Russia, friend or foe?

The strikingly harsh language that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used this week to describe Russian behavior toward the United States and its allies wouldn’t seem to leave any doubt.

“Malicious” is not usually a term chosen to describe a partner.

But wait. On the other hand, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin Nov. 11 in Vietnam, President Trump repeated his belief that Mr. Putin is telling the truth when he says Russia had no hand in interfering in last year’s US presidential election (one of the very actions that prompted Mr. Tillerson’s “malicious” comment Tuesday).

Mr. Trump again left the impression that he considers Putin someone he can work with and confide in when he touted as “great” the more-than hour-long phone call he had with the Russian leader Nov. 21, largely on the topic of Syria.

That more recent upbeat portrayal of cooperation with Putin’s Russia apparently left Trump’s Russia aides cringing, especially since it came a day after a news-making photo of Putin welcoming Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to Russia with an energetic bear hug – an embrace between rescuer and rescued.

What emerges from the Trump administration’s split Russia assessments is a schizophrenic approach that is impeding US action on top-of-the-agenda foreign-policy issues from Ukraine to Syria and the broader Middle East, US-Russia policy analysts say.

“We’re really dealing with a picture where the president has certain instincts about Russia that are not shared by his national security team,” says Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security affairs and Russia specialist at the US Naval War College in Newport, R.I. “The result is a bit of an impasse.”

Indeed, the inability to settle on one common approach to Russia is hampering the administration’s decisionmaking on the Syrian peace process, whether or not to impose additional sanctions on Russia, and whether to provide Ukraine with lethal weapons.

Moreover, the lack of a clear and assertive Russia policy from Washington is actually encouraging Russian boldness and determination to pursue a resurgence of Russian regional and global power, Dr. Gvosdev says.

“The Russians are very confused by all of this, they don’t understand why the president hasn’t instructed his national security staff to reflect his views,” he says. “Their sense is that they have no incentive to do certain things or to demonstrate any cooperation or goodwill,” he adds, “so they are moving ahead without the Americans and according to what they see as their interests.”

The disconnect over Russia between Trump and his top national security aides – national security adviser H. R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Tillerson – is not new, but it is bursting increasingly out into the open and showing signs of hampering decisionmaking.

The normally deadpan Tillerson surprised many with the intensity of his criticism of Russian actions in a speech Tuesday at Washington’s Wilson International Center for Scholars. He cited the “malicious tactics” Russia has used against the US and its European allies – including election interference – that he said had plunged relations to the low levels of the cold war.

Referring to Russia’s invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, its politically motivated regional energy policies, and its cyberwarfare on US and other countries’ democratic elections, Tillerson said such actions “are not the behaviors of a responsible nation.”

As if to put an exclamation mark on Tillerson’s comments, the State Department later Tuesday issued a statement condemning new Russian legislation labeling foreign news outlets as “foreign agents” and essentially treating them as hostile entities. The new law “presents yet another threat to free media in Russia,” the statement said.

Indeed, what some analysts saw in Tillerson’s speech was a frustrated but also increasingly confident secretary of state who was using the public stage to lay out a perspective he knows differs from the president’s.

“What we heard in Tillerson yesterday was a secretary of state telling the president he disagrees with him on some important issues, in this case on Russia,” says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official during the Reagan administration who is now a national security analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

Tillerson’s criticisms of Russia had the whiff of a confident cabinet member who knows he’s not about to be fired and so feels free to expose his differences with the president, Mr. Korb says.

“This is designed to get the president’s attention – just as he [Tillerson] did when he pressed ahead publicly on diplomacy with North Korea,” he says.

Moreover, Korb notes that Tillerson is not alone on the national security team in following a different path from the president’s. “Remember when the president had a call with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and said the US would stop arming the YPG [Syrian Kurdish rebel forces] – and the Pentagon came right out and said, ‘No, we’re still going to do it.’ ”

Some close observers of US-Russia relations have suggested that a moment of reckoning was coming for the administration’s Russia policy in the form of a $47 million arms deal for Ukraine that now sits on Trump’s Oval Office desk. The package of lethal weaponry (beyond the non-lethal weaponry the US already offers Ukraine) reportedly has the full backing of the president’s national security team.

In addition, the administration’s special envoy on the Ukraine conflict, Kurt Volker, supports the arms package as a means of strengthening Ukraine’s position vis-a-vis Russia, which continues to occupy territory inside its western neighbor.

But Gvosdev says he is hearing that the president could make something of a non-decision decision on the arms aid: Instead of providing Ukraine the assistance, “Trump could say ‘The weaponry is available for Ukraine to buy from us,’ and then sit back and do nothing, knowing they don’t have the money to make the purchase.”

Going that route would continue what Gvosdev calls the “passive-aggressive approach” Trump has followed in much of his Russia-related decisionmaking.

The joint communiqué on Syria that Trump issued with Putin this month was viewed by many Middle East analysts as essentially confirming Mr. Assad’s Russia-enabled victory in his country’s brutal civil war and Russia’s ascension to chief arbiter in the Syrian peace process.

On the other hand, the US continues to deploy about 2,000 troops inside Syria, even after the defeat of ISIS at its headquarters in Raqqa – suggesting they are staying on in post-ISIS Syria to support the anti-Assad rebel forces that still hold territory in the north.

And in his speech Tuesday, Tillerson – even as he deemed the Trump-Putin communiqué an important “alignment” of the two powers on the Syria peace process – insisted the US will continue to demand a diplomatic resolution that will “leave no role for Assad or his family in Syria’s government.”

What all this suggests is that the Trump administration’s 11-month-old pattern of mixed messaging on Russia-related issues appears unlikely to dissipate soon.

Yuri Gripas/Reuters

The US Supreme Court is seen Nov. 27, 2017 in Washington. On Wednesday, the court will hear a case about whether historical location data collected by cell towers is protected by the Constitution.

In more ways than one, Timothy Carpenter has been demonstrating the importance of smartphones in modern-day life.

Seven years ago, he began organizing and committing a series of armed robberies of cellphone stores in Michigan and Ohio. On Wednesday, he will be arguing to the United States Supreme Court that the privacy of historical location data collected by cell towers should be protected by the Constitution. If the justices agree, it will be the first time the Constitution’s privacy protections have been updated since the internet was invented. As digital technology becomes increasingly necessary for day-to-day activities, the outcome of this case could help determine how private those activities are.

“For every advance in technology, the [high] court has had an opportunity to weigh in on the effect of the new technology on privacy,” says Alex Abdo, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “This case may very well decide whether we can expect privacy in the digital age.”

Before he was a pioneer of privacy rights, Carpenter was supplying the firearms and serving as a lookout for robberies. During that spree seven years ago, his fellow robbers would enter a store brandishing their guns, herd customers and employees to the back, and order them to fill bags with new smartphones.

While investigating the robberies, authorities ordered MetroPCS and Sprint to turn over records of every call made to and from Carpenter’s phone over a 127-day period from cell sites the two companies operated in the areas where robberies were alleged to have occurred. The records – obtained in accordance with a federal law but without a judge-approved warrant – helped authorities place Carpenter at the scenes of the robberies and, ultimately, convict him.

Carpenter, however, has argued that if the government wants to know something as sensitive as his specific location at a certain time, it should have to abide by the Fourth Amendment and show a judge probable cause that he was involved in criminal activity first.

Lower courts have disagreed with Carpenter, but the high court, after nibbling at the edges of the issue in recent years, will now confront it head-on.

Pre-internet privacy laws

The Fourth Amendment is one of the Constitution’s blunter legal instruments, and thus the justices have agreed to periodically update it throughout history to reflect technological advances. The amendment originally required a warrant only for searches of “houses, papers and effects,” but it was expanded in the 19th century to include contents of letters carried by the postal system. In the 1970s, it was expanded to include telephone conversations, and it has not been updated since.

Significantly, throughout all these changes the content of communications has been protected by the Constitution, but information about communications (or “non-content”) have not. The Supreme Court maintained that precedent in its last major Fourth Amendment decision, the 1979 case Smith v. Maryland that created what is known as the “third-party doctrine.” The court ruled then that a person "has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties" – in this case a pen register, created by the telephone company at the request of police, of all numbers dialed by an alleged robber.

That kind of “non-content” information now includes the metadata – the data about data – transmitted constantly by digital technologies such as smartphones. And vast amounts of that data are collected by third parties.

When investigating Carpenter, authorities used the Stored Communications Act (SCA) to seize and search metadata captured by cell towers. The federal statute, enacted in 1986, effectively enshrined the third-party doctrine into law. Under the statute, all law enforcement needs to prove in order to search information held by third parties like cell service providers is that the records are “relevant and material” to an ongoing investigation.

These precedents are now outdated tools to protect privacy in the digital age, critics argue.

The third-party doctrine was created before the internet, for example, and at a time when third parties held much less information, both in quantity and detail, than they do now. When President Reagan signed the SCA into law, only about 500,000 people subscribed to a cellphone service, according to CTIA, a trade association for wireless communications companies. Now more than three-quarters of American adults own smartphones, which can each transmit more data in minutes than could fit on an entire hard drive in 1986.

“More and more we store our private information on the servers and computers of third parties,” says Mr. Abdo, who co-authored an amicus brief supporting Carpenter. “Do we sacrifice our right to privacy by using modern technology?”

Slippery slopes

Expanding on that argument is a coalition of some of the largest tech companies in the world. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Verizon, among other private industry heavyweights, write in an amicus brief – in support of neither party – that “courts should take a more flexible approach that realistically reflects the privacy people expect in today’s digital environment.”

The third-party doctrine, the brief adds, “should not apply in a world where devices and applications constantly transmit data to third parties by dint of their mere operation.”

Their fear, and the fear of some other observers, is that while law enforcement may now be using the third-party doctrine to easily obtain the location and movements of people – information that is also only getting more precise as smartphone technology improves and cell towers proliferate – the doctrine could be used in the future to easily obtain more personal information in even larger quantities.

The ever-growing “Internet of Things” offers a glimpse of that future, the tech companies write. While smartphones constantly transmit specific details about a user’s location to third parties, there are other devices transmitting other kinds of metadata. Smartwatches can transmit a user’s fitness data; smart-home devices can send metadata on room temperature and grocery orders through third parties.

“We don’t know how [third-party metadata] is going to be used in future,” says Michael Overing, an expert in internet law and an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism.

“Because we don’t know,” he adds, “I want us to err on side of caution.”

But some experts worry about another kind of slippery slope: that the justices decide to expand the Fourth Amendment in a way that delivers more questions than answers.

To rule that cell tower records are protected by the Fourth Amendment would be to depart from the content/non-content rule, a bright line that has been crucial as privacy law has evolved over the centuries, says Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University School of Law.

“The question is what should [the Fourth Amendment] protect and what should it not protect,” he adds. And the content/non-content rule “is an essential rule for maintaining balance as we shift from a physical world to a network world.”

Giving historical cell tower records Fourth Amendment protection “would drag state and federal courts into impossible line-drawing exercises that would cause endless confusion,” Professor Kerr writes in an amicus brief in support of the government.

If the Constitution protects historical cell-site records, he writes, does it also protect bank records? Automatic license plate readers? And is it limited to location information? How important is the length of time the surveillance covered? At what point in time does a search stop being constitutional? And does that point in time depend on the search method being used?

“That [would] create a quagmire for the lower courts,” says Christopher Slobogin, director of the Criminal Justice Program at Vanderbilt Law School. “It would be so hard to figure out when unconstitutional [searches] have occurred.”

'They need to be more aware'

The Supreme Court has avoided major Fourth Amendment questions in recent years, so predicting its decision here is even harder than usual, experts say.

Only one justice, Sonia Sotomayor, has expressed an opinion on the third-party doctrine. In a separate opinion to a unanimous 2012 decision regarding warrantless GPS tracking, she wrote that the doctrine “is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”

But while they may not know the views of the other eight justices, many experts predict the court will ultimately, as it often does with loaded constitutional questions, issue a narrow opinion and then refine that opinion over time through legal challenges stemming from the questions it leaves unanswered.

While they differ on how the Fourth Amendment should be updated, most experts agree that the SCA should be updated. They also hope that the public becomes more informed about how much information they’re giving to third parties every time they use their phones.

“They need to be more aware of what’s being broadcasted, what the privacy settings are on their phones,” says Mark Kuhr, the chief technology officer at Synack, a cybersecurity company based in Redwood City, Calif.

“It would be great to see consumers … demanding better privacy protections from their lawmakers, but also from the people they’re buying products from,” he adds. “Privacy is a little bit of a myth.”

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Mick Mulvaney, center, walks to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building after leaving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington, Monday morning, Nov. 27, 2017.

It may have seemed like made-for-TV farce: Two people showed up at a government agency this week, each claiming to be the interim director.

But underlying that Washington drama this week at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a serious question over how independent regulatory bodies should function.

Without enough independence, an agency can’t regulate industry effectively. Without enough political accountability, there are few checks and balances to ensure it is carrying out the will of voters. Resolving that tension is difficult.

“The short answer is: It’s inevitable,” says Jim Doig, a research professor of government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

There are exceptions. Sometimes, independent agencies can operate with little political input, especially when scientific or professional expertise is paramount, such as the New York Port Authority deciding on where to put bridges to ease traffic flow.

But at the CFPB the question is now front and center.

The interim director appointed by President Trump – Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget – arrived at the agency Monday toting doughnuts, and issued a 30-day hold on new agency actions and hires. Deputy Director Leandra English, who by law was to serve as interim director when Director Richard Cordray left the job, sent out an email welcoming employees back to work then went to Capitol Hill to consult with key Democratic supporters of the agency.

By Tuesday, a federal judge has ruled in favor of the president’s choice. So, for the moment, Mr. Mulvaney is interim director while Ms. English is deputy director. But the matter appears far from settled and awaits further legal decisions and appeals,

The confrontation revolves around how independent the CFPB should be.

In the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial crisis, the Obama administration and Democrat-controlled Congress were eager to find ways to protect consumers from financial institutions’ misdeeds.

“The track record of the financial regulators leading up to the crisis was exceedingly bad,” recalls Michael Barr, then an assistant secretary of the Treasury and key architect of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. Even the Federal Reserve, which has enjoyed a long history of insulation from politics, missed the danger signs that preceded the financial crisis.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Leandra English (left), who was elevated to interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by its outgoing director, meets in Washington on Nov. 27 with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D) of New York and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts. They discussed the fight for control of the consumer watchdog, after President Trump chose White House budget director Mick Mulvaney for the same post.

So Democrats combined elements that have insulated other agencies and created something unique, reasoning the agency needed protection from pressure from both the industry and future conservative Congresses or administrations that might weaken it.

Among its accomplishments, the CFPB has set stricter standards for the mortgage market and simplified loan disclosures for borrowers. It has eliminated some of the most predatory payday loans and created a database where consumers can publish complaints about financial institutions.

Regulation-wary conservatives have balked at several of these actions. For example, they point out that the complaints in the database are unverified. However, online retailers face the same scrutiny without their sales drying up.

The conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute claims the agency actually hurts consumers, because its regulations have raised the costs of loans and caused banks to stop offering profitable but risky loans.

But that’s a hard case to make against an agency that has forced banks to pay out almost $12 billion to 29 million customers for wrongful practices. Even with the increased costs, banks are making record profits. And those loans that are no longer available include abusive payday loans and the risky mortgages that got so many homeowners in trouble during the Great Recession.

Conservatives’ strongest attack against the agency is that it’s not politically accountable to the three branches of government. Congress doesn’t fund it, the Federal Reserve does. It’s run by a single director instead of commissioners from both parties, which is a more standard setup for independent agencies. And that director, while appointed by the president for a five-year term, can’t be fired by the president, unless there’s “cause,” such as malfeasance or dereliction of duty. (The legal battle over interim directors arose after Director Cordray resigned.) A federal appeals court is due to rule on the constitutionality of the restrictions against a director being fired.

Finally, the Dodd-Frank legislation, which set up the CFPB, instructs the courts to review some of the agencies’ decisions with more than the usual amount of deference.

Some Republicans in Congress have called it a rogue agency. Democrats “created a modern-day emperor, somebody immune from congressional oversight and appropriations process,” Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas said in a statement Monday as the drama over dueling interim directors was playing out.

It certainly “is a new agency like no other,” wrote Eric Pearson, an emeritus law professor at Creighton University, in a 2015 essay.

Mulvaney has promised that the CFPB will operate differently in the future, which suggests fewer regulations and a less aggressive stance against financial companies. The immediate question is how long he stays in place.

The legal ruling that favored him over English came from a Trump-appointed judge. But on appeal, in front of a mix of liberal and conservative judges, English’s case has legal merit, says Mr. Doig. Because of the insulation that Democrats gave CFPB from its inception, the decision “would be close.”

That question becomes moot if and when Mr. Trump appoints a new director, who would have to be approved by the Senate. That director would be able to take the agency in a new direction.

A new structure and balance between accountability and independence will depend on Congress.

“Congress could design this agency in lots of different ways,” says Mr. Barr, the former Treasury official. The CFPB will probably survive, he says.

“Is there a potential for a significant weakening of the agency? I am concerned,” he adds.

Jason Lee/AP

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi (r.) meets South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on Nov. 22, 2017. Late last month, Beijing agreed to relax restrictions meant to punish South Korea for deploying the THAAD antimissile system.

In early March, when American officials announced that they had begun to install a missile-defense system in South Korea that China said could be used to spy on its territory, the Lotte Mart in Beijing’s Wangjing district became an easy target for Chinese nationalists looking to vent their anger.

Urged on by editorials in the state-run new media, banner-waving protesters soon filled the sidewalk in front of the supermarket. They heckled would-be customers to boycott the store because it was owned by Lotte, a South Korean conglomerate that had agreed to provide land for the antimissile system known as THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense).

The store was soon closed, along with about 90 other branches across China, as anti-South Korean sentiments quickly spread. With implicit support from the government, Chinese consumers boycotted everything from K-pop to Hyundai in their campaign to punish South Korea and test its relationship with the United States.

“We don't have to make the country bleed, but we'd better make it hurt,” the Global Times, a nationalist Chinese tabloid, said in an editorial published on March 1. “Chinese consumers should become the main force in teaching Seoul a lesson, punishing the nation through the power of the market.”

But for now, at least, China appears to have concluded that the strategy isn’t working. Late last month, it agreed to end the dispute, even though South Korea is keeping the system in place, arguing that it’s needed to defend against North Korea. As tensions begin to thaw, China has reportedly relaxed a ban on group tours to South Korea, and allowed South Korean celebrities to appear again in marketing campaigns.

Yet Beijing's decision to soften its stance renews a domestic challenge: how to appease the nationalists it riled up but no longer needs. It last faced such a conundrum in 2012, when authorities were careful to contain nationalist sentiments over a territorial dispute with Japan that had led to street demonstrations.

“The Chinese government has the wherewithal to put the genie of popular nationalism back in the bottle,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, an associate professor of government at Cornell University and the author of a book about nationalist protests in China. “But it pays a price each time it squelches anti-foreign nationalism.”

Adjusting the volume

Dr. Weiss says in an email that some Chinese will likely feel used and betrayed by the about-face, while others will grow more cynical about how the government only encourages patriotic fervor when it suits its foreign policy goals. In the long run, such policy reversals could discourage Chinese citizens from responding to the government’s anti-foreign rallying cries, depriving Beijing of what has become a reliable and punishing tool in international disputes.

To be sure, many analysts agree that a dramatic shift won’t happen anytime soon, if ever. Beijing has turned the volume up and down on nationalistic sentiments for decades without facing any major backlash. If anything, Chinese nationalism is only intensifying under President Xi Jinping, who has established himself as China’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

Moreover, the growing personality cult around Mr. Xi only enhances his power of persuasion on almost any issue, including foreign policy, says Pal Nyiri, a professor at Free University Amsterdam who studies Chinese nationalism.

“If he says South Koreans are now forgiven, then they're forgiven,” Dr. Nyiri says, suggesting one possible reaction: “ ‘We can go back to watching our Korean soap operas.’ ”

But critics point out that unlike in the Mao era, the last time one figure so dominated Chinese life, the availability of the internet undermines the Communist Party’s efforts to inspire unwavering devotion and control the storyline. So while China’s state-run press has tried to claim victory over South Korea by repeating, for example, that South Korean President Moon Jae-in has promised not to accept any more THAAD deployments – which he’d already vowed to do – many Chinese nationalists aren’t convinced. Some have even accused the government of deceiving them.

“No longer believe in any patriotic feelings, no longer play any boycott games,” writes one user on Sina Weibo, a Chinese site similar to Twitter. “People like us are just pawns. We now feel that patriotism is so naive.”

Chinese ceasefire

South Korea and China agreed to end their dispute over the missile defense system and to restore their economic and other ties on Oct. 31. The announcement came after months of Chinese customers boycotting South Korean cars, movies, and television dramas, in addition to South Korean supermarkets.

In May, the Hyundai Research Institute estimated that the THAAD dispute could cost South Korea $7.8 billion this year, a 0.5 percent decrease in the country’s gross domestic product. The institute estimated China faced a loss of $1 billion, a mere 0.01 percent drop of its GDP. Nyiri says this proves, if nothing else, that China can squeeze other countries when it wants, given its outsized economic influence.

“It sends a signal to foreign countries that says, ‘Look, people in China are strongly nationalistic and you need us, the government, to hold them under control,’ ” Nyiri says.

Yet in spite of the hit taken by South Korean industries like consumer products and tourism, overall trade between the two countries has steadily increased. South Korea’s exports to China rose 13.4 percent to $114 billion in the January-October period from a year ago, according to the Korea International Trade Association. In October, China imported $10.2 billion worth of semiconductors and other electronic equipment, an all-time high. 

Mr. Moon is scheduled to visit Beijing in December to meet with Xi. The two leaders met on the sidelines of a regional economic summit earlier this month in Vietnam, where they agreed to work to resolve the North Korean crisis peacefully and strengthen bilateral cooperation. On Tuesday, a senior Chinese official was scheduled to arrive in South Korea for a four-day visit to discuss ways to further improve relations.

Meanwhile, in the Wangjing district, South Korean shop owners are simply happy to see customers returning. Oh Sug-bong, the owner of a small stationery store, says after sales dropped as low as 40 percent this spring, they’ve started to pick up again.

“I think the situation is finally getting better,” he says.

Erin Brennan was reading “Ron’s Big Mission” out loud when her 5-year-old daughter stopped her.

They were learning about how astronaut Ron McNair, who grew up black in Jim Crow times, would go to the library to read about flight and space – but was never allowed to check out books.

How was it possible for someone to be denied getting their own library card, Ms. Brennan’s daughter wanted to know. “Books are for everyone!” she declared.

More than 550 white families have been having such conversations through We Stories, a nonprofit started in 2015 by two white moms in the suburbs of St. Louis. In the country’s fifth-most segregated city, We Stories is working to raise “big-hearted kids” who will better understand the diverse backgrounds of their black and brown fellow citizens. The group, which provides a private Facebook forum for participating families, has become a catalyst for broader change across the St. Louis area.

Part of the group’s success in reaching a wide variety of parents, says co-founder Laura Horwitz, stems from the relatively easy entrance into tough issues that children's books provide.

“Everybody knows that nothing terrible will happen to you when you open a children’s book,” says Ms. Horwitz, We Stories’ executive director. Plus, she adds, reading them with someone leads to questions and conversations. “That is completely the opposite mind-frame that we as a nation often take to issues of race. We don’t start from, ‘Boy, I might have a lot to learn about this.’ ”

Immediate response

Horwitz, a St. Louis native who had moved away for school and her early professional career, happened to move back in 2014 on the very day that Michael Brown was killed by a white policeman – an event that broadcast St. Louis’s racial tensions on TVs all across America. But in white suburbs, there was a lot of silence.

So Horwitz and her co-founder, Adelaide Lancaster, were shocked at the response they got when they launched We Stories the following year. They hoped that within a month, they could recruit 60 kids for their Family Learning Program. But within 48 hours, they already had double that number signed up.

While We Stories includes a small subset of multiracial families, the focus is on white families because that’s where the cofounders see the greatest need for more robust conversations about race and racism.

“Why white families? We're glad you asked,” they say on their website. “Our area of focus is closing the family conversation gap. White families tend not to talk about race and racism with their young children, whereas black and brown families often consider talking about race and racism a necessary part of parenting and raising children in a world that will not treat them fairly.”

Parents pay $100 for the 12-week experience, and are given four books per child. They start out by talking about how it’s OK to talk about difference. Then in the second and third months, parents can choose their own curriculum. The book lists are “bundled,” so that children read not only about oppression but also resistance and everyday life. Historical books are also complemented with more contemporary stories. Parents are given separate readings for their own background.

Two years in, there are still hundreds of people on a waiting list for their program. 

“The story of We Stories is that there’s so much more interest than we have ever been equipped to handle,” says Ms. Lancaster. “I think that the thirst and the hunger has been really apparent.”

Opportunities for further discussion

The nonprofit is not so much quenching that thirst as whetting it. Some 85 percent of families continue to talk about race with their children after the program ends, and about half start new conversations with others or get involved in new initiatives – such as parent equity groups, which push for greater racial equity in schools.

“When you’re silent about it … your kids will fill in the blanks, because they are definitely observing.... and they are coming up with their own explanations for why the other neighborhood with the house with the broken window is where it’s all brown people,” says Farrell Carfield, a mom from Webster Groves, Mo.

But while white parents and schools are increasingly aware that their children can’t be insulated from the tremors that have shaken the St. Louis region in the past few years, there’s still some ambiguity about who should address it and how.

Parents are saying, “Thank goodness, the school is going to handle and teach my kid about how to feel about racism or how think about racism,” says Brennan, who lives in the city of St. Louis. “And the schools are going, ‘Well, all right, so we’ll talk about Martin Luther King and we’re hopeful that parents are having a more in-depth and nuanced conversation because we don’t want to take that away from them and step on any toes and offend their sensibilities, so we just won’t touch it either.’ And you reach an impasse, nobody talks about it. And the kids get that one-dimensional, one day a year message – Martin Luther King was a hero.”

We Stories, whose alumni hail from 67 different ZIP Codes, helps like-minded parents share tips on how best to approach school officials and provide constructive criticism.

The community also provides an avenue for deeper learning. For example, after Brennan’s daughter asked about why the astronaut-to-be couldn’t have his own library card, they visited the Missouri History Museum with some other We Stories families, where they saw a short play. A key line from the play was, “there were two laws back then: one for white people, and one for black people, and that’s not fair.”  They also heard that even after Dr. King’s civil rights movement helped do away with the dual legal realities, it was another 10 years before NASA accepted a black astronaut.

The We Stories experience is not only helping kids understand history and justice issues, but also each other. Stacie Dixon, a white mom who is raising two African-American children, says her son is increasingly aware of the deficit that comes from not having frank conversations at home.

“That’s one thing my kids know, especially my older one, is that some of the kids that have caused him pain through racism and things like that – he’ll say, ‘I bet their family doesn’t talk about it at home.’ ”

Reuters

People queue to withdraw cash outside a bank in Harare, Zimbabwe, Nov. 28.

Nations coming out of dictatorship or civil war sometimes offer forgiveness to past wrongdoers who fess up. For a torn society, a measure of mercy can often heal quicker than harsh justice. South Africa, Sierra Leone, and Tunisia have tried it. Colombia is in the midst of a truth-and-reconciliation process after its long war. Now it may be Zimbabwe’s turn.

After the end of Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule last week, a new leader offered an unusual and limited pardon on Nov. 28: Those who stole public money and stashed it abroad will be granted amnesty if they return the cash within three months. After that period, said President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the long arm of the law will be visited upon them.

Zimbabweans must come to grips with the troubling aspects of the Mugabe era. Many past wrongs need the bright light of truth and then perhaps some sort of forgiveness.

Mr. Mnangagwa himself is accused of gross human rights violations in the 1980s. He was vice-president under Mugabe but was sidelined and forced to flee the country in early November. After the military eased Mugabe out, Mnangagwa returned and took over.

Mr. Mugabe, despite his age, is being encouraged by religious leaders to admit mistakes. “Zimbabweans are a forgiving lot,” said Bishop Noah Pashapa of the Life and Liberty Church.

The new president’s amnesty move has a very practical purpose. The estimated $2 billion sent abroad by corrupt Zimbabweans might come back and give a needed boost to the economy, which is about half of what it was two decades ago. The country needs cash to build infrastructure for agriculture and mining.

Many countries use amnesties granted in exchange for ill-gotten gains in order to get a quick shot of revenue. They help improve tax compliance, which gives citizens a stake in their government. A one-time forgiveness also sets visible examples of honesty if enough wrongdoers come forward. A recent amnesty in Indonesia netted $367.5 billion that was hidden in offshore accounts. That is equal to about 40 percent of the Indonesian economy.

Mnangagwa’s move hints that he may also be seeking reconciliation with his political opposition. He faces an election next year and, if the process is open and fair, he’ll need to show quick results in reviving the economy. That is easier to do if he can unite the country rather than try to sideline opponents, as both he and Mugabe did in the past. Forgiveness, like that offered to those who have stolen public funds, is a good start in healing Zimbabwe.