Tenure struggle ends with Hannah-Jones charting new course
By TOM FOREMAN Jr. and AARON MORRISON


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Nikole Hannah-Jones is interviewed at her home in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Tuesday, July 6, 2021. Hannah-Jones says she will not teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill following an extended fight over tenure. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — A Black investigative journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for her groundbreaking work on the bitter legacy of slavery in the U.S. announced Tuesday that she will not join the faculty at the University of North Carolina following an extended tenure fight marked by allegations of racism and conservative backlash about her work.

Nikole Hannah-Jones will instead accept a chaired professorship at Howard University, a historically Black school in Washington, D.C.

The dispute over whether North Carolina’s flagship public university would grant Hannah-Jones a lifetime faculty appointment had prompted weeks of outcry from within and beyond its Chapel Hill campus. Numerous professors and alumni voiced frustration, and Black students and faculty questioned during protests whether the predominantly white university values them.

And while UNC belatedly offered her tenure last week, Hannah-Jones said in an interview with The Associated Press that the unfairness of how she was treated as a Black woman steered her toward turning the offer down.

“I wanted to send a powerful message, or what I hope to be a powerful message, that we’re often treated like we should be lucky that these institutions let us in,” said Hannah-Jones, who earned a master’s degree from UNC. “But we don’t have to go to those institutions if we don’t want to.”

Hannah-Jones — who won the Pulitzer Prize for her work on The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project focusing on America’s history of slavery — noted that she hadn’t sought out the job, and was recruited by UNC’s journalism dean before her tenure application stalled amid objections by a powerful donor and concerns by conservatives about her work.

“I wasn’t seeking to go into academia,” Hannah-Jones told AP. “It was this particular job at this particular place that I wanted to go and give back to the university that helped me build the career that I’ve built.”

The 45-year-old Hannah-Jones will instead accept a tenured position as the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard, which also announced Tuesday that award-winning journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates is joining its faculty. Coates, who won a National Book Award for “Between the World and Me,” and Hannah-Jones have both been given MacArthur “genius” grants for their writings.

RELATED COVERAGE
– UNC trustees OK tenure for journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones
– UNC protesters cite ongoing frustrations amid tenure dispute
– Donor: Concerns over Hannah-Jones prompted emails to UNC

Hannah-Jones’ tenure application was submitted to UNC’s trustees last year, but it was halted after a board member who vets the appointments raised questions about her nonacademic background. Instead, she was initially given a five-year contract, despite the fact that her predecessors were granted tenure when appointed. Last week the trustee board, after weeks of mounting pressure, finally voted to offer tenure.

UNC journalism school Dean Susan King, who supported Hannah-Jones throughout her application, said in a statement that she hopes “that UNC can learn from this long tenure drama about how we must change as a community of scholars in order to grow.”

The university’s enrollment is approximately 60% white and 8% Black.

More than 30 faculty members of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media signed a statement Tuesday saying they supported Hannah-Jones’ decision and decrying “the appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater.”

“We will be frank: It was racist,” the statement said.

Asked if she agreed with their assessment, Hannah-Jones told AP that “the facts speak for themselves.”

“If there is a legitimate reason for why someone, who has worked in the field as long as I have, who has the credentials, the awards, or the status that I have, should be treated different than every other white professor who came before me, outside of race, I would love to hear that explanation,” she said. “I haven’t heard it yet.”

Hannah-Jones’ and Coates’ Howard appointments are supported by nearly $20 million donated by three philanthropic foundations and an anonymous donor, gifts meant to bolster Howard’s investment in Black journalists, the university said.

“At such a critical time for race relations in our country, it is vital that we understand the role of journalism in steering our national conversation and social progress,” Howard President Wayne A. I. Frederick said in a news release.

Coates celebrated his return to Howard, which is his alma mater.

“This is the faculty that molded me. This is the faculty that strengthened me,” Coates said. “Personally, I know of no higher personal honor than this.”

In her written statement, Hannah-Jones cited political interference and the influence of a powerful donor to the journalism school, a reference to Arkansas newspaper publisher Walter Hussman. He has acknowledged in past interviews that he emailed university leaders challenging her work as “highly contentious and highly controversial.”

Hussman, whose name adorns the UNC journalism school after he pledged a $25 million donation, said in a phone interview Tuesday that he still has concerns about The 1619 Project but that he respects Hannah-Jones.

“I really felt a sense of regret that we were never able to get together and never had a chance to sit down and talk to her,” he said.

What excites Hannah-Jones most about her Howard appointment, she said, is the opportunity to help mold a new generation of journalists to serve “as the truth tellers in our democracy.”

“Unfortunately, for far too long, the institutions that are training Black journalists ... haven’t been able to get the type of resources they needed, to really compete and gain entry into newsrooms at the rates that they should. And I believe that we can change that.”

“While it’s unfortunate how this came about, and I’m deeply saddened by what happened with my alma mater, this is not a consolation prize,” she said of her new position at Howard.

“This hopefully also sends a message to other Black folks, who’ve gotten to a certain status in their career, that we can come home and build our own.”

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Morrison reported from Brooklyn, N.Y.

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AP race and ethnicity writer Aaron Morrison is a member, trainer and mentor for the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which Hannah-Jones co-founded.

Al Sharpton eulogizes white Arkansas teen shot by deputy

BEEBE, Ark. (AP) — The Rev. Al Sharpton and attorneys for George Floyd’s family on Tuesday mourned a white Arkansas teenager fatally shot by a sheriff’s deputy, as they urged support across racial lines for efforts to reform police practices.

Sharpton eulogized 17-year-old Hunter Brittain, who was shot and killed by a white Lonoke County sheriff’s deputy, Sgt. Michael Davis, during a traffic stop June 23 near Cabot, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Little Rock.

The killing in the predominantly white community has drawn the attention of national civil rights activists such as Sharpton, who said concerns about police tactics aren’t just limited to the Black community.

“The issue of policing is not about Black and white,” Sharpton told a packed auditorium at Beebe High School, where Brittain was a rising senior. “It’s about right and wrong.”

Many attending the memorial wore jeans and shirts that read “Justice for Hunter,” in a ceremony that included Floyd family attorneys Ben Crump and Devon Jacob. Both are representing Brittain’s family.

Floyd died in May last year when a white Minneapolis police officer used his knee to pin the handcuffed Black man’s neck to the ground. His death sparked nationwide protests over policing and racial inequality.

Crump and Jacob invoked other people killed by police, including Breonna Taylor, a Kentucky woman who was fatally shot during a botched police raid. Crump led the crowd in chanting, “Hunter Brittain’s life matters.”

“Because he is not here, we all have to unite together and make sure people all over America know that we will get justice for Hunter Brittain,” Crump said.

Lonoke County Sheriff John Staley last week fired Davis for not turning on his body camera until after he had shot Brittain. Staley said the only footage police have is from the aftermath. Arkansas State Police are investigating Brittain’s death. Davis is white.

Authorities have released few details about the shooting. Brittain’s family has said the teenager was unarmed and was holding a jug of antifreeze when he was shot. Brittain’s family and friends have held protests nightly outside the Lonoke County sheriff’s office and have complained about the lack of information released.

Family members have said Brittain had been working on his truck’s transmission and had been test driving it when he was pulled over.

Staley on Monday said he welcomed those who want to peacefully protest, but that out-of-state activists could risk “inflaming an already difficult situation.”

“The people of this county are good, decent people and they, like me, want to see accountability and transparency in this situation,” Staley wrote on the office’s Facebook page.

The memorial included calls to pass federal legislation in Floyd’s name to overhaul police practices.

“Hopefully, Hunter and his untimely death will finish what Hunter’s brother — George Floyd — and his death started,” Jacob said.

Jesse Brittain, Hunter’s uncle, received a standing ovation when he called for an end to qualified immunity for police officers, a legal doctrine that frequently shields them from civil lawsuits for things they do in the course of their job.

“Your life had meaning, you’re loved and your family will not stop advocating until we have justice for you, Hunter,” he said. “And also justice for all of our other brothers and sisters dying at the hands of law enforcement hired to protect and serve us around this country.”

As mourners filed into the high school auditorium Tuesday morning, photos and video of Brittain were displayed on a large screen above his casket, which was decorated with blue and white ribbons, the Chevrolet symbol and “Forever Chevy 17.” Family members said Brittain dreamed of becoming a NASCAR driver after graduation.

“Hunter did nothing wrong, just like we felt George Floyd did nothing wrong,” Sharpton told reporters before the memorial. “But if we segregate how we react, then we’re wrong.”

It was unclear what impact Sharpton’s and the attorneys’ calls for action would have in Lonoke County, a rural county of 73,000 people that is 90% white.

Even before the memorial service, Brittain’s friends and family were calling for change at the state level with petitions urging the Legislature to require officers to wear body cameras that would be turned on as soon as their shift begins.

“I never thought anything like this would happen until it hit so close to home,” said Scott Hendrickson, whose son was close friends with Brittain and who is . “Once it happened to my son’s best friend, I said it could happen to my son so it was too close to home to not do anything about it.”

Dozens of people gathered outside the sheriff’s office after the memorial service for a rally with Brittain’s family, attorneys and the NAACP

Melissia McMahan, who is the Brittain family’s mail carrier and knew the teen since he was a toddler, said she had thought about the need for police reform before Brittain’s death but hadn’t thought it was something her own community would face.

“I never expected anything like what happened, especially not just a country boy working on his truck and taking it for a test drive,” she said.

Targeting infidel 'crusaders': DR Congo's dreaded ADF militia

Issued on: 07/07/2021 -

Deserted: A boy rides a bicycle at the entrance to the town Mutwanga. Many residents have fled their homes because of attacks ALEXIS HUGUET AFP/File

Beni (DR Congo) (AFP)

Mado was worshipping at an evangelical church in the town of Ndalya in February when her life changed forever.

Gunmen burst in, killed her two-month-old daughter at point-blank range, ordered her to leave the baby's body on the ground and follow them out along with the other worshippers.

The young woman had become a hostage of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) -- the bloodiest and most dreaded of the many armed groups that roam eastern DR Congo.


The baby's killer said "now you won't be weighed down anymore," Mado, whose name has been changed for this article, recounted between sobs.

They made her carry a heavy package on her head through dense forest until the group came to a halt in a clearing.

It was prayer time for their jihadist captors.

Later, at meal time, the group was divided into four: the commanders, the combatants, the fully veiled women accompanying them, and the hostages under close guard.

After a four-day ordeal, Mado was freed.

Today she lives with a host family in Beni.

- Islamic State link -

The rise in bloody attacks in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has coincided with ADF"s affiliation to the so-called Islamic State (IS). It has become the latest armed group in a jihad that extends from the Sahel to Somalia and from Nigeria to Mozambique.

The ADF's long but murky story begins as an armed Ugandan Muslim group that holed up in eastern DRC in 1995.#photo1

It has not carried out any attacks in Uganda itself for years and lives off extortion and control over the region's abundant resources.

These are classic tactics used by the myriad other armed groups that operate in the area -- the Kivu Security Tracker (KST) monitor estimates their number at 122 -- flourishing on the ashes of the country's two great wars from 1996 to 2003.

But in March, the United States officially linked the ADF to the IS and identified its leader as Seka Musa Baluku. It said the ADF had become IS' "Central Africa Province" -- an entity that the IS declared in April 2019 as it was losing ground in Syria and Iraq.

In two written claims that circulated in late May, the ADF used rhetoric typical of IS and other jihadi groups, speaking of wanting to target "crusaders" -- a reference to Christians, in their view infidels.

The DRC's Catholic Church says the ADF has massacred around 6,000 civilians since 2013, a toll that has risen sharply since 2019, when the militia appears to have become more radicalised.

On June 30, the IS claimed responsibility for the DRC's first suicide bombing -- a blast outside a bar in Beni three days earlier that was preceded by an explosion in a Catholic church, injuring two women.#photo2

- Palpable threat -

Beni lies in the heart of ADF territory, which stretches east to the Rwenzori mountains on the Ugandan border and north towards neighbouring Ituri province.

The 45-kilometre (28-mile) drive on a dirt road under military escort from Beni to the Rwenzoris takes two hours, with modest army posts positioned at intervals along the way.#photo3

The threat is palpable.

Dozens of villagers have been massacred since the start of the year in attacks that typically occur at night.

Often the victims are decapitated with machetes, their arms tied behind their backs.

Witnesses of one attack, whose location and date are not being revealed by AFP in order to protect them, said the ADF tied up several hostages including one whose head was then cut off.

One said the ringleader shouted in Swahili, the dominant language of East Africa: "If you cut off the heads of these kafirs (infidels) in the name of Allah, He will be happy and you will be rewarded."

The others were then executed in turn.

- Fighters -

AFP was also able to interview two individuals presented by the army as ADF fighters.

Arafat and Moshoud -- their names have also been changed -- are Congolese who speak Lingala, the country's most widely spoken language.#photo4

They were arrested in December and February respectively and were being held in a safe house in Beni, police said.

They have provided valuable information on ADF's organisation and recruitment practices, according to their handlers.

The top echelon includes men from Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia and "most recently" Mozambique, said Arafat.

Arafat, 19, said he cooked for Baluku, the much-feared Ugandan who heads the ADF.

He described the chief as an "authoritarian and disciplined man" who likes goat meat -- "especially the entrails".

Tasks are handed out by national origin: "The Somalis teach the teenagers how to make home-made bombs. The Tanzanians and Ugandans are in charge of military training and teaching the Koran," said Moshoud.

The 23-year-old Muslim from Oicha, near Beni, said he was recruited in 2017 and that Baluku made him the commander of an 85-strong company.

"I was responsible for transferring money to ADF accomplices and collaborators in charge of recruiting new members," he added.

- Harsh justice -

Justice is harsh in the ADF's jungle or forest camps, some of which are temporary, others semi-permanent, they said.

A fighter accused of embezzling part of funds earmarked for recruitment was convicted by a tribunal of Ugandan and Somali chiefs.

"His left hand was cut off," Moshoud said.#photo5

A couple caught having sex were each given 100 lashes because they were not married, he said.

Arafat, who said he witnessed the whipping, added: "If it had been adultery, the man would have been stoned to death."

Wherever Baluku sets up camp -- always dubbed "Medina" in reference to Islam's second holiest city -- the day revolves around the five prayers required by Islam.

"We rise at five in the morning for prayers," said Moshoud. "Then the chiefs assign tasks and missions: patrols for some, ambushes for the others."

"Everyone returns to base at noon for prayers. We also pray at 3, 6 and 7 pm," Arafat said.

"Before going on an operation against (the army) or civilians, we first do the 'doua'," Moshoud said, referring to an invocation of Allah.

- Recruitment, training -

The ADF recruits Congolese members from around North Kivu, even though the province is minority Muslim like the rest of the country. They are recruited by force, through promises of jobs or through propaganda, according to UN experts.

Survivors of attacks confirmed the testimony of Moshoud and Arafat.

They said the assailants speak several languages including Arabic and Kiganda (spoken in western Uganda), as well as Lingala and Swahili.

Their style of dress is eclectic, some wearing parts of stolen army uniforms, some wearing Muslim skullcaps and others sporting military caps.#photo6

Still others tie scarves around their heads, witnesses have told AFP.

To identify themselves among unknown comrades during attacks they wear a piece of cloth of a designated colour around an arm, a wrist or the forehead.

As they attack, the ADF men loot everything in their path: telephone kiosks, stores of soap, rice, corn, also called maize, and medicines.

Like other armed groups, they are interested in the region's resources, but go for timber and cocoa more than minerals.

- Abandoned hamlets -

The nine kilometres (six miles) between the town of Mutwanga and the village of Mwenda, deep in the forested foothills of the Rwenzoris, are dotted with hamlets that have been emptied of their residents, weeds taking over the deserted homes.

"My children are in Beni," some 45 kms distant, a farmer says under the gaze of an army officer.

"I spend the night here on my own so I can tend to my fields. I hope the army is here to secure" the area.

In Mwenda, the army says it has "advance positions" against the ADF -- simple wood huts covered with tarps -- while command posts are set up in old administrative buildings.

As if reciting by rote from a manual, a major says: "Our mission is defensive, with fixed positions to protect the population. Every time a case is reported we go out in pursuit of the enemy."#photo7

An army offensive launched in November 2019 set off a wave of reprisals.

On May 6, President Felix Tshisekedi decreed a "state of siege" in North Kivu and Ituri, vowing to stamp out the armed groups, the ADF in particular, which he described as having an "Islamist leaning".

But has the new tack -- which has seen the military take over local institutions -- helped the rank-and-file soldier?

At the Mutwanga command post, an officer said he had seen little progress in the way of uniforms, rations and munitions. "We just pray that it will come," he smiled.

Meanwhile the ADF are perfecting their methods.

Various sources said they use surveillance drones -- what Mado thought were "toys" that they "sent up into the sky".

Especially worrying is an uptick in the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), according to UN experts.

Attesting to the increased firepower were three bomb attacks in Beni over a single weekend.

Two women were injured in a June 27 attack at a Catholic church ahead of a confirmation ceremony, and a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a bar hours later.

The previous day saw a bomb attack outside a petrol station on the outskirts of Beni, with no casualties.

- 'Grateful to be alive' -

Muslim leaders are increasingly under pressure from military chiefs to respond to the bloodshed.

But the community's leader, imam Hamza Mali Wasingenga, whose predecessor was shot dead, said: "We Muslims of Beni are massacred just like the Christians. The authorities should stop associating us gratuitously with these people, who kill with no concern for the religious affiliation of their victims."#photo8

While the ADF is seen as far and away the leading cause of violence in the region, many residents also point the finger at local militias known as Mai-Mai, as well as corrupt soldiers.

In May, two officers were placed in detention over accusations of being in league with ADF fighters, according to an army spokesman.

Many also wonder whether some business owners use the deadly tactics of the ADF to eliminate rivals, blaming their disappearance on the ADF.

In Mutwanga, a few men gaze at what is left of a shop that was looted and torched in a recent attack.

"We don't understand this war," sighed Musa Kakule, a cocoa farmer who was forced off his land.#photo9

"We don't know if the ADF come with the specific idea of killing people or not. The only thing we know is that through God's grace, we are here, together, alive."

© 2021 AFP

The murky link between DR Congo's ADF and Islamic State

Issued on: 07/07/2021

Grief: A relative of a woman killed in a suspected ADF attack in Beni 

carries a cross to her grave John WESSELS AFP

Beni (DR Congo) (AFP)

Its hallmark: Attack a remote village, massacre its inhabitants and abduct survivors.

Not for nothing has the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) become a name that inspires widespread dread in eastern DR Congo.

Suspicions are growing that this historically Ugandan Muslim group has linked up with the so-called Islamic State, also called ISIS, although experts say the depth of the involvement remains unclear.

According to the Kivu Security Tracker (KST), a respected monitor, the ADF is one of an estimated 122 armed organisations that roam eastern DRC -- the legacy of two regional wars that ran almost back-to-back from 1996 to 2003 and claimed millions of lives.

The DRC's Catholic church says the ADF is suspected of killing 6,000 people since 2013, while the KST blames it for more than 1,200 deaths in North Kivu province's Beni area since 2017.#photo1

On the weekend of June 27-28, Beni was hit by three bomb attacks, including a blast at a Catholic church, that came just hours after a suicide bombing outside a bar -- the region's first such attack.

The IS, monitored by the US-based SITE intelligence Group, identified the suicide bomber as "Abu Khadijah" who targeted "Christian disbelievers at a liquor bar."

- IS link -

On March 10, the US State Department branded the ADF a "foreign terrorist organisation" known as "ISIS-DRC" or "Madina at Tauheed Wau Mujahedeen."#photo2

It said the group was led by Seka Musa Baluku and had become IS's so-called "Central Africa Province" -- an entity that the IS declared in April 2019 as it was losing ground in Syria and Iraq.

The IS is also affiliated to jihadist groups in the Sahel and northern Mozambique -- two other poor, remote African regions with struggling governments.

In a report dated June 10, the UN experts said Baluku pledged allegiance to the IS in July 2019.

He deepened the commitment last September, declaring that the ADF no longer existed and was part of the "Central Africa Province" operation.

According to the Bridgeway Foundation, a US NGO that works on preventing mass atrocities, Baluku turned to the IS in 2017 when the ADF ran short of money.

The cash crunch weakened morale and virtually ended its operations.

An injection of IS funds and propaganda boosted recruitment and encouraged the group to take bolder operations, helped by an influx of motivated foreign jihadists, says the foundation's Laren Poole.

- Caution -

However the UN experts are cautious about the extent of the IS-ADF association.

They say they are unable to confirm any "direct" IS role in either commanding ADF operations or in providing it with financial, human or material support.

The ADF has been under US sanctions since 2014 -- the designation of the ADF as a "terrorist organisation" provides additional legal tools for US law enforcers to prosecute members of the group.

Jason Stearns of the Congo Research Group, an organisation based at New York University, suggests the announcement was "probably political, making the ADF part of the American war on terror."#photo3

But the designation carries several risks, not least the propaganda boost for the IS, Stearns warns.

Another peril is that the ADF becomes simplified to a military problem, thus enabling DR Congo President Felix Tshisekedi to sidestep more complex options, such as a programme to demobilise militia fighters.

"Two years after his inauguration, his government has not been able to articulate a strategy for dealing with armed conflict," Stearns wrote in a blog.

"It is difficult to see a solution to the conflict around Beni, or indeed to the violence in the DRC in general, without a transformation of the Congolese state," he added.

© 2021 AFP

French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts


Issued on: 07/07/2021 - 

French anti-discrimination groups took Twitter to court last year, accusing it of 'long-term and persistent' failures in blocking hateful comments Lionel BONAVENTURE AFP/File


Paris (AFP)

A French court on Tuesday ordered Twitter to give activists full access to all of its documents relating to its efforts to fight racism, sexism and other forms of hate speech on the social network.

Six anti-discrimination groups had taken Twitter to court in France last year, accusing the US social media giant of "long-term and persistent" failures in blocking hateful comments from the site.

The Paris court ordered Twitter to grant the campaign groups full access to all documents relating to the company's efforts to combat hate speech since May 2020. The ruling applies to Twitter's global operation, not just France.

Twitter must hand over "all administrative, contractual, technical or commercial documents" detailing the resources it has assigned to fight homophobic, racist and sexist discourse on the site, as well as the offence of "condoning crimes against humanity".

The San Francisco-based company was given two months to comply with the ruling, which also said it must reveal how many moderators it employs in France to examine posts flagged as hateful, and data on the posts they process.

Twitter said it was studying the court order.

"Our absolute priority is to assure the security of people using our platform," the company told AFP, adding: "We commit to building a safer internet, to combatting online hate and to improving the serenity of public discourse."

The ruling was welcomed by the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), which took Twitter to court alongside five other groups that campaign against homophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.

"Twitter will finally have to take responsibility, stop equivocating and put ethics before profit and international expansion," the UEJF said in a statement on its website.

- Gaps in the net -

Twitter's hateful conduct policy bans users from promoting violence or threatening or attacking people based on their race, religion, gender identity or disability, among other forms of discrimination.

Like other social media giants it allows users to report posts they believe are hateful, and employs moderators to vet the content.

But anti-discrimination groups have long complained that holes in the policy allow hateful comments to stay online in many cases.

French prosecutors on Tuesday said they have opened an investigation into a wave of racist comments posted on Twitter targeting members of the national football team.

The comments, notably targeting black Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe, were posted after France was eliminated from the Euro 2020 tournament last week.

France has also been having a wider public debate over how to balance the right to free speech with the need to prevent hate speech, in the wake of the controversial case of a teenager known as Mila.

The 18-year-old sparked a furore last year when her videos, criticising Islam in vulgar terms, went viral on social media.

Thirteen people are on trial accused of subjecting her to such vicious harassment that she was forced to leave school and was placed under police protection.

While President Emmanuel Macron is among those who have defended her right to blaspheme, former Socialist president Francois Hollande said her original remarks amounted to "hate speech" against Muslims.

© 2021 AFP

WHICH PSALM IS THAT

Capitol rioters formed fake 'Bible study' group as cover for manufacturing explosives: report

Matthew Chapman
July 06, 2021


Rioters January 6th (AFP)

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Fi Duong, an accused Capitol rioter from Northern Virginia, formed a radical militia group under the guise of a "Bible study" group, where he and his associates stockpiled improvised explosives.

Duong has become widely known as the Capitol rioter who can be heard in the footage shouting, "We're coming for you, Nancy!" — a key clip shown in CNN's special report on the attack.

"Duong allegedly told the undercover officer he was part of a 'cloak and dagger' group that will 'build resistances ... for what will inevitably come.' In March, he told associates, 'Keep your guns and be ready to use them,'" reported Rachel Weiner and Spencer Hsu. "He and others held 'Bible study' where they discussed firearms and other training, according to court document."

During these fake "Bible study" groups, the group also apparently gathered material for explosives.

"He said at a meeting in June that he had collected Styrofoam and more than 50 wine bottles to make molotov cocktails but had held off on buying fuel 'to avoid ... being hit with a conspiracy charge, according to the complaint filed against him," the Post reporters write. "He told the undercover agent he had been saving motor oil from his car for that purpose but he also said he would prefer a peaceful secession of Appalachia to a violent conflict."

A previous report indicated that Duong's group surveilled the Capitol for "weeks" and that the undercover agent was able to intercept their encrypted communications.

AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM

Here's how religion played a role in the Jan. 6 insurrection: report

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
July 06, 2021

Protesters storm the Capitol and halt a joint session of the 117th Congress on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.. - Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/TNS

The Republican Party and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity have been joined at the hip since the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan openly embraced the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., the Rev. Pat Robertson and other Christian Right theocrats — much to the dismay of arch-conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater, who saw Falwell and Robertson as terrible for the GOP and terrible for the conservative movement. Former President Donald Trump has been a major ally of the Christian Right, and the Washington Post's Michelle Boorstein examines the connection between fundamentalist Christianity and the January 6 insurrection in an article published six months later.

The January 6 insurrection was primarily a political attack. But in her article, Boorstein stresses that some of the rioters had religious motivations as well.

"Pauline Bauer, Stephen Baker and Jenna Ryan were among the thousands who descended on the Capitol in protest of what they falsely called a stolen election, including some who saw themselves engaged in a spiritual war," Boorstein reports. "For many, their religious beliefs were not tied to any specific church or denomination — leaders of major denominations and megachurches, and even President Donald Trump's faith advisers, were absent that day. For such people, their faith is individualistic, largely free of structures, rules or the approval of clergy."

Boorstein continues, "Many forces contributed to the attack on the Capitol, including Trump's false claims of electoral victory and American anger with institutions. But part of the mix, say experts on American religion, is the fact that the country is in a period when institutional religion is breaking apart, becoming more individualized and more disconnected from denominations, theological credentials and oversight."

One of the most famous January 6 rioters was Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman. BuzzFeed's Zoe Tillman reports that Chansley's latest request to be released from pretrial detention has been rejected:




Although fundamentalist Protestants were part of the January 6 insurrection, some of Chansley's practices are more comparable to those of eastern religion.

"Many Christians at the Capitol on January 6 were part of more conventional, affiliated faith, including pastors, Catholic priests and bused-in church groups," Boorstein observes. "But what researchers studying January 6 find remarkable are the leaderless, idiosyncratic expressions of religion that day. Among them are those of Bauer, who wrote to a judge last month that she's a 'free living soul' and an 'ambassador of Christ,' and of Jake Chansley, the 'QAnon Shaman' who prayed to Christ at a dais in the Senate and calls himself a 'multidimensional being.'"

Robert Pape, who teaches political science at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Post that religious fanaticism doesn't necessarily come from being indoctrinated by a particular sect — and such fanatics, according to Pape, "tend to have a thin knowledge and understanding of their religion."

Pape explained, "Recruits tend to be making individual decisions about the ideologies they want to follow and even what it means. It's very much at the level of the individual."

Fox News contributor admits US women's soccer team didn't disrespect WW II vet — but blames them anyway

Sarah K. Burris
July 06, 2021


Fox News spent the day after Independence Day attacking the U.S. Women's Soccer team by claiming that they turned away in protest from a World War II veteran who was playing the "National Anthem" on his harmonica.

The problem, however, is that it never happened.

"To be clear, no one turned their back on WWII Veteran Pete DuPré during tonight's anthem," the US Women's National Team (USWNT) tweeted. "Some USWNT players were simply looking at the flag on a pole in one end of the stadium."

Oftentimes the American flag is in a different place than the person singing the national anthem. Other times there are multiple flags flying over an event.

Fox News hosts admitted on Tuesday that the soccer team did not show disrespect toward the veteran -- but contributor Clay Travis still insisted the team was somehow in the wrong because some turned toward the flag instead of toward the veteran playing the "National Anthem."

A CNN fact-check also explained, "In addition to omitting the context about the location of the stadium's flag, the initial tweets and articles did not mention that the national team has a prior connection to DuPré. Some of the players met him during a 2019 trip to the beaches of Normandy and spoke about how touched they were by the experience. DuPré also played the anthem on the harmonica at the team's final game before the 2019 World Cup."

"The players all love Pete, thanked him individually after the game and signed a ball for him," the US Soccer communications team said in a tweet.

The CNN story calls out The Daily Caller, Canadian website The Post Millennial, commentator David J. Harris Jr., commentator Nick Adams, former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer and commentator Dinesh D'Souza, all of whom lied about the incident and spread the lie across the web.

They actually met with the veteran to give him props and thank him hours before the right attacked him.

"A huge percentage of American sports fans totally think it's believable," Travis said. "It's unfortunately a sign of where we are that so many of us just presume that level of disrespect."

Other right-wing outlets also scrambled to change things and figure out a way to continue to attack the women, despite being wrong about the story.

The video can be seen here:

Unearthed video reveals GOP's Ron Johnson's profane and conspiratorial rant at GOP lunch

Matthew Chapman
July 06, 2021

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

On Tuesday, CNN's KFILE unearthed comments made by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) at a meeting with the Republican Women of Greater Wisconsin luncheon in Wauwatosa, in which he spun profanity-laced conspiracy theories denying climate science.

"I don't know about you guys, but I think climate change is — as Lord Monckton said — bullsh*t," the Wisconsin Republican said, referring to British conservative climate change denier Lord Christopher Monckton. "By the way, it is!"

Johnson went onto lament that "we're killing ourselves" with measures to address climate change, and went on to call them "a self-inflicted wound."

This starkly contradicts Johnson's recent denials that he is a climate science denier.

Asked for comment, Johnson said, "My statements are consistent. I am not a climate change denier, but I also am not a climate change alarmist." There is no basis whatsoever to the claim that scientists are discrediting climate change.

Johnson's remarks come after a catastrophic heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, so severe that it melted streetcar equipment in Portland, Oregon.

Johnson, who is currently mulling whether to run for another term for Senate in 2022, has a history of promoting conspiracy theories. He triggered outrage recently when he suggested that the January 6 Capitol rioters behaved themselves and that the violence at the riot may have been a false flag.

The failed legacy of the 50-year War on Drugs started with a lie

Alfred Mccoy, Tom Dispatch
July 06, 2021

President Richard Nixon giving speech (YouTube)


Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon stood before the White House press corps, staffers at his side, to announce "a new, all-out offensive" against drug abuse, which he denounced as "America's public enemy number one." He called on Congress to contribute $350 million for a worldwide attack on "the sources of supply." The first battle in this new drug war would be fought in South Vietnam where, Nixon said, "a number of young Americans have become addicts as they serve abroad."

While the president was declaring his war on drugs, I was stepping off a trans-Pacific flight into the searing tropical heat of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, to report on the sources of supply for the drug abuse that was indeed sweeping through the ranks of American soldiers fighting this country's war in Vietnam.

As I would soon discover, the situation was far worse than anything Nixon could have conveyed in his sparse words. Heroin vials littered the floors of Army barracks. Units legendary for their heroism in World War II like the 82nd Airborne were now known as the "jumping junkies." A later survey found that more than a third of all GIs fighting the Vietnam War "commonly used" heroin. Desperate to defeat this invisible enemy, the White House was now about to throw millions of dollars at this overseas drug war, funding mass urinalysis screening for every homeward-bound GI and mandatory treatment for any who tested positive for drugs.

Even that formidable effort, however, couldn't defeat the murky politics of heroin, marked by a nexus of crime and official collusion that made mass drug abuse among GIs possible. After all, in the rugged mountains of nearby Laos, Air America, a company run by the CIA, was transporting opium harvested by tribal farmers who were also serving as soldiers in its secret army. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close ally, then operated the world's largest illicit lab, turning raw opium into refined heroin for the growing numbers of GI users in neighboring Vietnam. Senior South Vietnamese commanders colluded in the smuggling and distribution of such drugs to GIs in bars, in barracks, and at firebases. In both Laos and South Vietnam, American embassies ignored the corruption of their local allies that was helping to fuel the traffic.


Nixon's Drug War

As sordid as Saigon's heroin politics were, they would pale when compared to the cynical deals agreed to in Washington over the next 30 years that would turn the drug war of the Vietnam era into a political doomsday machine. Standing alongside the president on that day when America's drug war officially began was John Erlichman, White House counsel and Nixon confidante.

As he would later bluntly tell a reporter,

"The Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

And just in case anyone missed his point, Erlichman added, "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did."

To grasp the full meaning of this admission, you need to begin with the basics: the drug war's absolute, unqualified, irredeemable failure. Just three pairs of statistics can convey the depth of that failure and the scope of the damage the war has done to American society over the past half-century:

* Despite the drug war's efforts to cut supplies, worldwide illicit opium production rose 10-fold — from 1,200 tons in 1971 to a record 10,300 tons in 2017.

* Reflecting its emphasis on punishment over treatment, the number of people jailed for drug offenses would also grow 10-fold from 40,900 in 1980 to 430,900 in 2019.

* Finally, instead of reducing domestic use, the drug war actually helped stimulate a 10-fold surge in the number of American heroin users from just 68,000 in 1970 to 745,000 in 2019.

In addition, the drug war has had a profound impact on American society by perpetuating, even institutionalizing, racial disparities through the raw power of the police and prisons. Remember that the Republican Party saw the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended decades of Jim Crow disenfranchisement for Blacks in the deep South, as a rare political opportunity. In response, Nixon and his men began developing a two-part strategy for winning over white voters in the South and blunting the Democratic advantage with Black voters nationwide.

First, in the 1970 midterm elections, the Republicans began pursuing a "Southern strategy" of courting disgruntled white-supremacist voters in the South in a successful attempt to capture that entire region politically. Three years later, they launched a relentless expansion of the drug war, policing, and prisons. In the process, they paved the way for the mass incarceration of African Americans, denying them the vote not just as convicts but, in 15 states, for life as ex-convicts. Pioneering this cunning strategy was New York's Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller. The harsh mandatory penalties of 15 years to life for petty drug possession he got the state legislature to pass raised the number of people imprisoned on drug charges from 470 in 1970 to 8,500 in 1999, 90% of them African-American or Latinx.

Such mass incarceration moved voters from urban Democratic bailiwicks to rural prisons where they were counted in the census, but otherwise disenfranchised, giving a bit of additional help to the white Republican vote in upstate New York — a winning strategy Republicans elsewhere would soon follow. Not only did the drug war let conservatives shave opposition vote tallies in close elections, but it also dehumanized African Americans, justifying repressive policing and mass incarceration.

None of this was pre-ordained but the result of a succession of political deals made during three presidencies — that of Nixon, who started it; of Ronald Reagan, whose administration enacted draconian punishments for drug possession; and of the Democrat Bill Clinton, who expanded the police and prisons to enforce those very drug laws. After remaining remarkably constant at about 100 prisoners per 100,000 population for more than 50 years, the U.S. incarceration rate started climbing relentlessly to 293 by the end of Reagan's term in 1990 and 464 by the end of Clinton's in 2000. It reached a peak of 760 by 2008 — with a racial bias that resulted in nothing less than the "mass incarceration" of African Americans.

Reagan Domesticates the Drug War

While Nixon fought his war largely on foreign battlefields trying, and failing, to stop narcotics at their source, the next Republican president, Ronald Reagan, fully domesticated the drug war through ever harsher penalties for personal use and a publicity campaign that made abstinence a moral virtue and indulgence a fiercely punishable vice. Meanwhile, he also signaled clearly that he was determined to pursue Nixon's Southern strategy by staging a major 1980 election campaign rally in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had previously been murdered.

Taking office in 1981, Reagan found, to his surprise, that reviving the drug war at home had little public support, largely because the outgoing Democratic administration had focused successfully on drug treatment rather than punishment. So, First Lady Nancy Reagan began crisscrossing the country, while making TV appearances with choruses of cute kids wearing "Just Say No" T-shirts. Even after four years of the First Lady's campaign and the simultaneous spread of crack cocaine and cocaine powder in cities and suburbs nationwide, only about 2% of the electorate felt that drug abuse was the nation's "number one problem."

Then personal tragedy provided Reagan with the perfect political opportunity. In June 1986, just a day after signing a multimillion-dollar contract with the NBA's Boston Celtics, college basketball sensation Len Bias collapsed in his dorm at the University of Maryland from a fatal cocaine overdose. Five months later, President Reagan would sign the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, aka the "Len Bias Law." It would lead to a quantum expansion of the domestic drug war, including a mandatory minimum sentence of five years just for the possession of five grams of cocaine and a revived federal death penalty for traffickers.

It also put into law a racial bias in imprisonment that would prove staggering: a 100:1 sentencing disparity between those convicted of possessing crack-cocaine (used mainly by inner-city Blacks) and those using cocaine powder (favored by suburban whites) — even though there was no medical difference between the two drugs. To enforce such tough penalties, the law also expanded the federal anti-drug budget to a massive $6.5 billion.

In signing that law, Reagan would pay special tribute to the first lady, calling her "the co-captain in our crusade for a drug-free America" and the fight against "the purveyors of this evil." And the two of them had much to take credit for. After all, by 1989, an overwhelming 64% of Americans had come to feel that drugs were the nation's "number one problem." Meanwhile, thanks largely to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, Americans jailed for nonviolent drug offenses soared from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997. Driven by drug arrests, in 1995 nearly one-third of all African-American males between 20 and 29 would either be in prison or on parole.

Clinton's All-Too-Bipartisan Drug War

If those two Republican presidents were adept at portraying partisan anti-drug policies as moral imperatives, their Democratic successor, Bill Clinton, proved adept at getting himself reelected by picking up their seductive rhetoric. Under his administration, a racialized drug policy, with its disenfranchisement and denigration of African Americans, would become fully bipartisan.

In 1992, two years after being elected president, Clinton lost control of Congress to Republican conservatives led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Desperate for something he could call a legislative accomplishment, he tacked hard right to support the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994. It would prove the largest law-enforcement initiative in American history: nearly $19 billion dollars for 100,000 new cops to sweep the streets for drug offenders and a massive prison-expansion program to house those who would now be sentenced to life after three criminal convictions ("three strikes").

A year later, when the non-partisan U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended that the 100:1 disparity in penalties for crack-cocaine and cocaine powder be abolished, along with its blatant racial bias, Clinton flatly rejected the advice, signing instead Republican-sponsored legislation that maintained those penalties. "I am not," he insisted, "going to let anyone who peddles drugs get the idea that the cost of doing business is going down."

The country's Black political leaders were eloquent in their condemnation of this political betrayal. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a former Democratic presidential candidate, claimed Clinton knew perfectly well that "crack is code for black" and labelled the president's decision "a moral disgrace" by a man "willing to sacrifice young black youth for white fear." The Congressional Black Caucus would similarly denounce the sentencing disparity as "a mockery of justice."

As they predicted all too accurately, the relentless rise of Black incarceration only accelerated. In the five years following passage of Clinton's omnibus crime bill, the country added 204 prisons and its inmate population shot up by a mind-boggling 28% to 1,305,300. Of those, nearly half (587,300) were Black, though African Americans made up only 13% of the country's population.

Facing a tough reelection campaign in 1996, Clinton again worked with hard-right congressional Republicans to pass the Personal Responsibility Work Act, which, as he put it, brought an "end to welfare as we know it." With that law's work requirement for welfare, even as unemployment among Black residents of cities like Chicago (left behind by industry) hit 20% to 25%, youth in inner cities across America found that street-level drug dealing was fast becoming their only opportunity. In effect, the Clintons gained short-term political advantage by doing long-term social and economic damage to a core Democratic constituency, the African American community.

Reviving Jim Crow's Racial Stereotypes

Nonetheless, during his 1996 reelection campaign, Clinton trumpeted such dubious legislative achievements. Speaking at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, for instance, Hillary Clinton celebrated her husband's Violent Crime Control Act for taking back the streets from murderous minority teenagers. "They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators,'" Clinton said. "No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel."

The term "super-predator" had, in fact, originated with a Princeton University political scientist, John Dilulio, who described his theory to the first couple during a 1995 White House working dinner on juvenile crime. In an article for a neo-conservative magazine that November, the academic trumpeted his apocalyptic analysis. Based solely on the spottiest of anecdotal evidence, he claimed that "black inner-city neighborhoods" would soon fall prey to such "super predators" — a new kind of juvenile criminal marked by "impulsive violence, the vacant stares, and the remorseless eyes." Within five years, he predicted, there would be 30,000 "more murderers, rapists, and muggers on the streets" who would "place zero value on the lives of their victims, whom they reflexively dehumanize as just so much worthless 'white trash.'" This rising demographic tide, he warned, would soon "spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland."

By the way, the truly significant part of Hillary Clinton's statement based on Dilulio's "analysis" was that phrase about bringing super-predators to heel. A quick quiz. Who or what does one "bring to heel": (a.) a woman, (b.) a man, or (c.) a child? Answer: (d.) None of the above.

That term is used colloquially for controlling a leashed dog. By implicitly referring to young Black males as predators and animals, Clinton was tapping into one of America's most venerable and virulent ethnic stereotypes: the Black "buck" or "brute." The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan reports that "the brute caricature portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal — deserving punishment, maybe death… Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators."

Indeed, Southern fiction of the Jim Crow era featured the "Black brute" as an animal predator whose natural prey was white women. In words strikingly similar to those Dilulio and Clinton would later use for their super-predator, Thomas Dixon's influential 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan described the Black brute as "half child, half animal… a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger." When turned into a movie in 1915 as The Birth of a Nation (the first film ever screened in the White House), it depicted a Black man's animalistic rape of a virtuous white woman and reveled in the Klan's retribution by lynching.

In effect, the rhetoric about "super-predators" revived the most virulent stereotype from the Jim Crow lexicon. By the end of President Clinton's term in 2000, nearly every state in the nation had stiffened its laws on juveniles, setting aside family courts and sending young, mainly minority, offenders directly to adult prisons for long sentences.

Of course, the predicted wave of 30,000 young super-predators never happened. Instead, violent juvenile crime was already declining when Hillary Clinton gave that speech. By the time President Clinton's term ended in 2001, the juvenile homicide rate had fallen well below its level in 1985.

Amazingly, it would be another 20 years before Hillary Clinton was compelled to confront the meaning of those freighted words of hers. While she was speaking to a donors' meeting in South Carolina during her 2016 presidential campaign, Ashley Williams, a young Black activist, stood up in the front row and unfurled a small banner that read: "We have to bring them to heel." Speaking calmly, she asked: "Will you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?" And then she added, "I am not a super-predator, Hillary Clinton."

When Clinton tried to talk over her, she insisted: "I know that you called black people super-predators in 1994." As the Secret Service hurried that young woman out of the room amid taunts from the largely white audience, Clinton announced, with a palpable sense of relief, "Okay, back to the issues."

In its report on the incident, the Washington Post asked Clinton for a comment. In response, she offered the most unapologetic of apologies, explaining that, back in 1994, she had been talking about "violent crime and vicious drug cartels and the particular danger they pose to children and families."

"As an advocate, as first lady, as senator, I was a champion for children," she added, though admitting as well that, "looking back, I shouldn't have used those words."

That was it. No mention of mass incarceration. No apology for using the power of the White House pulpit to propagate the most virulent of racial stereotypes. No promises to undo all the damage she and her husband had caused. Not surprisingly, in November 2016, the African-American turnout in 33 states — particularly in the critical swing states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — was markedly down, costing her the election.

The Burden of This Past

As much as both Republicans and Democrats might wish us to forget the costs of their deals, this tragic past is very much part of our present. In the 20 years since the drug war took final form under Clinton, politicians have made some relatively inconsequential reforms. In 2010, Congress made a modest cut in the sentencing disparity between the two kinds of cocaine that reduced the prison population by an estimated 1,550 inmates; Barack Obama pardoned 1,700 drug offenders; and Donald Trump signed the First Step Act that released 3,000 prisoners. Add up all those "reforms" and you end up with only 1.5% of those now in prison for drug offenses — just the tiniest drop of mercy in a vast ocean of misery.

So, even 50 years later, this country is still fighting a war on drugs and on non-violent drug users. Thanks to its laws, petty drug possession is still a felony with heavy penalties. As of 2019, this country's prisons remained overcrowded with 430,900 people convicted of drug crimes, while drug offenders represented 46% of all those in federal penitentiaries. In addition, the U.S. still has the world's highest incarceration rate at 639 prisoners per 100,000 population (nearly double Russia's), with 1,380,400 people imprisoned, of whom 33% are Black.

So many decades later, the drug war's mass incarceration still denies millions of African Americans the right to vote. As of 2020, 48 states refused their convicts the vote, while 34 states imposed a range of restrictions on ex-convicts, effectively denying suffrage to about 2.2 million Blacks, or 6.3% of all African-American adults.

Recent challenges have made more visible the drug war's once largely invisible mechanisms for denying African Americans their rightful political power as a community. In a 2018 plebiscite, Florida voters restored electoral rights to that state's 1.4 million ex-convicts, including 400,000 African Americans. Almost immediately, however, Republican governor Ron DeSantis required that 800,000 of those felons pay whatever court costs and fines they still owed before voting — a decision he successfully defended in federal court just before the 2020 presidential election. The effect of such determined Republican efforts meant that fewer than 8% of Florida's ex-convicts were able to vote.

But above all, Black male drug users are still stigmatized as dangerous predators, as we all saw in the recent trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who tried to defend kneeling on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes because an autopsy found that the victim had opioids in his blood. And in March 2020, a paramilitary squad of Louisville police broke down an apartment door with a battering ram on a no-knock drug raid for a suspected Black drug dealer and wound up killing his sleeping ex-girlfriend, medical worker Breonna Taylor.

Maybe now, half a century later, it's finally time to end the war on drug users — repeal the heavy penalties for possession; pardon the millions of nonviolent offenders; replace mass incarceration with mandatory drug treatment; restore voting rights to convicts and ex-convicts alike; and, above all, purge those persistent stereotypes of the dangerous Black male from our public discourse and private thoughts.

If only…

Copyright 2021 Alfred W. McCoy

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author most recently of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His latest book (to be published in October by Dispatch Books) is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.