Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 211

The End of Discriminatory Policing in Ferguson?

The Ferguson, Missouri, City Council reversed its previous position and voted Tuesday night to accept the changes to its courts and police departments that were recommended by the U.S. Justice Department in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a police officer.

The council voted unanimously, 6-to-0, to accept the Justice Department’s changes, and likely spared itself from an expensive legal battle.

Under the Justice Department’s recommendations, officers would take a diversity-training course and would be trained to first de-escalate a situation. Additionally, the city would buy software and hire staff to review arrest data to prevent discrimination, and all supervisors and officers would be fitted with body cameras within 180 days. The arrangement would also require Ferguson to hire an independent monitor to ensure the city lives up to the agreement.

After Brown’s death, the government released a report that found Ferguson’s officers regularly and unconstitutionally stopped and searched blacks in the community. It also found the courts used officers as a way to generate revenue through constant harassment and unnecessary fines.

“These violations were not only egregious, they were routine. They were encouraged by the city in the interest of raising revenue," Attorney General Loretta Lynch  said in February. "They were driven, at least in part, by racial bias and they occurred disproportionately against African American residents of Ferguson.”

The Justice Department outlined a list of adjustments and changes Ferguson needed to make, but the city voted against them in February, citing, in part, costs. The city’s finance director estimated that complying with the agreement could cost nearly $7 million. The Justice Department responded with a lawsuit, saying the city’s officers engaged in “discriminatory policing, unconstitutional stops, searches and arrests, and the use of unreasonable force.”

Tuesday’s agreement still needs approval from a judge, but the Justice Department is expected to drop its lawsuit against the city.

Medium Evolves Again

When discussing the web’s great platforms, it’s impossible to understate the importance of organization and distribution.

Oh, sure, the atomic units—the tweet, the post, the ’gram—get all the attention. But how Twitter organizes itself—that it displays tweets in chronological order, indexed by author—is way more important than the formal properties of a tweet. Ditto Facebook, with its profile-structure and all-powerful News Feed algorithm, and Instagram, with its scroll of endless images.

On Tuesday afternoon, Medium—the online “community for readers and writers,” founded by Ev Williams—announced a new organizing principle. Technically it did this by releasing a feature to users on iOS and Android devices—the feature is called Collections—but, if these early iterations succeed, soon Collections will become a major aspect of Medium. A collection may even, one day, be weighted equally on the service to a post.

But first: What is a collection? A collection is just a list—of posts, of authors, of links to other places on the web.

“It’s this thing that you can create that has a title or a description, to group together Medium stories or Medium users or Medium publications. You can also use it to link to other ideas around the web,” says Katie Zhu, an engineer who helped build the feature. (Disclosure: She’s also a college friend.)

In Tuesday’s update of the Medium app, these lists come to dominate the platform’s organization. At the top of the home screen, there’s a list of topics, including “News,” “Comics,” “Sports,” “Syrian War,” and “Unrequired reading” (a play on Eggers). Collections, in other words, operate like a horizontal navigation bar.

Each of these showcase collections highlights Medium posts, major writers to follow, and a couple outside links. “News,” for instance, leads with a Medium post from Tamir Rice’s mother, Samaria Rice, about why she’s declined to endorse a candidate; it follows that with an “open letter to America,” from a defense contractor who declares “This Is Not My Republican Party.” The collection about Syria points to a Washington Post story that lives on Medium—“It’s the fifth anniversary of the start of the Syrian conflict. How did we get here?”—and lists users who write about the war, like Hanin Ghaddar, a security expert at the Atlantic Council.

Right now, collections only exist in the company’s apps. Zhu said a Medium.com version of the feature was coming in the next few weeks.

Most importantly, collections are created by people. “We believe that in order to create a great reading experience for humans, other humans should be part of that process,” writes Zhu in a company blog post. So each of the collections linked from the navigation bar was assembled by a Medium staff member or “trusted user.” Those same people are the only ones who can create any collection right now: At some point in the coming months, the company may let any Medium user create a collection.

This represents a major change in strategy for Medium. When Medium was founded, it directed readers to posts through algorithmic curation of its homepage. Through the company’s many in-house metrics—including its much-beloved “total time reading” measurement—it determined what stories you were most likely to enjoy. At the beginning, Medium didn’t even offer users a “follow” button. If you recommended enough posts by an author, the service assured users, you were effectively following them, even if you had no button to press. The site’s wise and prudent algorithm would sniff out your true intent.

The site started offering a “Follow” button one or two iterations ago, but the shift to curation here represents even more of a change. Humans, not computers, will now determine who sees a great deal of stories on the service.

When Medium was founded, many writers asked if it was a “publication or a platform.” The question has since been decisively answered: Medium is, regardless of however many writers it has on staff, a platform. But the addition of collections reflects that, if you want people to stick around, you have to be more than an algorithmically curated morass of word-filled pages. There has to a curatorial voice somewhere. Medium is a platform—but if collections succeed, it will be a platform with a publication’s editorial eye.

The Rubio Campaign Ends Where It Began

This was never how it was supposed to end for Marco Rubio, the man who once seemed ordained to save the Republican Party. Not in Florida, of all places, and certainly not at the hands of Donald Trump.

"After tonight while it is clear that we are on the right side this year, we were not on the winning side," Rubio said. He withdrew from the presidential race on Tuesday night after finishing a distant second in the state that sent him to the Senate six years ago, and where he had been camped out for the last week in a final, frenzied bid to extend his campaign. He delivered a paean to the need for a vibrant conservative movement, built on principles, and not fear, or anger, or frustration. “I chose a different path, and I’m proud of it,” he said.

He became the latest Republican establishment favorite to be bullied, belittled, and ultimately dispatched by Trump, who took home 99 delegates in winner-take-all Florida.

By the time Rubio spoke on Tuesday, neither the outcome nor his exit was a surprise; pre-primary polling showed him losing to Trump by as much as a 2-to-1 margin. But much like his onetime Florida mentor, Jeb Bush, Rubio found himself baffled by a Republican primary that confounded even the most outlandish predictions.

When Rubio launched his campaign 11 months ago in Miami, he was the favorite of many Republicans, but not the frontrunner. Fans and critics alike had been labeling him the GOP’s version of Barack Obama since well before Time Magazine plastered him on its cover in early 2013 under the headline, “The Republican Savior.”

It was easy to see why.

A first-term senator in his 40s, Rubio was, like Obama, a gifted orator with a biography that embodied the American dream. He wowed Republicans with his speech at the party’s convention in 2012, and his supporters saw a strong general-election candidate who could easily loosen the Democrats’ tight grip on the Hispanic vote. Rubio frequently invoked his working-class, immigrant parents, who came to the United States a few years before Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. “My father stood behind a small portable bar in the back of a room for all those years, so that tonight I could stand behind this podium in the front of this room,” Rubio said in a signature line from his announcement speech last April.

Like Obama in 2008, he sought to head off questions about his youth by calling for a generational turnover, a changing of the political guard. “Now, the time has come for our generation to lead the way toward a new American century,” Rubio said in a line that he hoped would work both against Jeb Bush in the primary and Hillary Clinton in the fall.

“Now, the time has come for our generation to lead the way toward a new American century.”

Yet for all of the hype, Rubio faced two major hurdles even before Trump got into the race. The first was the history of the GOP: Much more so than Democrats, Republicans have tended to nominate next-in-line candidates—those with deep governing experience or long tenures on the national stage. In the last 50 years, the only non-incumbent to win the Republican nomination who had not previously run for president was George W. Bush in 2000, and he was the son of a president and a two-term governor of Texas. For many Republicans, that candidate in 2016 was Jeb Bush, who moved quickly to sign up donors and staff who might otherwise have gone to Rubio.

In that sense, the comparisons to Obama hurt Rubio as well. For six years, Republicans had been telling voters it was a mistake to elect a president who hadn’t even completed a single term in the Senate. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom heading into the 2016 race was that voters disgusted with Washington politics would gravitate toward a governor, a dynamic from which Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, John Kasich, or Bobby Jindal stood to benefit.

The other big problem for Rubio was immigration. At a time when the Republican National Committee was formally calling for the party to embrace comprehensive reform, Rubio joined the Senate’s Gang of Eight in 2013 and tried to sell conservatives on legislation that offered an eventual path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants. The bill passed the Senate but never came up in the more conservative House, where hardliners denounced it as a form of amnesty. Rubio quickly renounced the legislation, but as the 2016 campaign began, he had lost support among conservatives who criticizing his original support for the proposal as well as from Democrats and reform-minded Republicans who said he had cut and run on a critical issue.

Trump dominated both the polls and the media coverage through the summer and fall of 2015, and while he tussled with Bush, Carly Fiorina, and many of the other Republicans, Rubio flew mostly under the radar. It was a strategy that his campaign insisted was a deliberate choice, and as the Iowa caucuses rolled around, it looked like it was paying off. He fought hard with Cruz over immigration and parried attacks from Bush over his absences from the Senate, but he kept his distance—as much as possible—from the Trump circus. As other candidates fell away, Rubio surged into a strong third-place finish in Iowa, nearly eclipsing Trump. He was mocked by some for delivering a “victory speech” after coming in third, but if anyone left Iowa with a clear shot of momentum, it was Rubio.

All of that disappeared, however, on a debate stage in New Hampshire. Under fire from Chris Christie for relying on canned, 25-second soundbites, Rubio inexplicably respond with … the same canned soundbite. “This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing,” Rubio repeated over and over again, in a performance that was immediately likened to a malfunctioning robot.

Three days later, Rubio slipped to fifth place in New Hampshire, a finish that was blamed in large part on his debate debacle. He recovered in South Carolina, edging out Ted Cruz for second place in a state that seemed strong for the Texas senator. But he still could not come close to Trump, and in Nevada on February 23, the billionaire defeated Rubio by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

With the race narrowed to five, Rubio finally went hard against Trump. Interrupting him frequently on the debate stage in Houston, Rubio unleashed months worth of opposition research and attacked Trump over his lack of policy depth, his use of immigrant labor, the lawsuit he’s facing over Trump University, and more. Trump staggered, delivering his worst performance of the primary season. The next morning, Rubio took it even further. In a planned departure from his stump speech that seemed like a cross between a Trump impersonation and a stand-up comedy routine, Rubio mocked the front-runner relentlessly. He made fun of him for misspelling words in his tweets, for applying makeup to his sweaty upper lip during a commercial debate in the debate, and for possibly checking to see if he had wet his pants. Later in the weekend, Rubio made fun of Trump for having “small hands.” “And you know what they say about guys with small hands,” Rubio said to shocked laughter from the crowd. “You can’t trust ’em!”

It was funny, sure. But many Republicans didn’t seem to know whether to laugh, cheer, or cringe. It also didn’t work. Trump upstaged Rubio by announcing the surprise endorsement of Chris Christie, and he proceeded to mock the Florida senator by calling him “little Marco” at rallies and debates. On Super Tuesday, Rubio was nearly shut out, winning only the Minnesota caucuses and watching as Ted Cruz eclipsed him as Trump’s main challenger. Rubio struggled, too, in the states that followed. He exited the race having won only in Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

By early March, Rubio had all but abandoned a national campaign and hunkered down in Florida, hoping that a victory in his delegate-rich home state would keep his campaign alive and deny Trump an opportunity to clinch the nomination before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But polls soon showed him trailing Trump badly, and the harbinger of any campaign’s demise—second-guessing operatives and preliminary obituaries by the media—began appearing. Would Rubio drop out before Florida to save face for a future statewide run? Why did he rely so heavily on media coverage (that ultimately went to Trump) instead of investing in a better campaign organization on the ground?

“I still, at this moment, continue and intend to support the Republican nominee. But it’s getting harder every day.”

Rubio faces a more uncertain future than many of his Republican rivals, who can fall back on governorships, retirement, or continuing careers in Congress. In running for president, he decided not to seek reelection to the Senate, and his term will end in January. There has been speculation that he will run for governor of Florida in 2018 after Rick Scott finishes his second term. His home-state loss to Trump might damage his standing, but at just 44, he may yet have a long political future in a party that rewards experience and likes a good comeback story.

Perhaps the most compelling, even poignant aspect of Rubio’s campaign was how much he publicly struggled to comprehend it toward the end. Barely two weeks after subjecting Trump to schoolyard taunts, Rubio told reporters he regretted doing so, that his wife and kids were embarrassed. He called Trump a “con artist,” insisted he would lose in the fall, and flirted with the #NeverTrump campaign, yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to disavow the frontrunner entirely. The campaign took a toll on him, and he could be heard coughing frequently during the final debate. At a press conference over the weekend, Rubio was pale, exhausted, and hoarse. He seemed aghast at the violence that had broken out at Trump rallies, and at the general tone of the whole campaign. “I still, at this moment, continue and intend to support the Republican nominee,” Rubio said. “But it’s getting harder every day.”

A few days later, Rubio lost to Trump again, and his bid for the presidency was over.

Obama Abandons Plans to Drill in the Atlantic Ocean

In the early months of 2015, Peg Howell heard whisperings of news that disturbed her: Energy companies wanted to open up the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, off the southeastern coast, to oil and gas drilling. The details came in pieces. First, she saw a local legislator editorialize on the benefits that oil production would bring in a local newspaper. Then, the Department of the Interior held a meeting to seek comment nearby.

Jewell, a retired corporate consultant, lives in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Pawleys Island is a tiny, oceanfront town—“one of the oldest beach resorts in the country,” she told me—and she was shocked.

“I couldn’t believe the oil business would come here,” she said Tuesday. “I started sounding the alarm to everyone I knew that this was for real. It wasn’t something that people were just talking about.”

Howell was not unfamiliar with how the oil industry worked. She was a multi-year veteran of the business. In 1979, she became a “company man”—that is, the senior professional who manages and commands full responsibility for the daily operation of an oil rig. Howell was, in fact, the first female “company man” in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet despite that experience, she knew—upon first seeing rumors of the offshore drilling—that she could not abide oil and gas wells in the Atlantic Ocean.

On Tuesday, Howell—and other coastal residents, community members, and environmentalists—won their victory. The Obama administration dropped its plan to open the coast of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas to oil and gas drilling.

But contrary to environmentalist expectations and early press reports, the Obama administration will continue to offer new leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Alaskan coast. The moves came as part of a revised proposal from the Department of the Interior handling offshore fossil-fuel drilling from 2017 to 2022. The proposal is not final.

“We heard from many corners that now is not the time to offer oil and gas leasing off the Atlantic coast,” said Sally Jewell, the secretary of the interior. “When you factor in conflicts with national defense, economic activities such as fishing and tourism, and opposition from many local communities, it simply doesn’t make sense to move forward with lease sales in the coming five years.”

Environmental advocates working at the national level reacted half-heartedly to the move.

“We’re thrilled that whales, dolphins, and coastal communities will be protected from the dangers of drilling in the Atlantic, but prohibiting new leases off the East Coast isn’t enough,” said Miyoko Sakashita, who directs the oceans program at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “President Obama needs to follow his own climate rhetoric and stop allowing new oil and gas drilling in all of our oceans.”

The revised plan will open 10 new leasing sites in the Gulf of Mexico and three new sites off the Alaskan coast. It’s still unclear whether those Arctic sites will actually be leased: Last year, Royal Dutch Shell abandoned its plan to drill for oil in the northern latitudes after spending $7 billion on a single exploratory well, in part because the price of oil has cratered.

Climate groups have recently focused on lobbying to keep untapped oil and gas reserves in the ground, a scientific necessity if the climate is to be kept from warming more than two degrees Celsius. Some estimates place all offshore Alaskan oil reserves at 25 billion barrels. The carbon dioxide preserved in those seams alone—about 10 billion metric tons—constitutes double the United States’s current annual carbon emissions.

The Obama administration’s continued commitment to leasing those three Arctic sites follows its move last year to restrict Arctic drilling in the vast majority of U.S.-controlled coastal waters. (The oil industry criticized that restriction before its details were even publicized.) In that same proposal, though, it also advanced the prospect of drilling off the southeastern coast.  

Unlike Arctic oil exploration—a divisive issue with a multi-decade history—the prospect of drilling in Atlantic waters shocked nearby residents.

“The Atlantic Ocean has never seen any commercial production of oil or gas drilling, and the Atlantic has not been open to oil or gas leasing for 30-some odd years,” said Christopher DeScherer, a Charleston-based attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “At least in the past several decades, this just hasn’t been an issue that came up here.”

In fact, the last time oil drilling was floated in the region at all was the late 1980s, when Mobil explored tapping a gas field near Cape Hatteras. Federal law—and local opposition that feared an Exxon Valdez-like disaster—put an end to that attempt.

Governors of all four states whose coastlines were under consideration—including Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat in Virginia, and Nikki Haley, a Republican of South Carolina—announced their support for oil drilling. But communities intervened, DeScherer said, and a partisan divide never emerged on the issue. Local retirees, environmentalists, and companies dependent on tourism and strong fisheries imagined an oil spill destroying their business or way of life, except the accident they cited this time around was BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

“Virtually every municipality along the coast of South Carolina has come out against this, no matter their political stripe,” he told me.

Howell added that many locals feared the southeastern coast would be “retrofit” for the oil industry. “The Gulf of Mexico grew up with the oil business, but there isn’t a coastline in the Gulf that’s like the coast of the Atlantic, where there are resorts and towns and shellfish fisheries—this whole lifestyle on the Atlantic is totally different,” she said.

“[The oil business] forever changes the environment, it forever changes the nature of work, it forever changes how people actually live in a place,” she added.

Her personal experience led her to oppose the proposal. Watching over the details of rig operation everyday, she said, she came to know that “pollution and harming the ocean environment was part of the cost of extracting oil and gas.” She took further issue with the industry after the 2010 spill in the Gulf.

“What really put me into opposing offshore drilling was the Deepwater Horizon accident—that British Petroleum did not take responsibility immediately for what happened there, that they didn’t say in their full statement, ‘we take full responsibility.’” She knew, as a former “company man,” that those in charge of the rig always bear ultimate responsibility for what happens there. (Howell left the oil business during its 1982 downturn, though she still worked with it occasionally as a consultant.)

But not everyone who opposed Atlantic drilling shared her distaste for the oil industry. Many local residents reacted to Congress’s lifting of the oil-export ban last year. People disliked that much of the fuel procured would ultimately be burned outside American borders, she said.

And ultimately, Howell felt that many people moved to protect their home and sense of place. “People here understood that these decisions are forever decisions,” she told me. “Opening up the Atlantic was going to put the oil and gas industry here forever. Even though the wells in California were drilled 50 years ago—and no new drilling is allowed off the coast of California, and hasn’t been since 1981—there’s still methane and petroleum leaks there today. This was a decision to allow the oil industry to come here forever.”

Burma's First Civilian Leader in Five Decades

Burma’s generations-long transition to democratic rule reached its apex on Tuesday after Htin Kyaw was elected president by the two houses of parliament. The 70-year-old leader was nominated to serve by his party, the National League for Democracy, after a constitutional provision by the ruling military junta barred Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy advocate and Nobel Peace laureate, from running for office.

Kyaw, the first civilian president in 54 years, made it clear he would serve as a proxy for Suu Kyi and emphasized that after his win.“Victory!” he declared on Tuesday. “This is sister Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory. Thank you.”

Kyaw, the son of Min Thu Wun, a respected poet, is a childhood friend of Suu Kyi, who went to school with her. He later won a scholarship to study in the U.K.

“He’s from a family that’s been at the heart of Burma’s [long-submerged] liberal tradition for nearly a century,” Thant Myint-U, a historian, told The Guardian in a recent interview.

But it’s as a loyal aide to Suu Kyi that Kyaw is best known. He ran the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation, a charity named for her late mother, and, as the BBC reported, “has been frequently seen at the NLD leader's side, serving as her driver from time to time.

Despite Tuesday’s milestone, some remain less optimistic about the work ahead for Myanmar.

“The military continues to wield great power, the NLD has no experience managing large and complex bureaucracies, corruption remains widespread, and Myanmar’s relationship with China is fraught,” Zoltan Barany wrote in Foreign Affairs in December.

As Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch noted, the second-place finisher in the election and Kyaw’s top vice-president is U Myint Swe, a former military hardliner under sanction by the United States.

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry issued his congratulations to Kyaw, but not without adding this note of caution to the proceedings.

The presidential election is another important step forward in Burma’s democratic transition, and we commend the people and institutions of Burma who continue to work together to ensure a peaceful transfer of power after the November 2015 elections.

Nina Simone's Face

When I was kid, I knew what the worst parts of me were—my hair and my mouth. My hair was nappy. My lips were big. Nearly every kid around me knew something similar of themselves because nearly every one of us had some sort of physical defect—dark skin, nappy hair, broad nose, full lips—that opened us up to ridicule from one another. That each of these “defects” were representative of all the Africa that ran through us was never lost on anyone.“Africa” was an insult—African bush-boogie, African bootie-scratcher etc. Ethiopian famine jokes were all the rage back then.

Did we want to be white? I don’t think so. We didn’t want to look like Rob Lowe or Madonna. We hated and mocked Michael Jackson’s aesthetic changes as viciously as we mocked each other. What we wanted was to be on the right end of the paper bag tests. We wanted hazel eyes. We wanted wavy hair. I had neither hazel eyes nor wavy hair. But I also didn’t suffer in the same way that I saw other kids around me suffer. I was not dark-skinned. And, more importantly, I was not a girl.

Even back then I somehow knew that it was a boy’s prerogative to be handsome or not in a way that it wasn’t a girl’s prerogative to be pretty or not. Boys had so many other ways of scaling the social ladder—humor, a killer jump-shot, or a reputation for violence—that were unavailable to girls. As I got older, I understood that this wasn’t merely a mark of West Baltimore, but of something grander. Biggie’s “One More Chance” was an ode to this distinctly masculine advantage:

Heartthrob never, black and ugly as ever

However, I stay Coogi down to the socks

Rings and watch filled with rocks

And my jam knocks...

Never has “however” been used to greater effect.There was no “however” for a girl deemed “black and ugly.” There were no female analogues to Biggie. “However” was a bright line dividing the limited social rights of women from the relatively expansive social rights of men.

I played a lot of Nina Simone in college. I play a lot of Nina Simone now. But I have always known that Nina Simone means something more to the black women around me than she does to me. Furthermore, I have always known that Nina Simone means something much more to a specific kind of black woman than she ever can for me. Simone was in possession of nearly every feature that we denigrated as children. And yet somehow she willed herself into a goddess.

Simone was able to conjure glamour in spite of everything the world said about black women who looked like her. And for that she enjoyed a special place in the pantheon of resistance. That fact doesn’t just have to do with her lyrics or her musicianship, but also how she looked. Simone is something more than a female Bob Marley. It is not simply the voice: It is the world that made that voice, all the hurt and pain of denigration, forged into something otherworldly. That voice, inevitably, calls us to look at Nina Simone’s face, and for a brief moment, understand that the hate we felt, that the mockery we dispensed, was unnatural, was the fruit of conjurations and the shadow of plunder. We look at Nina Simone’s face and the lie is exposed and we are shamed. We look at Nina Simone’s face and a terrible truth comes into view—there was nothing wrong with her. But there is something deeply wrong with us.

We are being told that Nina Simone’s face bears no real import on the new eponymous movie about her life, starring Zoe Saldana. “The most important thing,” said Robert Johnson, whose studio is releasing Nina, “is that creativity or quality of performance should never be judged on the basis of color, or ethnicity, or physical likeness.” This is obviously false. Saldana could be the greatest thespian of her time, but no one would consider casting her as Marilyn Monroe. Indeed Nina’s producers have gone to great ends—tragicomic ends—to invoke Nina Simone’s face, darkening Saldana’s skin, adorning her with prosthetics. Neither the term blackface nor brownface is entirely appropriate here. We are not so much talking about deliberate mockery as something much more insidious.

There is something deeply shameful in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic.

It’s difficult to subtract the choice to cast Saldana from the economics of Hollywood—Saldana is seen as bankable in a way that other black women in her field are not. It’s equally difficult to ignore the fact that, while it is hard for all women in Hollywood, it is particularly hard for black women, and even harder for black women who share the dark skin, broad nose and full lips of Nina Simone. This fact is not separable from this country’s racist history, nor is the notion of “darkening up” a lighter skinned black person. Producers did it to Fredi Washington in Emperor Jones. They did it to Carmen de Lavallade in Lydia Bailey. (The make-up was called “Negro Number Two.”) They did it because they wanted to use the aura of blackness while evading the social realities of blackness. It’s possible that the producers were not, themselves, personally racist. This has no bearing whatsoever on anything. In America, racism is a default setting. To do nothing, to go along with the market, to claim innocence or neutrality, is to inevitably be a cog in the machine of racist hierarchy.

The producers of Nina are the heirs of this history—not personal racists, but cogs. Jezebel’s Kara Brown researched the team behind Nina. It is almost entirely white. Doubtless, these are good, non-racist people—but not good enough. No one on the team seems to understand the absurdity at hand—making a movie about Nina Simone while operating within the very same machinery that caused Simone so much agony in the first place. I do not mean to be personally harsh here. I am not trying to hurt people. But there is something deeply shameful—and hurtful—in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic. In this sense, the creation of Nina is not a neutral act. It is part of the problem.

It’s here that the term “appropriation” bears some usage. We’re not talking about someone inspired by the deeper lessons of Simone’s life and her music. We are talking about people who think it’s fine to profit off her music while heedlessly contributing to the kind of pain that brought that music into being. To acknowledge that pain, to consider it in casting, would be inconvenient—as anti-racist action always is. It would mean giving an opportunity to someone who’s actively experienced the kind of pain that plagued Simone. That would doubtlessly mean a diminished chance at garnering funds for such a film. And that, in turn, would court years of delays and the possibility of the film never coming into being. That would be unfortunate—but less so for Nina Simone than for the agents who feel themselves entitled to profit her story.

Saldana has said that others actors who better resembled Simone passed on the role, and that she herself declined it for a year. But in the end she felt that Simone’s story “deserved to be told.” The sentiment is understandable. But the very fact that there’s such a shallow pool of actors who look like Simone is not a non-racist excuse, but a sign of racism itself—the same racism that plagued Nina Simone. Being conscious of that racism means facing the possibility of Simone’s story never being told. That is not the tragedy. The tragedy is that we live in a world that is not ready for that story to be told. The release of Nina does not challenge this fact. It reifies it.

Cynthia Mort, the film’s director, has pleaded with us to see the film before judging. Indeed, it’s dangerous to draw conclusions about the quality of a film before seeing it. But there is nothing that precludes a masterwork from proceeding on racist grounds. The early Rocky films are great. They also affirm the racist dream of the scrappy white guy, up against the mouthy buck who talks too much. Both things can be true. Nothing about the quality of Nina can actually counter the problems inherent in its very inception. Perhaps more importantly, in some deep way, black women have already seen Mort’s film. Indeed they’ve been seeing it all their lives.

Sketch Comedy’s Unlikely Revival

One of the most telling moments in the pilot episode of Fox’s new sketch-comedy show Party Over Here came 10 minutes in, when the three female cast members paused to acknowledge their producers. Nicole Byer, Jessica McKenna, and Alison Rich, who were front-and-center throughout their half-hour Saturday night debut, pointed to Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, the trio better-known as The Lonely Island, whom the camera revealed were dressed in black tie and frowning from the rafters. The three leading ladies immediately began grovelling and begging for attention and approval, popping the bubble of self-importance implied by the Saturday Night Live alums’ mentor status.

Related Story

Party Over Here Continues TV’s Sketch Revolution

The message was clear: Party Over Here might have found a home thanks to the big names behind it, but it will live or die by the merits of its cast members and writers. In that, it marks something of a progression from the cable sketch-comedy shows of recent years, which have anchored themselves firmly around the star power of a single performer (Inside Amy Schumer, Kroll Show) or a double act (Key and Peele, Portlandia). Rather, both Party Over Here and the new Netflix sketch show The Characters are gathering casts of relatively unknown comedic talents and giving them the freedom to experiment without the live-TV constraints of a product like SNL. Both have a long way to go before they can be considered must-see TV, but their existence alone is encouraging, giving young, diverse comedians a place to showcase their talents on two of television’s biggest platforms.

Party Over Here is no rehash of The Lonely Island’s greatest hits—the SNL vets are simply using their clout to get new talent on the air. Its first episode had the typical ups and downs of a late-night debut: One sketch about a suffragette who didn’t feel inclined to vote for either man on the 1920 presidential ballot was funny but felt a little one-note, while another gently mocked the cultural blowback to “vocal fry,” and the hysterical policing of women’s voices. Each sketch had a solid premise but no follow-through, and unlike plottier sketch shows like Portlandia or Kroll Show, there’s no organizing principle to Party Over Here: It simply consists of the funniest things the writers can cook up each week.

It wasn’t the confident, politically astute, social media-ready debut of a show like Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, but that’s typical of sketch comedy, which can take weeks to find its voice. Even Saturday Night Live, a well-oiled machine that’s been running for 40 years, hits the ground slowly every year on its return,  and for such a consistently popular show, it can be wildly inconsistent. Party Over Here has yet to establish its three actors’ comedic identities, but that might be a good thing, because it offers them more versatility going forward. Though it feels radically different because of its smaller cast size, it’s still an ensemble show in the SNL model, and part of its appeal lies in watching the cast members flit between characters and personas with grace, playing the straight-arrow in one sketch and a maniac in the next.

The show’s premiere seemed to mostly fly under the radar (ratings data was unavailable because of its late-night debut), but hopefully Fox will see the advantage in its low-stakes time slot. There’s plenty of time for Byer, McKenna, Rich, and the show’s talented and diverse group of writers to find their voices. Netflix, however, doesn’t allow for such evolution. The streaming service’s own take on sketch comedy, an eight-part series titled The Characters, debuted last Friday. Each episode is devoted to the comic persona of one up-and-coming comedian, and the talent includes the podcast star Lauren Lapkus, 30 Rock’s John Early (he played Jenna Maroney’s son), and the delightfully strange stand-up comic Kate Berlant. Netflix’s binge-watch model isn’t particularly suited to topical comedy—if broadcast TV still has benefits, it’s that it offers the ability to be instantly reactive, giving shows like Party Over Here an opportunity to distinguish themselves.

But The Characters is worth checking out too, because unlike Party Over Here, its comedic voice is immediately distinct. Every episode is devoted to the idiosyncrasies of its host—Early’s takes the shape of a “gay fever dream” populated by characters played by him, while Lapkus’s has more of a structured narrative, with its outsized characters feeling more reminiscent of reality-show stars. There’s a broad range of talent on display (the featured cast rotates along with each of the eight stars), and while each comedian only gets one episode to show off, it gives them the chance to distill their ideas into a kind of showreel that could launch them to future fame. It’s a long way from the old cable-TV model, where only more proven stars could hit it big, and coupled with Party Over Here’s embrace of younger, unproven talent, it’s an encouraging sign of the upside of Peak TV.

The NFL Fumbles a Key Concession on Concussions

One year ago this week, Chris Borland, a 24-year-old budding defensive star for the San Francisco 49ers, retired after just his rookie season in the NFL. Borland wasn’t the first professional football player to retire early, but he was the first to publicly attribute his decision to the ongoing discourse about the dangers of football and its links to brain trauma and the degenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

“I’m concerned that if you wait till you have symptoms, it’s too late,” he said at the time. “There are a lot of unknowns. I can’t claim that X will happen. I just want to live a long healthy life, and I don’t want to have any neurological diseases or die younger than I would otherwise.”

One outlet that reported Borland’s story was NFL.com, pro football’s equivalent to Pravda, in an article with the suspiciously vague headline “San Francisco 49ers' Chris Borland retiring from NFL.” It included this rebuttal from Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president of health and safety policy:

Playing any sport is a personal decision. By any measure, football has never been safer and we continue to make progress with rule changes, safer tackling techniques at all levels of football, and better equipment, protocols and medical care for players. Concussions in NFL games were down 25 percent last year, continuing a three-year downward trend.

This defensive line of patter was later echoed by Joseph Maroon, the team neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers and a consultant for the NFL’s sinister-sounding Head, Neck, and Spine Committee. On NFL Total Access, the flagship program on the league-owned NFL Network channel, Maroon offered:

When an athlete is fearful of any injury, it’s time to get out. You can’t play with apprehension in any sport and be as good as you can [be] and he obviously came to that conclusion by himself.

In other words, all sports are dangerous and Borland was afraid.

Maroon added that, in terms of concussions, the NFL “has never been safer.” When asked about former Pittsburgh great Mike Webster, the first player to be linked to CTE and whose case we profiled in December of last year, Maroon ceded that it was a “tragic story,” but clarified that Webster “was one of the hardest players in the history of the sport,” playing in an era when “to play hurt was a badge of courage.”

(Borland, it should be noted, also tells the story of walking away dazed after a heavy hit during a preseason game and continuing to play for fear he wouldn’t make the team.)

On Monday, during a congressional roundtable of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Jeff Miller, the same NFL executive that first massaged Borland’s narrative, became the first pro football official to acknowledge a link between the sport and CTE. Pushed to respond to a question the connection by Representative Jan Schakowsky, Miller affirmed, “The answer to that question is certainly yes.”

In the past, NFL officials have preferred to stay vague about its concussion problem and its associations with CTE. The league has been critiqued for sponsoring research that would downplay the concussion risks and attacking those who would argue otherwise.

However, following remarks on Monday by neuropathologist Ann McKee, one of those previously maligned researchers, that cited the extensive study of the brains of former players, Miller conceded that the link was there. Lest anyone unduly charge him with a change of heart, Miller followed, “But there’s also a number of questions that come with that.”

In the year since Borland retired, the chorus about the sport’s brain trauma problem has only grown. Among recent prominent CTE diagnoses were Kenny Stabler and Frank Gifford, two of the game’s most famous players and personalities. As we noted in January, Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist made famous by the film Concussion and who first identified CTE, said he would bet his medical license that O.J. Simpson suffers from the disease.

But despite Monday’s development, the NFL doesn’t seem quite ready to embrace the science as it stands. In emailed remarks to The Washington Post, an NFL spokesman clarified that Miller “was discussing Dr. McKee’s findings and made the additional point that a lot more questions need to be answered. He said that the experts should speak to the state of the science.”

The U.S. Government's Warning to Courts That Jail The Poor

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent a rare open letter to state judges asking them to stop practices that threaten jail time for people who cannot afford to pay fines.

The letter, sent Monday, is signed by Vanita Gupta, the the top prosecutor for the Justice Department, and Lisa Foster, who runs a division focused on helping poor people gain access to legal aid. At issue in the letter is a system in which courts threaten people who haven’t paid their fines––sometimes for traffic tickets, misdemeanors, or civil offenses––with jail time. Such practices, the letter said, makes courts seem as if they’re not concerned with “addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue. ” In many cases those practices can be unlawful, the letter said, and in jurisdictions that take federal money, they may also violate the Civil Rights Act when courts “unnecessarily impose disparate harm on the basis of race or national origin.”

The letter listed several practices that may violate a person’s due process, like jailing people because they can’t pay fines; making fines a prerequisite for a judicial hearing; and using bail or bond practices that leave poor people in jail only because they can’t afford to pay for their release.

The letter noted that these policies can force people into debt, land them in jail despite posing no risk to the community, and capture them “in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape.”

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that if someone is too poor to pay a fine, jailing them violates federal law. But Monday’s letter hinted that not all courts are following that ruling.  

Such a recommendation to courts from the Justice Department is rare. The last the department wrote a similar letter was in 2010, when it reminded state courts they were required, and legally obligated, to provide court interpreters to non-English speakers (that concern led to investigations in Colorado and North Carolina).

Last December, the White House held a two-day conference with prosecutors, defense attorney’s, judges, and scholars, to discuss the growing trend of courts turning into moneymakers for their cities. This was also the focus of a lawsuit filed in February by the Justice Department against Ferguson, Missouri, the city where Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer in August 2014. In that suit, the Justice Department said officers in Ferguson used racist and discriminatory “patterns and practices” of policing that targeted black people, and where, The New York Times wrote, “investigators concluded that the city’s police department and court operated not as independent bodies but as a moneymaking venture to pad Ferguson’s budget.”

The Justice Department has also raised concerns about jurisdictions that partner with private, for-profit companies to run their probation programs. In this type of system, the company collects a monthly payment from individuals to pay for its own services, on top of the fines they owe to the court. About a dozen states use a system like this, according to a Human Rights Watch report from 2014. The report argued that this system treats the wealthy and poor unequally, because someone who can afford to pay their fine off in a single payment will end up paying much less than a person who can’t afford to do so. Probation companies make their profit from monthly charges in “supervision fees,” so the longer it takes to pay off a fine, the more money the person pays the company.

Take the example of Greenwood, Mississippi, a small Delta town of 15,000. In early 2013, the Human Rights Watch report said a private company contracted to run the town’s probation program. Less than a year after the program began, nearly 10 percent of the people in town owed fees to the company. The report estimated that the company collected about $21,500 in fines each month for the town, and by charging each person on probation $40 in monthly fees, the company could have pulled in $48,000 each month. It wasn’t long before the town, where the average person made just $14,000 each year, dumped the program. Wayne Self, who served on the county’s board of supervisors, told Human Rights Watch the company made work for itself  “off the backs of the poor people.”

In Harpersville, Alabama, a judge who would ultimately shut down a similar system in his jurisdiction called it a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket.”

The Justice Department’s letter said that such contracts between courts and companies looking to make a profit raise “fundamental concerns about fairness and due process.”

The Justice Department also said Monday it would provide four grants of $500,000 each to state, tribal, or local jurisdictions willing to restructure how they assess and collect fines, and for ideas that reduce unnecessary jail time for people too poor to pay.   

How North Carolina Explains Trump's Rise

DURHAM, N.C.—How did North Carolina, a place that once prized its moderation, end up among the pack of states poised to hand the Republican nomination to Donald Trump?

The margin varies, but every poll taken in the last month shows the entertainer with a lead over his nearest challenger, Senator Ted Cruz. He’s built that margin even though—as in most states he visits—he does not have the support of major Republican officeholders. The winner-take-all GOP primaries in Ohio and Florida have understandably gotten more attention, but the Old North State actually sends more Republican delegates to the convention than either Ohio or Illinois.

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How North Carolina Became the Wisconsin of 2013

There are several reasons for Trump’s success. First, there’s his national lead in the polls—voters tend to flock to a winner. Second, there’s his sheer presence. In the last couple of weeks, Trump has visited Fayetteville, Hickory, and Concord for his trademark huge rallies. Cruz has visited the state as well. But Marco Rubio, fighting for his life in Florida, and John Kasich, doing the same in Ohio, have not. (Rubio announced his “North Carolina Women For Marco” group Monday evening—about 12 hours before most polls open.)

But North Carolina was also inviting territory to Trump because of the conditions in the state as he ran. The state has been pounded by job loss in manufacturing over the last two decades, especially in industries like textiles and furniture, both of which have a long history in the state. A Public Citizen examination of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that North Carolina has lost more than 359,000 manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. Nearly two-thirds of them applied for funds for workers who had lost their jobs because of trade deals. A protectionist candidate like Trump can find an enthusiastic audience in North Carolina. (Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders has tried a similar tack here. That seems to have served him well in Michigan and could work in Ohio, but may be less helpful in North Carolina, where a large proportion of the Democratic electorate is black and favors Clinton.)

The state is also extremely polarized, with its urban centers strongholds of liberalism and rural parts of the state much more conservative. For decades, Democrats mostly controlled the legislature and governorship, while the state voted Republican in national elections. But Republicans were able to take over the state legislature in the 2010 Tea Party wave and the governorship two years later. They promptly set to work harnessing a groundswell of voter anger to pass a series of conservative measures.

One major engine of the charge was Art Pope, a wealthy Tar Heel businessman and philanthropist. Pope donated to campaigns, funded conservative think-tanks, and served as budget director to Governor Pat McCrory, who was elected in 2012. Pope is essentially a classic pro-business conservative—he’s most interested in removing regulatory barriers. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker in 2011, Pope had once run for office as a single-shot pro-business libertarian; he later added some more socially conservative arrows to his quiver. But pro-business conservatism isn’t typically wildly popular on its own with average citizens, so Republican legislators pursued a wide range of conservative causes.

They passed one of the nation’s strictest voter-ID laws, which is going into effect for the first time on Tuesday. They repealed the state’s Racial Justice Act, which provided for challenges to convictions. They relaxed gun laws. They cut pre-school program and encouraged the use of vouchers for students. Some of them pushed to make Christianity the official state religion. They passed a law banning cities from designating themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants, in a state with a fast-growing Hispanic population. In other words, they tapped into populist, nationalist, and ethnic resentment as a tool for passing their business agenda: Lower taxes, fracking, opening up campaign-finance laws for judicial elections.

But McCrory, who had been a moderate during his tenure as mayor of Charlotte, found that he wasn’t able to contain the legislature. Lawmakers passed an anti-sharia-law bill, which the governor didn’t sign but allowed to enter law. They overrode his vetoes on bills ranging from “ag-gag” provisions to so-called religious-liberty measures.

This arc—Republicans tap into simmering resentments, gain political traction, then find themselves unable to control the forces they’ve unleashed—is very similar to the one that many analysts have seen at a national level, first in the rise of a Tea Party faction in Congress that Speaker John Boehner could not corral, and now in the rise of Trump at the presidential level, which threatens to splinter the Republican Party.

North Carolina, in its dramatic turn rightward and the current lean toward Trump, is a microcosm of that. McCrory has not endorsed any candidate in the presidential race. State Senate leader Phil Berger endorsed Ted Cruz on Monday, though he also praised Trump. But Pope and Senator Thom Tillis—speaker of the state house before vaulting to the U.S. Senate—both endorsed Rubio, who has been a non-entity in North Carolina (and nationally, for that matter). Senator Richard Burr, who is up for reelection, was reported to have said privately in January that he would vote for Bernie Sanders over Ted Cruz, a claim Burr hotly denied. While many of these Republicans have been restrained in their comments about Trump, John Hood, who has worked for several Pope-related organizations, has not. He wrote a scathing broadside against Trump for National Review earlier this month:

Donald Trump is a dangerous charlatan, a bully who deftly uses false promises, egregious lies, and malicious attacks to manipulate people to his advantage. His marks include media figures desperate for ratings, political has-beens desperate for relevance, and voters desperate for someone to restore American greatness after two unpopular presidencies, two costly wars, and nearly two decades of economic stagnation. It’s a swindle. It’s a world-class con. And for conservatives in North Carolina and around the country, it’s one of the greatest challenges we will ever face.

Trump’s toxic brew of insult comedy, rank dishonesty, ethnic grievance, and hostility to basic principles of free enterprise, free speech, and limited government cannot be reconciled with the modern conservative movement. If Donald Trump is the answer, you have asked a very wrong and very stupid question.

But who asked the question? It’s easy to conclude that North Carolina’s Republican establishment asked it, not realizing that it wouldn’t be able to control the answer.