The Failure of High-Tech Policing

Everyone remembers Ferguson. The small municipality in Missouri, located ten miles northwest of St. Louis, with a mostly black population of about twenty-one thousand, was the setting of a shocking police killing in 2014 that captured the nation’s attention.1 The city’s population, however, also represented a much broader trend—the culmination of a cycle of white flight that had been playing out all over the country for decades. In the 1950s and ’60s, as blacks moved in massive numbers from the South to large northern cities like St. Louis, white families fled those cities for the suburbs. By the 1980s, some blacks had accumulated enough wealth to move to the suburbs, too, and when they did many whites fled again to exurban communities even farther out. This trend created intensely segregated and often impoverished suburbs2—which Ferguson perfectly exemplified: between 1980 and 2010, Ferguson’s white population decreased from 85 to 29 percent […]

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

Bound at the Border, or How to Make Border Porn

On February 15th, Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency in order to fund his “great, great” border wall without having to go through Congress. There is, of course, no emergency, despite the rape fantasy that the president has regularly tried to pass off as public policy. In speech after speech, including his declaration of that emergency, he has told the same story: the United States needs a border wall to prevent sex traffickers from driving women into the country, bound with duct tape. “Women are tied up,” he typically says. “They’re bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases they can’t even breathe.” It’s a scenario he’s only continued to elaborate over time. “They have tape over their mouths, electrical tape, usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good. And they have three, four, five of them in vans, […]

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

Poetry was the language of the frontier, and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner was among its greatest laureates. “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society,” he wrote in 1893. “Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.”1 Expansion across the continent, Turner said, made Europeans into something new, into a people both coarse and curious, self-disciplined and spontaneous, practical and inventive, filled with a “restless, nervous energy” and lifted by “that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” Turner’s scholarly career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the height of Jim Crow and the consolidation of anti-miscegenation and nativist exclusion laws, with the KKK resurgent. Mexican workers were being lynched in Texas, and the U.S. military was engaged in deadly counterinsurgencies in the Caribbean and Pacific. But what became known as Turner’s Frontier Thesis—which argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of “free land” created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism—placed a wager on the future.

A Nation Unmade by War by Tom Engelhardt

Or How to Solve the Border and China Problems in One Swell Foop

Call me crazy, if you want, but I think I see how to do it! We have two intractable issues, one intractable president, and an intractable world, but what if it weren’t so? What if those two intractable problems could be swept off the table by a single gesture from that same intractable man? As a start, consider the problem of President Trump’s embattled “great, great wall,” the one to be built across 1,000 (or is it 2,000?) miles of our southern border, the one that so obsesses him, filling every other hour of his tweet-storming day, the one that a recalcitrant Mexican government refused to pay for, that Congress wouldn’t pony up the money for, and that striking percentages of Americans don’t want to fund either. As for turning it into a national emergency, that’s only going to line the pockets of law firms, not build the “big, fat, […]