2020-09-The_Atlantic

SEPTEMBER 2020 THEATLANTIC.COM H OW DID IT COME Why the Virus Won TO The Power of By Ed Yong American Denial By Ibram X. Kendi THIS?

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HOW CAN GREATER CONNECTIVITY HELP KEEP OUR DATA SAFE? I AM JEN EASTERLY Global Head of the Fusion Resilience Center While the Internet has made our lives easier, its interconnectedness has also made our data less secure, with a cyberattack now occurring every 40 seconds.1 In the Morgan Stanley Fusion Center, we’re capitalizing on the connectivity of our talent and technology to not only respond rapidly to cyberthreats, but also to proactively keep client data safe. So while the volume, variety and velocity of data are ever expanding, so is our ability to protect it. To watch Jen’s Morgan Stanley Minute on “Cybersecurity in the Connected Age,” go to morganstanley.com/cybersecurity. 1 “13 Alarming Cyber Security Facts and Stats,” cybintsolutions.com/cyber-security-facts-stats, December 2018. © 2020 Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. Members SIPC. CRC 2708333 09/19

OF NO PARTY OR CLIQUE VOL. 326–NO. 2 SEPTEMBER 2020 CONTENTS Features Cover Story DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX Cover Stories 48 Features 32 The end of denial 58 Anatomy of an By Ibram X. Kendi When China Sees All American Failure Xi Jinping is using artificial intel- Donald Trump has revealed the ligence to enhance his government’s By Ed Yong depths of the country’s prejudice— totalitarian control—and he’s export- How the virus won and forced Americans to confront ing this technology around the globe. By Ross Andersen The United States has just 4 percent of the world’s population, a racist system. but a quarter of its confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. 70 What Is MasterClass Actually Selling? The ads are everywhere: Learn to serve like Serena Williams or write like Margaret Atwood. But MasterClass delivers something altogether different. By Carina Chocano 3

SEPTEMBER 2020 Front Culture & Critics Back 6 78 90 The Commons OMNIVORE ESSAY Discussion & Debate David Copperfield’s “No Novel About Any Wild Ride Black Woman Could Ever Dispatches Armando Iannucci’s mad, Be the Same After This” loving, and brilliant adapta- That’s how Toni Morrison 9 22 tion of Dickens’s novel described Gayl Jones’s first book By James Parker in 1975. Jones has published OPENING ARGUMENT POLITICS to great acclaim and expe- 80 rienced unspeakable tragedy. The Mythology of Protest Works Now she’s releasing her first Racial Progress How the Black Lives Mat- BOOKS novel in more than 20 years. Believing that things are ter demonstrations will shake By Calvin Baker always getting better actually up the 2020 election—and What to Do About makes them worse. reshape American politics for William Faulkner 100 By Jennifer A. Richeson a generation to come A white man of the Jim Crow By Daniel Q. Gillion South, he couldn’t escape the Ode to Balloons 14 burden of race, yet derived By James Parker 26 creative force from it. SOCIETY By Drew Gilpin Faust SKETCH Police Reform Is Not Enough 83 The moral failure of incremen- The Relentless tal change Erin Brockovich BOOKS By Mychal Denzel Smith She was an early crusader for environmental justice. Lying as an Art Form 18 Today, she’s sounding the Elena Ferrante’s new novel alarm louder than ever. about adolescence explores the HISTORY By Amanda Fortini power of fictions. By Merve Emre Looking for 30 Frederick Douglass 86 On the Cover How a visit to his birthplace VIEWFINDER helped me understand this BOOKS TYPOGRAPHY BY moment in America The Black Yearbook MENDELSUND/MUNDAY By Clint Smith Photographs by The World Putin Made Adraint Khadafhi Bereal How KGB methods, tactics, and operations have fueled Russia’s quest for glory By Anne Applebaum 89 I Feel Good A poem by Nikky Finney 4 SEPTEMBER 2020

SPONSOR CONTENT This content was created by Atlantic Re:think, the branded content studio at The Atlantic, and made possible by ServiceNow. It does not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorial staff. Your Business Has Gone Digital. Now What? Future-proofing your company isn’t just a matter of “digital transformation.” It’s about understanding your consumers and building a digital experience around what they need. B usiness leaders are told they need to do a lot of – The percentage of best practices that have been implemented things when it comes to technology. They need to by organizations to date build an app. They need an AI chatbot. They need more data. They need a social-media strategy. – The percentage of implementation they expect to reach by 2023 In short: To better serve their customers, they need Developing digital skills 50% to go digital—and fast. But beyond buzzwords, 21% what’s actually at stake in this transformation? Implementing a customer-experience 45% To better understand the challenges that organizations management system 20% face and help them plan their digital transitions, ServiceNow surveyed 600 global executives in an array of industries—including telecoms, health care, manufacturing, the public sector, and financial services— in February and March of 2020. They discovered that businesses have a lot of catching up to do. Aligning experience 45% with business goals 18% You’re probably not prepared, Identifying 44% and you aren’t alone. key customer 18% touchpoints Creating a positive customer experience isn’t just about building a beautiful website or app. It’s about creating Creating an immersive 43% a digital workflow that enables customers to seamlessly and personalized 18% access what they need, and most organizations don’t experience have a plan in place to do that. Even companies leading in digitization—those who have adopted the best practices of building a digital customer experience (listed here)—have a long way to go. To gain more insight on how to keep pace with digitization, read the full article at: TheAtlantic.com/NowWhat

B e h i n d t h e C o v e r : A picture is worth a thousand allowed the dual crises of COVID-19 and racism to fester. THE words—but sometimes only a few words are necessary. They look squarely, too, at the choices the country now This month’s unadorned cover poses an urgent national faces if it is to have any hope of recovery. On occasions question in stark typographic terms. Ed Yong and Ibram such as this, a designer’s touch should be light, giving the X. Kendi, in their respective essays, elucidate answers by language space to resonate on its own terms. interrogating the uniquely American failures that have — Oliver Munday, Senior Art Director Underlying In America, George Packer There is a saying in the African Conditions wrote, the coronavirus American community that was has revealed a sick and captured by Sam Fulwood III in a 2015 article titled “When unequal society incapable of White Folks Catch a Cold, Black self-government (June). Folks Get Pneumonia.” Those of us in the African American Letters community who are cognizant of our history and have experi- I As I read this excellent article, I York City and have been simul- enced American inequities are was struck by the clarity of the taneously awed by the work of not shocked by the ineptness of I shall chew on this article for writer’s vision. my health-care colleagues and the health-care system in poor several days. The taste is bitter. furious at how much has been and urban minority communi- However, it should be swallowed I was completely unprepared, asked of them because our federal ties. However, white America and digested; hopefully its nutri- however, to burst into tears when government willfully stopped appears to be. ents will be absorbed. I read the last paragraph. The working like one long ago. It has phrase “We can use this pause in placed minorities, wage laborers, I could not agree more with Ian McHugh our normal lives to pay attention and “essential workers” at need- Mr. Packer when he says, “Inva- Mattapoisett, Mass. to the hospital workers holding less risk as the result of replacing sion and occupation expose a up cellphones so their patients core principles of good gover- society’s fault lines … clarifying can say goodbye to loved ones” nance with unrelenting partisan essential truths, raising the smell conjured up such a strong image, warfare, in all three branches. of buried rot.” If nothing else, I couldn’t hold back my tears. We We’ll dig out and recover from the coronavirus has served as a are all grieving—for ourselves, the daily impact of this crisis, harsh reminder that while white for our country, and for one but it’s much less certain whether America is catching a cold, Black another. The selflessness of so we’ll ever recover the nation’s America is suffering a potential many people should be an inspi- sense of unity and purpose. death threat. ration to all of us. Todd Hixson Yolanda Brown-Spidell Christine Szolkowski New York, N.Y. Westland, Mich. Howell Township, N.J. The article was powerful, but Comparing President Donald I am a senior administrator at it did not tell the entire story. Trump’s performance to that a major public hospital in New of France’s Marshal Philippe Pétain in World War II is a bit of a stretch. Perhaps a more apt World War II comparison is the United States’s disgraceful response to the U-boat menace off our Atlantic coast, in the Caribbean, and in the Gulf of Mexico in 1942. Despite watch- ing how the British dealt with the U-boats in the Atlantic for the first two years of the war, the U.S. failed to prepare, learn, or imple- ment effective countermeasures. It all sounds so familiar. John Whittemore Marion, N.C. 6 SEPTEMBER 2020

COMMONS DISCUSSION & DEBATE The accurate and devastating American friends, whose leader themselves under have allowed hear the administration using picture of today’s United States revels in displaying his ignorance them an unusual peek into the same language: that we are speaks to a betrayal of the dreams I of science and disdain for facts backyard worlds and dramas warriors against COVID-19. had when I came as an immigrant while his fellow citizens die. I that previously they had no idea I was unable to avoid getting to this country in 1971. Fortu- love my American friends, but existed. For me, now that I know cancer. I should be able to nately for all, the U.S. has proved for once I feel desperately sorry this whole universe is humming avoid getting COVID-19. There to be a most resilient country, able for you all. around me all the time, it’s pretty should be testing, tracking, trac- to recover from the worst natural hard to look away. ing, and a rational, coordinated and man-made disasters. Paul Jones national approach. St Kilda, Victoria, Australia Megan Richter César Chelala Ridgecrest, Calif. Now not only am I in the New York, N.Y. Why Birds Do What nightmare of knowing that at They Do The Last Day of some point my cancer will return, I am a refugee born after the end My Old Life but I am also in the nightmare of World War II and a proud The more humans understand of realizing that my government naturalized American citizen. about their behavior, In the June issue, Caitlin does not even want me to get My heart is wounded by every Jenny Odell wrote in June, Flanagan wrote about to that point. My government truth revealed in this article—but the more inaccessible their cancer in the time of the is framing the argument that I I thank Mr. Packer for writing it. world seems. coronavirus. am old, useless, and, for heaven’s sake, defective because I have Helma Reynolds I deeply appreciated Jenny During treatment for cancer, metastatic cancer. Sanibel, Fla. Odell’s article, and the simul- there are lots of images of the taneous wonder and quiet patient as a warrior, battling Celia Abbott While it is incredibly sad to see concern interspersed through- the cancer. I was always luke- Banning, Calif. our great southern neighbor out it. The stay-at-home orders warm about that imaging, but sink into irrelevancy, the real many Americans have found it is very prominent. Now I To respond to Atlantic articles or disturbing thing for Canadians submit author questions to The Commons, is that our neighbor may drag please email [email protected]. our nation into the abyss with it. Include your full name, city, and state. Maurice Coombs the facts both past and present. would see their income invested in the notion Toronto, Ontario That gap has remained rise from the bottom 20 of social mobility—the —— relatively stable for half a percent to the top 20 young rely on it for Sadly, almost every word of What we learned fact- century, but Americans percent over 10 years. future success, and George Packer’s article is inter- tend to assume that it They guessed that 16 elites need it to justify changeable with our experience checking this issue has narrowed over time. would make that leap; in their status as earned. over decades here in the U.K. It reality, only one would. Downplaying inequality, is no coincidence that our respec- On page 9, Jennifer Other research may Of the respondents, even unconsciously, can tive countries have among the A. Richeson considers help explain why such young people and those help people preserve highest COVID-19 death tolls why Americans over- misconceptions persist. who self-reported high comforting ideas about in the world. estimate the country’s Participants in one socioeconomic status themselves—and about progress toward racial 2015 study were asked were especially off target. their country. Paul Mellon equality. Her research to imagine America as As the study’s authors Glasgow, Scotland found that Americans having a population explain it, these two — Jack Segelstein, underestimate the gap of 100 people, and to groups are particularly Assistant Editor As an Australian, I daily sit between Black and estimate how many in stunned amazement at my white familial wealth, editorial offices & correspondence The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Manuscripts will not be returned. For instructions on sending manuscripts via email, see theatlantic.com/faq. By submitting a letter, you agree to let us use it, as well as your full name, city, and state, in our magazine and/or on our website. We may edit for clarity. customer service & reprints Please direct all subscription queries and orders to: +1 855-940-0585. For expedited customer service, please call between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday. 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D I S PAT C H E S OPENING ARGUMENT THE MYTHOLOGY OF RACIAL PROGRESS Believing that things are always getting better actually makes them worse. BY JENNIFER A. RICHESON or two days in early June, as America was erupting in sustained protests over the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis, the most watched movie on Netflix was The Help. The 2011 film—which depicts Black servants work- ing in affluent white households in 1960s Mississippi, and centers on a white female journalist—won acclaim in some quar- ters. But it has also been criticized as a sentimental and simplistic portrayal of racism—and redemption—amid the cruelties of Jim Crow. To ask what was going on here—why people started watching The Help at a moment of deep racial trauma—is to risk tumbling down a rabbit hole. That 9

Dispatches the movie was newly available only smooths over the past but our history, and challenges the And the hold is very hard on Netflix does not explain smooths over what is yet to nation’s prevailing psychology. to break, as a study we recently everything. One reality that come: It holds out the promise My own research as a social conducted, in collaboration the Help phenomenon makes of an almost predestined, natu- psychologist focuses in part with the Northwestern profes- us recognize is the enduring rally occurring future that will be on racial wealth disparities— sor Ivuoma Onyeador, makes power of mythology when it even more just and egalitarian. particularly, what people do all too clear. Up to a point, this comes to American racism. and don’t believe, and do new study had the same basic The mythology takes many Thinking this way won’t and don’t acknowledge about design as the one just cited. But forms. Sometimes it involves make the future better. those disparities. Unless people the sample group consisted a desperate grasping for affir- understand the systemic forces only of white Americans. And mation. Sometimes it involves The my tholog y of racial that create and sustain racial before they provided estimates, a gauzy nostalgia. Sometimes progress distorts our percep- inequality, we will never suc- a subset of the respondents were it involves a willful ignorance. tions of reality; perhaps more cessfully address it. But percep- asked to read a short article All of these strains, and oth- significantly, it absolves us of tions, it turns out, are slippery. about the persistence of racial ers, are woven into a larger responsibility for changing discrimination. Exposure to the and enduring narrative—the that reality. Progress is seen For the past several years, I, article had an impact. But here’s mythology of racial progress. as natural and inevitable— along with my Yale colleague the surprise: Those who read inescapable, like the laws of Michael W. Kraus and our stu- the article still estimated that, This is a uniquely American physics. Backsliding is unlikely. dents, have been examining in 2016, Black wealth was close mythology. Since the nation’s Vigilance is unnecessary. perceptions of racial economic to that of whites. They simply founding, its prevailing cultural inequality—its extent and per- plotted a more gradual slope sensibility has been optimistic, It is obviously true that sistence, decade by decade. In of progress. In other words, if future-oriented, sure of itself, many of the conditions of life a 2019 study, using a dozen people accepted that progress and convinced of America’s for Black Americans have got- specific moments between had been slower than they’d inherent goodness. Despite our ten better over time. Material 1963 and 2016, we compared imagined—the takeaway mes- tragic racial history, Americans standards have in many ways perceptions of racial wealth sage of the article they read— generally believe that the coun- improved. Some essential civil inequality over time with actual then they arrived at the idea try has made and continues to rights have advanced, though data on racial wealth inequal- that the past must not have make steady progress toward unevenly, episodically, and usu- ity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, been as bad as they thought. racial equality. Broad accep- ally only following great and the respondents in our study They did not entertain the tance of this trajectory under- contentious effort. But many significantly overestimated the idea that the present must be lies the way our leaders talk. It areas never saw much progress, wealth of Black families rela- worse than they think it is. The also influences the way racism or what progress was made has tive to that of white families. In mind is a remarkable instru- is treated in popular culture. been halted or even reversed. 1963, the median Black family ment, adept at many things, The mythology of racial prog- had about 5 percent as much including self-delusion. Get- When we think about the ress often rings hollow when it wealth as the median white ting people to alter overly opti- nation’s racial history, we often comes to, for instance, racial family. Respondents said close mistic outlooks—at least in the envision a linear path, one that, gaps in education. Or health to 50 percent. For 2016, the domain of racial progress—is admittedly, begins in a shame- outcomes. Or voting rights. respondents estimated Black not a straightforward matter. ful period but moves unerringly Or criminal justice. Or per- wealth to be 90 percent that of in a single direction—toward sonal wealth. History is not whites. The correct answer for Forming narratives is equality. As if we’re riding a a ratchet that turns in one that year was about 10 percent. a way for individuals to find Whiggish escalator, the narra- direction only. Martin Luther meaning in life and to make tive of racial progress starts with King Jr. famously asserted that People’s estimates of life seem more orderly and slavery, ascends to the Civil War “the arc of the moral universe inequality were not only far too predictable. The narratives we and the Emancipation Procla- is long, but it bends toward low for every period, but the tell about ourselves—and about mation, speeds past segregation justice.” And maybe it will, estimates actually grew more the social groups to which we and Jim Crow to the victories in the end. But in our actual inaccurate the closer they got belong—help us organize how of the civil-rights movement, lifetimes we see backward steps to the present. People are will- we interpret events as they and then drops us off in 2008 and tragic detours. ing to assume that things were unfold, and respond to them. for Barack Obama’s election. at least somewhat bad 50 years Narratives are part of our men- Many people asserted at the The protests that began in ago, but they also assume that tal architecture, and certain time that America had become late May have focused on fun- things have gotten substantially quirks of mind make specific a “postracial” society, or was at damental questions of police better—and are approaching narratives hard to escape. For least getting close—maybe one violence and civil rights. This parity. The mythology of racial instance, there’s what might more short escalator ride away. sort of awakening offers great progress exerts a powerful hold This redemptive narrative not opportunity—more on that on our minds. in a moment—but it is rare in 10 SEPTEMBER 2020

© LORNA SIMPSON. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH; PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES WANG. ARTWORK BY LORNA SIMPSON. PART 1 PART 2, 2016. 11 OPENING ARGUMENT

Dispatches OPENING ARGUMENT be called the generational fal- remedy—legal challenges the chasm between myth and jobs, politics, education, the lacy: Many who acknowledge demonstrating that these reality. Such moments—after environment, health, hous- the reality of racism see salva- laws are discriminatory—is the Civil War, and again in the ing, and of course criminal tion in the ebbing presence of unlikely to prevent violations 1960s—are rare, but they can justice. A window has opened, older white people and their of voting rights. create significant opportuni- and acting fast is essential. It replacement by a surging mass ties. I believe we are in such is possible that something has of enlightened younger people. Similarly, even in upholding a moment now. Most Ameri- permanently shifted in the But generational change is not some forms of affirmative action cans are disgusted and angered American psyche; we should so simple. Young people’s racial in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), by police tactics and attitudes hope that this is true. But his- attitudes are more like their Supreme Court Justice Sandra toward Black citizens. Police tory and psychology suggest parents’ than they may real- Day O’Connor invoked the killings of Black Americans instead that this window of ize. (It is also the case that this narrative of racial progress: are nothing new, of course, clarity and opportunity will “solution,” even if effective, but the urgent attention to law close quickly—it always has in would be very slow.) It has been 25 years enforcement’s behavior comes the past. For one thing, suc- since Justice Powell first at a time when the country cess often proves self-limiting: The mythology of racial approved the use of race is also facing a devastating Implement audacious new progress is corrosive in count- to further an interest in pandemic and historic levels measures, and the tempta- less ways. It provides a reason to student body diversity tion is to dust off your hands blame the victim: If we’re con- in the context of public ACTING FAST in satisfaction and declare the verging on equality, then those higher education. Since IS ESSENTIAL. problem solved. For another, left behind must not be trying. that time, the number of THE WINDOW as the historian Carol Ander- And it diffuses moral respon- minority applicants with FOR CHANGE son demonstrates in her book sibility for actively and signifi- high grades and test scores WILL CLOSE White Rage, any significant cantly reforming the American has indeed increased … QUICKLY—IT advance toward racial justice system: If we’re converging on We expect that 25 years ALWAYS HAS IN will be met with a backlash. equality anyway, then why do from now, the use of racial The passage of the Thirteenth, we need laws and other mea- preferences will no longer THE PAST. Fourteenth, and Fifteenth sures to promote it? be necessary to further the Amendments was followed by interest approved today. of unemployment—both of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, This isn’t some abstract which disproportionately affect lynchings, and a new era of worry. You’ll encounter it every- Seventeen years later, this pre- minority communities. The racial subjugation in the form where, once you’re primed to diction seems at best naive. year 2020 has not been a good of Jim Crow. The landmark look for it. The mythology of one for America’s “master nar- legislation of the civil-rights racial progress animated the These Supreme Court deci- rative” in any of its traditional era was followed by Richard majority opinion written by sions, different as they may be, forms. And it has exposed, at Nixon’s “southern strategy” Chief Justice John Roberts in rest on a rejection of the idea least momentarily, the narrative and the ascendance of racial Shelby County v. Holder, the that systemic racism continues of racial progress—automatic, dog whistles as a central tactic 2013 decision striking down a to make itself felt in Ameri- continuous, requiring little of American politics. key section of the Voting Rights can institutions. They reflect real effort—for the myth it has Act of 1965. Roberts wrote: a Court that sees society, both always been. We should not think of the in terms of institutions and next year or two as the start of a Nearly 50 years later, things individuals, as becoming more This is the time to strike, decade or more of incremental have changed dramati- racially egalitarian—admittedly the time to take audacious progress. We should think of cally … There is no doubt with the help of past “course steps to address systemic racial the next year or two as all the that these improvements are corrections” that the justices inequality—bold, sweeping time we have, and a last chance in large part because of the believe are now or soon will be reparative action. The action to get it right. Voting Rights Act. The Act unnecessary and obsolete. must be concrete and mate- has proved immensely suc- rial, rather than solely sym- Jennifer A. Richeson, a 2006 cessful at redressing racial The my tholog y of racial bolic, and must address cur- MacArthur Fellow, is the discrimination and inte- progress is durable, and can rent gaps in every significant Philip R. Allen professor of grating the voting process. survive many direct hits. The domain of social well-being: psychology and the director moments in our history when of the Social Perception & Since Shelby, multiple states it has fractured decisively Communication Laboratory have passed new election laws, have been moments when a at Yale University. including stringent voter-ID sense of national disruption regulations, and purged their was deep and pervasive, and voter rolls. And the first-line people could not avoid seeing 12 SEPTEMBER 2020

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SOCIETY POLICE REFORM IS NOT ENOUGH The moral failure of incremental change BY MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH I know that where I neighborhood than where I neighborhood has fewer pub- white New Yorkers live and live is the hood, and live; presumably they are cre- lic trash cans than neighbor- work and go to therapy—were not only because I ating more garbage, but their hoods such as the Upper East important. But then the city am in a part of clean streets suggest otherwise. Side. On the walk from the would also have to pay someone Brooklyn where a train station to my therapist’s to collect the garbage from those substantial number A casual observer might sug- office, I see a trash can on every cans. The city’s elected officials of Black people still live. Nor is gest that the people who live corner. They are fewer and far- would have to deem these resi- it because, year after year, for a in my neighborhood—mostly ther between on the 10 blocks dents worthy of that expense. solid month before the Fourth poor, mostly Black, mostly from my local subway stop to of July, my neighbors and I all immigrant—take less pride in What these officials have play the game “gunshots or where they live. They throw THE POLICE deemed the hood worthy of is fireworks?” It is not because of their candy wrappers and used HAVE policing, and not because it is the constant police presence, napkins, their half-empty soda so much cheaper. Policing is a though that certainly helps bottles and unfinished pizza, CONSISTENTLY costly public service, but the with identifying it. I witnessed their Styrofoam to-go contain- INFLICTED one most readily available here. half a dozen police officers re- ers and paper receipts on the There are undercover officers spond to one shoplifting call, ground because they don’t care VIOLENCE ON busting drug dealers. There are and that was after the accused about keeping their sidewalks THE MOST uniformed officers in patrol had already been handcuffed. presentable and livable. cars sitting on corners all day, But still this is not the telltale MARGINALIZED all night. Sometimes they are sign of the hood. And this, the observer may PEOPLE IN standing next to huge, over- argue, is because of a cultural SOCIETY. powering floodlights, warn- It is the trash. There is trash deficiency. They do not value ing the criminals off the street. everywhere, always. Nearly this place, their home, because the next one, on the always Sometimes there are raids, 8.5 million people live in such value has not been incul- crowded, always bustling Flat- 10 to 15 squad cars deep, in New York City, not including cated by their surroundings. bush Avenue. which one or two people are the tourists and bridge-and- Some of these observations arrested. The police are always tunnel folks who, in more nor- have been turned into aca- The city could put more on duty. The people here do mal times, flow in and out on demic studies that became trash cans here, if keeping this not lack for police, the way a daily basis. Of course there the foundation for what we neighborhood where mostly they do trash cans. is an abundance of trash. But now call “broken-windows poor, mostly Black, mostly when I get off the train to walk policing,” a theory that can be immigrant people live clean— A casual observer may tell to my therapist’s office on the traced to a 1982 article in this as clean as the neighborhoods you that this is because there Upper East Side, a neighbor- magazine, which claims that where mostly affluent, mostly is so much crime in this hood. hood devoid of any of the if such minor infractions are That the people here are law- character that makes New allowed to fester, they serve less, violent. And it’s true, there York City appealing, I notice as the prelude to much larger, is violence here, just as there that there is no trash on the more serious crimes. is violence anyplace where street. More people live in this the people are stripped of the Little, if any, consideration means to build a good life. is given to the fact that my 14 SEPTEMBER 2020

Dispatches Casual observers, who aren’t the stories of rape victims; smell of the empty car is so alienated from any sense of always so casual—they begin they side with domestic abus- repulsive, no person can rea- humanity and community. to include academics, media ers. They break into homes via sonably bear it for any amount professionals, policy makers, no-knock warrants. They intro- of time. Except there likely is a Only they won’t be left alone presidents—excuse the pres- duce the potential for violence person in that car, and that per- for too long, because someone ence of the police here, and by responding to calls about son has likely been unhoused else who is even more uncaring in other hoods like this one, loud music—or counterfeit for some time. That subway will not simply choose another because their position is that $20 bills. They shoot and kill car is their safest refuge. They subway car. They will see it as in order to stop the violence with impunity. Regardless of the have likely been riding for their right to ride unencum- of the hood you must impose other responsibilities police have hours, having hustled their bered by the sight and smell of the violence of the state. The assumed, they have consistently way onto the train at last, win- this other person. They will call police are meant, in this view, inflicted violence on the most ning a swipe from one of the the police, who will arrest this to protect the people from marginalized people in society. hundreds of people who have person, and for a night or two themselves, to enforce the dis- passed them by. They finally this person will have a place to cipline their culture lacks. A l e s s o n y o u learn fairly have a place to rest, but it has sleep, in a jail cell. quickly while living in New been who knows how long In reality, the police patrol York City and using public since they have been able to The police cannot solve and harass. They reluctantly transportation is that if there avail themselves of a bathroom, poverty, joblessness, mental ill- answer questions better suited is an empty subway car on an because in New York City all ness, addiction, and the hous- for town visitor centers. They otherwise crowded train, you the restrooms are for custom- ing crisis—the actual culprits enforce traffic laws at their dis- do not want to get in that ers only. So they smell like in the lives of the unhoused. cretion, or to shore up munici- car thinking you’ve somehow the piss and shit that they’ve But if we’ve deemed homeless pal budgets through the impo- hacked the system. After one or been unable to wipe from people, not poverty, the prob- sition of exorbitant fines. They two times believing that you’ve themselves, now caked on and lem, then what the police can arrest people who have dis- outsmarted all the other pas- causing other passengers to run do is make them disappear. obeyed them and then make up sengers, you realize that the away—leaving them further the charges later. They dismiss The major tools the police carry are handcuffs and guns; they can arrest or kill. The police © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK. ARTWORK BY HANK WILLIS THOMAS. STRIKE, 2018. 15

Dispatches can go forth and round up peo- a community deprived of the retribution for harm caused. Barack Obama and now seem ple without a home, then place basics expect to receive the Justice is not revenge. Rather, poised to do the same with Joe them in cages. And to grant resources it needs so that it no justice is a proactive com- Biden, positioning him as the them this authority, local gov- longer has to depend on police? mitment to providing each savior of democracy.) Then ernments can criminalize sleep- Its people have, purposefully, person with the material and we are left to panic when the ing outside, or criminalize pan- been given nothing else. When social conditions in which they country chooses wrong. handling, which begins to look they ask, they are told to wait; can both survive and thrive as a lot like the criminalization of when they shout, they are told a healthy and self-actualized For liberals shocked and vagrancy as part of the Black that they are undeserving. They human being. This is not an outraged by the election results Codes in the era that ended are shamed for the ways they easy thing to establish, as it of 2016, it became popular, Reconstruction. Governments have survived. They are blamed requires all of us to buy into the when speaking of Trump, to can fund a separate police force when they don’t survive. idea that we must take respon- dismissively refer to him as “not for the subway system to punish sibility for one another. But it is my president.” This is an empty turnstile jumpers, arrest women W h e n a s k e d “What would the only form of a just world. rhetorical move, but one that selling churros, and clear out you have us do with the allows the speaker a perceived more homeless people, while police?,” I make a point of The police have never been moral high ground: She is not neighborhood associations saying, unequivocally, “Abol- capable—historically, pres- responsible for the current state ensure that no new homeless ish them,” because that is what ently, either in statement of of affairs, because this president shelters get built near or in afflu- I mean. I seek a world without purpose or in action—and, I does not belong to her. ent neighborhoods. The streets police. When I explain that believe, will never be capable remain the only place for the achieving such a world would of fostering such conditions. I suppose I shouldn’t dispossessed to call home. Law- require us to enact a number And so I hate them, because begrudge people their small makers, and those who aspire of redistributive policies and I have grown past impatient acts of sanity preservation. But to become them, will continue educational programs aimed at with injustice. I am incensed this one in particular reveals a to send the police to arrest the providing for everyone’s basic by the delusion, so prevalent deeper problem with Ameri- poor, because they respond to needs and reducing violence, among the country’s suppos- cans and our relationship to two groups, funders and voters, both interpersonal and state- edly serious thinkers, that tin- the presidency: the sense that and the poor are neither. sanctioned, I’m asked why kering around the edges of an in choosing the “correct” per- I don’t lead with that rather inherently oppressive institu- son for president, we have ful- The motto “To protect and than the potentially alienat- tion will lead to freedom. filled our democratic duties. to serve”—adopted by the Los ing “Abolish the police.” And The sense that we don’t need to Angeles Police Department my answer is that I believe in Donald Trump swore invest in constructing bonds of in 1955 and later used by stating, in clear language, what that he alone could rescue collective power and commu- other departments around the you want, because otherwise America, return it to glory— nity outside the office of the country—has been a highly you are beholden to the cur- a dismissal of community in presidency, because electing effective public-relations tool. rent state of consciousness favor of a narcissistic desire to the “right” person is enough to With the propaganda machine and accepted wisdom. I want be adored for an impossible ensure that the country will see churning on, the police, and a world in which the police heroism. It’s uncomfortable to real change. Flattering ourselves the governments that direct do not exist, and there is no realize that, in different ways like this is part of how we ended them, are able to get buy-in clearer way to say that. and to varying degrees, we up here. It’s why all of our so- from the very people they are have all bought into similar called progress has been hollow. meant to police. People in the In the past, I have been delusions. As a country, we It’s why the so-called progress is community hear the gunshots; accused of hating the police. obsess over the election of one so easily undone. see the addicts wandering And I do. Such an admission person who is a part of one hopelessly and the dope boys may be taken to mean that I branch of our federal govern- O n t h e t h i r d n i g h t of pondering their next move; hate each police officer as an ment. We become content to protesting in Minneapolis, the grow fearful that a shouting individual whom I have judged hand over the reins of deci- third precinct was set on fire. Up match will turn ugly quickly; unfairly on the basis of his or sion making to one person, until then the protests, which and have been taught by teach- her occupation. But I hate whom we exceptionalize out had erupted in response to the ers, counselors, television, the police the same as I hate of necessity, because we must circulation of a video show- movies, and the police them- any institution that exists as believe that this person is the ing the officer Derek Chauvin selves that the cops can solve an obstruction to justice. It’s most deserving caretaker of kneeling on George Floyd’s neck this problem. So they call. important here to define jus- our national present, and can for eight minutes and 46 sec- tice, as the U.S. legal system personally bring about a bet- onds, killing him, looked famil- They have no alternative. has perverted our sense of it. ter national future. (Liberals iar. The scene was reminiscent No one will even pay for them It cannot be punishment or placed this misguided faith in of Ferguson in 2014, and Balti- to have trash cans. How can more in 2015, albeit with face 16 SEPTEMBER 2020

SOCIETY masks meant to protect against in Louisville, Kentucky—but cropped up around the rest The power brokers who would the spread of COVID-19. shifted within a week’s time of the country, either to take have opposed him now use him The people gathered and they to be about an overhaul of away small slices of the police to ensure that the democracy shouted for justice. The police the entire system of American budget, as in Los Angeles, or to he envisioned never comes to stood guard outside. policing. For those like myself do things like ban choke holds fruition. They adopted King as who have believed in and advo- and increase funds for training, a historic cudgel, because you Once the vacated police cated for police abolition for as in Philadelphia. This revo- can make a dead man believe station began to burn, this some time, it was a moment of lutionary moment seems to be whatever you want. protest became something rich opportunity. turning into yet another flash altogether different. The fire of progress. This makes sense when you was a militant action that put WE HAVE consider what James Bald- the protesters in direct con- CONVINCED Perhaps I am being too win wrote in his 1961 profile flict with the state, while also OURSELVES harsh. Progress is progress. of King: representing the decidedly And progress is hard. Progress new demand arising from the THAT is wrestling concessions from The problem of Negro nationwide demonstrations: HARD IS the behemoth of systematized leadership in this country Defund the police. A SYNONYM oppression. has always been extremely delicate, dangerous, and “Defund the police” is an FOR The problem is when complex. The term itself abolitionist call, part of a set REVOLUTIONARY. progress becomes its own becomes remarkably diffi- of ideas to reduce the power ideology—that is, when advo- cult to define, the moment of police in the short term, and And yet, as of this writing, cacy for incrementalism is seen one realizes that the real to eliminate police and polic- it already seems to be fading, as the astute and preferred role of the Negro leader, in ing in the long term. Abolition at least in actionable ways. As mode of political transforma- the eyes of the American demands an overall restruc- “Defund the police” gained tion. When we have done what Republic, was not to make turing of our economic and traction as a slogan, cable-news is hard, and convinced our- the Negro a first-class citi- political order. It holds that pundits implied that “Defund selves that hard is a synonym zen but to keep him con- decriminalizing those things the police” did not mean for revolutionary. Incremen- tent as a second-class one. that have been treated as crimi- “defund the police.” Instead of tal change keeps the grind- nal matters but are not violent spending time understanding ing forces of oppression—of L a s t s u m m e r, someone (the possession, use, and sale abolitionist ideas, they inter- death—in place. Actively tagged a nearby subway station of drugs, and sex work, for vened to say that “Defund the advocating for this position is after it had gotten a fresh coat of example) would result in tre- police” was in fact a request a moral failure. white paint. The tag read make mendous reduction of harm. to “reimagine the police.” The flatbush black again. It was set of demands issued by the There have always been covered up within a few days. This restructuring would police-reform advocacy proj- voices willing to take on the also require a massive pub- ect Campaign Zero, branded fragile American ego—to This year, in the middle of lic investment in the general “#8cantwait,” threatened to remind us that the racist prin- a global pandemic, multiracial welfare—safe housing, healthy suck up the energy that was ciples on which this country crowds have made their way up food, free education, free health forming around defunding was founded continue to guide and down Flatbush Avenue, care, a basic income. For those the police and divert it toward each of its institutions. At shouting in unison, calling for harms that would still occur minor reforms that would their most critical and potent, the creation of a world in which in such a world, abolition asks have little impact on levels of these voices disabuse us of the Black lives matter. The police that we find ways of addressing police violence. notion that America’s foibles have not discriminated—they them that do not include the can be overlooked in favor of have kettled, arrested, shoved, further violence of punishment, While Minneapolis’s city our inherent goodness. and beaten the protesters, but prioritize the needs of the council formed a veto-proof young and old, Black and white, victimized to be made whole, majority to dismantle its Yet American mythmaking gentrifier and native alike. and require the perpetrator to police department, weak plans has a remarkable, insidious abil- make proper restitution and to ity to swallow up the lives of Maybe this is how progress be rehabilitated so he doesn’t those who stand in open rebel- looks now. commit harm again. lion to the American project and turn them into obedient Mychal Denzel Smith is the The protests started out symbols of American excep- author of the forthcoming with the predictable demands tionalism. Martin Luther book Stakes Is High, from of arresting, prosecuting, and King Jr., for example, fought which this essay was adapted. convicting the police offi- for the rights of Black people to cers responsible for killing be full participants in a democ- Floyd—and Breonna Taylor racy that had yet to be built. 17

HISTORY LOOKING FOR T FREDERICK DOUGLASS The water under the Chesa- How a visit to his birthplace helped peake Bay Bridge whipped me understand this moment in America against itself, the wind lift- ing up handfuls of foamy BY CLINT SMITH white and slapping them back down. The sky was a pearly 18 ILLUSTRATION BY MARK HARRIS blue, and thick, milky clouds hung above us like bulging lanterns. As we passed over the bridge—4.3 miles connecting Maryland’s eastern and west- ern shores—I rolled down the

Dispatches MARK SUMMERFIELD / ALAMY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS windows and pulled back the of white men who paved the from his boyhood. When he that the nation “had no greater sunroof. I hadn’t realized how way for genocide and fought to saw it, according to Dickson turning point.” As Blight put much I’d missed the feeling of defend slavery are being taken J. Preston in Young Frederick it, Douglass believed Eman- wind rolling over my fingers; down by cheering crowds. A Douglass, he declared that cipation Day “ought to be a the feeling of my entire family moment in which Black lives he had found the exact spot national celebration in which singing along at the top of our matter has moved from a where he had been born. all blacks—the low and the lungs to my children’s favorite phrase laden with controversy Douglass stood under the tree mighty—could claim a new Disney songs. to language at the center of our in silence, and then plunged and secure social identity.” public discourse. A moment his hands into the earth to It was the first time since filled with rage, reckoning, scoop up handfuls of soil to With two toddlers, I was sheltering in place had begun, and possibility. cognizant of the fact that I almost three months earlier, DOUGLASS would not be able to gradu- that my family was all together It was with these reflections FEARED ally trek through every place in the car for an extended and Douglass’s words in mind THAT in Talbot County that had period of time. We’d packed that, on Juneteenth, I got in a meaningful association to our masks, our sandwiches, the car with my family and CONFEDER ATE Douglass. My family’s public- and more Ritz Crackers than drove from our home, outside STATUES history tour schedule was dic- anyone was physically capable Washington, D.C., to Talbot MIGHT BE tated by nap times and diaper of eating. One never knows County, Maryland, where ERECTED. changes. But there was one how traveling any meaningful Frederick Douglass was born. place in particular I knew I distance with a 1-year-old and I WONDERED wanted to visit: the court- a 3-year-old will be, so my wife In My Bondage and My WHETHER house where Douglass had and I had emotionally pre- Freedom, Douglass described HE COULD spoken nearly a century and a pared ourselves for tantrums the region of his childhood HAVE half earlier. and tears. But our children with revulsion. He called it IMAGINED were well behaved, perhaps “thinly populated, and remark- We pulled up to the Tal- themselves simply grateful to able for nothing that I know of THAT HIS OWN bot County Courthouse and be anywhere other than inside more than for the worn-out, LIKENESS walked across the lawn to a our home. They too seemed to sandy, desert-like appearance large statue. The bronze ren- relish the wind rushing past of its soil, the general dilapida- WOULD STAND dering of Douglass stands their faces. tion of its farms and fences, the ALONGSIDE atop an octagonal pedestal indigent and spiritless charac- ONE. etched with his name. Doug- “It is always a fact of some ter of its inhabitants, and the lass is captured mid-speech, importance to know where a prevalence of ague and fever.” bring back to Cedar Hill, his his mouth ajar, his eyebrows man is born, if, indeed, it be He went on to say that the area home in Washington. At an raised in a spirited fervor. His important to know anything was “seldom mentioned but event at the Talbot County left hand rests on a lectern. His about him.” So wrote Fred- with contempt and derision” Courthouse that evening, he right hand is lifted into the erick Douglass in his 1855 and that, living there, he was told the audience he had col- air, his fingers bending back autobiography, My Bondage “surrounded by a white popu- lected “some of the very soil toward his body. His long, and My Freedom. I had been lation of the lowest order.” on which I first trod.” thick hair is pulled into the spending time with Douglass’s style so familiar from pictures work for several weeks, hoping In 1878 Douglass returned It felt particularly of Douglass, the most pho- that reengaging with his writ- to the county, and visited important to visit the county tographed American of the ing might help me more fully the farm that had once been of Douglass’s birthplace on 19th century. understand how our country owned by his master, Aaron a day meant to celebrate the had arrived at this moment. Anthony, a man who may have emancipation of Black Ameri- While Douglass is known A moment in which a global also been Douglass’s father. cans from bondage. According to have spoken outside the pandemic has torn away the His grandmother’s cabin had to the historian and Douglass courthouse, it is also where veil and revealed the deepest stood there. It was a place that biographer David W. Blight, he was held in a jail cell for fissures and failures of Amer- had “few pretensions,” Doug- Douglass “viewed emancipa- two weeks after attempting to ica’s promise to its most vul- lass wrote. “To my child’s tion as the central reference escape from slavery 42 years nerable. A moment in which eye, however, it was a noble point of black history” and felt earlier. In the 19th century, people of all generations structure, admirably adapted enslaved people were sold on and races have taken to the to promote the comforts and the courthouse’s front steps. streets to demand an end to conveniences of its inmates.” state-sanctioned violence. A But it was gone now. Douglass’s statue was not moment in which the statues the only one in front of the What did remain was an courthouse. Across a cinna- old cedar tree Douglass recalled mon pathway splitting the SEPTEMBER 2020 19

Dispatches lawn in two was a statue of a symbol of white supremacy, simply by the passage of time; This is the problem with young man with a soft, boy- an ornament in the landscape rather, “it was the prize in a hollow attempts at “balance” in ish face wearing a brimmed of Jim Crow meant to ter- struggle between rival versions our public discourse. They mis- hat. His hands were wrapped rorize Black communities. In of the past, a question of will, take balance for fairness. Sug- around the staff of a flag, the 2015, the Talbot county coun- of power, of persuasion.” gesting that Douglass and the bronze cloth cloaking his cil voted unanimously against Talbot Boys are equally wor- shoulder. While my family and removing the statue; soon after On May 30, 1871, just six thy of public memorialization I stood in front of Douglass, my visit, however, the council years after the Civil War ended, might be “balanced,” but it is others came to pose for photos president would introduce a Douglass gave a speech at not fair; it is not just. This war, with this statue. They did not resolution to take it down. Arlington National Cemetery. as Douglass put it in an 1878 take photos of or with Dou- “We are sometimes asked, in Memorial Day speech in New glass, perhaps because they I looked up at the statue, the name of patriotism,” he said, York City, was not simply a bat- were attempting to practice its bronze body glimmering tle in which two sides fought social distancing, or perhaps under the sun, and then back at to forget the merits of this nobly for what they believed because they had no interest. Douglass, about 20 yards away. fearful struggle, and to in. No. It was “a war of ideas, My son was running in circles remember, with equal admi- a battle of principles … a war I wasn’t familiar with the under the shade of a large oak ration, those who struck at between the old and the new, person standing on top of tree while my daughter toddled the nation’s life, and those slavery and freedom, barbarism this pedestal, and though I after him. I thought of what it who struck to save it—those and civilization.” He went on: assumed it was an American meant to have Frederick Doug- who fought for slavery, and “There was a right side and flag draped over his shoulder, lass share the courthouse lawn those who fought for liberty a wrong side in the late war I couldn’t quite make it out. with the names of 84 men who and justice. which no sentiment ought to After a woman and a young fought to keep people like him cause us to forget.” man had finished taking pho- in bondage. I am no minister of tos, I approached to get a malice. I would not strike In early June, 113 miles closer look. Engraved on the The Douglass statue was the fallen. I would not repel from where I stood, Virginia front of the stone pedestal was: approved by the county the repentant; but may my Governor Ralph Northam had council in 2004, but it was right hand forget its cun- announced that a 130-year- TO THE TALBOT BOYS not immediately installed. It ning and my tongue cleave old statue of Robert E. Lee on 1861–1865 took several years of delibera- to the roof of my mouth, Monument Avenue, in Rich- C.S.A. tion and debate to decide how if I forget the difference mond, would be taken down. I the statue should be erected— between the parties to that had been thinking about Lee a It did not take me long to resulting in a policy that the terrible, protracted, and lot lately, how central his name understand what C.S.A. stood Douglass statue, and any other bloody conflict … We must and likeness were to the iconog- for, and to understand that the new statues on the lawn, could never forget that victory to raphy of my own childhood. flag this young man was hold- not be taller than the Talbot the rebellion meant death Hundreds of statues, schools, ing was not the American flag. Boys statue. When Douglass’s to the republic. We must and roads across the country statue was finally installed, never forget that the loyal are named after Robert E. Lee. The Talbot Boys were 84 in 2011, many were glad to soldiers who rest beneath The statue of Lee in my own local soldiers in the Confeder- see it erected and thought it this sod flung themselves hometown of New Orleans ate States Army; their names might balance out the Talbot between the nation and the was taken down in 2017. I are carved into the sides of Boys monument. But there nation’s destroyers. traveled down Robert E. Lee the stone base. The statue, I is no balancing out those Boulevard to get to school each would later learn, was erected who fought to perpetuate I thought of this speech as day. I remember when, before in 1916, more than half a cen- slavery with those who spent I looked at the statue meant its name was changed in the tury after the end of the Civil their lives working toward to commemorate these Con- mid-’90s, there was a Rob- War and during a period when its demise. federate soldiers. Douglass ert E. Lee Elementary School the majority of Confederate feared that such statues might that was attended mostly by monuments were built. These Douglass himself was one day line the landscape of Black children. memorials were an effort to keenly aware that the story of our country. But I wondered honor Confederate veterans, slavery, the story of the war, whether he could have imag- The veneration of Lee—a who were dying off in large and the story of emancipa- ined that his own likeness slave owner who led an army numbers—to teach younger tion were at risk of being told would stand alongside one, predicated on maintaining the white southerners about the in ways shaped by southern as if they were two equally institution of slavery—began war and that this generation postwar propaganda rather moral sides of the same coin, immediately after his death, in of men should be venerated. than truth. As Blight put it, both worthy of being lifted up 1870. Douglass was appalled. They were also a physical Douglass knew that historical and venerated. “Is it not about time that this memory was not determined 20 SEPTEMBER 2020

HISTORY bombastic laudation of the pence 2020 flag that whipped young Douglass growing up “I am not of that school of rebel chief should cease?” he in the wind. I looked at my here. Learning, over time, the thinkers which teaches us to asked. “We can scarcely take children in the rearview mir- unfreedoms placed upon his let bygones be bygones; to let up a newspaper … that is not ror, grateful for all they were boyhood body. “Living here, the dead past bury its dead,” filled with nauseating flatteries too young to know. The road with my dear old grandmother Douglass said in 1883. of the late Robert E. Lee.” ended at the water’s edge. I and grandfather, it was a long parked and kept the car run- time before I knew myself to In my view there are no The way Lee’s legacy ning. I told my family I needed be a slave,” he wrote in My bygones in the world, and seemed to be taking shape gave just a few minutes. Bondage and My Freedom. the past is not dead and Douglass one of his earliest cannot die. The evil as and clearest indications about I LOOKED I learned by degrees the well as the good that men how difficult the fight against AT MY sad fact, that the “little do lives after them … The the propaganda machine of hut,” and the lot on which duty of keeping in mem- the Lost Cause would be. “It CHILDREN it stood, belonged not to ory the great deeds of the would seem from this,” he said IN THE my dear old grandparents, past and of transmitting of Lee’s rise to saintly status, but to some person who the same from generation “that the soldier who kills the REARVIEW lived a great distance to generation is implied in most men in battle, even in a MIRROR, off, and who was called, the mental and moral con- bad cause, is the greatest Chris- by grandmother, “OLD stitution of man. tian, and entitled to the high- GR ATEFUL MASTER.” I further est place in heaven.” FOR ALL learned the sadder fact, The next day, I scrolled that not only the house through my Twitter timeline My children were grow- THEY WERE and lot, but that grand- and came across an image ing restless, and it became clear TOO YOUNG mother herself … and all that left me breathless. Under that we would have time to visit the little children around the haze of dusk, activists in only one more place before TO KNOW. her, belonged to this mys- Richmond had transformed heading back home and hoping terious personage. the Robert E. Lee statue they might fall asleep in the car. I walked out onto a small into a canvas blooming with wooden boat ramp and tried I only had a few minutes to new and reclaimed meaning. As we drove toward Cov- to take in my surroundings. take in the space, to breathe in Garlands of graffiti wrapped ey’s Landing, the roads became The air was thick and heavy. the air. As I stood at the edge around the statue’s base, their both emptier and more nar- The brown water was still but of the dock, I craned my neck anti-racist messages written row. The houses became less for the soft current that pulled and stood on my tiptoes as if in colorful letters that curled frequent, with more distance ripples along its surface. On that might allow me to get a and popped on the pedestal. between each new address. On my right, a small tree jutted better glimpse of the land that Projected onto the side of the one side of the road, wheat out from the shallow water, Douglass had run over as a 40-foot base was the face of fields stretched out in every its branches bending down as child, the land he had sunk his Douglass, his visage enor- direction, like a golden blanket if to drink. Across the river was hands into when he returned mous and striking, upstag- had been laid atop the land; a vast expanse of untamed, lus- as a man. ing the darkened silhouette on the other, budding corn cious green that looked like it of Lee above him. Between stalks shot up out of the soil. ran out into the sky. I got back in the car, Douglass’s head and Lee’s I remarked to my wife how shut the door, and made a silhouette was a quote from striking it was to consider that I turned to my left and U-turn. My children quickly Douglass that I think about so much of this land had once saw the river bend to its right. fell asleep in their car seats, often when I see the protests, been plantation fields Black Douglass’s birthplace was less and we switched from Dis- in their myriad forms: “Power people worked on. How their than a mile north up Tucka- ney musicals to the news, concedes nothing without a spirits still sang over these large hoe Creek. The only way to trying to hear updates on demand. It never did and it plots of earth. She mentioned get a close view of the land what had transpired that day never will.” a point we discuss often: None upon which Douglass spent with the protests, with the of this was that long ago. We his childhood is to get in a virus, with our country. We Clint Smith is the author of sat with that thought as we canoe or kayak and paddle made our way through idyl- the poetry collection Counting drove on, the car spitting up there yourself. I thought of a lic neighborhoods with open Descent and the forthcoming gravel behind its wheels. windows and colorful shut- nonfiction book How the ters. American flags hung Word Is Passed. In front of the last house from front porches. So did before the dock, the Ameri- Confederate flags. can flag rose up a tall staff along with a large blue trump 21

POLITICS PROTEST WORKS and dying. Martin Luther King Jr. went so far as to dis- How the Black Lives Matter demonstrations courage Black college students will shake up the 2020 election—and reshape from enlisting. American politics for a generation to come Donald Trump borrowed from Nixon’s playbook dur- BY DANIEL Q. GILLION ing his presidential run in 2016. During a rally in Las I drove 1,200 miles, renamed George Floyd Ave- protesters and tweets about Vegas early in his campaign, he from Philadelphia nue, across the street from “LAW AND ORDER” and villainized a protester by saying, to Minneapolis, Cup Foods, where Floyd had the “SILENT MAJORITY.” “I would like to punch him in to be a part of the been killed after allegedly pass- the face.” The rambunctious George Floyd pro- ing a counterfeit $20 bill. As Richard Nixon introduced crowd cheered in response. In test movement. I scanned the crowd, I saw the latter term to the Ameri- the months that followed, as Throughout the city, from what I had seen in the other can people during another his campaign stops continued the predominantly white cities I’d visited as I made my moment of ferment, one to be disrupted, Trump turned neighborhood of Bancroft way west: a shockingly diverse to which the current unrest the protesters into a useful foil: to the more diverse streets of group of protesters. As a Black has been compared. During The roaring crowd was us; the Bryant, I saw signs in living- man, I found myself standing the 1968 presidential cam- demonstrators were them. They room windows that read black next to many people who did paign and into his first years did not belong to the silent lives matter and we stand not look like me—sometimes, in office, as anti-war dem- majority, whose prerogatives for equality. As I drove up their cries even drowned out onstrations took place across Trump intended to restore. Cedar Avenue, heading to my own. The coalition has the nation, Nixon sought to Enterprising supporters even 38th Street, I also saw signs changed. It has grown. ostracize the protesters, paint- created signs: silent majority in the windows of stores and ing them as radicals whose stands with trump. Months restaurants that read minority Of course, not all Ameri- views did not reflect those of after the election, the signs were owned—an indication that cans have embraced Black Lives law-abiding Americans. The still available for purchase on these businesses stood with the Matter. Some look at the men term, which he introduced in Amazon, for the low price of Floyd movement, but also that and women demanding reform a speech in 1969, cut along $14.35, with positive reviews they hoped to be spared should and see only looters and thugs. racial lines: The leaders of the for the sturdiness of the paper. the protests turn violent. They are nurtured in this view civil-rights movement had by the president of the United become prominent opponents The specter of Nixon’s vic- Pressed together with States, who greeted the outcry of the war in Vietnam, where tory in 1968—and Trump’s protesters adorned in masks, following Floyd’s murder with a disproportionate number of in 2016—has haunted the I stood on the unofficially threats of violence against the Black Americans were fighting George Floyd protests. By channeling Nixon once again, Trump clearly hopes to revive his political fortunes. Poll- ing shows that a majority of Americans view the protests positively. Trump’s fractious response to the Floyd kill- ing, coming on the heels of his administration’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, seems to have left him badly damaged politically. Yet Trump has seemed dam- aged before. Some fear that, in the privacy of the voting booth, the American electorate will back the status quo over the calls for change in the streets. As of this writing, the protests have remained outraged yet largely peaceful. What if they 22 SEPTEMBER 2020

Dispatches turn violent and support for now. Righteous, nonviolent Far from playing into more voters to the polls, and the cause they are champion- demonstrations are a hallmark Trump’s hands, the demon- ultimately win. ing erodes? “THE SILENT of a functioning democracy. strators demanding justice MAJORITY IS STRON- They provide catharsis for for Floyd are engaged in a Both the people marching GER THAN EVER!!!” Trump the participants and show the movement that is likely to aid in protests and those observ- tweeted in mid-June. But the nation at large that something those candidates who oppose ing them are inspired to con- silent majority need not be is wrong with our society and the president’s policies in tribute to candidates who stronger than ever to reelect needs to change. Protests can November—and that could are perceived as being com- the president. Trump has to also spark that change, by reshape American politics for mitted to change. Consider persuade only a small number channeling energy, resources, years to come. the wave of protests that fol- of voters in a handful of mid- and votes to candidates who lowed Trump’s inauguration. western states in order to win take up the cause. Even 1968, I ’v e l o o k e d c l o s e ly at The most high-profile of these a second term. the year that supposedly proves how protests and elections were the Women’s March, the the risk of backlash, fails as an have interacted in America March for Our Lives, and the My own view, having spent example if we consider the since the 1960s, and I’ve counterprotests at the “Unite the past decade studying pro- presidential race alongside the found that protests nearly the Right” rally in Charlottes- test movements in the United congressional, gubernatorial, always benefit candidates asso- ville, Virginia. But anti-Trump States, is that we’ve always and mayoral contests that year, ciated with the causes being protest was widespread across overestimated the power of the which swept reform-minded fought for—helping them the United States; hundreds of silent majority, and that we’re politicians into office. build bigger war chests, bring events occurred in his first year giving it too much credence in office alone. Zip code by zip CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: KEVIN CLAIBORNE; GEORGE TAMES / THE NEW YORK TIMES / Clockwise from top left: Harlem, May 2020: a rally against police brutality; Washington, D.C., May 1957: the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, calling on the REDUX; BRANDON BELL; RAYMOND DEPARDON / MAGNUM federal government to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education; Minneapolis, May 2020: protesting the murder of George Floyd; Chicago, August 1968: demonstrators confronting federal troops during the Democratic National Convention. 23

Dispatches POLITICS code, demonstrations on behalf 36 in Tucson, Arizona; and 43 convention. Mikva unseated found that frequent liberal of liberal causes were associated in Miami helped Democratic a superannuated Demo- protest in a given congressio- with a significant increase in candidates Joe Cunningham, cratic incumbent during the nal district increases the prob- donations to Democratic can- Ann Kirkpatrick, and Donna primary and then roundly ability that a serious Demo- didates; controlling for other Shalala flip seats in their defeated his Republican chal- cratic challenger will enter the factors, such as neighborhood respective districts. lenger, even as Nixon carried race for that seat, whether it’s wealth, the places that saw pro- Illinois. Mikva was not alone: occupied by a Republican tests saw more money flow into This was hardly the first Democratic candidates across or a complacent Democrat. campaigns. Spread across the time that protests had fueled the nation benefited from lib- Of course, those challengers nation, political activism was successful challenges against eral protest, which helped the don’t always carry the day. But the source of millions of dollars incumbents. In the 1960s, party maintain control of the when they do—when they are in additional campaign giving. House and the Senate. propelled into office by a pro- THE POINT test movement—they become This is not to say that pro- OF PROTEST Focusing too narrowly on its institutional allies, intro- test doesn’t inspire backlash. IS RARELY TO Nixon’s victory in 1968 has ducing bills and supporting I also found a connection also encouraged Americans to policies that reflect protesters’ between liberal protests and SWING A overlearn another lesson from concerns. In this way, protest donations to Republican candi- SINGLE RACE. that year: that violent protest not only affects electoral out- dates. But these contributions will necessarily provoke a comes today, but establishes were smaller, overall. When IT IS TO backlash. The fact is, many the conditions for change in liberal protests occur, all candi- CHANGE THE protests turn violent when the future. Abner Mikva went dates make money. Democrats the supposed enforcers of law on to be a leading progressive just make more of it. TERMS OF and order do harm to demon- voice for decades and helped POLITICAL strators, whether it’s an Ala- launch the careers of Elena Protests likewise increase DEBATE, AND bama state trooper fracturing Kagan and Barack Obama. voter turnout. For example, ULTIMATELY John Lewis’s skull in Selma in although Black voters cast bal- TO CHANGE 1965 or Park Police dispers- The Floyd protests likely lots in lower numbers in the SOCIETY ITSELF. ing the people who congre- arrived too late in the 2020 2016 general election than gated in Lafayette Square in cycle to push new candi- they had in 2012, the drop-off for instance, the civil-rights 2020. Voters understand this. dates into the field, but they was less pronounced in areas movement and anti-Vietnam While wanton, opportunistic have shifted the dynamics of where Black Lives Matter was protests descended on Abner destruction of public prop- some races, helping progres- active. And in areas that wit- Mikva’s Chicago neighbor- erty can certainly undermine sive candidates win prima- nessed heightened levels of hood. Mikva did not imme- an otherwise righteous pro- ries and topple entrenched protest activity, Black voter diately champion either cause, test movement, nightsticks, incumbents such as Repre- turnout increased. and he lost in his run for Con- rubber bullets, and tear-gas sentative Eliot Engel of New gress in 1966. Over the next canisters can draw attention York, who lost his race despite All of this energy helps two years, during which Illi- to—and sympathy for—a the support of the Demo- candidates affiliated with nois’s Second Congressional cause and those brave enough cratic establishment. We will protesters’ goals. On average, District was the epicenter of to advocate for it. continue to see the effects a district that sees 50 liberal protest activity in the state, he of these demonstrations in protests in an election year reinvented himself as a strong The point of protest is years to come. When protest sees the Democratic candidate advocate of the campaign to rarely to swing a single race, occurs, we can expect that in that district increasing his end racial discrimination in however momentous that change is coming—change or her vote share by 2 percent housing. He also acted as legal race may be. It is to change that reflects the evolving will and the Republican decreas- counsel for protesters jailed by the terms of political debate, of the people. ing his or her vote share by an aggressive police depart- and ultimately to change soci- 7 percent compared with the ment during anti-war protests. ety itself. And indeed, protest Daniel Q. Gillion is a previous election. In a close has always foreshadowed the political-science professor at race, such swings can be deci- Mikva’s embrace of these most radical shifts in Ameri- the University of Pennsylvania sive. During the 2018 mid- movements rattled Chicago’s can history. and the author of The Loud terms, eight liberal protests Democratic machine, led by Minority: Why Protests occurred in the average con- Mayor Richard Daley, who Protest calls attention Matter in American Democ- gressional district. In districts infamously ordered the police to problems with the status racy, from which this article with greater protest activity, and the National Guard quo—and often spells politi- was adapted. liberal candidates fared well. to crack down on protest- cal doom for those who have Sixteen liberal protests in ers at the 1968 Democratic upheld it. In my research, I’ve Charleston, South Carolina; 24 SEPTEMBER 2020



SKETCH THE RELENTLESS processes. In 1991, Brocko- ERIN BROCKOVICH vich, then a file clerk at the San Fernando Valley law firm Masry She was an early crusader for environmental justice. & Vititoe, happened upon sus- Today, she’s sounding the alarm louder than ever. picious medical records while sorting through a box of files for BY AMANDA FORTINI a pro bono real-estate case. She drove out to the Mojave Des- Twe n t y ye a r s a g o , Er i n to tell you that life takes an The first case that Erin ert to investigate. The water was Brockovich was released, and interesting turn when your Brockovich Erin Brocko- green. She saw frogs with two the brash, unvarnished legal name becomes a verb,” the real viched—the subject of the heads. Residents were suffering assistant turned activist at the Erin Brockovich writes in the movie—was her 1990s battle from nosebleeds, miscarriages, heart of the film—memorably introduction to her new book, with Pacific Gas & Electric. and cancers. She persuaded Ed portrayed by Julia Roberts in Superman’s Not Coming. “To The power company had con- Masry to take the case, and in micro-miniskirts and ver- ‘Erin Brockovich something’ taminated the groundwater 1996 they won a $333 million tiginous high heels—had the has become synonymous with in the small desert town of settlement for 650 plaintiffs, at surreal experience of becom- investigating and then advo- Hinkley, California, with the time the largest toxic tort ing a household name almost cating for a cause without chromium-6, a highly toxic settlement in American history. overnight. “Let me be the first giving up.” chemical used in industrial (Brockovich herself received a $2.5 million bonus.) Brockovich, 60, is mag- netic, fast-talking, and very funny, not unlike her character in the movie, a portrayal she calls “about 97 percent accu- rate.” On the early-May after- noon when we first speak via Zoom, she is in her home office in Agoura Hills, California, a sunny room with shelves full of framed photographs of her now-adult kids. She lives alone (she and her third husband divorced in 2015), save for her three small dogs, one of whom, a Pomeranian named Wiley, is yapping in the background. She tells me she has been working on an ABC drama based on her life, Rebel; she will execu- tive produce and Katey Sagal will star. Erin Brockovich grossed $256 million worldwide, a success only partly attribut- able to Julia Roberts’s charis- matic performance, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar. The movie made its namesake into a kind of American folk hero, à la Davy Crockett or Mother Jones. (Every time her name floated up on my phone, it was like Annie Oakley had texted me.) Like most folk 26 ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN TAMAKI

Dispatches heroes, her appeal is a popu- out to me.’ This happened to including rashes, hair loss, and Brockovich says, “and the city list one. Audiences could see me over and over again.” diarrhea. Eventually, they began told us to fuck off.” themselves in this struggling, emailing Brockovich, sending twice-divorced single mom Brockovich is dyslexic and her photos of their brown, yel- Flint’s issues grew out of a who wasn’t a doctor, a lawyer, has a photographic memory; low, or orange water. She for- tangle of bureaucratic incom- or a scientist, and believe that she prefers to see things laid warded a few emails to Bob petence, bad decisions, and they too might fight injustice. out visually, so she started Bowcock, the water-quality racism, but the city is hardly To “Erin Brockovich some- plotting the email inquiries on expert she works with. Bowcock unique. A 2017 study by the thing,” then, means not only a map. One day, she looked at says that Brockovich has “this Natural Resources Defense to investigate an issue, but to be her map and counted 300 dots ridiculous sixth sense about Council (NRDC) found that a regular person who takes on scattered around the country. her” and that “nine times out “contaminants that may harm a corporate giant polluting the She decided to make her work of 10” her hunches are borne human health” were present in environment. The notion feels accessible to more people, so the tap water of every state in especially urgent now, as the she digitized it and put it up on THE MOVIE the nation—often in poor com- Trump administration’s Envi- her website. Here, people can MADE munities and communities of ronmental Protection Agency self-report health effects of envi- color, which are targeted as sites fails to regulate toxic chemicals ronmental pollution, and find BROCKOVICH for industrial plants and land- and industry lobbyists wield others reporting the same issue. INTO AN fills. In 2015, community water undue power. “I looked at it today and there’s systems had more than 80,000 13,000 dots on it,” Brockovich AMERICAN reported violations of the Safe After the movie’s release, says. “It’s like, ‘What the fuck? FOLK HERO, Drinking Water Act, the 1974 Brockovich, who was already at What’s going on?’” À LA DAVY law that regulates roughly 100 work on another contaminated- CROCKETT contaminants. More than groundwater case—this one in I N L A T E 2 0 1 5 , the country OR MOTHER 18 million Americans got their the Latino farming community began asking similar questions drinking water from systems of Kettleman City, California— as reports of exceedingly high JONES. that had violated federal lead was deluged with emails and lead levels in the water in Flint, regulations, according to a 2016 letters. “I put my finger in Michigan, began to circulate. out by his research. In late Janu- NRDC report. the dike,” she tells me, “and I In April 2014, an emergency ary 2015, almost a year before thought I might help stop its manager had made the disas- President Barack Obama would Brockovich’s book—at once flow. I had no idea.” In 2005, trous cost-cutting decision to declare a state of emergency in a master class on water for the she left the law firm to start her stop supplying Flint with water Flint, Brockovich posted about layperson and an exhortation own company, Erin Brockovich from the Detroit system and the “Dangerous Undrinkable to work for improvements in Consulting, which she runs make the Flint River its tempo- Drinking Water” on her pub- our own communities—takes out of her home; she advises rary source while the city built lic Facebook page. readers on a tour of struggling people on environmental- its own pipeline. The Flint locales around the country. At contamination issues, consults River had long been a dump- When a water issue arises, Camp Lejeune, for instance, the with law firms, and is a regular ing ground for industry; it also Brockovich and Bowcock usu- Marine Corps base in Jackson- on the keynote-speaker circuit. contains significant amounts ally travel to the city or town in ville, North Carolina, residents of bacteria and organic mat- question. “My role is to quarter- were exposed via drinking water She continues to receive ter, thus requiring high levels back all the experts and pull all to numerous contaminants, thousands of emails every of chlorine and ferric chlo- the science together,” Bowcock among them TCE, an indus- month. “A mother writes me ride to clean it. But Flint had says. “Her part is to rally the trial solvent that can cause birth and says, ‘I’m concerned. I live an antiquated system of lead troops and get the town orga- defects and childhood cancers. down in Florida. My daugh- pipes, which the disinfectants nized and conduct the town- Brockovich writes that so many ter was diagnosed with a glio- corroded, causing lead to hall meeting.” But at the time, babies died there in the ’60s and blastoma. I have heard reports leach into the water supply of Brockovich was in Australia ’70s that a nearby cemetery had that we had a solvent chemi- 95,000 people. for work, so in mid-February, a section called “Baby Heaven.” cal in our water. Do you know Bowcock got on a plane to Flint anything about it?’” she says, Shortly after the switch, himself. There, he found levels Reading the book, one describing a typical email. The Flint residents—54 percent of of chlorine that exceeded those acquires a dispiriting sense of following week, another email whom are Black, and 40 percent of a swimming pool. Bowcock why water issues are so wide- from another mother. A few of of whom live below the pov- drew up a plan for Flint’s mayor, spread and entrenched. The these, and she searches her inbox erty line—started complaining the water municipality, and the most obvious reason is that for the town’s name: “I’m like, about their foul-smelling and Flint city council. “We actually you can’t see the majority of ‘Holy shit. Ten people from that discolored water, plus a host wrote a whole water protocol,” chemicals, so unless you have same community have reached of strange new health issues, your water tested, you likely won’t know a contaminant is SEPTEMBER 2020 27

Dispatches SKETCH there. But water problems are in a family of four children man named Steve Brockovich, been critical of Trump’s EPA also fairly technical, requir- growing up in Lawrence, who would become her second on social media. “I never get ing a grasp of chemical and Kansas, a university town 45 husband and the father of her into the politics of it. I’ll pull legal terms. “Water’s not an minutes west of Kansas City, younger daughter. That mar- my hair out,” she says. “There’s easy discussion; it’s not sound Brockovich was placed in riage was tumultuous, too— plenty of blame to go around bites,” Brockovich says. “It’s a special-education classes for her self-esteem took such a everywhere.” She believes that story.” She explains that “no two her dyslexia. Her parents—her dive that she had to be hos- water is not a partisan issue but bodies of water on this planet mother, B. J. O’Neal-Pattee, pitalized for anorexia—and a human right: “It doesn’t mat- have the same fingerprint,” was an editor of the Univer- lasted only a year, leaving her ter what side of the aisle you’re which means that each has its sity of Kansas alumni maga- broke, pregnant, and shat- on, the color of your skin, own particular problems. Then zine; her father, Frank Pattee, teringly lonely. Around that what’s in your bank account.” there are the structural issues. was a mechanical engineer who time, Brockovich got in a car Our country’s infrastructure is worked as a regional manager If Brockovich does have antiquated—some water mains for the U.S. Department of IF a discernible politics, it’s her are 50 to 100 years old. Of the Transportation—taught her BROCKOVICH populism, her belief in people, approximately 40,000 chemi- to believe in herself and gave her utter faith that they—we— cals on the market, less than her a solid moral foundation HAS A can take matters into our own 1 percent have been tested for that emphasized honesty and DISCERNIBLE hands. “People think when I human safety. Science is often “stick-to-itiveness,” as her POLITICS, IT’S speak to a community that I’m manipulated by companies that mother called it. Those lessons, HER POPULISM, coming in with an agenda, but put profit over public health. In she says, didn’t sink in until she HER BELIEF my only role is to empower sum, industry pollution goes worked on the Hinkley case. the people,” she writes. In her largely unsupervised and laws IN PEOPLE. discussion of Hannibal, Mis- remain unenforced. In 1978, Brockovich souri, where local women got graduated from high school accident that herniated two ammonia banned as a disin- The U.S. also lacks a and enrolled in Kansas State disks in her spine. But the fectant, she includes a quote national disease database where University. She spent her first misfortune proved fortuitous. often attributed to Margaret people can report their issues semester staying out all night Not long after, she met a biker Mead: “Never doubt that a and connect the dots between and skipping classes, and when named Jorge; he introduced small group of thoughtful, illness clusters and environmen- her father saw her report card, her to Jim Vititoe, who repre- committed citizens can change tal hazards. In 2013, Brocko- he made her drop out. She sented her in a lawsuit against the world; indeed, it’s the only vich joined Trevor Schaefer, a transferred to Wade College in the other driver. She lost, but thing that ever has.” young man from Idaho who Dallas, graduated with an asso- she persuaded Vititoe to hire had been diagnosed with brain ciate’s degree in fashion mer- her. The rest is, well, a movie. Doesn’t she ever get cancer at the age of 13, to tes- chandising and interior design, demoralized? After all, Hink- tify on Capitol Hill about the then took a job as a manager Brockovich and I speak for ley is almost a ghost town now importance of documenting at a Kmart store in Los Ange- the last time in early June; the because the groundwater con- and tracking cancer clusters. les, but she hated the work and country is aflame with pro- tamination spread, and Cali- Three years later, President resigned after three months. tests about police brutality fornia currently has no legal Obama signed “Trevor’s Law” She dabbled in the world of against Black people, and the limit for chromium-6. Seven as part of the newly strength- professional beauty pageants pandemic shows no signs of years ago, she says, she did ened Toxic Substances Control and was crowned Miss Pacific abating. When I ask how she feel burned out—“It’s just too Act, but the current administra- Coast in 1981. is, Brockovich tells me she is much; it doesn’t stop”—but tion has failed to implement it. deeply sad about the murder then she stood in the delivery Brockovich hopes her crowd- The following year, she of George Floyd. But, as is her room and watched as her first sourced digitized map will act met and married her first hus- way, she sidesteps any concrete granddaughter was born and as a de facto disease database. band, a house painter, with discussion of politics. Her dad thought, “What will this world “She’s a pioneer in environ- whom she had her son and was a Republican, and her be like for her if I don’t con- mental investigations and with her first daughter. Their five- book emphasizes that it was tinue to fight? What legacy are uncovering pollution sources,” year marriage was volatile, and Richard Nixon who started the we going to leave?” And she felt Schaefer, now 30, says. “She’s Brockovich suffered debilitat- EPA. Yet she also worked with reinvigorated. been so successful in exposing it.” ing panic attacks. When her former Democratic Senator husband got a job in the food Barbara Boxer on Trevor’s Law, Amanda Fortini is a writer A s B r o c k o v i c h herself industry that moved the family a bipartisan bill, and she has based in Las Vegas and often says, her path was not to Reno, Nevada, Brockovich Livingston, Montana. an obvious one. The youngest was hired by a brokerage firm there; one of the brokers was a 28 SEPTEMBER 2020

“You only think you know the “The best audio documentary story of Hurricane Katrina.” to come out this year so far, — Oprah Magazine hands down.” — Vulture “An expansive and powerful piece of work.” “Eerily prescient.” — AnOther Magazine — Financial Times LISTEN TO ALL 8 EPISODES ON

VIEWFINDER The Black Yearbook In August 2016, during his first week of college, Adraint Khadafhi Bereal went to “Gone to Texas,” Photographs by a large back-to-school event held every year for students at the University of Texas at Austin. Hun- Adraint Khadafhi dreds upon hundreds of people had gathered in front of the campus clock tower for the welcome Bereal event and fireworks display. But despite the throng of students, Bereal didn’t see any who looked like him—and he wouldn’t for another week. 30 The university, like many flagship colleges across the country, enrolls vanishingly few Black undergraduates—just 4 percent of the 40,000 students are Black, and just 1.5 percent are Black men. That can leave the few Black students the university does enroll feeling isolated. So last sum- mer, just before the start of his senior year, Bereal began work on The Black Yearbook, a project that aims to give expression to their experiences. It’s not a traditional yearbook; through portraits and 100 interviews, The Black Yearbook shows the highs and lows of Black life at a predomi- nantly white college, both the beauty of the campus experience and the stress of having such scant representation. In several images, students turn their back to the camera. This, Bereal told me, is how white students too often see their Black peers: as faceless. They regularly mistake one for another. But even shot from behind, Bereal’s subjects reveal their individuality—a do-rag here, an expres- sive pose there. The yearbook is “a view into what our daily life looks like on a predominantly white campus,” Bereal said. He hopes people can see the full picture. — Adam Harris SEPTEMBER 2020

Dispatches Clockwise from top left: Octavian Moten; Siji Deleawe; Awab Ahmed; Jala Jones; Black Homecoming, September 28, 2019. Opposite page: Members of the Longhorn Band. 31

How the virus won 32

Anatomy of an American Failure By Ed Yong 33

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and mag- Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively nitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom. to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling In the first half of 2020, SARS-CoV-2—the new coronavirus upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed behind the disease COVID-19—infected 10 million people around in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medi- been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of cal School, told me. the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest coun- experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything try in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was sick citizens. predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a govern- ment denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable 34 SEPTEMBER 2020

OPENING SPREAD: DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX. nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic THIS PAGE: JABIN BOTSFORD / THE WASHINGTON POST / GETTY; NATALIE KEYSSAR. inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the contributing writer, asked me. ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Despite its epochal effects, COVID-19 is merely a harbinger Americans especially vulnerable to COVID-19. The decades- of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic. foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar. The U.S. has little excuse for its inattention. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 flu, Zika, A pa n d e m i c c a n b e p r e v e n t e d in two ways: Stop an and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming pathogens could wreak. Health experts, business leaders, and thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. There are sim- even middle schoolers ran simulated exercises to game out the ply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. spread of new diseases. In 2018, I wrote an article for The Atlan- Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in tic arguing that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic, and some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many sounded warnings about the fragility of the nation’s health- people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano care system and the slow process of creating a vaccine. But the from them for fertilizer. Thousands of bats also fly over these COVID-19 debacle has also touched—and implicated—nearly people’s villages and roost in their homes, creating opportuni- every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, ties for the bats’ viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism. of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies emerging dis- eases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of SARS-CoV-2 is something of an anti-Goldilocks virus: just people every year. “Most infected people don’t know about it, bad enough in every way. Its symptoms can be severe enough and most of the viruses aren’t transmissible,” Daszak says. But to kill millions but are often mild enough to allow infections it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic. to move undetected through a population. It spreads quickly enough to overload hospitals, but slowly enough that statistics Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended don’t spike until too late. These traits made the virus harder up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a human—and another, to control, but they also softened the pandemic’s punch. and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood SARS-CoV-2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. Dead- super-spreading event. The COVID-19 pandemic had begun. lier pathogens almost certainly exist. Wild animals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could “There is no way to get spillover of everything to zero,” Colin potentially jump into humans. How will the U.S. fare when Carlson, an ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. Many “we can’t even deal with a starter pandemic?,” Zeynep Tufekci, conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of “bush meat,” an exoticized term OPENING SPREAD: NEW YORK CITY AT THE HEIGHT OF THE PANDEMIC. THIS PAGE, LEFT: PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP AND THE CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE BRIEF THE PRESS AT THE WHITE HOUSE. RIGHT: A RECORD NUMBER OF BODIES BEING PROCESSED AT A FUNERAL HOME IN QUEENS, NEW YORK. 35

for “game,” but few diseases have emerged through either route. U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use antagonized its allies. It has a seat on the WHO’s executive board, change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. but left that position empty for more than two years, only filling Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. it this May, when the pandemic was in full swing. Since 2017, Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising Trump has pulled more than 30 staffers out of the Centers for temperatures, we have uprooted the planet’s animals, forcing Disease Control and Prevention’s office in China, who could have them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own door- warned about the spreading coronavirus. Last July, he defunded steps. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing an American epidemiologist embedded within China’s CDC. grip—and viruses have come bursting out. America First was America oblivious. Curtailing those viruses after they spill over is more feasible, Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong but requires knowledge, transparency, and decisiveness that were ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed lacking in 2020. Much about coronaviruses is still unknown. expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with There are no surveillance networks for detecting them as there inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants are for influenza. There are no approved treatments or vaccines. as part of a “deep state.” In 2018, he dismantled an office that Coronaviruses were formerly a niche family, of mainly veterinary had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandem- importance. Four decades ago, just 60 or so scientists attended the ics. American intelligence agencies warned about the corona- first international meeting on coronaviruses. Their ranks swelled virus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intel- after SARS swept the world in 2003, but quickly dwindled as a ligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, spike in funding vanished. The same thing happened after MERS Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored. emerged in 2012. This year, the world’s coronavirus experts—and there still aren’t many—had to postpone their triennial conference Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, “so in the Netherlands because SARS-CoV-2 made flying too risky. that when something like this happens, you’re moving quickly,” Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West In the age of cheap air travel, an outbreak that begins on one African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. “By early February, continent can easily reach the others. SARS already demonstrated we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of that in 2003, and more than twice as many people now travel which were taken.” Trump could have spent those crucial early by plane every year. To avert a pandemic, affected nations must weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking compa- alert their neighbors quickly. In 2003, China covered up the early nies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and spread of SARS, allowing the new disease to gain a foothold, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused in 2020, history repeated itself. The Chinese government down- on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. played the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was spreading among would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, humans, and only confirmed as much on January 20, after mil- and urged Americans to avoid going there. lions had traveled around the country for the lunar new year. Doctors who tried to raise the alarm were censured and threat- Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously ened. One, Li Wenliang, later died of COVID-19. The World enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully Health Organization initially parroted China’s line and did not inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people declare a public-health emergency of international concern until to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately January 30. By then, an estimated 10,000 people in 20 countries hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trump’s included had been infected, and the virus was spreading fast. numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later The United States has correctly castigated China for its duplic- announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of ity and the WHO for its laxity—but the U.S. has also failed the travelers packed America’s airports in a rush to beat the incom- international community. Under President Donald Trump, the ing restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote LEFT: LOS ANGELES UNDER LOCKDOWN IN MARCH. MIDDLE: AN UNEMPLOYED WOMAN IN HOUSTON. RIGHT: AN EMPTY STREET IN BOSTON IN THE EARLY MONTHS ADAM AMENGUAL; ELIZABETH BICK; YOAV HORESH OF THE PANDEMIC. 36 SEPTEMBER 2020

much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread. On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be down to close to zero.” Over the next two months, at least 1 mil- lion Americans were infected. MARK RALSTON / AFP / GETTY; ROSE MARIE CROMWELL; TIM RUE / BLOOMBERG / GETTY island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of A s t h e c o r o n av i r u s established itself in the U.S., it found an epidemic—not stop it. And they can create a harmful false a nation through which it could spread easily, without being confidence, so countries “rely on bans to the exclusion of the detected. For years, Pardis Sabeti, a virologist at the Broad Insti- things they actually need to do—testing, tracing, building up tute of Harvard and MIT, has been trying to create a surveil- the health system,” says Thomas Bollyky, a global-health expert lance network that would allow hospitals in every major U.S. at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That sounds an awful lot city to quickly track new viruses through genetic sequencing. like what happened in the U.S.” Had that network existed, once Chinese scientists published SARS-CoV-2’s genome on January 11, every American hospi- This was predictable. A president who is fixated on an tal would have been able to develop its own diagnostic test in ineffectual border wall, and has portrayed asylum seekers as vec- preparation for the virus’s arrival. “I spent a lot of time trying tors of disease, was always going to reach for travel bans as a first to convince many funders to fund it,” Sabeti told me. “I never resort. And Americans who bought into his rhetoric of xeno- got anywhere.” phobia and isolationism were going to be especially susceptible to thinking that simple entry controls were a panacea. The CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. These proved useless because of a faulty chemical And so the U.S. wasted its best chance of restraining component. Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for COVID-19. Although the disease first arrived in the U.S. in getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of Feb- mid-January, genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses ruary, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didn’t but only hundreds had been tested. The official data were so land until mid-February. The country could have used that time clearly wrong that The Atlantic developed its own volunteer- to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presi- led initiative—the COVID Tracking Project—to count cases. dency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very Diagnostic tests are easy to make, so the U.S. failing to create one seemed inconceivable. Worse, it had no Plan B. Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to col- leagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,” she told me. It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms couldn’t find out what was wrong with them. Health officials couldn’t cut off chains of transmission by identifying people who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves. Water running along a pavement will readily seep into every crack; so, too, did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every fault line in the modern world. Consider our buildings. In LEFT: A WOMAN WITH COVID-19 SYMPTOMS GETS HER VITALS CHECKED IN MONUMENT VALLEY, ARIZONA, IN THE NAVAJO NATION. MIDDLE: BLOOD SAMPLES IN A LAB IN FLORIDA. RIGHT: THE USNS MERCY ARRIVES IN THE PORT OF LOS ANGELES TO PROVIDE HELP TO OVERSTRETCHED HOSPITALS. 37

response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick build- ings,’” says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy efficiency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacrificing well-being. “We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people,” Allen says. The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran ram- pant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours. The hardest-hit buildings were those that had been jammed with people for decades: prisons. Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough- on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500. Other densely packed facilities were also besieged. Amer- ica’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID-19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers. Even though a Seattle nursing home was one of the first COVID-19 hot spots in the U.S., similar facilities weren’t provided with tests and protective equipment. Rather than girding these facilities against the pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspec- tions in March, passing the buck to the states. Some nursing homes avoided the virus because their owners immediately stopped visitations, or paid caregivers to live on-site. But in others, staff stopped working, scared about infecting their charges or becoming infected themselves. In some cases, 38

ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK A WOMAN PROCESSES TAKE-OUT ORDERS AT A RESTAURANT IN THE EAST VILLAGE, IN MANHATTAN. 39

LEFT: HEALTH-CARE WORKERS SURROUND A COVID-19 PATIENT AT LENOX HILL HOSPITAL, IN MANHATTAN. RIGHT: A WOMAN WEARS A MASK IN LOS ANGELES. residents had to be evacuated because no one showed up to care forced overstretched departments to furlough more employees. PREVIOUS SPREAD: DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX. THIS PAGE: SARAH BLESENER; ALEXIS HUNLEY. for them. When states needed battalions of public-health workers to find infected people and trace their contacts, they had to hire and America’s neglect of nursing homes and prisons, its sick build- train people from scratch. In May, Maryland Governor Larry ings, and its botched deployment of tests are all indicative of its Hogan asserted that his state would soon have enough people problematic attitude toward health: “Get hospitals ready and wait to trace 10,000 contacts every day. Last year, as Ebola tore for sick people to show,” as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the non- through the Democratic Republic of Congo—a country with profit Partners in Health, puts it. “Especially in the beginning, a quarter of Maryland’s wealth and an active war zone—local we catered our entire [COVID-19] response to the 20 percent health workers and the WHO traced twice as many people. of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community.” The latter is the job of the R i p p i n g u n i m pe d e d t h r o u g h American communities, public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations the coronavirus created thousands of sickly hosts that it then rode instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs into America’s hospitals. It should have found facilities armed uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a with state-of-the-art medical technologies, detailed pandemic matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good. plans, and ample supplies of protective equipment and life-saving medicines. Instead, it found a brittle system in danger of collapse. At the end of the 20th century, public-health improvements meant that Americans were living an average of 30 years longer Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends than they were at the start of it. Maternal mortality had fallen nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about by 99 percent; infant mortality by 90 percent. Fortified foods all a quarter of which is wasted on inefficient care, unnecessary treat- but eliminated rickets and goiters. Vaccines eradicated smallpox ments, and administrative chicanery. The U.S. gets little bang and polio, and brought measles, diphtheria, and rubella to heel. for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of These measures, coupled with antibiotics and better sanitation, comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and curbed infectious diseases to such a degree that some scientists the fewest doctors per person. This profit-driven system has scant predicted they would soon pass into history. But instead, these incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime achievements brought complacency. “As public health did its job, drills, and layered contingency plans—the essence of pandemic it became a target” of budget cuts, says Lori Freeman, the CEO preparedness. America’s hospitals have been pruned and stretched of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis. Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health- care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments When hospitals do create pandemic plans, they tend to fight were already struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing the last war. After 2014, several centers created specialized treat- obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. ment units designed for Ebola—a highly lethal but not very con- Last year saw the most measles cases since 1992. In 2018, the U.S. tagious disease. These units were all but useless against a highly had 115,000 cases of syphilis and 580,000 cases of gonorrhea— transmissible airborne virus like SARS-CoV-2. Nor were hospitals numbers not seen in almost three decades. It has 1.7 million cases ready for an outbreak to drag on for months. Emergency plans of chlamydia, the highest number ever recorded. assumed that staff could endure a few days of exhausting condi- tions, that supplies would hold, and that hard-hit centers could be Since the last recession, in 2009, chronically strapped local supported by unaffected neighbors. “We’re designed for discrete health departments have lost 55,000 jobs—a quarter of their workforce. When COVID-19 arrived, the economic downturn 40 SEPTEMBER 2020

LEFT: A PRO-TRUMP PROTESTER IN HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, IN APRIL. RIGHT: AN ANTI-LOCKDOWN PROTEST IN MOUNT WOLF, PENNSYLVANIA, IN MAY. disasters” like mass shootings, traffic pileups, and hurricanes, says shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Science University. The COVID-19 pandemic is not a discrete Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never least until a vaccine is ready. replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left. Wherever the coronavirus arrived, hospitals reeled. Several In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didn’t have states asked medical students to graduate early, reenlisted retired enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the doctors, and deployed dermatologists to emergency departments. public, or navigated a morass of back-alley deals and internet scams. Doctors and nurses endured grueling shifts, their faces chapped Others fashioned their own surgical masks from bandannas and and bloody when they finally doffed their protective equipment. gowns from garbage bags. The supply of nasopharyngeal swabs Soon, that equipment—masks, respirators, gowns, gloves—started that are used in every diagnostic test also ran low, because one of running out. the largest manufacturers is based in Lombardy, Italy—initially the COVID-19 capital of Europe. About 40 percent of critical-care American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. They drugs, including antibiotics and painkillers, became scarce because acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine they depend on manufacturing lines that begin in China and India. supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from Once a vaccine is ready, there might not be enough vials to put it countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. The lines in, because of the long-running global shortage of medical-grade are invisible until they snap. About half of the world’s face masks, glass—literally, a bottle-neck bottleneck. for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply The federal government could have mitigated those problems by buying supplies at economies of scale and distributing them accord- MARK PETERSON / REDUX; AMY LOMBARD ing to need. Instead, in March, Trump told America’s governors to “try getting it yourselves.” As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neigh- bors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies. While the president prevaricated, Americans acted. Businesses sent their employees home. People practiced social distancing, even before Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, and before governors and mayors subsequently issued formal stay- at-home orders, or closed schools, shops, and restaurants. A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID-19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier. But better late than never: By collectively reducing the spread of the virus, America flattened the curve. Ventilators didn’t run out, as they had in parts of Italy. Hospitals had time to add extra beds. Social distancing worked. But the indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because America’s leaders wasted months of 41

A MASKED WORKER CLEANS A NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY ENTRANCE. ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK 42 SEPTEMBER 2020

ART / PHOTO CREDIT TK prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enor- mous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million peo- ple lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country that—uniquely and absurdly—ties health care to employment. Some COVID-19 sur- vivors have been hit with seven-figure medical bills. In the middle of the greatest health and economic crises in generations, millions of Americans have found themselves disconnected from medical care and impoverished. They join the millions who have always lived that way. T h e c o r o n av i r u s f o u n d , exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shoul- dered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID-19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history. Of the 3.1 million Americans who cannot afford health insur- ance, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black. This is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct America’s system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. They fought every attempt to improve Black people’s access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. A number of former slave states also have among the low- est investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes. As the COVID-19 pandemic wore on, they were among the quickest to lift social-distancing restrictions and reexpose their citizens to the coronavirus. The harms of these moves were unduly foisted upon the poor and the Black. As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID-19—a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face. Compared with white people, they die three years younger. Three times as many Black mothers die during pregnancy. Black people have higher rates of chronic illnesses that predispose them to 43

fatal cases of COVID-19. When they go to hospitals, they’re COVID-19 because they don’t wash their hands enough, a remark PREVIOUS SPREAD: DINA LITOVSKY / REDUX. THIS PAGE: AL BELLO / GETTY; less likely to be treated. The care they do receive tends to be for which he later apologized. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of ANDREW RENNEISEN / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX. poorer. Aware of these biases, Black people are hesitant to seek Louisiana, also a physician, noted that Black people have higher aid for COVID-19 symptoms and then show up at hospitals in rates of chronic disease, as if this were an answer in itself, and not sicker states. “One of my patients said, ‘I don’t want to go to the a pattern that demanded further explanation. hospital, because they’re not going to treat me well,’” says Uché Blackstock, an emergency physician and the founder of Advanc- C l e a r d i s t r i bu t i o n of accurate information is among the ing Health Equity, a nonprofit that fights bias and racism in health most important defenses against an epidemic’s spread. And care. “Another whispered to me, ‘I’m so relieved you’re Black. I yet the largely unregulated, social-media-based communica- just want to make sure I’m listened to.’” tions infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that mis- information will proliferate fast. “In every outbreak throughout Black people were both more worried about the pandemic the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial and more likely to be infected by it. The dismantling of Amer- communities immediately spread their content about how it’s ica’s social safety net left Black people with less income and all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company higher unemployment. They make up a disproportionate share or Bill Gates,” says Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet of the low-paid “essential workers” who were expected to staff Observatory, who studies the flow of online information. When grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail COVID-19 arrived, “there was no doubt in my mind that it while the pandemic raged around them. Earning hourly wages was coming.” without paid sick leave, they couldn’t afford to miss shifts even when symptomatic. They faced risky commutes on crowded Sure enough, existing conspiracy theories—George Soros! public transportation while more privileged people teleworked 5G! Bioweapons!—were repurposed for the pandemic. An info- from the safety of isolation. “There’s nothing about Blackness demic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. Rumors that makes you more prone to COVID,” says Nicolette Louis- coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep saint, the executive director of Healthcare Ready, a nonprofit users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is that works to strengthen medical supply chains. Instead, existing polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to inequities stack the odds in favor of the virus. act in concert, this is calamitous. “The social internet as a system is broken,” DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused. Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the people in the Navajo Nation can’t easily wash their hands, Beginning on April 16, DiResta’s team noticed growing online because they’ve been embroiled in long-running negotiations chatter about Judy Mikovits, a discredited researcher turned anti- over the rights to the water on their own lands. Those with water vaccination champion. Posts and videos cast Mikovits as a whistle- must contend with runoff from uranium mines. Most live in blower who claimed that the new coronavirus was made in a lab cramped multigenerational homes, far from the few hospitals and described Anthony Fauci of the White House’s coronavirus that service a 17-million-acre reservation. As of mid-May, the task force as her nemesis. Ironically, this conspiracy theory was Navajo Nation had higher rates of COVID-19 infections than nested inside a larger conspiracy—part of an orchestrated PR any U.S. state. campaign by an anti-vaxxer and QAnon fan with the explicit goal to “take down Anthony Fauci.” It culminated in a slickly Americans often misperceive historical inequities as personal produced video called Plandemic, which was released on May 4. failures. Stephen Huffman, a Republican state senator and doctor More than 8 million people watched it in a week. in Ohio, suggested that Black Americans might be more prone to LEFT: A WOMAN HUGS HER GRANDMOTHER THROUGH A PLASTIC SHEET IN WANTAGH, NEW YORK. RIGHT: AN ELDERLY WOMAN HAS HER OXYGEN LEVELS TESTED IN YONKERS, NEW YORK. 4 4 SEPTEMBER 2020

Doctors and journalists tried to debunk Plandemic’s many News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting misleading claims, but these efforts spread less successfully than the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the the video itself. Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to uncontrollable unless caught early. But while health organiza- treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine tions recognize the need to surveil for emerging diseases, they story was muddied even further by two studies published in are woefully unprepared to do the same for emerging conspira- top medical journals—The Lancet and the New England Journal cies. In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the of Medicine—that claimed the drug was not effective and was threat of misinformation, “their response was: ‘ That’s interest- potentially harmful. The papers relied on suspect data from a ing, but that’s just stuff that happens on the internet.’” small analytics company called Surgisphere. Both were retracted in June. Rather than countering misinformation during the pan- demic’s early stages, trusted sources often made things worse. Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, Many health experts and government officials downplayed the the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at threat of the virus in January and February, assuring the public record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before that it posed a low risk to the U.S. and drawing comparisons to anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow. The ensuing confu- the ostensibly greater threat of the flu. The WHO, the CDC, sion, and the many genuine unknowns about the virus, has cre- and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, ated a vortex of fear and uncertainty, which grifters have sought hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. to exploit. Snake-oil merchants have peddled ineffectual silver These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledge- bullets (including actual silver). Armchair experts with scant ment of uncertainty, so when they were reversed—the virus or absent qualifications have found regular slots on the nightly is worse than the flu; wear masks—the changes seemed like news. And at the center of that confusion is Donald Trump. befuddling flip-flops. D u r i n g a pa n d e m i c , leaders must rally the public, tell the The media added to the confusion. Drawn to novelty, jour- truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeat- nalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most edly contradicted public-health experts, his scientific advisers, Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incre- and himself. He said that “nobody ever thought a thing like [the mental scientific claim, even those that hadn’t been verified or pandemic] could happen” and also that he “felt it was a pandemic peer-reviewed. long before it was called a pandemic.” Both statements cannot be true at the same time, and in fact neither is true. There were many such claims to choose from. By tying career advancement to the publishing of papers, academia already A month before his inauguration, I wrote that “the question isn’t creates incentives for scientists to do attention-grabbing but whether [Trump will] face a deadly outbreak during his presidency, irreproducible work. The pandemic strengthened those incen- but when.” Based on his actions as a media personality during the tives by prompting a rush of panicked research and promising 2014 Ebola outbreak and as a candidate in the 2016 election, I sug- ambitious scientists global attention. gested that he would fail at diplomacy, close borders, tweet rashly, spread conspiracy theories, ignore experts, and exhibit reckless In March, a small and severely flawed French study sug- self-confidence. And so he did. gested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox BRANDON BELL; MEL D. COLE LEFT: PROTESTERS AT THE MINNEAPOLIS INTERSECTION WHERE GEORGE FLOYD WAS KILLED BY POLICE. RIGHT: PROTESTERS IN MANHATTAN’S WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK IN JUNE. 45

about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soar- who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention cen- ing to record-breaking heights. ters would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot “wartime president,” he merely presided over a culture war, turning stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts public health into yet another politicized cage match. Abetted by at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a supporters in the conservative media, he framed measures that pro- shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that tect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and an armchair polymath would claim to have a “natural ability” at anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the cura- government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to tive potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable “LIBERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public- of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by health officials left their jobs over harassment and threats. blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack populist leaders—Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom— of testing, “I don’t take any responsibility at all.” also fumbled their response to COVID-19. “When you have people elected based on undermining trust in the government, what hap- Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID-19 pandemic. He isn’t pens when trust is what you need the most?” says Sarah Dalglish solely responsible for America’s fiasco, but he is central to it. A of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. studies the political determinants of health. “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,” Ron Klain said. “It moves if the president stands on a table “Trump is president,” she says. “How could it go well?” and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.” T h e co u n t ri e s t h at fared better against COVID-19 didn’t follow a universal playbook. Many used masks widely; New Zealand In the early days of Trump’s presidency, many believed that didn’t. Many tested extensively; Japan didn’t. Many had science- America’s institutions would check his excesses. They have, in part, minded leaders who acted early; Hong Kong didn’t—instead, a but Trump has also corrupted them. The CDC is but his latest grassroots movement compensated for a lax government. Many victim. On February 25, the agency’s respiratory-disease chief, were small islands; not large and continental Germany. Each nation Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of succeeded because it did enough things right. school closures and saying that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems Meanwhile, the United States underperformed across the to have benched the entire agency. The CDC led the way in every board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the template for public-health agencies around the world. But dur- hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit ing the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted the virus’s spread. Twitter amplified Trump’s misleading messages, COVID-19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didn’t which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopen- spend more time scouring for information on Twitter. Even sea- ing the country were shelved for a month while the White House soned health experts underestimated these compounded risks. Yes, released its own uselessly vague plan. having Trump at the helm during a pandemic was worrying, but it was tempting to think that national wealth and technological supe- Again, everyday Americans did more than the White House. riority would save America. “We are a rich country, and we think we By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought can stop any infectious disease because of that,” says Michael Oster- the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental holm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research well-being. Their sacrifice came with an implicit social contract— and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But dollar bills alone that the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an are no match against a virus.” extraordinary, energetic effort to suppress the virus, as did the likes of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the Public-health experts talk wearily about the panic-neglect cycle, bafflement of health experts. “There are instances in history where in which outbreaks trigger waves of attention and funding that humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases,” quickly dissipate once the diseases recede. This time around, the says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center U.S. is already flirting with neglect, before the panic phase is over. for Health Security. “It’s appalling that we in the U.S. have not The virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, includ- summoned that energy around COVID-19.” ing Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After Instead, the U.S. sleepwalked into the worst possible scenario: Arizona’s cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara People suffered all the debilitating effects of a lockdown with few of Christ, the director of the state’s health-services department, said, the benefits. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing “We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we can’t stop living as well.” The virus may beg to differ. 46 SEPTEMBER 2020