Since the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2014, I’ve stood with hundreds of families impacted by police violence. With few exceptions, justice for them has been a fleeting mystery. The law is working against them. District attorneys are working against them. Bigotry and the undeserved esteem of law enforcement over everyday citizens is working against them. And yet, each new family whose loved one is mowed down in a hail of bullets hopes against hope that they will be different: that they will be the exception to the rule, and that they will be ones who finally get some tiny measure of justice.

Moments ago, that hope was just realized when Amber Guyger was found guilty for the murder of Botham Jean, who was killed by Guyger, a Dallas police officer at the time, when she entered his apartment and shot him dead. They were neighbors, and Guyger claimed she thought she had gone into her own apartment and that Jean was an intruder. No verdict balances the scales of what Jean’s family has suffered and lost, but this semblance of justice is both rare and necessary. It took not only a skilled team of organizers and activists, but a world-class legal team, a committed district attorney, a fair judge, and a racially diverse jury to get what so few families impacted by such violence ever do.

While activists and organizers are exhausted by the sheer volume of carnage and the subsequent denials of justice left in the wake of America’s police brutality crisis, it does not hit the same way for a family. They do not see their son or daughter, mother or father, their significant other as yet another hashtag or trending topic. They do not see them as a news story or viral video. While our first introduction to Tamir Rice or Philando Castile or John Crawford was their last moment alive, families have thousands of micro-memories to recall instead.

Each family seeks justice with a desperate zeal as if thousands of families before them were not denied that very same thing. They are not deterred by that stark reality and push forward with a singular, obsessed focus to hold someone responsible for the pain, loss, and trauma they caused. Such is the case for the family of Botham Jean, who was unarmed, nonviolent, and sitting on his couch eating ice cream when he was shot and killed in his own home by Amber Guyger. And such is the case for the family of Anthony Hill, also unarmed and nonviolent, when he was shot and killed by DeKalb County, Georgia, police officer Robert Olsen, after neighbors called 911 to get Hill medical assistance for what appeared to be a mental health emergency. Hill, a young veteran of the war in Afghanistan, was completely nude and was wandering aimlessly through his apartment complex.

While Guyger was just found guilty, Hill’s family is still waiting for their justice. And in spite of the knowledge that some of the most violent, most heinous, most negligent police officers have gotten away with such acts of violence, the Guyger verdict no doubt gives the Hill family hope. I can hardly believe that I am saying this, but it gives me hope too. Botham Jean and Anthony Hill should be alive right now. Neither ever did anything to warrant an arrest. They damn sure didn’t do anything to warrant lethal force. Truthfully, we shouldn’t even know their names. They should each just be living their lives, out of the spotlight, in comparative anonymity.

Both families deserve justice in these cases, but the truth is that the whole nation needs and deserves it. Over and over again, police have been able to claim that they feared for their lives because they thought their eventual victim was reaching for a gun, but no such excuse exists for officers Guyger or Olsen. If Olsen is allowed to get away with Hill’s murder, the already outrageously low bar for excusable police misconduct will somehow be lowered even more, turning the Guyger verdict into an outlier rather than precedent. It will send a message to police across the country that they have absolutely no obligation to even concern themselves with the mental health needs of people, but that they can just shoot and kill them on contact instead.

This cannot continue. It must not. I feel foolish sometimes for ever believing that this fragile democracy that we call the United States of America can improve and get better, that it can right its wrongs, but here we are. Today, a family who deserved justice received it. I am going to give hope a chance one more time for the family of Anthony Hill.

The post Guilty Verdict Against Amber Guyger Gives the Family of Botham Jean the Justice They Deserve appeared first on The Intercept.

Osaze Osagie, 29, was beloved by his family and community. At his funeral this March, so many people showed up to pay their respects that every seat in the main room was taken and at least 100 more were filled in an overflow area. Person after person told stories of his warmth and kindness. Ten days earlier, his father, Sylvester, made a simple call to local police to perform a mental health “wellness check” on his son. Osagie was shot and killed in his own home by police in State College, Pennsylvania, soon thereafter.

Osagie had been hospitalized at least six times over the years; with a history of autism, paranoid schizophrenia, extreme anxiety, and Asperger’s syndrome, he sometimes struggled to function in society. Last December, his family was proud when he transitioned out of a community residential center to an apartment of his own. As much as they wanted it to work out for him, it was rough. Osagie stopped attending support meetings and cycled on and off his medications. On March 10, after sending texts to family suggesting that he might harm himself, they called 911 for support.

When police got there, they claimed that Osagie had a knife that he refused to put down. When he walked toward the officers, they claimed that a Taser had no impact on him, so they shot and killed him right there on the spot. This past week, the family announced their intention to file a lawsuit against the police department for abandoning multiple protocols when their son was confronted and killed.

Over the past five years, I’ve closely studied thousands of police shootings and seen a trend of black families under duress calling 911 during a mental health emergency, only for their loved one to be killed by police as a result. Of course, when a black family calls 911 for support in a mental health emergency and it goes well, that doesn’t make the news. But the fact remains that in general, black families remain skeptical of calling the police for help under any circumstance — and fatal encounters like the one experienced by the Osagie family confirm those doubts.

Black families remain skeptical of calling the police for help under any circumstance — and fatal encounters like the one experienced by the Osagie family confirm those doubts.

Police killings of people with mental illnesses are a huge problem for those of all races. Studies show that as many as 50 percent of people killed by American police had registered disabilities and that a huge percentage of those were people with mental illnesses. One study states that people with untreated mental illnesses are a staggering 16 times more likely to be shot and killed by police.

But African Americans are at even higher risk due to the racism in our country and in our police forces. Right now, outside of Atlanta, a trial is underway for the officer who shot and killed Anthony Hill, an Afghanistan war veteran who had a mental illness. Hill was not only unarmed, but he was also completely nude. He needed immediate medical attention. Instead, he was fatally shot by an officer who claimed what officers often claim: that he feared for his life.

This past December, the city of New York paid the family of Deborah Danner — a 66-year-old black woman with a long history of mental illness, who was also completely nude and in her own home — $2 million after an New York Police Department officer shot and killed her. She, too, needed medical help, but got bullets instead.

It is interesting how many times American police routinely find a way to push past such fears to peacefully arrest white mass shooters who were heavily armed and just slaughtered scores of people. For years, I used to advocate for police to receive more training to prevent the shooting deaths of people like Hill and Danner. Cut after seeing police from coast to coast routinely exercise so much restraint and patience when arresting armed white shooters, I’m no longer confident that training is the problem. Police seem fully capable of exercising restraint when they feel like it.

The list of black deaths is so long. This past May, Pamela Turner, a 44-year-old black woman experiencing a mental health crisis was shot and killed by police in Texas. In Oklahoma this past April, 17-year-old Isaiah Lewis, also naked and in a mental health crisis, was shot and killed by police. This past June, Taun Hall called 911 for support with her 23-year-old-son, Miles, who had a mental illness. Police shot and killed him. The latest research suggests that no single group of people is more likely to be killed by police than young black boys and men — registering even higher than white people with mental illnesses. Consequently, young black men with mental illnesses are in the single most at-risk category in the nation for fatal police violence.

People live with mental illness all over the world without being shot and killed by police. This happens, in great part, because police in many countries aren’t trained with a “shoot first, ask questions later” type of mentality. In fact, in many countries, it is the standard for mental health experts and nurses to travel with police on mental health calls. Those practices are already being deployed in a few places in the United States, but New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Willis is proposing a complete overhaul for the police response to mental health calls in our nation’s largest city. Last year, a staggering 180,000 unique calls were made to 911 in New York City for “emotionally disturbed persons.” But 78 percent of NYPD officers haven’t even received training on how to handle the calls. That’s not going to work. They all need training, but Williams is proposing that expert mental health teams be dispatched to these calls.

No solutions to this crisis are simple, but the bottom line is that what we have right now is just not sustainable.

The post If You Are Black and in a Mental Health Crisis, 911 Can Be a Death Sentence appeared first on The Intercept.

Today, I live in Brooklyn, but I didn’t grow up in New York. I’m country. I grew up in a small Kentucky town and was a part of a church that taught us a verse from the Bible that says “the love of money is the root of all evil.” For my whole life, even as my faith has struggled, I’ve held on to that verse and have believed that wherever we find evil, we’ll always find a money trail somewhere nearby.

And I have long since believed that profit, jobs, and wealth are at the center of the explosive growth of America’s mass incarceration crisis – and not just with jails, prisons, and police, but with the offshoot industries that survive and thrive on the back of our crooked legal system. One of these crooked industries involves bounty hunters, and there’s been an incredible injustice with a group of them killing an innocent man in Tennessee and avoiding any real punishment for it.

Jalen Johnson Milan was a beloved 24-year-old father of three young children in Clarksville, Tennessee, about an hour north of Nashville. Two years ago, on a spring evening in April of 2017, Jalen and some buddies, including his cousin, Jaden Hogan, who was driving, took a trip to the local Walmart where they ended up parking next to a car that had a drug informant inside named Kirsten Mahon.

When I say “drug informant,” am I right that your first assumption is that this is about to be a story on a police sting gone awry? You’d think so, but this was something altogether different.

According to surveillance video from the Walmart, within seconds of pulling into that parking spot, their car was surrounded by seven men who frantically yelled from every side, telling Jalen and his friends to get out of their car. The seven men had guns drawn. One of the men who surrounded the vehicle smashed open a window. Freaking out, Jaden Hogan, the driver, backed out of the parking spot, and then mashed the gas to the floor, so that he could get them all away from these men with guns.

They didn’t know if it was a gang, robbers, or police surrounding them, but it was clear their lives were in danger. Put yourself in that position, and imagine your car being surrounded by seven rough-looking dudes with guns drawn who did not identify themselves as police. What would you do?

When Jaden sped away, two of the seven men who surrounded the car, Joshua Young and Roger West Jr., unloaded their guns, firing shot after shot. Jaden, the driver, was hit in the neck, and Jalen was mortally wounded, with a bullet ripping through his heart and lungs. Investigators later tested every bullet at the scene and determined that they all appeared to have been fired by Young and West, according to reporting by The Leaf Chronicle, a newspaper in Clarksville that has provided consistent coverage of the case.

Those seven men got into their car, and for nearly seven miles they chased their prey through Clarksville. Jaden Hogan, the wounded driver, frantically called 911 from the parking lot before the chase was even fully underway, telling the operator that they had been surrounded and shot by a group of men, and that they were fleeing for their lives, speeding down a local road. But here’s the weird thing: The shooters also called 911 saying that they were in an emergency situation as they claimed to be chasing down a local drug dealer named William Ellis.

With both parties on the phone with 911, one of the dispatch operators advised the injured men to pull their car over and surrender to the men who just shot them. But remember this: The shooters weren’t police officers. They weren’t FBI officials or from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They hadn’t been to anybody’s police academy, and they damn sure weren’t supervised by any serious government agency.

They were a ragtag group of bounty hunters and bail bondsmen who were searching for a man named William Ellis who owed them a lot of money because he had skipped bail on two different occasions — leaving debts of thousands of dollars to the bail bondsmen. They had paid a desperate local sex worker, Kirsten Mahon, who struggled with drug addiction, to set up a fake drug deal with Ellis so that they could perform what they called a routine “snatch and grab,” possibly squeeze some money out of him, and then turn him over to authorities. This is routine work for bail bondsmen and bounty hunters.

Except William Ellis wasn’t in the car they had shot and chased; Kirsten Mahon later testified that she tipped Ellis off in advance that people were looking for him. By the time Jaden Hogan finally pulled his car over, his cousin Jalen was already dead. The bullets recklessly fired at the car seven miles prior had ripped his insides all up. The bounty hunters and bail bondsmen would eventually swear under oath that the men in the car shot at them too, but not a single gun was found on their prey, not a single shell casing found in their car, and investigators determined that every bullet fired appeared to be fired at the victims — not from them.

Nine days later, county prosecutors threw the book at the bounty hunters and bail bondsmen — charging them with a slew of crimes ranging from first-degree murder, attempted murder, aggravated kidnapping, reckless endangerment, and damn near every other charge you can think of. It took two years for the case to finally come to trial. It was complicated as hell with 50 different witnesses, hundreds of pieces of evidence — and two of the seven defendants had flipped, agreeing to testify against the other five. Altogether, the five remaining men faced a combined 80 charges.

In the end, earlier this month, a jury found the five men not guilty on 79 different charges — only convicting one man, Joshua Young, with recklessly firing his gun in the Walmart parking lot. He might not even go to jail.

Listen, I’m a prison abolitionist. I’d like to see the whole legal system torn down and rebuilt from scratch. But how in hell a group of pissed off bounty hunters and bail bondsmen can kill an innocent man, in what at very best has to be described as a case of mistaken identity, and get away with it, is beyond me. Defense attorneys basically suggested 101 conspiracy theories, effectively planting doubts in the mind of the jury, that William Ellis really was in that car and disappeared somewhere — even though nobody ever saw any such thing happen. The attorneys also suggested that the victims really did have guns and fired them, even though no evidence whatsoever showed such a thing. Their ploy worked — in great part, I believe, because the jurors treated the bail bondsmen and bounty hunters like they would have treated law enforcement officers, giving them respect and deferring to their storyline.

In the end, it’s gun violence run amok. Jalen Milan was one of the nearly 40,000 people shot and killed that year in our country – which more and more resembles the Wild West. And at the center of these past few years, which have been some of the deadliest years ever measured for gun violence, with almost no progress whatsoever on substantive gun reform, is money. It’s always money. Money for campaigns from the NRA. Profits for the firearms industry. Money for lobbyists. And again, right at the center of the shooting death of an innocent young father, were bounty hunters and bail bondsmen so determined to get back their money from a man that they shot a stranger, thinking it was him. Guns are a problem, but dammit, the money trail is never far behind.

The post Bounty Hunters Are a Lethal Weapon in a Justice System Corrupted by Money appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump has a rich, varied history of racism, bigotry, and discrimination going back to at least 1973, when the Justice Department filed a racial bias suit against him for mistreating Black applicants and tenants all over New York. At the time, it was one of the largest lawsuits of its kind. That was 46 years ago. Since then, the list of offenses has piled up. In a better time, his racist behavior would have prevented him from ever being elected, but here we are. He’s president and now he’s openly carrying that bigotry right into the Oval Office. Not only do I think he is violating his oath of office — I think his open, flagrant bigotry is an impeachable offense.

In the days when Trump was busy tempting the front pages of tabloids in between guest appearances on professional wrestling pay-per-view shows, his racism, misogyny, and even open accusations of sexual assault and harassment were frequently dismissed by the general public with a wink and a nod. An equal mix of wealth, white privilege, and the public’s obsession with celebrities that allowed him to ride above it all. But now he’s president of the United States, not just an NBC employee with a bad reality TV show where not a single “Apprentice” ever developed into an actual meaningful employee. And he is, in theory, subjected to the Constitution and all of the laws governing the presidency. But the thing is, somebody actually has to enforce them.

Do you know the difference between implicit bias and explicit bias? I need to explain it for what I’m about to say to really make sense. Across the country, corporations and government agencies, including police departments, are offering a wave of what’s called “implicit bias training.” The fundamental theory is that, in this country, otherwise well-meaning employees can be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or xenophobic in ways that they may not really even be aware of. It’s the notion that people unknowingly or unconsciously discriminate against others. Racial slurs might not be used, but the resulting bias and discrimination are real and painful. It’s about preferences and promotions, and who’s punished and who’s spared. I’m not saying I buy it; I’m telling you that’s what implicit bias is. Implicit bias training is designed to teach people how they may be advancing systemic oppression without being fully aware.

Why don’t corporations and agencies have training for explicit bias? The answer is simple: Explicit bias literally violates thousands of laws, codes, and policies across the country. When you are an open bigot on your job, the standard operating procedure is that you don’t need training, you need to be fired. That’s because bigotry is dangerous. It’s dangerous to have a racist doctor or nurse. It’s dangerous to have an openly bigoted police officer. That’s why responsible prosecutors are now ignoring cases from police officers found to have been openly bigoted on social media — because it’s impossible to trust a person’s judgment and credibility, especially about people different than them, when they publicly admit to hating those people. All over the country, people are routinely fired for explicit bias. As they should be.

If this past week has taught us anything at all, it has taught us that Trump is not implicitly biased. To tell four sitting congresswomen of color that they should “go back” to where they came from is so overtly bigoted that an almost identical phrase is listed on Trump’s own government website for the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

Ethnic slurs and other verbal or physical conduct because of nationality are illegal if they are severe or pervasive and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment, interfere with work performance, or negatively affect job opportunities. Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, ‘Go back to where you came from,’ whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.

Can we pause there for a moment? The United States government literally specifies the very phrase that Trump just uttered as a prime example of unlawful workplace misconduct.

The paragraph also alludes to why explicit bias is so dangerous. After Trump first targeted the four congresswomen on social media, his followers then ran with it and gave his initial attack a life of its own: Thousands of attendees at a Trump rally in North Carolina began chanting “send her back, send her back” to Rep. Ilhan Omar. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think it was and is one of the single most bigoted moments in modern American politics. The next day, Trump, who has told over 10,000 lies in office, told one of the dumbest of them all – saying that he tried to stop his followers from making the bigoted chant. He said that like we don’t have eyes and ears. He basked in the chant. He stopped giving his speech and allowed the chant to grow. And did so for a full 13 seconds. And when he started speaking again, he said nothing of the moment. In fact, he restarted his attack on Omar as soon as the chant died down.

Let me share a quote with you. And then I’d love for you to guess who said it.

Donald Trump is not just allowing it to happen, but actively encouraging it to happen, is an indefensible disgrace.

The President keeps insisting he’s not a racist, and I’ve repeatedly said that in the 13 years I’ve known him, I’ve personally never witnessed him being a racist.

But since running for the White House, his inflammatory language has flirted ever closer to crossing the line into overt racism, and now he’s crossed that line. Big time.

Let’s be very unambiguously clear: what happened in North Carolina last night was not just racist-fueled demagoguery but bordered on fascism.

There was the President of the United States whipping his supporters into a hyper-animated state of rage about a political opponent because of her ethnicity.

That was from the blowhard Piers Morgan: a lifelong friend and defender of Trump. Before we applaud him, I should note that soon after Morgan made this bold, respectable statement on Trump, he went into his own indefensible attack on Congresswoman Omar. But the greater point is this: Piers fucking Morgan said it “was not just racist-fueled demagoguery but bordered on fascism.”

Presidents and prime ministers across the world are calling Trump out and openly saying that the bigotry demonstrated by Trump and his followers is depraved and unacceptable. On top of that, you couldn’t name a single serious employer in this nation that would allow an employee to say and do what Trump and his followers are saying and doing.

I’d call that a problem. It basically means that the only reason Trump isn’t fired is because he’s president of the United States. He’d be fired from any other major corporation for this dangerous tomfoolery.

And only Congress has any real power to hold the president accountable. And while scores of progressive members of Congress have called for impeachment hearings to proceed, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for whatever reason, is against it.

Let’s examine what the presidential oath of office actually says. It’s one simple sentence. It says, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

I have questions.

Can we sincerely say that a man who has done what Trump did this week is honoring that oath? Can an explicitly biased person “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States?” Can an overtly racist person “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution?”

I emphatically say, hell no. An explicitly racist person cannot “preserve, protect, and defend” the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Both of those clauses were authored to protect groups of people who would otherwise be marginalized. They’ve been challenged and successfully defended for over 150 years because they were designed to ensure that all American citizens are treated equally. When Trump became president, he swore an oath that he, too, would play by these rules.

Can a person who is explicitly, overtly racist treat everyone equally under the law? I feel dumb even asking such a question. Now if you let them tell it, they’ll tell you “yes” a hundred times. But you can’t let a racist be the judge of whether or not their racism negatively fuels and shapes the way they think and make decisions. It’s the very reason why overtly racist people are fired from every single type of place of employment. If you are an overtly racist person, Walmart will fire you from bagging groceries. Uber will fire you from driving cars. Amazon will fire you from packing boxes. McDonalds will fire you from making burgers. Because you are a liability, and you can no longer be trusted.

The president of the United States should be held to a higher standard than an entry-level employee at any Fortune 5000 company in this country. Right now, he isn’t.

And only Congress has the power to change that.

The post Racism Is an Impeachable Offense appeared first on The Intercept.

“Yes, we do have concentration camps,” began the stinging critique of the Trump administration’s immigration detention facilities. It was written earlier this week by the editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune, in the reliably conservative state of Utah.

Andrea Pitzer, author of the definitive book on the global history of concentration camps, agrees. So do people who were once forced to live in another era’s concentration camps.

But amid the debate about what to call immigration detention facilities, few people have disputed the truly terrible conditions that exist within them. Migrants have long reported awful experiences in immigration custody, but in recent months, an increase in the number of people, especially families and children, crossing the border and being detained has led to severe overcrowding.

Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier was granted access to a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, and wrote in her report about it that “the conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities.” They “felt worse than jail.” The kids she examined were forced to endure “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”

It’s not an accident. These systems are cruel by design.

Over the past year, seven children have died in U.S. immigration custody or shortly after being released. These deaths occurred after 10 years during which not a single child died. Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, told The Atlantic that the stench in some detention facilities is so horrible that it was hard for her to even have a focused conversation with the children. Babies didn’t have diapers. Young kids were forced to care for infants who they didn’t even know. Clothes were covered in snot and excrement. Baby bottles were used without being properly cleaned and sterilized. All of these conditions have created environments where sicknesses and diseases spread like wildfire. In one facility, lice spread from child to child, and when the children were forced to share “lice combs,” and one somehow got lost, dozens of kids were punished by having their bedding removed. They had to sleep on the cold concrete floor.

This is why we say that cruelty is the point. It’s not an accident. These systems are cruel by design. The idea is to make it miserable to deter people from coming to the U.S. These detention centers are reckless and dangerous.

As many have pointed out, we need to remember exactly how and why the teenage diarist Anne Frank actually died. She was not gassed to death in a Nazi death camp. Instead, she died of neglect, malnutrition, and disease. It’s believed that she and her sister Margot contracted and died from typhus. In December 1944, a minor miracle occurred when Nanette Blitz, a lifelong childhood friend and classmate of Anne’s, was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp where the Frank sisters were being held.

“She was no more than a skeleton by then,” Blitz recalled. “She was wrapped in a blanket; she couldn’t bear to wear her clothes anymore because they were crawling with lice.” Guess what? Lice are the primary carriers of typhus. That’s how the disease spread.

And right now, today, we have prison camps across the United States where the same thing is happening. Multiple reports state that emergency conditions are repeatedly ignored until they result in death. The adults and children in these camp aren’t accused of being a danger to society. They haven’t been charged with violent crimes. Yet they are clearly being punished in the most severe ways.

Here’s where I am. If we have doctors, historians, and leading congresspeople calling these facilities “torture facilities” and “concentration camps,” and we all see the deaths piling up, and the conditions growing perilous, the question becomes: What exactly are we going to do about it?

For all the years that we’ve read and heard about concentration camps in other countries under other regimes, I don’t think many of us fully considered what we would do if such camps were built and operated in our nation, by our government, on our watch, on our dime. But that’s exactly where we are right now.

My soul is uncomfortable with where we are.

I swear, I am not trying to be inflammatory. I don’t mean this as a threat of violence or physical force, but I thought that concentration camps were supposed to be liberated. I thought that kids being held against their will in such atrocious conditions were supposed to be rescued. I don’t know what that kind of rescue would look like in present-day terms, but I know this much: My soul is uncomfortable with where we are.

It seems like our game plan is to focus on defeating Trump, and in the meantime, sue the administration until it incrementally agrees to start allowing kids to brush their teeth or wash their hands with soap. It just doesn’t seem to be enough. What if Trump wins again? Is our game plan then to wait four more years to hope we end these monstrous camps? Even if a Democrat wins, pledging to improve conditions, how can we hold them to account and demand that migrants be freed?

I always wondered how concentration camps lasted for so many years during the Holocaust, but now that we have our own, I see how. It’s a mix of fear, indifference, and lack of political will. We see the consequences of doing nothing, but it seems as though we’ve put all of our eggs into the basket of a far-off election. And I just don’t feel good about it.

The post History Has Taught Us That Concentration Camps Should Be Liberated. We Can’t Wait Until 2020. appeared first on The Intercept.

That was the single deadliest day of the apartheid regime. When my family and I lived in South Africa in 2014, we quickly learned that June 16 is still a national day of mourning there. It’s called Youth Day, and it is literally a federal holiday.

In Sudan, June 3, 2019 will now be that day. Earlier this month, at least 100 young civil rights protesters were shot or bludgeoned to death in Khartoum; many of their bodies were tossed into the Nile River. Hundreds of other protesters were shot or critically injured. Experts believe that at least 70 women were sexually assaulted. Businesses were ransacked. And the space that the protesters were occupying outside of the capitol was cleared.

Less than two months earlier, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, a long-indicted war criminal, stepped down in disgrace after nearly five months of protests over economic conditions that had brought the entire country to a halt. The protesters were right to call for his removal. But what followed was painfully predictable. The military, led by many men who for generations proudly did the work of a war criminal, took over the government and started cracking down on the protesters.

The protesters were calling for a civilian-led government. Soon, the military cut off all internet services to prevent them from communicating with each other and with the outside world. Then the military cut off cell service. But the sit-in demonstrations continued. So then the military ordered armed forces to clear the protesters out, which led to the June 3 massacre. The military has even admitted it.

For months, the Trump administration has said and done virtually nothing. One could reasonably argue that it’s better to keep Donald Trump far away from Sudan. Hell, he might love what the military is doing there. With his penchant for dictators and brutal strongmen, it’s not like Trump would identify with civil rights protesters calling for free and fair elections. That’s not on-brand at all. This administration has proven itself to be consistently cruel to all people of color who seek refuge from dictators here or abroad. And that belies the more disturbing point. The world is learning that cruelty to human beings is not a bug in the Trump philosophy on governance, it’s a feature.

The Trump administration has loudly signaled to the world that it doesn’t give a damn about Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordering the torturous murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist, or a North Korean dictator executing whoever irritates him on any random day of the week. Maybe you missed the news, but earlier this week, Israel named a whole damn town after Trump. It’s literally called “Trump Heights.” But of course they would. Israeli snipers shot a staggering 1,350 people last May — killing women, children, journalists, and nurses — and the U.S. government proudly relocated its embassy to Jerusalem at Trump’s behest. Trump didn’t do as much as bat an eye at the slaughter of so many civilians.

Think about it for a moment. What could the United States say to Sudan with any level of seriousness or moral ground to stand on? Nothing! Whether or not that calculus went into the decision for the Sudanese military to order the wholesale slaughter of civil rights protesters is unknown, but this much is clear: They knew, as the world knows, that the Trump administration has no inclination whatsoever to do anything substantive about such abuses.

All of this has made it difficult to figure out exactly how well-meaning, everyday people around the world can actually help bring safety and democracy to Sudan — especially since the internet remains cut off and social media virtually inaccessible nationwide. This may sound nebulous, but the first thing I ask people to do is to simply make a place in their hearts and minds to actually care about the human rights abuses in Sudan. People are understandably suffering from compassion fatigue. So much is wrong in our nation, and wrong around the world, that it can be legitimately difficult to make room for one more crisis.

Once you make up your mind that you are going to care and stick with Sudan, you need to follow, read, and amplify the voices either on the ground or seriously in the know. Here’s one person to follow. And another. And another. And what you will learn from them about Sudan will be immensely richer than anything I could ever tell you. I’m learning just as much as you are, but this much I know: I won’t turn my head and pretend this abomination is just a bad dream. It’s very real.

The current state of American foreign policy will have to be completely overhauled (I mean torn down to the studs) and reimagined in order for the United States to actually be able to play a positive, substantive role in such a conflict. Of course that will mean that the president of the United States can’t be a superfan of brutal dictators and state-sanctioned violence against citizens calling for civil rights and human rights. But it also needs to mean that presidential candidates and congressional leaders have to express more courage, clarity, and consistency on the human rights abuses of “allies” like Israel. The words of Martin Luther King Jr. ring true here: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The most prominent leaders in our nation rarely seem to operate from that philosophy. It’s easy to imagine that they are as overwhelmed by the state of the nation as the rest of us, but the current crisis in Sudan, and the historic abuses and carnage suffered there, simply have not gotten the attention it deserves. When everybody is in campaign mode, trying to give red meat to their base and focusing on domestic policy issues, it just seems like the crisis in Sudan gets squeezed out. Our job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The post Sudan’s Military Is Killing Pro-Democracy Protesters. Trump Doesn’t Care — but We Should. appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday evening, my wife and I were on our way to dinner with our three youngest kids when I happened to learn from Twitter that a man in Virginia Beach had just shot and killed 12 people. And so my struggle, which I am sure is also regularly your struggle, began. In almost every developed nation in the world, 12 people being killed in a mass shooting would make that incident the deadliest in years. In some nations, it would be the deadliest ever. But in the United States, they happen so often, with such ferocity and carnage, that when we learn about the next one, we hardly skip a beat. Indeed, 2018 was by far the most violent year ever measured for school shootings in the United States, and 2017 was the deadliest year in at least a half-century for gun deaths altogether in this country — with an astounding 40,000 people killed by guns. That’s 110 people per day. We couldn’t keep up if we tried.

After seeing the news of this latest mass shooting, I wanted to somehow relay the fact that 12 people were just murdered to my wife without actually saying the specific words in front of our kids. “Oh no. 12 people,” I said to her, not speaking in a complete sentence. “Virginia Beach,” I continued. I know my kids are aware of gun violence and mass shootings, but it just seemed like too much in that moment to say in front of them something like, “12 people were just shot to death.” Between the seriousness of my tone and the six words that I assembled for her about the shooting, she knew exactly what I was trying to relay to her without the kids quite catching on.

They were happy. And we were pulling up to a fun restaurant in Brooklyn. And so I used the strange skill that none of us should have but all of us use almost every day. Somewhere deep in my mind I tucked the thought of that horrific shooting in Virginia Beach away. I compartmentalized it — boxed it up and closed the door to the memory — so that I could be emotionally present during dinner, so that I could listen to the kid’s stories about their day at school, and excitedly order from the menu with the family. And I did it. I moved on in that moment so that I could enjoy the taste of Vietnamese food. And while I ate dinner, as I reflect back on it, I don’t think I once thought again of the victims in Virginia Beach.

That’s the game we play. To get through dinner, to get through a movie or a game, to get through quality time with our loved ones, we must temporarily suspend our knowledge that people are being slaughtered all around us. We speak of the wild, Wild West as some nostalgic era of the past, but we’re living it. The United States is the only nation in the world estimated to have more guns than people. And it shows. Americans are shooting and killing themselves and killing others with guns at a pace that should be treated as a dire national emergency. If we just enacted a fraction of the basic standards and norms held by the rest of the world, our nation would be so much safer.

In New Zealand, after 51 men, women, and children were shot to death earlier this year while gathering for prayers in their local mosques, the nation, in a matter of just a few days, made radical shifts in their gun laws: banning assault rifles and so much more. And that urgency is just what the United States needs, but I am afraid we’ve crossed some invisible threshold, having given up after burying so many thoughts of so many shootings and so much violence — so that we can just have dinner in peace.

The post Mass Shootings, Dinner, and the Cognitive Dissonance of Just Living in America appeared first on The Intercept.

I used to be a preacher.

And one of the lessons that I would often teach my congregation is that in the Bible, in the days before Jesus’s death, his words had a unique urgency — almost as if he knew that he had to hurry up and say as many things that mattered as humanly possible. Now I’m not comparing my dear friend Ady Barkan to Jesus, but I have long since viewed any words that Barkan is able to utter nowadays as something that we should all stop and pay attention to.

In 2016, Barkan, a beloved 32-year-old organizer with a newborn son, was diagnosed with ALS. And it has been really fucking aggressive ever since. First, it attacked his arms and legs, making it hard for Barkan to get around, but he kept pushing and working and fighting for causes until his arms and legs no longer worked. After he started using a wheelchair, ALS then began to impact his voice, but Barkan never stopped talking, never stopped fighting.

Now it has taken his audible voice altogether. Unable to move his body or speak a word out loud, Barkan, for the time being, uses special software that tracks his eye movements and allows him to communicate to the world through a computer-generated voice. And because he is determined to make the world a better place until his dying breath, today Barkan is doing something truly remarkable.

This week, Barkan made an outrageously difficult trip from California to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress about the necessity and value of Medicare for All. I was told that this may very well be the last trip he ever makes. It was incredibly difficult and because of the fragile nature of his health, cross-country flights are inadvisable.

I’d like for you to put yourself in Barkan’s shoes for a moment. Imagine you were told that you could make one last flight, one more long trip, before you died. Few among us would have the focus and selflessness to make that last trip a journey to the U.S. Capitol to testify before Congress. I’d like to think I’d have the courage to do what Barkan just did, but I’m thinking that if I had one last flight in my life, I’d take it to the Caribbean somewhere to be dropped off at the beach. But Barkan’s different.

He wants to know that with every breath and every blink of an eye that he has left, that he spent it fighting to make the world a better place for his son — and for all of us, really. So he’s going to be the one and only activist testifying before Congress today offering full-on support for Medicare for All.

And a part of me is embarrassed that the United States, so often hailed by people as the Greatest Nation on Earth, requires a dying man to testify that health care should be universal here. It is universal in nearly every developed nation in the world but this one. While universal health care is framed by conservative Republicans and Democrats as the too expensive socialist pipe dream of crazy liberals, it is literally the standard, the norm everywhere else. Capitalist nations across the world have universal health care systems and people are grateful for them. But the United States, with all of its wealth, refuses to develop one of its own — instead falsely claiming that our system is already the best. It isn’t, neither in costs nor in outcomes.

Every day I am challenged by Ady Barkan to be the best possible version of myself. When my own aches and pains cause me to want to go into a shell, I think of Barkan. When my own insecurities cause me to think that I don’t have the right words to speak or write about the world, I think about Barkan and how he now can hardly do either but continues to fight anyway. The man is my hero, but I know that he doesn’t want us to all sit around and admire his strength in the face of adversity. He is putting his life on the line, making what could be his last trip, because he hopes that we will fight this hard alongside him. It might be for Medicare for All or the environment or voting rights or racial justice, but what I know is this: Ady Barkan is fighting this way, with every ounce of strength he has, so that it will inspire us to continue the fight in his honor after today.

We love you, brother.

The post Ady Barkan Is Making What Is Likely His Last Long Journey — and It’s to Testify in Support of Medicare for All appeared first on The Intercept.

Don’t believe what anybody tells you about “progressive prosecutors.” It’s not the new wave. It should be. Hell, it can be, but it isn’t yet. Of the more than 2,400 elected prosecutors across the country, we’d be lucky to identify a few dozen true reformers out of the whole lot. That tribe is so exceptionally small that I can pretty much name them all without a Google search.

Democrat and Republican alike, America’s prosecutors are still overwhelmingly conservative. North to South, from coast to coast, they all tend to buy into the same old law-and-order malarkey. So, when the chief law enforcement officer for an entire state starts to color outside the lines — shaking the trees and announcing bold reforms — best believe it stands out.

That’s what’s happening in Delaware.

Last fall, the people of Delaware elected Kathleen Jennings to be attorney general. The Democratic primary was a four-way race between reform candidates, and some contenders doubted whether Jennings, a career prosecutor, was likely to follow through on her promises. But on February 15, just over six weeks after assuming office, Jennings sent out one of the most revolutionary internal memos on criminal justice reform ever issued by a state attorney general in modern American history. As an advocate for reform myself, reading something like this is so out of the ordinary that when I first got it, I wondered if it was even real.

It is.  

I need you to read and share this memo. It’s six pages of brilliance. Now listen, if me and the homies were in charge and wrote this memo, of course it would look and sound a lot more like it came from the Black Panther Party. But don’t be mistaken, this memo is 2,000 words of badassery.

Jennings sought the input of an experienced team that recommended 37 sweeping reforms in eight primary areas of oversight, including charges, bail, pleas, sentencing, probation, and treatment of minors, as well as expungements, pardons, and commutations.

Let me break down some of the highlights.

Right away, in the very first sentence, Jennings makes it abundantly clear that her ability to articulate what’s wrong, why it’s wrong, and how to fix it, rises above cliches and buzzwords. She announces that her office is “committed to making the criminal justice system fair, equal, and accessible to every person regardless of race, income or ZIP code.” You can pretty much determine, using those three pieces of information, whether or not a person is going to get anything that even remotely resembles “fairness and equality.” For a prosecutor’s office to acknowledge the biases that, for decades, have been accepted as the status quo represents a striking shift.

Before Jennings begins detailing the policies she’s going to change, she smartly frames the work of her office in an essential way for her staff. “We cannot control what other agencies or stakeholders do,” she writes, “but we can change our practices and policies to reverse this trend [of inequality and recidivism] and increase fairness and proportionality in the system.”

Jennings makes it clear that these aren’t simply aspirations or ideas. She doesn’t simply want to have another empty dialogue. “Effective immediately,” she wrote, “the Department of Justice and its Deputies and staff will observe the following presumptive guidelines in criminal cases.”

In other words, this is now how it is in Delaware.

I’d like you to read all 37 of her reforms. If they were to become law nationwide, they would radically reduce the number of people caught up in the system. The memo is not perfect, by any means. I wish it made the case for abolishing cash bail. I wish it fully decriminalized marijuana. I wish it fully decriminalized sex work. I wish it did more to address restorative justice. But it’s a great start.

Let me just detail five of the best reforms.

Charging

1. “We will adopt an office-wide presumption not to charge multiple minimum mandatory crimes when one crime accounts for the facts and circumstances of an event. Deputies will focus on limiting the number of charges in an indictment to those that most accurately reflect the misconduct and are most provable.”

This one is huge. Right now, when prosecutors file charges, it’s commonplace for them to file as many as a dozen different charges for the same crime — ultimately putting the defendant in a position where they are willing to take a plea deal to avoid facing the total sentence from multiple charges. Deciding to simply charge a defendant with the minimum number of criminal counts instead of intimidating them into a plea gets us closer to a system of fair justice.

2. “We will encourage alternatives to prosecution for Prostitution. We will be cognizant of the potential for accused sex workers to be victims of sex trafficking and always make an appropriate law enforcement referral when we suspect a defendant is a victim of human trafficking. We will also refer people charged with Prostitution to specialized treatment courts designed to assist them.”

The prosecution of sex work, particularly of sex workers, often puts victims of both trafficking and poverty in the position of being penalized. Alternatives to jail time help them to avoid the stigma of a criminal record, and it puts sex workers on a path to restorative justice instead of a punitive one.

Sentencing

3. “For Guideline sentences of 0 to 12 months, Deputies should ask for probation or home confinement, when appropriate.”

This is so simple, but the impact will be profound. Instead of jailing people for petty crimes, give them citations or other alternatives to incarceration. This shift will free up the entire justice system — from jails, to police officers, to prosecutors — to focus on much more serious, systemic issues.

4. “Studies show that most probation violations occur within the first year, and additional years are unnecessary with lower level offenses. Deputies will keep probation recommendations to a one-year maximum unless the conviction is for a violent felony or top-tier drug crimes.”

Another smart but simple reform. By extending probation for years and years on end, prosecutors and judges all but ensure that people will ultimately return to jail for minor violations. If someone has served their time, and they are able to honor the terms of their probation for a year, that should be the end of their sentence. Otherwise, people end up trapped in a never-ending cycle of expensive supervision.

Probation Violations

5. “Deputies will work with Delaware Probation and Parole to avoid recommending prison sentences for technical violations, such as missed curfews, etc.”

Again, a simple but powerful reform. Nobody should be sent back to prison for a technical violation of probation. By simply removing this obstacle, it allows probation officers to focus more on rehabilitation and re-entry into society than on being taskmasters about petty requirements that could mean the difference between freedom and incarceration for far too many people. 

Jennings sent the memo out to all of the deputy attorneys general and staff of her entire state office. Delaware is one of a handful of states where county prosecutors are appointed by the state attorney general, rather than being elected. That system has its own pros and cons, but in this case, it meant that Jennings’s progressive mandate has a further-than-typical reach.

In the first paragraph, Jennings acknowledges that “prosecutors have the power to charge or not to charge; to choose which charges to bring; to offer a plea or not, and to recommend a sentence. These decisions substantially impact people’s’ lives, their sense of justice, their liberty, their livelihood, and their families, in addition to the community’s fundamental faith in the system.”

This document was not written by activists and abolitionists, but from a career prosecutor. That, in and of itself, is remarkable.

As more Americans recognize the primary role prosecutors, more so than cops, play in the inequities of the criminal justice system, we’re likely to see more prosecutors yield to the political pressure to be better. America’s justice system is not broken. It’s functioning exactly the way those who designed and built it intended it to function. It’s not a well-built system with a few flaws, but a rotten system with inequality baked into its very fiber. Consequently, I want the whole damn system to be torn down.

With all that said, this is one of the best documents ever issued as state guidelines for justice reform.

The machine of mass incarceration in the United States is about as well-oiled as any industry in the so-called land of the free. It’s deeply resistant to change, and those who profit from it are constantly seeking out new ways to grow its power as it mows down immigrants, the poor, and communities of color. But it genuinely appears that a reasonable, compassionate reformer is the new “head reformer in charge” of Delaware. Kudos, Kathleen Jennings.

The post Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings Has Unveiled a Startlingly Progressive Reform Agenda appeared first on The Intercept.

Some people blame the losses on Russia — and that’s ridiculous. Others make it out like the hacking and interference had no impact at all — and that’s ridiculous too. The Democrats lost for dozens of reasons, but the hacking and interference was damn sure one of them. It was a major distraction during the campaign. My fear was that it would also be such a distraction for the Democratic Party moving forward that the party would ignore all of the substantive changes it needed to address.

Don’t get me wrong, I think election interference is a huge deal. The safety and integrity of our elections is no small thing, but since the losses of 2016, Democrats have needed to find a way to walk and chew gum at the same time. There’s good news here: I see four things happening right now that makes me cautiously optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party.

Embracing Progressive Ideas

A few years ago, if you supported “Medicare for All,” you were probably either a hippie, a Bernie supporter, or both. Today, polls show that 70 percent of Americans like it, and mainstream Democrats are finally embracing it publicly. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began talking about how essential it is that the United States embrace a “Green New Deal,” on Day 1 her idea only had support from a few of her closest allies in government. In just a few weeks’ time, you’d now struggle to find a Democrat who doesn’t support it. Speaking of Ocasio-Cortez, she’s got the entire country talking about finally making the ultrarich pay their fair share of taxes. And a few years ago, I struggled to find a single mainstream Democrat talking about ending cash bail or decriminalizing weed — now those are basic talking points for presidential candidates.

I’m glad about all of this, but here’s why I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s easy as hell to talk about your bold policy choices when your party doesn’t have the power to enact them. I just want to make sure the Democrats don’t lose their nerve when it matters most.

Candidates Hiring Diverse Staff

One key reason why presidential candidates are so often tone deaf on issues of race and class is because their senior staffs are often primarily made up of white men. Democrats have completely changed this for the upcoming primaries. Julián Castro hired an amazing black woman, a highly skilled organizer named Maya Rupert, as his campaign manager. Kamala Harris announced that her campaign manager will be Juan Rodriguez, who also ran her Senate race in 2016. In Kirsten Gillibrand’s new staff, she announced six new hires — four of them are women. Of those six, two are African-American and one is Latina. This is a big deal. These early candidates are not just setting the tone for the candidates who will follow them, they are building teams that will actually be able to skillfully advise them on how to reach the entire nation.

Race Barriers Fall in Senate

I have long railed against the lack of diversity of Senate Democrats’ senior staffs. It’s still a serious problem, but it’s getting so much better. When Alabama’s Doug Jones was elected, he appointed the Senate’s first African-American chief of staff, Dana Gresham. Of course it’s embarrassing we had to wait this long. Thankfully, Sen. Elizabeth Warren just hired Anne Reid as her new chief of staff; an Obama administration alum, Reid became the first black woman to serve in this role for any Senate Democrat. She wasn’t the only black woman in that role for long. Gillibrand just hired Joi Chaney to serve in the same role for her office. Yes, I am celebrating the fact that we went from zero African-American chiefs of staff for Democrats to three — because it’s trending upward.

Competitive and Healthy Primaries

The 2016 Democratic presidential primaries were weird. A dozen serious candidates should’ve jumped in there to run, but they were either flagged off or chose not to, in order to make room for Hillary Clinton. I ultimately think that that was actually bad for Clinton. In the end, two people who nobody thought stood a chance, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, ignored the chatter and ran anyway. Sanders shocked the world and won 22 states, but a robust, competitive nationwide primary — with a normal number of candidates — would’ve been better for the winner. In 2008, Barack Obama beat out a who’s who of Democrats to win the nomination and went into the general with a ton of momentum. In some ways, that’s what Donald Trump actually did on the Republican side in 2016.

The upcoming Democratic primaries are going to be altogether different from the previous ones. Clearly, it appears that we will have a healthy number of candidates running. Already, with Warren, Harris, and Tulsi Gabbard in the race, it appears that the primary will set a record for the number of women running. Not only that, but this cross-section of candidates is already on pace to be the most ethnically diverse ever as well. These candidates look more like America. And with Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, now in the race, we have the first openly gay Democratic candidate to run for president. Whoever wins is going to have to fight in all 50 states to do so. And again, that’s going to be good for their chances at defeating Trump in 2020.

Correction: February 4, 2019
A previous version of this story stated that Bernie Sanders won 20 states in the 2016 Democratic primaries. In fact, he won 22 states. The story has also been updated to clarify that Pete Buttigieg is the first openly gay Democratic presidential candidate.

The post Four Reasons I’m Cautiously Optimistic About the Democratic Party in 2020 appeared first on The Intercept.

The past 48 hours have been a complete whirlwind. Not only did our nation just elect 435 members of the House of Representatives — including so many historic firsts — with Democrats seizing back a strong majority, but also dozens of important governorships and Senate seats were up for grabs from coast to coast. Those stories, rightly so, dominated the headlines. Then, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And then we had news of another horrific mass shooting, this time in Southern California.

Yet amid all these stories — and the controversies that surrounded them — many other very good stories of important election victories from Tuesday were overlooked.

It’s shocking to say this in 2018, but this is the first time most of these states have ever had an African-American man or woman serve as their state’s top law enforcement official.

Four that immediately come to mind took place in Nevada, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, where progressive black candidates each ran for and won their races to be the attorneys general of their respective states. I dug around for hours to confirm that this had never happened before, and I don’t believe the United States has even ever had four African-Americans simultaneously serve in this position at the same time across the country. It’s shocking to say this in 2018, but this is the first time most of these states have ever had an African-American person serve as their state’s top law enforcement official.

Aaron Ford, a former high school teacher turned lawyer with a Ph.D. in education, narrowly edged out his Republican opponent in Nevada. Ford previously served as the minority leader in the Nevada state Senate and then became the majority leader after Democrats took control in 2016.

Kwame Raoul, like most Democrats running for statewide office in Illinois this year, defeated his Republican opponent by double digits. Rauol, born in the United States to Haitian immigrants, is widely known in the state for taking over the state Senate seat that was vacated by Barack Obama back in 2004, when the future president was first elected to the U.S. Senate.

Former Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., won a tough race for attorney general in Minnesota — also marking a sweep for Democrats running for statewide office there. Ellison was once considered a shoo-in for the role, but ended up being nearly overtaken by allegations of domestic violence.

Lastly, Tish James became the first black woman ever to win statewide office in New York with her blowout victory to become attorney general. Formerly serving as New York City’s public advocate, James takes on her new role after the last elected attorney general resigned in disgrace over an assault scandal.

While racial and cultural representation are absolutely important in politics, each of these newly elected leaders have also made strong pledges on criminal justice reform, protection of immigrant families, and much more. Furthermore, while each would likely deny that they are using the position as a political stepping stone to something else, such statewide offices are regularly used as a pool from which to draw candidates for higher office. In other words, these were big wins.

The post Why It’s a Big Deal That Four Black Candidates Won Their State Attorney General Races appeared first on The Intercept.

On the evening of October 21, Brian Schatz, the U.S. senator from Hawaii, wrote a tweet that proved to be prophetic. Looking ahead to the week that just passed, he said, “I just have a feeling that this coming week is going to be wacky and not in a good way. No matter what madness may come, let’s just keep talking to voters everywhere about health care and fighting corruption.”

I believe in feelings and hunches. Schatz felt something. I know it’s hokey for me to report on his sixth sense, but we’re in a peculiar time.

This past week was one of the worst in modern American history.

An avid supporter of President Donald Trump mailed 14 pipe bombs to a mix of prominent Democrats, outspoken critics of the White House, and CNN. Elsewhere, after failing in his attempt to break into a local black church in Louisville, Kentucky, a white man went into a nearby grocery store and shot and killed two black grandparents. Before he was caught by police, he assured an armed white man that he’d never shoot white people.

Then, on Saturday, the unthinkable happened: Driven by white supremacist and neo-Nazi conspiracy theories, many of which Trump himself has advanced, a bigot with an AR-15 walked right into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and slaughtered 11 mostly elderly Jewish congregants.

Staring all of that in the face, Trump woke up Monday morning and blamed the news media for the “great anger” across our country. He tweeted, “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame.”

The bigots and racists and white nationalists love Trump; they receive his barely coded messages loud and clear.

It’s difficult to rank Trump’s most dangerous tweets, but this one must be high on the list. In a week where CNN — along with a sitting member of Congress, a couple former presidents, a former vice president, and a former attorney general, among others — received bombs in the mail from one of his supporters, Trump called the media “the true Enemy of the People.” It’s breathtaking. He is signaling to the most disturbing forces in this nation that he supports them.

Meanwhile, Trump spent a recent campaign rally declaring himself to be a “nationalist” — a dog whistle for the sort of white nationalism Trump has been accused of giving succor to. White nationalists, for their part, recognized Trump’s message: Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, who also retweeted Trump’s attack on the media, gleefully supported Trump’s public embrace of nationalism, admitting along the way that it was indeed an embrace of white nationalism.

As always, the bigots and racists and white nationalists love Trump; they receive his barely coded messages loud and clear.

In the case of the Pittsburgh attack, it was Trump’s message that the so-called caravan of Central American migrants heading to the U.S. posed an existential danger to this country. It’s as false as could be, but the Pittsburgh killer latched onto it, grafting the idea onto his anti-Semitism and blaming Jews for the “invaders” coming to this country.

Early this morning, a British Trump supporter named Katie Hopkins — a columnist whose anti-Muslim work Trump has lauded in the past — unapologetically blamed the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on the Chief Rabbi of the U.K.’s support for refugees. She literally blamed the Jews for the anti-Semitic slaughter of Jews in Pittsburgh. (Hopkins eventually deleted the tweet.) These are the kinds of people who love Trump, and whom Trump loves right back.

It’s easy for some people to say, “Ignore Trump.” And I think I could, if he were just the host of “Celebrity Apprentice” conning people into taking lousy classes at Trump University. But he’s the president of the United States. He is deeply influential with a potent core of Americans. And some of those prominent supporters are openly and publicly admitting that they aim to be violent.

Of course, Trump won’t fully distance himself from white supremacists and bigots, even when they are violent, because they are his most devoted base. Every time this man has a chance to pivot toward reconciliation, he doubles down and shows the nation his true colors. We saw it throughout his campaign. We saw it after Charlottesville. We’re seeing it now.

That’s why I have a hunch of my own: I think this thing is going to get worse — much worse — before it gets better.

The post Trump Is Blaming the Media for One of the Worst Weeks in Modern American History — but His Own Support for Violent Bigotry Is to Blame appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said something that I thought was perhaps the most disturbing indicator of just how severe the voter suppression has been in Georgia. In case you missed it, in a state that has been solidly Republican for a generation, Democrat Stacey Abrams is in a dead heat with Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp in the race for governor. It’s a big deal: Abrams could become the first black governor of Georgia. (Full disclosure: In my personal capacity, outside of my work for The Intercept, I have endorsed Abrams in the race.)

That’s why it’s so disturbing that every few days, a new story of voter suppression comes out.

It is, of course, an outrageous conflict of interest for the man who oversees Georgia’s elections to be simultaneously running for the highest office in the state. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single reasonable person who says otherwise. Kemp should have stepped down from his role as secretary of state, or at least recused himself from all election oversight, the moment he decided to run for governor.

The stories of voter suppression detail how thousands and thousands of voters, almost always African-American, have somehow been disenfranchised. About 47,000 voter registration applications — most of them from black residents — are on hold with Kemp’s office under the state’s “exact match” law. And his office held up the re-application to register for those folks, too. The applications weren’t fraudulent, but were put on hold if the information in them — including someone’s signature or even a dash in their name — did not perfectly match information on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s preposterous and has nothing at all to do with voter security.

While voters with pending registrations can still cast a ballot if they bring their IDs to the polls, confusion is widespread — and those votes could determine this election.

And that takes me back to what Khanna said last week. Khanna criticized Kemp for not resigning and pointed to the registrations on hold. “Our response should be forceful and clear,” Khanna tweeted. “If @staceyabrams ends up with less votes in a close but illegitimate election, she should REFUSE to concede.”

I agree with him. I spoke to Khanna about this before appearing on a panel with him this past week at San Jose State University. I told him that, while I agreed with him, it shocked the hell out of me to hear him say it. Because we live in an age of shocking words and events, it’s painfully easy to look over exactly what Khanna said.

Before a major election has even taken place, a sitting member of Congress is already advising a candidate not to concede if they lose. I’ve never seen that before. And this isn’t about sour grapes; it’s about the uncertainty among voters that they will be able to cast a valid vote on Election Day, and the possibility that so much other ugliness is going on there, too.

An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that Georgia has been accelerating the rate of its voter purging in recent years. Between 2008 and 2012, the study found, the state purged some 750,000 voters. In the following four years, between 2012 and 2016, 1.5 million voters were purged from the rolls — in a state with a total population of just over 10 million people!

And there’s more. Black voters across the state are complaining about election machines changing their votes for Abrams to votes for Kemp. And more than 200 voting precincts have closed across the state. In a separate case, after a call from a county official, black senior citizens were ordered off a bus that was taking them to vote.

I first moved to Atlanta in 1997 to go to college. I was married there. My kids were born there. I bought my first home there. I called Atlanta home for most of the past 20 years. And I’ve never seen anything like what is happening there right now. As the possibility of a statewide Democratic victory has increased, so, too, have heinous voter suppression tactics.

Georgia previously ranked No. 43 out of 50 states in election integrity, according to a Butler University professor’s rankings. That fact alone should disqualify the man who runs the state’s elections from running for governor. I’d be surprised if the state didn’t plummet to last place after this election season, but that’s not the point. Those with power don’t seem to mind the anti-democratic trend very much, because it’s not their votes that are being suppressed.

Correction: October 27, 2018, 4:10 p.m. EST
This article has been corrected to clarify the number of voter registrations pending in Georgia and the fact that voters with pending registrations are not prevented from casting a ballot at the polls. 

The post Staggering Voter Suppression in Georgia Could Keep Democrats Out of Power appeared first on The Intercept.

Wednesday, October 24, will forever be known as the day that a slew of pipe bombs were sent to CNN and a long list of prominent Democrats across the country. Today, October 25, will likely be known as the day President Donald Trump seemed to publicly blame the bombs being sent on members of the media themselves.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s an enormous mess. Bombs being sent to the homes and offices of former presidents, vice presidents, and members of Congress is a big deal. It deserves to dominate news coverage. And when the sitting president of the United States — while those bombs are still being discovered — tweets about how the simmering anger of this country is because of the media, we have a real problem on our hands.

The bombs, though, were actually Wednesday’s second-most important story in this country. The other most important story caught the media’s attention for just a few minutes, then faded right back out of the news cycle. In its short life as a national story, no one ever quite got it right.

In the calm of a sunny afternoon, at a Kroger grocery store in the east side of Louisville, Kentucky, a 51-year-old white man named Gregory Bush walked right into the store with a loaded gun, targeted two black customers, and killed them.

“Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”

The first victim was a black grandfather, Maurice Stallard, who was shopping for groceries with his 12-year-old grandson in tow. Bush shot the grandfather in the back of his head, then continued shooting him after he fell to the ground, according to an account of the arrest citation. Stallard was the father of the city of Louisville’s chief racial equity officer, Kellie Watson, who has served as an executive in the mayor’s office for years.

After Bush killed Stallard, he calmly walked out of the store and tracked down another black customer, this time a woman, and shot and killed her. Standing outside of the store, a witness confirmed that the woman was his mother. When Ed Harrell, a white man in the parking lot, saw Bush coming toward him, he pulled out his own revolver, and yelled to ask what was going on. According to Harrell, Bush replied, “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”

And there we are.

While Louisville officials are still saying they don’t have a motive for the shooting, it appears to me that Bush made his intentions pretty damn clear in that parking lot. He came there to shoot black people. Trump says the simmering anger in this country is primarily caused by the news media, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what caused Bush to shoot and kill a grandfather in front of his grandson and then a mother pushing some groceries through the parking lot.

It was racism. These killings were hate crimes. Saying otherwise is not only an insult to the victims and their families, but to the entire black community of Louisville, which is reeling right now from this.

The post Louisville Shooter Made Racist Remark Right After Killing Two Black People, but Police Won’t Call it a Hate Crime appeared first on The Intercept.

Every single day, families suffering from police violence find themselves in the fog of unspeakable setbacks. Some have lost their fathers or sons, their mothers or daughters, their brothers or sisters, their neighbors or friends. I am sometimes enlisted to help them. Before I was a journalist, I was a pastor, and it was often my job to guide families through grief and loss. But it’s a unique crisis to have the life of your loved one taken by the state. Who do you call? 911? Who leads the investigation? Who brings you justice? The answers for these families are altogether different than in other murder cases.

When I got the call that Chinedu Okobi had been killed by police from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was different. This was my Morehouse brother. You’d almost have to have lived at 830 Westview Drive, on that red clay hill in Georgia called Morehouse College, to truly understand how that bond is formed. We are close. We have each other’s back. Comparing Morehouse to a regular Greek fraternity is not good enough. It’s a brotherhood in the truest sense: It’s a family.

I was Chinedu’s student government president. He and I lived in the same dorm. He was close friends with many of my close friends. His sister Ebele, a revered executive at Facebook, is close with many of my closest friends at the company.

When I got a call from her this past Saturday to discuss Chinedu Okobi’s death, I had to fight hard to hold back tears. I was surprised at my own fragile state. My dear brother, Jason, just passed away a few weeks ago. While his death had absolutely nothing to do with police violence, for the first time I understood the unique pain of losing a brother who was supposed to have his whole life ahead of him.

Chinedu Okobi should be alive right now. At the very most, he should be in a hospital receiving mental health treatment. By now, he likely would’ve been released back to the care of his family. Local police have not responded to my repeated requests for more information about Chinedu’s death, but this much we know: While he was technically unarmed, meaning that he had no gun or knife or illegal weapon on his body, he was armed in a very American way. He was a big Black man, a dark-skinned Nigerian who was 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 330 pounds. In the eyes of American police, that might as well be armed. This nation has long since weaponized blackness.

This country has also weaponized mental illness. Chinedu lived with mental illness. He received treatment, took medications, and worked hard to balance his life the best he could. I never knew it. What I do know is that in this country, when someone is having a mental health crisis, police are called — which is like bringing in a bulldozer to fix a leaky faucet. It’s a stupid system.

Chinedu needed to go to the hospital. He needed medical treatment. Instead, he was surrounded by officers who appear to have repeatedly used a Taser on him until he died. Let me phrase that another way: Chinedu was still shot, but by guns that electrocute people to death instead of tearing apart their flesh and organs with bullets. In the name of being safer than guns, hundreds of thousands of police officers have now been armed with Tasers, but they aren’t safe — not at all.

Chinedu’s black life didn’t matter. Those cops would not have treated their own family that way. If Chinedu was their son or father or brother, those men would’ve found another way to deal with his crisis.

Since 2000, American police have killed at least 1,000 people with Tasers. They are horrible. The primary company that makes them, Taser, has changed its name to Axon — just like Corrections Corporation of America, the notorious private prison company, changed its name to CoreCivic. It’s an attempt to escape their baggage, but it’s the same old shit.

And Axon has gotten a complete pass for what the company makes. The company deflects from the fact that they make machines that send uncontrollable electricity into people’s bodies. The problem, of course, is that the human body simply was not built to take these surges of electricity. Axon advertises these weapons as “less lethal,” but the comparison to guns and other weapons would be cold comfort for the more than 1,000 people who have died from the electric shocks.

Worse yet, the “less lethal” moniker has meant that many cities and states don’t have robust regulations for how law enforcement is supposed to use these weapons. So the mythical “less lethal” marketing is working — for the company, not for victims of the weapons.

That such dangerous shocks would be administered to people with mental illnesses is especially upsetting. Every single day in this country, hundreds of thousands of nurses treat adults and children who are living with mental illness. Those patients are regularly in crisis, and nurses consistently face them down without ever having to electrocute them into submission. If five police officers were unable to do the same thing with Chinedu without killing him, the problem is not Chinedu — it’s the police officers. It’s the consistent impatience with black people in distress that is shown by law enforcement.

The United States, particularly the United States government, seems to have long ago given up on completely reimagining how to solve its most complex problems. This much, though, should be obvious: Electrocuting people into submission is a horrible idea, no matter how supposedly “less lethal” the weapon is.

The post My Morehouse Brother Chinedu Okobi Died After Being Electrocuted by Police. Tasers Are Not “Less Lethal” Weapons. appeared first on The Intercept.

Many of my greatest heroes were assassinated.

I am thinking about Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of post-colonial Congo. Orchestrated by American and Belgian governments, his murder is sometimes called “the most important assassination of the 20th century.” He was just 35 years old.

I am thinking about South African intellectual Steve Biko, who was the 46th political prisoner killed while in police custody during Apartheid — which allowed imprisonment without trial or any type of due process. He was just 30 years old and died of a traumatic brain injury.

I am thinking of the fierce South African resistance leader, Chris Hani, who was shot and killed in 1993. Hani was the second most popular leader in the country and was murdered by a white supremacist with the support a longtime bigoted member of parliament.

I am thinking of Tom Mboya of Kenya. I am thinking of Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau. I am thinking of the brilliant scholar and activist Walter Rodney of Guyana.

Of course, I am thinking of Martin, Malcolm, and Medgar.

I am thinking of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner — the three young Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi to register Black folk to vote. This summer, I spoke for the Andrew Goodman Foundation and was so touched to meet his family. Fifty years later, they are still grieving the loss.

And I am thinking of the brave Brazilian activist Marielle Franco, gunned down in a drive-by assassination this by March.

In many of those cases, nobody was ever held responsible. Not legally or even in the court of public opinion. In fact, governments around the world have participated in targeted assassinations with little to no blowback for decades.

I think social media, and the way it democratizes information — and confrontation — has a chance to change all that.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 2, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to finalize some paperwork for his upcoming marriage. Exterior security camera footage clearly shows him entering the building. But not a single shred of evidence, from eyewitnesses or cameras, shows him leaving. The Saudi consulate now says they don’t have any footage from inside the building and give no explanation for why Khashoggi was never seen leaving.

What we do know is that Khashoggi, while careful to not call himself a dissident, was an informed critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, and the manner in which he manages the country. Now, according to media reports, Turkish investigators believe that the Saudi government assassinated Khashoggi and literally cut his body into bits inside of the consulate. As heinous as this is, it doesn’t quite come as a surprise — for people who follow the exploits of Saudi Arabia — considering how the government arrested and imprisoned activists across the country.

Not a surprise, but a new low nonetheless.

Maybe inside the kingdom’s bubble, the Saudi royal family didn’t really understand that we’d find out and that we’d care. Maybe they listened to President Donald Trump repeatedly ramble on about how the press is the enemy of the people, and they assumed we all thought that. We don’t. And unlike previous generations, outraged strangers around the world are connecting with one another via social media.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve connected with various associates of Khashoggi. They are distraught — “I met with his family to tell them that we were pretty sure Jamal had been murdered by Saudi government — it was devastating,” Khashoggi’s friend told me.

But, even more than that, they are pissed — and they are determined to get to the bottom of this. These aren’t men and women who will soon let go. Several have emphatically said that they will make it their life’s mission to get justice for Jamal Khashoggi.

Every journalist, activist, organizer, and peace-loving person in the world should make that their mission. If we don’t hold them accountable, who will? Trump? It damn sure won’t be the American business community, who seems so pumped to cozy up with MBS that they are willing to look past every repressive action he’s ever taken.

Social media can be an ugly place. I see that ugliness up close every single day. But it’s also what allowed me to identify and track down the bigots who attacked and maimed a young man in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a white supremacist rally. Social media brought people together to take down Bill O’Reilly at Fox News. It forced companies to stop disseminating the callous conspiracies of Alex Jones. When used well, it’s a powerful tool that allows an everyday person to confront powerful brands and leaders face to face.

In Saudi Arabia, you just can’t call out MBS without fear of being arrested or killed, but Twitter is an irreverent medium when addressing that type of power. And that’s a good thing.

The post Let’s Use Social Media to Put Pressure on Saudi Arabia Over Jamal Khashoggi’s Disappearance appeared first on The Intercept.

Colin Kaepernick should have an NFL job right now. He’s arguably better and more accomplished than half of the starting quarterbacks currently in the league. He’s better and more accomplished than every backup. Let’s not even talk about third-stringers. The notion that Kaepernick is not one of the top 100 quarterbacks in the league is preposterous.

Just for argument’s sake, though, let’s work from the premise that Kaepernick is not in the NFL right now for purely football reasons. Let’s start at the position that every quarterback in the entire league is better, more skilled, more capable, more accomplished than he is. All of them. And that he’s been out of the NFL for over 500 days simply because it has been determined on football grounds that he would not make a single team better. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single current or former NFL player to agree with such a position, but let’s just put all that aside for a moment.

Try to make the argument that Eric Reid doesn’t belong on an NFL roster for football reasons. It’s impossible.

Now explain why Pro Bowl safety and defensive back Eric Reid doesn’t have a job.

Reid is 26 years old and injury-free. He can play multiple positions and is an ethical, generous leader on and off the field. His rookie contract just expired, and he is widely known as a coachable, team-first athlete. Try to make the argument that he doesn’t belong on an NFL roster for football reasons.

It’s impossible. A deep analysis of his stats and value has already been done. Everybody who plays at Reid’s level has a job and a well-paying contract except for Reid. The NFL is riddled with athletes who’ve been suspended and arrested and convicted — and they’ve routinely been given second and third and fourth chances. But not Eric Reid.

That’s because Reid is clearly being punished — not just for taking a knee on the field, which he did, but for doing so alongside Kaepernick.

Reid was the first NFL player to join Kaepernick in his protest against systematic racism and police brutality in this country. As the protest gained steam, a small handful of black players joined in — some continue to this day, either by taking a knee or remaining in the locker room during the national anthem. But only Reid did so side by side with Kaepernick for an entire season.

Reid was the first NFL player to join Kaepernick in his protest. It’s difficult to imagine any other reason why he does’t have a job in the NFL this season.

We can’t know for sure, but it’s difficult to imagine any other reason why Reid does’t have a job in the NFL this season. It may sound far-fetched, but you have to remember that many NFL team owners and executives have said that they “hate” Kaepernick and have even gone so far as to compare him to a convicted murderer.

I suspect team owners and executives hate Kaepernick so much that their animosity toward him spread to Reid. I can’t make sense of it any other way. I’ve looked at Reid’s forced exodus from the league from every imaginable angle. It’s hard to believe that a mainstream American company — and that’s what the NFL is, a corporation — is willing to so obtusely tip their hand like this. But I think that’s exactly what they’ve done here. It’s preposterous!

I’m a sports junkie — have been my entire life. On sports talk radio, I regularly hear both the hosts and callers say that they think Kaepernick has been banished from the NFL — not just because of his on-the-field protest, but because he wore socks portraying cops as pigs or a shirt featuring Malcolm X talking to Fidel Castro. Let’s just pretend, just for the moment, that those articles of clothing — not the protests themselves — were the things that pushed NFL owners to effectively ban Kaepernick. Let’s say that that’s the case.

Then how do you explain Eric Reid?

No one has snapped pictures of Reid wearing politically radical clothing. He never rocked a full afro. He didn’t put up a Black Power fist during warmups or after a game.

What he did, though, was kneel by his teammate Colin Kaepernick’s side. It sure looks like it’s cost him everything.

The post The Best Evidence That the NFL Effectively Banned Colin Kaepernick? His Name Is Eric Reid. appeared first on The Intercept.

2018 has been an absolute bloodbath, not just for black folk in America, but for people of color around the world. Yet President Donald Trump dominates the headlines and the overwhelming barrage of news about him makes it easy for us to miss all the bigoted atrocities around the world. But we must not let these stories slip by.

2018 has been one of the deadliest years ever measured for police brutality in the United States, but most of us couldn’t name three of those victims if somebody paid us. The injustices surrounding the brutality are as bad as they have ever been.

A breathtaking 12,800 migrant children are currently being detained by this federal government — which is a 400 percent increase from last year and the highest number recorded in modern American history.

A bomb that was designed, built, and sold by an American company killed at least 40 children on a school bus in Yemen. Every agency studying the bombing now admits that the bombing was a “mistake.” That single “mistake” killed more children than were killed on 9/11 or in the Oklahoma City bombing.

In one single day this past May, Israeli snipers shot and killed at least 60 Palestinian protesters. By the end of the week, snipers shot and killed at least 119 Palestinians — including a heroic volunteer medic named Razan Al-Najar.

I could go on. I could weigh in on the horrendous spike in hate crimes across this country. I could talk about the epidemic of white people calling the police on black people who are simply living their everyday lives. That list is long. I could talk about the staggering number of nonlethal incidents of police brutality and false arrests that really go unmeasured and underreported simply because nobody died.

There’s a lot happening. But what I want to illuminate today was something that I find increasingly jarring.

Earlier this summer, a groundbreaking study was released that determined that when an unarmed African-American was killed by police, it has a horrible, measurable impact on the mental health of African-Americans. This, of course, may seem obvious. Yet what I found jarring was that the study determined that those same deaths — or even the deaths of unarmed white people by American police — don’t have any measurable mental health impact on white people.

I unpacked this study at a recent event and I think the results stung some good-hearted white people in the audience. The report isn’t saying that you don’t care. It isn’t saying that you aren’t bothered. It’s saying that by in large these incidents come and go, and your mental health remains firmly intact nonetheless.

I saw this all week with my own eyes, as some of my best friends and I worked hard around the clock to fight for justice for 26-year-old Botham Jean, who was shot and killed in his own home by Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger.

My oldest daughter’s birthday was on Sunday. Mine is today. But all I have been thinking about is Botham Jean.

Spending as much time as I did on the case is part of what made this weekend particularly painful. My oldest daughter’s birthday was on Sunday. Mine is today. But all I have been thinking about is Botham Jean.

The same was true for scores of pastors and leaders and protesters who showed up to the Dallas Cowboys game on Sunday. They love sports as much as the next person. In fact, most of them grew up loving the Cowboys. Instead of going to a game — which many of them were already protesting because of the league has mistreated Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid — they showed up with mourners, hearses, and coffins to eulogize not only Botham Jean, but also 24-year-old O’Shae Terry, who was shot and killed by an Arlington, Texas, police officer on September 1.

Black Dallas is grieving. And the city government made it 100 times worse by pretending to care about what happened to Botham Jean. That bubble burst when the city publicly released the fact that some weed was found in Jean’s apartment just a few hours after his beautiful funeral service. It was a devastating blow to his family and to the entire community — which was already on edge.

While other people can easily pivot and move on from these shootings and go watch a good, old football game, we can’t. It hurts too much.

I don’t just see this in Dallas. I see it in every big city in the country. The police violence, the hate crimes, compounded with all of the other issues related to race and poverty in America. How do we react? All I know is that we have to somehow figure out how to tuck our present pain in.

The post The Aftermath of Botham Jean’s Killing Shows Why We Need to Cope With the Community Trauma of Police Brutality appeared first on The Intercept.

From day one, the United States has always struggled to walk its talk. In 1776, as the U.S. declared itself independent from Great Britain, the framers of said declaration noted that “all men are created equal.” But Thomas Jefferson, the lead author of the Declaration of Independence, owned men. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he compared Africans to apes. He had sex with an enslaved woman and kept her children in bondage.

This is not just me looking back 242 years and imposing my present-day worldview onto a different era — the hypocrisy was seen and known in real-time.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’’ English writer Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775. A year later, English abolitionist Thomas Day wrote, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature it is an American patriot signing resolutions of independency with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

We are expected to judge this nation’s early leaders on their words and not their deeds.

In other words, we are expected to judge this nation’s early leaders on their words and not their deeds. When it comes to the past, we’re supposed to basically do the opposite of what Martin Luther King Jr. said we should do in his “I Have a Dream” speech: actually overlook the content of someone’s character.

Here’s the thing, though: It appears that that’s easier for some people to do than others. I’m stuck. I am simply incapable of respecting someone who bought, sold, traded, bred, and forced human beings into a brutal life of slavery. It’s a disqualifier for me. And my guess is that, the less your ancestors were affected by such a practice, the less of a disqualifier it is for you. But some of us value black lives so much that we find it pretty hard to be wooed by someone’s otherwise brilliant words when they owned black people. Kind of like how it’s hard to marvel over the poetry of Nazis or the photographic skills of 9/11 hijackers. At some point your character, or lack thereof, gets in the way of your contributions.

Francis Scott Key, the author of what is now known as our national anthem, absolutely needs to be on the list of folks drummed out of polite company for their transgressions. He was a genuinely horrible human being. He was an open, flagrant bigot. He was not a silent bigot; he put his bigotry into words and actions.

Key said that African-Americans were “a distinct and inferior race of people.” Of course he thought that: He came from a long line of slaveowners. His family got wealthy off buying, selling, trading, breeding, and working human beings to death. He continued the practice himself and owned human beings for most of his life. Not only that, but as the district attorney of Washington, D.C., Key fought against the rights and human dignity of black people every chance he got. In case after case, he fought against the rights of abolitionists and sought any means available to silence them.

All the way back in 1833, Key was defending heinous incidents of police brutality against African-Americans. The man fought to protect slavery until the day he died. He was no timid beneficiary — Key fought tooth and nail to protect it.

I have a problem with Francis Scott Key. I don’t care how great his poetry may or may not have been — I see him as evil.

All of that results in me having a problem with Francis Scott Key. I don’t care how great his poetry may or may not have been — I see him as evil. I see slavery as an evil institution. Participating in it, for Key, was not a one-time choice, but a gross daily decision to benefit from and defend at all costs.

When he wrote a poem based on his eyewitness account of the War of 1812, it makes perfect sense that his absolute loathing of free black people found itself into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There, Key gleefully wrote about the murder of enslaved Africans that had been enlisted in the fighting. Their deaths were a highlight for him. The poem says:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This poem bothers me. Again, this is not me viewing the 19th century through a 21st century lens. It bothered abolitionists of the day. They, too, were irked by how easily the deaths of enslaved Africans could be celebrated in the same stanza in which this land was hailed as “the land of the free.” Abolitionists even created other songs to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that spoke of the true pain and costs of slavery and how desperately freedom was desired.

There’s a reason why this history is so important. Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick started his demonstration during the national anthem to protest the repetitive cycle of systemic injustice and police brutality in this nation. It did not feel right to him to stand up to a song full of empty promises.

Kaepernick is not alone in the annals of sports. Jackie Robinson, in the final years of his life, in 1972, reflected back on injustice in this nation and said, “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag.” And he was a veteran who gave years of his life in the military. It all ringed so hollow to him.

And it does to me as well. I am a man. I have a brain. I have a heart and soul. My fight in this country is against injustice. The same is true of Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid and so many other NFL players who’ve taken a knee. But something weird has happened where it’s now seemingly politically incorrect to say that anybody is protesting the anthem.

So let me say it: I am protesting the anthem.

I am protesting its deeply bigoted author — who owned human beings for convenience and profit.

And I am protesting injustice in this nation on behalf of so many families that continue to experience systematic racism, police brutality, and inequality — all while others expect us to get up and sing with a heart full of happiness.

I’ll take a pass.

The post Why We Should Be Protesting the National Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

We often hear that police officers across the country are pissed at Colin Kaepernick. When Nike announced an endorsement deal with the former NFL quarterback, who has been effectively banned from the league for his protests during the national anthem, an umbrella group of police unions called the National Association of Police Organizations called for its ranks to boycott the shoemaker’s products.

Yet we often don’t hear about how black police officers across the country think of Kaepernick and the subjects he raised with his protest. The reality is that these cops are often in support not only of Kaepernick’s stance against police brutality, racism, and injustice in the United States, but that black police actually support and defend his previous protests around those issues during the national anthem.

On Wednesday, the National Black Police Association released an open letter they sent to Mark Parker, Nike’s CEO. In the letter, the group not only condemned the calls from traditionally white police organizations to boycott Nike, but congratulated Nike on its new campaign featuring Kaepernick.

“Kaepernick’s stance is in direct alignment with what law enforcement stands for—the protection of a people, their human rights, their dignity, their safety, and their rights as American citizens.”

National Black Police Association National Chair Sonia Pruitt wrote that her group sees Kaepernick’s stance and words as very much being in line with their own values — taking a shot at the National Association of Police Organizations in the process. “NAPO believes that Mr. Kaepernick’s choice to openly protest issues surging police brutality, racism and social injustices in this country makes him anti-police,” Pruitt wrote. “On the contrary, the NBPA believes that Mr. Kaepernick’s stance is in direct alignment with what law enforcement stands for—the protection of a people, their human rights, their dignity, their safety, and their rights as American citizens.”

The letter is powerful not only because it debunks many popular notions about how police feel about Kaepernick. It also shows how much of that rhetoric is more about race and culture than it is about the profession of policing. As I’ve traveled the country, black cops everywhere I go tell me how much they love Kaepernick and believe in his mission. At this time last year, nearly 100 current and former New York Police Department officers rallied together in a press conference to show their support for him. So some police do stand up for Kaepernick — just not the ones that Donald Trump mentions when he sneers about the national anthem protests.

The post Black Police Group Supports Nike Deal with Colin Kaepernick Despite Police Unions’ Boycott appeared first on The Intercept.