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A new podcast from NBC News takes a deep dive into the fight over diversity and inclusion in Southlake schools.

The affluent, mostly white Carroll school district has become a symbol of the firestorm over how this country deals with race and racism in the classroom.

The series, Southlake, chronicles how it all unfolded. The six-part podcast is hosted by national investigative reporter Mike Hixenbaugh and NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton.

In 2018, a 9-second video blew open some very old divides and exposed an uncomfortable truth, the audio trailer describes. Your experience at school has a lot to do with your skin color.

That was the year a video of Southlake students chanting the N-word went viral. Afterward, the district convened a group of more than 60 students, parents and staff to discuss how students of color are treated in the district and to assemble recommendations on how to improve the school environment.

The resulting Cultural Competence Action Plan includes a wide-ranging set of recommendations such as: hire a director of equity and inclusion; establish a grievance system through which students can report discrimination; require cultural competency training; and audit the district curriculum through an equity lens.

But many families quickly turned against the groups work and rallied to oppose the proposals. At tense school board meetings, parents accused the district of promoting a left-wing agenda and creating diversity police. Meanwhile, students of color stood up to testify about the racism they faced at school.

A mother in the district sued over the plan. Two trustees were indicted on charges of violating the Texas Open Meetings Act by discussing the diversity work privately. A heated election season resulted in major change on the school board, with candidates opposed to the diversity plan sweeping in.

As tensions in Southlake escalated, so did the national culture wars over the idea of critical race theory in schools, fueling the fire in Carroll ISD.

We basically stumbled into a town that had a two-year head start on the fight that is now spread across the country, Hixenbaugh told the Houston Chronicle.

Carroll ISD spokeswoman Karen Fitzgerald said the district has been listening to families concerns and will roll out a new system for students and parents to report incidents to the administration.

Because of a temporary restraining order, she said, the district cant implement or discuss anything related to our diversity plan.

The first two episodes will be available Monday, with new episodes following on successive Mondays.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Labs journalism.

Originally posted here:
NBC News podcast dives into Southlake Carroll schools fights over race and education - The Dallas Morning News

PARIS Josephine Baker, an American-born Black dancer and civil rights activist who in the early 20th century became one of Frances great music-hall stars, will be laid to rest in the Panthon, Frances storied tomb of heroes, a close adviser to President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday.

The honor will make Ms. Baker who became a French citizen in 1937 and died in Paris in 1975 the first Black woman and one of very few foreign-born figures to be interred there. The Panthon houses the remains of some of Frances most revered, including Victor Hugo, Marie Curie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The decision to transfer Ms. Bakers remains, which are buried in Monaco, comes after a petition calling for the move, started by the writer Laurent Kupferman, caught the attention of Mr. Macron. The petition has garnered nearly 40,000 signatures over the past two years.

Mr. Kupferman suggested that Mr. Macron approved the reinterment because, probably, Josephine Baker embodies the Republic of possibilities.

How could a woman who came from a discriminated and very poor background achieve her destiny and become a world star? Mr. Kupferman said. That was possible in France at a time when it was not in the United States.

Entombment at the Panthon can be approved only by a president, and Ms. Bakers reinterment is highly symbolic, coming as France has been convulsed by heated culture wars over its model of social integration, and as gender and race issues have fractured the country around new political front lines.

The news was first reported by Le Parisien newspaper. The funeral will take place on Nov. 30.

Ms. Baker, born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906 in St. Louis, started her career as a dancer in New York in the early 1920s before heading to France, where she quickly became a sensation.

She said that she had been motivated to move abroad because of discrimination that she had endured in the United States. I just couldnt stand America, and I was one of the first colored Americans to move to Paris, she told The Guardian newspaper in 1974.

Along with other Black American artists including the writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin Ms. Baker said she found in France a freedom that she felt denied in the United States.

In Paris, Ms. Baker quickly rose to fame and became a fixture in shows at Les Folies Bergres, a famous music hall, dominating Frances cabarets with her sense of humor, her frantic dancing and her iconic songs, like Jai Deux Amours, or I Have Two Loves.

But part of her artistic career was also built around stereotyped and erotic dances, like the so-called banana dance. The dances were riddled with racist tropes once associated with Black women and their bodies in a colonial France then fascinated with Black and African arts, prompting some activists at the time to denounce her for fueling those caricatures.

But Pap Ndiaye, a historian who specializes in Black studies, said in 2019 on France Culture radio that Ms. Baker had specifically used the stereotypes in her acts, deriding them as much as she exaggerated them.

It is this French colonial imaginary world which she will capture and which she will play with, obviously with many nods and much distance, because Josephine Baker is not fooled, Mr. Ndiaye said.

Ms. Baker later became a passionate civil rights advocate in the United States. She wrote about racial equality, refused to perform in segregated venues and, in 1963, joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. onstage to speak during the March on Washington.

In recent years, French authorities have responded to growing calls to inter more women in the Panthon, where the vast majority of those buried are men. In 2014, Germaine Tillion and Genevive de Gaulle-Anthonioz, who fought in the French Resistance to the Nazis, were awarded the honor, and Simone Veil, a health minister who championed Frances legalization of abortion, was laid to rest there in 2018.

Ms. Bakers burial at the Panthon, by nature of it being the first awarded to a Black woman, could prove politically beneficial for Mr. Macron as debates over racial discrimination are raging in France less than a year before the 2022 presidential elections. But Sundays announcement may also give fuel to the animosity over Frances model of integration, which Mr. Macrons government has heated up recently.

Supporters of moving Ms. Bakers remains to the Panthon have said that it was Frances so-called universalist model purportedly secular, colorblind and of equal opportunity that allowed her to perform in France when she could not in the United States. But this model has also come under severe criticism recently, with some critics, especially among young minorities, accusing it of masking widespread racism and of comprising unfulfilled ideals.

The reinterment will also afford France the chance to celebrate Ms. Bakers life outside the arts. During World War II, she served as an ambulance driver and an intelligence agent, earning her medals of honor. And in the 1950s, Ms. Baker adopted a dozen orphans of various nationalities, races and religions, with whom she lived in a chateau in southwestern France.

Read this article:
Josephine Baker to Be Honored With a Panthon Burial - The New York Times

The BBC Proms, the last night of which is on 11 September, are on their way to achieving the near impossible: an almost complete season, with live audiences, despite the pandemic. Londons Royal Albert Hall may have been quieter than usual, but it has still welcomed audience members who are double-vaccinated, or have tested negative, by the thousands into its expansive auditorium. In the meantime, millions have listened to the broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, or watched the concerts on iPlayer or on television.

Beneath the smooth surface, there have been many last-minute programme changes and artist swaps, as conductors and soloists booked to travel from overseas have encountered obstacles. On a number of occasions, UK-based artists have stepped in to fill the breach. In fact, the whole season, if one were so minded, might be seen as a tribute to the excellence of British orchestras, which with the exception of the Berlin-headquartered Mahler Chamber Orchestra have been the mainstay of this years season. That not only goes for the BBC orchestras, which always provide the concerts backbone, but also smaller, younger ensembles, such as Chineke! and the Manchester Collective.

In fact, the 2021 BBC Proms could be seen as a legitimate excuse for a modicum of national pride, though with an acknowledgment that, in normal years, it is the festivals gathering together of the very best musicians from across the world that makes it the substantial event that it is. Even this year, the festival has been immeasurably enriched, indeed made possible, by visiting artists. In 2020, though, when the Proms were much reduced and performed without live audiences, any such potential pride was brushed aside by an ugly attack on the BBC from the right, after it was reported that Land of Hope and Glory and other Last Night of the Proms favourites would probably be performed without words. The BBC said that this was an artistic decision with no one in the audience, it made no sense to attempt works in a form reliant on a mass singalong. The BBC was, however, suspected of taking the opportunity to suppress in the summer of Black Lives Matter protests some of the uglier lyrics of Rule, Britannia! (which would have anyway been an honourable position to take). The prime minister sensed an excellent opportunity to cast the corporation as a woke stronghold. Then the new BBC director general commanded a U-turn. The words were sung, a touch awkwardly, by the BBC Singers.

It was an unedifying episode. Looking back on it a year later, it seems even more futile and absurd. The Last Night of the Proms is a cultural flashpoint, despite the fact that its timeless traditions were largely invented after the second world war by the conductor Malcolm Sargent, years after the Proms were founded in 1895. What is sad about such episodes is that they leave a long shadow, a kind of stain. No doubt that is exactly what some on the right intend. But at least such attacks can be seen, with some perspective, for what they are: one-sided skirmishes in the Tories empty culture wars. And, fundamentally, nothing much to do with the Proms.

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The Guardian view on the Proms: British artists to the rescue - The Guardian

In my latest column, motivated by the California recall, I pointed out that the Golden States left turn on policy hasnt produced the economic collapse that conservatives predicted. On the contrary, the states economy has boomed, even as it keeps getting trash-talked by the business press: Between the election of Jerry Brown and the Covid-19 pandemic, both output and employment grew about as fast in California as they did in Texas.

It has, however, been a peculiar kind of boom, one in which more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in.

Economists trying to understand the rise and fall of regions within a country often rely on some form of economic base analysis. The idea is that a regions overall growth is determined by the performance of its export industries that is, industries that sell mainly to customers outside the region, such as the technology firms of Silicon Valley and the Los Angeles entertainment complex (or, here in New York, the financial industry). Growth in these industries, however, generates a lot of growth in other sectors, from health care to retail trade, driven by the local spending of the base industries companies and employees.

But base analysis suggests that when a state has a booming export sector, as California does, it should be seeing growth in more or less everything. Instead, what we see in California is that while highly educated workers are moving in to serve the tech boom, less educated workers are moving out:

Theres no great mystery about why this is happening: Its because of housing. California is very much a NIMBY state, maybe even a banana (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) state. The failure to add housing, no matter how high the demand, has collided with the tech boom, causing soaring home prices, even adjusted for inflation:

And these soaring prices are driving less affluent families out of the state.

One way to think about this is to say that California as a whole is suffering from gentrification. That is, its like a newly fashionable neighborhood where affluent newcomers are moving in and driving working-class families out. In a way, California is Brooklyn Heights writ large.

Yet it didnt have to be this way. I sometimes run into Californians asserting that theres no room for more housing they point out that San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles ringed by mountains. But theres plenty of scope for building up.

If we look at population-weighted density the population density of the neighborhood in which the average person lives we find that greater New York is two and a half times as dense as the San Francisco and Los Angeles metro areas, with more than 30,000 people per square mile in New York and only around 12,000 in both California metros. This doesnt mean that every New Yorker lives in a high-rise (the metro area includes plenty of leafy green suburbs), it only means that those who choose to live in multistory apartment buildings can do so. If California were willing to offer that choice, it wouldnt have its housing crisis.

Personal aside: My New York apartment is in a neighborhood that, according to census data, has 60,000 residents per square mile, with many 10-plus-story buildings. Its not a teeming sea of humanity; its surprisingly quiet and genteel!

The thing is, Californias housing problem, while especially extreme, isnt unique.

Since the 1980s America has experienced growing regional divergence. We have become a knowledge economy driven by industries that rely on a highly educated work force, and firms in those industries, it turns out, want to be located in places where there are a lot of highly educated workers already places like the Bay Area.

Unfortunately, most of these rising knowledge-industry hubs also severely limit housing construction; this is true even of greater New York, which is much denser than any other U.S. metropolitan area but could and should be even denser. As a result, housing prices in these metros have soared, and working-class families, instead of sharing in regional success, are being driven out.

The result is that there are now, in effect, two Americas: the America of high-tech, high-income enclaves that are unaffordable for the less affluent, and the rest of the country.

And this economic divergence goes along with political divergence, mainly because education has become a prime driver of political affiliation.

It may seem hard to believe now, but as recently as the early 2000s college graduates leaned Republican. Since then, however, highly educated voters who have presumably been turned off by the G.O.P.s embrace of culture wars and its growing anti-intellectualism have become overwhelmingly Democratic, while non-college-educated whites have gone the other way.

As a result, the two Americas created by the collision of the knowledge economy and NIMBYism correspond fairly closely to the blue-red division: Democratic-voting districts have seen a big rise in incomes, while G.O.P. districts have been left behind:

Again, this didnt have to happen, at least not to this extent. True, the growing concentration of knowledge industries in a few metropolitan areas reflects deep economic forces that are hard to fight. But not building enough housing to accommodate this concentration and share its benefits is a policy choice, one that is deepening our national divisions.

There are hints of movement toward less restrictive housing policy; Californias legislature has just passed a bill that would, in essence, force suburbs to accept some two-unit buildings alongside single-family homes. Even this modest measure would make it possible to add around 700,000 housing units roughly the same number added in the whole state between 2010 and 2019.

We need much more of this. Restrictive housing policy doesnt get nearly as much attention in national debates as it deserves. It is, in fact, a major force pulling our nation apart.

Read more:
Opinion | The Gentrification of Blue America - The New York Times

Aug 26th 2021

by Kori Schake

This By-invitation commentary is part of a series by global thinkers on the future of American powerexamining the forces shaping the countrys global standing, from the rise of China to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Read more here.

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MY FAVOURITE expression of Americas dynamism comes from the countrys former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky: American culture, he observed, seems so much in process, so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply. What pessimists about American power overlook is the protean regeneration that is the countrys essential nature.

The United States has a government created by people who distrusted government, and is a great power whose people would prefer to remain uninvolved in the world. Those anomalies make it difficult to sustain international commitments, especially involving countries not constituted along similar domestic lines. And yet America is the architect of a durable political, economic and security order that has made it and others safer and more prosperous.

The debacle in Afghanistan will require demonstrations of greater commitment elsewhere, but it doesnt call into question the order itself. In fact, that America and its allies persevered in Afghanistan for 20 years despite very slow progress may even deter some challengers.

The global order should not be taken for granted. Its genius is that it benefits not just America and its allies but every country that plays by its rules. And it is especially beneficial to middle-sized and smaller powers. They would have little ability to protect their interests in an environment where the strongest werent constrained by rules and institutions. That makes the system more stable and cost-effective than those that other hegemons have established, such as French dominance of Europe in the Napoleonic era or even Spain with all its plunder from the New World. While the rules prevail, everyone prospers.

The world is confronted with a historic challenge. It is happening economically, diplomatically, militarily, technologically and more. But at its core, it is philosophical, contesting the Hegelian belief that as people grow wealthy, they demand more political rights. That idea seemed to explain how the worlds most sustainably prosperous countries were free societies. The rise of China, where there is economic well-being without an open society, calls that into question._______________

Read more:

Henry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan Anne-Marie Slaughter on why Americas diversity is its strength Niall Ferguson on why the end of Americas empire wont be peaceful_______________

Yet it would be wrong to regard the tension as a great-power competition. Instead, it is a situation in which America and the vast majority of other countries are attempting to sustain a mutually beneficial order against a country that seeks to overturn it for its sole advantage. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea illustrates the distinction: China is a signatory, but routinely violates it; America has not ratified the convention yet not only abides by its terms, but also assists other countries in upholding it.

Although China benefits enormously from orderly global trade, it is still willing to abuse its terms to penalise Australia and Japan for pursuing foreign policies with which it disagrees. Russia may share Chinas ambition of an international order favouring authoritarianism, but it lacks the economic heft to create systemic change. If America cannot or will not uphold the international, rules-based system, the likeliest outcomes will be either a frayed, more chaotic world, or one dominated by China. Either outcome would be less peaceful and prosperous.

Certainly, American power has ebbed relative to the growing economies of the global south that Americas rules-based order helped bring about, as well as from the countrys own mistakes, such as the Iraq war and the chaotic departure from Afghanistan. Yet tales of American decline fail to capture the countrys capacity for reinvention and rejuvenation, from creating Silicon Valley to electing a black president. Critics underestimate how difficult it is for other countries to get right what America already has right.

The United States has both high- and low-skilled labour through immigration and social acceptance, university systems that generate technical and scientific innovation, deep and diverse capital pools for investment, reliable commercial law and recourse through the courts, and a political system responsive to public concerns. Washington is designed to be at a stalemate unless there is a broad political consensus. Its a regrettable byproduct of beneficial democratic features: congressional elections every two years that make the chamber closer to public attitudes, less centralised party control that provide wider avenues for newcomer participation (Donald Trump, for example), and a federal system that enables policy experimentation by the states.

Allies and enemies alike are right to question whether Americas capacity for regeneration is enough this time to fix its myriad problems. The country seems to luxuriate in performative politics. The culture wars have evolved into stark ideological divisions over everything from mask-wearing to army recruiting commercials to the integrity of the presidential election in 2020. Governing amid social diversity is difficult and social medias immediacy and pervasiveness complicates everything.

Yet such challenges have always typified the American experience, and are perhaps to be expected for a country so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, in Mr Pinskys words. The Black Lives Matter protests illustrated injustices in America, but also showed the breadth of solidarity and demand for improvement. The protests inspired demands for changes around the worldfitting for a country that sees its values as universal.

The past three American presidents have argued for less international involvement, evoking the idea of nation-building at home. But it is not a binary choice; the aims are complementary not contradictory. America needs an international order that prevents trouble so that it can focus on domestic challenges, and strengthening the country domestically boosts its influence internationally. The alternatives to the rules-based order are costlier and more dangerous than sustaining what exists: shielding ourselves against a hostile or chaotic order would require more expense and effort. America should strengthen the current system. Three steps for this stand out.

First, close the strategy-resources gap. For the past 20 years, America has tolerated a chasm between its ambitions and the money it commits to achieve them: financing wars through debt and allowing dedicated social programmes to outpace funding. Its defence posture is predicated on an annual 3-5% increase in real spending that has not materialised. President Bidens defence budget doesnt even keep pace with inflation. Were tempting adversaries to test whether we can do what we say we will. It is past time to buy a wider margin of safety, either by increasing military spending (perhaps to 6% of GDP from 3.7% today) or giving the Defence Department latitude to spend differently (such as by eliminating non-defence elementslike cancer researchfrom its budget).

Second, smarten up diplomacy. American diplomats are typically generalists on whom the State Department spends a fortune for language training. Instead, the country needs to hire language speakers and put the emphasis on teaching strategy: the arts of nuclear deterrence, successful negotiation and diplomatic history. Moreover, creativity should be encouraged. For example, faced with a lack of transparency in China, the American embassy started tweeting Beijings air quality on an hourly basis, which pressed the government to take environmental policies more seriously.

Third, stop imperiling dollar supremacy. So much of the latitude America enjoys in order to run high deficits comes from issuing the global reserve currency. It has been lucky that, so far, the alternatives like the euro or yuan are inferior. But the rise of secondary sanctions (imposed on individuals and organisations outside a country under sanctions) creates incentives for the development of new payment mechanisms to skirt the dollar zonethe very system that keeps Americas debt affordable. A plan to end deficit spending and exercising restraint in using the financial system as a weapon when imposing sanctions needs to be a national-security priority.

Americans are experiencing a crisis of confidence over whether their democracy can handle its challenges, and they question the universality of their values. They are also questioning the use of military force after failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. However leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping embrace no such introspection. They imprison political activists, build surveillance systems, suffocate dissent and constrain business.

It is true that many people would not want a society as brilliantly and brutally in motion as America, but they probably do wish for a government that is fair and accountable. America should not lose faith that the truths it holds to be self-evident genuinely are just that. Sustaining an international system is hard work. No dominant power has had as much voluntary co-operation from allies as America. With collaboration and creativity, the country may grow even stronger in the 21st century._____________

Kori Schake is the director of foreign and defence policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. She has previously held positions at the Defence Department and State Department, and on the National Security Council

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Kori Schake on why America should keep faith in the rules-based order - The Economist