Dear Commons Community,

Over the weekend, the Associated Press had a feature article entitled, Black Catholic nuns: A compelling, long-overlooked history.  The author, David Crary reports on this population of dedicated women whose association with the Catholic Church has been neglected.  His article is based largely on an interview with Shannen Dee Williams, who has conducted extensive research for a new book entitled, Subversive Habits.   Here is an excerpt:

“After 14 years of tenacious research, Shannen Dee Williams – a history professor at the University of Dayton — arguably now knows more about America’s Black nuns than anyone in the world. Her comprehensive and compelling history of them, “Subversive Habits,” will be published May 17th.

Williams found that many Black nuns were modest about their achievements and reticent about sharing details of bad experiences, such as encountering racism and discrimination. Some acknowledged wrenching events only after Williams confronted them with details gleaned from other sources.

“For me, it was about recognizing the ways in which trauma silences people in ways they may not even be aware of,” she said.

The story is told chronologically, yet always in the context of a theme Williams forcefully outlines in her preface: that the nearly 200-year history of these nuns in the U.S. has been overlooked or suppressed by those who resented or disrespected them.

“For far too long, scholars of the American, Catholic, and Black pasts have unconsciously or consciously declared — by virtue of misrepresentation, marginalization, and outright erasure — that the history of Black Catholic nuns does not matter,” Williams writes, depicting her book as proof that their history “has always mattered.”

The book arrives as numerous American institutions, including religious groups, grapple with their racist pasts and shine a spotlight on their communities’ overlooked Black pioneers.”

As a toddler growing up in the Bronx in the early 1950s, my mother would take me shopping with her on 3rd Avenue.
Every once in a while, we would see a Black nun in front of one of the department stores, sitting with a small up, and quietly saying a rosary.  My other always gave me a dime to drop in the cup.

Tony

Dana Bash and Asa Hutchinson

Dear Commons Community,

Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas said Sunday that he’s weighing a White House bid in 2024 and that he would still consider running even if former President Donald Trump enters the race.

“You’ve got to get through, of course, this year. But that’s an option that’s on the table,” Hutchinson, who is term-limited as governor, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked if he was seriously considering 2024 run.

Pressed by Bash on whether he would still consider running if Trump decides to seek the 2024 GOP nomination, Hutchinson said the former President’s candidacy is “not a factor in my decision-making process.”

“I’ve made it clear: I think we ought to have a different direction in the future,” he added. “I think he did a lot of good things for our country, but we need to go a different direction.”

Trump has not announced a 2024 White House bid but has teased a potential run since leaving office last year.

Hutchinson also took aim at another possible 2024 GOP presidential contender Saturday. He said that he disagrees with Florida’s recent law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that effectively punishes Disney for opposing LGBTQ restrictions enacted in the state.

“I don’t believe that government should be punitive against private businesses because we disagree with them,” Hutchinson said. “To me, that’s the old Republican principle of having restrained government.”

The Arkansas governor, however, did say that he felt Disney “handled this very poorly,” adding that he shared DeSantis’ belief that sexual orientation should not be taught “in those lower grades” in school.

Hutchinson told Bash last year that he would not back Trump if he decided to run in 2024 — a departure from his previous support for Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.

At the time, the governor said that although Trump would continue to have a voice in the Republican Party, the former President “should not define our future,” adding that the party needs “to respond and identify with the issues that gave him the first election and gave him support throughout his presidency.”

First elected governor in 2014, Hutchinson, who served in the US House from 1997 to 2001, has come to be known as someone who occasionally bucks the GOP while also nodding to his party’s base on certain issues.

Earlier this year, he urged large businesses in his state not to comply with the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate, saying employers should not follow the “oppressive” rule hours before it was set to partially go into effect.

Last August, as the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus was sweeping through the US, the governor said he regretted approving a statewide ban on face mask mandates.

And in April 2021, Hutchinson drew praise from LGBTQ advocates after he vetoed an anti-transgender health care bill that prohibited physicians in the state from providing gender-affirming “procedures” for trans people under age 18. The bill, however, later became law after state lawmakers overrode the veto.

I hope Hutchinson runs and wins the nomination to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.  He would be a formidable opponent for whomever the Democrats nominate.  More importantly, he would represent an honest, moderate nominee for the Republican Party.

Tony

GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger tells @margbrennan on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:

"When [she] is confronted, she's all of a sudden a victim…That's insane…History is not going to judge her, or people like her, that are buying the big lie, well. I firmly believe that." pic.twitter.com/OnznlmBwpJ

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 1, 2022

Dear Commons Community,

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) laid into his colleague, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), yesterday after her lawyers characterized her as a victim, not a perpetrator, of the U.S. Capitol attack.

“For Marjorie Taylor Greene to say she’s a victim. It’s amazing how folks like her attack everybody for being a victim,” Kinzinger said on CBS’ “Face The Nation” (see video clip above).

“I mean, she assaulted I think a survivor’s family from a school shooting at some point in D.C.,” he said. “She stood outside of congresswoman’s office and yelled at her through a mail slot and said she was too scared to come out and confront her.

“And then when Marjorie Taylor Greene is confronted, she’s all of a sudden a victim and a poor helpless congresswoman that’s just trying to do her job.”

“That’s insane,” he added.

Kinzinger was seemingly referring to two videos of Greene in 2019 before she was elected to Congress. In one, she is seen persistently harassing Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg near the U.S. Capitol. In another, Greene screams abuse at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez through the mailbox to her office, telling her to “stop being a baby and stop locking your door and come out and face the American citizens that you serve.”

Last week, lawyers representing Greene in a legal battle to keep her name on the primary ballot in Georgia argued in a court filing that Greene “was not a participant in the January 6th violence—she was a victim.”

“She was sequestered for hours, she was scared and confused, and she and her family feared for her life,” lawyers argued, claiming Greene had

A group of Greene’s constituents represented by Free Speech for People, an organization that advocates for fair elections, is trying to disqualify Greene from running for reelection, arguing she violated the Fourteenth Amendment by participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Kinzinger tells it like it is!

Greene just keeps showing the country what an embarrassment she is to the U.S. Congress!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News reported yesterday that school districts in 26 states have banned or opened investigations into more than 1,100 books, according to an April report from PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization that compiled data on such bans from July 2021 to March.

PEN America counted actions that led to the removal or restriction of previously accessible books for at least a day, and found that Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas lead the country in bans. The three states have had more than 1,300 instances of book bans, or 87 percent of the country’s roughly 1,500 banning incidents.

Banned books include “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” a nonbinary author’s autobiography by Maia Kobabe; “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a book by Margaret Atwood where a totalitarian society subjugates women; and “Under My Hijab,” an illustrated children’s book by Hena Khan about women wearing traditional headscarves. Bans also included titles from long-established authors like Toni Morrison, whose books “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye” were pulled from shelves in Florida, Georgia and Kansas.

According to PEN America, 41 percent of the bans are tied to directives from state officials or elected lawmakers to investigate or remove books. This includes some bannings that resulted from an incident in October in which a Republican state lawmaker in Texas sent a list of 850 books to school districts asking them to investigate “material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

Certain bans are the result of legislation that bars school curriculums from including diversity and equity topics, such as the study of racism and inequality and themes relating to sexuality and gender identity. A high-profile example was a Florida law signed in March that prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in the state’s public schools.

Legislation in Georgia awaiting Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature will give principals the power to remove “obscene” books from schools, while a law passed in Tennessee will require school libraries to determine which books are age appropriate.

Nearly 240 bills were introduced in the first three months of this year targeting LGBTQ issues, outpacing the 191 bills introduced in all of 2021.

Below is a list of the states that have initiated the most bans.

Tony

——————————————–

Total bans by state, top 12:

Texas: 713 bans, 16 districts
Pennsylvania: 456 bans, 9 districts
Florida: 204 bans, 7 districts
Oklahoma: 43 bans, 2 districts
Kansas: 30 bans, 2 districts
Indiana: 18 bans, 3 districts
Tennessee: 16 bans, 4 districts
Virginia: 16 bans, 7 districts
Missouri: 15 bans, 6 districts
Georgia: 13 bans, 1 district
New York: 12 bans, 3 districts
Utah: 11 bans, 2 districts

Dear Commons Community,

Americans leaving urban counties reached a new high in 2021 as droves of people settled in suburban and exurban counties.

More than two-thirds of large urban counties saw their populations decline, according to a recent report by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) that used federal statistics. This marked the first time in 50 years that counties with an urban center and more than 250,000 people experienced negative growth as a category.

Key Findings from the report:

• Large urban counties (defined as those with more than 250,000 people that include an urban center) experienced a net loss of 863,000 residents in 2021, the first time this group has experienced negative growth in the aggregate in the past 50 years.
• Sixty-eight percent of large urban counties lost population in 2021, an exceptionally high share by historical standards.
• Only four of the top 15 counties for net domestic migration in 2011 saw positive domestic migration a decade later in 2021, underscoring just how substantially patterns have shifted.
• California’s Inland Empire, the Mountain West and eastern Texas saw some of the most comprehensive population growth in 2021.
• The majority of the fastest growing counties in 2021 were suburban or exurban.
• Over eight in 10 (81 percent) of exurban counties gained population in 2021, outperforming any other group

While some migration patterns had been in effect before the pandemic, COVID-era remote work and delayed immigration accelerated the shift.

“The big key takeaway to me was just how dramatic the effect was in 2021,” August Benzow, the lead researcher on the study, told Yahoo Finance.

Exurban counties saw the biggest increase across the board, with about 80% gaining population. These counties are defined as areas with “a population smaller than 50,000, at least 25 percent of their population in a large or medium-sized suburb, and must be in a metro with a population of 500,000 or higher.”

“While there has been much discussion of a flight to the suburbs, the share of suburban counties growing actually declined,” the report stated. “Instead, exurban and rural counties saw a rising share of counties that gained population, with non-metropolitan rural counties seeing the highest population gain since 2008.”

The share of rural counties with population growth underscored the demand for more remote places.

‘Bigger, cheaper housing’

Housing affordability and spaciousness are likely culprits for the shift away from major cities.

“The tendency is just for people to maybe be attracted to cities when they’re younger and then move out to the suburbs and exurban places to find bigger, cheaper housing when they choose to have families,” Benzow said. “That trend has always sort of defined the map.”

Urban counties saw huge gains in the early 2000s that began petering out after the Great Recession. In 2011, nearly all of the top 15 counties for population growth were large urban counties, whereas just three were in 2021.

“That trend really picked up after COVID hit and during the pandemic as people started, for different reasons, exiting these more urban counties and moving further out,” Benzow said. “Suburbs are the dominant forces of the landscape in terms of being where the cheap affordable big housing is.”

The result of the outward expansion from major metropolitan areas such as New York City and Washington D.C. created a phenomenon that has been called the “donut effect.” As counties farther out from city centers grow their populations, city centers become hollowed out due to departing residents.

However, the influx of people to suburbs and exurbs is more welcome in some places than in others.

In some areas like Billings, Montana, the housing inventory hasn’t been able to keep up with the increased demand, which has driven up housing costs for new and long-time residents alike. Other counties surrounding major cities hope to make the most of the population growth.

“There are definitely some negative effects in places that are getting too many people at once,” Benzow said. “But then there’s also the places that have been on the outskirts of metros and have maybe not seen a lot of populations grow and now are benefiting from having more people coming in and creating more jobs and more economic activity.”

Benzow added that “it’s a mixed bag, and it depends on how places can soak up all these newcomers and to what extent that’s a permanent shift too.”

‘Sunbelt and the Mountain West continued to outshine’

Another population dynamic that showed no indication of slowing down was migration Westward.

For instance, Phoenix’s Maricopa County, Arizona, experienced the most significant population growth despite being classified as a large urban county.

“Overall, the Sunbelt and the Mountain West continued to outshine the rest of the country,” the report stated. “Remote rural counties in eastern Oregon and northern Idaho experienced robust population growth while every single county in Nevada gained population.”

Urban cores in the Great Plains and Midwest generally fared worse, with some exceptions, while all large urban counties lost population in the Northeast. In the South, Wake County in North Carolina, which encompasses Raleigh, bucked the trend by adding 16,651 residents, and metropolitan areas in Texas and Florida largely retained their populations.

How these demographic shifts affect key issues such as labor markets, political maps, and resource distribution has yet to unfold.

“We’re still kind of waiting for the dust to settle” from the upheaval that the pandemic brought about, Benzow said.

“Some of the effects of the pandemic that drove this outmigration are likely temporary, such as young people moving back in with their parents and the more affluent retreating to vacation homes,” Benzow wrote in the report. “However, it seems less likely that those who purchased homes in the suburbs and exurbs during the pandemic, motivated in part by new remote work options, will be selling and moving back to cities.”

I agree with Benzow’s analysis!

Tony