Sherrilyn Ifill, “Is It Too Late?”
Leading politicians tell Democrats to talk to “real Americans,” and not to talk so much about “identity” in the face of an opposition that talks about identity every day. Many of those with the biggest platforms know very little about race, so they protect their status as experts by insisting that race is not the issue.
But you cannot claim to analyze the threat to our democracy and refuse to confront the single greatest force that has threatened democracy in this country since its founding.
Samantha Michaels, “‘I’ve Never Seen So Many Police Cars'”
Although I’m new to Memphis, I’ve been reporting on the criminal justice system for more than a decade and have spent time in cities with a lot of law enforcement. I’ve also lived in an authoritarian country overseas, yet I’ve never experienced a police presence like this. Some Memphians critical of the surge liken the city to a war zone, with helicopters circling over neighborhoods, National Guard officers patrolling downtown, and unmarked law enforcement vehicles in the streets. Immigrant citizens carry their US passports, lest they be detained. One volunteer I spoke with compared the vibe to 1930s Germany.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has welcomed the task force, and Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, has cooperated, crediting the effort with reducing 911 calls about gun violence. But Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, another Democrat, compares occupied Memphis to a failed state. “Our risk is that [America is] gonna become a Yemen or a North Korea or something else altogether, where there is an armed individual with a semiautomatic weapon and military fatigues on many corners,” he tells me. “There may be zero crime, but we also won’t be leaving our houses. I know that’s a dark scenario, but that’s kind of where we are.”
Heba Gowayed, “The ethnic cleansing of the United States will destroy it”
Trump and his acolytes have increasingly been using the term “reverse migration” and even proposed an “office of remigration”. The idea, borrowed from white supremacists in Europe, understands immigrants as an inherent threat to the identity of what they imagine to be “white” nations. Immigrants’ forcible and systematic removal – remigration – is envisioned as a way to “restore” that whiteness.
This vision of an ethnically cleansed, white US is being enacted in policy. …
The strength of this imperfect nation, which has never repaired for its original sins of genocide and enslavement, is in the incredible diversity of people who make it great, in the freedoms it claims to uphold – of life, liberty and justice. This ethnic cleansing can only be accomplished through the destruction of all of the above, in ways that touch the lives of each and every person within the nation, American or not.
Kelley Nikonheda, in Jubilee Economics: The Purpose, Practices and Possibilities for a Better Future
Some talk of jubilee as an antiquated practice for ancient economies. And they add to that the notation that these texts, and the policies they outline, are utopian ideals. Far from it, what the jubilary canon reveals is an uncanny awareness about the undulations of the economy, the role of debt in that unevenness, and therefore the need for better policies in place to address the inevitable indebtedness. Not utopian at all, it is a highly functional structure. Jubilee practices were enacted—a testament to a true grasp of the economic realities in the world. Debt happens—so too must jubilee if neighbors are to live viable lives. To think that the economy will just magically calibrate itself, that its benefits will naturally trickle down to those at the bottom of the pyramid, is magical thinking, a false ideal that world economies now hold to. And not at all in sync with how economies are actually structured.
Sean Carlton, “Firewood Banks Aren’t Inspiring. They’re a Sign of Collapse.”
When a society is functioning, wood isn’t the fallback and families aren’t relying on volunteers with chainsaws. Firewood is now doing the work that was supposed to be guaranteed. That shift is why wood banks have multiplied in places like Maine, where leaders report record demand and new laws now support their expansion because so many families have no other reliable heat.
People like to say rural communities are resilient. What they mean is rural communities absorb the damage so others don’t have to think about it. The volunteers running wood banks aren’t performing resilience. They’re plugging holes in a sinking ship and doing the work the state stopped doing. They are the thin line between a cold snap and another obituary.
Rebecca Traister, “Me Too Forever”
Every day makes clear that the claim that Me Too went too far is simply a lie. Powerful men never stopped harassing women; Cuomo was reportedly propositioning staffers in 2020, three years after Me Too’s peak; Summers and Epstein were yukking it up over how to get a subordinate in bed in 2018 and 2019. Reports of patriarchy’s death have always been greatly exaggerated. But so, too, have reports of feminism’s.
Which is the larger point. The story of women’s liberation isn’t a straight line; the state of women’s rights is blurry and contradictory. Things are moving backward and forward at the same time. There are no clean demarcations between feminism and its backlash and the backlash to the backlash, between progress and regress. It was always fanciful to conceive of progressive victories as permanent, just as it was a shortsighted fantasy that edgelord heterodoxy would remain cool. It’s never been waves but circular eddies, conversations among the same people again and again, creating a disorienting sameness as we try to get to the surface and determine where we are.
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