Monthly Archives: April 2022

What you need to know about cryptocurrency and filing your taxes

If you're thinking of investing in cryptocurrency, plan to pay taxes on what you earn. Here's how you'll be taxed and what you'll owe.

Andrea Kramar and Hye-Su Jun, USA TODAY

Tax season procrastinators had one more chance to sort out returns and pay any taxes owed.

April 18 is the deadline for most taxpayers across the U.S. to file their returns. Residents in Maine and Massachusetts have until April 19 because of Patriots' Day.

As of April 8, more than 103 million federal tax returns were filed. The IRS estimates it will receive more than 160 million returns this year.

For those taxpayers getting a refund, their deposit or check was likely larger than in 2021. IRS data shows refunds are averaging $3,175this season, nearly 10% higher than last year.

Below is a recap of all the information you need to know on the final day of the 2022 tax season.

TAX SEASON 2022: What to know about extensions, refunds and child tax credits.

WHEN ARE TAX RETURNS DUE?: These are the deadlines to file

Multiple Twitter users say they are having trouble logging into their accounts with the IRS. They are either stuck on a landing page that automatically refreshes or are directed to a new page with a notice that says increased traffic is impacting service. "Please consider returning later while we work to resolve this issue."

The IRS did not immediately respond to USA TODAYS inquiry regarding when it expects to resolve the problem and what last-minute filers should do if they cannot access key information on their accounts.

Its unclear if the issue is occurring nationwide or if it is isolated in certain geographic areas.

Elisabeth Buchwald

Tens of millions of tax returns will flood the Internal Revenue Service now that the April 18 filing deadline is here. But the headaches of the latest tax season and last year's leftover troubles will linger in the months ahead.

"The IRS has to get current with not only prior years but this year's tax returns before they move into the next filing season without this albatross around its neck," said Erin Collins, the national taxpayer advocate.

For the IRS, it has meant putting as many resources and people as possible toward clearing out the backlog that built up in 2021.

For taxpayers, it can mean repeated efforts to get an IRS employee on the phone to answer a question or help with a problem. It means anyone who has filed a paper return this year risks ridiculously long waits of possibly six months or even nine months to receive an income tax refund.

The IRS has historically been able to process a refund within two weeks for an electronically filed tax return and up to six weeks for a paper tax return.

Susan Tompor, Detroit Free Press

The number of people who reported cryptocurrency transactions in their 2020 tax return more than tripled compared with 2019, according to data from TurboTax. The tax software company expects even more people to report crypto transactions on their 2021 taxes.

TurboTax also found that 63% of people reporting crypto on their 2020 returns gained money compared with 45% of people on their 2019 returns.

Elisabeth Buchwald

Residents in states affected by a natural disaster could get more time to file returns and pay the IRS.

For example, Tennessee residents and businesses in 14 counties hit by disasters in the past year will get until May 16 to file returns and make payments.

Tennessee was hit by severe weather in December, including strong winds and storms in some areas of the state.

Residents in other states could see relief as well, including victims of wildfires in Colorado, and victims of severe storms and flooding in Puerto Rico.

Don't forget the Tax Day treats

Filing your taxes can be stressful. Fortunately, several businesses and restaurants are providing Tax Day freebies and perks. Among some of the food and services available:

As of April 8, the IRS received more than 103 million returns. Of those, the agency processed nearly 100 million returns. Thats 10% higher compared to the same time last year. However, the tax deadline was extended by a month.

Compared to the total number of returns received by the end of filing season 2019, we have received almost of all the returns we will receive by the filing deadline, said Anthony Burke, an IRS spokesperson.

So far the IRS issued more than $222 billion in refunds. The average refund is $3,175, nearly 10% higher than last year thanks to the enhanced Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, and the third round of stimulus checks which many taxpayers will be claiming as a refund.

Elisabeth Buchwald

The deadline to file taxes typically falls on April 15, but this year taxpayers get a couple of extra days to file thanks to a D.C. holiday.

The D.C. offices for the IRS were closed on April 15 to recognize Emancipation Day, which commemorates the abolition of slavery. Although Emancipation Day is April 16, it was observed by the government the Friday before.

This is not the first time in recent history taxpayers received extra time to file their taxes. Last year, the deadline was pushed to May 17 so taxpayers had more time to file. In 2020, the IRS extended the tax deadline to July 15 amid the COVID pandemic.

Filing taxes is never fun, but digital services which allow taxpayers to submit returns electronically have made the process smoother, especially for those waiting until the last minute.

So what's the best tax software? According to Reviewed, TurboTax is the top option because"It's intuitive, offers differently priced packages depending on your tax needs" and provides lots of support if you run into issues.

Another great choice is H&R Block, which Reviewed says is easy to navigate and includes unemployment income if you're using the free edition of its service.

Taxpayers who need more time to complete their return can file an extension, which gives them until Oct. 17to submit. However, you still have to pay the IRS any taxes owed by Monday.

Taxpayers can visit the IRS website's Free File option to receive the six-month extension for free. After picking a firm that participates in Free File, taxpayers fill out Form 4868 for the extension.

Taxpayers who do owe money will need to estimate the amount. According to H&R Block, taxpayers who don't pay at least 90% of that amount face a penalty.

If you are receiving a refund, there's no penalty, according to the IRS. But if you don't file a return within three years, you could lose the refund.

If you owe money to the IRS, you face two penalties. The first is for not filing on time, which the IRS says will cost"5% of the unpaid taxes for each month or part of a month that a tax return is late."

You can also receive a penalty for not paying your taxes on time, which amounts to0.5% of your unpaid taxes plus interest.

Want to make a cool interest rate of more than 8% on your tax refund cash?

Late filers who are due a federal income tax refund can use Form 8888 toimmediately invest up to $5,000 of that money in inflation-indexed savings bonds, or I Bonds.

The average interest rate is 8.36% over the 12 months for those who buy the I Bonds before late April.

Study the details of these bonds before signing up at TreasuryDirect.gov. For example, you do not have access to the money in I Bonds for 12 months.

Contributing: Elisabeth Buchwald, Susan Tompor, and The Associated Press

Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @brettmolina23.

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Tax Day recap: What to know on the last day to file tax returns in 2022 - USA TODAY

The large budgets allotted for urban policing must be reconsidered so that communities can explore safer alternatives.

Defund should not be a dirty word.

In fact, defunding public police is a step towards choosing real safety for communities across Canada. Defunding means taking funds from police budgets, while shrinking the size and operations of police. At the same time, it means granting more power to community groups and dedicating more resources to community and social development. Defunding police is a necessary step toward social and economic justice.

Taking the time to cut through intimidating police rhetoric can help reveal ways police actually create harm.

Police rhetoric and intimidation push people away from thinking through the costs of policing. The rhetoric can be so overwhelming that it often prevents us from exploring alternative possibilities of non-punitive and community-led responses to transgression.

Ive recently helped to edit a collection of essays exploring the economic, political and social reasons for defunding, disarming and dismantling public police in Canada. After reflecting on the arguments, I am convinced that larger police budgets and greater police deployments will cause more harm than good.

One major reason to defund police is economic.

In some Canadian cities, public police budgets now account for more than 30 per cent of municipal budgets. The costs of policing are expected to surge even higher in the next decade.

These costs are creating structural deficits that municipalities will never escape from. On economic grounds alone, defunding police is an issue anybody interested in cities and public (and fiscal) policy should have at the front of mind. This money should be reinvested in social programs, community development, mental health, transportation and housing.

Still, its necessary to go beyond economic claims and look at the politics. The politics of police are another reason for defunding.

The politics of police forces are anti-democratic and contrary to social justice.

For example, this past February during the right-wing trucker protest, some police sided with the anti-vaccine convoy in cities like Ottawa, Winnipeg and Coutts, Alta.

Some officers used their cars as personal photo booths for the occupiers and acted as valet parking for the truckers, revealing differential treatment for mostly white settler protesters compared to, for example, Indigenous Wetsuweten land defenders and water protectors. Several officers across the country are under investigation for either donating to the trucker convoy or posting social media alerts cheering on the occupation of Canadian cities that were hurtful, disruptive and disrespectful to so many.

There are other examples of regressive police politics. Police have used public resources to support their own narrow, conservative political causes. In Edmonton and Lethbridge, Alta., police have been caught spying on their critics and circulating negative social media posts. In Toronto and Winnipeg, police unions have run attack ads against mayors when those politicians suggested police costs should be reined in.

Recently, Calgary police have indicated they will continue to wear thin blue line patches that have been called fascist and racist in the United States and in Canada too.

Some police like to suggest they are the thin blue line holding back forces of chaos in the world. This requires police to adopt an aggressive law-and-order ideology.

To mark their political stance and exceptional (some might call it extremist) posture, officers will adorn their uniforms with thin blue line patches or put blue line stickers on their cars.

These examples reinforce the idea that police are biased against left-wing political groups and embody a conservative political order.

In this conservative political police culture, critics must be neutralized. Police defunding becomes a dirty word.

A further reason to defund and abolish police is the violence they exact, especially on Black and Indigenous peoples.

Numerous studies and countless stories demonstrate the graphic violence police wantonly use against racialized people.

There are other groups suffering from police violence in ways that have become commonplace. People experiencing mental health crises are routinely shot to death by police instead of getting support.

Medical doctors and nurses in the U.S. and Canada tired of seeing the results of police violence on the bodies of their patients have formed groups calling for the defunding and abolition police.

Other groups are mobilizing for abolition and organizing workshops on alternatives to calling the police because they see police violence is causing tremendous harm.

That immediate violence is in addition to the slow violence that criminalizing people does to entire neighbourhoods. Every arrest by police can affect access to education and employment opportunities, and have a lasting impact on families. Imprisoning Communities by U.S. criminologist Todd Clear is a book everyone should read: it reveals how putting people in jail erodes social and familial bonds.

It might seem counter-intuitive, but criminalization undoes community and creates conditions for more transgression. The more police criminalize people, the less healthy our communities are. When you understand that, you start to see the harm that police do everywhere.

Do we want a society governed by a rock-em-sock-em mentality of reactive, violent responses to people in distress and need?

Or do we want to live in a generous society in which community development is the focus of government funding, and policing is no longer a major priority?

It is not a luxury to debate this for many people, especially Black, Indigenous and people of colour in Canada. Police abolition is a matter of survival.

For more discussions about defunding the police, check out the book Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada which confronts policing myths head on. The ideas in the book build on the work of many social movement groups calling for police defunding. The book examines the politics and economics of policing, the history of police violence, the colonial dimensions of Canada that public police continue to uphold, the police targeting of sex workers and migrants, and the need to put defunding on the agenda in every jurisdiction.

Reading these arguments may help communities envision alternatives to police while bolstering arguments to defund police and refund community.

We have decreased the power and scope or done away with harmful social institutions before. Continuing to accept the status quo by handing over massive budgets to public police institutions will not get us to a safe and healthy future. Bigger police budgets and greater police deployments are a recipe for more harm.

Kevin Walby does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Why is defunding the police important for community safety? - Vancouver Is Awesome

Other suggestions proposed by about 300 pupils aged five to 13 as part of the project to address injustice, prejudice and racism were BAME Park, Multi-faith Park and Diversity Fields.

Rainbow Park, Freedom Peace and Harmony Park and the Peace Park of Equals were also put forward, along with Ramsey Park and MacDonald Park - an apparent deconstruction of Ramsey MacDonald, the former Labour leader, who had tenuous links to landmarks in the area.

Brent Borough Council said it is continuing its engagement work pending a formal decision on a new name, which it has been searching for since the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

At that time, Gladstone - widely considered to have been one of Britains greatest political leaders - was swept up in a local review of historical figures involved in the slave trade, over his push for slave owners like his father to be compensated following abolition.

Although he went on to call slavery the foulest crime in history, he was named in a council-commissioned dossier of historical figures whose views, in association with the slave trade, are inappropriate.

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Park could be renamed after Diane Abbott in Labour council slavery review - The Telegraph

At the David and Lyn Silfen University Forum, Penn Interim President Wendell Pritchett hosted award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in a wide-ranging discussion about Burns new documentary on Benjamin Franklin, founding father and founder of the University of Pennsylvania.

The hour-and-a-half chat discussed everything from how Burns view of Franklin transformed during the making of the two-part documentary, to the idea of Franklin as the original social networker who never stopped reinventing himself, to how so much of Franklins work has relevance today. The discussion was intermingled with short clips from the four-hour documentary that premiered earlier this month on PBS.

John L. Jackson Jr., the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor, introduced Burns and Pritchett, and noted how at so many major events at Penn, Benjamin Franklin or one of his aphorisms are typically invoked in a quick and perfunctory gesture, even a ritualistic one, before moving on to the subject at hand.

Today, however, weve decided to pause on Franklin even more purposefully than usual by talking about the powerful filmic portrait of Franklins life offered up by Ken Burns, Jackson said. After having the chance to watch the documentary himself, Jackson was struck by how Burns managed to portray the larger-than-life Franklin as truly human in his faults and accomplishments.

This is a Franklin who isnt reducible to pithy renditions of his most storied accomplishments. It is a decidedly multidimensional Franklin, and one that this particular Quakermemet again for the first time with new eyes through the films powerful storytelling.

This is a Franklin who isnt reducible to pithy renditions of his most storied accomplishments. It is a decidedly multidimensional Franklin. Annenberg School of Communication dean John L. Jackson Jr.

Starting off the conversation, Pritchett noted that Burns has said in the past he doesnt choose his documentary topics, but rather, they choose him.

So how did Ben Franklin choose you? Pritchett asked.

Burns, who is also the 2022 Penn commencement speaker and recipient of an honorary doctor of arts degree, said hes drawn to topics with complicated stories and Benjamin Franklin represents exactly that.

Hes arguably the most important founder, and I think hes also the most interesting, he said, noting Franklin was a teenage runaway who achieved such remarkable success that his example would be handed down for generations as the embodiment of the American dream.

Franklin was a writer, a publisher, an inventor, a scientist, a civic leader who embraced the Enlightenment, but he also owned and enslaved human beings and benefited from the institution of slavery, Burns said.

He constantly remade himself from apprentice to printer to scientist to government official to revolutionary to abolitionist, Burns said. He never was finished with himself. He always thought that he was a work in progress.

Burns said he doesnt make films to highlight what he already knows but would rather share with you a process of discovery, and the discovery of Franklin has been as satisfying as anything weve done over nearly 50 years making films.

The talk then moved on to Franklins goals for establishing what would become the University of Pennsylvania, which was to create the first nonsectarian college in America, not beholden to any religious dogma.

He felt it in his bones that education, the thing that he couldnt have as a child, is central to everything he wants to create enlightened human beings who will go about the process of enlightening their community, Burns said. As we look at the mess that were in right now, we see the decline of public education. He knew at the start of his experiment how much that public education would be important and worthwhile and beneficial.

Pritchett also asked how actor Mandy Patinkin came to be the voice of Franklin in the film. Burns said Patinkin as Franklin came to him as he watched an episode of Homeland with his daughter, who he joked was likely too young to have been watching the show at all.

He makes Franklin accessible and thats a great gift, he said of Patinkin.

The talk turned to the issue of slavery several times over the afternoon, including when Pritchett asked how Franklins thinking on the topic evolved over time.

[Franklin] constantly remade himself from apprentice to printer to scientist to government official to revolutionary to abolitionist. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns

Burns said the passing of the Constitution made the issue of slavery a huge topic because of the hypocrisy of all the Southern planters who owned hundreds of human beings articulating that all men are created equal and also using the language of slavery to describe what King George was doing to them. Either these rights are universal, or they werent.

One of the great things that that Franklin did was to liberate the slaves in his own very small household and refuse to run advertisements for the sale of human beings or the return of runaways, Burns said. Franklin eventually became president of the Abolition Society.

I dont think you get a pass for that, but you get higher marks than any of the other white men who created the country, Burns said.

The talk moved to audience questions, which addressed the craft of documentary filmmaking.

In the final question, one audience member asked Burns if he sees a connection between all his documentary subjects, from the Civil War to baseball, from jazz to Franklin.

Theyre all about us, he said. Theyre asking the same question: Who are we? Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? What does an investigation of the past tell us about not only what weve been, but where we are and where we may be going?

Since 2009, the Silfen Forum has allowed for important conversation and debate in a public space. Late University Trustee David M. Silfen and his wife Lyn endowed the series, as well as funded two Penn Integrates Knowledge University professorships, the Silfen Student Study Center, a term professorship, and the David and Lyn Silfen Fund to support educational innovation in the School of Arts & Sciences. Previous forum topics have included political polarization and public debate, battling cancer, asylum and immigration, the opioid epidemic, and the future of higher education.

Video of the event is available on The Silfen Forum website.

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Ben Franklin: A voice from the past that speaks to our time | Penn Today - Penn Today

Had it been released five years ago, Ken Burnss recent documentary Benjamin Franklin would have seemed like just another iteration of the Burns formula: a stentorian yet intimate narrator, ponderous panning shots over still images, period music transporting us to a bygone time, experts bubbling over with enthusiasm, and a compelling human story to tie the package together. But in the fog of our current history wars 1619 vs. 1776, contested monuments, and the hyped-up furor over something called critical race theory the documentary has acquired a cultural weight Im sure Burns never intended or expected. Benjamin Franklin illustrates everything that is wrong with how most white Americans think about their nations founding.

Ken Burns is Americas historian. Since his start with The Brooklyn Bridge, in 1981, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination, Burnss documentaries have regularly attracted NFL-size audiences. When The Civil War first aired, in 1990, it drew the largest audience of any PBS show, ever. Since then, Burns has directed dozens of films under a long-term PBS contract. Even professional historians have recognized him as the closest thing America has to a historian laureate: The American Historical Review, the flagship journal in the field, invited him to write an essay on the changing nature of historical truth for its centennial issue, in 1995. (Burns declined the invitation but agreed to an interview with the journal.)

Burnss chosen topics often appear likely to split audiences along culture-war cleavages: the Civil War, Jack Johnson, Vietnam, the Central Park Five, Muhammad Ali. Yet he has shown an uncanny ability to package even divisive topics in ways that ultimately reinforce a sense of patriotism and belonging.

This superpower has paid off in corporate support. General Motors sponsored Burnss productions for 22 years, until the company nearly went bankrupt in the crash of 2008. When Burnss World War II series debuted, Anheuser-Busch printed promotions on its beer cans and Bank of America flashed reminders on its ATMs to watch the show. The famously conservative billionaire David Koch underwrote Burnss series on Vietnam.

Burnss popularity is rooted in his folksy nationalism, a muted celebration of Americas rise that is tempered with nods to the regrettable. His films center on heroes because, as he explained in the 1995 interview with the American Historical Review, I believe that history ought to be sung, that Homer, the Homeric mode is an important one, that you need to sing the epic verses, and the way we do that is around this electronic campfire. This epic mode is marked by an emphasis on storytelling and a quiet refusal to take any particular point of view. Ahead of the release of The Vietnam War, Burns and his co-director, Lynn Novick, wrote, There is no simple or single truth to be extracted from the Vietnam War. The documentary was later criticized for precisely this attitude a strange ambivalence about American imperial overreach, as Alex Shephard wrote in The New Republic. And when the Congressional Hispanic Caucus criticized his World War II series for not representing the sacrifices of Latino soldiers, Burns responded by saying The War was a sort of epic poem and not a textbook.

In endeavoring to sing Benjamin Franklin, Burns cant avoid taking sides in a longstanding scholarly debate in which everyone begins by agreeing that Franklin is the prime exemplar and shaper of the thing we call the United States of America. Franklins life does indeed trace the full arc of the 18th century, and no founder had a better vantage point from which to make sense of it all. Franklin soaked up political debates as a printer, surveyed the full sweep and variety of the colonies as deputy postmaster to the Crown, attended the coronation of George III, represented the rebel Continental Congress in London, took part in a last-ditch negotiation on Staten Island to end hostilities with the British, charmed Louis XVIs court at Versailles to win the diplomatic war, drove a hard bargain with England to secure the peace, and played a pivotal role in the Constitutional Convention. He was the essential founder. The trailer for Benjamin Franklin intones, The American identity begins when Benjamin Franklin knit the American colonies together. He has become a metonym for America.

So, when assessing the meaning of Franklins life, the details matter. We can see him either as a flawed but evolving genius whose life mirrors and prefigures Americas halting progress toward equality, or as a man imbued with the typical biases of his time, whose overriding concern was the promotion of the well-being of people like himself, a people Franklin called lovely white. Franklin, like America, cant be both.

Burns is an unwavering believer in the idea that Franklin overcame his racial prejudices and atoned for his earlier, unthinking racism by the end of his long life. On the Today show the filmmaker made things simple: He enslaved human beings but at the end of his life was an abolitionist The thing about Franklin is that he is always improving, always trying to make himself better like the union.

It is true that Franklin accepted election as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and published a biting satire of the novel pro-slavery arguments its petitions provoked in Congress. But it is also true that Franklin, in his 80s and suffering from a growing list of maladies, wished to burnish his legacy and could see which side was the wrong side of history to be on. Early in Episode 1, the narrator observes that Franklin continuously and carefully crafted [his] public image. Somehow, Franklins gift for politics and self-fashioning in Episode 1 becomes, in Episode 2, his unimpeachable sincerity.

To frame Franklin as evolving is to see the United States as a nation stained by slavery but equipped with the radical principle of liberty that made its rehabilitation inevitable. This interpretation was pioneered by the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn in 1956 amid a bare-knuckled ivory-tower fight with an older generation of progressive historians, who had painted the Constitution as a greedy power grab by enslavers, land speculators, and bankers.

Burns includes an interview with Bailyn in which the historian argues that the fledgling United States shouldnt be judged primarily for its reliance on slavery. It should be judged by its single greatest declaration: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights A ringing principle that, Bailyn argued, had changed the course of history.

Burns has never shied away from displaying the ugliness and contradictions of the past. His are not the historical documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s, which presented an American past whitewashed of any mention of slavery or settler colonialism. Benjamin Franklin notes that Franklin profited from printing advertisements for the sale of enslaved people in his newspaper, and that he bought and sold enslaved people himself. Quotes are read from Franklins cringe-inducing Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), in which he bemoaned the importation of enslaved Africans that had blackend half America and asked, Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? As the historian Christopher Brown insightfully explains, Franklins racism and his opposition to the slave trade were hardly contradictory: Both attitudes meshed neatly with his conviction that the American colonies had, in Browns words, too many Black people. The narration also notes at several points that Franklins policies and actions dispossessed Native peoples of their lands.

By deftly assembling such vignettes, Burns creates for viewers the experience of an unvarnished story or, as Burns likes to say, history warts and all. But such warts as Burns chooses to expose are carefully curated and quickly and thoroughly drained of their subversive potential by earnest scholars explaining why what we just heard or saw is not as important as it seems or, worse, could not have been otherwise.

Late in the second episode, for example, the narrator describes how, at the Constitutional Convention, Franklin maneuvered a series of compromises on congressional apportionment that included the three-fifths clause, which effectively cemented the power of pro-slavery interests in the new government. This episode might lead viewers to wonder whether racism was not, in fact, baked into the republic. But these thoughts are immediately quashed as a platoon of historians marches onscreen, the first proclaiming that the union is only possible if it includes the South and therefore if you did the moral thing the Constitution would have never passed. Another famous scholar bemoans the tragic compromise, while a third looks gravely into the distance and proclaims it Americas original sin.

Burns then cuts to the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, who tells viewers how they should understand this jarring contradiction in their nations ideals: For Franklin, unity and compromise was the only thing that could make this new nation move forward. Without it, it would be a failed journey. American democracy would not develop without it. Who doesnt want the nation to move forward? Who wants a failed journey? No one asks, Whose journey is it?

The practice of sprinkling a fair number of disquieting facts into an argument in order to make it more persuasive was named by psychologists studying the dynamics of propaganda during the early Cold War. They called it attitudinal inoculation. The Yale University psychologist and War Department researcher Arthur A. Lumsdaine observed that two-sided propaganda, which exposed the listener to contrary information but ultimately arrived at its intended conclusion, was far more effective than propaganda that did not acknowledge counterarguments at all. This was because the listener had been given an advance basis for ignoring or discounting the opposing communication and, thus inoculated, he will tend to retain the positive communication.

But two-sided propaganda is still propaganda. Benjamin Franklin overlooks a number of facts that compromise its portrait of Franklin as evolving and the young nation as wrestling with its original sin of slavery. There is no mention of the fact that fears of Black rebellion animated patriot resistance at the critical juncture of 1775. No mention of the fact that some of the first patriot militias in the South were raised in response to suspected slave uprisings in support of Virginias governor, Lord Dunmore. No mention of Lord Dunmores offering freedom to enslaved persons in exchange for their service to the Crown.

Burns distorts the history of Washingtons army by saying only that it included Native Americans, free African Americans, and enslaved men, hoping to be freed when the war ended. In fact, Washington, who owned enslaved people from age 11 until his death, banned all Black men from his army for its first year. He grudgingly accepted Black soldiers only after the British began recruiting them, and opposed forming all-Black regiments. (The British did not: Members of one British Black regiment, formed early in the war, famously wore sashes emblazoned with the words Liberty to Slaves.) No mention is made of the fact that many of the enslaved men who fought for American independence did so not because they had been promised their freedom but because they were substituting for their enslavers, or serving them.

The narrative of Franklins evolution toward abolitionism also runs aground on the details of the peace treaty Franklin hammered out with the British. As Franklin and his fellow American negotiators met with their counterparts in Paris, they were all aware that the British were providing sanctuary to thousands of fugitives from slavery on Manhattan and Long Island. Franklin pushed for Article 7, which bound the Brits to withdraw without carrying away any negroes or other property of the American inhabitants. In other words, Franklin was quite comfortable condemning thousands of free Blacks to be returned to the mercies of their former enslavers. In the end, the British general Guy Carleton brushed aside the patriots insistence that the thousands of fugitives under his protection be immediately returned, and sailed away with them when he evacuated to Canada.

None of this, not a hint of it, appears in Benjamin Franklin. It is equally absent from the best-selling biography of Franklin written by Walter Isaacson, the documentarys senior creative consultant and the on-air talking head with the most face time.

There is a deeper problem at work in Burnss portrait of Franklin, a problem that emanates from the same qualities that make his work so popular. Throughout, Franklin and America are viewed through what the sociologist Joe Feagin has called a white racial frame. In such a perspective the interests, problems, and fortunes of white Americans are prioritized, while those of nonwhite others are discounted, viewed as lesser and available for sacrifice. White framing silently assumes that the us and the we in thinking about America are white people.

That framing is evident throughout Benjamin Franklin. For example, when the documentary discusses the Junto, a club for fellow young artisans organized in Philadelphia by Franklin, Isaacson comments, Franklin believed that the virtues and values of a working middle class were going to be the backbone of American society. The artisans, the shopkeepers, the people who put on leather aprons early in the morning to help serve the public. Of course, in Franklins time, only white artisans, white shopkeepers, and leather-apron-clad white people were eligible for membership in mutual-aid clubs like the Junto. The white part doesnt have to be said out loud: The volunteer fire departments, lending libraries, and free colleges that Franklin helped organize, except for the specifically named Negro school, were for whites only.

White framing is also evident in Burnss segregation of commentary. Most of the expert comments dealing with race, racism, or slavery come from the only two scholars of color among the dozen or so historians featured in Benjamin Franklin: Christopher Brown and Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Conversely, while Brown and Dunbar are deeply learned scholars with much to say about the world of the 18th century in general, they are rarely asked to discuss topics beyond slavery or racism. Indeed, the stories of people of color are generally sequestered as the possession of Black historians, a special interest.

Back in the 1970s, when Burns was just starting out, a new generation of historians was emphasizing not only that those left out of earlier narratives women, Natives, people of color had stories worth telling but that their stories drastically altered the longstanding consensus history of America, which highlighted the gradual perfection of the Enlightenment principles of liberty and equality. Edmund Morgans 1975 book American Slavery, American Freedom upended the consensus theory, arguing that the spread of democratic practices in the United States in fact depended on enslaving one-fifth of its population. Since then, researchers have focused on writing the stories of the dispossessed, despised, overlooked, and forgotten not out of some sense of fairness or balancing the scales, but because their dissent shaped, and pushed forward, this bulky thing we call a nation. Most historians have since come to appreciate that it is precisely the succession of clashing aspirations, not some core agreement over shared ideals, that has made America.

Like much of Burnss oeuvre, Benjamin Franklin hews to the old consensus narrative, swaddling conflicts in the comforting blanket of necessity. Pitching the project on the Today show in March 2020, Burns was asked about the Constitutions strengthening of slavery. He said of Franklin, He is one of the architects of those terrible compromises, but theres no United States without those terrible compromises. Just a few months later, Sen. Tom Cotton was swiftly condemned for describing slavery as a necessary evil upon which the union was built. Burnss documentary makes the same argument without eliciting a peep of protest.

Back in his 1995 interview with the American Historical Review, Burns boasted that there is more unum than pluribus in my work. Burns may have believed that e pluribus unum referred to making one nation out of the many colonies. In fact, as the committee charged with designing a seal for the new United States reported to Congress in 1776, pluribus referred to the many countries from which the States have been peopled. The committee, on which Franklin served, planned to represent these countries figuratively in the form of a shield depicting a rose for England, a thistle for Scotland, a harp for Ireland, a flower de luce for France, an eagle for Germany, and a lion for Holland. The one-fifth of the population who hailed from Africa, and all those native to this land, were absent.

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The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns - The Chronicle of Higher Education