resulted in a rollback of rights for minorities, women, the LGBT movement, and the working class.

The strangest thing about white fragility politics is that the detrimental policy results are spread out across race and class. Yet, the political results for the conservative movement priming the pump of white fragility and rage is election victories. And why should they change when they can get large sections of an aging white population to consistently vote for policies proven to statistically hurt their economic chances, personal health, their children’s education, and their very safety?

When it comes to racism and increased segregation, both Wise and DiAngelo noted that there seems to be this rigid unwillingness to address any inequality, because it would upset the very people who are both benefiting from the injustice and refusing to acknowledge its existence.

When I asked Wise and DiAngelo to give me something hopeful for the future, they both gave me a bleak picture. When I suggested that more facts and evidence could sway people, they disagreed. “People who are deeply committed to a world view don’t change their opinions when confronted with new facts,” Wise said. “Oddly enough, new facts cause them to dig in more deeply.”

The technique holds the power to repair or enhance any human gene. “It raises the most fundamental of issues about how we are going to view our humanity in the future and whether we are going to take the dramatic step of modifying our own germline and in a sense take control of our genetic destiny, which raises enormous peril for humanity,”

The paper’s authors, however, are concerned about countries that have less regulation in science. They urge that “scientists should avoid even attempting, in lax jurisdictions, germline genome modification for clinical application in humans” until the full implications “are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.”

Though such a moratorium would not be legally enforceable and might seem unlikely to exert global influence, there is a precedent. In 1975, scientists worldwide were asked to refrain from using a method for manipulating genes, the recombinant DNA technique, until rules had been established.

Though highly efficient, the technique occasionally cuts the genome at unintended sites. The issue of how much mistargeting could be tolerated in a clinical setting is one that Dr. Doudna’s group wants to see thoroughly explored before any human genome is edited.

“We worry about people making changes without the knowledge of what those changes mean in terms of the overall genome,” Dr. Baltimore said. “I personally think we are just not smart enough — and won’t be for a very long time — to feel comfortable about the consequences of changing heredity, even in a single individual.”

Many ethicists have accepted the idea of gene therapy, changes that die with the patient, but draw a clear line at altering the germline, since these will extend to future generations. The British Parliament in February approved the transfer of mitochondria, small DNA-containing organelles, to human eggs whose own mitochondria are defective. But that technique is less far-reaching because no genes are edited.

There are two broad schools of thought on modifying the human germline, said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Doudna group. One is pragmatic and seeks to balance benefit and risk. The other “sets up inherent limits on how much humankind should alter nature,” she said. Some Christian doctrines oppose the idea of playing God, whereas in Judaism and Islam there is the notion “that humankind is supposed to improve the world.” She described herself as more of a pragmatist, saying, “I would try to regulate such things rather than shut a new technology down at its beginning.

The Doudna group calls for public discussion, but is also working to develop some more formal process, such as an international meeting convened by the National Academy of Sciences, to establish guidelines for human use of the genome-editing technique.“We need some principled agreement that we want to enhance humans in this way or we don’t,” Dr. Jaenisch said. “You have to have this discussion because people are gearing up to do this.”

The first and most important of these is basic integrity

He and his wife have not only displayed superior integrity themselves, they have mostly attracted and hired people with high personal standards.

all sorts of unsightly characters floating around politics, including in the Clinton camp and in Gov. Chris Christie’s administration

Second, a sense of basic humanity.

Donald Trump has spent much of this campaign vowing to block Muslim immigration. You can only say that if you treat Muslim Americans as an abstraction. President Obama, meanwhile, went to a mosque, looked into people’s eyes and gave a wonderful speech reasserting their place as Americans.

Imagine if Barack and Michelle Obama joined the board of a charity

You’d be happy to have such people in your community. Could you say that comfortably about Ted Cruz?

Third, a soundness in his decision-making process.

Take health care. Passing Obamacare was a mighty lift that led to two gigantic midterm election defeats.

Sanderscare would take employer coverage away from tens of millions of satisfied customer

This is epic social disruption

Fourth, grace under pressure.

Fifth, a resilient sense of optimism

To hear Sanders or Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson campaign is to wallow in the pornography of pessimism, to conclude that this country is on the verge of complete collapse.

But there is a tone of ugliness creeping across the world, as democracies retreat, as tribalism mounts, as suspiciousness and authoritarianism take center stage.Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.