Mediaboss Marketing

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (NEXSTAR) Invoking the dream of his formerly enslaved great-grandfather, Richard Irvin, the mayor of Illinois second largest city, jumped into the Illinois Republican primary race for Governor on Martin Luther King Day.

Richard Baxter Irvin was born a slave, but he dreamed of being free, Irvin said in a campaign launch video. I dont just share the name Richard Irvin, he said. I share his dream of what Illinois could be: where a growing economy provides ladders of opportunity for anyone willing to work; where families are safe; where kids are educated, not indoctrinated.

Before he was elected as the mayor of Aurora in 2017, Irvin fought as an Army soldier in the Gulf War, returned home and graduated from law school at Northern Illinois University, went on to work as a prosecutor in the Cook County States Attorneys Office, and eventually became a community prosecutor in his hometown.

I grew up in Section Eight public housing in Aurora where I now serve as mayor, Irvin said in his campaign video. Mom had me at 16, a single mother working two jobs. Didnt have much of a father, but my granddad, son of Richard Baxter Irvin, taught me to believe in myself, to do the best I could in whatever I did.

He ran for mayor in 2005 and 2009, and lost both races. Former House Republican Leader Tom Cross endorsed him at the time. Irvin later became a local precinct committeeman in the Republican party. However, Kane County election records show Irvin pulled a ballot to vote in recent Democratic primary contests in 2014, 2016, and 2020, including both presidential races where Donald Trump was on the ballot.

Irvins voting history raised questions about his political allegiances and created an opening for his GOP opponents to attack him. State senator Darren Bailey (R-Louisville) labeled him as a career Democrat. Gary Rabine (R-Bull Valley) sarcastically welcomed Irvin to the Illinois Republican Party. Jesse Sullivan (R-Petersburg) said the people of Illinois are sick of career politicians whove been given ample opportunities to fix our state.

Illinois Republican Party chairman Don Tracy called on the candidates to play nice, and said hed enforce Ronald Reagans so-called 11th Commandment, Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.

Tracy also dismissed the attacks questioning Irvins conservative credentials.

Hes definitely a Republican, Tracy said on Monday morning at a Martin Luther King Day breakfast. Up in that area, in Chicago in particular, people tend to pull Democrat ballots because thats where the action is.

Just because people have voted in Democratic primaries before does not disqualify them from being Republicans or voting Republican, Tracy said.

Irvins announcement also drew swift reaction from billionaire and Republican megadonor Ken Griffin, who has discussed plans to spend up to $300 million backing Republican candidates in Illinois in 2022.

Unlike the current Governor who was born into wealth and has demonstrated little urgency or progress in improving our State, Richard Irvins life embodies the American Dream and a real commitment to making communities stronger, Griffin said through an emailed statement from his spokesman at Citadel Strategies.

From humble beginnings, he put himself through college with the help of the GI bill and chose to enter public service to make a difference in the lives of others, Griffin said. As Mayor of Aurora, he has successfully delivered on the issues Illinoisans care most about strengthening the education system, improving public safety, creating economic opportunities and governing with integrity. I am excited that he has decided to join the race, and look forward to the opportunity to meet him and learn more about his ideas in the weeks ahead.

The timing of Irvins campaign launch on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day irked top Black leaders in Springfield. Senator Robert Peters (D-Chicago), and Representatives Kam Buckner (D-Chicago) and Sonya Harper (D-Chicago) slammed the shallow opportunism of the Republican party.

The co-opting of a day of great significance to justify a political platform that from its onset seeks to strip protections from working families across Illinois, minimizes the struggles of the past, and rolls back the progress that weve made to expand rights is highly disappointing, the chairs of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus said in a press release.

On Irvins campaign website, he claims he called in the national guard to respond to looting in the aftermath of protests over the murder of George Floyd. However, a spokesman for the Illinois National Guard confirmed mayors do not have that authority, and would have to make any request through the governors office.

Governor Pritzkers office declared states of emergency in several counties during the protests and looting incidents of the summer of 2020, and issued deployments of the national guard to assist local police departments in several cities, including Aurora. Calls to Irvins office in Aurora were not returned on Monday.

The next year, while he was running for re-election in Aurora in the spring of 2021, Irvin told a local news outlet, I support Black Lives Matter strongly and passionately.

This year, now that hes running for governor in a Republican primary, Irvin repeated critics of the Black Lives Matter movement who often retort, I believe All Lives Matter.

Read more:
In bid to become first Black governor of Illinois, Richard Irvin says All Lives Matter - wcia.com

Black Lives Matter activists in Mississauga, Canada, protest the death of Abdirahman Abdi, killed by Ottawa police on August 25, 2016. Image credit: arindambanerjee / Shutterstock

The late political theorist Cedric Robinson once wrote that, as it concerns the historical premises and practices of Black struggle, the most important issue is conceptualization: how are we to conceptualize what we were, what we are, what we are becoming? The essay in question is titled Coming to Terms. It is a fitting formulation for considering the accomplishments of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) through the lens of Robinsons query, on the one hand, and on the other, the conceptual rendering of the movement offered by Deva Woodly in her beautifully crafted new book, Reckoning.

In essence, I want to come to terms with M4BL as it has evolved, and also with one of Woodlys key tools of interpretation: what she describes as the canonical thinkers in political theory. The hope is to arrive at a provisional and necessarily incomplete answer to the question that concludes Woodlys text: What shall we do?, a path forward based on what we were, what we are, and what we are becoming.

The we in this context has, I think, a three-fold meaning. It refers, first and foremost, to Black people freedom dreaming on the front lines of struggle, past and present, be that through organized movement spaces or otherwise. In a second sense, it refers to Black academics, and the Negro intellectual, as Harold Cruse once put ittwo groups that include both Woodly and myselfand how we have collectively (and historically) engaged with Black rebellion as a political phenomenon. Finally, this we refers to all of us, Black and non-Black alikea totalizing weand not just people living in the United States, but around the world.

In Emergence, the first chapter of her study on Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, Woodly notes the movement was born twice, first as a hashtag online (#BlackLivesMatter). It was then reborn as a post-Ferguson organizational matrix (M4BL) emanating from a 2015 convening of allied organizers and groups in Cleveland. The two-births thesis, as Ill call it, is a useful starting point, a way of marking where we were.

And if we take the flux of this temporal framing seriously, if we think the movement was really born twiceas we shouldthen the unprecedented global uprisings of 2020 might best be understood as the zenith of the second phase, evidence that the decade to come has the potential to be a moment for reconstruction, just as Woodly hopes.

At the same time, last years Black-led rebellion might also be conceived as the beginning of the end of this second phase, which is where Id suggest we are, marching toward a yet to be determined third phase, which I think represents we are becoming. For the time being and for lack of a better name, Ill assign this third phase the label post-#BlackLivesMatter.

The suggestion we are moving towards a period that could be persuasively described as post- #BlackLivesMatter may seem contradictory. Perhaps it is. The scope of the 2020 uprisings in many ways undermines such a statement. But the destructive and jubilant dynamism seen in the streets, coupled with how the organizational infrastructure of M4BL was able to harness that dynamism and mobilize it further, papers over fractures that, to my mind, inform what post- #BlackLivesMatter might mean and what the praxis of a post-#BlackLivesMatter world might look like.

Put somewhat differently, in noting the ways M4BL has innovatively intervened in American political life through the re-politicization of the public sphere, and the possibilities this opens for the future, as Woodly does in her book, we must also take stock of why 2020 ended up being a watershed moment for a different kind of reckoning. This reckoning, a series of ruptures years in the making, saw organizers in the M4BL ecosystem, along with those observing from beyond, conclude that the movement, as represented by the M4BL constellation of leaders and groups, had lost its way.

Perhaps the most public example of this came in late November of 2020, when a group of chapters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) publicly broke with the organization. The chapters (dubbed BLM10 and later the BLM10Plus) charged that the BLMGN, as shepherded by Patrisse Cullors, had long suffered from a lack of transparency, principled accountability, and democratic decision making, which was undermining the movement. As the group later described, their concerns were less about individual leaders and more about the ways liberalism and capitalism have manifested in BLMGN and the current iteration of the Black liberation movement as a whole, co-opting and deradicalizing this critical historic moment of revolutionary possibility.

Similar critiques were raised by members of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), the national, chapter-based organization I was an active participant in, and with which I am still nominally affiliated. But the dissenters in BYP100 also decried the organizations sharpened focus on electoral politics, and what they saw as its structural submergence in the nonprofit industrial complex, allowing for the reproduction of hierarchies and the slow creep of harmful liberal-capitalist logics. Some also critiqued the outsized role the M4BL umbrella organization played in directing strategy, often without the buy-in of grassroots BYP100 members. Consequently, several chapters chose to sunset their involvement with BYP100, concluding that it could no longer act as their political home.

When coupled with recurring attacks on celebrity movement activists and lawyersa group that includes Cullers, Shaun King, Tamika Mallory, and Benjamin Crumpfor what their critics, among them mothers of the dead, have taken to be a crass and disingenuous penchant for profiting off Black pain, a clear but complex picture of where we are emerges.

From the perspective of M4BLs detractors, its original radical promise has been hopelessly compromised. The social forces and material conditions that galvanized the movement in its first phase remain largely unchanged. The organizational matrix, fortified over the course of the second phase, has become well-resourced, and to a degree, politically influential. M4BL has set its sights on winning influence in more establishment venues, while waging digital campaigns to educate, organize, and bring more people into its fold.

But that approachto set ones sights on mainstream poweralthough sensible and pragmatic, doesnt fly if you want the establishment to burn. It doesnt cohere if you believe liberation depends on the end of the world and the creativity that arrives with destruction.

In other words, a number of activists who have defected from the M4BL ecosystem believe that the war against anti-Blackness and its attendant ills cannot be waged and won on the oppressors terms, using the oppressors tools. And if this is the anchor of your analysis, then regardless of shifts in political discourse and public opinion, policy wins, or the salience of slogans like defund the police, youre likely to conclude that #BlackLivesMatter, along with allied groups such as BLMGN and BYP100, have been captured.

Whether or not you consider capture to be the appropriate term to describe what has happened in M4BLs second phase, aspects of the movement have unquestionably become institutionalized. This has happened in a manner that not only more directly engages the state, especially on the federal level, but also helps to normalize the movements presence withinrather than stridently againstAmerican liberal institutions. In some respects, an argument can be made that the M4BL umbrella organization has become like an oppositional tendency adjacent to the Democratic Party, gunning for a seat at the table. And it is precisely this kind of strategy, and the kinds of practices and tactics it produced, that caused a rupture in the shadows of the 2020 rebellion.

Its possible that some sort of schism was inevitable. I certainly could see the seeds of it being planted as far back as 2016, and the fact is, channeling the benefits of nonprofit status, and effectively changing public policy, were always among the explicit goals of organizers in the M4BL ecosystem. Its also the case that the radical energy that inspires the creation of radical movements comes and goes, as do movement organizations more generally.

When organizations survive, they often moderate their strategies, if not their objectives, in accordance with whatever their current leadership thinks the moment requires. From this we might say that theres a dialectical relationship between what we are becoming and the question what shall we do? Our understanding of the former impacts how we respond to the latter, and vice versa.

Which brings me back to the issue of conceptualization.

If were headed towards a yet-to-be-determined third phase, a post #BlackLivesMatter world, it wont be one where the current constellation of movement organizations simply disappear or become ineffective in their attempts to bring Black people closer to liberation. Instead, it will be a world where movement ideas and principles are taken up anew and materialize in novel forms designed to resist the pitfalls of institutionalization. After all, the objections raised by M4BLs critics were never about political beliefs. The dissent was about how those beliefs were put into practice, driven by a desire to ensureas the critics in BLM10Plus put itthat capitalism and liberalism would be unable to co-opt or blunt this critical historic moment of revolutionary possibility.

So, if this is one possibility of what we might become, then how are we to conceptualize and make sense of the political horizons of a post #BlackLivesMatter world? Will the key organizers in that world build on the radical spirit of the protesters who burned the Minneapolis Third Precinct to the ground at the onset of uprisings in 2020? What are the interpretive tools we should use, and importantly, how should we wield them?

These questions are especially urgent for Black academics and intellectuals committed to Black struggle.

Woodlys answer to the question of what conceptual tools we need is radical Black feminist pragmatism, a political philosophy through which one can view all of the forces that inhibit Black peoples ability to live and thrive. Guided by a carefully considered encounter with the words and lived experiences of movement leaders, her extended theoretical engagement with M4BL through the prism of radical Black feminist pragmatism is a testament to the love she has for Black people.

It also shows her deep admiration for the movements approach to what she terms the art of organizingthough she is equally clear that M4BL is a work in progressand her well founded intuition that the ideas present in this movement are offering the substance, the matter, that can help us to craft a new era . . . that has not yet been named.

A similar sensethat a new era of possibilities had dawnedwas indeed one of the reasons critics of M4BL concluded that the movements institutionalization was evidence it had lost its way.

But Woodlys text has another stated objective: to demonstrate M4BLs usefulness to canonical political and social thought, and in doing so, disrupt, challenge, and revolutionize canonical thinking. This goal partially explains why, throughout the book, many of her theoretical interlocutors come from the white western canon of political theory rather than the trove of Black thinkers who might be equallyif not betterpositioned to conceptualize our historical moment.

For example, Woodly draws on John Deweys notion of social intelligence, which she says the movement uses, in part, to press foundational American ideals into service to salve and correct the structural conditions that enable domination and oppression in present day.

Deploying the term social intelligence to describe M4BLs approach to problem solving is one thing. But its hard not to see her framing as rephrasing a redemption narrative that is all too familiar, whereby the ideas and innovations of Black movements, born out of the pain of Black struggle, are placed in the service of correcting, but ultimately upholding the American project.

We must reject this narrative: neither America, nor any other nation-state, can be redeemed.

Furthermore, the idea of pragmatism itself has its own genealogy in Black feminist thought, one that, like Woodlys interpretation of M4BL, is grounded in pragmatic activism, as Stanlie James put it, and that similarly understands that the future is something to be pondered and set as a goal for today in our theories and in our practices, to borrow from V. Denise James. In this genealogy, the use of the term pragmatism, as a way of naming the nature of the work, emerged independent of any explicit engagement with Dewey, even if scholars like V. Denise James later sought to explore how Dewey might supplement Black feminist theorizing.

The point is this: relying on the canon to help interpret Black movements, and explain their contribution to mainstream political theory, does more to reify the canon than it does to disrupt, let alone revolutionize it. This is a version of being on the oppressors terms and using the oppressors tools, all for the sake of legibility to a canon that has never really concerned itself with Black life.

Reification is obviously not Woodlys intent, and her desire to champion the movement is clear. She is also not alone in explicitly adapting Deweys pragmatism and applying it to an analysis of Black life. Cornel West laid out the argument decades ago, and more recently, Eddie Glaude Jr. comes to mind.

But what we are and what were becoming might require something different from us now, something more. Perhaps thats among the things we need to come to terms with, as the uprisings and internal ruptures usher in a new, post #BlackLivesMatter phase, in Black struggle.

Click here to read an excerpt from Reckoning, courtesy of Deva Woodly and Oxford University Press.

Christopher Paul Harris is an assistant professor of Global and International Studies at University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in politics and historical studies from The New School for Social Research.

More:
On Coming to Terms - publicseminar.org

Martin Luther King Jr., a reverend who charted a colorblind approach to racial injustice, was a man of honor. Read his famous speeches and you will be in absolute awe.

Oh, how we need a King now. Hed set race-baiters everywhere straight. Hed tell them to love their fellow, flawed human beings as individuals, not attack them as irredeemables.

Today, Black Lives Matter the group, not the concept should review MLKs approach to civil rights. The organizers and adherents have chosen a different approach to racial reconciliation: belittlement, division and wholesale condemnation.

King was a modern saint, a modern Moses, leading his people out of separate-but-equal bondage and into a land of equal opportunity where skin color and background was secondary to content of character and ambition.

He was all about love real love which is intentional, reality-based and long-suffering with a pinch of forgiveness thrown in for good measure. Listen to King describe his main motivating idea of pacifism as the only way to win hearts and minds:

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, Love your enemies. It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. Thats love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. Theres something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.

This is the King-led civil rights movementin one paragraph. It defeated its enemies by loving them. Blacks were separated, ostracized, threatened, beaten, killed, shot with fire hoses and all other kinds of evil, but they persevered because they were led by King, who believed love was the answer, not revenge, hate and violence.

If King wanted, he probably could have led Civil War II, with the likes of Malcolm X and other clench-fisted Black Power haters leading followers into armed confrontation. He did not, thankfully. And, in hindsight, he didnt have to. The patient, pacifist approach earned respect from the multitudes who were confronted by white supremacy and rejected it in its raw, hateful form.

Those who need proof BLM is taking a completely different tactic from King need only look up clips from rioting in major cities everywhere in the summer of 2020. Watch as demonstrators in these oft-touted peaceful protests took over whole city blocks and fought against police officers, burned businesses, carried bullhorns during early-morning parades threatening and mocking residents who just wanted a peaceful nights sleep and went on network news shows threatening to come for all white people when they got done destroying cities.

The whole experience was surreal, as if we were watching the Bolshevik Revolution scene in Dr. Zhivago when hordes of communists overran a familys home during dinnertime. But this was America in 2020. It was scarier than any novel coronavirus could ever be.

And BLMs message has gotten more divisive as the years pass. They reject the nuclear family. They align themselves with Democrats and progressives and are hostile toward Republicans and conservatives at every turn. They reject capitalism. They sow distrust of Americas venerate institutions. They tell us to beware and defund the police. The groups website requests readers to report any suspicious disinformation regarding BLM, as if were in Stalinist Russia.

After the recent Kyle Rittenhouse not-guilty jury verdict, an official BLM tweet responded to Rittenhouses magnanimous, turn-the-other-cheek support of the BLM movement by simply stating, (Expletive) you. Would King ever use that hateful expression? Of course not. He wasnt that crude, unforgiving or ungracious.

We were lucky to have King in the 1960s. We need similar wise leadership now, and its not too late for BLM to start forming bridges, rather than creating further division. If it did, it, too, might still be relevant 50 years from now, just as King is.

Visit link:
Here's Something: BLM should learn to be more like MLK - pressherald.com

Nick Saban (r.), with Joe ManchinPhoto: Getty Images

There is no shortage of examples of athletes using their public platforms to elevate social justice causes, from the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics to the Black Lives Matter marches led by collegiate athletes in the summer of 2020, and the countless moments in between. Multiple athletes in American history have chosen to place their careers on the line to make a statement in the last half century, these protests have often taken place in the name of combating racial injustice, specifically against Black Americans. And far too often, the athletes are left alone and abandoned, sometimes ostracized, from their sport for having the courage to speak out after theyve succeeded in getting to a national or international stage.

Im not sure whats worse being left out to dry, as the NFL did to Colin Kaepernick, or whatever the leagues are doing in order to seem like theyre trying these days. Players arent punished for peaceful protests anymore, but in 2020, Rob Manfred tried to pull off a protest publicity stunt during an MLB game. He then proceeded to defend the racism behind the Braves name and traditions in 2021. The NFL plastered End Racism in end zones throughout the country in 2020 while still essentially refusing to hire or retain Black coaches in 2022 (do I need to remind you that 70 percent of the players are Black?). The public efforts of major sports leagues have often rung distinctively false and seemed as though theyre just attempting to cling onto some sort of trendy concept of racial justice.

And in the middle of the athletes and the organizations lie the coaches and executives a group that signed a letter to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin this week urging him to support the Freedom to Vote Act, which aims to restore several original aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Alabama coach Nick Saban, who grew up in West Virginia and walked alongside his players in a Black Lives Matter march, is one of the signers of the letter, along with former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and NBA executive and former player and coach Jerry West, a favorite son of the Mountain State.

The letter reads, in part: So we are united now in urging Congress to exercise its Constitutional responsibility to enact laws that set national standards for the conduct of Federal elections and for decisions that determine election outcomes. Former WVU and NFL athletes Oliver Luck (father of Andrew) and Darryl Talley were the other two signers.

Does this read as a genuine effort or as an empty, for-show gesture? Of course, racial justice matters are at the root of voting rights bills like this one, as Black Americans are the most frequent victims of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. Figures like Saban have very different platforms available to them than the athletes themselves while the athletes are able to make public statements and amplify their messages on social media, higher-level coaches and executives often have direct ties to the people in power. Saban and Manchin, for instance, have been friends since their childhood in the 1950s. Saban is also the Messiah of the religion of Southern football, giving him a real modicum of power in the region.

Is the letter strongly worded? No, not particularly. It doesnt read as an urgent demand for justice, by any means, and no ones career is getting laid on the line because of it. Perhaps the most condemning paragraph says that states have enacted dozens of laws that restrict voting access that seek to secure partisan advantage by eliminating reliable practices with proven safeguards and substituting practices ripe for manipulation.

But we never know perhaps hearing from one of his most publicly influential friends will change Manchins mind on giving Americans voting rights, but without a financial incentive, it seems highly unlikely that hell shift his views (though maybe Im just being a cynic). So this letter isnt exactly groundbreaking stuff, but its also not a meaningless front in place of real effort, either. Saban, Tagliabue, and the other signers directly address one specific legal issue in the broader ongoing fight for racial justice, and Saban in particular, risks antagonizing a chunk of his fan base not that theres really a huge risk there. Hell keep coaching, theyll keep coming to games, nothing will really change. He doesnt face the same scrutiny that protesting athletes and particularly the Black athletes who speak out against injustice have to face in the aftermath of their dissent.

Its something real, at least, more concrete than the empty platitudes that professional and collegiate athletes have been hearing from the higher-ups for decades. Sabans not one to be a phony, and while his letter included a footnote saying that he in particular did not support getting rid of the filibuster, its an unexpected public move. Whether it will actually change anything remains to be seen, of course, but its a good example for more coaches and execs in the business to remember that they can use their public platforms for a legitimate cause, beholden not only to the people who sign their paychecks, but to the athletes who have played for and with them throughout their careers.

Link:
Nick Saban speaks up for the right to vote (kinda) - Deadspin

On 30 May 2020, photographer Philip Montgomery captured a police charge during protests in Minneapolis against the killing of George Floyd. The cops look like giant metal insects, every human part of them hidden. You cant see faces through the glinting visors, or flesh under their robotic armour as they approach with guns blazing through a pale mist of teargas smoke.

Blown up to the size of a painting, Montgomerys spooky monochrome news photo looks like a premonition of the future in the Saatchi Gallerys engrossing, unsettling exhibition America in Crisis. These sci-fi American stormtroopers mirror the warnings, a year on from the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, that the worlds most powerful democracy is heading for a second civil war. Yet America in Crisis is not only about the future. Its about how the present may be understood by the past.

For this show juxtaposes photographs of the USs current troubles with images of a divided country more than half a century ago. It takes its title from a project organised by the Magnum photographers agency in 1969. America in Crisis involved such renowned snappers as Bruce Davidson and Elliott Erwitt in an exhibition and book reporting the protests, assassinations and inequalities of the 1960s a decade that seems in glowing retrospect almost incomparably more hopeful and joyous than todays bitter times.

Yet the 60s dont look so optimistic in Erwitts devastating photograph of Jackie Kennedy at her husbands funeral in 1963. Today the most famous images of her black-clad mourning are Andy Warhols silkscreen pantings but where they are ashen icons, Erwitt takes us closer, through her veil, to see every twitch of her breaking face. Where she takes the tragedy of a nation on herself, Paul Fuscos colour pictures of the train that carried Bobby Kennedys coffin from New York to Washington in 1968, met by grieving crowds along the way, portray a great community of pain. Black and white Americans squeeze together along a platform to salute the passing train, from which Fusco was watching with his camera.

In 2020 it was not the slaying of a famous politician that got people on the streets but the murder of a citizen, Floyd, during his arrest by Minneapolis police that united one half of America in tears of rage. One of the most convincing continuities in this exhibition is between images of the 60s civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter. Davidsons photographs of the Selma freedom march in 1965 pick individuals out of the crowd whose faces make you wonder where they are now, what their later lives were like: a young Black marcher gazes at us over the American flag hes carrying, asking a question America still hasnt answered. Kris Gravess picture of Robert E Lees equestrian statue in Richmond, Virginia in 2020, its colossal plinth completely covered with graffiti, points right past the 1960s to the never-healed wounds of slavery. The most startling images here from the original America in Crisis collection are portraits of Black sharecroppers in South Carolina in 1966. They seem still to be living in the Great Depression.

Perhaps America is timeless in its wrongs, its founding sin, the hypocrisy of a nation based on the declaration that all people are created equal when southern states based their way of life on slavery, so endemic in its history that it cannot go on like this. Yet as you explore America in Crisis, the parallels between past and present fade. Things are clearly getting worse.

There was hope and joy in 1969, after all. Protest, 60s style, seems innocent and childlike now. In Marc Ribouds definitive image of the era, a young woman called Jane Rose Kasmir holds up a flower to the guns of National Guardsmen during an anti-war march in 1967. LOVE says the banner behind two protesters at the Democratic convention in 1968.

The keyword now is HATE. One photograph says it all: the silhouette of Donald Trump at a rally. There was no one like Trump in 1969. A picture of Richard Nixon is offered by comparison but any similarities are superficial: yes, Nixon showed how Republicans could benefit from culture wars by marshalling a silent majority of middle Americans horrified by the perceived excesses of the flower children, but when Watergate was exposed he went quietly. Trump refused to accept the result of a fair election, a lie his supporters still believe, and so took the US into completely uncharted territory.

You see this leap into chaos in photographs of the attack on the Capitol last January. Balasz Gardi photographed a man in 18th-century revolutionary garb waving the US flag with a gang of masked putschists on the Capitol steps. This character dressed for a far-right version of the musical Hamilton is claiming the heritage of the founding fathers for an act that spat on the democracy they created. At times of violent change, wrote Karl Marx, when people are creating something previously non-existent, at just such epochs of crisis they anxiously summon up the spirits of the past to their aid. The Capitol rioters in their weird costumes from a half-forgotten American history opened a new age that nothing from the past can help us to understand. This absorbing exhibition leaves you stupefied by the crisis thats beginning.

Go here to see the original:
America in Crisis review photographs of a country on the brink of civil war - The Guardian