“This Jay Chen for American Congress, he’s perfect for China,” one agent told his colleague in a smoke-filled room at the “Chinese Communist Party Intelligence Division.” Chen, the agent said in stereotypically accented English, was “a socialist comrade” who supported Bernie Sanders “for supreme leader.”

“Sanders loves Mao, Chen loves Sanders,” the other spy said, as the pair erupted in maniacal laughter.

The two men were actors in an advertisement for GOP Rep. Michelle Steel in her 2022 reelection fight against Chen in Southern California’s 45th Congressional District. Following a barrage of promotional material in this vein, groups from Asian American and Pacific Islander communities protested the tactics used by Steel, calling them “McCarthyist” and making signs reading “Stop Asian hate” and “Red-baiting is race-baiting.” 

Steel, who is Korean American, won the race, taking 52 percent of the vote and helping Republicans narrowly seize control of the US House.

Politicized battles over Asian American identity have become a recurring feature of campaigns in the 45th—a wrench-shaped swing district that spans more than a dozen cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties. It’s one of the country’s few majority-minority congressional districts represented by a Republican, and Democrats see it as one of their top pickup opportunities as they try to retake the House in November. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 39 percent of the district’s voting-age residents—the second highest in the state. Approximately half of the district’s Asian population is Vietnamese.

Democrats hope their challenger this time around—Derek Tran—will fare better than Chen. A US Army veteran and the son of refugees, Tran is leaning heavily into his anti-communist bona fides. “Derek’s family fled a murderous communist regime in Vietnam,” his campaign website notes. “He knows firsthand the devastating impact of totalitarian governments and is committed to standing firm against Chinese Communist rule.”

In an interview with Mother Jones, Chen expressed optimism that Tran’s biography would be a powerful tool in fighting back against Steel’s “red scare” tactics. “The fact that Derek is Vietnamese American will help him counter a lot of these attacks,” Chen predicted.

Chen—who is Taiwanese American—recalled that, in his own race two years ago, Republicans posted campaign signs reading “China’s Choice Jay Chen” and “made them resemble the Chinese flag.” Similar rhetoric was deployed in Vietnamese and featured the colors of the flag of South Vietnam, the US-backed country that ceased to exist in 1975 after it was defeated by communist forces at the end of the Vietnam War. “The bulk of its focus is on the Vietnamese community, and the symbolism that [Steel] includes—the red and the yellow—are meant to trigger an immigrant population, many of whom were refugees who were very traumatized by communism,” Chen said.

That’s happening again. Steel’s team has installed large signs invoking the South Vietnamese flag around the area’s Little Saigon community—across from a Costco popular with Vietnamese shoppers and at the entrance to a plaza of Vietnamese shops. “Đả Đảo Cộng Sản,” they read: “Down With Communism.”

The signs have caused some controversy. “To us, Steel is misusing the flag for her own political gain—the flag we so revere,” said Christina Dao, a host and commentator for Nguoi Viet Daily News in Little Saigon. “We would never put any political slogans or anyone’s names on the flag. Michelle Steel is not really a part of its history.”

In our conversation, Dao pointed to a Wall Street Journal report from 2020 that documented how Steel’s husband, Shawn Steel, who has served as the Republican National Committee member from California since 2008, invited Chinese nationals to a 2017 GOP event where attendees allegedly talked through campaign strategy. (Steel told the Journal that it would be “false, defamatory, and offensive” to suggest he’d helped Chinese government efforts in any way. He did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

All this convinced Dao and other Vietnamese Americans in Little Saigon to form an unofficial group, start a petition on Change.org, and organize an online press conference to criticize Michelle Steel. The congresswoman is “abusing” the flag “to satisfy her greed for power,” the petition says.

In 1984, following the GOP’s national convention, Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential reelection campaign in Fountain Valley, part of today’s 45th District. “It’s nice to be in Orange County,” Reagan famously remarked, “where the good Republicans go to die.” At the time, the county was about 78 percent white and solidly conservative.

Since then, the region has grown in diversity and has slowly shifted toward the political center. A survey conducted earlier this year by the University of California, Irvine, concluded that the county is now “politically purple…almost evenly split among Republicans (32%), Democrats (33%), and Independents (35%).” Among Asian American respondents, the partisan divide is similar. 

The common narrative is that the influx of immigrant communities made the county more ethnically and economically heterogeneous. This, along with the backlash to Republican support for California’s Proposition 187 in 1994—which ordered health care institutions and school districts to deny services to undocumented people—led to a decades-long political drift away from GOP hegemony. In 2018, bolstered by opposition to Donald Trump, Democrats won a clean sweep of all seven congressional seats in the county.

Viewing Orange County as purple is “dangerous for Democrats.”

But there’s no reason to think these changes are permanent. Republicans—including Steel—recaptured two of those House seats in 2020. And Gustavo Arellano, an author and columnist at the Los Angeles Times, warned this year that viewing Orange County as purple is “dangerous for Democrats,” as the GOP still dominates local politics. Republicans, he noted, “hold every countywide elected position and all the seats on the Orange County Board of Education…A majority of city councils in the county lean GOP.” 

In 2018, Arellano credited the Republican Party as the “pioneer in diversifying O.C.’s politics,” listing notable Latino politicians who arrived in the region in the ’80s, including Tom Fuentes, a Mexican American who worked on Richard Nixon’s California gubernatorial campaign and later became the long-standing chair of the county GOP. 

Now that Asian American Republicans have become a force in Orange County politics, Arellano argued, the GOP was constructing “a new racial cold war” through appeals to immigrants across the country who “come with skills and ambitions and don’t want government handouts.” In his view, the Republican Party was now drawing on anti-Latino feelings among other immigrant groups, resulting in support for policies like stronger borders. 

“The countywide power held by [Republicans] reflects strong local mobilization efforts by the party,” said UC Irvine professor Long Bui, an expert on the politics of Vietnamese refugees, in an email interview. “Saying Orange County is increasingly Democratic due to a rise in immigrants overlooks nuances, especially when party affiliations among Vietnamese Americans split along generational, class, and educational lines.”

Survey data published last year shows that a narrow majority of Vietnamese Americans nationwide lean toward the Republican Party, a sharp contrast to other AAPI communities, which tend to heavily favor Democrats. According to Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, a professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, the political divides within the Vietnamese American community partly reflect several distinct groups of immigrants: refugees who left Vietnam at the end of the war in 1975; boat people who fled starting in the late ’70s; and later humanitarian and family reunification efforts. 

While Nguyen-Vo stresses that many differences exist among individual voters, in general, those who immigrated in 1975—in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon—were mostly middle- and upper-class urban dwellers and tended to be more liberal than groups who arrived later. They opposed the communist regime, but they didn’t necessarily see anti-communism as incompatible with Democratic policies like progressive income tax rates and a more generous social safety net.

Vietnamese boat people and other groups who fled after 1975 are more “staunchly anti-communist and pro-American,” according to Nguyen-Vo. Before leaving Vietnam, she notes, these families lived through “extreme economic hardship, partly due to the American embargo and socialist reorganization…and outright repression including incarceration in prisons and reeducation camps.”

“Many died or disappeared due to boat wrecks, lack of fuel, food and water, and encounters with pirates,” explains Nguyen-Vo. “These folks languished in refugee camps for long years awaiting countries to grant asylum.” Once in the US, boat people often had a tougher time financially than earlier Vietnamese immigrants and may support policies like lowering taxes and restricting immigration, believing they will help them reach economic stability or advancement. “However, they tend to favor social programs like health care and social assistance, as many had depended on these programs at some point,” Nguyen-Vo suggested. “They may equate being anti-communist and conservative with the GOP and vote red, but they would still want their GOP representatives to support social programs.” 

Culture war issues have become a particular flashpoint. Lance Trover, a spokesperson for Steel, cited the Republican lawmaker’s work in introducing the Helping Applications Receive Valid and Reasonable Decisions (HARVARD) Act to “stop racial discrimination in university admissions that has been proven to specifically target Asian Americans”—the subject of last year’s Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action policies. 

Trover also noted Steel’s efforts to highlight “Vietnamese communist human rights abuses.” In a July 2024 interview with VietFaceTV, a Vietnamese-language television station based in the district, Steel voiced her concerns with the Vietnamese government’s treatment of prisoners of conscience. She also noted her support for a bipartisan bill that would prevent Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the United States prior to 1995 from being deported.

Both candidates have leaned heavily on their families’ immigration experiences. “To forge the American Dream in California,” Tran said over email, “I know that what this community wants more than anything is someone who will protect individual freedom, fight for economic opportunity, and address the affordability crisis that is hurting families.” In May, Tran sparked his own controversy when he told Punchbowl News that although Steel presents herself as a Korean refugee who fled communism, she actually moved to the US for “economic gain.”

“That’s not the same as losing one’s country after the fall of Saigon in ’75 and having no home,” he said.

“There are people in the community who are tired of this continued conversation about identity.”

Dozens of AAPI organizations and community leaders came to Steel’s defense, insisting that Tran apologize for his statement. “Mr. Tran, starting a new life and working to attain a better economic state is the American Dream that so many of us or our parents have done,” they wrote. “It’s why we are here, and why we love representing the diverse groups in our communities.”

Of course, Tran isn’t the only candidate trying to draw distinctions between different groups of immigrants. “You regularly see [Steel] and Young Kim [a Korean American Republican representing a neighboring congressional district] talking about how, Oh, I came here legally to pursue the American Dream. But it’s the undocumented who are making it worse for everyone,” said Chen.

Hao Phan, the Southeast Asia curator at Northern Illinois University, thinks that such rhetoric could resonate with voters. “Vietnamese Americans are concerned about the issue of illegal immigration,” he says. “Although Vietnamese are immigrants, they tend to see themselves as good immigrants in contrast to the bad immigrants.”

Some voters are growing frustrated with the increasingly bitter identity politics. “This new political dimension has created a painful rift within the community, which used to be united around the identity of a community of refugees…against the communist regime in Vietnam,” says Phan.

Jeanie Le, a board member with the Orange County Young Democrats, says she appreciates the importance of ethnic background and the history of AAPI identity. But, she adds, “there are people in the community who are tired of this continued conversation about identity…People who are here are worried about if their kid is going to school and how they’re going to pay rent.” She called out Steel’s red-baiting in particular: “A lot of Vietnamese people are really tired of it because it makes the community seem monolithic.”

Le sees the battles over AAPI identity as misguided distractions from the more immediate concrete problems facing the district, including the soaring cost of living. She praised Kim B. Nguyen-Penaloza—a Garden Grove City Council member who lost the March primary to Tran by a couple hundred votes—for her work leading the city’s mobile mental health program for the unhoused. She also highlighted Thai Viet Phan, a council member from nearby Santa Ana, for her support of a local law that limits rent increases to 3 percent per year.

“There’s so much happening in our community, and I just really want to make sure that when people write about this community, they reflect that,” Le told me. “It’s a lot more complex than a lot of people try to make it out to be.”

Update, October 4: This story previously noted that Le told Mother Jones that the OC Young Democrats weren’t fully backing a candidate in the California 45th congressional race. After that interview, but before this story was published, the group endorsed Tran.

Thinking before you speak publicly is an important skill. Idaho State Sen. Dan Foreman, a conservative Republican, apparently did not get the memo.

As Boise State Public Radio, an NPR affiliate, reported on Thursday, a “meet the candidates” forum was held on Tuesday evening in Kendrick, a town with a population of about 300. Foreman attended, as did others running for District 6 state House and Senate seats. (Idaho has 35 legislative districts, each with one senator and two representatives.)

After Trish Carter-Goodheart, a Democrat running for a House seat, pointed out that discrimination and racism exist in Idaho, Foreman reportedly lost his temper and told her to “go back where you came from.”

Among the various problems with that statement, Carter-Goodheart happens to be a member of the Nez Perce tribe, which has a reservation smack in the middle of District 6. She was where she came from. Foreman, as the radio piece noted, was born in Illinois. (Foreman did not respond to Boise State Public Radio for comment.)

Foreman is not the only Western politician to make offensive remarks about Native Americans recently—Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy admitted to doing the same, and his Democratic rival, incumbent Jon Tester, has made it a campaign issue.

Tester: The statement you made degrades Native Americans. You're a big guy, apologize. 

Sheehy: Do you apologize for opening the border? 

Tester: I didn't open the border. When we had a opportunity to fix the border, you said we want to play politics with this pic.twitter.com/FRbM23aD3R

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 1, 2024

Republican Rep. Lori McCann—who is running against Carter-Goodheart—told the radio station that she agrees with her opponent’s assessment of what happened, which Carter-Goodheart summarized in a statement released on Wednesday:

Last night, I entered what should have been a respectful and constructive public candidate forum. Instead, I was met with hateful, racist remarks from State Senator Dan Foreman, who screamed at me to “go back where you came from.”

The question on the floor was about a state bill addressing discrimination. One of the candidates responded, claiming that “discrimination doesn’t exist in Idaho.” When it was my turn to speak, I calmly pointed out that just because someone hasn’t personally experienced discrimination doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Racism and discrimination are real issues here in Idaho, as anyone familiar with our state’s history knows. I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality.

That’s when Sen. Foreman lost all control. His words to me: “I’m so sick and tired of this liberal b*llsh*t! Why don’t you go back to where you came from?!”

I stayed. I stayed because I wanted to show our community that I can, and will, handle difficult, unpleasant situations. After the forum, several members of the crowd came up to me and offered their support, apologizing for Sen. Foreman’s behavior. But it’s not the people in the crowd who need to apologize.

I need to thank the women who stood with me against this hate: Representative Lori McCann, Kathy Dawes, and Moscow City Councilwoman Julia Parker. You had my back when it mattered, and I appreciate your strength and solidarity.

What happened last night was a reminder of why this election matters. I am a proud member of the Nez Perce tribe, fighting to represent the land my family has lived on for generations. People like Dan Foreman do not represent our diverse community, and I will continue to stand against the hatred and racism they spread. Our state deserves better. Our community deserves better. We deserve better.

Thinking before you speak publicly is an important skill. Idaho State Sen. Dan Foreman, a conservative Republican, apparently did not get the memo.

As Boise State Public Radio, an NPR affiliate, reported on Thursday, a “meet the candidates” forum was held on Tuesday evening in Kendrick, a town with a population of about 300. Foreman attended, as did others running for District 6 state House and Senate seats. (Idaho has 35 legislative districts, each with one senator and two representatives.)

After Trish Carter-Goodheart, a Democrat running for a House seat, pointed out that discrimination and racism exist in Idaho, Foreman reportedly lost his temper and told her to “go back where you came from.”

Among the various problems with that statement, Carter-Goodheart happens to be a member of the Nez Perce tribe, which has a reservation smack in the middle of District 6. She was where she came from. Foreman, as the radio piece noted, was born in Illinois. (Foreman did not respond to Boise State Public Radio for comment.)

Foreman is not the only Western politician to make offensive remarks about Native Americans recently—Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy admitted to doing the same, and his Democratic rival, incumbent Jon Tester, has made it a campaign issue.

Tester: The statement you made degrades Native Americans. You're a big guy, apologize. 

Sheehy: Do you apologize for opening the border? 

Tester: I didn't open the border. When we had a opportunity to fix the border, you said we want to play politics with this pic.twitter.com/FRbM23aD3R

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 1, 2024

Republican Rep. Lori McCann—who is running against Carter-Goodheart—told the radio station that she agrees with her opponent’s assessment of what happened, which Carter-Goodheart summarized in a statement released on Wednesday:

Last night, I entered what should have been a respectful and constructive public candidate forum. Instead, I was met with hateful, racist remarks from State Senator Dan Foreman, who screamed at me to “go back where you came from.”

The question on the floor was about a state bill addressing discrimination. One of the candidates responded, claiming that “discrimination doesn’t exist in Idaho.” When it was my turn to speak, I calmly pointed out that just because someone hasn’t personally experienced discrimination doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Racism and discrimination are real issues here in Idaho, as anyone familiar with our state’s history knows. I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality.

That’s when Sen. Foreman lost all control. His words to me: “I’m so sick and tired of this liberal b*llsh*t! Why don’t you go back to where you came from?!”

I stayed. I stayed because I wanted to show our community that I can, and will, handle difficult, unpleasant situations. After the forum, several members of the crowd came up to me and offered their support, apologizing for Sen. Foreman’s behavior. But it’s not the people in the crowd who need to apologize.

I need to thank the women who stood with me against this hate: Representative Lori McCann, Kathy Dawes, and Moscow City Councilwoman Julia Parker. You had my back when it mattered, and I appreciate your strength and solidarity.

What happened last night was a reminder of why this election matters. I am a proud member of the Nez Perce tribe, fighting to represent the land my family has lived on for generations. People like Dan Foreman do not represent our diverse community, and I will continue to stand against the hatred and racism they spread. Our state deserves better. Our community deserves better. We deserve better.

Daniel Inouye wanted to serve the United States from a young age. Growing up in Hawaii, he was rattled by the attack on Pearl Harbor; in 1944, at the age of 19, Inouye deployed to Italy, then France, to fight the Nazis. War changes most soldiers’ lives, but Inouye, fighting in an all–Japanese American combat unit, also had to get his right arm amputated: A Nazi soldier struck him with a grenade launcher, partly destroying the arm and forcing him to pry the undetonated grenade out with his left hand. He threw it back at the Nazi—this time, it detonated.

After being rehabilitated, Inouye continued to serve the United States, first as one of Hawaii’s earliest delegates to the House of Representatives, then, in 1963, in the Senate, where he remained for nearly 50 years. Inouye supported civil rights, but he was not at the forefront of the disability rights movement; in fact, Inouye did not see himself as a disabled person, likely due to stigma at the time. By 2010, Inouye was president pro tempore of the Senate, making him the highest-ranking person of color with a disability in the presidential line of succession, ever.

“When he started in politics, to have a disability would have been a weakness.”

Inouye’s story is the subject of a new documentary, out October 8, in PBS’ Renegades series of five short films telling the stories of underrecognized disabled figures in US history, like Inouye and Black Panther Party member Brad Lomax.

Mother Jones spoke with Renegades series creator Day Al-Mohamed, who has worked on disability policy in the Biden-Harris administration, and Tammy Botkin, who directed the short on the late senator, on Inouye’s relationship to his disability and more.

As someone who worked in politics, Day, why was it important for you that a politician with a disability was featured?

Al-Mohamed: If you think about it, very much that shapes the the way the country operates, right? It actually, in some way, shapes the very look and feel of a country—that is, the politics and the policies and the laws. It would be remiss to not include a politician, and we specifically wanted Sen. Inouye to be a part of this because of his perspective on disability.

In your work in disability policy, even decades later, do you see similarities in how many veterans may not view themselves as part of the disability community—like Daniel Inouye didn’t?

Al-Mohamed: I still remember, as one veteran explained it to me, “I don’t have a disability. I’m just busted out.” It’s very much a way of thinking about that. Veterans are a community in and of themselves and [had] a job, in many ways, that is based on your your body, abilities and capacity.

We all have different perceptions of what it means to be disabled, and we can even see that within the non-veteran community as well. There’s this general mainstream perception that disability is a wheelchair user, or it’s somebody who is blinded. I think that that has done a disservice to many folks who don’t see the opportunity to take advantage of the policies and politics that protect them, which is also, in some ways, at the heart of the episode.

It does seem there’s a generational shift, where younger people are embracing that identity more than in the days when more people were being institutionalized.

Botkin: It’s definitely related to generational views of disability. It is also related to the Senator’s identity as a war veteran, who has seen many other friends who died and were maimed far worse than he. It also has to do with his identity as a Japanese American. Then, his need as a politician to show himself as strong—and when he started in politics, to have a disability would have been a weakness.

Why was it important to explore multiple aspects of Inouye’s identity—including how anti-Japanese sentiment made it difficult for Inouye to enlist, and led to his being called a communist?

Botkin: First off, the senator being smushed into 12 minutes feels like an aberration. How do you do that? He [had] such a massive, massive life, and he himself was such a prolific storyteller and framer of his experience and our collective experience.

There were so many facets to him that to really even begin to understand him as an individual, to leave any of those out is to not be able to really grasp who he is—that he belonged to many communities. He’s Japanese American, yes, but also Hawaiian. Yes, he’s military. He’s a politician. He’s a man from a certain generation of Americanism. He would fight for people with disabilities, but for him to take the lead on it would be self-serving. He wouldn’t do that, and that leans a lot into his Japanese American heritage. We worked with Japanese American consultants to nail this in.

When you’re telling somebody’s story, it’s terrifying because I personally feel like I have to get it right. Luckily, in this case, the Senator’s best friend, who’s in the film, Jeff Watanabe, was incredibly pleased with the representation, so I can breathe.

Al-Mohamed: If you watch the film, you can see [Tammy’s] pulling strands of different labels. As you even highlighted, the discussion around communism, discussion about being Japanese American, discussion about disability, discussion about veteran, those are all labels. At the heart, it’s about the ones you choose to embrace, the ones you don’t, the ones society puts on you, and the ones that you choose for yourself.

What does Inouye’s story reveal about about how people’s lived experiences can help them push for justice?

Botkin: As a person who was never diagnosed as a child with neurodivergence, it started dawning on me in my 30s. I’m like, “Huh, you might have this thing.” I’m terrified of the label, to be honest. That’s the kind of the stance that I feel like that the senator was taking, which was, I’m not going to claim it for me, but I’m going to fight for everybody else.

What is that inability within ourselves to accept it? I don’t know. That’s something that I actually felt like I had in common with the senator, and I think maybe it’s just the old programming that we haven’t been able to take care of.

Al-Mohamed: In many ways, your own lived experiences are what are going to shape your own policies, your views and your actions. It was very clear from the senator’s early life and the things that happened to him, there was very much a clear recognition of some of the inequities that existed. He was somebody who basically committed five decades of his life to addressing those inequities across a variety of arenas.

From a political standpoint, he didn’t have a box, [like] it’s just going to be veteran stuff. He actually ended up taking that way of looking at what is fair and what is right and putting it into a variety of arenas. Some stronger than others, but the fact is that they were there. I think that’s where you see Inouye using that personal experience and using it to push for positive change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On Sunday, two New York City police officers fired into a crowded Brooklyn subway station, shooting and injuring four people, including two bystanders, one of whom is a hospital employee now in critical condition after police shot him in the head during his commute. 

The catalyst for this bloody confrontation: an alleged fare evasion. In other words, $2.90.

According to the NYPD, officers suspected that 37-year-old Derell Mickles had skipped a turnstile at the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. The officers followed Mickles, resulting in a chase that ended with officers shooting him, two bystanders, and another officer on duty. While police initially claimed that they had recovered a knife Mickles had used to threaten officers, officials later contradicted their own claim, prompting questions over what exactly had happened.

Asked about body camera footage on Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams deflected, telling a reporter to “speak with the police commissioner,” before praising the officers involved in Sunday’s shooting for demonstrating a “great level of restraint.” The NYPD has since firmly defended the officers, with the police departments chief of patrol stating, “We are not perfect.”

The violent incident, inside one of the world’s busiest subway systems, has sparked outrage among New Yorkers as well as a victim’s family members, who condemned the officers’ actions as “reckless.”

And they’re far from alone. Criminal justice reform advocates are slamming what they see as an outsized response by the NYPD to something as minor and trivial as alleged fare evasion. It comes amid New York Mayor Eric Adams’ aggressive crackdown on fare evaders, a policy Adams has claimed would also help with violence that occurs on trains. Protests have since broken out across the city, calling for the officers involved in Sunday’s shooting to be held accountable.

I spoke with Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the New York City Civil Liberties Union, to learn more about Adams’ crackdown on fare evasion, overpolicing, and lack of police transparency surrounding Sunday’s violent encounter. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is an ongoing investigation. But there are already significant concerns over how the police handled this situation and how the mayor has responded.

This disturbing incident is sadly not surprising, given what we’ve seen from this administration. The Adams administration and NYPD have been dramatically ramping up enforcement activity, increasing their presence in the subways, increasing stops, increasing frisks, and increasing all of the hallmarks of broken windows policing.  This is a predictable and inevitable consequence of this administration’s approach to a very aggressive enforcement mindset. There are so many questions about what we’ve heard from the mayor’s office from the NYPD about what exactly unfolded. 

We have heard officer accounts of what happened. We’ve heard some witness accounts. The NYPD and the mayor’s office have been reviewing body camera footage. But, we have not been able to see this. We’re not getting a transparent accounting of what took place. It’s absolutely critical that we see the evidence that they’re relying on to make these assertions. 

We’re being asked to take the word of a mayor whose initial tweet in response to this incident had to get community noted because it was leaving out the important context of the officer he was talking about having been shot was shot by a fellow officer. We can’t really trust their version of events when they’re not showing us the evidence of what took place in that incident.

This is a predictable and inevitable consequence of this administration’s approach to a very aggressive enforcement mindset.

Are complaints over transparency from the NYPD common?

It’s a hallmark of the NYPD. We know that they can be transparent when they choose to be and when they think it serves their interest. Folks may remember back in January of 2024 the NYPD released body camera footage within hours, within a day of the traffic stop of a city council member when they sought to use that footage to highlight their version of what took place. But they treat incidents like this very differently.

How common—or rare—are shootings like this in New York?

I don’t know that we have the full stats on how common this type of shooting is in the subway from an officer.  It’s not something that I’ve seen a full accounting of, but what we have seen are increased reports of police misconduct and abuse of New Yorkers that have upticked with this administration. Civilian complaints going into the Civilian Complaint Review Board have reached alarmingly high levels. At the same time, there have also been real concerns about what the department is actually doing with complaints that are moving through the NYPD disciplinary system, where they’re just not taking those reports seriously. 

When you respond to everything with an officer, you are increasing the likelihood that we’re going to see more cases where someone is subject to use of force.

Can overpolicing backfire? How do outsize police presences affect communities, particularly communities of color?

The approach that this administration has taken since day one is overpolicing. 

They’ve identified police officers as the be-all, end-all, sole solution to every societal ill. Fare evasion? Send a cop after it. Homelessness? Send police to conduct sweeps. Mental health crises? Instead of sending peers and EMTs, send a cop instead.

It’s a formula that this administration seems wedded to, but it’s not improving community safety for New Yorkers. Police are primarily concerned with enforcing criminal laws, making arrests, and issuing summonses. They have an enforcement mindset, not a delivery of services or addressing root causes mindset.

So when you respond to everything with an officer, you are increasing the likelihood that we’re going to see more and more cases where someone is subject to use of force, someone is tased, someone is shot, someone is killed when they did not need to be, because you are responding to a situation with tools that are just fundamentally not a good fit for that scenario.

We see this play out largely in communities that need more investments to address the root causes of crime, poverty, homelessness, the need for increased mental health and healthcare services. Rather than making those investments, which are harder and will take more thought to accomplish, we instead default to a reliance on police officers.

In March, the NYPD announced they would send 800 officers into subways to combat fare evasion. In the same month, Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed the National Guard in response to several violent incidents that occurred a few weeks prior. Realistically, how effective are methods like this in preventing crime, and what are some of the pitfalls?

It’s brought up time and time again that if you focus on low-level crime and low-level signs of disorder, you’re mitigating the potential for it to escalate into more serious criminal activity and driving down overall crime rates as a result. 

That’s been studied and debunked numerous times. New York City hit historically low crime rates as stop and frisk plummeted to historic lows and was reined in as enforcement fell, as summonses and arrest activity went down. The data is just not there to justify the approach to broken windows or quality-of-life policing.

Instead, it’s very effective at funneling more and more people into the criminal legal system, saddling people with fines that they cannot afford, making them attend court dates that they cannot afford, and giving people the potentially lifelong consequence of acquiring a criminal record which can extend to every aspect of their life. What it’s not doing is meeting community needs and making New Yorkers safer.

Eric Adams has pushed for a crackdown on fare evasion. Last month, the MTA announced that they’ll be sending summons of up to $50 to $100 to fare evaders. Did a “tough on crime” approach play into what happened over the weekend?

What happened over the weekend is an inevitable outcome of that kind of tough-on-crime approach, where the only tool that we seem to have to offer is police officers, who are going to focus on enforcement and if they’re given an aggressive mandate to enforce, are going to enforce that aggressively.

We haven’t seen the actual footage yet. We’re relying on accounts of what happened. But it’s very easy to see how a police officer pursuing someone, chasing them, is a tactic that is escalatory, as opposed to thinking of ways we can tackle issues like fare evasion without the threat of violence.

That is such a mismatch we don’t need to be constrained thinking about responding to fare evasion with just a police law enforcement tool.

We should be thinking more broadly about getting people access to the support they need to enroll in programs for New Yorkers who can’t afford to pay for fares to get to work, pay for child care, or get access to medical care. We can think about other ways that we are addressing those causes without putting armed officers in and telling them you need to make sure that you are aggressively cracking down on everyone within the system.

As this case has gained traction on social media, one of the most disturbing responses I’ve seen is how so many people justify using this level of force because Mickles was suspected of evading a $2.90 fare. It’s a narrative that oftentimes rears its head after a high-profile case of police brutality. We saw this with George Floyd, Eric Garner. 

The level of force used here is so disproportionate to the alleged infraction. No one should be subject to having their life put in jeopardy because of an alleged evasion of a $2.90 cent fare, to say nothing of the fact that officers pursued him into a crowded station and onto a train.

That response is not only out of proportion to the individual’s alleged offense, but it is putting so many other people needlessly in harm’s way.

It’s deeply disturbing that the NYPD and the administration could view that level of a response as an appropriate reaction when we’re talking about something as trivial as the evasion of a $2.90 cent fare.

Since the shooting occurred, plenty of New Yorkers have started to protest the NYPD’s crackdown on fare evasion. What are your thoughts on some of these demonstrations?

People are recognizing an uptick in the targeting of their communities and an uptick in stop activity racial disparities as bad or even worse than they were at its height. There is a real sense that the NYPD is not providing a service to New Yorkers but is causing active harm In communities.

And I think that an expression that also finds a voice in the number of complaints of police misconduct going in, being on the rise, and is evident in the types of protests that we’re seeing against this incident and against other instances of police brutality and violence.

It’s important that New Yorkers be able to express their to raise their voice and express their views in protesting against policies that are causing harm in their communities rather than actually helping deliver real safety for them.

A number of prominent figures on the right and far right are once again engaged in energetic antisemitism; this time, Instagram personality Dan Bilzerian, a poker player and lifestyle influencer previously famous for posing with women on large boats, has climbed aboard. Bilzerian and two other masculinity influencers—accused human traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate—have increasingly pivoted to criticisms of Israel that promptly segue into antisemitic claims clearly rooted in the blood libel, a medieval conspiracy theory about Jews murdering Christians.

Bilzerian is grandiosely known as the “King of Instagram,” where he displays scenes of a lifestyle involving yachts, crowds of bikini-clad hangers-on, and exotic locales to 32 million followers. In the past few weeks, however, Bilzerian has been spouting wild conspiracies about the Israeli government, telling a podcaster that he believes it “knew about 9/11” (presumably in advance) and “had JFK assassinated.”

Last week Bilzerian was among those who shared a viral meme on Twitter/X claiming to show English translations of the Talmud, a foundational Jewish religious text, “proving” that it exists to justify the mistreatment and murder of non-Jews. These claims, which have been debunked many times over the last several centuries, seem to be largely sourced from antiquated antisemitic texts, like 1892’s The Talmud Unmasked. Besides being composed of outrageous lies—claiming, for instance, that Judaism permits the rape and murder of non-Jews—the meme cites a purported book of the Talmud that the American Jewish Committee identified as “altogether fictitious” in 1939.

“Antisemites trying to focus on the Talmud is almost as old as antisemitism gets,” explains Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, the social media editor of Chabad.org, the Judaism website run by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a branch of Orthodox Judaism. “You have places on the dark corners of the internet where people have compiled bits and pieces that are totally made up, or taken out of context. They have the same spelling mistakes and use made-up terms in Hebrew.”

The meme vastly oversimplifies what the Talmud is: an intricate text, composed of thousands of pages of summation of oral tradition, opinions from rabbis and sages, teachings, conversations and debates. While some observant Jews devote years to understanding its mysteries, antisemitic memes presume it is a literal rulebook by which modern-day Jews live, instead of a compilation of religious and ethical arguments written between the third and sixth centuries.  

The Talmud is, Lightstone adds, written “in a language that isn’t accessible to the common person today.” Even at the time it was written, in a blend of Aramaic and Hebrew, it was “incomprehensible to the non-Jewish world,” making it even more attractive for antisemites looking to imbue it with meanings that would demonize Jews, and frame it, as Lightstone puts it, as “the things Jews don’t want you to see.”

Bilzerian isn’t alone among far-right influencers, where antisemitic rhetoric is on the rise as prominent conservatives like Candace Owens and Stew Peters make increasingly overt claims about Jewish people. While they are often cloaked in supposed critiques of the Israeli government’s invasion of Gaza, that isn’t always the case. Last week, for instance, Owens shared posts about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was murdered in Georgia in 1915 by a lynch mob that claimed he was guilty of rape, a claim most historians dispute. She stated without evidence that Frank was related to the founder of a cult “which practiced ritualistic incest and pedophilia.” (Owens has previously displayed an obsession with Frankism, a long-dead Jewish heretical sect from the 1700s that practiced sexual rituals, but had nothing whatsoever to do with Leo Frank.)

Owens has been joined by the Tate brothers, who she interviewed in Romania last year about the trafficking allegations against them, and who recently sat down with her for interviews again. This week, the Tates were raided at their Romanian compound for the second time, this time reportedly over allegations of sex with a minor. Upon his release, Tate retweeted a post from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, which read, “Just 2 days after Andrew Tate said that ‘the Matrix’ is really just the Jewish mafia—his house was raided and he was arrested again.”

Other masculinity influencers, like Rumble personality Sneako, celebrated their release. “Welcome home,” he tweeted, tagging the Tates. “Tell the truth, whatever the cost.” Later the same day he added in another tweet that “The Matrix is Israel.” 

Posting any one thing for too long—whether it’s misogynist screeds, pictures of women in swimwear, or Andrew Tate’s omnipresent photos of himself smoking cigars—can leave an audience feeling bored and prone to drifting away. For Andrew Tate and Bilzerian, focusing on Israel’s assaults on Gaza brings not only novelty, but an appearance of moral high ground that such influencers don’t typically get to assume; their antisemitism also provides a new enemy that could be, for instance, useful as the human trafficking case against the Tates moves forward. 

Chabad, the movement that Lightstone is part of, encourages less-observant Jews to learn more about their religious traditions. And while he’s disgusted by the meme, he hopes it, and the people like Bilzerian spreading it, might push someone to take time to look into the actual text.

“The Torah and the Talmud is here to bring truth and light to the world,” he says. “All of this hate is darkness and distraction from that purpose.”

It’s fair to say that Michelle Obama stole the show at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday. (Husband Barack was on point in noting how hard an act she was to follow.) And to a journalist like me who covers wealth and inequality, one line in particular stood out. Listen:

Michelle Obama: She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. pic.twitter.com/ywBjdwZl3E

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 21, 2024

The affirmative action of generational wealth. That’s a smart reframing of a longtime conservative hobby horse.

Republican politicians and right-wing media have regularly attacked programs designed to counter the generational impacts of government-sanctioned discrimination in housing, education, and veterans benefits. Now they’re targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—see JD Vance’s recently introduced “Dismantle DEI Act“—and trying to brand Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” That’s a laughable assertion. (New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that the moniker applies more aptly to Vance.)

But the critics of DEI and affirmative action want to have their cake and eat it too. For example, if you, like our Supreme Court, think the use of race as a factor in college admissions should be illegal, that’s your prerogative. But I hope you are similarly inclined to outlaw the practice of elite colleges giving an admissions boost to children of alumni and to students (like Jared Kushner) whose parents are major donors. Because isn’t that, too, a kind of affirmative action?

In just a handful of words, Michelle Obama managed to convey a simple truth, says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that focuses on the racial wealth-and-opportunity gap: “It is not those asking to break up concentrated wealth and opportunity that are asking for an unfair advantage, but rather those who are hoarding concentrated wealth.”

“Most of us,” as Obama noted, “will never benefit” from generational wealth. And that’s true of everyone, but even truer when you are Black or Hispanic. In the Federal Reserve Board’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)*, about 47 percent of white respondents said they’d either received an inheritance or expected to receive one. Their median inheritance expected was $195,500 (in 2019 dollars).

Only 16 percent of Black respondents had received or expected an inheritance—and their median expectation was about half the white figure. Less than 12 percent of Hispanic respondents had received or expected an inheritance.

The disparities are similar when you look at federally subsidized retirement savings, which, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), will cost US taxpayers a whopping $1.9 trillion from 2020-2024. Most of that cash goes to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who tend to be, yep, pretty white.

In 2021, the JCT identified 8,000 Americans with Individual Retirement Account (IRA) balances in excess of $5 million who were still getting tax breaks for their annual contributions—which is “shocking but not surprising,” noted Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden. Peter Thiel, ProPublica reported, even managed, using questionable tactics, to amass a Roth IRA worth $5 billion.

Affirmative action for the rich.

According to the latest (2022) SCF, only 35 percent of Black families and less than 28 percent of Hispanic households even had a retirement account, compared with 62 percent of white families. The accounts of those white families were worth over $380,000 on average, more than triple the Black and Hispanic savings—and again, these numbers don’t account for the fact that a large majority of Black and Hispanic households have no private retirement accounts at all.

Then there’s land ownership—see “40 Acres and a Lie,” our acclaimed multimedia package exploring how the few Black families who received land reparations after the Civil War then had their acres cruelly rescinded a year and a half later. And consider these passages on the Homestead Acts, from a chapter of my 2021 book, Jackpot, titled “Thriving While Black.”

The two acts, passed during and after the Civil War, granted 160-acre parcels of public land—a foundation for generational wealth—to families willing to stake out the plots and make improvements. But the timing and circumstances made it extraordinarily difficult for Black Americans to participate:

It was a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza for white fortune-seekers. “The acquisition of property was the key to moving upward from a low to a higher stratum,” wrote author Everett Dick. “The property holder could vote and hold office, but the man with no property was practically on the same political level as the indentured servant or slave.” […]

Between the two acts, about 270 million acres of farmland—14 percent of the total landmass of the continental United States—was granted to 1.6 million white families, but only 4,000 to 5,000 Black families. [University of Michigan professor Trina] Shanks calculates that more than 48 million living Americans are direct descendants of those Homestead Act beneficiaries. Which means there’s a greater than one-in-four chance your forebears benefited directly from the biggest public-to-private wealth transfer in American history—if you’re white, that is. 

Affirmative action for the rich.

Obama hit the nail on the head. Asante-Muhammad says he was struck by her simple acknowledgement “that affirmative action for the privileged happens,” though “I wish there could have been a follow up to re-emphasize why programmatic affirmative action to advance more equal opportunity is necessary.”

But “it felt good,” he adds, “to hear a political speech that connects so personally with my political ideals, and to the challenges of the racial wealth divide and the action and ideals needed to bridge it.” 

*I used 2019 numbers here because the 2022 inheritance data was only available in raw form.

Just a few (long) weeks ago, President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, grappling with persistently negative polling. One major concern for Democrats—and a source of surprise and delight for Republicans—was the apparent shift of young Black male voters towards former President Donald Trump. This will-they-won’t-they question dominated the summer, culminating at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July: Could Trump make significant inroads into a voting bloc that traditionally supported Democrats?

That narrative shifted dramatically with the entry of Vice President Kamala Harris into the race. Suddenly, a much higher percentage of Black voters told pollsters of their intent to vote, a big increase from July when Biden was still on the ticket. “I seem to be doing very well with Black males,” Trump mused during a televised press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, without citing evidence. “And I still am.” But he also seemed spooked: “It could be that I’ll be affected somewhat with Black females.”

When the Mother Jones team reported from the RNC last month, I went on a mission to unravel these complex cross-currents of identity, policy, and political strategy. “I learned a lot about Black Republicans during these conversations—their motivations, their stories, their goals,” I recall, in a new, in-depth video showcasing several substantive interviews with Black convention attendees. “I wanted to know what draws a Black person to identify with this Republican Party.”

I uncovered old-school appeals to rugged individualism (with elements of historical revisionism), traditional anti-abortion viewpoints, and a rejection of government interventions. Ultimately, I discovered that—for a party that so openly courts racists and racism enablers—having more Black people in the ranks could be, surprisingly, beneficial: “The only way the Republican Party becomes this ideologically conservative but racially inclusive big tent party,” I conclude, “is if there is a fundamental rejection of the people, policies, and practices they currently hold as sacred in their political vision.”

When police kill someone, a medical examiner lists their cause of death—which plays a significant role in whether a police officer will be held accountable.

Some of those determinations shield the police from potential accountability: notably, “excited delirium,” a so-called syndrome not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases, with research finding that most deaths attributed to the term involve aggressive restraint.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, a professor of American studies at Princeton University, traces the history of “excited delirium” in a new book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease—and calls it a “very useful tool that has allowed medical examiners to participate in these cover-ups.”

Beliso-De Jesús spoke to me about the racist and xenophobic views behind the term, the devastating impact of its pseudoscience on the families of the deceased, and what has to be done to move forward.

Forensic pathologist Charles Wetli first used the concept of “excited delirium” in dismissing the deaths of Black sex workers in the 1980s; they were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer. Does the term’s origin speak to its being dehumanizing? 

Medical diagnoses are supposed to be helpful to people. But as we can see in the example of excited delirium, and specifically with the misdiagnosis of the cases that you’re referring to—the misdiagnosis of Black women who were strangled to death, murdered and raped by a serial killer—which Charles Wetli described as “cocaine sex deaths,” this horrific term was really used for him to substantiate his argument.

He used these Black women’s deaths to sort of make the argument that Black people, who he saw as a species that was separate from white people, had a specific genetic flaw [causing them] to die spontaneously.

He argued Black women died through small amounts of cocaine use and sexual activity, which he assumed or presumed to be consensual. Then he argued that Black men died spontaneously around police officers. This reveals so much dehumanization.

How did Wetli use and misconstrue Afro-Latine religions in rationalizing excited delirium? 

The relationship between Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine and “excited delirium syndrome” is not direct or obvious, but I think it’s much more subtle and ingrained. So this is the 1980s, during the Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans arrived as refugees in Miami—and those Cubans that arrive are darker, poorer and less well or less resourced than the previous generations of Cubans, who were whiter and wealthier.

Wetli was in his first couple of years as the new assistant medical examiner, and at the same time, there was a mass criminalization of this community. You see it in stereotypes like the famous Tony Montana from Scarface, who is this sweaty, aggravated, sexual predator mobster who is addicted to cocaine and murder.

Charles Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine, particularly on the tattoos of Afro-Cubans, is a participation in this longer criminalization of Afro-Cuban religions. He has this hobby where he claims himself as an expert on Afro-Caribbean religions, or cults, as he calls them.

He’s saying that, basically, mostly Black and Latino men have this tendency to become aggressive, sweaty, and overheated—essentially just self-combusting as a result of their aggressiveness. And as a result, he argues, they die, and police witness their deaths. It becomes a pattern with the Afro-Cubans he’s studying, where he blames the religion and the Cubans as these aggressive criminals, almost a plague infection into the United States.

How has the label of “excited delirium” in the killing of Black people by police been used to underplay how lethal other forms of police violence can be, such as the use of tasers?

Excited delirium has allowed for certain deaths to go under the radar for so long. With shootings, it’s very clear what the cause of death was. But for many years, with this term, these deaths have been completely ignored.

What excited delirium does is say that the person’s own behavior— cocaine use or hyper-masculinity, aggressiveness—leads to their death. As a result, there’s a very frightening, medicalized cover-up of police violence. If it hadn’t been for footage of George Floyd’s death, many people would have taken for granted the initial argument: that he was simply a man who died under medical distress. That was what [Minneapolis police] had posted when his death first occurred. Without the bystander video, there really would have been no way for the world to have known that this was someone who was essentially murdered in plain sight.

Was there anything that stood out to you in conversations with family members of people whose deaths were labeled as excited delirium?

For a lot of the family members I spoke with, there is a sense of relief—because for many years, people were blaming the victims. A family I interviewed was told that their father just suddenly up and died during a police car chase, that it was his drug use, and his heart had just self-combusted. There were other stories that maybe the police had pushed him off the road. Questions around that completely got erased by the narrative.

These people who are labeled as dying by “excited delirium” are often seen as written off by society, similar to the way that the Black women who were murdered and raped were written off as so-called “crack whores.” That weaponization [of the term] by police justified blaming the victims, and in many [cases], created a buffer for police and medical doctors to work together to write off whole communities.

The American Medical Association came out against “excited delirium” in 2021. What do you think would need to change for its racist pseudoscience to be discarded?

I’m really glad to see that there have been many people, many organizations, many states, actively working against excited delirium right now. I think it’s [a trend] that grew out of the post-2020 uprising of people coming together and recognizing systemic police violence.

That practice has not gone away simply because people don’t use the term any longer. People are still being tased and asphyxiated. Police officers are putting their weight on people’s bodies, putting them into chokeholds; people are complaining of not being able to breathe, and then ultimately dying. Medical examiners and coroners are still using the same kinds of medical justifications, like heart failure and drug use, rather than acknowledging the role of police violence in these deaths.

We have to continue to ensure that we don’t just focus solely on this term, but on the broader structure of policing in the country and how these two institutions—medical institutions, police institutions—are tied together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

At high tide, the marsh alongside Seafood Road disappears under an inscrutable mirror of water. Then, as it drains, reeds resurface and begin to trace hundreds of paths through the marsh, etched by generations of subsistence fishing. 

Ten Mile’s community center overlooks the water from red brick stilts while a heron flaps across the marsh. Local artist Dana Coleman stands out on the road in a black, short-sleeved shirt with chunky turquoise embroidery. Every passing car honks affably because Coleman grew up in Ten Mile, a community settled behind Seafood Road by freed slaves after the Civil War. Now there is a new noise: rhythmic hammering over his shoulder from a block of houses under construction on the Ten Mile Eagles’ old baseball diamond.

As climate change threatens South Carolina’s coastal riches—from sunswept resorts like Hilton Head to huge future developments—the state’s historical African American settlements are also at risk. Squeezed between luxury homes and rising water, Coleman and other locals spy an opportunity to get creative. 

“We know some secret spots. Wait till the tide goes out, walk about a quarter mile…We get a bag full—fresh oysters, clams, crab, everything.”

While the county council considers a pause on new developments, settlement leaders are turning to forestry projects, land trusts and greenbelt initiatives. Land trusts and the county greenbelt program prohibit development on tracts reserved for conservation, while sustainable forestry offers landowners a way to make money from their family’s land without selling to a developer. Green programs like these could help preserve the character of historic Black neighborhoods, Coleman hopes, while enshrining as much flood resiliency as possible. 

“We know some secret spots,” said Coleman. “Wait till the tide goes out, walk about a quarter mile and there’s hundreds of little channels going all different directions.” Pick the right one and before long, the marsh under your feet is more oyster than mud, he said. “We get a bag full—fresh oysters, clams, crab, everything—come back and steam them right here in the yard.”

He points over the water: Between two palmettos in the distance is a channel leading to the Atlantic. “This is what we’re trying to protect. And this is why the developers want it.”

In recent years, Ten Mile has found itself in the path of one of the country’s fastest growing cities: the affluent suburban sprawl of Mount Pleasant, just east of Charleston. As well as driving up house prices, locals say development is exacerbating sea level rise by replacing absorbent trees and marshes with concrete. Experts warn that this worsening sea level rise, in turn, will fuel more gentrification—which is why locals feel such urgency to act.

First, Ten Mile petitioned Charleston County to become a historic district. Granted in 2022, the designation means that new construction must be approved by a county commission. Now, community leaders hope green programs could help preserve the community into the future. 

Critics say development restrictions could harm property values, or push development into neighboring Black communities that have not yet organized. But Coleman hopes Ten Mile can be an example to follow for the other 23 historic black settlements scattered across the county. 

“We’re getting more, for lack of better words, bullets in our guns now,” he said from a bench under the community center. Between him and the hammering construction is an 11-acre copse. The neighborhood association bought it with greenbelt funding: a program where Charleston County offers cash to protect green spaces from development in perpetuity. “We’ve got stuff in place to fight for the land for our kids and grandkids.” 

“They didn’t want to live near swampland because of mosquitos and everything—so they let slaves have it,” said Coleman. “But now it’s reversed.”

Jesse M. Keenan, a Harvard professor focusing on urbanism, first noticed climate change and gentrification walking in lockstep on a research trip to Denmark in 2011. San Kjeld was a working class, portside neighborhood of Copenhagen a decade earlier, but when Keenan arrived, all the amenities of gentrification had beaten him to it.

“I remember walking around with the vice mayor at the time and it was apparent that this neighborhood had gone through a kind of transformation physically,” Keenan remembers. “When you see neighborhoods that go through change there’s little details about the type of retail, how people put planters and flowers on streets, how trash receptacles are located.” The catalyst of San Kjeld’s change, Keenan learned, was an experimental climate resilience program, and the investment that came with it.

Around the world, “climate gentrification” was working in two main ways, according to a Harvard paper Keenan finished seven years later. He found that low-income communities would be squeezed out of elevated neighborhoods as the cost of flooding grew clearer and high ground took on a premium. And, as happened in San Kjeld, poorer people would also be edged out of low-lying areas as the cost of repairs, insurance and resilience infrastructure increased, for those able to afford them. 

Communities like Ten Mile are being squeezed by the latter. In coastal South Carolina, waterfront land is more valuable than ever, despite accelerating sea level rise. Charleston harbor is now seven inches higher than it was in 2010, according to tide gauges. Federal scientists predict it will rise over a foot more by 2050, at which point two days out of every three in the City of Charleston will see tidal flooding.

“When you’re talking about waterfront development in pretty high-risk areas like Charleston, there are people who are willing to absorb not only the risks of flooding and storm damage, but also the insurance cost of doing so,” said Keenan. 

Only wealthy owners can afford the new houses, such as those nearest Seafood Rood largely built on brick stilts. That development pushes up property taxes across the neighborhood. And at the same time, the new houses make flooding worse.

When he grew up in Ten Mile, Coleman said, Seafood Road would only flood if a big storm swept through, once a year at most. “Now it floods on a regular tide with no hurricane, excess rain or anything. These tides that come in now that never were a thing in the past.” He laughs a little incredulously. “They’ve got names for them, man: king tides, wolf tides.”

The historical irony, he explains, is that settlements only formed along marshes and wetlands because white landowners sold cheap after the Civil War. Charleston was once home to the busiest slave port in the United States—so prolific that two out of every five enslaved Africans arrived in the country through a single wharf downtown. Few freed slaves were given land after emancipation. Instead, most bought it, often by working for meager wages at the same rice or indigo plantations they were enslaved on. For that reason, many freed communities found themselves pushed towards the cheaper, marshy areas white landowners did not want.

“They didn’t want to live in the country; they didn’t want to live close to the water; they didn’t want to live near swampland because of mosquitos and everything—so they let slaves have it,” said Coleman. “But now it’s reversed.” He can’t help himself from chuckling. “They want to be out on the water. Waterfront is the thing now.”

In the 1980s, the same decade Hurricane Hugo tore through Charleston’s suburbs, Mount Pleasant’s population doubled. Since the turn of the century, it has doubled again. Instead of growing denser (Mount Pleasant already has a ban on new apartments or condos, extended in March for the fourth time), the town continues to sprawl outwards into rural and waterfront areas. “The majority of population growth occurred in entirely new subdivisions located within recently annexed neighborhoods,” according to the town’s development plan.

An important historical factor made settlement communities uniquely vulnerable to predatory developers and helped propel such growth: Since the first generation of Black landowners, most settlement land slipped into so-called heirs’ ownership, when land is inherited without a public will or deed proving legal ownership, leaving the property informally split between all living heirs. Each heir can sell their stake. 

Then if any stakeholder—whether they are an original member of the family or bought a stake from one—wants to sell the land itself, a court tries to divvy it up physically. Often that is not possible, in which case the whole tract automatically goes on the market, as a way of severing co-ownership. Each state has different statutes for resolving disputes like this: Some put the tract up for auction; others, like South Carolina, put it on the market.

Jennie L. Stephens is CEO of the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, a nonprofit educating South Carolina’s settlement communities about property law. She said the beginning of ownership was a pivotal historical moment: hopeful, but vulnerable. “As African Americans, we went from being property to owning property,” Stephens said. “But think about it: There were not a lot of Black attorneys they could go to to help them navigate those waters.”

In one case the center found that a single deed from the 1950s was now split between over 200 heirs. If a developer were to buy a stake from any one of them, the developer would have the same ownership rights as any other heir. “Developer X, Y or Z becomes the newest member of the family,” Stephens said. 

From that position they can effectively force the entire property on the market: ask the court to sell against the wishes of familial heirs. When a judge almost inevitably finds the property cannot be physically divided, the entire tract is put on the market to resolve the co-ownership dispute.

Coleman’s grandfather, John Wright Sr., saved up from farming, carpentry, lumber work and shifts as a chef to eventually buy a tract in the early 1900s from another Black family. The paper document itself was destroyed when Storm Hugo hit Coleman’s mother’s house, but Coleman has since put the plot he now lives on under his own name.

The burden of updating old land titles falls onto individual owners and is not always straightforward, according to the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation. For many settlement descendants, selling can seem easier than a protracted legal battle against developers or other heirs.

Mavis Gragg left her job at a financial law firm when her parents died in a car crash and she became an heir to their property. “It became crystal clear that my own family was land-rich, cash-poor: that our generational wealth was very precarious.” She set up a private practice helping other heirs clear their titles in North Carolina. But in two decades of practicing as a self-described “death and dirt” attorney, she reached an epiphany of frustration. 

“‘I had to choose between you and the property taxes,’” she said one client told her a year after dropping her calls. “He hired me to help save the property, but he risked losing the property if he paid me instead of paying the tax. I felt like I needed to have a bigger impact. I wanted to see systemic change.”

In 2020, Gragg started HeirShares, an online platform for real estate ownership education, developing tools to estimate how many heirs might be alive today, reconstruct family trees and trace ownership. Both HeirShares and the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation use sustainable forestry as a means for keeping heirs property owners on their land. The latter offers consultation with a professional forester for any owner who commits to workshops on water management and regenerative alternatives to clear-cutting. 

Gragg picked up on the power of conservation initiatives serving as director of the Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Program. The federally funded initiative connects Black landowners in Southern states with markets for sustainable lumber. “We found that doing conservation, stewardship and sustainable forestry actually motivates people to take action on the legal part that makes their ownership so precarious,” Gragg said.

Forestry programs not only offer landowners a way to retain their property and make money off it. Recent research has found that healthy forests also play an outsized role in mitigating flood risk. 

“We’ve got all these things that we can put in place so right after that [moratorium] developers swoop in and people will be like, ‘Nah, we’re good.’” 

While we know that trees suck up water, understanding the exact role forests play in flood resilience has long confounded scientists. More than a decade after Einstein offered his theory of relativity, the US Department of Agriculture concluded that barely any scientific studies had produced useful findings about forests and flooding, “because of the inherent difficulty of isolating variables from the complex interacting factors in watersheds.”

But last summer, German scientists—spurred by 2021 floods that killed 243 people across Europe—found that forests can both help and hinder flooding. Their findings suggested that for forests near infrastructure, like drains or bridges that can get clogged by timber and debris, the kind of management that comes with sustainable forestry can reduce deadwood and lessen the threat of flooding. 

In addition to forestry programs for individual owners who retain their property, communities like Ten Mile are turning to funding from the county greenbelt program to intercept land before developers get to it. 

For Coleman, that’s why a development moratorium—which passed its first reading at the county council but awaits final approval—is so important. “It slows the growth, gives us time. Then we can talk to the community and educate them,” Coleman said. At first the council approved a decade-long moratorium, but in June voted to shorten it to two years. “We’ve got all these things that we can put in place so right after that [moratorium] developers swoop in and people will be like, ‘Nah, we’re good.’” 

Since it began in 2007, the greenbelt program has protected almost 45,000 acres across Charleston County, mostly in rural areas and wetlands, according to county figures. A third of the publicly accessible land was purchased for settlement communities or other neighborhoods with a majority Black or Indigenous population. So far Ten Mile’s neighborhood association has bought almost 20 acres, and Coleman is eyeing 50 more that fit the bill. 

Even without turning the land over to green programs, land use patterns in settlement communities are naturally more flood resilient, according to county planning documents.

While new developments already constructed in the neighborhood can average more than seven houses per acre, the rest of Ten Mile is much sparser, averaging less than one house per acre. The space between houses, often forested or broken up by wetlands and tidal creeks, absorbs water during floods and releases it slowly.

“African Americans were environmentalists before the word was even created because of the way in which we live,” Stephens, with the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, said about the original settlers of Ten Mile. “That community might not have known about sea level rise, but they understood certain things: If you move from one spot to another, the water is going to adjust. They knew that and they were mindful of their surroundings.”

Hurricane Hugo hit the coast of South Carolina in September 1989. Suddenly, that instinctive flood resilience was clear to Donna Brown Newton, a grandmother and now-retired administrator at the local school district in Snowden, another settlement just west of Ten Mile.

“It was so weird how one house can be demolished and the next house be standing,” Newton said, driving through the neighborhood one recent afternoon. “It was really, really creepy—as if it selected which houses would be destroyed.” It’s the same in Ten Mile: Brick bungalows with a low center of gravity survived; wooden new builds were washed down the street.

These days, her hair braided and dyed orange, Newton catalogs from behind her steering wheel how Snowden is slipping underwater. “They built a subdivision over there,” she said, pointing to a clutch of brightly painted wooden houses. “That was a marshland and it’s filled in with dirt.” She remembers playing out of her driveway in the rain as a child. Now every hard rain floods the main road, and each month another car slides off a turn into the ditch running alongside it. “I’m being squooshed out here,” Newton said.

Despite the signs of rising flood risk, Snowden, like most other settlements, does not have the same protections as Ten Mile. Locals like Newton fear that while the county’s greenbelt restrictions and historic designations set a good example for preserving community land, they may also push development into Snowden and other adjacent, unprotected neighborhoods. In the meantime, she is fighting against distrust to get her neighbors to petition for the same historic designation as Ten Mile: the first step in limiting development.

“I will stay here and fight to the bitter end. I think selling to me is just giving up and saying, ‘It’s not worth it. You’re not worth it. The people here are not worth it.’”

There’s lots of old-school thinking that if it becomes a historical district, then the white man will come and take it,” Newton explained, “but I’m hoping people here will understand the importance: We’re going to lose the sense of community, the sense of family, a sense of somebody having your back. You can’t build that no place else, no matter where you go.” 

Snowden’s community center has used greenbelt funding to buy and protect four acres, but blocks away another 20 acres just went up for sale. Newly built homes already edge back from the main road towards the community’s historic core, along with Planet Fitness and a Chick-fil-A. Since Newton began trying to bring new protections to the neighborhood, two of her brothers sold their lots to developers and moved out without telling her, she said, decisions she called “heartbreaking.” Neither could be reached for comment.

“What bothers me about my brother selling the property is I know how much our ancestors had to sacrifice,” she said. Newton’s great-great-grandfather bought the family’s lot in the 1890s for $120. “You’ve got to figure back then for a Black man to get that kind of money to buy five acres of property …” She shakes her head. “The sacrifice he had to make to do that.”

Newton isn’t blind to the attraction of selling. “Sometimes I think I could just give all this up and be done with it,” she said, “but I will stay here and fight to the bitter end. I think selling to me is just giving up and saying, ‘It’s not worth it. You’re not worth it. The people here are not worth it.’”

While she tries to get Snowden protected, Newton is also aiming higher. This summer she advanced from her district’s Democratic primary and will face the incumbent Republican representative in November. In a majority white, affluent, Republican district, she admits, “It’s an uphill battle.” But she is not in the habit of giving up.

Like much of South Carolina’s coastal Lowcountry, settlement communities face dramatic, accelerating sea level rise in the coming decades. Eventually moving inland will be inevitable, coastal scientists say. But for Newton and Coleman, any kind of retreat, managed or not, loses its meaning if the community is broken apart by development.

“We know that eventually parts of this will probably be underwater, and that’s kind of the reason we want to preserve what’s here now,” Coleman said. 

Just like he knows the marsh’s secret fishing paths, the community knows how water moves through Ten Mile: where the ground is higher, and where it stays dry. “When stuff like that is happening, we have an area where we can go.” He smiles. “If people are still here.”

In the meantime, Coleman is working to protect Ten Mile, both the land and its stories. His latest painting is only a monochrome foundation so far, but the outline is clear: From a corridor of reeds, a young man in rubber boots leans into the foreground, picking an oyster from the mud. Sometimes Coleman paints from distant memory or imagination, he said, but this time that wasn’t necessary. All he needed was a fishing trip with his son out from Seafood Road.