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It’s no small thing that several Minneapolis police officers, including Chief Medaria Arradondo, took the stand against Mr. Chauvin in his trial over the death of George Floyd. Fourteen officers in the same department signed an open letter last year saying Mr. Chauvin “failed as a human and stripped George Floyd of his dignity and life.”

Three generations of police officers protected the accused in uniform.

Among the victims were several people of color. “Two African-American men are dead,” said the city’s police chief, Carmen Best, at the time, “at a place where they claim to be working for Black Lives Matter.”

We need every cop to wear a body camera. We need to curb the power of police unions, the biggest protectors of the blue wall. And we need officers of all stripes to back the words of those 14 in Minneapolis. They said, “This is not who we are.” Now prove it.

The challenge of global climate action isn’t that other people will benefit from your emissions cuts; it’s that many interests actively oppose decarbonization. The key to passing climate policy is stitching together a coalition that will support and sustain decarbonization.

is is familiar enough: Coal mines suffer; electric utilities prosper. Because political leaders want, above all, to maintain the support of key constituencies, climate policy flows from a societal negotiation between potential winners and potential losers, a fight between climate reformers and climate obstructionists

In essence, climate policy restructures the economy, creating new economic winners and losers

Surveying the past few decades, they find that countries almost never care about free riding. “Governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do,” they write, “and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not.”

When Donald Trump took the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, other nations did not react by withdrawing as well. Instead, revulsion at Trump himself—and his climate views by proxy—strengthened political support in those countries for continuing climate action.

both Aklin and Mildenberger’s coalitional idea and the free-rider conception of climate action seem to operate within the Biden administration

The president’s domestic-policy staff, epitomized by his adviser Brian Deese, is pursuing coalition-building climate policies, primarily characterized by public spending. The policies spread the economic gains of decarbonization around and increase the Biden coalition’s support for further action.

An older guard, epitomized by Kerry, hopes to secure other countries’ involvement as well, in order to prevent free riding.

Whose theory is better? Neither seems necessarily awful to me. Kerry’s approach actually fits within Deese’s: Securing foreign climate commitments makes the task easier at home.

now. The Biden administration has sold climate action as concretely in America’s interests: Its infrastructure package seeks to develop green industries not out of a sense of global do-goodism but because America’s economic competitiveness is at stake. And Xi Jinping’s government has, since last year, pursued aggressive climate policy as a way to build its international prestige. China uses climate policy to sell the orderliness and sanity of its system over the cacophonous and chaotic American approach.

So the weekend’s announcement seemed anticlimactic, to be honest. Of course the Biden administration and the Xi government now say they want further emissions reductions in the 2020s: Both governments are already acting domestically as if climate action is in their concrete interests.

. The question for me is whether—during this transition period—the politics of free riding help or hinder Biden’s attempt to forge a stronger pro-decarbonization coalition. If Biden commits to slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, will that make the public pay more attention to—and feel more skittish about—the rest of his climate-policy playbook?

The infrastructure plan is what’s supposed to put the better in the White House’s “Build Back Better” agenda. It’s meant to push the American economy toward decarbonization and climate-friendly growth.

Many articles have tried to answer what, exactly, the word infrastructure means. Yet the centrality of the bill has never quite been clearly stated. This is the climate bill.

I regularly hear from Americans of all ages and occupations that Congress should do something about climate change. This plan … well, it’s something. In the months to come, climate-concerned Americans will have to ask themselves: Should Congress do it?

Its marquee policy is probably its clean-energy standard for the electricity sector, which aims to zero out carbon emissions from power generation by 2035

this bill hurls several different and mostly sensible tools at the climate problem.

But nearly as important is its extension of certain key green-energy tax credits; it also converts these into direct payouts from the IRS, which should make them simpler, cheaper, and more equitable to implement.

Others may be peeved that it isn’t labeled a Green New Deal, even though it borrows that policy’s love of public investment (while omitting its populist theory of change)

In short: If you want the United States to act at a national level to fight climate change, this bill is it. This is the climate bill.

He also somewhat infamously said that climate policy was “like a Christmas tree,” in that you could hang any other policy you wanted on it. Police reform, land-use regulation, monetary policy—these are all (to varying degrees of plausibility) climate policy.

There are worse strategies. Given the acrimony that greeted previous climate plans, the new strategy seems to be keeping these moves as low-key as possible—working to pass historic climate legislation while not making a huge deal of it.

The House of Representatives will take up the bill this week. Now that Congress has brought back earmarks, which allow individual lawmakers to flag budget lines for specific projects or nonprofits, representatives are likely to ladle all sorts of goodies into the bill. Then it will go to the Senate, where the buffet will be piled even higher than before, and then, if all goes well, Biden will sign it.

The proposal has flaws. A foretaste of the criticism:

Many climate activists, for instance, allege that it does not spend enough money on a problem as existential as climate change

it does not adopt a revenue-neutral carbon tax (even though—I must add—the Senate has no appetite for such a policy)

One of the intellectual fathers of this strategy was Steve Rayner, a social scientist at Oxford University who died last year at age 66.

The bill funds its work by raising taxes on corporations; in the eyes of many economists, infrastructure improvements are better funded through deficit spending, because public works boost the economy so much that they raise the amount of money collected by other taxes, meaning infrastructure essentially pays for itself.

And yet. This bill is the only policy on the table. Congress will modify it, but lawmakers are not going to draft another legislative vehicle. The U.S. is not getting a carbon tax, a Green New Deal, or a new Department of Climate Change. We’re getting this proposal. It’s something. I think respect for our role as democratic citizens compels climate-concerned Americans to ask ourselves: Is this long-awaited something better than nothing?

At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.

The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender

Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women

But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.

In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 

After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”

The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.

Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.

Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.

Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.

the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.

But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.

Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders

they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;

and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.

Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.

Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.

If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024

CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.

second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.

In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

Congress now has a month to pass the bill. In July, it will go to committee, where Senators Reed and Inhofe’s influence leaves the legislation’s solutions vulnerable to being watered down or minimized.

Obama is this triumph of political persuasion and compromise. And then he also leaves behind, certainly a less persuadable Republican Party and a more fractured and polarized political system. And I’m not saying that’s his fault. But it is part of the whole thing, in this really, I think, difficult way that is shaping our politics now.

But even after, I think, a shift in perspective around George Floyd, we’re still back into the trenches of how do we get different district attorneys elected? And how do we actually reform police departments? And now, we’re back in the world of politics. And as soon as we get back into the world of politics, it’s a numbers game.

But look, when you’re dealing at the macro level, when you’re dealing with 300 million people with enormous regional, and racial, and religious, and cultural differences, then now you are having to make some calculations. So let’s take the example you used. And I write extensively about the emergence of the Tea Party. And we could see that happening with Sarah Palin.

I set up that kind of persuasion and pluralism tension, because something that really struck me about the book is how much it lives in paradoxes, how much it’s comfortable with the idea, that you’re comfortable with the idea that something and its opposite are true at the same time. And I think of a politics of persuasion as being the central paradox of your presidency. So you accomplished this massive act of persuasion, winning the presidency twice, as a Black man with the middle name Hussein.

Now, why that is the way I think about things generally partly is temperament. Partly it’s biographical. As I’ve written not just in this recent book but in past books, if you’re a kid whose parents are from Kansas and Kenya, and you’re born in Hawaii, and you live in Indonesia, you are naturally having to figure out, well, how did all these pieces fit together?

So you have this real difference now between the parties, where Democrats need to win right of center voters to win national power. But Republicans do not need to win left of center voters to win national power. And that’s really changed the strategic picture for both of them.

And even on historically difficult issues like race, people aren’t going around thinking, man, how can we do terrible things to people who don’t look like us? That’s not people’s perspective. What they are concerned about is not being taken advantage of, or is their way of life and traditions slipping away from them?

I mean, I think it’s fair to say that the difference in how George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama administration would’ve approached the basic issue of a pandemic and vaccines, there might be differences in terms of efficacy, or how well programs were run, et cetera. But it’s hard to imagine a previous Republican administration completely ignoring science.

For a century, the Tulsa race massacre of May 31, 1921, went largely ignored by sitting U.S. presidents, never prompting a trip specifically to honor those killed in the once-thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood until now.

The Black educator Booker T. Washington coined the name "Black Wall Street" for Greenwood in recognition of thriving Black middle, upper and professional classes with Black-owned businesses dotting the streets.

At roughly 100 days into Biden's presidency, 89% of Black Americans say they approved of the job he is doing – more than any other racial group, according to a Pew Research Center poll. The administration's responses, particularly regarding economic inequality and criminal justice will be closely watched. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which many had touted would pass by the anniversary of Floyd's death May 25, remains with the Senate.

The White House has been criticized by some racial justice advocates for not going far enough in advancing some police reform and other progressive measures, though activists have conceded Biden officials are more responsive than past administrations on the issue.

Mr. Vollmer’s 1936 textbook makes a similar suggestion, though more as an approach to reducing crime than Ms. Kaba’s goal of creating a cooperative society in which police are obsolete. Mr. Vollmer asserted that school, welfare, health, and recreation were more likely to prevent crime than jails.

To this point, Mr. Vollmer would perhaps respond that reforming the police doesn’t come cheap — and that public funds could be used to educate would-be officers. When he forced out his deputies, he rebuilt the department with extra money from the city for education, raises and lab equipment. The proposals of Ms. Kaba and other police abolitionists would put public funds toward educating a wide range of people in community support jobs: mental health experts, conflict de-escalation teams, addiction specialists and advocates who can help the unhoused find shelter.

CPS also agreed to two years of ongoing oversight of the anti-bullying program.

In January, a three-judge panel from the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected CPS' motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

The boy's parent's provided "multiple examples of specific instances" in which school officials "withheld information regarding Taye's safety and wellbeing" and failed to punish the students that attacked Taye,

"This Court finds their behavior, as alleged, to be egregious and clearly reckless, thus barring them from the shield of government immunity," Bouie Donald wrote.

At the center of the suit was security footage from two days before Taye's death, in which the boy is seen falling unconscious at school.

The lawsuit alleged that the school knowingly withheld the bathroom incident from the boy's parents.School officials maintained that a school nurse called his mother to pick Gabriel up from school and take him to the hospital.

If agreed to, the settlement will require the district to improve its efforts to track individuals involved in repeat incidents of bullying, as well as locations in the school where repeat instances of bullying take place.

The proposed settlement also calls for "placing an appropriate memorial" to Gabriel at Carson Elementary School.The Cincinnati Board of Education is expected to hold a vote Monday night that, if it passes, will finalize the proposed settlement.

The scale of the spending, which Biden has made the center of his economic plans, is an intentional effort to transform an economy the President has repeatedly said leaves too many behind and, just as importantly, has made the US less competitive in the face of an ascendant China.

At its core, the budget underscores the fundamental divide in viewpoints between the two parties in the wake of the pandemic -- as well as the clear shift in the Democratic Party towards an embrace of ramping up spending and tax increases on corporations in the wealthy in order to expand the federal government's role in assisting those on the lower-end of the income scale.

Biden is asking Congress for $932 billion for discretionary, non-defense programs for fiscal year 2022 -- a significant increase from last year. The President has proposed $756 billion in defense funding, which is also an uptick from last year

Young argued the investments are "front-loaded" and would be "more than paid for" by the reforms to the tax code that would require the wealthiest of Americans and corporations to pay higher taxes. The President has repeatedly pledged that Americans making less than $400,000 would not have to pay increased taxes.

Biden has made racial equity a top focus of his administration, but there is no specific line item in the budget focused on addressing racial inequality. Young argued it wasn't necessary because Biden has directed the entire federal government to address racial inequality as it implements all of its programs.

In addition to the American Jobs Plan and the American Families plan, the budget proposal calls for:

The presidential budget did not include the Hyde amendment -- a four-decade-old ban on federal dollars being used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the woman's life is in danger -- which Biden previously supported before reversing course and denouncing during the Democratic primary. Abortion rights supporters had long called for Biden to drop the measure.

In his budget overview, the President calls on Congress to enact several of his major health care initiatives, including lowering prescription drug costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, creating a public health insurance option, giving those age 60 and older the option to enroll in Medicare and closing the Medicaid coverage gap.

Instead, the White House budget focuses on the health care measures contained in the American Families Plan, which would make permanent enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that were contained in the Democrats' $1.9 trillion rescue plan that Biden signed into law in March. That boost to the federal subsidies currently lasts only two years.

The budget also doesn't include increasing the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, which Biden had included in his $1.9 trillion relief proposal. But the measure was dropped from the Senate version after the parliamentarian ruled it did not meet a strict set of guidelines needed to move forward in the Senate's reconciliation process.

What is in the budget is setting the hourly minimum wage at $15 for federal contractors. This process is already underway, thanks to an executive order Biden signed in late April.

The setback, while widely expected, poured fuel on calls from a growing number of Democratic senators and progressives to change the Senate’s rules. 

A coalition of 57 progressive groups released a joint statement arguing that Democrats could either “protect the filibuster or deliver on critical and popular policies.” 

“The path forward is clear: The filibuster must be eliminated as a weapon that a minority of senators can wield to veto popular democracy-protecting bills,” the groups said. 

The setback on the commission vote comes as Democrats, and some Republicans, were also frustrated by a group of conservative senators slow-walking a debate on China-related legislation, even after a lengthy committee process and amendment votes on the Senate floor. 

He is vowing to give a sweeping bill to overhaul federal elections a vote in June, as well as a paycheck bill previously filibustered by Republicans under the Obama administration. He’s also mulling bringing up a LGTBQ protection bill that previously passed the House and gun reforms amid slow-going talks that Murphy is leading with GOP senators. 

He will also announce new specifics on the $10 billion community revitalization fund included in his infrastructure proposal.

New competitive grants totaling $15 billion will target neighborhoods where people have been cut off from jobs, schools and businesses because of previous transportation investments, Biden is expected to announce. And the American Jobs Plan will also invest $31 billion to support minority-owned small businesses.

"I am 107 years old and have never seen justice. I pray that one day I will," Fletcher told lawmakers. Fletcher was seven years old when she witnessed the massacre.

He said the federal government needs to "acknowledge the role that it has played in stripping wealth and opportunity from Black communities."

The President said his administration is addressing longstanding racial inequalities by investing in programs to provide capital to small businesses in economically disadvantaged areas, and ensuring that infrastructure projects advance racial equity and environmental justice.

Missing from the rollout was a plan to cancel student debt, which disproportionately affects Black students, or address the issue of reparations, federal repayments that relatives of Tulsa victims say could restore what was erased. White House officials have said that, as with the broader issue of reparations for Black Americans, the president supports a study of the issue.

Mr. Biden’s visit to Tulsa was a somber one. Before he delivered remarks, Mr. Biden met privately with survivors of the massacre, each between the ages of 101 and 107, whom he mentioned throughout his speech.

The massacre was sparked by the arrest of Dick Rowland, 19, a Black shoe shiner who was accused of assault against Sarah Page, 17, a white elevator operator. As he toured the Greenwood Culture Center, the president was told that within 24 hours of that encounter, the mob that formed in the wake of Mr. Rowland’s arrest destroyed much of Greenwood. The case was later dismissed.

But the political response to the recent killings remains uncertain. Mr. Biden had vowed to secure passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by May 25, the first anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death. The bill would ban the use of chokeholds, impose restrictions on deadly force and make it easier to prosecute officers for wrongdoing. He missed that deadline, but lawmakers in both parties have expressed optimism that they will be able to reach a compromise on the legislation in the weeks ahead. Despite investigations, no one was ever convicted of crimes related to the Tulsa massacre. Mr. Biden has promised that his Justice Department will be a more active participant in helping to root out bias and bigotry in American police departments. The department has already begun “pattern or practice” investigations in Louisville, Ky., and Minneapolis, which are intended to examine excessive force, biased policing and other misconduct by officers.

President Biden said on Tuesday that he had directed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead Democrats in a sweeping legislative effort to protect voting rights, an issue that is critical to his legacy but one that sees little hope of success in a divided Senate.

Her foreign policy portfolio comes in addition to a host of other engagements, including, but not limited to: selling the American Rescue Plan, championing Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package, representing women in the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate, assisting small businesses, assessing water policy, promoting racial equity, combating vaccine hesitancy, and fighting for police reform.

Mr. Biden has focused on issues related to voting rights for much of his career, but he faces especially wrenching decisions when it comes to the voting rights legislation he has asked Ms. Harris to help shepherd through Congress.

Known as the For the People Act, the bill is the professed No. 1 priority of Democrats this year. It would overhaul the nation’s election system, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But after passing the House, it hit a wall of Republican opposition in the Senate.

One option for Democrats would be to ram the bill through on a partisan vote by further rolling back one of the foundations of Senate tradition, the filibuster. But at least one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, remains opposed to the idea, potentially scuttling it.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ ” Mr. Biden said. “Well, because Biden has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” a likely swipe at Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another moderate Democrat.

Texas Democrats called for Congress to pass national legislation that would protect the right to vote. "We did our part to stop SB 7. Now we need Congress to do their part by passing HR 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act," tweeted state Rep. Erin Zwiener, D-Driftwood.

The For the People Act passed the House in March. It has no Republican backers. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has yet to be taken up in the House. 

As of Tuesday, 152,817 absentee ballots had been sent out by elections officials. Citywide, more than 12,000 had already been returned.

To calculate the winner, the first-choice votes of each ballot are counted. If no one receives a majority of the vote (which is unlikely in such a large field), the candidate with the least support is eliminated from contention, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to whomever the voter marked as their second choice. That process continues until a winner is determined.

The stakes are high. Thirteen candidates are running for the Democratic nomination for mayor, with the winner heavily favored in November's general election. (Two Republicans are vying for their party's nomination.)

Almost three-quarters of New York City voters picked ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections in a 2019 referendum.

While the system is new to New York, it's been used in other places for years, according to FairVote, an organization that advocates for election reforms. New York City is the largest jurisdiction in the country to adopt ranked-choice voting, but it's been used for congressional and presidential elections in Maine since 2018. Alaska will begin using it next year.

"In order to do this process in the best way, we need to balance the public's right to know who won the election and the individual voter's right to cast absentee and affidavit ballots that will be counted and counted in an anonymous manner," Frederic Umane, the election board's president, said at a meeting last week.

Under the old system, if no primary candidate won 40% of the vote, the top two advanced to a runoff.November's general election will not use ranked-choice voting.

In April, the city launched a $15 million voter education plan, including advertising and community outreach.

In a statement announcing the initiative, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to a "full court press to ensure every New Yorker has the information they need to make their voice heard."

"Studies have shown that a disproportionate number of Black Democrats, particularly older voters, vote for only one candidate, so a Black candidate that finishes ahead with first place votes can ultimately lose if White voters fully avail themselves of the RCV option," Hazel wrote. "In essence, those votes by White voters would count more than the older Black single candidate voters since the Black voters' second choices would not come into play."

Despite those concerns, Dukes wrote that she was committed to helping educate voters about the process to "ensure voters know what to expect when they go to the polls this June."

"We're hoping that it will be a positive experience in the end," Quigg said. "That people can see 'maybe my first choice candidate didn't win, but hey look my second or third choice candidate won and so that effort that I put into figuring that out made a difference.'"

"I think a lot of a lot of voters have sort of 2020 fatigue, if you will and are frankly, still a little traumatized from that election cycle. So, you know, a lot of people just haven't really been tuning in yet," she said. "I think a lot of New Yorkers want to participate, but they just need to know about it and they need to know that it's actually not that complicated."

So if you want Medicare for all, Nordic levels of support for child care and families in general, and so on, just raising taxes on the 400K-plus elite won’t get you there. And many progressives — myself included — would like us to have these things.

What this means, I suspect, is that while some of the critiques may well be correct, Biden’s proposals are appropriate in their general thrust and probably don’t have huge flaws in their details. My biggest concern isn’t that he’ll botch important issues, it is that Democrats in Congress — some of whom are still far too deferential to moneyed interests — will water down the things he’s trying to do right.

"Untold bodies dumped into mass graves," Biden said. "Families, who at the time, waited for hours and days to know the fate of their loved ones, are now descendants who have gone 100 years without closure.

In his inaugural address, Biden said he would help to deliver "racial justice" and promised that "the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer."

But while Biden has talked about tackling "systemic racism," his administration has faced challenges. Racial disparities have continued throughout the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, with Black Americans getting vaccinated at a lower rate than whites.

When it comes to police reform, Biden called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by the first anniversary of Floyd's death. While negotiations continue in the Senate, Congress failed to meet that deadline.

Survivors of the Tulsa massacre are still seeking justice and reparations a century later. Three survivors testified before Congress in May about what they saw and the devastating and ongoing impact of the attack.