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White supremacy is as American as apple pie, as the latest killings in Buffalo show. Biden needs to take a stand against neofascists
On Tuesday, Joe Biden described white supremacy as a poison, and he is right, but – as ever – Ehe fails to understand the gravity of his failure to make racial justice a priority; to see this cowardly white supremacy as a threat to American democracy.
The simple truth is that you cannot see this latest neofascist attack in isolation. Think of the attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, when a white supremacist terrorist killed nine African Americans during their Bible study in 2015. Think of the attack on the American Asian community in Atlanta last year, when four people were murdered amid assertions from prosecutors that the attack was fuelled by race and gender hatred. Or the attack on Chicanos in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, when 22 people were killed in an allegedly hate-motived shooting; and the murder of 11 Jewish Americans at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh the same year by a man who said Jews “were committing a genocide to his people”.
White supremacy is as American as apple pie. It was constitutive of the founding of our nation, like a serpent wrapped around the legs of the table on which the Declaration of Independence and constitution were signed. What we saw in Buffalo at the weekend is another manifestation of it.
From what we know, the alleged shooter was a young and gullible man who got caught in the web of neofascist propaganda. But it is important to look beyond him – to look to those who have created this atmosphere of anger and hate.
After the death of George Floyd, there was a marvellous display of multiracial solidarity, not just here but around the world. But the US has been unable to fight against this neofascist challenge. The Trump forces have got stronger. They have become the public face of US neofascism, and their targets are black people and indigenous people and LGBTQ people.
Trump is not out there with a gun, but he is leading a campaign continuing what Malcolm X called a war against black and coloured people. He is doing it within the electoral political system. He is not killing folks. But he bears responsibility in terms of the context. Have no doubt, he is still the dominant figure.
The campaigning and reflection after the death of George Floyd should have made things better in the US. And, for a beautiful moment, it did. But that moment passed. The press is fickle, the pandemic started to kick in, and other issues such as Ukraine and inflation captured attention. Look at the polls and see how issues of race have fallen down the list of people’s priorities.
The impact of the George Floyd marches was blunted. Congress was unable to enact any meaningful legislation, including the George Floyd bill itself, which would have given us some mechanism with which to address police misconduct and brutality. The Democratic party was not even able to act decisively to uphold voting rights for black people. That is a colossal failure of the Biden administration, but then Biden bears a lot of responsibility when it comes to the position and arrogance of these white supremacists.
Last year Biden said America was not a racist country, and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, backed him on that. But these are lies, and those lies have their effect. If we operate on that level, how can we ever address the vicious legacy of racism and white supremacy?
To the president and Democrats in power, I say: “Shame on you, you dropped the ball.” They must be vigilant and stop acting as if these murders are something they can address in a couple of weeks and then move on. Race is the most explosive issue in the history of this country: from war to civic strife to Buffalo.
The president can’t stop a rightwing gangster killing black people, but he can send a message. He can say: I am being consistent because one of my major priorities is to ensure black people have their rights. If, after all the demonstrations and the campaigns, racists pick up the message that politicians don’t really care about black people, we end up exactly where we are today.
Neofascists and the far right have momentum with their narrative of the great replacement, but someone – and ideally it would be Biden – needs to explain to them what is really going on: that in some places there is replacement in the name of fairness. That sometimes they are seeing visible black folk where they did not previously see them. The racists need to know that they are living in a changing society and we are concerned about them being treated fairly, just as they should be concerned about others being treated fairly. There is a fascist story about replacement and a progressive story about replacement. The neoliberal story cannot counter the fascist story, and we on the left have been unable to get our story out.
So how should black America respond? Since the shootings, I have spoken to so many people and appeared on so many radio stations. People are devastated. The answer is to be a love warrior of the highest sort, a justice warrior, to never give in and never give up. The anger is there, and I don’t aim to calm it down, but I want to rechannel it. Our organisation must be perennial. But counter-terror in the face of terror and counter-violence in the face of violence are not the moral and spiritual options that we need.
It is for us to respond with the same grace and dignity as the people who were killed in that store last weekend: they were very dignified people. Think of Ruth Whitfield. She was 86, a strong member of her community, and had just been visiting her husband in his nursing home. We have to be continuous with the best of our history.
Above all, remember Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy abducted and lynched by Mississippi racists in 1955. She said: “I don’t have a minute to hate, I’ll pursue justice for the rest of my life.”
Safa Muhammed Aba al-Najjar, left, and Yusara al-Najjar sit on a bed frame in front of what used to be their house in the West Bank, before it was demolished by the Israeli army on May 11. (photo: Steve Hendrix/WP)
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But this time there was reason to fear that the house would be gone for good. After decades of demolition, rebuilding and a more than 20-year legal battle, Israel’s highest court this month gave the military permission to permanently evict more than 1,000 Palestinians here and repurpose the land for an army firing range.
Less than a week after the high court ruling, the Najjars’ house was demolished, marking the start of what activists say will probably be the biggest mass expulsion of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since the 1967 war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from territories captured by Israel.
The court was unswayed by historical documents presented by advocates for the Palestinians, showing what they said was evidence that the proposal to establish a firing range, decades ago, was meant to prevent Palestinians from claiming the land.
“We had 30 minutes to get out what we could,” said Yusara al-Najjar, who was born in a hand-hewn cave on this same slope in the Negev desert 60 years ago. She looked over the pile of broken blocks and twisted metal that had been her family home and wiped her hands with a slap. “It took no time and our house was gone, again.”
The demolitions have sparked expressions of concern from Washington ahead of a planned June visit to Israel by President Biden, coming at a time of mounting instability in Israel’s coalition government and the recent approval of more than 4,200 new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, responding to a question about the high court ruling, beseeched both Israelis and Palestinians to avoid steps that raise tensions. “This certainly includes evictions,” he said.
The European Union urged Israel to halt the demolitions. A United Nations human rights panel warned that the “forcible transfer” of residents would amount to “a serious breach of international and humanitarian and human rights laws.”
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that the demolitions were in accordance with the high court’s years-long review and its unanimous ruling on behalf of the military.
“The Supreme Court fully accepted the State Of Israel’s position, and ruled that the petitioners were not permanent residents of the area,” the statement said. “The court also noted that the petitioners rejected any attempted compromise offered to them.”
The tug of war for these dry rolling hills south of the biblical city of Hebron began in the 1980s, when Israeli officials laid claim to several areas of the West Bank for the stated reason of creating military training grounds.
This region of 8,000 to 14,000 acres — known in Arabic as Masafer Yatta and in English as the South Hebron Hills — was designated as Firing Zone 918.
“The vital importance of this firing zone to the Israel Defense Forces stems from the unique topographical character of the area, which allows for training methods specific to both small and large frameworks, from a squad to a battalion,” the military said in court documents reported by the Times of Israel.
But human rights activists, both Palestinian and Israeli, contend that the real purpose of many of the firing zones has been to clear away Arab residents and strengthen Israel’s grip on more occupied Palestinian territory. Often, the designation has made way for expanding Israeli settlements, which are considered illegal by most of the international community.
Archived minutes from a 1981 meeting recently found by researchers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed to support that idea. Then-agriculture minister — later prime minister — Ariel Sharon is recorded saying it was important to slow the “expansion of Arab villagers from the hills,” according to a story in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on the document. “We have an interest in expanding and enlarging the shooting zones there, to keep these areas, which are so vital, in our hands.”
The document was entered as legal evidence.
Israeli officials argued that the residents of eight to 12 small hamlets in Zone 918 — most of them tent-dwelling herders who still wintered in caves dug from the limestone — could not show legal ownership of the land.
What followed was a legal Catch-22. Residents and their advocates repeatedly applied for permits to build houses and string power lines. Military officials, saying no one was allowed to live inside a firing range, denied the applications and then regularly dispatched armed demolition squads to knock down the “illegal” structures.
Officials issued the first eviction orders in 1999 but have since refrained from physically removing families as the legal challenges dragged on. Instead, according to advocates, the repetitive demolitions amount to strategic harassment meant drive the families away.
“I don’t think we’ll see pictures of people being put on trucks, because of the optics,” said Dror Sadot of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that has worked on the case. “What we’ll see will just be more repeated demolitions, which will force the community to leave because they can’t live there anymore.”
Over the years, the court has entertained compromises, including one that would allow evicted Palestinians to return to the fields on Jewish holidays and other periods when no military training was likely to take place. Residents rejected those proposals out of hand.
The high court finally brought an end to the challenge on May 5, ruling unanimously for the military and finding that the Palestinian families had failed to prove they had a legal claim to the land or had lived there before it was designated as a firing range.
“There is the law that works for the Jews, but for us it is nonexistent,” said Nidal Younes, head of the Masafer Yatta village council, who noted that a nearby outpost maintained by Israeli settlers is not subject to evictions under the order.
In her village, Najjar shakes her head at the idea that she is a newcomer to the land where she says her grandparents dug a limestone herder’s shelter in the 1950s and where she was born in 1961.
Now she and her family have been forced back into that cave, which, like many families, they have maintained over the years as a kitchen and extra living space. As the number of Israeli settlers in the area grew, and with them incidents of settler vandalism and physical attacks, they saw it as a refuge from violence.
The simple houses of block and metal roofing they built have all been demolished.
Tending to a batch of traditional labneh cheese under solar-powered lights, Najjar described the most recent unannounced appearance of the bulldozer, escorted by more than a dozen soldiers with automatic weapons.
“They didn’t say why they were here, they gave us no papers,” she said. “But we knew.”
The soldiers instructed the men of the family to stay well away from the house as the women raced to grab clothes and bedding. They struggled with a washing machine. Many of their belongings were still inside when the soldiers told them to stand back.
It took less than two hours for the bulldozer to level two houses and two sheep pens in the village of seven families, Najjar said. In all, the army demolished 20 structures in three villages that day, according to Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist who documents IDF activity in the area.
The IDF has not said when it plans to carry out more demolition orders.
'Chiricahua Apaches Four Months After Arriving at Carlisle,' black-and-white photographic portrait of a group of Apaches at the Carlisle boarding school. (photo: Richard Henry Pratt Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library/Wikimedia Commons)
A section of the report, Section 7: Federal Indian Boarding School System Framework, reads: “The Department has stated it was ‘indispensably necessary that [the Indians] be placed in positions where they can be controlled, and finally compelled, by stern necessity, to resort to agricultural labor or starve,’ later adding that ‘[i]f it be admitted that education affords the true solution to the Indian problem, then it must be admitted that the boarding school is the very key to the situation.’”
Reading that section of the report brought back memories of the day I first met Dr. Suzanne Cross (Saginaw Chippewa Indians) in the late 1990s when I served on the Native American subcommittee of the Michigan Department on Aging. Dr. Cross is an assistant professor emeritus at Michigan State University and served as a consultant to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS). She came to our subcommittee to discuss the work she had done on her doctoral dissertation on historical trauma. The conversation quickly moved to the historical trauma associated with Indian boarding schools.
Several adults told stories of abuse they suffered at Indian boarding schools, and others shared how boarding schools affected their families. One Ojibwa woman shook and wept, telling us how her mother never hugged her during her life. The mother had learned during her years at an Indian boarding school that she should never hug or show physical affection.
Last week's release of the report on the purposeful and deliberate plan by the federal government to destroy Native families also brought back memories of an interview I did with American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks (Ojibwa) in the fall of 2009 at Grand Valley State University. During the interview, Banks recounted his experiences attending various Indian boarding schools. He told me the experience caused him to maintain an indifferent attitude towards his mother because he felt she had abandoned him during the years he attended Indian boarding schools.
Banks recalled on certain occasions, school officials would announce a mail call so that students could get mail from home. He would show up, but he never received any mail. He felt as if his mother did not love him.
Years passed by and he eventually was able to go home when he was in his late teen years. He said the first day home was awkward, but on the second day home, his mother made him a blueberry pie because she knew it was his favorite. He felt then perhaps things could return to normal. So, he began talking to her and asked her why didn’t she ever send him any letters or try to bring him home. She told him she did.
He did not believe her.
For the rest of their lives together, he told me, he would look at his mother and have a sense of indifference towards her. This feeling lasted until she died.
Decades later, while he was in his 70s, Banks saw an Internet advertisement with information about how he could obtain his own Indian boarding school records. He followed through on the offer and received several boxes with his school records.
In the boxes, Banks found 14 unopened letters from his mother. He took them to his mother’s grave, where he sat in a lawn chair reading them one by one. Inside of one of the letters was a money order to pay for a bus ticket home for him.
In that moment, Banks, one of the greatest Native American warriors of the last century, wept at his mother’s grave and asked her for forgiveness. He had been lied to by the Indian boarding school officials, not his mother.
As I interviewed Banks at the university in my hometown, I recognized that his inner child, which had been wounded for decades, still resented the policy set forth by the federal government to destroy the very fabric of Native American families.
Banks’ story is just one among a multitude of survivor stories about how Indian Boarding Schools tore Native families apart.
“There's not a single American Indian, Alaskan Native, or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasn't been affected by these schools,” Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said during the press conference about the investigation and report last week.“That impact continues to influence the lives of countless families, from the breakup of families and tribal nations, to the loss of languages and cultural practices and relatives. We haven't begun to explain the scope of this policy until now.”
During last week’s press conference, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) said, “The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies, including the intergenerational trauma caused by forced family separation and cultural eradication, which were inflicted upon generations of children, as young as four years old, are heartbreaking and undeniable. When my maternal grandparents were only eight years old, they were stolen from their parents, culture, and communities and forced to live in boarding schools until the age of 13. Many children like them never made it back to their homes.”
The Interior’s report calls for the continuation of the investigation of boarding schools with many more survivor stories to be collected as part of Secretary Haaland's yearlong tour called "The Road to Healing."
For countless boarding school survivors and their families, the road to healing will be paved with pain. Telling their stories will be haunting and painful, but hopefully it will give them the same type of release that Dennis Banks felt as he sat by his mother’s grave in a lawnchair, reading her long lost letters and confronting the past.
Testing is crucial to addressing the pandemic's many costs, as are more preventative measures. (photo: Wang Ying/Xinhua/Getty Images)
Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere it seems, yet conflicting public health messaging and a lack of funds may only prolong the crisis.
As we enter our third summer since the Covid-19 outbreak began, public health experts are warning of another likely wave of infections. But as public concerns over the pandemic begin to wane, public health messaging around Covid-19 may become more challenging.
On Thursday, the CDC recommended those living in communities with high levels of infection wear face masks indoors in public settings, even though the federal mask mandate is no longer in effect after it was overturned by a federal judge.
“We urge local leaders to encourage the use of prevention strategies like masking in public indoor settings, and increasing access to testing and treatment for individuals,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told the New York Times.
Hospital data remains a primary metric in how experts are tracking trends in the pandemic. As of early May, Covid-19 hospitalizations were up by 22.4%, with about 3,000 people admitted with Covid-19 per day, according to the CDC. Experts believe those numbers will only trend upward in the months to come, underlining the need for strong public health measures.
Public health messaging around Covid-19 must continue
With the politicization of Covid-19, public health messaging around the pandemic in the US has faced an uphill battle — and it shows. Beyond the recent hikes in hospitalizations, as of May 20, only 66.5% of the US population had been fully vaccinated — lagging behind other wealthy nations like France, Japan, and the UK — while just 46.4% had received a booster, according to CDC data.
But in a country where public health recommendations like getting vaccinated and wearing masks have become the cruxes of political debates, getting citizens on board with public health measures is easier said than done.
Research shows that masks, if used correctly, can be a valuable tool for reducing the spread of the virus. But the CDC’s mask recommendation for people living in areas with high risks of Covid-19 this week was met with mixed responses online. Some have criticized the agency’s inconsistency in its masking policy, while others tried to paint the CDC’s motives as political, pointing to the upcoming midterm elections.
In April, US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled to overturn the CDC’s mask mandate for public transit. In her ruling, Mizelle — a Trump nominee who was rated “not qualified” for that position by the American Bar Association — contended that the federal public health agency had overstepped its authority in enacting the public health mandate.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says a combination of confusing guidelines from public officials and a lack of careful reporting by the media have led to the politicization of public health measures.
“The U.S. public is done with the pandemic even though the virus is not done with us, and we have to recognize that in public health,” Osterholm said in a televised interview with ABC News following the ruling. “What has happened is this has become really a philosophical and political issue, not a science issue.”
According to Dr. Renuga Vivekanandan, the division chief for infectious disease at CHI Health and Creighton University, strong public health measures and messaging are crucial in preventing the spread of the coronavirus. “It’s very important to have public health measures to try to blunt the Covid-19 or any other type of infection rate,” Dr. Vivekanandan told Vox. “We have to have a uniform message [and] make sure we give the right information to our community.”
Vivekanandan, whose work focuses on preventing the spread of infections in public settings, says she is focused on providing patients with the right information regarding proper pandemic mitigation tools, such as vaccinations, boosters, and masking in public, even though she still encounters people unwilling to get vaccinated.
“There are some individuals who still want to think about it or who still do not want to receive the vaccine, but I think that’s an individual choice,” said Vivekanandan. “But as public health [officials], we’re just going to continue to stay with that messaging and show what works and what doesn’t.” Relatively low vaccinations, as well as booster rates, are other public health mitigation tools that would benefit from stronger public health messaging, she said.
Building public health infrastructure and stabilizing funding is key
Despite these concerns around the erosion of public trust in public health, experts are undeterred and have proposed ways to strengthen the country's public health measures. Doubts about the authority that government health entities can wield when it comes to enacting public health measures in times of crisis only fuel distrust and conspiracies around government health guidelines. Rebuilding public trust is key and that starts by establishing credibility through clearer government structures and providing a uniform message around Covid-19 public safety protocols.
A 2021 report from the think tank Bipartisan Policy Center suggested 10 broad recommendations to prepare the US for the next pandemic cycle, including the need to clarify federal responsibilities during a pandemic and create a national board on pandemic preparedness, which would be tasked with establishing a standard of benchmarks to evaluate the country’s preparedness.
Beyond rebuilding public trust, building out public health infrastructure and stabilizing funding are key ways to address the current pandemic and better prepare for what may lie in store in the future. It’s critical that the US continues to respond, as Covid-19 is certainly not going away.
“The pandemic is going to be a turning point,” said Tom Frieden, a former director of the CDC, and a member of the American Public Health Association. “Whether it’s toward a healthier society or one more resistant to collective action to protect one another, time will tell.”
Weak public health messaging may also have wider implications when it comes to fighting off the next wave of Covid-19 infections. Congress has been in deadlock over President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief proposal — which was slashed from $22 billion to $15 billion — since early March. A seeming lack of urgency in dealing with the pandemic could affect the ease of accessing more funding as well. White House pandemic coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned that drained funds, which would cover the country’s purchase of the next generation of Covid-19 vaccines, could lead to issues in the fall when the US is expected to see more waves of infection.
In a 2021 report by Trust for America’s Health, which issues annual findings on the country’s readiness in facing health crises, the Trust recommended addressing the steady decline in public health funding through the creation of a mandatory $4.5 billion-per-year public health infrastructure fund. Legislation to establish a similar “off-limits” fund dedicated to public health infrastructure development was introduced in Congress by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray last year.
“While the vaccines have given us a way to get through COVID, we also have to learn from this pandemic and make sure we are better prepared for the next public health emergency. That means finally making — and maintaining — the kind of bold investments in public health I have been pushing for, for years,” Murray said of the Public Health Infrastructure Saves Lives Act.
Until a more robust public health infrastructure is implemented, the onus of keeping the next Covid-19 wave at bay lies with each community member.
“What I’ve thought about during the pandemic, it’s not ‘I’ it’s ‘us,’” Vivekanandan said. “I think the public health community have been doing their very best... communicating that public health message about how we can all work together to make sure every time we have a wave [we] bring the wave down and protect each other.
Rosemary Radford Ruether was among the first scholars to think deeply about the role of women in Christianity. She died Saturday at the age of 85. (photo: Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary)
Palm trees growing out of another giant sinkhole in China's Hubei Province in 2020. (photo: Song Wen/Xinhua/Getty Images)
The unusual sinkhole was first discovered by cave explorers in China’s southern Guangxi region, who alerted scientists to their find, according to The Guardian. After confirming the forest’s existence, researchers think it has even more secrets to reveal.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to know that there are species found in these caves that have never been reported or described by science until now,” expedition leader Chen Lixin said, as The Guardian reported.
Lixin’s team completed their expedition on May 6, USA TODAY reported. In addition to the trees, they also encountered undergrowth that reached their shoulders. The sinkhole contains three caves and has a total volume of 5 million cubic meters, meaning it would take 2,000 Olympic swimming pools to fill it. It is 1,000 feet long and 500 feet wide. It is also the 30th sinkhole found in China’s Leye county, according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. It was found near the village of Ping’e in Luoxi township.
Known as “tiankeng,” or “heavenly pits” in China, giant sinkholes are common in this portion of the country, The Washington Post reported. It is a karst landscape, which is a landscape formed when rainwater mixes with carbon dioxide and wears away at bedrock, National Cave and Karst Research Institute (NCKRI) executive director George Veni told Live Science.
“Because of local differences in geology, climate and other factors, the way karst appears at the surface can be dramatically different,” Veni, who was not a part of the exploration, told Live Science. “So in China you have this incredibly visually spectacular karst with enormous sinkholes and giant cave entrances and so forth. In other parts of the world you walk out on the karst and you really don’t notice anything. Sinkholes might be quite subdued, only a meter or two in diameter. Cave entrances might be very small, so you have to squeeze your way into them.”
Veni said the presence of the ancient forest was not necessarily surprising.
“It’s not unusual to have trees growing out of cave entrances,” he told The Washington Post. “It’s just that this [sinkhole] is particularly large and particularly deep, so it’s not the sort of thing that most people would expect.”
Still, he acknowledged to Live Science, “This is cool news.”
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