Jelani Cobb on the anti-CRT campaign’s high stakes and the deep roots of fascism in America

On Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump and his cabal attempted a coup to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election and by doing so to end American democracy. Part of this plot involved a lethal assault by Trump’s followers on the Capitol. Those actions have been described by the mainstream American news media as the stuff of a “mob” or an “insurrection.”

Such language obscures both the real goals and desires of Donald Trump, the Republican fascists, their followers, and the larger white right in their attacks on American democracy – attacks which have not stopped and are escalating.

Donald Trump was America’s first white president. In that role he was a human opioid of white identity politics, white rage, white violence, white aggrieved entitlement, white male victimology and white supremacy.

Trump and his Republican party and their followers and allies want to create a new American apartheid where white people (specifically Christian fundamentalist fascist male plutocrats) maintain control over every area of American life and society. They are so committed to this goal that they are willing to embrace authoritarianism and fascism in order to achieve it — thus their collective admiration of strongmen and other political terrorists and thugs, such as Vladimir Putin.

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On this point, Amanda Marcotte details this revolutionary vision of destruction and misery in an essay here at Salon:

One important document that points to the answer was released this week by Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, a pamphlet titled, “An 11 Point Plan To Rescue America.” Needless to say, the title is misleading, as this pamphlet is very much about destroying America — by dismantling basic freedoms and democracy itself — under the guise of “saving” it.

Despite the heavy declarations of patriotism, the document presents a depressing and dystopian vision of America that is at total odds with the values of freedom, equality, and democracy that are supposed to define this country. Through rhetoric heavy on euphemism and doublespeak, Scott’s plans are not hard to suss out: Replacing fact-based education with nationalistic propaganda, destroying voting rights, ending all efforts to ameliorate racial inequalities, and forcing rigid and sexist gender roles on all Americans. Scott justifies the latter by declaring it’s “God’s design for humanity,” which of course, violates the very first amendment to the constitution that protects freedom of religion….

Like Putin, Republicans know that their views cannot win in a free, fair democratic debate. The tension between claiming to be for democracy in Ukraine while opposing democracy in the U.S. is causing way too much cognitive dissonance on the right. It’s why Trump is going with a simpler message of blatantly rooting for Putin. Trumpism has always been part of this transnational war on democracy. Bannon in particular loves to trumpet this fact. With this invasion of Ukraine, this alliance between Trumpists at home and authoritarians worldwide is only going to strengthen — and strengthen Trump’s hold on the Republican Party.

The goal here is to “Make America Great Again.”

In practice this means restoring a fictive American past and “golden age” where Black and brown people (as well as women, gays, lesbians and other marginalized groups) were silent, submissive, obedient, deferent and happily compliant with and to White America. Of course, such a country never really existed; whiteness is built on many fantasies and other lies.

The proof of how white supremacy motivated Trump’s attack force on Jan. 6 (and beyond) is easily demonstrated by the things they carried, wore, said, and their other behavior.

Trump’s attack force carried a huge white Christian cross, prayed for protection to their “god” in battle, sang out and screamed passages and various prayers from the Bible, and engaged in other acts of worship to militant white Christianity.

Anthea Butler, who is a leading scholar of religion, American society, and race, offered this context in a recent conversation with Salon:

White Christianity is a Christianity that is based on the following: Jesus is white. Jesus privileges white culture and white supremacy, and the political aspirations of whiteness over and against everything else. White Christianity assumes that everybody should be subsumed under whiteness in terms of culture and society.

White Christianity assumes that it does not have to look at poverty. We see this in the form of the so-called prosperity gospel, and that any blessing you get from God is because God favors you. If anybody else is out of favor, let’s say some poor kid in Northwest Philadelphia who doesn’t have enough to eat, well, that’s just too bad because they’re not blessed of God.

When suffering happens, it’s blamed on anybody else but God.

Trump’s attack force also erected a gallows — imagery that cannot be separated from the Ku Klux Klan and America’s history of white on black lynchings and other acts of white supremacist terrorism — with the presumed purpose of executing “traitors” such as Vice President Pence (chants of “Hang Mike Pence” rang out during the attack) and Democratic Party leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others deemed to be “the enemy.”

Trump’s attack force included neo-Nazis and other declared white supremacists.

Trump’s attack force assaulted Black and brown Capitol police and other law enforcement officers with racial slurs and other hateful invective.

Trump’s attack force carried the flag of the Confederacy, a symbol of hatred, violence and white supremacy that is acknowledged as such around the world.

Trump and his coup cabal and the other Republican fascists and their followers failed in their immediate short-term mission on Jan. 6 to nullify the 2020 Election and by doing so to end American democracy.

However, they are undeterred. For example, in dozens of states across the country the Jim Crow Republicans are enacting laws and other rules (both “legal” and quasi-legal) that are specifically designed to keep black and brown Americans and other supporters of the Democratic Party from voting.

Ultimately, the battle to protect America’s multiracial democracy is fundamentally a fight for democracy itself and the basic tenet of one person, one vote in a society supposedly governed by a Constitution and the rule of law.

In all, this dire moment of existential crisis for American democracy and society, with its fascist assaults on truth and reality itself, is also an opportunity, once again, for all Americans (and people around the world) to learn from the triumphs and struggles (and tragedies) of the civil rights movement and the long Black Freedom Struggle.

Jelani Cobb is The Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.” His essays and other writing have appeared in such leading publications as the Washington Post, The New Republic and The New Yorker. His essay “The importance of Black History Month” was recently featured at The Deseret News.

In this conversation Cobb explains how Black History Month and its emphasis on truth, facts, and real history stands against the lies and other fictions that are the heart of fascism and racial authoritarianism. He also warns that most Americans are hobbled in their ability to understand the existential danger posed by neofascism and white supremacy because they lack a real understanding of American history and how such evil forces are endemic to this country and not something foreign or abroad.

Towards the end of this conversation, Cobb highlights how lessons in hope and resistance can be learned from the Black Freedom Struggle and the ways that they can help to sustain what will be a long war against American neofascism and white supremacy.

With the assaults on America’s multiracial democracy and this tide of rising neofascism across the color line it feels as if so much is fundamentally broken and out of sorts. How are you making sense of all these events?

It is jarring and disturbing, some times more so than others. We, Black folks especially, have a certain inheritance of progress in this society. And we, at some point, could have presumed — and I think that I was guilty of this too — that whatever else might happen that we were fighting to preserve that inheritance and build upon it. We weren’t thinking so much about just how swiftly you could lose that inheritance altogether. At present we are looking at the resurrection of old regimes. We have been fighting battles over voter access, for instance and now also seeing xenophobic, nationalistic, violent white supremacist movements that are now an open part of the country’s political dialogue.

Thinking about the long Black Freedom Struggle and our history of resistance as a people, I have found myself asking what year is it really here in America.

This is just a point where we can see more clearly the cyclical nature of this struggle. We always knew that there were ebbs and flows and that progress would be met with backlash. That reality and dynamic is now just extremely apparent right in this moment.

America is a project that can be easily undone, and we’re watching it in real time. The country has only been, at least on a paper, a multiracial democracy with full and equal rights for Black and brown people for 50 or so years. How do we explain this to a more general public?

When you talk with people about full enfranchisement for Black Americans that conversation usually starts in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. The fact that on every front at present, from voting to affirmative action to employment protections to abortion and reproductive rights, we are now looking at a vast reactionary wave that is trying to push us back to earlier eras of American life.

For me at least, it has been a reminder that when we talk about history our task is to look at history for the case studies it provides as opposed to, for example, looking at the Montgomery bus boycott as a static frozen display of what happened in one place in Alabama in 1955 and what the implications of it were.

Instead, we should look at history and such examples as a broader metaphor for how repressive forces work, how people can strategize and counter-strategize in the midst of that kind of repression and what kinds of leadership models and objectives that we can take from that.

For Black Americans, we have an intergenerational experience with American fascism. Likewise, scholars of American history and the color line also see these connections and continuities between Trumpism and neofascism in the present and the old history of such forces in this country. But there are many white folks, including those who should know better among the pundit and commentariat and larger political class, who are still treating this like something mysterious and shocking. What do we see that they are not?

I believe that many people have never really countenanced the full narrative of what America is and so they can’t really understand it collectively. For example, we have people debating about whether the Civil War was fought over slavery and if you have not ever countenanced what the true full narrative of this country is you are left with a distinct inability to understand how the country operates right now.

Moreover, you will also be left with a distinct inability to understand what the country’s weaknesses are.

There’s always been this broad anti-democratic thread in American life. There has been, for a very long time, a pro-fascist element in American life — but that many Americans have chosen to not talk about. But both things resurrect themselves from time to time, and now is a moment where you see just how significant and how prominent those forces have been.

How are you making sense of white backlash politics at present?

I think that it’s part of the zero sum formulation that people have adopted and promulgate as it relates to race in this country. From the moment that we saw Barack Obama being sworn in as president, we could have known that white backlash was imminent. The empirical evidence actually pointed to that outcome. For example, there was a growing number of white people across Obama’s presidential terms who thought that white people were the most disadvantaged population in the United States. That is absurd and at odds with any kind of empirical study of advantage and disadvantage. But for those who believe such a thing the facts do not really matter.

That white backlash and related fictions was accompanied by a furious attempt on the right to discredit even the idea of white privilege, even though, again, empirically, we can point to such a thing existing and the ways in which it operates. Having imbibed this idea of this zero-sum kind of racial reality, that anything that Black people achieve, and other non-whites groups as well, comes at the expense of white people sets in motion a cascade of other events and reactions that we have been witnessing for some years now.

How do we you locate the importance of Black History Month in this moment of rising authoritarianism, neo-fascism, and Orwellian assaults on truth and reality itself? What does Black History Month help us to better understand in this moment of democracy crisis?

I think that Black History Month helps contextualize everything we’ve just been talking about. And we also have to keep in mind that when Dr. Carter G. Woodson created what was then “Negro History Week”, he was thinking about these same things. Woodson was in the midst of a fight and attempting to use history as an evidenced claim and type of proof for Black humanity and therefore equal and full Black citizenship. What has happened is that there are forces in this country that have tried to strip away the connection between his scholarship and that narrative. They’ve tried to sever the links that people understand between those two things, which is what we are seeing in the right-wing’s attack on so-called critical race theory.

Black History Month has never been more crucial; but we’ve also never been closer to the reasons why Black History Month was founded in the first place.

When I was a child, I remember my parents, my Black elementary school teachers, and other adults giving me books about Black inventors and Black facts about history and Black civilization and the importance of Black Americans and the Black Diaspora to American and global history. I was also given all these documentaries to watch and made to go to various talks and workshops about Black history and culture. At the time, I found so much of this to be very tedious. Now, these years later, I truly appreciate all those experiences. It really was a type of armor and preparation.

Those books and scholarship and thinkers were trying to present the basis of a narrative, even if it was just starting with disembodied facts. That was literally the point of it. When (white) people said that Black people were inferior, that we had no claim to the span of human civilization, you and others were then empowered to respond with the facts about African and Black civilizations.

Those facts were meant to dispute the narrative of our non-humanity as Black people. That literature and those materials were revolutionary in their own right.

What specific lessons can we draw there from the Black Freedom Struggle in this moment of democracy crisis? Black folks have been trying to warn white American society about these vile forces for centuries.

W.E.B. Du Bois tried to warn people in his work “Black Reconstruction” about this moment of crisis. The Black Freedom Struggle has taught us about the fundamental fragility of democracy and the possibility of democratic institutions being corrupted and becoming non-democratic, authoritarian, dictatorial and the like.

We saw what fascism looks like in the post-slavery, post-Reconstruction Jim and Jane Crow South. We saw what authoritarianism looked like in America more generally. We saw the kind of racial authoritarianism that is an implicit part of the history of this nation.

When we consider these now shocked observers, aghast at how far the United States has fallen in the scale of global democracy these last few years, the question then becomes perhaps American should not have been ranked as high as it was in the first place.

It is Black History Month, and we are also having this conversation the same week as Valentine’s Day. Brother Frederick Douglass chose Valentine’s Day as his birthday. What do you think he would make of this America?

And just thinking about Black History Month, Brother Douglass, and yeah, we can’t reanimate people. We could read David Blight’s new book. We can’t summon them up like a zombie. What do you think he would make of this moment? I was thinking about Brother Douglass on January 6th.

I think that he might look around in ways that were both affirming and disturbing. He would perhaps look at the world that we now occupy and say, “Just as I expected.”

What are you most concerned about in this moment and is there anything that gives you hope?

The forward creep of authoritarianism gives me the most concern. What gives me the most hope is reacquainting myself with the long lineage of people who fought to oppose it and the victories that have been won against great odds.

More in-depth conversations about democracy under attack:

Ukraine refuses to lay down weapons while under attack

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy implored people in the capital of Kyiv to brace for an all-out Russian assault overnight, and as a result of intense resistance from the Ukrainian military and civilians alike, they were able to fend off the invading army, though fighting continues throughout the country on Saturday morning.

“The invaders wanted to block the center of our state and put their puppets here… We broke their plan.”

Just after midnight, Zelenskyy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces would storm Kyiv in “vile, cruel, and inhuman” fashion, according to a translation by Max Seddon, the Moscow bureau chief at Financial Times.

“We have to persevere tonight,” said Zelenskyy. “The fate of Ukraine is being decided right now. The night will be hard, very hard, but there will be a morning.”

After another excruciating night spent in bomb shelters, basements, and subway stations, the residents of Kyiv awoke with the city still in the hands of mayor Vitali Klitschko and the Ukrainian government still under Zelenskyy’s control.

Several apartment units were destroyed by Russian missiles, and at least 35 people, including two children, had been wounded as of 6:00 a.m. local time, according to Klitschko.

The mayor added that while “there are no Russian troops in the city,” people should remain underground as additional air attacks are expected.

As the BBC reported:

According to a report by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, Kyiv officials put out a statement asking people to stay in shelters and to stay away from windows if they were at home.

But Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov told Ukrainian news site Lb.ua that the army was “in control” of the situation.

“We are stopping the horde using all means available. The army servicemen and citizens are in control of Kyiv,” said Mr. Danilov.

According to BBC correspondent Paul Adams, “The Ukrainian army said it had repelled an attack along one of the main roads in the west, early [Saturday] morning. And it says it’s managed to prevent a Russian attempt to land airborne troops at an airport south of Kyiv—even saying a large plane carrying troops had been shot down.”

In a video recorded Saturday morning from the empty streets of Kyiv’s government district and shared on Twitter, Zelenskyy countered rumors that he had directed the army to surrender to Russian troops.

“I’m here. We will not lay down any weapons. We will defend our state,” he said.

According to the New York Times, “Reports on Friday from the Ukrainian military and the United States and its allies indicated that Ukrainian troops were fighting fiercely, slowing the Russian advance.”

“Civilians were also volunteering to defend the country,” added the newspaper, which interviewed several residents who have taken up arms.

In an address to Ukrainians on Saturday morning, Zelenskyy said that “we are defending the country, the land of our future children.”

“Kyiv and key cities around the capital are controlled precisely by our army,” the president added. “The invaders wanted to block the center of our state and put their puppets here like in Donetsk. We broke their plan.”

Meanwhile, fighting continues throughout Ukraine, where Russia is being condemned for alleged war crimes.

Western governments have vowed to increase weapons shipments to Ukraine and impose harsher sanctions on Russia—including directly targeting the assets of Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—but Zelenskyy continues to urge all European Union members, including current holdouts Germany and Hungary, to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT international banking system.

For the first time in history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Friday activated parts of its Response Force.

Viktor Liashko, Ukraine’s health minister, said Saturday that 198 Ukrainians, including three children, have been killed so far, and more than 1,100 people, including 33 children, have been wounded.

United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, Kelly Clements, told CNN on Saturday morning that more than 120,000 people had fled Ukraine “to all of the neighboring countries.”

“The reception that they are receiving from local communities, from local authorities, is tremendous,” said Clements. “But it’s a dynamic situation, we’re really quite devastated obviously with what’s to come, and we would say that up to four million people could actually cross borders, if things continue to deteriorate, which they have until now.”

Trump’s White House was warned about “psycho list” prior to Jan.6

According to a new report from the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s White House was made aware that some attendees who would be speaking at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Capitol riot were causing alarm among the event’s organizers.

The Post is reporting that the House select committee is now being supplied with audiotapes of squabbles between some of the organizers bickering to the point where one of them requested a police officer be dispatched to remove one attendee.

According to the report, “At roughly 8:15 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, a few hours before President Donald Trump and his allies whipped up thousands of supporters with false claims of election fraud, law enforcement was summoned to the rally grounds to deal with a ‘possible disorderly.'” before adding, “The incident threatening to disrupt the event at the Ellipse wasn’t happening in the crowd. It was happening backstage.”

A review of texts and recorded audio is revealing there were concerns about some of the speakers with “Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director at Women for America First, a pro-Trump group that held the permit for the rally” battling Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren over the speakers which led to a call for police intervention.

That information has drawn the interest of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot that forced lawmakers to flee for their lives.

“Wren, who was listed on the permit for the rally as a ‘VIP ADVISOR,’ had with others organized an initial spreadsheet of potential speakers that included far-right conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones and Ali Alexander, planning documents obtained by The Post show. The final list of Jan. 6 speakers was personally approved by Trump and did not include Jones and Alexander, according to those documents and people involved in the planning, who like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity,” the Post report before adding that “Kremer grew concerned that Wren was rearranging seats and trying to move Jones and Alexander closer to the stage.”

The report goes on to add, “The Post’s reporting also shows that the White House was made aware of concerns among Trump allies that some people coming to Washington on Jan. 6 to potentially speak at the rally were too extreme, even for a president who had frequently pushed or crossed the boundaries of traditional political norms.”

“The advance warnings to the White House and the friction among Wren and Pierson and her team have become a focus for the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, as lawmakers try to understand the planning and financing behind the rally, according to multiple people familiar with the panel’s work,” the Post is reporting before adding, “Pierson, a former Trump campaign aide, was initially brought in to assist with the rally by Wren, according to two people involved in the event. Three days before Jan. 6, Pierson raised concerns to Meadows about Wren’s proposed speakers. She wrote in a text to Meadows: ‘Caroline Wren has decided to move forward with the original psycho list. So, I’m done. I can’t be a part of embarrassing POTUS any further.'”

As politics infects public health, private companies profit

For some counties and cities that share a public health agency with other local governments, differences over mask mandates, business restrictions, and other covid preventive measures have strained those partnerships. At least two have been pushed past the breaking point.

A county in Colorado and a small city in Southern California are splitting from their longtime public health agencies to set up their own local departments. Both Douglas County, Colorado, and West Covina, California, plan to contract some of their health services to private entities.

In Douglas County, Colorado, which is just south of Denver and has one of the nation’s highest median household incomes, many residents had opposed mask mandate guidance from the Tri-County Health Department, a partnership among Adams, Arapahoe, and Douglas counties. Tri-County issued a mask order for the counties’ school districts in September 2021 and, within days, conservative Douglas County announced its commissioners had voted unanimously to form its own health department.

Douglas County, which in 1966 joined what was then called the Tri-County District Health Department, is phasing out of the partnership, with plans to exit entirely by the end of this year. It has already taken over many of its own covid relief efforts from Tri-County.

It is contracting things like covid case investigation, contact tracing, and isolation and quarantine guidance to a private consultant, Jogan Health Solutions, founded in early 2021. The contract is reportedly worth $1.5 million.

“We believe the greatest challenges are behind us … those associated with being one of three counties with differing and competing public health demands, on a limited budget,” Douglas County spokesperson Wendy Manitta Holmes said in a statement.

Daniel Dietrich, Jogan Health’s president, declined a request for an interview. “All of the data that Jogan Health is collecting is being relayed directly to Douglas County so that public policy aligns with real-time data to keep the residents of Douglas County safe,” Jogan Health spokesperson Sam Shaheen said in a prepared statement.

A similar situation is playing out east of Los Angeles, in West Covina, California. Its City Council has voted to terminate its relationship with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health over disagreements about covid shutdowns.

West Covina officials have criticized the county health department’s covid restrictions as a one-size-fits-all approach that may work for the second-largest city in the U.S., but not their suburb of about 109,500 people. West Covina plans to join Long Beach, Pasadena, and Berkeley as one of a small number of California cities with its own health agency. A date for the separation has not been set.

As in Douglas County, West Covina plans to contract some services to a private consultant, Transtech Engineers, that works mainly on city engineering projects and federal contracts, according to its website. Transtech officials did not respond to requests for comment.

West Covina Councilman Tony Wu and area family physician Dr. Basil Vassantachart are leading efforts to form the city’s own department. They hope L.A. County’s oversight of about 10 million people — “bigger than some states,” as Vassantachart noted — can be broken up into regional departments.

Amitabh Chandra, who directs health policy research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, said the private sector won’t necessarily have better answers to a public health problem. “It might be the case that they’re good at delivering on some parts of what needs to be done, but other parts still have to be done in-house,” Chandra said.

Jeffrey Levi, a professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University, suggests there are too many local health departments in the U.S. and there should be more regionalization, rather than splitting into smaller departments.

“It’s very hard to effectively spend money and build the foundational capabilities that are associated with a meaningful public health department,” Levi said. “Doing this just because of anger at something like a mask ordinance is really unfortunate.”

Levi noted that public health departments are responsible for everything from restaurant and septic system inspections to administering the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, a federal food assistance program. If a department is not adequately resourced or prepared, residents could see lapses in food or water safety efforts in their community, Levi said.

“L.A. County Public Health Department is one of the most sophisticated, and one of the most robust health departments in the country,” Levi said. “You are losing access to just a wide, wide range of both expertise and services that will never be replicable at the local level. Never.”

“The public will be hurt in ways that are not instantly measurable,” he added.

The most recent major private-sector takeover of public health was a flop. A private nonprofit, the Institute for Population Health, took over Detroit’s public health functions in 2012 as the city was approaching bankruptcy.

The experiment failed, leaving a private entity unable to properly oversee public funding and public health concerns placed on the back burner amid the city’s economic woes. Residents also didn’t have a say in where the money went, and the staff on the city’s side was stripped down and couldn’t properly monitor the nonprofit’s use of the funds. By 2015, most services transferred back to the city as Detroit emerged from bankruptcy in 2014.

“That private institute thought it was going to issue governmental orders until it was informed it had no power,” said Denise Chrysler, who directs the Network for Public Health Law’s Mid-States Region at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

In Colorado, Tri-County’s deputy director, Jennifer Ludwig, expressed concerns about Douglas County creating non-covid programs essential to the functioning of a public health department.

“We have programs and services that many single-county health departments are not able to do just because of the resources that we can tap into,” Ludwig said. “Building that from scratch is a huge feat and will take many, many, many years.”

There are also practical benefits. A larger health department, according to Ludwig, is more competitive in securing grant funding, can attract and retain high-quality expertise like a data team, and can buy supplies in bulk.

But West Covina’s Wu accepts that the city will not be able to build its department overnight. “You have to start small,” he said.

Douglas County and West Covina face another key snag: hiring amid a national public health worker shortage. Douglas County officials say they are conducting a national search for an executive director who will determine the new health department’s staffing needs.

Before Jan. 6, I knew violence was coming. I know how far men like Trump will go to win

On January 6, 2021, I received a message from Karla, my best friend, containing a single question: “How did you know?”

Washington, D.C., was under siege by violent insurrectionists, who were directed by then-president Donald Trump to storm the Capitol to stop the certification of the election that he’d lost to Joe Biden. Karla was shocked and confused as the attack unfolded and couldn’t understand how I had warned her of the likelihood of such violence months earlier.

“I dated a man like Trump,” I said. “I know how far they will go to win.”

I spent the entire year of my life prior to that day trying to wrestle freedom for myself and my family from the grip of my abusers: My ex and the United States of America. After allowing me to return to my homeland Trinidad and Tobago with our two kids on a quest to escape American racism, their father enlisted the U.S. court system to try to reclaim control of my life by falsely alleging I was a kidnapper.

“You want to go to jail?” he taunted and threatened during conversations.

I was horrified that he would go so far to rope me back into our abusive relationship. One that, despite my many attempts to fix it and make it work, engulfed me in constant pain, disappointment and toxicity. But I had already received a message from the universe, and it had different plans for me: During Carnival 2020 my sister Niki came bearing an unexpected message. One that promised we would be free.

As the maxi snaked through the hills of Maraval, the cool breeze was both refreshing and invigorating. It was 4 a.m. on February 24, 2020, Carnival Monday morning, and I was sitting on the bus with my sister and our friend Katrina. We were making our way to Port of Spain to partake in J’ouvert and I imagined Carnival 2020 would be the best of my life. The sound of music from the big trucks beckoned us as we neared the city’s center. As soon as we came close to a band filled with big trucks blasting soca, we jumped out of the bus, excited to be lost in the sea of revelers. The bass rattled through my body, awakening my spirit. I sipped my drink as my body twisted and swayed in appreciation of the rhythm. People chipped, wined, and rolled their waists. The cloak of respectability had been cast aside.

I turned to Niki and her face was contorted with emotion.

“The ancestors, they are here,” she said.

Tears were streaming down her face.

“They said we are going to be free this year,” Niki cried out, louder this time. “We are going to be free.”

“We are already free,” I said to Niki before breaking from our group to wine with a random man.

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“Tiff, it was so beautiful,” Niki said in a whisper later that day. “The message I got from the ancestors:

“We are going to be free.”

I couldn’t help but trip over the way the statement undermined my current moment of bliss. Why was our freedom a matter for the future, when we had everything I could’ve dreamed of at that moment? I pushed aside her pronouncement, not allowing the unease it had spurred to take over me.

Then early one sunny morning months later while scrolling through Facebook, I watched the video of George Floyd taking his last breaths under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. I scrolled through the day’s news headlines and terror came crashing in on me like a rogue wave. Suddenly I was back in America, plunged into an abyss of systemic racism captured in heart-wrenching detail by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Michael Brown, and the endless list of names of Black children and adults who have lost their lives to police brutality. . . . As days passed and deaths from COVID-19 and from the protests began to mount, it became even more clear to us abroad how precarious remaining in the U.S. would’ve been. If I had not returned to Trinidad with my family — my sister, our three kids and my mom who was a nurse for years before finally retiring — we could’ve been a part of those statistics.

“Mommy, look—chocolate!” My daughter’s sweet voice came tumbling in like a lifeline, lifting me out of the depths of America’s darkness.

She extended her small brown hands toward me, covered in melted, sticky gooeyness. I reached out to pull her in close, burying my face in the nape of her neck. Her tiny body comforted me. The tides turned and I noticed the sun was still shining, the breeze was still blowing, and we were safe. Not a day went by that I didn’t celebrate: we escaped.

Not too long after that, I stumbled upon a song a Trinidadian artist, Jiselle Singer, released called “Billion Dollar Dream.” The sound of the artist’s sweet voice posed questions that were the most pressing to me in that moment:

Will you stand up?
Will you stand up?
Will you stand up for rights?
Will you get up?
Will you get up?
Don’t give the fight

I listened to the song while on the beach and was overcome with gratitude and sadness for the sacrifices of those who came before us and died in bondage with only the dream and hope that the next generation could experience true freedom. For those whose lives were claimed or tormented by the evils of racism and all other forms of abuse. Through my DNA and that of every Black person in the Western Hemisphere, our African ancestors and their stories live on. It’s a story of survival. However, as I scanned the moonlit ocean and my eyes fell upon my mom, daughter, and son on its sandy shores, exchanging whispers and giggles while pointing at colorful Christmas lights strung upon a nearby tree, I realized that Black life is not defined simply by survival but by magic. All of the forces of good, both seen and unseen, had conspired to put us all together, safely, in that beautiful moment. That night, I recognized I was not alone in battle. And I would never give up the fight.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear, I heard my mom whisper.

Her mantra floated away into the universe. Finally, I understood the power of living on a Black woman’s prayer.

“Black American Refugee” by Tiffanie Drayton

A memoir about “escaping the narcissism of the American Dream”

After following her mother to the U.S. at a young age, one woman must come to terms with how systematic racism and trauma keep the American Dream inaccessible to Black people.

$23.92 at Bookshop

This saffron-packed chickpea and almond pasta will transport you to Spain

They say desperation is the mother of invention, right? Something like that.

In my case, a months-long drought of Spanish chorizo at the grocery store took me down a path of recipe tinkering that resulted in a vegan pasta dish that — dare I say it — makes me feel downright smug.

It all started at least a decade ago, when I stumbled upon this excellent 2007 recipe for spaghetti with chorizo and almonds from Epicurious. Spanish chorizo’s beguiling subtlety shines when paired with such like-minded co-stars as garlic, dry white wine and floral saffron — then tossed with pasta and the welcomed heft of creamy chickpeas and toasted almonds.

The resulting dish is gorgeous and balanced — tinted orange from the rendered chorizo and saffron-tinged stock. It promptly joined my regular cooking rotation, where it deliciously remained until I could never seem to find Spanish chorizo at my local grocery store.

Mexican chorizo proved too strongly seasoned to work as a replacement; nor could I nail down a satisfying dry-cured pork substitute. So I instead leaned into the dish’s other alluringly subtle components, most of which happen to be vegan. I subbed in vegetable stock for chicken broth — mainly because it’s my preferred boxed stock where flavor is concerned. I subbed in lemon juice for the wine because I always have plenty of the former on hand. But over time, I appreciated its pronounced citrus tang, particularly for how it brightens that vintagey saffron.

The finished dish is elegantly understated and a textural delight. (See? There I go with the smugness.) I’m not entirely sure when the vegan version officially replaced the original in my monthly rotation. However, I can tell you that my self-righteousness transcends time.

***

Recipe: Saffron and chickpea pasta

Yields

2 servings

Prep Time

5 minutes

Cook Time

20 minutes

Ingredients

Salt, as needed

1 box spaghetti

Olive oil, as needed

6 fat garlic cloves, thinly sliced

1 14-ounce can chickpeas, rinsed and drained

½ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley, plus a handful more for garnish

Pinch red pepper flakes

½ teaspoon crumbled saffron threads

Juice of one juicy lemon (or 1 ½ if your lemon is stingy)

⅓ cup low-sodium vegetable stock

½ cup slivered or sliced almonds, dry toasted in a skillet (save a tiny handful for garnish, please)

Handful of fresh chive blades, minced (optional)

Directions

While you bring a large, generously salted pot of water to a boil for your pasta, heat a heavy-bottomed pot or skillet over medium-high. Add a generous ¼ cup of olive oil to the skillet. When it shimmers, add the garlic, chickpeas, parsley, red pepper flakes, saffron and a large pinch of salt.
Sauté until the chickpeas soften a little and the garlic just turns golden.
Add the lemon juice and vegetable stock, cover the skillet, and bring to a boil. Remove the lid, reduce the heat to medium low, and simmer until the liquid reduces by half or so. Taste it at some point during the simmer stage, adjusting as needed with lemon juice and salt.
Cook your pasta until it is al dente, then add it promptly to the skillet along with the toasted almonds and a glug of olive oil; toss until everything is yellow-tinged and glossy.
Plate in warmed shallow bowls, garnished with the rest of the herbs and almonds and another shiny drizzle of olive oil.

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Make pasta night special with Martha Stewart’s sausage and kale stuffed shells

While spring is on the horizon, many of us are still experiencing the tail-end of some dreary winter weather. If you’re running low on dinner ideas and want something that will nourish your tummy and soul, then you might want to try these sausage and kale stuffed shells from Martha Stewart.

This dish has got all the good stuff you’d expect in a pasta casserole dish, plus the added benefit of being freezer friendly. You can double up while prepping and get two dinners for the effort of one!

First you’ll cook your jumbo pasta shells in salted water (no oil!) for about five minutes. Then you’ll take some E.V.O.O and add it to a nonstick skillet over medium high heat. You’ll then add in your spicy Italian sausage that’s been removed from the casing and break it up with a spoon while making sure it cooks evenly. This takes about five minutes.

Transfer the sausage to a plate and add your chopped kale leaves to the pan, along with two tablespoons of water. You should only cook for around two minutes, until the kale is wilted. Season to taste, and combine the kale and sausage. Once it has cooled completely, you can roughly chop

Now it’s stuffing time!

Combine your ricotta, Parmesan, mozzarella and sausage mixture, and season to taste. Take about two tablespoons of the mixture to fill each shell. Then, you’ll prepare the final construction for the baking. Take a 9 by 13-inch baking dish, and spread your marinara sauce of choice on the bottom. Top with your stuffed shells, and add another layer of sauce over top of them. Sprinkle your remaining cheese and cover with parchment lined foil.

Here’s where the choose your own adventure part of the dish comes in:

If you want to freeze: put it in the freezer for one hour, then remove, wrap the entire dish in plastic wrap, and store in your freezer for up to three months.

If you want to bake: Preheat your oven to 375 degrees and remove the plastic from your dish. Bake it covered, until it is heated through and the cheese is bubbling around the edges (an hour). Then remove your cover and allow the top of the dish to reach toasty golden brownness (20 mins). Let stand 15 minutes before serving. You’ll be left with a dinner that is hearty, satisfying, and technically has vegetables! Find the full recipe here.

More super simple weeknight meals:

Dear Hollywood: In times of international crisis, speechlessness is always preferable to stupidity

Crisis and its twin, tragedy, remind us of our frailty. One cannot fairly call them great levelers, since each of us is affected and reacts differently according to our resources. But they also engender a common feeling of not quite knowing what to do.

That was not the case for marginally famous actor AnnaLynne McCord though. Apparently the news of Russia invading Ukraine moved her read an open letter directed toward…the violent despot responsible for starting this war. Cringe-inducing as that description is by itself, the product is so much worse.

“Dear President Vladimir Putin,” McCord says, gazing into the camera, her blonde waves tousled just so, “I’m so sorry that I was not your mother.”

…Come again?

Dear Mister President Vladimir Putin… pic.twitter.com/LbDFBHVWJf

— AnnaLynne McCord (@IAMannalynnemcc) February 24, 2022

You read right. McCord, best known for playing the heel on the “90210” reboot, is chalking up the Russian strongman’s impulse to take over a neighboring nation by military force to poor parenting. Then, compounding horror upon horror, we soon realize she’s not reading a letter but performing a poem.

“If I was your mother, you would have been so loved/Held in the arms of joyous light/ Never would this story’s plight /The world unfurled before our eyes/A pure demise of a nation sitting peaceful under a night sky…”

Throughout the ages, war has moved artists to create works that speak to the moment. But this is as far from Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” as a person can get. And sure, who among us hasn’t wondered whether the right intervention could have prevented Adolph Hitler from becoming a genocidal fascist? Still, this is also a far cry from that famous “Doctor Who” episode that played witih such a scenario. McCord’s two minute and 20 second word drool is so godawful, in fact, that one can almost picture Amanda McKittrick Ros crying out for mercy.

But the worst novelist ever did not have followers on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok feeding her ego with likes, retweets and replies. On normal days such followers and fans instill in celebrities a duty to keep their purported lines of communication open and parasocial relationship tanks topped off. So when disaster strikes they may feel obligated respond to enormity with rhyming couplets – or, like action star John Cena, a wish that the superhero he plays on TV were real.

“If I could somehow summon the powers of a real life #Peacemaker I think this would be a great time to do so,” he tweeted on Thursday – and sure, there’s nothing wrong with calling for peace.

But at best, Cena’s tweet was interpreted as using breaking news about a potentially catastrophic incursion to promote his HBO Max show. At worst, he’s wishing that a fictional vigilante who vows to kill men, women and children for peace were real at a time when Russian soldiers are actually threatening the lives of men, women and children, and have killed at least 130 of them.

McCord’s idiocy follows in the grand tradition of Gal Gadot’s tone-deaf “Imagine” video, offered in the spirit of helping the world feel better as the pandemic first peaked in 2020 and tens of thousands of people were dying, by gathering other famous folks to join her in crooning a song that opens with, “Imagine there’s no heaven.”

This was followed by the famous “I Take Responsibility” video submitted by white celebrities apologizing en masse for not doing enough to speak up against racism over the years. Two years later we can see how very helpful that was.

What we are witnessing is another chronic flare-up of celebrity foot-in-mouth disease in the social media age. Unfortunately, there is not a cream for that, nor a cure. Be it pandemic, environmental disaster, a righteous protest or the outbreak of a conflict, you can count on at least one famous person to meet the moment with utter stupidity.

This condition is not necessarily limited to stars running wild on TikTok, Twitter or Instagram, either, although slices captured in other media inevitably go viral. Take this moment from a recent episode of “The View,” in which co-host Sunny Hostin presented statistics intended to stress the ramifications of Putin’s actions.

“Estimates are 50,000 Ukrainians will be dead or wounded, and that this is going to start a humanitarian crisis, a refugee crisis, in Europe,” Hostin says. “We’re talking about 5 million people that that are going to be displaced.”

To which fellow host Joy Behar replied, “Well, I’m scared of what’s going to happen in Western Europe too. You know, you just, you plan a trip, you want to go there, I want to go to Italy for four years, I haven’t been able to make it because of the pandemic. And now this, you know?”

The singularly dire meaning of this moment is being experienced around the world, either in real time or close to the moment of occurrence, through our social media feeds. Unedited video of air strikes, bombings and ground confrontations is readily accessible via multiple online sources. Firefights and other combat footage are being uploaded to Reddit. Updates stream on Instagram live.

It was entirely possible to encounter Cena’s Peacemaker wish an entry or two removed from the video capturing the bold last words from the 13 Ukrainian soldiers killed on Snake Island for defying a Russian warship’s order to surrender. Mixing such urgent media with indulgent platitudes only sharpens the level of cognitive dissonance we’re collectively experiencing as we witness these escalating hostilities from afar. Tens of thousands of people are expected to die or be wounded. Millions will become refugees. But yes, let’s not forget that luxury vacations are likely to be further delayed.

Not all stars fall victim to their half-baked concepts. Some are acting in ways that are on brand while being of service. Sean Penn is in Kyiv to film footage of invasion for a documentary he’s producing, which is a very Sean Penn move. He’s also directly bearing witness to what Ukrainian civilians are enduring.

While Bravo reality producer Andy Cohen spelled out PEACE in Wordle tiles, took a screenshot of that image for an Instagram story and called it good, former “Real Housewives of New York” star Bethenny Frankel mobilized millions in supplies and funds to directly assist refugees crossing the border into Poland.

Does this burnish Frankel’s image? Of course. But she’s on the ground in Europe with her charity’s team members.

Then there are those who cannot help but be personally invested because they have ties there, whether distant – as singer songwriter Regina Spektor shared in a personal note coupled with a family photo on Instagram – or direct.

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While McCord was sharing her rainbows, “Dancing with the Stars” professional dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who hails from Ukraine, has been sharing his experiences of being trapped in Kyiv as a civilian.

Chmerkovskiy was participating in the production of Ukraine’s version of “World of Dance” as a judge. In an Instagram video shared as the assault began, he is candid about being scared and confesses guilt at knowing he has the privilege of being able to escape while so many of his fellow countrymen cannot, including friends and loved ones.

He also offers an open letter, targeting a more humane constituency.

“Dear Russians, I know you know me,” he says. “…I am not at this point someone who is pleading, you know, for someone else’s safety from a far distance, from a safe distance. I’m somebody who’s about to go into a bomb shelter because sh*t’s going down, right?”

He continues, “So I think that in 2022 civilized world, this is not the way we do things. And I think that as a powerful, forward-thinking nation… I think the Russians need to get up and actually say something because no one’s opinion is being heard. This is all one man’s ambition of just … something. However it sounds, however convenient it sounds in Moscow, however comfortable you are, where you are in Russia, I just, I just don’t think that this is this is the right thing, that these are the right steps and this is the correct action.”

Chmerkovskiy goes on to unintentionally contradict himself by saying he doesn’t know what words to use, unaware of the bravery it takes to defy the very human instinct to lapse into speechlessness in the face of terror. The clarity of his unscripted message may even move at least one Russian citizen among 890,000 Instagram followers to answer his call.

Other widely known figures might amplify that message as well, along with links to relief agencies or other resources for Ukrainians seeking escape or assistance.

And there are artists who have crafted the right sentiments for this moment, whether they were written years ago by poets like Ilya Kaminsky or created recently, like this verse Amanda Gorman shared on Thursday.

There is no such thing as gentle war.
There is no peace
That can’t be flung aside.
Our only enemy is that which would
Make us enemies to each other.

— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) February 24, 2022

Gorman’s words are meant to comfort and inspire. They might even prompt another famous person to generate something. In these dark times of escalating conflict and literary censorship, I would never tell any well-intentioned person to shut up.

However, based on recent displays, let’s cross our fingers that the next star aspiring to show how much they care workshops said concept before posting it. If the world’s dictators have no use for terrible poetry or juvenile wishes, assume the rest of us don’t either. Silence may not be an option, but retweeting the wisdom of more adept thinkers is free.

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10 inspiring facts about the Tuskegee Airmen

The first Black pilots to serve in the United States military — along with the navigators, mechanics, instructors, and other personnel who supported them — are today remembered as the Tuskegee Airmen. Established in 1941, they built an impressive combat record, helped the Allies win World War II, and put the U.S. armed forces on the road to integration.

1. The Tuskegee institute trained the country’s first black military pilots

Now called Tuskegee University, the Tuskegee Institute was founded in 1881 as a school for training Black teachers. In its first five decades, the school employed and produced leading Black scientists and thinkers, including botanist George Washington Carver and architect Robert Taylor. In 1939, the institute secured federal funding under the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) to train Black pilots in response to the outbreak of war in Europe; the program intended to create a pool of trained aviators for potential military service. The institute quickly leased an airstrip, acquired multiple planes, and hired its own instructor pilots. The Tuskegee Institute was one of six historically Black colleges and universities that participated in the CPTP.

2. The Tuskegee Airmen had roots in Illinois

Before 1941, the U.S. military — which was officially segregated — prohibited Black pilots. Civil rights organizations and Black newspapers pressured the government to open up the role to Black aviators. In 1941, the government contracted Tuskegee Institute to offer primary training for the military’s first Black airmen. On March 22, 1941, the 99th Pursuit Squadron (later the 99th Fighter Squadron) was formally constituted [PDF]. Not only was it the very first Tuskegee Airmen unit, but it was also the first Black flying unit of any kind in American military history. The inaugural members began their training at Chanute Field in central Illinois, about 16 miles north of Champaign, Illinois. But they didn’t stay there very long. By the end of the year, the 99th had relocated to Tuskegee, Alabama.

3. No one called them “Tuskegee Airmen” during World War II

The “Tuskegee Airmen” nickname was coined by author Charles E. Francis in the title of his 1955 book [PDF]. The Tuskegee Airmen encompass several different squadrons and groups with connections to the training facilities in Tuskegee: the 99th, 100th, 301st, and 302nd squadrons, which together made up the 332nd Fighter Group. The 447th Bombardment Group, a Black bomber unit, is also included under the Tuskegee Airmen umbrella, along with the instructors, mechanics, and ground crew at the Tuskegee Institute’s training facilities between 1941 and 1946.

4. Eleanor Roosevelt supported the Tuskegee Airmen when others didn’t

The first lady put a spotlight on the Tuskegee program when she visited the Tuskegee Institute in 1941. Charles A. Anderson, a pilot now known as “the father of Black aviation,” was its chief civilian flight instructor. At Roosevelt’s request, he took her on an aerial tour and the pair spent 40 minutes flying over the countryside together. The resulting news photograph of Roosevelt and Anderson helped to dispel the notion that Black Americans were unfit to fly aircraft — and encouraged many to apply to the program.

5. The Tuskegee Airmen built an exemplary record in their bomber escort missions

Members in the 332nd Fighter Group were tasked with escorting bomber planes on their missions. The escorts protected the bombers in flight and attacked enemy aircraft that might fire at the bombers. The Tuskegee Airmen flew these important missions around the Mediterranean theater and racked up an admirable number of hits. According to historian Daniel Haulman, the Tuskegee Airmen flew 312 missions, of which 179 were bomber escort missions, between June 1944 and April 1945. “They lost escorted bombers to enemy aircraft on only seven of those missions,” totaling 27 American planes, he said in an interview with the National World War II Museum. Each of the six other escort groups in the U.S. command lost an average of 46 bombers [PDF].

6. Some Tuskegee Airmen were dubbed “Red Tails”

During World War II, individual fighter groups set themselves apart by giving the tails of their planes a distinctive paint job. This made it easier to coordinate large flight formations and helped bomber crews recognize friendly aircraft. In July 1944, members of the 332nd Fighter Group began flying P-51 Mustang planes with tails painted solid red [PDF]. Soon, the Tuskegee Airmen (as a group) were nicknamed the “red tails.” A 2012 George Lucas-produced film by the same name fictionalizes this unit’s success in shooting down German fighter planes.

7. The first three Black generals in the U.S. Air Force were Tuskegee Airmen

The life of four-star general Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. (1912-2002) is a series of firsts. Davis was the son of the Army’s first Black general, and in 1932, became the first Black cadet admitted to the U.S. Military Academy since Reconstruction. The career officer served for 33 years, fought in three wars, and commanded the 332nd Fighter Group in the Tuskegee program. Daniel “Chappie” James, Jr. (1920-1978) served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam, and became the first four-star African American general in any U.S. military branch in 1975 when he was appointed the commander of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). After enlisting in the Army Air Forces in 1942, Lucius Theus (1922-2007) served as a training officer at the Tuskegee Air Field before going on to serve or command at numerous U.S. and international air bases and at the Air Force headquarters. He was the first Black combat support officer to be promoted to major general.

8. The Tuskegee Airmen faced segregation on base

A nonviolent protest at Freeman Field in Indiana in 1945 became known as the Freeman Field Mutiny. Its commander separated accommodations by race, which was against Army rules. When the 477th Bombardment Group was transferred there, its Black personnel were miscategorized as trainees so the base’s white officers wouldn’t have to share their officer’s club with them. On April 5, 1945, some of the Black airmen peacefully walked into the club anyway. All the Black officers at Freeman Field were then told to sign a document agreeing to “separate but equal” policies on military bases, and the 101 Black personnel who refused were arrested. Eventually, three were court-martialed and one was convicted of insubordination.

9. A Tuskegee Airman led a classified inquiry into UFOs

Robert Friend served as a wingman for Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. during WWII. He went on to direct Project Blue Book, a classified Air Force research initiative that investigated 12,618 alleged UFO sightings beginning in 1948. In 1969, the Air Force concluded that “there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ are extraterrestrial vehicles,” and shut down the project.

10. In 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal

The airmen, including military and civilian support staff, received the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States Congress for their “unique military record that inspired revolutionary reform in the armed forces.” Other Congressional Gold Medal recipients include the crew of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

Marjorie Taylor Greene defends herself for attending white nationalist conference

On Friday night, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene attended a white nationalist conference in Orlando, and then came to her own defense on Saturday, saying she had been there to “talk to the audience.”

Greene doubled down on her defense, which was part of a statement given in a recorded interview to CBS News correspondent Robert Costa, saying she does not personally know Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist leader who organized the event in question, held on Friday night at the Orlando World Center Marriott.

“I don’t know what his views are, so I’m not aligned with anything that may be controversial,” Greene said. “I went to his event last night to address his very large following because that is a young, very young, following and a generation I am extremely concerned about.”

News: ⁦@CBSNews⁩ pressed ⁦@RepMTG⁩ on her appearance last night at a white nationalist conference

Full video: pic.twitter.com/omoKffnnvF

— Robert Costa (@costareports) February 26, 2022

Fuentes, host of the white nationalist conference that Greene was seen at, was subpoenaed last month by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to The Hill. During the conference on Friday Greene was photographed shaking the hand of Fuentes, as reported in The Hill’s coverage.

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“In any other world, Greene speaking at a white supremacist conference where attendees have defended Vladimir Putin and praised Adolf Hitler would warrant expulsion from the caucus, to say nothing of her advocacy for violence and consistent anti-Semitism is disgusting,” DNC spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement.

Read more:

Why “greening” cities can make gentrification worse — and often doesn’t help the environment either

Running just under one and a half miles long and featuring a beautiful array of botanical gardens and art sculptures, the High Line — an elevated park in Manhattan — is a major recreational attraction to both tourists and native New Yorkers alike. Created in 2009 and inspired by the Promenade plantee in Paris, the final section of the High Line, known as “the Spur,” was completed in 2019. Since then, annual visits to the High Line jumped from 5 million to 8 million people.

But despite its immense popularity and often being touted as a success story in urban renewal, the High Line is not a boon to all. A 2020 study of the High Line found that its creation directly led to a 35% increase in home values in the area. While that might be good news for homeowners, over 75 percent of Manhattanites are renters and more apt to be evicted or suffer rent increases as a result.

Built over a formerly derelict section of the New York Central Railroad West Side Line, the walkway and area immediately surrounding the High Line prior to its construction were often characterized as “gritty.” The nearby Chelsea section of Manhattan, where two large public housing developments are located, is historically home to many Black and brown residents. However, the High Line’s cascading price impacts on surrounding real estate spurred rapid closures of local businesses and pushed many lower income renters out of the area.

The High Line isn’t an isolated cautionary tale. Many municipalities are pushing for or have implemented “green” features that have led to major rent hikes in the area — and, in turn, displacement of working class and low income families. In fact, the phenomenon is so commonplace it even has a name: eco-gentrification.

The sad irony is the people most likely to be displaced by eco-gentrification are those most in need of its benefits. In the past few years, there has been an emergence of research confirming that low income communities — and particularly low income communities of color — have far fewer trees and conservation lands in their borders as compared to more affluent communities.

This scarcity of green space contributes to profound public health inequities, including greater rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Lack of tree cover also translates into actual temperature disparities, with poorer neighborhoods experiencing more sweltering conditions in the summer months and higher incidences of heatstroke.

“Gentrification wouldn’t be as much of a problem if displacement didn’t follow,” says Melissa Checker, an associate professor of anthropology and environmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of The Sustainability Myth, a book that examines eco-gentrification in New York City.

“The problem is ‘greening’ projects get tied to property values,” says Checker.

And it isn’t only parks and greenways that can cause eco-gentrification.

In the Boston metro area, since plans for the Green Line extension of the subway for the Union Square section of the City of Somerville were finalized in 2016, property values for that neighborhood have increased approximately 40 percent. Union Square is home to a large population of Haitian, Brazilian and Latinx communities and cultures that are gradually disappearing with escalating rents.

Over in Boston proper itself, the opening of the Blue Hill Avenue station in Dorchester (a Black-majority neighborhood) as part of the Fairmount Line of the commuter rail ushered in steep rent increases that threaten the ability of long-time residents to remain in the area.

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“The lack of stops was accurately described as transit racism….the trains went through communities of color but hardly stopped there,” a spokesperson for City Life/Vida Urbana — a Boston tenants’ rights organization that was part of the coalition that advocated for the opening of the Blue Hill Avenue station — wrote in an email to Salon. “At the same time…all social efforts by community activists to improve the neighborhood create value that is then privatized by real estate investors in the form of raising rents and flipping buildings.”

This real estate response is enabled by a larger pattern of local governments in urban and ex-urban communities across the country embracing free market-friendly “Yes In My Backyard” policies. Such policies usually favor new development projects that foster increased “density,” often boasting of their climate benefits, regardless of their affordability to residents.

Yet one major study from UC-Berkeley found that the carbon savings from dense cities and suburbs are usually undermined by the sprawl they cause. The study authors also indicated that densifying suburbs could in fact potentially increase carbon emissions by creating their own sprawl and offshoot suburbs, as well as concentrating affluence. Indeed, people with higher incomes have much higher carbon footprints than those with lower incomes and as such, more affluent neighborhoods and towns have higher carbon emission rates.

As rent prices increase with the growing density of a given community, lower income people are often displaced and so are less able to access the improved public transit and the other green features that often go along with density plans.

“[W]hen low income people are pushed further and further out, it increases their emissions for traveling by cars—cars that are often less efficient and emit more [greenhouse gasses],” says Jennifer Rice, an urban geographer with the University of Georgia, who has researched eco-gentrification trends in Seattle.

Further compounding this problem is a growing trend of rental buildings being built with little-to-no off-street parking spaces partially as an effort to “go green.” Some affordable housing complexes are even attempting to mandate that tenants do not own cars at all in the name of sustainability. However, car ownership among lower income demographics is strongly linked to greater job stability and economic mobility and — for chronically ill and disabled folks — significantly better healthcare access.

“Any policy that requires major off-street parking reductions for affordable housing while maintaining exclusionary parking access [on street]…is inequitable on its face,” says Michael Spotts, a senior visiting research fellow at the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing.

Instead, Spotts suggest municipalities employ an on-street parking permitting system as a way to reduce or eliminate off-street parking spaces for new developments. This would help lower a development’s environmental footprint (not to mention, construction costs) without risking the consequence of pushing low income residents who need cars for work or healthcare needs out of the area — and upping their emissions as a result.

Spotts also recommends that policymakers “Pay more attention to buses, which lower income people use … more than trains” as improving and extending bus services tends not have the same level of influence on rent prices as rail or subway extensions do.

When asked about other ways to ensure greening efforts in communities don’t displace marginalized residents, researchers on eco-gentrification consulted for this article all had one common response: expanding investments in low income housing.

“If cities require inclusionary zoning with units affordable for households who make 80% of the Area Median Income, it is unlikely that low-income folks can afford them,” says Alessandro Rigolon, an assistant professor at the department of City & Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah.

Rice agrees.

“Mainstream thinking that just getting out of the way for developers to build more and more — often called ‘increasing supply’ is not going to get us out of the affordability or carbon gentrification problem,” says Rice, who notes that most developers are not interested in building low income housing in hot market neighborhoods. “We really need massive investments in public green housing.”

Additionally, new developments tend to mostly contain one bedroom or studio apartments as a way to be “greener” — which can pose a major problem for low income families.

“One bedrooms and studios are cheaper units to build….[but] these are clearly too small for families, and especially multi-generational families…who might be at risk of displacement,” says Rigolon. “So unit size also needs to be considered….to help longtime residents of color remain in their neighborhood.”

Other solutions to eco-gentrification could be re-examining policies that were expected to increase equity via greening efforts but instead have had the opposite impact.

Take the Massachusetts Community Preservation Act, or CPA.

Though it is a state law, municipalities in the Commonwealth can opt to adopt the CPA by ballot vote. The Act then requires those municipalities to contribute funds from their own property taxes to subsidize their intended projects, that the state government then subsequently matches.

As any proposed projects are required to be partially funded by property taxes, it automatically privileges upper class towns and cities over financially disadvantaged ones. Some reports have suggested the CPA has enabled some white-majority communities in the state to conserve and add green spaces — and as a result, grow their affluence — while largely forsaking (or even altogether abandoning) the other major goal of the Act’s creation: funding affordable housing.

So, while greening projects in traditionally depressed communities can increase rents and push low income people out, programs like the CPA can also be used in already-affluent towns in Massachusetts to invest in “sustainable” projects at the expense of affordable housing. This has had the consequence of making these advantaged communities even more elite and exclusionary — and their green amenities even more inaccessible — to low income individuals.

These kinds of impacts are why Checker believes there should be increased investments in rental voucher programs like Section 8, as well as tighter regulations on rental prices through policies like rent control and stabilization.

The spokesperson for City Life/Vida Urbana, which is a proponent of recent legislative attempts to return rent control — which was banned in Massachusetts by ballot vote in 1994 — back to the Boston area, couldn’t agree more: “We back the [environmental] improvements, but we demand some control over the market that escalates rents.”

Read more on cities and environmentalism:

How to cook lobster tails perfectly, every single time

If you grew up playing The Sims like I did, then you know exactly what lobster thermidor is. Or at least, you know what it is in the context of the popular RPG (role playing game): It’s the final meal your simulated character learns after studying the culinary arts over the course of a few days. As in real life, in The Sims, the more you cook and the more cookbooks you read, the more recipes you learn, and the faster your simulated character can graduate from salad to spaghetti to tri-tip steak, then finally to lobster thermidor.

The goal is always lobster thermidor.

So how does this relate to perfectly cooked lobster? Lobster thermidor is, for one, a dish I’d like to eat every single day. It also calls for lobster tail meat, which must be cooked properly in order to enjoy the succulent, sweet flavor of lobster and maintain its juicy texture, wihtout chewiness. If you bear with me for a few more minutes while I spread the love for lobster thermidor, I’ll then get into how to thaw frozen lobster tails (which are much more accessible if you don’t live in Maine and want to indulge in the crustacean year-round) and how to cook lobster tails.

In order to satisfy my curiosity and save you time and money, I tested four of the best ways to cook lobster tails, including steamed, broiled, boiled, and grilled. But first, back to lobster thermidor.

What Exactly Is Lobster Thermidor?

It’s a gratin dish from the ’60s and ’70s where lobster tail meat has been folded into a creamy mélange of egg yolks, brandy, mustard, and Gruyère cheese. It’s rich and delicious and hardly anyone makes it anymore.

Why? Because lobster’s expensive as heck. If I lived on the Maine coast I’d have access to fresh lobster 24/7. But unfortunately I do not, so instead I enjoy it at home on special occasions like Valentine’s Day, my birthday, or a Wednesday night.

If you can’t get whole, live lobsters at your corner fishmonger, then I recommend heading to your local Whole Foods or Costco to buy frozen lobster tails.

But be warned: The two are vastly different. At the Whole Foods fish counter, you’ll be able to find individual, uncooked (previously frozen) lobster tails for around $10 each. These are the small, fleshy, Maine-like ones that are sweet and flavorful. The Costco lobster tails might be more affordable by the pound, but you’ll notice that they’re a different breed than the American ones, i.e. they’re large and spiny and from places like Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, etc. (I also think they’re a little less flavorful, but that’s just me.) But lobster is expensive enough and inaccessible enough that if you find a great product, stock up (that’s the beauty of the pre-frozen stuff anyway).

Whatever you end up getting, be sure to thaw them properly before cooking.

How To Thaw Frozen Lobster Tails

As you would a chicken or a turkey, just plunge your frozen lobster tails into cold water for about 30 minutes, or until fully thawed. You could also thaw them in the refrigerator, but the water method is significantly faster.

Next, decide how you’d like to cook your lobster: Steamed? Broiled? Grilled? There are many ways, and to test each one, I decided to treat my family to a lobster tail dinner. Here’s what happened:

Lobster tail, four ways. Photo by Eric Kim