A woman passes a fence outside Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery adorned with tributes to victims of COVID-19, May 28, 2020, in New York. The memorial is part of the Naming the Lost project which attempts to humanize the victims who are often just listed as statistics. The wall features banners that say "Naming the Lost" in six languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Bengali. What kind of permanent memorial will we build to those lost to the Trump administration's criminal incompetence? | Mark Lennihan / A

We can barely begin to count the multiple overlapping crises in our country right now. You know them all, and doubtlessly youre dealing with some or all of them in your own life. Its a struggle not to feel overwhelmed.

One crisis has to do with epic death, grief, and memory. How many are dying nowboth from COVID-19 and from natural causeswho receive but a short graveside eulogy with only the most immediate family present, if that? Spouses, siblings, children and grandchildren, workmates, and social friendsmost of them must stay home without offering a comforting embrace or shedding a tear together with the other bereaved. Maybe theyll gather on Zoom to share a treasured memory or anecdote and raise a glass.

We have a collective grief to deal with in our land, yet from our highest tribunes all we hear is, This will be over sooner than you know it, nothing to see here, lets get back to work.

A brief experiment with reconciliation

An analogy could be made to the American Civil War, in which over half a million of our people were killed either on the battlefield or in makeshift medical tents and hospitals. Our brief experiment with Reconstruction, a national effort toward a just reconciliation, attempted to make those sacrifices count for something: Freedom, representation, compensation, forty acres.

Much of the Reconstruction program was never enacted. It did not last long, thanks in large part to the pro-Southern impeached but not convicted President Andrew Johnson, who proclaimed, Its over, folks. Too much wanton democracy going on here, time to get back to what were best at. Sharecropping, tenant farming, wage and debt slavery, no voting rights, separate and not equal, lynching, Ku Klux Klan, terrorism, apartheid American-style.

The country did not have enough time or sufficient unified will to properly heal and bind up her wounds, to repair, restore, renew our family, our democracy. Our grief did not go deep enough. So we moved on as a nation, and forgot, and soon some people appropriated our grief.

They built monuments. Not to memorialize the Middle Passage, nor the human auction block, nor the parents separated from their children, the cotton plantation laborers who built a strong economy both South and North, the chain gangs, the forced illiteracy, the false prophets who taught the religion of slavery.

No, their memorials lifted up the trimly uniformed generals on their poised horses, the noble slaveowner patriarchs, the wise legislators of division and contempt, the gallant officers of a traitorous Confederacy, all in the name of tradition, heroism, sacrifice, pride, womanhood, honor. Let all who pass this sanctified place know: This is the new, eternal order of the land. Grieving time is over: Back to your hoes and your kitchen aprons. And to the good ole boys they said, We know life aint always easy, but hey, ya aint Black, right?

And they still tried killing us by the hundreds and thousands and millions. In state penitentiaries, in the mines, sweatshops, factories and fields, in imperial wars, in poverty and disease, all the while our school children pledged unqualified allegiance to all that star-spangled liberty and justice in this bountiful, brave land of the free for all.

Our teachers didnt tell us the whole story, our historians entombed the truths that stared out at them from the sources they studied, our preachers roared that God himself separated the races. Perhaps our poets probed deeper with their emotional paeans, odes, and laments, but they lacked the political power to transcend the catharsis of the valley of death and lead us to new, glorious mountaintop heights.

Monuments of the future

We ride the metaphorical train of life, and one after the other hear the conductor announce the cities we pull into. We watch as signposts announce the names of cities and towns and counties, places we know in our bones we will never pass through again in this life.

It was only a few miles back, around Memorial Day, that our nation marked the tragic milestone of 100,000 dead from the COVID-19 pandemic. Two, three, five, fifty, five hundred, five thousand, ten thousand. How did we get to one hundred thousand in only four months time?

And we know the number was higher, too, with uncounted deaths unattributed to COVID but that surely were. We know, too, how skewed the numbers are, not only toward older people, but toward African Americans, Latinx, and other people of color. Poorer living standards, poorer healthcare, poorer prevention, what else could we expect?

As its so often said, one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. But each one of those deaths meant something very special to families, neighbors, co-workers, and communities. We cannot erect a monument in the public square to every one of them, but can we sanctify a statistic? Perhaps the Europeans have a handle on this enormity when they place stones in the sidewalk, and plaques on buildings. In this home lived a Jewish family, the Goldbergers, Heinrich, Ida, Sophie, Karl, and Paul, whom the Nazis deported in 1942 to Auschwitz. All perished there, date unknown.

We do have some of that here, with our Holocaust memorials and museums. And we also have several Civil Rights museums and historical sites, as well as the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, otherwise referred to as the National Lynching Memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama.

How will we remember our tens of thousands, now turning into hundreds of thousands, succumbed to a fatal disease that could have been contained with prompt, dedicated, compassionate, science-led policies, but instead was allowed to extrapolate in some modern macabre version of the medieval Dance of Death? It didnt have to be, as our epidemiologists warned us. But in this land of the free for all, it was every man, woman, and child for themselves: Good luck, and God bless. I take no responsibility.

A new milestone

So now we have arrived at a new milestone. One hundred fifty thousand Americans dead. Not from a virus, but from ignorance, neglect, arrogance, superstition, pride, greed, racism, individualism, power-hunger, and willful malevolence.

How do we memorialize these statistics? Do we go back to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall of 58,000+ names, dead, sacrificed on some altar or otherbut we are never told whose altar? Did you support that war? Oppose it? No matter, the names are all here for you to meditate upon as you see fit. No controversy, please, especially not in our nations capital!

That cant work for our eventual coronavirus monuments. We commemorate here the [five hundred thousand? five million?] people in the United States who lost their lives to a terrible worldwide pandemic (2019-20??). May their loved ones find comfort, and the souls of the departed rest in everlasting peace.

No! There must be some accountability, some justice, truth and reconciliation, even some names named! How about something like this?

We memorialize here the [x number of] people in the United States who lost their lives in a terrible worldwide pandemic (2019-20??), the largest number of victims by far of any country on Earth. As U.S. citizens, we take personal and collective responsibility for our inability or unwillingness at the time to recognize the incompetence and heartlessness of the Donald Trump administration to humanely, rationall,y and scientifically coordinate an effective response to this fatal disease. The loyal Trump supporters in the Senate had the opportunity to rid the country of this vain and prideful tyrant, who remains to this day a shameful blot on our history, but opted not to when they had the opportunity in his February 2020 impeachment trial. Although the American people voted Trump out of office in the November 2020 presidential election, and also elected a Democratic Senate, we erect this monument in our public square now as a reminder and safeguard forever of our duty and honor as citizens to never again allow such abuse to happen. May all who stand here in the generations to come remember that democracy depends on active participation and righteous resistance to malfeasance. May we never forget the hard lesson we endured in that deadly hour, and may this monument forever serve to honor those sacred dead the Trump administration sacrificed in the name of greed and power.

A little wordy, maybe; it would require a ton of bronze for that plaque. But thats the spirit of it: We cannot just assume this pandemic is the new normal. Its not, and it must never be.

On Memorial Day weekend, we listed the names of whole cities of 100,000 that would have been wiped off the map if COVID-19 had been concentrated in one place.

Since that time, weve now also surpassed my own birthplace, New Haven, Conn. (a rounded 130,000), and a number of state capitals. I hope the legislators who gather in those Capitol buildings and statehouses take note: Hartford, Conn. (124,000), Lansing, Mich. (115,000), Springfield, Ill. (117,000), Columbia, S.C. (134,000), and Boise, Ida. (146,000). Theyd all have been swept up in a rapture of disease.

On the track to 150,000, weve now also lost McAllen, Mesquite, and Killeen, Tex.; Dayton, Ohio; Fullerton, Orange, Valencia, Torrance, Pomona, and Pasadena, Calif.; Syracuse, Borough Park, Astoria, and East Hampton, N.Y.; Savannah, Ga.; Bridgeport, Conn.; Naperville, Rockford, and Joliet, Ill.; Paterson, N.J.; Clarksville, Tenn.; Hollywood, Fla.; Kansas City, Kan.; Alexandria, Va.; and Springfield, Mass.

As for the next state capital to disappear, Eugene, Ore., is on the death watch, with its 160,000 residents.

Newspapers during the Vietnam War used to published running numbers of dead and wounded as a daily reminder of the human cost of that ill-advised criminal adventure. Naturally, they barely ever mentioned how many times that numbermany millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodianswho were killed, maimed, and poisoned by U.S. attacks.

This is one of our ways of never forgetting our shamefully unnecessary human losses, and to what? To another altar of insanitythe Trump presidency.

Sadly, it must be said: Our dead can never rest in peace until new heights of justice flourish throughout the land. May the day come soon!

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150000 dead of coronavirus in U.S.: What monument will they have? - People's World

In the summer of 1965, my birthday cake was stuck at a bakery across town. My mother couldnt get to it because Watts was on fire, which sent surrounding cities, like ours in the South Bay, into lockdown.

No way could she have known when she placed the order for my fifth birthday that a white highway patrol officer would soon pull over a young Black man for reckless driving and, in the ensuing chaos, arrest him, his brother and his mother. It was a sequence of events that played poorly in a community already bristling at overcrowded housing, low-wage jobs and routine incidents of police brutality.

In those six days of rebellion which some might call a fed-up-rising residents clashed not only with police but also the National Guard. In the end, 34 people lay dead, more than 1,000 had been injured, and tens of millions of dollars in property was gutted.

That smoke lingers, and the people periodically erupt in outrage, as when officers were acquitted in 1992 following the brutal beating of Rodney King, or when George Floyd died after a cop knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while he lay face down and handcuffed.

As the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote recently, The lulls you experience between explosive revolts of the oppressed should never be mistaken as harmony. They should be taken as rest breaks.

In the summers of the 1960s and early 1970s, my family could only hope for the best when driving while Black from Los Angeles to New York every other year. We went to reconnect with our East Coast kin.

To guide us, my mother ordered TripTiks from the American Automobile Assn., small, spiral-bound books that outlined the best path. My sense is that my parents asked for directions that expressly avoided the South, out of concern that we might get pulled over by racist highway patrolmen during the turbulent civil rights era.

In a time before major interstate highways, we connected to Route 66 and kept it moving along two-lane highways dotted with bad diners and dimly lighted motels. To pass the time, my mother read my father and me novels, such as The Grapes of Wrath. The AAA TripTiks highlighted points of interest along the way, such as Native communities or petroglyphs, but we flew by them all to make good time.

Once we were safely in New York, our people descended on us in my grandmothers Harlem kitchen. Over the next couple of weeks, we visited family around the tri-state area and in New Castle, Del., and binged on a buffet of delights at Coney Island.

Only on the way back did we slow down to sightsee. We might cruise the pulse of Chicagos Michigan Avenue or down a two-laner through Davenport, Iowa, stalks of corn swaying as if to the tune of for amber waves of grain.

We wound our way up the Black Hills of South Dakota to regard the 60-foot faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln blast-sculpted into granite. We strolled around charming Coeur dAlene, Idaho, and heard the church bells peel at noon.

When we entered a restaurant, hotel or curio shop, I secretly watched to see how people received us as a Black family. I cant remember coming across anyone who was unwelcoming.

At the same time, these were the same years when a president, a presidential hopeful John and Robert Kennedy along with three civil rights leaders, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, were assassinated.

The tranquil beauty of the United States passing by my window over those summers seemed out of sync with our countrys history of violent bloodshed. I began to perceive the image of America as a glossy brochure for a house, where the best features are well-lighted and captured with a wide lens while flaws, such as lead water, termites and a roof about to cave, were cropped out.

Of all the places we toured, Mt. Rushmore made the deepest impression. At the time, I was ignorant that it was built on stolen Indigenous land by a sculptor with ties to the Ku Klux Klan. I just remember gazing up at those carved faces, particularly Lincolns, farthest to the right, and noting that the pinch in his brow barely hinted at the pressure he faced watching the U.S. become engulfed in a civil war over slavery.

Though Lincoln tried to warn us that a house divided against itself cannot stand, our country has yet to mend its cracked foundation. Too many continue to hold the American brochure aloft, while stubbornly refusing to address the pressing repairs needed to fix the racism, inequality and police brutality.

Recently, I heard a NPR interview with the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist, Martin Luther King Jr.s old church in Atlanta. He said that the current moment is not about burning ourselves out trying to squash all racial hate.

I just want to make sure that our city and our state and our country is not too busy to love, he said. And justice is what love looks like in public.

As the 55th anniversary of those fateful, fiery days in Watts approaches, theres no AAA TripTik we can follow to show us a way forward. But I think James Baldwin sagely pointed toward the North Star when he observed: Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Pamela K. Johnson is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. @pamelasez

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55 years since the Watts rebellion, how far have we traveled? - Los Angeles Times

(Editors Note: This article is part of a specialJust SecurityRacing National Securitysymposiumedited by editorial board memberMatiangai Sirleaf. Thegoalof the symposium is to render race visible in national security to shift the dominant paradigm toward addressing issues of racial justice.)

We carry the border on our skin, in our language, through our religion. Anyone on the other side of that border whose skin is Black or Brown; who speaks to their loved ones in Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, or Farsi; whose house of worship is a mosque or a temple is readily dehumanized as a national security threat.

While this particular brand of racism is levied by many individuals against migrants (and people wrongly assumed to be migrants based on their race), it is important to remember the ways in which immigration law has constructed and perpetuates racist imaginaries of national security. In turn, migration status (or lack thereof) and national security frames can be used to obscure race, though these concepts are deeply intertwined. This dehumanization of immigrants also has a curious twist: when it comes to conversations about race and racial justice, the migrant experience is oddly invisible.

The border in the minds of most Americans is, of course, the southern border with Mexico. Countless atrocities have been committed there in the name of national security. While these racialized harms have been magnified to an extreme under the Trump administration, they have been perpetuated by Democratic and Republican administrations alike for centuries in the name of keeping the nation safe.

The most horrific of recent abusive immigration policies was the administrations family separation program, analyzed as torture by Beth Van Schaack. In 2018, at least 2,800 children were torn from their parent(s), who had been prosecuted for unlawful entry and were told by Customs and Border Protection officials that, as a result, they no longer had a right to be with their children. This zero tolerance policy specifically targeted families of color fleeing extraordinary levels of violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. It is not clear what national security goal is served by ripping families apart, or what security threat parents fleeing extraordinary violence pose to one of the wealthiest nations in the world, but that was nonetheless the legal justification for this racist policy.

The law consistently sends a clear message that, at the border, Brown lives do not matter, as they are outweighed by nebulous national security concerns. One stark recent example is the case of Hernandez v. Mesa, decided by the Supreme Court in February. As Steve Vladeck, who helped litigate the case, explained in language from the brief, We argue only that a border patrol agent could not, without any justification, shoot petitioners fifteen-year-old son [Sergio Hernandez] while he hid behind a pillar a few feet into Mexican soil. Yet citing foreign relations and national security implications, the Supreme Court refused to allow Sergios parents to pursue a Bivens claim a lawsuit against the federal officer for violating the U.S. constitution based on this cross-border shooting. Since the Trump administration found that the CBP officer who shot Sergio did not act inconsistently with [Border Patrol] policy or training regarding use of force, it did not prosecute that officer. In other words, the law now tells us that border enforcement officials can shoot across the border to take Brown lives with impunity.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration has also invoked national security to close the border to asylum seekers, in violation of our international legal commitments (as analyzed by Oona Hathaway) and with dubious public health justifications. The most recent pronouncement to this end is a proposed new rule issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice on July 9. This rule would permanently enable the executive to bar from asylum and withholding of removal, on national security grounds, applicants traveling from countries where a contagious or infectious disease is prevalent or epidemic. The background to the rule provides a sweepingly broad interpretation of national security, noting that:

the scope of the term extends well beyond terrorism considerations, and national defense considerations as well. The Attorney General has previously determined that danger to the security of the United States in the context of the bar to eligibility for withholding of removal encompasses considerations of defense, foreign relations, and the economy.

Defined so broadly, public health concerns easily fall within the scope of national security and can be manipulated to exclude asylum seekers on grounds that are not explicitly racial but map conveniently onto racial categories.

These are just a few examples of the many uses of national security as a justification for our racialized physical borders. But the racialized border is everywhere, carried with migrants of color and their descendants, as well as with people of color wrongly assumed to be migrants, in the interior of the country, without regard to individual circumstances and accomplishments. The migrant of color is the perpetual outsider, readily transformed into a national security threat. The recent example of racial discrimination against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates how easily even a model minority can be shown their place.

How does the law come into play here? For Asian Americans, years of exclusion through immigration law, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that was not completely dismantled until the Immigration Act of 1965, instantiated and perpetuated the racialized othering upon which Trump and others now play.

The pandemic also foregrounds a deep and painful irony in the situation of Latinx migrants. As described above, the Trump administration has used COVID-19 as a justification to completely exclude migrants from the Northern Triangle of Central America who are seeking protection from exceptional levels of violence in their home countries. When it comes to detained migrants, the executive has revisited its torturous family separation policy, offering parents a binary choice of remaining in detention with their children in the face of the pandemic or enabling their children to be released by voluntarily accepting family separation.

Yet at the same time, the executive has relaxed the requirements for processing temporary worker visas both in the interior and the exterior; most recipients of these visas are Mexican nationals. Even Trumps most recent Proclamation Suspending Entry of Aliens Who Present a Risk to the U.S. Labor Market Following the Coronavirus Outbreak contains an exception for any alien seeking to enter the United States to provide temporary labor or services essential to the United States food supply chain. Temporary status, yet essential labor; this is a precarious place to reside. This paradox, instantiated and reified by immigration laws that fail to provide sufficient lawful pathways for plentiful low-wage jobs, underpins the permanent labor underclass upon which the U.S. economy depends. On one side of the border, Latinx asylum seekers are a threat to national security; on the other side, Latinx workers are essential workers but disposable people.

These examples present just a handful of recent uses of racialized national security tropes to exclude immigrants. Though anti-migrant racism abounds in history and has grown exponentially under the Trump administration, the migrant experience curiously disappears from the conversation when it comes to racial justice. To be sure, the original sin of slavery must be the first priority in terms of accountability and redress. At the same time, there must be space to expand the conversation around racial justice to include the very real suffering of all migrant communities of color and their hyphenated progeny.

Racialized borders travel with all of our skin, no matter how long ago our ancestors arrived. From African-Americans who were labeled refugees after Hurricane Katrina, to Puerto Ricans who were treated as foreign in the wake of Hurricane Maria in terms of their receipt of federal aid, to second and third-generation Latinx Americans who are told to go back to their home country for speaking Spanish in public, all people of color in the United States are subject to othering as foreign. Our experiences are all intertwined in the history of American racism and the enduring power of White supremacy in the country; addressing each of them completely requires attention to all forms of racial subordination.

What would it mean to have a real conversation about racial justice, migration, and national security? We are so extremely far from this reality at the moment that it is difficult to even imagine what this discourse might look like. I do, however, have a first step to offer: humanization. In order to protect the lives of people of color, they must first be valued as equal to White lives. The law has played a central role in devaluing and dehumanizing migrants, often through a national security frame. It is an open question whether law can be nearly as effective in humanizing all people of color in the United States and at our borders. It is also an urgent question: until the full humanity of all racial minorities is recognized, we will carry the border on our backs.

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Dispatches from a Racialized Border: The Invisible Threat - Just Security

Minneapolis-St. Paul, the center of the reigniting of the Black Lives Matter movement, has one of the highest rates of prosperity in the United States, ranked sixth among its 150 metropolitan-area peers. But it ranks 149th in terms of racial inclusion, indicating one of the worst racial wealth disparity gaps in the country.

This finding, and other granular details, have emerged as part of the Racial Equity Index, a new tool that allows users to view how 100 cities, 150 metro areas, and all 50 states, perform with respect to racial equity compared with their counterparts. Launched on July 23, its the latest iteration from the National Equity Atlas, the nations most detailed report card on racial equity, which provides evidence for the need to build equitable, resilient, and prosperous new economies. The hope is that this newest release of data can be harnessed by politicians to assess specific problems and craft policy that focuses more precisely on areas of need.

The new data resource takes the form of scorecards, accompanied by visually digestible analysis. The indexs nine specific indicators range from unemployment and median wage to air pollution, commute time, and rent burden (the share of renter-occupied households spending more than 30% of income on housing costs). Scores are generated, from 1 to 100, for each locations performance and for each racial group within that location.

Using the tool, youd discover that Minneapoliss inclusion troubles stem from huge disparities in educational attainment. Youd see that, while 16% of white residents of the area are economically insecure, that rate is 57% for Black residents and 50% for Native Americans.

[Screenshot: National Equity Atlas]Racial equity really is the defining issue of our time, says Michael McAfee, president and CEO of Policy Link, which started building the atlas in 2014 along with USCs Program for Environmental and Regional Equity. We cant tackle it without clear data on who is most impacted, where they live, and what are the most significant issues in their lives.

For McAfee, the tool has rolled out at exactly the right moment, when protesters are still mobilizing across the nation. Data is crucial to concretely showing where the biggest prosperity gaps are, which racial groups theyre affecting, and what their causes are. Now, were in a moment where we can merge our hopes and aspirations with the rigor of really good data, he says.

We live in a moment in which the world has broken open to try to pay attention to issues of racial inequity, says Manuel Pastor, director of the USC program. And I think its useful to have a tool on the shelf that can help you to do something about it.

The index found that no community in America is free of racial inequities, even the highest performing, such as San Jose, California, in the middle of Silicon Valley. There, Black people have the highest college graduation rate yet still have an educational attainment rating thats 23 percentage points lower than white people. It also found that some of the highest-scoring cities have low Black populations, such as Albuquerque, Reno, and Honolulu. Of the 33 bigger cities with the most Black residents, only two of them are in the top 20 for racial equity performance. Among the 25 best regions for prosperity, none are also in the top 25 for racial inclusion.

Pastor calls this a diagnostic tool, in that it shows where policymakers need to move the needle, and what groups need to benefit from policies and investments, all to reach the atlass ambitious end goal of dismantling structural racism on the local level.

McAfee says some localities have already made policy strides using the atlass prior data. It was used by Fairfax County, Virginia, to help establish One Fairfax, the countys plan to advance racial equity and opportunity. It was used by Asheville, North Carolina, which last week announced its approval of monetary reparations for slavery and discrimination for Black residents.

While these examples give McAfee hope, he stresses that data can never supplant conscious leadership. Leaders need to be committed to acknowledging Americas racist past in order to make an effectual change. The problem that this nation has faced is that it has not reconciled with the fact that its democracy and its economy were predicated on stolen land, genocide, and slave labor, he says.

The COVID-19 crisis, he says, has exposed the cracks in a system that was designed to be toxic for Black and brown people and which is now affecting people on a wider scale. He mentions Floridas failing unemployment system, which Republicans admitted was designed badly to purposely keep its users from receiving benefits. Now, it means people cant receive their pandemic relief checks. That is a real-world example of how anti-Black racism ends up impacting white America.

When combined with the fighting spirit of this rare moment, where a diverse coalition of young people are demanding change, the data make McAfee optimistic for changewhich needs to happen in an extensive and sweeping way in order to close up the gaps. Black people can never catch up with white people unless you do something really radically transformative, he says.

Just as the founding fathers had the radical imagination to create something that was as beautiful as this democracy and this economy, but equally as oppressive for some, he says, we can remake it now.

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The Racial Equity Index compares racial equity around the US - Fast Company