What if your skin is light, but your curls reveal your Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means one cannot easily check off one box or another. The number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.

And what if you are too Black to be white and too white to be Black.

And often the term “mulatto,” is used. it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents. Derived from the Spanish word for mule, or “mulo,” it was used during slavery to liken biracial people to the hybrid animal and to justify their legal and social oppression. If this is used to describe you, you may feel mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.

For somebody to use it today, it really is an especially derogatory use, because it’s really going back to the era of slavery in the U.S.

Racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding, and this kind of dehumanizing language is not unusual.

In the current political moment, we are really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority,”

Also, there is a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hyper sexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them. Enslaved women were sexually abused all the time.

“Mulatto” used to be a racial category on the census, along with “octoroon,” meaning one-eighth African blood, and “quadroon,” meaning one-fourth African blood. The 1870 census defined “mulatto” as including “all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a “doomed class of people, which was a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing.

Our society’s ideas about race are constantly fluctuating. Racial categories have changed on nearly every census since the first in 1790. The 2030 census will include new “Hispanic or Latino” and “Middle Eastern or North African” boxes to check.

Race is a political and social classification system, which humans invented to divide people into different “categories of worth.”

The deepest divide in this country is not perhaps one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals. It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other. Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society.

Racism isn’t always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we’ve never questioned. That kind of thinking doesn’t just fade with time. Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives.

The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities.

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product, as the refrain goes. Many social media sites and search engines that provide free services do so in exchange for your personal data.

But with this, consumers give up data that enables companies to sometimes charge them more for products. I have done this in the past but try to avoid it.

This is a practice in which a company sets a price for particular consumers based on what it gleans from their personal data. New parents, for example, may be shown baby thermometers at the top of their search results that are more expensive than those shown to others.

As digital tracking becomes more sophisticated, more companies began using consumers’ data to set personalized prices. Studies by the Federal Trade Commission found that personal information — including mouse movements and items abandoned in shopping carts — was being used to set prices for individual consumers.

The study is ongoing, and will release the findings of the study to the public once it’s complete.

Surveillance pricing sits at the intersection of two things most people revile: feeling tracked and feeling ripped off.

Lawmakers are working to restrict the practice at the state level, including in California, Georgia and Illinois. A law requiring companies to disclose its use is working its way through the New York Legislature. And New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a consumer alert to warn New Yorkers about the practice, and encouraged them to file complaints if they encountered violations in the wild.

Companies have always been free to set prices based on their own costs, and what they think the market will bear. But with surveillance pricing, prices are not so much about supply and demand as they are about what a particular individual might be willing to pay. Though unappealing to consumers, the practice is, unfortunately, broadly legal.

Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and consumer advocate said in an interview that she could not pinpoint the exact origin of the phrase. But she acknowledged that it may have emerged from conversations she started having with friends in recent years, in a time of “feeling a lot of urgency in finding a way to communicate one of the biggest revolutions in the markets and economy.”

Beyond the name, the practice, she noted, is visceral, and disturbing, to many consumers: “Whenever people really think about prices being set using the same blob of intimate details that decides their TikTok feed, they get freaked out,” and the idea that retailers could use “your keystrokes, your eye movements, your mood, to set the price of diapers and bread hits a deep nerve.”

Racism is not only morally wrong, but it also has massive detriments to our economy. In a recent study by Citigroup, “Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps,” economists state that in the last 20 years, racism has cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion. This is not insignificant as the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is more than $21 trillion.

These effects are stark in housing, education, and tax policy.

Housing is a major source of intergenerational wealth for many people. However, public, private, and federal discrimination and policies like redlining prevented families of color from owning a home and devalued their homes.

Decades of obstacles to homeownership meant that families of color have missed out on the benefits of rising home values. This is critical, as owning a home is crucial for wealth accumulation.

A study by Princeton University notes “that even among Black families owning homes, properties do not appreciate at the same rate as properties held by other ethnic groups.”

In 2016, the Federal Reserve found that the median amount of housing wealth for a Black family was $124,000; for white families, it was $200,000.

All forms of discrimination are very costly to the economy. Economists estimate that $218 billion was lost in the last two decades due to discrimination in providing credit—lending and receiving loans—to families of color to purchase homes.

In February 2021, the Austin family bought and renovated a house in Marin City, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. Despite the location and $400,000 in renovations, it appraised for $989,000, or just $100,000 more than its appraisal before the renovations.

The Austin family suspected racism and got a second appraisal. This time the house was staged to make it seem like a white family owned it. The house was appraised for $1,482,000, almost 50% more than its previous appraisal. A family of color in the U.S. cannot use their home to build wealth and contribute to the economy if their homes continue to be devalued.

The adverse effects of racism build upon themselves. Due to housing discrimination, the education of Black people suffered as well. Property taxes fund local schools; schools in wealthier areas receive more funding than those in poorer areas.

Due to years of racial segregation, families of colors’ homes are worth less, which means their schools are not as well funded. The result is that children of color often don’t get a high-quality education.

Education is fundamental to increasing a person’s income and potential. Over 40 years, a person with a college degree and advanced degree will earn $1.3 million to $2 million, respectively, compared with a high school graduate.

Since more Black students fail to access quality education at a younger age, the path towards college and advanced degrees is extremely difficult. The Citigroup study estimates that it costs the economy billions of dollars, as “$90 billion to $113 billion in lifetime income is lost from discrimination in accessing higher education.”

Racism also negatively impacts our tax system, which currently gives more advantages to people with wealth, which is highly concentrated in white families. According to the Brookings Institution, the net worth of a median white household is ten times that of the median Black household.

A lower tax rate on income from wealth versus wages perpetuates the existing racial wealth divide. While tax advantages like the mortgage interest deduction provide additional tax relief for homeowners, there is typically no deduction or credit for renting. All over the tax code, benefits are given to people who have wealth.

It is critical to address racism, as decades of housing discrimination in real estate, homeownership, lending, and federal policies means Black, Latino, and Native American households are more likely than white households to be low-income renters.

Congress needs to enact a tax system that stops advantaging income from wealth over income from wages. We should advocate for Congress to increase taxes on corporations and the capital gains tax.

The current capital gains tax allows families to transfer vast sums of wealth across generations with minimal tax from art, real estate, and stocks. By prioritizing the taxing of wealth, we are working to close the racial wealth divide.

It may seem that racism in our economy only affects people of color, but it costs all of us. It has cost us trillions of dollars and hurt our country’s economic potential, but we can change this.

I am 79 and am lucky to be able to speak my mind, so as eight Democratic-aligned senators with an average age of about 70 voted with Republicans to end the 40-day shutdown without the health care concessions I ask how old is too old to fight Republicans?

Let’s look at how this capitulation and the subsequent anger played out in the arguments. So many members of Congress who are at (and well beyond) retirement age.

Democrats are denouncing Mr. Schumer and this deal to end the government shutdown that their voters hate. But they offer no plausible account of how they would have done better, because maybe there isn’t one.

It’s a lot easier to vote for something your base hates if you’re too old to worry about re-election.

Of the Democratic-aligned senators who voted for the shutdown deal, two are not running again: Dick Durbin of Illinois, 80, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, 78. Angus King of Maine is 81 and Jacky Rosen of Nevada is 68. Both Tim Kaine of Virginia and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire are 67.

All would be past 70 years old if they decide to run again when their terms end.

The other “yes” votes were from Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, 61, representing a state where the Las Vegas tourism industry feared taking a major hit from canceled flights, and from John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is just 56 but has embraced Trump on a slew of issues.

This is called a gerontocracy. When you have older leaders who are never going to face re-election again, you make decisions that can be disconnected from what their voters believe.

Yet the age issue is likely to keep flaring up. Senator Chuck Schumer’s top three midterm recruits would be in their 80s by the end of a second term.

This is a matter of how much to fight, and who should lead the charge. Remember, Democrats were less than a week removed from sweeping victories in California, New Jersey and Virginia. For many in the party, Tuesday’s elections were the first time in a year that they could feel good about their collective ability to punch back against extremism.

They wanted the Republicans to fund Affordable Care Act subsidies — with polls showing that voters were generally on the Democrats’ side.

Many progressives and younger Democrats have argued increasingly loudly that Schumer, 74, is no longer up to the fight.

Feeding the discontent are memories of the last shutdown fight in March, when Schumer led Senate Democrats to make a deal with Republicans to keep the government open. Then as now, the party’s base and most of its members in Congress wanted the fight against Trump and his allies.

In one sign of how far out on an island the eight senators are, they drew backhanded scorn from the Democratic National Committee, which rarely intervenes in intra party disputes.

This is all taking place as Trump issued preemptive pardons to Rudolph Giuliani and a host of people who tried to overturn the 2020 election results.

In a world without the Democratic senators’ capitulation, the pardons might have been a galvanizing issue for the party’s elected officials to rally around while continuing to press their case that spiraling health insurance costs were too high.

Fortunately for Democrats, they had some wins that should not be discounted. They raised the salience of soaring health insurance premiums and sent the message that Republicans made the policy that caused them. They goaded Trump into making unpopular moves to withhold food stamps that appear to have hurt his poll numbers. It’s possible the shutdown has still been a net political gain for the Democratic Party despite its necessarily ignominious end.

Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. Our values are on the side of people at the margins who are suffering endlessly with the extremists world view.

Some experts predict that AI will lead to significant job displacement, as machines will be able to perform many tasks that are currently done by humans. However, other experts argue that AI will create new jobs and opportunities, particularly in the fields of data analysis and machine learning.

You might not know it, but an artificial intelligence algorithm used to screen applicants has decided that you are too risky. Maybe it inferred you wouldn’t fit the company culture or you’re likely to behave in some way later on that might cause friction (such as joining a union or starting a family). Its reasoning is impossible to see and even harder to challenge.

It doesn’t matter that you practice safe digital privacy: keeping most personal details to yourself, avoiding sharing opinions online and prohibiting apps and websites from tracking you, A.I. predicts how you’ll behave at work, based on patterns it has learned from countless other people like you and me.

A.I. banks can use algorithms to decide who gets a loan, learning from past borrowers to predict who will default. Some police departments have fed years of criminal activity and arrest records into “predictive policing” algorithms that have sometimes sent officers back to patrol the same neighborhoods.

Social media platforms use our collective clicks to decide what news — or misinformation — each of us will see. In each case, we might hope that keeping our own data private could protect each of us from unwanted outcomes. A.I. only needs to know what people like you have done before.

As we adapt to living with A.I. as a larger part of our lives, we need to exert collective control over all of our data, to determine if it’s used to benefit or harm us

A while ago, protections meant people might be more willing to share their data with third parties, and these differential privacy algorithms are now quite common. Apple iPhones are built with these algorithms to collect information about user behavior and trends, without ever revealing what data came from whose phone. The 2020 U.S. census used differential privacy in its reporting on the American population to protect individuals’ personal information.

Palantir is building an A.I. system to identify and track people for deportation by combining and analyzing many data sources together getting around the obstacle posed by differential privacy.

Even without knowing who any one person is, the algorithm can likely predict the neighborhoods, workplaces and schools where undocumented immigrants are most likely to be found. A.I. algorithms called Lavender and Where’s Daddy? have been reportedly used in a similar way to help the Israeli military determine and locate targets for bombardment in Gaza.

In climate change, one person’s emissions don’t alter the atmosphere, but everyone’s emissions will destroy the planet. Your emissions matter for everyone else. Similarly, sharing one person’s data seems trivial, but sharing everyone’s data — and tasking A.I. to make decisions using it — transforms society.

Everyone sharing his or her data to train A.I. is great if we agree with the goals that were given to the A.I. It’s not so great if we don’t agree with these goals; and if the algorithm’s decisions might cost us our jobs, happiness, liberty or even lives.

We need to build institutions and pass laws that give people affected by A.I. algorithms a voice over how those algorithms are designed, and what they aim to achieve. The first step is transparency.

Use of A.I. should be required to disclose their objectives and what their algorithms are trying to maximize — whether that’s ad clicks on social media, hiring workers who won’t join unions or total deportation counts.

The second step is participation. The people whose data are used to train the algorithms — and whose lives are shaped by them — should help decide their goals. Like a jury of peers who hear a civil or criminal case and render a verdict together, we might create citizens’ assemblies where a representative randomly chosen set of people deliberates and decides on appropriate goals for algorithms.

That could mean workers at a firm deliberating about the use of A.I. at their workplace, or a civic assembly that reviews the objectives of predictive policing tools before government agencies deploy them. These are the kinds of democratic checks that could align A.I. with the public good, not just private power.

The future of A.I. will not be decided by smarter algorithms or faster chips. It will depend on who controls the data — and whose values and interests guide the machines. If we want A.I. that serves the public, the public must decide what it serves.

There is a fight between Democratic activists, who have called on Congressional leaders to fight Trump and his administration more, and the leaders themselves — who, until recently, were very publicly ambivalent about the demands of the mobilized left wing of the party.

Senator Schumer publicly rebuked the “fight Trump” wing of the party back in March when he refused to shut down the government.

Democrats need to engage in an all-out fight for the country. And so,House minority leader Jeffries and several other Democratic representatives attended No Kings Day rallies.

Democrats are energized to participate in politics right now. It looks like 5–6 million people turned out nationwide to stand up for democracy and protest Trump on Saturday. That is a big shift in organization and energy to the left from the 2024 Biden and Harris campaigns (and an increase in turnout since the first No Kings Day in June).

Meanwhile Democrats lead by 3 in the House generic ballot, according to the average at FiftyPlusOne.news, and they’ve increased their vote margin in the average special election since January by 15 points.

In the September Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, voters who were most likely to say they’ll vote next year were 9 points friendlier to Democrats in the House.

Among the most engaged voters (those saying they are definitely or very likely to vote), the margin is still D+5 (50–45). Voters were asked to rate their interest in the election on a scale from 1 to 10: Among the 10-out-of-10 voters, Democrats lead 55–41 (just 4% undecided) in the generic ballot.

But in the sense that No Kings is evidence to party leadership that Democrats want them to publicly fight for democracy and sensible government, I’d say it’s very important. And if you compare how leadership is acting now (holding firm on day 21 of a government shutdown) to where they were six months ago, I’d say we are in a better place.

Also, party identification age distributions have changed over the last 50 years. Gallup just released its quarterly estimate of national party identification on Oct. 20. Now Democrats hold a 7-point lead on party ID now, their highest since before Joe Biden was elected president.

Moreover that 7-point lead is actually larger than the equivalent Democratic Party ID advantage during Trump’s first term:

This quarter’s D+7 reading is close to the lead Democrats had for most of the past decade, including in 2012 during Barack Obama’s re-election:

This is very different from the party registration data of a few months ago when the NYT said it was a “crisis“ for Democrats. Avise back then was to take the catastrophic framing with a grain of salt, since by mid-year, the data was pretty stale (not a lot of people register to vote in the off year), and so was likely hiding the shift toward Democrats we were seeing in polls.

So, don’t clutch the pearls just now, don’t agonize, organize.

Joblessness for Black workers is rising again, two years after reaching a record low. It’s a troubling indicator: A rise in black unemployment is often considered an early warning sign for the overall economy, as Black workers are frequently the first to be laid off during economic downturns.

The administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government have serious implications for federal workers and their families—especially Black workers.

For decades, the federal government has provided stable employment, excellent benefits, and key protections in hiring and promotions that supported a robust Black middle class.

This time, the administration’s assault on diversity programs and cuts to the federal work force could make it even more difficult for Black workers to recover when conditions improve.

The African American unemployment rate has surged over the past four months, from 6 to 7.5 percent, while the rate for white people ticked down slightly to 3.7 percent. On top of a slowing economy, the White House’s actions have disproportionately harmed Black workers, economists said.

Since the 1970s, the rate for Black people has run about twice the rate for white people. Because of inferior educational opportunities, the legacy of mass incarceration and discrimination over generations, Black people confront greater challenges in the job market.

In 2023, conditions for Black workers looked as healthy as ever. Unemployment reached a low of 4.8 percent. Wages rose at their fastest pace since data collection began in the 1990s, and median Black household wealth reached the highest level on record.

Conditions started to deteriorate in 2024 after pandemic-era subsidies expired. Hiring slowed, and high prices weighed heavily on low-income earners. Black households were the only racial group last year in which median income fell and the poverty rate rose, according to the Census Bureau.

Job losses are concentrated among Black women working in professional services such as human resources, according to Ms. Wilson’s analysis of federal data. A hiring freeze and mass layoffs in the federal work force, which have continued during the government shutdown and now exceed 200,000, have also fallen disproportionately on Black workers.

The hiring freeze is an impediment to young workers trying to get their foot in the door, too.

State and local governments have picked up some of the slack from federal agencies. But competition for those jobs has gotten tougher with more laid-off public-sector workers looking for positions.

The Los Angeles Black Worker Center, has pushed local governments to hire more Black workers because unionized public-sector jobs have historically provided an on-ramp to stable employment.

The federal backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion practices may be making it more difficult for Black workers to get hired in the private sector, too. The administration ordered that group not to pursue racial equity anymore.

Lower interest rates could offer some relief. Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote to Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, in early September demanding that the central bank take stronger action to support full employment for Black workers. Fed officials lowered rates later in the month for the first time this year and suggested that more cuts were likely.

But the administration’s actions beyond work-force cuts and anti-D.E.I. policies, could create additional hurdles for Black workers. The Department of Labor’s proposed rollback of minimum-wage and overtime protections for domestic workers, for example, would hurt their incomes. Home care aides for the elderly are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic women.

And despite the claim that immigrants take jobs from Black people, rising joblessness among Black workers suggests that mass deportations of migrants haven’t arrested the trend.

immigrants fill labor shortages, complement the native workforce, and create jobs through entrepreneurship and increased economic demand. Instead of displacing U.S.-born workers, immigrants often take jobs that native-born workers are unwilling or unable to do, or they fill high-skill positions that are in high demand.

Democrats and the Working Class

Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars to understand the working class that once defined their party. They face an identity crisis at the very moment they are trying to attract blue-collar voters who no longer think the political left sees them — or cares. Why did the working class switch sides?

To find a way forward, Democrats might want to look back to when they first lost the working class and the New Deal coalition fractured. While some Democratic challenges have changed, too many struggles remain all too familiar.

Remember in 1970, after Nixon expanded the Vietnam War and the National Guard killed four Kent State students, the antiwar movement radicalized like never before.

Workmen watched protesters chanting support for the other side fighting their kin and kind in Vietnam. IIn a clash that engulfed Lower Manhattan and came to be known as the hard hat riot, masses of workmen pummeled student protesters.

The icons of Franklin Roosevelt’s coalition had attacked the left’s future. It shocked power brokers. The New Left was at war with the Old.

Vietnam concerned not only how one lived but also how one might die. It chafed many working families to see student protesters lecture Americans with less status about social justice while their boys went to war in students’ place. For weeks, two breeds of Democrats were now in the streets, clashing over social values and who felt valued.

This was a class war boiling beneath the emerging culture wars.

Many Americans wanted not only respect for soldiers and the flag but also for motherhood, elders, the workingman. Once celebrated, blue-collar workers were now dismissed as reactionary, racist and ignorant suckers.

So, some Republicans saw their chance to win that Democratic base.

By the 1972 campaign, labor sought to salvage blue-collar Democrats. But at the Democratic convention, George McGovern became the standard-bearer. The New Left had won the party.

At the convention, delegates were diverse by race and sex — but not by class. The party establishment shifted Democrats’ emphasis from social class to social identity. Republicans from Ronald Reagan to President Trump framed campaigns as common touch versus out of touch.

Nixon won 49 states with nearly all his electoral gains being with blue-collar voters. The Republican presidential nominee won the labor vote for the first time since tracking began.

Enough of history! Democrats’ question today is: will Hispanic voters, in particular, ultimately drift rightward as so-called ethnic whites once did?

Trump got the white working class and Latino men. Most of Mr. Trump’s increased Latino support was within the working class. Democrats belatedly recognized that demographics — and a multiracial electorate — did not assure a progressive destiny.

In 2020, when protests and riots took place in many American cities, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina warned that the mind-set “burn, baby, burn” had “destroyed our movement back in the ’60s.”

But Democrats are not fated to relive mistakes that confuse some activists’ causes for whom they claim to represent or the views of radical youth for the views of the young or to forget that politicians can win big, boisterous crowds and still lose America.

Blue-collar America has changed. It’s less unionized, less white, less reliant on manufacturing. But most Americans still lack a bachelor’s degree and would find it difficult to pay a $1,000 emergency expense.

American intellectuals have long struggled to fathom the average American. One study showed that Democrats’ ability to accurately comprehend the other side “actually gets worse with every additional degree they earn.”

And it seems, too often, that leading Democrats who seek some populist fire misunderstand how Democrats got burned. More than two-thirds of swing voters who chose Mr. Trump strongly agreed that Democrats held wrongheaded positions on immigration, crime and identity politics.

Economic populism, including Bernie Sanders’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy tour, is the easy part. A populism that ignores most Americans’ social outlook has never proved able to win a majority outside dire economic times.

Democrats cannot merely buy back the working class.

There are also progressive headwinds. Democrats who identify as socially liberal rose to 69 percent from 39 percent over the past two decades.And since the 1970s, loud voices from popular culture to politics have encouraged an orthodox social liberalism that has weighed down swing-state Democratic candidates.

Which inspires yet another question: Have Democrats lost enough to win? Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — led Democrats out of a similar wilderness. For even when Mr. Trump’s presidency ends, the challenges will persist.

Democrats need to stop walking into the same old trap, and supplement defense of democracy with a viable strategy to lure back enough non-college-educated voters to win elections. Both white voters and voters of color without degrees typically care more about the economy than democratic norms.

First, Trump is not focused on the kitchen table issues he ran on. Second, he has cut government programs that provide security for ordinary Americans in order to finance huge tax cuts for big business. Third, he’s making America weak again in the process.

The New Christianity

A disclaimer, I am an atheist but do go to church (Unitarian Universalist). I don’t espouse, as Karl Marx did, that "Religion is the opium of the masses". I do think we have to be careful about extreme dogma.

Religious conservatism now is more intentional and mission-driven and a post-secular formation. The Christian right’s bargain with the current administration could look less corrupting and more necessary.

The Kirk service was more religious than political, with a portrait of the slain father and husband emphasizing his faith over his political activism — but his memorial unfortunately was still a fundamentally right-wing and Republican affair. The good is still very good. Erika Kirk’s act of forgiveness should be remembered for a very long time.

It was a statement of evangelical resilience and an indicator of enduring religious influence within the G.O.P.. But controlling a political coalition is not the same thing as converting a culture..

Traditional Christianity in the past was seen as an overly ideological and factional persuasion by many Americans. There was some distance between partisan conservatism and Christian faith.

But if the Republican Party becomes identified with Christian revivalism and vice versa, then any Christian renewal could hit a ceiling outside the distinctive culture of the G.O.P.

Then there’s also the question of how much the ongoing requirements of the administration are still influencing conservative Christianity for the worse. The new religious conservatism as a mind-set that seeks an “assertive common good Christianity” that aspires to “anchor society in the stability and order that flow from Christian ethics.” There are a lot of Christians who think of their faith’s public witness in this way — as a moral and spiritual answer to the dissolving influences of the 21st century

But there are also versions of religious conservatism that cheerfully participate in our era’s very online cycles of scapegoating while forgetting the key moral concerns of religious conservatism from abortion to foreign aid to the public morals of our politicians.

And there is also very clearly the public Christians have to constantly prove that they, too, are tough enough and mean enough, willing to cross the line or play the bully or break the moral norm if that’s what it takes to stand by the boss or stick it to the libs.

And so it is today. We are enduring vengeance. Far too few experience Christian kindness. It is a great tragedy of our time that so many Christians see a divine plan on what’s happening today/

Unitarian Universalism embraces peace, love, and understanding that goes beyond individual belief systems.

The administration’s attacks on the Smithsonian Museum for being too “woke” in its exhibits are part of a broader effort to control America’s story. But, for example, Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, has created institutions that confront the nation’s painful past to preserve an honest vision of history.

Everyone has been trying to figure out what the Trump years mean for America, in particular about civil rights and the criminal justice system.

The world has changed since Jan. 20. In this country we’re in the midst of a critically important narrative struggle about who we are, what our priorities are as a nation and how we get to a better future. Our courts and the larger society are retreating from that commitment to full equality and justice.

History is becoming a real battlefield. In August, the White House announced a sweeping review of Smithsonian exhibitions and collections. What’s going on here? Why is history so important?

When we are honest about history, we learn things, we discover things and we prepare for things differently. In Johannesburg, for example, the apartheid museum is so honest about the legacy of something so devastating.

In Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing a monument or a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. There's this reckoning with history. There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

This liberated them, empowered them to create a new democracy that is trusted, respected, vibrant and that’s growing. It doesn’t mean that all the problems have been eliminated, but it does mean that they have recovered something really important, discovered something important.

Slavery, liberation and segregation needs to allow us to liberate us from the burden that that history creates — that burden that still hangs over us, the fog that that history has created that no one is trying to address.

America should celebrate its history. There are lots of things about America that are worth celebrating, but it should also acknowledge the mistakes it’s made. The mistake with trying to whitewash history is that we just continue and sustain the problems that that history has created.

We need to create a world where the children of our children are no longer burdened by this history of racial bias, where there are no more presumptions of dangerousness and guilt that get assigned to people based on their color, where everyone is free to live kind of a life of value and opportunity without restraint because of their color. And we won’t get there if we don’t address some of these harms.

For decades in this country, we had really qualified women and really qualified people of color being denied opportunities for leadership because they were women, because they were Black, because they were brown. That was unfair. It was wrong.

Also, now courts tolerate more racial bias in cases, more extreme misconduct by police and prosecutors, and they look for procedural reasons not to address substantive constitutional violations. That proceduralism became a fence to keep the courts from having to talk about really hard issues.

We are living where the rule of law is not operating in a way to protect people who have been historically vulnerable, historically victimized by power and abuse, and are, in fact, being utilized in a way that will add to that abuse, add to that exclusion.

Judges in state courts who refuse to enforce federal law are no longer fearful that a federal court will overturn them. They’re not worried that the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene.

The composition of the court right now makes it an institution that if you’re trying to advance racial justice, if you’re trying to advance human rights. It is not a very welcoming or hospitable place.

If a court says that states can do whatever they want to do to maintain political power, to disenfranchise Black and brown people, then that will take us back decades. It will fundamentally negate all of that progress.

Should the Court have the authority to undermine the objectives of the president? And that will be a fundamental question this court has to decide — one that will shape the future of this country.

Truth has the power to be resurrected, even in the face of lies and difficult dark days it can triumph!