Wear a mask. That is, unless you want to be intubated by a gynecology intern July 1st who did her last semester of med school via Zoom.

What Is Owed
From the Magazine: ‘It Is Time for Reparations’ https://nyti.ms/37YQk1a

If true justice and equality are ever to be achieved in the United States, the country must finally take seriously what it owes black Americans.

It has been more than 150 years since the white planter class last called up the slave patrols and deputized every white citizen to stop, question and subdue any black person who came across their paths in order to control and surveil a population who refused to submit to their enslavement. It has been 150 years since white Americans could enforce slave laws that said white people acting in the interest of the planter class would not be punished for killing a black person, even for the most minor alleged offense. Those laws morphed into the black codes, passed by white Southern politicians at the end of the Civil War to criminalize behaviors like not having a job. Those black codes were struck down, then altered and over the course of decades eventually transmuted into stop-and-frisk, broken windows and, of course, qualified immunity. The names of the mechanisms of social control have changed, but the presumption that white patrollers have the legal right to kill black people deemed to have committed minor infractions or to have breached the social order has remained.
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It devastates black people that all the other black deaths before George Floyd did not get us here. It devastates black people to recall all the excuses that have come before. That big black boy, Michael Brown, must have charged the weapon-carrying officer. Eric Garner should have stopped struggling. Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend had a weapon in her home and shouldn’t have shot at the people who, without a knock or an announcement, burst through her door. We’re not sure what Ahmaud Arbery was doing in that predominantly white neighborhood. Rayshard Brooks, who in the midst of nationwide protests against police violence was shot in the back twice by a police officer, just shouldn’t have resisted.
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While unchecked discrimination still plays a significant role in shunting opportunities for black Americans, it is white Americans’ centuries-long economic head start that most effectively maintains racial caste today. As soon as laws began to ban racial discrimination against black Americans, white Americans created so-called race-neutral means of maintaining political and economic power. For example, soon after the 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote, white politicians in many states, understanding that recently freed black Americans were impoverished, implemented poll taxes. In other words, white Americans have long known that in a country where black people have been kept disproportionately poor and prevented from building wealth, rules and policies involving money can be nearly as effective for maintaining the color line as legal segregation. You do not have to have laws forcing segregated housing and schools if white Americans, using their generational wealth and higher incomes, can simply buy their way into expensive enclaves with exclusive public schools that are out of the price range of most black Americans.

It has worked with impressive efficiency. Today black Americans remain the most segregated group of people in America and are five times as likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods as white Americans. Not even high earnings inoculate black people against racialized disadvantage. Black families earning $75,000 or more a year live in poorer neighborhoods than white Americans earning less than $40,000 a year, research by John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, shows. According to another study, by the Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon and his colleagues, the average black family earning $100,000 a year lives in a neighborhood with an average annual income of $54,000. Black Americans with high incomes are still black: They face discrimination across American life. But it is because their families have not been able to build wealth that they are often unable to come up with a down payment to buy in more affluent neighborhoods, while white Americans with lower incomes often use familial wealth to do so.

In 1881, Frederick Douglass, surveying the utter privation in which the federal government left the formerly enslaved, wrote: “When the Hebrews were emancipated, they were told to take spoil from the Egyptians. When the serfs of Russia were emancipated, they were given three acres of ground upon which they could live and make a living. But not so when our slaves were emancipated. They were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends and without a foot of land on which they could live and make a living. Old and young, sick and well, were turned loose to the naked sky, naked to their enemies.”

Just after the federal government decided that black people were undeserving of restitution, it began bestowing millions of acres in the West to white Americans under the Homestead Act, while also enticing white foreigners to immigrate with the offer of free land. From 1868 to 1934, the federal government gave away 246 million acres in 160-acre tracts, nearly 10 percent of all the land in the nation, to more than 1.5 million white families, native-born and foreign. As Merritt points out, some 46 million American adults today, nearly 20 percent of all American adults, descend from those homesteaders. “If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth and property ownership to a single entitlement program,” Merritt writes, “then the perpetuation of black poverty must also be linked to national policy.”

The federal government turned its back on its financial obligations to four million newly liberated people, and then it left them without protection as well, as white rule was reinstated across the South starting in the 1880s. Federal troops pulled out of the South, and white Southerners overthrew biracial governance using violence, coups and election fraud.

“At the very moment a wide array of public policies was providing most white Americans with valuable tools to advance their social welfare — ensure their old age, get good jobs, acquire economic security, build assets and gain middle-class status — most black Americans were left behind or left out,” the historian Ira Katznelson writes in his book, “When Affirmative Action Was White.” “The federal government … functioned as a commanding instrument of white privilege.”

In other words, while black Americans were being systematically, generationally deprived of the ability to build wealth, while also being robbed of the little they had managed to gain, white Americans were not only free to earn money and accumulate wealth with exclusive access to the best jobs, best schools, best credit terms, but they were also getting substantial government help in doing so.

My Wife Is Black. My Son Is Biracial. But White Supremacy Lives Inside Me
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/06/22/protests-george-floyd-racism-haiti-children-calvin-hennick

To protect my son, and every other Black boy and girl in America, white people must change the way our own eyes see the world. We must do the work of stamping out white supremacy where it lives: in our systems, and in ourselves.
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When I realized what was happening in my own brain, I shuddered. I wasn’t what anyone would describe as a racist. I was engaged to a Black woman whom I would marry later that year, and who would become the mother of my two children. But white supremacy had infected me in ways I’d never realized.

I’ve lived my entire life in a world filled with literal monuments to racism, a world where we regularly make unspoken justifications for living on land stolen from indigenous people, for honoring slave owners on our money, for tolerating enormous racial gaps in wealth and education and health outcomes. Even my awareness of Chiara Levin’s murder is an example of white supremacy in action; if she’d been Black, I doubt the news media would have latched onto her story. Journalists saw her white face, and the same thing that happened in my brain happened in theirs. Of all the murder victims in Boston, this is the one who matters, the white supremacist inside them whispered. This is the tragedy we will talk about for weeks, while the names of murdered Black men and women go unspoken.

I confess that there’s still a part of me that tries to look for “reasonable explanations” when I first hear of a Black person dying in police custody. A part of me looks to explain away the horrible things I don’t want to confront. If I’m going to be a part of the solution, this is the piece of me I need to destroy.
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I’m going to more actively look for ways to get involved, rather than hide in despair when the news makes me afraid for my children’s futures. I’m going to take my cues from Black activists who know what actions will make a difference in their own lives. Perhaps most importantly, I’m going to recommit to listening to and amplifying Black voices — and I’m going to try to sit and stay quiet during my own moments of discomfort, when their stories challenge the things I thought I knew.

I’m particularly interested to relearn American history from the perspective of the people who lived through it. The version I learned in school was so sanitized, so paternalistic: White people enslaved Black people, but then we saw that it was wrong, and we stopped. We forced Black people to live as second-class citizens in their own country for another century, but then we saw that it was wrong, and we stopped.

Trump, first by embracing the “birther” movement, and later as the candidate who promised to return the United States to an idealized past, successfully rode these backlashes to the White House. Four years later, Trump is hoping to ride the same wave of anger, fear, and resentment to a second term.

There’s only one problem: His opponent is Joe Biden.

For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden. But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the “radical left.” They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a “testicle lockbox.” They don’t buy that Biden’s platform, which is well to the left of the ticket he joined in 2008, represents a quiet adherence to “Kenyan anti-colonialism.” Part of this is that Biden has embraced popular liberal positions while avoiding the incentive to adopt more controversial or unpopular positions during the primary. But it’s also becoming clear that after 12 years of feasting on white identity politics with a black man and a woman as its preeminent villains, the Republican Party is struggling to run its Obama-era culture-war playbook against an old, moderate white guy.

The president’s sparsely attended rally in Oklahoma on Saturday was a showcase for Trump’s blunted arsenal. He warned that “the unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our beautiful monuments,” to “tear down our statues and punish, cancel, and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control.” He warned that the left wants to “defund and dissolve our police departments.” He fantasized about a “tough hombre” breaking into your home at night, warned that Biden was a “puppet of China,” called the coronavirus the “kung flu,” and complained that Democrats had objected to his characterization of some undocumented immigrants as animals (Trump later claimed he was exclusively referring to MS-13 gang members).

But even Trump didn’t really buy it.

“Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left,” Trump said, before acknowledging that “he's not radical left. I don't think he knows what he is anymore. But he was never radical left.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/trump-cant-figure-out-how-attack-biden/613402/

“To separate [black schoolchildren] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Earl Warren, Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

Juneteenth is a day of profound weight and power—a holiday whose very existence tells us so much about the soul of America. It reminds us of just how vulnerable our nation is to being poisoned by systems and acts of inhumanity. And it reminds us, too, of our incredible capacity to heal, to hope, and to emerge from our darkest moments of cruelty into a better version of ourselves. The Psalms tell us that ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ Juneteenth contains both the long, hard night—the two-and-a-half years those enslaved in Galveston, Texas, endured before learning of their emancipation—and the promise of the brighter morning to come.

There is no question that the night feels endless right now. The last words of George Floyd—I can’t breathe—have called our entire nation to reckon with the injustices we have allowed to fester. His death carries echoes of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth—senselessly killed by officers in their own homes. It carries echoes of Ahmaud Arbery—lynched before our eyes while jogging on a Georgia road. It carries echoes of Rayshard Brooks—shot in the back by an officer on the eve of his eldest daughter’s eighth birthday party. It carries echoes of an unbearable litany of lives and dreams snuffed out before their time.

Their deaths call us to come face to face not only with overt acts of violence, but with subtler realities that strike at the dignity of Black Americans every day. Homes systematically undervalued in Black communities. Credit that is harder to access for Black entrepreneurs. Expectant Black mothers who are disbelieved when they share medical concerns with their doctors—contributing to Black women being two-and-a-half times as likely to die from pregnancy complications as white women. And today, in the grip of a devastating pandemic that has claimed more than 117,000 lives, persistent disparities in our health and economic systems have conspired once more to place the sprawling burden of the crisis disproportionately on the shoulders of Black families.

Black Americans carry this weight. But all Americans have the responsibility to act. I believe that the moral obligation of our time is to rebuild America in a way that finally delivers the full share of equality, opportunity, and dignity due to every American. And, achieving it starts by rooting out systemic racism from our laws, our policies, our institutions, and our hearts.

https://www.essence.com/feature/juneteenth-black-americas-fight-justice-joe-biden/