Farah Stockman

A spirited debate is playing out in black communities across America over the degree to which identity ought to be defined by African heritage — or whether ancestral links to slavery are what should count most of all.

Tensions between black Americans who descended from slavery and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are not new, but a group of online agitators is trying to turn those disagreements into a political movement.

They want colleges, employers and the federal government to prioritize black Americans whose ancestors toiled in bondage, and they argue that affirmative action policies originally designed to help the descendants of slavery in America have largely been used to benefit other groups, including immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.

The American descendants of slavery, they say, should have their own racial category on census forms and college applications, and not be lumped in with others with similar skin color but vastly different lived experiences.

The group, which calls itself ADOS, for the American Descendants of Slavery, is small in number, with active supporters estimated to be in the thousands. But the discussion they are provoking is coursing through conversations far and wide.

Those who embrace its philosophy point to disparities between black people who immigrated to the United States voluntarily and others whose ancestors were brought in chains.

Roughly 10% of the 40 million black people living in the United States were born abroad, according to the Pew Research Center, up from 3% in 1980. African immigrants are more likely to have college degrees than blacks and whites who were born in the United States.

A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Education found that 41% of black freshmen at Ivy League colleges were immigrants or the children of immigrants, even though those groups represent 13% of the black population in the United States.

In 2017, black students at Cornell University protested for the admission of more “underrepresented black students,” who they defined as black Americans with several generations in the United States. “There is a lack of investment in black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America,” the students wrote to the president of the university.

University administrators say that black students from other countries contribute to increased diversity on campus, even if their admittance does not mitigate the injustices of American slavery. Many black immigrant groups are also descended from slavery in other countries.

Film producer Tariq Nasheed is among the outspoken defenders of the idea that the American descendants of slavery should have their own ethnic identity.

“Every other group when they get here goes out of their way to say, ‘I’m Jamaican. I’m Nigerian. I’m from Somalia,’ ” he said. “But when we decide to say, ‘OK. We are a distinct ethnic group,’ people look at that as negative.”

This year, responding to requests for “more detailed, disaggregated data for our diverse American experience,” the Census Bureau announced that African Americans will be able to list their origins on census forms for the first time, instead of simply checking “Black.”

The goal of ADOS’ two founders — Antonio Moore, a Los Angeles defense attorney, and Yvette Carnell, a former aide to Democrat lawmakers in Washington — is to harness frustrations among black Americans by seizing on the nation’s shifting demographics.

Embracing their role as insurgents, Moore and Carnell held their first national conference in October and have made reparations for the brutal system of slavery upon which the United States was built a key tenet of their platform.

Their movement has also become a lightning rod for criticism on the left. Its skepticism of immigration sometimes strikes a tone similar to that of President Donald Trump. And the group has fiercely attacked the Democratic Party, urging black voters to abstain from voting for the next Democratic presidential nominee unless he or she produces a specific economic plan for the nation’s ADOS population.

Such tactics have led some to accuse the group of sowing division among African Americans and engaging in a form of voter suppression not unlike the voter purges and gerrymandering efforts pushed by some Republicans.

“Not voting will result in another term of Donald Trump,” said Brandon Gassaway, national press secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, has been embroiled in an online battle with ADOS activists for months. Mitchell contends that the group’s leaders are “using reparations as a weapon” to make Trump more palatable to black voters. Others have pointed out that Carnell once appeared on her YouTube channel in a “Make America Great Again” hat.

Over 1,000 people attended the group’s first national conference, hosted by Simmons College of Kentucky. Guest speakers included Marianne Williamson, a white self-help author who has made reparations a key plank of her platform as a minor Democratic presidential candidate, as well as Cornel West, a black Harvard professor who said ADOS is giving a voice to working-class black people.

Tara Perry, a 35-year-old paralegal, was among the attendees. A former employee of the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, which used to count the number of black laborers at construction sites, Perry said she believed that the influx of Mexican immigrants had made it more difficult for black men to find construction jobs in the city.

“People call us divisive. We’re not divisive. We’re self-interested,” said Perry, adding that she was prepared to see Trump reelected.

Critics consider the movement a Trojan horse meant to infiltrate the black community with a right-wing agenda and question why the group would target Democrats, who have been far more open to discussions of reparations.

“You are willing to let Donald Trump win, who clearly says he doesn’t see reparations happening?” asked Talib Kweli Greene, a rapper and activist who has become a vocal opponent of the group. “Get out of here!”

Recently, Hollywood has become the source of much of the frustration around the dividing line between U.S.-born African Americans and black immigrants. When black British actress Cynthia Erivo was hired to play abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the casting received immediate backlash. Similarly, filmmaker Jordan Peele has been criticized for hiring Lupita Nyong’o, who is Kenyan, and Daniel Kaluuya, who is British, to play African American characters in his movies.

But Moore, 39, and Carnell, 44, say they are not scapegoating black immigrants or trying to lead black voters astray. They say they are merely demanding something tangible from Democrats in exchange for votes and trying to raise awareness around the economic struggles of many black Americans.

Carnell said she learned of the huge disparities in inherited wealth that left black Americans with a tiny share of the economic pie by reading reports, including an Institute for Policy Studies report that predicted the median wealth of black families would drop to zero by 2053. Moore had been talking about some of the same studies on his own YouTube channel. The two joined forces in 2016 and coined the term ADOS, which spread as a hashtag on social media.

“What they have done is taken the racial wealth divide field out of academia and packaged it under a populist hashtag,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Asante-Muhammad lamented that the rhetoric of the movement comes off as anti-immigrant and said that Moore and Carnell “over-dramatize” the effect of African immigrants on the wealth and opportunities available to black Americans.

William Darity Jr., a professor at Duke University, has written a series of reports about wealth inequality cited by Moore and Carnell. In one report, Darity found that the median net worth of white households in Los Angeles was $355,000, compared with $4,000 for black Americans. African immigrants in the city had a median net worth of $72,000. Darity’s research also shows that not all immigrant groups are wealthy.

Darity did not attend the recent conference in Kentucky, but he said he saw ADOS as a social justice movement on behalf of a segment of the black population that is being left behind.

But not everyone agrees with Darity’s view that empowering disadvantaged African Americans is the extent of the group’s message. Some who have used the hashtag have used racist, violent language when going after their detractors. Carnell once defended the term “blood and soil,” a Nazi slogan, on Twitter.

Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, said she was harassed online by the group’s supporters after she mentioned ADOS on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show in a segment about Russian disinformation campaigns.

During the segment, Mitchell implied that ADOS was made up of Russian bots impersonating real black people online. After the segment aired, the group’s supporters harassed Mitchell as well as Reid, who they noted was born to immigrants.

“If you do not agree with them, or acknowledge their existence, they go after you,” Mitchell said.

Carnell has also been criticized for her past service on the board of Progressives for Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration group that has received funding from a foundation linked to John Tanton, who was referred to as “the puppeteer” of the nation’s nativist movement by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

A September newsletter from Progressives for Immigration Reform touted the growing political clout of ADOS and praised it as “a movement that understands the impact unbridled immigration has had on our country’s most vulnerable workers.”

This summer, ADOS ignited a flurry of criticism after Carnell complained that Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., was running for president as an African American candidate but had failed to put forth an agenda for black people. She noted that Harris is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. Critics quickly accused Carnell of “birtherism” and xenophobia.

And although Carnell and Moore say ADOS is a nonpartisan movement, the hashtag has been used by conservatives who support Trump.

“I like #ADOS,” Ann Coulter, a white conservative commentator, wrote on Twitter. “But I think it should be #DOAS — Descendants of American slaves. Not Haitian slaves, not Moroccan slaves.”

At the conference in Kentucky, supporters pushed back against the idea that they were anti-immigrant or surrogates of the president’s agenda.

“We’re not xenophobes,” said Mark Stevenson, a director of talent acquisition in the Navy who said he founded an ADOS chapter in Columbus, Ohio, this summer. “If you ask somebody who is Latino what is their heritage, they’ll tell you they are Puerto Rican or Dominican or Cuban.

“This is our heritage,” he added. “I don’t see the issue.”

This article originally appeared in

A Growing Identity Debate in Black America

In Hollywood, Harriet Tubman is played in a new movie by a black British woman, much to the annoyance of some black Americans. On the U.S. census, an ultrawealthy Nigerian immigrant and a struggling African American woman from the South are expected to check the same box. When many American universities tout their diversity numbers, black students who were born in the Bronx and the Bahamas are counted as the same.

'We're Self-Interested': The Growing Identity Debate in Black America

In Hollywood, Harriet Tubman is played in a new movie by a black British woman, much to the annoyance of some black Americans. On the U.S. census, an ultrawealthy Nigerian immigrant and a struggling African American woman from the South are expected to check the same box. When many U.S. universities tout their diversity numbers, black students who were born in the Bronx, New York, and the Bahamas are counted as the same.

Their departure comes as the organization that grew out of anger over Trump’s election tries to move past its history of discord and focus on the 2020 presidential and congressional races.

Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist; Tamika Mallory, an African American gun control activist; and Bob Bland, a white fashion designer, are stepping down from the organization’s board, the organization announced in a news release Monday.

Their departure, earlier reported by The Washington Post, comes after complaints from some local women’s march leaders that the New York-based group was too insular to lead a national movement, and after some of the earliest organizers of the march on Washington accused Mallory and a fourth co-chair, Carmen Perez-Jordan, of making anti-Semitic remarks.

Perez-Jordan, a Latina activist who organizes against mass incarceration, will remain on the Women’s March board.

The four co-chairs are credited with helping to change the face of American feminism by highlighting the voices of women of color, as well as sexual minorities. But they were also accused of concentrating power in the hands of an insular group of New York-based activists.

The group angered some activists in other parts of the country when they tried to trademark the name Women’s March in the wake of the 2017 march, which was put together by loosely connected volunteers, many of whom found one another on Facebook. Millions took the streets in simultaneous marches in Washington and hundreds of cities around the world.

After the 2017 march, the four co-chairs ousted one of the group’s earliest organizers, Vanessa Wruble, who is Jewish. Wruble later helped establish a new organization and made accusations of anti-Semitism. Mallory’s close ties to the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who is respected in the black community but widely reviled in the Jewish community for virulently anti-Semitic remarks, had long raised eyebrows in New York.

The accusations, made public in advance of the 2019 march, heightened a sense of infighting. In some cities, including New York and Philadelphia, two separate women’s marches were held.

In a statement, Sarsour, Mallory and Bland expressed pride in what they had accomplished.

“Our mission was to build a powerful institution that defied the status quo, centered the leadership of women of color and united diverse women around a set of principles that are intersectional, visionary and bold and we feel accomplished,” they wrote. “Grateful for the brilliant movement leaders who have stepped up to continue to shepherd this organization and water the seeds that we planted. We look forward to spending the next 14 months building power and engaging voters nationwide to win this critical election.”

Wruble said in a statement: “There’s a lot of work to be done as we approach 2020. We can’t afford to be divided — and I welcome everyone to join us as we march on the polls again.”

The New York-based Women’s March group announced Monday that 17 new board members from across the country had been chosen in July through a national search. They include Charlene A. Carruthers, a founder of the Black Youth Project 100, and Shawna Knipper, a Women’s March organizer in Pennsylvania.

Three Leaders of Women's March Group Step Down After Controversies

Three leaders of the Women’s March on Washington who helped organize one of the largest mass mobilizations in United States history following the inauguration of Donald Trump have stepped down from the organization’s board after years of controversy.

Her resignation comes days after the Baltimore City Council proposed amending the city charter to make it possible to remove her, and after the FBI raided her two homes and her office at City Hall.

Pugh stepped down from the hospital network’s board, but she had resisted calls to step down as mayor. She has been home on medical leave for weeks. Her lawyer told reporters previously that she was too ill to make decisions. Bernard Young, president of the Baltimore City Council, has been serving as acting mayor and will complete the rest of her term.

“I am sorry for the harm that I have caused to the image of Baltimore and the credibility of the office of the mayor,” Pugh said in a statement read aloud by her lawyer, Steve Silverman, at a brief news conference that she did not attend. “Baltimore deserves a mayor who can move our great city forward.”

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who appoints the board of the University of Maryland Medical System, applauded Pugh’s resignation in a post on Twitter.

“This was the right decision, as it was clear the mayor could no longer lead effectively,” he wrote. “The federal and state investigations must and will continue to uncover the facts.”

Pugh has been under intense scrutiny since March, when The Baltimore Sun reported that she was one of nine members of the board of the University of Maryland Medical System who had profited personally from contracts with the hospital system.

When the scandal broke, Pugh maintained that there was nothing illegal or unethical about her deal to sell her “Healthy Holly” children’s books, which promote nutritious food and exercise, to the hospital network, whose board she served on as a state senator. The network, in turn, was supposed to donate the books to Baltimore schools and day cares.

She apologized for failing to report the deal on disclosure forms as a state senator and returned the most recent payment of $100,000.

But questions continued to swirl over who authorized the contract and how many of the books actually reached children, especially after thousands of books were discovered untouched in a school warehouse. Pugh has received $500,000 since 2011 from the medical system for the books. Other entities, including Kaiser Permanente, reportedly paid her an additional $190,000 for the books.

“This whole entire episode has been hurtful to the city,” said Jill Carter, a state senator representing Baltimore who has been pushing to limit self-dealing on the hospital network’s board. “Those of us who are holding elected office now, it is incumbent upon us to do everything in our power to restore the public trust.”

Carter said she began investigating the hospital network’s contracts after hearing complaints from minority-owned businesses that it was impossible for them to bid on contracts, while politically connected board members received lucrative deals that did not go through normal channels of procurement.

Carter noted that other board members reaped far more from the hospital network, including Francis X. Kelly, who advocated the privatization of the hospital network as a state senator, and went on to obtain $16 million in contracts through his insurance company, Kelly &amp; Associates Insurance Group.

“It’s been very troubling to me that so much focus has been placed on the mayor that there has been too little scrutiny and too little desire to investigate the other members,” Carter said.

The hospital network’s website lists Kelly as being “on leave” from the board, along with three other members who had business contracts. He did not return a call seeking comment Thursday.

A recent bill passed by Maryland’s General Assembly will replace the medical system’s entire board in July, and generally prohibits future board members from receiving no-bid contracts.

Michael Schwartzberg, a spokesman for the medical system’s management, said it would not be issuing a statement on the mayor’s resignation.

Pugh, who was elected mayor in 2016, has long been a fixture in the city’s politics. She previously served as a state senator and majority leader in Maryland’s General Assembly. Her resignation comes after a series of other corruption scandals in the city have shaken faith in Baltimore’s government. Last year, six Baltimore police officers pleaded guilty in a wide-ranging corruption trial that included robbing a motorist of $25,000 and dumping garbage bags full of stolen prescription drugs on the market.

The city, which endured riots and unrest in the wake of the 2015 death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, has seen four police commissioners cycle through since Gray’s death. Last year, former police commissioner Darryl De Sousa pleaded guilty in federal court to failing to file income tax returns.

In 2010, another Baltimore mayor, Sheila Ann Dixon, resigned after being found guilty of misappropriating gift cards for the poor.

Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, said her group has received several calls from people expressing a loss of faith in Pugh. But Antoine said she is heartened by recent proposals brought by Baltimore City Council members to tighten ethics disclosure rules and make it easier to remove the mayor.

“I think we’re on the verge of recovering from all of this,” she said. “We believe the City Council is taking steps to move forward.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/catherine-pugh-baltimore-resigns.html" id="9d60a242-2116-3182-a2e9-389bb6214507">The New York Times</a>.

Baltimore Mayor Resigns Amid Children's Book Scandal

After weeks of mounting pressure, Mayor Catherine Pugh of Baltimore resigned Thursday amid a widening scandal involving hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of children’s books that she wrote and sold to the University of Maryland Medical System while serving on its board of directors.

Pugh’s lawyer, Steve Silverman, announced her resignation Thursday, effective immediately. He read a statement from the mayor that said, “I am sorry for the harm that I have caused to the image of the city of Baltimore and the credibility of the office of the mayor.”

But questions continued to swirl over who authorized the contract and how many of the books actually reached children, especially after thousands of books were discovered untouched in a school warehouse. Pugh has reportedly received more than $500,000 since 2011 for the books.

In 2010, another Baltimore mayor, Sheila Ann Dixon, resigned after being found guilty of misappropriating gift cards for the poor. Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Dallas Dance was convicted of lying on disclosure forms about money he received from a contractor that had business interests with the school system.

Mayor Catherine Pugh of Baltimore Resigns Amid Children's Book Scandal

But not Lee Carter, the self-described socialist who represents this Virginia suburb in the state’s House of Delegates.

Instead, he blasted the deal on social media as “corrupt,” noting that it gave the well-off company $70 million in government grants to create 1,100 jobs.

“Micron doesn’t need the money,” Carter said in an interview, of one of the largest employers in his district. “We could have used it for something else.”

The recent midterm elections showcased the growing popularity of candidates who identify as socialists. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who were sworn in just weeks ago, have already attracted widespread attention as members of Congress. In state legislatures across the country, about a dozen newly elected socialists are also just embarking on their terms.

But Carter, who won an unexpected victory in 2017 against a Republican who served as majority whip, has already served a year in office. And his tenure gives a glimpse of what happens when a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America is elected to office.

Virginia politics has never before seen someone quite like Carter. In a state where Democrats and Republicans alike boast of being pro-business, Carter has waged a lonely battle against companies that seek funding from the public coffers, in addition to tax breaks, in exchange for bringing more business to Virginia.

He has yet to see any of his bills passed. But he is part of a nascent movement in Virginia that is challenging the large influence that corporations typically enjoy in the state. Virginia is one of only a handful of states that allow corporations to donate unlimited amounts of money to politicians, and is the only state that does not bar politicians from using those funds for personal expenses.

“What we have in Virginia is that lobbyists literally write the bills and present them,” said Mark Keam, a Democratic delegate from Fairfax County who has served for nearly a decade. Carter has challenged his colleagues to represent ordinary people, not special interests, Keam said. “The one thing that Lee Carter has helped me understand is that labels don’t matter very much. What matters is ‘What do you stand for and what are you willing to fight for?'”

The arrival last year of Carter and 14 other newly elected Democrats made it possible for Democrats to expand Medicaid. Now the party is aiming to take control of the state legislature this November, a goal that once seemed out of reach.

The upcoming election also sets the stage for a struggle over Virginia’s future between those who believe that prosperity lies in wooing more businesses and those like Carter, who believe it comes from making businesses share more of their wealth. While Virginia is the 12th largest economy in the country by gross domestic product, according to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, it ranks 26th in income equality, according to the American Community Survey.

Carter has been a vocal opponent of the incentive package, worth more than half a billion dollars, used to lure one of Amazon’s new headquarters to Crystal City, Virginia. And he fought against a bill overhauling the state’s energy grid, arguing that it gave away too much to Dominion, a powerful for-profit utility.

In recent days, Carter filed a bill that would get rid of the union-weakening “right to work” statute that has been in place since 1947, as well as another bill that would give public employees, including teachers, the right to strike.

He is the first to admit that these bills have little chance of passing this session, since Republicans hold a slim majority in both chambers of the state legislature, and even some Democrats oppose them.

“One of the biggest things has been trying to keep in mind that by electing a socialist, my constituents have made the choice to reject the status quo,” he said. “They want someone to go and fight, even if that person is on the losing end.”

But it is not clear how many of Carter’s constituents know that he is a socialist. More than a dozen voters on the streets of Manassas expressed surprise to learn that the district is represented by a lawmaker who embraces that label.

And although Carter sees his victory as proof that Northern Virginia wants radical change, others consider it a fluke.

“Democrats could have nominated a dead cat and it probably would have won,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, noting that 2017 was the first opportunity to rebuke President Donald Trump.

So far, incentive packages for Micron and Amazon appear to have public support. At Olde Towne Auto Repair in Manassas, Robert Smith, a service manager, acknowledged that giving taxpayer money to wealthy companies was a “hard pill to swallow.”

But he insisted that it was worth it.

“The whole country wants Amazon,” he said. “How could that be bad for us?”

Still, Carter has attracted a nationwide following. Like Ocasio-Cortez, or “AOC” as her fans call her, he has forged a strong bond with struggling constituents by sharing his own financial troubles. A former Marine who depends on a GI Bill stipend to make ends meet, he admits that he pockets the $213 dollar per diem given to Virginia state lawmakers during the 46-day legislative session, staying at a friend’s house instead of a hotel. Lawmakers are paid $17,640 a year for their work.

Carter is uninterested in presenting a typical politician’s varnished image. On Twitter, he has revealed every negative bit of personal information about himself that he can think of: He has been fired from jobs. He is still struggling to get his college degree. He is in the middle of a messy divorce from his third wife.

Then there was this Twitter post, which caused the Virginia political establishment to clutch its collective pearls: “Just like everyone else under 35, I’m sure explicit images or video of me exists out there somewhere. That’s just a reality of dating in the smartphone era.”

Carter said that airing his dirty laundry has focused his upcoming re-election race on what really matters: the economy. Now, he says, his Republican opponent, Councilman Ian Lovejoy of Manassas, has nothing to attack him about, except for socialism, a subject Carter says he welcomes.

Lovejoy did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Terry Kilgore, a Republican who leads the Commerce and Labor Committee, says he is confident that Virginians will choose to keep their pro-business policies and reject Carter’s views in November.

“Unions, years ago, brought a lot of good things to the workplace, but now I think that society has evolved and workers are protected,” said Kilgore, who hails from Gate City, a coal-mining town near the Tennessee border that has gotten redder over the past two decades, even as Carter’s district has grown more blue.

Republicans hoping to win back Carter’s seat this fall have created pamphlets with his smiling face next to images of Lenin and Stalin. Some Democrats predict that he and other progressives will struggle to win re-election without a governor’s race and a pro-business Democrat at the top of the ticket.

But even those who disagree with Carter’s stance on Amazon and Micron say he has elevated the level of public debate.

“He will get up and say exactly what’s on his mind, and he will say it in a very firm way and so people know exactly where he stands,” said David Toscano, a Democratic delegate from Charlottesville who served as minority leader in the House from 2011 to 2018.

At an event last month at the City Tavern in Manassas, Carter told a group of teachers about his bill that would give them the right to strike.

“Oh really?” Erin Merrill, a civics teacher seated next to him, replied.

“It’s going to die in subcommittee,” Carter admitted.

“It’s a faraway thing,” she said later. “If he starts now, he can build that coalition.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/us/lee-carter-amazon-micron.html" id="a3a324ea-f03a-3a22-abfd-cc73219e83dd">The New York Times</a>.

How One Socialist Lawmaker Is Trying to Change His State's Pro-Business Policies

MANASSAS, Va. — When the state of Virginia recently struck a deal with U.S. microchip maker Micron to expand in Manassas, both Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and the local mayor, Hal Parrish, a Republican, attended a ceremony celebrating the news.

The unity did not last long. Vanessa Wruble, a Brooklyn-based activist, said she told the group that her Jewish heritage inspired her to try to help repair the world. But she said the conversation took a turn when Tamika Mallory, a black gun control activist, and Carmen Perez, a Latina criminal justice reform activist, replied that Jews needed to confront their own role in racism.

The women who gathered that night would go on to organize one of the biggest protests in American history, remarkable not just for its size, but for its inclusive nature. The event on Jan. 21, 2017, inspired thousands of women who had never been involved in politics before to pour their energy into helping Democrats win elections this fall.

But the divisions apparent at that very first meeting continue to haunt the Women’s March organization, as charges of anti-Semitism are now roiling the movement and overshadowing plans for more marches next month.

Wruble was pushed out of the organization shortly after the march, and she now asserts that her Jewish identity played a role. She went on to help found an organization called March On, which supports local women activists.

The rift is now so dire that there will be two marches on the same day next month on the streets of New York: one led by the Women’s March group, which is billed as being led by women of color, and another by a group affiliated with March On that is stressing its denunciation of anti-Semitism.

Mallory, meanwhile, who is now co-president of the Women’s March group, has been criticized for attending an event by Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam who has been widely reviled for making anti-Semitic remarks. Mallory has called Farrakhan “the GOAT,” or “greatest of all time,” on social media.

The accusations of anti-Semitism, which were outlined in an article this month in Tablet, an online Jewish magazine, have prompted some women to reconsider their support for the group.

Some Jewish women have announced on social media that they will not attend the mass protest in Washington on Jan. 19 being organized by the Women’s March group. Last month, Teresa Shook, a white woman from Hawaii who created the first Facebook page proposing a march, called for the group’s leaders, who include Mallory and Perez, to step down.

Rachel O’Leary Carmona, chief operating officer of the Women’s March group, cast the controversy as the growing pains of a new organization that is struggling to build a diverse coalition. She said steps were being taken to ensure that Jewish women felt welcome, including giving Women’s March leaders education about anti-Semitism and adding Jewish women to the organization’s “unity principles,” which highlight groups that are considered especially vulnerable.

Mallory and Perez say they categorically condemn anti-Semitism, and that when they asked Wruble to leave the group, it had nothing to do with her being Jewish. But they acknowledged that the role of Jewish women was discussed in that first meeting.

“Since that conversation, we’ve all learned a lot about how while white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy, ALL Jews are targeted by it,” Mallory said in a statement to The New York Times.

The allegations of anti-Semitism are particularly painful because Women’s March organizers made a commitment from the beginning to work across racial and religious lines, and to be led by what they considered the most “marginalized” women.

Now Women’s March activists are grappling with how they treat Jews — and whether they should be counted as privileged white Americans or “marginalized” minorities, especially in the aftermath of the October mass shooting in Pittsburgh, when 11 people were gunned down at their synagogue.

Tensions around identity have swirled around the Women’s March from its earliest days. Black and Latina women complained on Facebook that white women were planning a march without their input, and that mainstream feminists had long ignored their needs.

Wruble, a central organizer of the march, says she agrees that white women, including Jews, should grapple with their racial privilege. She put out a call for women of color to join the planning team and was connected with Mallory and Perez. At that first meeting, Wruble said, they seemed to want to educate her about a dark side of Jewish history, and told her that Jewish people played a large role in the slave trade and the prison industry.

“I was taken aback,” said Wruble in her first extensive interview about her experience organizing the Women’s March. “I thought, ‘Maybe there are things I don’t know about my own people.'”

She said she went home that night and searched Google to read about the Jewish role in the slave trade. Up popped a review of “The Secret Relationship between Blacks and the Jews,” a 1991 book by Farrakhan, which asserts that Jews were especially culpable. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor, has called the book the “bible of the new anti-Semitism.”

Wruble said she did not dwell on the issue because she wanted to work together on the march, which was only two months away. Mallory and Perez brought a friend on board, Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist. The three women — and another woman named Bob Bland, a white fashion designer who created one of the first Facebook pages about the march — became the event’s official leaders. They were widely featured in the press as the public face of the movement.

Behind the scenes, Wruble said she felt cast aside.

She said she was told by one of the march leaders that “we really couldn’t center Jewish women in this or we might turn off groups like Black Lives Matter.” While Black Lives Matter is a diffuse movement, some activists have issued statements expressing solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

At one point, Wruble said she asked about security for the march and was told by the leaders that the Nation of Islam would be providing it.

“I said, ‘You are going to open up the march to intense criticism,'” Wruble said, warning that it would be a red flag for Jews. She said they dismissed her concerns in a heated email exchange and accused her of unfairly maligning the Nation of Islam.

As the march grew closer, Perez gathered a diverse group of activists who created a set of “unity principles” that would tie all marchers together and highlight those viewed as the most vulnerable at the time.

“We must create a society in which all women — including Black women, Indigenous women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women — are free,” it read.

Wruble noticed that Jewish women were not included, but said she was too busy with logistics for the march to focus on it.

In an interview, Mallory and Perez said that they work in communities where Farrakhan is respected for his role in rehabilitating incarcerated men. They attended the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March in 2015, which Farrakhan planned.

But they said they did not subscribe to his views about Jewish people and never mentioned the slave trade in that first meeting with Wruble.

“It never happened,” Perez said.

They also denied telling Wruble that she could not be an official leader of the march because she is Jewish.

In fact, they said, they urged her to be more assertive if she wanted public recognition. “A closed mouth does not get fed,” Mallory told Wruble in an email viewed by The Times.

Mallory said the Nation of Islam was not hired for security. An internal document obtained by The Times said that the Women’s March group does not ask the religious affiliation of contractors, but said that because private security firms employ a large number of Nation of Islam members, “it is likely” that some members of the sect have provided security for Women’s March events.

Even though the march was a success, Wruble said that she felt angry and that the event’s official leaders were more focused on celebrity than building the movement. She also felt they were unwilling to confront their own bias against Jews. At a meeting days after the march, an argument broke out between Wruble and the other leaders.

Mallory and Perez began berating Wruble, according to Evvie Harmon, a white woman who helped organize the march, and who attended the meeting at Mallory’s apartment complex.

“They were talking about, ‘You people this,’ and ‘You people that’ and the kicker was, ‘You people hold all the wealth.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, they are talking about her being Jewish,'” said Harmon, whose account was first published by Tablet. “The greatest regret of my life was not standing up and saying ‘This is wrong.'”

Mallory denied that she disparaged Wruble’s Jewish heritage in that meeting, but acknowledged telling white women there that she did not trust them.

“They are not trustworthy,” she said, adding that Wruble gossiped behind the backs of the other march leaders instead of confronting them when she had an issue. “Every single one of us has heard things that offended us. We still do the work.”

Shortly after that meeting, Mallory, Perez and Sarsour decided they did not want to work with Wruble anymore.

On her way out, Wruble texted a senior adviser to the organization with a warning: “The one thing I would suggest you discuss with them is the anti-Semitic piece of this,” she wrote. “Their rhetoric around this stuff will hurt the movement.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/us/womens-march-anti-semitism.html" id="04ce6402-39f1-3043-a1e9-e5c288b6b219">The New York Times</a>.

Women's March Roiled by Accusations of Anti-Semitism

Within days of Donald Trump’s election, a diverse group of women united by their concern about the incoming administration gathered at a restaurant in New York to plan a protest march in Washington. They had seen the idea floating on Facebook and wanted to turn it into a reality.

<h1>BOSTON — Dangerously hot temperatures are expected to spread across the Central and Eastern United States on Wednesday through the weekend, with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the hardest-hit places, the National Weather Service has warned.</h1>

And even when the sun dips below the horizon, temperatures in many places are expected to remain in the 80s.

The hottest part of the country? Smack dab in the middle.

Everyone living in the region stretching from northern Oklahoma and central Nebraska through Iowa, Missouri and western Illinois should brace for a “prolonged period of dangerously hot temperatures and high humidity,” the warnings say. People in central and south central Kansas should expect to endure highs of about 102 degrees; the temperature in Des Moines, Iowa, was expected to hover around 100.

Excessive heat warnings have also been posted farther east, for parts of New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania.

All told, at least 15 million people across the United States are being warned of dangerously high temperatures that could affect human health between Wednesday and Friday.

By the weekend, what meteorologists are calling a “heat dome” in the middle part of the country is expected to spread into the Great Lakes and the East Coast.

Extreme heat can kill. Here’s what you can do to stay safe.

“The combination of heat and humidity can take its toll on someone who is outside and overdoing it,” said Richard Bann, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. “It can be life-threatening.”

Last year, 108 people died from extreme heat, compared to just 30 who died from cold, according to statistics on weather-related fatalities released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Here are four safety recommendations from the National Weather Service:

— Stay in an air-conditioned room.

— Check on relatives and neighbors, especially the elderly.

Some of the country’s biggest cities can expect to swelter.

So far, Philadelphia is the only major city on the East Coast under an excessive heat warning. Meteorologists are predicting highs there of 100 degrees. But New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston are expected to be uncomfortably hot, with temperatures soaring into the high 90s and above; Chicago can expect the same.

Saturday’s expected highs are 97 in Boston, 100 in Washington and 98 in New York. Chicago is expected to see a high of 97 degrees Friday and 94 on Saturday.

Gentry Trotter, founder of Cool Down St. Louis, a nonprofit that provides utility assistance for low-income families and donates air conditioners to people who are elderly or have disabilities, said that the organization has assisted in more than 1,900 emergency situations over the past three weeks and received 63% more requests this year than it did last year.

“It has just been brutal,” he said. “Yesterday we went in a home of an 80-year-old lady, and the heat almost knocked us over.”

In Iowa, football practice is off, but the 2020 campaign rolls on.

Heat warnings have Iowa farmers worrying about their corn, after planting was delayed by a soggy spring that has not left the plants much time to take root.

Despite the scorching heat, Democratic candidates for president have continued to crisscross the state. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota marched 3 miles over the weekend in saunalike heat, and earlier this week, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, sweated through a forum on gun violence. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is expected to attend an AARP forum in Sioux City

But ordinary people are shuffling everything from church picnics to sporting activities.

Steven Rogers, director of operations for Eastern Iowa Elite, a middle-school football club, said that two football practices have already been canceled and the team tryouts this coming Saturday have been moved indoors.

“You can’t really expect the kids to perform at the highest level if they are outside in this heat, beyond the fact that its totally dangerous,” he said. “There have been a couple of kids having some pretty bad health issues related to heat and overexertion. It’s just not safe.”

Nighttime is unlikely to bring much relief.

More than 100 local heat records are expected to fall Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. Most won’t be record-daily highs but record-high nighttime lows, and that lack of cooling can be dangerous, meteorologists say.

Temperatures in parts of the East won’t drop below the mid- to upper-70s or even 80 degrees (26.7 Celsius) at night.

“Daytime hours when the sun is out is clearly our highest risk periods,” said Dr. Michael Kaufmann, EMS medical director with the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. “We’re not expecting the drops in temperature at night — or the humidity — that we often realize when the sun goes down.”

A high pressure system stretching from coast to coast is keeping the heat turned on. The heat and humidity are made to feel worse by the large amount of moisture in the air coming from the Gulf of Mexico, much of it left over from Hurricane Barry.

The heat will make air-quality problems worse.

Officials are also concerned about smog, which is exacerbated by the heat and makes it harder for certain people to breathe, including the very young, the elderly and people with asthma or lung diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s live air quality tracker reported that the air was “unhealthy” Wednesday for sensitive groups in a stretch of the East Coast from Baltimore to Bridgeport, Connecticut, including Philadelphia and New York City.

Farah Stockman

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