After she lost her son, Tonda Thompson dreamed of a baby in a washing machine. She’d stuffed in dirty clothes and closed the door. The lock clicked shut. Water rushed in. Then she saw him, floating behind the glass. Frantic, she jabbed at a keypad on the machine, searching for a code to unlock the door.
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What It’s Like to Be Black and Pregnant When You Know How Dangerous That Can Be

When Thompson became pregnant she was 25, living in Los Angeles and working as a model. She and her boyfriend got engaged and moved back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She’d grown up on the city’s north side, a predominantly African-American neighborhood with pockets of deep poverty, in a zip code known for having the highest incarceration rate in the United States. Thompson went to all of her medical appointments, took prenatal vitamins, and stayed in shape. On her birthday, she wrote on Facebook that the only gift she wanted was “a healthy mom and baby.” But she also wrote about how hard it was to be pregnant in a city where there was “nothing to do that’s fun and safe.”

Thompson got married in April 2013, and a month later went into labor. Forty hours later, Terrell was born. He lived less than half that time, due to “complications” with the delivery. By the time Thompson got home, all of the baby’s things had been moved to the basement. She’d gotten to hold him for five minutes.

Thompson sank into a depression. She thought about suicide. On her birthday, she received divorce papers; by the next summer, she was on the verge of homelessness. She often felt angry that the hospital didn’t save her son. But mostly she asked herself, “What did I do wrong?”

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All of these effects together create what scientists call “allostatic load,” or “the cumulative wear and tear on the body’s systems owing to repeated adaptation to stressors,” according to a 2006 study published by Arline Geronimus and others in the American Journal of Public Health. Geronimus, a University of Michigan professor, developed what she calls the “weathering” hypothesis, which posits that black Americans’ health deteriorates more rapidly than other groups’ because they bear a heavier allostatic load. “These effects may be felt particularly by Black women because of ‘double jeopardy’ (gender and racial discrimination),” Geronimus and her co-authors noted. (Infant mortality is just one of many forms of disease that fall disproportionately on black Americans. The list includes cervical cancer, asthma, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.)

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Institutional racism is like a thicket of thorny plants: After a woman spends a few decades walking through it, it can be hard to tell which particular prick led to her child’s death, or if it was all of them together. But there’s growing recognition that a woman’s entire life experience matters, maybe even her parents’. “We literally embody, biologically, the societal and ecological conditions in which we grow up and develop and live,” said Dr. Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University. “Infant mortality is affected by not only the immediate conditions in which the infant is conceived and born, but also the health status of the mother and, some evidence indicates, the father as well.” In 2013, Krieger and her colleagues compared infant deaths in states with and without Jim Crow laws; they found that black infant deaths were significantly higher in Jim Crow states, but that after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the gap shrank and, by 1970, had disappeared (although the overall black/white gap persisted). The study suggests that discriminatory policy does indeed shape health outcomes. If this is true, then the infant-mortality gap can’t be closed without addressing broader inequities in employment, education, health care, criminal justice, and the built environment—in other words, without ending racial discrimination altogether.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in July, and I’m lying on my bed trying to calm down. The month’s rapid-fire events are hitting me square in the gut. Today, someone agitated by police shootings of black men ambushed police in Baton Rouge. Already, commentators are pointing a finger at black organizers. Just over a week ago, a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas ended with a sniper targeting police there; in return, the police circulated an image of an innocent protester as a suspect before using a robot to kill the perpetrator. Two days before the Dallas shooting, Baton Rouge police killed Alton Sterling while he was pinned to the ground, and the next day Philando Castile was shot dead by police during a traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, while his girlfriend and her daughter sit inches away.

For the past three years, my job has been to report on black-led organizing and the police violence that fuels it, and, until recently, I’ve been able to read and process related news with the detachment that my journalism training has instilled in me. But now, what I see online and on TV simply makes me afraid. I am seven months pregnant, and these days, tragic events hit me in a way that I can’t neatly tuck away. I’m learning that in moments like these, it’s critical that I step away from the screen and stop crying, that I figure out how to return my breathing to normal. My health and my fetus’s health depend on it.

Black women, after all, are almost four times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than our white counterparts, and black babies are twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday. I worry that I’ll have a baby that’s too small to thrive, or that I’ll be treated so negligently by the hospital staff during delivery that I will end up seriously injured, or dead.

You might think that I don’t need to worry: I eat a healthy diet; I don’t have high blood pressure or diabetes. I am not poor; I have private insurance and a master’s degree. I started prenatal appointments at 10 weeks and haven’t missed one. But I’m under no illusion that my class privilege will save me. Research suggests that it’s the stress caused by racial discrimination experienced over a lifetime that leads to black American women’s troubling birth outcomes, not the individual choices those women make or how much money or education they have.

Washington (CNN)Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and other former aides are in the hot seat for their interactions with Russia over the course of the presidential campaign, transition and new administration. So what do we know happened when?

2016

March 28: Then-candidate Donald Trump hires Manafort to head his delegate efforts for his Republican primary campaign.

May 19: Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee, gives Manafort a promotion: campaign chairman and chief strategist.

June 20: After Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is abruptly fired, Manafort emerges as Trump's top campaign official.

July 27: As the Republican nominee for president, Trump publicly calls on Russia to hack Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's private emails.

August 14: The New York Times reports on $12.7 million in secret cash payments earmarked for Manafort from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

In September of 2014 I went to Steve Bannon’s house for a party. I was on assignment from Rolling Stone to embed with the staff of Breitbart.com. It was supposed to be a way of illuminating the larger world of gonzo right-wing media. I had never heard of Steve Bannon himself.

The invitation — to cocktails and a seated dinner — listed the location as the “Breitbart Embassy.” It turned out to be a brick townhouse on Capitol Hill, a few blocks east of the Supreme Court building. The Embassy did triple duty as a workspace for the website’s D.C. reporters, a handsome living quarters for Bannon and other company brass, and a swank entertainment venue for a social circle drawn from Washington’s misfit conservative fringe.

Or at least, they were fringe at the time. Bannon, now arguably the surrogate president of the United States, was then Breitbart.com’s executive chairman. He moved among clusters of guests with a big smile. When I was introduced to him, I asked why he called the place the Embassy. “D.C. is like Saigon in ’68,” he said. “You don’t know who your friends are and who your enemies are.” Among friends for the moment at least, he promised that he’d set up time for the two of us to talk one-on-one, and then returned to his hosting duties.

I didn’t recognize many people at the event, aside from right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions — easily the oldest guest in a millennial crowd. I asked Sessions some questions about his relationship to Breitbart, mostly to be polite to my hosts. He surprised me by giving Breitbart credit for fatally poisoning a congressional immigration-reform deal that he himself had crusaded against. “You might not think it could” kill the bill, Sessions said, “but it did.” He told me that he read the site almost daily and that his constituents regularly quoted Breitbart articles to him by author name. “From my perspective, Breitbart is putting out cutting-edge information that’s independent, geared to the average working American, that’s honest and needs to get out.”

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During the brief time I spent with him, I never detected personal animus or malice. He was friendly and good-natured. It was clear that a sense of grievance — and awakening — had driven him to an edge zone where he sometimes, maybe often, mistook fantasy for fact. Nevertheless I took it to be genuine. Listening to my recording of our interview now, I’m struck by how much I hear myself laughing and nodding along with his points. That he wanted to gut the establishment seemed more mischievous than actually sinister. Clearly I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me.

Stephen Miller is reportedly a college buddy of neo-Nazi punching bag Richard Spencer. He’s also Donald Trump’s senior adviser, and was recently drafted as a new White House spokesperson. For his new role, Miller took a tour of the Sunday morning news shows, each appearance showing off an ability to lie matched only by the other members of the Trump team. If you caught any of those appearances, you may have noticed a few Miller trademark gestures. Empty, reptilian eyes scanning left to right over cue cards. A pouty mouth delivering each insane untruth. And a voice that sounds like every hyper-unlikable, pompous, joyless, self-important authority-on-everything you’ve ever met. Or as Katie McDonough of Fusion puts it, “he has the voice of someone who is a dick.”

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“Stephen Miller likes to use a lower register,” West indicates. “So, number one, the pitch he’s going for is at the bottom, even a little bit below, where he can comfortably speak. He’s also clenching his tongue a little bit while he speaks. This is a common, however unconscious, tactic by men to sound more masculine and authoritative. It’s just to suggest that extra bit of, Here’s what I have to say and welcome to it.”

West suggests that Miller’s cadence—which is more a sort of superior-sounding monotone—is another turn-off. He explains why Miller brings to mind the dude you had classes with in high school or college who everyone mostly wished would stop talking. Not the cool, interesting nerd, who was an inventive misfit waiting to blossom, but more like the unsympathetic know-it-all who repelled everyone with his smugness, arrogance and almost frightening dearth of charm.

“In the case of this particular gentleman, we have a situation where large swaths will feel that this is not a guy I would enjoy spending time with,” West says, making the understatement of the century. “It feels like he’s talking down to me, it feels like he’s being overly pedantic, and indeed, condescending. What he does though is, speaking of that guy in college we all rolled our eyes at, when you don’t have perhaps content on your side—without being overtly political here—what one has to do then is compensate for that. And that’s a keyword I’d like to highlight with you: What we don’t like about that, if we can remove ourselves from the political content for a moment, is generally the fact that it seems like this person is trying to compensate. We see a person who is trying too hard. That’s not an attractive quality, when we see someone pushing and trying too hard.”