Race and Ethnicity

Political Campaigns Have More Data On You Than You Might Think

Technology and social media have increased digital footprints, meaning campaigns can know a lot about a person before they even contact them.

It’s now midterm election season, and millions of voters are getting tons of emails, texts and phone calls they might not have even signed up for.

Political calls, texts and emails are spamming voters everywhere, and it’s getting easier and easier for political campaigns and causes to know exactly who they should reach out to.

While robocalls have been used in politics for decades, the growth of tech and social media giants — and an ever-increasing data footprint — means campaigns can know a ton about a person before they even call.

When someone registers to vote, they get a voter file. That includes their address, phone number and usually their email. Most states allow political campaigns to access that info.

University at Buffalo professor and political communications expert Jacob Neiheisel says many political campaigns build and grow lists, and those often snowball over time and get passed down — or sold — from one campaign to another.

“If you don’t have a lot of resources as a candidate or as a campaign, you usually are going to have access to the voter file,” Neiheisel said. “A lot of your targeting from is just the voter file. If you are somewhat better resourced or you can draw upon the resources of your political party, you’re going to have access to things that the party has collected internally, and also you’re going to have access to, again, resource and party dependent data from private firms.”

Those private firms take things a step further. They’re able to find out a ton of other things about people from legal, relatively public sources like credit bureaus and IP addresses.

“You are able to reach out to them on the campaign side and then give these organizations hundreds of fields of demographics from race and ethnicity, age, to things like income, education, level, hobby and interest gun ownership, whether they’re a veteran or not,” said Paul Westcott, L2 execuitive vice president. “Then models — are they likely to be supportive or against around 120 different issues?”

Westcott, from the nonpartisan political data firm L2, says a lot of this information may feel individual and personal, but that campaigns are often using it as part of broader efforts to reach certain kinds of voters.

“This voter, Jean Smith, is at 123 Main Street, and therefore is at this cookie, at this IP address, and this is their device ID,” Westcott said. “So therefore, they are a voter. Let’s say they’re a high propensity Democratic primary voter, and you really want to talk to that person on election day to turn out the vote. What the campaign is going to do is going to use L2 to target not just that individual, but thousands or tens of thousands or maybe millions of people who look like that person and then be able to target them for digital advertising.”

It’s a big guessing game that ties back to a revolution in data and targeted marketing. Online tech giants like Facebook and Google are able to use data on what individuals search, react to, and watch to develop a much more detailed profile about you.

Laura Edelson, a postdoctoral researcher in computer science and co-director of the New York University’s project Cybersecurity for Democracy, has seen this come up in her research.

“If you wanted to run a broadcast TV ad and you had to advertise to everyone who was watching ‘Friends’ or the nightly news or whatever, but platforms like Facebook introduced really narrow targeting parameters where advertisers could target people based on their interest in dogs or or in pickup trucks,” Edelson said.

There are some limits here. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission issued a $5 billion fine against Facebook for privacy violations relating to data improperly accessed by the data firm Cambridge Analytica. The firm provided data to Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in 2016.

But most accessing of this data is totally legal, and it’s led to a push for more oversight or regulations on your personal info.

“These are very powerful tools, and in the hands of the wrong person, a very powerful tool becomes a weapon,” Edelson said. “I think that’s why we do need the ad platforms to be a little bit more careful about who they allow to use their platform and in what way they allow them to be used.”

But for all of this work to gather data and reach out, it’s worth noting this may only swing a small number of people, which could make a big difference.

“So much of what goes on in a campaign, particularly a big national campaign, is kind of baked in,” Neiheisel said. “The reason why these operations are so sophisticated is that there’s so very, very little room to maneuver, and so you were really looking at the margins here. So we’re putting a lot of resources into finding little tiny advantages that may or may not exist out there. You look for any little advantage you can find, and this is where the data operations come in.”

So, what can a person do to protect themselves here? Edelson says she thinks this shouldn’t be an individual responsibility issue and that policy changes can offer a solution.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to do so much,” Edelson said. “The onus shouldn’t be on them, so I think one thing that we all can do is contact our elected representatives and tell them that we support a national privacy law that would give consumers a little bit more protection from having this data gathered about them in the first place.”

But in the meantime, the options are pretty limited. If a political campaign is using a larger data provider or if the message a person got actually ties to a campaign, it’s probable they can unsubscribe.

Westcott says L2 has an opt-out system but that even if a person doesn’t get messages from their affiliates, they’re probably not out of the woods yet, especially as election day is getting close.

“There’s data everywhere, and people, if you’ve ever donated to a campaign, and certainly if you are a high propensity voter, you are going to get calls and texts, and they’re going to come from many, many, many different sources, even if you opt out,” Westcott said.

So, to get out of the woods and freed from unwanted calls and mail, a person may have to go into the woods… literally.

“How do I stop the phone calls?” Neiheisel said. “Basically, it boils down to… advice you would give people going off the grid.”

Source: newsy.com

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At Wells Fargo, a Quest to Increase Diversity Leads to Fake Job Interviews

Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews.

For many open positions, employees would interview a “diverse” candidate — the bank’s term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank’s yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else.

He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the “fake interviews” were “inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong.”

Wells Fargo said Mr. Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee.

Mr. Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank’s wealth management unit to interview “diverse” candidates — even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate. Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it.

damaged the bank’s reputation and led to more than $4.5 billion in fines.

qualified Black candidates. He later apologized for the comment when the memo became public in September.

Following Mr. Scharf’s directive, Wells Fargo adopted a formal policy in requiring that a diverse slate of candidates would have to be interviewed for all open jobs paying more than $100,000 a year.

That August, Wells Fargo paid nearly $8 million to settle a claim by the Department of Labor that it had discriminated against more than 30,000 Black job applicants for positions in banking, sales and support roles.

Wells Fargo had already been trying to increase diversity. In 2013, a group of Black financial advisers at Wells Fargo sued the bank for racial discrimination, saying they were corralled into poor neighborhoods and kept away from opportunities to win new clients and partner with white financial advisers.

The bank settled the case in 2017. Wells Fargo paid nearly $36 million to about 320 members of the class-action lawsuit, and pledged to “take actions designed to enhance opportunities for employment, earnings, and advancement of African American financial advisors and financial advisor trainees.”

sued by Black coaches, who claimed they were subject to “sham” interviews.

“Well-intentioned people created these initiatives, but when they hit the ground the energy was devoted not to implementing them but finding a way to get around them,” said Linda Friedman, the lawyer for the Black financial advisers involved in the 2017 Wells Fargo settlement.

Mr. Bruno joined Wells Fargo in 2000 and worked his way up to market leader for Wells Fargo Advisors in Jacksonville, Fla. He oversaw 14 branches of the bank’s wealth management operation. He saw himself as a champion of diversity.

Mr. Bruno was mainly responsible for filling two categories of jobs — financial advisers and financial consultants, who work alongside advisers. He said that he was often told to conduct interviews with Black candidates for the financial consultant positions, which were lower-paying jobs. In most such cases, Wells had no intention of hiring those people because either he or his superiors had already picked someone for the job, Mr. Bruno said.

Mr. Bruno said he eventually refused to conduct the interviews. “I got a Black person on the other side of the table who has no shot at getting the job,” he told his bosses.

Barry Sommers, the chief executive of Wells Fargo’s wealth and investment management business, said that fake interviews wouldn’t even have been necessary for the financial consultant positions that Mr. Bruno was hiring for. Their salaries, Mr. Sommers said, fell below the $100,000 threshold that required a diverse slate of candidates to be interviewed per Wells Fargo’s 2020 policy.

“There is absolutely no reason why anyone would conduct a fake interview,” Mr. Sommers said. Rather than tracking the identities of interviewees, the bank focused on the results, and “the numbers are getting better,” he said.

Of the nearly 26,000 people the bank hired in 2020, 77 percent were not white men, Ms. Burton said. And last year, 81 percent of the 30,000 people hired were not white men, she said. She declined to specify how many of those new hires were for jobs above the $100,000 salary threshold.

But six current and former Wells Fargo employees, including Mr. Bruno, said that fake interviews were conducted for many types of positions. Three current employees said they conducted fake job interviews or knew of them as recently as this year.

In 2018, Tony Thorpe was a senior manager for Wells Fargo Advisors in Nashville, overseeing 60 advisers. Mr. Thorpe said his boss and the human resources manager overseeing his area both told him that if he found a financial adviser worth recruiting, and that adviser wanted to bring a sales assistant along, it was permissible — but the assistant’s job had to be posted publicly.

Mr. Thorpe, who retired from Wells Fargo in 2019, said he was instructed to reach out to colleges and business associations in the area where he could meet nonwhite candidates for the assistant job. Mr. Thorpe said he never conducted a fake interview, but was required to document that he had tried to find a “diverse pool” of candidates, even though he knew exactly who would be getting the job.

“You did have to tell the story, send an email verifying what you’ve done,” Mr. Thorpe said. “You just had to show that you were trying.”

Ms. Burton said that she couldn’t speak to practices under Wells Fargo’s prior management, but that the bank kept records of every job interview. The record-keeping is necessary because the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the nation’s top banking regulator, conducts periodic audits. While the O.C.C. doesn’t impose its own diversity standards for banks, it does check to make sure they’re following state and federal laws, including anti-discrimination laws.

Don Banks, 31, a Black wealth manager living in Monroe, La., was contacted by Wells Fargo twice before he was hired. In 2016 and 2017, a human resources representative from the bank told Mr. Banks that he had advanced past an initial interview round for a financial adviser trainee position and would be getting a call from a manager. Both times, no one called.

Mr. Banks had been submitted to fake interviews, according to a former employee who was a manager in the area where Mr. Banks had applied, and who participated in the hiring process involving Mr. Banks’s application. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in the industry.

Mr. Banks was eventually hired in 2018 by Wells Fargo in a more junior position. Two years later, he was laid off during cutbacks in the pandemic.

“It doesn’t sound like a great experience,” Mr. Sommers, the wealth management chief executive, said. “It shouldn’t have happened that way.”

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The End of the All-Male, All-White Cockpit

Then the university called off its partnership with the flight school, making it difficult for Ms. Percy to get the pilot training she needed in time to graduate, so she switched to a concentration in aviation management. It wasn’t until she arrived at the Lt. Col. Luke Weathers Jr. Flight Academy, which was started by the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals, in May 2020 that she began flight training in earnest. Now, Ms. Percy expects to receive her airline pilot certification within a year, with plans to pursue a Ph.D after that.

While flight school can be expensive, the payoff is improving. There were an estimated 164,000 certified active airline pilots in the U.S. last year, slightly fewer than there were in 2019, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Desperate airlines looking to staff up have started offering early-career pilots higher salaries, bigger bonuses and better schedules. A student can earn a six-figure salary within a decade of graduating, sometimes much sooner, and a senior pilot at a major airline can easily earn several hundred thousand dollars per year. But the price is still daunting, especially in an industry that seems to swing so easily between good times and bad.

Historically, the armed forces offered a less-expensive path into the field. But the military has long struggled with pilot diversity and shortages, too. Still, the Air Force has slowly improved diversity among active duty pilots: Today, about 8 percent of those pilots are women and about 13 percent are nonwhite. While nowhere near reflective of the American public, those figures are still better than the numbers for commercial airlines.

But the reason for racial inequality among pilots that is most commonly cited by experts and instructors is perhaps the most apparent: A lack of role models and exposure has played a central role in keeping many women and people of color out the field.

“Historically, we’ve seen that a lot of our aviators come out of the military or have family members that were pilots or are somehow involved in the industry,” said Allison McKay, the chief executive of Women in Aviation International. “If you don’t have either of those two things, you may not even have considered flying.”

The group is working to change that. Every year, the nonprofit hosts an annual “Girls in Aviation Day,” with events around the world connecting pilots and other aviation professionals with children and students. The Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals and groups representing other underrepresented groups, including Latinos or the L.G.B.T.Q. community, are making similar efforts to expose more people to the field.

That might have been helpful to Ricki Foster. Growing up in Jamaica, she had never seriously considered a career in aviation.

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Corporate Board Diversity Increased in 2021. Some Ask What Took So Long.

People pushing for greater diversity on boards say companies need to expand their searches beyond current and former senior business executives, and emphasize skills over title.

“If you look around, everyone wants a sitting or recently retired C.E.O. who’s done very similar things to what their company’s trying to do sometime in the last decade,” said Jennifer Tejada, chief executive of PagerDuty, a software company, and a member of the boards of Estée Lauder and UiPath, a software company. “That’s a very narrow lens to look through.”

Under her leadership, PagerDuty’s eight-member board has just two white directors. She emphasized that she hadn’t had to settle for lesser candidates to have a diverse board. Her directors, she noted, include the dean of engineering at the University of Michigan, Alec D. Gallimore, who is Black; Bonita Stewart, who is a board partner at Gradient Ventures, an investment arm of Google, and the first Black woman to be a vice president at Google; and Rathi Murthy, who is Indian and a top technology executive at Expedia Group.

To ensure there are enough board candidates from a variety of backgrounds, companies need to do a better job promoting more people from underrepresented groups into senior roles, some executives said. That is especially true of increasing the number of Hispanic board members, said Elena Gomez, the chief financial officer of Toast, a software company, who is on PagerDuty’s board.

“What we need to do is get more Latinx people into those management roles, and that starts deeper in how you recruit and train,” Ms. Gomez said.

But the push to make boards more diverse has led to a backlash by some conservatives and libertarians. Some are suing to overturn the California laws, arguing that the state is illegally restricting the right of shareholders to select and vote on directors based on merit and skill.

“A coercive quota is being imposed on these companies,” said Daniel Ortner, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation. The foundation is representing the National Center for Public Policy Research, a group that says it promotes free-market policies, in a lawsuit challenging the law that requires directors from underrepresented groups.

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Can Progress on Diversity Be Union-Made?

Mr. Erlich is one of the authors of a book addressing the history of racial exclusion in the building trades. He notes that the original Boston Residents Jobs Policy in 1983 came out of the fight by Black workers for jobs on building sites. But it had to include residents and women to gain white political support and overcome the opposition of union leadership.

“There is a legacy of racism, which by no means has been eliminated,” Mr. Erlich said. “I respect folks in the community that complain that things are not changing fast enough. And they are not changing fast enough.” Still, he argues, unions realize that “they need to become less homogeneous and reflect the demographics of the city.”

And he warns that the nonunion contractors that will hire workers of color do not generally provide training or a career path, as unions do. The work is often more dangerous, he says, and it pays nothing like the wages in union shops.

The Limits of Patience

Workers of color who make it into the unions acknowledge the opportunities that membership provides. On a sunny October afternoon in Dorchester, a roomful of apprentices and journeymen and women, assembled by Local 103 to talk to a reporter, lauded the union’s efforts to broaden its ranks and called for patience.

“Diversity doesn’t happen overnight,” said Sam Quaratiello, a recent graduate of the apprenticeship program who is of Asian descent. Walter Cowhan, a Black journeyman, argued that the union had become far more diverse in his 20 years of experience. Still, he said, if workers of color are to become more prominent on job sites, training is essential. “If you don’t prepare the work force, directly bringing in Black and brown workers could undermine the whole process,” he said.

But among some of those pushing for racial equity, patience is wearing thin. Mr. Watson offered the words of the Black author and activist James Baldwin: “You’ve always told me it takes time,” Mr. Baldwin said in the 1989 documentary “The Price of a Ticket.” “How much time do you want, for your progress?”

The building unions are “huge obstacles” to that progress, said Angela Williams-Mitchell, who heads the Boston Jobs Coalition, a community organization dedicated to increasing opportunities for people of color. “They do not open their doors to create access for communities that have historically been excluded.”

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Torn From Parents in the Belgian Congo, Women Seek Reparations

BRUSSELS — The girls were as young as 2, some still breastfeeding, and no older than 4 when they were taken from their mothers.

Like thousands of other mixed-race children born under colonial rule in Belgian Congo, the five girls, the children of African mothers and European fathers, were taken from their homes by the authorities and sent to religious schools hundreds of miles away, growing up in poverty and suffering from malnutrition and physical abuse.

The victims of a segregationist policy of the Belgian authorities who ruled a vast territory in Africa that now includes Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, they kept their childhoods a secret for decades, even from their own families. Now women in their 70s, they listened to their stories being told in public by their lawyers on a recent morning in a small courtroom in Brussels packed with dozens of spectators.

“Their names, their origins and identities were stripped from them,” said one of the women’s lawyers, Michèle Hirsch. “What they shared with me is not in the history books.”

Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese leader it helped overthrow in a coup that led to his death, and revamped a museum that celebrated colonialism. Last year, the authorities removed some statues of King Leopold II, whose rule over Congo led to the deaths of millions through forced labor and famine. King Philippe of Belgium has also expressed his “deepest regrets for the wounds of the past,” but stopped short of apologizing.

Stolen Generations,” who as “half-caste” children were taken away from their families and put into church-run compounds from the 1900s to the 1970s.

In Canada, a national commission concluded that a government’s residential school program that separated at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their families from 1883 to 1996, amounted to “cultural genocide.” The discoveries earlier this year of hundreds of unmarked graves of children who died in the schools has prompted a new reckoning over the government’s historical policies.

The number of children taken away from their families in Belgium’s former Central African territories is in the thousands, but historians are hesitant to provide a firm estimate. What is clear is that mixed-race children were seen as a threat, according to Delphine Lauwers, the lead archivist of Résolution Métis, a state-run research project created after the Belgian Parliament apologized in 2018.

“Interbreeding was upsetting a binary colonial system whose basis was the superiority of the white race over the Black race,” Ms. Lauwers said. “So the Belgian state decided to confine the mixed-race children in an in-between, a liminal space, where they were excluded from both categories.”

The five plaintiffs grew up together in a Catholic school in Katende, in what is the province of Kasai in the Democratic Republic of Congo today. Ms. Tavares Mujinga, one of the plaintiffs, said she and her fellow students lived like prisoners, with insufficient clothing and food. In letters sent to the regional authorities in the early 1950s and seen by The New York Times, the nuns warned about a lack of food, and the insalubrious dormitory and canteen.

Ms. Tavares Mujinga said a scar on her forehead comes from a nun who hit her when she was 5, and that the scars on her legs are from ulcers she got from malnutrition. But the deepest scars are psychological, she said. When Ms. Tavares Mujinga came back to her family as a teenager, her mother told her she had been forced to abandon her to avoid reprisals from the authorities.

Following Congo’s independence in 1960, some of the youngest children were abandoned to a militant group after the nuns left the area. Many of the girls were raped, according to Ms. Bintu Bingi.

“These are not stories you can tell your children,” Ms. Bintu Bingi said in an interview as she recalled how she opened up to her daughter in recent years. “The Belgian state destroyed us, psychologically and physically.”

The women moved to Belgium in the 1980s and later and all live there, except for one who moved to France.

Some legal experts are divided on whether the forced separation of the mixed-race children from their mothers amounts to crimes against humanity. Ms. Hirsch, the plaintiff’s lawyer, argued that it did, because Belgium state had tried to wipe out the civil existence of métis children.

Emmanuel Jacubowitz, a lawyer representing the Belgian state at the hearing, said the authorities didn’t deny that the policy was racist and segregationist, but that it wasn’t seen as violating fundamental rights at the time.

Eric David, a professor of international law at the University of Brussels, said it was a stretch to call the practice crimes against humanity. “There was deportation, detention, and what could amount to torture,” Mr. David said. “But there were no slavery, murder, or systemic rapes in those schools.”

Mr. Jacubowitz added that hundreds of similar requests for compensation could follow.

“It may be that Belgium’s fear is to open the tap for reparations,” said Ms. Lauwers, the archivist.

Déborah Mbongu, the granddaughter of Ms. Tavares, said she struggled to understand why Belgium was so reluctant to pay. The plaintiffs say they didn’t sue for money, but Ms. Mbongu, 23, said it was essential her grandmother and others were recognized as victims.

“For our shared history,” she said, “a crime must lead to reparations. It’s just fundamental.”

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Racial Bias Skewed Small-Business Relief Lending, Study Says

But Sergey Chernenko, an associate professor of finance at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, who was not involved in Dr. Howell’s research, said the new paper aligned with his own findings on race-based gaps in Paycheck Protection Program lending. At an economic conference next month, he will present a paper that concluded that Black-owned businesses were disproportionately left out of the relief program.

“This fits very well with and complements our finding that minority-owned businesses were less likely to get loans because of racial bias, and to the extent that they do get them, they’re more likely to get them from fintechs than banks,” Dr. Chernenko said.

The government designed the Paycheck Protection Program to be virtually risk-free for lenders: They would advance small companies up to $10 million — the size of the loan was based on the company’s head count and payroll — and the government would then pay off the loans in full for business owners that followed the rules. If the borrower defaulted, the government would still repay the lender. In theory, any lender should have been willing to lend to any qualified applicant.

It didn’t work out that way. Many banks limited their loans to their current customers, which was a hurdle for owners who lacked business checking accounts or loans. But even Black owners who had accounts were noticeably more likely than those of other races to end up with a fintech loan, Dr. Howell and her co-authors found.

The effects were strongest in parts of the country with higher levels of racial animus, which the study measured with variables like the extent of local housing segregation and the prevalence of racially charged Google searches.

The researchers tested — and found little evidence for — other common hypotheses about the program’s racial lending disparities. Even after controlling for variables like the applicant’s ZIP code, industry, recent revenue, affinity for online lenders, and loan size and approval date, the gap persisted.

This was not the case, they found, at the nation’s biggest banks. After researchers controlled for those elements, Black-owned businesses appeared to be just as likely as any other to get a loan from Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

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The Mayor, the Teacher and a Fight over a ‘Lost Territory’ of France

TRAPPES, France — It all began when a high-school teacher warned that Islamists had taken over the city. The teacher went on TV, issuing alarms from inside what he called a “lost city” of the French Republic. In Trappes, he said, he feared for his life.

“Trappes, it’s finished,” the teacher said. “They’ve won.”

The mayor, a strong believer in the Republic, saw the teacher on television and didn’t recognize the city he described. He knew his city, west of Paris and with a growing population of immigrants and Muslims, had problems but thought it was being falsely maligned. The mayor also happened to be a Muslim.

“The truth doesn’t matter anymore,” he said.

For a few weeks this winter, the fight pitting the mayor, Ali Rabeh, 36, against the teacher, Didier Lemaire, 55, became a media storm that, beneath the noise and accusations, boiled down to a single, angry question that runs through the culture wars rippling through France: Can Islam be compatible with the principles of the French Republic?

Lupin.” But Trappes also saw about 70 of its youths leave for jihad to Syria and Iraq, the largest contingent, per capita, from any French city.

article about Mr. Lemaire, who said he was quitting because of Islamists.

Within a few hours, a conservative politician eyeing the presidency tweeted her support for Mr. Lemaire and “all those hussars on the front line in the fight for the Republic.” Next, the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, attacked “certain elected officials” for failing to protect the teacher from Islamists.

That the words of a virtually unknown teacher resonated so much was a sign of the times. A few months earlier, an extremist had beheaded a middle-school teacher for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on free speech. President Emmanuel Macron was now pushing a bill to fight Islamism even as he pledged to nurture an “Islam of France.”

Mr. Lemaire’s words also resonated because of the outsized role in France of public schoolteachers, who are responsible for inculcating in the young the nation’s political values and culture. In the Republic’s mythology, teachers are the “hussars” — the light cavalry once used for scouting by European armies — fighting to preserve the nation’s sanctity.

In the article, Mr. Lemaire said he had been under police escort for months. Trappes’s mayor, he said, had called him an “Islamophobe and racist.” He said he was waiting for an “exfiltration” from deep inside “a city lost for good.”

Overnight, the soft-spoken, longhaired teacher, who said he preferred curling up with Seneca than going on Facebook, was issuing dire warnings on top television news shows.

“We have six months to a year,” he said, “because all these youths who are educated with the idea that the French are their enemies, they’ll take action one day.”

Mr. Lemaire arrived in Trappes, a banlieue, or suburb, in the outer orbit of Paris, two decades earlier. Once a village that grew around a millennium-old Roman Catholic parish, Trappes is now a city of 32,000.

Mr. Lemaire’s high school, La Plaine-de-Neauphle, stands at the heart of an area built to accommodate immigrant workers from France’s former colonies in the 1970s — a mixture of rent-subsidized high-rises, attractive five-story residences and a constellation of parks. The mosque is nearby. So is a market where vendors offer delicacies from sub-Saharan Africa and halal products.

Parti républicain solidariste, which espouses a hard line on France’s version of secularism, called laïcité. He now favors taking girls away from their parents, after a second warning, if the children violate laïcité rules by putting on Muslim veils during school field trips.

“We have to protect children from this manipulation,” of being used “as soldiers or as ideologues,” he said.

‘I See Myself In Them’

remarks to the newspaper Le Monde, the local préfet, the top civil servant representing the central government, praised Mr. Rabeh’s administration for its “total cooperation” in combating Islamism. The préfet also refuted the teacher’s claim to having been under a police escort.

The teacher’s story began wobbling. He admitted to the French news media, as he did to The Times, that he had “not received explicit death threats.” He had also accused the mayor of calling him a “racist and Islamophobe” in an interview with a Dutch television network.

But the network denied the mayor had said any such thing.

‘France Really Doesn’t Like Us’

letter to the students at the teacher’s high school.

“Don’t let anybody ever tell you that you’re worth nothing and that you’re lost to the Republic,” he wrote.

debate was scheduled that evening between Ms. Le Pen and Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister leading the government’s crackdown on Islamism. Hours before the debate, he announced that the teacher would be granted police protection.

That evening, Jean-Michel Blanquer, the national education minister, issued a statement supporting the teacher. He also accused the mayor of trespassing into the high school to distribute tracts — the letter — that morning. “Political and religious neutrality is at the heart of the operation of the School of the Republic,” the minister said.

The city officials at the school that morning told The Times that no copies were distributed inside. The regional education office and Mr. Blanquer’s office refused to make the school principal available for an interview. The minister’s office declined to comment.

The trespassing accusations led to such an avalanche of threats against the mayor that he, too, was put under police protection — a shared destiny, for a while, for the two men of Trappes, who had each lost something.

The teacher was forced to leave the school where he had taught for 20 years and, despite his criticisms of Trappes, said “you really feel you’re on a mission.” He said he should have been more careful with the facts and had made “many mistakes,” but stuck by his interpretation of Trappes as “lost.”

His words, he said, had led to a “clarification of positions today in France.”

The mayor questioned the very Republic that once inspired him. He had believed that “the people who embody the Republic will come, the government will eventually express its solidarity with me.”

“Stunned,” he said, “I find that’s not the case.”

He declined his worried father’s request to resign.

“For a moment during the crisis, I told myself, well, if this is the Republic, I’m abandoning the Republic, just as it’s abandoned me,” Mr. Rabeh said. “But the truth is they’re not the Republic. The kids of Trappes are the Republic.”

Gaëlle Fournier contributed research.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones Receives Support in Tenure Dispute

Republican lawmakers in nearly a dozen states have tried to shape how racism and slavery can be taught in schools, with some bills explicitly targeting the 1619 Project. This month, Tennessee passed a law to withhold funding from schools that teach critical race theory, following a similar law in Idaho. Similar legislative proposals are underway in Texas, New Hampshire and Louisiana.

Tuesday’s letter added that the same “anti-democratic thinking” behind the failure to offer Ms. Hannah-Jones tenure was evident in efforts by the state lawmakers to ban the 1619 Project from schools.

“We, the undersigned, believe this country stands at a crucial moment that will define the democratic expression and exchange of ideas for our own and future generations,” the letter said.

The University of North Carolina’s trustees are overseen by the university system’s board of governors, which is appointed by the Republican-controlled legislature. Ms. Hannah-Jones, who earned a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina in 2003, is scheduled to start in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine.

A university spokeswoman said university leaders would respond privately to the letter of support. Ms. Hannah-Jones declined to comment.

“That so many distinguished historians have signed this letter is yet further testament to the impact she has had in sparking an important conversation about American history,” Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of The Times Magazine, said in a statement. He added that Ms. Hannah-Jones’s work was “in the best tradition of New York Times reporters who have deepened our understanding of the world with rigorous journalism that challenges the status quo and forces readers to think critically.”

Previous Knight Chairs at the University of North Carolina were tenured.

“It is not our place to tell U.N.C. or U.N.C./Hussman who they should appoint or give tenure to,” Alberto Ibargüen, the president of Knight Foundation, which funds the positions, said in a statement last week. “It is, however, clear to us that Hannah-Jones is eminently qualified for the appointment, and we would urge the trustees of the University of North Carolina to reconsider their decision within the time frame of our agreement.”

In an email on Sunday to faculty members that was reviewed by The Times, Susan King, the dean of the Hussman School, suggested that the board could reconsider the tenure recommendation at a future meeting. “So that this won’t linger on,” she wrote, “we’ve asked for a date certain by which a decision about a board vote will be made.”

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It’s the Media’s ‘Mean-Too’ Moment. Stop Yelling and Go to Human Resources.

Perhaps even worse, Ms. Cooper remarked early on that she’d never heard of Brian Lehrer, the beloved WNYC morning host whose gently probing, public-spirited interviews embody the station’s appeal, and that she didn’t “get” why he was popular. She has since come to the view that “Brian is the soul of the station and, in many ways, the city itself,” a WNYC spokeswoman, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, said in an email.

In fact, Ms. Cooper’s mission was to jump-start the station’s lagging digital transformation, something she had done with unusual success in San Francisco and that requires a willingness to make enemies. She has ambitious plans to hire 15 to 20 more reporters — but first she had the near-impossible assignment of bringing together a group of traditional radio journalists, used to working for days and occasionally weeks on colorful local features, with the reporters at Gothamist, the scrappy local blog that WNYC bailed out in 2018. Ms. Cooper sought to professionalize Gothamist away from its bloggy and irreverent roots, telling reporters to be less openly hostile to the New York Police Department in their reporting, two reporters said. Ms. Roussel suggested that Ms. Cooper was trying to rein in Gothamist’s habit of adding “an element of editorializing to its coverage that can be interpreted as bias.”

And Ms. Cooper started pushing the radio journalists to pick up their pace and to file stories for the web. That seemed like a reasonable request, but it led to another stumble in early February, when an 18-year veteran of the radio side, Fred Mogul, filed a story with one paragraph printed in a different font. The editor realized it was Associated Press copy; Ms. Cooper promptly fired Mr. Mogul (who declined through his union to be interviewed) for plagiarism without a review of whether he’d ever done it before.

Ms. Cooper declined to speak to me about Mr. Mogul’s termination. But one thing I learned this week about public radio is that no matter what is happening, someone is always recording it. And that was true when Ms. Cooper called a virtual meeting Feb. 5 over Zoom to inform the full newsroom of her decision to fire Mr. Mogul. According to a copy of the recording provided to me by an attendee, Ms. Cooper told the staffers, “It’s totally OK to be sad.” But then several stunned radio reporters questioned the move, explaining that they regularly incorporated A.P. copy into stories on air and had imported the practice to WNYC’s little-read website, crediting The A.P. at the bottom of the story.

“Go through every single one of our articles and fire all of us, because that is exactly what we have all done,” one host, Rebeca Ibarra, told her.

On Feb. 10, more than 60 employees — including Mr. Lehrer — signed a letter asking Ms. Cooper to reconsider and calling the firing a “troubling precedent.”

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