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In this website it explains why African Americans have decided to report Trump a republican. Daniel Cameren is famously known for deciding against the murder charges of the cops whose bulets killed Breonna Taylor in April. He even calls it a crime against justice for people to think otherwise.

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"It's a mindset, like Hitler youth, based on hatred-religious hatred, racial hatred." -Gore Vidal, on the Republican Party, 2009

OPENING STATEMENT

One night I flipped to Fox News-which I watch near never-curious to see how the day's nonsense was being reported in an alternate universe, and caught Tucker Carlson announcing Daniel Cameron as his next guest.

Cameron's the Kentucky AG infamous for deciding against recommending murder charges for the cops whose bullets killed Breonna Taylor in April. (While deliberating on that case, he also found time to keynote at the Republican National Convention.)

In the interview, he defended the Taylor decision and critiqued those who deem it a miscarriage of justice.

Ever-aspiring-to-fairminded me kept watching, open to the possibility that he would say something to give me at least the hint of a reason to revise my early averse judgement.

He didn't.

In fact, dude did the opposite.

"I hope someday we can have dinner," said Carlson, toward the interview's end. "And I'm going to ask you what you think of all the other prosecutors who've bowed to political pressure. But I'm not going to ask you that on TV because that'd be putting you in a bad spot."

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"I'm going to take you up on that dinner," said Cameron, and smiled.

The bald obsequiousness, the sly-ass smile, the blithe bantering with Carlson while defending the tragic death of a Black woman-in that moment Cameron was an exemplar of the worst of Black Republicans.

Where's my damn remote?

As you might've sussed, I ain't down with the elephants. But to keep it buck, a political label features little in factoring my sense of self. The most prominent aspect of my identity is my Blackness. And as a Black man, I believe it hard if not impossible for a Black person in good conscience or faith to support the current Republican party.

I disbelieve that Black people are homogenous and should vote as monolith.

Peep: in 2016 Trump captured 6 percent of Black voters. Per a 2017 PEW poll, 8 percent of Black voters identify in some way with the Republican party. And while the costs of that support-to Black people and almost every other constituency save affluent white men-was speculative pre-the-first-go-'round, there's beaucoup proof of the grave dangers of repeating that error.

Please be clear: I disbelieve that Black people are homogenous and should vote as monolith. However, I do believe the present version of the Republican party is out-and-out undeserving of Black support. In fact, Black folks who support Republicans in light of their long train of abuses and usurpations do so at the expense of justice for Black people at large.

For the record, I'm defining justice the same way the inventors of democracy did: a structure of civic bonds which are beneficial to all, rich and poor, powerful and weak.

But again, I pride myself on open-mindedness, and in that spirit, I sent an ABP for Black Republicans to some friend groups and contacts, and after a few false leads was able to schedule conversations with just two, to whom I am grateful: Steven Mullins-a former candidate for the United States Senate and the current commissioner of planning and zoning for the city of West Haven, Connecticut, and Gianno Caldwell: Fox News pundit, author, and podcaster. Not for nothing, I asked them some big questions, and also pulled public-record answers from other prominent Black GOPs.

As evidence, I submit the salient passages.

THE DEFENSE
On whether this iteration of the Republican party is the best political party for Black people:
Mullins, to Esquire: "Yeah, actually: currently and always, quite frankly. Because you have to remember, it was founded as an anti-slavery party. And you know, no one ever talks about this, but the first Black people who were elected to Congress from the South-from Louisiana, from Georgia and so forth-were Republicans."

Caldwell, to Esquire: "I think the best thing Black folks can really do for us as a community is to ensure that our vote counts for something. And what I mean by that: If you're voting for Democrats 90 percent of the time, you should be in better conditions. Black folks should be a priority to Democrats beyond election time, which it seems as though the only time we're going to hear from folks like that. I often say Black lives don't matter to Democrats, Black votes do, and I think that's been conclusive throughout my time of being alive."

Ja'Ron Smith, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy: "Donald Trump knows that in the work of revitalizing communities, America's strength is America's people. And I can tell you, he really cares. And he takes action. Every issue important to Black communities has been a priority to him, prison reform, rebuilding broken families, bringing jobs back." (2020 Republican National Convention)

Candace Owens, author and activist: "Democrats want black people to fail." (Fox News interview, 4/10/19)
On the Black Lives Matter movement:
Mullins: "It has been hijacked in such a manner that as soon as the term is mentioned, it is now thought of as people who are disrupting the lives of good, and innocent, decent American people."

Caldwell: "You better be about law and order because if not, the same folks that are supposed to be fighting for equality and justice for the community? You maybe next. They may be burning your shit down next, which is unfortunate and something that the community should never support."

Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: "Do Black lives matter? I think everybody would agree that they do. But we're talking about something else when we're talking about a movement that espouses taking down the model of western family structure, talking about defunding the police, and there a host of things on their website of a Marxist influence. These are things that are antithetical to the American model and to patriotism in this country." ( Fox News interview, 7/1/20)

Owens: "Black Lives matter is an organization of white men, using the faces of dead black people, to raise millions of dollars toward electing white Democrats into positions of power. It is the most flagrantly racist organization in America." ( Twitter, 9/23/20)
On Trump:
Caldwell: "He's been the most effective president for Black folks in my lifetime. Now that doesn't have anything to do with rhetoric, but from a policy standpoint, he's been more effective than any Democrat or Republican in a matter of well, we're going on almost four years."

Carson: "Our president, Donald J. Trump, believes in the people. He is one of us." (2020 Republican National Convention)

Smith: "Every issue important to Black communities has been a priority for him, prison reform, rebuilding broken families, bringing jobs back." (2020 Republican National Convention)

Owens: "[The media] were trying to convince me that he was a racist, a sexist, a misogynist. And I had to ask myself, is it possible that racism is being used as a theme to turn Black people into single-issue voters? And the answer to that question is, of course, yes." ( Fox News, 9/26/18)

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THE PROSECUTION

Mullins mispresents the party by citing the history of its founding while neglecting to mention that its present ethos is almost the inverse of those Party-of-Lincoln days. And that misinformation supports my theory that the Black Republicans who feel compelled to locate support for their party in the realm of righteousness (or at least acceptable precedent) is an almost impossible task. Defense of the indefensible, as George Orwell once put it.

Say word to Caldwell's argument on the need for measurable connections between voting Democrat (any party for that matter) and Black progress; nonetheless, he fails to point out that, at 34 he's lived through more Republican administrations than Democrat. And it's downright duplicitous, ain't it-someone claiming a belief in Black suffrage and its necessity in achieving equality for Black people, while supporting a party that blatantly, maliciously, perennially, works to usurp those means.

On the one hand, Caldwell and Mullins (and Carson and Smith) admit that Black lives should be valued. On the other, they distort the movement. Mullins, (how Trumpesque and ambiguous of him) ties the movement to violence-and uses the term "decent American," which has long been the stock of racist white politicians. Caldwell invokes "law and order-hella telling that he cites violence and looting as if they are an overwhelming aspect of the protest rather than anomalous-a phrase from the same genre.

Author and activist Candace Owens

It's tough to imagine either man wielding, without suffering at least a little inner turmoil, the same rhetoric that ill-meaning white folks have used to dehumanize and criminalize Black people for decades. It's impossible to fathom a world that exempts them from the upshot of said implicit aspersions. Which is to say that part of showing fidelity to the party is wielding a weapon against other Black folk-which, everybody but a fool knows, is tantamount to turning a weapon on oneself.

Carson and Smith's descriptions of Trump are flat-out absurd, as is Owens' spin of him as a victim. Mullins trivializes Trump's demagoguery, by describing him as "unpredictable" and "entertaining." Caldwell describes Trump's racist incitement as dismissible. But there's nothing trivial about fueling plots to kidnap a governor, about emboldening white nationalists to "stand back and stand by," about legitimizing white supremacist as "very fine people," about labeling peaceful protestors "terrorists." There's nothing dismissible about exacerbating national division; fueling mayhem and murder, all of which not only make life less safe for Black people-for all of us-but are antithetical to the objective of achieving justice.

CLOSING STATEMENT

Every Black Republican is at least a tacit supporter of:

* Transgressing what Jesus proclaimed as the second greatest commandment: Love your Neighbor as yourself (here's Matthew 22 looking at you, Black Christians);

* Abiding Russian (Chinese, Iranian) election interference;

* Throwing babies in cages and untold other detention tortures;

* Abiding leadership that knew a lethal virus would kill an inordinate number of their skinfolk and rather than protecting them, downplayed it, straight lied;

* Supporting an administration dead set on nixing healthcare for millions during the pandemic caused by its incompetence/indifference/malfeasance; and

* Assenting to a diabolical Senate majority leader who defenestrates-his word is worth less than a wooden nickel-political norms as he damn well pleases.

Which returns me to Daniel Cameron, a man who was Mitch McConnell's former legal counsel.

Do remember that Kentucky was the last state to join the old Confederacy, and that in the last election Trump won all the former Confederate states save Virginia due in large part to the well-documented use of the "Southern strategy": at heart, a concerted appeal to the racial animus of southern whites against Blacks.

MLK Jr. once said, "the ultimate logic of racism is genocide."

Are all southern whites racist? Of course not.

Are the lion's share of Southern white Republicans racist? Oh, how I hope not.

And yet there are enough of them in the Republican ranks for racist appeals to have proved effective for decades.

Black people who support this iteration of the Republican party concede to accepting, whatever the number, racists and white nationalists as bedfellows- party members whose ultimate aim, if you believe Dr. King, poses them a literal existential threat. They concede, if you give them the benefit of the doubt, to hedging that they can ally with obvious antagonists to achieve the justice long denied Black people in this purported bastion of freedom and democracy.

And riddle me, what, really, are the chances of that?

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"It's a mindset, like Hitler youth, based on hatred-religious hatred, racial hatred." -Gore Vidal, on the Republican Party, 2009 OPENING STATEMENT One night I flipped to Fox News-which I watch near never-curious to see how the day's nonsense was being reported in an alternate universe, and caught Tucker Carlson announcing Daniel Cameron as his next guest.

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In this article it talks about the "Negro Republican Party". This party allowed African Americans in Alabama to vote until 1901. In the time when the party was dissolved it was actually found that around 1901 the republicans wanted to give African Americans their basic rights. This is why there are still some republican African American Republicans today.

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The Negro Republican Party is one name of the African American branches of the Republican Party formed in the Southern United States by the Union League in 1867 during the Reconstruction Era. After 1890, the faction was usually called the Black-and-tan faction.

William F. Butler of Jefferson County, Kentucky spoke at the first convention of the Negro Republican Party held in Lexington, Kentucky in November 1867 and became the president of the party. The religious leader Elisha Green was chosen vice-president of the Kentucky branch at the Lexington convention in 1867. He was a leading Baptist preacher in Maysville and Paris until he died in 1889.

The Democrats were opposed to the Negro Republicans, which represented the majority of eligible voters in some states. In 1866, The Old Guard magazine accused the Democrats of using force and fraud to gain and retain power, and representing "but a despised faction of the American people".

Many years later, the New Orleans Times-Picayune was hostile to the organization in Louisiana, publishing editorials in the 1890s in favor of disenfranchisement of Negroes on the basis that they were "unfit to vote, ignorant, shiftless, depraved and criminal-minded", and would be controlled by a "ring" of white politicians. In September 1895 after a "pow-wow" of the Negro Republican Party, the Picayune claimed that whites would be willing to accept subordinate positions in the party to control the Negro vote. In his 1920 book Children of the Slaves, the British author Stephen Graham mentions that in New Orleans the Negro Republican Party could not count for much in votes.

African American males were allowed to vote in Alabama until 1901, when the state disenfranchised them although still letting them register. The Negro Republican Party in Birmingham, Alabama was organized in opposition to the lily-white Republican party, after that party prevented any of the twenty-five black delegates from taking part in its Birmingham convention. In Maryland, while the Democrats were typically against allowing blacks to vote at all, the Republicans wanted to give them this and other basic rights, but many did not want blacks to hold important political offices or to have frequent contact with whites. Their vote was important to the Republicans, however. In 1909, at a time when the Democrats were pushing for disenfranchisement in the state, the Republicans called on all members of the Negro Republican Party to turn out on voting day in every district.

Abbott, Richard H. "The Republican Party Press in Reconstruction Georgia, 1867-1874." Journal of Southern History 61.4 (1995): 725-760. in JSTOR

Cox, LaWanda, and John H. Cox. "Negro suffrage and Republican politics: The problem of motivation in Reconstruction historiography." Journal of Southern History (1967): 303-330. in JSTOR

Drago, Edmund L. Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (1992)

Fitzgerald, Michael W. (2000). The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction. LSU Press.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. "'To Give Our Votes to the Party': Black Political Agitation and Agricultural Change in Alabama, 1865-1870." Journal of American History 76.2 (1989): 489-505. in JSTOR

Holt, Thomas. Black over white: Negro political leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (1979).

Nathans, Elizabeth Studley. Losing the Peace: Georgia Republicans and Reconstruction, 1865-1871 (LSU Press, 1969)

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The Negro Republican Party is one name of the African American branches of the Republican Party formed in the Southern United States by the Union League in 1867 during the Reconstruction Era. After 1890, the faction was usually called the Black-and-tan faction. William F.

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America's racial problems have not melted away merely because Obama has spent eight years in the White House. Far from it. this tells you that we are still fighting racism in the U.S.A every day

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Barack Obama sealed his racial legacy the moment he sealed victory in the 2008 election - a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, a history-defying as well as history-making achievement.

In 1961, the year of Obama's birth, there existed in the American South a system of racial apartheid that separated the races from the cradle to the grave.

Whites-only water fountains. Whites-only schools. Whites-only graveyards.

In some states, his very conception - involving an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas - would have been a criminal offence.

Washington, too, remained a largely segregated city.

When in the 1950s, a former TV executive by the name of E Frederic Morrow became the first black White House aide not to have a job description that included turning down beds, polishing shoes or serving drinks with a deferential bow, he was prohibited from ever being alone in the same room as a white woman.

Back then, as Morrow recounted in his memoir, Black Man in the White House, African-Americans were routinely stereotyped as sexual predators incapable of controlling their desires.

Little more than half a century later, a black man ran the White House - occupying the Oval Office, sitting at the head of the conference table in the Situation Room, relaxing with his beautiful young family in the Executive Mansion - a family that has brought such grace and glamour to America's sleepy capital that it is possible to speak of a Black Camelot.

When Jack and Jackie Kennedy lived in the White House, that would have been unthinkable, even though the civil rights movement was starting to hammer more insistently at the walls of prejudice, and seeking legal and legislative redress for a malignant national condition described as the "American dilemma".

When demonstrators assembled in August 1963 to hear Martin Luther King deliver his I Have a Dream Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, few would have thought that a black man would one day take the oath of office at the other end of the National Mall.

Likewise, how many of the protesters bludgeoned by white policemen on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965 would have dared to imagine that, 50 years later, they would cross that same bridge hand in hand with the country's first black president?

For veterans of the black struggle, those remarkable images of Obama marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma protest became instantly iconographic, a truly golden jubilee.

In legacy terms, his very presence in the White House is one of the great intangibles of his presidency. Just how many black Americans have been encouraged to surmount colour bars of their own? Just how many young African-Americans have altered the trajectory of their lives because of the example set by Obama?

And behaviourally, what an example it has been. Because of the lingering racism in American society, the Obamas doubtless knew they would have to reach a higher standard, and they have done so, seemingly, without breaking a sweat. In deportment and personal conduct, it is hard to recall a more impressive or well-rounded First Family.

The "when they go low, we go high" approach to racists who questioned his citizenship has made the Obamas look even more classy.

His family's dignity in the face of such ugliness recalls the poise of black sit-in protesters in the early 60s, who refused to relinquish their seats at segregated restaurants and lunch counters even as white thugs poured sugar and ketchup over their heads, and punched, kicked and spat at them.

Yet racial firsts, of the kind achieved by Barack Hussein Obama, can present a distorted view of history and convey a misleading sense of progress. They are, by their very nature, a singular achievement, a milestone indicative of black advance rather than a destination point.

Hollywood did not become colourblind the moment in 1964 that Sidney Poitier became the first black man to win best actor at the Academy Awards any more than discrimination ended in the justice system when Thurgood Marshall first donned the billowing robes of a Supreme Court jurist.

America's racial problems have not melted away merely because Obama has spent eight years in the White House. Far from it.

Indeed, the insurmountable problem for Obama was that he reached the mountaintop on day one of his presidency.

Achieving anything on the racial front that surpassed becoming the country's first black president was always going to be daunting. Compounding that problem were the unrealistically high expectations surrounding his presidency.

His election triumph is 2008 was also misinterpreted as an act of national atonement for the original sin of slavery and the stain of segregation.

Yet Obama did not win the election because he was a black man. It was primarily because a country facing an economic crisis and embroiled in two unpopular wars was crying out for change.

Doubtless there have been substantive reforms. His two black attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, have revitalised the work of the justice department's civil rights division, which was dormant during the Bush years.

The Affordable Healthcare Act, or Obamacare, as it was inevitably dubbed, cut the black uninsured rate by a third.

Partly in a bid to reverse the rate of black incarceration, he has commuted the sentences of hundreds of prisoners - 10 times the number of his five predecessors added together.

As well as calling for the closure of private prisons, he became the first president to visit a federal penitentiary. "There but for the grace of God," said a man who had smoked pot and dabbled with cocaine in his youth.

Early on, he used the bully pulpit of the presidency to assail black absentee fathers, and, more latterly, spoke out against police brutality. But that record of accomplishment looks rather meagre when compared to the drama of hearing "Hail to the Chief" accompany the arrival of a black man on the presidential stage.

Race relations have arguably become more polarised and tenser since 20 January 2009. Though smaller in scale and scope, the demonstrations sparked by police shootings of unarmed black men were reminiscent of the turbulence of the 1960s.

The toxic cloud from the tear gas unleashed in Ferguson and elsewhere cast a long and sometimes overwhelming shadow. Not since the LA riots in 1992 - the violent response to the beating of Rodney King and the later acquittal of the police officers filmed assaulting him - has the sense of black grievance and outrage been so raw.

Historians will surely be struck by what looks like an anomaly, that the Obama years gave rise to a movement called Black Lives Matter.

Public opinion surveys highlight this racial restlessness. Not long after he took office in 2009, a New York Times/CBS News poll suggested two-thirds of Americans regarded race relations as generally good. In the midst of last summer's racial turbulence, that poll found there had been a complete reversal. Now 69% of Americans assessed race relations to be mostly bad.

An oft-heard criticism of Obama is that he has failed to bring his great rhetorical skills to bear on the American dilemma, and prioritised the LGBT community's campaign for equality at the expense of the ongoing black struggle.

But while he was happy to cloak himself in the mantle of America's first black president, he did not set out to pursue a black presidency. He did not want his years in office to be defined by his skin colour.

As a candidate, he often left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy, rather than doing so himself.

His famed race speech in the 2008 primary campaign, when his friendship with a fiery black preacher threatened to derail his candidacy, was as much about his white heritage as his black.

This remained true when he won election. Besides, there were pressing problems to deal with, not least rescuing the American economy in the midst of the Great Recession and extricating US forces from two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Early on in his presidency, his efforts at racial mediation also seemed ham-fisted. The "beer summit" at the White House, when he brought together the black Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates and the white police officer who had arrested him on the porch of his own home in an affluent suburb of Boston, all seemed rather facile.

A clumsy photo-opportunity rather than a teachable moment. Obama, one sensed, wanted to speak out more forcefully - initially he said the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" - but his political cautiousness reined him in.

Seemingly, he did not want to come across to the public as a black man in the White House.

Rather in those early years, it was as if he was trying to position himself as a neutral arbiter in racial matters, though one sensed his preference was for not intervening at all.

As his presidency went on, however, it became more emphatically black. He spoke out more passionately and more intimately.

Telling reporters that his son would have looked like Trayvon Martin, the unarmed high school student shot dead in Florida by a neighbourhood watch coordinator, was a departure.

This new, more candid approach culminated in Charleston, South Carolina, when Obama delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the black preacher slain, along with eight other worshippers, by a white supremacist at a bible study class at the Emanuel American Methodist Episcopal church.

That afternoon he spoke, as he often does in front of mainly black audiences, with a cadence that almost ventriloquised the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and ended, electrifyingly, by singing Amazing Grace.

That month he seemed to be at the height of his powers.

The Confederate flag, a symbol for many of black subordination, was about to brought down in the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol because the Charleston gunman Dylann Roof had brandished it so provocatively.

Obamacare had withstood a Supreme Court challenge. On the morning that he flew to Charleston, the Supreme Court decreed same-sex marriage would be legal in every state. Progressivism seemed to have triumphed. Obama seemed to have vanquished many of his foes.

But that month Donald Trump had also announced his improbable bid for the White House, and the forces of conservatism were starting to rally behind an outspoken new figurehead, who sensed that nativism, xenophobia and fear of the other would be central to his electoral appeal.

That America's first black president will be followed by the untitled leader of the Birther movement, a candidate slow to disavow support from the Ku Klux Klan and happy to receive the backing of white nationalists, Donald Trump can easily be portrayed as a personal repudiation and also proof of racial regression.

The truth, though, is more complicated.

Obama is ending his presidency with some of his highest personal approval ratings, and clearly believes he would have beaten Trump in a head-to-head contest. Moreover, although Trump won decisively in the electoral college, almost three million people more voted for Hillary Clinton nationwide.

In judging the mood of the country, the 2016 election hardly produced a clear-cut result that lends itself to neat analysis.

What Trump's election does look to have done, however, is end Obama's hopes of being a transformative president, not least because of the proposed rollback of his signature healthcare reform.

Truly transformative presidents, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, enact reforms, like social security, that become part of the nation's fabric rather than being ripped apart. If Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress get their way, Obamacare will be shredded.

Nor has he been transformative in the attitudinal sense. Indeed, Trump's victory, messy though it was, can easily be viewed partly as a "whitelash".

Much of his earliest and strongest support came from so-called white nationalists, who saw in his candidacy the chance to reassert white cultural and racial dominance. Some of the loudest cheers at his rallies came in response his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim invectives.

Trump's message, from the moment he announced his candidacy to the final tweets of his insurgent campaign, was aimed primarily at white America.

The billionaire's victory also makes it harder to view Obama as a transitional president. Eight years ago, it was tempting to cast the country's first black president as the leader who would oversee a peaceable demographic shift from a still strongly Caucasian America - the last census showed that 62.6% of US citizens are white - to a more ethnically diffuse nation.

But the talk now is of walls, not human bridges.

Of course, the notion that Obama would usher in a post-racial America was always fanciful, and a claim wisely he steered clear of himself. For all his cries of "Yes we can," he was never that naïve.

But the black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a persuasive case that Obama has always been overly optimistic on race, in large part because he did not have a conventional black upbringing.

His formative years were spent in Hawaii, America's most racially integrated state, and the whites he encountered, namely his mother and grandparents, were doting and loving.

Obama was not the victim of discrimination in the same way as a black kid growing up in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, or even New York or Illinois. As a result, he may have underestimated the forces that would seek to paralyse his presidency and to impede racial advance more broadly.

The president has said repeatedly since election night that the result proves that history is not linear but rather takes a zig-zagging course.

He is also fond of paraphrasing Martin Luther King's famed line that the arc of history bends towards justice. However, that curvature has veered off in a wholly unexpected direction.

Besides, even to talk of arcs of history at this moment of such national uncertainty seems inapt.

For as we enter the final days of the Obama presidency, the more accurate descriptor of race relations is a fault-line - the most angry fault-line in US politics and American life, and one that continues to rumble away, threatening small explosions at any time.

From Obama we expected seismic change of a more positive kind.

And although it was a presidency that began atop a mountain, it ended in something of a valley.

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Barack Obama legacy: Did he improve US race relations?

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Barack Obama sealed his racial legacy the moment he sealed victory in the 2008 election - a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, a history-defying as well as history-making achievement. In 1961, the year of Obama's birth, there existed in the American South a system of racial apartheid that separated the races from the cradle to the grave.

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In the article "US election 2020: Why racism is still a problem for the world's most powerful country". It talks about how most of the democratic part is African Americans and why they chose it because it is" liberal and republicans were conservative". but some people are confused when African Americans choose republicans but some do it Because they don't have much though on race and social welfare.

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The stories of police brutality and discrimination against African Americans this year are similar to those of 20 years ago, writes the BBC's Clive Myrie. A new breed of civil rights activist is trying to bring about a reckoning with America's racist past.

I remember my first US presidential election well. My first taste up close of the mechanics of the most powerful democracy on earth, grinding into gear to fulfill the promise of its people, that all their voices matter and will be heard. That ordinary people can control their own destiny.

The year was 1996 and those were relatively innocent times. Left and right, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative - they tended to try to work together to find the common ground upon which they could stand, rather than exploit and widen the fissures that might separate, in order to gain political advantage.

In those heady days, when co-operation was more often the norm than a rarity, there were clear understandings on the need to improve race relations. An understanding that America was still failing to uphold its own ideals. Can we truly say there is a clear understanding of that now? An appreciation of the inequality of American society when it comes to race and discrimination?

I'm hopeful we can still say that, but it took the brutal death of George Floyd to jolt Americans from a position of seeming complacency, where a president could feel confident enough to say that "there are very fine people on both sides" after anti-racism protesters clashed with a group of white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017.

Why is racism still such a problem for the most powerful country on earth?

You'd think a Civil War might have been the last word on the issue. The slave holding states of the Old South did battle with the northern states in 1861, fighting for the right to extend slavery into the vast lands of the West as America grew. The South lost and President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.

But the South was never admonished for having slaves in the first place. History quickly rewrote the Civil War as a "quarrel between brothers".

For the North, what was vital was re-admitting the old Confederacy back into the bosom of the family. Racist views and bigotry - no problem, just don't disturb the Union.

There was no attempt to change the hearts of Southern racists. In fact, as long as the Union remained intact, racists could act as they pleased. They could lynch, and loot and burn. They could murder and rape. They could threaten and intimidate. They could bully.

Hence the rise of segregation, the intimidation of black voters, indeed the denial of the right to vote for black people. And through it all, the mindset was left untroubled - the notion that white might is right, and black people should be treated as second-class citizens.

Of course, that mindset was embedded deep in many of the nation's police forces, which grew out of groups set up to catch runaway blacks slaves as well as maintain law and order.

It's the mindset that led President Woodrow Wilson, in office from 1913 to 1921, to oversee the re-segregation of multiple federal agencies. This is the same president who publicly backed the Ku Klux Klan.

It's the mindset that at the turn of the 20th Century saw the vilification of black people as wide-eyed "happy negroes" content with their lot as poor share croppers and shoe shiners.

It's the mindset that saw the erection of hundreds of Confederate statues of Southern civil war leaders, that are now the subject of controversy today. Men venerated as patriots, when they fought a war to break up the Union - men who should have been treated as traitors, not heroes.

Ah, I hear you cry. All that is ancient history, things have changed.

It is easy for white Americans to compartmentalise the past. To see the injustices of yesteryear as having no relevance to events today. African Americans don't have that luxury. The past is the present, the racism is the same.

I know this because having reported from America for nearly a quarter of a century, I'm seeing the same stories of police brutality, discrimination in housing and jobs, and black voter suppression, as I saw back in Los Angeles in the 1990s.

Suspicious deaths in police custody followed by rudimentary inquiries, followed usually by the exoneration of the officers involved. It's a pathetic cycle of indulgence that allows, even condones and encourages, bad behaviour.

There's another example of the past being the present.

I've already mentioned my first US presidential election in 1996. It was a blowout for Bill Clinton against a hapless Bob Dole for the Republicans.

A big issue in the campaign was urban crime and the Clinton administration's controversial 1994 Crime Bill that critics say increased mass incarceration and led to the disproportionate jailing of tens of thousands of black men. Joe Biden helped get that legislation on the books, and his involvement has come back to haunt him.

It's meant some African Americans view the Democratic Party candidate suspiciously, despite his time serving eight years as vice-president to Barack Obama. And it's part of the reason a minority of African American men say they'll vote for Donald Trump in this election.

Polls suggest African Americans overwhelmingly back Democrats in elections. But in the 2016 race for the White House, many failed to show up at the polls for Hilary Clinton, choosing instead to stay at home, and thereby helping to hand Donald Trump the presidency.

I've been talking to a new breed of young, engaged African American civil rights activist, fired up to turn out the vote. People like Percy Christian in Phoenix, Arizona, arrested on a peaceful civil rights March and jailed for seven days.

He says he's committed to fighting for a better future for black people and will continue to take to the streets.

"I'm willing to do whatever it takes. I'm willing to put my life on the line to raise awareness about the issue that police brutality is real... that the system is set up and designed to hold a certain group of individuals back and that's my people," he told me.

Another activist, Jazlyn Geiger, who's 21, told me that the fear of a bad encounter with the police lives in the mind of every African American.

"It makes me think my life can be taken at any given time, just because I have brown skin, because I'm black, because since I was a little girl I've seen the way black people in America are treated and all over the world. It's a really unsettling state of mind to be in."

These are the people multiplied by millions in this country, who could swing this election. Committed and determined to have their voice heard, so that the next election doesn't have to go over the same old ground, when it comes to race.

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US election 2020: Why racism is still a problem for the world's most powerful country

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The stories of police brutality and discrimination against African Americans this year are similar to those of 20 years ago, writes the BBC's Clive Myrie. A new breed of civil rights activist is trying to bring about a reckoning with America's racist past. I remember my first US presidential election well.

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“No, I don't think America is a racist country,” Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC News, adding, “but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.” But she still thinks that there are still some kinds of racist president Biden added Then there’s President Joe Biden: “No, I don't think the American people are racist,” Biden said last week. “But I think after 400 years African Americans have been left in a position where they're so far behind the eight ball in terms of education, health, in terms of opportunity.”

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Greetings Recast family! It just keeps happening. Even with a renewed push for criminal justice reform on the federal level, Black and brown people continue to die at the hands of police with astonishing frequency. On Monday, loved ones laid to rest Andrew Brown Jr., who was killed by sheriff's deputies in Elizabeth City, N.C., last month. Police have yet to release the complete body camera footage. And on April 19, Mario Gonzalez died in the Los Angeles area. In this case, police released the video. Gonzalez did not seem to pose a threat to officers, one of whom appears to use a knee to pin him down for several minutes. Gonzalez gasps for air - and later dies. Is there any end in sight? Let's jump in.
"America is not a racist country."

That's the phrase du jour parroted by the nation's highest elected officials, thanks to South Carolina's Tim Scott.
Now, any politician facing the cameras has to answer the question: Is America a racist country?
And when answering that question, inexplicably, the nation's top two elected officials and the dean of South Carolina's congressional delegation all follow the Republican's script.

"No, I don't think America is a racist country," Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC News, adding, "but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today."

Then there's President Joe Biden: "No, I don't think the American people are racist," Biden said last week. "But I think after 400 years African Americans have been left in a position where they're so far behind the eight ball in terms of education, health, in terms of opportunity."

And right on cue, there was Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House Majority Whip: "We should stop arguing about whether or not this is a racist country. It is not," , adding if it were, then neither former President Obama or Harris would have been elected to their respective offices.

None of it makes sense.

The election of two biracial politicians to the highest offices in the land doesn't eradicate the racial biases that permeate so many facets of American life - from education, to the criminal justice system, to health disparities to access to capital.
Even Scott admitted in an interview over the weekend that he's been stopped by police for Driving While Black, by his count, 18 times.
So with all that, how is it that nearly three quarters of Americans agreed the guilty verdict of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was the correct outcome, but America's top officials seem incapable of holding a nuanced conversation about the role systemic racism plays in our country?

Or are Democrats siding with Scott for pragmatic reasons?

The party is desperate not to squander the momentum from the Chauvin verdict as it pushes for a federal police reform overhaul. Leaders know that with slim margins in the House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate, any reform has to go through Scott.

And if the filibuster remains in place, the only way to achieve that is to keep him engaged - and remain hopeful that he can persuade nine other Republicans to join him.

We'll keep tabs to see how it all plays out. But one thing is clear: A robust discussion of American-style racism, at least among current elected officials, is not happening anytime soon.

All the best,
The Recast Team

Power dynamics are changing. With The Recast, you'll get a twice-weekly breakdown of how race and identity are the DNA of American politics and policy. Stay tuned for fresh analysis, scoops and new voices.

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A newly released poll shows pretty stark divides between Black and white adults on policing.

The Benenson Strategy Group survey found that a majority of Americans don't consider police highly integral to public safety. They'd like to redirect funds to other areas, like youth recreation and deescalation training.

But Black adults were more likely than their white counterparts to say it's "very important" police are filmed by bystanders, use body cameras and held more accountable for excessive force.

By comparison, white adults were more likely than Black respondents to say it's "very important" police should be well-funded and armed.

President Biden urged lawmakers to pass police reform by the anniversary of George Floyd's murder later this month. Less than 24 hours later, Scott, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), and Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and others were negotiating behind closed doors.

While both sides remain optimistic a deal can get done, those reading the tea leaves on police reform talks are less bullish. Monica Bell teaches at Yale and has written extensively on sociology, law and policing. Isaiah McKinnon is a former chief of the Detroit Police Department and also formerly served as that city's deputy mayor.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
THE RECAST: What did you make of all these politicians declaring America was not racist? Do you think Democrats wanted to provide cover so talks could continue on police reform? Or is it that if you are a high-ranking elected official, you simply can't come out and say America is racist?

MONICA BELL: I think both are true. Across the spectrum, saying that America is racist is read by people saying that Americans are racist. We don't have a good way in our society of thinking about the difference between structural and systemic racism and individual racism. This is the big problem. So all of them have to separate themselves from that narrative. And so, yeah, I think it plays two roles. [The other] is to try to get Tim Scott to move and to provide cover on some of the police reform stuff.

THE RECAST: Is police reform possible without a change in qualified immunity? Certainly progressives and activists that are trying to push lawmakers on this and likely won't be satisfied with anything less than altering qualified immunity.

ISAIAH MCKINNON: I don't know if this Congress is going to approve removing qualified immunity. I think that the unions and others will be so powerful they won't let that go.

MONICA BELL : I understand why for some progressives qualified immunity is a sticking point. I would just encourage us to not fetishize qualified immunity and to instead come back with a bolder agenda when the politics are ready for it.

In May 2020, Intel announced ambitions for the next decade to accelerate the integration of responsible, inclusive, and sustainable practices and innovative approaches in its operations and supply chain, across the technology industry, and beyond. This week, Intel released its 2020-21 Corporate Responsibility Report which provides detail on Intel's 2030 RISE strategy and goals, including progress made since they were launched a year ago. Read more at https://www.intel.com/responsibility

THE RECAST: Do you think the politics of this moment that it's possible to get Scott and nine other Republicans to sign on to a bill to pass a police overhaul bill?

MONICA BELL: I think it is possible. There is a narrative that is robust right now that to support police reform is the same thing as supporting and being a part of Black Lives Matter, which is the same thing as hating the police. I think Tim Scott needs to work to try to separate out those views [for his colleagues]. And the real question is whether enough Republican senators have the room to be able to adopt [that] sort of message.

ISAIAH MCKINNON: I don't think there's a meaningful path. I think if they were serious, they would look at having a national standard of law enforcement agencies.

I hope that this is a true calling for change in America. But when we see people saying there's no racism ... it'll slide back under the covers and nothing will happen.

The fastest-growing and yet, the most poorly represented: Meet the Asian American and Pacific Islander population.

Our very own Rishika Dugyala got the exclusive on a new report from the Reflective Democracy Campaign. It reveals that - as of mid-2020 - AAPI people account for just 0.9 percent of all elected leaders, but make up 6.1 percent of the U.S. population.

Even among states with high Asian concentrations (think New York, California, Nevada), representation drops off. There's only one state that can claim its share of AAPI elected leaders is nearly equivalent to its population: Hawaii.

When it comes to the criminal justice sector, the lack of AAPI representation is ... particularly stark. Overpolicing and deportation are key issues for Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians - but by mid-2020, just 0.24 percent of elected prosecutors and 0.07 percent of county sheriffs identified as AAPI.

Given ongoing conversations of police reform, the rise of AAPI political sway and the rise of pandemic-related hate crimes, the report is a step toward more data transparency on a much-discussed and wide-ranging demographic group, said Brenda Choresi Carter, the Reflective Democracy Campaign's director.

"Voters, regardless of party identification, really want to see reflective leadership," Choresi Carter said. "Political power has been concentrated in the hands of white men in the United States since the very beginning. And I think we are seeing the limitations of that."
Read more here.
Groups Push Biden Administration on "Good Data" - Nearly a dozen racial justice advocacy groups (including the NAACP, the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum and the National Conference of American Indians) sent a proposal to the White House on Monday. They want the Biden administration to form an Equitable Data Working Group to adopt standard definitions of race/ethnicity across federal agencies, encourage community involvement in data collection and mandate transparency at levels of government.

Without this data, they argue, "localities, states and even the federal government are less able and less accountable for responding appropriately to the full scope of the problem."

What's the play? Dems Confused on Voting Rights Strategy - Constrained by both the filibuster rules in a 50-50 split Senate and disagreement within their own ranks, Democrats set out to chart a path forward on voting rights legislation. POLITICO's Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine report some are questioning the strategy moving forward.

A McAuliffe Win Means Thwarting History - Terry McAuliffe is opening a wide lead in his quest to be the first governor to win a second term in Virginia since 1973. POLITICO's Maya King reports: "Democratic primary voters in Virginia have prioritized pragmatism over racial representation." In other words, if any other Democrat were to topple McAuliffe for the party's nomination - in particular two who many feel have the chops to become the nation's first Black female governor - time is running out to make a move. The party primary is June 8.

Caitlyn Weighs In - Former Olympian and reality-TV star Caitlyn Jenner raised some eyebrows over the weekend for her stance on transgender girls participating in amateur sports. POLITICO's Quint Forgey reports her remarks come less than two weeks after Jenner announced her candidacy to challenge California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. She's not backing down in the face of controversy, either.

On this day 60 years ago, May 4, 1961, the original Freedom Riders - 13 white and Black activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC ) departed Washington, D.C. The group, which included the young John Lewis, was on a mission to test whether states in the Jim Crow South were adhering to the Boynton v. Virginia Supreme Court decision that ruled segregation of busing terminals and other ports of interstate transportation was unconstitutional.

Among those "tests" the Freedom Riders would conduct were to use whites-only waiting rooms and lunch counters, and for whites and Blacks to sit together on the bus as it drove through the South.

Intel has a long history of transparency, driving global impact and value through corporate responsibility as well as focusing on integrating environmental, social and governance strategies across its business. In May 2020, the company announced ambitionsfor the next decade to accelerate the integration of responsible, inclusive, and sustainable practices and innovative approaches in its operations and supply chain, across the technology industry, and beyond. This week, Intel released its 2020-21 Corporate Responsibility Report which provides detail on this strategy, including progress made over the past year. For example, Intel increased renewable energy use from 71% to 82% and conserved 7.1 billion gallons of water in 2020. Additionally, it launched the Alliance for Global Inclusion to drive collective impact in four key areas: leadership representation, inclusive language, inclusive product development, and STEM readiness in underserved communities. Initial members include Intel, Dell Technologies, Nasdaq, NTT DATA, and Snap Inc. Learn more at https://www.intel.com/responsibility

The Freedom Rides grew in size and at one point had more than 400 participants. Angry white mobs attacked them with rocks and bricks. They even firebombed a bus.

In Rock Hill, S.C., Lewis and two others were beaten for entering a whites-only waiting room. Nearly half a century later, one of the white attackers, Elwin Wilson, apologized to Lewis.

The American Constitution Society is holding an event exploring "our Constitution's establishment of a racial caste system." The panel, "Founding Failures: Reckoning with Our Constitution's Generational Impacts on Health and Well-Being," starts at 3 p.m. ET today. Sign up here.

The Atlantic is out with its second installment of a multiyear project called " Inheritance," which focuses on Black contributions to shaping American culture. Two features explore the future of Black history and what lessons can be learned from the nation's first Black inhabitants.

We recommended Jhumpa Lahiri's new book a few weeks ago - but we're back to recommend this profile of the iconic author by BuzzFeed's Scaachi Koul.

Check out this project from NBC News with generations of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders talking about the discrimination they've experienced. It attaches faces to names, to stories - and is well worth the read.

For this month's issue of Harper's Bazaar, Yo-Yo Ma curated a playlist themed around beauty. It's an eclectic mix of classical (Pablo Casals playing Bach), country (Rhiannon Giddens) and classic (Stevie Wonder). Worth a listen, for sure.

We're big fans of Lion Babe, the musical duo helmed by Jillian Hervey (daughter of Vanessa Williams) and Lucas Goodman. (So good when you're on deadline and you need some musical inspiration to bang things out.) Their latest song, "Frida Kahlo," is one big ol' dose of happy. So is the video.

Finally, we know the week *just* started but... ugh Zoom.

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Greetings Recast family! It just keeps happening. Even with a renewed push for criminal justice reform on the federal level, Black and brown people continue to die at the hands of police with astonishing frequency. On Monday, loved ones laid to rest Andrew Brown Jr., who was killed by sheriff's deputies in Elizabeth City, N.C., last month.

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this document shows the implement rates of people (black white and Hispanics.) that blacks have the lowest implodes and whites are the highest.  it also shows how white household wealth are 102t dollar that is 100t more than blacks.

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Black Americans are underrepresented in high-paying jobs

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 54% of employed Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations - the highest-paying major occupational category - compared with 41% of employed whites, 31% employed Blacks, and 22% of employed Hispanics.

This, in part, can be explained by racist hiring practices that kept Blacks out of business for decades under Jim Crow. It can also be explained by more subtle forms of prejudice today.

One Harvard University study found that when Blacks and Asians "whitened" their resumes - for example, used "American" or "white"-sounding names - they got more callbacks for corporate interviews. Twenty-five percent of Black candidates received callbacks from their whitened resumes, while only 10% got calls when they left ethnic details on their resume.

In addition, many companies rely on employee social networks for referrals, which can be problematic if your company is largely white, diversity experts told Business Insider. One survey found that three quarters of white employees don't have any non-white friends.

Similarly, overall income for Black Americans was about 42% lower than for whites in 2018.

There's a similar disparity at the household level. Lower incomes mean that the poverty rate for Black families is over twice that of white families.

One common way to illustrate the gender and race wage gaps is through looking at "equal pay days" for different groups.

Equal pay day for a particular racial or gender group marks the extra days someone in that group has to work into the next year to earn what the typical white man earned in the previous year.

Based on income figures from 2018, it would take the median black woman worker 226 extra days into a new year to earn what a median white male worker made in the previous year.

Educational opportunities remain starkly split by race.

A study by the Department of Education showed that in 2013, Black high school students were only a bit more than half as likely as white students to have any Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate credit, and only about a third as likely to have AP/IB credit for math.

As with income, intergenerational educational mobility varies widely between racial groups.

This chart, based on another study from Opportunity Insights, looks at the likelihood that a child whose parents had only a high school diploma goes on to earn a college degree or higher.

Only 15% of Black students from less-educated households went on to finish college, well below the 25% of white children who earned a degree.

Black men are roughly five times more likely to be imprisoned than their white counterparts - and nearly 13 times as likely in the 18-19 age group.

The most recent numbers available on imprisonment rates come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' analysis of 2018 data, which showed that Black men aged 18-19 were 12.7 times as likely to be imprisoned as their white peers, and Black men of all ages were roughly 5.8 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men.

A Pew Research Center analysis of the data showed that the Black imprisonment rate has actually dropped by 34% since 2006 - the greatest decline across all races.

Yet even still, Black Americans - and particularly Black men - remain more likely than any other group to be imprisoned. For every 100,000 Black men there are 2,272 inmates, whereas for every 100,000 white men there are just 392 inmates.

Marijuana usage rates are similar between white and Black Americans, yet Black Americans are 3.64 times more likely to get arrested on marijuana possession charges.

According to the federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, marijuana usage between Black and white Americans is similar. Just 18% of Black people over the age of 12 in 2018 reported using marijuana within the past year, while 17% of white people over the age of 12 reported the same.

But the usage rate is where the similarities end - that same year, Black Americans were arrested 3.6 times more often than white Americans for marijuana possession, according to an American Civil Liberties Union analysis of FBI and US Census data.

The racial disparity in marijuana arrests has actually gotten worse in recent years, even though more states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana.

According to the ACLU's analysis of marijuana arrest data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, racial disparities in marijuana arrests have continued in every state.

Despite widespread reforms to state marijuana policies, the racial disparity has even gotten worse over the years, not better. For instance, in 2010, Black people were 3.31 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, and over the years the rate ticked up to 3.64 in 2018.

The marijuana arrests that continue to the present day have disproportionately "caused profound and far-reaching harm on the people arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated for marijuana offenses," the ACLU wrote. "It has been a colossal waste of money and law enforcement resources that has only deepened the divide between communities and their governments and increased public hurt rather than safety."

Black people are overwhelmingly more likely than white people to be under parole supervision - and they're more likely to be sent back to prison for minor infractions.

Research from Columbia University's Justice Lab has shown that Black people are far more likely than white people to be under parole supervision. Though the federal prison system has largely abolished parole, most states still retain the practice of releasing some inmates from prison sentences early in exchange for heavy supervision while they try to get back on their feet.

New York state has a particularly extreme racial disparity when it comes to parole supervision. Black people are 6.77 times more likely to be under parole supervision than white people, the Justice Lab found. They are also 4.99 times more likely than white people to be re-incarcerated due to "technical" parole violations, meaning that they had parole revoked due to minor infractions such as missing an appointment, rather than committing a new crime.

A Justice Lab report said parole supervision has also had an unequal effect on Black people - even though some of the supervision requirements may seem neutral or sensible, they may be far harder for people in Black communities to abide by through no fault of their own.

For instance, one common parole requirement is for parolees to stay away from people who have felony convictions. Yet an estimated one-third of Black men have felony convictions. That means parolees could be ordered to stay away from friends, family members, and neighbors.

"People on parole ... may be forced to choose between obeying the rules on one hand, or, on the other, risking a parole violation by spending time with relatives and friends who could be valuable sources of support, stability, housing, or employment connections," the Justice Lab report said.

Roughly half of those fatally shot by police are white, but Black Americans are fatally shot at a disproportionate rate compared to their representation in the US population.

The Washington Post has compiled one of the most thorough datasets available when it comes to fatal police shootings, and it has sparked debate over what it means when it comes to racial bias in police killings.

The data show that more than half of the people fatally shot by police in America within the last five years were actually white - but fatal police shootings of Black people were disproportionately high, considering they account for roughly 13% of the US population.

As of June 12, 2,469 white people had been fatally shot since 2015 at rate of 13 per million, whereas 1,293 Black people were fatally shot at a rate of 31 per million.

The database also comes with a number of other qualifiers - namely, that it tracks only fatal police shootings, not fatal police encounters in general. So the deaths of Black men like George Floyd, which occurred after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, have not been included in the dataset, nor have the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, who died from a police chokehold, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, who died of spinal injuries he suffered in a police van.

It's also worth pointing out that every fatal police shooting included in the database has its own unique set of circumstances that may or may not have justified a shooting. For instance, the database includes Omar Mateen, the mass shooter who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub in 2016 before police fatally shot him.

The majority of fatal police shootings - 4,037 out of the 5,403 people fatally shot by police in the last five years - occurred when a suspect had either a gun or a knife.

Though the presence of a weapon does not in and of itself mean each of those police shootings was justified (for example, the database includes the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile, who was legally armed and obeyed the officer's commands during a traffic stop), officers are generally permitted to use deadly force when they believe a person poses a serious threat of injury or death.

But even when narrowing the data down to fatal police shootings of unarmed people, it shows a similar story as the aggregate data. Of the 352 instances where police fatally shot unarmed people, 145 of those people were white and 123 were Black (63 were Hispanic and 21 were designated "other" or "unknown.") - that's a rate of 10.7 white deaths per 10 million, and 30.1 Black deaths per 10 million.

Keep reading

More: Features Racism Education Unemployment

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26 simple charts to show friends and family who aren't convinced racism is still a problem in America

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Black Americans are underrepresented in high-paying jobs The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 54% of employed Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations - the highest-paying major occupational category - compared with 41% of employed whites, 31% employed Blacks, and 22% of employed Hispanics.

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The sole Black Republican in the chamber used his rebuttal to say that Democrats ignore the country's racial progress over the past century for political and financial gain. he is the only black republican and he does not thing American is racist.

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When Sen. Tim Scott gave a rebuttal following President Joe Biden's first address to Congress Wednesday night, the South Carolina senator defended the country's record on race.

"Hear me clearly," Scott said. " America is not a racist country."

The sole Black Republican in the chamber used his rebuttal to say that Democrats ignore the country's racial progress over the past century for political and financial gain.

"Just before COVID, we had the most inclusive economy in my lifetime," he said.
'America is not a racist country':12 CHARTS: How racial disparities persist across wealth, health, education and beyond Tim Scott says in Republican rebuttal to Biden's speech
On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman, first Black person and first Indian American in the role, disagreed with some - but not all - of Scott's statements.

"First of all, no, I don't think America is a racist country, but we also do have to speak the truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today," Harris said.

Statistics and facts compiled in a number of sectors over a number of years show inequality pervades U.S. society.

Life expectancy for Black, Latino populations declines most

Data through June 2020 shows life expectancy at birth for the total U.S. population dropped to 77.8 years, the lowest since 2006, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
The U.S. lost a whole year of life expectancy: For Black people, it's nearly 3 times worse
Life expectancy for Black populations declined the most from 2019 - by 2.7 years, to 72 years - its lowest level since 2001. Latinos experienced the second-biggest decline, falling 1.9 years since 2019 to a life expectancy of 79.9 years, lower than when it was first recorded in 2006.

The disparities highlighted in the study add to the mounting evidence of COVID-19's disproportional effect on Black and Latino communities, health experts say.

The graduation gap

Disparities at all levels of education exist.

The racial wealth gap

Although more white Americans live in poverty by total numbers (17 million vs. 9 million Black people), in terms of percentages, Black Americans are almost twice as likely to live below the poverty line as white Americans. They also have lower household incomes and lower rates of home ownership.
USA TODAY's Phillip M. Bailey, Adrianna Rodriguez, Mabinty Quarshie, N'dea Yancey-Bragg, Anne Godlasky, Jim Sergent and Veronica Bravo contributed to this report.
More: Black homeowners are more than twice as likely to have to return to renting

Figures show racial disparities in criminal justice

Black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men, according to a study from the University of Michigan, Rutgers University and Washington University. Bias has Disparities have also been documented in plea bargains and sentencing. After decades of rising incarceration rates that followed the "get tough on crime'' mandate of the 1980s, '90s and early 2000s, the problem of mass incarceration is slowly declining, according to Pew Research data.

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Sen. Tim Scott said America is not a racist country. But data shows racial disparities.

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When Sen. Tim Scott gave a rebuttal following President Joe Biden's first address to Congress Wednesday night, the South Carolina senator defended the country's record on race. "Hear me clearly," Scott said. " America is not a racist country."

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This belief that racial biases had softened, however, did not translate to positive feelings about policies that address racial disparities, according to a new University of Michigan study. In fact, opposition to affirmative action and immigration may have increased since 2008.

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ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Many Americans changed their perceptions of discrimination and racism after Barack Obama became the nation's first black president. This belief that racial biases had softened, however, did not translate to positive feelings about policies that address racial disparities, according to a new University of Michigan study. In fact, opposition to affirmative action and immigration may have increased since 2008. "When racial progress is made, and perceived, by many Americans from a variety of racial backgrounds, it may seem counterintuitive that opposition to affirmative action would increase," said Nicholas Valentino, an associate professor of communication studies and political science.

He wrote the study with Ted Brader, a research assistant professor at the U-M Center for Political Studies.

"The answer may be simple: If the playing field is perceived to be more balanced than before, then the need for policies to address inequality is lessened," Valentino said.

Perceptions of discrimination could play a factor in how some vote in next year's presidential election.

"It is possible that these perceptions could be used by both parties to mobilize their base voters," he said.

The survey involved telephone interviews before and after the 2008 presidential elections. The pre-election interviews were completed by 617 respondents and 82 percent of these completed the post-election survey. They were asked how much discrimination they thought blacks faced in America.

Prior to the election, 61 percent said there was "a lot" or "some" discrimination against blacks, but only 50 percent endorsed that view after the election. More than one in four people revised their estimate of racial discrimination downward immediately after the election.

Significant declines in perceived discrimination occurred in all subgroups, including blacks, whites, men, women, the rich and the poor.

Declines in perceived racism were significantly larger among conservatives, perhaps because this group opposed race-related policies to begin with.

Anxiety before the election-regardless of party affiliation or ideology-was linked to large drops in perceived discrimination as the result of Obama's victory, Valentino said.

"Anxiety may trigger a more open-minded approach to new information, and thus facilitate belief change," he said.

Other emotions such as anger, enthusiasm and sadness before the election did not seem to affect the size of the change in perceived discrimination.

"These results suggest that voters used Obama's election as a sign that things have improved for blacks even more than they previously believed. They think the playing field is more balanced," he said. "As a result, and regardless of the reality, policies designed to improve equality of opportunity such as affirmative action are seen as less necessary."

The findings appear in this month's Public Opinion Quarterly.

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Obama's election reduced perceptions of racism, but boosted opposition to race-related policies

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ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Many Americans changed their perceptions of discrimination and racism after Barack Obama became the nation's first black president. This belief that racial biases had softened, however, did not translate to positive feelings about policies that address racial disparities, accord

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“Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story,” this shows that it looks like people voted for him because they did not want to look raciest

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One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it's fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.

The existence of those voters has served as evidence that the most plausible explanation for what happened in 2016 - that Trump's campaign tapped into the racism of white Americans to win pivotal states - is wrong. "How could white Americans who voted for a black president in the past be racist," or so the thinking goes.

"Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It's not a simple racism story," the New York Times's Nate Cohn wrote on the night of the election. This typically segues into an argument that Trump won by tapping into economic, rather than racial, anxiety - anger about trade and the decline of manufacturing, or the fallout from the 2008 Great Recession.

A new study shows that this response isn't as powerful as it may seem. The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia - and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.

"White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues," the paper's authors write. "We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016."

This new paper fits with a sizeable slate of studies conducted over the past 18 months or so, most of which have come to the same conclusions: There is tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it.

This isn't just a matter of historical interest or ideological ax-grinding. Understanding the precise way in which racism affected the 2016 election should shape how we think about the electorate in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. More broadly, it helps us understand the subtleties of America's primordial divide over race - and why racism will continue to fracture the country politically for the foreseeable future.

The study found strong evidence for racism - and little for economic anxiety

The three scholars who wrote the study - UCLA's Tyler Reny, UC-Riverside's Loren Collingwood, and Princeton's Ali Valenzuela - drew on a database that has information on more than 64,000 American voters. Inside that huge sample, they restricted their analysis to white voters who switched their presidential vote from 2012 to 2016 (most commonly from one major party's candidate to the other's, but occasionally from a third party in 2012 to Clinton or Trump).

They then split the sample of white voters in two, between working-class and non-working class voters, and then tried to figure out what the vote switchers ran in common. To do so, they ran tests on three different types of question: scores on a test measuring attitudes towards racial minorities, hostility to mass immigration, and measures of economic stress (e.g., whether a person's family income was lower or higher than the median income in the county where they lived).

The results were quite striking. First, attitudes on race and immigration were crucial distinguishing characteristics of both Trump and Clinton switchers. The more racially conservative an Obama or third party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Trump. Similarly, the more racially liberal a Romney or third-party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Clinton.

Second, class was largely irrelevant in switching to Trump. Keeping racial attitudes constant, white working-class voters were not more likely to switch to Trump. The white working-class voters who did switch tended to score about as highly on measures of racial conservatism and anti-immigrant attitudes as wealthier switchers.

Third, the correlations between measures of economic stress and vote switching were either weak or non-existent. There's just little evidence supporting the "economic anxiety" or "economic populism" explanations for the Trump surge.

"We find a much stronger association between symbolic racial and immigration attitudes and switching for Trump and Clinton than between economic marginality or local economic dislocation and vote switching," Reny et al. write. "In fact, we find marginally small or no associations between any of our economic indicators and vote switching in either direction."

These findings reveal the subtlety, and importance, of America's racial divide

The Reny et al. findings may seem counterintuitive: How can people who wanted a black man to run the country somehow become attracted to Trump because of his racial demagoguery?

The unspoken premise behind this question is an assumption of a certain kind of white redemption narrative: By voting for Obama, white America exorcized its racial demons. But the truth is nothing of the sort. For one thing, Obama lost the white vote by 12 points in 2008 and 20 points in 2012.

For another, voting for Obama once or even twice doesn't automatically mean that someone is not prejudiced against black people or immigrants. It's possible to support Obama in particular while maintaining overall anti-black or anti-immigrant attitudes. In those cases, some other factor, like the Iraq War catastrophe or financial collapse, may have predominated over white voters' racial hang-ups in the 2008 and 2012 election.

The 2016 election was different.

One reason is that Obama's second term featured a significant amount of racial conflict. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and subsequent week of protest and unrest, kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.

A second reason is that Obama's very presence in office was racially polarizing. Michael Tesler, a scholar at the University of California-Irvine, has documented in detail how Obama's very presence in the White House polarized America along racial lines. It would make sense that this effect would grow stronger the longer Obama was in office, setting the stage for a major backlash in his final year.

Third, and arguably most importantly, the two candidates turned the election into a kind of referendum on American race relations. Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.

Clinton, for her part, positioned herself as a champion of racial justice. While Obama's rhetoric on race was typically post-racial, positioning the country as more united than divided, Clinton got out front on issues like police violence and immigration. There are plenty of valid reasons for this - Clinton was more worried about failing to turn out minority voters, Obama was more worried about alienating skittish whites, and there was no way to respond to Trump's campaign without tackling race head-on.

The result, though, is that racial issues became the key political dividing line in a way they were not in either 2008 or 2012.

Now, Reny et al.'s statistical analysis can't show all of this on its own. You should never draw conclusions this large from one statistical analysis, as it could suffer from any number of problems.

However, this analysis of the election is supported by a wide and deep body of research, the vast majority of which shows that concerns about identity and race were the decisive issues in the 2016 election. This was true in the Republican primary and the general; it's also consistent with research on far-right parties in Europe whose xenophobic appeals are similar to Trump's. There is a complete lack of statistical evidence, by contrast, for the "economic anxiety" theory.

American politics are likely to only get more polarized on racial lines. Trump and Trumpism are, for the time being, the core of the Republican Party; the Republican message on race and immigration will match his as such. California Rep. Duncan Hunter, for example, is running a nakedly anti-Islam reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar (who is a Mexican-Arab Christian by background).

The implications, both in 2018 and in the long term, could be significant. Reny et al. compare this period to the post-civil rights era, a period where the historically Democratic South transformed into modern-day red America primarily in backlash to the Democratic embrace of civil rights:

History suggests that significant changes in voting across party lines, particularly for the presidency, precede changes in party identities, the basis for realignments. This sequence of events played out during the Southern realignment (i.e., Democrats voting for GOP presidential candidates but maintaining their party attachment) and here we provide evidence that it may be happening again after two terms with a black president and during an era of mass demographic change due to immigration. Racial conservatives and those with the most punitive immigration views are moving right and were the most likely to switch to Trump in 2016. Our data suggest the same is happening in the opposite direction as those with racially liberal or pro-immigration views may be sorting into the Democratic Party.

This prediction may or may turn out to be accurate. But it's plausible, and there's no use burying our heads in the sand by pretending this is about class when it isn't.

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A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump

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One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016.

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If we were to look back on African American History we would be able to see why we have so many problems today.  In " Know your history: Understanding racism in the US" it says " Examining American history provides the us with the tools to analyze how the death of Michael Brown and the demonstrations on Florissant Avenue became a tipping point and sparked a movement." looking back on the history of America it can show us why people today are having such problems with African American history and why we have so many movements.

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"And then you might understand how the death of Michael Brown became a tipping point in the US."

An African American woman yells 'Freedom' when asked to shout so loud it will be heard all over the world at the March on Washington in August 1963 [Express Newspapers/Getty Images/File]

There will never be an acceptable explanation for what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in Ferguson but we will never fully grasp why the stage was set for such an encounter unless we know American history.

We cannot fully comprehend why Dylan Roof murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston unless we study the Civil War and the Confederacy.

We cannot truly fathom how a minor traffic stop in Cincinnati could result in a white campus police officer blowing out the brains of an unarmed black man unless we delve into the role race has played in law enforcement from the enactment of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 to today's mandatory minimum sentencing statutes.

Examining American history provides us with the tools to analyse how the death of Michael Brown and the demonstrations on Florrisant Avenue became a tipping point and sparked a movement. Connecting the dots between the past and the present helps us to see the origins of our current national debate - about race, police misconduct, white supremacy, white privilege, inequality, incarceration and the unfinished equal rights agenda.
The pendulum
The history of people of African descent in America - which is to say the history of America - is a pendulum of progress and setbacks, of resilience and retaliation, of protest and backlash. There have been allies and there have been opponents. There have been demagogues, who would divide Americans on the basis of colour and class, and visionaries who would seek to lead us to common ground.

The quest for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" has been an American aspiration since the Declaration of Independence, but black Americans, Native Americans and women were not at the table in 1776. Forty of the 56 signers owned other people.

Lest there be any doubt about where the young nation's sentiments lay, the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision made clear that people of African descent - whether enslaved or free - would not be considered American citizens and had no legal standing in the courts. It mattered not that some of their grandfathers had served in George Washington's Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

Last month in Washington, DC, at the third annual March on Washington Film Festival, Clarence B Jones, a confidant and personal legal counsel to Martin Luther King, Jr., said "a definitive discussion and description of the institution of slavery, the concomitant supporting ideology of white supremacy and the impact it has had on subsequent generations" are missing from the history curriculum of most American high schools and colleges.

Without that knowledge, he said, it is impossible to understand America today.

"Our history has never taught the centrality of race as the key barometer to how well we are doing with the American Experiment," added Pulitzer Prize winning historian Taylor Branch that same evening. "If you don't have race at the forefront of an investigation of how America is fulfilling its goals, then something is wrong. And unfortunately right now we are paying the price for 50 years of trying to avoid and hide that subject."

Indeed every time we see another video - of Sandra Bland, of Freddie Gray, of Tamir Rice - we witness the horrifying evidence of our national failure to confront this legacy.

What used to be called "the Negro problem", really is a matter of the intransigence of white supremacists who are mired in the past.

Slavery was not the benign, paternalistic system described in the history textbooks of my youth. Instead, it was a brutal, often sadistic, form of domination over the bodies and minds of people who were kidnapped, whipped, beaten and raped. Generations of human beings toiled against their will without pay or legal rights.

For 246 years - from 1619, when 20 Africans were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, until the end of the Civil War in 1865 - most people of African descent in America were enslaved. Those who had purchased or otherwise been granted their freedom lived a precarious, circumscribed existence.

Slavery and the slave trade were essential to the American economy and to the development of American capitalism, especially after Native Americans were driven off their ancestral land in the Deep South in the 1830s to make way for vast cotton plantations. The wealth of the nation was inextricably dependent upon uncompensated labour, which enriched not only the planters, but universities, banks, textile mills, ship owners and insurance companies, who held policies on their bodies. To settle a debt, an owner merely needed to sell one of his slaves.

By 1850, enslaved Americans, who were listed in their owners' inventory ledgers alongside cattle and farm equipment, were worth $1.3bn or one-fifth of the nation's wealth. When the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the value of that human collateral exceeded $3bn and was worth more than the nation's banks, railroads, mills and factories combined. Now numbering four million souls, they were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, America's "greatest financial asset".

Immediately after the Civil War, during the hopeful, but brief period of Reconstruction, black people were finally recognised as citizens with rights. But just as quickly as the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments abolished slavery, provided equal protection under the law and granted black men the right to vote, Reconstruction ended with retaliatory Redemption.

When federal troops abandoned their posts in the South after the Compromise of 1877, the defeated Confederates regrouped as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. They regained control of their workforce, not by owning them, but by circumscribing their lives through terror, violence and voter suppression.
READ MORE: Reflections of a former white supremacist
In Louisiana, the number of registered black voters plummeted from 130,334 in 1896 to 5,320 in 1898. Fraudulent voting schemes pushed black elected officials from state legislatures and from Congress. During the late 19th century, there were 20 black members of Congress . When North Carolina's George Henry White left in 1901, there would not be another until 1928, when Oscar DePriest was elected in Chicago. For virtually the first half of the 20th century the 15th Amendment had no value for blacks in the former Confederate states, where they were denied the right to vote through the cynical artifice of poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses.

Jim Crow laws and Black Codes obliterated Reconstruction wins and codified racially based discrimination. The sharecropping system, which left black farmers in debt at the end of every harvest, was equivalent to slavery. Black children were allowed to attend school only during times of the year when there were no farm chores to do. Historian Rayford Logan called the period "nadir of American race relations".

Those who got too uppity were lynched, firebombed in their homes and chased from land they owned.

In 1915, DW Griffith's technically groundbreaking movie, Birth of a Nation, glorified the Klan and fed the trope of black inferiority and criminality. Around the same time, a migration wave began that would eventually see more than six million black Americans flee the brutality and deprivation of the South for the relative freedom of the North and the West.

Four years later, when black soldiers returned from World War I military duty in France, they were attacked during the "Red Summer" as resentful whites instigated riots in at least 34 cities, from Chicago and Washington, DC to Memphis and Charleston. Their goal was to put men who had received France's Croix de Guerre back in their place as the Klan had done after Reconstruction. The NAACP investigated and black newspapers editorialised. During the succeeding decades - through the Depression, the New Deal and World War II - the pendulum continued to swing between progress and setbacks.

The attitudes that informed Jim Crow laws and discriminatory public policy existed in the North as well as the South. The results are evident today in major American cities, where banks refused loans to black home buyers in the 1950s and 1960s, literally drawing on maps red lines around predominantly black neighbourhoods and ensuring that those homes would not appreciate in value at the same rate as comparable white neighbourhoods.

In 1957, when my parents were ready to finance a new home in an all-black development of newly constructed residences in a suburb of Indianapolis, they were unable to secure a loan from any of the city's large banks. Both were college graduates and business executives. Our neighbours were doctors, teachers, coaches, plumbers, entrepreneurs, realtors, nurses, ministers, architects, insurance salesmen and carpenters. Many of the men were veterans of World War II and the Korean War and therefore eligible for the GI Bill's home loan guaranty. In other words, people who normally would have had no trouble qualifying for mortgages. Instead, they went to Mammoth Life Insurance, a black-owned insurance company then based in Louisville, Kentucky, for their loans.

In 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision struck down so-called separate but equal education and mandated that American schools be racially integrated. As a post-Brown v Board child, I always attended integrated schools, encountering the occasional racist, but, like my parents, rolling with the punches, keeping perspective and finding progressive kindred spirits in the process. But in many communities - both in the South and the North - the diehard segregationists responded with paranoia and bitterness, decrying the evils of race-mixing and miscegenation.

In 1957, nine students at Little Rock High School were harassed and spit upon. In 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace tried, but failed, to block the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood. Across the South, federal troops were called in to facilitate the process.

For a time, it seemed that American schools might be integrated, but that pendulum soon began to move in the other direction as all-white academies opened. Today, most Americans are enlightened enough not to oppose interracial marriage and are much more tolerant than their grandparents and great-grandparents, but American public schools in most areas are more segregated than ever, as Nikole Hannah-Jones' April 2014 ProPublica investigation of Tuscaloosa, Alabama schools so well illustrated.

Pressure from Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, thousands of activists and a powerful cadre of civil rights leaders combined with the political muscle and willingness of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to push for critical legislation during the mid-1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting and firing. Today, our workplaces are undoubtedly more diverse than they were in the 1950s, with more people of colour employed as physicians, firefighters, attorneys, journalists, investment bankers and professors. But it is still true that when a white person and a black person with comparable credentials apply for a job, the white person is more likely to be hired.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed poll taxes and made it possible for thousands of formerly disenfranchised black Americans to vote. Now, throughout America, there are thousands of people of colour who are city council members, mayors, members of Congress, on school boards and of course, now in the White House. During the last two presidential elections, black voters turned out in record numbers because they were motivated and because many of the old obstacles to voting had been removed.

But a backlash has developed in that arena, too. Two years ago, in Shelby County v Holder, the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, removing the "preclearance" provisions that required states with a history of voter discrimination to seek permission for changes to electoral procedures. Despite no evidence of significant voter fraud, Republican legislators immediately passed new voter ID laws that groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the Advancement Project argue will suppress voter turnout among black, Latino, elderly and young voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

President Barack Obama 's election in 2008 and re-election in 2012 provided evidence of how much the nation has changed in the last half a century . While arrival of the "post-racial" era was much overstated and a result of magical thinking, Americans rightly celebrated the progress on Inauguration Day 2009. The high of the moment, though, was accompanied by the rise of the Tea Party and the reminder of the strain of white supremacy that is baked into the American DNA.

Rattled by the presence of a black family in the White House, "birthers" emerged and fabricated a myth that America's first black president - by some amazing feat of molecular transference - had been born not in Hawaii, where his mother was located at the time, but in Kenya. In this age of social media, Youtube and cable television, their illogical stories took flight, promulgated not just by the poorly educated prone to conspiracy theories, but by people who clearly knew better.
READ MORE: A photographic journey through race and racism in the US When the past isn't past
William Faulkner famously said, "The past is not dead. It is not even past". This is certainly true when it comes to the Civil War. Most credible scholars and historians agree that slavery was the root cause of the war, whether they focus on the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, President Lincoln's election in 1860 or a myriad of other events and factors. But for an adamant segment of the American population the reason for "The Late Unpleasantness" remains in dispute, 150 years after Confederate General Robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse.

Five years ago, the Pew Research Center found that nearly half - 48 percent - of those polled believed "states' rights" was the main cause of the war, compared to 38 percent who thought that it was slavery. Particularly disturbing is that 60 percent of respondents under the age of 30 selected the states' rights option.

One suspects the current Red States/Blue States polarisation - where Republican-controlled legislatures resist federal programmes like the Affordable Care Act in the name of "states' rights" - has seeped into the historical debate and conflated the past with the present.

There is so much to remind us that the past is neither dead, nor past.

Later this month, when five million Texas students return to school, they will be learning American history from a syllabus that equivocates about the reasons for the Civil War.

"Slavery was a side issue to the Civil War," declared Texas State Board of Education member Pat Hardy, when the board adopted highly politicised standards in 2010. "There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states' rights."

This intentionally and unapologetically ideological approach to curriculum development is akin to educational malpractice. By misinforming children, they are failing to prepare them for the very diverse world, not only that they will inherit, but in which they already live. They might as well tell them that the stork brings babies or that tooth fairies put dollars under their pillows.

In fact, the "states' rights" that Hardy holds so dear are the states' rights that defended segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, with complaints about "outside agitators," Freedom Riders and other young activists who registered voters, sat at lunch counters and integrated public facilities. To the degree that states' rights factored into causing the Civil War, it was the effort to preserve the right to continue slavery and the desire for western territories to enter the Union as states where slavery was legal. States' rights was about the planters' prerogative to own other people rather than some highly principled constitutional debate.

When those states seceded from the union, their reasons were quite precise. Mississippi's declaration of secession could not have been clearer, in fact: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world ... a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilisation."

Texas was equally as direct: " We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race."

Among the popular slogans on t-shirts at Civil War battle re-enactments and Confederate flag rallies are "Know your history" and "If this shirt offends you, you need a history lesson".

Many of the people who agree with those sentiments will say that their ancestors were in the states' rights camp and that they didn't own enslaved people. In truth "more than half of the Confederate officers in 1861 owned slaves," writes historian Joseph Glatthaar, author of General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse. As young army recruits, only a few of the enlisted men personally owned anyone, but more than a third of them were members of slave-owning families. And as young white men in America, they all benefitted from membership in a society which prospered from the system of slavery.

READ MORE: Racism in the US: What if your identity was a lie?

A nation of contradictions
Because Dylan Roof displayed the Confederate Battle Flag and drew inspiration from fellow white supremacists as he planned his attack on Emanuel Church, many people have begun to re-examine their attachment to the flag. When they are honest, they must admit that the history of the Confederacy does not equal the history of the South. A flag that was resurrected in 1962 and unfurled at the University of Mississippi to oppose James Meredith's enrollment and that was beloved by members of the Klan and the White Citizens Council is fraught with dastardly symbolism. So when someone says it is about "heritage, not hate," it seems they have been duped or that they do not really know the actual heritage they profess to admire.

Inseparable from the 'heritage' that reveres family member who fought on the losing side of the Civil War, is the evil of a system and an economy that relied on slave labour for two and a half centuries, then on codified inequality for another 100 years,

"I am proud of the culture, grace and elegance of the Old South, of our heritage of courage, honour, chivalry, respect for womanhood, patriotism, and of duty to God and country," a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans rhapsodised several years ago in an essay. "I love the Confederate Flag and 'Dixie' as stirring symbols of that heritage."

Far be it from me to question another person's affection for his ancestors. But I can't help but note that all that "culture, grace and elegance" that occurred, no doubt, under fragrant magnolia blossoms, would not have been possible without the labour of those millions of unpaid people who worked not just from sun up to sun down, but through the night, to preserve that Disney-fied version of reality.

It would be easier to believe this symbol was unrelated to a desire for white supremacy if it weren't so frequently sported by people who also have swastika tattoos and wear Nazi paraphernalia. And if their social media comments comments didn't so closely correlate with hate group mentality. It would be easier to believe that this fealty for the Confederate flag was all about family pride if the provenance of its popularity were different.

Soon after General Lee surrendered, he took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and advised his compatriots to do the same.

"Lee did not want such divisive symbols following him to the grave," wrote Jonathan Horn in the Daily Beast earlier this year. "At his funeral in 1870, flags were noticeably absent from the procession. Former Confederate soldiers marching did not don their old military uniforms, and neither did the body they buried. 'His Confederate uniform would have been 'treason' perhaps!' Lee's daughter wrote."

"Racial ignorance is a prison from which there is no escape because there are no doors," Toni Morrison said at Portland State in 1975 . "And there are old, old men and old, old women who need to believe in their racism...They are in prisons of their own construction. But you must know the truth. That you are free."

Fortunately, there also are young Americans who wish not to be associated with this ignorance. Earlier this year, before the murders in South Carolina, the University of Texas' student government passed a resolution demanding the removal of a statue of the Confederate States of America president, Jefferson Davis. It took the massacre at Emanuel Church to finally shame the South Carolina legislature into removing the Confederate Battle Flag from the statehouse grounds, but at least that has happened. In response, there have been more than 130 pro-flag rallies, but the demonstrators look more marginalised each time they gather.

Since the election of President Obama, those who resent him have taken to talking about "traditional Americans," by which they mean white Americans of European descent. This view reeks of old time white supremacy and a willful amnesia about the reality of American history.

Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved Africans in 1808, which means the majority of African Americans are descended from people who were here long before many European Americans - especially the large waves of Irish, German, Italian and Jewish immigrants who came between 1820 and 1920.

For all those many years, those people of African descent were planting rice, picking tobacco, baling cotton and building levees, but also starting businesses, founding churches, performing surgery and more. At the US Capitol, where they worked as carpenters, stone masons, plasterers, painters and labourers, their owners were compensated for their work though they were not. For as long as African Americans have been in America, they have played a role in its development. They are as "traditional" in their longevity and their worthiness as anyone else. In fact, America would not be America without them.

But when one segment of the population convinces itself that it has a more legitimate claim to being 'American,' it follows that they will think their lives are more valuable and more important. When they convince themselves that black and brown people are 'takers' rather than producers, they feel justified in disrespecting them, incarcerating them and disenfranchising them.

When public policy is based on lies and misconceptions, a mentality emerges that "those people" are undeserving. It allows the Darren Wilsons of the world to convince themselves that they are victims. And it follows that the Michael Browns of the world not only do not matter, but are the victimisers.

We are a nation of contradictions. We continue to fight the same battles over and over, decade after decade, generation after generation without facing reality. We put band aids on lacerations and hope the cancer of racial hatred won't recur.

Once again, we are at a pivotal moment. The pendulum is moving. It is as clear as it has ever been that what we know about our history shapes the way we think of ourselves, the way we think of our government and the way we treat our fellow Americans. What we know about history and what we know about current events shapes public policy. When we are misinformed, we make poor decisions.

We have come to this place because a generation of activists who lived through the Freedom Rides, the march on Selma and the traumas and triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement are determined that they will not have the gains they made trampled upon. When they gathered for the March on Washington anniversary on the Mall in August 2013, they wondered who the new foot soldiers would be. They know the battle has always been fought on so many fronts by lawyers and scholars, by journalists and ministers, by community organisers and teachers. But at the March on Washington Film Festival this summer, they were heartened that a generation of young activists had emerged. DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie of We The Protestors. Bree Newsome who climbed the flagpole in Columbia, South Carolina. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi who founded the Black Lives Matter movement. And many, many more.

Michael Brown's corpse on the scorching pavement on August 9, 2014 forced America to pay attention just as Emmett Till's bloated body grabbed the nation in the summer of 1955. The shootings at Emanuel Church felt much too much like the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist church in Birmingham in 1963. The tanks and armoured personnel carriers on Florissant Avenue reminded us of Bull Connor's hoses and attack dogs. Americans of good will could no longer retreat into their comfort zones and pretend that there were not consequences for us all.

Michael Brown and all the others who died before him and who have died since made it impossible for us to look away. And that has changed everything.
A'Lelia Bundles is a former network television news producer and executive. She is the author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, a biography of her great-great-grandmother.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

This article first appeared in a special edition of the Al Jazeera Magazine exploring race in the US. Download it for iPads and iPhones here , and for Android devices here .

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Know your history: Understanding racism in the US

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"And then you might understand how the death of Michael Brown became a tipping point in the US." There will never be an acceptable explanation for what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in Ferguson but we will never fully grasp why the stage was set for such an encounter unless we know American history.

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In the article "the Humanity of Blackness " 'missing from history classes: How to Transform Black History Education in School" Dr. Daina says that when African history is taught it shouldn't start at slavery.  It should have been started when the African Americans were free people and when they had a stable system.  If we started at that part of history people would understand how Africa really was and not the racial biases we were taught then history wouldn't be a problem.

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Editor's Note: This story was originally published June 29, 2020 in the wake of the protests following the death of George Floyd and has been republished for Black History Month.
The history of African Americans begins on the African continent where diverse empires thrived for thousands of years and traded gold, ivory and salt with people from other civilizations. But in the majority of classrooms K-12 across the U.S., students learn about the African American heritage starting with the enslavement in the U.S. colonies, a system that erased the identity of the enslaved and treated them as property.

"Those that populated the colonies were free people from communities in Africa with large scale civilizations that had tax systems, that had irrigation systems, that had universities -- they came from civilized nations that were advanced," said Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, a professor of American history at the University of Texas at Austin. "That's where the curriculum should begin, that's the biggest omission from my perspective. It's an erasure of culture and heritage so that identities of African Americans for some are that of slaves and those fighting for their freedom."

That starting point is just part of the problem in the way the American education system addresses Black history, according to experts. The system also minimizes the gross violence Black Americans faced after the Civil War, and over-simplifies the civil rights movement.

"I feel like we've missed several generations of learning," Berry said.

As a result, many Americans are taught little about the history of systemic racism and the many contributions of Black people to America's economy and the democratic system. Educators also say there's more to Black history than just teaching about oppression and suffering, and that curriculums need to incorporate lessons on Black "agency, joy, love and global connection with Blackness around the world," said LaGarrett King, director of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri.

King said it's more historically accurate in Black history to start talking about liberation with June 19, 1865, or Juneteenth, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned that the Civil War ended two months before and that they were free. Juneteenth has been celebrated by Black people across the country since then, but it has not been widely taught in schools.

"There's a lack of understanding of what is actually Black history," King said. "What is historically important to white people is not historically important to Black people. July 4, 1776, means nothing historically to Black people."

Recent protests in the wake of George Floyd's killing by the Minneapolis police have sparked a national conversation on racial injustice that includes the reexamination of how African American history has been taught in schools. Experts who have focused on that topic have been calling for a major overhaul of the K-12 curriculum for years, so that Black history, which is vital to understanding American history, is better integrated into mainstream U.S. history classes and that there are courses devoted to the African American experience.

Historians and educators say classroom lessons don't explain that white politicians continued to pass laws after the abolition of slavery that prevented Black communities from thriving. The segregation laws, known as "Jim Crow," relegated African Americans to the status of second class citizens in post-Reconstruction America, preserving a system of racial apartheid that dominated mostly the southern and borders states between 1877 and the mid-1960s, but also impacted Black people living in the North. Black citizens were denied the right to vote, were not allowed to attend the same schools as white people and could not rent or buy real estate in white neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, white citizens, who felt threatened by the rise of Black communities during Reconstruction, unleashed a wave of terror on their fellow countrymen -- incidents that have been minimized or ignored in textbooks.

On Nov. 2, 1920, a mob of white people in Ocoee, Florida, became infuriated when a Black man showed up at the polls to vote and over two days of terror, the mob set fire to homes and drove Black residents from their community. Some estimate that as many at 60 people were killed.

Florida did not require students to learn about the Ocoee massacre until this month -- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill requiring schools to teach it in history classes on June 25.

In 1921, white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, attacked the city's affluent African American community, killing as many as 300 people and injuring hundreds more. The attack, which took place over the course of 16 hours, destroyed the Black business district, known as Black Wall Street, and left thousands of people homeless.

Schools in Oklahoma were not required to teach it until 2002.

The civil rights movement, an unprecedented fight for equality, spanning two decades, often gets boiled down to "lessons about a handful of heroic figures and the four words 'I have a dream,'" according to a 2014 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The report found that some states, like Georgia and South Carolina, are doing "an outstanding job" of teaching about the civil rights movement, but it gave many states grades of D and F, including Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine.

"There is tremendous pressure from the political right to teach a wholly false history that ignores the nation's blemishes and misrepresents struggles for social justice," the report said. "In this revisionist version, the framers worked tirelessly to end slavery, the nation was perfect at birth, and states' rights-not slavery-was the motivation behind Southern secession. Together, these interpretations deny the everyday reality of millions of today's students-that the nation is not yet perfect and that racism and injustice still exist. This narrative also ignores the agency of people of color and denies the need for group action to promote social justice."

There are school districts that already mandate the teaching of African American history or offer it as an elective, but the curriculum, which is supposed to delve much deeper into the Black experience than a standard U.S. history course, often doesn't humanize the African American experience. And while there are thousands of teachers who to teach a much richer and more complete history even though it's not in the standards, many more don't have the training or the time to incorporate it into their teaching, experts say. While progress continues to be made, there needs to be a shift on the national level to contextualize the Black experience in the U.S., so that students see how it relates to issues of police brutality and systematic racism Black people deal with today, King and Berry said.

"The Black history curriculum needs to come from a Black perspective with topics specifically geared towards the Black experience, and many times these narratives are and need to be independent of the way we typically frame U.S. history," King wrote in "The Status of Black History in U.S. Schools and Society," an article published in the Social Education journal in 2017. "The curriculum will need to balance narratives of victimhood, oppression, perseverance, and resistance, but unlike current renditions of the curriculum, it should contextualize issues that connect with the present."

King launched the Carter Center in 2018 because he noticed that there wasn't an organization that was dedicated strictly for the professional development for Black history K-12 teachers. On July 24 and 25, the center will host its third annual "Teaching Black History Conference" that offers professional development to teachers who want to improve K-12 Black history education. King said history teachers who want to make changes to how they teach Black history should "start by taking inventory of self, understanding that Black history may be contentious with who you are as a person and the perspectives that you have. If you're teaching it through your perspectives, then you're likely teaching it wrong." He said teachers need to look for resources, which are free and readily available, and seek out primary source documents so that students read "the words of Black folks." They should invite Black people from their communities who can talk about their experiences.

Mike Bennett teaches U.S history at Parnassus Preparatory School in the suburb of Minneapolis. He said after taking an online course last year with Berry on the "The Lives of the Enslaved," he's been able to incorporate an article on "how the entire United States benefited from slavery, not just the South," and add slave narratives that provided rich details he would not have otherwise included in his classroom. He says, as a white, middle-aged man, he's still learning and challenging himself to incorporate more Black voices and perspectives in his lessons.

King said school districts also have the responsibility to help teachers understand and define what Black history is and that if there's going to be a curriculum overhaul, there needs to be a buy-in "by the schools' system where educators, administrators, the community, university personnel, all come together to design this curriculum."

But school districts don't have the "reinvent the wheel because there are great Black curriculums out there," King said. In 2005, the city of Philadelphia mandated that ninth-graders be required to take a course in African-American history. Philadelphia became the first major city to require such a course for high school graduation.

In April 2020, the State Board of Education in Texas approved an elective African American studies course, which means high schools can offer it as early as this fall.

Keina Cook will be teaching that course for the first time at Killeen High School in Killeen, Texas. Growing up in New Orleans in the 1990s, Cook learned about African American history starting at enslavement. Then she said, she remembers learning about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King. Jr., and Malcolm X, the extent of her Black history education. She learned to be proud of her African heritage from her dad, who grew up in the 50s and the 60s in segregated New Orleans and was proud of the African American culture. She also attended a camp where kids learned about the principals of Kwanza. She said she didn't learn Black history in more depth until she went to college, and she's still learning and discovering just how horrible slavery was.

Cook also took Berry's course on the "The Lives of the Enslaved," which was offered through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in partnership with Pace University. She learned that Black enslaved women were used by white doctors for gynecological experimentation because they were believed to experience less pain than white women and that Black bodies were commodified even after death and dug up for medical testing. She doesn't want her students to miss out on information that humanizes the enslaved.

"There's a way to explain to students in high school these gory details," said Cook. "You shouldn't have to go to college to learn these things. The standards have to change, the curriculum needs to change because we've always taught history from the Eurocentric point. We incorporate marginalized groups a little bit. The African American identity has to be reformulated."

The African American studies elective was piloted in some Dallas high schools before it was approved and students who took the course testified at a Texas Education Agency hearing last year in favor of the class, saying it has changed how they think of themselves and their communities.

"My ancestors were more than slaves, and I want to understand what they did to contribute to my future and to America," said Taylor Ellingberg-McLeod, a student at Trinidad Garza Early College High School. "It is so unfortunate that I have to work hard to get a basic understanding of where I came from."

Another student said her teacher incorporated lessons on immigration, which helped her understand similarities among Latino and African American communities.

"This course really impacted me because it made me realize many of the injustices that my people face are really similar to the injustices the African American community faces," said Johana Miranda, a student at New Tech High School.

Educators say it's important that Black students learn about their history and that non-Black students understand the humanity of Blackness as well as the long history of systematic racism that extends to this day and affects their Black peers. To achieve that goal, Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, an Ohio Democrat, thinks all schools should be required to teach Black history. In May, she introduced the Black History Is American History Act, which if passed, would offer grants for teachers and students to teach and learn Black history. It would also require the only national test given to elementary, middle, and high school students to always include Black history.

Berry, who in February released, "A Black Women's History of the United States," a book co-authored with Prof. Kali Nicole Gross, said at the hearing in Texas that, after teaching for 20 years, she still feels shocked when students enter her classes at The University of Texas and show little or no knowledge of the African American heritage.

She hopes that teacher trainings and changes in the curriculum will make a lasting impact on the education of future generations.

King noted that this year's conference hosted by the Carter Center is virtual due to the coronavirus concerns, and there's increased interest in the training in light of the protests in the wake of George Floyd's death.

"Teachers have to stop thinking of their students as students and start thinking of their students as citizens," said King. "You have to think of them as future police officers, judges, lawyers, and doctors and it's important for citizens to understand other citizens.

"If we leave out histories and leave out knowledge of our country, particularly of non-white people, then how will those citizens become good citizens when they become adults? They just can't, because they don't understand half of the population that they will be serving. Until we understand that Black people are human, then change in the curriculum is going to be difficult."

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'The Humanity of Blackness' Missing From History Classes: How to Transform Black History Education in Schools

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Editor's Note: This story was originally published June 29, 2020 in the wake of the protests following the death of George Floyd and has been republished for Black History Month. The history of African Americans begins on the African continent where diverse empires thrived for thousands of years and traded gold, ivory and salt with people from other civilizations.

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An 8th-grade history teacher has voiced their concerns about where African American history started, and that it should be taught as an all-year class. "We must remember that African American history is not all about slavery, but that slavery had a profound impact and reach that continues today," says Lauren S. Brown in the article " Shining the Light of Truth: Teaching Black History All Year Long". This teacher realized that we are only showing one side of the coin and that there is more to African American history that should be being taught in schools.

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A MiddleWeb Blog
The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. - Ida B. Wells
The end of this past school year, and the events surrounding the death of George Floyd while in police custody, have left all of us reeling.

For those of us who teach U.S. history, there is so much advice, so many suggestions from so many well-meaning individuals and organizations, so much to read. And more to read. I have gotten more links to lists of books to read about racism in the last few weeks than I can count.

But may I suggest that, for history teachers, what Dr. King described as the "urgency of now" demands we read as much about the past as the present?
"The 1873 Colfax Massacre Crippled the Reconstruction Era" (Smithsonian Magazine)
Whenever I get overwhelmed, I go back to what matters most to me as a teacher. And right now, that means rethinking my curriculum to include more Black history than I already do. I teach 8th grade U.S. history picking up from after Reconstruction. I can imagine that what my new students understand about Reconstruction will be shaky due to remote learning.

So I am considering starting off the year with a review of the Reconstruction Era and how it is an unfinished process in our country.

We must remember that African American history is not all about slavery, but that slavery had a profound impact and reach that continues today. (See the end of this post for resources on that continuing impact via the 1619 Project.)

We must remember that when we do teach about historical slavery, we can't wait to teach it until right before we get to the Civil War unit. We must teach students about the enormous impact of slavery on the story of America from its very beginnings.

And when we wrap up our units on the Civil War and Reconstruction, we can't ignore Black history until Rosa Parks. None of us - no matter our race or the race of our students - can afford such a distorted view of history.
Editor's note: The remainder of this article first appeared on 9/17/19, and some comments date from then.

If we are intentional about doing the work that social justice advocates are talking about right now, we will be busy. We will struggle this summer as we get ready for fall. Lonnie G. Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian, concluded his recent statement on racial violence and division with the quotation below.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. - Frederick Douglass

Why Students Need Black History All Year

In the month of February you will find countless articles about Black History Month. One of the many suggestions you see in those articles is that Black history should be taught all year, which is why you are reading this in September.

In my classroom, we are newly back to school, and we cannot wait until February. Carter Woodson, the founder of what started out as Black history week, hoped that one day the need for such a special designation would disappear - that one day the history and contributions of Black people would be fully embedded in our classes.

I don't think we're at that point yet. How could we be when we still read stories about misguided teachers holding slavery simulations in their classrooms or asking students to identify slavery's positive aspects?

But in my classroom I am working hard to reach Carter Woodson's goals. The district where I teach has been wrestling with issues of equity that center around race with a new urgency during the past few years. As a result, I have been to a number of workshops on this issue.

These workshops and my own reading and experience confirm for me, a white teacher, that at least part of the answer is to be found in our curriculum. I cannot single-handedly close the achievement gap or end racism, but I can focus on Black history.

Black History Is for Everyone

Among my own students, 55% are white and the next largest group is African American. But whatever the racial makeup in a school, ALL of our students need Black history.

Why? Let me suggest four reasons, with three caveats.

Reason 1: U.S. history makes no sense without African American history.

As W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote, "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." The twenty-first century, so far, does not appear to be much different.

The color line, beginning with slavery, has informed every aspect of our history. Slavery is THE fundamental contradiction in our country's history. Our nation's founding principle - a dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights - is in direct conflict with slavery.

Our country was built with slave labor, we went to war over slavery, and we have not yet made good on the promissory note Martin Luther King spoke of in 1963. As Nikole Hannah-Jones recently asked, "What if America understood...that we [African Americans] have never been the problem but the solution?"

While our country espouses the ideals of democracy, liberty and equality, we haven't lived up to them, and yet ironically, it is Black Americans who have been the "foremost freedom fighters" in our history. Understanding this contradiction is one of the keys towards understanding the history of the United States of America.

Reason 2: African American history intersects in every unit and period.

Even after your class gets past Reconstruction, African American history continues to play an important role. The Jim Crow era, during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and the Civil Rights movements are the obvious spots, but African American history fits EVERYWHERE.

As I have taught different grades, I have found myself at different points in the curriculum during February, which has led me to research and then teach different aspects of Black history. A few years ago, I found myself teaching about the Spanish American War and the annexation of the Philippines during February. At first, I didn't see how I would find a connection there. But find it I did. African Americans fought in the war, many because they hoped it would prove they were loyal Americans.

This would be true of every war the U.S. has ever fought, beginning with the American Revolution and the death of Crispus Attucks during the Boston Massacre. Interestingly, some Black Americans pointed out the hypocrisy of fighting to acquire the Philippines against the will of the population and then working to "civilize them" when there was still so much discrimination against African Americans at home.

Using primary sources such as this declaration from the Colored Citizens of Boston protesting the Filippino War, or "The Black Man's Burden," a response to Rudyard Kipling's famous poem, "White Man's Burden," help provide alternative perspectives. Furthermore, the anti-imperialist view of the Colored Citizens of Boston is echoed in all the subsequent wars of the 20th century. I use this YouTube clip (starting at minute 1:51) of Muhammed Ali's stance on Vietnam to demonstrate the parallel.

So whatever units or periods of American history that you teach, do some research. (See resources below for places to start.) You will find something on the role Blacks played that can fuel discussion and illuminate greater truths about the period. Whether it is the opportunities of the workers in the Gilded Age, or the cowboys out west, or the suffragists fighting for women's right to vote, or the impact of World War II - there are Black people involved.

Reason 3: Our nation's present problems with race and intolerance make no sense if we don't know the history behind it.

As I write this post, the New York Times has just published The 1619 Project which examines "the ways the legacy of slavery continues to shape our country." The last several years have brought renewed attention to the impact of slavery on the world today. (See the excellent podcast, Seeing White, from Scene on Radio.)

Whether you are looking at today's rise of white supremacy movements, contemporary efforts to take down Confederate monuments, or the advantages slavery had for Northern institutions, it is clear that slavery was the major plot line of American history in the past and continues to inform the present.

When we teach Black history in isolation - as a pause for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or a few heroes in February, or worse, as a few days spent on slavery, its abolition in 1865 and then nothing until Brown v. Board in 1954 - we contribute to our nation's amnesia about race.

Our students - even in all/mostly white communities - know that race is a major issue in our country. When we don't acknowledge that, when we don't teach about the roots of it, then the misunderstanding and the racism continue. As I mentioned in a recent post, Professor Steven Thurston Oliver speaks eloquently about this issue in a podcast for Teaching Tolerance's Hard History: American Slavery.

Reason 4: Students like Black History

In my experience - no matter what the racial composition of a student is - they like African American history. They like it because it is about justice and injustice. And there is nothing like injustice to stir the passion of a 13-year-old.

During my unit on the Great Depression, I use an engaging, 10 minute film clip from the History Channel. I watch students watch it (and they are mostly watching), but I always have a few who drift in and out. Until the part when noted actor Ossie Davis comes on and talks about FDR's fireside chats.

Davis says, "...and me, a little Black boy down in Georgia...it wasn't that [FDR] told it to Daddy...or told it to Mama. No, he was talking to little Ossie." And when he says that, I kid you not, the entire class, including the white kids, perk up and refocus. I know, because I have watched all 5 of my classes for the past few years I have shown this, and it never fails. The same thing happens every time. There is something about that comment (and it's not just Davis's wonderful voice) that speaks to them.

This is how it is whenever I teach Black history. Middle school students are (please forgive my broad generalization here) idealistic, full of hatred against anything that isn't fair. Too often they feel powerless. African American history is all about that and more.

3 Important Caveats

Remember that there is diversity of experience over time and place. Do not treat all African Americans alike. Not every Black person was a slave. Slavery was different in the North from the South. Consider urban vs. rural, small farm or large plantation. Consider the conditions of Black people in the colonial period vs. antebellum vs. 1920s.

The Great Migration fundamentally changed the demographics of our country and life was different for those who made the journey and those who didn't, for those who followed family and for those who were the first to arrive. There is a beautiful expression of this by classroom teacher Jordan Lanfair in #15 of the Teaching Hard History: American Slavery podcasts at about minute 38:00.

Even African Americans who had the same experiences did not interpret them the same way. I love to use two opposing documents about women's suffrage from Booker T. Washington and Du Bois to illuminate this. Students are surprised that a Black man would oppose women's suffrage.

Be sure your entire focus is not slavery and oppression. It shouldn't be, and not only for the sake of our Black students, who can be justifiably proud of the enormous impact Black culture continues to have on everything American. While slavery and oppression, of course, are a major part of the story, they don't explain the cultural longevity and successes of African Americans, nor their unique contributions to the arts, to literature ( including SF), to music, to sports, to business, to science and mathematics.

One source I especially like to use to address this is a brief video from a New York Times interactive collection featuring the voices of "hypenated" Americans. Michaela, a very light-skinned woman who identifies as Black, is so proud of her identity she pointedly asks, "Why would I want to be White?"

Another piece of cultural history is found in a chapter from Langston Hughes's 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, called "When the Negro Was in Vogue." Students will see echoes of the role African American culture played in the 1920s in our society today.

And one last question you might have....

So if you do this all year, what do you do in February? I'm still wrestling with this question. It is probably wise at the start of the month to explain to students the story of how Black History Month came to be. History.com's video does this well. I then remind them of other designated months.

You might consider a discussion of what African American history month is for. Is it a celebration of famous people and contributions? A time to focus our attention on the history of African Americans as a people? Is it a time to focus on the successes and the victories? Or the struggle? Or the work yet to be done?

To do all this well, you will need sources other than a textbook. A few of my favorites are linked below.

Resources

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Why Our Students Need Black History All Year Long

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A MiddleWeb Blog The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them. - Ida B. Wells The end of this past school year, and the events surrounding the death of George Floyd while in police custody, have left all of us reeling.