Category: Race,

How the Police See Us, and How They Train Us to See Them

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Race,Leave a comment

The true horror of the video is that there is a video at all, that Reynolds knows just what to do.

…Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record.

…“I told him not to reach for it!” the officer shrieks.

“You told him to get his ID, sir,” Reynolds softly corrects. It isn’t until she’s handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser that she finally breaks down and sobs.

… A black person’s rights, even inalienable ones, can be stripped from them without due process. And, almost always, an officer who does so won’t be convicted of any wrongdoing.

…In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect.

…In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.

… This is seen as just, supported by the conceit that black citizens brought this upon themselves. The aggressive posture of the police, the fear that every man reaching for a wallet may be reaching for his weapon, only deepens. And everyone insisting on black citizens’ rights — to life, to due process, even to bear arms — is blamed for instigating violence against the police.

How the Police See Us, and How They Train Us to See Them – The New York Times

sigh…

Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees

On By peanutgallerynhIn Military,, Race,Leave a comment

The Republican-controlled Senate quietly cut the phrase “white nationalist” from a measure in the National Defense Authorization Act, which was intended to explicitly address the threat of white nationalists in the military.

The House amendment, which was passed in July, was drafted to explicitly study the feasibility of screening for white nationalist beliefs in military enlistees. 

…The news comes days after the US military and naval academies launched internal investigations after cadets and midshipmen were captured on ESPN’s pre-game show for the Army-Navy game making a hand gesture that some interpreted as white nationalist.

Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees – CNNPolitics

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Bots in Blackface – The Rise of Fake Black People on Social Media Promoting Political Agendas

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Race,Leave a comment

…Perceptive social media users have even unearthed fake black accounts using Google’s reverse image search feature. One such Twitter account, @Mike47441781, was proven to use a stock image as the account’s avatar.

…Mitchell says the activity behind these fake accounts boils down to “getting people not to vote for Democrats.” She points out that social media is the ultimate affordable platform for white supremacists.

…“The 3,500 ads on Facebook by the Russian Internet Research agency were centered largely on Black American Culture over all other identity and race-based narratives. …The themes of Black Identity and culture were the focus of the majority of the ads with the intent to engage in voter suppression of Black voters.” 

…The report found that Russian actors specifically manipulated topics such as Hillary Clinton’s “super predator” comment from 1996; and issues related to race and policing, immigration, and guns.

…Clearly, there are concerted efforts to splinter the powerful black voting bloc and to keep black people from voting. 

Bots in Blackface – The Rise of Fake Black People on Social Media Promoting Political Agendas – Black Enterprise

Sigh…

Mississippi Blues Trail

On By peanutgallerynhIn Gulf Coast Region,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,Leave a comment

North of Bentonia, the road enters the vast alluvial plain known as the Mississippi Delta. Two hundred miles long and 70 miles across at its widest point, reaching from Memphis to Vicksburg, the Delta was the original epicenter of the blues. The music emerged at the turn of the 20th century and was characterized by raw emotional intensity, the use of repetition, and bent or sliding notes on the guitar or the diddley bow, a one-stringed instrument played with a slide. Most scholars trace the blues back to the field hollers and spirituals sung by slaves, and perhaps further back to West Africa, where similar musical scales and techniques can still be heard.

The Delta was a feudal, apartheid cotton society. White landowners ruled over huge plantations, and black sharecroppers toiled in the fields. For early bluesmen like Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, playing music for money and whiskey was a way to escape hard labor, entertain a crowd, attract women and achieve a measure of freedom. 

…Holmes County, an hour north of Bentonia, is the poorest county in Mississippi, with a median household income of $22,325 and 62 percent of children living in poverty. “Mechanized farming hurt this place more than anything,” says Sam Calahan, 67, a retired music promoter standing by a blues marker in the small, rough town of Tchula.

“One good-sized plantation used to employ hundreds of men,” he says. “Now it don’t take but five or six tractor drivers, and there’s nothing else. A lot of people here have been on welfare for two or three generations. The stores have closed.

…Hoover takes visitors to the grave and some civil rights locations and the dusty old preserved shack that serves as his museum. “I’m making more with my tours than my store now.”

He’d like to see more support for blues tourism from local business leaders and politicians. “I’m trying to get grants and raise money to do more. We should have a couple of blues clubs with live music, a bigger museum, a soul food restaurant. These tourists got money. They just need somewhere to spend it.”

…Clarksdale, a town of 17,000 in the northwest Delta, is the undisputed capital of Mississippi blues tourism. It has live music seven nights a week and more than a dozen festivals through the year. 

…The old downtown is undergoing a major revitalization, with entrepreneurs, most of them white, opening restaurants, cafés, clubs, hotels, music stores and souvenir shops in previously run-down buildings. Many of the buildings have been left partially decrepit for a hard-bitten look. 

Buster Moton, a firebrand city commissioner representing a low-income, predominantly black ward, welcomes the tourists, but says there are too many white people profiting from an African-American art form. “Blues tourism is not providing jobs for the people who really need jobs or solving any problems in my part of town,” he says. “And we’re seeing more and more white musicians playing in white-owned clubs.”

…“A lot of money has gone into buildings and tourism,” says Abel. “But these old guys like John and Duck Holmes and a few others are still playing for peanuts, when they can even get a gig. I’d like to see them honored more, because they’re the last guys playing the real thing.”

…“If we’re basing economic development on the blues, then we must be concerned about the individuals who gave us this music,” he says, speaking from his home in Jackson. “We owe them that.”

Mississippi Blues Trail | Al Jazeera America

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The Invention of Thanksgiving

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,, Race,, The Americas,Leave a comment

The first Thanksgiving was not a “thanksgiving,” in Pilgrim terms, but a “rejoicing.” An actual giving of thanks required fasting and quiet contemplation; a rejoicing featured feasting, drinking, militia drills, target practice, and contests of strength and speed. It was a party, not a prayer, and was full of people shooting at things. The Indians were Wampanoags, led by Ousamequin (often called Massasoit, which was a leadership title rather than a name). An experienced diplomat, he was engaged in a challenging game of regional geopolitics, of which the Pilgrims were only a part.

…Nor did the Pilgrims extend a warm invitation to their Indian neighbors. Rather, the Wampanoags showed up unbidden. And it was not simply four or five of them at the table, as we often imagine. Ousamequin, the Massasoit, arrived with perhaps ninety men—more than the entire population of Plymouth. Wampanoag tradition suggests that the group was in fact an army, honoring a mutual-defense pact negotiated the previous spring. They came not to enjoy a multicultural feast but to aid the Pilgrims: hearing repeated gunfire, they assumed that the settlers were under attack. After a long moment of suspicion (the Pilgrims misread almost everything that Indians did as potential aggression), the two peoples recognized one another, in some uneasy way, and spent the next three days together.

…Why would Ousamequin decide to welcome the newcomers and, in 1621, make a mutual-defense pact with them? During the preceding years, an epidemic had struck Massachusetts Bay Indians, killing between seventy-five and ninety per cent of the Wampanoag and the Massachusett people. A rich landscape of fields and gardens, tended hunting forests, and fishing weirs was largely emptied of people. Belief systems crashed. Even survival did not mean good health, and, with fields unplanted and animals uncaught, starvation followed closely behind. The Pilgrims’ settlement took place in a graveyard.

Wampanoag people consolidated their survivors and their lands, and reëstablished internal self-governance. But, to the west, the Narragansetts—traditional rivals largely untouched by the epidemic—now outnumbered the Wampanoags, and that led to the strengthening of Ousamequin’s alliances with the surviving Massachusett and another nearby group, the Nipmucks. As the paramount sachem, he also had to contend with challenges to his leadership from a number of other Wampanoag sachems. And so, after much debate, he decided to tolerate the rather pathetic Pilgrims—who had seen half their number die in their first winter—and establish an alliance with them. 

…Ousamequin’s sons Pumetacom—called King Philip by the English—and Wamsutta began forming a resistance, despite the poor odds. By 1670, the immigrant population had ballooned to sixty or seventy thousand in southern New England—twice the number of Native people.

…Abenaki and other allies continued the struggle for years.

…New Englanders certainly celebrated Thanksgivings—often in both fall and spring—but they were of the fasting-and-prayer variety. Notable examples took place in 1637 and 1676, following bloody victories over Native people. To mark the second occasion, the Plymouth men mounted the head of Ousamequin’s son Pumetacom above their town on a pike, where it remained for two decades, while his dismembered and unburied body decomposed. The less brutal holiday that we celebrate today [did not take] shape [until] two centuries later. …In 1841, the Reverend Alexander Young explicitly linked three things: the 1621 “rejoicing,” the tradition of autumnal harvest festivals, and the name Thanksgiving.

…A couple of decades later, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, proposed a day of unity and remembrance to counter the trauma of the Civil War. …Only later would it consolidate its narrative around a harmonious Pilgrim-Wampanoag feast. …American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.

…The Thanksgiving story buries the major cause of King Philip’s War—the relentless seizure of Indian land. …Like most Colonial wars, this one was a giant slave expedition, marked by the seizure and sale of Indian people. …During the next two centuries, New England Indians also suffered indentured servitude, convict labor, and debt peonage, which often resulted in the enslavement of the debtor’s children.

…With so many men dead or enslaved, Native women married men outside their group—often African-Americans—and then redefined the families of mixed marriages as matrilineal in order to preserve collective claims to land. They adopted the forms of the Christian church, to some degree, in order to gain some breathing space. 

The Invention of Thanksgiving | The New Yorker

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A black woman faces prison because of a Jim Crow-era plan to ‘protect white voters’

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Race,Leave a comment

The state’s policy of banning people convicted of felonies from voting is rooted in a late 19th century effort by North Carolina Democrats to limit voting power of newly-enfranchised African Americans as whole. In 1898, the North Carolina Democratic party spoke of the need “to rescue the white people of the east from the curse of negro domination”.

…When lawmakers passed the felon-voting law, they were open about their racial intent. The 1898 Democratic handbook in the state talked about voting restrictions necessary “to protect the white voters of the State against having their honest votes off-set by illegally and fraudulently registered negro votes”.

…Since then, North Carolina lawmakers have tweaked the law, but its core – stripping felons of their voting rights while they serve criminal sentences – remains in place.

…If someone votes while they are serving a criminal sentence, it is a so-called “strict liability” felony in North Carolina. That means that prosecutors don’t have to prove Bratcher and other people convicted of felonies intended to vote illegally in order to convict them.

…The North Carolina felon voting law has not only been discriminatory, but also confusing. A little over four months after the 2016 election, the state board of elections released a report finding there wasn’t a standardized process for informing people on probation they couldn’t vote.

…“I’ve never heard of a judge informing a convicted individual of the loss of voting rights or the process by which these can be restored,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy group. He called the many cases in which people get prosecuted for unintentionally voting illegally “disturbing”.

A black woman faces prison because of a Jim Crow-era plan to ‘protect white voters’ | US news | The Guardian

Sigh…

India Citizenship Act: government controls on protests extended after day of deadly violence

On By peanutgallerynhIn Race,, Religion,, Southern Central Asia,Leave a comment

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in at least 15 cities across the country, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata on Thursday in a show of nationwide public anger against the law considered by many to be unconstitutional and discriminatory against Muslims.

At least two people died in the protests, which saw violent pitched battles between police and protesters in several cities, including Ahmedabad, Mangaluru, and Lucknow. Police fired tear gas, water cannons and used batons against protesters who pelted stones, vandalized and set fire to buildings and buses. Thousands of people were arrested.

…At the center of the unrest is the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was passed into law last week. The law that promises to fast-track citizenship for non-Muslim religious minorities, including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians, from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who arrived before 2015.

The government, ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said the law will provide safe haven for religious minorities who fled persecution in their home countries. Critics say it undermines the country’s secular constitution as it bases citizenship on a person’s religion and would further marginalize India’s 200-million strong Muslim community.

India Citizenship Act: government controls on protests extended after day of deadly violence – CNN

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Paper Genocide: The Erasure of Native People in Census Counts

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,, The Americas,Leave a comment

Native people, in particular, are the most undercounted ethnic group in the census’ history. Native people were excluded from the first 70 years under the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly regarded “Indians not taxed,” or those living on reservations or unsettled territories, as not countable. In more recent years, the U.S. Census Bureau’s own data has shown significant undercounting. In the 1990 census, 12.2 percent of Native people on reservations were undercounted, according to the Census Bureau’s findings. A decade later, the census seemed to improve, with the bureau not reporting a statistically significant undercount. But then in 2010, it jumped back up to 4.9 percent.

This is particularly devastating for Indigenous people because of how census data has been used to help determine many aspects of tribal sovereignty, such as tribal recognition and enrollment.

…“American Indian and Alaska Natives” are designated by the Census Bureau as a hard-to-count population due to issues including non-traditional addresses, high rates of renters and houselessness, and difficulties accessing more rural lands.

…In theory, blood quantum measures the amount of “Indian blood” a Native person possesses, which is then captured on a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood issued by the BIA. Officials use the following federal government records to measure blood quantum: census rolls between 1885 and 1940, the 1900 special Indian census, the Dawes Rolls, Durant Rolls, and land conveyances involving Native people. During this period, sexual violence became a common form of genocide against Native people, which some elders have attributed to an effort to lower the blood quantum of future generations.

There are only three types of living beings in the United States that have to register their blood quantum with the U.S. government: dogs, horses, and Native people.

…With the passage in 1887 of the General Allotment (Dawes) Act, the United States government institutionalized the distinction between full- and mixed-blood Indians. To receive an allotment, Indians had to become enrolled members of their respective tribes. To enroll in a tribe, an individual needed to prove a certain degree (purity) of Indian blood.”

…My blood quantum is registered with the BIA as one-eighth. This has a direct impact on my ability, and that of future generations, to gain tribal citizenship and be entitled to our treaty rights.

The passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 created new issues for counting Indigenous people. As Jobe’s paper explains, “The Census Bureau was concerned that Mexican laborers might attempt to pass themselves as Indians in the states that share a border with Mexico. To get an accurate count of the Indian population, the bureau instructed enumerators to take special care to differentiate between the two groups in the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico.” To this day, Indigenous people from what is now known as Mexico and Central and South America aren’t counted as Indigenous to those lands. They can identify on the census as American Indian or Alaskan Native, but are often counted as Hispanic or Latino.

…Under the 1902 directive, officials assigned women and children the surname of their husbands and fathers even though this was not the way many nations and clans traditionally assigned names.

…Take U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in the 2009 Carcieri v. Salazar decision holding that if tribes weren’t “under federal jurisdiction” in 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act was passed, then they can’t hold land in trust. This affects tribes that were not federally recognized before 1934, often because the government used the existence of intermarriage and assimilation to deny their status as Indian nations. This history is now being used against them, particularly for tribes mixed with Black people.

Paper Genocide: The Erasure of Native People in Census Counts – Rewire.News

sigh…

ICE, asylum under Trump: An exclusive look at US immigration detention

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Domestic Affairs,, Race,, The Americas,Leave a comment

President George W. Bush, operating in a post-9/11 environment, expanded the number of detention centers used by ICE to more than 350 nationwide. President Barack Obama consolidated that system, cutting roughly 150 facilities while instituting reforms to improve living conditions. But the overall ICE detention population continued to grow under his watch, reaching 34,000 detainees in his last term.

…Critics say Trump’s rapid expansion has only exacerbated long-standing problems in the detention system, which is long overdue for real oversight and a massive overhaul. 

…The problems documented by ICE inspectors ranged from moldy food and filthy bathrooms to high numbers of sexual assault allegations, attempted suicides and claims of guards using force against detainees. A central theme identified by government inspectors was the failure of guards to grasp the difference between running a prison and an immigration detention center. 

…The investigation revealed more than 400 allegations of sexual assault or abuse, inadequate medical care, regular hunger strikes, frequent use of solitary confinement, more than 800 instances of physical force against detainees, nearly 20,000 grievances filed by detainees and at least 29 fatalities, including seven suicides.

…Just before one detainee died in Florida, he “vomited feces,” according to a death report written by ICE. Two others detainees died elsewhere after being taken off life support without consent from their relatives. Death reports also show detainees died of pneumonia, heart attacks and internal bleeding. In several instances, the cause of death remains “unknown.”

Detainees say they are denied toothbrushes, toilet paper and warm clothing in the winter. Some say they have been forced to drink water that reeks of chlorine.

…He recalled seeing rocks and pebbles sprinkled into the beans he was served from the cafeteria and green spots dotting the lunch meat. 

…The day after his death, 20 other detainees carried out what they say was a peaceful protest. They wrote “Justice for Roylan” on their white T-shirts, sat down in the cafeteria and refused to eat. Guards swooped in and attacked, beating one of them so severely he was taken to a hospital.

…Detainees are forced to work jobs that would otherwise be done by regularly waged employees, according to the lawsuit. Since the detainees listed in the Project South complaint are paid between $1 and $4 a day, that leads to huge savings for private prison operators at the expense of the detainees’ constitutional rights. 

…It is now a $3 billion network of 221 facilities, the largest of which are operated by private companies under government contract. Combined, those facilities detain more than 50,000 women, men and children who wait months or years for immigration court proceedings.

ICE, asylum under Trump: An exclusive look at US immigration detention

Jeezus…

Government study finds racial, gender bias in facial recognition software

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Privacy,, Race,Leave a comment

After reviewing 189 pieces of software from 99 developers, which NIST identified as a majority of the industry, the researchers found that in one-to-one matching, which is normally used for verification, Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men.

In one-to-many matching, used by law enforcement to identify people of interest, faces of African American women returned more false positives than other groups.

Government study finds racial, gender bias in facial recognition software | TheHill

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The History of Black Incarceration Is Longer Than You Think

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Race,Leave a comment

Recent scholarship has explored the roots of modern mass incarceration. Launched in the 1980s, the war on drugs and the emergence of private, for-profit prison systems led to the imprisonment of many minorities. Other scholarship has shown that the modern mass incarceration of black Americans was preceded by a 19th century surge in black imprisonment during the Reconstruction era. With the abolition of slavery in 1865, southern whites used the legal system and the carceral state to impose racial, social and economic control over the newly liberated black population. The consequences were stark. In Louisiana, for example, two-thirds of the inmates in the state penitentiary in 1860 were white; just eight years later, two-thirds were black.

…Although they usually relied on the whip, countless enslavers also chained their human property in plantation dungeons below the main dwelling house or in a barn. Some locked enslaved persons in a hot box under the scorching southern sun. 

…After 1819, only the state of Louisiana habitually punished enslaved criminals with prolonged sentences in the penitentiary, usually for life. Virginia bondpeople typically spent only months to a year or two in the penitentiary before being purchased by a slave trader.

…The New Orleans Day Police confiscated the convict bondpeople and carried them to the Watch House at city hall for safekeeping. 

…Listed as “forfeited to the state,” their new master was the state of Louisiana. Some 200 enslaved people were held in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in the antebellum decades. 

…Prisoners at the penitentiary donned the convict’s uniform, which included an iron ring around the leg, linked by an iron chain to a belt around the waist. The penitentiary itself consisted of a three-story brick structure. Prison guards deposited inmates in cramped, individual cells, three and one-half feet wide and seven feet deep, secured by a iron door, poorly ventilated and unheated in the winter. Prisoners slept on mattresses placed on the floor and, at mealtime, ate mush and molasses from a tin plate in their cell, in the dark and alone. 

…Enslaved women may have willingly participated, in spite of vigilant officials, in loving relationships or clandestine affairs with fellow prisoners. At least as likely, female convicts proved captive, convenient and vulnerable targets for the unwanted advances of inmates, coercive white guards or other penitentiary authorities who wielded power over them. The prospect of rape was ever-present. At the same time, it is possible that the relatively few enslaved women in the Louisiana State Penitentiary were able to leverage their sexuality to extract various favors from those in charge or from inmates able to smuggle in goods from the outside. Given the range of possible encounters, Charlotte’s son and daughters may have been the products of consensual acts, forced sex, coercion or some combination thereof.

…A Louisiana law of 1848, unique among the slaveholding states, declared that children born to enslaved female prisoners confined in the penitentiary belonged to the state. An act of 1829 forbade the sale of enslaved children under the age of 10 away from their mothers, however, so the state was legally obligated to keep them together until the child’s 10th birthday. At that time, the state could seize the youngster as state property and auction him or her off to the highest bidder. The proceeds of such sales went to the free school fund, to finance the education of Louisiana’s white schoolchildren.

… By the outbreak of the Civil War, the seeds for the later mass incarceration of black people were already planted, the institutional structures already in place, and the precedents for black imprisonment already set. With the end of slavery, prisons were well positioned to transition from a secondary to a primary form of black oppression.

The History of Black Incarceration Is Longer Than You Think | Time

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McKinsey proposed ICE cut spending on food and medical care for detained migrants to reduce costs.

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,, The Americas,Leave a comment

McKinsey was brought into the deportation game by the Obama administration, according to the report, which used the firm to carry out an “organizational transformation” in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division grappling with processing and deporting a surge in undocumented migrants. “Organizational transformation,” in consultant speak, roughly translates as: This is too expensive; somebody’s about to get screwed. Could be the workers, and it usually is. Could be anyone. Could be migrant families. And in this case, it was.

…“They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees.”

…After its ICE contract ran out, McKinsey slid over and is working on a $10 million gig with Customs and Border Protection that will run at least through September 2020.

McKinsey proposed ICE cut spending on food and medical care for detained migrants to reduce costs.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Lessons of the Kamala Harris campaign

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Race,Leave a comment

One, know and establish your political persona before you get in.

…Harris promised a focus on racial issues with an implicit suggestion that Barack Obama, the first African-American president might have been too timid here. By this fall, there appeared to be no focus — race or otherwise.

…A candidate can alter, modify or change a position or two, but the overarching message has to be consistent and coherent.

…Two, when you get that moment in the limelight, be ready to capitalize on it and move on.

…Three, a campaign [organization/staff] matters.  A staff is — to an extent — a mirror reflection of the candidate. [Which makes the Peanut Gallery curious why the Hill singled out her sister and not her stuff in the rest of the paragraph.]

…There is no doubt the political bar is a little higher for women — and more so for minority candidates.

It’s hard to cite this as the major factor in Harris’s collapse: In the past three presidential elections, twice the Democratic nomination went to an African-American, Barack Obama, the other to a woman, Hillary Clinton.

Lessons of the Kamala Harris campaign | TheHill

Yup.

…Also can we stop any talk of nominating sitting Senators to VP or cabinent positions. Enough already. They need to stay where they are.