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Bill Gindlesperger, Columnist Published 7:00 a.m. ET Sept. 2, 2020

Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway leaves position to focus on family, and her husband will also be stepping away from the Lincoln Project. USA TODAY

So who is George Conway, and why should you care?

George Conway is a 57-year-old American attorney and ultra-conservative Republican. Not a RINO (Republican in name only). He is dyed in the wool.

Conway knows Donald Trump. He was on the shortlist for appointment to U.S. solicitor general. He was also recruited for assistant attorney general heading Civil Division in U.S. Department of Justice.

Trump wanted him, because Conway is a star. Conway argued Morrison v. National Australia Bank before the U.S. Supreme Court. He won unanimously with the opinion authored by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

Twenty years ago Conway dated conservative Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham. Then he saw Kellyanne Fitzpatrick on the cover of a society magazine and was stunned. He called another friend, Ann Coulter, for an introduction.

Bill Gindlesperger(Photo: Bill Gindlesperger)

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George and Kellyanne were married in 2001, and Kellyanne Fitzgerald became Kellyanne Conway. Today they have four children and live in Washington, DC.

Kellyanne turned out to be no slouch. She is a pollster, political consultant and pundit. She worked as campaign manager and strategist in the Republican Party and was CEO of The Polling Company / Woman Trend. She became Trump's campaign manager when he ran for president.

Up until recently Kellyanne was Trumps counselor and spokesperson. She appeared regularly on Fox News. Thats why you may recognize the Conway name.

Meanwhile George Conway and Neal Katyal, another high-powered lawyer, wrote an op-ed in New York Times challenging the constitutionality of Trump's appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general after Trump fired conservative Jeff Sessions. Conway and Katyal argued Trump was overriding explicit wording in the Constitution.

George Conway sought support from members of the ultra-conservative and libertarian Federalist Society. Members were influential in selecting candidates for Trump to appoint to federal courts. They concluded Trump was betraying well-established legal norms and conservative values.

None of this went down well with Trump.

With Trump suffering from narcissism to the detriment of the country and its Constitution,George Conway founded the Lincoln Project.

This conservative Super PAC wants to Defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box. In fact the Lincoln Project is dedicated to "persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to help ensure a victory in the Electoral College, and congressional majorities that dont enable or abet Mr. Trumps violations of the Constitution".

Contrary to what Trump has tweeted, the Lincoln Project is hard right, conservative, libertarian, rule-of-law, and Constitution-based.

Trump has called George Conway a "stone cold LOSER & husband from hell".

Trump has publicly called George Conway Moonface. This racial slur is based on George Conway being half Filipino. His mother was a well-respected organic chemist from the Philippines.

George Conway grew up near Boston, graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude, and obtained a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. Thats where he was editor of Yale Law Journal and president of Yale Law Schools chapter of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society.

More: Trump is pulling the ultimate con on the American people

More: Political posturing will not change the facts about COVID-19

Several weeks ago, conservative Republican George Conway made a statement regarding COVID-19 and Trumps responsibility to the American people. Here it is:

"For Trump supporters, let me make one thing VERY clear!

For the record NO ONE is blaming the President for the virus. Let me repeat. Coronavirus is not Trumps fault.

Heres a detailed list of what we are blaming him for:

* Trump declined to use the World Health Organizations test like other nations. Back in January, over a month before the first Covid-19 case, the Chinese posted a new mysterious virus and within a week, Berlin virologists had produced the first diagnostic test. By the end of February, the WHO had shipped out tests to 60 countries. Oh, but not our government. We declined the test even as a temporary bridge until the CDC could create its own test. The question is why? We dont know but what to look for is which pharmaceutical company eventually manufactures the test and who owns the stock. Keep tuned.

* In 2018 Trump fired Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossart, whose job was to coordinate a response to global pandemics. He was not replaced.

* In 2018 Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC director for medical and bio-defense preparedness left the job. Trump did not replace Dr. Borio.

* In 2019 the NSCs Senior Director for Global Health Security and bio-defense, Tim Ziemer, left the position and Trump did not replace the Rear Admiral.

* Trump shut down the entire Global Health Security and Bio-defense agency. Yes, he did.

* Amid the explosive worldwide outbreak of the virus Trump proposed a 19% cut to the budget of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention plus a 10% cut to Public Health Services and a 7% cut to Global Health Services. Those happen to be the organizations that respond to public health threats.

* In 2018, at Trumps direction, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries including China.

* Trump didnt appoint a doctor to oversee the US response to the pandemic. He appointed Mike Pence.

* Trump has on multiple occasions sowed doubt about the severity of the virus even using the word hoax at events and rallies. He even did it at an event where the virus was being spread. Trump has put out zero useful information concerning the health risks of the virus.

* Trump pretended the virus had been contained.

* Trump left a cruise ship at sea for days, denying them proper hospital care, rather than increase his numbers in America.

Repeat. We do not blame Trump for the virus. We blame him for gutting the nations preparations to deal with it. We blame him for bungling testing and allowing it to spread uninhibited. We blame him for wasting taxpayer money on applause lines at his rallies (like The Wall). We blame him for putting his own political life over American human life. I hope this clears things up."

This is not a liberal speaking. These are the words of George Conway and members of the ultra-conservative libertarian Federalist Society.

Bill Gindlesperger is a central Pennsylvanian, Shippensburg University trustee and founder of eLynxx Solutions that provides Print Buyers Software for procuring and managing direct mail, marketing, promo and print. He is a board member, campaign advisor, published author and commentator. He can be reached at Bill.Gindlesperger@eLynxx.com

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One of Trump's biggest detractors is as conservative as they come - Public Opinion

Members of far-right militias and white pride organizations rally near Stone Mountain Park in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on Aug. 15.Logan Cyrus/Getty Images

David Kilcullen is one of the worlds leading authorities on insurgencies. For decades he has studied them. As an infantry soldier in the Australian army and an adviser to the U.S. Army, hes fought against them. His latest scholarly work has focused on their role in urban conflicts.

So when Kilcullen says that America is in a state of incipient insurgency, its worth sitting up, taking notice, and trembling just a little.

The official definition of an insurgency is the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control of an area. An incipient insurgency might be happening when inchoate actions by a range of groupsfollowed by organizing, training, acquisition of resources (including arms), and the buildup of public supportlead to increasingly frequent incidents of violence, reflecting improved organization and forethought.

Kilcullen argues that this is what weve been seeing the past few months in the waves of provocations and street violence that have blown through American cities since the May 25 police killing of George Floyd. By and large, the protesters havent been at fault. Its been the extremistsleft and rightwho have tagged alongside the protests and counterprotests, exploiting the disorder.

In some cases, the violence has been committed by individual idiotsas Kilcullen calls themsuch as, most notably, Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old self-appointed vigilante who, after reading radical right-wing ravings online, drove from his home in Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, and wound up shooting three people, killing two of them, in the wake of demonstrations over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

The incidence of violence is rising. According to a new report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (which usually monitors violence in war-torn countries), 20 violent groupsleft and righthave taken part in more than 100 protests related to the George Floyd killing. In June, there were 17 counterdemonstrations led by right-wing militant groups in June, one of which sparked violence. In July, there were 160 counterdemonstrations, with violence in 18.

Armed militias are nothing new in the United States. A decade ago, Kilcullen counted about 380 right-wing groups and 50 left-wing ones, many of them armed. In the early 1990s, the faceoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians, outside Waco, Texas, left 80 people deadand inspired Timothy McVeigh and his gang of extremists to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. In the late 1960s and early 70s, left-wing groups such as the Weather Underground set off bombs all over the country; police waged deadly shootouts with the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, and Chicago; and marchers for and against the Vietnam Warmainly students and hard-hat workersclashed in violent street battles.

But except for the last set of clashes (which didnt involve organized groups, much less insurgencies), those earlier incidents rarely corresponded with the divides between the nations political parties. This is one way in which the current conflicts are differentand, potentially, more dangerous.

Another difference and danger is the prevalence of cable TV networks and social media, which amplify and spread the shock waves. Incidents that in the past might have stayed local now quickly go viral, nationwide or worldwide, inspiring others to join in.

After Rittenhouse shot three people in Kenosha, right-wing militants touted him as a hero. FoxNews host Tucker Carlson hailed him for deciding that he had to maintain order when no one else would. Frequent Fox guest Ann Coulter said she wants Rittenhouse as my president.

Kilcullen also has observed, in the militias social media, a steady rise of dehumanizing rhetoricthe left calling the right parasites, the right calling the left (especially the left wing of Black Lives Matter) rats. The trend parallels, and intensifies, the mutual hostility between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and politics broadly.

Meanwhile, a powder keg is building. FBI background checks for gun sales hit 3.9 million in Junean all-time high. Many of them were for first-time gun buyersby definition untrained, possibly rash in their actions. An estimated 20 million Americans carry a gun when they leave their homes. It takes just a few trigger-pullers to set off a conflagration; even in intense insurrections, such as the postwar rebellion in Iraq, only 2 percent of insurgents actually fired their weapons.

Kilcullensees a pattern similar to the patterns that precipitated insurgencies in Colombia, Libya, and Iraq. The key factor is the rise of fear. He cites Stathis Kalyvas book The Logic of Violence in Civil War as observing that fear, not hate, drives the worst atrocities. Every civil war and insurgency of the last 50 years has been driven by fear, Kilcullen told me. Todays politics and social tensions are dominated by three fears: fear of other social groups, fear that those other groups are encroaching on ones territory, and fear that the state no longer has the ability to protect the people.

Things do not have to get worse. Incipient insurgency doesnt mean inevitable insurgency. We are still in the very early phase of this rampagea pre-McVeigh moment, as Kilcullen puts it. And the extent of disorder has been exaggerated, usually for political motives. When violence has occurred during protests, it has been confined to just a few blocks; it hasnt spread throughout a city. Contrary to Trump and other Republican politicians, New York is not a hellscape, Portland is not ablaze all the time, and Chicago is not more dangerous than Afghanistan.

In other words, there is still time for political leaderslocally and nationallyto calm the storm, douse the flames, and stifle the violent provocateurs across the spectrum, while also addressing the underlying social, political, and racial issues that sparked the (legitimate) protests.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump has no interest in calm. Instead, he is deliberately fanning the flames as part of a cynical election strategy. He has declined to criticize Rittenhouse, viewing his actions as self-defense. In general, he rails only against left-wing militants such as antifa activistsnever against the right-wing ones, such as the Boogaloo Bois, Patriot Prayer, or Proud Boys. More than that, he has lumped antifa alongside the truly peaceful protesters of Black Lives Matterand alongside the Democratic Party. His words encourage some police, in some cities, to take the same view. (In Kenosha, police were caught on camera tossing water bottles to armed right-wing militants, thanking them for coming out to help.)

Trump is also threatening to cut off federal aid to cities with Democratic mayors and rising crime rates, calling them anarchist jurisdictions. He has painted his opponent, Joe Biden, as a weak politician in thrall to leftist radicalsignoring Bidens long record as a left-centrist and his repeated denunciations of violence and looting, regardless of the cause.

Trumps aim is to incite fearfear of violence, disorder, changeand to paint himself as the bastion of law and order. Its an odd tactic for an incumbent president, and its unclear whether the ploy is working. But, as Kilcullen and Kalyvas point out, hes right about the fears potency. And the first violent incidents can spark a self-reinforcing cycle of violence, retaliation, and retaliation for that. It doesnt matter what the original grievance is, Kilcullen says. It becomes self-sustaining.

The report by the Armed Conflict Location a& Event Data Project concludes:

In this hyper-polarized environment, state forces are taking a more heavy-handed approach to dissent, non-state actors are becoming more active and assertive, and counter-demonstrators are looking to resolve their political disputes in the street. Without significant mitigation efforts, these risks will continue to intensify in the lead-up to the vote, threatening to boil over in November if election results are delayed, inconclusive, or rejected as fraudulent.

In short, the authors write, The United States is in crisis. The upcoming electionhow it plays out, as well as how it ends upcould determine how deeply into crisis the country continues to plunge.

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There are warning signs that America is in the early stages of insurgency. - Slate

Remote learning

How can kids really get school from being on a computer for hours upon hours five days a week? I realize social distancing is necessary, but in the meantime, what is this doing to families with school-age kids?

I watch my daughter struggle with performing her remote-work obligations shes currently the only full-time breadwinner in her home, with a 2-, 6- and 12-year-old in her charge. And she is expecting a baby in November.

It was bad enough last spring when the kids went to remote learning. Things were kind of lax last year, but now kids are expected to be on point. How can they be? And how does a working parent suddenly become equipped with teacher skills during working hours? I will tell you how: They do not. The amount of stress remote learning is placing on my daughter and her family is shameful. Is anyone else experiencing this reality?

This is not to say teachers are exempt from the burden and reinvention of our educational system. Teachers, you have my deepest sympathies as well. And those parents who can afford to home-school their children, more power to you. But I imagine parents who can quit their job to stay home to educate their kids are the exception.

I do not have the answers, but I hope families can withstand this enormous pressure. The only way I see remote education working is that it will only be remotely effective.

Voting twice

Our president has instructed his supporters to vote twice ("Election officials cry foul," Sept. 4), once by mail-in ballet and once by voting in person on Election Day at their precinct. This is illegal. We need to know that police will be stationed at all voting precincts so as to arrest all people who try to vote twice.

'Democrat cities'

President Trump complains a lot about Democrat cities that are mismanaged, but thats just his opinion. A city can be managed very well and still have problems. If theres anything we should know about Trump by now, its that he doesnt have the best judgment.

Large cities are complicated. They bring in people from all over the country and often from all over the world. These people bring aspects of their own cultures with them, which makes for a rich and vibrant social environment. Thats why so many of them are Democratic, too, because they understand that people are different, but they can still get along with each other.

Thats not exactly a Republican characteristic. Republicans tend to be uncomfortable with people who are different from them.

Unfortunately, when you put a lot of people in one place, there are also negative aspects. There may be friction. There are likely to be drugs, poverty and crime.

Republic cities have problems, too. They're just not very good at confronting them.

It should be noted, though, that not all crime associated with city living is alike. Destruction associated with protest is different from gang violence. Republicans would like to say theyre the same, but theyre not.

Its complicated. Books have been written about crime in cities. Its not all going to be told in a letter to the editor. Or on a Fox network TV show. Or by a presidential tweet.

Killers

Jacob Blake didnt kill anyone.

Tamir Rice didnt kill anyone.

George Floyd didnt either, nor did Breonna Taylor.

But police officers killed them and conservatives rush to the police's defense.

That 17-year-old kid with the AR-15 killed two protesters in Kenosha and tried to kill more. And commentators on Fox News praised him. Ann Coulter tweeted, I want him as my president. President Trump stood before the nation and made excuses for him.

Why is killing people the conservative solution? Is property truly more valuable than human life?

Every single day, pro-life is reaffirmed to be another conservative lie.

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The Readers' Forum: Tuesday letters | Letters To The Editor | journalnow.com - Winston-Salem Journal

Stacey Abrams in All In: The Fight For DemocracyPhoto: Amazon

Note: The writer of this review watched All In: The Fight For Democracy from home on a digital screener. Before making the decision to see itor any other filmin a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Heresan interview on the matter with scientific experts.

The agitprop documentary All In: The Fight For Democracy presents itself as an urgent dispatch from the frontlines of the voting wars. The movie is so up to date that its opening minutes include footage from the summer of 2020, referencing both the state primaries that have taken place during the COVID-19 pandemic and President Trumps recent warnings that enforcing existing voting laws could be catastrophic to Republicans. The bulk of the story that directors Lisa Corts and Liz Garbus are telling has its roots in the past 150 years of American history, from the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War to the dawn of the civil rights movement. But more than anything, All In is the story of the rise of Black, Latinx, Asian, indigenous, and young adult participation in American democracyand of how the powers that be have scrambled to change the rules of the game to keep those blocs from winning.

B-

B-

Lisa Corts, Liz Garbus

Select theaters September 9; Amazon Prime September 18

The most persuasive voice in All In belongs to Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate whose close 2018 loss to Brian Kempthe man who was, at the time, in charge of the voting process in the stateraised a higher-than-usual state of alarm among those whove been tracking the recent decay in our democratic institutions. Abrams herself refused to concede that shed lost, pointing to the myriad constitutionally questionable ways that Kemp made it easier for his supporters to vote and harder for hers, including reducing polling stations and auto-purging registration rolls. Much of All Ins final thirdthe films most gripping sectiondetails how Abrams worked extra-hard to get out the vote, while all the most egregious voter-suppression tactics were brought to bear by her opponent.

Throughout, Corts and Garbus use Abrams case as a frame, starting with a moment where Abrams discusses her personal experiences as a Black woman growing up in Georgia, seeing her credentials questioned and her opportunities curtailed. All Ins central argument is that the advances made during the civil rights movement are being rolled back across the country perhaps because, ironically, the narrative surrounding public figures like Abrams has changed. Successes like hers are now often held updisingenuously, depending on whos doing the holdingas an example of the end of systemic racism, not as an example of someone battling to overcome it.

The larger story All In tells about the difficult process of making American democracy more democratic is supported by archival footage, personal anecdotes, and a lot of dot-connecting between different recent national news stories, from the rise of local authoritarians like Sheriff Joe Arpaio to the multiple recent Supreme Court cases dealing with gerrymandering and ballot access. Corts and Garbus draw a line between Jim Crow America, which has been the backdrop to so many feel-good stories of civil rights triumphs, and the America of today, which seems to be retreating rapidly to that past.

Frankly, All In would be better if it were less expansive. A more straightforward bio-doc about Abrams, with extended digressions about the larger history behind her voting rights activism, mightve been more powerful. Instead, the absence of one clear narrative through-line makes the movie feel more like an aggregation of alarming incidents than the richer piece of contemporary journalism it should be. All In is still plenty effective, but it lags behind the likes of social media and late-night comedy shows, which have presented a lot of this same information in packages that are more emotional and entertaining.

That said, the film does have real resonance, even beyond its original intention of promoting voting and cautioning about voter suppression. This summer of unrest has been a reminder that the United States has for decades grappled withand failed to resolvequestions about who really gets a voice in the grand democratic experiment. In All In, clips of President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-60s calling for a reckoning with the crippling legacy of bigotry and right-wing pundit Ann Coulter just a few years ago calling for the return of Jim Crow voting restrictions is a reminder that no matter how far weve come, we can always turn back.

Continued here:
The alarming documentary All In offers a possible preview of Novembers election - The A.V. Club

During her 2020 presidential campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., found herself at the center of a controversy about which Americans can claim to be Black, or Black enough because of both her biracial identity and her immigrant parents.

Born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Harris was subject to a smear campaign insinuating that she was not Black at all which began anew immediately after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced she was his pick for the vice presidential nomination. After a July 2019 debate, critics took issue with her for discussing a topic they viewed to be most relevant to American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) busing to racially integrate schools. Although Harris was bused to a majority white school in California as part of a desegregation campaign, her lineage didnt include enslaved African Americans, the group such efforts targeted, her detractors argued. (Harris' father, Donald, wrote in 2018 that his research suggests he and his daughters are descended from Black people enslaved in Jamaica.)

To have her Blackness questioned in this way mustve been jarring for a woman who graduated from the historically Black Howard University, was born in Oakland, California hometown of the Black Panther Party and has likely been viewed as Black by a majority white society.

But the questions about what constitutes Blackness arent new.

When he ran for president, Barack Obama also faced questions about his racial identity, having grown up outside the continental United States without his Kenyan father. And when he identified as solely Black on the 2010 census form, some mixed-race activists openly expressed their disappointment with his decision to exclude his white heritage even though he did not have the option to identify as biracial until a decade before, in the 2000 census, which took place well into his adulthood (and three years after he had begun serving in the Illinois state Senate).

Until 2000, the federal government hadnt allowed members of the public to identify as two or more races on the census. For most of the 20th century, Americans either had to pick one race or "other," a shift from even the late 1800s when the census included racial designations for people with fractions of African ancestry."

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After the 2000 census gave mixed-race people more options, civil rights groups for African Americans and Asian Americans challenged the move, fearing the voting power of people of color would be diluted if the multiracial category reduced their counted populations during the congressional apportionment process. But it was already evident that multiracial people were increasingly choosing not to identify as any one race: Two million Americans selected the other category on the 1990 census.

It was for that reason that multiracial activists had spent the next decade campaigning for the government to allow for multiple racial identities on the census form and succeeded.

The multiracial option isnt the only way that the census, which also included the term African American for the first time in 2000, will have complicated Black identity. Black people from immigrant backgrounds may now specify their ethnic origins on the 2020 census, which owes a debt to the same campaign two decades ago to differentiate the types of Blackness in America.

The change coincides with the rise of the ADOS movement, which seeks to prioritize the socio-political goals of African Americans whose families have lived in the United States for generations, rather than their counterparts whose families arrived recently and voluntarily. Black immigrants to the United States enjoy higher household incomes and rates of educational attainment than U.S.-born African Americans, a trend that gets overlooked when the Black experience is universalized. (However, some Black immigrants, such as Afro-Latinos, are speaking up about the marginalization they face in society.)

The ADOS movement includes supporters as wide-ranging as Harvard philosophy professor Cornel West, who has said that it is giving working-class Black people a voice, and white conservative political commentator Ann Coulter. But the movement has many detractors, some of whom view it as divisive at best and xenophobic at worst. Others have argued that it ignores the long history of African Americans with immigrant roots, including black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who was Jamaican, and Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, whose mother was Grenadian.

Similarly, the idea that multiracial people are distinct from other Black people overlooks the history of mixed-race civil rights activists such as Homer Plessy, Walter Francis White, Adam Clayton Powell and Diane Nash, all of whom couldve "passed" for white.

Still, 20 years into the movement to allow mixed-race Americans to acknowledge their differentiation from Black Americans, the multiracial demographic is one of the fastest-growing groups in this country. And it's fair to say that the oldest Gen Zers and the youngest millennials are unfamiliar with a society that deemed someone wholly Black and nothing else for having a trace of African ancestry.

Today, its not uncommon for young people with two Black parents to view themselves as completely distinct from those with just one hence, the outcry that the new show BlackAF didnt exclusively star actors with two Black parents, or the recent charges of anti-black racism leveled at the biracial rapper Doja Cat.

And Meghan Markle born to a black mother and a white father exactly 20 years after Obama has consistently identified as biracial, reinforcing the generational divide in perceptions of Black identity.

Or take singer-songwriter Kehlani, who has white, black and Native American ancestry: In May, she give fans permission on Twitter to call her mixed. For a multiracial woman, thats not exactly a groundbreaking announcement, but the reasons she gave for doing so reflect a shift in how black identity is viewed today. The 25-year-old R&B star explained the importance of recognizing that she does not face the same issues as black women w 2 black parents" and that to suggest otherwise perpetuates the erasure of these women.

Generations ago, when the archaic one-drop rule which declared that a drop of African blood made one Black still shaped African American identity, these discussions about authentic representations of Blackness werent as likely to occur. In 1982, Susie Guillory Phipps, who didnt realize until adulthood that she was 3/32nds Black under the law, fought the state of Louisiana to have the race listed on her birth certificate changed from colored to white. She lost, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

As recently as the 1990s, mixed-race people were typically encouraged to identify or simply identified in society as Black, even if they looked racially ambiguous (see: Mariah Carey). And it was considered laughable, if not unthinkable, that a darker-skinned multiracial person would reject the Black category in favor of identifying as multiracial. Golf star Tiger Woods is a case in point: In 1997, he was widely ridiculed for saying that he didnt consider himself as Black but cablinasian, a portmanteau of Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian, representing the entirety of his racial background.

Just three years later, Woods and other mixed people who didnt want to be boxed into one racial category would be vindicated by the census. And today, Blasian is an acceptable way for people of mixed Asian and Black heritage to refer to themselves.

Unbound by the one-drop rule or even by the broad term African American, Black people in the United States have more freedom than ever to identify themselves as they choose. For some, that means not describing themselves as solely Black; for others, that means specifying their ethnic origins, embracing the ADOS label or taking none at all. Each choice is potentially controversial but more important than how any one person identifies is that Blackness in this country has long been nuanced, and always will be.

Related:

Nadra Nittle is a Los Angeles-based journalist. Her writing has been featured inVox, The Guardian, Business Insider, KCET and other publications.

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Kamala Harris is Asian and Black. That shouldn't be confusing in 2020 but it is to some. - NBC News