Courtesy of Jennifer-Ruth Green Campaign

Lt. Col. Jennifer-Ruth Green won the GOP primary in Indiana’s 1st Congressional District last month and will take on the Democratic incumbent in the fall. Diverse candidates like Ms. Green, an Air Force reservist, represent a critical part of the GOP’s effort to win more Democratic-held seats.

When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tore up President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech in February 2020, she inspired a Black female Iraq War veteran to run for office – as a Republican.

As Lt. Col. Jennifer-Ruth Green watched Ms. Pelosi’s symbolic gesture on television, she thought to herself: Congress declares war. If you are telling me that you are not listening, how do I know when you declare war that you have heard all sides?  

“In the military, we focus on bringing people together regardless of any differences, because the mission is so important,” says Lieutenant Colonel Green, an Air Force reservist who won the GOP primary in Indiana’s 1st Congressional District last month. 

While the political environment looks increasingly favorable to Republicans heading into the fall midterms, the number of competitive districts has dwindled compared with previous cycles, thanks to aggressive gerrymandering. So diverse candidates like Ms. Green represent a critical part of the GOP’s effort to win more Democratic-held seats.

It’s a strategy Republicans launched a decade ago and are leaning in on: recruiting and supporting candidates of color who could represent and appeal to a broader range of voters. In 2020, all but one of the 14 House seats the GOP flipped were won by a woman or minority candidate. And in statewide races, women and minorities accounted for 71% of the party’s successes, according to the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC). Of the 16 nonwhite freshmen who entered Congress two months later, more than half were Republican.

The party still has a long way to go. Overall, 83% of nonwhite members of Congress are Democrats, while 17% are Republicans. Still, that represents an increase over the last Congress, when 10% were Republicans. 

Proponents hail this shift as a slow but genuine transformation of a party that was established on an anti-slavery platform but later attracted many Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights. Critics, however, see the GOP’s diversity initiatives as essentially a fig leaf that obscures the party’s unwillingness to grapple with racist strains within. For now, at least, it may come down to who can win. 

“It used to be window dressing. It’s more than that now,” says Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes elections. “But their motives are not necessarily high-minded. They’ve found a strategy that wins, and they’re going for it.”  

As the GOP has made big gains with working-class voters in recent years, those gains have increasingly included working-class minorities – particularly Hispanics, one of the fastest-growing electorates, but also Black voters. In 2020, President Trump saw a 10-point gain in Hispanic support compared with 2016. A Wall Street Journal poll late last year showed that Hispanic support for the GOP has risen even more since then, with voters now evenly split between the parties.

The reasons for these gains are complicated, but they reflect in part a sense among some working-class people of color that the Democratic Party has moved too far left on cultural issues, as well as a receptivity to the GOP’s economic message of lower taxes and support for small businesses.

At a time when many voters are focused on soaring gas prices and grocery bills, Republicans see an opening for even bigger gains among minority groups. And whether there’s a genuine desire for transformation or not, bringing more GOP candidates of color into Congress and the nation’s state legislatures could change both the party’s voter base and its policies.

“By having more diverse voices in the party, it’s an invitation to some folks who never considered it,” says Tanya Contreras Wheeless, a Mexican American running for Congress in Arizona.

The first seeds

In 2012, the GOP saw a net gain of only one Hispanic legislator across all 50 states. It was an inauspicious start for a new effort to recruit diverse Republican candidates to local and state offices, initially focused on women and Hispanic candidates. But despite a relatively modest budget, the RSLC’s Future Majority Project steadily gained steam. The next cycle, in 2014, they recruited 240 diverse candidates in 40 states, 43 of whom won. 

The following cycle, they gave a young Jason Miyares not only money but also strategic advice on everything from press releases to policy. The Cuban American landed a seat in Virginia’s state legislature and won his subsequent reelection bids. Last fall, he narrowly beat his Democratic opponent to become attorney general – and the first Hispanic of either party to be elected to statewide office in Virginia. 

“You’re seeing those seeds that were planted in the last decade starting to bear fruit,” says Attorney General Miyares. “I think that has been a good thing for our country and for the party.” 

On the opposite coast, the Future Majority Project invested in Young Kim, a Korean American small-business owner who won election to the California State Legislature in 2014 by leaning into her story as an immigrant. “I really focused on how my party is the Grand Opportunity Party that was working on pro-growth policies to make life affordable, keeping families safe, and ensuring future generations can pursue their American dream,” she says. After serving one term, she set her sights on Congress – and in 2020, she helped the GOP take back four of the seven seats that Democrats had flipped in the 2018 election. 

Heading into the 2022 midterms, more minority Republican candidates are looking to follow in the footsteps of Attorney General Miyares and Representative Kim. Among them is Ms. Wheeless of Arizona, who says she grew concerned when she saw Congress and the Biden administration increasing the scope of government “handouts,” sending COVID-19 relief checks to people who hadn’t even lost their jobs. 

“We absolutely should have safety nets for our vulnerable populations; I support that 100%,” says Ms. Wheeless, a lifelong conservative and former small-business owner. “One of the things I learned in business, and I think absolutely applies to government, is that when you try to do everything, you don’t do it very well. When you focus in on the really acute needs and the things you can do best, you’re actually much more successful.”

Ms. Wheeless is running in Arizona’s 4th District, which includes Phoenix and which the Cook Political Report recently shifted from “Likely D” to “Lean D.” As of March, she had raised more money than all but one of her five GOP opponents, including $10,000 from House Republican Caucus leader Elise Stefanik’s super PAC. 

To build a bigger pipeline of people like Ms. Wheeless, the RSLC last fall introduced the Right Leaders Network, headlined by national Republican officials who got their start in state office. They include Representative Kim and three potential 2024 presidential candidates: Sens. Marco Rubio and Tim Scott, the only Black Senate Republican, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants.

John Bazemore/AP/File

Former Gov. Nikki Haley is shown signing a law enabling the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina's statehouse, July 9, 2015, in Columbia. “It makes me so mad when people say America is a racist country," the former U.N. ambassador told a group of Black pastors. "Because I am a perfect example of why it’s not.”

The goal is not only to inspire more minorities to run for state office as Republicans but also to encourage those who have been elected to parlay that success into winning seats in Congress.

“A lot of progress has been made, but we needed to do more,” says Kamilah Prince, who until recently was the political director at the RSLC. “We are the face of the future of the party, literally.” 

Taking it to the national level

As a room full of Black pastors savored the last forkfuls of dessert in an upscale Washington, D.C., hotel last fall, Ambassador Haley took the podium. “When I think of my hardest times, it’s the faith leaders I remember,” said Ms. Haley, who worked her way up to a Trump Cabinet position after serving as a state legislator and later governor of South Carolina.

The single hardest moment, she told the group, was when as governor she reached out to the pastor of the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston after getting word of the 2015 shooting during a Bible study. His phone rang and rang in his pocket. He had already been killed, as were eight other worshippers. 

Charleston, already shaken by the police shooting of Walter Scott two months prior, threatened to devolve into racial violence as Ferguson and Baltimore had in recent months. The next day, the killer’s racist manifesto was released and his face was all over national media with the Confederate flag – a flag that South Carolina still flew at its statehouse.

When Ms. Haley finally persuaded the state Legislature to take down the flag and the flagpole, it was cemented so strongly in the ground that it broke the first crane that tried to dismantle it. “Isn’t it symbolic: How deep-seated some things are, but how persistence can continue to tap at that?” she asked the pastors at the luncheon, which was part of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education’s national policy summit. 

“Our job is to fight racism and discrimination everywhere it exists. We have to address the challenges that hold people back,” she continued, pointing to an education system that fails too many students and an economy that traps people in poverty. But “it makes me so mad when people say America is a racist country. Because I am a perfect example of why it’s not.” 

Many Republicans see the rise of anti-racist initiatives like The 1619 Project and the influence of critical race theory as having shifted the national conversation on race in an unhelpful direction. In this view, racism is increasingly presented as a defining feature of American democracy, built into the very structures of U.S. society and governing ideals. To those on the right, this new doctrine is undermining a shared love of country, while imposing a divisive racial lens on everything.

Those on the left criticize the GOP for tolerating or even abetting racism, citing the white nationalist and white supremacist views espoused by some Trump supporters and even members of Congress like Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, who last year shared an anime video that showed him assassinating Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Critics argue that putting a few more diverse faces out in front of a party that refuses to reckon with such elements won’t help anything and could even entrench the problem by giving Republicans plausible deniability. 

Senator Scott has faced a barrage of racist attacks, including being called an “Uncle Tim,” and at times he has called out members of his party on racial issues. Perhaps most notably, he criticized President Trump for not taking a stronger stand against hatred and violence in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

But while he acknowledges he has been willing to speak out “when necessary,” he has largely focused on helping minority communities advance and prosper through economic opportunity. Under President Trump, who included Senator Scott’s Opportunity Zones initiative in his 2017 tax cut bill, Black and Hispanic poverty rates reached all-time lows before that progress was halted by the pandemic. 

“Race, or racism, is not a partisan issue,” Senator Scott told the Monitor. “It has to do with the depravity of man.”

To be sure, Republicans of color acknowledge difficult chapters in American history and in their own lives. Since entering the Senate in 2013, Senator Scott has been stopped numerous times in the Capitol by security who didn’t realize he was a lawmaker, as well as by police when driving. Ambassador Haley told the pastors of watching her Sikh father get humiliated at a produce stand as a girl, a memory that still pains her. But they say they nevertheless hold a positive vision of America that they believe speaks to voters of all backgrounds on the campaign trail. 

“We’ve had horrific chapters in our nation’s history – but we are unique,” says Attorney General Miyares. He encourages voters to celebrate the second chances America has given to people from all backgrounds, races, and faiths over the course of its history – including his mother, who fled communist Cuba in 1965. “That resonates.” 

(Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the amount of funds Ms. Wheeless received from Rep. Stefanik’s super PAC and clarify her Mexican heritage.)

Photo illustration by Dado Ruvic/Reuters/File

Representations of virtual cryptocurrencies are placed on U.S. dollar banknotes in this illustration taken Nov. 28, 2021.

It has been a red-ink spring for American investors. Rattled by real-world inflation, shortages, and war, stock markets in the United States and around the world have stumbled. In the world of digital money known as cryptocurrency, the losses are far, far worse.

Bitcoin, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, has lost more than half its value from November highs. Another digital currency called TerraUSD, designed to be worth $1 at all times, collapsed along with its sister token, Luna. Another so-called stablecoin, DEI, has lost its $1 peg and is now trading around 51 cents. 

Yet, despite all this turmoil, acceptance of cryptocurrency keeps spreading. In May, a law firm based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, began accepting payment in bitcoin and a few other digital currencies. An Italian restaurant in Wales claimed it was that country’s first restaurant to do the same. Here in Waltham, Massachusetts, Bentley University announced it’s now ready to take tuition payments in cryptocurrency.

Why would anyone trust such shaky money?

For high rollers interested in investing in cryptocurrency, as opposed to using it as a currency, the volatility has been part of the appeal – at least when prices are going up. But one key reason is also that the software technology behind most cryptocurrencies promises a revolution in finance – through efficient and secure transactions independent of the traditional banking system.

“Finding ways to make [financial transactions] cheaper and faster, and finding ways to make people that are unbanked or under-banked able to send peer-to-peer value to each other, in real time, and for no cost, is going to be a game changer for economies, not just in this country but elsewhere in the world,” Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said earlier this month at an online forum of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

Bringing money up to speed

Wait a minute, you may protest. I already can move money digitally for free and almost instantly with services like Venmo and Zelle. But that is a bit of an illusion – or a Ferrari front end on a horse-and-buggy back end, as one digital asset banker puts it – involving an advance on money that still takes today’s plodding world of government-issued cash and authorized financial institutions much more time to transfer. 

The so-called blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies is a radical departure. Instead of relying on central banks, it’s designed to be decentralized. Anyone can launch new digital coins without government permission. And in theory, users don’t need to trust any of the players in the system, only the technology and the assets that back it.

That trust is being sorely tested right now, as some cryptocurrencies continue to fall and as chastened investors take to social media to vent their anger or lament their losses.

It “is definitely a time to question the trustworthiness of a lot in crypto,” says Omid Malekan, a Columbia Business School professor and author of “Re-Architecting Trust,” a book on cryptocurrencies that will be available in July on Amazon. “A lot of those [digital currencies] are more hype than substance. But bitcoin has a unique value proposition because it’s like a currency that has its own built-in transfer mechanism. That feature hasn’t existed before, other than cash.” 

Still, the road to future money is proving quite bumpy.

This past September, El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender. By law, businesses had to accept it. And the government worked hard to convince citizens to use it. It created a mobile-phone app that allowed users to trade bitcoin and dollars with no transaction fees. And anyone who downloaded the app got $30 worth of bitcoin, a considerable sum in a poor country like El Salvador. Those who used it to pay at a service station got a discount on gas. 

In the initial rush, half of the nation’s households downloaded the app. But after spending their $30 bonus, nearly two-thirds stopped using it, according to a recent study for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Another fifth of households never even bothered to spend the bonus. This year, virtually no one has downloaded the app. And the government’s vision of giving free digital financial tools to its poor and unbanked people – 9 in 10 Salvadorans don’t have a bank account – has fallen short. 

“The main concern people have … is trust,” says David Argente, an economics professor at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of the study, which surveyed 1,800 Salvadoran households. They prefer to use dollars; they don’t trust the government’s system or bitcoin itself.

That survey was conducted even before bitcoin and the No. 2 cryptocurrency, Ethereum, made their latest plunge. These wild swings in value discourage consumers from using them to buy things and pay bills. That’s why most Salvadorans – as well as many companies – who receive cryptocurrencies quickly convert them to dollars. Here in the Boston area, Bentley University uses a crypto exchange called Coinbase to automatically make the conversion for a small fee.

Wanted: Stability

The failure of bitcoin to act as a stable currency has attracted investors and consumers to a different kind of cryptocurrency: stablecoins, which are built to maintain the same value as the U.S. dollar or some other traditional currency. The stablecoins that collapsed in May were based on an algorithm, or mathematical set of rules. By contrast, the three major stablecoins backed by actual dollars have held their value, despite intense selling pressure.

The question not yet resolved is who will issue a stablecoin that can gain the world’s trust. It could be one of the current crop, like Tether or USD Coin. It could be another private-sector entity, like a cryptocurrency entrepreneur or a big international bank. Or it could be a central bank like the U.S. Federal Reserve. By one count, 87 nations are researching or testing the idea of issuing their own digital currencies.

Among major economies, China is the furthest along. In the past two years, Beijing gradually has been rolling out its central bank digital currency, called e-CNY and based on the yuan. The European Union’s executive branch plans to propose a digital euro law next year. Here in the U.S., the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have partnered to find solutions to the technological challenges of creating a stable, safe, and secure digital dollar. 

Big questions remain. For example, how would a central bank guarantee that consumer purchases remain private while building in enough transparency to track criminal financial activity? Will digital coins be mined (created) in an energy-intensive way like bitcoin, which consumed more electricity than Norway last year, or use other protocols that require far less computer power? 

“There hasn’t been too much effort put into upgrading the underlying technology behind bitcoin,” says Christian Fioravanti, chief marketing officer and point person for blockchain technology strategy at Mad Energy, a clean-energy company. “It’s old and outdated, and unless a major change is made to upgrade the technology, … people may move to better technologies that are much more futuristic.”

Then there’s the recent plunge in bitcoin and Ethereum, which has dented confidence in cryptocurrencies. What happens if one of these giants, on which layers of other crypto products are based, should collapse?

“Because there’s no intrinsic value, as people begin selling, there’s no place to go except zero, because there’s no collateral to sell,” Thomas Vartanian, executive director of the Financial Technology & Cybersecurity Center, warned at the American Enterprise Institute forum. “So it starts out as an incredibly high-risk endeavor. And that’s fine. That’s absolutely fine. And it may be the future. But the problem is that we’re dealing with something that is highly unregulated and basically an analog of the Wild West.”

Whether wild or increasingly regulated – as some in Congress are weighing via legislation – the future of money at least in the medium term could turn out to be crowded.

“I don’t think cash will completely disappear,” says Andy Long, chief executive of White Rock Management, a Swiss-based bitcoin mining firm that’s expanding to the U.S. “I don’t think the dollar is going away. I think there will be a dollar [digital] currency. I think bitcoin is not going away, as well. And they’ll coexist.”

With 14 days and counting to go until her deployment to Afghanistan, Holly Alvarado realized she was pregnant – and she didn’t want to be. 

The 9/11 attacks and gratitude for a country that had welcomed her immigrant grandparents inspired Ms. Alvarado to join the Air Force. What she wanted was to go to war with her fellow troops. 

She also knew herself. “It was not a cold or bleak decision on my behalf – rather, a compassionate one for myself and life and potential I wanted in my own future.” 

But when she called the only abortion clinic in North Dakota, where she was stationed, they didn’t have any appointments before her flight to Afghanistan. 

The next closest possibility was Minnesota, which, like many states, requires women to receive lectures about potential consequences of the procedure – followed by a 24-hour waiting period to reflect on their choices – before being permitted to proceed. 

Because of high demand for scarce abortion services, Ms. Alvarado had to wait 72 hours between appointments. This constituted not only a professional risk but “an enormous financial burden.” 

To save money, she slept in her car for three nights, eating saltines and drinking Gatorade. To pay for the abortion, which military health insurance doesn’t cover, she maxed out her credit card. 

“I cannot reconcile that our government trusted me to hold weapons in protection of our country and serve as a respected member of our armed services, but could not trust me to make the right decision over my own body,” she told lawmakers in a February 2020 hearing. 

Should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion – and a draft opinion leaked in May signals that justices may be preparing to do just that later this month – such scenarios could become increasingly common for military servicewomen, defense analysts say. Abortion would become illegal in about half of states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive rights.

The second-order effects could portend a threat to national security, they warn, by prompting women to leave the military and making it more difficult – in an economy where filling the ranks is already a challenge – to recruit them in the first place.

In the hours after the Supreme Court memo was leaked, Pentagon officials pointed to potential risks of such a scenario. 

“We cannot be an effective military without the brave women who serve,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters. “We’d be literally cutting our readiness.”

In advance of the Supreme Court ruling, Pentagon leaders have been taking some steps to protect the women in their ranks. 

Military base clinics are banned by federal law from performing abortions, except in cases of rape or threat to the mother’s health, but the Army and Air Force have now put in place policies prohibiting commanders from denying leave to soldiers seeking one. 

With no such guarantees for other service branches, however, the Pentagon “absolutely should have a department-wide policy,” says former Air Force lawyer Rachel VanLandingham, now professor of law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. 

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/File

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, Nov. 1, 2021.

When health care depends on where you are stationed

When Ms. Alvarado’s abortion was complete, “I felt relief,” she said. She was decorated for her tour of duty in Afghanistan and honorably discharged from the military after reaching the rank of staff sergeant.

Yet with the advent of increasingly restrictive abortion laws across America, military analysts have doubts about whether future service members in similar circumstances will have the option of following Ms. Alvarado’s path, as difficult as it was. 

This is because 13 states including Texas – home to 20,000 active-duty servicewomen – have passed “trigger laws” to further limit or ban abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned. 

What’s more, the junior troops who are most likely to be affected by abortion laws cannot travel outside designated local areas, let alone the states where they are stationed, without permission from their chain of command. 

Inconsistency in state laws means “the reproductive and health care rights” of service members are “dependent on their duty station,” a group of democratic senators wrote in a letter this year urging the Defense Department to guarantee troops access to abortion if it’s outlawed in states where they are based. 

Dr. Jeffrey Jensen, who served as a Navy physician from 1988 to 1992, says he saw firsthand the consequences of troops denied the “health security” of safe abortions.

While stationed overseas in the Philippines, where abortion is illegal, Dr. Jensen treated troops who developed infections after having back-alley procedures off base. “These are women who are just trying to serve their country,” says Dr. Jensen, who is now director of the Women’s Health Research Unit at the Oregon Health and Science University.

If nurses or officers’ spouses had a “crisis pregnancy, I could potentially manage that after hours. I had the skills and equipment to conduct procedures if I chose to,” he says. “But I felt very unable to help the people who needed the most help.”

Though some have pointed to medication abortion, which can be used up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, as a solution, such treatments still are difficult “if you’re in a barracks situation without a lot of privacy.” 

“Why aren’t we providing the very best care and the very best options to our military women?”

Military sexual assault

Such questions of privacy and control are magnified when pregnancies involve military sexual assault. 

When Kimberley Bailey was raped by a noncommissioned officer while serving as an Army medic at a U.S. base in Germany, she wasn’t planning on telling anyone. 

“He was well known in the hospital, and I was trying to pretend it never happened.” 

But when she became pregnant, “I didn’t have a choice – I knew I needed help.” 

Rather than attend to her needs, her commanders were determined to learn the details of the assault. “‘Were you drinking?’ was their first question. I had been. They said, ‘Well, we need to address that first,’ and put me into an administrative alcohol program.”

Commanders ultimately convinced Ms. Bailey to name her attacker (he had volunteered to be her group’s designated driver) and he was arrested.

Because she was facing retaliation at work and in the barracks for reporting the assault, when she learned she was pregnant, leaders gave her emergency leave to return to the United States. 

There, she debated ending the pregnancy. “I was adopted; I was the product of sexual assault myself,” she says. “It wasn’t the baby’s fault.” 

But after talking to her mother, and given the turmoil it was causing in her military life, she ended the pregnancy. Now the mother of three, Ms. Bailey says it was an agonizing decision that has since become a moral injury.

After she returned to Germany, the JAG officer asked whether she wanted to proceed with her attacker’s trial. “They said, ‘The only evidence you had was your baby.’” She dropped the charges and received no further counseling or care. 

“I thought at the time I made a good choice for myself because things went back to normal,” she says. “People started talking to me again.” 

The interconnection of work and home, privacy and public duty, inherent to military life make it vital for defense leaders to step up to better plan and care for the welfare of their most vulnerable troops, says Ms. VanLandingham, who as a young lieutenant stationed in South Korea was ordered to accompany a fellow servicewoman off base to obtain an illegal abortion. 

“I was terrified,” she recalls. “She was pretty calm. We drove back and never spoke about it again.” 

Since South Korea legalized abortion last year, “in a perverse reversal of events, if a woman in the U.S. military is seeking an abortion it’s often better to be overseas. It shows that we’ve really gone backward,” Ms. VanLandingham says.

“You join the military and you give up some of your rights – got it. But for women to be expected to give up even more,” she adds, “is just not fair.”

A story from ages past tells of a young lawyer who, after being told by a homeless carpenter to love his neighbor as himself, challenges the carpenter to define his terms. “Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asks.

In response, the carpenter tells him a story: One by one, three men come upon a man who has been robbed and beaten. The first two pass by without offering any aid. The third, a Samaritan, bandages his wounds and takes him to an inn, where he nurses him. The next day, he gives the innkeeper money to continue caring for the man and promises to pay whatever more is needed the next time he visits.

The lawyer acknowledges that, of the three, only the Samaritan was a neighbor to the wounded man. The carpenter, Jesus, then tells the lawyer to follow that example. We never learn whether he does, but the bravado the lawyer brought to his encounter with Jesus suggests that the generosity needed to be a neighbor may be more than he can muster.

Fast forward to today, and Sheryll Cashin is asking our nation a similar question: Who will we allow to be our neighbor? How our nation continues to respond to that question determines our ability to benefit from what she calls an “ethic of love.”

For the past 20 years, Professor Cashin, a Georgetown University law professor and the daughter of civil rights activists, has researched racial residential segregation in the United States and how it has created high-opportunity white spaces and concentrated poverty in highly surveilled “hoods.” Her latest work, “White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality,” chronicles the communal toll residential segregation takes on American society and offers possibilities meant to bring about a more just, joyous, and equitable nation. 

Professor Cashin spoke with the Monitor recently. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What did you discover as ground zero for legalized racial residential segregation?

Around 1910, W. Ashbie Hawkins bought a property on one of the toniest streets in Baltimore and rented it to his brother-in-law, George W.F. McMechen. They were two very learned Black attorneys. Mr. McMechen moving his family in upset white residents, and Baltimore became the first city in the country to adopt a racial zoning ordinance designed to separate Blacks and whites in a city where Black people had otherwise been scattered all over. It was premised on the idea that Black people were not worthy of living in white neighborhoods.

That was the beginning of legal attempts at white residential avoidance of Black people, even highly educated Black people. Racial zoning ordinances initially adopted in the South were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court because they prohibited white people from selling their homes to whoever they wanted to. The court’s ruling was not based on a Black person’s right to live wherever they so choose.

That was the South more than a century ago. How did the architecture of neighborhoods of abundance and neighborhoods of concentrated poverty get constructed across our nation?

As millions of Black people moved from the South to towns and cities in the North and West, a new racial caste system was constructed that tightly compacted Black neighborhoods, creating ghettos where none had existed. It was the working out of a structural mechanism of white supremacy. The South’s Jim Crow racial caste culture that had developed after the Reconstruction era was matched in the rest of the country with a residential system of social control that also limited Black people’s access to everything, no matter the level of a Black person’s socioeconomic status. It was propagated by federal, state, and local government actions such as redlining, limited access to mortgages, concentrated public housing in Black neighborhoods, and the uneven distribution of public services and economic and educational resources. All these actions created neighborhoods of concentrated abundance and places of concentrated need and poverty. 

Is racial residential segregation only a concern of Black and white people?

It’s not just race. ... It’s the intersection of race, where you live, and your socioeconomic status. There are Black people, Latinos, Asians, and other people who can afford to buy their way into poverty-free, high-opportunity havens. But Blacks and Latinos tend to be heavily on the receiving end of segregation and housing discrimination. Recently, when a gunman wanted to kill Black citizens, he had to travel 200 miles from his nearly all-white community to find the East Side of Buffalo, New York, ... a neighborhood dense with descendants of Black people who had fled the South during the early 20th century. The fact that he and anyone can research Black communities by ZIP code offers insight into racial housing discrimination across our country.

In what ways does residential segregation impact the entire nation and not just the people who live in concentrated poverty areas?

We say we’re a country of opportunity, but what we have is a caste system where existing structures of extreme segregation alter politics, ... can suppress votes in geographic areas, ... and determine where limited public and private resources get allocated.

A tragedy of racial residential segregation is that it perpetuates the myth that high-opportunity living is earned, and hood living is deserved and the result of bad choices. That thinking causes some kids to lose the neighborhood lottery and grow up in spaces that are designed for them to fail ... [and] where they are heavily surveilled because it’s much easier to do that when you have a demarcated hood. Other children benefit from opportunity hoarding, meaning they have resource-rich schools, ... the most experienced teachers, ... friendly police officers, ... safe parks and playgrounds. We should not be proud of a system that makes it very hard for some of its children to thrive.

What starts to address this issue?

In California, for example, there’s a homelessness crisis. ... The state is about 3 million housing units short of what’s needed, because we have ordered society only for the people who can afford to buy a single family detached home. Such ordering does not address the needs of young people coming out of college with debt, single people without children, people wanting to be able to walk to work, or other activities of life. These people are cut out of high-opportunity spaces as well.

If we dismantle the rigid exclusion in housing markets and if all neighborhoods had their fair share of affordable housing, there would be a lot more opportunity for everyone, and we also would have a society where there would be much less pressure on everyone, particularly parents with children. Right now, parents who can, spend as much as they can afford to avoid the so-called bad neighborhoods with their under-resourced schools, public services, pollution, and lack of places to buy healthy food. This reality is exhausting and difficult for far too many families.

What have been some hopeful signs that decreasing concentrated poverty is a benefit to an entire community? 

It’s amazing what we can do in the spaces where we live to make things better. Louisville, [Kentucky], used to be a hypersegregated city, but over two decades of school desegregation, they have integrated their schools, giving parents options for where to live decoupled from segregated housing patterns. Families are better able to find affordable housing and good schools, and there’s less anxiety. It’s a metro area premised on inclusion and opportunity rather than separation and the denigration and fear of the “other.” 

Cities like Newark, New Jersey, and Savannah, Georgia, are finding that violent crime was reduced through universal basic income pilot [programs], hiring the formerly incarcerated, and moving people into higher-opportunity neighborhoods. I cite throughout the book many other cities that are finding that applying a lens of care is more effective and less costly than heavy surveillance, incarceration, and the continuation of high-poverty, low-resourced communities.

You write about an ethic of love. Can you talk about what love has to do with housing equity?

The late author bell hooks wrote a beautiful essay about the ethic of love. I borrowed that term from her and tied it to Dr. King’s vision of a beloved community. ... [I think of it as a call] to live lives of unconditional love for fellow citizens ... and to see each other as assets who can contribute to their own transformation and the transformation of their neighborhoods.

Once you apply an ethic of love, it frees you up to focus on evidence-based strategies that cost taxpayers less and produce better outcomes, ... outcomes that we can celebrate as opposed to policies and strategies that are borne of decades of racial dogma. A society based on separation, fear, and violence is not sustainable.

After the Hudson’s Bay Co. department store shuttered its hulking, 650,000-plus-square-foot building in downtown Winnipeg in 2020, Peatr Thomas was asked to replicate one of his murals in the empty windows.

The Inninew and Anishnaabe artist at first hesitated. If any entity casts a colonial shadow in Canada, it is the Hudson’s Bay Co.

Established in 1670 by the king of England, the HBC existed for centuries as a fur trading enterprise that upended the lives of First Nations as it aggressively expanded into what would later become Canada. Mr. Thomas didn’t want to be affiliated.

At the same time, the flagship store in Winnipeg looms large - physically and in historical relevance. Mr. Thomas saw an opportunity to share his vision of a “new future,” he says, “built on truth.”

Today his vibrant mural, “Aski Pimachi Iwew,” reflects back the story of the earth’s renewal. Animals painted in black, upon a red background representing dawn, depict the seven ancestor teachings of “Turtle Island,” what many Indigenous people call North America: love, wisdom, respect, courage, honesty, humility, and truth.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Peatr Thomas, an Inninew and Anishnaabe artist, muralist, and educator, poses in front of his commissioned mural in the cafe in Qaumajuq, the new Inuit art center at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, on May 12, 2022. The mural tells the story of the earth’s renewal.

It’s accompanied by text written by his mother, a residential school survivor:

A new sunrise with the new moon.
After a time of change and awakening.
Turtle Island is new once again, built on truth in the sacred seven ancestor teachings.
Ancient knowledge once lost, is taught to us again by Mother Earth in all that she offers.

His mural would be a taste of what’s to come to downtown Winnipeg. Since April, colorful flags and banners have enlivened the building’s drab neoclassical facade, installed by the Southern Chiefs’ Organization (SCO), which represents 34 First Nations groups in southern Manitoba.

This spring HBC, now a holding company that owns businesses and investments including Saks Fifth Avenue, transferred the building to the SCO. The Indigenous leaders plan to turn it into a multifaceted facility centered around low-income housing for the urban Indigenous community, as well as restaurants, pop-up stores, and space for artists. It will also become the new seat of SCO governance.

At a time when Canada says that Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples is a driving goal at the highest levels of government, the transfer of a colonial icon to Indigenous leaders resonates with symbolism – and is seen as a tangible sign of renewal. Its working title in Anishinaabemowin is Wehwehneh Bahgahkinahgohn, or “It is visible.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Grand Chief Jerry Daniels gives an interview in the Southern Chiefs' Organization office on May 10, 2022, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Hudson’s Bay Co. has turned over its flagship store to the SCO in a step toward economic Reconciliation.

“I think it was important for us to let it be known that this is the change that’s coming,” says Jerry Daniels, the grand chief of the SCO, whose offices are currently based on the industrial outskirts of Winnipeg near the airport. “This is what Reconciliation is. ... It’s a great example of what’s possible.”

“It was uniting all of us”

HBC is Canada’s oldest company. It was chartered in 1670 by King Charles II, after two fur traders convinced him that a base on the shores of the Hudson Bay would provide direct access to the beaver pelts so popular in Europe at the time.

HBC would come to rule over trapping grounds that represent a third of Canada today. And in its pursuit it would drive settlement across the continent, acting as a de facto government and disrupting communities that had been self-sustaining with their own sophisticated trade networks and diplomatic ties to one another. In the era of the English East India Co. and Dutch East India Co., the colonialists didn’t question their moral authority to do so.

So when the building at Portage Avenue was transferred to Indigenous leaders 352 years later this April, it was so rich in iconography that it drew leaders from all levels of government, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called it an act of “reclamation.”

In an elaborate ceremony, Grand Chief Daniels, in a beaded headdress, transferred two beaver pelts and two elk hides, the traditional “rent” under the original charter, to the governor of HBC, New York business executive Richard Baker.

Sophia Smoke was invited there as the oral historian. She’s an eloquent 14-year-old from Dakota Plains Wahpeton First Nation in Manitoba whose ceremonial role was a nod to an Indigenous way of history.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Sophia Smoke, who is a member of Dakota Plains Wahpeton First Nation, chats in her home on May 13, 2022, in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. She was the Southern Chiefs' Organization’s youth delegate when the Hudson’s Bay Co. handed over its flagship building in Winnipeg to Indigenous people.

She addressed the crowd in the Dakota language, which her grandmother taught her, before continuing in English. “Today there is no mistaking, we are changing the course of history for good,” she told the crowd.

A few weeks later, from her living room in Portage La Prairie, an hour west of Winnipeg, she reflects on what it meant to her. “It was uniting all of us,” she says.

And that felt transformative, adds her mother, Joan Smoke. “A long time ago when agreements were made, everything from treaties to the ceding of different parcels of land, it was done in the language of the colonizers, and the spirit and the intent wasn’t understood,” says Ms. Smoke, a school principal. “Being present at [the HBC] ceremonies, I felt like the spirit and the intent of what we were doing was understood by both parties.”

The geographic heart of Canada

At the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, Winnipeg was central to HBC operations, and that had a profound effect on the province’s course of history. The fur trade gave rise to the Métis Nation – the sons and daughters of Europeans and Indigenous women whose marriages were crucial to the success of the trade. HBC spurred the settlement of the Red River Colony that would later become Winnipeg. Always a crossroads, Winnipeg became a major transport and grain hub at the geographic heart of Canada. 

Today, Winnipeg counts the largest urban Indigenous population in Canada with over 92,000 (in a population of 750,000). It has led to a vibrant Indigenous social and cultural scene that is increasingly present on the cityscape. But the economic reality of Indigenous peoples, dispossessed from their lands, also comes into stark view here.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

An Indigenous mural fills the front of a building in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on May 11, 2022.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A man walks past homes in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on May 11, 2022. The Indigenous community numbers more than 90,000 in the city. Many live in this low-income neighborhood where drugs and gangs are prevalent.

According to the latest census figures, 31% of Indigenous people in Winnipeg live below the low-income threshold, compared with 13% of the non-Indigenous population. Homelessness is a major problem for the city, and 66% of those in emergency shelters, transitional housing, and safe spaces identify as Indigenous. Child poverty is the highest of any province.

The SCO project is intended to help correct these imbalances. The Manitoba government is providing $35 million to help redevelop the HBC site; the federal government has promised another $65 million. A centerpiece of the project is the 300 housing units for low-income residents.

Mr. Daniels, from Long Plain First Nation, says he experienced much turbulence growing up, part of the child welfare system for a while. He says providing stable housing will have a ripple effect on the community that’s suffered poverty and intergenerational trauma, especially from the residential schooling system.

“Families are built on the stability of their grandparents and their great-grandparents who were able to provide the knowledge and the love and support to engage in different areas,” he says. “We didn’t have that opportunity. We didn’t have that luxury. Ours was filled with abuse. It was filled with addictions. It was filled with exclusion and racism.”

That shows up today in the huge gaps in health care, education, labor participation, and housing. “We want to acknowledge that and try to create change as quick as we can,” he says. Mr. Daniels says they hope to break ground in mid-August.

“Opportunities to restructure ourselves”

Wehwehneh Bahgahkinahgohn is meant to be a vibrant hub, with two restaurants and community space. It will showcase Indigenous art and culture and include a museum that tells the role that Indigenous people played in the founding of HBC from their perspective.

The building reinforces a transformation already underway in Winnipeg. There is Qaumajuq, billed as the largest Inuit art center in the world, that opened last year. There is the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which dedicates a significant portion of its permanent display to the truth about Canada’s violent assimilationist policies. Indigenous murals, sculpture, and gardens color the cityscape.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Exhibits at Qaumajuq, the new Inuit art center at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, on May 12, 2022, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The center is billed as home to the largest public collections of contemporary Inuit art in the world.

Now the SCO project will contribute to Winnipeg by revitalizing a part of the city that had been neglected, says Amelia Fay, curator of the HBC collection at the Manitoba Museum. As downtown retail declined through the decades, the HBC lost vitality. But it’s so big – it was the largest reinforced concrete structure in Canada when it was constructed in 1926 – that it left a vacuum in the heart of the city. “HBC held on to their retail involvement there probably far longer than they should have, purely based on the connection to that building,” she says.

The new project could become a model for other Canadian cities and landmarks, says Lloyd Axworthy, a former Canadian foreign minister and former president of the University of Winnipeg who is an adviser on this project.

“This is an act of restoration. It was a long time coming, but was done in a very cooperative way, and to have this initiated by a First Nations group, by the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, is an incredible statement of how history now can be restored or returned,” he says. “This project dispels the idea of Native people being dependent on welfare and all those kinds of stereotypes. No, they are entrepreneurs, they are activists doing important things, and they can manage a big project.”

Stephen Bown, author of the book “The Company,” which tells the story of the first 200 years of HBC, says the Winnipeg project in some ways takes history full circle. “The amount of Indigenous involvement in that business often goes unrecognized,” he says.

While run from London, HBC on the ground depended on the knowledge, savvy, and goodwill of the Indigenous inhabitants. “That began right from the very, very beginning. And those cultural links are what enabled the company to thrive and survive. The company was essentially almost a subbranch of Indigenous cultures,” he says. “The symbolic significance could be that the company is returning maybe in one sense to its roots as an Indigenous-run thing.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A display of goods sold by the Hudson’s Bay Co. is on exhibit at the Manitoba Museum, on May 15, 2022, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Credit and barter trade involved advancing credit to trappers in the fall for winter supplies, with debts being paid in furs the following spring.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Lower Fort Garry National Historic Site in St. Andrews, Manitoba. Lower Fort Garry was built in 1830 by the Hudson's Bay Co. on the western bank of the Red River. This is Canada’s oldest collection of stone fur trade buildings. Hudson’s Bay Co. trappers and traders worked here in the 1850s.

Mr. Thomas, the muralist, says that if done right, the project will be an important space for the Indigenous population. “For the longest time, we as Indigenous people were so oppressed and silenced. Now we are having these opportunities to restructure ourselves as peoples and our culture,” he says, “by just having the same chance at life that any settler has had.”

That’s not to say he’s not still skeptical of HBC motives. While the company has painted the transfer as a commitment to Reconciliation, the building is so old, Mr. Thomas explains, that its value was assessed at $0. By handing it over, they solved a problem for themselves first and foremost, he suggests. 

He has never been shy about voicing criticism of the colonial company. The first version of his mural is on the walls of the Qaumajuq cafe. The Winnipeg Art Gallery later asked him to replicate it in the HBC. He designed it digitally and was able to stretch it to fit the window’s dimensions.

It’s the exact same version – except for the patterns on the turtle shell. On the HBC rendering, Mr. Thomas designed the scutes (scales) in black to spell the words, “land back.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Photos of Sophia Smoke, who is a member of Dakota Plains Wahpeton First Nation, with her grandmother, who taught her the jingle dress dance, are seen in an album, on May 13, 2022, in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.

Sophia Smoke says that the creation of “Indigenous spaces and places in the middle of Winnipeg” is not to be underestimated for Indigenous youths. “My friends and I are always talking about ‘land back,’ ‘land back.’ Now we’re going to ‘land back’ this giant, beautiful building. It’s happening close to home. It’s no longer a far-off fairy tale.”

She is already a youth activist. She is a jingle dress dancer, an Indigenous practice she has been learning from her grandmother since age 3. While her peers spend their summers at camp, she spends it with her family on the “powwow” trail, dancing across western Canada. She spends Friday nights learning the Dakota language from her grandmother.

Her mother struggled to assert that strong sense of identity when she was growing up, leaving her reserve for high school and later attending university. “You want to defend your history and you want to defend your community and stand up for yourself, but you never quite have the confidence,” her mother says. “So when I see my kid being unafraid and unabashedly Indigenous, it makes me really proud.”

Reuters

People push a cart of potatoes in Sanaa, Yemen, during a truce between government forces and Houthi rebels.

For what has been one of the world’s longest civil wars, peace now means far more than the absence of conflict. Over the past two months, a truce in the Arabian country of Yemen has brought tangible benefits, such as fuel supplies, commercial flights, and aid shipments to a population on the verge of mass famine. On Thursday, with the warring sides perhaps seeing victory in a new light, the truce was extended for another two months.

“The truce represents a significant shift in the trajectory of the war,” said U.N. Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg, who helped negotiate the temporary cease-fire. Fear among civilians has been greatly reduced since the truce began April 2. As U.S. President Joe Biden noted Thursday, “Thousands of lives have been saved as fighting receded.”

It is still uncertain if the truce will hold and renew the promise of democratic unity that began in Yemen during the 2011 Arab Spring. Talks to end the war have been a bellwether for how much the two main rivals in the Middle East – Iran and Saudi Arabia – want to get along and end a proxy competition in Yemen. With each country facing internal challenges, support of external wars has been an expensive indulgence. Restless youth in both Iran and Saudi Arabia have tired of their leaders battling over which country better represents Islam.

Each side in Yemen has made concessions to help maintain the truce. They have shown “responsible and courageous decision making,” Mr. Grundberg stated. One of the most significant concessions was the removal of the Saudi-backed president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, and the formation of a broad-based Presidential Council in April. Even though the Iran-backed Houthi rebels have not joined the council, the extension of the truce could now lead to talks on a political compromise.

Yemen is the Arab world’s most impoverished nation and one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The war, which began in 2014, has killed over 150,000 people. Yet now, the renewal of a truce has created a canvas for Yemeni factions to paint the details of a permanent peace. With a revival of normal civilian life, it may be the Yemeni people who are showing that peace is a palpable possibility.