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This article represents the opinion of the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board.

Big step on Piney Point. The appointment of an independent receiver for the old Piney Point fertilizer plant property marks a major step toward shutting down this environmental threat. The state Department of Environmental Protection had sought a receiver as part of the lawsuit it filed earlier this month against the property owner, HRK Holdings. The appointment means that day-to-day management of the property will shift to the receiver, which officials hope clears the way to shutter the site near the Manatee-Hillsborough County line. This spring, a leaky reservoir at the site prompted the release of 215 million gallons of polluted wastewater into Tampa Bay. While workers patched the torn seam, the state fears that the summer rainy season could spark another release. Piney Point has received more than 24 inches of rain since the start of June. It has room for roughly another 11 inches, and is expected to receive at least another 9 inches by the end of September. The receiver will need to get going, involve area agencies and environmental groups and have the states full support to close Piney Point before another environmental crisis erupts.

Hell need a small box. Gov. Ron DeSantis office announced this week that Dr. Scott Rivkees will depart next month as the states surgeon general. Floridians might think this is old news; after all, Rivkees has hardly been seen since an aide to the governor yanked him from a press briefing on the coronavirus in 2020 after the surgeon general suggested that Floridians might have to social distance for up to a year. He emerged from protective custody earlier this month to issue a rule at the governors directive mandating that parents be allowed to excuse their children from masking requirements at school a measure a state judge on Friday struck down as unlawful. We realize that gubernatorial appointees are expected to carry some polluted political water. But Floridians deserved much better.

Welcoming Afghans to Tampa Bay. Many watching the chaos of Afghans fleeing Kabul are left with a simple question: Where are those lucky enough to get out actually going? Some are ending up in Tampa Bay. Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services has settled six people from Afghanistan and is preparing for four more next week. As the Tampa Bay Times Michaela Mulligan reports, the group settles up to 100 refugees each year. Now they are opening up for Afghans fleeing from the Talibans takeover of the country in advance of the Aug. 31 deadline for Americas withdrawal. Another local nonprofit, Radiant Hands, is also poised to help with refugees from Afghanistan. The group helps resettle and integrate refugees from Muslim and Arabic-speaking countries. Aside from meeting an immigrants immediate needs, these groups also help orient refugees to navigate everyday life catching a bus, for example and provide training in life skills, such as driving or opening a banking account. As much as these groups give, refugees give back in many ways, opening businesses, adding character and contributing to the diversity and fabric of a community. We all have a stake in making Tampa Bay a welcome and thriving place to settle. To help, contact Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services and Radiant Hands.

Step right up. Hernando County School Board candidate Mark Johnson and his wife, Arlene Glantz, took their push against critical race theory on a road trip recently, hosting an unofficial town hall that doubled as propaganda and a campaign event. Spinning conspiracy theories from cherrypicked records, they derided the theory as a Marxist effort to create division in the classroom and to dumb-down academics. Leaving aside that interpretation, Hernando doesnt teach critical race theory, which examines the impact of racism across American life. No school district in Florida does. Yet its become a dog whistle in the culture wars thats putting school children and teachers in the cross hairs. If we dont stop this craziness now, Glantz told the audience, were gonna lose this country. Glantz and her husband should take that advice to heart.

Setting COVID records. The final item this week comes via a graphic.

Editorials are the institutional voice of the Tampa Bay Times. The members of the Editorial Board are Editor of Editorials Graham Brink, Sherri Day, Sebastian Dortch, John Hill, Jim Verhulst and Chairman and CEO Paul Tash. Follow @TBTimes_Opinion on Twitter for more opinion news.

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From Piney Point to COVID deaths, the highs and lows across Tampa Bay and Florida - Tampa Bay Times

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.

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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.

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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.

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Opinion | The Gentrification of Blue America - The New York Times