Innehållsförteckning för August 12, 2019 från The Nation

Forgotten History Although David Cole’s review of Steve Luxenberg’s book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation [“Inherently Unequal,” July 15/22] fails to delve into an important forerunner of this historic case, one hopes Luxenberg did not. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 expanded the 14th Amendment to include public accommodations, and this expansion was tested by a black man, Bird Gee, who was denied service at a hotel. His case made it to the Supreme Court, which not only ruled against Gee but used the case to annul the Civil Rights Act, thereby setting the stage for Plessy and 70 more years of Jim Crow. In a nifty coincidence, however, Gee’s grandnephew Loren Miller, a prominent civil rights attorney, filed the appellate…

Litchfield, Connecticut It was a curious moment in the annals of American literary fetishism: On Saturday, July 20, an auction house in Litchfield held an online sale of 134 lots from the estate of Philip Roth, who died in 2018. In the run-up to the big day, the bidding did not seem especially brisk, though there was some interest in the master’s Sandy Koufax baseball card, two IBM Selectric typewriters, a badly chipped Pat and Dick Nixon souvenir plate, and a few pieces of good furniture—the leavings of a man well known for taking to heart Flaubert’s advice that writers should live modestly if they want to be wild and original in their work. (Were the contents of Philip’s Manhattan apartment to come up for sale, they would be even…

When Donald Trump launched his recent racist attack on four congresswomen of color, much of the punditocracy focused on the question of whether he was deliberately creating a distraction and, if so, from which of his other outrages. One Washington Post writer theorized that it was an attempt to overshadow speculation about his possible sexcapades with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and Trump acquaintance charged with trafficking underage girls for sex. Another denied that it was a distraction from the reporting on the administration’s migrant mistreatment. New Yorker columnist Susan B. Glasser called it “a calculated political play” to preempt stories that would otherwise receive much more coverage—including the Epstein arrest, the border concentration camps, and Robert Mueller’s upcoming testimony—and credited Trump with “the extraordinary ability to get Americans to talk…

What is it about the left and the space program? Back in the summer of ’69—long before he became The Nation’s lead editorial writer—the late Andrew Kopkind pointed out the inextricable ties between American militarism on earth and our country’s higher aspirations. “We Aim at the Stars (But Hit Quang Tri),” he wrote, decrying a system “that swells the profits of the biggest military/space corporations without changing the system of distribution of those profits one whit.” Critics might say we’re still at it, still harshing the national buzz by noticing those on whose backs that giant leap was launched—just as we did at the time, when The Nation impertinently remarked that amid all the talk about “the blackness of space,” the faces on the screen were uniformly white. So perhaps…

Dear Liza, I’m a 35-year-old white woman working for an arts and community nonprofit on the South Side of Chicago. Last summer, while we were painting a mural, a 12-year-old girl from the neighborhood befriended me. Later she asked me to take her to a high school open house when her parents were working and she needed a ride. Since then, I’ve been helping her with homework and occasionally taking her and her siblings to dance lessons. Her parents, who work a lot, say they appreciate my help. A couple of months ago, I went to her school’s talent show, and this is where race comes in. Out of 200 people in this space, I appeared to be the only white person, which brought her obvious attention. She told me…

As Donald Trump ramps up his attacks on immigrants, grassroots religious organizations are pushing back. At one demonstration in mid-July, hundreds of Catholics led by the groups Faith in Public Life and Faith in Action filled the US Capitol to object to the administration’s treatment of migrant children at the border. Protesters lay on the floor of the rotunda in the shape of a cross, holding photos of minors who died in government custody. Seventy people were arrested, including several nuns. Just two days earlier, Never Again Action, a coalition of young Jews who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Movimiento Cosecha, a group fighting for the rights of undocumented immigrants, led a march from the National Mall to ICE headquarters in DC. The rally drew about 1,000 people, with…

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS DOESN’T GET A LOT OF RESPECT. THERE ARE NO monuments to the sixth president on the National Mall, his face adorns no paper currency, and history mainly remembers him for losing reelection to Andrew Jackson. But before Adams became president, he was an accomplished diplomat, representing the US government in multiple European capitals. On July 4, 1821, while serving as secretary of state, he gave a speech in which he declared that although the United States would always be sympathetic to national liberation struggles, “she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” This early warning against an interventionist foreign policy has echoed into the present. Adams’s middle name has been adopted by a newly formed think tank in Washington, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,…

Things looked good for the Democrats in 2009. Not only had Barack Obama been elected president, but for the first time in 14 years, their party controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House. Then came the 2010 midterms: In what Obama called a “shellacking,” the Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. While the headlines focused on the Republican takeover of Congress and what it meant for the rest of Obama’s presidency, the most painful losses occurred in the state races down ballot. Before 2010, the Republicans controlled 14 statehouses, and the Democrats held sway in 27. After 2010, the Republicans controlled 25 statehouses and had scored a trifecta—the governorship as well as both chambers of the legislature—in 11 states.…

125 Number of retailers bought by private equity firms since 2002 61% Percentage of layoffs in the retail sector in 2016 and 2017 that occurred at private-equity-owned companies 9 Number of the 10 largest retail bankruptcies in 2017 that were backed by private equity firms $5T Aggregate worth of private-equity-backed companies—more than the annual GDP of Japan 11 Number of Democratic presidential candidates who have received donations from employees of Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm $0 Amount given to Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns by private equity firms —Spencer Green…

In response to the inhumanity of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, workers around the country are rising up to hold accountable private employers that participate in the cruelty. In June hundreds of employees at Wayfair, a home goods e-commerce corporation, staged a walkout at the company’s headquarters in Boston to oppose its $200,000 contract furnishing a child migrant detention center in Carrizo Springs, Texas. In July leaked audio of a company meeting revealed employees of the ad agency Ogilvy Worldwide lashing out at their CEO for pursuing contracts with Customs and Border Protection. Amazon workers recently recirculated an employee letter calling on the company to cut ties with Palantir, whose software is crucial to ICE operations. WNYC uncovered e-mails that show that the data analytics firm continues to help ICE…

Go back. If you’re a nonwhite American, chances are that you’ve heard this taunt at some point in your life. Maybe it came from bullies in the schoolyard. Go back. We don’t want you here. Or it was delivered as a joke, told by colleagues around the watercooler. Hey, if you don’t like it here, you can always go home. Or it came from one of your own relatives, in the middle of a heated argument during Thanksgiving dinner. America, love it or leave it. The locale may change, the wording may be different, but the idea remains the same. You’re not fully American. The president gave this racist message his executive approval when he tweeted that four progressive female representatives—all of them from racial, ethnic, or religious minority communities—should…

THE BANNER THAT READ “MARIE NEWMAN: DEMOCRAT FOR Congress” was sandwiched between a trailer for a beauty salon and a dashing troupe of small horses in Homer Township’s annual Independence Day parade. It was noon on a clear day, and the parade meandered past tidy homes, farmland, and a cemetery shimmering in the heat. Behind the banner, a group of about 20 campaign staffers, supporters, and volunteers waved signs and nodded along to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” which blared from a speaker pulled in a red Radio Flyer wagon. The parade moved slowly, and Marie Newman jogged ahead wearing a blue campaign T-shirt and white jeans. Zigzagging across the shadeless road to shake hands with the spectators lined up on either side, she hoped she could secure their vote…

A few months back, I sat with my mother in a hotel room and asked her to tell me about how her family had left Vietnam. I knew only the barest outlines of their passage—the airlift out of the country, the refugee camps in the Philippines, their move to Arkansas and then Washington. I knew small details, taken out of context—the beautiful silk jacket with the broken zipper that turned out to be a discarded polyester lining, the first time she and her sisters ate soft pretzels. But I didn’t know the larger story of how they’d come here or what they’d left behind. I knew the distances she had traveled but had no map for my own mother’s emotional experience—settled and assimilated in America, we hardly ever spoke of…

ACROSS 1 Noticed a tool melting (4) 4 Put in other words: political center managed group of candidates (9) 10 Our dean mangled a poem (7) 11 Article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung chases star’s split with loud rumbling (7) 12 ’60s activists surround university with beer and heavy sounds (5) 13 Demonstrate switching the internal components of salt from the south of France (9) 14 It wreaks havoc with recreational equipment (5,3) 17 Boy with grand air in a skimpy bathing suit (5) 19 Peg only listening to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, et al. (5) 21 Like some grapes, after replacing sulfur with nitrogen once for no reason (8) 23 Lofty perch with snow drifting through top (5,4) 25 Spot unfinished chicken part with expression of relief (5) 28 Less…