This is deadly earnest stuff, pitched like a sermon: in a lesser writer’s hands it might tilt toward the sentimental. But in Baldwin’s voice (which, by that point in his career, was nearly the same in talking as it was in writing), it is graceful, perennially relevant, and true. These days, when even the word “empathy” sounds to some like the language of stuffy social justice activism, the mere mention of race or sexuality only sets off the same dull culture-war script we’ve been playing out for decades. In our general hangover from the whole “Woke Era” (for lack of a better term) — which essentially canonized Baldwin as a kind of guiding shaman/saint — we run the risk of forgetting the pressing racial and sexual issues that era ultimately failed to address. We may be tired of hearing about them; we may resent the proliferating academic vocabularies with which they were often  discussed; but we’re still not free of them. Nor are we free from the insight and genius of James Baldwin himself, who really was one of the most important writers on the intertwined evils of racism and sexual bigotry.

Though really, Baldwin was one of the finest American writers full stop: an excellent novelist and a moral essayist without any peer in the 20th century. He was also an unbelievably complex man: self-loathing and self-indulgent; courageous; jealous; a born performer, who enjoyed his fame, yet remained essentially religious in his sincerity and commitment to civil rights campaigns in America. These were the same paradoxes out of which he penned numerous of the most personal stories and essays of his time — and it’s this picture of Baldwin that Nicholas Boggs’s tremendous new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, gets perfectly right. The key is in the subtitle, A Love Story. Since, at least in Baldwin’s writing, everything always came back to that most easily over-complicated, easily-dismissed, ubiquitous four-letter word.

In pursuit of its subtitle, Boggs’s book divides itself into sections, according to the great male loves of Baldwin’s life. The first — not a sexual relationship, to be clear — spans his early years under the influence of his mentor, the great Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney, whom Baldwin met as a young man in Upper Manhattan. The rest of the book covers several longer periods, in each of which a particular man (generally a bisexual, often married, man) became the focus of Baldwin’s artistic and romantic imagination: first the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, then the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, then the French artist Yoran Cazac. These periods roughly correspond to those passages of time which Baldwin spent in France, in Turkey, and finally, in France again. Indeed, despite his many trips back to America — particularly in the Sixties — Baldwin spent most of his life in relative exile from the United States, bouncing between paramours.

Besides his many smaller love affairs, Baldwin’s greatest romances revolved around vague domestic fantasies about these “mostly heterosexual” men, and the commingled “family” of people he gathered around him: artists like Delaney, friends like Mary Painter, or personal assistants like David Leeming, Baldwin’s eventual biographer. Boggs is exhaustive in his attempts to tie these romantic pursuits — along with Baldwin’s developing sense of himself as a black, gay man in a time of absolute upheaval around American society’s relationship to those identities — into the progression of his novels, from Go Tell it On the Mountain (1952) to Just Above My Head (1979), and his greatest works of non-fiction, from Notes of a Native Son (1955) to The Devil Finds Work (1976). There is almost nothing in Baldwin’s own books which Boggs can’t trace back to what was happening in the writer’s life as he planned, wrote, and revised these works, sometimes over years.

At times, this gives the reader an insightful look into Baldwin’s actual creative process. Yet Boggs’s biographical literary-critical method verges on becoming a vice, hewing pretty closely to the most clichéd ideals of writing-as-therapy, sometimes leaving little room for the possibility that Baldwin’s creations might have come from a deeper imaginative space, and not just from an attempt to achieve personal catharsis. Still, if it is a vice, it’s the only one, in what is otherwise a remarkable book of social and personal history. Some passages are so vividly rendered, Boggs manages to do the near-impossible, making one of the most tumultuous times in American history — the crest of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and 1964 — seem furiously present-tense and unpredictable. This is especially true of the episode encompassing Baldwin’s near-breakdown, while trying to stage his first play, Blues for Mister Charlie, with Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York. Baldwin’s unbelievable levels of stress make sense, when one realizes he had only recently traveled to a violently desegregating South, afterwards organizing his infamous meeting with Robert Kennedy, to get more explicit support for civil rights campaigners. He had also just participated in the March on Washington, where his scheduled speech was pulled, partially due to Baldwin’s reputation as a known homosexual.

Given his intimate relationships with fellows artists like Lena Horne, Marlon Brando, and Lorraine Hansberry — as well as his his brief friendships with civil rights leaders like Malcolm X, Medger Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael — it’s no surprise that a biography of Baldwin also doubles as a social history of American culture from the Forties to the Seventies. It reveals him as one of his own time’s greatest and sharpest moral voices — a man writing with unforgiving clarity about the inner struggles of black Americans and sexual minorities, not to mention the moral rot of a white America that couldn’t let go of its racial divisions (nor its deep psychosexual angst about those divisions, something Baldwin insisted was irrevocably intertwined with the roots of white supremacy). And at a certain point his expatriate exile and homosexuality both left him nearly adjunct to the newly forming canon of black American art.

Yet what remains most inspiring and influential in Baldwin’s writing is how he recognized, from the start, that the struggle for freedom for Black America (and White America, too, in the end), was inseparable from his own search for personal freedom, for the freedom to create himself. Like his close friend (and fellow genius) Nina Simone, the righteous rage which radiated out from his words was an undeniable personal rage, not just a greater, symbolic one. For Baldwin, the need to be free — free as a gay man, and as a black man — in a society set up to punish him for being either, was no different from the call for greater freedom across America, or across the globe. Yet for him the American Dream was a fairly monstrous myth, a myth of American innocence: one in which the country’s vision of freedom always came at the expense of the enslaved and the persecuted. Real freedom would require those who profited the most from the arrangement — white Americans — to let go of their innocence, to realize the horrors which had been required to create that naïve Dream.

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That is, seriously grappling with American racism would mean understanding just how much it had to do with sexual fear and jealousy (as all racism ultimately does). But what was clear to Baldwin — one of his darkest but most important insights — was that there is no greater nightmare than America’s perennial wish to believe in that innocence. As he stated many times over, the creation of “white” as a category not only built a framework excluding black people from free society, it corroded the souls of white Americans, too — by only ever allowing them to be white. Reducing their lives and identities, to arbitrary ideals of racial purity, which would have to be defended (no matter how absurd, or immoral) in order to preserve the institution of slavery. For Baldwin, the restoration of abused black Americans, after centuries of horrors, would mean getting to the bottom of the historical disaster that was “whiteness” — which had left white Americans as confined to that destructive racial category as their black compatriots were to theirs.

Of course, there is a kind of fatalism that crops up, when we consider just how long this historical situation went on, how much it still defines American society. Baldwin himself spent much of his career growing weary and pessimistic about the hope for this kind of large-scale change. There are echoes of his later stance — his sadness about how little could be done to really achieve equality for black Americans and sexual minorities — in the general pessimism which has plagued so many social justice movements this century. Indeed, there is still widespread exhaustion with how much still has to be done, not least in combating poverty, or dismantling America’s hellish prison system (not to mention the kinds of outright white supremacist rhetoric and sexual bigotry which the MAGA movement has been happy to popularize again, even ironically). Across the 2010s and into the early 2020s, this pessimism tended to manifest as a directionless obsession with guilt, atonement, and the moral surveillance of other people — something our social media panopticons make too easy. Yet puritanical strains of social justice campaigning simply run counter to reality: freedom can’t be achieved by defining and enforcing any particular creed or morality. In order to be free, people must, as the philosopher Hegel once said of Shakespeare’s characters, be able to become “free artists of themselves” — a phrase which fits Baldwin’s own personal mission of freedom perfectly.

Baldwin was adamant, always, that though the world may be broken, though pessimism may in fact be realistic, people still always have a choice to love. We may call that trite, or dismiss it as sentimental. We may complain about how unrealistic it is, or about how many complicated political issues there are that get in the way of ostensibly simple ideals like love and peace and, yes, empathy. Yet if we don’t accept the possibility that love is always a choice — vulnerability, difficulty, pain be damned— then we doom ourselves (and each other) to hate, violence, ignorance, and evil. In a way, it’s exactly as simple as this. A lot of political rhetoric is only designed to make it seem ridiculous compared to, say, the realpolitik of immigration or law enforcement (as if human morality and spirituality could ever be reduced to a political argument). But if there is any lesson to be taken from James Baldwin’s life and work, it is that no matter how fatalistic we are, no matter how “realistic” we may wish to be, the only things that matter in the end are the things we do out of love. And that real human freedom would be the highest possible expression of that love.

But Ty Pinkins, a slim and energetic African-American lawyer, decided to challenge the GOP incumbent for a US Senate seat anyway. As the 50-year-old told me of his decision to take on Roger Wicker, “Don’t be afraid to walk in the tall grass. That’s how I started.”

Born to an unwed 15-year-old mother, Pinkins chopped cotton as a boy to help feed his family, a fate David Rushing, chair of the Sunflower County Democratic Party, says is typical of poor boys from the Mississippi Delta. “We don’t have many gutters in Mississippi,” explains Rushing, “but we have a lot of ditches.” For Pinkins, then, the tall grass was the only route out of that Delta ditch.

The first in his family to graduate high school, he struggled to pay for college. So, Pinkins left Mississippi for the tall grass of the US Army.

A 21-year military career gave him a passport full of stamps, three combat tours, a Bronze Star, and a job in the White House. After retirement, Pinkins earned not one but two law degrees from Georgetown University. He turned down the big money of a Washington law firm for the Delta. 

Back in his hometown, Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Pinkins published a memoir, 23 Miles and Running, and litigated hundreds of civil cases for the underprivileged. In 2021, he made national news by filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of fired black farm labourers, who had been replaced by white South Africans. Filing suit and testifying before Congress on the issue, he forced a settlement. 

Taking note was Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman, Bennie Thompson. The chair of the January 6 Select Committee tapped Pinkins to run for the local school board. By the time Pinkins learned of Thompson’s desire, he had already publicly declared his candidacy for the senate seat. “The biggest problems are federal issues,” he tells me. “That’s what I’m interested in. Our state is last in everything that is good and first in everything that is bad.”

In theory, Thompson and state Democratic chair Cheikh Taylor promised Pinkins, the only Democrat to announce for the race, their party’s full support. But though he knew the contest would be an uphill struggle, Pinkins never expected a major hurdle would be Bennie Thompson — his own Congressman and the very politician to first have noticed his talents.

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At first, his phone calls asking for endorsements went unanswered. Then, when his phone did ring, respondents attacked, apparently upset that Pinkins’ hadn’t followed Thompson’s advice and run for his local school board. As Will Colom, a prominent black Mississippi attorney and party donor allegedly told him: “You will lose. You are a loser. And you will always be a loser.” A young Mississippi state representative also phoned. “Who the hell do you think you are, getting your name on the ballot?” they yelled. “You need to go through us gatekeepers.”

Gatekeeper. The term shocked Pinkins. Party insiders refused to support him simply because, as he tells me, “I didn’t ask anyone, ‘can I please run?’” The candidate’s astonishment went beyond personal ambition. With its pungent whiff of machine politics, what Pinkins calls Mississippi’s “Gatekeeper Syndrome” is the very problem “preventing our democracy at the state level from blossoming.”  

Not that everyone is surprised. When I asked Ralph Eubanks about gatekeeping he laughed. As the academic and writer puts it: “Welcome to poor ole beat down Mississippi.” To Eubanks, Gatekeeper Syndrome reflects the “way the Democrats think about their own state. It is learned helplessness. There are so many things that are broken that can’t be fixed that many just give up.” 

“Giving up” would oblige Democratic elites to abandon their prerogatives in favour of building a competitive party. So to safeguard their position, Bennie Thompson and his colleagues have adapted the strategy of that classic wheeler-dealer: Richard Daley. Just like Chicago, Eubanks tells me, Mississippi is a place where you “have to work your way up through the system or you are jumping the line.” He adds: “It’s not healthy at all because it stops someone who has talent and drive with an inspiring backstory. You’d think ‘let’s get behind the brother and help him out’ but that’s not happening.”  

From the outside, Mississippi is ruby red. Outsiders assume that Democrats like Pinkins have zero chance. But with an African-American population of 40%, it’s the blackest state in the union. A reliable Democratic bloc, the African-American vote means Democrats can win with high black turnout and a quarter of white ballots. In 2023, Brandon Presley used that formula to come within 26,619 votes of the governor’s mansion.  

White and black Mississippi Democrats can, and have, run competitive statewide races. But the problem isn’t at the top of the ballot. The issue, as Pinkins and others point out, are those gatekeepers, those machine politicians who think Mississippi’s Democratic Party belongs to them and them alone. No less important, gatekeeping means the bottom of the ballot stays empty. 

In the same cycle as Presley’s 2023 near-miss, there were contests for all 122 of Mississippi’s statehouse seats. Yet in nearly half of contests, Democrats failed to field a candidate, a phenomenon that affects up-ticket races too. As Michele Hornish, the executive director of the Every State Blue campaign group explains, simply fielding a state representative candidate gives the top of the ticket a 1.5% vote boost. Running candidates across the ballot is also a barometer of a party’s grassroots health. As Scott Kleeb, a lead organiser with Rural Americans for Harris-Walz, admits: “For the last several decades Democrats have not been building at the local, county, and state level,” especially in rural states like Mississippi. Of the nation’s 3,143 counties, Kleeb says that Democrats have a chair in just 300. 

To be fair, an increasing number of Democrats are prodding the system to change.

One example is Rickey Cole, a two-time Mississippi Democratic state chair and Pinkins’ campaign manager. Cole always intended to run a senate race while also re-building the state party’s grassroots. 

Cole’s strategy was to organise Mississippi’s 82 counties and appoint a campaign leader in all 1,762 precincts. From there, Cole says, it’s “just math.” In 2020, after all, some 400,000 registered Mississippi Democrats failed to vote. This year, Cole needs to mobilise around 178,000. Once the party got organised, the path to higher Democratic turnout was easy. “In rural Mississippi,” Cole explains, “if you provide the matriarch of the family a list of folks who are sporadic voters, they can get to them.” 

As Kleeb warns, moreover, this comprehensive approach is the only viable path to a Democratic revival in conservative redoubts like Mississippi. “Institutions matter,” he says. “We can’t go from candidate to candidate. Every campaign can’t build an airplane from scratch every four years.” 

But instead of endorsements and campaign cash, all Pinkins got was a cold shoulder. Mississippi’s African-American leaders — notably Mike Espy — refused even to meet, much less endorse. Appeals to the Congressional Black Caucus, Black Economic Alliance, BlackPAC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Dirt Road Democrats all went unanswered too. 

Behind it all was Pinkins’ former admirer: Bennie Thompson. 

Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman is the political kingpin of the Delta, and the state’s black political establishment. Thompson earned national attention as chair of the January 6 Select Committee, but at home he squelches democracy as Mississippi’s lead gatekeeper. Pinkins tells me that “fear of Bennie Thompson” has resulted in only three of Mississippi’s African-American state senators and representatives endorsing him. Others supposedly tell him: “I can’t host a fundraiser for you because of Bennie Thompson.” 

All the same, Pinkins persevered, and nearly two years on from his initial snub finally bagged a meeting with Thompson in May 2024. Much like their earlier interaction, Thompson was kind, heaping praise on Pinkins and promising his full support. “I commit to you,” he apparently said. “I will make a sizeable contribution to your campaign.” 

Yet once again, Pinkins would soon find this apparent warmth vanish, like dew in the Delta sun.  

Just days after their apparent reconciliation, the duo attended the Democratic State Convention. In an auditorium full of the state’s leading liberals, Pinkins awaited his promised endorsement. Instead, Thompson praised the white Brandon Presley as his “brother” and then promptly sat down. Audience members turned to Pinkins in astonishment. In July this year, at another Democratic gala, Thompson pulled the same stunt. Pinkins understood “that my own Congressman was clearly refusing to publicly support my candidacy.” 

And in late August, at the Democratic National Convention, Bennie Thompson took his gatekeeping public. At a Mississippi state delegation breakfast, Thompson supposedly told 100-or-so party leaders that “we need to support our candidates but some of them need to earn it. He needs to work for the support. He doesn’t get to walk up to the head of the table and think he’s going to get our support.” The Congressman never mentioned Pinkins by name — but then again he didn’t need to.

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Pinkins, for his part, has endured Thompson’s slights with grace, describing them as “the Congressman’s prerogative.”  Not that he’s sat on his hands either, instead throwing himself into grassroots campaigning. Gradually, perhaps, Mississippians have understood he’s a different sort of candidate from the gatekeeper stereotype, not least in terms of race. 

In the Deep South, most African-Americans run in majority-minority districts, developing little experience wooing white voters. Pinkins, by contrast, had spent two decades in the military, meeting civilians and leading soldiers from every walk of life. And like Georgia or North Carolina, Mississippi’s demography is changing. Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s scandal-plagued GOP nominee for governor, won his race for lieutenant governor on the backs of white votes. He may bring pizza to a porn shop, but he also reveals that white voters in 2024 are not what they were in 1965. He also shows that Southern whites are more open to voting for black candidates. For their part, Cole and Pinkins have eyed white Yankee transplants to Mississippi’s Memphis suburbs, as well as snowbirds, soldiers, and shipbuilders in towns like Pascagoula. In soliciting white votes, alongside the African-American base, Pinkins says he’s learnt that most voters crave the same thing. “They want someone they can trust,” he says. “They are so tired of politicians doing the same old things. We end that by meeting voters face-to-face.” Pinkins adds that Mississippians of all races are interested in a Delta boy like him “doing something unorthodox.”

More than that, meanwhile, Pinkins feels a moral obligation to take on people like Bennie Thompson. “Walking in the tall grass,” he says, “is doing what the average Mississippian can’t afford to do,People want politicians to have moral courage. They wonder: ‘Do you have the courage to the hard right or the easy wrong?’” 

By going public about Thompson’s behaviour, Pinkins believes he is doing that hard right. Perhaps. But there’s still a way to go until the gatekeepers are vanquished. As Pinkins explains, one issue are those black Mississippian Democrats still unwilling to cause civil rights legend John Lewis called “good trouble”.

“There are a select few black men who, because of Gatekeeper Syndrome, are stopping progress in Mississippi at the federal and state level,” he says, after a heavy sigh. “Their reluctance to go against Bennie Thompson is holding back black Mississippians. We have a lot of officeholders who prioritise their personal power over the people’s interest.

At this point, Pinkins stops and exhales, before starting again. “We need to have the conversation. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” 

All the while, Cole and Pinkins believe their efforts will boost Democratic changes in a 2026 senate race against a weak GOP incumbent. They’re also looking ahead to Brandon Presley’s widely anticipated 2027 race for governor. But those efforts will be undone if Mississippi’s gatekeepers shoo talented candidates like Ty Pinkins from the ballot.

As for the former cotton chopper, David Rushing is clear. “He has my unequivocal support. He’s the real deal. He is not blowing smoke. I just admire him. He’s a bright star, and the future of the party if he doesn’t get frustrated by all this mess.”

But the tall grass is where Pinkins feels most comfortable. Like his own life, he sees it as the only way for Mississippi to move forward.

The “soaring environmental rhetoric of the state’s affluent, largely white technocratic leadership”, she concludes, is “deepening the state’s shameful legacy of racial injustice”. Certainly, the impact is stark. California now suffers the nation’s worst cost-adjusted poverty rate; and according to the United Way of California, more than 30% of California residents lack sufficient income to meet basic costs of living, even after accounting for public assistance programmes. Those struggling families include half of Latino and 40% of black residents.

There are two main factors driving this “new Green Jim Crow era”. The first, and most obvious, is California’s energy policy, which has made the state’s electricity and gas prices the highest on the mainland, with electricity prices 50% above the national average and gasoline costs that exceed even import-reliant Hawaii in the centre of the Pacific Ocean.

This surge in prices derives from the state’s obsession — shared by the ruling tech oligarchs — with renewable energy and the elimination of fossil fuels. Yet as a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report has shown, over-reliance on renewables is costly, because it requires the production of massive (and environmentally unfriendly) battery-storage capacity — the price of which is invariably passed on to the taxpayer.

This is not bad news for the tech oligarchs, who have been prominent among those profiting from “clean energy” investments. But many other Californians, primarily those in the less temperate interior, find themselves falling into energy poverty or are dependent on state subsidies that raise electricity prices for businesses and the middle class. Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43% more of their household incomes on energy than white households. Last year, more than 4 million households in California (30% of the total) experienced energy poverty.

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These policies have also had the secondary effect of driving out many of the blue-collar industries — manufacturing, construction, energy — that have traditionally employed ambitious, upwardly mobile minority families. While the small, insulated, post-industrial urban elite bloats up on cash and stokes its virtue, over the past decade California has lost 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs, more than twice as many as any other state.

This attrition reflects in part the torpor of the state’s industrial sector; California now sits in the bottom half of states in manufacturing-sector employment growth, ranking 44th last year, easily outpaced by competitors such as Nevada, Kentucky, Michigan and Florida. Even without adjusting for costs, no Californian city ranks in the US top ten in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs, but four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom ten.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that California’s largest economic pogrom is directed at the state’s most important energy industry: gas and oil development. Two years ago, Governor Newsom — who has been described as “California’s champion virtue signaler” — announced plans to shut the entire industry down. His latest decree, announced in April, confirmed his intention to phase out oil extraction. Perhaps it could be considered a noble campaign, if it weren’t for the fact that California chooses instead to import its oil from such enlightened states as Saudi Arabia.

And while this shift will not cause much pain in Malibu or Menlo Park, where the wealthy can continue to tool around in their BMWs, in Bakersfield, where the industry is centered, or around the coastal refineries, the impact could be catastrophic. According to a study by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, these dictates threaten over 366,000 high-paying, largely blue-collar jobs — roughly half of which are held by people of colour.   

Yet perhaps inflated housing costs constitute the cruelest blow dealt by the Greens to the state’s middle and working class. As part of its climate policy, California strives to force development into transit-dependent dense neighbourhoods, a policy that has raised prices and ire in mostly minority working-class communities. At the same time, the state and the Green lobby has worked overtime, often in alliance with well-funded green groups, to stop or curtail development along the urban fringe, where land prices and regulatory costs tend to be somewhat less extreme. Some developments, like the Tejon Ranch north of Los Angeles, have been delayed for three decades.

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These and other restrictions have slowed housing growth in the state. During 2020, when national house construction was increasing 6.1% from 2019, California’s rate was down 3.7%, according to Census Bureau data. As a result, for more than half of renters in California, housing costs exceed 30% of household income, the traditional definition of unaffordability. And nearly 70% of all state households with unaffordable housing costs are people of colour.

These conditions explain why Californians are leaving; an exodus which is particularly notable among minorities. California may have the most “enlightened” policies for people of colour, but they are still leaving the state for less “progressive” states, such as Texas. San Francisco’s African-American community has declined from one in seven in 1970 to barely one in twenty today, with most now ensconced in public housing.

Even the foreign-born — the group that has transformed California over the past few decades — are staying away. An analysis of Census data by demographer Wendell Cox shows that the foreign-born population is actually declining in Los Angeles, fading in the Bay Area while growing by as much as 30% in rival cities like Dallas.

Is there any chance that these patterns can be reversed within the state? I suspect we are about to find out. Hernandez has filed a lawsuit with 200 civil rights leaders alleging that the California Air Resources Board, the supreme architect of climate policies, adopts policies essentially discriminatory towards minorities. “CARB,” the group wrote to the agency at the end of last year, “wilfully elected to increase housing costs and make it more difficult for members of our communities to close the wealth gap”.

Of course, the plaintiffs face an uphill fight in the progressive-dominated California judiciary. Even with strong support from leading minority activists, her suit has received virtually no coverage from the state’s mainstream media, which has become largely an amplifier of green agitation.

But outside the media bubble there are clear signs of growing dissent. Roughly half of Latinos, according to the most recent polls, favour the recall of the state’s eco-Governor Gavin Newsom. Recently Latino voting rights advocates openly criticised the efforts by the Sierra Club — a leading environmental organisation — to “phase out” affordable gas-powered cars. The rules, they suggest, are designed instead to make it possible for “our rich neighbors in the next town to charge their Teslas and run their air conditioners on hot days but make it unaffordable to use ours”.

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Ultimately, the Greens will have to confront such criticism. Some may seek a way out by shoving the displaced working class into permanent dependency with the introduction of a universal basic income. This could allow the state to reduce energy consumption— but comes with an eye-watering price tag. The Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transit Commission recently proposed a $205 billion statewide universal basic income program, but that only covers a $500 monthly payment to all households — a pitiable amount in a state where rents average $1500 a month .

Meanwhile, Hernandez is calling for “climate equity”, where the rich, rather than the poor, pay the biggest price. After all, wealthy neighbourhoods generate up to fifteen times more greenhouse gas emissions than average and lower-income ones.

What’s certain is that to succeed over time, in California and elsewhere, environmental policy must not sacrifice what Michael Shellenberger has described as “the goal of universal prosperity”. Environmentalists need to win over the population not by terrorising them but by showing that we can protect nature without stomping out human aspirations. If minorities are able to force the green establishment to confront the economic implications of their policies, that might be a start.

Rather than celebrate it, an angry white mob descended upon the city and committed what in any other context would be remembered as ethnic cleansing. Entire city blocks were burned to the ground and at least 300 black residents murdered; the exact numbers may never be determined.

This weekend, 99 years later, angry mobs were on the streets again, as the United States rose up in protest against the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black American, by Derek Chauvin, a police officer.

These two moments, nearly a century apart, demonstrate an enduring reality for black Americans. We are consistently told that we must stop our own oppression, and do so in a way that is acceptable and not too jarring for the rest of society. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Dress, talk and act properly. If you must protest, do so in the most peaceful, least disruptive way possible (which is not at all how protests work). And even then, after black Americans employ all these peaceful forms of protest and self-empowerment, they are still met with opposition from angry white Americans who oppose changes to the status quo.

Sometimes, this opposition has been blatant and direct, ranging from the mobs that descended upon Tulsa in 1921, to the white supremacists at Charlottesville in 2017 who were heralded as “very fine people” by President Trump — despite their killing an innocent anti-racism activist and injuring many more.

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At other times, the opposition to black equality has been faceless. I’m thinking of the Jim Crow laws of the American south which legalised discrimination for most of the 20^th century, as well as also official government policies such as redlining — which deny African Americans home mortgages in more affluent or white neighborhoods, as marked by literal red lines drawn on city maps. These latter policies ensured that wealthy black communities like the one in the Greenwood District would be much harder to create and that black wealth would be only a fraction of white wealth for the average American household.

Throughout American history, black America has had the deck stacked against it. Black Americans have, even so, attempted to effect change, or simply fit in with our white neighbours and colleagues, in ways that were deemed acceptable (polite, peaceful, not too disruptive or uncomfortable) by the wider society. But even when we do everything that would seem necessary to gain acceptance – talk softly and in “proper” English, obtain education and professional success, obey the rules to a fault – these are not defences against arbitrary oppression or violence.

Acceptability did not prevent noted Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (a truly respectable gentleman for whom I once worked) from being suspected of “breaking in” to his own house in 2009 and then being arrested for “disorderly conduct” for complaining too loudly about the situation. Nor did achieving the highest office in the land protect the new black President of the United States, who called the arrest “stupid” and was accused of not speaking in a way that was “becoming” or “appropriate” for the president (a standard that somehow stopped being enforced once Obama left office). Fame and success did not protect football players such as Colin Kaepernick, who was blackballed and singled out for kneeling during the national anthem as a polite protest against police brutality; President Trump called on the NFL to say “get that son of a bitch [Reid] off the field right now” to any player choosing to kneel.

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By Michael Tracey

On the same day that George Floyd was murdered, respectability did not protect Chris Cooper — a black, mild-mannered, Harvard-educated former comic book editor and current bird watching enthusiast out for a stroll in New York’s Central Park. After asking a white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), to obey the park’s leash laws, she threatened to call the police and accused the “African American man” (as she emphasises) of threatening her. She not only makes the false accusation to the police while repeatedly pointing out Mr. Cooper’s race, but modulates her voice as if in a panic from some imagined assault. It’s all captured on video. Even when we’ve done everything right, threats, violence and arrest are only one moment away.

Despite being opposed at every turn, black Americans continue trying to work peacefully towards change. And the immediate reaction to George Floyd’s death gave hope that this time would be different; everyone from President Trump to Joe Biden and virtually all major conservative pundits condemned Floyd’s murder and called for swift justice.

But when this did not come, and frustrated that Chauvin and his associates had not been arrested, Minneapolis protestors displayed their anger in a generally peaceful way — by all reports, one broken window and some spray paint inflicted at the precinct where the officers worked on the first night of protests. But, instead of working to de-escalate the situation (or, say, arresting the man who killed a detained civilian on video), police responded by “firing tear gas and flash grenades” into the crowd.

After that, the protests and clashes grew in intensity, spreading across an America where many citizens felt that they had exhausted other options and, well, just felt exhausted in general. Curfews had to be enforced, and by the time Chauvin was eventually arrested, the clashes had taken on a more destructive character.

Despite the way that the unrest is being portrayed by Trump, who has labeled the protestors “thugs” (long a racially-coded term in American discourse), the lion’s share of actual violence — not property damage, but injury and death of people — has been inflicted on the protestors, not caused by them. Multiple motorists have purposely driven into crowds of protestors. This includes New York City police officers who were caught on video accelerating into a group of protestors (NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed protestors for being in the way). Police and National Guard troops opened fire into a crowd in Louisville killing a popular black restaurant owner who may not have even been protesting at the time (the police claim they were responding to gunfire, but their body cameras were turned off, prompting firings and an FBI investigation into the event). In all, several black protestors and bystanders have been killed.

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Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

It is interesting to compare the authorities’ immediately aggressive response to the Floyd protests, even during the first few days of overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration, to the tolerance shown by police to armed, white anti-quarantine protestors when they invaded government buildings at the beginning of May. Echoing his Charlottesville remarks, the President encouraged and lauded those armed white protestors as “very good people”. These Floyd protests, by contrast, are “domestic acts of terror” with Trump threatening to implement martial law, even in defiance of local and state governments. Right-wing Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, has argued that the rioting is worse than the offence and represents “oppression” and “tyranny” being committed by African Americans against society (the idea that African Americans are the true oppressors is a new, almost laughable, spin on a conservative strategy of painting themselves as the victims of progressive and minority agendas).

Unfortunately, as the protests endure and are met with sustained repression, the crowds are becoming more hostile. Outsiders — many of them white — have been responsible for much of that escalation in violence, although the identity of these individuals remains an open question — Right-wing extremists attempting to spark a “race war”; far-Left antifa activists, as President Trump has alleged, or whatever this mysterious and oddly dressed hammer-wielding man represents.

Lost, though, amid all the reports of looting and violence, is the reality that in instances where police officials and officers have shown recognition of the protestors’ grievances and solidarity with their struggles, the encounters have remained peaceful.

America declared its independence to protect “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for its citizens. Most Americans take these rights for granted, and fiercely defend them at the slightest provocation. But while, the anti-lockdown protestors were literally allowed to take up arms to protest the temporary infringements upon their liberty and personal pursuits, black Americans have been attempting to just convince society to fully respect the “life” portion of that phrase. The intensifying uprisings currently gripping the country are the latest, desperate but calculated attempt to be included in the principles that have been granted to others but continue to be denied to some.

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How Trump is fixing the vote

By Justin Webb

In the face of racial injustices, non-violent resistance of the type employed by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other Civil Rights protestors has been idealised as the “right” way for black Americans to protest. Across social media, many people have reminded us that even King recognised that “a riot is the language of the unheard”.  It’s also worth remembering that King’s non-violence did not prevent him from being beaten, jailed and ultimately shot in the face at age 39.

As black America continues to be shot in the face for standing up to racism and oppression, perhaps we’re beginning to recognise the limits of passive protest, as did America’s founders. In the words of black labour leader A Philip Randolph, an architect of Dr King’s March on Washington, “Freedom is never granted: It is won. Justice is never given: It is exacted.”

And the protests are sparking pledges of change across the country — Democratic and Republican governors have promised to implement reforms, while corporations, sports franchises and wealthy individuals are pledging millions of dollars for social justice initiatives.

So while not “acceptable” to those currently in power, the current uprising is forcing America to confront the injustices it has continued to enforce, it is rejecting the idea that we must oppose these injustices in the “right” way and it is recognising that we must do what is effective. The ultimate outcome remains uncertain, but the protests are certainly creating an atmosphere in which America sticking to an unjust status quo is no longer “acceptable” to us.