02 May 21
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Andy Borowitz | Explosive Video Reveals Biden Plot to Use His Power to Improve Living Conditions
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "An explosive video that emerged last night appears to show President Joe Biden plotting to use his power to improve living conditions in the United States."
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Former Rep. Ron Wright at a hearing in March, 2019. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
The Texas Special Election, Explained
Gabby Birenbaum, Vox
Birenbaum writes: "A special election for the House seat in Texas' Sixth Congressional District will head to a runoff, featuring two Republicans in a race that has implications for the 2022 midterms and the post-Trump Republican Party."
The death of Rep. Ron Wright (R-TX) yielded a 23-candidate runoff to fill his seat in a changing district.
special election for the House seat in Texas’ Sixth Congressional District will head to a runoff, featuring two Republicans in a race that has implications for the 2022 midterms and the post-Trump Republican Party.
The special election was called after the death of former Rep. Ron Wright (R-TX) due to Covid-19. Voters in the district, which is centered in suburban Tarrant County, outside of Fort Worth, went to the polls Saturday to choose from a slate of 23 candidates in an all-party election.
Susan Wright, the widow of the late congressman and a longtime Republican activist in the district, will advance to the runoff after winning 19.21 percent of the vote, according to The Texas Tribune. She will be joined by Republican state Rep. Jake Ellzey, after Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez conceded Sunday, although the race has not yet officially been called due to just 354 votes separating the two.
Altogether, Republican candidates received about 62 percent of the vote, while Democrats earned about 37 percent. There were 78,374 votes cast — a far cry from Election Day in 2020, when 339,992 voters cast ballots in the House race, per The New York Times.
The low turnout may explain the disappointing showing for Democrats in an election that was likely their only pickup opportunity on the calendar this year to expand their narrow House majority of 222 to 213.
There were seven special elections scheduled this year — with a rating of R+6 from the Cook Partisan Voting Index, the Texas election was the only one expected to be competitive.
Texas’ Sixth District is one of the areas in which recent voting patterns and demographic changes have excited the Democratic Party about the Lone Star state. After years of being a virtual lock for the GOP, the district went from being won by John McCain in the 2008 presidential election by 15 points to going for Trump in 2020 by just a three-point margin.
Democrats’ rosy prognostications for Texas did not pan out in 2020, suggesting they still have a ways to go with converting growth in Latino and Black populations into support and votes.
With such a narrow majority, a pickup would have been critical for Democrats as they head into 2022 with major disadvantages, including being the party of the President — historically, an omen of bad fortune — and being locked out of the redistricting process in key states, including Texas, where Republicans will get the opportunity to draw congressional maps advantageous to their interests.
The special election was an important test for the GOP, being the first chance for Republicans to compete with one another in a post-Trump world.
Wright, who won the most votes and will compete in the runoff, received a last-minute endorsement from Trump just five days before the election.
“Susan Wright will be a terrific Congresswoman (TX-06) for the Great State of Texas,” Trump said in a statement, per The Texas Tribune. “She is the wife of the late Congressman Ron Wright, who has always been supportive of our America First Policies.”
But Wright was far from the most devoted Trump acolyte in the race. The slate of 11 Republicans included Brian Harrison, who worked in the Trump administration as the chief of staff to former Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, Sery Kim, who worked in the Trump administration’s Office of Women’s Business Ownership and has been loquacious in her praise for the former President, Travis Rodermund, who focused his campaign on gun rights and building the border wall, and Dan Rodimer, a professional wrestler whom Trump endorsed in a previous race.
So, although Wright was the candidate Trump endorsed and is no slouch when it comes to being anti-abortion, anti-immigrant and anti-federal election or voting rights laws, she was certainly not the most Trumpian of the bunch. The same goes for Ellzey who talks about similar GOP themes but has been criticized by Wright as being soft on immigration, blasted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for not being conservative enough and opposed by the anti-tax Club for Growth, which has spent six figures on attack ads against him, according to The Texas Tribune.
The runoff election has not yet been scheduled.
U.S. President Joe Biden prepares to sign a series of executive orders, including rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
How Biden's Firm Line With Republicans Draws on Lesson of Obama's Mistakes
Joan E. Greve, Guardian UK
Greve writes: "Biden started his presidential campaign with promises to be a unifying force in Washington who would help lawmakers come together to achieve bipartisan reform. But over his first 100 days in office, Biden's message to Republicans in Congress has been closer to this: get on board or get out of my way."
The president has sought bipartisan support but not at the cost of delay and dilution of his bold policies
oe Biden started his presidential campaign with promises to be a unifying force in Washington who would help lawmakers come together to achieve bipartisan reform. But over his first 100 days in office, Biden’s message to Republicans in Congress has been closer to this: get on board or get out of my way.
This willingness to go it alone if necessary appears to be a hard-won lesson from the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Democrats negotiated with Republicans on major bills only to have them vote against the final proposals.
It has also prompted some – especially on the left of the Democratic party – to make early comparisons between Biden and Obama that favor the current president as a more dynamic, determined and ruthless political force for progressive change than his old boss.
Just three months into his presidency, Biden has already signed the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package, which did not attract a single Republican vote in Congress. Delivering his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Biden signaled he was willing to take a similar approach to infrastructure if necessary.
“I’d like to meet with those who have ideas that are different,” the president said of his infrastructure plan. “I welcome those ideas. But the rest of the world is not waiting for us. I just want to be clear: from my perspective, doing nothing is not an option.”
Even though he has much smaller majorities in Congress than Obama did in 2009, Biden has decided to take a much more audacious approach. The Biden strategy centers on acting boldly and quickly to advance his legislative agenda. And if he has to abandon bipartisanship along the way, so be it.
The numbers behind Biden’s proposals tell the story of this daring strategy.
While the 2009 stimulus bill that Obama signed into law amid the financial crisis cost about $787bn, Biden’s coronavirus relief bill came in at $1.9tn. The president’s two infrastructure proposals, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, would cost a collective $4tn.
The size and scope of these policies have signaled that Democrats are intent on learning from the Obama-era stimulus bill talks, when Republicans successfully negotiated to get many provisions taken out of the final legislation. Democrats have blamed the watered-down legislation for their massive losses in the 2010 midterms.
“I don’t just blame Obama. I could blame all of us – everybody,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, recently told writer Anand Giridharadas.
Schumer said Democrats had made two crucial errors in allowing Republicans to “dilute” the stimulus bill and drag out negotiations over the Affordable Care Act. “We’re not going to make either of those mistakes,” Schumer said.
Republicans are taking notice of Democrats’ new no-nonsense approach. In his response to Biden’s address on Wednesday, the Republican senator Tim Scott accused the president of further dividing the country by passing major legislation without bipartisan support in Congress.
“President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted,” Scott said. “But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.”
Biden and his team have insisted their proposals are bipartisan, pointing to surveys showing the coronavirus relief package enjoys the support of a broad majority of Americans, including many Republicans. They accuse Republican lawmakers of being out of touch with the needs of their constituents.
“The biggest game-changer this White House has made to the policy debate is redefining bipartisanship to mean among the public and not among DC politicians,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
Green and other progressive strategists expressed hope that these widely popular policies will pay dividends in next year’s midterms, allowing Democrats to avoid their disastrous showing in 2010.
“There are two huge regrets of the Obama administration,” said Reed Hundt, a member of Obama’s transition team and the author of A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions.
“We didn’t spend enough to get the economy to be fully recovered by 2010, and we disastrously lost the House,” Hundt said. “And regret number two is we never made up for it over eight years.”
Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, said the 2009 stimulus negotiations demonstrated the potential danger of prioritizing bipartisanship over progressive change.
“It’s a lesson learned because, if you don’t push far enough on a major issue everyone cares about, then the compromise working with Republicans ends up being something that doesn’t satisfy the base,” Allison said.
But Allison also made a point to emphasize that Biden is operating under much different circumstances than Obama was when he became president. Most notably, Biden arrived in office on the heels of Donald Trump, who made hardly any attempts to win over Democrats in Congress.
“It’s really, really different times. We didn’t have the experience of a Trump,” Allison said of Obama’s early presidency. “There wasn’t quite that sense of urgency, whereas I think now there’s that expectation we got to get things done, and we need to get them done this year.”
Obama also faced the unique challenge of being a barrier-breaker as the first African American president. Obama has acknowledged that the hurdles he faced in making history affected his ability to negotiate with Republicans, such as the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, and even affected his choice of Biden as his vice-president.
Obama writes in his memoir, A Promised Land, “One of the reasons I’d chosen Joe to act as an intermediary – in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen – was my awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice-president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do.”
Over his first 100 days in office, Biden seems to have used his image as the centrist “Uncle Joe” to his advantage – something that Obama obviously could not do.
“There’s probably a large range of things that, had the exact policies been proposed by a President Bernie Sanders, they would face a lot more obstacles,” Green said. But he was quick to add, “There’s also a range of things that Biden will not propose that a more progressive president would have proposed.”
John Paul Mejia, a spokesperson for the climate group Sunrise Movement, echoed that point, saying Biden still had a lot of work to do to meet the demands of the progressive coalition that helped put him in office.
“While there is some sigh of relief for the president accomplishing or beginning to accomplish some popular demands, that’s really the floor that we’re examining right now,” Mejia said. “In order to truly deliver to the fullest extent of the crises that we face right now, we need a lot more.”
On infrastructure specifically, Mejia said Biden should aim to spend much more money to combat climate change and build a green economy. While the president’s American Jobs Plan calls for $2.3tn in spending over eight years, Mejia and other progressives, including congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, say the US should be looking to invest $10tn over 10 years.
Ocasio-Cortez has applauded Biden’s legislative approach so far, but she has also emphasized that the president – and Americans in general – should not forget the activists who pushed him on major policy and helped make these bold proposals possible.
“Not enough credit is given to the countless activists, organizers and advocates whose relentless work is why we are even hearing anything about universal childcare, white supremacy as terrorism, labor and living wages tonight,” Ocasio-Cortez said after Biden’s speech on Wednesday. “Yet we cannot stop until it’s done. Keep going.”
Police. (photo: iStock)
'I Don't Feel Safe!': A Black Man Told Police He Feared Them, and Then an Officer Yanked Him by His Hair
Theresa Vargas, The Washington Post
Vargas writes: The man's windows appeared too dark. That's the reason D.C. police officers gave for stopping his car just before 10 p.m. on a Wednesday night."
When an officer questioned the man about the tint, he explained that he bought the car that way. He told the officer that he drove for a ride-sharing company and was trying to get home. He also handed over his license and registration.
Two other officers then approached the car and started shining flashlights through the rear windows. The man asked the officer near him whether he could have the others back away.
He told the officer that he felt unsafe.
Then he said it again. And again. And again.
The fifth time he said it came right after one of the officers knocked on his window with a stick while ordering him to open his door, and right before the officer near him reached through his window to do it for him.
“Stop! Man, no! I don’t feel safe!” the man said.
Those moments and the ones that followed are detailed in a report written by an examiner for the D.C. Office of Police Complaints. The examiner — who was tasked with determining whether one of the officers used unnecessary or excessive force when he later pulled the man’s hair — describes the facts in the report as based in part on police body-camera footage.
Right now, some of the loudest and most high-stakes conversations about local and national police restructuring are occurring in the nation’s capital. But even though that hair-pulling encounter happened in the city last year, you probably haven’t heard about it. It didn’t draw public outrage. It didn’t draw much of anything. That’s because most people don’t know it occurred.
For every viral video showing police using excessive force, there are countless trust-eroding encounters that never get seen by the public. That’s often because no one died, or no one filed a lawsuit, or no one thought to ask, because the system is designed to keep police misconduct allegations private.
When talking about police restructuring, what we’re not seeing matters as much as what we are seeing. We can’t fix what we don’t know exists.
I learned about the hair-pulling encounter while looking through findings on the website for the D.C. Office of Police Complaints (which I tend to do from time to time, to keep tabs on what’s happening in the region). In the past few years, I have read through countless complaints on the site, and I’ve shared a few with you in a previous column, but that use-of-force case stood out for two reasons.
At the core of the encounter is this: A Black man told police that he felt unsafe in their presence, and then they confirmed his fears.
The incident also shares similarities with a police encounter in North Carolina that recently stirred public outrage. In that case, police body-camera footage shows officers pulling a 68-year-old Black librarian by her arm and hair from her car to the ground. In the video, Stephanie Bottom, a grandmother of five, cries out and asks: “What have I done wrong?”
A federal lawsuit that Bottom filed says police stopped her for going 10 mph over the speed limit. It also describes an officer as bragging to his colleagues about grabbing a “handful of dreads.”
The man with the tinted windows also wore dreads. And he, too, was forced from his car against his will.
“I’m not doing nothing,” the man repeated as an officer unbuckled his seat belt and pulled him by his arm, the report says. It describes the man as standing outside the car, bent forward, when an officer grabbed his hair “as if holding a ponytail and pulled it up.” The man, it says, “repeatedly screamed for approximately eleven seconds, ‘You got my hair. Cuz, you got my hair!’ ”
The Office of Police Complaints recently released a report that revealed that fewer D.C. police officers are using force. The report also pointed to 13 occasions since 2018 involving officers unjustifiably using neck restraints to subdue suspects.
Use of force by D.C. police is decreasing, but report also cites improper neck restraints
The use of neck restraints has come under intense scrutiny in recent years, and in July, the D.C. Council enacted emergency legislation that prohibits its use by law enforcement officers. The legislation took what the D.C. police department was already doing even further. The department had barred the use of neck restraints in most circumstances, according to an article that my colleague Peter Hermann wrote about the use-of-force report. In that article, Michael G. Tobin, executive director of the complaints office, describes the police as appearing to “send a message to all of the department members that neck restraints are no longer tolerated.”
When it comes to police restructuring, that’s a positive development.
That’s also only part of the picture.
I reached out to Tobin to ask him about the hair-pulling incident and where it fits into use-of-force practices.
As neck restraints have come under more scrutiny, he has noticed more complaints about hair-pulling, he says. The complaints almost always involve a person of color, he says, and in a couple of instances, hair has been yanked from the scalp.
Tobin says his office plans to look closer at the issue and could put forth recommendations for police policy and training changes.
There will inevitably be people who want to defend the officer who pulled the man’s hair. The truth is that he may have a stellar record — or he may have a concerning one. All I can tell you is what the examiner, who was given the chance to review all the evidence before making a decision, wrote in that report. It doesn’t list the officer’s name, but it describes him as saying he pulled the man’s hair unintentionally, thinking it was his jacket collar or shirt.
The examiner describes the officer as lacking credibility, noting that the man yelled out, and writes that pulling his hair was “neither reasonable nor necessary and it thus constituted an excessive and unnecessary use of force.”
That night, the man was handcuffed and walked to the back of his car.
While standing there, he complained of pain, the report says: “Ya’ll just pulled my head, man. I got a headache and everything man. . . . Just pulled my head to pull me out of the car. My shoulders feel like they hurt.”
The report describes two officers — the one who stood near his window and the one who pulled his hair — talking off to the side about their options. They discussed charging the man with “failure to obey,” and one asked the other: “Does the guy have a warrant or something?” He didn’t.
The officers, in the end, decided to let him go with a warning for the tinted windows.
A funeral service is held for 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant at the First Church of God on April 30, 2021 in Columbus, Ohio. Bryant was shot and killed on April 20 by a Columbus police officer answering a domestic dispute call. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Why They're Not Saying Ma'Khia Bryant's Name
Fabiola Cineas, Vox
Cineas writes: "After watching 15 seconds of police body camera footage last week, viewers of various races and political affiliations had made a decision: 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant was 'the aggressor' - the 'fat,' 'huge,' 'knife-wielding attacker' and 'maniac' who deserved to be fatally shot by the police on April 20 in Columbus, Ohio."
The 16-year-old Black girl could never be the “perfect victim.”
fter watching 15 seconds of police body camera footage last week, viewers of various races and political affiliations had made a decision: 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was “the aggressor” — the “fat,” “huge,” “knife-wielding attacker” and “maniac” who deserved to be fatally shot by the police on April 20 in Columbus, Ohio.
According to these viewers, Nicholas Reardon, the police officer who immediately shot and killed Bryant, who was holding a knife, was justified. That she was a teenager in the middle of an altercation, in which she was presumed to be defending herself, did not matter.
Reardon shot Bryant dead about 20 minutes before a judge announced that a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, a killing that catalyzed worldwide protests against police violence. For a moment, those seeking justice for Black life exhaled in relief, knowing that the officer who callously took Floyd’s life would be imprisoned.
But the cries for justice that applied to George Floyd did not ring out as loudly for Bryant. Even after it was discovered that Bryant was living in foster care, that she was in the middle of a fight with older women when police arrived, and that she was allegedly the one who summoned the police for help, people — some of the same people who called for justice in Floyd’s case — used police talking points to justify the four bullets that Reardon unloaded into Bryant’s chest. She was brandishing a knife, many pointed out, which meant the other Black women needed to be protected.
Crisis response experts noted, however, that deescalation tactics — like commanding Bryant to drop the weapon, physically getting between the women, or simply communicating with her — could have kept everyone alive. In many recorded encounters between the police and white people carrying weapons, for instance, officers didn’t shoot first or even reach for their guns — they successfully managed to peacefully apprehend the suspect.
Bryant’s death has become a debate that questions a child’s actions — and worthiness to live — instead of another example of the racism of policing and the institution’s failure to provide wholesome support, care, and safety for the communities it serves. The insistence that Reardon had no other option than to take Bryant’s life to save others — though he risked everyone’s life in the process — displays the lack of consideration and value that society places on the lives of Black girls and women.
Treva Lindsey, a professor of African American women’s history at Ohio State University, told Vox that there are those who won’t see Bryant as a victim but as someone who brought this on herself. And even for those who do see her as a victim, they’ll still victim-blame, erasing the systemic oppression — including that Black children are far more likely to be in foster care than their white counterparts, and kids in foster care are often exposed to high levels of violence — that brought her to being killed at the hands of the police.
“People will say ‘I’m really sad this whole scenario happened, but had she not had that knife …’ That becomes the ‘but,’ the qualifier, the caveat. And too often we have a caveat when it comes to defending, protecting, and caring for Black girls,” Lindsey said.
The debate over whether police should have shot a child
On the afternoon of April 20, Ma’Khia Bryant reportedly dialed 911. The call was dominated by screams, but the caller said that someone was “trying to stab us” and “put hands” on their grandmother. “We need a police officer here now,” the person said. Body camera footage shows that when officer Reardon exited his vehicle, there were seven people outside of the home.
There was yelling, and a girl could be seen falling to the ground after being attacked by Bryant and kicked by an unidentified man standing nearby. Bryant, holding a knife, then lunged toward a woman dressed in pink who was standing up against a vehicle. Just moments after asking “What’s going on?” Reardon pulled out his gun yelled, “Hey! Hey! Get down! Get down!” (prompting the woman in pink to run away) and fired four shots at Bryant. Bryant immediately slumped to the ground next to the vehicle.
Interim Columbus police chief Michael Woods called the shooting a terrible tragedy for all those involved but said department policy states that an officer can use deadly force against someone when they appear to be inflicting harm on another person. He explained that the officers did not use a taser because there was an immediate threat of death. In addition, the chief said that officers aren’t required to verbalize to bystanders that they are about to fire their weapon.
The Columbus Police Department has long disproportionately used excessive force against Black people, coming under fire in recent months for the police killings of Andre Hill, a Black man police shot in a garage, and Casey Goodson Jr., a Black man who was entering his home.
Almost 55 percent of the department’s use-of-force incidents targeted Black people who make up less than 30 percent of the population. Other reports show how racism is rampant within the department’s ranks. With renewed attention on the department, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is conducting a third-party investigation of Bryant’s shooting that will answer questions like what might have happened if Reardon did not shoot and what information he had upon approaching the scene.
Sill, many have already drawn their own conclusions. Bryant’s death sparked debate across media and social media about whether the officer should have shot the 16-year-old.
On Face the Nation, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), a former Orlando police chief, vehemently defended the officers’ actions, saying that police are forced to make calls in the heat of the moment. “Everybody has the benefit of slowing the video down and seizing the perfect moment. The officer on the street does not have that ability. He or she has to make those split-second decisions, and they’re tough.”
On the popular radio show The Breakfast Club, host DJ Envy stated, “The whole situation is tragic and it’s sad because that system failed that young lady.” But he also added, “Every case is different, and in this case, if I pull up to a scene and see a girl chasing another girl about to stab a girl, my job as a police officer is to make sure that girl doesn’t get killed. And the law allows me to stop that killing or that stabbing by any means necessary.”
But as crisis interventionists pointed out, the police officer could have taken steps to deescalate the situation, savings all lives in the process. Psychologist Merushka Bisetty explained in an essay for Vox that children like Bryant may “present with aggression and an inability to self-regulate their emotions and, consequently, engage in behaviors that can seem aggressive or involve weapons,” but that doesn’t mean that these situations “require or should be met with violent force.” Instead, it’s the role of intervening professionals to stop an aggressive interaction from becoming fatal.
That the reaction to Bryant’s killing has turned into a debate about whether the use of force is justified is an attempt to “displace blame onto the victim and their family rather than on the systems that created situations that led to her death,” Bisetty, who has provided services in shelters, schools, and jails, wrote. “It is worth considering whether Bryant might have still been alive today if a mental health expert — or someone else trained in nonviolent deescalation — had responded to the call.”
It’s also worth considering whether the police officer would have fired shots if Bryant or the people involved in the altercation were white. There are countless examples of police peacefully apprehending white boys and men wielding weapons. Just last year police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, handed water bottles to and thanked 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a self-described militia member who carried an AR-15-style rifle during the unrest that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse was allowed to leave the scene after fatally shooting two people and harming another, though the police had been informed that he was the shooter.
In other cases, white men have verbally threatened police officers and pointed weapons at them. In those situations, the police did not reach for their guns at all or ever use them. In 2019, 19-year-old Matthew Bernard who killed two women and a child led Virginia authorities, who tried to stop him with mace and a stun gun, on a naked chase before they eventually took him into custody.
White women, too, often get a softer side of law enforcement handling. Several white women who were part of the Capitol insurrection on January 6 could be seen on video being peacefully escorted down the steps of the Capitol building amid the chaos. In a tense July 2020 Detroit-area encounter, a white woman in a minivan pointed a gun at a Black mother while the Black woman’s 15-year-old daughter watched and screamed nearby. When the police arrived after six 911 calls, they ordered the white woman out of the van, put her on the ground, handcuffed her, and took her gun, according to the police.
Black women aren’t treated with the same patriarchal protections, however problematic, that are afforded to white women, Lindsey points out. The idea that Black women should be handled with care because they are women just doesn’t exist.
“We see an incredibly disparate treatment gap between what white women experience with police and what Black women experience with police,” she said.
In police encounters, racism and sexism work against Black girls and women
The level of dismissal and scrutiny that Black female victims face when they die at the hands of the police is unmatched. Bryant’s name is no longer trending, and even though her funeral was Friday, headlines about the fatal incident have dwindled. What narrative there is surrounding fatal police violence and police brutality often centers Black cisgender men and boys, leaving out Black women, girls, and trans people.
The focus on Black men and boys is warranted since they face the highest risk of being killed by the police: About 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys in America can expect to die at the hands of police, according to a 2019 study, a risk that is 2.5 times higher than for white men.
Likewise, the same study found that out of all women, Black women face the highest risk of being killed by the police. Black women make up 20 percent (48 total) of the 247 women fatally shot by the police and 28 percent of unarmed killings since 2015, according to a 2020 Washington Post analysis. All of this research does not include violent encounters between Black women and the police that do not result in death — such as cases of sexual harassment and assault.
But the realities of these statistics often don’t make the front page, or any pages at all. The invisibility of Black girls and women persists, many scholars note, because they stand at the complex intersection of their gender and Black racial identity. When it comes to their blackness, they’re not recognized as a group that needs protection. And this coupled with their status as women means that they cannot be trusted or believed.
“We still read blackness through the lens of masculinity,” Lindsey told Vox. “The strange fruit hanging from the tree is still Black men.” As a result, when Black women end up in encounters with police, society always asks, “Well, what did she do wrong?”
Lindsey said that we’re entrenched in a narrative that the police violence against Black women “is more of a blip and not a pattern for an investment,” though police violence always had a penchant for Black life across all genders.
These ideas go back to slave patrols, progenitors of policing in the United States. It was Black women who were on “wanted” posters for escaping, Lindsey explained — like, for example, Harriet Tubman, who would have been killed by patrols for defying the state. And as Michelle F. Jacobs wrote in “The Violent State: Black Women’s Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence,” both Black men and women were killed, maimed and mutilated at the will of slave holders, but Black women were violently raped and sexually abused by both the slave holder and his employees as an economic necessity.
Jacobs points out that by the time the country gets to the Jim Crow era, stereotypes about Black women (they’re governed by libido and loose morals, are liars, and are aggressive) are solidified and become cemented in state policy. “Public benefits law, educational law, delinquency and neglect policy, and all aspects of criminal law have embedded the stereotypes as the normative foundation for how government evaluates, judges, and punishes Black women,” she wrote.
While state violence against Black bodies is often seen through the narratives of Emmett Till, Amadou Diallo, Mike Brown, and George Floyd, “What about Carol, Denise, Addy, and Cynthia — the four little girls bombed in Alabama?” Lindsey said.
Black women’s experience with the police — and the police’s desire to avoid accountability for killing — even gave birth to the intentionally passive term “officer-involved shooting.” In 1979, Los Angeles police officers shot Eula Love eight times in her front yard. The two officers were escorting a gas company employee to cut off her service.
According to the police, Love had a $22.09 money order for the gas company in her purse and a kitchen knife in her hand. One of the officers described Love as a “raging, frothing at the mouth, knife-wielding woman” and newspapers described her as “unemployed and overweight.” Love’s killing was one of the earliest instances in which police used the phrase “officer-involved shooting” to blur the truth, as opposed to the more direct language that the police shot and killed Love that is being advocated for today.
This decentering of the Black women’s experiences when it comes to state violence detracts from the bigger trends, forcing Breonna Taylor, whose name and face turned into a meme and unit of commodification, to become an exceptional case and not an example of a larger issue, Lindsey said.
Taylor’s death, in fact, only rose to prominence after video of Floyd’s death went viral. She was also perhaps the closest example we have of “perfect” Black woman victimhood since she was asleep in her bed when the encounter began. And yet people still found ways to blame her, claiming that she should not have engaged with a drug dealer who led police officers to her door that night.
Sandra Bland, another one of the more well-known recent cases of police violence against a Black woman, was blamed for being “combative” with the police when she was pulled over on a Texas road in 2015 for failing to signal a lane change. Police took Bland into custody at a local jail where she was pronounced dead, her death ruled a suicide. Right-wing commentators, white liberals, and people within the Black community itself said that Bland should have followed the police’s directions and not been confrontational in order to save her life.
For Black girls, criminalization and adultification start early. According to the 2017 Georgetown Law study “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” Black girls face “adultification bias” from as young as 5, which means adults perceive them to be less innocent and thus less worthy of nurturing, protection, and comfort. This too stems back to slavery, the report noted, since Black children were put to work as young as two and three years old and were punished for showing child-like behavior.
This can be seen in other instances of police violence against Black girls caught on camera. In a 2015 case of police brutality that went viral, an officer tackled, dragged, and pinned 15-year-old Dajerria Becton to the ground at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, after officers were called to the home over alleged trespassing. In February, police in Rochester, New York, pepper sprayed a 9-year-old Black girl after they responded to a report about “family trouble.” Video footage shows that the girl repeatedly screamed for her father as police handcuffed her. When she refused to get into the police vehicle, police pepper sprayed her. “Don’t do this do to me” she exclaimed, and officers responded “You did it to yourself.”
It is also how people have referred to Bryant. When Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther shared the news of Bryant’s killing on Twitter, he wrote of the 16-year-old, “a young woman tragically lost her life.” People immediately reminded him that she was “just a girl.”
As scholar and activist Brittany Cooper noted, it was a Black girl that helped the world see what happened to Floyd. Darnella Frazier was 17 when she recorded Floyd’s death and accompanied by her 8-year-old cousin who also witnessed the murder so that the world could eventually see it. Without these Black girls, the small dose of justice that brought many people relief last week would have likely never happened.
Justice begins with visibility and accountability
A reason why there is debate over Bryant’s death is that it is difficult to educate the public if stories like hers rarely make the news — so when they do, there are preconceived notions that preclude nuanced views about policing and the sanctity of Black girlhood.
“There’s definitely an internalization of misogynoir inside and outside of our communities,” Lindsey said, referring to the term coined by Moya Bailey to explain how anti-Blackness and misogyny manifest in Black women’s lives. “So even beyond the sheer hatred of Black women, people really don’t understand these stories. [Black women and girls] are not legible. So even when we gain visibility, like in the Ma’Khia Bryant case, her story will remain illegible to folks.” People will continue to see a knife-wielding suspect as opposed to a traumatized 16-year-old girl.
To address this problem, Black legal scholars and feminist activists, primarily Kimberlé Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2014 and released a corresponding report, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,” to bring awareness to the forgotten victims of police brutality.
The report pointed out that Black girls as young as 7 (Aiyana Stanley-Jones) and women as old as 93 (Pearlie Golden) have been killed by the police, with officers escaping prosecution or conviction. “Say Her Name sheds light on Black women’s experiences of police violence in an effort to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally,” Crenshaw and Ritchie wrote.
But in the years since the campaign launched, people have muddled the meaning behind #SayHerName, even if inadvertently. The phrase has morphed into #SayHisName whenever a Black boy or man is killed by the police, and the collective #SayTheirNames became widespread in 2020 in the months following Floyd’s death to further elevate the movement for Black lives. But the crowding out of #SayHerName in favor of these other versions, takes away from the campaign’s original purpose and furthers the erasure of Black girls and women.
According to Lindsey, protests since Bryant’s death led by Black women, Black queer folks, and Black gender non-binary folks, have been ongoing. “There’s a good amount of non-Black allies and accomplices who have been present in this, but it still looks nothing like what we tend to see when Black men or boys are killed by police, in terms of sheer number,” she said.
Each time a Black girl, woman, trans, or gender nonbinary person is killed, it’s an uphill battle to bring awareness to their story. For Lindsey, the goal should never be to debate whether Black people are human or matter.
“It’s important for us to continuing highlighting and vocalizing how the inhumanity of white supremacy shows up in the lives of Black women and girls,” Lindsey said. “When we’re equipped with the full truth of how it operates, we have a better chance at rooting out the operating system of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”
Supporters of the chief minister of West Bengal state and chief of Trinamool Congress, Mamata Banerjee, celebrate in Kolkata, India. (photo: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters)
Modi's Party Looses Key State's Majority in Indian Election Upset
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The incumbent chief minister's party in India's West Bengal state has defeated Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party in state elections held as the coronavirus pandemic surged to crisis levels."
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Governor Gretchen Whitmer. (photo: Jim West/Alamy)
Looming Showdown as Michigan Governor Orders Canadian Pipeline Shut Down
Amanda Coletta, The Washington Post
Coletta writes: "For Michigan's governor, the 645-mile pipeline jeopardizes the Great Lakes. For Canada's natural resources minister, its continued operation is 'nonnegotiable.'"
or Michigan’s governor, the 645-mile pipeline jeopardizes the Great Lakes. For Canada’s natural resources minister, its continued operation is “nonnegotiable.”
The clash over Calgary-based Enbridge’s Line 5, which carries up to 540,000 barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids across Michigan and under the Great Lakes each day, is placing stress on U.S.-Canada ties — and raising questions about how the close allies, which have expressed a desire to work together to fight climate change, can balance energy security with the transition to a clean-energy economy.
In a move applauded by environmentalists and Indigenous groups on both sides of the border, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in November ordered the firm to shut down the nearly 70-year-old lines by May 12.
Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have appealed to their American counterparts, including President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for help.
Joe Comartin, Canada’s consul general in Detroit, said a shutdown would have “significant” impacts on both sides of the border. He predicted effects ranging from months-long propane shortages to higher costs for consumers to fuels being carried by rail, truck or boat — methods that he said are less emissions-friendly and more dangerous than a pipeline.
“It certainly strains our relationship,” he said, “and we’ve had a very long history of working closely together.”
One “irritant,” he said, is “the claim from the state that they are doing this to protect the Great Lakes, that they’re more interested in protecting the Great Lakes than we in Canada are. Basically, we reject that completely.”
Line 5, built in 1953, is part of Enbridge’s mainland system, which carries fuel from Alberta’s oil sands to the Midwestern United States and Eastern Canada. Running from Superior, Wis., to Sarnia, Ontario, it is a key conduit for refineries in those regions, which make gas, propane and home-heating oils, as well as jet fuels for airports in Toronto and Detroit.
For 4.5 miles under Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac, the waterway where Lake Huron meets Lake Michigan, Line 5 splits into dual pipelines..
Whitmer announced last fall that she was revoking the 1953 easement that allows the lines to cross the straits, citing the “unreasonable risk” that they pose to the Great Lakes and what she said were Enbridge’s “persistent” breaches of the easement’s terms.
The announcement listed several infractions, including failures to ensure that the lines are supported every 75 feet and that they’re covered by a coating to prevent erosion. It noted two incidents, in 2018 and 2019, in which the pipelines were struck and damaged by cables or anchors from boats.
Enbridge is challenging the move in U.S. federal court. It has vowed to continue operating the pipeline beyond Whitmer’s deadline, absent a court order. The sides began mediation in April..
Environmental groups, more than a dozen state attorneys general and several Indigenous tribes filed friend-of-the court briefs in support of the state’s argument that the matter should be decided by a Michigan state court.
“The Straits of Mackinac are a sacred wellspring of life and culture for Tribal Amici and other Indian Tribes in Michigan,” the tribes wrote in their brief. “An oil spill into those waters would be culturally, economically, spiritually and historically devastating.”
Enbridge said the twin pipes under the straits are in good condition and “probably the most heavily monitored pipeline segments in the Enbridge system, if not the nation.”
“Line 5 is operating safely, reliably and is in compliance with the law,” said Tracie Kenyon, an Enbridge spokeswoman. “The State of Michigan has never presented any concrete evidence to suggest otherwise.”
In 2018, the company negotiated a deal with Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) to rehouse the lines under the straits in a concrete tunnel.
Beth Wallace of the National Wildlife Federation said Line 5 poses an “urgent” threat, and the process of securing permits for the tunnel and constructing it will take longer than the company asserts. She said the firm has overstated the impacts of a closure.
Seamus O’Regan, Canada’s natural resources minister, has cast a shutdown as a threat to Canada’s energy security — one he is “watching like a hawk.” He told a parliamentary committee in March that the pipeline provides 53 percent of Ontario’s crude and 66 percent of Quebec’s and 55 percent of Michigan’s propane needs.
“As the Minister has repeatedly made clear, the continued safe operation of Line 5 is vital for energy security on both sides of the border,” said Ian B. Cameron, a spokesman for O’Regan.
Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley said the dispute is fueling “a lot of anxiety” in the border city, where he said thousands of jobs are at risk.
“I’ve written more letters to the governor than Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians,” he told Canadian lawmakers in March, “and I’ve gotten no responses back.”
Bradley told The Washington Post that Whitmer’s behavior is doing “immense” damage to cross-border ties.
“She may be focused on her one issue, but the relationship between Ontario and Michigan has been set back, in my view, for decades,” he said.
Whitmer’s office did not respond to questions about Canadian concerns for bilateral relations. Spokesman Bobby Leddy said the governor stands by her decision, and Enbridge’s continued operations of the lines after May 12 would be “unlawful.”
“These oil pipelines in the Straits of Mackinac are a ticking time bomb,” he said. “Their continued presence violates the public trust and poses a grave threat to Michigan’s environment and economy.”
Canada has not ruled out invoking a 1977 treaty that bars officials from actions that “would have the effect of impeding, diverting, redirecting or interfering with … the transmission of hydrocarbon in transit” unless there was a natural disaster or operating emergency.
The treaty has never been invoked, said Kristen van de Biezenbos, an energy law professor at the University of Calgary, in part because there don’t appear to have been other attempts by public officials to stop a working pipeline that crosses the U.S.-Canada border.
That “tells you something about how unusual Line 5 is,” she said.
Several oil companies have said they believe a shutdown in the near term to be unlikely, but they have contingency plans in place. Mark Little, chief executive of Suncor, said in a February earnings call that the company bought a stake in a different pipeline that could import oil from Maine to Montreal. A spokeswoman for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority said fuel sources for Toronto’s Pearson International Airport are “diversified and consequently not at risk.”
Canada is the world’s fourth-largest producer of crude oil. The United States is its top customer.
Granholm, a former Michigan governor who was born in Canada, was asked at a CNN town hall in April about Enbridge’s controversial Line 3 project, which aims to replace segments of an existing pipeline. She said the project was not under her purview — but had some tough words on Canada’s oil sands.
“If we’re going to do pipes, let’s do pipes that build the infrastructure of America in a way that is future-looking,” Granholm said, “and not rely upon fuels or transport fuels — even though our neighbors to the North want it — that are not going to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office revoking the permit for an extension of TC Energy’s Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to Nebraska.
Trudeau expressed disappointment, a reminder that there’d be sticking points in the relationship even if a new administration featured a more collegial tone.
“That has had obviously a negative impact on cooperation,” Comartin said. “This would be another example of that.”
The White House declined to comment.
Looming larger over the debate in Michigan is a spill involving a different Enbridge pipeline. In 2010, a rupture in the Line 6B pipeline leaked more than 20,000 barrels of oil over 17 hours into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Marshall, Mich.
It was among the largest and costliest inland oil spills in U.S. history. The National Transportation Safety Board found that Enbridge had not fixed cracks in the pipeline that it had noticed years earlier.
There have been 33 spills since 1968 along sections of Line 5 that don’t pass through the Straits of Mackinac, according to data Wallace obtained through public records requests.
Patty Peek and her husband built a house in St. Ignace, Mich., near the straits more than a decade ago, but it wasn’t until the 2010 spill that they learned Enbridge had another pipeline nearby.
“The more we read about it, the more concerned we became,” said Peek, chairwoman of the Straits of Mackinac Alliance, a group opposed to the pipeline.
She said a tunnel isn’t good enough.
“The tunnel to us is kind of a diversion from the real problem, which is that in all likelihood the pipeline is not as safe as Enbridge claims it to be,” Peek said.
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