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“Our South Side communities, our West Side communities are littered with broken promises, unkept commitments,” Stacy Davis Gates, the vice president of the teachers’ union, said this week, alluding to Ms. Lightfoot. “This contract has to represent something different for the city of Chicago — it has got to represent something different. And she ran to do that. Period.”

Chicago, a city of 2.7 million people, faces a strained municipal budget with a looming deficit, a serious pension crisis and a school system that has struggled with its finances (though in recent months they have stabilized somewhat, largely because of increased state aid).

“The fact is, there is no more money,” Ms. Lightfoot said on Friday

In negotiations, the city has offered teachers a 16 percent raise over five years, while union leaders called for increases of 15 percent over a shorter three-year term.

Lightfoot dismissed suggestions that she was turning her back on her campaign pledges related to equity. Like union leaders, she said, she wanted more nurses in schools, more counselors, more social workers. But she questioned whether the city’s affordable housing policy should be set as part of one union’s contract negotiations, rather than in a broader conversation across the city.

“I’m seeing just a stubbornness: I think that she is mistaking intransigence for strength,” said Maressa Spinak, a special-education teacher

Even in a heavily Democratic city where support for labor unions is strong, Ms. Lightfoot faced conflicting messages on how to proceed. The editorial boards of Chicago’s two main newspapers, The Tribune and The Sun-Times, focused on the city’s bleak fiscal outlook and urged her to stand tough against some of the union’s demands.But for many moved by Ms. Lightfoot’s campaign promises about neighborhood investment and equity in schools, the lack of a deal was discouraging, confusing and highly inconvenient.

“We have two Chicagos: There’s a Chicago of workers and longtime residents,” said Ms. de Jesus Alejandre, who did not vote for Ms. Lightfoot. “And then there’s a Chicago that’s getting much more love and attention from politicians, for the rich and the elites who don’t use our public resources.”The dispute with the teachers was, in some ways, a microcosm of the broader challenge facing Ms. Lightfoot: how to lead a city with limited cash and entrenched financial problems, while trying to create equity in a place that has struggled with segregation and disinvestment for decades.

“But the fact that the mayor is talking about it, that the teachers’ union is banging the drum about it, probably means that we’re in a better place,” he said. “We’re having the conversation.”

If you were a privileged white kid in the ’90s who could feel a moral pull to fight for something but didn’t know where to start, looking to the media for inspiration was a dry, dry well

The modern right loves to quote the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a “real” activist, while deriding Black Lives Matter.

But social justice activism as a continuum, a mantle to take up, a moral obligation (particularly for those of us born into comfort and power) was harder to see.

Contemporary activists were human hacky sacks with suspect motives or imperfect methods or any other number of manufactured excuses as to why they weren’t legitimate, weren’t the same as our parents marching to end segregation on the same streets a couple of decades before.

There was always reverence for “real” activists, of course — the heroes of the civil rights movement, the suffragists, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk — people who had lived and died and won great battles before we were born.

Conservatives claim to support social justice in the abstract but hate “social justice warriors.

They’re all for freedom and equality, they say, but sneer at the mechanisms that might actually help get us there as bleeding-heart pandering to the dreaded “politically correct.”

I did not go to the W.T.O. protest partly because my mom told me I couldn’t and partly because I didn’t understand it, but primarily because I’d been taught that when ordinary people, especially young people, try to do activism, they look stupid.

things are different now.

Activism comes so naturally to my girls. They are native to it. They are not afraid of sincerity. They’re at every protest, ones I haven’t even heard about.

this generation wasn’t fed activism as a punch line the way I was, and as Donald Trump emboldens conservative teenagers, my daughters and their friends aren’t cowed — they’re galvanized.

Think of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg

Think of the Parkland school shooting survivors

In the auditorium, my stepdaughter took the mic. “We are tired of the fact that we still have to fight,” she chanted, “for what the white man gets to call his inalienable rights. And it’s not how we fight, it’s that we dare to.” She took a deep breath. “So we, as a people, will keep fighting, whether it’s peaceful or scary, until we reach justice by whatever means necessary.”

It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution.

With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.

We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality. 1019 Comments

the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.

Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids

Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else

The Constitution could not prevent civil war, and it could not end slavery. Therefore, Republicans reluctantly and temporarily abandoned some of their faith in the Constitution to save the country and to end slavery. They broke constitutional norms, relied on military rule, added states, and threatened to dismantle the Supreme Court because they did not believe they could end slavery within the Constitution as it was.

As architects of a country that failed, the First American Republic, the First Founders might shimmer as warnings or ideals but not as guides. Americans might have to shed the sense that the Founders possess answers to our current predicaments or blame for our situation. They might retain their glamor — like José Martí in Cuba, Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico, even Toussaint-Louverture in Haiti — as emblems of romantic struggles that do not quite speak to the present political conditions. We might see their work the way the French see the First, Second, Third, or Fourth Republics, as important preludes but also as relics who, having used up their magic, can safely be held and examined. Voices of the past, not oracles of the future.

Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.”

Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class

The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them

The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays.

If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.

we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.

“I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.

One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness

we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school.

“We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,”

We have to treat America’s cancer.

the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances

In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.

A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.

Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable.

Family structure collapsed.

The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years

The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.

The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did.

Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor.

It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors.

But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making.

If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.

Why did deaths of despair claim Farlan, Zealan, Nathan, Rogena and so many others?

First, well-paying jobs disappeared

Second, there was an explosion of drugs

Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families.

Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools

Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.

Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending,

ob training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.

For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario. As the scholar Victor Tan Chen has showed, the two countries responded differently

The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.

The focus on job placement meant that Canadian workers were ushered more quickly back into workaday society and thus today seem less entangled in drugs and family breakdown.

Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.

We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery.

The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs

Yet it’s not hopeless. America is polarized with ferocious arguments about social issues, but we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children. Here’s what does work.

Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money.

For individuals trying to break an addiction, a first step is to face up to the problem — and that’s what America should do as well

“He was the model of what you aspire to be as governor,” Ray Mabus, who worked in Mr. Winter’s administration and served as governor himself from 1988 to 1992, said in an interview. “He was the best governor Mississippi ever had.”

Almost immediately, he set a new tone for state leadership. He and his wife held a series of dinners at the governor’s mansion featuring prominent Mississippians, and not just white people like Walker Percy and Eudora Welty. Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, dined with them, as did Leontyne Price, the world-famous soprano whom previous governors had shunned. The Winters invited her to stay overnight in the Bilbo Room, named for Theodore G. Bilbo, an infamously racist governor and senator; the next day Mr. Winter renamed it the Leontyne Price Room.

the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,”

Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”

The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”

Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.

a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school

Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.

even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”

“What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”

health workers and people in need of treatment are being sent into facilities without clean water, decent toilets or even soap on a vast scale.

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, infections among health workers have been far greater than those in the general population: Health care workers represent less than 3% of the population yet account for 14% of reported Covid-19 cases worldwide.

Preliminary estimates show that making sure all health facilities in all these countries have basic water, sanitation, hygiene, waste management and cleaning services will cost an additional $3.6 billion between 2021 and 2030.

That's around 30 cents a year to cover both the initial investment and the ongoing costs of providing these basic services to each person in the least-developed countries where such basic water services are lacking.

In the world's 46 least developed countries, governments spent around $10 per person in 2018 on health services. But where budgets are spread so thinly, even this hugely cost-effective investment becomes a challenge.

the UK government alone budgeted £15 billion (around $20 billion) for personal protective equipment during 2020-21.

Each year, that's how many mothers and babies are estimated to die from infections soon after birth, a tragedy that is easily preventable with better conditions.

Political polarization has festered and made an all-or-nothing ideological banner out of something as simple as a surgical mask.

The randomness of death that once seemed relegated to war zones is now everywhere.

With the new coronavirus variant sending the country’s infection curve sharply skyward, the government intends to keep the lockdown in place until mid-February, when the country’s most vulnerable residents, including everyone older than 70, are expected to have been vaccinated.

Europe is even further behind. In Germany, where the government was poised to extend lockdown measures through January, nearly 265,000 people had received a first shot as the nationwide drive entered its second week, according to health officials. Those numbers dwarf the vaccinations in France, where only about 500 people received the vaccine during the previous week.

The whole world seems to be alone together, cut off from the pre-Covid conceptions of what life was supposed to look like.

But nearly a year into the crisis, after any New Year’s buzz has worn off, talk of common fragility and self-actualization can feel like whistling in the dark. For many, despair is setting in.

“There’s no sense of motivation, that it’s a New Year and that things will happen.”

South Korea, with near blanket contact-tracing and effective quarantines, had seemed to dodge the scourge. But over Christmas week, infections soared to the largest daily increases yet, and officials this week introduced a nationwide ban on private gatherings of more than four people.

scattered clusters of cases have emerged in China in recent weeks, including in Beijing, bringing fresh restrictions and warnings against mass gatherings, residents greeted 2021 with a mix of hope and concern.

he plot of land dedicated to 850 Covid victims had grown from one acre to five and a half. The dead were buried in segregated 15-feet-deep pits.

Wealthy nations have already bought up South Africa’s first millions of doses, however, and South Africans must wait well into the New Year.

India, determined to take a different path, announced on Sunday that it would not export about one billion doses of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for several months until its own vulnerable populations were inoculated.

in a year that has seen record levels of early voting and a huge surge in use of voting by mail, Republicans are gearing up to challenge ballots with missing signatures or unclear postmarks.

Mr. Trump in that moment said out loud what other Republicans have preferred to say quietly, which is that his best chance of holding onto power at this point may rest in a scorched-earth campaign to disqualify as many votes as possible for his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

After months of claiming that any election outcome other than a victory for him would have to have been “rigged,” the president used his final days on the campaign trail to cast doubt on the very process of tabulating the count, suggesting without any evidence that any votes counted after Tuesday, no matter how legal, must be suspect.

Both sides expect Mr. Trump and his allies to try again to disqualify late-arriving ballots in the emerging center of the legal fight,

Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic Party, said Democrats were keeping careful track of all ballots that were being rejected in key swing states, under a strategy to get as many as possible fixed and reinstated now and seeking to force the reinstatement of the rest in postelection litigation if the closeness of the Electoral College count requires it.

A wild card for both sides is the posture the Justice Department will take in voting disputes under Attorney General William P. Barr. On Monday, the department announced it was sending civil rights division personnel to monitor voting at precincts across the country, including in key areas like Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit and Houston. That is standard operating procedure, but both sides were girding for possible breaks from protocol given Mr. Barr’s own statements about potential for fraud, which have echoed Mr. Trump’s.

The Republican efforts moved to an even more aggressive footing on Sunday, after Mr. Trump made clear his intention to challenge an unfavorable outcome through a focus in particular on the mail-in vote, which both sides expect will favor Mr. Biden.

The president has no legal authority to stop the count on Tuesday night, and even in normal election years, states often take days or even weeks before completing their tallies and certifying the outcome.

That situation has led Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a Democrat, to issue guidance that election officials should segregate any ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Too often, the victories we have won have proved to be ephemeral or incomplete, and our full acceptance as Americans has once again been denied.

Mr. Trump is too late. We are everywhere in America. We are in the bone and the blood and the root of the country. We are not going anywhere, certainly not to some fantasy of a new “separate but equal” segregation, we in “our” cities, white people in “their” suburbs.

Perhaps the president is confused by how the Rev. Dr. King Martin Luther King Jr., in his greatest speech, referred to the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a “promissory note to which every American is to fall heir.” Perhaps that gave Mr. Trump the idea that this was all about money.

He quoted the most fundamental promise of the Declaration, that all of us have “certain unalienable Rights” — among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It seems strange that we must still agitate for these basic rights, or that Mr. Trump thinks he is being magnanimous when he offers them to us again as last-minute campaign promises — so long as we stay in our place.

for all the bitter lessons we have learned from Mr. Trump’s term in office, I can tell you that the wheel is turning again. That we have never had so many white allies, willing to stand together for freedom, for honor, for a justice that will free us all in the end, even those who are now most fearful and seething with denial.

e have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.

the First Step Act would release more than 3,100 federal prison inmates and said its retroactive sentencing reform had led to nearly 1,700 sentence reductions. The Sentencing Project said last year that Black Americans made up 91 percent of everyone receiving reductions.

Trump reinstituted the federal death penalty. Seven people have been executed this year under the policy — five were white, one was Native American and the other was Black. And there are 55 federal death-row prisoners. Twenty-five are African Americans, 22 are white, seven are Latino and one is Asian.

Under the Trump administration, the Black unemployment rate steadily improved, dropping to 5.4 percent at its bottom in August 2019, compared to 7.5 percent when Trump took office in January 2017. But that achievement is attributable to economic growth that was already revving when Trump took office, economists say.

Black workers did not see employment levels ever go “above the trend.”

The bill is a 10-year renewal of funding. During Obama’s eight years in office, mandatory HBCU funding ranged from almost $80 million to $85 million per year. The same has been true during Trump’s administration.

Even with record-low unemployment rates in 2019, Black Americans still had fewer jobs than their white counterparts — even for those with college or advanced degrees — according to research by EPI.

In April, when unemployment peaked at 14.7 percent — the highest level seen since the Great Depression — the unemployment rate for Black workers was even higher, at 16.7 percent. By September, the share of unemployed Black workers still struggling to find a job only dropped to 12.1 percent.

Many banks limited their initial application pool for the small business rescue Paycheck Protection Program to previous customers, a staff report by the House coronavirus subcommittee found. Democrats and non-profits argue that shut out many minority-owned businesses that lacked business banking relationships from the program, which offered forgivable loans to companies that kept their workers on the payroll.

when the labor market is tight, like it was in first three years of the Trump administration, discrimination tends to decline.

The amount of funding for HBCUs is “the same thing that we had under President Obama.”

creating “more than 8,000 opportunities zones, bringing jobs and opportunities to our inner-city families.”

Opportunity zones “are tax incentives to encourage those with capital gains to invest in low-income and undercapitalized communities,” according to the Tax Policy Center.

A feature of the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, the program was intended to benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income communities. But there’s very little data about what’s actually happening in opportunity zones. There isn’t a full accounting of the number of opportunity zone projects, let alone basic information such as what those projects are, why they’re being pursued and who is benefiting from them.

the vast majority of opportunity zone capital appears to be going into real estate rather than operating businesses, meaning that the opportunity zones aren’t creating sustainable, long-term jobs.

he scrapped an Obama rule requiring localities to track patterns of segregation or lose federal funding.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development replaced the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act with a much weaker rule in July, using a waiver to exempt the new regulation from public-comment requirements. Public comments allow people to weigh in on proposed rules before they’re finalized. But by bypassing that critical step, the agency essentially expedited a months-long process without any public input.

baseless fear of crime and decreased property value as attempted triggers to get at white anxiety about living with people of color — and African Americans in particular — and the idea of integration itself,”

new rule in September overhauling the Obama administration’s 2013 “disparate impact” rule. The new rule would have required plaintiffs to meet a higher threshold to prove unintentional discrimination — known as disparate impact — and given defendants more leeway to rebut the claims.

A federal court intervened this month -- the day before the rule was set to take effect last week -- issuing a preliminary nationwide injunction to bar HUD from implementing the new regulation until the merits of a lawsuit brought by civil rights advocates have been decided.

reports of robocalls spreading misinformation in the city of Flint that told voters that “due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow.” Attorney General Dana Nessel said that was false and called it an effort to suppress the vote.

An extension for receiving ballots in the mail by Nov. 10, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, faces legal uncertainty after a federal appeals court ruling last week that the extended deadline is likely unconstitutional. The court ordered the state to segregate late-arriving ballots for possible disqualification.

Civil-rights groups said they filed a lawsuit in federal court late Monday against the Alamance County sheriff and chief of police in Graham, N.C., alleging the police disrupted a Saturday march to an early-voting location and intimidated and discouraged march participants from voting. The Graham Police Department said the demonstration blocked traffic and was deemed unsafe and unlawful. The department said it arrested eight people.

A Republican-backed lawsuit asked a federal judge to throw out at least 1,200 ballots in Montgomery County, outside Philadelphia, alleging local officials handled mail-in ballots illegally. The suit alleged the county Board of Elections was illegally sorting through and identifying potential problems with mail-in ballots received before Nov. 3. A county spokesperson said: “We believe our process is sound and permissible under the Election Code.”

The Supreme Court earlier let stand a ruling by Pennsylvania’s highest court that extended the deadline for accepting mail-in ballots by three days. The ruling also allows ballots with illegible postmarks to be counted if received by the deadline. The state’s top election official, a Democrat, extended the deadline to compensate for more voters turning to mail ballots. Republican plaintiffs asked the high court to reconsider the matter. In anticipation of possible postelection legal challenges, local election officials have been directed to separate ballots received after the original Election Day deadline.

The judge noted that state law requires voting on Election Day to take place inside buildings. To ensure compliance, the clerk for Harris said on Twitter that the county would operate one drive-through center on Election Day, at the Toyota Center, a large indoor arena.

The Supreme Court declined to allow pandemic-related changes to voting rules in Wisconsin, letting stand a federal appeals court’s ruling that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day.

After emancipation, Black people in Canada still faced segregation, and the looming threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

According to Henry’s research, the earliest record of African enslavement in colonial Canada was the sale of a young boy, named Olivier LeJeune in 1629.

Slavery was formally ended in the British empire in 1834, including British North America, but legislation was repeatedly passed that would weaken anti-slavery laws in the years leading up to abolition.

by the end of the 1700s, as many as 2,000 Black people were enslaved in the Maritimes region. About 300 more people were enslaved in the area known as Lower Canada (what is now the province of Quebec) and as many as 700 in Upper Canada (Ontario).

Only in recent years has Canada grappled with the legacy of its residential schools – where many Indigenous students were sent against their will and experienced verbal, physical and sexual abuse – a period which schools have now started to teach.

“That’s the existential context of the statue. It’s not just a statue of a man being subservient to Lincoln,” said Jackson, who described the moment in his 2001 book “A More Perfect Union.” For years after the dedication, he says, former slaves came to the statue and laid wreaths at its base.

“We can’t tear everything down,” Jackson said. “You can’t, on the one hand, celebrate Juneteenth . . . and then tear down the statue that marks the event. How much sense does that make?”

“You see a new generation that says, ‘All right, your generation wanted to get rid of segregation law, anti-discrimination laws — thank you, people — but you didn’t take care of all of it,’” Norton said. “Now we’re scrubbing. We’re scrubbing the country of remnants of racism.”

“As long as those symbols of racism are alive and well, we have not gored the snake,” she said. “It lives among us.”

Norton said destroying statues or placing them out of public view “is about the worst thing you could do.” Instead, she said, they should be preserved in museums to “tell what is still the untold story” — how and why the monuments were conceived and erected and “why they came down.”

“Oh, boy, that is important,” she said. “In fact, the statues are a better way to tell it than reading it in books.”

Norton said the country needs to be careful that it doesn’t “erase history for its own sake.” She said a commission is needed to study the lives of the Founding Fathers, and suggested additional markers could be added to existing monuments that reflect the complexity of their lives. Although Washington owned slaves, she pointed out, he struggled with the morality of the practice and, at the end of his life, ended up freeing them.

In her 20s, as she attended Yale Law School, she became an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, work that took her to Jackson, Miss., and a meeting with Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963.

Evers picked her up at the airport that day and later dropped her at the bus station, from where she traveled to Greenwood to visit a voter-registration drive.

The next day, she learned Evers had been shot to death in his own driveway.

All modern Americans inherit a legacy stained by that suffering. But black Americans also inherit the suffering

Well-designed studies show that discrimination against various signifiers of “blackness” persist in our labor markets.

Note that this could happen even if the people making discriminatory decisions have no particular animus toward black people. All it takes is a slight preference for people whom they perceive to be “like me.”

media and academia aren’t leaning ever further left because a bunch of lefties got into a room and decided to oust the conservatives. Mostly it happened because human beings tend to think that others who agree with them must be especially fine people. That “affinity bias” influences hiring decisions, often unconsciously. The fewer conservatives there were, the more pronounced the skew came, a process that sped up as it advanced.

The way small decisions cascade into major social forces is how Americans who profess no racial hatred — and declare their implacable hatred for racism in all forms — could nonetheless end up contributing to patterns of residential, educational and employment segregation that left the average black American with fewer opportunities for well-paid office work than the average white person.

In a world with covid-19 racing around, that disparity isn’t simply unjust; it’s deadly

One can acknowledge this without endorsing every solution advanced by social justice activists.

But if you think that it is a major social problem when large numbers of people are pushed to the margins of important aspects of American life — well, then you should believe that it’s a problem even when you aren’t one of those marginalized.

A listener presented a polite but pointed question: Do you have real, actual examples of systemic racism in the U.S.? If so, what would you do to solve those?

Today, many white people don’t see how there can be systemic racism when the nation put its most sweeping civil rights laws into effect more than half a century ago, when affirmative action policies have been implemented to address past inequities, when a Black man has been elected president—and, above all, when most white people genuinely believe they aren’t racists themselves

To many Black people, that also is all true, but not the whole story. They see the ways that the country’s racist past has built into its social and economic systems deep underlying inequities that still exist, long after the attitudes that created them in the first place may have changed. These effects are at once both subtle and more far-reaching.

After World War II, she noted, the federal government pumped millions of dollars into programs to build houses to develop the soon-sprawling suburbs—but under policies that denied those benefits to Black Americans. “So houses were sold at a very, very cheap rate that allowed for generational wealth to be developed in the white population, and did not in the Black population,” she said.

In his 2017 book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” Richard Rothstein chronicles in detail how decades of federal housing policy affected the disparate accumulation of wealth in America.

Starting during the New Deal, the federal government, through its Home Owners Loan Corp., began underwriting mortgages to allow working-class Americans to keep their homes during the Depression. But the government wanted to protect its investment by funneling funds to relatively “safe” mortgages—and decided that homes owned by white people, in all-white neighborhoods, were safer investments than homes sold to Black people or in mixed-race neighborhoods.

So mortgage assistance went out specifically to help white people, not Black people. When the Federal Housing Administration was created to expand homeownership to more Americans, it simply adopted the same policies. Then, crucially, so did the Veterans Administration when it began helping finance the largest housing boom in American history for soldiers returning from World War II.

So for decades government policies explicitly helped white Americans build housing capital and denied Black Americans the same opportunity. Such policies have long tails: They also consigned Black people to less-prosperous neighborhoods with poorer schools, with effects that linger long after the policies themselves were changed.

“I don’t think it should be a guilt issue,” Ms. Bass said in the Journal interview. “Whoever it is who asked that question, they didn’t have anything to do with this. This is the way the system was created.”

Racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. While many Republicans today like to mourn the absence of an intellectual voice like William Buckley, it is often overlooked that Mr. Buckley began his career as a racist defending segregation.

That strategy has worked so well that it was copied by the Russians in their 2016 efforts to help elect Mr. Trump.

In the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, on which I worked, we acknowledged the failures of Republicans to attract significant nonwhite support. When Mr. Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative,” some on the right attacked him, calling it an admission that conservatism had not been compassionate. That was true; it had not been. Many of us believed we could steer the party to that “kinder, gentler” place his father described. We were wrong.

There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent. My j’accuse is against us all, not a few individuals who were the most egregious.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.

This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.

I’ve given up hope that there are any lines of decency or normalcy that once crossed would move Republican leaders to act as if they took their oath of office more seriously than their allegiance to party

I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that would be a lie and there have been too many lies for too long.

Against Douglass’s expectation, Christian conversion tended to make slave-owners less humane. Because their version of faith justified and normalized slavery, their oppression and cruelty became more extreme.

“The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus,” Douglass wrote. “The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning.” Douglass understood that the relationship between apostasy and slavery was not only individual but also structural. “The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit,” he continued, “and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.”

Even though Douglass often found “the Christianity of this land” depressing, he maintained great respect for “the Christianity of Christ,” which he regarded as a revolutionary doctrine of freedom and equality.

It is the great temptation of Christians in every time to shape their faith to fit their interests and predispositions rather than reshaping themselves to fit the gospel. This is what happened when Christians justified slavery, blessed the violent reimposition of white rule after the Civil War and sanctified segregation.

Now scandalous injustice has forced the examination of white supremacy in our lives and institutions. The Christianity of Christ has much to offer. Among White evangelicals, it needs better representatives than we have recently seen.

The appeal of this argument is its simplicity. You can tell if a place is enabling systemic racism merely by counting the people of color in it; and you can tell if a place isn’t by the same rubric. The drawback, of course, is that the world isn’t nearly as simple

On some measures, the NYT is already a mirror of NYC. Its staff is basically 50 - 50 on sex (with women a slight majority of all staff on the business side, and slight minority in editorial). And it’s 15 percent Asian on the business side, 10 percent in editorial, compared with 13.9 percent of NYC’s population. 

But its black percentage of staff — 10 percent in business, 9 percent in editorial — needs more than doubling to reflect demographics. Its Hispanic/Latino staff amount to only 8 percent in business and 5 percent in editorial, compared with 29 percent of New York City’s demographics, the worst discrepancy for any group

notice how this new goal obviously doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics in many other ways. It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing.

We have no idea whether “white” people are Irish or Italian or Russian or Polish or Canadians in origin. Similarly, we do not know if “black” means African immigrants, or native black New Yorkers, or people from the Caribbean

Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be

Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews

48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic.

Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced.

It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx.

My point is that any attempt to make a specific institution entirely representative of the demographics of its location will founder on the sheer complexity of America’s demographic story and the nature of the institution itself

Journalism, for example, is not a profession sought by most people; it’s self-selecting for curious, trouble-making, querulous assholes who enjoy engaging with others and tracking down the truth (at least it used to be). There’s no reason this skillset or attitude will be spread evenly across populations

It seems, for example, that disproportionate numbers of Jews are drawn to it, from a culture of high literacy, intellectualism, and social activism. So why on earth shouldn’t they be over-represented? 

that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity?

take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up? 

The more you think about it, the more absurdly utopian the Kendi project turns out to be. That’s because its core assumption is that any demographic discrepancies between a profession or institution and its locale are entirely a function of oppression.

That’s how Kendi explains racial inequality in America, and specifically denies any alternative explanation.

So how is it that a white supremacist country has whites earning considerably less on average than Asian-Americans? How does Kendi explain the fact that the most successful minority group in America are Indian-Americans — with a median income nearly twice that of the national median?

Here’s a partial list of the national origins of US citizens whose median earnings are higher than that of white people in America: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Iranian, Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Armenian, Hmong, Vietnamese.

But it is absurd to argue that racism is the sole reason for every racial difference in outcome in the extraordinarily diverse and constantly shifting racial demographics of New York City or the US

It’s true, of course, that historical injustices have deeply hurt African-Americans in particular in hobbling opportunity, which is why African-Americans who are descendants of slaves should be treated as an entirely separate case from all other racial categories. No other group has experienced anything like the toll of slavery, segregation and brutality that African-Americans have. This discrimination was enforced by the state and so the state has an obligation to make things right. 

You can argue that these groups are immigrants and self-selecting for those with higher IQs, education, motivation, and drive. It’s true. But notice that this argument cannot be deployed under the Kendi test: any inequality is a result of racism, remember?

In fact, to reduce all this complexity to a quick, crude check of race and sex to identify your fellow American is a kind of new racism itself.

It has taken off because we find it so easy to slip back into crude generalizations.

for all those reasons, attempting to categorize people in the crudest racial terms, and social engineering them into a just society where every institution looks like every other one, is such a nightmare waiting to happen. It’s a brutal, toxic, racist template being imposed on a dazzling varied and constantly shifting country.

this explicit reintroduction of crude racism under the guise of antiracism is already happening. How many institutions will it tear apart, and how much racial resentment will it foment, before it’s done? 

this cannot mean a return to the status quo ante. That would ignore the lessons of the 21st century — that neoconservatism’s desire to rule the world is a fantasy, and that zombie Reagonomics has been rendered irrelevant by its own success and unintended failures

What the right needs to do, quite simply, is to seize the mantle of cultural conservatism while moving sharply left on economics.

Here’s the gist of a platform I think could work. The GOP should drop the tax cut fixation, raise taxes on the wealthy, and experiment with UBI

It needs a workable healthcare policy which can insure everyone in the country, on Obamacare private sector lines. (Yes, get the fuck over Obamacare. It’s the most conservative way to achieve universal access to healthcare we have.

It has to promote an agenda of lower immigration as a boon to both successful racial integration and to raising working class wages.

It needs finally to acknowledge the reality of climate change and join the debate about how, rather than whether, to tackle it.

It has to figure out a China policy that is both protective of some US industries and firm on human rights.

It needs to protect religious freedom against the incursions of the cultural left.

And it needs to become a place where normie culture can live and thrive, where acknowledgment of America’s past failures doesn’t exclude pride in America’s great successes, and where the English language can still be plainly used.

No big need to change on judges (except finding qualified ones); and no reason either to lurch back to worrying about deficits in the current low-inflation environment.

I believe this right-of-center pragmatism has a great future. It was the core message behind the British Tories’ remarkable success in the 2019 election

The trouble, of course, is that GOP elites would have a hell of a time achieving this set of policies with its current membership. Damon Linker has a terrific piece about the problem of Republican voters most of whom “remain undaunted in their conviction that politics is primarily about the venting of grievances and the trolling of opponents. The dumber and angrier and more shameless, the better.”

I see no reason why someone else couldn’t shift it yet again — not back to pre-Trump but forward to a new fusion of nationalist realism, populist economics, and cultural conservatism. By cultural conservatism I don’t mean another round of the culture wars — but a defense of pride in one’s country, respect for tradition, and social stability. There is also, I suspect, a suppressed but real desire for the normality and calmness that Trump has eviscerated.

What I was trying to argue is that the roots of critical theory are fundamentally atheist, are very much concerned with this world alone, and have no place for mercy or redemption or the individual soul.

Christians who think they can simply adopt both are being somewhat naive. And yes, I feel the same way about “liberation theology” as well, however sympathetic the Pope now is.

It seems to me the logical outcome of a broad application of critical theory will be a wider revival of white supremacy. Where there’s no possibility of redemption, resistance becomes inevitable.