The Architects of Racial Injustice Are at It Again
Welcome back to Flux, a twice-weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America.
The one-story adobe Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe sits just down Palace Avenue from where I lived on Martinez Street in elementary school. The former seat of Spain’s colonial administration of the area, it was built in 1610 and is today a national historic landmark, “the oldest extant public building constructed by European settlers in the continental United States,” according to the National Park Service. Growing up in New Mexico, children like me were taught that though we lived in a sparsely-populated state that didn’t join the nation until 1912 as the 47th state, we were older than the Northeast, founded decades before the Pilgrims ever hit Atlantic shores.
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Today, in places like New Mexico, the current reckoning with the racial injustices written into America’s creation and evolution is confounding easy ideas about who is an oppressor and who is oppressed. We live in an era of soaring anti-Latino hate crimes and have a president who routinely insults those with Mexican heritage. And in a state with Latino heritage that long predates the existence of an independent Mexico, Native Americans are demanding reforms to how the Spanish conquistadores who settled and seized their ancestors’ lands are remembered.
In Albuquerque, a statue of the region’s 16th-century provincial governor Juan de Oñate, who was so cruelly violent to Native Americans he was convicted for his actions in Spain, was removed after a chaotic mid-June protest at which a man was shot and where police used stun grenades and chemical irritants on activists. Reforms to police departments in Albuquerque and statewide have also been announced and praised by the state’s governor, including mandatory use of body cameras.
How to build a movement of allies is a question Karla Cornejo Villavicencio considers in a GEN piece on Trump’s Tulsa speech. “I am an immigrant, I was undocumented all my life, and now I am simply out of status. My family is undocumented. Stephen Miller is the architect of every single anti-immigrant policy this Administration has enacted. He is a committed white supremacist, but so far his fixation, his hobby, his raison d’être, has been Latinx immigrants,” she writes. Her take: Miller is seeking to drive a wedge between Black and Latino communities while also amplifying white political discomfort, resentment, and anti-immigrant sentiment into an enduring electoral force.
Driving the point home, Trump today is visiting the border wall for the first time in 2020, where he’ll tout the 200 miles of new wall built to keep out migrants from Mexico and Central America. Of course, only three of those miles were “constructed where no barriers existed before,” points out CNN’s John Harwood.
— Garance Franke-Ruta, Executive Editor, GEN
Vote! If you still can…
It’s primary night, again! New York is voting at last, but I’ll be watching the Kentucky Senate primary with great interest, where State Rep. Charles Booker, an African American former school principal, is squaring off against former Marine and fighter pilot Amy McGrath for the chance to take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November. McGrath burst onto the political scene as part of a wave of women running in the first election after Hillary Clinton’s historic bid for the White House, but ultimately lost her 2018 race for a House seat in a solidly Republican district. For GEN, Lexi Pandell looked at McGrath’s Senate campaign and Booker’s late surge as part of the new wave of African American men seeking Senate seats in the South that’s gaining momentum amid the new civil rights uprising.
Also of great interest is the New York congressional campaign of Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal who is seeking to oust weakened 16-term incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel in the Bronx and New York suburbs in an AOC-style challenge from the left. Bowman, who backs calls to defund the police, wrote way back in early March about his experiences under New York Mayor Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy, “I got to experience the horrors and the trauma of how his police department treated people like me.”
Flux populi: Farewell to all girlbosses
The gap between everything that successful men took for granted and everything that ambitious women wanted became outrageous tinder for the girlboss’s fire. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run was the match that lit the flame — it was a total girlboss move to run again after losing the primary to Obama in 2008.
The white girlboss, and so many of them were white, sat at the unique intersection of oppression and privilege. She saw gender inequity everywhere she looked; this gave her something to wage war against. Racial inequity was never really on her radar. That was someone else’s problem to solve.
Leigh Stein, “The End of the Girlboss is Here” (GEN)
One more thing…
Comedian Sarah Cooper is a national treasure, and if you haven’t yet experienced her satirical Donald Trump lip-syncing performances, her video of the president’s pre-Tulsa rally comments is perfection. “Nobody’s even heard of numbers like this. And we expect to have, you know, it’s like a record-setting crowd. We’ve never had an empty seat and we certainly won’t in Oklahoma,” Cooper-as-Trump says in the clip.
In the end, 6,600 people attended the Tulsa rally, instead of the nearly 100,000 Trump said he was expecting, leaving an empty outdoor stage for overflow attendees. This is a pretty good metric these days for the extent to which Trump’s promises jibe with the reality he delivers.
