Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 286

Planned Parenthood Shooting: The Suspect's Motive

Updated on November 30 at 4:12 p.m. ET

The man accused of killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs on Friday made a court appearance on Monday in connection with the shooting in which nine other people were wounded.

Robert Lewis Dear, 57, was arrested Friday after a five-hour standoff at the facility. At an advisement hearing that lasted about 10 minutes, at which he appeared via video, Dear was advised of his rights. He is being held on an initial charge of first-degree murder. Formal charges will come next Wednesday, District Attorney Dan May said. Dear is being represented by Dan King, a public defender.

Dear stared down and showed little reaction to what he was being told by the judge. He had a beard and messy hair.

— Jordan Steffen (@jsteffendp) November 30, 2015

Dear made three statements in response to the judge: "Yes" "Yes" and "No questions."

— Jordan Steffen (@jsteffendp) November 30, 2015

The motivations for Dear’s actions are still unclear, but news reports cite unnamed law-enforcement sources as saying Dear opposed Planned Parenthood’s activities. The group has come under intense focus this year after an anti-abortion organization released videos about the group’s fetal-tissue research program.  

Prosecutors in El Paso County filed requests to seal both the search and arrest warrants in the  case. The judge granted both requests before the advisement hearing.

The three people who were killed in the attack were identified as Ke'Arre Stewart, 29, a veteran of the Iraq war who leaves behind two daughters, aged 11 and 5; Jennifer Markovsky, 36, who was accompanying a friend to the clinic; and Garrett Swasey, a police officer with the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, who responded to the call for assistance with the active shooter.

As my colleague Matt Ford reported last week, the attack isn’t the first on a Planned Parenthood facility this year.

On October 1, an unknown arsonist threw an ignited container of gasoline inside one of the organization’s centers in Southern California. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified three similar incidents at Planned Parenthood facilities in Illinois, Louisiana, and Washington in recent months. In September, the FBI warned law-enforcement agencies throughout the country about “lone offenders using tactics of arsons and threats all of which are typical of the pro-life extremist movement.”

The Rapper of Refugees

Maya Arulpragasam is a famous rapper, singer, designer, producer, and refugee. When she was 9, her mother and siblings fled violence in Sri Lanka and came to London, and the experience was formative for her art. As she explained to The Guardian in 2005 after the release of her debut Arular, “I was a refugee because of war and now I have a voice in a time when war is the most invested thing on the planet. What I thought I should do with this record is make every refugee kid that came over after me have something to feel good about. Take everybody’s bad bits and say, ‘Actually, they’re good bits. Now whatcha gonna do?’”

That goal—to glorify people and practices that the developed world marginalizes—has been a constant in her career. Her new music video tackles it in a particularly literal and urgent way, not only by showing solidarity with refugees at a moment when they’re extremely controversial in the West, but also by posing a simple question to listeners: Whose lives do you value?

The video for “Borders,” a song off her forthcoming album Matahdatah, features images recalling all sorts of migrations from the developing world—there are people crossing deserts, fences, and bodies of water. Though much of M.I.A.’s work has been about women and children, this video is filled with brown men: the ultimate bogeyman for many in the West, stereotyped as terrorists, criminals, and job-takers.

There are shots of the men’s faces, clear reminders of their individual humanity. But for the most part, M.I.A. (who directed the video) is interested in them as a mass. She has them climb a fence and spell out “LIFE.” She has them lay on their backs on the roof of a jampacked ship, silent and bored-seeming. She has them form into a human sculpture in the image of a boat. As one point, their watercraft crowd like an armada.

M.I.A.’s camera watches for patterns in people and in environments, for repetition in silhouettes and wave wakes. The effect isn’t unlike that of other art forms using synchronized masses of people—marching bands, ballet troupes, performance art. It’s hypnotizing and viscerally pleasing, even as it spotlights difficult conditions. She also adds doses of fabulousness: There’s a shot of her and the men sitting artfully on breakwater rocks, swathed in gold Mylar blankets, symbols of emergency situations suddenly made couture.  

The video may prove controversial for reasons beyond the fact that it seems to want to assert of the dignity and beauty of people who are often denied those things. M.I.A. is front and center in most of the shots, mouthing the words to her song while dressed in incongruously cool outfits (most memorable: the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team’s Fly Emirates shirt remixed as “Fly Pirates”). As is often the case in M.I.A.’s career, some may argue she’s using people as props, aestheticizing poverty for her own gain, and mixing cultural signifiers in ways that could feed stereotypes about the developing world as an undifferentiated mass. This is a dynamic she’s well aware of; last year, she tweeted that her label censored a video of hers because of “cultural appropriation,” and she didn’t so much protest the decision as ask for a wider discussion of it. But you can defend her by pointing to the fact of who she is—here, a refugee speaking for refugees—as well as to the intent of her music.

Then again, that music is almost always divisive as well. So it is with “Borders,” which at first seemed to me like an Aldous Snow-type parody of clumsily political pop stars. Autotuned to the frequency of radio rap, she begins by drawling “Freedom, ‘I’-dom, ‘Me’-dom. Where’s your ‘We’-dom?” Then she breaks up into a chant that, like many of the most catchy songs, appears totally naive:

Borders: What’s up with that?

Politics: What’s up with that?

Police shots: What’s up with that?

Identities: What’s up with that?

It’s another classically M.I.A. move: She’s playing with pop tropes and schoolyard repetition in order to cause a confrontation. After the first verse’s litany of world problems, she starts asking “what’s up with that?” about pop slang: “queen,” “slaying it,” “being bae,” “making money.” Most explosively, perhaps, is “love wins: What’s up with that?”—the subtext being that America’s favorite gay-rights slogan could be applied to a much wider array of issues around the world but isn’t. She’s essentially indulging in what my colleague Megan Garber labeled “attention policing.” But instead of chastising those who gleefully debate the color of a dress but not what to do about global warming, or those who mourned Paris but not Beirut, she’s highlighting the gaps in liberal-leaning pop culture’s preaching of acceptance, empowerment, and humanism. As she rapped in 2013’s “ATENTion,” another song about refugees (the title’s capitalization references tents), “my intent is to let you know what’s important.”

The most powerful thing about “Borders” is that the mantra of “what’s up with that?” is not a condemnation. It’s a question. Standing calmly in front of representations of the most desperate populations in the world, M.I.A. asks it again and again. What’s your answer?

The #ActualWorst Final: Ramsay Bolton vs. Hannibal Lecter

As our bracket to find the actual worst person on television nears its conclusion, it’s hardly surprising that the last two competitors left standing are sadists. In one corner is Ramsay Bolton, the bête noire of Game of Thrones, a psychopath who seems to derive pleasure only from cruelty. In the other, Hannibal Lecter, a far more refined monster, whose victims become his gourmet meals. Both men are almost unthinkably evil creations, but the biggest difference is that Ramsay is entirely unsympathetic (emerging from the “Plain Evil” bracket) while Hannibal is one of the most popular antiheroes of modern TV.

HBO

Ramsay stands out on Game of Thrones partly because he’s entirely lacking in ambiguity. Even that show’s protagonists commit grievous misdeeds, but its villains are usually given real depth too—the exception being Ramsay and Joffrey, who Ramsay defeated in the third round of this competition. The bastard child of the ice-blooded Roose Bolton, a northern lord who usurps the heroic Starks at the notorious Red Wedding, Ramsay has spent the majority of his screen time torturing people, feeding women to dogs, and sexually assaulting the teenaged Sansa Stark on the night of their (forced) marriage. He does almost all of this with an impish grin on his face, meaning that whenever he does get his comeuppance on the show, it’ll surely prompt celebration across the land.

Hannibal is a more complex creature, but his motivations also seem simple. He murders people, but usually because he finds them rude or uncouth; only by then preparing them as food and consuming them can he establish dominance over them. He’s tortured and maimed people, but typically as part of some grander scheme to protect his identity, and many of the people he’s killed were villains worse than him. It’s easier to rationalize much of his conduct, which makes him the perfect antihero, but he’s nonetheless a dangerous creature who often loses his calm, repeatedly carving and slicing his way out of dodgy situations to protect his own skin, and stabbing his closest “friends” in the back if necessary.

[image error] NBC

There’s precious little explanation for Hannibal’s violent compulsions. There are hints at a sad childhood and the loss of his sister when he was a teenager, but within the Hannibal TV universe, little more than that. Ramsay is easier to diagnose—his father is a sociopath, less delighted by cruelty, but equally happy to mete it out when he deems it necessary, and Ramsay’s only real insecurity is the long shadow that Roose casts over him. Even that doesn’t make him sympathetic, though. Hannibal is a raconteur, a charmer, an agent of chaos who slithers into people’s lives and helps tear them apart. It’s fun to watch him work, as awful as the consequences might be. There’s nothing fun about Ramsay.

So the final vote might come down to a simple popularity contest. Hannibal has beaten two other top-billed antiheroes (Walter White from Breaking Bad and Frank Underwood from House of Cards), so he clearly doesn’t lack for clout. Ramsay, meanwhile, has taken down psycho after psycho (Hannibal nemesis Mason Verger, Outlander’s Black Jack, Prince Joffrey, and Moriarty) but has he finally met his match in a hero who possesses 10 times his charisma? Who is the actual worst? Only you can decide.

A Short History of Hillary (Rodham) (Clinton)'s Changing Names

[image error]

What name will be on the Democratic ballot for president in November?

It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s not even a question about Bernie Sanders, whose numbers seem to have plateaued. It’s a question about how the Democratic frontrunner identifies herself.

On Monday, both the Associated Press and New York Times announced they would begin referring to her not as “Hillary Rodham Clinton” but simply as “Hillary Clinton.” That’s the culmination of a long, politically charged, and politically important evolution in how the candidate refers to herself.

Related Story

The Mononymy Trap

Hillary Rodham was a product of the women’s liberation movement. When she agreed to marry Bill Clinton—the third time he asked—she decided to keep her own name. Bill didn’t seem to have a problem with that. His mother did. Virginia Clinton Kelley recalled in her autobiography that when Bill told her, the day of the wedding, she began to weep. “I had never even conceived of such a thing. This had to be some new import from Chicago,” she recalled.

Hillary Rodham’s decision seemed evidence not only of her roots in a city up north, but also of the future. The couple was married in 1975, smack in the middle of a decade when








[image error]

The Rhetoric Over a Downed Plane

Updated on November 30 at 2:41 p.m. ET

President Vladimir Putin is accusing Turkey of shooting down a Russian warplane last week so it could protect its oil trade with the Islamic State. The comments, made in Paris on the sidelines of the climate-change talks, come hours after Turkey’s prime minister refused to apologize for the action.

The escalating rhetoric is likely to hinder attempts to forge a joint coalition against the Islamic State.

“We have every reason to believe that the decision to shoot down our aircraft was dictated by the desire to ensure the safety of supply routes of oil to Turkey, to the ports where they are shipped in tankers,” Putin said Monday.

Turkey denies it buys oil from the Islamic State, but several news reports suggest Turkey tolerates some level of oil smuggling from its southeastern borders with Iraq and Syria. (For an assessment of these claims, read this.) Syrian President Bashar Assad, Putin’s ally in the Syrian civil war, has also been accused of buying oil from the Islamic State, a group that his forces are ostensibly fighting. Putin’s remarks did not touch on that claim, but they are likely to inflame already high tensions with Turkey.

Earlier in the day, Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister, defended his country’s decision to shoot down the Russian warplane that was carrying out airstrikes against Syrian rebels.

“No country can ask us to apologize [for the incident] because [we were] doing our job,” he said. “Our action was a defensive action.”

His comments were made at a news conference in Brussels with Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, the alliance of which Turkey is a member. Turkish media quoted Stoltenberg as saying: “Turkey has the right to defend itself and [its] airspace.”

As my colleague Marina Koren reported last week, Turkey said it shot down the Russian plane after the aircraft violated Turkish airspace and ignored 10 warnings to leave. The pilot was killed by rebels as he parachuted to safety. His body was flown home to Russia on Monday. The co-pilot was rescued in a Russian special-forces operation.

It later emerged the plane was in Turkish airspace for 17 seconds. At the time, Putin called the incident “a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists.” Russia demanded an apology and announced measures, including economic steps, against Turkey. Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, are not expected to meet in Paris, where they are attending the U.N. climate summit, though Erdogan said he was “saddened” by the incident.

Putin, in his comments Monday, also said he regretted the chill in relations with Ankara.

“I think that this is regrettable for all of us,” he said. “And for me personally it’s a real pity, because I myself did much to build up relations with Turkey over the course of a long period of time.”

Last week’s incursion was not the first made by a Russian aircraft into Turkish airspace, but the dispute over the downed airplane threatens to undermine fragile attempts to build a global coalition against the Islamic State, with other world leaders getting involved in the rhetoric. Russia is targeting rebel groups, including the Islamic State, that are opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad. The U.S. and its allies, including Turkey, are also operating against the Islamic State, but they support the relatively moderate, anti-Assad rebel factions. It was one of those groups, a Turkmen rebel organization, that the Russian plane was targeting last week.

But after the November 13 attack on Paris, Francois Hollande, the French president, has been trying to bring together a coalition, which includes Russia, the U.S., Turkey, and others to fight the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack that killed 130 people. The downing of the Russian airplane complicates those efforts.

Still, Putin, who met with President Obama in Paris on Monday,  said he will continue to work toward a global coalition against the Islamic State.

“We talked about the tactics of our joint action on this political track, and overall, in my opinion, there is an understanding about where to go from here,” he said.

Obama is scheduled to meet with Erdogan on Tuesday.

The Yuan as a Global Currency

The International Monetary Fund has added the Chinese renminbi to the world’s basket of reserve currencies, an acknowledgment of China’s economic importance.

In a statement, the IMF said that its executive board decided that starting October 1, 2016, the Chinese currency, which is more commonly known as the yuan, will be freely usable, and join the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen, and the British pound in the basket of currencies that make up the Special Drawing Right.

“The Executive Board’s decision to include the RMB in the SDR basket is an important milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system,” Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, said in a statement. “It is also a recognition of the progress that the Chinese authorities have made in the past years in reforming China’s monetary and financial systems.”

Here’s more on the move from The Wall Street Journal:

It confers a measure of international legitimacy to China’s currency as the government starts to liberalize its rigidly controlled exchange rate and financial system.

For the Chinese, it is a matter of prestige, a plank in Beijing’s strategy to elevate the country’s economic role in the global economy as it challenges U.S. political and economic dominance around the world.

But, as The New York Times notes: “The changes could inject volatility into the Chinese economy, since large flows of money surge into the country and recede based on its prospects. This could make it difficult for China to maintain its record of strong, steady growth, especially at a time when its economy is already slowing.”

The IMF reviews the SDR’s currency composition every five years. In 2010, it rejected the yuan because, the Fund said, it didn’t meet the necessary criteria. The yuan’s addition to the currency basket is the first since the euro was adopted in 1999. The common European currency replaced the old German and French currencies.

Bloomberg adds the yuan will have a 10.92 percent weighting in the currency basket. The dollar is weighted at 41.73 percent (from the current 41.9 percent), the euro at 30.93 percent (from 37.4 percent) , the yen at 8.33 percent (from 9.4 percent), and the pound at 8.09 percent (from 11.3 percent). Here’s more on the move’s likely impact:

Approval is unlikely to have much impact on short-term demand for the yuan, given the SDR’s minor share of global reserves, according to economists at banks including HSBC Holdings Plc and ING Groep NV. But the backing of the IMF, as well as the financial reforms required for China to secure and maintain it, could propel use of the yuan past the pound and yen over the medium term, said Viraj Patel, a currency strategist at ING Bank in London. …

The decision should boost efforts by Xi to open up China’s financial markets. China implemented a series of reforms to win IMF support, such as opening its onshore bond and currency markets to foreign central banks and reporting its reserves to the IMF.

Kobe Bryant’s Farewell

On Sunday night, Kobe Bryant, the NBA great and longtime Los Angeles Laker, announced (via poem) that this season would be his last in professional basketball. Here’s part of the newsworthy stanza from “Dear Basketball,” perhaps the first piece of free verse (sorry, W.S. Merwin) to ever crash a website:

You gave a 6-year-old boy his Laker dream
And I’ll always love you for it.
But I can’t love you obsessively for much longer.
This season is all I have left to give.

Speaking on Sunday, following the Lakers’ sixth consecutive loss, Bryant explained his mind had started to drift away from basketball during meditation sessions. He also thanked his various “muses” for giving him advice on retirement as he wraps a brilliant career across 20 seasons.

But don’t let all these feelings fool you. Bryant’s retirement is neither the upshot of mindful clarity nor is it a result of his resignation with his team’s profound lousiness. It is because of his fundamental inability to play basketball anymore.

My heart can take the pounding
My mind can handle the grind
But my body knows it’s time to say goodbye.

The 37-year-old Bryant has battled injuries much of the past few seasons. This year in particular, the former two-time scoring champion is finding that his legendary jump shot is failing him and his vaunted ability to drive the lane has betrayed him. Bryant is shooting a career-worst 31.5 percent from the field.

As a basketball prodigy, Bryant went straight from high school to the NBA in 1996. In addition to time logged on the court, his self-styled defiance, evident in his play and in his image, is part of what has caught up with him.

My colleague David Sims points out that Bryant’s peers—Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, and Dirk Nowitzki, all of whom are Bryant’s age or older—have not suffered similar declines because they have accommodated age by changing the way they’ve played and limited their minutes. Bryant, forever compelled to take charge, refused.

He will retire in third place on the NBA’s all-time scoring list after passing Michael Jordan on the list last season. Following his announcement,NBA Commissioner Adam Silver released a statement paying tribute to Bryant and highlighted some of his innumerable achievements.

With 17 NBA All-Star selections, an NBA MVP, five NBA championships with the Lakers, two Olympic gold medals, and a relentless work ethic, Kobe Bryant is one of the greatest players in the history of our game. Whether competing in the Finals or hoisting jump shots after midnight in an empty gym, Kobe has an unconditional love for the game.

Do Black Votes Matter to Donald Trump?

“I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

So Donald Trump claimed back in 2011. But his bravado induces renewed skepticism this week. Last Wednesday, Trump announced that he’d hold a press conference on Monday to announce his endorsement by a coalition of about 100 black religious leaders. It turns out that wasn’t quite what the black religious leaders had in mind. On Sunday, Trump abruptly canceled the press conference, though the meeting was still on.

Never one to avoid throwing gasoline on a fire when there’s a jerrycan handy, Trump didn’t just chalk the reversal up to a miscommunication, as Darrell Scott, an Ohio pastor who helped arrange the meeting, did. Instead, Trump suggested that the ministers had been subverted. “Probably some of the Black Lives Matter folks called them up, said ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be meeting with Trump because he believes that all lives matter,’” he said.

Related Story

The Ecstasy of Donald Trump

If that seems like an odd way to win over their support, it’s of a piece with Trump’s general record with respect to black voters. He continues to say he plans to win the crucial demographic, even as he does little to court such voters on the issues—and on occasion goes out of his way to alienate them. The weekend before, when a Black Lives Matter activist was roughed up at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama, the Republican frontrunner had strong words of condemnation—for the victim. “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said.

Despite all that, Trump does have some black support. The question is how much. It can be tough to tell, because some of the best pollsters on the primary race so far don’t release crosstabs, but also because there are so few black Republican primary voters that the sample sizes are small and often weighted, creating some ambiguity. A Public Policy Polling survey in mid-November found that 75 percent of African Americans had an unfavorable opinion on Trump, versus just 9 who held favorable views. A Fox News poll in November found that in a head-to-head matchup against Hillary Clinton, only 13 percent of non-white respondents would pick Trump—the lowest in the Republican field. (Ben Carson, at 24 percent, did best among non-white voters.) Only 10 percent of black respondents thought Trump was trustworthy. Going further back, an August Quinnipiac poll found substantial skepticism toward Trump among black voters.

There was at least one result that showed more positive outcomes for Trump. A SurveyUSA poll in September showed Trump taking a quarter of the black vote in a head-to-head matchup against Hillary Clinton. At the time, Philip Bump laid out some reasons to be skeptical about that figure. Among them is that if Trump truly won 25 percent of the black vote, it would be an incredible reversal of the general trend over the last few decades. The best any recent Republican has done with black voters was 17 percent—and that was Gerald Ford in 1976, competing against a southern Democrat and helming a very different Republican Party. In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama won 95 and 93 percent of the African American vote, respectively, and while that number is likely to go down with a white Democratic nominee, it probably won’t go that far down. (Trump stressed his “great relationship” with the black community in 2011 to make the point that black support for Obama had produced “very, very frightening numbers.” He argued that voters were backing Obama on the basis of his race alone, and so might not be as open to supporting Trump on a hinted but never launched 2012 bid.)

The problem for Republicans who want to win the black vote is that African Americans just don’t agree with them on that much. As true as that is for the mainstream GOP, it’s even more acute for Trump. Go back to the Fox News survey. Solid majorities of blacks opposed Trump’s signature initiatives, like building a wall on the Mexican border and deporting all illegal immigrants. Seven in 10 did, however, support a path to legal status for unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. It can’t help that Trump has become the favorite candidate of white supremacists. Trump’s message of grievance and return to the mythical good old days plays well among working-class whites who have seen their status slip in society, but it doesn’t have the same appeal for African Americans, for whom the good old days were rarely all that good.

Perhaps black evangelicals are one group with which Trump might do better. His support among evangelicals overall has been unexpectedly strong. Black churches tend to be conservative on social issues, and President Obama’s backing for gay marriage in 2012 created worries that black voters would desert him in his quest for reelection. Instead, the opposite happened: The campaign heavily courted black pastors to keep them in the fold, the president’s share of the black vote barely budged, while African American support for marriage equality moved upward.

Trump’s not much of a social-issues candidate, but courting black pastors is, if successful, an efficient way to improve outreach in the black community, because of the influence that ministers hold. On Saturday, Trump offered some black pastors VIP passes to his rally in Sarasota. One of them, Sheila Griffin, told Bloomberg she wasn’t upset about Trump’s comments about Black Lives Matter. “Oh goodness. Donald Trump is not a racist—that's just the press looking for a story. What was it? A couple of knuckleheads in a crowd of thousands? It's a non-issue,” she said.

Even if he can win over pastors like Griffin over, though, Trump faces plenty of hurdles to winning the black vote in the general election—something he has pledged to do. And the endorsement fracas suggests he may not even be able to win over the pastors.

Convictions in Jerusalem

A court in Jerusalem has convicted two Israeli minors in the killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy last year.

The minors, whose names were not released because of their age, were found guilty on Monday of the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was abducted outside a mosque near his home, driven to a forest, and burned alive in July 2014. The slaying came a day after funerals for three Israeli teenagers, whose killings a month earlier in the West Bank were claimed by Hamas, the Islamic militant group. Khdeir’s death was suspected to be a revenge attack.

The court delayed a verdict for the alleged ringleader of the trio involved in Khdeir’s death, according to the Associated Press. Yosef Haim Ben David, 31, entered a last-minute insanity plea.

“My blood is boiling,” Hussein Abu Khdeir, Khdeir’s father, told reporters. He said the last-minute insanity plea made a “joke of the court.”

More from the AP on the decision:

In his ruling, Judge Jacob Zaban determined that Ben David and the two minors snatched Abu Khdeir off an east Jerusalem sidewalk in July 2014 and burned him alive in a forest west of the city.

The judge found that Ben David drove the car while the two youths beat Abu Khdeir unconscious in the back seat. Once they reached the forest, one accomplice helped Ben David douse Abu Khdeir with gasoline. Then Ben David lit the match, according to Zaban.

…

During the trial, one of the convicted Israeli minors claimed he did not realize the three of them would kill Abu Khdeir, while the other said he took part in strangling the Palestinian youth in the car and pouring gasoline on his motionless body. Ben David did not testify.

Forensic analysis of Khdeir’s body, which was found hours later, discovered soot deposits in his lungs, suggesting he was still breathing when he was set on fire. Within days of the crime, the three suspects confessed to police.

Khdeir’s death prompted riots by Palestinians in Jerusalem. Israel police clashed with hundreds of protesters at his funeral, sending tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds.

Days later, Israel launched a military operation against Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Hamas responded with rocket attacks. The resulting 50-day conflict led to the deaths of 2,200 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 73 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

The Jerusalem court will issue a verdict for Ben David in December, according to the AP.

The Bleak Future of College Football

Football can be a force for good. The University of Missouri’s football team proved it earlier this month when student athletes took a facet of campus life that’s often decried—the cultural and economic dominance of college football—and turned it into a powerful leverage point in the pursuit of social justice. Football can build a sense of community for players and fans alike, and serve as a welcome escape from the pressures of ordinary life. The sport cuts across distinctions of race, class, geography, and religion in a way few other U.S. institutions do, and everyone who participates reaps the benefits.

But not everyone—particularly at the amateur level—takes on an equal share of the risk. College football in particular seems headed toward a future in which it’s consumed by people born into privilege while the sport consumes people born without it. In a 2010 piece in The Awl, Cord Jefferson wrote, “Where some see the Super Bowl, I see young black men risking their bodies, minds, and futures for the joy and wealth of old white men.” This vision sounds dystopian but is quickly becoming an undeniable reality, given new statistics about how education affects awareness about brain-injury risk, as well as the racial makeup of Division I rosters and coaching staffs. The future of college football indeed looks a lot like what Jefferson called “glorified servitude,” and even as information comes to light about the dangers and injustices of football, nothing is currently being done to steer the sport away from that path.

The football-consuming public has only recently started to grapple with the magnitude of the dangers inherent in playing football—traumatic brain injury and painkiller addiction chief among them—and to understand that you don’t need to play 10 years in the NFL to suffer permanent physical, psychological, or neurological damage. Though football’s dangers compound over time, they manifest right away, even at the lowest levels. Therefore, as more information comes out, more and more parents are hesitating to let their sons play organized football. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from January found that 37 percent of respondents would prefer that their children play any other sport, which seems understandable—what parent wouldn’t protect his or her children from unnecessary risk?

Unfortunately, the degree to which children are protected from the risks of playing football is very much related to the level of privilege—racial, economic, and social—the child experiences while growing up. That same NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that while 50 percent of respondents with postgraduate degrees would prefer their children not play football, only 31 percent of people with a high-school education or less would say the same.

There’s a good reason for that disparity—better-educated and wealthier people have more access to information about football’s concussion crisis. A 2013 poll conducted by HBO and Marist found that 63 percent of college graduates and 66 percent of people making more than $50,000 per year said they’d heard “a good amount” about football causing concussions, compared to 47 percent of those who made less than $50,000 per year and half of those without a college degree.

In other words, children are being put in danger not because of their own carelessness, or a difference in parenting style, or even because poorer, less privileged kids have fewer ways to climb the class ladder. It’s because many of their parents—especially those who earn less or who haven’t attained as much education—aren’t getting the information they need to make the best decisions for their families.

College football players participate in America’s longest and most brutal unpaid internship.

Of course, any discussion of privilege in the power dynamics of football has to contend with racial privilege as well. In college football, where coaches and administrators are paid six- or seven-figure salaries while players are paid nothing, who has the power? Who bears the risk? A handy tool from the NCAA called the Sport Sponsorship, Participation, and Demographics Search offers some illuminating data. In the 1999-2000 school year, 51.3 percent of Division I football players were white, and 39.5 percent were black. By 2007-2008, those numbers had evened out (46.6 percent white, 46.4 percent black), and in 2014-15, 40.2 percent of DI football players are white, and 47.1 percent are black.

Compare that to the university employees who profit most directly from football: coaches and administrators. In 2014-15, 81.6 percent of Division I athletic directors were white—87.4 percent if you don’t count HBCUs. The numbers skew even farther if you include all three divisions. The NCAA reports 1,081 member schools that aren’t HBCUs, and among those a little over 90 percent have a white athletic director. The numbers are about the same for coaches: 82.8 percent of Division I head coaches and 81.5 percent of coordinators are white, while 15.2 percent of head coaches and 15.6 percent of coordinators are black.

While the head coach and coordinator numbers more or less represent the population of the U.S. as a whole, there are two bits of context worth noting. First, the population of college-football participants gets whiter the farther up the chain of power you go: from players, to graduate assistants and position coaches, to coordinators and head coaches, to administrators. Second, the racial dynamics of the head-coaching ranks don’t come close to matching the makeup of the body of players from which coaches are almost universally drawn.

In short: In the world of college football, the more privileged a person’s background, the more power he (sometimes she, but usually he) has, and the less risk he assumes. And if those survey numbers about parents holding their kids out of football wind up reflecting the future, that imbalance is not only going to increase, but it’s going to be reflected significantly along class lines as well as racial lines.

Not that any of this comes as a particular shock. But unless something changes, college football is going to reach a point where the distribution of risk and profit in college football is so grotesquely unfair, and the ethical ramifications (ideally) or the optics (probably) of unpaid poor and/or black men destroying themselves for the profit and amusement of white men will make the sport, as it exists now, unsustainable.

So what, if anything, can be done?

There’s a growing belief that football is so dangerous it’s unethical to contribute to its hegemony in American culture by consuming it, publicizing it, or contributing to it financially. Every minute passed discussing the sport adds to its cultural importance; every dollar spent on tickets or apparel feeds the machine that turns healthy boys into broken men, and along the way produces toxic levels of sexism, militarism, retrograde masculinity, and corporate greed. The only way to stop the dangerous chokehold football has on American culture, then, is to deprive it of the attention and money that make it work.

But while the urge to boycott is understandable, it’s so far been ineffective as a tactic for enacting change. The most direct impact of football’s brain-injury crisis has been the proliferation of thinkpieces calling for concerned consumers to boycott the NFL, a movement that’s gained steam as the league bungled domestic-abuse investigations against Ray Rice and Greg Hardy. But the league posted $7.2 billion in revenue in 2014—more than double what it pulled in in 2010. Last May, Keith Olbermann called for viewers to boycott the NFL draft and the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, in response to inaction by the governing bodies of both football and boxing to confront their athletes’ high-profile predilection for intimate-partner violence. The draft’s ratings dropped significantly from 2014 (though it’s unclear how much of that is due to the influence of Olbermann and others like him), but it was still the third-highest-rated draft ever. The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight took in $400 million from 4.4 million pay-per-view buys in the U.S. alone. If a boycott of football could bring about real change, it hasn’t happened yet.

Football is supposed to build a sense of community, and true communities look out for everyone’s kids.

It’s possible that football is such big business it almost can’t be starved, even as universities spend self-destructively in pursuit of on-field success. So until and unless such a mass defection can be organized, the best avenue for reform runs through the existing fan and media structure, not by opting out. A football community only composed of people unconcerned about player safety and workers’ rights would never pursue reform on its own. But by remaining part of the conversation and within the community, empathetic fans and media members can exert pressure on the power structure to diversify its own ranks and ensure better treatment for players.

The NFL has made small steps toward improving player safety and minority hiring, but concussion protocols and the Rooney Rule, which mandates that NFL teams interview minority candidates for head coaching jobs, didn’t come about under threat of boycott. They were the result of an internal push from players, fans, and media who remained involved with the game. The next step is to pursue some evolution in the rules or technological breakthrough that could reduce the risk of playing tackle football. If that’s not feasible, then it’s worth fighting to ensure that players are compensated according to the risk they’re undertaking.

Refusing to participate in college football—or to let your kids participate—because you're horrified by its nature won't compel the people with power over how the game operates to make it safer, or its economic structure less exploitative. Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, and it doesn’t cease to be a problem just because it doesn’t affect your kids anymore. Seven high-schoolers have died playing football this year, and tens of thousands of college players have performed for millions of fans, for free and at great personal risk. Football is supposed to build a sense of community, and true communities look out for everyone’s kids—not out of self-interest, but because it’s the right thing to do.