Gary Younge: "Black skin in a game where the odds are stacked against it."

I'm sad to see Gary Younge move back to the UK. For as long as I can recall reading The Guardian on line, his byline has been an indication of depth and quality.

Younge's farewell is not easy reading.

However, it is required reading.

Gary Younge: Farewell to America at The Guardian

... This is the summer I will leave America, after 12 years as a foreign correspondent, and return to London. My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney.

But while the events of the last few years did not prompt the decision to come back, they do make me relieved that the decision had already been made. It is why I have not once had second thoughts. If I had to pick a summer to leave, this would be the one. Another season of black parents grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless anchors opining. Another season when America has to be reminded that black lives matter because black deaths at the hands of the state have been accepted as routine for so long. A summer ripe for rage.

"Many conservative Americans have seen their livelihoods threatened by the very neoliberal economics their party seeks to extend."

See: Chickens, Colonel Sanders, et al.

The world as seen by Republicans, in a land of myth and amnesia; US conservatives are increasingly keen to interpret their country's woes primarily in terms of threats from abroad, by Gary Younge (Guardian)

... But while liberals are more likely to see the roots of this crisis as domestic – growing economic inequalities, religious zealotry, corporatisation of media and politics – conservatives are increasingly keen to perceive the primary threat as external: immigrants, Islam, foreigners and foreign trade.