Aaron Ross Coleman | Vox

Congress’s failure to pass stimulus has had a devastating — and predictable — effect on minority groups

2020-09-14T22:53:29-04:00

With white unemployment in single digits, minority unemployment in double digits, and policymakers cutting federal unemployment insurance by triple digits, the country finds itself in a situation similar to the one it faced during the Great Recession. Now, just as then, minorities are bearing the brunt of the recession. Now, just as then, policymakers are failing to account for that fact — and in doing so, are threatening to reinforce the United States’ long-simmering racial inequalities.

The national unemployment rate fell to single digits in August, at 8.4 percent. However, that number conceals America’s racially stratified economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while white unemployment fell to 7.3 percent in August, the Black unemployment rate was at 13.0 percent, the Hispanic rate at 10.5 percent, and the rate for Asian Americans was 10.7 percent.

With unemployment of people of color still incredibly high, Congress has yet to approve another round of stimulus funding. And the terms lawmakers are discussing would be less generous than earlier rounds of stimulus. In their “skinny” stimulus bill, Republicans suggest setting the federal unemployment insurance benefit — which gave Americans receiving unemployment an extra $600 a week, before the program expired in August — to $300.

Congressional Democrats have remained adamant that a $600 per week benefit is necessary. Meanwhile, some Democratic policy advisers, like former Obama economic council chair Jason Furman, have pushed Democratic lawmakers to compromise, suggesting that an extended unemployment program be reinstated at $400 per week.

“The $600 a week boost to weekly unemployment checks may have made sense when the economy has shutdown,” Furman wrote on Twitter. “But with an [unemployment rate] of 8.4%, it should change. The President’s $400 is reasonable—but the Senate needs to actually pass it for it to be real.”

However, other experts — pointing to the higher unemployment rate for people of color — disagree.

“Jason’s call is tone-deaf,” William Spriggs, chief economist for the union group AFL-CIO, wrote in an email to Vox.

Spriggs noted that not only is unemployment high for people of color, but that a growing number of job losses are permanent, “signaling the labor market is going to be very slow in recovering.” That, coupled with the fact families of color have fewer liquid assets than white families, “make the $600 necessary,” Spriggs said.

For many Americans living this reality, the combination of absent government stimulus and financial hardship is crushing. Just last week, a new NPR poll found “70 percent of Latinos in Los Angeles have experienced serious financial problems because of the job losses and other economic impacts during the pandemic.” To minority communities like these, and policymakers concerned about them, one thing is clear: Top-line statistics fail to capture all the events happening in a racially stratified economy, and policymakers should consider that in their stimulus.

The Covid-19 stimulus was generous until it wasn’t

In the early days of the coronavirus recession, it seemed that American policymakers had learned from their Great Recession mistakes.

As researchers for the ACLU and the Social Science Research Council noted in 2015, the last recession and recovery had a racial slant. Their “Impact of the US Housing Crisis on the Racial Wealth Gap Across Generations” report outlined “a tale of two recoveries,” noting that “white households have started to rebound from the worst effects of the Great Recession while Black households are still struggling to make up lost ground.”

“The divergent recoveries are important in the immediate term, but they are also an especially ominous sign for the future,” the report’s co-authors, Sarah Burd-Sharps and Rebecca Rasch, wrote. “Unequal opportunity to rebuild wealth coming out of the crisis is leading to widening racial disparities.”

This time around, the expanded unemployment benefit appeared to be the type of recessionary policy that economists had long been calling to provide everyday Americans, particularly working-class people of color, a foothold in the economy. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews notes, the $600 a week bump was “a massive expansion in the generosity of the program,” and it pushed the wage “replacement rate beyond 100 percent for workers with weekly wages below $600.”

But now, as the top-line unemployment numbers have come down, Congress has failed to come to any consensus on aid for its most vulnerable citizens, particularly minorities. And this failure has left these Americans with no aid at all, abandoning them to suffer the effects of high unemployment in this unprecedented recession. And despite past warnings about the difficulty people of color have in recovering from recessions, lawmakers are repeating the mistakes.

America fails to account for the disparate impact of a downturn on communities of color

Economists like Michelle Holder, an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College, argue policymakers failed to address the specific and predictable economic hurdles minorities faced in the last recession, and that in not extending unemployment benefits with an extra $600 a week, they are threatening to do so again.

“The unfortunate thing is that when our policymakers are proposing policies to deal with an economic and cyclical downturn, their approach is always a colorblind one, even under Obama,” Holder says.

The Obama administration largely failed to address economic disparities for African Americans and other minority groups during the last recession. Its $787 billion stimulus package was a contributing factor in Black Americans’ prolonged double-digit unemployment during the last downturn, Holder notes. Overall, providing insufficient stimulus during a time of great financial crisis has become a key criticism of the Obama administration, with scholars like Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr. going so far as to describe the Great Recession as the “Great Black Depression.”

It’s based on these sharp disparities that economists like Holder make their arguments against the reduction of the expanded unemployment insurance program pushed by many Republicans and some Democrats. And it is important lawmakers keep in mind this recent history, and the mistakes that need to be avoided in designing future pandemic stimulus.

As Holder says, “Those calling for the scaling back, for the elimination of unemployment insurance, are missing the reality, which is in this country, the burden of the recession is not equally distributed.”

The killing of Daniel Prude, explained

2020-09-11T11:00:36-04:00

Joe Prude, the brother of Daniel Prude, looks out into the crowd as he holds his wife, Valerie, at a march for his brother on September 7 in Rochester, New York. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The release of video of the killing of Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man, in Rochester, New York, is raising new questions about the use of law enforcement as ad hoc mental health specialists in light of calls to reform, defund, or abolish the police.

There is still an ongoing investigation into Prude’s death, which has led to the resignation of all of Rochester’s top police officials. Prude was stopped by police on March 23, early on in the coronavirus pandemic, after officers responded to a call about a naked man claiming he was infected with Covid-19. He was animated and appeared distressed during his arrest, and was ultimately pinned down by officers who’d placed a hood over his head until his cries of distress — and his movements — stopped. The video, released in early September, displays Prude’s final moments as captured by an officer’s body camera, and its delayed release prompted concerns of a cover-up.

The video immediately sparked intense protests in Rochester and escalated ongoing anti-police violence protests around the United States, with demonstrators taking to the streets in honor of Prude, calling for transparency, resignations, and reforms.

Some resignations arrived on September 8, when the command staff and the chief of police, La’Ron Singletary, retired. Singletary had previously denied accusations of a cover-up, writing in his resignation announcement that “as a man of integrity, I will not sit idly by while outside entities attempt to destroy my character. The events over the past week are an attempt to destroy my character and integrity.”

The New York state attorney general’s office is continuing its investigation into the killing, having impaneled a grand jury on September 5.

The new information around Prude’s killing comes at the end of a long summer of racial unrest and protest amid a surge of attention to the Black Lives Matter movement. Additionally, Prude’s killing places a particular spotlight on activists’ calls to defund the police and invest in new emergency response systems that could respond to mental health crises like the one Prude experienced before his death.

What happened to Daniel Prude

On March 22, Prude — a Chicago native — traveled to Rochester to visit his older brother Joe Prude. Joe had invited his younger brother in hopes of helping with his mental health issues.

On the train, Daniel exhibited abnormal behavior, according to a Depew Police Department report that described him as “refusing to listen to orders” and “continu[ing] to smoke on the train.” Earlier in the evening preceding his death, Prude had been admitted to — and released from — the hospital over concerns he might be experiencing a mental break. By early in the morning on March 23, Daniel slipped out of Joe’s home, prompting his older brother to call the police for help.

The next time Joe would see Daniel was at the hospital a week later, when doctors asked him if he wanted to end life support. It would take the family months of legal work to discover the role police had played in his death.

Body camera footage recently released by Prude’s family, which were obtained following petitions to the state under freedom of information laws, show what happened to Prude.

The video, taken from several officers’ body cameras, begins at 3:16 am. It shows Prude standing naked in the middle of a street wet with snow. He appears in distress, but is mostly compliant with police. With a Taser pointed at him, Prude follows police commands, lying down on the pavement and allowing officers to cuff him.

For three minutes, Prude makes a variety of statements, including thanking the officers, asking for gloves, and requesting he be allowed to collect money. Officers then placed a mesh “spit hood” over Prude’s head, saying they did so out of fears about the coronavirus and their concern Prude might have it; he reportedly told a Rochester resident he did earlier in the night.

The hood aggravates Prude, and he becomes less compliant, offering prayers, requesting cigarettes, and making pronouncements that officers respond to with laughter. As the snow continues, officers place Prude face down on the street, applying force from several angles on his back and head to restrain him. Prude begs them to stop. They do not.

Shortly after that, Prude becomes unresponsive. Officers move his head and discuss the fluid that has issued from his mouth; some laugh. Then officers begin providing medical assistance. Nearly 10 minutes after the interaction began, they uncuff him and place him in an ambulance. A paramedic can be heard telling the officers that the drug PCP is why Prude became unresponsive, saying, “It’s not you guys’ fault. You’ve got to keep yourselves safe.” Prude died a week later, on March 30.

The Monroe County medical examiner and documents filed along with a lawsuit from Prude’s family describe the events that night as a homicide, noting that “complications of asphyxia” and PCP were contributing factors in Prude’s death.

Allegations of a cover-up

In late April, after conducting a review of the body camera footage, an investigation by the Rochester Department determined the officers involved had complied with their training and acted appropriately. “Based upon the investigation, the officers’ actions and conduct displayed when dealing with Prude appear to be appropriate and consistent with their training,” the report concluded, according to a legal complaint from Prude’s family. (This legal action, filed on September 8 and detailed by local media outlets, alleges an “internal cover up that began immediately after the incident.”)

For weeks more, the family was left in the dark as their private counsel pushed the state to release more information. According to reporting from the New York Times, it wasn’t until May 18, after procuring an attorney, that the family received the county medical examiner’s report explaining that police had killed Prude. And it wasn’t until July 31 that the family was invited to the state attorney general’s office to view the body camera footage that showed the homicide.

Before the family successfully petitioned for the video and documents relating to the killing, the Rochester police had classified Prude’s cause of death as a drug overdose. Police told the mayor, Lovely Warren, that Prude died after taking PCP. Warren cited this misinformation as a contributing factor to the initial creeping pace of the investigation.

“Experiencing and ultimately dying from the drug overdose in police custody, as I was told by the chief, is entirely different than what I ultimately witnessed, on the video,” the mayor said after the video was published.

According to a local news report by WHAM, former Police Chief La’Ron Singletary called the mayor to inform her of Prude’s death the day it happened. Singletary denied obscuring the truth.

“This is not a cover-up,” Singletary said. “Let me be clear when I say that: This is not a cover-up whatsoever.”

After the family released the video and demonstrations began, officials took much more aggressive action. The day after the video was released, seven officers involved in Prude’s arrest were suspended, and New York Attorney General Letitia James announced she would launch a grand jury investigation.

“The Prude family and the Rochester community have been through great pain and anguish,” James said in a statement about Prude’s death, noting that the grand jury was a prong in an “exhaustive investigation.”

Similarly, Rochester City Council President Loretta Scott expressed sympathy for “the anger, confusion, and betrayal felt by the community”; in another statement, Warren apologized for the killing.

“Mr. Daniel Prude was failed by our police, our mental health care system, our society, and by me,” Warren said during a press conference. “And for that, I apologize to the Prude family and all of our community.”

The mayor also announced reforms aimed at addressing systemic issues around police officers’ failure to provide assistance to people with mental illness. “We are doubling the availability of mental health professionals,” Warren said. “We will take our family crisis intervention team out of the police department and move it and its funding to the department of youth and recreation services.”

Within a week of the video’s release, Singletary announced he would be stepping down as police chief. He has denied public concerns that he hindered or covered up the investigation, arguing that “the mischaracterization and the politicization of the actions that I took after being informed of Mr. Prude’s death is not based on facts, and is not what I stand for.”

Instead, Singletary said he was resigning because “his career and integrity [have] been challenged,” by “outside entities.” According to Rochester City Newspaper, “The departures included the chief, one of his deputies, and two commanders, as well as the demotions of two other deputy chiefs and another commander, and came three days after the state attorney general announced that she would impanel a grand jury to consider evidence in Prude’s death.”

Yet the delay in publishing information concerning Prude’s case, the initial misclassification of the cause of death, and the long-standing inconsistencies in police descriptions of officer killings (for example, Laquan McDonald) have caused concern for activists who say the Prude case was a cover-up.

“Let’s keep the pressure up until all those responsible for Daniel Prude’s murder and cover up—including Mayor Lovely Warren—have resigned, taken responsibility, and donated their pensions to the families they allowed to be harmed,” Free The People Roc, a Rochester racial justice advocacy group, wrote on Facebook. “Together we have the ability to hold those in power accountable and bring an end to systemic police violence in our community.”

As noted by a popular “how many weren’t filmed” sign seen at Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many protesters fear that when there is no hard evidence, the police may very well get away with murder.

Prude’s case is representative of long-standing problems policing mental health

Prude’s killing is part of police departments’ long history of using lethal violence against people with mental illness. According to the Washington Post Fatal Force tracker, this year American police officers have killed more than 100 people with mental illness, including a 37-year-old Army veteran with a machete in North Carolina, an unarmed 20-year-old in a Walmart parking lot in Texas, and a 24-year old holding a toy gun in New Jersey. In the five years the Post has been keeping the tracker, at least 1,254 people with mental illness have been killed by the police — that’s 22 percent of all those killed.

Stretching back to the shooting of Eleanor Bumpurs in 1984, if not earlier, the killing of people with mental illness has long been a problem for police in New York state. The persistence of this violence highlights one of the key demands of many activists who call for “defunding” police: sending funds to mental health professionals more appropriately trained to respond to mental health crises.

As Vox’s Ezra Klein explained on a recent episode of his podcast, these activists would like to reimagine emergency response for people with mental illness:

The state would have a specific and special competency in, like, people who knew how to help others with mental health. So when those folks were having a really bad night for them and for others, there’d be someone forgiving and gentle and calm — the person you would want to be called out there if it was your sibling with bipolar disorder who had lost the plot and was wandering around.

Yet as Prude’s case shows, when someone is having a crisis, they are all too often met with lethal force rather than with deescalation and expert mental health care.

“I placed a phone call for my brother to get help,” Joe Prude told reporters. “Not for my brother to get lynched.”

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The Black lives that don’t make headlines still matter

2020-09-04T18:46:19-04:00

A sign reads ‘How Many More?’ at a makeshift memorial where Dijon Kizzee, a 29-year-old Black man, was killed by Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies in South Los Angeles on September 1, 2020. | Mario Tama/Getty Images

On August 31, Dijon Kizzee, a Black man, was shot and killed as he fled from police in Los Angeles, California. On September 2, new video emerged of Daniel Prude, a Black man, being suffocated with a “spit hood” by police in Rochester, New York, earlier this spring. On August 18, Adrian Jason Roberts, a mentally ill Black Army veteran, was killed by police serving Roberts an involuntary commitment order in Cumberland County, North Carolina.

Since March 13 and the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, the police have killed 83 Black people, according to the Washington Post. Other organizations put the total even higher: The Mapping Police Violence database notes more than 100 Black people killed by police since March 13.

More than likely, these deaths will usher in no legal reckoning. According to the Mapping Police Violence database, “99 percent of killings by police from 2013-2019 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime.” It is this slow, steady drip of police killings that ultimately drives Black families, activists, and their allies to protest in the streets.

“So many people have reached out to me, telling me they’re sorry that this happened to my family,” Letetra Wideman, Jacob Blake’s sister, said during a press conference last week. “Well, don’t be sorry. Because this has been happening to my family for a long time. Longer than I can account for. It happened to Emmett Till. Emmett Till is my family. Philando, Mike Brown. Sandra. This has been happening to my family. And I’ve shed tears for every single one of these people that it’s happened to. This is nothing new. I’m not sad. I’m not sorry. I’m angry. And I’m tired.”

Jacob Blake’s sister *did* that. pic.twitter.com/TpEEWOI073
— Arlan 👊🏾 (@ArlanWasHere) August 26, 2020

Independent of the news cycle, Black people are disproportionately killed by the police

According to the Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer for creating the first nationwide tracker of police killings, “the rate at which Black Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans.”

Yes, more white Americans are killed by police in total each year, but Black Americans, who make up less than 13 percent of the US population, represent 24 percent of those shot and killed by police, according to the Post’s database.

Additionally, the Post notes that the number of people the police kill annually holds steady.

“Police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people annually — nearly 1,000 — since The Post began its project,” the Fatal Force project reads. “Probability theory may offer an explanation. It holds that the quantity of rare events in huge populations tends to remain stable absent major societal changes, such as a fundamental shift in police culture or extreme restrictions on gun ownership.”

In other words, the high probability of steady and disproportionate Black death is why racial justice activists have to take to the streets to fight for major societal changes: to break the cycle. For example, the Movement for Black Lives-sponsored legislation like the Breathe Act aims to solve problems like excessive policing and insufficient social welfare programs in Black communities. And in addition to issues like the ubiquity of guns and violent police culture, scholars also note racialized poverty as a driver of disparities in police killings.

Inequality exacerbates racialized police killings but doesn’t explain the gap entirely

According to a 2020 analysis by the People’s Policy Project based on census poverty data and the Fatal Encounters police killing database, across all races, the higher the poverty rate of the neighborhood, the higher the police killing rate in the community. NYU School of Medicine’s Justin Feldman, lead researcher on the project, found that “rates of police killings increase in tandem with census tract poverty for the overall population, and within the white, Black, and Latino populations.”

“For the overall population, the rate of police killings increased as census tract poverty increased,” Feldman’s report found. For the poorest Americans, there were 6.4 police killings per million, compared with 1.8 per million for the richest Americans. That means you are three times more likely to be killed by police if you are poor than if you are rich.

This trend is particularly disturbing once you account for the racial stratification of American poverty. While a plurality of white Americans live in the country’s least-poor neighborhoods, a plurality of Black Americans live in the country’s poorest neighborhoods, exposing them to a heightened threat of police fatalities.

Black people in poor neighborhoods had the highest rate of killings by police of any demographic measured in the report. At 12.3 per million, it is nearly double the national rate for police killings in the highest poverty neighborhoods.

Yet even after accounting for racial economic stratification, the study estimates that Black Americans’ disproportionate poverty only accounts for about 30 percent of the disparity in police deaths, with researchers suggesting that race-based discrimination likely fuels much of the gap.

In total, the combination of omnipresent guns, the racial nature of American poverty, the violent culture of policing, and the persistence of anti-Black racism form a system that produces deaths like those of Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Rayshard Brooks, and many others. Barring a massive policy shift, the racialized police killings and the unrest they spur will likely continue unabated.

Kenosha’s looting is a symptom of a decrepit democracy

2020-09-12T23:58:14-04:00

Protesters march on September 1 after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. | Chris Tuite/ImageSPACE/Getty Images

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made a forceful denunciation this week of the property destruction that followed the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, saying “rioting is not protesting.”

“I want to make it absolutely clear, so I’m going to be very clear about all of this, rioting is not protesting,” he said. “Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple.”

Biden’s rebuke of rioters and adulation of peaceful protesters reflects a bipartisan sentiment.

President Donald Trump argued during his own trip to Kenosha that “these are not acts of peaceful protest, but really domestic terror.” Attorney General Bill Barr similarly denounced “mob violence.” Barr urged Americans concerned about police shootings to trust the “due process” of the law and allow “dispassionate, reasoned decision based on an analysis of the situation.”

It’s not hard to find denunciation of looting from local officials — from Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot arguing that rioting was “not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech,” to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz decrying property damage as “attacking civil society.”

These politicians insistence on nondestructive protest echo President Richard Nixon’s civil rights era appeals for law and order amid riots against racial injustice. “Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change,” Nixon said in 1968. “But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence.”

Yet what Nixon, Trump, Biden, and other elected officials miss is that America’s government frequently fails to provide meaningful avenues for peaceful change — particularly on police violence.

If looting and rioting have no place in a well-functioning democracy, then perhaps we should pause to consider that these are signs that Americans are not, in fact, in a functioning democracy.

Rioting and unrest, while tragic and destructive, remains a historically familiar and rational response to state violence and weak democratic institutions. From the Boston Tea Party, to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, violent insurrections have served as a form of protest and resistance for centuries in the United States. Today’s riots, still relatively rare, roil after years of legal logjams and gridlock on meaningful policing reform.

In the executive branch, the recommendations from President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing failed to be implemented nationwide. In the judicial branch, legal precedent still protects officers from the consequences of deadly force with qualified immunity. In the legislative branch, this summer’s police reform bills have stalled out. The institutional stalemate persists at the local level even in the bluest of districts like in New York City or Minneapolis, where police brutality persists, despite years of activism and electoral support for reform candidates.

In declining to reconcile the failure of America’s democratic institutions and in their strong denouncements of riots as political protest, elected officials like Trump and Biden avoid the truth — there is no more effective force for stopping riots than making a serious effort to stop police from killing Black people.

Why looting happened in Kenosha and elsewhere in the US this summer

On Sunday, August 23, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by officers as they attempted to arrest him in Kenosha. Graphic video of the shooting shows an officer holding Blake by the end of his shirt and firing bullets into his back as he attempted to enter into his car.

By that night, protesters and demonstrators gathered to express their outrage, and were further agitated as police pepper-sprayed them. As the night went on, demonstrators set fire to dump trucks and local buildings. It was the beginning of a week of unrest and protests that mirrored destructive demonstrations seen earlier this summer following police violence.

Perhaps we should pause to consider that looting and rioting are signs that Americans are not in a functioning democracy

The unrest in places like Kenosha happens as local leaders show an inability to enact basic police reforms like firing police officers known for misconduct. Regardless of the specific details of any police shooting, Black people have seen the same pattern play out over and over.

As civil rights attorney and Democratic mayor of the very liberal city of Minneapolis Jacob Frey said of his inability to fire wayward officers: “We’re hamstrung by the architecture of this system that prevents change and protects officers from being held accountable. And if we really want to see the massive culture shift that is essential, we need to have that ability. And right now, in many instances, the truth is we don’t.”

Executive officials’ failure to fire violent officers on the front end is also matched with judicial officials’ failure to prosecute them on the back end.

As observed in the absence of guilty verdicts after the killings of Elijah McClain, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Korryn Gaines, Eric Garner, Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, Michael Brown, Eleanor Bumpurs, Freddie Gray, and many, many others, the courts — a key site of democratic life — consistently fail to provide justice for Black people slain, and deterrence to police or vigilantes who would unjustly slay Black folks again.

America’s government repeatedly fails to provide meaningful avenues for peaceful change.

In absence of that, and in the presence of racial violence and discrimination, some people lose faith in democratic institutions. “I don’t know where they got them motherfucking jurors from, but that was some straight-up bullshit,” Valerie Castile said in a Facebook Live video in 2017 after the police officer who killed her son, Philando, was found not guilty. “They’re gonna keep on killing us, as long as we just sit down and just take it.”

“I just want to say one thing to everybody out there, I don’t give a fuck what you do,” she added. “Do what your heart desires because that shit wasn’t right. Because I’m here to say that, and fuck the police.”

Castile’s disillusionment is common. It’s human. It’s rarely acknowledged, however.

Instead, the heroes held up in media are the family members and activists who forgive their attackers or retain faith in the political system. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah remarked on this selective storytelling in her GQ profile of Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. She said it was somewhat startling when one of the shooting survivors told the court that “Roof belonged in the pit of hell”:

Their vitriol was warranted but also unexpected, since in most of the press coverage of the shooting it had largely been erased. Almost every white person I spoke with in Charleston during the trial praised the church’s resounding forgiveness of the young white man who shot their members down. The forgiveness was an absolution of everything. No one made mention that this forgiveness was individual, not collective. Some of the victims and their families forgave him, and some of them did not.

This same complex communal response helped fuel the riots in Kenosha last week. After watching a local Black man shot seven times in the back in front of his children, some residents were saddened by property destruction, and others were fine with it, according to New York Times reporter Julie Bosman. Summarizing her reporting on The Daily, she said:

A lot of people said, look, this is a totally appropriate response to what happened to Jacob Blake. This is a totally appropriate response to the oppression of the Black community in this city and in this country. Like I talked to a man who was standing there, smoking a cigarette. And just said, “Look, I’m really sorry to see this, but like if this is what it takes, then this is what it takes.”

Incubated by generations of rejected appeals to legislative, judicial, and executive bodies, the lure of violent unrest grows. This is evident not only in the upheaval that stretched from Atlanta to Wisconsin this year, but in the periodic upheaval that has repeated across the last century.

We tend to lionize peaceful movements — and forget the riots that also brought change

In August 1943, the avenues of Harlem in New York City descended into chaos. Black people ran through the streets with their arms filled with coats, jewelry, and furniture. The young and the old, the rich and the poor, looted as much as possible from white store owners. A young Malcolm X watching it all unfold recounted seeing “all of these Negroes hollering and running north from 125th Street. Some of them were loaded down with armfuls of stuff.” The rioting, the destruction, was triggered by news of a police shooting.

This is one of several scenes of unrest depicted in the University of Massachusetts Amherst historian Traci Parker’s book Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement. The book recounts Black activism’s decades-long history, both nonviolent and violent, unfurling at stores. While Parker covers the famous sit-ins, she also writes, that “not all expressions of Black consumer protest and outrage, however, were so composed and organized; in fact, several pointedly sought violent and destructive revenge.” During riots like the one in Harlem, Parker explains that looters “were frustrated and angered by not only the reported killing but also the history of racial oppression and violence.”

In her book, Parker writes that riots didn’t just express public rage. They were at times even an effective mode of political advocacy prompting biased stories to reflect on biased business practices. “Wartime riots not only ended race discrimination in the marketplace but also created an awareness and discourse that would benefit the black freedom struggle in the postwar era.”

Parker explains the decades-long persistence of both nonviolent and violent protests unfolding at retailers should inform how we understand the fight for racial justice. Rebutting the binary politicians like Bill Clinton posed last month between the legacy of nonviolent figure John Lewis and the less compromising Kwame Ture, Parker tells Vox that “we have to understand that the Black freedom movement isn’t always about an either-or, or a versus.”

“We should be thinking about this as there are different organizations, different tactics, and strategies that are useful to get to a particular endpoint,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, one or the other. I’m not advocating for looting, right. But I think that there could be other ways of thinking about this.”

Whether looking at the looting in Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, Los Angeles in 1992, or Baltimore in 2015, many of America’s most infamous instances of racial unrest start after police brutality. In fact, the autopsies and commissions investigating these uprisings describe a direct relationship between police violence and property destruction. Summarizing the findings of the 1968 Kerner Commission that investigated the civil rights era riots, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes that “the top three grievances it found in Black communities were police brutality, unemployment and underemployment, and substandard housing.”

Today it is perhaps the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie who most pithily expressed how this relationship works. “Kenosha would be quiet if not for an incident of police brutality and abuse,” he wrote this week. “The same is true for other cities where rioting and disorder have taken place.”

Nothing extinguishes a burning skyline like equality and justice for all

Consulting the historical record, we can see looting isn’t some random act of destruction. It isn’t the bloodthirst of the “mob,” as Trump describes. It is political speech, at times persuasive, at times not, that is made all the more common by weak democratic institutions.

Like America’s burning forests, America’s burning cities are the result of years of policy decisions. And like tackling climate change, there is no quick fix for the underlying racial inequality that fuels unrest. Yet for those serious about tackling the problem at the scale that it exists, blueprints are present. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained on similar riots in 1967:

Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

If politicians don’t want to see cities burn, they must prioritize real change. The policy options are endless. Establishment Democrats have introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 which has provisions to make police more accountable in court. Progressives Democrats have introduced the Breathe Act which provides a framework for defunding. At the local level, moderate reformers have suggested ideas such as 8 Can’t Wait’s plan to revamp police use-of-force policies. More progressive activists have pushed the 8 to Abolition to move toward less violent emergency response systems. Many plans exist, but too few make it through the gears of American bureaucracy.

Elected officials have options for expanding social justice and progress in communities long denied it. But until politicians heed demands to end police brutality, America will continue to struggle with periodic riots and unrest, as it has for generations.

Republicans claim Democrats want to defund the police. Biden’s plan calls for more police.

2020-08-25T14:13:20-04:00

Kimberly Guilfoyle prerecords her address to the Republican National Convention at the Mellon Auditorium on August 24, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Black Lives Matter activists would be much happier if they lived in the world that Republicans described on the first night of the Republican National Convention — a world where Democrats yearn to defund the police.

From beginning to end, the Republican speakers at last night’s convention painted a vivid picture of a Democratic Party policy vision that doesn’t exist, claiming Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is leading his party in demanding police budgets be drained like a cold bathtub.

Here’s how they described it:

Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise said, “Joe Biden has supported the left’s defunding of the police. There won’t be any children and grandchildren without those law enforcement and first responders.”

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan added, “Democrats refuse to denounce the mob, and the response to the chaos — defund the police, defund border patrol, and defund our military.”

And Kimberly Guilfoyle, chair of the Trump Victory finance committee, said: “They will defund, dismantle, and destroy America’s law enforcement.”

Similar rhetoric can be found in other speeches from the night, including those of RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and businessman Maximo Alvarez. But these claims could not be further from the truth. While some progressive Democrats have supported calls to defund the police, they are in the minority — and Democratic leaders absolutely do not want to defund the police. Many don’t even like the rhetoric or the phrase.

Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser has said she was “not at all” considering police defunding. Likewise, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black member in Congress, previously told CNN that “nobody is going to defund the police.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in unveiling Democrats’ police reform legislation, stressed the bill “isn’t about” defunding the police when asked about it in June.

In heavily Democratic cities like New York and Seattle, where activist city council members have pushed for budget reconsideration, they have been met with staunch opposition by the very mayors Trump and other Republicans have accused of wanting to defund the police. And, at the top of the Democratic ticket, not only has Biden opposed defunding the police, he actually advocates for adding more funding to the police.

As Vox’s Fabiola Cineas noted in explaining Biden’s criminal justice plan, “while activists call for reducing the number of police officers and policing budgets, Biden’s framework would actually increase the number of police officers in Black and brown communities. He wants a $300 million investment in the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which he helped spearhead in the 1990s, to reinvigorate community-oriented policing.”

Moreover, earlier this summer, PolitiFact noted, “Biden himself has said several times in interviews and op-eds that he does not support defunding the police.” Biden underscored that message at the Democratic National Convention when he told a panel assembled to speak about racial justice that “most cops are good.”

Not only do Democratic leaders oppose defunding the police, but in practical budgetary terms, some Republicans actually support cutting police budgets as part of their overarching support for government austerity. As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias writes:

In early February of this year, the Trump administration proposed a 58 percent cut in the federal government’s COPS Hiring Program, a federal program that supports police department staffing. That’s not a one-off; his administration’s budget proposals have routinely called for huge cuts to this program, which was inaugurated in the 1990s as part of Bill Clinton’s pledge to hire 100,000 new police officers (Congress keeps declining to do this).

The reality of Republicans’ long-held affinity for government austerity, particularly during economic downturns, is in tension with Trump’s stance that he will never defund the police. And just like the president’s claims that the coronavirus will magically disappear, the argument that the Democratic Party is champing at the bit to defund the police is also not true.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the future of the left

2020-08-24T16:20:03-04:00

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) addresses supporters during a campaign rally for then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on March 8, 2020, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. | Brittany Greeson/Getty Images

This week’s Democratic National Convention roused more fuzzy feelings than a Hallmark movie.

From the heartwarming story of a teenager learning to manage his stutter to the endearing testament of Joe Biden finding love after losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash, the Democratic Party’s narrative arc inspired millions yearning for a return to American character and civility.

Yet for many progressives, the week was also laced with angst.

A number of Republicans received invitations to speak, while progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was only given a minute to speak. A story reported in the Hill suggested Democrats might dawdle on pushing for a public option even as a pandemic rages through the nation. Then the HuffPost noted that the DNC “dropped language calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks from its party platform.” Biden had been making overtures to progressives, but they started to wonder if, as president, he might swap progressive ambition for political austerity.

Thus, it’s here, between skeptical support for Joe Biden and overwhelming opposition to Donald Trump, that progressives chart their future. For two presidential cycles, Sen. Bernie Sanders ignited and expanded the progressive left. Now organizers and activists seek to build on that working-class coalition by tapping into the energy of a national anti-racist protest movement and an increasingly diverse citizenry. It’s a political strategy previewed this week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the DNC.

Ocasio-Cortez’s brief speech described the left as a mass movement not only fighting for “guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages, and labor rights” but also “striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia.”

AOC — a young, progressive economic populist — stands amid a cohort of movement-based officials and candidates like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman (none besides AOC were invited to speak at the convention), who make up a newer, more diverse class of progressive politicians. Both in 2016 and 2020, the significant critique of the Sanders left was its shortcomings in mobilizing enough people of color, particularly Black voters.

Now, during America’s racial reckoning, progressives are seeking to fix that. But just as urgent is their desire to get Trump out.

For progressives, Biden is not ideal, but Trump is catastrophic

From the Blue Dog Democrats to the democratic socialists, many agree that Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. It was a consistent theme for the DNC.

“I am … asking you to believe in your own ability — to embrace your own responsibility as citizens — to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure,” former President Barack Obama said in his remarks. “Because that’s what’s at stake right now. Our democracy.”

Sanders himself argued that “at its most basic, this election is about preserving our democracy.” Likewise, in a debrief following her comments, AOC said voting for Biden was about “stopping fascism in the United States — that is what Donald Trump represents.”

They are forming an alliance, however uneasy, with establishment Democrats to defeat Trump.

“Electing Biden allows us to move from defense to offense,” says the Working Families Party’s national campaign director, Joe Dinkin. “Living in Trump’s America is living every day to stop the latest attack on constituencies that we care about — on working-class people, people of color.” Dinkin describes electing Biden as “a door, not a destination” that allows for groups like WFP to grow a movement and make demands for more expansive policies.

“The very next task is to end the Trump era,” he continued. The political calamity of the Trump administration has unified the party behind Biden for now, the scope of the devastation stretches so wide — a deadly pandemic, lynchings, double-digit unemployment rates — that progressives believe the left will remain highly mobilized even if Biden wins.

“Some of the richest people in the world are still getting richer, and millions of people are on the cusp of eviction or foreclosure or hunger,” Dinkin tells Vox. “The dramatic crisis that we’re facing is making people embrace the kind of politics that the WFP, AOC, and our allies have been working on.”

The left believes its future is in organizing diverse coalitions

The Democratic Socialists of America, which stands to the left of the WFP, has a similar theory of the case on holding a future Biden administration accountable and expanding progressives’ power.

“It was a myth that you just vote in November and then your work as a political actor is done. That is not what we see now in DSA,” says Maikiko James, who serves on the group’s National Political Committee. “People are very animated and want to be involved and do more than vote. So as it relates to whatever administration is coming next — the energy that I see, I don’t fear dissipating.”

Following the protests over the police killing of George Floyd, James says the DSA has been working to support Black Lives Matter activists and organizations to conduct “progressive politics in a way that is in genuine solidarity with all communities.”

“We need to actively defend Black lives in material ways,” she continues. “Showing up to protest is a great step one, but how do we now, as a left, strategize around building coalitions, listening to Black leadership, understanding that there are incredible moments of opportunity for young Black leaders to emerge, but also our consulting elders who’ve been in this moment from civil rights and beyond. This is a crucial moment to understand what genuine solidarity and collective organizing means in creating an antiracist society.”

As groups like DSA work to expand their appeal, however, they face a particularly uncertain environment. Alliances have been drawn and redrawn by Covid-19, an unpredictable president, and the economic collapse. These shifting political currents make long-term organizing a tricky order.

Yet this type of multiracial coalition-building is something that Ocasio-Cortez, whom James describes as “a really important leader” for DSA, has excelled at in her congressional career. Regularly advocating for anti-racism, reparations, and police reform on her social media platforms and on the Hill, she has drawn comparisons to activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and politicians like Shirley Chisholm.

Her ease with Black activists and thinkers is a coveted asset for progressives who have long struggled to win over Black voters from mainstream Democrats. Often progressives are accused of forging a reductive analysis of the role of racism in American society in relation to class.

For all the good Sanders has done the progressive movement, his approach with Black voters did him no favors. Berkeley law professor Ian Haney López wrote in Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America that Sanders’s “approach to race carries a real cost, creating blind spots regarding how racism works today as well as alienating racial justice activists who form an influential part of the Democratic base.”

Sanders changed his political outreach in 2020. In 2016, the Sanders leadership team was all white, and even Sanders himself conceded that his campaign was too white.

In 2020, the campaign made a push to diversify and built a leadership team with workers who were Black and of South Asian and Pakistani descent, among other ethnicities. In the Southwest, the campaign’s months of investment in relational organizing led to a huge win in the Nevada caucuses thanks in large part to Latino voters. Sanders had lost the state to Clinton in 2016. When he was still surging at the top of the year, Sanders even overtook Biden in Reuters polling among Black voters in late February. Yet despite the campaign shifts, Sanders was trounced as the race moved through the South where Black voters revived Biden.

Today, still aiming to diversify, groups like the DSA have thrown themselves into coalition-building with Black activist organizations. Thus far, they’ve leveraged local chapters to help support Movement for Black Lives agenda items like defunding the police.

“There’s a lot of conversation happening around how we build coalitions across a very stark racial divide in this country,” James told Vox, adding that right now that looks like investing in campaigns at the local level to reroute municipal funding from police to community safety initiatives and educational opportunities in Black communities.

For years, Sanders sustained the organizations like DSA on the progressive left. He attracted young supporters. He bolstered political legitimacy. Yet Sanders will be 79 in September. It is “very, very unlikely” he’ll run again.

A new generation of left advocates, who are rooted in the lived experience of discrimination and fluent in the language of racial justice, stand ready to take his place. In so many ways, the future of Bernie’s movement looks a lot like AOC.

Correction, August 22: This story has been updated to include the correct pronouns for Maikiko James of the DSA.

New goal: 25,000

5 winners and 2 losers from night 3 of the Democratic convention

2020-08-20T12:12:51-04:00

Sen. Kamala Harris speaks during the third day of the Democratic National Convention. | Carolyn Kaster/AP

With Joe Biden officially receiving the Democratic nomination for president on Tuesday night, Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention was reserved for big speeches from just about every prominent Democrat except the candidate himself: former President Barack Obama, previous nominee Hillary Clinton, third-place primary finisher Sen. Elizabeth Warren, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris. Oh, and Billie Eilish.

The night understandably lacked the DIY charm of Tuesday’s state-by-state roll call vote for president. But it featured Obama’s harshest criticisms to date of his successor, President Donald Trump, and Harris’s opportunity to reintroduce herself to the nation at large after her failed presidential bid. And it devoted airtime to some of the policy priorities that have dominated Democratic politics in recent years: gun control, immigration, climate change, women’s issues, and child care.

Here’s what stood out on night three of the convention.

Winner: The youth

The first half-hour of Wednesday’s presentation was dominated by two issues: gun violence and climate change. In both sections, young Americans took center stage in the Democratic Party’s presentation.

The gun violence segment featured a powerful video, narrated by Parkland activist Emma Gonzalez, about the toll gun violence is taking on American public life. The climate sections spotlighted a series of young activists. And then, as if to hammer the point home, the climate section closed with a performance by Billie Eilish, arguably the most famous Generation Z artist on the planet.

As a formerly young millennial, I found the display of what kids today are doing pretty impressive. But there is a deeper logic behind the DNC’s decision to focus on young activists here.

On both of these issues, some of the most prominent advocates are young (like Greta Thunberg), as are some of the biggest activist organizations (March for Our Lives, the Sunrise Movement). If you’re looking to spotlight young voters, an essential part of the Democratic coalition, it makes sense that you’d pick those segments to do it.

And in the primary, one of the biggest divides between Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders was age, with younger voters overwhelmingly backing the Vermont socialist. Spotlighting the work of young activists on issues that younger voters care about is a smart way of trying to court Gen Z voters without coming across in a “how do you do, fellow kids” kind of way.

—Zack Beauchamp

Winner: Resistance moms

Ladies, remember how cathartic it was to take part in the Women’s March in January 2017? Pussy hat on, offering your fellow protesters carrots and hummus as you huddled in the cold? Democrats would like you to revive that feeling and harness it all the way to the voting booth (or mailbox) come November.

Much of the third night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention was dedicated to the women who have emerged as a powerful force of opposition to the Trump administration. The first hour of the night featured a five-minute video titled “Women’s Suffrage to Women’s March” that interspersed images of women protesting, in politics, and in public spaces, ranging from soccer star Megan Rapinoe to Rep. Maxine Waters to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If you could channel the last three and a half years of the #Resistance into content, this would be it.

The night also focused on issues that matter to women in particular. The issue of gun violence, for example, was prominently featured. Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez spoke, as did former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), a gun control advocate and survivor of gun violence, in a prerecorded video. “We are a nation ready to end gun violence,” she said. “A safer America is possible.”

The programming sought to cast Joe Biden as a champion for women, even though his record on that front is decidedly mixed. Viewers saw a video highlighting the former vice president’s work on the Violence Against Women Act that featured personal, and at times disturbing stories from victims, including Ruth Glenn, now CEO and president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, who was shot by her husband in 1992.

A lot of the night was moving from a gender perspective, especially given that we’re now at the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s ratification, which gave women — at least white women — the right to vote across the US. It’s exciting to see House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wearing white in honor of suffragists and channeling their political power. It’s cool to see Elizabeth Warren in a schoolroom talking about child care and reminding you of all her plans. It’s thrilling to have Kamala Harris, a woman of color, with a chance at becoming vice president. And there’s no denying that if Biden wins the presidency, women voters will play a big part in that, as they did in the 2018 blue wave that handed Democrats the House.

Women are staring up at the glass ceiling yet again, and part of Wednesday’s convention was aimed at telling them they’ll break through. The question is whether they finally will, or if in January 2021, they’ll be back out on the streets in their pink hats, bracing themselves for four more years of Trump.

—Emily Stewart

Winner: Elizabeth Warren

Joe Biden is not an “I have a plan for that” kind of guy.

He has plans, no doubt, but he has never really distinguished himself as a policy wonk (except perhaps as an old hand at foreign policy), or centered his concrete legislative ideas as his biggest attraction. His experience and temperament, rather, have been the primary themes throughout the 2020 cycle, with the advisers and surrogates around him picking up the slack on policy.

Elizabeth Warren, of course, has a plan for that, and that, and that, and everything you can think of as a potential problem facing America. So it was wise of her to use her primetime slot — later in the week and arguably more prominent than that of Bernie Sanders — to assure Democrats, and her supporters, that Biden has a plan for that, too. Warren focused on a place of deep continuity with Biden: child care, where Biden has proposed a massive system of subsidies that bears a strong resemblance to Warren’s plan. Both would cap child care expenses at 7 percent of income for most Americans.

Simply pulling out child care, as important as the issue is, would have risked making the speech seem overly niche. But Warren connected it to the broader coronavirus pandemic and the problem of many schools being unable to safely open for the 2020-’21 school year — she delivered the speech from an early childhood education center. Child care “is just one plan,” she concludes. “It gives you an idea of how we get the country working for everyone.”

Warren came in third in the primaries, and it’s not like her supporters were unlikely to support Biden in the general election, so the persuasion role of her speech was limited. But she effectively built a policy case for the nominee, which was exactly her role.

—Dylan Matthews

Loser: Hillary Clinton

An important programming detail when considering Wednesday night’s speeches is that most major networks only started tuning in to the proceedings at 10 pm, meaning the activities between 9 and 10 were broadcast to a limited number of people viewing on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, other full-coverage outlets, and online streams.

In that context, the fact that 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was confined to a slot before 10 was a bit of a snub. Failed nominees obviously are never the stars at conventions, but they play important roles on occasion. In 2008, former Secretary of State John Kerry gave a 13-minute address defending Barack Obama’s foreign policy credentials and assailing George W. Bush’s management of the Iraq War. Like Clinton, he didn’t speak during the network hour, but he got a lengthy slot beforehand.

Clinton, by contrast, got a noticeably shorter time slot (only five minutes by my count), and delivered low-key remarks. Content-wise, the speech was fine, and Clinton got in some good populist jabs, like, “It’s wrong that billionaires got $400 billion richer during the pandemic while millions lost $600 a week in extra unemployment.”

The most memorable line of her speech was also the saddest: “Joe and Kamala can win by 3 million votes and still lose. Take it from me.” It was a warning to Democratic voters to not be complacent about this coming election — and a reminder of the distance between 2016 and this evening, when the last winner of the popular vote had to settle for a less-than-marquee slot during her party’s convention.

—DM

Winner: Making a plan to vote

Democrats had two big messages coming out of Wednesday night’s convention: Vote for Joe Biden, and make sure you have a detailed plan to do it.

The messaging on having a plan to vote started from the get-go. Before the night’s program kicked off, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris came on in a short segment to tell people not only to vote but to figure out how they are going to vote.

“I know many of you plan to vote this year, but amidst the excitement and enthusiasm for this election, you heard about obstacles and misinformation and folks making it harder for you to cast your ballot,” Harris said. “Each of us needs a plan — a voting plan.”

That messaging continued with the rest of the convention’s biggest speakers and performers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, singer Billie Eilish, 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama.

“They’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and convince you that your vote doesn’t matter,” Obama said. “Make a plan right now for how you are going to get involved and vote. Do it as early as you can, and tell your family and friends how they can vote too.”

Making a plan to vote is important every election, but it’s even more urgent in 2020, which is no normal election year (studies have shown that making a plan to vote increases a person’s likelihood to actually cast their ballot). The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the nation’s system of elections into chaos in many states. Fear of contracting the virus has seen poll workers — many of whom tend to be older — step down from their posts. A lack of poll workers has led to a resulting lack of in-person polling places.

Absentee voting through mail is a sensible option for anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable casting their ballot in person, but the US Postal Service is also facing mounting problems and delays, in some cases caused by the actions of new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a former Trump donor. A recent restructuring by DeJoy had eliminated overtime and gotten rid of mail sorting machines in facilities all over the country, which has led to a slowdown in mail delivery — and growing public concerns about the impact on the election. DeJoy has since reversed some measures in response to the national outcry.

With these myriad challenges, there’s no doubt voting will be more complicated this year than in recent elections. Elections experts say Americans who plan to cast their ballots via mail need to plan ahead, and get their ballots in as early as possible.

“Don’t wait to register to vote; don’t wait to request a ballot on the deadline,” Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser on elections at the nonpartisan foundation Democracy Fund, told Vox recently. “You’re never going to get that ballot in time.”

Democrats laying out a detailed plan for voters at their convention and weaving that messaging throughout the program was a smart move.

—Ella Nilsen

Winner: Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris had a chance to reintroduce herself on Wednesday — and she took it.

In a history-making speech, she confronted Trump with biting one-liners (“I know a predator when I see one”), told voters more about who she is (“[My mother] raised us to be proud, strong Black women and … be proud of our Indian heritage”), and laid out a vision that didn’t shy away from the country’s challenges with race (“None of us are free until all of us are free”).

Many likely knew Harris from her run in the Democratic primary last year, when she emerged as a charismatic candidate but struggled to break through amid critiques of her prosecutorial record and inconsistent messaging from her campaign.

The message she offered Wednesday, however, was far clearer.

Harris explained how her mother’s activism and her parents’ focus on civil rights were the defining influences of her life. She demonstrated exactly how much she brings to the presidential ticket: groundbreaking representation and a policy perspective that was missing before. And she showed that she was able to talk about race in a way that Biden hasn’t been comfortable with.

Perhaps most importantly, by effectively making the case for her candidacy, Harris proved that she was ready to take on the job from day one.

—Li Zhou

Loser: Hope and change

During his now historic 2004 DNC speech, then-state Sen. Barack Obama wowed convention-goers and TV viewers alike with soaring oratory, denouncing American partisanship and praising national unity. “Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” Obama bellowed. “Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America.”

The rhetoric projected Obama as a national unifier of American politics and helped propel him to the White House.

Today, a little older and a lot grayer, a subdued Obama lamented that “our democratic institutions [are] threatened like never before.” He also conceded “that in times as polarized as these, most of you have made up your mind.” It’s a stark shift.

Of course, the Democratic message is still one of aspirational bipartisanship and unity. A few Republicans have been conspicuously featured thus far at the DNC. Yet Democrats’ messaging on uniting the country is now paired with a more urgent focus on restoring American democracy. During the eulogy for Rep. John Lewis last month, Obama cited a long list of desired democratic reforms, including eliminating the filibuster, automatic voter registration, reenfranchisement of inmates, more polling places, more early voting, an Election Day holiday, and statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.

He lingered on that broad theme this evening. “Do not let them take away your power,” he warned during his DNC speech. “Do not let them take away your democracy.”

Sixteen years after Obama exploded onto the national scene, his convention speeches have shifted in focus — from the hope and change of an earlier time to the darker theme of rescuing democracy in a more toxic and polarized era.

—Aaron Ross Coleman

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The DNC’s opening message: The system isn’t broken, it just feels like it

2020-08-18T12:43:01-04:00

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee former Vice President Joe Biden has a conference call during the virtual convention on August 17, 2020. | DNCC/Getty Images

The first night of the Democratic National Convention was not reflective of the revolutionary calls for structural change seen in last year’s Democratic debates, or the demands for radical change to American life that have emerged from ongoing anti-racist unrest. Instead, it was a moderate affair.

From policing to the Electoral College, systems under a microscope for the last several years eluded the toughest critiques last night. Instead, the event struck a markedly different tone, making the argument that the system isn’t broken, even though it feels like it.

The message was telegraphed by most of the night’s speakers, including Republican John Kasich, who said, “I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat. They believe [Biden] may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that.”

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders’s remarks focused on how “Joe will move us forward” through a bevy of popular Democratic reforms rather than his old calls for revolution. But the theme of moderation was most notable in statements made by the presumptive nominee himself and one of his most important surrogates, former first lady Michelle Obama.

In a discussion early in the night with activists, politicians, and attorneys about how best to resolve racial inequality in American policing, Biden made a statement that absolved many officers of systematic complicity — and that made plain his stance on the issue in just a few words.

“Most cops are good,” Biden said. “But the fact is that the bad ones have to be identified, and prosecuted, and out, period.” The former vice president’s answer offered a surprisingly individualistic analysis in a year when the phrase “systemic racism” has become common parlance. Biden’s response framed police brutality as a problem of human resources rather than communal resources. It’s a position at odds with many of the activists at the forefront of the anti-racism protests, who note — as Vox’s Sean Illing explains — racism is endemic to policing:

No matter how you look at it, the American criminal justice system is riddled with biases. As the Washington Post’s Radley Balko cataloged, we know that black people are nearly twice as likely to be pulled over and more likely to be searched once they’re stopped even though they’re less likely to have contraband; and that unarmed black people are more than three times as likely to be shot by police as unarmed whites.

Likewise, former first lady Michelle Obama’s keynote eschewed systemic critiques for individual ones.

In her speech, she suggested President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was the result of apathetic voters instead of an unfair electoral system. “Four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didn’t matter,” Obama said. “Maybe they were fed up. Maybe they thought the outcome wouldn’t be close. Maybe the barriers felt too steep. Whatever the reason, in the end, those choices sent someone to the Oval Office who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.”

In a bit of self-contradiction, the former first lady went on to lament that more citizens didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton while also acknowledging that more citizens voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump.

Absent from her speech were calls — or acknowledgments of a movement — to abolish the current electoral system, a goal of many progressives given it is an anti-democratic system that has allowed two of the last five presidents to win elections without the popular vote. Nor were there critiques that called the Electoral College racist — an argument made by Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar who contends that former bias favoring slave states and the current bias favoring rural white states makes the Electoral College a monument to white supremacy. There were, however, calls for more enthusiastic voting on the scale of 2008 and 2012.

When summarizing the current state of the union, Obama described America as infuriating, disappointing, and “underperforming not simply on matters of policy but on matters of character.”

“Underperforming” certainly pales in comparison to the assessments of much journalistic analysis grappling with the country’s current challenges. Recent months have seen the New York Times investigating “The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus” and the Atlantic magazine lamenting “How Did it Come to This.” These pieces and others frame the current system as collapsing, a view perhaps most unsparingly articulated by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Packer, who proclaimed in June: “We Are Living in a Failed State.”

This type of language is foreign to the Biden-Obama wing of the party, which has for years honed an optimistic, big-tent message, and Monday’s remarks squarely focused on enlisting Democrats — and Republicans — to participate in a system that the Democratic Party’s leaders see as underperforming but not fundamentally broken.

It is ultimately a vision that was accepted by Democratic voters, who rejected progressive critiques like that of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who argued in the primary elections that “the system is rigged.” And up by double digits in many polls — and seeking to expand their appeal in all directions, including Republican ones — the message that Democrats signaled last night they will be moving forward with is repair rather than revolution.

5 winners and 2 losers from the first night of the Democratic National Convention

2020-08-18T09:11:41-04:00

Eva Longoria emcees the first night of the Democratic National Convention. | Democratic National Convention via AP

Monday night kicked off the most unconventional Democratic National Convention in modern history. And for the most part, the first fully virtual convention went smoothly.

The first night of the 2020 Democratic convention was the true test of what a traditional convention — normally an all-day event where political stars flex their chops in front of thousands of screaming (or occasionally booing) delegates — would look like with two hours of Zoom calls and pretaped speeches.

The very format of the convention recognized the stark reality of America in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. But it also gave regular Americans impacted by Covid-19 and hurt by police brutality a direct voice. Rather than having thousands of people packed into a massive convention hall listening to political rising stars, dozens of Americans beamed in from their living rooms to speak.

Monday night featured plenty of big Democratic names but also emphasized the experience of regular Americans impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, from a small-business owner who said he lost 40 percent of his revenue during the continued economic downturn to Kristin Urquiza, an Arizona woman whose father died of Covid-19 after the state’s hasty reopening.

“My dad was a healthy 65-year-old,” Urquiza said. “His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life.”

Perhaps more than any other night on the roster, Monday also showcased the ideological spectrum of those who are backing former Vice President Joe Biden over President Donald Trump in the fall. Two of the night’s most notable speakers were progressive icon and former Biden opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who in 2018 signed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country into law.

“In normal times, something like this would probably never happen, but these are not normal times,” Kasich said in his address — while literally standing at a crossroads.

“Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs,” Sanders said in his address, positioned in front of a woodpile in his native Vermont.

The first night of the 2020 DNC certainly wasn’t perfect, but it hit many of the themes Democratic officials wanted. Here are the night’s winners and losers.

Winner: Real people

One of the night’s most scathing indictments of the Trump administration came not from a Democratic politician but from Kristin Urquiza, a young woman who lost her father to Covid-19 in May; he had gone out to an Arizona bar with his friends after the state reopened.

“A few weeks later, he was put on a ventilator, and after five agonizing days, he died alone in the ICU with a nurse holding his hand,” said Urquiza, whose obituary for her father went viral earlier this year. “My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life.”

Her conclusion: “There are two Americas: the America that Donald Trump lives in, and the America that my father died in.”

The message of the first day of the four-night virtual gathering was clear: This is about people, and they will be front and center from the start.

An assortment of singers from across the US performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a gallery of video screens at the outset of the night, and the first 20 minutes of the evening featured no one of real national recognition except for actress Eva Longoria Baston, night one’s host. Instead, viewers were introduced to Scott, a small-business owner, Marley, the teen founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks, Rick, a farmer, Michelle, an El Paso nurse in Cookie Monster scrubs, and a former Trump voter who is now backing Biden and delivered his address seemingly holding a drink. There was an address from the family of George Floyd, the Black man killed by Minneapolis police earlier this year, who called on the audience not only to remember Floyd but also the people who have unjustly lost their lives to at the hands of police and to racial violence in the United States.

“George should be alive today. Breonna Taylor should be alive today. Ahmaud Arbery should be alive today. Eric Garner should be alive today. Stephon Clark, Atatiana Jefferson, Sandra Bland, they should all be alive today. So it is up to us to carry on the fight,” said Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s brother.

Gwen Carr, the mother of Garner, who was killed by police in New York in 2014, appeared in a panel with Biden where you could see Christmas decorations hanging in the background.

One music montage, titled “Rise Up,” featured a montage of videos and images of life in America before and after Covid-19. Other montages featured voters speaking directly to the camera about their support for Biden and different issues of focus — racial injustice, election security, front-line workers, Republicans for Biden.

“What I want to see in the next president of the United States is someone who is fair, who believes in criminal justice under the law. I want him to lead us through this revolution that we’re experiencing right now,” one voter said.

“I’m absolutely sure that [Biden] is going to help us bring this country together once again,” said another.

The night focused on both Americans who will vote in November and those who won’t make it there, including a moving montage of people who have lost their lives in the pandemic. “You are the ‘we’ in we the people” was the rallying cry, and Democrats made good on it.

—Emily Stewart

Winner: Michelle Obama

For a convention night that was anchored by real people throughout, former first lady Michelle Obama was the obvious choice for a keynote speaker.

Obama is well-known, relatable, and above all, empathetic. When her husband left office in 2016, she had a 64 percent approval rating. Since then, she’s gone on to have a best-selling autobiography, documentary, and podcast about her life experiences. And as she made a point of emphasizing multiple times during her speech, she is not a huge fan of politics.

Known for her signature phrase “when they go low, we go high,” Obama made it clear that four years under Trump’s presidency hasn’t changed her mantra. In fact, she said, it’s only deepened it.

“Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me: When others are going so low, does going high still really work?” she said. “My answer? Going high is the only thing that works. Because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else.”

Obama brought down the house during the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when she had tens of thousands of fans cheering her on. Over 20 minutes in a far quieter setting on Monday night, she proved she’s just an effective speaker on a Zoom call as she is in an arena.

Rather than trying to replicate the fire of an in-person convention, Obama’s keynote felt like an intimate conversation with a close friend. Emitting warmth and understanding, she at times quietly pleaded with her audience to do their civic duty and vote in the November election.

“We’ve got to show up with the same level of passion and hope for Joe Biden,” she said. “We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can, we’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow up to make sure they’re received, and then make sure our friends and families do the same.”

Obama also provided an incredibly effective argument against Trump’s presidency. Rather than painting him as an authoritarian strongman as many of his critics do, she talked about him as a weak and ineffective leader.

“He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head,” Obama said. “He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us.” Then, using Trump’s recent phrase in which the president glossed over the deaths of 160,000 Americans and counting, Obama added, “It is what it is.”

—Ella Nilsen

Winner: John Kasich’s crossroads

Robbed of the usual pageantry that a national convention provides, Democrats had to get creative. No staging was more inventive — or literal, and maybe a little silly — than John Kasich standing at an actual crossroads to make the case for Republican voters like him to support Biden over the Republican incumbent.

“America is at a crossroads. Elections represent a real choice,” the former governor said from somewhere, probably rural Ohio, to open his remarks. “As individuals and a nation, about which path we want to take when we have come to challenging times. America is at that crossroads today.”

Do you get it?

Kasich’s appearance was the subject of some controversy before the convention’s start. Why, some of the more progressive Democrats asked, are we granting precious time to a lifelong Republican at a convention for a political party with so many voters who have been energized by the politics of Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

“There are a bunch of people out there, silent Biden voters, Republicans who want to vote for Biden or who will be voting for Biden, and it’s important to let them know they’re not alone,” Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), one of the national co-chairs of Biden’s campaign, told reporters before the convention got underway. “There are Republican leaders that are voting for Biden [and vice presidential pick Kamala] Harris. You make sure that support is known.”

The man himself obliquely referred to the (far) other side of the aisle.

“I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat. They believe he may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that,” Kasich said. “I know the measure of the man. Reasonable. Faithful, respectful and no one pushes Joe around.”

But in the end, it was a brief 90 seconds for Kasich and one unforgettable image, broadcast right as the major networks were starting their coverage. He set up another montage of regular people — by far the most effective surrogates for Democrats on the convention’s first night — to explain their conversion from Republican voter to Biden backer.

“Vote, America. That’s the only way to get out of this,” one man said. “Joe Biden is just the person to ensure we get our lives back to normal.”

As unofficial campaign slogans go, that seemed like something the Biden campaign would be perfectly happy with.

—Dylan Scott

Loser: The “defund the police” agenda

On Sunday, elected officials and activists in Chicago held a press conference protesting the city’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, for deploying city police to kettle, pepper spray, and beat Black Lives Matter demonstrators over the weekend. On Monday, Lightfoot was then invited to the DNC to speak about ending systemic racism. It was an awkward fit.

Earlier in the night, the DNC had DC Mayor Muriel Bowser speak to the importance of Black Lives Matter after she commissioned a BLM mural near the White House. However, like Lightfoot, Bowser has been deluged with criticism from activists, who have chastised her for creating symbolic change without championing the legislative reforms they demand — principally, defunding the police.

Crucially, a likely letdown for organizers was Biden’s language around describing the police problem. “Most cops are good,” Biden said. “But the fact is that the bad ones have to be identified, and prosecuted, and out period.”

This logic — which falls pretty close into the “bad apple” paradigm — fails to capture the fundamental issue that many Black Lives Matter activists seek to highlight. This was likely intentional on Biden’s part. He’s signaling that while he favors reform, he doesn’t agree with the “defund the police” agenda. For years, organizers have insisted the problem in American policing isn’t individual cops, but a racist political system that floods low-income and minority neighborhoods with cops and deprives them of investment.

The intellectual leaders and founding activists from Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson, Missouri, movement are political radicals. They have a robust agenda and worldview that has most recently emphasized defunding the police. Their voice, as well as their posture toward policy change, was absent in Monday’s remarks. Many people watching likely will not be bothered by the DNC’s comments on policing or the guests invited to speak on the topic. However, the young racial justice activists who care about the substance of the BLM policy agenda are left wanting.

—Aaron Ross Coleman

Loser: Lecterns

The Covid-19 world means seeing a lot of people in settings we’re not used to, as in, at home and in their living rooms. And it turns out not only is it fine, but it’s actually pretty nice, even in politics.

Multiple speakers on Monday evening opted to go the more traditional route for their addresses. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke seated at a table, replicating the format he’s used for public addresses throughout the pandemic, including a “Today is Monday” reminder. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) spoke from lecterns.

In some cases, it came off as a little stale and stiff.

It’s not that there’s a problem with sticking to tradition and norms, but also, these aren’t normal times. This is an entirely virtual convention, and it is a moment and an opportunity to be creative. It’s impossible to create the energy of a live audience, so why not do something different?

During the night, we saw a lot of regular people speak; as mentioned, one with a drink in hand, another with Christmas decorations in the background. And some politicians had more homey formats as well. Many of the Republican figures who spoke in support of Biden — love them or hate them — did so from the comfort of their homes.

Former first lady Michelle Obama delivered her remarks seated casually in what appeared to be her house, though she definitely had some aesthetic treatment — different camera angles, a background that was blurred. Still, it conveyed a level of intimacy as she redefined her memorable line from the 2016 convention, “When they go low, we go high.”

“Going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold, hard truth,” she said. “So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

Sticking to a more formal setting went better for some than for others. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appeared in front of stacks of lumber between flags for his native state of Vermont as he ticked off issues such as paid family leave, Medicare, and a $15 minimum wage. Sanders isn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy figure, whatever the setting, and he was one of the only figures of the night to really focus on policy.

It was a night of live politics in the Zoom world, and some of those who embraced it were rewarded. Politicians are people, after all, and dropping some of the formalities and dressings a normal convention would bring with it was an opportunity to demonstrate that.

—ES

Winner: The convention format

Even though they were holding out hope that a smaller in-person convention could happen, Democratic officials had been preparing for the possibility of an all-virtual convention since April.

The 2020 convention was supposed to be tens of thousands of delegates packed into Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum — cheering, shaking hands, hugging, dancing, and watching the balloon drop. In other words, it was every public health official’s nightmare during the coronavirus era.

With the 2020 convention going fully virtual, there was simply no way to replicate the raw energy of an in-person event. Keynote speaker Michelle Obama’s Monday speech was still captivating, but the deafening applause and cheers that marked her 2016 speech in Philadelphia were absent.

“Having 5,000 people screaming and partying, does that meet the moment?” Alex Lasry, senior vice president of the Milwaukee Bucks and an instrumental figure in bringing the DNC to the city, told Vox recently. “This is a very serious time and a very serious moment; this is something you can’t do ad hoc.”

The months of preparation resulted in a tight two hours of primetime television. It wasn’t without awkward moments: a stilted Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning, cuts to audiences clapping in tiny Zoom boxes after speeches wrapped up, and Bruce Springsteen wearily intoning the words “rise up” in between video montages.

But all in all, Democrats hammered home the message they wanted to come out of the convention: With America in chaos under Trump, they are the party of governing and responsibility. The very fact Democrats quietly planned for a virtual convention for months while Republicans tried to keep an in-person convention format until July showed this. And hearing the voices and seeing the faces of everyday Americans helped convey the humanity of those being impacted by Covid-19, systemic racism, and the economic downturn.

Under trying circumstances, Democratic officials may have made a case for doing away with in-person conventions — or at least shortening them.

—EN

Winner: Eva Longoria Baston

In a convention where everyone involved was beaming in from disparate locations, Eva Longoria Baston, the designated emcee for the night, ultimately served as a much-needed anchor.

As the evening’s host, Longoria Baston gamely kept the event moving, interviewing guests and streamlining segments throughout the two-hour program. Perhaps best known for her work as an actress and producer, including her starring role in the ABC drama Desperate Housewives, Longoria Baston also has deep ties to the Democratic Party, which were notably on display Monday.

A longstanding immigration activist, Longoria Baston has launched a number of advocacy groups including Latino Victory, an organization devoted to electing Latino lawmakers, and Momento Latino, a coalition aimed at addressing economic inequities within the Latino community. “I’ve always been politically active,” she told the Daily Beast in 2019. “I’ve been involved since Clinton ran in ’92, volunteering, going door-to-door, canvassing, phone-banking. … And coming from the state of Texas — the country of Texas, I should say — I’m definitely at the forefront.”

Why is Eva Longoria the emcee for the Democrats' convention? She's been a political activist for about a decade. She helped launch Latino Victory to get more Latinos elected to state and national public office, works to improve women's roles in Hollywood in front of and behind…
— Suzanne Gamboa (@SuzGamboa) August 18, 2020

According to Democrats’ convention committee, Longoria Baston is one of four actresses who will emcee the event this week: Tracee Ellis Ross, Kerry Washington, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus will each helm one night as well.

—Li Zhou

Kamala Harris is a politician, not an activist. It’s an awkward fit for this moment.

2020-08-13T10:22:34-04:00

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee former Vice President Joe Biden (L) speaks as his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) looks on during an event at the Alexis Dupont High School on August 12, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Sen. Kamala Harris has made history as the first Black woman to be selected for a major political party presidential ticket — but she’s also wading into a political quagmire. Harris’s record stands at odds with some of the most urgent racial justice issues today.

Her biography mirrors many of the Black women who anchor the Democratic Party’s base and who endure the brunt of America’s racism. Harris was born into a segregated United States, famously talking about her own experience with busing. Her parents organized in the civil rights movement. She attended a historically Black college. She belongs to a Black sorority. In symbolic virtue and stature, her candidacy already embodies the grandeur of electoral trailblazers like her friend Barack Obama and her muse Shirley Chisholm.

For months, journalists, activists, and pundits have emphasized Biden’s need to choose a Black woman candidate. Headlines like Barron’s “After George Floyd, Pressure on Biden to Pick Black VP” or the Boston Globe’s “Joe Biden already was under pressure to pick a Black woman running mate. The outrage over George Floyd’s death adds to it” capture the angst.

Many of these assertions rest on the premise that Black women remain uniquely equipped to wrangle the racial inequality festering in the United States — particularly as protests against police violence continue across the nation. Yet many of the policies and institutions (particularly in the criminal legal system) that have drawn the ire of Black activists have Harris’s support. (The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

For example, on drug policy, Black activists have broadly called for more empathic and health-based interventions. Just this week, a letter signed by a coalition of Black men pressed this point. The petition, which pushed for a Black woman vice president, skewered former Vice President Biden for not showing more “remorse for the 1986 or 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse bills, which established mandatory minimum sentencing and subsequently crack cocaine sentencing disparities, and by his own admission, led to mass incarceration.” Yet until at least 2014, Harris supported the criminalization of marijuana, which the ACLU argues disproportionately harmed minorities.

“Of course this nomination is historic, but something else historic is going on right now — we are in the middle of the largest protest movement in American history. It’s a protest movement that’s all about finding non-punitive non-carceral solutions to the kinds of economic problems that are plaguing proportionally black and brown communities,” said Briahna Joy Gray, former press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign, on Democracy Now in reaction to the choice of Harris as Biden’s running mate.

Gray underscored that there is a “great deal of frustration” among activists at the seemingly ironic choice.

“Kamala Harris is someone who has had these criticisms leveraged at her throughout very early on. … To many people in the activist community, she has done very little to assuage people’s concerns about her previous stances or demonstrate the level of growth that we would like to see,” Gray said.

Why criminal justice advocates are skeptical of Harris

A 2019 New York Times op-ed from law professor Lara Bazelon pushed back on Harris’s claim that she was a “progressive prosecutor,” arguing that she was responsible for enforcing regressive policies as California’s “top cop.” Harris opposed measures to investigate shootings involving officers, appealed a judge’s effort to end the death penalty, and “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors,” Bazelon wrote.

Similarly, law professor and civil rights attorney James Forman Jr. expressed dismay last year over how policing policies that Harris supported as San Francisco’s district attorney, such as arresting truant parents, harm those who are “overwhelmingly poor, black and brown, and struggling.”

Harris’s historically expansive view of the police and incarceration are not aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement. She has mocked protesters’ signs and chants calling for more schools and fewer jails. “There’s a fundamental problem with that approach, in my opinion,” she said at a 2013 policy talk. “I agree with that conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.”

“There should be a broad consensus that there should be serious and severe and swift consequences to crime,” she continued.

This is in sharp contrast with the Black women leading the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists are demanding radical transformation in the country’s criminal legal system. This includes responding to crimes like truancy and murder as public health problems requiring well-funded communal intervention.

As a prosecutor, Harris believed in the utility of state force to discourage antisocial behavior. She noted that she had “a huge stick” she could use to enforce things like school attendance, insisting that other arms of the government had carrots as incentives to action. Many Black activists, however, remain highly skeptical of this type of policymaking. For those who have been systematically excluded from social welfare programs and overloaded with state-sanctioned violence, their policy demand remains more carrots, fewer sticks: more schools, fewer jails.

Although moderate throughout her career as a California prosecutor, Harris has tacked left during her time in the Senate. She has been a voice for police reform and against police brutality. Earlier this year, along with prominent senators like Cory Booker, Harris introduced the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, aiming to decrease racial discrimination and increase accountability in policing with a bevy of reforms. Last year, during her presidential candidacy, Harris’s move left on criminal justice was evident in her policy platform, which adopted increasingly popular reforms including eliminating private prisons, ending mandatory minimums, reducing the use of cash bail, and legalizing marijuana.

What the Kamala Harris pick was supposed to accomplish for the Biden campaign

All of this makes Harris a somewhat puzzling choice for the Biden campaign, when considering the current centering of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, there are some ways in which Harris does balance Biden’s ticket. Where Biden has drawn criticism for his gaffe-ridden, halting speech, Harris remains renowned for her sharp questioning and rhetoric. Harris is a generation younger. Her lived experience as a Black and Indian American woman speaks to a rapidly diversifying country.

But both Harris and Biden struggle to overcome their “tough on crime” past in a party that has swung hard against those impulses in recent years. Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie, though, tells Vox the hurdle is not insurmountable — even during this protest movement against excessive policing.

“There’s going to be tension, and Harris and Biden will have to navigate that. But their gamble relies on their willingness to have a conversation and compromise,” Gillespie says. “That is the strategy that’s going to cast the widest net for voters. It’s intended to blunt Donald Trump’s invocation of ‘law and order’ and his attempt to terrorize white suburbanites away from the Democratic ticket.”

Counterintuitively, it could be enthusiasm among white suburbanites for Harris that helps Biden drive up turnout. Just as Donald Trump’s 2016 outreach to Black voters may have helped increase his palatability to white Americans in the suburbs, Biden’s Harris pick affords him a similar opportunity. As Vox’s Li Zhou reported, Harris ranked the highest among potential VP candidates in a recent poll of Democratic voters.

Suburban voters may embrace Harris’s candidacy in a spirit of tolerance of diversity that many have gravitated toward in the polarizing Trump years. And while she may not be a favorite among Black activists, Harris is a paragon of representation that Black women in the Democratic Party have been demanding in recent years.

Harris is a politician, not a racial justice activist

The upshot is clear: Harris is not a movement candidate. She does not relate to Black Lives Matter the way that Bernie Sanders relates to Occupy Wall Street, the way Sen. Ted Cruz relates to the Tea Party, or the way Cori Bush relates to the Ferguson, Missouri, uprisings.

Harris is not an activist. She is a very talented Democratic politician who has spent the lion’s share of her career within mainstream party politics pushing many mainstream policy positions. The most generous interpretations of her career describe Harris as an official open to the racial justice agenda but not a consistent champion of it. As Vox’s German Lopez has explained:

A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions. She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.

Harris’s presidential debate performances during the primary captured this duality. Last June, Joe Biden stood onstage across from Harris, flat-footed as she lobbed a scathing attack on Biden’s record on segregation.

“It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country,” Harris said, referencing the segregationists Biden held relationships with early in his career. “And it was not only that — you also worked with them to oppose busing.”

Biden floundered with a defense of states’ right to eschew civil rights laws:

HARRIS: Vice President Biden, do you agree today — do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose bussing in America then? Do you agree?

BIDEN: I did not oppose bussing in America. What I opposed is bussing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed. I did not oppose . ..

HARRIS: Well, there was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California, public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.

BIDEN: Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision.

HARRIS: So that’s where the federal government must step in. That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That’s why we need to pass the Equality Act. That’s why we need to pass the ERA, because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.

That exchange dragged up Biden’s mixed record on racial justice, reminded the country of the evils flowing from continuing segregation, and it arguably won Harris the debate. Yet, just days later, when her position on federal intervention to enforce desegregation through busing was interrogated by reported, she appeared to hold views closer to Biden’s.

Harris’s muddied messages persist. Whether talking about federal government intervention for integration or responding to activists’ demands to shift large-scale funding away from policing and toward community care, Harris has remained lukewarm in her support for bold racial justice policies.

For many Black women, this is not a deal breaker. Representation matters.

“If you look back at Shirley Chisholm, she ran so that Kamala could lead at this moment,” a Black female Harris supporter told the AP’s Kat Stafford. “I think it’s important for us to look at that and see other young women of color realize that they can go after their dreams and really make change in our world.”

But there is still lingering disappointment. As Derecka Purnell wrote in a column for the Guardian, “If we must support politicians of color seeking office, let’s especially protect the ones … who risk their lives resisting white supremacy, Republicans, and moderate Democrats.”

If Democrats seek to capture the energy of the protest movement led by younger Black women and supported by a diverse coalition of allies, the party likely has a way to go. The movement was built on seeking justice, not symbolic representation.