When Democrats next week formally nominate the daughter of an Indian immigrant to be vice president, it'll be perhaps the biggest leap yet in the Indian American community's rapid ascent into a powerful political force.

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Why it matters: Indian Americans are one of the fastest-growing, wealthiest and most educated demographic groups in the U.S. Politicians work harder every year to woo them. And in Kamala Harris, they'll be represented in a major-party presidential campaign for the first time.

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By the numbers: There are more than 4 million Indian Americans, and the population is growing quickly.

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• In the battleground states of Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas, the number of eligible Asian American and Pacific Islander voters grew more than 117% between 2000 and 2018, to nearly 1.7 million.
  
  Read the full story on Axios

Photo by Erin Edgerton

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Six months after Heather Heyer was killed protesting a neo-Nazi rally, a memorial at the site of her death is still being showered with gifts, mementos and flowers. But it has also been vandalized, according to Heyer’s mother – a reminder of the hatred that took her daughter’s life.

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For many, the riot triggered by far-right protesters  in Charlottesville on Aug. 12 exposed  the underbelly of hatred and racism in America, and the months since then have been about coming to terms with that reality. But for Susan Bro, Heyer’s mother, the half-year has been hallmarked by efforts to promote the values Heyer stood for – and eventually died for – in Charlottesville.

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“She wanted everybody treated equally and fairly. That was a lifelong passion for her,” Bro said Sunday.

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Read the rest in the Commonwealth Times.

Even while still living in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we're starting to see the long-term effects of lost schooling, curtailed travel and shuttered businesses.

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Why it matters: The U.S. will see some $7.9 trillion in lost economic growth through this decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The World Bank, meanwhile, predicts global gross domestic product will shrink by 5.2% in 2020 alone — nearly three times as much as the 2009 recession.

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Poverty reduction around the globe could be set back 20-30 years, according to the World Bank.

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• The organization expects 70-100 million people to be pushed into extreme poverty, reversing the downward trajectory of the phenomenon.

• UNU-WIDER, part of the United Nations University, predicts 395 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty, while the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day worldwide could rise to more than 1 billion.

 

Job losses have disproportionately affected women, resulting in a prolonged dip in their income and participation in the job market.

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Read the full story on Axios.

A number of Black people living in Ukraine, many of them exchange students, report being blocked as they tried to board trains to escape the war.

 

Why it matters: The racist incidents — some documented on video, as the hashtag #AfricansInUkraine flooded Twitter — added individual agony to the desperate nationwide exodus.

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Zoom in: Among the more than 1.5 million people who have fled Ukraine since Russia's invasion is Alexander Somto Orah, a 25-year-old Nigerian student who told Axios he witnessed three separate incidents of racial discrimination against evacuees by Ukrainian authorities during the long journey from Kyiv to Warsaw.

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1. At a Kyiv train station, police officers said they'd prioritize entry to women and children, Orah said. But they denied access to a group of African women — some of whom were pregnant — even as African men pleaded with authorities to let them pass.

2. At a station in Lviv, officers said only Ukrainian nationals could pass, "but I saw them take only white people," Orah said. The authorities didn't respond when he and others confronted them to ask how they knew who was Ukrainian without checking passports, he recalled.
    

Read the full story on Axios.

From its start, the United States gave citizens the right to vote — as long as they were white men who owned property. From counting a slave as 3/5 of a white man to the creation of the Electoral College, there's a through-line of barriers that extends to today based on racial politics.

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Why it matters: 150 years after the 15th Amendment — and 55 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act — people of color still face systemic obstacles to voting.

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The state of play: The Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing a slew of new state laws to make voting more difficult.

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Read the full story on Axios.

 

This column first appeared in The Commonwealth Times, the student-run press at VCU. 

 

Things got interesting for U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris at a recent town-hall-style campaign event last week in Hemingway, South Carolina — a Southern democratic enclave. An attendee named Meg Oliver asked the California Democrat a question.

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“I’m embarrassed to say that my father was most likely in the [Ku Klux Klan] and I grew up in the South as a daughter of the South,” Oliver said. “I’m embarrassed at what I see with a lot of Southerners and a lot of members of our Congress and the blatant racism of the Steve Kings and the Cindy Hyde-Smiths.”

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She continued: “I’m wondering what we as white people who don’t believe in that, and don’t support that — what can we do to help offset the obvious flash points of racial divides in this country?”

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After a round of applause, Harris said the key to moving forward on race was to be honest about the country’s past and present racial fault lines.

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“We do have to speak the truths like you spoke a very difficult truth,” Harris responded. “For too long in our country we have not had these honest discussions about race.”

 

Many found the exchange to be extraordinary. For one, it’s remarkable to hear a white person admit to their own family’s racist background — much less that of their father. The same was true for politicians until very recently.

 

But the exchange also highlights how the national landscape has changed when it comes to race, which was once deemed too vexed of a subject for the world of politics.

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For politicians, particularly black ones, the issue once deemed too toxic to touch the campaign trail is now imperative. These days, being able to demonstrate dexterity when talking about race-related issues is even viewed as an asset.

 

No one knows this better than Harris herself. Christopher Cadelago at POLITICO reports the senator’s staff is closely monitoring public opinion as it relates to questions about her “blackness.” Three of her campaign advisers told Cadelago Harris’ extended interviews with prominent black hosts like Charlamagne tha God from the syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club” are calculated — aimed at directly tackling awkward memes and questions  about whether Harris is “black enough” before they snowball.

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Cory Booker, another black democratic hopeful for the nomination, seems to have subscribed to a similar doctrine. Not too long ago, the New Jersey senator was a guest on Charlemagne’s program and discussed his love interests, revealing he had a “boo.”

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“Sixty percent of the show’s daily audience is African-American,” Maxwell Tani and Gideon Resnick write in The Daily Beast, “and the show’s hosts feel that their background allows them to ask questions that many mainstream political journalists and cable-news hosts couldn’t ask — or wouldn’t ever think to.”

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The willingness to talk about race, among all candidates, is a clear departure from what’s been the norm for decades. For a long time, black politicians rose through the ranks of elected office by nullifying race as an issue.

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Former President Barack Obama, the most prominent black politician in American history, largely avoided confronting the race question for much of his political career.

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Obama’s stock skyrocketed when he delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention as a state senator. But the speech itself was a monument to the moderate, “come together” politics of the past. He painted the chasms in American politics and culture as artificial, rather than appreciable.

 

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America,” Obama said before a roaring crowd. “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

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Things have certainly changed, and it’s hard to pinpoint the catalyst for this cultural shift. Like with so many phenomena, it’s likely there are multiple reasons. The thinking of Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate, could help explain the change in behavior. The South Carolinian spent most of his career trying to avoid being defined by his race. But he has reshaped his image in recent years.

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“I’ve been in public life for 25 years almost, and I’ve been reluctant [to speak about race] for about 22 of those 25 years,” Scott told The Wall Street Journal in February. “Trayvon Martin and other issues just kept populating the public forum, and at some point, I decided that I was doing the nation a disservice by not speaking out clearly when necessary.”

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Scott, like other politicians, may be finding that moderation is outdated in today’s contentious cultural atmosphere. Movements like Black Lives Matter, #OscarsSoWhite and the kneeling of athletes during the national anthem at games have made overtones of discussions that were previously undertones.

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Meg Oliver’s question in South Carolina — and her forthright admission of her father’s racism — is a sign that Americans are moving closer to having the difficult conversations they have so long evaded. It appears their elected leaders have received the message and are acting accordingly.