"On Louisville, Breonna Taylor, and Muhammad Ali."

Photo credit: The Nation.

From one of the few sportswriters capable of mattering, talking straight.  

On Louisville, Breonna Taylor, and Muhammad Ali, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Louisville is hallowed ground, the birthplace of Muhammad Ali. It will now, thanks to Daniel Cameron, be also remembered as the home of an unspeakable injustice.

 ... If struggle is truly the secret of joy, then I’ll repeat: It felt like hallowed ground.

Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky Attorney General, has desecrated this hallowed ground. In his ambition to remain a Republican rising star, mentored by McConnell and beloved by Trump, he chose his career over justice and made the decision to use Breonna Taylor’s body as a stepping stone to reach even greater heights ... but to me this is less about the color of Cameron’s skin than a naked and grotesque expression of what it takes to rise in GOP circles: You protect the cops, you blame the dead, and you assert, no matter the cost, that Black lives—particularly the lives of Black women—simply do not matter. 

 For the people of Louisville, Breonna Taylor’s name will not be forgotten as surely as Muhammad Ali’s. Maybe someday people will walk Breonna Taylor Boulevard in downtown Louisville and speak her name not merely as a tragedy but as a turning point towards true justice. Daniel Cameron’s name, if remembered at all, will be thought of like the person who stole young Cassius Clay’s bicycle, which inspired the 12-year-old Clay to take up boxing. He will be the anonymous, ignofarm-near-me/">minious cudgel of immorality whose blows didn’t put the people of Louisville down for the count, but propelled them to rise off the mat.

Brave & Strong.

Sportswriter Royce Young posted this on Twitter.

The prelude: "First question for (San Antonio Spurs coach) Gregg Popovich today was about Marco Belinelli's status for the game against the Grizzlies. This was his answer."

"Our number one priority as far as the country and society is concerned is racial justice, actually racial injustice that exists in our country and trying to make everything just for all people. Just as a reminder, in this world a lot of people really do not understand the breadth and depth of this horrific situation that Black people have been in for so long. And I just want to give you one example. We're all doing this on our gamedays as we find an opportunity, just so people understand how gross we have been. Not just now, but in the past. It didn't just happen; it's been this way for hundreds of years. As an example: Today, 120 years ago in North Carolina a constitutional amendment was approved and what it did was it established a literacy test for Black people that they had to pass before they could vote. White people did not have the same literacy test and it was so gross that they made a rule that if you had a relative before 1863 that had voted, and you're still illiterate now, you can vote. So that meant White people could vote if they had a relative before 1863 who voted. Well, Black people were enslaved and didn't have any relatives before 1863 who voted. So they were disenfranchised.

"There was a former Confederate officer, William Guthrie, who on the eve of the election made a statement and basically said ... this was very necessary to protect the White women, that they can't go out in the streets and don't feel safe when they're alone. We have to keep the quote-unquote colored people away from them. So he emphasized this just on the eve of the election , to make sure that their way would be the rule that people had to live under. This sort of activity went on over and over and over again, for all this time. And again, it's about education and culture, and none of us knew these kinds of things, none of us were taught these things. Black, Brown, Asian, Native American -- it doesn't matter, none of us were taught these things. Hopefully if people understand how gross this situation really is and how long it's been this gross , maybe we can make some headway.

Marco Belinelli is out tonight."

Why 'destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea -- also, the Growth Ponzi Scheme revisited.

Exhibit 456-90-2020 in our series, "Nothing In America Makes Sense."

'Destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea, by Bonnie Kristian (The Week)

The Democrats, says President Trump, are going to destroy the suburbs ... so what, exactly, does destroying the suburbs entail?

Think: zoning.

Taken at face value, this is a bizarre policy choice for the Republican Party, both in its pre-2016 social conservatism and free-marketism and in its post-2016 Trumpian populism. Upzoning — allowing construction of buildings with more units or more nonresidential units than was previously permitted in a given area — seems like it should fit the GOP agenda.

It's a move toward greater economic freedom and stronger property rights. It can lower housing prices and make homeownership more accessible, especially for young couples who struggle to afford both home and kids. (A brief dig through the archives of the conservative Heritage Foundation turns up years of praise for Houston's unusual lack of zoning restrictions on exactly these grounds, and The American Conservative regularly publishes arguments for upzoning, including advocacy for doing away with single-family zoning altogether.) Also, having a granny flat means you might actually live with your granny, who can pass along familial traditions and help with childcare, a very attractive option amid pandemic. Surely this is the kind of pro-family, even pro-natalist policy Republicans ought to like. Why is Trump railing against it?

Because polls show the suburbs losing interest in Trump.

In those remarks and an even shorter comment on the subject three days prior, Trump singled out an Obama-era rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), which Biden supports and which Trump promised to repeal. That repeal arrived Thursday. The adfarm-near-me/">ministration characterizes it as a strike for freedom, federalism, and family. It is none of those things.

AFFH didn't "force" municipalities to do anything, as some conservatives have alleged. It mainly set conditions on some federal housing and transportation subsidies. (Suburbia is very subsidy-dependent.) It told local governments that to receive cash from Washington, they'd have to meet certain requirements, most notably ending single-family zoning. But single-family zoning isn't the creature of local self-governance Trump suggests. It originated significantly because of a previous set of conditions for different federal subsidies — subsidies, in fact, introduced by the archetypical Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministration: the New Deal-era White House of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We've been talking about suburban subsidies for as long as the NA Confidential blog has existed. Take it away, Charles Marohn.

"[S]ingle-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt adfarm-near-me/">ministration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance," explains Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, a new urbanism advocacy organization. "So, [AFFH said,] suburban governments, you won't get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then," he continues. "And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?"

It makes no sense.

Ah, but there's even more to it.

In addition to being heavily subsidized in both construction and ongoing maintenance, much of suburbia was shaped by 20th-century housing and highway policies that implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly functioned to segregate American homes. "White flight" was not merely an organic movement of private prejudice and social fashion. It was in no small part engineered by federal policies, as Richard Rothstein has meticulously documented in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

"To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford," Rothstein writes. Some of this was classism, he notes, but some of it was done with "open racial intent."

This, might we suggest, is the underlying reason for the suburb hubbub.

The Obama adfarm-near-me/">ministration's AFFH rule focused on the residue of that deliberate segregation, and Trump's critique of it hasn't untangled the issue of federal manipulation of local policies from the issue of racist zoning. That makes it plausible to see his talk of single-family zoning as the bastion of suburban integrity as implicitly part of an older tradition of state-enforced racism. It's not unreasonable to wonder if being "invaded by negroes" is what Trump means when he deplores watching a "beautiful suburb ... go to hell."

If you have not previously read Marohn's articles about the Growth Ponzi Scheme, as published at Strong Towns, then now is the ideal time.

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 1

The underpinnings of the current financial crisis lie in a living arrangement—the American pattern of development—that does not financially support itself. 

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 2

If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth. 

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 3

Our development pattern is not productive enough to sustain itself.

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 4

Our national economy is "all in" on the suburban experiment. We cannot sustain the trajectory we are on, but we've gone too far down the path to turn back.

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 5 (finale)

How did we build such an amazing place before the home mortgage interest deduction? How did we accomplish this before zoning? What created this place before we had state and federal subsidies of local water and sewer systems?

We began writing about the Growth Ponzi Scheme in 2011 with a prominent series of articles that outlined the way American cities, towns and neighborhoods were growing themselves into insolvency.  Since then, the Growth Ponzi Scheme has been discussed in numerous publications. The term, as we've defined it, continues to be widely used and cited.

"The United States of America is, by its very nature, anti-Black."

Some will be tempted to stop reading after the first three paragraphs. This would be shortsighted. Get past the discomfort, and immerse yourself in the author's point.

Oh, and wear your mask when you're out in public.

Let It Burn, by Robert Jones, Jr. (The Paris Review)

In 2017, I wrote an essay titled “I Don’t Give a Fuck about Justine Damond,” which outlined my perspective on Ms. Damond’s death at the hands of Mohamed Noor, a Minneapolis police officer who also happened to be Somali American and Muslim. My thesis was this: How can I be concerned about a white woman shot and killed by a police officer when there are countless Black people who suffered that fate to the stunning silence and antipathy of the vast majority of white American populace?

The essay was met with the characteristic outrage from white people (but not only white people). They accused me of disrespecting Damond’s memory and being inconsiderate of her family’s feelings. I was also accused of being a hypocrite for not condemning the actions of the cop as I had in previous incidents involving Black victims. Even some of the people closest to me believed that I had crossed a line and thought that I had been too harsh in my assessment and should if not show reverence then certainly remain silent on the matter.

But I could do neither, not with the blood of Black people flowing endlessly in the streets. I insisted that there was a purpose to my position. I had predicted that the outcome of Damond’s death would be unique and that, unlike in the numerous cases in which the murder of a Black person by state agents was considered “justified” and the agents themselves regarded as valiant, the officer who killed Damond wouldn’t have access to the protections or rationalizations that his white compatriots had always been given.

And I was correct.

Without so much as a raised pitchfork, Noor was fired, abandoned by a union that defends even the most egregious actions of its officers. He was swiftly charged, swiftly convicted, and swiftly sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison. And Damond’s family was swiftly compensated, settling for a hefty $20 million from the city of Minneapolis, not at the expense of police forces but at the expense of the taxpayers.

If we are to accept that this is what justice looks like in a penal and punitive nation like the United States of America, the question, for me, is then, why isn’t it applied universally? Why did it take the threat of burning the entire country to ash before the forces of “law and order” would arrest and charge the non-Black (and that’s important to note) police officers caught on camera murdering George Floyd, a Black man? Why are the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, inside her own home in Louisville, Kentucky, still free to murder another day? Police kill Black people at 2.5 times the rate they kill white people. In 2015, for example, more than a hundred unarmed Black people were killed by police, and only four cops were convicted of any crime in those cases. Experts believe police kill Black people at an even higher rate, but since the nation keeps such spotty records, perhaps intentionally, it’s difficult to grasp and easy for some people to dismiss the magnitude.

The answer to these questions is obvious and yet it’s an answer that this country—from the time it was just a patchwork of greedy and insatiable Europeans who pillaged and plundered the unsuspecting Indigenous people of this land until today—refuses to confront:

The United States of America is, by its very nature, anti-Black ...