Wednesday, June 24, 2026
‘We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible’: author Eddie Glaude on US’s 250th birthday | History books | The Guardian
‘We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible’: author Eddie Glaude on US’s 250th birthday
“The mere presence of Black people at the Fourth of July celebrations, acting as if freedom belonged to them, exposed the lie at the heart of this ritual of remembrance by the nation: ours was not a nation committed to liberty and equality.” So goes the second chapter of the author Eddie S Glaude Jr’s latest book America, U.S.A.: How RaceShadows the Nation’s Anniversaries.
The Princeton University professor’s new text illustrates how political turmoil has historically reached a boiling point around celebrations of the nation’s founding on the Fourth of July. The text is especially relevant now as the United States approaches its 250th birthday. Throughout the book, Glaude argues that since the very beginning, Black Americans have played a vital role in establishing this country. Their presence is a constant reminder that the mythological America – one of a white republic – does not exist. Celebrations of the nation’s founding, he says, reinforce myth-making at the expense of the truth. They’re treated as sacrosanct events, thus justifying the sanitization of the nation’s brutal history.
Against today’s backdrop, the 250th celebrations come with the normalizing of white supremacist rhetoric, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the threatening of birthright citizenship.
The Guardian spoke with Glaude about his book and how it explains America’s current political moment. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You juxtapose past racist violence against Black people with current-day violence against them. What do you make of the cyclical nature of race relations in this country, in which progress is typically marred by these attacks?
I think it’s rooted in the chapter “Freedom is the white man’s gift”, which flows out of the divided soul of the nation. I make a claim that America suffers from a kind of double consciousness, that it imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can’t hold those two claims together without contradiction or depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country. Freedom is seen as the possession of a particular group of folk who can give it and take it away. And so when we find ourselves in these moments where we want to live up to our ideals and address racial injustice, we typically do so in a sentimentalized way: “What can we do for you?”
But that charity runs dry, such as at the end of Reconstruction, where people said: “We are done with the issue of slavery, but we don’t want Black folk to have full citizenship rights.” Folks who were anti-slavery suddenly were deeply suspicious about extending the franchise to Black people. Or we have these other moments where folks are asking the question, “What else do you want? We’ve given you so much. Show some gratitude.” We find ourselves in these cycles of sentimentality and white rage, as Carol Anderson talks about. So we find ourselves, over and over again, in these moments of backlash and then a desire for absolution.
To that point, with so many of these anniversaries, there seems to be a racial flashpoint. What do you think of 250 years coinciding with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act?
Six years ago, folks were saying that we were experiencing a racial reckoning after we witnessed the murder of George Floyd, and people risked their lives to protest as Covid-19 raged. In a blink of an eye, we’ve witnessed a simultaneous attack on two major pieces of legislation: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Both of them fundamentally changed the trajectory of the nation. They opened up the doors for a genuinely multiracial democracy by changing the national quotas around who can immigrate here, in effect overturning the Nationality and Immigration Act of 1924, which was basically written by the Klan. The Voting Rights Act expanded Black political power and our participation in the political process. What we’re experiencing in this moment is a wholesale attack on that vision of the country.
Much has been made of the Trump administration’s whitewashing of the country’s history ahead of the 250th anniversary. But you point out that that’s par for the course, highlighting the 1876 anniversary and the 1926 anniversary as other times when Americans decided to whitewash history to preserve a specific idea of Americanness. What can people do to push back on the distortion of history?
“Disremembering” is so important, right? That’s Toni Morrison’s language, this active forgetting that echoes “dismembering”. There’s a violence that attends this.
In 1876, after the carnage of the civil war, over 600,000 people dead on land and sea, President [Ulysses S] Grant and others focused on talking about the business acumen of the country, its technological fortitude, its innovation. Black folks are effectively disappearing because our presence reveals the lie of that narrative.
Just think about the backdrop of 1876: you have the Colfax massacre in Louisiana. You have Vicksburg, Mississippi. You have Hamburg, South Carolina. There is literally a political coup going on in some parts of the occupied south.
What has to happen here in order to protect the innocence of the country? Black folks have to be disappeared. We have to be made to play minor bit parts in the story. This is one way that I’m trying to parse [James] Baldwin’s sentence in The Fire Next Time. He says the innocence constitutes the crime. It’s a way of preserving American innocence by redacting the historical record.
Do you think it’s possible for Americans to be anything other than, as Frederick Douglass said, “destitute of political memory”?
I think so. I don’t want to say we’re fated to be this, that the country can never change. I’m attached to people on the ground, and I have a fundamental faith in the fact that people can be otherwise. It’s not my place to throw away people. If we grow up finally as a nation, if we don’t remain in this perpetual state of adolescence where we can look at our past and honestly see it for what it is, maybe we can discover who we really are as Americans. That’s what I’m calling for at the end of the book. I don’t put forward any policy agendas. I don’t want to participate in the ongoing ritual of behaving like we’re actually trying.
I simply say it’s clear. We have to make a choice. Either we’re going to be a white republic, or we’re going to be a beacon of freedom. We can’t be both. That requires of us a kind of tragic sense, a blue-soaked sensibility torecognize and acknowledge the horrors and the joys, the triumphs and the defeats that make us who we are as Americans.
Where do you think the country is headed, given this volleying back and forth – yet another anniversary, yet more tragedy?
Right now, we’re on the precipice. I don’t know who we’re going to be on the other side of this. [Donald] Trump and Maga are literally destroying the foundations of our democracy right in front of us. We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible. It’s going to take generations to get back on our feet. It’s a dark hour. But, you know, midnight is the beginning of a new day. It’s the darkest of hours, but it’s also the beginning of a new period, a new day. We have an opportunity, if we are mature enough as a people, to actually try to build a country in the aftermath of the ruins left behind by Trump and his people."
‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison | Protest (US) | The Guardian
‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison
"Advocates sound alarm after zines were used as evidence to convict protesters of terrorism charges tied to 2025 protest at Texas ICE facility
It’s the day after Mother’s Day, the first one Elizabeth Soto has spent apart from her three children. Sitting in jail in Wichita Falls, Texas, her face is washed out by the overhead fluorescent lighting, and her dingy jumpsuit blends into the cinder block walls surrounding her.
Speaking through a glass separator, she tells me she celebrated the holiday with her children over the jail’s video-call system while they had dinner at their grandmother’s. “I’ve been a full-time mother all of their lives,” she said. “I’ve never been away from them.”
Soto’s children have not visited her in jail, which lies on Texas’s northern border near Oklahoma, hours from their home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Elizabeth Soto has only seen her husband, Ines Soto, once over the past year, the longest they’ve spent apart since they first started dating more than 20 years ago. He is being held in a federal prison more than 100 miles away.
On Tuesday, Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison; Ines’s sentencing is set for 1 July. All because, as she put it: “They didn’t like my book club.” Her laugh doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.
After a three-week trial, a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of “providing material support to terrorists”, among other crimes. For the Sotos, this “material support” included owning a “printing press” used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued. The couple had already left the scene by the time guns were drawn. All eight of the defendants sentenced so far have received unusually harsh sentences – 30 to 100 years – essentially life in prison.
Their attorneys announced their intention to appeal, but many supporters are doubtful that anything short of a presidential pardon from a future administration would free them.
The Prairieland case was the first tried and convicted under the Trump Department of Justice’s “counter-terrorism” initiatives targeting “antifa” – short for antifascist – a decentralized movement the administration has officially categorized as a “domestic terrorist organization”. The federal government argued the Prairieland defendants, what they called a “North Texas Antifa cell”, had planned the demonstration as an assassination attempt against a law enforcement officer. The government alleged this conspiracy even though the defendants were loosely connected, and some who attended the protest did not even know each other.
The conviction of the Prairieland defendants has shocked legal and civil liberties experts, who say the Trump administration is making examples of them and setting a dangerous precedent for what this means for the first amendment right to protest and to create and distribute information.
“It is not only an attempt at chilling speech,” said Chip Gibbons, policy director at the advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, “but an indication that the [the Trump administration is] going to continue going after protests extremely hard.”
In total, 22 people have been charged in connection with the protest: five others took plea deals, another five have state charges pending and three more were indicted last month. What the federal government has described as “antifa extremists” are activists you’d find anywhere in the US: trans people, tattoo artists, vegans and anti-ICE community members who engage in mutual aid. The federal government’s focus on the possession of leftwing literature, including zines, and other basic security measures common in our modern era – like owning Faraday bags, meant to block wireless signals to prevent surveillance; using the encrypted messaging app Signal; or dressing in all-black clothing – is alarming to activists.
“Zines are a foundational first amendment document” going back to the Federalist papers, said Xavier de Janon, the director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild and the attorney representing Elizabeth in her state case. “Zines discussing ideas of revolution, mutual aid, ideas of a world after capitalism, should not be able to be criminalized in and of themselves … That’s just dangerous to all of us.”
The Emma Goldman book club
The Sotos’ crimes largely stem from a “printing press” that the FBI noticed during the initial raid of their home: a standard office printer, a paper cutter and a book binder. During the raid, one of the Sotos’ children told Elizabeth’s attorney that police put a bag over their head and brought them in for an interrogation; another child was interrogated in the home. Elizabeth only found out about their child being taken for interrogation from an article published by the anarchist collective Crimethinc that was later made into a zine. The justice department did not return the Guardian’s request for comment on the raid of the Sotos’ house, its attacks against the first amendment or its unusual use of counterterrorism law.
The federal prosecution argued the Sotos used the printing press to produce anti-government zines for a book club they and some of the other defendants were part of, named for the celebrated 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman, who 99 years ago this month was arrested on conspiracy charges for organizing against the first world war draft.
At the book club, the group read political zines on subjects like “a journal of materialist feminism” and “a call for the eradication of artificial intelligence from the face of the earth” – perhaps niche, but nothing illegal, an FBI agent testified in court. Still, the FBI seized these zines, along with the printing press and a collection of poetry about losing a sibling to cancer.
Zines have been an important source of information for leftwing community organizing for decades, in part because they’re analog and can be anonymous. They’ve become even more important during the second Trump administration, amid the rise of the state surveillance of protesters and aggressive social media censorship. In many local bookstores, libraries and coffee shops across the US, you can find “know your rights” zines explaining how to legally observe ICE agents or how to maintain anonymity at a protest.
“It definitely feels like there’s an overarching project to limit the amount of information that people have,” said Dario Sanchez, another Prairieland defendant, who did not attend the protest. Sanchez is facing state charges, not federal, and his trial has yet to be scheduled. He was charged with tampering with evidence after removing two other defendants from a Signal chat after the shooting.
During the trial, federal prosecutors argued that the possession of these zines and other leftist materials, like stickers with the letters “ACAB” (a slogan that stands for “all cops are bastards”) or “Chinga La Migra” (Spanish for “fuck the immigration police”), were evidence of their participation in an “antifa” terror cell. Prosecutors held up several of the zines in front of the jury for dramatic effect.
One zine found in multiple homes during FBI raids was a 2019 review of the films Hereditary and Midsommar by the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, titled: “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real.”
“If you weren’t crying, you would laugh, because it looks as though they didn’t read any further than the title,” Lewis said, “and so it’s almost like a confession – as though the words on the pamphlet are: ‘We worship the devil, signed, antifa’.”
Donald Trump’s targeting of “antifa” began in his first administration and has only intensified since he retook office. Last month, the Trump administration issued its “counterterrorism strategy”, describing “anarchists and anti-fascists” as “violent left-wing extremists” and equating “pro-transgender ideology” to terrorism. This strategy built upon its National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), issued in September shortly after the killing of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk, which the right inaccurately blamed on violent leftwing protesters and trans people. At least three of the nine people convicted and five of the 22 charged Prairieland defendants are trans; many have been incorrectly named in legal filings, despite having legally changed their names.
“There’s a long history in the US of trying to claim that anarchists or communists, or other -isms on the left, are engaged in criminal conspiracies, and then conflating their activism with those so-called conspiracies, casting a wide net to equate speech with violence or critical acts,” said Gibbons of Defending Rights and Dissent. That history goes back to the conspiracy charges against Goldman – Joseph McCarthy’s early attempt at building the Red Scare – to the political imprisonment of Black Panther and American Indian Movement members, to police arresting George Floyd protesters to control crowds.
Book club members and local activists familiar with the Prairieland case say that the literature and other leftist rhetoric were presented as evidence of criminality to a jury unfamiliar with or even hostile to the cultural and intellectual diversity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They say Johnson county, where the Prairieland facility is located and where defendants were initially jailed, antagonized the defendants, putting them into solitary confinement for weeks, subjecting them to repeated strip-searches and denying them dietary restrictions, while characterizing them as violent terrorists from the big city.
Defendants Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris, both trans women, are being held in men’s facilities, where they are vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse – counter to recent federal rulings that trans women should be held in women’s facilities for their safety. According to Hill’s wife, Lydia Koza, Morris was denied access to hormone treatments while in Johnson county, which could have had severe medical consequences. (The Johnson county sheriff’s department did not return the Guardian’s request for comment on the defendants’ treatment in jail.)
Hill and Morris received 50-year sentences for conspiracy to riot and ambush a law enforcement officer, even though they were not present when shots were fired.
“[The prosecution] just used the fact that this is not ‘normal’ to most people – you don’t recognize this, therefore it’s sinister,” said Koza. “They’re just anti-intellectual, too: ‘Oh, these defendants read, that’s so fucking scary. You shouldn’t trust people who read. They might be writing things that’ll be dangerous to you.’”
When the FBI pulled up in Swat gear and raided Koza and Hill’s house – where they lived with several roommates, plus their three dogs and five cats – agents sent flashbangs through a front window, leaving burn marks across their floor.
Daniel “Des” Sanchez-Estrada, an artist, tattooer and green card holder, was not at the protest, but his wife, Maricela Rueda, was. When she called him from jail after her arrest, she asked him to tow her car and check on her home. The government recorded the conversation. Soon after, Sanchez-Estrada was stopped by police while moving a box of zines from his home. Many of his illustrations, in the form of stickers or tattoo flash sheets, criticizing ICE and police, were entered into the prosecution’s exhibit files. His arrest has led to the rallying cry written in zines, sewn on to patches and posted online: “Zines are not a crime!”
Sanchez-Estrada was convicted of “corruptly concealing a document or record” and “conspiracy to conceal documents” and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
“I worked really hard every day in this country, and I believe in human rights and helping others in need. I donate money and art to help animals and other people,” he told the court before sentencing. “I’m a father, a husband and a teacher. But I’m not a terrorist.”
The precedent set
The Department of Justice’s successful conviction over the possession of leftist, anti-Trump or anti-ICE literature may be novel, but it’s part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown against protesters. It’s a strategy that’s had little success in the courtroom.
A ProPublica and Frontline investigation earlier this year found that over a third of more than 300 anti-ICE protest cases “crumbled”. In Chicago, anti-ICE protesters were charged with conspiring to obstruct law enforcement operations; the case was tossed last month over alleged prosecutorial misconduct, and defendants, known as the Broadview Six, are now pushing for an investigation into the case’s handling.
But after the Prairieland conviction, federal prosecutors have had at least one other success: in Spokane, Washington, three people were convicted last month of conspiring to impede a federal officer over a protest to block an ICE vehicle attempting to transporttwo migrants. And the justice department shows no signs of stopping. Last week, 15 people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were hit with the same charges of conspiracy to obstruct ICE operations, and were accused of being a part of “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement”.
What legal experts say differentiates Prairieland from many other federal protest cases that fell apart was that a police officer was shot. According to Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, the combination of property damage and injuring an officer is what the state built a conspiracy around.
While the government said protester Benjamin “Champagne” Song fired directly at the officer with the intention to kill, her attorney showed footage from the shooting that suggested Song fired at the ground as a warning shot or an attempt to distract the officer, raising doubt that she intended to shoot him. Defendants’ supporters have hired an investigator to further study the evidence released from the shooting.
During the trial, the judge refused to let the defendants enter a self-defense plea. Song, a former US marine, was the only one convicted of attempted murder of a government employee and discharging a weapon.
In a statement issued after she received 100 years in federal prison, Song wrote that she brought her weapon out of fear that law enforcement would hurt or kill protesters, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, protesters who were shot and killed by immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota earlier this year.
“This is wrong,” she said of the charges against the 21 others. “This is mass punishment. This is collective punishment. This is guilt by association. This is injustice.”
Some of the defendants, including Song, were part of the Socialist Rifle Association and legally owned guns, which the federal government presented as evidence of intended violence. Many marginalized communities, especially trans people, have opted to engage in the second amendment in recent years amid rising hate crimes. Homemade first-aid kits carried by Prairieland demonstrators were also presented as evidence that they planned for violence.
Sanchez said making those first-aid kits was “something we were incredibly proud of”. Sanchez is a teacher and started bringing the first-aid kit with him in case he needed to make a tourniquet for a student during a school shooting.
“Is it normal to charge a terrorism offense in this context?” said Kadidal. “It strikes me as excessive, and I think it would strike an ordinary American listening to this conversation as excessive.”
Savanna Batten, another member of the Emma Goldman book club, has been sentenced to 50 years in federal prison. (The eighth defendant convicted, Zachary Evetts, was also sentenced to 50 years.) When I visited her in the Wichita Falls jail in May, her spirits were bright despite her circumstances. I wanted to ask her about what she’s been reading, but wondered if she was scared to answer.
“It’s crazy that we live in a world where it’s not safe to ask what books you’re reading,” she said. Batten, a vegan who has often had to go hungry in prison, said her life outside revolved around nature and her “companion pets”: a cat named Garfielda, whom she brought on a leash on hikes, and six rescued hermit crabs, the first two of which she found in a dumpster. In jail, she is reading a book about the natural history of crabs, and she tells me that hermit crabs can live for 40 years when not in captivity.
“The irony is not lost …” Batten trailed off, hearing herself describe the humanity of hermit crabs inside a jail where the only place she can see the sky is under bars. “I understand that living in captivity is inherently awful.”
Perplexity AI
A zine is a small, usually self-published and noncommercial publication, often made by one person or a small group and distributed in limited numbers. It can be printed or digital, and it often focuses on a niche interest, personal expression, or a subculture.[1][2]
## What makes it a zine
- DIY and independent, rather than professionally published.
- Small circulation, often photocopied, stapled, folded, or otherwise handmade.
- Content can be anything from art and comics to politics, music, memoir, or fandom.[3][4]
## Where the word comes from
“Zine” is short for **magazine** and is closely tied to “fanzine,” an early form of fan-made publication.[4][5]
## Simple example
A zine might be a 12-page booklet about punk music, a personal photo essay, or a handwritten mini-magazine about gardening or local history.[6][3]
Sources
[1] Zine Definition & Meaning | Britannica Dictionary https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/zine
[2] Introduction - Zines at the Library of Congress https://guides.loc.gov/zines
[3] What's a Zine? - Zines! - LibGuides at University of Richmond https://libguides.richmond.edu/zines
[4] Zine | Examples, Definition, Printing, Making, History, & Facts https://www.britannica.com/topic/zine
[5] Zine Definition & Meaning https://www.yourdictionary.com/zine
[6] What is a Zine? - Zines - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/c.php?g=576544&p=3977232
[7] Zine - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zine
[8] Zine History & Culture - Zines - LibGuides at UVa Library https://guides.lib.virginia.edu/zine/history
[9] Zines and Fanzines - Zines, Pamphlets, Artists' Publications ... https://libguides.pace.edu/zines/definition
[10] zine https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/zine
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Monday, June 22, 2026
Race, racism, and heart disease: Why awareness matters
Race, racism, and heart disease: Why awareness matters
“Discrimination and its downstream effects may underlie the survival gaps in cardiovascular disease between racial groups. The aftermath affects everyone.
In the United States, Black adults are more than twice as likely to die of cardiovascular disease than white adults. Growing evidence points to structural racism as a "fundamental driver" of this stark disparity, according to a 2020 presidential advisory from the American Heart Association (AHA).
Structural racism refers to the systems in a society that create and maintain racial inequality. But the damaging health effects of the underlying problem — racial discrimination — have been studied for decades. More than 25 years ago, sociologist David R. Williams, professor of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, developed the Everyday Discrimination Scale. It's designed to quantify the hassles and indignities people experience in daily life and whether they feel this unfair treatment is due to their race, gender, age, or other characteristics. A recent update reviewed some of the cardiovascular effects related to race (see "Racial discrimination and heart health: The evidence").
"While there's a great deal of literature on the health effects of stress, the traditional measures have not always fully captured the stressful effects of discrimination, which can extend beyond daily indignities to also include a higher frequency of traumatic experiences, such as being unfairly stopped by police and exposure to gun violence," says Williams.
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Controlling Your Blood Pressure
An alarming one in three American adults has high blood pressure. Known medically as hypertension, many people don't even know they have it, because high blood pressure has no symptoms or warning signs. But when elevated blood pressure is accompanied by abnormal cholesterol and blood sugar levels, the damage to your arteries, kidneys, and heart accelerates exponentially. Fortunately, high blood pressure is easy to detect and treat. In the Special Health Report, Controlling Your Blood Pressure, find out how to keep blood pressure in a healthy range simply by making lifestyle changes, such as losing weight, increasing activity, and eating more healthfully.
LEARN MORERacial discrimination and heart health: The evidenceCardiovascular disease and related health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity are often collectively referred to as cardiometabolic disease. Dozens of studies have explored how racial discrimination may worsen these common conditions. A review in the March 28, 2023, issue of the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities synthesized the evidence to date. The review assessed 123 peer-reviewed studies done in the United States and published from 1996 to 2022. All the studies included people with cardiometabolic diseases who belonged to racial or ethnic minorities. Blacks were the most frequently studied racial group, accounting for 53% of participants across all the studies. The Everyday Discrimination Scale (see main story) was the most commonly used measure of discrimination. About three-quarters of the studies found that racial or ethnic discrimination was significantly associated with an increased risk of cardiometabolic disease. |
Downstream effects
Discrimination can also affect employment opportunities and advancement, which has downstream effects that contribute to health disparities, according to Dr. Michelle Albert, president of the AHA. "If you can't get a well-paying job or develop wealth, these circumstances limit where you can afford to live. That, in turn, affects your access to healthy foods, safe places to exercise, and good medical care," she says. In addition, discrimination has been linked to other factors that are hard on the heart, including social isolation, depression, and unhealthy coping skills such as smoking and alcohol use.
Like other stressful experiences, the experience of discrimination can activate the fight-or-flight response, triggering a release of hormones that raise blood pressure. Over time, blood pressure spikes can damage the blood vessels, kidneys, and heart, says Dr. Albert, director of the Center for the Study of Adversity and Cardiovascular Dis-ease at the University of California, San Francisco.
The price we pay
Given that cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of disability and death in this country, the financial impact of race-based health disparities is substantial, says Williams. The cost to society at large includes not just higher health care spending but also productivity losses related to job absenteeism and premature death. While Blacks make up about 14% of the population, nearly 40% of people currently living in the United States belong to a racial or ethnic minority. People in the other groups, which include Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, also experience cardio-vascular disease disparities to varying degrees.
The AHA's Office of Health Equity sponsors community and workplace programs to address discrimination and other barriers to equitable health care. But on a personal level, everyone can benefit from becoming more aware of their implicit biases — the unconscious assumptions people have about groups of people that may underlie some discriminatory behaviors. Project Implicit (see health.harvard.edu/bias) includes online tests to explore implicit bias.
"The data on the health effects of discrimination are a call to each one of us to treat each person we encounter every day with the dignity and respect that they deserve as a human being," says Williams.”
The Real Reason Macron Skipped Ghana's Reparations Summit
In 1825, Haiti Paid France $21 Billion To Preserve Its Independence -- Time For France To Pay It Back
“In 1825, Haiti was forced to pay France $21 billion in reparations for its independence, a crippling debt that took 122 years to pay off. This debt, equivalent to extortion, left Haiti chronically insolvent and contributed to its current state of poverty and instability. The author argues that France should return these payments to help Haiti recover.
!['We can spend 30 years and we'll never bounce back,' said Duvanel Francois, 42, who was trying to... [+] earn school fees one morning in a tiny village outside of Jeremie, the Grand'Anse capital, by helping another farmer rebuild his home. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images)](https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/dam/imageserve/818143278/960x0.jpg?fit=scale)
'We can spend 30 years and we'll never bounce back,' said Duvanel Francois, 42, who was trying to earn school fees one morning in a tiny village outside of Jeremie, the Grand'Anse capital, by helping another farmer rebuild his home. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images)
The devastation wreaked on Haiti by Hurricane Matthew last fall was just the latest in a seemingly endless string of misfortunes that have befallen that country, which in March concluded a year-long interlude of caretaker governance by installing banana exporter Jovenel Moïse as its 58th president. Moïse faces a daunting task; Haiti’s chronic status as the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation is due to a litany of afflictions that range from widespread illiteracy, to endemic corruption, to woefully inadequate infrastructure. But while these would be hard enough for any country to overcome, for more than a century of its existence Haiti carried an additional but little-known millstone, the effects of which are still being felt.
In 1825, barely two decades after winning its independence against all odds, Haiti was forced to begin paying enormous “reparations” to the French slaveholders it had overthrown. Those payments would have been a staggering burden for any fledgling nation, but Haiti wasn’t just any fledgling nation; it was a republic formed and led by blacks who’d risen up against the institution of slavery. As such, Haiti’s independence was viewed as a threat by all slave-owning countries – the United States included – and its very existence rankled racist sensibilities globally. Thus Haiti – tiny, impoverished and all alone in a hostile world – had little choice but to accede to France’s reparation demands, which were delivered to Port-au-Prince by a fleet of heavily armed warships in 1825.
By complying with an ultimatum that amounted to extortion, Haiti gained immunity from French military invasion, relief from political and economic isolation – and a crippling debt that took 122 years to pay off. My father-in-law still recalls the patriotic song he was taught as a Haitian schoolboy, its poignant lyrics urging all Haitians to reach into their own pockets to help their government raise the amount that was still “owed” to France. Thanks to voluntary contributions from Haiti’s citizens, most of whom were desperately poor, that debt was finally settled in 1947. But decades of making regular payments had rendered the Haitian government chronically insolvent, helping to create a pervasive climate of instability from which the country still hasn’t recovered.
France’s demand for reparations from Haiti seems comically outrageous today – equivalent to a kidnapper suing his escaped hostage for the cost of fixing a window that had been broken during the escape. And though the present French government can’t be blamed for the gall of King Charles X (France’s ruler in 1825), a modicum of historical accountability sure would be nice. While France still ranks among the world’s wealthiest nations, Haiti – with a per-capita annual income of $350, a power grid that fails on a regular basis and a network of roads that’s more than 50-percent unpaved – is plagued by drought, food shortages and a struggling economy. For the “crime” of shaking off the yoke of involuntary servitude, Haiti dutifully paid France reparations over the course of nearly six generations – with interest. France should now do the right thing and return those payments, estimated to total $21 billion in today’s dollars. What would be a relative pittance in the French national budget is desperately needed by Haiti and could help it begin a broad-based recovery that would seem like manna from heaven to its long-suffering people.
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Mona Khalil, Defender of Sea Turtles, Killed in an Israeli Strike in Lebanon
Mona Khalil, Defender of Sea Turtles, Killed in an Israeli Strike in Lebanon
“Mona Khalil, a dedicated defender of endangered sea turtles in Lebanon, died from injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike. For over two decades, she protected turtle nests on a beach near her guesthouse, Orange House, and worked to preserve biodiversity while balancing local development. Her efforts earned her respect among conservationists, and she remained committed to her mission despite the ongoing conflict.
For a quarter century, Ms. Khalil ran a guesthouse and worked to protect endangered sea turtles who every summer lay their eggs on a stretch of beach near Tyre, Lebanon.
For more than two decades, Mona Khalil protected the endangered sea turtles that laid their eggs on a beach near her bed-and-breakfast in Lebanon and kept predators away from the vulnerable hatchlings running to the Mediterranean Sea.
Her efforts to spotlight the plight of the turtles, bringing together often opposing interests, earned her respect among conservationists. She remained unflinching in her mission even as periodic war erupted around her in southern Lebanon.
On June 4, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah that has taken so many civilian lives in recent months caught up to her. She was wounded in an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon, and on Friday, she died of her injuries at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, a close friend, Fadia Jomaa, said.
Her sister, Amal Khalil, remembered Mona Khalil, who was 76, as “a well-rounded person — extremely tough, extremely kind.”
“Inside, I am angry,” Amal Khalil said.
More than 4,000 people have been killed in the most recent round of fighting between the Israeli military and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group and political party that controls much of southern Lebanon. The fighting has threatened to upend a fragile peace agreement between the United States and Iran.
Ms. Khalil was born to Lebanese parents in Lagos, Nigeria. She later moved to the Netherlands, where she lived for more than a decade, working for a time as a porcelain restorer.
In the 1990s, Ms. Khalil returned to Lebanon to visit her family’s seaside home between Tyre and Naqoura, which had been built by her grandfather in the 1970s but abandoned during the civil war in the 1980s. It was dangerously close to a zone the Israelis occupied at the time. One night, she was walking on the Hima Qoleileh–Mansouri beach when she spotted a turtle squirming across sand.
“The first time I saw them, it was completely by accident,” Ms. Khalil said to a reporter for a 2006 Times article. “I suddenly heard a noise. It was a turtle creeping through the sand, coming to lay her eggs.”
Ms. Khalil learned that two species of sea turtle who nested there — the loggerhead and the green turtle — had been declared critically endangered by the World Conservation Union.
Her plans shifted. She moved to Lebanon in 2000.
“She used to say that something kept pulling her back to the south — to the land she had left, and to a sea she never forgot,” Ms. Jomaa wrote in a text message to a reporter.
Ms. Khalil transformed her family’s seaside home and, in a nod to the Netherlands, named it Orange House. She partnered with a woman named Habiba Fayed to fend off foxes, wild dogs and crabs preying on hatchlings. Her guests, in the spirit of ecotourism, could volunteer to protect the turtles’ nests or keep the beach clean.
The periodic fighting between Hezbollah and Israel sometimes interrupted her work. During the war in 2006, she and Ms. Fayed had to flee because of the rocket fire close by and returned two weeks later to find their house had been hit by a shell.
Over the years, she successfully protected the Hima Qoleileh–Mansouri, which has more than 58 endangered sea turtles’ nests, according to the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon. Ms. Khalil established a network of local communities, youth groups, volunteers and environmental advocates to preserve biodiversity while balancing local development, the organization said online.
“There are people who work for conservation, and there are people who become conservation itself,” wrote Assas Serhal, the director general of the Society for the Protection of Nature, in a statement. “Mona Khalil was one of those rare individuals whose life, spirit, and daily existence became inseparable from the cause she dedicated herself to.”
Ms. Khalil hoped to be buried facing the sea, Ms. Jomaa wrote.
“Sadly, the war is still ongoing there, and we cannot reach it,” she wrote.
Ishani Desai is a reporter covering breaking news and other topics, and a member of the 2026-27 Times Fellowship, a program for journalists early in their careers.“
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