The new identity politics, bird smarts, healing Gaza's children: Weekend Reads for August 3, 2024

Some readings worth your time this weekend

This week, in a wildly racist interview appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, Donald Trump pulled from the moldering library of scientific racism to invent a new birtherism, this time out of supposed questions around Kamala Harris’s identity, trying to force a choice between her Indian and Black heritage.

Meanwhile, a new kind of identity politics is emerging among Democratic campaigners and movement organizers — focusing on white men and white women as identity groups like any other. The “White Women: Answer the Call” Zoom had 200,000 participants and raised some $11 million for the Harris campaign; “White Dudes for Harris” — addressing a demographic Democrats have struggled to motivate — gathered another 200,000 attendees and has raised more than $4 million.

To help frame the ideas behind all of this, we’ve pulled together some readings — as we do each weekend for our paid subscribers — that tackle questions of identity — what it’s meant in America, how we’ve understood it, and how this new spin on identity politics might shape the future. We’ve also collected some of the best pieces we’ve found this week on other matters, ranging from the struggle to heal Gaza’s children, to avian intelligence, to the way truth is invented alongside falsehoods. We think all of these pieces of writing are worth spending some time with this weekend, and we hope the articles we’ve collected inspire and entertain you, and even give you some hope for the future.

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In case you missed it

We attended the White Dudes for Harris call — and talked to organizer Ross Morales Rocketto about what it means to organize white men.

The reason is to rally around Kamala Harris. But the even deeper meaning to it is that we need to create space for folks to join our tent and get to learn about us and understand what we're really about.

Because if you look at the polling over and over and over again, people say they like our ideas, but they don't like us. They don't like us. And that's a real conundrum. And so we have to create space. And I've addressed this a bunch of times, but it makes people really uncomfortable to talk about white men. And we don't have a muscle for it on the left.

We took on Donald Trump’s misunderstanding of race (and of America) and unpacked Kamala Harris’s very American set of multiple identities.

Harris went to Howard University, an historically Black college, and has identified as both Indian and Black all her life. She had the unusual childhood situation of being raised by an Indian mother who, having divorced Harris’s Black father, nevertheless invested great effort and intention in exposing Harris and her sister, Maya, to the Black community and Black tradition and thought, as Harris writes in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.

Author Anne Applebaum told us about the new authoritarians, why they’re linked by an interest in kleptocratic extraction shared set of grievances rather than ideology — and how to fight back.

First of all, we live in a time of great chaos and division and change, chaos in the information sphere, when people's lives are being transformed by the internet, by social change, by demographic change. The world looks very different now than it did in your childhood 50 years ago, or the town that you grew up in doesn't resemble at all what it used to be.

When you live in times like that, you have people who begin to want things to slow down and to stop. And that’s the appeal of someone who says, "I'm going to get everything under control again for you." 

Despite Trump’s attempt to turn the conversation on himself at the NABJ conference, it was very much Kamala Harris’s week. And we dug into the question of what it means for Democrats to finally own the discourse, and play in the culture.

No longer is Donald Trump driving the public conversation. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention to pretty much any news outlet, the Republican campaign is mostly playing defense or catchup, for once, struggling to get over vice-presidential pick J.D. Vance’s tall stack of gaffes, or dealing with the torrent of mockery sparked by the recognition that the best way to talk about MAGA is to point out exactly how weird it is, how totally out of step with American life its candidates and advocates are.

A reenergized Democratic Party is getting more pressure from big donors who fear real change (and the survival of Biden’s most progressive programs). We asked why the Party — and Americans in general — puts up with donor demands.

But why do we let corporate leaders define what’s “anti-business” or what’s good for America in the first place? Why do we allow billionaire donors to draw spurious connections between the interests of giant firms and the impact on regular American bank accounts? Do we really want the amoral inclinations of business titans — happy with whoever allows unfettered consolidation of corporate power — to drive Democratic politics?

Democrats finally realized what it was that bothered most people about MAGA Republicans, J.D. Vance, and Project 2024 — it’s creepy. Republican leaders and their plans are just weird. And they decided to call it out where they saw it. We heard from you about whether you think the strategy is working.

The label has a lot going for it. How else to describe the folks who are obsessed with birth rates and whether or not women have children? Who want to erase reproductive freedoms and outlaw contraception? Who think library books and drag queen story hours threaten the future of America? Who want to keep tabs on women’s ovulation and restrict pregnant people from crossing state lines? Who promise radical fundamentalist followers that they’ll fix things so they won’t have to vote anymore? 

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Readings

Coming to America

NGOs like HEAL rely on networks of volunteers and donors, people so eager to help a child who got out of Gaza that they’ll sometimes greet them at the airport with posters and balloons; they invite them to dinner, family events, theme parks. This in turn requires the kids to play a role: to smile, pose for photos, show gratitude.

Layan didn’t like strangers looking at her amputated legs. She didn’t want their pity. And she certainly wasn’t interested in having to glimpse their happy lives, untouched by war and loss. [The Atavist Magazine]