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Enslaved people on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate lived in small cabins like this one. Photo: Russell Contreras/Axios

Historic sites linked to enslavement and emancipation are getting new attention and funding for preservation after years of neglect.

The big picture: The popularity of Juneteenth and the racial reckoning after George Floyd's murder in 2020 led several cities and states to rethink how they commemorate difficult chapters of American history, including slavery.

State of play: Hundreds of historic sites from Massachusetts to Texas offer windows into enslaved people's lives yet vary in status, sit abandoned or rarely appear in visitors' guides.

The push to recognize places that were part of unflattering episodes in U.S. history has years of resistance, preservation activists say especially from local historic commissions.

Zoom in: Popular tourist attractions such as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and James Madison's Montpelier have placed physical reminders about slavery in recent years, thanks in part to pressure from descendants of those who were enslaved.

Pressure and new funding from public and private entities are beefing up demand to include the voices of enslaved people at sites.

Between the lines: The Action Fund announced last week it had awarded $3.8 million to protect 40 Black American historic sites.

What they're saying: "We believe that not until Black history matters will Black Lives Matter," Leggs said.

What's next: The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund is developing a mapping project to identify and locate all Black American cultural sites, including those linked to enslavement.

Originally posted here:
Juneteenth puts focus on preserving enslavement sites - Axios

In the early 2000s, the wage gap between Black and white workers in the U.S. was as large as it had been in 1950.

That is a shocking statistic and a sign of the countrys deep racial inequality. Over the past five years, however, the story has changed somewhat: The wage gap, though still enormous, has shrunk. Its a pretty meaningful reversal, Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told me.

In todays newsletter on Juneteenth Ill try to explain why the gap has narrowed and what would have to happen for it to narrow more. After all, even with the recent progress, the median Black worker makes 21 percent less than the median white worker.

There appear to be three main causes of the recent trend, and the most significant is the countrys tight labor market. The unemployment rate has been falling for most of the past decade and has recently been near its lowest levels since the 1960s.

Tight labor markets help almost all workers, and they tend to help disadvantaged workers the most. As Gould put it, When employers cant be quite as choosy when employers have to look beyond their network that can provide more opportunities for historically marginalized groups.

This dynamic helps close the Black-white wage gap because Black workers are overrepresented among low-wage workers. (A Times story set in Philadelphia went into more detail, focusing on Markus Mitchell, a worker there.) The Hispanic-white wage gap has also declined recently.

William Spriggs, a labor economist and Howard University professor who died unexpectedly this month, often made this point. In one of his last interviews, Spriggs told my colleague Ben Casselman that he was concerned the recent Federal Reserve interest-rate increases would weaken the labor market and undo the recent progress of Black workers.

You should see from this moment what you are truly risking, Spriggs said. (If you have a few minutes this morning, I recommend reading his Times obituary.)

Of course, inflation is also a serious economic problem, which is why the Fed has raised rates. But the recent narrowing of racial wage inequality is a reminder that the Fed faces risks both from doing too little to fight inflation and from doing too much. Tight labor markets make almost everything else easier, said Suzanne Kahn, a historian who works at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank.

More than a decade ago, a group of fast-food workers in New York City began agitating for a higher minimum wage. They attracted the support of Senator Bernie Sanders, the leaders of the Service Employees International Union and other high-profile allies. The movement became known as the Fight for $15.

It has not persuaded Congress to lift the federal minimum wage, mostly because of opposition from congressional Republicans. The federal hourly minimum has been $7.25 since 2009, even as inflation has eroded its value. But the Fight for $15 movement has helped change policy in states and cities.

A minimum wage well above $7.25 is a broadly popular idea, including among many Republican voters and independents. Ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage have passed over the last decade in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada and several other states. As a result, the effective national minimum wage a weighted average of state minimum wages, adjusted for inflation has risen to nearly its highest level in 40 years (before falling a bit lately because of high inflation.)

Minimum-wage increases tend to shrink the racial wage gap for the same reason that tight labor markets do: Black workers disproportionately work in low-wage jobs. As a result, one powerful way to reduce racial inequality is to reduce economic inequality.

The flip is also true. The racial wage gap widened in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s mostly because income inequality was soaring.

After a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, racial inequity became a focus of intense national attention. Many companies promised to diversify their work forces and leadership ranks, and some took concrete action.

At Fortune 500 companies, for example, Black board members occupied less than 9 percent of all board seats in 2020, according to Deloitte. By last year, the number had risen to 12 percent (compared with 14 percent of the U.S. population). It remains unclear how widespread the changes in corporate America have been; corporate boards obviously make up a tiny share of jobs. But the recent emphasis on diversity has probably played at least a modest role in narrowing racial gaps.

There is a larger point here. Yes, a reduction in economic inequality can substantially shrink the Black-white wage gap. But that gap will never approach zero so long as racial inequities remain as large as they are in the U.S. today.

The problem is not only that Black workers disproportionately work in low-wage job categories; its also that Black Americans make less money on average than similar white Americans. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a typical Black worker last year made 13 percent less than a typical white worker who was the same age and gender, had the same amount of education and lived in the same region. And the racial wealth gap is even larger than the wage gap.

Related: A new book, Just Action, offers policy ideas for reducing residential segregation, much of which is the legacy of subsidized mortgages that were designed to exclude Black Americans. Today, write the authors, Richard and Leah Rothstein, Placing Black Lives Matter signs is not enough.

The Dannahue: A prestigious rose breeder is naming a new bloom for a Black gardener.

Discovery: Archaeologists found a 3,000-year-old sword so well preserved its still gleaming, CNN reports.

Cash crop: An Oregon border town is booming thanks to the Idahoans who visit its legal weed shops.

Metropolitan Diary: Whats a vegetarian doing in a pastrami palace?

Lives Lived: Donald Triplett was widely considered the first person to be diagnosed with autism. His happy life later became the subject of a book and documentary. He died at 89.

Gen Zs favorite tote: TikTok has spread the gospel of Baggu totes. Videos highlighting the lightweight, foldable bags have collected over 130 million views. Now, self-described Baggu girlies are filling farmers markets and public parks with the brands vibrant prints recognizable without a logo.

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The Racial Wage Gap Is Shrinking - The New York Times

The red heart emoji is one of the most commonly used emojis, and dozens more have a heart in them. Perhaps the example with the trickiest meaning to define is the black heart emoji , which seems to offer a mixed message between the love conveyed by the heart and the dark theme. So what does the black heart emoji mean?

There isnt one definitive answer to this question. Weve outlined how the emoji is most commonly used to help you avoid a misunderstanding.

Matt Horne / Android Authority

The black heart emoji meaning can relate to a dark or sad theme, but not necessarily. And in any event, its still a heart emoji. Sometimes its useful to convey both a black color and the usual meaning of a heart. Here are some examples of how it might be used.

The most obvious situation in which you might want to show love but also want to acknowledge a bleak situation is when youre being supportive of someone in a sad moment.

Dark humor can be risky as it could easily be misinterpreted, especially via text messages. The black heart can be used to clarify or acknowledge dark humor.

People often use the heart color that best relates to the thing theyre supporting. If thats a sports team that plays in black, for example, the black heart emoji makes sense. It has also been used in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Theres no reason not to use the black heart emoji to express love. It might be especially pertinent if your partner enjoys a gothic aesthetic.

As with any emoji, it completely depends on the context. The black heart emoji can be used in ways like those outlined above, but if someone is using it to accuse you of having a black heart, you might want to clarify why they are suggesting that.

The black heart emoji isnt inherently offensive in itself, but it could be used as part of an offensive or insensitive message.

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What does the black heart emoji mean? - Android Authority

How did America become a land of economic extremes, with entrenched, grinding poverty for those struggling at the bottom even as most poor adults who are not seniors are working?

Desmonds greatest contribution is changing the lens from individual behavior the hoary focus of so many books about poverty to asking and answering the larger question, Who benefits from practices that keep people poor? Poverty, he argues, results from three quintessentially American habits: exploitation of the poor; subsidization of the rich; and the intentional segregation of the affluent and the poor such that opportunity is hoarded and social mobility is rare.

Desmond acknowledges the role of anti-Black racism in perfecting Americans antipathy to spending for public benefits. Other books engage directly with the dog-whistling politics that dissuade working and middle class people from voting their economic interests. Desmond focuses more on making transparent the systems that fabricate scarcity and offers solutions.

He paints a clear picture of the morally fraught systems we all participate in. Well-paid professionals like me benefit as consumers from the poverty wages paid to others in an economy where Uber is a verb and surveilled and squeezed gig workers respond to and deliver our every need. Our stock investments swell as companies cut or outsource jobs, stagnate wages and oppose unions. We get free checking; the poor get usurious fees from banks and payday lenders. Meanwhile, zoning codes that allow only single-family homes create artificial housing scarcity that enhances our property values while foisting high costs and homelessness on others. Segregation encourages private opulence and public squalor, Desmond argues, as affluent people withdraw from public institutions and society systemically disinvests in the public goods ordinary people need.

Desmond also shows how the federal government, through the tax code, greatly subsidizes the affluent. In 2021, the U.S. spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks, forgoing revenue that otherwise would have been paid in taxes, much of it going to very rich people. For example, each year the U.S. loses more than $1 trillion in unpaid taxes because of the tax avoidance strategies of multinational corporations and wealthy families.

What to do about this system of American-designed poverty? Desmond offers a bold proposal. He argues that we could bring nearly every family in America above the official poverty line without adding to the deficit simply by collecting unpaid federal income taxes from the top one percent of households from closing loopholes to going after tax cheats. That would amount to an estimated $175 billion annually; those resources would then be allocated to expand broadly popular programs, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, that directly alleviate poverty. He also advocates for structural reforms that reverse the practices that deny poor people choices in housing, banking and employment.

If it is utterly easy as Desmond claims to find plenty of money to abolish poverty by closing nonsensical tax loopholes, then why dont we do it? He notes that in 2019 other western democracies like France and Germany raised as much as 38 percent of their GDP in tax revenues and invested broadly in public goods while U.S. total revenues were at 25 percent and the U.S. lavished government benefits on affluent families and refused to prosecute tax dodgers.

After laying out his analysis, Desmond urges readers to become poverty abolitionists, to spread an ethic that shuns companies that exploit workers and supports government policies that rebalance the social contract toward alleviating poverty rather than helping elites grow their wealth. Importantly, he is not arguing for redistribution per se. He is arguing that if the rich pay their taxes and the government stops over-subsidizing them and instead invests in the general welfare with aid to the poor, poverty can be eliminated, without adding to the deficit.

It remains to be seen whether an ethic of poverty abolition can take hold or overcome the rigging of electoral politics, particularly by Republican-dominated legislatures that constrain majority will through voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering. But Desmonds surprising insights and proposals offer much needed new thinking.

This brings me back to the role of racial division and the necessity of transcending it if America is to dismantle extreme systemic inequality in which people of all colors suffer.

Desmond notes that white families with accountants benefit most from government largesse. They have the strongest antigovernment sentiments and vote more often than those who both need and appreciate the role of government. And race-coded rationalizations justify hostility to government benefits a false, debunked propaganda that public benefits create welfare dependency being first among them.

Herein lies the rub. Decades of anti-Black racial coding, including Ronald Reagans stoking of the welfare queen stereotype, helped perfect anti-tax and anti-government attitudes and consolidate Republican power, especially in the South. Just as the forces that perpetuate poverty are structural, so are the politics that undergird it.

(Oddly, Desmond doesnt mention political culture-warring against the IRS which underfunded and undermined the agency, itself something of a tax cut for the rich, even as the IRS audited poor wage earners at five times the rate of everyone else. Hopefully, the Inflation Reduction Act will reverse these trends with its $80 billion increase in IRS funding over the next decade.)

Desmond finds hope for a transcending scenario in polls showing that most Americans believe the economy benefits the rich and harms the poor; that the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes; and that there should be a $15 federal minimum wage. Invoking abolition as a mantra for the transformation that needs to occur aptly describes his ambition, though advocates for racial equity or reparation for the legacy of slavery, redlining and other forms of racial oppression may wince at his call for universal strategies for all races. The deep irony is that anti-Black policy and rhetoric were central to the creation of savage systems of inequality that harm everyone, and anti-Black processes continue to sustain segregation. But direct efforts to repair the economic and social damage to Black people inevitably produces backlash or is weaponized by the political right to woo voters, as was done with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Desmond admits that Black people have been disproportionately harmed, especially from historic and contemporary redlining and discrimination in housing. But he suggests that the universal reforms he recommends would disproportionately benefit Blacks while broadening political coalitions to end poverty.

This is an important debate. For my part, I have called for the abolition of Americas residential caste system and argued in support of policies that promote racial equity and repair for historically defunded Black neighborhoods and the citizens who have most suffered predation and disinvestment by government and private institutions. And I applaud local governments that are doing this work. But in wrestling with the conundrum of how to repair the damage of anti-Black racism, I have also been greatly influenced by the late stage thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and contemporary Black civil rights visionaries. They pursued a fusion politics that Desmond also admires.

In the final months of his life, Dr. King envisioned a national Poor Peoples Campaign that intentionally built a multiracial coalition to demand an economic bill of rights. In the 2010s, Reverend William Barber II successfully led the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and recently revived a Poor Peoples Campaign that brings conservative poor whites into the movement for economic fairness. The North Carolina movement paid off in 2023 expansions to Medicaid in the state, for example. They are a sign of hope in a nation riven by division, racism and hate. I see traction for a bold politics that joins the aspirations of all economically oppressed people, similar to the exciting rhetoric and moral claims of the new-South Justins who are building multiracial power in Tennessee by speaking to a rainbow of humans seeking freedom from gun violence and oppression of all kinds. The alternative is more of the same, a nation divided, with systems that elevate the wealthy and crush others.

Read more here:
Opinion | America's Poverty Is Built by Design - POLITICO

Some have hypothesized that the rise in homicide rates is specifically a result of the June 2020 protests, Chalfin and MacDonald wrote, but theories about the role of the protests must contend with several challenges. Violence typically climbs during the summer, and in 2020, that happened to correspond not only with the protests but also with an end to the most intensive Covid lockdowns in many cities making it hard to pin blame on any one cause without more examination.

In a 2020 article, Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities: The Minneapolis Effect and the Decline in Proactive Policing, Paul G. Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, saw a clear relationship between the protests, the police reaction to them and the rising homicide rate:

Crime rates are increasing only for a few specific categories, namely homicides and shootings. These crime categories are particularly responsive to reductions in proactive policing. The data also pinpoint the timing of the spikes to late May 2020, which corresponds with the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis and subsequent anti-police protests protests that likely led to declines in law enforcement.

Cassell wrote that his thesis is that the recent spikes in homicides have been caused by a Minneapolis effect, similar to the earlier Ferguson effect. If this thesis is correct, he continued, It is reasonable to estimate that, as a result of depolicing during June and July 2020, approximately 710 additional victims were murdered and more than 2,800 victims were shot.

Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved homicides, made a detailed argument for a strong link between the protests, depolicing and the increase in homicides in an August 2022 essay, Murder and the Legacy of the Police Killing of George Floyd: What is beyond debate is that homicides increased dramatically in 2020. Murders surged nearly 30 percent, the largest one-year increase on record.

When weekly homicides are studied, he continued, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

a very clear pattern emerges. Although social and economic disruption caused by Covid began in early 2020, it wasnt until the week ending May 30 that weekly homicides topped 500 for the first time in many years. Although unemployment caused by Covid surged in April, there was little if any increase in murders at that time. Homicide began the historic hike exactly in the week when George Floyd was murdered.

There may have been several contributing factors to the surge in U.S. homicides, Hargrove concluded, but George Floyds murder was the very specific spark that lit the fuse to an extraordinary increase in fatal violence. He added, Law enforcement is learning from this experience. Police officers must be trained to avoid unnecessary deaths like George Floyds, acting as guardians of society and not as anticrime warriors.

Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton sociologist who writes about policing and crime, provided a nuanced response to this issue by email:

There are plausible reasons to think that the movement to change the way police carry out their work in Black communities and to end police violence against Black Americans has created real changes with tangible consequences. In cities where the police have been asked, for decades, to dominate public spaces by force and then are required to change the way they do their job whether by public protest, local mobilization, public opinion or court order there is often a destabilization of the local social order that can result in multiple shifts.

In this changed environment, Sharkey continued, Police may no longer get involved in incidents where they have discretion, residents may no longer provide information to police or go along with the way things used to work, and guns may start to circulate more widely.

But, Sharkey stressed,

This doesnt mean that Black Lives Matter protests cause police killings to fall and other forms of violence to rise. It means that when cities rely primarily on the police to deal with violence and all of the other challenges that come with extreme inequality and then the role or practices of the police begin to shift, there are often clear impacts on police killings and other forms of violence. The key challenge is how to develop a new model that confronts violence without the costs that come with aggressive or violent policing and mass incarceration. That is the challenge that every city should be grappling with.

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Opinion | America Has Become Both More and Less Dangerous Since Black Lives Matter - The New York Times