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When will people learn that families come in all different colors? Well, someone needs to start by teaching Southwest Airlines employees before a major misstep evolves into a major lawsuit. 

The most recent gaffe by the airline took place a month ago when Mary MacCarthy, who is white, boarded a plane in San Jose, California, with her 10-year-old biracial daughter Moira MacCarthy to attend a funeral. 

When the plane landed in Denver, MacCarthy and her daughter were swarmed by police officers and a Southwest staff member on the jet bridge. MacCarthy says she initially thought the police were there to inform her about the death of another family member. Instead, police separated her and her daughter to question them following a report of a suspicion that MacCarthy was a potential human trafficker and her daughter was a victim. 

“The officer said, ‘We’re talking to you because you were reported to the pilot for suspicious behavior,’” MacCarthy told the Denver Post. “And it immediately occurred to me what was going on. This is the type of situation that mixed-race families and families of color face all the time while traveling.”

The Independent reports that a crew member felt it was suspicious that MacCarthy and her daughter were the last to board the flight, asked other passengers to move so they could sit together, and were not very communicative. What? 

MacCarthy boarded the plane last because she bought her ticket at the last minute due to the sudden death of her brother, so and her daughter were in the last boarding group. She tells The Independent that she asked the flight attendants if she could change her seats so that she and her daughter could sit together, but was told she needed to ask her fellow passengers. 

As for the lack of communication, MacCarthy said: “My brother had died less than 12 hours before, I’m a single mother and he was like a father figure to my daughter … so we were in shock.” She adds, “The police report says I wouldn’t give any information, but I have a three-minute video.” 

In the video below MacCarthy can clearly be heard explaining herself. 

MacCarthy is now demanding the airline apologize and explain why they racially profiled her and her daughter. 

“The whole thing is based on what I believe to be a racist assumption about a mixed-race family,” MacCarthy told The Independent. “Things like this happen to mixed-race families all the time, this is a thing that we are afraid of … I feel an obligation towards my daughter and other mixed-race families to speak out.” 

Sadly, this isn’t something that is that uncommon with mixed-race families. In 2017, Brian Smith, a white Arizona man, was stopped at the Phoenix airport after being accused of trafficking his 16-year-old daughter, who he and his wife adopted from China. A Southwest Airlines flight attendant “had some concerns” about his daughter, according to ABC 15 in Arizona. 

“I don’t like to accuse anyone of anything,” the girl’s mother, Renee Smith, told ABC 15. “But if Georgianna was a Caucasian child, I don’t believe this would have happened.

In another more high-profile incident in 2018, Lindsay Gottlieb, a coach for the University of California-Berkeley women’s basketball team, was flying with her 1-year-old son when she was stopped at the Denver International Airport by a Southwest Airlines employee asking her to “prove” she was the mother of her biracial son—even after providing the child’s passport.  

“We had a passport that verified our son’s age and identity, and both parents were present,” Gottlieb said in a statement to The Washington Post at the time. “But still being pushed further to ‘prove’ that he was my son felt disrespectful and motivated by more than just concern for his well-being.”

“She said because we have different last names. My guess is because he has a different skin color,” Gottlieb wrote on Twitter.

Now, we’re not against being vigilant about human trafficking, but maybe Southwest Airlines need to be a bit better trained. 

“If [staff] had chatted to my daughter and I, any reasonable person would understand that we’re family … if they are going to be trained in things like looking out for human trafficking, they should also be taught not to engage in ignorant racial profiling,” said MacCarthy, who added that she has hired an attorney to handle the incident.  

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After weeks of striking and 15 days without food, New York City’s taxi drivers were served a crucial victory as Mayor Bill de Blasio finally agreed to a debt restructuring plan building off an initial program that already eliminated $21.4 million of debt for individual drivers who took out loans to secure their medallions. Two dozen drivers have already had their debt fully forgiven and more than 1,100 have been interviewed to participate in the improved Taxi Medallion Relief Program.

An individual taxi driver in New York City is defined as an owner-driver who has five or fewer medallions. Those drivers owed an average of half a million dollars for their medallions and faced staggering monthly payments that have now been capped at $1,122. The city’s largest lender for medallions, Marblegate, has agreed to “restructure outstanding loans to a principal balance of $200,000, which will be constituted as a $170,000 guaranteed loan, plus a City grant of $30,000,” per a press release. “The terms of the new loan will include a 5% interest rate and a 20-year, fully amortizing term.”

Marblegate became the largest lender because it bought thousands of loans from numerous companies that were shut down by the federal government following the 2014 medallion collapse that saw individual medallion prices skyrocket to more than $1 million. Jacobin has an excellent write-up on the damage wrought by banks, hedge funds, and the city of New York itself that directly led to the medallion bubble’s boom and bust.

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) has been fighting for the livelihoods and well-being of its members for years in hopes of attaining some relief in what has become a life-or-death situation for many drivers faced with insurmountable debt. Their victory Wednesday was an emotional one for those still standing. On-the-ground coverage from The City shows drivers dancing, embracing, and crying as they chanted “no more suicides.” At least eight drivers tragically took their own lives while facing debt and dwindling wages following the rise of ride-share companies like Lyft and Uber between 2017 and 2018.

Richard Chow, whose brother was one of those eight drivers, is a cabbie himself and has played an active role in the strikes that led to the debt restructuring agreement. He told The City he was proud to make history with his fellow drivers. Augustine Tang, who inherited his father’s medallion and the debt attached to it, continued to drive to honor his legacy and said the moment would’ve meant the world to his dad.

“I’m sure he didn’t want me to go through what I went through throughout this journey, but us winning has to be something,” Tang told The City. The NYTWA’s actions have inspired family members of drivers to run for office and put the pressure on lawmakers to do the right thing.

NYTWA has had the support of the likes of Chuck Schumer, city council members, and even Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, who at one point almost sued the city of New York for its actions against medallion holders. Last month, 50 elected officials signed a letter calling on de Blasio to act. Now that he has, they and NYTWA members and supporters are rightfully celebrating.

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When detained immigrants are able to access legal help and gain representation, they are up to 10 times more likely to be able to stay in the U.S., the Vera Institute of Justice said earlier this year. “Lawyers make a big difference.” Maybe that’s one reason why Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have consistently set up roadblocks that make just trying to get a lawyer on the phone outright impossible.

“As described in a letter sent today by the American Immigration Council, the ACLU, and 88 legal service provider organizations to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, ICE detention facilities have systematically restricted the most basic modes of communication that detained people need to connect with their lawyers and the rest of the outside world, including phones, mail, and email access,” American Immigration Council staff attorney Emma Winger and ACLU National Prison Project senior staff attorney Eunice Cho write in a post.

Like previously noted, unlike in the criminal court system, immigrants in the immigration court system are not guaranteed an attorney if they can’t afford one. But let’s say a detained immigrant does get pro-bono help (there are many great organizations working to do just that). “Even when attorneys are available and willing to represent detained people, ICE detention facilities make it prohibitively difficult for lawyers to communicate with their detained clients, refusing to make even the most basic of accommodations,” Winger and Cho write. “For example, many ICE facilities routinely refuse to allow attorneys to schedule calls with their clients.”

We already saw a form of this play out amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, when ICE officials told attorneys they had to wear face masks and other protective gear to visit their detained clients. Right now, that doesn’t sound out of the question. But officials said this in March 2020, when the nation was facing major protective gear shortages. When attorneys were actually able to get protective gear, ICE blocked them from seeing their clients anyway. Officials claimed it was a safety measure. Hilarious, considering how the agency’s refusal to allow detained immigrants to shelter at home worsened the national caseload by the hundreds of thousands.

“Immigration law is a highly technical, complex area of law, which federal courts themselves have observed can confuse even experienced lawyers,” the organizations tell the Biden administration in their letter. But Winger and Cho note that ICE facilities often cut short the calls they do allow, “leaving legal  providers like the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona unable to complete intakes for potential clients in complex immigration cases in less than 20 minutes.”

Again, that’s if they can even schedule a call in the first place. The letter notes that at Boone County Jail in Kentucky, “a faulty fax machine” is the only mechanism to request calls or visits. Just this past summer, ICE was forced under court order to restore a free legal hotline it shut down after it was featured on the Emmy-winning Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. “ICE has tried again and again to silence and censor anyone who speaks out against its abusive immigration detention system,” Freedom for Immigrants deputy executive director Layla Razavi said at the time.

”The Biden administration has made access to legal representation and access to justice a priority,” the letter continues. Last month, for example, the administration announced a significant initiative expanding legal representation to asylum-seeking children (they aren’t guaranteed legal help either). “Despite this commitment, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) maintains a network of immigration detention facilities where people are routinely denied access to counsel and are prevented from effectively representing themselves,” the letter continued.

The organizations make a number of key recommendations, notably ensuring “private, confidential, free video conferencing for legal visits to all people in immigration detention,” “timely access to private, confidential, free legal phone calls of unlimited duration and adequate quality,” and “meaningful access to private, confidential in-person visitation with legal representatives.” Of course, it’s better that immigrants just not be locked up in the first place. Immigration detention is civil detention, and “the data show that most undocumented people show up for court,” the ACLU noted last year. “Detention is not necessary, nor is it a humane or acceptable de facto response.”

“Immigration detention is inhumane, and it is a key barrier to access to justice,” Winger and Cho concluded. You can read their full post here, and the full letter from the organizations to the Biden administration here. “But so long as people are detained, ICE must ensure that detention facilities provide immigrants with timely access to counsel.”

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As Daily Kos has continued to cover, Republicans have been more than happy to jump into anti-trans hate as a way to distract people from their failures in office. While some state-level legislation has died in committee, some has made its way through both the statehouse and senate and made it all the way to the governor—and some, sadly, has even been signed into law by Republicans. One example comes to us from Tennessee, where Republican Governor Bill Lee signed a discriminatory anti-trans sports bill into law in March 2021, which is also when it went into effect. With the help of Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), however, one brave openly trans teen is suing for his right to play sports with the team that matches his gender identity, as reported by NBC News.

In a news release, 14-year-old Luc Esquivel, a trans boy who wanted to try out for the boys’ golf team at Farragut High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, said he was “crushed” by the legislation. “I just want to play,” the high school freshman added. “Like any other kid.”

As some context, most people pushing these anti-trans bills are hyper-focused on the idea of trans girls participating on girls’ sports teams, arguing that it could be unfair to cisgender girls when it comes to competitions and even scholarships. (It’s not.) Some bills do use language that refers only to trans girls (which is still hateful, discriminatory, and wrong) but most use broad language that includes both trans girls and trans boys (and arguably non-binary trans youth, too), which is the case for public middle and high schools in Tennessee. So while legislators waxed faux hysteria about trans girls, trans boys like Luc are also being discriminated against, though their situation has gotten far less national media attention.

Luc, unlike so many trans kids and teens, has the support of his mother, Shelley Esquivel. In a press release, Luc’s mother described it as “heartbreaking” to see him miss out on the chance to play sports with his peers, a normal and fun high school activity. “It’s painful for a parent to see their child subjected to discrimination because of who they are,” she added.”

The goal of the lawsuit, which was filed by Lambda Legal, the ACLU of Tennessee, and the ACLU, is to get the federal court to intervene. The suit argues that the law is fundamentally discriminatory and unconstitutional. A similarly transphobic sports bill in Idaho has been temporarily blocked using the same method, and is waiting for a decision by a U.S. appeals court. Temporarily blocking the law at least gives trans youth back some dignity and opportunities to participate in sports with their peers for the time being.

Executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee, Hedy Weinberg, said the emotional cost of this law is “tremendous” when it comes to harming trans student-athletes. “We stand with trans students across the state as we challenge this law, and we urge other trans student-athletes and their families facing such discrimination to contact us,” she said in a statement. 

“For trans kids, who often experience alienation and stigmatization, participating on teams with their peers is especially important,” explained Sara Buchert, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal, in a statement. “Luc just wants to play golf with other boys, to be part of the team, and to improve his game. Like all kids, he just wants to play.”

“To have the legislature pass a law that singled out me and kids like me to keep us from being part of a team, that crushed me, it hurt very much,” Luc stated. 

Disturbingly, anti-trans legislation is booming across the nation, and Republicans are quick to use whatever angle they can to fire up outrage against a vulnerable, marginalized population. In Tennessee alone, Gov. Lee has signed multiple transphobic bills into law in addition to this sports bill. For example, Lee signed a bill into law that requires restaurants and businesses to post what the HRC calls “offensive and humiliating signage” alerting customers that trans folks are able to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, as well as a bill that bars trans youth from accessing gender-affirming medical treatment. 

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How far will white parents go to fight against educators teaching race and racism in America—or as people of color and anyone with a shred of common sense calls it, American history?  

A Facebook ad paid for by (this is not a joke) the Most Racist Colleges and Universities group—one which claims they work to “stop university support for terrorists”—lashes out at a Black Stanford University professor, Hakeem Jefferson, for “promoting his view in a series of social media posts that ‘Whiteness’ is largely responsible for opposition to school mask mandates.” 

Jefferson, a Stanford assistant professor of political science, is being called a “racist” in the ad, and threatened and harassed by the group, its followers, and other users who encounter the ad. And Facebook, true to form, is doing nothing to stop it.

Jefferson is meeting with his dean Friday and says the meeting was scheduled months ago—after he was harassed last time.

As Bree Newsom Bass—activist, filmmaker, and heroine who bravely removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse in the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting in 2015—wisely tweeted in response to the outrage of white parents about CRT: 

Groups such as Moms for Liberty, a group started in that bastion of caucasity, Florida, has grown to 60,000 nationwide, according to CBS News. The group’s mission is “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”

What they’re really doing is showing up at school board meetings with the false pretense of fighting against critical race theory (CRT), which isn’t even taught in K-12 schools. And the end result? A Republican governor in Virginia in Glenn Youngkin, and a disturbing wave of book banning. 

“Grade two, module three, has five or six books. One of them is Martin Luther King and the March on Washington, which of course that should be taught. But how should it be taught? What should we focus on when we teach it?” Robin Steenman, founder of Moms for Liberty asks CBS.

“There’s one specific example in this book … there’s a very famous photograph of firemen spraying children that were engaged in a protest in, I believe it was Birmingham. It’s a terrible photo, they’re doing harm to children, Black children, they’re blasted by fire hoses. And it shows that to these second-grade children,” Steenman continues. “Most kids up to that point have idolized the policemen, the firemen.”

“I don’t want them to see racism yet—to engage, to learn racism. They can teach history, but let’s not teach racism,” Steenman said.

Let’s unpack Steenman’s statement: “They can teach history, but let’s not teach racism.” 

It’s so easy for white people to dismiss teaching racism, but the lessons for children of color come fast and young. Do they get a choice about when they can learn about racism? 

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey recently declared on Twitter that she has “permanently BANNED Critical Race Theory in Alabama.” 

Ivey, like so many in the GOP, has followed in the clumsy and bloodstained footsteps of two-time impeached and one-term former President Donald Trump who weaponized CRT, lumping it ridiculously into diversity and inclusion training, and even excluding federal contracts that offer diversity and inclusion training.

Virginia Beach at-large school board member Victoria Manning—aka book-banning Karen, aka non-reading pro-censorship Karen—is going after American literature she clearly doesn’t understand.

Daily Beast reports that Manning, founder of the “Wokeness Checker” website, along with co-board member Laura Hughes, sent an email to Virginia Beach City Public Schools Superintendent Aaron Spence to demand that four books be removed from circulation or used in the classroom “due to their pornographic nature.”

“It has been brought to my attention by some parents that there are some disturbing books in our district that are available to students,” Manning wrote on Oct. 5. “I would like to ask that you pull these books from shelves and also block any electronic access by students to getting these books IMMEDIATELY.”

First on Manning’s list is author and Nobel Laureate in Literature Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, alongside Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, and the memoir comic Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe.

Manning has not even read The Bluest Eye—“just reading a few of the pages gives me utter disgust,” she said according to The Virginia-Pilot.

Sharon Roberson, president and CEO of the YWCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, wrote a letter on behalf of the Tennessee Department of Education, decrying a law put into place in July in Tennessee, banning CRT and teaching any “lessons that suggest anyone, based on their race or sex, is ‘inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,’” as well as any curriculum that makes people feel ‘discomfort, guilt, anguish, or distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.’”

Robertson understands a key principle in education: If we don’t teach our history, we are destined to repeat it. 

“I was actually born in Germany, from a military family, and very proud of that. In Germany, they teach about Hitler because they want people to understand this was a very difficult aspect, a horrible part of their history, but you need to understand that because if you love your country you want your country to be the best that it could be, so they teach those things. Some people don’t like it, but it doesn’t make Germans not like Germany, It makes them proud that their country has overcome that and become the country it is today,” Robertson tells CBS News.  

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The scumbag crew over at right-wing private dirt machine Project Veritas is in the news again. The New York Times has an explosive report tying the Justice Department’s investigation into a burglary of President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley’s private journal with the muckraking, and frequently muck-fabricating, right-wing website. While not published by Project Veritas, the journal was published on a right-wing blog a couple of weeks before the November election in 2020.

According to the Times, the DOJ searched two locations in New York “at places linked to people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events.” One of the places searched was the New York City apartment of ”longtime Project Veritas operative and confidante of Mr. O’Keefe, Spencer Meads. The Times reports that after Meads did not answer the FBI’s loud knocking for 10 minutes, the door was forced open.

Ashley Biden, who was 39-years-old at the time of the release of her diary, had been able to stay out of the public eye in a way that Biden’s son Hunter had not. While the release of her journal, reportedly begun while she was in a rehabilitation center in Florida, did not make waves in the way that Hunter Biden’s laptop fiasco did, it was a real dirtbag thing to do. Unlike Hunter Biden, where there was at least meaningful mention of his Ukraine employment, Ashley Biden’s journal only seemed to expose the thoughts of a person dealing with issues of addiction and rehabilitation, with the frank—and mostly very private—thoughts, shames, and angers one has when dealing with difficult issues.

Project Veritas has said that while it had received this “whistleblower” diary, they decided “for ethical reasons,” to not publish—as they could not verify the authenticity of the journal at the time of publication. Considering that Project Veritas has yet to show a single ounce of ethics in anything they’ve ever been involved in, this is a hard-to-swallow statement. I wonder what they’re doing with all of their PPP money?

In a video that you can watch below, James O’Keefe does what all right-wing fraudsters do these days—blame the liberal persecution of patriots like James O’Keefe. Saying that he was putting himself at “great risk”* by making this statement: “I awoke to the news that apartments and homes of project veritas journalists or former journalists had been raided by FBI agents.”

“Journalists or former journalists?” Two people were “raided” by the FBI. It’s an either-or thing, James. O’Keefe proceeds to say that the subpoena asked him not to make this big public statement, but he did because he’s such a brave young lad.

O’Keefe goes on to say that after his group decided not to publish the diary, they tried to give it back to “an attorney representing Ms. Biden, but that attorney refused to authenticate it.” It’s interesting. You get a stolen thing and then say you can’t publish it unless you can verify that it was really stolen, and then you go to the people who were robbed and ask them to authenticate the theft so that you can publish it? That’s some super dirtbaggery right there. Of course, O’Keefe says that the federal government is only investigating his group because it’s Joe Biden’s daughter. However, it will be interesting to see if one of these “journalists or former journalists” is guilty of a crime.

As an aside, The New York Times reports that Flyover Media owns the company that owns the website publishing Ms. Biden’s journal pages. Flyover Media is registered to the same Wyoming address as Branch Six Consulting International. Branch Six is owned by Richard Seddon, a former British spy with ties to private security billionaire Erik Prince (Betsy DeVos’ brother). According to the Times:

Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address.

Right-wing Patrick Howley, who goes by the moniker of “reporter,” published a few pages of the journal, trying to imply that Joe Biden may have molested Ashley Biden. This is not an assertion that is written in the handful of published journal pages, mind you. Howley’s reporting consists of all the right-wing conspiracy-style partisan hackery you have come to expect from ultra-right-wing media outlets.

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has been dealing with the effects of Hurricane Ida, which submerged the group’s Westchester, New York, headquarters in September. But with powerful and wealthy friends like O’Keefe has, I’m sure he isn’t the one facing time. He probably knows where many of the bodies are buried

* Barf.

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It’s now standard practice for Donald Trump and his henchmen to declare a “stolen” election in advance of every big contest with national implications. And a recent NBC News poll shows that Trump’s incessant and baseless lying about 2020 has primed Republican voters to believe something is afoul whenever an election doesn’t go their way.

The NBC poll released this week found that Trump eroded Republicans’ faith in the notion that their voted will be counted accurately by more than 40 points from October 2020 to October 2021.

“Last year, 84 percent of Republicans said they were confident in the vote count, about on par with Democrats. But now, 41 percent of Republicans share that view, while 50 percent say they are not confident their vote will be counted accurately,” writes NBC.

That giant drop in confidence is anomalous among Republicans. Confidence among independents that their vote will be counted, for instance, dropped by less than 10 points since last year—from 84% confident last year to 76% confident this year. That’s a notable dent, but it pales in comparison to the rise in distrust among Republicans.

Republican views of whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected also stood apart in the poll, with a meager 22% of them saying Biden’s victory was legitimate, while 71% of independents and 93% of Democrats believe Biden was legitimately elected.

Overall, two-thirds of all Americans said they were confident their vote would be counted fairly compared to 85% who said that last year—a nearly 20-point decrease mainly attributable to Republicans.

Trump’s success in stoking distrust of U.S. elections among his fervent base now poses a domestic terror threat to the country. Earlier this week, a PRRI poll found 30% of Republicans agreed with the idea that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” The sentiment was particularly high among those who said they believed 2020 was “stolen” from Trump, with 39% of that cohort endorsing potential violence.

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The October jobs report was a burst of good economic news. Not only did job creation exceed expectations in October with 531,000 new jobs added, but the previously disappointing jobs reports from August and September were revised upward by a combined 235,000. That adds up to a three-month job creation average of 442,000 a month.

In other good news, women gained 57% of new jobs added, the National Women’s Law Center reports, after a disproportionate number of jobs lost during the pandemic were women’s. The unemployment rate ticked up among women, likely because of women reentering the labor force but not having found jobs yet. 

The recovery is still incomplete and unequal, though. Among women, 292,000 of those reentering the labor force were white and 114,000 were Hispanic—but 52,000 Black women left the labor force. More than 1.7 million women are still out of the labor force as compared with February 2020, as compared with 1.2 million men. 

The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.6%, but continued to highlight racial inequities. The white unemployment rate is 4%, while the Black unemployment rate is nearly twice as high at 7.9%.

“Payroll employment is still down 4.2 million from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould tweeted. “But the real job shortfall is more likely to be in the range of 5.5 to 8.2 million using reasonable counterfactuals to absorb working age population growth or pre-pandemic trends.” 

While overall jobs growth was good in October, the gap in state and local government jobs grew, largely due to seasonally adjusted losses in education jobs. State and local governments “are down 928,000 since Feb ‘20—most of that, 574,000, in education,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz tweeted, calling for the governments to use American Rescue Plan funds to close that gap.

It’s great to have such a solid jobs report showing that recovery is still moving forward despite the delta strain of COVID-19. But as with the pandemic itself, in which more than 1,000 people are still dying every day, the economy is not all better. The uneven recovery shows the deep-seated inequality of the U.S. economy, which is with us through good times and bad.