Could Other Countries Force Reparations on America?

In May, Cameron Whitten lost his bid for a northeast Portland council seat … but rather than wallow, the hard-charging activist began a Black Resilience Fund to aid Black-owned businesses that had suffered losses from coronavirus shutdowns. What emerged was nothing short of astonishing: He surged past his $5,000 goal to hit $1 million in less than a month. He was already well-known for a 55-day hunger strike while standing naked in a cardboard box outside City Hall in 2012. Now the man who The Oregonian once dubbed “Portland’s most famous young radical” is thinking bigger.

2. Texas as Kentucky 2.0

Royce West, a Black criminal justice reformer and Democratic state senator, is the Texas version of Charles Booker, who narrowly lost a Kentucky Senate primary in June to Amy McGrath. In this case, West, 67, has spent three decades in the Statehouse with a record of fighting racial injustice. Now he’s trying to ride the tide of the Black Lives Matter movement over his opponent, MJ Hegar, who, like McGrath, is a white, establishment-favored military veteran. If West pulls out the surprise victory in the Tuesday primary runoff, it could change the conversation about who is electable in Texas — though he’d still be a long shot against GOP Sen. John Cornyn.

3. A New Black Republican Star

Democrats don’t have a monopoly on Black Texans with powerful backstories. Wesley Hunt, an Army veteran with a master’s degree in business from Cornell, recently emerged from a contested congressional primary in Houston, backed by party leaders including Trump. (Hunt, in turn, has the president’s back despite Trump’s various racist acts.) In June, Hunt released one of the most powerful ads of this cycle, detailing how his family went from slavery to him graduating from West Point. Among conservatives, he has clear star potential, and is facing Democrat Lizzie Fletcher in one of the most winnable seats for Republicans in November.

4. Hoops Activism

Two-time WNBA MVP Candace Parker has a history of putting her money where her mouth is, and this week she declared that there was “no place in the league” for Kelly Loeffler, the Atlanta Dream co-owner who became the junior U.S. senator from Georgia last year … and who recently spoke out against the WNBA’s support for Black Lives Matter. Parker follows in the activist steps of another WNBA champion, Maya Moore, who sat out the last two seasons of her playing prime in order to help advocate for criminal justice reform.

5. A Kennedy Faces a Democratic Turncoat

Amy Kennedy’s last name precedes her, of course, but it doesn’t diminish the New Jersey schoolteacher’s stunning primary win this week over a candidate handpicked by some of the Garden State’s most influential powerbrokers. Next, Kennedy — who is married to ex-Rep. Patrick Kennedy (Teddy’s youngest son) — will face Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a conservative Democrat who switched to the GOP last year while pledging his “undying support” to Trump.

The first female cadet to graduate from The Citadel, Nancy Mace has battled both the right and the left in her quest to make it to Congress. She has aggressively defended Trump and made waves last year by telling the story of how she was sexually assaulted as a teenager while convincing her fellow (mostly male) South Carolina lawmakers to make exceptions for rape and incest in an anti-abortion bill. She criticized her eventual Democratic opponent Rep. Joe Cunningham for contracting COVID-19, telling OZY she hoped the episode would teach people “to take social distancing seriously” … before testing positive for the virus herself in June. In a very winnable race, Mace could emerge as an AOC-like rabble-rouser for the right.

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1. New Hampshire

On Saturday, Trump returns to the scene of his narrowest loss in 2016: Hillary Clinton took the Granite State (four electoral votes) by just 0.4 percentage points. In the short run, the Portsmouth rally is intended as a show of strength after the campaign’s Tulsa debacle. But come fall, New Hampshire state campaign director Seb Rougemont, an immigrant from London who became a U.S. citizen in 2016, aims to spring a surprise. A pre-coronavirus poll there had Trump up by 2 percentage points on Joe Biden.

2. Minnesota

The George Floyd protests have given new symbolic meaning to a state long targeted by Team Trump, given his squeaker of a loss in the Land of 10,000 Lakes in 2016. The president’s aim now is, basically, to convince white America that if he isn’t reelected, socialists, antifa and various liberal boogeymen will be coming to loot their homes and tear down any remaining statues. And what better place to do that than Minnesota (10 electoral votes), where the city council may be willing to disband the police but the average citizen may not be so keen on eliminating the authorities.

3. New Mexico

The Land of Enchantment (five electoral votes) would seem like a fairly safe liberal stronghold, but there are two things that may work in favor for Trump after losing the state by 8 percentage points in 2016. For one, Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate and former New Mexico governor, isn’t running this time, after taking 9 percent of the vote four years ago. Secondly, Biden is surprisingly soft with Latino voters: He is polling well behind Clinton’s 2016 results, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias broke down last week. And 40 percent of the 2016 New Mexico electorate was Latino.

A pair of Brookings Institution scholars suggest that African nations can put pressure on the U.S. to implement reparations (and start mending the racial equity gap) by barring corporate entry into their countries until amends are made. While the idea seems wild, the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent already explicitly stated in a 2016 report that the U.S. owes reparations to its Black citizens. And such tactics would be similar to Americans promoting divestment in corporations from South Africa during the apartheid era. One of the scholars is William Darity (pictured), who has already pushed a federal jobs guarantee into the mainstream.

2. Fighting Trump’s Foreign Student Ban

After ICE announced it would ban foreign students from staying in the United States if their instruction went fully online, Harvard and MIT sued the Trump administration. Watch in upcoming weeks for lawmakers to pass regulations to help their international scholars, not just out of moral outrage but also from financial necessity (after all, those out-of-state tuitions are cash cows for public colleges). States could try a number of tricks, from requiring at least one day of in-person, socially distanced instruction to mandating quarterly one-on-one reviews between teachers and scholars at their public universities.

3. Back-to-Work Bonus

While the federal government’s juiced-up pandemic unemployment checks have kept Americans from defaulting on their mortgages or rent payments, business owners say they’ve also kept people from returning to work because that payout exceeds many peoples’ salaries — and comes without the risk of catching the virus. With Congress debating a new relief bill and the extra unemployment benefits due to expire, Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio has instead proposed a $450 per week “return to work” bonus on top of their paychecks.

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1. Tax Day

On their face, today’s dual 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court decisions look like losses for Trump — particularly one stating New York prosecutors should have access to his financial records. And Trump dutifully raged against them on Twitter. But though the court hemmed in Trump’s broad claims of immunity, by sending both the New York case and a dispute with Congress back to lower courts to sort out the details, the court made sure it will be a while until any tax returns are made public — likely after the election, if at all.

2. Media Meltdown

Institutions are being forced to reckon with themselves, and media organizations are no different. Activist forces within outlets from The New York Times to Vox and The Intercept are demanding changes. But many of their accused colleagues argue that they’re being subject to an illiberal “cancel culture” with little regard for the truth, one where any reporting against woke consensus is decried as racism. Simmering tensions erupted after Harper’s Magazine published a piece titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, ” in which everyone from Margaret Atwood and David Brooks to Noam Chomsky and JK Rowling spoke out against “ideological conformity.” The future of our political-media industrial complex could be determined by who wins battles like these across the world’s newsrooms.

3. Conventional Campaign, Convention Chaos

The Trump campaign is determined to continue business as usual, even amid a surging pandemic. Aside from Trump rallies, they’re doing the mundane things like “Women for Trump” meet-and-greets across Wisconsin. But Trump’s rally in Tulsa showed that just because he shows up like everything is normal, it doesn’t mean potential supporters will. And while he wants a big convention in Jacksonville, five Republican senators have already said they won’t be attending amid Florida’s spike in COVID-19 cases. Trump even said Tuesday he was “flexible” about convention plans, a hint that he might be forced to shift again.

4. Biden Out of the Bunker

Biden has been doing more campaign events in public, including plans for a trip to a factory near Scranton, Pennsylvania, today. His emergence is providing fodder for the Trump campaign, which is determined to paint even the smallest of gaffes as signs of Biden's failing mental abilities. But it’s worth watching if Biden can rise to the occasion and deliver powerful moments without the power of big crowds. And while he’s at it, he could begin test-driving veep hopefuls. Watch for who joins him on the trail, with likely candidates being Kamala Harris (pictured), Val Demings, Tammy Duckworth and Karen Bass, among others.