A collection of opinionated commentaries on culture, politics and religion compiled predominantly from an American viewpoint but tempered by a global vision. My Armwood Opinion Youtube Channel @ YouTube I have a Jazz Blog @ Jazz
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“U.S. gasoline prices reached a four-year high of $4.18 per gallon, driven by stalled peace talks between the U.S. and Iran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz and restricting Iran’s nuclear program. This has led to a significant increase in oil prices, with Brent crude surpassing $105 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate crude nearing $101 per barrel. The disruption to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital trading route for oil and natural gas, remains a major concern for investors and analysts.
The jump on Tuesday of 1.6 percent was the highest percentage increase in more than a month.
Price of gasoline in the U.S.
Gasoline prices in the United States rose on Tuesday to their highest level in four years as peace talks between the United States and Iran appeared at an impasse.
The average cost for a gallon of regular gasoline is $4.18, according to the AAA motor club. The price at the pump has not been that high since April 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Tuesday’s jump of 1.6 percent was the highest percentage increase in more than a month.
Oil prices continued to climb on Tuesday, with negotiators deadlocked over proposals to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic and restrict Iran’s nuclear program.
The price of crude oil has risen steadily over the past week, as talks have stalled during an uneasy cease-fire. Brent crude, the international benchmark, has posted gains in six of the past seven trading sessions and remains more than 40 percent higher than it was before the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February.
Stock markets are trading near record highs, however, as corporate earnings have been largely resilient. A batch of financial reports expected this week from the largest technology companies, which are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence systems, will be closely watched.
Oil continues to rise.
The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, jumped 4 percent, to above $105 a barrel for July delivery, but slipped to $104 a barrel after the United Arab Emirates said it would leave the OPEC oil cartel next month. Brent’s price has risen about $10 per barrel over the past week. The price for oil deliverable in June rose above $110 per barrel for the first time this month.
West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, rose 5 percent, to around $101 a barrel, for June delivery.
Investors and analysts are focused on the continued disruption to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that is a vital trading route for oil and natural gas that normally carries as much as one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.
Stocks dip ahead of Fed meeting and tech earnings.
The S&P 500 fell 0.6 percent on Tuesday after nudging higher on Monday. Investors await a number of tech company earnings and the Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates this week, which could move markets.
Stocks in Asia, where countries import vast quantities of oil and gas, were mixed. The Kospi index in Korea gained 0.4 percent, but Taiwan’s Sensex index slipped 0.4 percent. The Nikkei 225 in Japan slid 1 percent after the Bank of Japan held interest rates steady, as expected, but some board members argued for a rate increase to deal with inflation risks spurred by the war in Iran.
In Europe, the Stoxx 600, a broad index that tracks the region’s largest companies, fell 0.5 percent.
S&P 500 index
How stocks are trading in the United States
Gasoline prices tick higher.
U.S. gasoline prices rose on Tuesday, jumping to a national average of $4.18 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club. The increase has raised the cost for drivers 40 percent since the war began.
Gas prices don’t move in lock step with crude, usually trailing increases or drops.
Diesel prices have increased even more quickly and stood at $5.46 on Tuesday, up 45 percent since the start of the war.
What they are saying: ‘Exceptional’ conditions for big oil companies.
BP, the British oil giant, reported its latest earnings on Tuesday, comfortably surpassing analysts’ expectations by doubling its profit in the first quarter, to more than $3 billion. “The oil trading contribution was exceptional,” the company said in a filing.
Meg O’Neill, who recently took over as chief executive of BP, said in a statement that she joined the group “at a time when our industry is operating in an environment of conflict and complexity, playing a vital role in keeping energy flowing.”
“The United Arab Emirates announced its departure from OPEC, citing unfair export quotas and a desire to prioritize its national energy production. This decision, expected to weaken OPEC’s influence, comes amid tensions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the cartel’s de facto leader. The UAE aims to increase oil production to meet global energy demands, particularly during the ongoing U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran.
The Gulf government has long complained about the group’s quotas, which officials believe unfairly limited its exports. Its departure is expected to weaken OPEC’s influence.
The headquarters of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.Christopher Pike/Bloomberg
The United Arab Emirates will next month leave OPEC, a cartel of oil-producing countries, its government said on Tuesday, a decision that will weaken the group's influence over global energy markets.
Emirati officials had long floated the idea of quitting the cartel, complaining that its quotas had unfairly curtailed its oil exports.
The government is now expected to increase its energy production to serve its own national interests. Before the war, the Emirates was producing about 3.6 million barrels of oil per day, according to the International Energy Agency — roughly 12 percent of OPEC’s overall production. OPEC countries supplied more than a quarter of the world’s oil before the war with Iran.
A coalition of the world’s largest oil exporters, OPEC was able to steer prices by setting quotas for those countries. But the organization’s power had slipped in recent years as U.S. oil production soared.
The Emirates had belonged to the organization for more than 50 years. Its government decided to leave in light of its “long-term strategy and economic vision,” and because it plans to accelerate investment in its domestic energy production, according to a statement published by WAM, the Emirati state news agency.
The statement referred to the government’s desire to meet the demands of energy markets during a period of geopolitical strain caused by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, which has sent oil and gas prices soaring.
“The world needs more energy. The world needs more resources, and U.A.E. wanted to be unconstrained by any groups,” the country’s energy minister, Suhail Al Mazrouei, said in an interview. The Emirates wanted to exit at a time that would cause minimal disruption to oil markets, he added.
The price of Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, pulled back after the announcement but was still trading 3 percent higher than it was on Monday. Oil has risen more than 40 percent since the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a transit point for a fifth of the world’s oil.
“We will remain as a responsible producer,” Mr. Al Mazrouei said.
The announcement came amid festering tensions between the Emirates and Saudi Arabia — the de facto leader of OPEC. Once close allies, the two Gulf countries have diverged in recent years. The Emirates has increasingly gone its own way in the region, pursuing closer ties to Israel and backing an armed separatist group in southern Yemen, where the Saudis are supporting the government.
The war with Iran appears to have hardened that rift, as Saudi Arabia and the Emirates weigh differing strategies of how to respond to Iran. The Emirates — which hosts a major U.S. military base — has faced thousands of Iranian missile and drone attacks. Emirati officials have spoken of their dissatisfaction with the response of regional multilateral organizations, including the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League, hinting that they would have preferred a harsher unified stance against Iran.
“Every Gulf state had its own policy of containment toward Iran, and all of those containment policies have failed,” Anwar Gargash, a senior Emirati official, said in Dubai on Monday. “All our policies have failed miserably.”
Oil policy has, for years, also been a key source of tensions between the Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
“While Saudi Arabia aims to sustain oil markets for the next century, the U.A.E. feels no such urgency,” said Bachar El-Halabi, senior analyst in Dubai for Argus Media, a commodities research firm. “Because their economy is more diversified, they do not require high oil prices to balance their budgets, allowing them to prioritize volume over price support.”
The Emirates’ decision comes after Ecuador and Qatar left the cartel in 2020 and 2019. But the Emirates is a much larger oil producer than either country, and its decision is more consequential as a result.
Abu Dhabi — now the capital of the U.A.E. — joined OPEC in 1967, several years before the Emirates became a unified country.
“During our time in the organization, we made significant contributions and even greater sacrifices for the benefit of all,” the statement published by the Emirati state news agency said. “However, the time has come to focus our efforts on what our national interest dictates and our commitment to our investors, customers, partners and global energy markets.”
Ismaeel Naar and Rich Barbieri contributed reporting.
Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.“
“Israeli President Isaac Herzog has decided not to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his corruption trial, opting instead to pursue a plea deal through mediation. Herzog believes this approach will foster unity and address the country’s deep divisions, while also considering the broader implications beyond the legal aspects of the case. Netanyahu, who denies wrongdoing, has submitted a pre-emptive pardon request, but the Pardons Department found no legal basis for it without an admission of guilt or resignation.
President Isaac Herzog of Israel has decided not to issue a pardon to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his corruption case at this time, and instead will seek mediation, officials say.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, left, with President Isaac Herzog, in Jerusalem last week.Pool photo by Ilia Yefimovich
For months, President Isaac Herzog of Israel has deliberated over the politically fraught question of whether to grant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon in his long-running corruption trial. It’s a highly contentious issue that has divided Israelis and drawn pressure from President Trump, who has aggressively intervened on Mr. Netanyahu’s behalf.
But Mr. Herzog does not plan to give Mr. Netanyahu a pardon anytime soon. Instead he will first try to initiate a mediation process to reach a plea deal, according to two senior Israeli officials with direct knowledge of Mr. Herzog’s thinking.
Mr. Herzog, the officials said, believes that there are many options beyond the binary pardon-or-no-pardon choice, and that the main role of Israel’s president is to foster unity. So he does not plan to say yes or no to Mr. Netanyahu’s request for a pardon at this stage, the officials said, preferring to try to resolve the issue through negotiations.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the issue is so politically sensitive.
In response to a request for comment, Mr. Herzog’s office said in a statement: “President Isaac Herzog has stated on several occasions that he regards reaching an amicable solution between the parties as an important public interest. As for the decision on the pardon request, the president will act solely in accordance with Israeli law, guided by his conscience, and in the best interests of the state of Israel.”
The prime minister’s office and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Netanyahu, 76, a conservative, has been on trial for almost six years. Charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust, he is battling three separate but interlocking cases centered on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage of him and his family.
Mr. Netanyahu at his trial on corruption charges in 2024. The trial has lasted more than five years, and he has denied all wrongdoing.Pool photo by Stoyan Nenov
He denies all wrongdoing and says he is the victim of a political witch hunt by a liberal “deep state,” finding a kindred spirit in Mr. Trump in that regard. The American president has pressed Mr. Herzog hard for a pardon and called him “disgraceful” and a “weak and pathetic guy” for not already granting one.
Israel is deeply divided over the issue. Polls indicate that about half of all Israelis oppose a pardon. Opinions are split roughly along political lines, with conservatives more sympathetic to the prime minister.
Mr. Herzog is acutely aware that the atmosphere in the country is tense, the officials said, because of the wars in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, and with national elections slated to take place within six months.
Though the president’s role in Israel is largely ceremonial, one of the few powers Mr. Herzog has is granting pardons. A decision either way would be momentous and defining for both his and Mr. Netanyahu’s legacies and for the country’s future trajectory.
The officials who spoke of Mr. Herzog’s plans declined to elaborate on the potential outlines of a deal at this point, before the sides were even on board with mediation.
A plea agreement usually involves an admission of wrongdoing by the defendant and some kind of sanction. Israeli legal experts have said that any plea deal should be conditioned on Mr. Netanyahu agreeing to resign from public office.
Mr. Netanyahu has so far shown no inclination to admit any wrongdoing or to quit political life.
“Netanyahu knows the option of a plea bargain is always available to him,” said Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research group based in Jerusalem. “An admission of guilt, expressing remorse and agreeing to leave — or not to run for — office would be the essence of any plea bargain,” he said, adding, “If you are giving up on a prison sentence, that’s the minimum that should be required.”
A protest against Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem in December. The sign reads, “No pardon.”Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Still, the officials said, Mr. Herzog believes that with good will, the legal landscape leaves room for creativity and innovation and that mediation would be the only way to heal the rifts threatening to tear Israel apart.
Mr. Netanyahu submitted a formal, pre-emptive request for a pardon midtrial last November. Though he said he would prefer to prove his innocence in court, Mr. Netanyahu argued that canceling the trial would help alleviate Israel’s divisions and free him to attend to the crucial affairs of state without the distraction of court hearings.
His request came amid a persistent pressure campaign by Mr. Trump for a pardon. During a visit to Israel in October, the American president turned to Mr. Herzog on the podium in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and said, “Mr. President, why don’t you give him a pardon?” A month later, Mr. Trump made the same request in a letter to Mr. Herzog. Two weeks later, Mr. Netanyahu made his formal request.
Mr. Herzog, who worked as a lawyer before entering politics and previously led the Labor Party, called the pardon request “extraordinary.” Critics — including legal experts, liberals in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s political opponents and nongovernmental watchdogs — said granting it would run counter to the rule of law.
The general rule in Israel, according to legal experts, is that a president can pardon people who have been convicted. They say that a request for a pre-emptive pardon subverts a cornerstone of Israeli democracy: the principle of equality before the law.
In line with procedure, Mr. Herzog sought an opinion from the Pardons Department of Israel’s Ministry of Justice. The department issued a detailed response last month saying there was no legal basis for a pardon unless Mr. Netanyahu admitted some guilt, took responsibility by resigning or was found guilty in court. It said it was unable to conclude or recommend that the presidential authority for pardoning should apply in this case.
But the department also said it did not have the tools to consider the nonlegal aspects of Mr. Netanyahu’s request, such as the implications for national security and the rifts the trial was causing in the country.
The officials with knowledge of Mr. Herzog’s thinking said that he was assessing an alternative opinion submitted by Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right member of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, on behalf of the government.
Mr. Eliyahu’s opinion took the Pardons Department to task for examining the issue through what it described as the narrow, technical lens of the law. It argued that the president had the authority to take a broader approach and a historical view that goes beyond the usual realm of the justice system.
Mr. Herzog visiting the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh, Israel, last month.Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Mr. Herzog is now waiting for his office’s legal counsel to study all the material and make a recommendation, according to the officials. The general assessment in the president’s circles, they said, is that he does have the authority to pardon Mr. Netanyahu but that such a decision would need to pass judicial review and would most likely be challenged in the Supreme Court, creating further strife.
A decision not to pardon Mr. Netanyahu would most likely fire up his supporters before the election with claims that the prime minister was being persecuted by the liberal establishment, and fuel their crusade against the courts.
Mr. Netanyahu has done nothing to suggest that he will meet the usual conditions for a pardon. He appears to be campaigning for the next election rather than thinking of resigning, and if he decides to call more witnesses, he could stretch out the trial for years.
Mr. Herzog is proposing a way out of the conundrum, the officials said, by seeking to hold informal talks under presidential auspices, with the state prosecution and the attorney general on one side and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyer on the other.
At least one prior effort to reach a plea deal in Mr. Netanyahu’s case was unsuccessful. A former Supreme Court president tried to arbitrate an agreement in late 2021 and early 2022 under a previous attorney general who had served the indictment against Mr. Netanyahu, who was then the leader of the opposition.
But the sides failed to agree, and time ran out as the former attorney general was coming to the end of his term.
Asked if those favoring or opposing a pardon might see a negotiation as weakness or a cop-out, the officials dismissed that as a factor. Even if there is only a slight chance of success, they said, it is worth trying to resolve the predicament without acrimony.
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.“
“She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ and helped to develop critical race theory, now her life’s work is under attack by Washington’s war on ‘woke’. As her memoir is published, the legal scholar explains why she’ll never stop speaking truth to power
When Donald Trump returned to office in January last year, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding for any school teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A raft of other orders mandated the termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) personnel, offices and training across the federal government. Federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid or eliminate, including “intersectional” and “intersectionality”. All of which has amounted to 40 years of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work being literally and deliberately erased.
For decades, the 66-year-old legal scholar has been naming things that powerful people would prefer remain unnamed. In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise. Around the same time, she was one of a group of African American scholars who created the framework that came to be known as “critical race theory”, which sought to examine how racism is embedded in legal systems rather than simply enacted through individual prejudice. Now, Crenshaw’s ideas are being contested like never before.
“Unfortunately, I did see this coming,” she tells me over a video call from the California offices of the African American Policy Forum, the thinktank she co-founded. We are calling to discuss Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, but the conversation soon shifts. “The fact that they are targeting this … it is because they understand the power of these ideas, the power of this history.” Behind her, posters reading “History repeats when we forget” and “The freedom to learn is the freedom to live” hang alongside shelves of critical race theory texts and Black history books the likes of which have, in some states, become politically radioactive.
What makes the intensity of this backlash striking is how recently Crenshaw’s work entered mainstream public consciousness. Until a few years ago, ideas such as intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely within the domain of legal scholarship, academic debate and activist vernacular. It wasn’t until 2020, when a loose coalition of conservative activists, media figures and politicians began elevating them as political flashpoints, that they were thrust into the centre of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this snowballed into all-out war against “woke”, with critical race theory as its ultimate bogeyman. It became a byword for liberal overreach, a catch-all for everything that was wrong with the US in the eyes of the conservative right.
“Trump jumped on a bandwagon started by a few rightwing propagandists, claiming that intersectionality and critical race theory were anti-white, anti-male and anti-American,” she says. “Fox News amplified this, and within weeks, these ideas were mentioned more than they had been in the previous four decades.”
Crenshaw, true to form, is not shy about naming what she considers to be the problem. “One of the keys of fascism is control of the nation’s narrative,” she says. “That, alongside creating a group of people that are legitimate targets of exclusion – an us and them – allows for the autocrat to be seen as the embodiment of the essential nation. And in the United States, we come prefabricated for that dimension of fascism to set into our politics.
“Why is it that so many white Americans are willing to continue to vote for a president that is demolishing democracy, so long as he’s willing to affirm them effectively as true Americans?” she continues. “Because of the idea that those over there are different from us. They don’t really belong. That is the way fascism works.”
It is clearly in Crenshaw’s DNA to confront injustice, as is evidenced in Backtalker, which chronicles her journey from witnessing inequality as a child to challenging entrenched power structures in law, academia and politics. “Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant,” she writes. “There is BS that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second‑class status as the price of belonging sickens me.”
Born in Ohio in 1959, on the verge of the civil rights movement, Crenshaw grew up at a time of expanding yet restricted possibilities. She watched that tension unfolding in real time, in the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr on television, and in discussions around the kitchen table, where her parents, dedicated anti-racist activists, treated politics as a daily practice. “As a Black child, I had early inklings that differences would matter in my life, even if I couldn’t name them,” she says.
Crenshaw at home in New York. Photograph: Lelanie Foster
One such inkling came when her family moved to the predominantly white suburb of Canton, Ohio. “When we arrived, there were children playing everywhere,” she remembers. “I was excited.” But almost overnight, the children vanished. Neighbours treated the new family as intruders and shouted slurs when they walked by; an estate agent knocked on their door urging a quick sale.
Perhaps the most formative incident came when she was five years old, and was the only girl in her all‑white class who was not given the opportunity to play the princess, Thorn Rosa, in a school performance. “Thorn Rosa marks the stirring of my nascent awareness that my colour and my girlness were linked,” she writes.
“You push that doubt down until something happens that forces it open,” she tells me. “You realise that how others see you will shape your experiences. And that realisation is traumatic.”
What mattered, she says, was that those moments were not dismissed. “I credit my parents for taking them seriously,” she says. “They refused to minimise what I experienced, even as a young child. That affirmation was freeing, it told me my feelings were grounded in reality and gave me permission to understand them.”
It was tragedy that would, in many ways, become the making of the young Crenshaw. She was eight years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968 – a before-and-after moment in her life. The following day, young Black activists in Canton directed schoolchildren to the local church for a hastily organised memorial service. Crowded into pews, everyone was silent when the activists asked if anyone had anything to say about Dr King. No one moved. It was Crenshaw who broke the silence, exhorting the crowd not to let his death be the end of the freedom struggle. “We pick up where he left off,” she recalls saying. “We continue to walk in his footsteps. They can’t kill his dream for us – not if we won’t let them.”
Further devastation followed. A year later, her father, an apparently healthy 34-year-old, died suddenly, leaving the family reeling. Not long after, her older brother Mantel was shot and killed while at university. The circumstances were never fully explained, and justice never came. She writes of that period with unflinching candour: “Happiness was dead.” These losses left an indelible mark, sharpening her awareness of the unevenness of justice in a world already structured by racial and social inequities.
Crenshaw arrived at Cornell University in 1978, to a campus shaped by the afterlives of civil rights struggle and Black student organising. It was there that she entered into a relationship with a fellow student that became physically abusive. In one incident, he beat her and tried to throw her from the window of her 10th-floor dorm room.
“We were eye-to-eye when he threw the first punch,” she writes in Backtalker. “Pressed out of denial, I woke to the fact that he was going to beat the daylights out of me.”
What followed unsettled her understanding of community more profoundly than the violence itself. Rather than rallying around her, many of her peers – fellow Black students and friends – closed ranks around him. To involve authorities, they told her, would be to expose a Black man to a system already predisposed against him. The implication was that her suffering as a woman should be subordinated to a broader racial solidarity.
“The way that sexual violence against Black women has long been justified – framing us as unlikely ever to say no to any sexual encounter – you can know this historically, but then when you experience it interpersonally, you have to grapple with the fact that more people in your own community will come to the defence of your abuser than you,” she says. “It really presses the question of ‘what is solidarity supposed to look like?’” she continues. “What does it mean to defend the ‘we’, when that ‘we’ often excludes me?”
Crenshaw returns to that question – of the instability of “we”– again and again. From arriving at Harvard Law School and being called the N-word on her first day, to being directed to enter the university’s exclusive Fly Club through the back door because she was a woman – the Black male friends she was with, rather than challenge the slight, urged her not to make a scene. What she would later call “asymmetrical solidarities” revealed themselves in practice: loyalty expected but not returned. “I cannot bring myself to ride or die for a politics that won’t ride or die for me,” she writes of the incident.
In legal terms, the problem came into focus when Crenshaw came across a 1976 case in which an African American woman was denied the ability to bring a discrimination claim against her employer on the grounds that the law could recognise race or gender, but not both at once. Her experience – specifically of being discriminated against as a Black woman – fell through the cracks and the case was thrown out of court. In 1989, Crenshaw identified this form of compound discrimination and gave it a name: intersectionality. Around the same time, she was part of a group of scholars developing what would become critical race theory, a broader attempt to understand how racism is a structural part of the legal system.
It is a lesson that would resurface, years later, in a very different arena. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the language of “we” returned with renewed force – this time, as a promise. For many, Obama’s election felt like a rupture with the past. But for Crenshaw, it quickly raised a familiar question.
“I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime,” she says, of that initial hope after Obama’s victory. “It felt like a miracle. My mother and I celebrated together on the phone – I was dancing on a table at Stanford and she was doing the same in her retirement facility. For her especially, it was a dream come true.”
But symbolism, Crenshaw suggests, has limits, particularly when it is used as a substitute for structural change. She found his reticence to address racial injustice head-on frustrating. Very quickly, the terms of Obama’s political viability became clear.
“He had been framed as post-racial, beyond these issues,” she says. “And that framing became a constraint on what he could say and how directly he could address racial injustice.”
Even when Obama did address racial inequality more explicitly in his second term – most notably after the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 – the focus, she felt, remained narrow. The White House’s response, My Brother’s Keeper, was launched as a nationwide initiative to expand opportunities for Black boys and young men. Its intentions were widely praised. Crenshaw was not convinced, and she took the administration to task directly.
“What was being discussed – Black boys and boys of colour– while important, came at the expense of girls,” Crenshaw says. “Black girls and girls of colour were suffering many of the same issues.”
Through the African American Policy Forum, she launched the #WhyWeCantWait campaign, calling for the programme to be expanded to include girls and young women of colour. Prominent Black feminist leaders and advocates including Brittney Cooper, Barbara Arnwine, Lisalyn Jacobs and Fatima Goss Graves threw their support behind it. An open letter, signed by more than 1,000 women and girls, urged the administration to realign the initiative with the principles of inclusion and shared fate that had long underpinned struggles for racial justice. The groundswell widened further with a second petition backed by high-profile white feminists including Gloria Steinem, V (formerly Eve Ensler) and Jane Fonda.
Crenshaw was invited to the White House to discuss the initiative, but the encounter only underscored how little space there was for the argument she was making. She recalls being interrupted by Obama’s chief of staff, who, she says, incredibly, told her she perhaps didn’t understand the meaning of intersectionality. Afterwards, she found herself shut out of the administration.
“It was uncomfortable to find myself outside the flow of support,” she says. “I never liked being at odds with my community. But if speaking out means sometimes being at odds with people I love, well, so be it. I still love them. I hope they still love me.”
More recently, though, the backtalking has not been against people she loves. The whiplash between the 44th and 45th presidents – the cautious optimism of Obama and the aggressive rollback under Trump – made that unavoidable.
Since 2020, the backlash has metastasised, Crenshaw argues, into an all-out assault not just on ideas, but on the very existence of Black people and women in positions of authority. “Our very presence in power is treated as preferential treatment,” she says. “This narrative of reverse discrimination has been central to the attack from the start.”
In response, she has not retreated but doubled down on her work with the African American Policy Forum, mobilising coalitions, supporting grassroots activists and amplifying voices that challenge the distortion and erasure of race and gender in public life. She continues to insist that the frameworks she helped build are necessary for understanding how inequality operates today.
This febrile political climate has brought a rising tide of political violence into everyday life in the US. The 2021 Capitol Hill riot, the assassination attempts on Trump, the 2025 targeted killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. I ask her whether her physical safety is now something she worries about. She demurs.
“There’s a long history in this country of using the threat of violence to keep people under heel,” she says. “The civil rights movement succeeded despite that terror. One cannot ignore that history. One cannot think that those forces that are willing to break this country rather than share it, don’t have descendants who won’t carry forward the same ideas.
“So yes, it’s a reality, and of course I take steps to be safe,” she continues. “But that is the cost of backtalking to the forces of autocracy.”
Middle East crisis live: Palestinians vote in first elections since outbreak of war; Israel strikes Lebanon despite ceasefire
“Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are voting in local elections, the first since the Gaza war began in October 2023. The elections feature candidates aligned with Fatah or running as independents, with no Hamas-affiliated lists. The White House has shifted its strategy towards sustained economic pressure on Iran, hoping to fracture its leadership and prevent a new consolidation of power.
Elections taking place in the occupied West Bank and also central area of Gaza
Local elections begin in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Palestinians cast ballot in West Bank and Gaza in first elections since outbreak of war
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the central area of Gaza are casting ballots today for local elections in the first vote since the Gaza war.
Over 1 million people are eligible to vote, including more than 70,000 people in Gaza’s Deir el-Balah area, according to the Ramallah-based Central Elections Commission.
Local elections begin in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
An AFP journalist visiting stations in the West Bank said turnout was low this morning, with the elections commission reporting a turnout of 15% so far.
Most of the electoral lists are aligned with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party or feature candidates running as independents. There are no lists affiliated with Hamas, which controls nearly half of the Gaza Strip.
The Fatah party is the driving force behind the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the latter of which governs the West Bank in a tense partnership with occupying Israel and is deeply unpopular among Palestinians. Many in the West Bank continue to face relentless settler attacks, with two Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, killed on Tuesday after Israeli settlers opened fire near a school in the village of al-Mughayyir.
Today’s vote is the first Palestinian election to be held since the Gaza war began in October 2023.
Nearly eight weeks after Donald Trump launched his assault on Iran, the White House has shifted from a strategy of shock-and-awe bombardments and leadership decapitation to a plan of sustained economic pressure as it tests the will of a regime practiced over decades at wars of attrition.
Since the negotiations stalled, the White House has begun to shift its messaging to say it is willing to wait to strike a more durable deal with Iran – despite the growing economic toll inflicted on the world economy by the closure of the strait of Hormuz. The reason, senior officials have said, is because the joint US-Israeli strikes were so successful that they have fractured Iran’s leadership and prevented a new consolidation of power.
“Don’t rush me,” Trump told reporters on Thursday when asked how long he was willing to wait for Iran to respond to the US’s latest ceasefire proposal. “We were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years. We were in Iraq for many, many years … I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”
Reminded that he told people in the US that the war would end in four to six weeks, Trump added: “Well, I hoped that, but I took a little break.”
The whiplash of Trump’s diplomacy – as well as the growing cost of the war – has unsettled career officials at the Pentagon and state department, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as well as foreign allies who increasingly view the US as a destabilising force.
The White House’s latest strategy coalesced earlier this week during a meeting of Trump’s national security team – including Vance and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state: continued economic pressure on Iran to open the strait while waiting for Tehran to provide a unified response to US offers for a ceasefire deal.
But the lack of a sustained strategy to end the Iranian war – and in particular to address the closure of the strait of Hormuz – has convinced US allies that the White House is running out of ideas to manage the threat from Tehran.“
