Table of contents for July 6, 2020 in TIME Magazine

THIS JULY 4TH ARRIVES AT A CRITICAL MOMENT for what the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen in this issue calls “the alchemical experiment” of the United States. As the country nears its 250th anniversary, it is being tested by an overdue reckoning on police brutality, white supremacy and systemic racism in all its forms, by a relentless pandemic on the rise again, by a deep economic and unemployment crisis, by a President who continually deploys racist language and stokes rather than calms division. This week, we turned to voices from within and outside TIME to explore the frustrations, hopes and experiences of marginalized communities in a country that claimed equality as its cornerstone but hasn’t delivered for so many. Working with the searing photographs of Haruka Sakaguchi, Anna Purna…

SYRIA’S BASHAR Assad has been counted out before. There were times during his country’s civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and pushed more than 12 million more from their homes, when it seemed the only way forward for all the major parties involved would be for Russia and Iran, Assad’s chief sponsors, to find him a new home and a suitably loyal replacement. He survived in part because of former President Barack Obama’s reluctance to deepen U.S. involvement in Syria. Today Assad’s government is again fully in charge of about two-thirds of his nation’s territory. The isolated city of Idlib, site of a slow-motion humanitarian catastrophe, remains beyond his grasp. Turkey’s military, U.S.-backed Kurds, and jihadists remain active in other areas outside the military’s control. Beyond…

OVER 20 YEARS IN THE FOOD WORLD, I HAVE WATCHED talented chefs and leading restaurants across the U.S. build a New American cuisine. These chefs, typically white and U.S.-born, often treated ingredients like yuzu, turmeric, berbere, poblanos and za’atar as experimental inputs, not parts of other people’s history. As an Indian immigrant, I realized there was more to the stories of these foods. To hear these stories, I spent the past year traveling across the U.S. talking with immigrant, Black and Native American home cooks, chefs, food historians and restaurateurs. In El Paso, Texas, I met Kristal and Emiliano Marentes, a couple from Mexican immigrant families who had recently opened their own restaurant, Elemi. Recalling the tortillas that their mothers used to cross the border to buy in Juárez,…

AMID ALL THE LONG-NEEDED NATIONAL debate following the murder of George Floyd, one element is emerging as particularly polarizing: the discussion over “defunding the police.” The phrase has come to mean a wide variety of possible actions—from shutting down entire police departments to shifting some level of funding from police to social services. It is a discussion that is long overdue and wrapped up in highly disparate viewpoints of policing in the country. The Department of Defense’s experience internationally can offer some insights to this debate. For much of my career as a senior military officer, I was an advocate for what the military calls “soft power.” This is the application of Department of Defense resources for international activities other than combat operations (which we call “hard power”). This…

MARCUS-DAVID PETERS HAD JUST LEFT his day job teaching high school biology and arrived at his second job at a hotel, where he worked as a part-time security guard, when he apparently experienced a psychiatric episode. He left the hotel naked, got into his car, then veered off the side of a highway in Richmond, Va. A police officer, Michael Nyantakyi, who had seen the vehicle crash, saw Peters climb out, and attempted to subdue him with his Taser. When Peters advanced, Nyantakyi fired two shots into the belly of the unarmed, unclothed 24-year-old, killing him. Peters had no criminal record, his family said he had no history of mental illness or drug use, and his death, like those of many killed by police around the country, left those…

From the hotel terrace where he ate breakfast, Phil Pelzer could almost pretend nothing had changed. Yes, the maître d’ had aimed a temperature gun at his head before allowing him near the buffet. And he wouldn’t usually serve himself eggs in gloves and a mask. But the friendly waitresses still addressed him in halting German, and the sun still warmed his pale, tattoo-covered arms. For Pelzer, a plumber from Alsdorf, Germany, who has long taken his annual vacation on the Spanish island of Mallorca, the important things were still in place. “There’s still sun, there’s still sand,” he said. “Maybe it’s not quite so much fun as before, but it’s still a holiday.” On that wan enthusiasm rests a continent’s hopes. Pelzer and his family were among the 400…

President Donald Trump prompts his audience to jeer at the media at his first rally since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, on June 20 at a Tulsa, Okla., arena that was about a third full, per fire-department estimates. At the rally—which originally had been set to take place on Juneteenth—Trump discussed the “radical left,” his commencement speech at West Point and his opponent Joe Biden, but did not mention the name of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked a national reckoning over systemic racism. Photograph by Peter van Agtmael for TIME Inheritance At Juneteenth celebrations in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, the site of one of American history’s worst-ever episodes of racial violence, Deshon and Omarion wear T-shirts depicting their grandmother Leslie Randle—who was alive during…

A FEW DAYS AFTER PROTESTERS PULLED DOWN a statue of British slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, a statue of the Jamaican-born actor Alfred Fagon in the same city was vandalized with bleach. It wasn’t a coincidence; a lot of feelings are attached to what these individuals represent. Pulling down Colston’s statue is not removing history—it is creating a historical moment. You can’t hide behind words like tradition and history if they’re used to neutralize any kind of discussion about change. Around the world, statues have been used to exemplify what power looks like and to maintain systems of power. Now, the public is looking at its representations of people and delving into uncomfortable parts of history. The response to the removal of Colston’s statue has been to ask:…

Diseases and outbreaks have long been used to rationalize xenophobia: HIV was blamed on Haitian Americans, the 1918 influenza pandemic on German Americans, the swine flu in 2009 on Mexican Americans. The racist belief that Asians carry disease goes back centuries. In the 1800s, out of fear that Chinese workers were taking jobs that could be held by white workers, white labor unions argued for an immigration ban by claiming that “Chinese” disease strains were more harmful than those carried by white people. Today, as the U.S. struggles to combat a global pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 120,000 Americans and put millions out of work, President Donald Trump, who has referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” and more recently the “kung flu,” has helped normalize…

MINNEAPOLIS SEEMED FULL OF OPPORtunity when Roxxanne O’Brien moved there in 1987. She was just a kid, but her mother, a teacher, had heard that the school system was stellar and that it was looking for Black teachers. She faced some racism—a neighbor forbade her son from playing with O’Brien because she was Black—but overall, the city seemed like a place where a Black family could succeed. Minnesota was, and still is, majority white, but it was also among the first states in the nation to outlaw school segregation, and its political leaders, including Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale, helped usher in some of the legislative accomplishments of the civil rights era. But over time, O’Brien, now 37, noticed that Minneapolis seemed to have backslid on many of…

MICHELLE MCNAMARA’S SHOCKING DEATH ON APRIL 21, 2016, left two stories unfinished. There was the crime journalist’s yearslong investigation into a serial rapist and murderer she called the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California in the 1970s and ’80s—and about whom she was at work on her first book. And there was the fractured narrative of McNamara’s private life: the loving family unit she’d created with comedian Patton Oswalt and their young daughter in one compartment, and the traumatic history that fueled her furtive late-night research hidden in another. After writing about the case on her popular blog True Crime Diary and in Los Angeles magazine, McNamara spent her final years working out her obsession with the Golden State Killer on the page. When she died, Oswalt enlisted fellow crime…

‘Rayshard Brooks could’ve been my brother, my father, or even my significant other.’PINKY COLE, Atlanta restaurateur and philanthropist, in a June 19 statement on deciding to work with Clark Atlanta University to offer scholarships to the children of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man killed a week earlier by Atlanta Police ‘I think we’re talking about a structural and cultural revolution being pushed by the radical left, the intolerant left.’CHRIS MCDANIEL, Republican Mississippi state senator, speaking June 20 of his opposition to efforts to change the state flag, which is embedded with an image of a Confederate battle flag ‘I TURNED TO MY HUSBAND AND I TOLD HIM, “I’M SAFE.”’BRIAN DE LOS SANTOS, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, after the Supreme Court’s June 18 decision blocking the Trump Administration…

DIED Jean Kennedy Smith Ambassador of generosity IN 1944, TWO PRIESTS ARRIVED AT THE KENNEDY HOME TO inform Joseph Kennedy Sr. and Rose Kennedy that their oldest son had been killed in World War II. Sixteen-year-old Jean, the eighth of their nine children, was devastated. After riding her bicycle to church to pray, she went next to the local hospital—to volunteer. Jean later recalled this as an obvious choice, asking, “What else could I do?” To spend time with Jean Kennedy Smith, who died on June 17 at 92, was to be bowled over by the sheer quantity of positive energy she brought to this world. When I saw her after I became U.S. ambassador to the U.N., she was firm (and wise) in her direction: “Don’t waste any…

Sports are only just restarting after the COVID-19 shutdown. Yet a swell of athlete activism has already risen worldwide. Soccer stars and jockeys kneel for Black Lives Matter. College athletes fight for justice. A Black NASCAR driver seeks to banish the Confederate flag. The days of keeping a social conscience off the field seem gone forever. George Floyd’s death has sparked a movement that will only build momentum as more sports leagues—particularly the NBA and NFL, whose players are majority Black and wield immense influence—attempt to come back. And this resurgence of athlete activism, a spiritual descendant of Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protests during the national anthem in 2016, is destined for more than hashtags and dutiful statements. It’s driven by action. Take Bubba Wallace, the lone Black driver in NASCAR’s…

May 18, 1896: Segregation wins in Plessy v. Ferguson In some ways, the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Louisiana’s statute mandating segregation in all public facilities, was the nail in the coffin. Since 1876, the courts and Congress had eroded the Reconstruction Amendments’ promises to African Americans: suffrage, equal protection of the law and due process before the law. But the Plessy opinion and its embrace of “separate but equal” let African Americans know once and for all that despite those guarantees, their fundamental rights would not be protected. Plessy v. Ferguson was not overturned until 1954, and only because of dedicated work by civil rights attorneys and organizers. From Plessy, we know that the letter of the law, and even the Constitution, is insufficient…

I was off that day, because the company I work for made it a holiday. Because it happens to be the day, 155 years ago, that Union Army General Gordon Granger declared that all enslaved Black people in Texas were now free too. Since then, Juneteenth has shifted from a day Black Texans spent BBQing and storytelling to a day that some Black Americans celebrate, some of us acknowledge, and some of us don’t even know exists. The latter is a damning indictment of the American educational system. If the schools I attended were my only resource for learning about slavery, I would’ve thought that Abraham Lincoln personally went block to block, like an Amazon truck, to deliver freedom—and I went to “good” schools. But in 2020, Juneteenth became…

THE LONG FIGHT TOWARD EQUALITY IN THE U.S. IS OFTEN recounted by listing banner acts of Congress and the Supreme Court. Every child learns about the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But behind those bright headlines, another, less flashy battle for civil rights unfolds. In Executive Orders and court appointments and in the great, hulking machinery of the U.S. regulatory state, presidential administrations have outsize influence over how laws and federal programs are structured, implemented and enforced. While those administrative decisions often take effect without fanfare, they determine how public policy actually works. Who receives benefits and whether marginalized groups truly get equal protection under the law are shaped by the bureaucratic details of rulemaking and lower court injunctions. For decades, these…

BLACK-CLAD SECURITY FORCES ARMED WITH RIOT SHIELDS advance on a mass of peaceful demonstrators. Rubber bullets and gas canisters fly. The embattled head of state, flanked by his top prosecutor and general, emerges from his estate to stake a claim for order. The scene looked like something out of a banana republic, but it unfolded in Washington’s Lafayette Square on June 1. And soon after, an obscure nonprofit got a call from a state attorney general’s office, asking the perennial questions of the Donald Trump era: Can he do that? How can we stop that from happening here? These are questions the nonprofit Protect Democracy was founded to answer. When the call came in (from a state the group declines to name), its lawyers got to work on an analysis…

IN JUNE 2016, THE BROADWAY PHENOMENON Hamilton was filmed in all its syllable-spraying, suede-coat-shaking glory. Director Tommy Kail used Steadicams and camera cranes to capture composer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s definitive cultural artifact of Obama’s America: a multicultural, optimistic narrative in which an immigrant lifts himself out of poverty by “working a lot harder” and “being a self-starter” to become an American Founding Father. Hamilton remains an astonishing triumph in so many ways: as a rebuke to a white-dominated theater world; as a genre-crossing musical monument; as a subversive interrogation of who gets to claim American greatness. It scored a record-setting 16 Tony Award nominations, set box-office records and reimagined theater in the 21st century. But when the film drops on Disney+ on July 3, it will arrive into a world…