The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

In 1974, Harlem’s deserted streets and tumbledown tenements told the story of a neighborhood left behind. Decades of disinvestment had culminated in a mass exodus known as urban flight and residents watched as their wealthier, more educated counterparts left the New York City neighborhood in droves.

But the tide turned when Percy Sutton, then the Manhattan borough president and New York City’s highest-ranking Black elected official, launched a campaign to bring back vitality to the historically African American neighborhood that had been known as a global Black mecca of arts, culture and entrepreneurship.

It became known as Harlem Week, and would go on to draw back those who had departed. On Sunday, organizers celebrated Harlem Week’s 50th anniversary after 18 days of free programming that showcased all the iconic neighborhood has to offer.  [snip]

“The neighborhood was blighted,” recalled Malik Yoba, an actor born in the Bronx in 1967 who grew up in Harlem and spent days playing in the dirt of vacant lots. Yoba attended school in the Upper East Side with peers who had country homes upstate in the Hamptons.

“I didn’t understand why where we lived looked so dramatically different than where they lived,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”

But Harlemites are creatives and entrepreneurs, visionaries and leaders. Where others saw decline, they saw opportunity, and the determination to match Harlem with its potential ran high.

Yoba, now 56, built a career as an actor showcasing Harlem to audiences across the nation. His experiences with housing inequality also fueled his passion for real estate.

Yoba combats the effects of redlining through his company Yoba Development, which provides young people of color access to the industry and has active projects in Baltimore and New York City.

“When you grow up in disenfranchised and divested communities, you can’t see the forest through the trees,” Yoba said. “You can grow up believing that walking by burnt-down buildings is your birthright, as opposed to understanding that building is a business.”...

Harlem's turnaround into a coveted neighborhood is one of the success stories of the revitalization of New York City since the 1970's.

The bad:

...[J]ust as Brexit prefigured Donald Trump’s election in 2016, there are signs that we are again the canary in the coalmine. The same transatlantic patterns, the same playbook, the same figures. But this time with a whole new set of dangerous, unchecked technological vulnerabilities to be exploited.

The streets are – for now – quiet. The violence has been crushed. But this is Britain, where extremist political violence is someone carrying a brick and throwing a chair leg. In America, there aren’t just automatic weapons and rights to openly carry firearms, there are actual militias. Regardless of how well Harris is doing in the polls, America is facing a singularly dangerous moment, whoever wins the election.

Because as Trump has already showed us and as Jair Bolsonaro learned, it’s not even necessarily about winning any more. Or even about a single day. The entire period between the result and the inauguration is an anything-can-happen moment not just for America but for the world.

In Britain, the canary has sung. This summer we have witnessed something new and unprecedented. The billionaire owner of a tech platform publicly confronting an elected leader and using his platform to undermine his authority and incite violence. Britain’s 2024 summer riots were Elon Musk’s trial balloon.

He got away with it. And if you’re not terrified by both the extraordinary supranational power of that and the potential consequences, you should be. If Musk chooses to “predict” a civil war in the States, what will that look like? If he chooses to contest an election result? If he decides that democracy is over-rated? This isn’t sci-fi. It’s literally three months away...

Musk's pervasive "X" social media platform, SpaceX ownership, and Christofascist ideology make him a uniquely dangerous threat to national security.  Combined with the efforts of anti- democratic, election-denying MAGAts, Musk's actions both before and after the election could ignite events that could spiral out of control.  He can't be immune from the consequences of those actions should they lead to violence and civil disorder.

The ugly:

Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon is outdoing J.D. Vance in the anti-woman department. Webbon does not just want the U.S. to go back to pre-Roe, pre-no-fault divorce days, he wants to go all the way back to 1920 and repeal the 19th Amendment. That’s the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.

This guy clearly has a major problem with women. Last month, C&L reported on Webbon’s prayer “that we would not have female leadership.” That’s part of his desire for Christian power which, he said, means “crushing our enemies and rewarding our friends.”

More recently, Right Wing Watch caught Webbon suggesting that Christians should demand that women lose the right to vote.

“The reason why I have grown to despise democracy is because … everyone is allowed to vote,” Webbon said. “And just for the record, yeah, I think the 19th Amendment should be repealed. I think that because, first and foremost, I'm a Christian and that is the Christian position."

Webbon yammered on to claim that, “The way that God sees humanity is, he breaks them down to families.” So, according to Webbon, taking away women’s votes is not just “elevating the male vote” but is also “elevating the household vote.” Which sounds a lot like J.D. Vance’s “thought experiment” to give parents more votes than single people, but with a generous helping of extra misogyny.

Repealing the 19th Amendment “is not just trying to take away a female vote but is trying to say, no, there’s a family vote,” Webbon continued. Women, he said “get their voice” from their male relatives, i.e. husbands if they’re married or fathers or brothers if single...  (our emphasis)

When we talk about Christofascists, this is what we mean.  "The Handmaid's Tale" isn't a work of fiction, it's a promise.  By the way, yesterday was the 104th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.