Equality Newsletter, Issue #2
World's richest billionaires just got richer, White privilege continues in U.S. publishing; gender violence in the Ukraine; NC still ground zero for LGBTQ rights; and more..
WEALTH
World’s ten richest billionaires just surpassed $1 trillion in combined wealth
How much richer did the super-rich become under Donald Trump? A lot richer, it turns out. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the world’s top 50 billionaires went from less than $1.8 trillion in net worth on election night in 2016 to more than $2.8 trillion on election night in 2020 -- a 55% jump. Some of the biggest gains were recorded by the world’s 10 wealthiest billionaires, including Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft software giant co-founder Bill Gates. Last week, the combined wealth of Bezos, Gates and 8 other top-10 billionaires, including Warren Buffet and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, topped $1 trillion -- a record.
Currently, Bezos heads the global top-10 list with $182.4 billion, while Gates ranks #4, with $118.6 billion. French multi-billionaire Bernard Arnault who owns 70 luxury consumer brands, among them Louis Vitton and Sephora, has a net worth of $139.5 billion which makes him the wealthiest man in Europe and #2 on the top 10 list.
Tesla owner Elon Musk, who now ranks #3 on the top-ten list, was the biggest gainer in 2020. Musk’s net worth skyrocketed by $100.3 billion this year, marking the largest single increase among those on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. In January 2020, Musk ranked a distant 35th.
How fast is Musk rising? Last week, the 49-year-old entrepreneur saw his net worth rise by $7.2 billion to $128 billion as Tesla shares surged days after the news that the electric car company will be admitted to the S&P 500 index later this month. Musk is also co-founder of the space exploration firm SpaceX, whose valuation just doubled from $52 billion to more than $100 billion, according to the New York investment firm Morgan Stanley.
RACE
Despite recent gains, White privilege still haunts American publishing
In recent years, some of the nation’s most popular best-sellers were written by men and women of color. To cite one recent example: In November, former President Barack Obama's “A Promised Land” topped the USA Today Best-Selling Books list by selling more than 1.7 million copies in North America in its first week alone . That’s roughly equal to the combined first week sales of memoirs by Bill Clinton and George W Bush -- and is among the highest ever for a nonfiction book.
But industry analysts say that high-profile sales of presidential memoirs and some leading works of fiction obscure a more sobering truth: Only a small proportion of U.S-published books overall are written by non-White authors, and the numbers show no signs of improvement.
In fact, an analysis conducted by Richard Jean So of McGill University and published last week in The New York Times found that just 5% of more than 7,000 fiction works published between 1950 and 2018 were written by people of color .
Again, there are some high-profile exceptions: Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere” spent months on The New York Times’s best-seller lists this year, and Colson Whitehead’s has garnered not one but two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction in the past four years.
But according to Marie Duttin Brown, a literary agent and former editor at Doubleday, these success stories can be deceptive. Less famous “mid-list” authors are overwhelmingly White because a White editor’s interest in Black authors tends to fluctuate with the news cycle, she says.
It doesn’t help that the heads of the “big five” publishing houses are white. And some 85 percent of the people that acquire and edit books are white, according to a 2019 industry survey. There’s also a documented gap in how much publishers are willing to pay white and blacks authors for their work. So the ethnic bias in publishing is deeply ingrained.
Some change is afoot. After this summer’s protests, several Black women were hired as editors at the main publishing houses. But that’s no guarantee that more books by people of color will make it into the top tier, analysts say
GENDER
Human Right Group Denounces Gender-Based Violence in Ukraine
The international human rights group Amnesty International issued a blistering human rights report on gender-based violence in the Ukraine last week, calling out the government for failing to protect women from domestic violence by spouses and sexual violence perpetrated by members of the military. “Gender inequality, implicit cultural and societal norms and attitudes, as well as gaps in protection and lack of adequate response from the government – all contribute to high levels of gender-based violence against women in the country,” the report noted.
The 74-page report focuses special attention on gender-based violence in the government-controlled regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, two areas that have witnessed escalating armed conflict since 2014. As the report notes, women, the elderly and children constitute the majority of the population in this 20 km zone and often are unable to secure protection from abuse due to a lack of security and shelters. Moreover, the Ukraine military is exempt from the provisions of a law passed by the government that ostensibly protects women from sexual violence and abuse. As a result, members of the military are free to act with impunity toward women and too few come forward to report abuses for fear of being abused still further.
Adult women are not the only ones to suffer abuse, the report notes The report found that military personnel often harass and try to pressure or coerce girls as young as 10 to engage in sexual relationships and like adults some consent to transactional sex in order to meet family financial needs. Since most of the households in the government-controlled regions are impoverished and female-centered, resistance to sexual pressure is compromised. Military members are also confident that their adolescent victims as well as those engaged in sex work nearly full time will have little recourse but to submit to their sexual demands, even when they encounter resistance from family members of the victims or from their fellow soldiers or from police.
The report concludes with a detailed list of recommendations to the government, the parliament and police and military forces in the two controlled zones. They include a strengthening of the nation’s laws to make sexual abuse and violence a more serious punishable crime, the provision of adequate shelter and legal representation for domestic and sexual violence victims and improved data collection and reporting systems to ensure that crime circumstances and incidents are properly identified and recorded.
LGBTQ
North Carolina Still Ground Zero for Protecting Transgender Rights
North Carolina became nationally and even internationally famous when its state legislature in 2016 passed HB2, the so-called “bathroom bill” that denied transgendered people equal access to public restrooms. The resulting backlash -- including a damaging commercial boycott -- led to a revision of the original law and a separate 2019 measure that prohibited cities from passing local ordinances for or against additional restrictions on transgendered rights -- a move designed to cool down the controversy -- at least temporarily.
However, that measure expired on December 1st, and it’s left LGBTQ activists worried about fresh attacks on transgendered rights.
Transgender and gay rights activists have already begun pushing cities to start enacting new protections. Kendra Johnson, executive director of the Raleigh-based LGBT advocacy group Equality NC, told the Charlotte News Observer that a big focus will be on housing. She said landlords shouldn’t be able to deny people housing due to their sexuality or gender identity.
So far, there’s little sign that conservative religious groups plan on making a big new push for HB-2-type laws. North Carolina’s former Republican governor lost his bid for re-election over the controversy and the state legislature in 2018 moved to revise the original HB-2 law to remove its overtly discriminatory language.
Have conservatives learned their lesson? Apparently not. In an opinion article published in the North State Journal earlier this month, Tami Fitzgerald, the leader of the N.C. Family Values Coalition, a conservative Christian group, urged cities not to pass any pro-LGBT ordinances after the ban on any new ordinances expires.
Fitzgerald and other conservatives want to see the ban on local ordinances made permanent. However, LGBTQ activitists say pro-LGBTQ ordinancres are their only way of protecting their rights in the face of continuing hostility, including future executive orders from conserbative governors as well as ongoing discriminatory practices by employers and landlords.
DID YOU KNOW?
Wyoming was the first territory or state in our nation's history to grant women the right to vote. When Wyoming was still a territory, legislators passed the Wyoming Suffrage Act of 1869. Lawmakers had different motives for supporting this measure. Wyoming was sparsely populated, and some felt granting suffrage would draw more women to the territory, which it did. Others noted that women played an integral role in life on the frontier. Therefore, it was only natural that women should have a say in how the territory was run.
When Wyoming became a state in 1890, women retained the right to vote. Wyoming was also one of the first states to ratify the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women in all 50 states the right to vote.
Suffrage wasn’t the only first achieved by Wyoming women. Before most U.S. states had granted women the ability to own property, Wyoming women were homesteading and ranching.
For more on women’s pioneering roles in Wyoming’s frontier history, see the 1987 book by Denice Wheeler, The Feminine Frontier: Wyoming Women, 1850-1900.
Equality Newsletter, Issue #2
These are well-written articles.