Between 2016 and 2020, only 12 percent of United States–based GoFundMe medical fundraising campaigns met their goals, according to a 2022 study. More than that, 16 percent of campaigns received no donations at all. One of the study’s authors, University of Washington professor Nora Kenworthy, has taken a dive into the landscape of US medical fundraising in a new book, Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare. 

Kenworthy talked to Mother Jones about how the US private health insurance model fuels medical debt, biases that shape who people consider worthy of donations, and what medical fundraising could look like in the future—even if Congress did listen to its constituents and pass legislation enacting a more socialized healthcare system.

How has the American private insurance model contributed to the rise of medical fundraising sites like GoFundMe? 

Crowdfunding for healthcare expenses exists in lots of parts of the world—there are places like the UK and Canada, that have better health systems than we do, where people still rely on crowdfunding for a lot of uncovered healthcare and expenses associated with [it], like child care, that are still hard to pay for. But in the United States, we have a tremendous amount of crowdfunding. That seems to really arise from either things that are not covered by insurance, are covered inadequately, out-of-pocket costs that are incredibly high, or from people who are not insured, or underinsured, when they experience illness or accidents.

We live in a very capitalistic country. How does that shape people’s feelings about their own medical debt, asking for help with it, and contributing to other people’s medical expenses? Is it a source of shame, or has it been normalized?

Some of the kinds of social norms that really are deeply rooted in the United States both push people towards crowdfunding and also make it a really difficult thing for people who most need it to use successfully. We have a very extreme idea of individualism, like, “If you can’t fix it, you’re kind of on your own.” Or that the person with the most merit should win out, even when a lot of the ways that we measure merit are very much linked to privilege and racial identity and class identity and things like that. I write about the way that all these play out in the marketplace of crowdfunding, and get projected onto people’s crowdfunding campaigns.

Feelings of shame, particularly about having to start a campaign for yourself,  are exceedingly common. In interviews, I’ve also talked with people about the very acute shame that they felt in terms of having to ask for help. On the other hand, starting campaigns for other people is seen as less shameful. If someone starts a campaign for you, then that taps more into this idea of wanting to help each other, and we are also a very charitable society. That is also a result of our very capitalist and neoliberal systems: we rely a lot on each other in order to meet basic needs because so many of us are made vulnerable by these economic systems.

As you note in your book, white people’s medical campaigns tend to go viral more often than people of color’s. Can you speak to that? 

It’s important to say that the top level of racism that’s operating here is really structural racism, and the racial wealth gap, which is enormous in the United States. The way that that comes into play is that campaigns started by or on behalf of people of color, but particularly Black people, tend to do less well than campaigns for other people. There’s also an interpersonal racism and racial bias element that is playing out here, particularly with campaigns that go viral or get lots of exposure. That’s the kind of internalized biases and overt racism that we might bring to the way that we regard and read and look at campaigns that can translate as people viewing campaigns with more suspicion, more tendency to think about them as fraudulent, or more likely to blame the person who’s in need.

We see that especially with viral campaigns. I did a research project with some amazing researchers, Aaron Davis and Shauna Elbers Carlisle. What we looked at the top most viral medical campaigns in GoFundMe’s history, and so that was about 900 campaigns that had raised over $100,000. In that group of 900, we found only five were on behalf of Black women, and of those five, two had been started by white people. That, to us, speaks to these incredibly huge disparities that are happening at that more viral level of campaigns, and how people’s campaigns are being treated very differently by the crowd.

Genetics, environmental exposure, and poverty can all contribute to the development of chronic health conditions. Yet, it can be harder to fundraise for conditions where some people blame the patient, like those who have Type II Diabetes. How does that shape crowdfunding efforts?

The really large structural factors—the neighborhood you live in, or how much money you have, or the air around you—shape the the likelihood of your becoming ill over your lifetime. Particularly when it comes to chronic health conditions, whether that’s diabetes, or congestive heart disease, or cancer; these chronic conditions are very much shaped by big factors that are out of our control. When we’re crowdfunding, we’re often looking for the solvable problem, right? For an individual, [that means] “If I can just give you this one thing, then you’ll be okay.” That’s really hard to deal with in chronic conditions.

I talked to a lot of people with diabetes, both Type I and Type II, who are reliant on insulin to survive. It’s really hard to crowdfund for insulin every month. Even when we know that the cost of insulin is absurdly high, and we understand that people need it, and if they don’t get it, they’re truly not going to survive. It’s really hard for people to find ways to use crowdfunding to solve those kinds of ongoing chronic issues. People talk to me about exactly what you’re describing: feeling blamed for their conditions, and feeling like they’re being judged by the crowd for what has happened to them. We see crowdfunding reinforcing and amplifying, and almost kind of fueling, these individual-level judgments of who’s deserving and who’s not. 

Legislation like Medicare for All could reduce further medical debt—but would it get rid of the need for medical fundraising? Where could we still see it?

What we think of as a universal health coverage system not only reduces future medical debt, but could also reduce the amount that people have to pay for certain things like insulin. A more universal system can protect people better in those periods of vulnerability. But we know that illness, particularly acute or severe illness episodes, requires lots of different kinds of social support. There are things that even very well-funded universal health systems do not cover, whether that’s experimental treatments, childcare, or perhaps specialized foods that you might be forced to take. I don’t think we should think of all crowdfunding as bad. It has the potential to meet some important needs that fall outside of formal systems.

At the same time, I think we need to remain aware of the ways that crowdfunding in its current form in the US is actually undermining the efforts that are being made to move towards more universal healthcare systems, because it’s reinforcing these ideas that not everyone deserves the same thing. That we’re all individuals, and we’re on our own when we get sick, or the idea that a marketplace mentality can be the best option for fixing these kinds of societal challenges.

All of those ideas really run completely counter to the moral ideas that undergird a more universal medical coverage system. Medicare for All is based on the idea that when people are sick, they deserve help, regardless of how good a person they are, what the color of their skin is, or how much they make. It’s the idea that we have a safety net that actually catches everyone. And that idea is just not there in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is really kind of undermining our commitment to some of these more universal ways of supporting each other.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

In the summer of 2022, heavy rainfall damaged a water treatment plant in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, precipitating a high-profile public health crisis. The Republican Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency, as thousands of residents were told to boil their water before drinking it. For some, the pressure in their taps was so low that they couldn’t flush their toilets and were forced to rely on bottled water for weeks. 

Many of the city’s 150,000 residents were wary that their local government could get clean water running through their pipes again. State officials had a history of undermining efforts to repair Jackson’s beleaguered infrastructure, and the city council, for its part, didn’t have the money to make the fixes on its own. So when the federal government stepped in that fall, allocating funding and appointing an engineer to manage the city’s water system, there was reason to believe change may finally be near. 

But as the months wore on, hope turned to frustration. The federally appointed engineer, Ted Henifin, began taking steps to run the city’s water system through a private company, despite Mayor Chokwe Lumumba’s objections. Advocates’ repeated requests for data and other information about Jackson’s drinking water went unanswered, according to a local activist, Makani Themba, and despite Henifin’s assurances before a federal judge that the water was safe to drink, brown liquid still poured out of some taps. Faced with these conditions, a group of advocates sent the Environmental Protection Agency a letter last July asking to be involved in the overhaul of the city’s water system. 

“Jackson residents have weathered many storms, literally and figuratively, over the last several years,” they wrote in the letter. “We have a right and responsibility to be fully engaged in the redevelopment of our water and sewer system.” The letter was followed by an emergency petition to the EPA containing similar requests for transparency and involvement. 

Earlier this month, a federal judge granted the advocates their request, making two community organizations, the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and the People’s Advocacy Group, parties to an EPA lawsuit against the city of Jackson for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. A seat at the table of the legal proceedings, the advocates hope, will allow the city’s residents to have a say in rebuilding their infrastructure and also ward off privatization.

The saga in Jackson reflects a wider problem affecting public utilities across the country, with cash-strapped local governments turning to corporations to make badly needed repairs to water treatment plants, distribution pipes, and storage systems, a course that often limits transparency and boxes locals out of the decision-making. 

“This isn’t a uniquely Jackson problem,” said Brooke Floyd, co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People’s Advocacy Institute. “We need ways for all these cities that need infrastructure repairs to get clean water to their communities.”

The roots of Jackson’s water crisis lie in decades of disinvestment and neglect. Like many other midsize cities around the country, such as Pittsburgh and St. Louis, Jackson declined after white, middle-class residents relocated to the suburbs, taking tax dollars away from infrastructure in increasing need of repair. Between 1980 and 2020, Jackson’s population dropped by around 25 percent. Today, the city is more than 80 percent Black, up from 50 percent in the 1980s. A quarter of Jackson’s residents live below the poverty line, with most households earning less than $40,000 a year, compared with $49,000 for the state overall.

Over the decades, antagonism between the Republican state government and the Democratic and Black-led local government created additional obstacles to updating Jackson’s water and sewage infrastructure. A Title VI civil rights complaint that the NAACP filed with the EPA in September 2022 accused Governor Reeves and the state legislature of “systematically depriving Jackson the funds that it needs to operate and maintain its water facilities in a safe and reliable manner.” The biggest problem, the NAACP argued, was that the state had rejected the city’s proposal for a 1 percent sales tax to pay for infrastructure updates and by directing funds from the EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund away from the capital city. 

“Despite Jackson’s status as the most populous city in Mississippi, state agencies awarded federal funds” from the EPA program three times in the past 25 years, the complaint read. “Meanwhile, the state has funneled funds to majority-white areas in Mississippi despite their less acute needs.”

In the absence of adequate resources from the state and local government, Jacksonians have learned to fend for themselves, Floyd told Grist. At the height of the water crisis in 2022, federal dollars helped fund the distribution of bottled water to thousands of residents, but when the money dried up, people organized to secure drinking water for households still reckoning with smelly, off-color fluid running from their taps. When Henifin began posting boil-water notices on a smartphone app that some found hard to use, one resident set up a separate community text service. Floyd said that for some residents, these problems are still ongoing today. 

“There’s this sense of, we have to provide for each other because no one is coming,” Floyd said. “We know that the state is not going to help us.”

Henifin has told a federal judge that he’s made a number of moves to improve Jackson’s water quality. The private company that he set up, JXN Water, has hired contractors to update the main water plant’s corrosion control and conducted testing for lead and bacteria like E. coli. But residents and advocates point out that while the water coming out of the system might be clean, the city hosts more than 150 miles of decrepit pipes that can leach toxic chemicals into the water supply. Advocates want the city to replace them and conduct testing in neighborhoods instead of just near the treatment facility, changes that the city has federal money to make. In December 2022, the federal government allocated $600 million to Jackson for repairs to its water system.

But the worry is that this money will be spent on other things. Henifin is the one who handles the federal funds. By court order, he has the authority to enter into contracts, make payments, and change the rates and fees charged to consumers. 

Themba, the local activist, said that Henifin has not responded to residents’ demands for additional testing and access to monitoring data that already exists. Because JXN Water is a private company, it’s not subject to public disclosure laws requiring this information to be shared with the public. (Henifin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.) 

Themba points to Pittsburgh as an example of a place where residents fought privatization of their water system and secured a more democratic public utility. In 2012, faced with a lack of state and federal funding, the city turned over its water system to Veolia, an international waste- and water-management giant based in France. Over the following years, the publicly traded company elected for cost-cutting measures that caused lead to enter the water supply of tens of thousands of residents. A local campaign ensued, and advocates eventually won a commitment from the city government to return the water system to city control and give the  public a voice in the system’s management.

“What we’ve learned from all over the country is that privatization doesn’t work for the community,” Themba said. “We want what works.”

The court order that designated Henifin as Jackson’s water manager in 2022 does not outline what will happen once his four-year contract expires in 2026. Last month, the Mississippi Senate passed a bill that would put Jackson’s water in the hands of the state after Henifin steps down, a move that the manager recently said he supports and that Jackson’s mayor strongly opposes. That bill soon failed in the House without a vote. Now that they are part of the lawsuit, advocates hope they’ll have a chance to influence the outcome, before it’s too late. 

“Jackson residents have felt left out of the equation for so long,” Floyd said. “If we lose this, that’s a big deal.”

Books recounting Bridges’ story—several of which are authored by Bridges herself, including one published in January—have been banned or challenged by schools in Pennsylvania, Texas, Iowa, and Tennessee. And last year, a school in Florida stopped showing a Disney film about Bridges’ life after a parent complained it might make kids think white people hate Black people.

On Sunday, Bridges, 69, told Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that she sees such efforts as “ridiculous.” 

“The excuse that I’ve heard them give is that my story actually makes, especially White kids, feel bad about themselves,” Bridges told Welker, adding that children from all around the world regularly reach out to her to tell her what her story means to them.

“I found through my 25 years of travel that they resonate with the loneliness, probably the pain that I felt, not having a friend,” she told Welker of readers. “There’s all sorts of reasons that they’re drawn to my story. So I would have to disagree…I believe that it’s just an excuse not to share the truth—to cover up history. I believe that history is sacred—that none of us should have the right to change or alter history in any way.”

WATCH: Civil rights activist Ruby Bridges reflects on book bannings, as her own work has faced censorship in some schools.

"I think that's ridiculous. I mean, most of my books have been banned. … It's just an excuse not to share the truth, to cover up history.” pic.twitter.com/HyvS2j3yR9

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) April 27, 2024

When Bridges desegregated her New Orleans elementary school in November 1960, she and her mother were escorted by federal marshals as crowds of angry white people screamed racist slurs. Some white parents withdrew their kids from the school in protest of her attendance.

“My parents never explained to me what I was about to venture into,” Bridges told Welker, adding she thought she was “venturing into a Mardi Gras parade” the first day she attended the desegregated school—a misperception she held until she met a child inside who called her a racist slur.

WATCH: Ruby Bridges made history when she attended a newly desegregated school in 1960 — but she didn’t grasp the full significance at the time.

“My parents never explained to me what I was about to venture into. … I thought that day I was venturing into a Mardi Gras parade.” pic.twitter.com/NytGarSdS3

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) April 28, 2024

The conservative group Moms for Liberty has led the charge to ban books nationwide, and several of its activists have deemed books about Bridges “inappropriate.” One of the group’s co-founders claims that the way one of the books about Bridges is taught—but not the book itself—is “divisive,” because a teachers’ manual directs teachers to mention a racist slur featured in the book.

But Bridges—and the majority of voters, 61 percent of whom oppose efforts to remove books from school libraries—disagree that “divisive” materials that depict accurate American history warrant censorship. “Those things are what we live with today,” Bridges told Welker. “The history, all the subject matter that they want to ban, it’s happening in the world. We cannot live in a bubble, put blinders on like it’s not happening…we’re not hiding anything from our young people.”

Walter Moorer likes to say he lives at 411 “Death Row Street.” At least that is what he compares his living conditions to as he is bombarded with the stench, pollution, noise, and dust that emanates from an asphalt plant owned by Hosea Weaver and Sons Inc.

“I changed it to Death Row because I’d be in the house and that odor comes from Hosea Weaver,” Moorer said at a hearing last month before the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM). “It’s like I’m in a gas chamber. So I been on death row 20 something years.”

Moorer’s testimony came during part of the hearing set aside for public comment on Hosea Weaver’s application for a new or revised Synthetic Minor Operating Air Permit. The input from Moorer and others who live next door to the company could be summed up in three words: deny the permit. 

It had been a long road of opposition for Moorer and his neighbors, who can still remember life before the asphalt plant, and the Planning Commission meeting 25 years ago when their concerns were first ignored. Would their testimony, and written comments, to the state’s environmental regulators produce a different result this time? 

Moorer actually lives on Chin Street in the historic Black community of Africatown, which was founded by former slaves brought to America on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the country. Intertwined in Africatown’s history is the constant billow of industrial pollution that has plagued residents there for years. 

Moorer, 66, grew up on Chin Street and reminisces about how life used to be before Hosea Weaver constructed the asphalt plant just yards away from his home 20 years ago. Moorer said he once was able to go outside and hear children playing, smell food barbecuing and feel a vibrant community.   

Now the sound of young children playing and smell of food grilling has been replaced with machinery and the noxious fumes of asphalt cooking. 

Michael Weaver, Hosea Weaver’s president, did not respond to a request for comment.  

Moorer and other residents have complained for years about Hosea Weaver to local officials, yet the company has continued operating. The experience has taken a toll on Moorer, who said the company has destroyed his life. The only relief from the facility’s pollutants, he said, are when it rains or if the company gives workers a day off. 

“My life, my nerves,” Moorer said, “all this is about is Hosea Weaver. I think about them all the time because they done destroyed my life.”

Now, Moorer just hopes the new permit will be denied by ADEM and some peace can be restored to his life. But if the permit is denied it is unclear whether the facility will have to cease operating, or could re-apply. 

In November 2021, after residents filed complaints with ADEM about the facility, regulators conducted a particulate matter air quality test in June 2022. It found that Hosea Weaver was emitting the maximum amount of particulate matter allowable under their air permit, and ADEM issued a warning. The company responded to ADEM two months later promising to conduct quarterly tests to detect any leaks. Subsequently, ADEM conducted a test in December 2022 that revealed the facility had not fixed the issue and was emitting particulate matter above the allowable limit. 

The limit for particulate matter emission is 0.04 grains per dry standard cubic foot. The asphalt company was found to be emitting an average of 0.067 gr/dscf. 

Particulate matter is a pollutant created from a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Exposure to particulate matter can cause a multitude of health complications, according to studies, including lung cancer, aggravated asthma, increased respiratory issues and more. The facility also exposes residents to several “criteria” pollutants alongside particulate matter, as defined by the EPA, including sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, ozone pollution, lead, and nitrogen monoxide. 

Hosea Weaver discovered that the reason for the excessive emissions was a failed mechanism designed to capture pollution. The facility was issued a consent order by ADEM for violating the emissions limit and fined $24,000.

The new revisions to the permit would place further limitations on the facility’s hours of operations and on the types of fuel oil it is allowed to burn. ADEM contends these revisions will ensure that Hosea Weaver remains in compliance with the new permit. But an environmental organization, the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC), argues that the new permit requirements demonstrate that the facility has been operating without the correct permit the entire time. 

Moorer and other nearby residents are not satisfied with these revisions and want Hosea Weaver out of their neighborhood. Public comment from several other environmental organizations cite multiple reasons why the proposed permit is not sufficient and should be denied. 

While the majority of public comments submitted to ADEM asked the agency to deny the permit, some people still support the company—but none who live on Chin Street. 

As part of the public input process, ADEM held the hearing and also allowed written comments to be submitted. Yuvonne Brazier offered written comments and spoke during the hearing. 

“When I tried to tell ADEM about all the cancer and sickness I have seen over the last 20 years, I am told to go to the health department,” Brazier wrote. “The health department has told me that they have nothing to do with the environment. Thank God there are no more fish in 3 Mile Creek where the whole street used to fish and share with the neighbors. My mother, who never smoked, died of lung cancer. I tried to get her to leave, but she loved our home and her garden in the backyard. She bragged about her fresh vegetables. When her cancer got so bad, she had to leave and come stay with me. Then my niece tried to live there, until her son almost died of asthma. He could not breathe.”

An environmental justice report by the EPA called an EJScreen was conducted on Africatown, mapping different socioeconomic and environmental indicators. The test confirmed that Africatown was an environmental justice community because residents face the highest air toxics cancer risk in Alabama (99th percentile) and in the United States (95-100th percentile). 

Also, a countrywide 2019 EPA study found that Alabama emitted the fifth-most toxic substances into the air and Mobile County ranked first in the state in overall releases. 

All told, over 65 pages of written comment were submitted by a collection of environmental organizations, including MEJAC, Mobile Alabama NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Committee, Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Air Pollution (GASP), the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), and Clean Healthy Educated Safe and Sustainable Africatown (CHESS). 

Throughout the document, the organizations presented numerous reasons why ADEM should deny the permit, chief among them that Hosea Weaver needs to be designated as a so-called “major source” emitter under Title V of the Clean Air Act. They argue that, based on Hosea Weaver’s emissions history, the asphalt plant clearly releases excess tons of pollution that go above the threshold of a major source emitter. 

The environmental organizations also argue that ADEM is not fulfilling its role to protect the civil rights of a disproportionately harmed minority community, as described under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

“ADEM—as a recipient of federal funds for enforcement of the air permitting and other programs delegated to it by the EPA—must ensure it fulfills its legal duty to protect civil rights as required by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the document says. “Such consideration is required under Title VI because emissions from the Source result in an emissions impact to a community that already bears disproportionate socioeconomic harms.”

For Beverly Cooper, who spoke against the new permit, the ADEM hearing brought back memories of another public meeting in 1999: She was, at the time, a member of the Mobile Planning Commission, and Hosea Weaver had come before the panel, belatedly seeking a construction permit for a project it had almost completed. 

“I voted against this because it was clear that it would have a negative impact on the local community, and it has,” Cooper said. “Since it went into operation, it has had a devastating impact on the local community, the residents, their health, and local businesses.”

Cooper also said that the facility was essentially fully constructed by the time Hosea Weaver even came before the planning commission to request its approval.

According to a Mobile Press Register article from 1999, Hosea Weaver constructed nearly 75 percent of the facility next to Chin Street prior to obtaining the necessary construction permit from the city of Mobile. The city administered multiple stop-work orders for Hosea Weaver to halt construction on the facility after finding out but the company continued building anyway. The firm’s former president, Paul Weaver, said at the time that he did not know it needed a permit to build. 

Despite the plant being constructed without city permits, the Mobile Planning Commission voted 4-2 to give Hosea Weaver preliminary approval. One of the members, James Laier, recused himself because he worked with Hosea Weaver on the project. 

According to the Press Register, 40 Africatown and Chin Street residents protested the facility being built during the meeting. As part of the construction approval, the commission required Hosea Weaver to build an 8-foot privacy fence and two strips of 16-foot-tall trees to serve as a buffer for nearby residents. These requirements were never fulfilled.

Inside Climate News spoke to several residents who detailed how Hosea Weaver has negatively impacted their community, although they did not submit public comments.

Arthur Ruggs, who did not submit written testimony with ADEM objecting to Hosea Weaver’s new permit, said in an interview that his backyard was swampy due to an embankment created by the asphalt plant. Ruggs said he could not even mow his lawn, explaining how his lawnmower recently got stuck in the muddy earth.

Ruggs is glad his children were grown by the time Hosea Weaver moved in and avoided the company’s pollution and environmental impact.“The only thing about it now is ain’t no small kids around here,” he said. 

Jemal Walker said that the noise produced by the plant often kept him from getting any sleep at night. Walker was once incarcerated and said he had “more peace” in prison than he does now. 

“I’d rather be in prison than to be sitting here listening to this noise,” Walker said. “I got more peace in prison than I do right here.”

There are some within the Africatown community and outside who support Hosea Weaver. Cleon Jones, a member of the Africatown Community Development Corporation, argued during the public hearing that Hosea Weaver and “business” were needed to help revitalize Africatown, even though residents say the company does not employ anyone from the community. Charles Williams, also with ACDC, said he empathized with Chin Street residents but believed they needed to discuss solutions because “industry is going nowhere.” 

“My heart goes out to the people that live next to the plant,” Williams said. “I live over here. So I don’t have to hear the noises. I don’t have to see the pollution. I don’t have to walk in your shoes, but I can empathize with you. But also there are people who work at that plant who have got to feed their families. And we’ve got to try to find a solution.”

ACDC is connected to a nonprofit organization that works to protect the interest of businesses in the port of Mobile from environmental activists, called Keep Mobile Growing (KMG). Its website says it is a “non-profit alliance of Mobile Businesses and industries supporting the Alabama Port Authority, related port commerce and the region’s energy markets.”  

The organization was founded in 2014 explicitly to provide a voice against environmental activists, according to its website. “Radical, national environmental organizations remain active locally and are emboldened by increasing attention to the Mobile area,” a page on the website says. “Their agendas often conflict with the traditional, safe operations of KMG members. KMG exists to provide a voice of advocacy against any threats posed by these groups.”

The Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition was founded just a year prior, in 2013, advocating on behalf of citizens who live near the port and all its businesses. 

Keep Mobile Growing’s membership list on their website features Hosea Weaver. The organization touts how, through its collaboration with the Africatown Community Development Corporation, it established the Africatown Business and Community Panel (ABCP) in 2016. In IRS filings, this relationship is referenced consistently. Keep Mobile Growing gave $1,000 to Jones’ organization, the Cleon Jones Last Out Community Foundation, according to 2021 filings. 

During her public comments at the recent ADEM meeting, Brazier, in describing all the cancer in her family, mentioned that a city council member told her they were powerless to help because businesses in the port generated substantial revenue.  

“Some guys came down from Washington, they said they’ve never seen a plant that close to a community,” Brazier said. “And I just don’t understand that. We’ve been to city council after city council meeting. We were there a couple years ago. And the city council member said we get $30 billion from the state dock and all that’s connected, so there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Shirley Ford, another Chin Street resident, has no faith in ADEM and remembers what life was like prior to Hosea Weaver moving in. 

“I was born here and raised here,” Ford said. “I remember when the air was better. I remember when it smelled better. Nine times out of ten ADEM’s gonna give the permit to Weaver anyway, cause the plant isn’t in their neighborhood.” 

On March 18, ADEM announced its decision regarding the air permit, and it was just as Ford had assumed: ADEM granted the permit despite the overwhelming pleas from Chin Street residents asking for a denial. 

In a response to the public comments received, ADEM separated the submissions into two sections. One section was for comments concerning the proposed permit, the agency said in its response, while the other section was for comments not relevant to the proposed permit action. It categorized all of the comments asking for the permit to be denied—those made primarily by Chin Street residents—as irrelevant to the permitting action. 

The comments deemed relevant to the proposed permit action were predominantly those submitted by MEJAC and other environmental organizations. ADEM responded to these comments by explaining how Hosea Weaver complied with applicable regulations or how the comments did not necessitate any changes to the proposed permit.

“The applicant [Hosea Weaver] has submitted to the Department a request for additional restrictions and recordkeeping requirements for the existing Synthetic Minor Operating Permit,” ADEM said in response to comments to deny the permit. “The application indicates, to the satisfaction of the Department, that the proposed changes to the permit can comply with the technical and administrative requirements applicable to the proposed operation of the facility. Once an applicant satisfies all legal requirements for obtaining a permit, the Department cannot arbitrarily deny the issuance of the requested permit. In addition, the Department has no jurisdiction over the zoning and siting of permitted facilities. Such issues should be presented to the appropriate local zoning agency/department.”

The comments that were relevant to the proposed permit action were predominantly the arguments submitted by the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition and other environmental organizations. ADEM responded to these comments by explaining how Hosea Weaver complied with applicable regulations, and how the comments did not necessitate any changes to the proposed permit.

Walter Moorer, like his neighbor on Chin Street, Shirley Ford, was not surprised by the decision. “I knew it was gonna happen because nobody cares about our lives,” he said. 

Moorer said he did not want to bring up race as a factor, but he believed that ADEM was so willing to disregard the community’s concerns because they are Black and the owners of the asphalt plant are white. 

Surrounded by industry in the “chemical corridor,” Ford said she wants people to know the uncomfortable conditions she and other residents live under. “It feels like we don’t exist,” she said. 

“I want them to know about the smell, how terrible it is,” Ford said. “The noise. The dust. And how they just ignore us like we don’t exist. And don’t care. They didn’t even put the eight-foot fence up. They didn’t even put nothing to try to buffer the noise nor the dust or anything. It’s like we don’t count. We don’t exist.”

One such choice is the cover of the Beatles’ iconic song “Blackbird”, from the White Album, as the record’s second track. Trust Beyoncé to reissue a song so redolent with Black history: The song was written about the Black Liberation struggle of the American civil rights movement. Watch:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“I was sitting around my acoustic guitar, and I’d heard about the civil rights troubles that were happening in the sixties in Alabama, Mississippi, Little Rock in particular,” McCartney told GQ in 2018. “And I just thought it’d be really good if I could write something that, if it ever reached any of the people going through those problems, it might kind of give them a little bit of hope.” The name, “Blackbird”, was a play on British slang, “bird” meaning “girl.”

In particular, McCartney was inspired by the Little Rock Nine, a group of Black students who enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957, after Brown v. The Board of Education heralded the start of school desegregation. On the eve of the teenagers’ first day of school, the Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus, sent in the state’s national guard to stop them, sparking a standoff and legal battle that lasted weeks. Eventually President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent troops to protect the teenagers.

Incredible to meet two of the Little Rock Nine–pioneers of the civil rights movement and inspiration for Blackbird. pic.twitter.com/QrnOQnqrFX

— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) May 1, 2016

Now, Beyoncé has made me think about the incredibly brave little Black girls desegregating the American South: Ruby Bridges, Elizabeth Eckford, and many, many others, who faced hell. That’s who this song was written for, which adds even more significance to Beyoncé’s choice to feature the voices of four Black women on her version of this song—Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts. It’s kind of perfect.

Price is tired of journalists. As one of the country’s most progressive district attorneys and the first Black woman to hold the position in Alameda County, she’s encountered extreme scrutiny since taking office in January 2023. She had campaigned to roll back mass incarceration, address racial disparities, and hold more police accountable, and won the race by a close margin, about 27,000 votes. But before she could unpack her boxes, critics launched an effort to recall her, funded primarily by a handful of wealthy hedge-fund and real estate investors. Price says they’re spreading misinformation to stoke people’s fears about crime, turning her into a scapegoat. And she thinks the media is amplifying their message, blaming her for social problems that existed long before she took office—problems that her predecessor did not seem to face nearly as much condemnation for. “There’s a double standard for progressive prosecutors,” she told me earlier. “No one was looking at the [prior] DA and saying, ‘What are you doing about this?’ Now, everyone’s looking.”

Price is among a cadre of progressive DAs who are challenging conventional political wisdom about crime and punishment. This “puts a unique target on their backs,” says Insha Rahman, who leads the justice advocacy group Vera Action. Since 2017, lawmakers in at least 17 states have introduced bills to remove power from democratically elected progressive prosecutors. In 2022, not long before Price took office, rich businessmen funded a successful recall of San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin. Now some of the same financiers are attacking Price. In early March, her opponents said they submitted more than the 73,195 signatures needed to trigger a recall election (though the signatures have yet to be verified). This time, they have the sympathies of a group of mothers of color who are grieving shootings and believe Price hasn’t punished the perpetrators harshly enough.

Price has, at times, shied away from correcting the record, wanting to focus instead on her job: prosecuting gun violence and robberies, looking into wrongful jail deaths, helping victims get services, hiring more diverse attorneys. “What does justice look like? That’s the job,” she says. “And that job is not going to change if we’re going through a crime wave or we’re not—I still have to do the job.”

But her determination to focus on the work instead of fighting rumors has created an information vacuum that her opponents have been more than happy to fill. Price is “willfully fomenting a culture of violence,” a press release for the recall campaign states: She has “a total lack of regard for public safety.” None of it, Price tells me, is true. But will she find a way to convince everyone?

As we drive into Oakland, I glance longingly at my list of unasked questions. To be fair, Price sat down with me for a 45-minute interview the day before, but I’d hoped to take the conversation further today, and she’s still looking out the window and talking on the phone. She’s wearing a bright turquoise dress, and every so often she looks down at a list of agenda items as she and her colleague run through plans to connect with more of her constituents at an upcoming event for foster kids.

Soon we arrive at Laney College, a community college in downtown Oakland where Price will talk with a roomful of students, teachers, and activists about the recall effort. “This is nothing more than a power grab,” she tells them, framing her struggle in the context of the civil rights movement. “For me to become your district attorney puts me in the most powerful seat in this county, and that makes some people nervous.” A few audience members murmur in agreement, a Pan-African flag draped on the wall behind them. “I am exactly where I am supposed to be,” Price adds, “so I need you all to help me stay.”

On a couch along the perimeter of the room, LaChe Graybill, a psychology student, listens with skepticism. Graybill had recently signed the recall petition after her daughter was assaulted in Oakland. A police officer claimed he couldn’t arrest the perpetrator because Price wouldn’t prosecute. She’d come to ask Price about it. “It was convincing, what she was saying,” Graybill said of the DA’s presentation. But “I don’t know how much of it is her trying to save her ass.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about Price is that she’s all or nothing—that she’s “lost sight of the real victims,” as her critics put it, because she’s “advocating for the accused.” But to understand Price, you must know that she sees this as a false dichotomy. It’s possible not only to care for both victim and accused, but to be both victim and accused. Just look at her own life.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1956, as the civil rights movement was gaining steam, Price landed on the wrong side of the justice system before she could even drive. After Chicago police assassinated Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, she was expelled from her college prep school for organizing a sit-in outside the principal’s office when she was 13. She ran away from home that year after her parents forbade her from joining more civil rights protests. The runaway Price ended up at juvenile hall, and then in foster care, before she was arrested again at another protest and spent a year incarcerated.

But through it all, Price had managed good grades, and she was soon admitted to Yale University with a full scholarship. There, she found herself on the other side of the justice system: Her senior year, she joined a lawsuit with a handful of female students who alleged they’d been sexually harassed on campus. Price testified that her professor gave her a C after she refused his sexual advances. The case made national news, the first time anyone had argued that sexual harassment violated Title IX, a federal anti-discrimination law. A judge ruled against the women, but the experience convinced Price to go to law school, where she again found herself in front of a court.

While studying law at the University of California, Berkeley, Price fell in love with a man who turned violent. But after she called Albany police repeatedly for help, the cops grew frustrated and arrested her for disorderly conduct. (She was acquitted.) Feeling jaded about criminal law, she left her job in public defense and later opened her own litigation practice in Oakland in 1991 to help other victims. She represented preteen sisters who were allegedly molested by a music teacher in Berkeley; worked with attorney John Burris to sue after BART police killed Oscar Grant in 2009; and successfully argued a racial discrimination case in front of the US Supreme Court. “It’s been a long time comin’,” she said after her client in that case won a settlement.

It wasn’t until 2017 that Price considered running for district attorney, at the encouragement of Yoel Haile at the ACLU of Northern California, who thought her experiences as a civil rights attorney and as a survivor of the juvenile justice system gave her “unique insight.” At first, Price hesitated at the idea of managing a prosecutors’ office with a reputation for harming people of color. The DA at the time, Nancy O’Malley, among other things, had repeatedly charged Black and brown children as adults. But since 2016, Price had watched other Black progressives become elected prosecutors in Chicago and St. Louis, drawn by the power to change the system from the inside.

Price had some political experience; she’d recently served on the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee. But running for chief prosecutor would be trickier. No one had challenged an incumbent in Alameda for nearly half a century; retiring DAs usually hand-picked a replacement, who then ran unopposed in the next election. With support from Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and activist Angela Davis, Price won 43 percent of the vote in the 2018 primary, more than expected but not enough to beat O’Malley, who received tens of thousands of dollars from police unions. Price took the loss hard, says her friend Eloise Middleton, who campaigned with her. But she decided to run again, Middleton told me, after she heard John Lewis, the former congressman and civil rights hero, speak about the importance of “good trouble.” 

By Price’s second campaign in 2022, the political situation had changed. O’Malley had announced her retirement without picking a replacement, leaving the field wide open. And the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the nationwide protests that followed had “pulled back the curtain on the broken system of criminal justice,” Price wrote to supporters in an email, “clearly exposing the racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities.” She pledged a corporate-free, grassroots campaign, promising to charge more police, pursue alternatives to incarceration, and “restore public trust” by publishing demographic data about cases.

Across the Bay, another progressive DA was fighting to stay in office. In June 2022, several months before Price’s election, the city voted to recall Chesa Boudin. “A lot of us volunteers were quite worried that she couldn’t win in that environment,” says her friend Rivka Polatnick. But that November, Price won 53 percent of the vote to beat Terry Wiley, a more moderate candidate who’d worked for O’Malley.

Price’s historic victory complicated the story national tabloids tried to sell after Boudin’s ouster; it suggested that Bay Area voters still craved progressive justice reforms. “She is somebody who wants to correct the mistakes of the past,” says Nicole Lee, executive director of the Urban Peace Movement, a racial justice group. Her first month in office, Price reopened several cases involving police shootings and in-custody deaths, and she soon set up a commission to improve mental health courts.

But her promise to shake up the system, at a time when people were seeing more news coverage of crime, set the stage for a backlash. Within weeks she saw a post on the app Nextdoor falsely alleging that she’d bought televisions for the inmates at Santa Rita Jail. Other commenters were frustrated about plea deals that her office made for violent crimes, with punishments that they felt were too short. In February 2023, a Change.org petition began collecting signatures against Price, linking to some of these cases and claiming “she’s out of control.” In July, an official recall committee launched. When a recall campaign pops up that quickly, Boudin told me, “it’s clearly not about the policies or the management style,” but “about refusing to accept the outcome of the election” and making it hard for the DA to do her job.

Boudin’s recall was on her mind, but Price didn’t immediately worry. San Francisco had a much smaller proportion of Black voters than Oakland did, which meant Price might benefit from a broader base of support. And she had a longer history and deeper community roots in Alameda County than Boudin did in San Francisco.

But her location had downsides: While crime generally fell in San Francisco under Boudin, it had risen in Oakland before Price took office and was continuing to rise after her inauguration, especially homicides and thefts. “We are a place with people who have a lot of wealth in close proximity to people who are really struggling economically,” says the Urban Peace Movement’s Lee. The pandemic brought that into starker relief. For decades crime disproportionately affected low-income communities in Oakland’s flatlands, but now richer neighborhoods were seeing more instability too. “All of a sudden,” says Lee, “the alarm bells go off.”

When the Change.org petition against Price started in February 2023, Price didn’t give it much thought. She’d expected criticism, she told me, but she had bigger things to focus on than some online trolls. The office she’d inherited was a mess—literally, it needed to be cleaned, and attorneys were doing a lot of work on paper because the computer system was so antiquated. Complicating matters, many people in the agency had supported the campaign for Wiley, her opponent. (Some later accused her of firing them in retaliation; Price’s spokesperson told me the DA’s office does not comment on personnel matters.) “We were focused on the inside,” she told me. “We really weren’t paying attention to the people on the outside.”

But the dissenting voices outside were getting louder. A local ABC affiliate published an interview with a departing prosecutor who said people would die because of Price’s policies: “With each passing day, we’re receiving new information about plea deals that favor criminals and leave victims of violent crime feeling like they haven’t received justice,” wrote the reporter, Dan Noyes. (He failed to explain that around the country, about 95 percent of cases resolve in plea deals that don’t seek the maximum punishment.) “Everyone is in danger,” Oakland’s NAACP branch, which counts Wiley as a member, would soon claim, adding that Price’s “unwillingness to charge and prosecute people…created a heyday” for criminals. After Delonzo Logwood, who committed murder at age 18, received a plea deal from Price’s office in February 2023 that would cut his prison sentence to a fifth of what he’d been facing, Price got death threats.

Price’s supporters questioned why she wasn’t defending herself more. One of her top spokespeople, Ryan LaLonde, soon resigned because he wanted her to respond more to her opponents in the press, but she often refused to, unhappy that some reporters had disrespected her as a Black woman. “She really just wanted to do her job and not be drawn into it,” says her friend Polatnick. She shouldn’t be “raising a ruckus,” says Mister Phillips, an attorney in her office, “but there are people out there who are louder than her and they get press, and what they are saying is not always true.”

Sometimes Price was criticized for decisions she hadn’t even made yet. Last April, about 100 protesters gathered outside the county courthouse shouting, “Do your job!” and “Justice for Jasper!” In 2021, toddler Jasper Wu had been killed by a stray bullet in a gang battle on the freeway. Wu’s family worried Price wouldn’t punish the shooters harshly enough, especially after she instructed her office to limit the use of sentencing enhancements, a tool that can make prison sentences longer. At the time of the rally, Price’s office was still examining the evidence. “The coverage of her work has speculated on what she will do, in ways that haven’t proved to be her actual decisions,” says Cristine Soto DeBerry, founder of the Prosecutors Alliance of California, who describes Price’s policies as “measured” compared with those of other progressive DAs. “When discretion is vested in the hands of the first elected Black woman in the county, the spotlight and the magnifying glass is zeroed in more intensely.”

Ultimately, Price’s office did not make Jasper’s two alleged shooters eligible for life in prison without the possibility of parole, an option they’d faced under DA O’Malley. But the men did get charged with enhancements, and they are now facing 175 years to life in prison and 265 years to life.

There’s a general lack of public understanding about how DAs handle cases and the extent to which their policies do or don’t affect crime levels, Price tells me. “Everybody’s looking at me,” she says, “and they have no idea what I do. There’s so much about this position that has never been discussed.”

But Price’s reticence toward journalists is not helping her cause. At a public event I attended with her in Oakland, some people in the audience said they struggled to find good sources of information about the DA’s office. “Most of the news we get is from rumors,” an elderly man complained. More than a year into her term, Price still hasn’t fulfilled the San Francisco Chronicle’s request for charging data that could help voters see how her performance compares with her predecessor’s. Price says her team has lacked the technology to gather the data and is working to fix that. But David Loy, a legal director at the First Amendment coalition, told the Chronicle that her office appears to be violating the state’s public records law. “This is not behavior that seems consistent with an agency that wants to be transparent,” he said. “We have met and exceeded the parameters of the law with regard to our duty to assist the public,” agency officials wrote to the paper’s reporters in November.

Later that month, press-freedom advocates also raised alarm after Price’s office barred a Berkeley Scanner reporter, who’d published critical articles about the DA, from a press conference. (The office said the reporter’s media credentials were “under review,” but it later backtracked and invited her to future events after Loy alleged a First Amendment violation.)

When I emailed to ask about criticism that Price wasn’t open enough with press, spokesman William Fitzgerald said, “we’d push back on the premise of the question.” He referred to the time Price had spent with me for this story. “She’s not going to sit down with every single reporter because some of them have demonstrated…a one-sided view that doesn’t give a fair representation of what’s going on.”

Price has some reason to tread cautiously with journalists. Compared with traditional prosecutors, progressive DAs anecdotally appear to be held to a different standard in the press and on social media, says Pamela Mejia at the nonprofit Berkeley Media Studies Group. In the first year of the pandemic, the murder rate in Boudin’s San Francisco was roughly half that of Bakersfield, California, a Republican-led city with a more conservative DA. “Yet there is barely a whisper, let alone an outcry, over the stunning levels of murders” in Bakersfield, the think tank Third Way found in a study examining the outsize attention on crime in Democratic cities. “A lot of it is driven by police union and police department communication teams that are important sources for journalists,” says Boudin. His moderate replacement in San Francisco, DA Brooke Jenkins, has not received nearly the same amount of negative press as he did, even though overdoses and some crimes rose after she emboldened cops to crack down on drug sales. “Jenkins gets a pass partly because she talks about crime in binary terms that appeal to moderates and Republicans,” Chronicle columnist Justin Phillips wrote. “Price so far has proved incapable of doing this.”

The scrutiny on Price is exacerbated, says the Urban Peace Movement’s Lee, because of her race and gender, a trend that progressive DAs of color have seen nationally. Kim Gardner, the first Black circuit attorney in St. Louis, received letters calling her the n-word and a “cunt” before she resigned in 2023. Aramis Ayala, the first Black DA in Florida, got a noose in the mail after then-Gov. Rick Scott prohibited her from handling death penalty cases in 2017. In the Bay Area, recallers are also targeting Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, who is Hmong American, and reformist Contra Costa DA Diana Becton, who is Black. “People feel very, very comfortable discrediting her,” Lee says of Price: “I have been called every kind of black B; I’ve been called a roach,” Price told me. “The attacks are vicious: There are no boundaries when it comes to Black women.”

So, who exactly is calling for Price’s removal? On a sunny Saturday in February, I go to meet some of her critics along the banks of Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland, where they’ve set up a table with hopes of enticing some of the joggers and dog-walkers circling the lake to sign their recall petition. The group is small, fewer than a dozen people, many of them women of color. Among them is Brenda Grisham, co-founder of the recall committee Save Alameda For Everyone (SAFE). Her 17-year-old son was shot dead outside their East Oakland home in 2010 as they were heading out to grab dinner at Burger King. Grisham wants Price to give victims’ relatives more input over prison sentences. But when she brought up her concerns at a meeting last April, she says Price didn’t take them seriously. She “feels she doesn’t have to talk with these families,” Grisham tells me. (Price says she meets with some relatives, but that her office served more than 12,000 victims last year, and that Marsy’s Law, which governs victim rights, does not require a district attorney to connect with everyone.)

Serena Morales, who helps Grisham with social media for the recall effort, lives in Hayward and worked previously on the campaign against Boudin in San Francisco. She tells me she’s upset that Price would not pursue sentencing enhancements for the men who killed toddler Jasper Wu—apparently having missed the news that Price’s team did, in fact, charge them with enhancements. When I ask Morales why enhancements are so important, she says she wanted to see the harshest possible punishment, and that enhancements might deter future crimes. “If these are gangbangers out on the street killing our children, what can we do to prevent that?”

Nearby are two mothers wearing T-shirts displaying photos of their dead children. Sophia, who asked that I not use her last name, says her five-year-old daughter, Eliyanah Crisostomo, was fatally shot on the freeway in 2023 while they were driving to a steakhouse in Fremont. In her case, Price’s office also pursued sentencing enhancements, but it took longer than Sophia expected. “Why did I have to wait nine months?” she asks. “Was it only approved because the DA is feeling the pressure of the recall?”

As I talk with the group, a white man on a bicycle peddles by and then stops, turning toward us. “You are all being paid by Trump voters!” he shouts at the mothers. Brenda Angulo, whose 15-year-old son, Erick Portillo, was shot in Hayward in 2023, asks the cyclist whether he ever lost a child. He responds coldly, asking whether hers died before Price’s election. “You’re lying,” he says after she refuses to answer. A white woman participating in a nearby Free Palestine protest comes over and intervenes, telling the cyclist that she, too, opposes the recall, but that he should move along. “Stop being a white asshole! You’re not helping our side,” she tells him.

Say what you will about his approach, the cyclist was hinting at a question on many people’s minds: whether the recall campaign is being steered by conservative forces. At the very least, some of the donors are rich. Campaign filings showed that about $1 out of every $3 spent on the recall last year came from a single hedge-fund partner, Philip Dreyfuss, who also spent heavily to oust Boudin. He and the next four biggest donors—real estate and tech investors Justin Osler, Isaac Abid, and Carl Bass, and real estate firm Holland Residential—gave about half of all the funds raised in 2023. As of early February, the recall campaign had spent $2.2 million, dwarfing Price’s resources. Much of the money went to SAFE, the group Grisham co-founded with Dreyfuss and Chinatown businessman Carl Chan, as well as to Dreyfuss’ second group, Supporters of Recall Pamela Price, primarily for signature gathering.

“We’re having a moment in California politics where wealthy donors can purchase a spot on the ballot and redo an election result,” says the Prosecutor Alliance’s DeBerry. She says that nationally, progressive DAs tend to do well at the polls. Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, Chicago’s Kim Foxx, and St. Louis’ Kim Gardner were all reelected to second terms, as were dozens of other reformist prosecutors. Though Boudin remains one of the movement’s biggest losses, he actually had more supporters vote for him in the recall election than they did during his original election. “The progressive prosecutor movement is vibrant and strong because it’s advocating for changes that are popular with voters,” he told me recently. But those changes can rile up Republican politicians or rich business execs who were faring well under the status quo: “You end up getting pushback from above, not from below.”

In Alameda, I reached out to some of the recall campaign’s major donors, but most declined to comment. One of them, who asked that I not name him in the story, pushed back on the suggestion that the campaign was undemocratic or less legitimate just because it was funded by executives. “Many people, they’re as upset [with Price]—they just don’t have enough discretionary income to give to political campaigns,” he told me, adding that the recall petition garnered about 123,000 signatures. He said he got involved after noticing an uptick in crime in his neighborhood—he had two attempted break-ins at his house, one of his cars was stolen, and another one of his car’s windows were smashed five times. His friend a block over was held at gunpoint. “For the first 30 years I lived here, it didn’t feel that way. I never had it in the neighborhood, in front of the house,” he said. “People are legitimately concerned.”

The mothers at Lake Merritt told me they were volunteers, driven by a desire to feel safer and get accountability for their kids’ deaths. Sophia, whose five-year-old was killed by a bullet on the interstate, still can’t drive that route without an anxiety attack. “Justice needs to be served for my daughter,” she says, “and for all other innocent children that are dying senselessly.” 

Over the past five years, polls show that Americans have grown more worried about crime, regardless of whether their cities have become more dangerous. Nationally, reported rates of violence “appear to be going down, but public perception is that people don’t feel safe and that data doesn’t necessarily feel meaningful for people,” says Mejia at the Berkeley Media Studies Group. She cited a phenomenon called the “mean world” syndrome: When people consume a lot of news about crime, they become convinced the world around them is a dangerous place.

In 2022, she says, news outlets published significantly more stories about violence in California than they did just five years earlier, mirroring national media trends. Journalists are writing more about crime, says Vera’s Rahman, in part because politicians are talking more about it; after New York City Mayor Eric Adams ran on a law-and-order platform in 2021, media mentions of the issue skyrocketed there, according to a Bloomberg analysis. In the Bay Area, relentless crime coverage adds to the unease some people feel when they see visible changes in their neighborhoods, after the pandemic amplified existing problems around poverty, substance abuse, and mental illness, leading to more homelessness and open-air drug use.

The fear creates a communications challenge for progressive DAs, says Mejia, because research shows that people process information differently when they’re afraid. If voters “are in an acute phase of anxiety, they might not be receptive to hearing the data points” or talking about solutions—“until there’s some acknowledgement that the fear exists,” she says. Rather than being idealistic or pretending bad things don’t happen, she says, it’s more effective to “give people space to feel heard in their anxiety and to move through it.”

“It’s really important to meet people where they’re at,” Boudin told me when I asked him what lessons he’d learned from the recall in San Francisco. “All of us post-Covid have a level of anxiety we never had before,” Price says, “so there is fear, and it’s legitimate fear, and I have to acknowledge that.”

After turning away from the press during her early days in office, Price says she’s thinking more now about how to talk with the public. In February, she invited me to a video call with the communications team from her Protect the Win campaign, which is fighting the recall. They discussed the latest negative media coverage, this time about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to send state attorneys to help Alameda prosecutors with some cases. They’re “saying the DA’s office is in soft receivership,” Fitzgerald, her campaign spokesman, said. Price laughed at the falsehood. “We laugh,” he added, “but when we know people have bought their lies, it’s because of that type of story.”    

“I get it,” she said. They’re trying to say “the DA’s office is a hot mess. So what’s the opposite?” She listed some accomplishments to share with people, like building up the collaborative courts, tackling the backlog for victim services, and hiring more attorneys of color. “This is the most diverse district attorney’s office in the whole state,” she told me later. “We have done a lot to bring people in who reside in this community, who were raised here, who want to serve this community, that look like the community.”

Hoping to reach an even broader audience, Price also hosts events where Alameda County residents can ask her questions, using the gatherings as an opportunity to dispel misinformation. At an event at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in February, she asked the crowd, “How many of you have heard that I did not charge the two men accused of killing toddler Jasper Wu?” A handful of folks raised their hands. She held up a pamphlet that her communications team distributed, with information about the case. “This is an opportunity for you to hear the facts for yourself,” she said.

A KQED reporter raised her hand and said people were getting misinformation from police officers, too. “We’ve been hearing that—it’s obviously a concern of ours,” responded Oakland Assistant Police Chief Tony Jones, who was seated beside Price. “When we hear that our officers are making comments like that, it’s very disappointing to us.”

Back at Laney College, Price wraps up her speech and takes some questions from the audience. She calls on LaChe Graybill, the psychology student who signed the recall petition. Graybill asks about the Oakland cop who claimed he couldn’t arrest her daughter’s assaulter because the district attorney—Price—wouldn’t charge him. Price’s first instinct is to debunk the police officer’s claim, but then she changes her tactic. “I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter,” she tells Graybill, her voice softening. “We are living in a terrible time where people don’t care, and they will hurt you. We have to try to protect ourselves, but sometimes we can’t.”

Price continues talking about another question Graybill raised, about why her daughter was still waiting for victim assistance funds from the DA’s office several months after the attack. Price explains that before she inherited the job, a backlog had pushed wait times to more than a year. Her team had since gotten it down to 59 days—“which is still not acceptable,” she says—and her goal was to make sure victims received assistance within 10 days. One of Price’s colleagues walks over to Graybill and gives her a business card, urging her to call. “The system is broken—that’s why I’m here,” Price tells her. “It’s broken.”

Recent polling by Rahman’s Vera Action asked voters in California and nationwide what approach they wanted to see from DAs. Most said they wanted prosecutors to focus on preventing crime, and to prioritize “justice and the truth.” “Not to necessarily seek a conviction, and not to necessarily engage in reform,” says Rahman, but “to advance a fair process.” They don’t need prosecutors to use “tough on crime” rhetoric, she adds, “but they do need you to signal that you’re serious about safety.”

After the Laney College event concludes, Price slips out the door and I run to catch up, but she tells me I can’t tag along anymore because she has too much work to do. Instead, I go back to the room to find Graybill. She tells me that by the end of Price’s talk, she no longer wanted to support the recall; she even removed her signature from the petition. I wonder what changed her mind. “Her willingness to hear,” she tells me of Price. “She answered the question in detail, instead of brushing it off.”

If the district attorney is going to survive to the end of her term, she’ll need to do more than convince a single voter. Price may no longer be able to choose between keeping her head down to focus on delivering justice, or taking time to talk with people about it. Both are the job now.

Update, April 17, 2024: Alameda County officials have finished counting signatures—and confirmed that District Attorney Pamela Price will face a recall election later this year. It was a close call: Price’s opponents needed 73,195 valid signatures to force an election, and they got 74,757.

X, and before it Twitter, has a long-held reputation for being a breeding ground for white supremacy. Dating as far back as the 2016 election, these extremists have used the app to sow seeds of misinformation and spread racism.

Garrison zeroes in on a specific phenomenon: Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior, showing how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for raising “awareness” in a thread last year. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, via X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.)

“People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, told Garrison in a video interview. He added: “This is the most basic statistical error in the book: Correlation does not equal causation.”

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In 2022, just one week after Musk purchased Twitter, the Center for Countering Digital Hate —an online civil rights group— found that racial slurs against Black people had increased three times the year’s average, with homophobic and transphobic epithets also seeing a significant uptick, according to the Associated Press. More than a year later, Musk made headlines once again for tweeting racist dog whistles in a potential attempt to “woo” a recently fired Tucker Carlson. But, his new shift into sharing tech-bro-friendly bigotry carries its own unique set of consequences.

Garrison also talks to Dr. Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who points out that because this racism is seemingly backed by scientific fact, people often lack the language to call out its problematic nature.

“There’s a kind of fusion between old-school gutter racism that everyone can recognize and this new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis. And I think that this is very confusing to people,” said Gusev. “They don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that I recognize as ugly, and then there’s somebody posting a hundred charts that seem to support it.'”

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the most prestigious public high schools in the country, adopted a new system for admissions in late 2020, shifting from a reliance on standardized tests to a more holistic review of applicants with reserved spots at all the middle schools that feed into Thomas Jefferson. The new policy was challenged by a group of parents called the Coalition for TJ, who claimed that the new policy was a form of anti-Asian discrimination aimed at lowering the number of Asian-American students who made up a majority at the school. 

The new policy, like the old one, did not take race into account. It was not only race-neutral but race-blind, which is to say admissions officers do not know the race of the applicants. The group of parents was represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian non-profit law firm already representing Asian-American parents in two similar cases concerning public school admissions.

Last summer, the Supreme Court effectively banned affirmative action in university admissions, rolling back decades of precedent. The Thomas Jefferson case would have taken the court’s hostility to policies promoting racial equality to a new, more radical level. “The goal of the Pacific Legal Foundation and others in this extreme colorblindness movement is to take racial justice off the table as an objective for policymaking at all levels of government,” says Sonja Starr, a law professor at the University of Chicago who has closely followed the foundation’s cases, told Mother Jones last year. If the Supreme Court adopts this view, she warned, “it would be a legal earthquake.”

As I reported last August:

This next phase targets admissions policies in K-12 schools, and is an effort to maintain the status quo, even as American public education grows increasingly segregated. Radically, the lawyers driving this test case have invited the Supreme Court to go beyond its rejection of affirmative action and ban admissions policies that do not actually take race into account.

“If the government is simply choosing a race neutral policy in order to achieve a racial result, we are going to object,” explains Joshua Thompson, who leads the Pacific Legal Foundation’s education litigation. “You cannot have a racial purpose consistent with the equal protection clause,” Thompson argues, except “to remedy past government discrimination.”

If the court accepts that argument, it would constitute a sea change—not just in education, but in broader American life. For decades, public officials have considered racial disparities and segregation in arenas as varied as education, pollution, and health policy to be problems government should tackle. Under PLF’s theory, even the desire to eliminate racial gaps could be successfully challenged in court.

Alito makes no secret of why he would have wanted to take this case. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of the new admissions policy, he wrote, “is flagrantly wrong and should not be allowed to stand.” Justice Thomas signed onto this dissent.

It’s possible other justices are sympathetic to Alito and Thomas’ view but didn’t want to take up a second case on race and admissions so soon after their major decision against affirmative action last year. If that’s the situation, similar cases in Maryland and New York working their way through the courts would allow justices to radically restrict efforts to integrate K-12 schools and restrict the government’s effort to promote diversity and equality. When the Supreme Court allowed Thomas Jefferson’s new policy to take effect at the start of the litigation, Justice Neil Gorsuch showed a willingness, alongside Alito and Thomas, to halt the new policy. Chief Justice John Roberts has authored opinions hostile to the idea of integrating K-12 schools—all evidence that there may be enough justices eventually to take up this issue. 

The dissent appears to support the argument that the new policy takes away spots from deserving Asian-American students and gives them to less-deserving non-Asian students—though there is no data to support that conclusion. In fact, in the first class admitted under the new admissions policy, the average GPA of the incoming class was higher than in recent years under the old plan. In one paragraph that is likely to draw attention, Alito employs a hypothetical about Black basketball players to illustrate his view that the policy is denying admission to those who deserve it most.

Suppose that white parents in a school district where 85 percent of the students are white and 15 percent are [B]lack complain because 10 of the 12 players (83 percent) on the public high school basketball team are [B]lack. Suppose that the principal emails the coach and says: “You have too many [B]lack players. You need to replace some of them with white players.” And suppose the coach emails back: “Ok. That will hurt the team, but if you insist, I’ll do it.” The coach then takes five of his [B]lack players aside and kicks them off the team for some contrived—but facially neutral—reason. For instance, as cover, he might institute a policy that reserves a set number of spots on the roster for each of the middle schools who feed to the high school.

Alito’s point here is that the school board instituted a policy that may appear to be neutral on its face but still contained the insidious purpose of targeting a specific racial group, and therefore amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. The court’s decision not to take up this case allows Thomas Jefferson High School’s policy to stand, and signals to other schools and colleges around the country that race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action are permissible—at least for now.

Catherine Coleman Flowers has seen it all firsthand. 

She’s been to homes across the state where Alabamians can’t flush their toilets, the result of failing or nonexistent wastewater infrastructure. 

She can tell you about the families in the state’s Black Belt whose children suffer from increased risk of pathogenic E. coli due to exposure through well water to raw sewage from failing wastewater systems nearby. 

“Many people live with straight piping, which means when they flush the toilet, it’s not going through any kind of treatment system,” Flowers said. “Children are playing around it.”

It’s that kind of on-the-ground knowledge that Flowers, a Lowndes County native, has brought to her role on President Joe Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council, bringing national attention to issues impacting Alabamians. 

On Tuesday, Flowers joined Radhika Fox, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, in announcing the expansion of a federal program aimed at providing as many as 150 communities with the technical assistance needed to begin addressing wastewater access issues. 

The program initially served 11 pilot communities, including White Hall, a small town halfway between Selma and Montgomery.

“It’s also on a failing septic system,” Flowers told reporters Tuesday morning. Flowers worked with officials at every level of government to identify solutions to the community’s wastewater woes. The technical assistance provided through the Biden Administration pilot program led the community to secure $450,000 in federal dollars to aid in that effort.

“We could not imagine that this would happen and happen so fast,” Flowers said. 

Now, the Closing America’s Wastewater Access Gap Community Initiative is expanding to up to 150 communities, which will be selected on a rolling basis, according to Fox. Interested communities can request assistance by completing the WaterTA request form, according to the EPA. There is no deadline to apply. 

Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.), who represents the Black Belt in Congress, said that access to adequate wastewater infrastructure is a basic human right, praising the expansion of the program announced this week. 

“Unfortunately, too many Alabamians in the Black Belt have suffered from generations of disinvestment in basic water infrastructure,” Sewell said. “Today’s announced expansion of the Closing America’s Wastewater Access Gap Community Initiative is an important step toward correcting this injustice.”

Communities’ efforts to access various pots of federal funding to address wastewater concerns haven’t always been successful, particularly when significant portions of federal funding must be delivered through state agencies. 

In March 2023, for example, Flowers’ Black Belt-based nonprofit, the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management over allegations that the agency discriminates against Black residents by preventing residents from accessing federal dollars to improve access to onsite sanitation in violation of federal law. Federal officials are currently investigating the complaint, which state officials have disputed. 

Fox told reporters on Tuesday that the EPA will help local communities engage with state-level officials on the front end of applications for federal dollars, potentially making it easier for them as they go through the often-competitive funding process. 

“I think that’s why we’ve had such a high success rate, where over seven of these communities are already in the pipeline to receive servicing funding dollars from the state,” Fox said. 

Flowers emphasized that advocates will continue to use whatever tools they can to make sure the sanitation issues facing Alabamians are adequately addressed. 

“That’s the role that we play as a non-government entity in working with people in the communities who are experiencing these problems and making sure their voices are lifted up and heard,” Flowers said, adding that her organization will continue to engage state and local officials. “We’re still taking advantage of those tools as advocates and activists to make sure that the right thing is done, and that it is done in an equitable way.”