When Lena McPeters first messaged her now-girlfriend on Facebook Dating, she didn’t know much about her; she just thought Camilla was cute. But pretty quickly, she realized: They didn’t speak the same language. Like, not even a little bit.

Lena, a hotel manager in Lubbock, Texas, spoke only English; Camilla, a factory supervisor who lived five hours away in Dallas, spoke only Spanish. She told Lena she’d been messaging her with the help of a translator app, and taught her to do the same—and then they just kept talking, each replying in the other’s language. Often, something wouldn’t translate well, so they’d have to keep trying to rephrase it. About three months in, Camilla visited for the first time.

On the way to pick her up at the bus station, Lena was terrified. How would they get through this first car ride without saying anything? But they ended up having a ball. Lena’s friends were totally charmed by Camilla. Keeping a steady back-and-forth conversation was tough, but still: “She was drinking with everybody, and she was dancing with everybody,” Lena told me. “And when she noticed there was silence in the room, she filled it.” (Using the translator app.) Every time someone told a story, Lena would use the app to summarize it for her.

Roughly 10 months later, they still don’t speak each other’s language fluently. But they do live together.

[Read: The scariest part of a relationship]

Today, multilingual relationships are more possible than ever. Globalization, accessible travel, and social media have made it easier to meet people who speak different languages. Language-learning resources such as Duolingo are widely available, and translators like the kind that Lena and Camilla use are becoming quicker, more accurate, and more popular. It’s a good time to fall in love across a language barrier. And when I talked with people who did, I came to think that they know something special about the guts, humor, and patience that falling in love with anyone requires.

What drew these partners together, if not conversation? The people I spoke with weren’t necessarily having profound discussions off the bat. (Though the same is true of plenty of partners who speak the same first language.) Regardless, they felt they got a strong sense of the other person, some vibe that didn’t just come from their words. That didn’t surprise the researchers I talked with; Nai Chieh Tien, a psychologist who has studied multilingual relationships and specializes in intercultural couples and family therapy, told me that a remarkable amount of communication is nonverbal. We might find someone appealing for any number of complex reasons—not always because of their eloquent philosophical musings, but maybe some mix of their smile, the way they hold themselves, the tone they use when talking to other people.

Some couples even felt that a language barrier helped relieve the typical weirdness of a first date; it shook them out of being serious or anxious. Sabrin Hasbun, an Italian Palestinian writer, grew up hearing family lore about her parents’ funny, awkward multilingual courtship. When they were first dating, for instance, her father didn’t know enough Italian to express his feelings for Sabrin’s mom. Instead, he’d sing her Frank Sinatra songs; she couldn’t understand English, but she knew that the music was romantic. So when Sabrin met her now-husband, Sergio, at university in the U.K., she started learning his native Spanish; in the meantime, they got by using her very basic English and the smidge of Italian that Sergio knew. But she didn’t find it scary—it was fun, even “liberating.”

People like Sabrin who tackle a language barrier for love might be a self-selecting group; they’re probably game for a learning experience in the first place. Research has shown that people high in open-mindedness and social initiative seem to feel more at ease in their multilingual relationships. Jean-Marc Dewaele, a linguistics professor at Birkbeck, University of London, told me that those who are more neurotic might worry that the obstacles are insurmountable. “I think you need to be a little bit of an optimist,” he said. Tien has also found that these partners tend to demonstrate openness and curiosity—after all, they’re there, willing to stumble through a conversation. A romance like this might be really hard for some people. But maybe those aren’t the people who are trying it.

[Read: What second-chance couples know about love]

The couples I talked with had thrown themselves into learning to communicate. But still, of course, they’d run into misunderstandings: At one point, Sabrin told Sergio she wanted to spend New Year’s Eve out rather than with his family, and said that if he decided to stay in, she would go celebrate without him. He interpreted her words as meaning she would break up with him. They realized they’d confused each other only weeks later, she said, when he professed how glad he was not to have lost her: “And I was like, What?”

Even with the right words, partners with different linguistic backgrounds might interpret things in very different ways. Finnish people tend to be quite comfortable with silence, Erika Sorvisto, a student in Finland, told me; their partner, Morris, who speaks Dutch and Bosnian, used to worry that Erika was mad at him. “Are you okay?” they said he’d ask. “You haven’t said anything in, like, five minutes.” Several people mentioned to me that the phrase I love you is used much more casually in English than its translation in some other languages. Ingrid Piller, a sociolinguist at Macquarie University in Australia, told me that in her native German, “I love you is … almost creepy.” When I asked what term she would use in German to express strong feelings, she said, “You don’t verbalize it so much.” Erika and Morris do declare their love—but in the other’s native language.

That’s partly because I love you really does mean something different in different cultures. But Erika also told me that when they and Morris hear it in their first language, it just seems to hit harder; “it has more feeling.” That’s a common phenomenon, Dewaele told me, related to what researchers call “emotional resonance”: Even when people speaking non-native tongues know what the words mean, they don’t always feel their power. When you acquire your first language, he said, the phrases you learn become loaded with meaning: Thinking of a swear word, you might imagine your teacher’s face when you used it inappropriately as a kid. Using an expression of love, you’re probably repeating what you’ve heard other people use—perhaps your parents while you were growing up, or in years of rom-com viewing. But you might not have those “rich emotional connotations” attached to subsequent languages you learn, at least not at first.

That can be especially tough in conversations you’d likely have with a partner: flirting, professing affection, arguing, discussing the future. You might feel like a bad actor on a stage, Dewaele told me, performing lines without really knowing if they’ll land. “It’s a minefield,” he said. “You don’t know whether these words will get you a slap in the face or, in fact, won’t be strong enough to express how you feel.”

You might even feel like another person altogether. In one study, Dewaele found that 85 percent of participants reported feeling somehow different when they switched languages. That could just be the lack of emotional resonance, or the clumsiness of not being fluent. But many people describe wholly separate personalities in their non-native tongue that might not be explained away by those factors.

Partly for this reason, the language a couple chooses to use together can shape their power dynamic in complicated ways. If they speak a language that’s native to only one partner, the other won’t just have to work harder to communicate; they might never feel like their most authentic self in the relationship. (Notably, women adopt their partner’s language much more commonly than men do.) When couples use a lingua franca—a third option that’s neither party’s first language—they might stand on more equal footing. But they might both sense that some crucial part of their identity is lost.

Several sources told me they worried that they and their partner might never know each other’s true selves. One of them was Asemahle Giwu, a teacher living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her first language is Xhosa, and her partner’s is Sotho, but they speak English together. She told me that when she speaks Xhosa, she’s louder and funnier; when she speaks English, she’s “more deep” but also “a bit toned down.” And when her partner speaks Sotho, she finds him to be less of a gentleman, more “bad boy-ish.” Neither side is bad, but the shift itself makes her uncomfortable, especially when she notices it in herself. “Am I a hypocrite?” she wonders. “Am I trying to be someone I’m not?”

But I asked Asemahle if she feels like she’s really not herself when she speaks English—or if she’s just finding a different, but equally true, version. She said it’s the latter. Ultimately, she’s grateful that she’s discovered this new side of herself, and that she’s gotten to witness varied dimensions of her partner as well. “You get two worlds when you’re dating a person who speaks a different language,” she said. “And it’s nice living in both of them.”

[Read: My novel is a love letter my mother can’t read]

The arc of my talk with Asemahle mirrored what seemed like a pattern in most of my conversations: Many of the initial obstacles to multilingual relationships turned into sources of connection and deeper understanding—and eventually a richer life together.

For instance, the potential for miscommunication can lead couples to be more careful with their words, to try to speak as clearly as possible, and to check in more often to see if they’re on the same page. Kaisa Pietikäinen, a researcher at the Norwegian School of Economics, has found this in her studies on partners who use English as a lingua franca. “They’re quite patient in trying to arrive at a shared understanding,” she told me. “Instead of jumping to conclusions, they listen, and they take time, and they ask again, and they rephrase.” That struck me as a good idea for any couple.

Some long-term partners even develop what Pietikäinen calls “couple tongue”: their own unique lexicon that incorporates features of multiple languages. Sabrin and Sergio, for instance, now speak a mix of Italian, English, and Spanish together—and they didn’t even realize they’d been switching back and forth until their friends pointed it out. Sabrin told me that using three languages lets her access a wider range of thought and emotion, because some concepts are better expressed or only exist in one of them.

Even a lack of emotional resonance can be helpful sometimes. On the one hand, it can make arguing particularly difficult. Tien told me partners will say things like “I don’t even know how to start a fight, okay? … I just want to yell in my first language.” On the other hand, a language barrier can give partners some needed emotional distance; it can slow them down, allowing them to cool off—even laugh at the situation. “In the heat of an argument,” Sabrin told me, she’ll sometimes stop and say, “Oh … but can you tell me how to say that in English?” And that breaks the tension. Lena told me the same about using her translator app with Camilla. “How can you stay serious when you’re sitting there staring at each other all angrily with a robot voice behind you?” she said.

Many of the sources I spoke with found their language differences particularly challenging with people outside of the relationship. Sabrin said she felt totally overwhelmed meeting Sergio’s grandmother, who spoke a Spanish dialect that she hadn’t begun to master. She told me Sergio felt the same when he met her family, who spoke Italian so quickly that he felt he had to “close himself off.” Erika sometimes felt excluded hanging out with Morris’s friends, who didn’t want to limit their own conversations by switching to English, and struggled to communicate with his mother, who didn’t speak much English at all. Pietikäinen told me that this is a common dynamic: The partner meeting the friends or family feels isolated and left out, and the partner doing the introducing has to act as a translator rather than just relaxing with people they love.   

And yet, my sources seemed to be tackling this test, too, with the optimism and tenacity that researchers said are so common in multilingual couples. Erika is practicing their Dutch, but they also show Morris’s mom pictures on their phone to illustrate what they mean. The two sometimes bake together—and even though they don’t speak much during, they eat the sweets in each other’s company. “I feel closer to her,” Erika told me.

When I interviewed Sabrin, she said her best friend was visiting and Sergio was practicing Italian with her; they were all laughing as he mixed up words and smushed others together into new ones. And when his family was over for Easter, they had fun teaching Sabrin a new verb tense in Spanish. “It becomes an ongoing bonding experience,” she said.  

Perhaps language learning is an apt metaphor for falling in love. You have to be vulnerable, to admit what you don’t know, to risk messing up and making a fool of yourself. But if you can laugh at yourself, listen, and stick with it, you stand to gain a lot. Dewaele said that he’s told students learning a foreign tongue, “You will learn concepts that don’t exist in your first language, so it will open your mind.” So, too, might a partner, if you commit to understanding them more and more over time.

Things with Camilla haven’t always been easy, Lena told me. Once there was a fire in their building, and when she shook Camilla awake from her nap to tell her to leave the apartment, Lena found she couldn’t relay what was going on. She was frantically trying to explain while she gathered up her cats, and Camilla was just confused. They weren’t hurt, but it clarified just how much a language barrier can matter. Lena was shaken by it.

At one point, they almost broke up. Lena was tired of using the translator, tired of having to keep her phone charged in order to talk to her own girlfriend, tired of constantly working on her Spanish, tired of striving and stretching herself all the time. She worried that perhaps Camilla would never really know her, the version that came out when she was casually speaking English with friends. But when the couple decided that Camilla should go back to Dallas, Lena found she couldn’t bear to buy her the bus ticket. She didn’t want to wake up the next day, she realized, without Camilla there.

Earlier this spring, they had a big achievement: They sat at a bar for two hours without their translator, having a basic conversation using what they’d learned of each other’s language. It gave them hope, Lena told me. Since then, they’ve been spending most evenings without the app—unless they’re gossiping or having long talks—and they happen to make an excellent charades team. Lena has realized that this relationship is making her grow, however painfully at times, more than any other has.

She can’t wait for the day when she and Camilla can stop using the app for good. At that point, which could be years into the relationship, other couples might be growing bored; after the initial rush of getting to know each other, the honeymoon phase could be over. But Lena and Camilla will still have miles and miles of ground to cover—all the stories that were too hard to tell with the translator, the different ideas and selves that a new language can draw out. Lena hopes they’ll eventually move to Mexico, where Camilla is from and where much of her family still lives. “I’m excited to raise kids together and teach them our languages,” she told me. And she hopes that those kids will be inspired by their parents’ history to believe that love is worth working for.

Dallas Independent School District issued a statement Friday explaining why students received the controversial book.

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Tomorrow marks one year since a shooter killed 19 students and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school—the deadliest school shooting since the one at Sandy Hook a decade prior. Each of these grim American anniversaries raises the same question: Has the country made progress in curbing the likelihood of mass shootings since the tragedy? Today’s newsletter will check in on a few overlapping factors of America’s gun-violence crisis.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first social-media babies are growing up—and they’re horrified. The second generation of school shootings The Republican primary has entered its chaos phase.

Escalating Trauma

In a new essay, the writer Sarah Churchwell summarizes what America has begun to feel like in 2023: “We’re at a point of iterated, escalating trauma: the same people being affected by mass shootings across generations.” Churchwell writes about her brother, whose elementary school was targeted by a shooter when he was a child, and who, more recently, evaded a mass shooting at a nearby Fourth of July parade—and was then forced to explain the reality of such events to his preschooler.

This morbid mass-shooting tradition can seem particularly intractable because it involves overlapping conflicts in American policy, culture, and society. First, of course, is the matter of guns. As I wrote last month, a majority of Americans support gun-control measures such as universal background checks for gun purchases, but the nation’s political system fails to enact even these popular gun-control policies because of the intense political polarization over the issue and influence of the domestic gun industry.

In my story, I cited an Atlantic essay by the Stanford Law School professor John J. Donohue pointing out the disparity that exists even between National Rifle Association leaders and the organization’s own members. “Repeated surveys show that while the NRA membership consistently supports reasonable measures such as universal background checks,” he wrote, “NRA leaders stake out a much more extreme position.”

The role of the NRA is crucial to understanding America’s gun situation, but just as important is understanding how the Supreme Court has recently altered the lines of the debate. The Court’s decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen changed the framework that courts use when determining the constitutionality of firearm regulations, broadening interpretations of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to protect an American’s right to legally carry a handgun in public. Although the power of the NRA has long slowed the passage of new gun-reform measures in Congress, this Supreme Court ruling makes some existing modern laws that restrict firearms liable to being ruled unconstitutional in the future.

Setting aside Americans’ access to firearms, there’s also the question of how to address the emotional or psychological ills that could drive someone to turn to gun violence in the first place. My Atlantic Daily colleague Tom Nichols outlined his theory of the “Lost Boys” last month, in which he suggests that a scourge of male narcissism is likely to blame:

Yes, the country is awash in guns; yes, depression seems to be on the rise in young people; yes, extremists are using social media to fuse together atomized losers into explosive compounds. But the raw material for all of the violence is mostly a stream of lost young men.

Why is this happening? What are we missing? Guns and anomie and extremism are only facets of the problem. The real malady afflicting these men … is the deluge of narcissism in the modern world, especially among failed-to-launch young men whose injured grandiosity leads them to blame others for their own shortcomings and insecurities—and to seek revenge.

Other Atlantic writers have turned their attention to the social-media ecosystem waiting to capitalize on angry young men’s worst impulses. Last year, the writer Juliette Kayyem noted that “lone wolf” shooters may act alone but often have an “online pack” of peers who share their ideology.

Last week, the sociologist Eric Gordy pointed to a lesson America might learn from Serbia, a country shocked by two mass shootings in the course of a week earlier this month. Because semiautomatic weapons are illegal in Serbia, the government was able to respond quickly, Gordy explained: “It took only a day for President Aleksander Vučić to deliver a speech promising swift action to protect public safety and to reduce ownership of illegal firearms by 90 percent.” But for many Serbian observers, limiting gun access was only the first step in dealing with a larger problem—a country where “political elites and tabloid media continue to promote ethno-nationalist resentment and hatred.”

Gordy notes that many American gun-control advocates are reluctant to blame cultural or psychological causes, rather than the sheer number of guns in the country, for the persistence of mass shootings. But he argues that it’s worth paying attention to the residents of Serbia who are arguing that “eliminating the danger of violence will also require building institutions that are truthful and responsible, and building a culture that is, if not tolerant and understanding, then at least relatively nontoxic.”

This brings us back to Uvalde. On May 8, Republicans unexpectedly allowed a bill that would raise the purchase age for semiautomatic rifles to advance out of a House committee. A likely impetus for this sudden move is, by all definitions, the very opposite of progress: a mass shooting days prior, this time near Dallas at an outdoor mall, where nine people were killed.

Related:

A firearm-owning Republican’s solutions for gun violence Mass shootings are a problem America can’t fix

Today’s News

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis plans to announce his 2024 presidential campaign in a live audio conversation with Elon Musk on Twitter tomorrow. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a public advisory on the “profound risk of harm” that social media can have on young people. A man is in custody after crashing a U-Haul truck carrying a Nazi flag into a security barrier near the White House last night. Investigators are treating it as a potentially intentional incident.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ thoughts on the marijuana-legalization divide.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

In Ukraine, brutality lingers. Tim Keller’s critique of liberal secularism Photos: Extreme weather brings deadly flooding to northern Italy.

Culture Break

Tina Thorpe / HBO

Read. The Late Americans, the new novel by Brandon Taylor, which hits bookstores today. Or check out another title from The Atlantic’s summer reading guide, which includes 20 books you should grab this season.

Watch. A Black Lady Sketch Show (streaming on Max). It’s the perfect mix of random and hilarious.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This week is a good time to hear from America’s kids. I recommend this collection of reflections from students across the country, in their own handwriting, after the Uvalde shooting.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you collect statues of Lenin, Harlan Crow told me, “you get to be a bit of a snob.” The first Lenin I had seen that morning was a brass likeness in the entryway to Crow’s Dallas mansion—a house that capitalism built, if ever there was one. Lenin was in his Finland Station pose, but with his head replaced by Mickey Mouse’s. Crow’s office had at least one more Lenin. Now we were outside, pelted by rain in Crow’s Garden of Evil, admiring the fourth in a series of Lenins, an 18-footer harvested from western Ukraine. “There’s so many statues of Lenin,” Crow said, educating me on dictator-statue appreciation the way another rich guy might introduce a friend to the world of fine wine. Having a good story was crucial. “You don’t want a Lenin From Factory 107. You want Politburo.”

The many Lenins joined dozens of other petrified tyrants and world leaders, among them Communist revolutionaries (Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara), a few secular autocrats (Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak), and a few hunched babushkas, in remembrance of communism’s victims. “Most are Communist,” Crow said, but he acknowledged that he hadn’t sorted the statues perfectly according to gradations of evil. Some had been moved years ago, not because of a historical reevaluation but during renovations when he built a batting cage for his kids, who are now grown. When they were little, he said, “the kids used to be scared of them.”

The garden is really a mishmash of 20th-century evil, evil-lite, and a few of Crow’s heroes (in the last category: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Winston Churchill). “I have a number of people who are [just] dictators, like Pinochet and Juan Perón,” Crow said. “You can argue about Juan Perón, whether he was a force for good or a force for bad … You can argue about Mubarak.” He noted that Yugoslav President Josip Tito was preferable to Stalin, and Zhou Enlai (“one of my favorites”) was a big step up from Chairman Mao. “There are probably a few more guys in storage that I’ll eventually put out,” he said. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: “Probably more for good than bad,” he said. “But it’s complicated.”

Last month, Crow’s eccentric hobby became a side drama in a broader scandal over his friendship and financial relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics of that relationship drew attention to Crow’s garden statues as well as a small hoard of Third Reich memorabilia inside Crow’s enormous home library and museum. He owns a signed Mein Kampf, paintings by Hitler, and (reportedly) a Third Reich–era tea service. Crow said he hadn’t felt the need to sort the interior collection by level of evil, either. In the garden, he said, “I like these guys”—he motioned to Thatcher and Reagan, then to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro—“and I don’t like those guys. In my world, that’s blindingly obvious … But one thing I have learned from this is that I must not assume that things are obvious.”

“This is my era. I was born in 1949,” Crow said. “Communism was the great threat to the world.” The choice between capitalism and communism, freedom and serfdom, was a “big philosophical argument.” The Greatest Generation, he said, had a dramatic, existential shooting war. The Baby Boomers did not (“thankfully,” he added). “In my lifetime and your parents’ lifetime … we didn’t have the Battle of the Bulge or the storming of the beaches of Normandy.” But the big argument was worth memorializing. “I want us to remember it. I want us to learn from it,” he said. “And it’s pretty damn important that we remember it.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I should just get rid of it all,” he said. He knows that strangers have doubts about him, and about anyone who associates with him. “I’m not looking to be odd.” But the oddness was a colorful part of the case against his friend Thomas. “If you said, ‘Are you glad you did this?’ I would say, ‘I’m not sure.’”

Koba at rest. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

When the twin Thomas and Third Reich scandals broke, I wrote that Crow is not a Nazi, and that to smear him as one is an offense against victims of actual Nazis, and against Crow himself. A week later, a public-relations firm representing Crow wrote to me to offer their client for an interview. When we met, Crow said he had read my article when it came out, and that very morning had reread the first couple of paragraphs, before hitting the Atlantic paywall. Even to be defended from this charge, he said, stung. “‘Harlan Crow Is Not a Nazi,’” he paraphrased the headline. “A bit too much like ‘Good News! Harlan Crow Stopped Beating His Wife.’”

Crow made clear that his preference would be not to talk at all about the current scandal—which had made him introspective about his relationship to politics, if not repentant. “My hope is that this is the last conversation I have on this topic in public,” he said. “I’m not the private person I was. I’m sad about that, but there’s nothing I can do. I just still kind of hope that it’ll all fade from memory, and I can go back to being just an old guy.”

[Graeme Wood: Clarence Thomas’s billionaire friend is no Nazi]

He surely knows deep down that the desire to be “just an old guy” is somewhere between delusional and a forlorn dream. Crow is not even a normal old ultrarich guy.

His statue garden and in-home museum are nothing compared with the living friends and politicians he has collected: ex-presidents (George W. Bush and the late Gerald Ford are especially beloved), scholars and writers (Charles Murray, David Brooks), and foreign dignitaries (the socialist British Prime Minister James Callaghan was an early guest on his yacht, on a cruise with Ford up the Dnipro River to Kyiv in the 1990s). His patronage of the American Enterprise Institute—to name just one of the venerable conservative institutions that take his money—has placed him near the center of the conservative movement for decades.

And his relationship with Thomas is irregular to the point of suspicion. ProPublica’s investigation revealed that Thomas accepted various goodies from Crow, including luxury vacations on Crow’s yacht and jet, private tuition for Thomas’s grand-nephew, and a real-estate deal with fishy particulars. Crow bought a house owned by Thomas. Thomas’s mother lives there rent-free. Thomas’s failure to report these gifts and transactions has led to accusations that the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court votes according to the wishes of his wealthy friend, a prolific donor to right-leaning political candidates and think tanks. Even if Thomas votes autonomously, they say, for the sake of transparency and the Court’s integrity, he should have reported the gifts, hospitality, and transactions.

Rules and norms apply to justices with integrity and to justices without it, to free the former from suspicion and to expose the latter. Thomas has resisted these rules more aggressively than any other justice. His critics have enjoyed a feast of cynicism at his expense. “We should all have friends like Clarence Thomas’s,” Eric Levitz of New York magazine wrote. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa Graves described this behavior as “stunning” and “astonishing,” because of the “appearance of impropriety,” and because even if Crow has no business before the Court, he certainly knows people who do, and he supports think tanks that have submitted amicus briefs. (Although I agree that the transparency standard for justices should be a full monty—nothing less than total disclosure of financial arrangements—the accusation of corruption is different. Justices with connections to Harvard or its myriad donors, supporters, and alumni are not automatically corrupted by these connections. And Harvard, unlike Crow’s think tanks, is a respondent in the most prominent case currently pending before the Court.)

But even if justices are bound by strict rules, their unbound friends are still subject to speculation, reasonable and unreasonable, about the nature of their relationship to those in power. Crow is like most people, in that he feels he has acted with the purest and most honorable intentions. He is unlike many, though, in thinking that the world should take his word for it—and that if it does not, that’s the world’s fault, and not his.

“I probably have more influence than the ordinary Joe,” Crow told me. “But I still don’t think of myself as a center of influence. I think of myself as a real-estate guy that lives in Texas.”

One common feature of the rich and powerful is that they do not feel rich and powerful. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is an absolute monarch, told me he couldn’t just rule by fiat. He listed all the ways in which he was constrained by history, by family, by tribal interests. Last month Joe Biden told a group of visitors to the White House that “the one thing I thought when I got to be president, I’d get to give orders. But I take more orders than I ever did.”

With Crow, the psychology is similar. The liberal world thinks he orchestrates a vast right-wing conspiracy, because he is in fact surrounded by huge numbers of influential people, some who want his money and access to power, and some who are just friends. But Crow kept insisting that he has little power over the American political scene. Even with his fantastic wealth, he was incapable of preventing the rise of the politicians he most abhors, in particular Donald Trump.

And although he often says he wants to go back to being just a normal guy, it is not obvious that a man is normal when he is standing with you in his house next to a life-size mannequin of Winston Churchill and makes no comment about it until prompted. In the one-minute walk to his home office we passed perhaps a hundred objects—paintings, death masks, statues, swords, and other curios—whose presence in any normal guy’s home would have merited a proud explanation. He said he stopped giving tours long ago, after realizing that “most people just want to see a rich man’s house.” Crow happily acted as docent on request, but on our first pass through the collection, the only object that he flagged for special interest was a small ziggurat of foil-wrapped breakfast burritos and a tray of doughnuts, to which The Atlantic’s photographer and I were welcome.

Clarence Thomas and his family “have been dear friends for almost 30 years,” Crow said, denying that their friendship was political in any way. “It’s an ironic friendship, in the sense that I came from a world of silver spoons, and he came from a very difficult upbringing.” (Crow’s father, Trammell, who died in 2009, was at one point described in the press as the largest private landowner in the United States. Thomas did not see an indoor toilet until late in childhood.) Crow has taken Thomas on his yacht in Indonesia; he has hosted him at his resort in the Adirondacks.

I asked if he ever talked about law with Thomas. “I have never, nor would I ever, think about talking about matters that relate to the judiciary with Justice Clarence Thomas,” Crow said. He added that they “talk about the kind of things friends talk about,” such as weather and sports. In an email, he told me that “it’s not like we haven’t talked about work-related issues,” but that those conversations were casual and unrelated to jurisprudence. “It’s not realistic [for] two people [to] be friends and not talk about their jobs from time to time.” Thomas has spoken to him of his fondness for his clerks, or about bumping into Justice Stephen Breyer at Target. But Crow wrote that “it would be wrong” for him to talk about Court cases. “From my point of view, that is off limits. He and I don’t go there.”

[Adam Serwer: Clarence Thomas is winning his war on transparency]

Crow said he wasn’t a “law guy” and professed ignorance about any details of constitutional law. (The closest Crow has come to a Supreme Court case was in the early 2000s, when an architecture firm asked the Court to adjudicate a dispute with a firm in which Crow had a minority interest. The Court declined to hear the case.) “It would be absurd to me to talk to Justice Thomas about Supreme Court cases, because that’s not my world,” he told me at his house. “I could probably name maybe five or six cases. Brown v. Board of Education. Marbury v. Madison.” He thought for a bit and stopped at two. “We talk about life. We’re two guys who are the same age and grew up in the same era. We share a love of Motown.”

Harlan Crow at Old Parkland Campus in Dallas, Texas (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

He wanted to be normal, he said. But I noted that Thomas is not a normal friend, and friendships with Supreme Court justices are laden with responsibilities that normal friendships are not. Singing Diana Ross together on the deck of a yacht in Bali would be wholesome fun with a non-justice. But with Thomas it raised all sorts of issues. Between choruses of “Baby Love,” did Thomas wonder whether his next trip to Bali depended on his continuing to vote a certain way? What guarantee did Americans have that their friendship transcended such doubts?

“I’m not trying to say I’m this moral paragon, because I’m not. I’m just a guy that made lots of mistakes in my life,” Crow said. “But I do believe that I’m on the right side of right, morally and legally.” He said that it was “kind of weird to think that if you’re a justice on the Supreme Court, you can’t have friends. That’s not healthy. Should I have changed my life in order to have these friends? Or should I behave differently around them because of who they are?” He said if the billionaire and patron of leftist causes George Soros were hunting buddies with the chair of the Federal Reserve, he would not particularly care. “If they are genuine friends and people of good character”—he said his friends’ interactions with Soros suggest that he is—“I don’t think it’s up to me to decide.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong with your questions,” Crow told me. He recognized that character is “one of those highly subjective things.” But ultimately it is all that matters. “And I believe Justice Thomas to be a person of the highest character.”

For Crow, much hinged on this question of “good character.” In discussion of politicians, he often defaulted, in a way I found almost inspiringly optimistic, to analyzing them not by their policies but by their integrity. Integrity, he seemed to think, would isolate a politician or judge from influence, and would naturally incline that person toward a moderate, decent position. We discussed his nostalgia for a “good America,” whose politics existed on the spectrum between Reagan and Roosevelt, or better yet, between Romney and Obama (“an honorable man”), with his personal preference toward the Romney side. Thomas, he said, is “one of the most amazing and admirable people I know,” and it was as blindingly obvious that Thomas would not sell his soul for a series of vacations as it was that Harlan Crow was not a supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Moreover, the hospitality he offered to Thomas was not unusual. “For a long time, I’ve lived a certain lifestyle,” Crow said, sounding like he was about to confess to a kink. But the lifestyle he described was simply that of an extremely wealthy guy who likes to travel and host friends on holidays. “I’ve been successful. I have lived a comfortable life. I have a really big house,” he said. At his home in the Adirondacks, he said, a typical summer means 150 guests—work associates, parents of his children’s friends, a few wonks and political types. His yacht, too, is best understood as a floating extension of his hospitality. The only reason to have a yacht, he said, is to go places where one cannot go any other way—hopping around guano islands in the South Pacific, visiting the grave of a favorite Antarctic explorer on a tundra island in the South Atlantic, following the Northwest Passage. He likes to fill the staterooms with guests, both when he’s aboard and when he’s elsewhere.

“That’s the life I’ve lived. I don’t think there’s anything bad about it,” Crow said. He sees no reason to exclude Thomas from it. “I didn’t want to change my life.”

The ado over Thomas’s mother’s house seemed to baffle Crow completely. He said he considers Thomas’s rise “the kind of American story you dream about,” and he’d donated money in Thomas’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia, that would memorialize both his bootstrapped success and the Gullah-Geechee culture that produced him. Crow sent money to the Carnegie Library there; he bought the dilapidated former cannery where Thomas’s mother had worked (and gave the former owners a “life estate”—the right to remain living there until their deaths).

He said he’d had dinner at Thomas’s mother’s house “several times.” “She was a great cook, and probably still is at 94.” He’d asked Thomas if he could buy the house, at fair market value, and develop the area with the aim of eventually opening the house to the public to “honor” him. “I’m a real-estate guy,” Crow added modestly, and he figured that the neighborhood would improve if he bought and razed the drug dens and brothel on the same block, then sold the lots on the condition that the buyers build new houses. Thomas’s mother received a life estate as part of the transaction, which he said was “very common” in real-estate deals involving the elderly, and an “insignificant” expense in comparison to the cost of the deal as a whole.

“One day, I walked down that street with Justice Thomas, and there were mixed-race families living in the neighborhood,” he said. “The brothel and the crack houses were gone. There were kids riding bikes in the streets, families planning and working in their gardens. It was a neighborhood. And I’m very proud of that.”

Surely, I suggested, he could have structured the deal in a way that would not have involved writing a personal check to a Supreme Court justice. Create a foundation for public education, put impartial trustees on its board, and let it buy the house. Crow said he had done many deals in his life, and every one could, in retrospect, have been done a little better. This one wasn’t even a bad one, let alone corrupt. “It was a fair-market transaction, and I had a purpose,” Crow said. “I don’t see the foot fault.” But the idea that he had secretly corrupted his friend left him aghast. (I asked him whether he had any other financial relationships with Thomas or anyone related to Thomas, and he declined to answer, saying he doesn’t keep track of the hospitality extended to friends.)

[Brooke Harrington: Mob justice]

Crow is aware that being denounced in the press is an occupational hazard of being absurdly rich, and that one of the unwritten rules of the billionaire life is that one must not complain about being a billionaire. (As Anthony Hopkins said, playing a billionaire in The Edge: “Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.”) But Crow certainly feels embattled. “If I go out and help an old lady across the street this afternoon, there’ll be something written about my diabolical purpose and evil intent.”

Crow’s sensibility is bound in the local culture of Dallas. I grew up there and recognized it instantly. It is not familiar to most Americans. Austin is proud of its bumper sticker KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD. But Dallas’s weirdness is so deep that it perpetuates itself unintentionally, without noticing it. An auto-insurance agent specifies on his sign that he is named Ross but prefers to be addressed as “Pistol.” At the most famous historic site, you can have a picnic and watch tourists drive by and mimic the way John F. Kennedy’s head jerked “back and to the left” as it exploded. Crow has statues of fallen dictators in his yard, and those baffle outsiders. But I remember that Goff’s, the burger joint down the street from my house, had a statue of Lenin out front, salvaged in the 1990s from an Odesa, Ukraine, crane factory and outfitted with a plaque that said AMERICA WON. It was all very Dallas, and even without the plaque everyone would have known that its owner planted it there to mock rather than revere the Soviet Union, much as a high-school student might steal and display his crosstown rival’s mascot.

Heroes (Photographs by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

Crow’s emphasis on integrity is also vintage Dallas. Dallas’s citizens may not have more integrity than anyone else, but they surely do talk about it more. A classicist friend told me he was asked to translate a Dallas family’s made-up motto, “Do the right thing,” into Latin. (His suggestion, Fac Rectum, was not accepted.) Dallas is an honor society, like much of the South. And it is no surprise that a wealthy Dallasite who aspires to be a good citizen would revile the politician who more than any other has obliterated the idea that integrity is a requirement for office.

The figure of Donald Trump looms over conversations with Crow, perhaps especially when his name hasn’t been uttered for some time. Crow’s loathing for Trump and Trumpian politics is well known. “Countries don’t survive forever,” he told me, and he thought “reasonably small groups” on the right and left in America were sowing discord. Without Trump, he said, “we wouldn’t have gone as nuts on the right as we have.” He said he had proudly self-diagnosed himself with “Trump derangement syndrome” and preferred not to sidetrack our conversation about Thomas by going on an “anti-Trump jihad,” although he was tempted to do so. He was morose and reluctant for much of our conversation but lit up when he noted how the country had “repudiated” extremists of the right and left in the 2022 elections. The extremists of the right were the Trumpists. “I don’t think the left has a Trump equivalent,” Crow wrote to me later. “Thank God.” But he does consider the “progressive wing of the Democrat party” extreme, and he said he wished it had even less power than it does.

Crow describes himself as “center right,” and he deviates from the Republican Party not only in his refusal to genuflect to Trump but also in other ways, such as his support for legal access to abortion. He is a backer of the No Labels movement, which is a quixotic—some say foolhardy—attempt to vanquish extremists by fielding a presidential ticket across party lines. He spends a great deal of energy cultivating politicians who might be bipartisan-curious. (I told him I wondered if that sort of grooming by rich donors had empowered Trump in the first place. Many voters don’t want their politics determined through backroom dealing. He acknowledged that he did not understand reactionary politics, and he committed himself to listening more to the views of those enraged by the power of people like him.)

But for Trump himself, his distaste is permanent and unalterable. Part of this animus comes from the stunning 2016 repudiation of Crow’s political causes, into which he has poured millions. But the animus is even deeper, I suspect. Crow’s view of politics, and the viability of his argument that a rich man and a Supreme Court justice can just be friends with yachting benefits, depends on voters’ and elites’ voting out people of bad character. “Trump is a man without any principles at all,” Crow wrote in an email. “Bernie Sanders has principles; I just think they’re wrong. Trump doesn’t have any.”

In superficial ways, the two men are similar. Like Trump, Crow is a real-estate developer with political interests and assets that require the use of scientific notation to estimate. Both men grew up rich, then took over his father’s empire. In almost every other respect, they are total opposites. Trump cratered the empire he inherited, while investing in the sleaziest possible ventures; under Crow’s stewardship, the family fortune increased. Crow is appalled at the accusation that he used a shady real-estate deal to funnel money to a crony—which is, frankly, the kind of thing Trump would do. Trump commands attention and bellows; Crow speaks in a reluctant mumble. Trump inflates his net worth; Crow does not. Trump contemplates pulling out of NATO. Crow says he has no time for any politician who wavers in supporting Ukraine. (“The Ukrainians’ courage is unique in recent history,” he wrote to me. “I believe they’ve earned the right to their own independence.”) Crow begs to be assessed on whether he is a person of “good character.” Not even Trump’s most loyal fans could keep a straight face if their leader asked the same.

And then there is the matter of the two men’s hobbies. The poet Clive James once observed that wealth and culture do not go together. As a rule, he said, “the bigger the yacht, the smaller the library.” Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, could sleep every Supreme Court justice and still have room for Crow and the solicitor general. His library, which is a wing of his home, is not correspondingly small. It would be a jewel in the collection of any Ivy League school. He opens it more than 100 times a year for events and visits from schoolchildren and researchers.

Does Trump own any books? I browsed randomly on a few shelves in Crow’s library and found an early edition of Montesquieu’s L’esprit des Lois. Crow has a full-time archivist and librarian. At one point I asked Crow if he had in fact collected the signatures of every Supreme Court justice in American history. He paused, opened a small side door, and poked his head in to confirm with the librarian that the collection was complete. The librarian, who presumably sits there all day just waiting for such an inquiry, said they still lacked signatures from a handful of recent justices. (“Thanks!” Crow said, before closing the door.)

It is impossible to imagine Trump sailing for days in howling austral winds to reach the grave of Ernest Shackleton on South Georgia Island. Trump has no known friendships with Supreme Court justices, or indeed any friendships, period. Crow has many friends, and many acquaintances who have been his guests. One of his problems after the ProPublica exposé was that many possible character witnesses in his defense had been disqualified due to having accepted Crow’s hospitality. This includes Atlantic contributors who are employed, or have been employed, by think tanks he and his wife, Kathy, have funded, among them Arthur C. Brooks, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute as well as those who have dined or stayed at his homes, including the Atlantic contributing writer and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Crow stands in his library. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

“What about the Hitler paintings?” I asked before leaving. He must have known the question was coming, but he took five full seconds before he gathered the courage to answer. “They’re put away,” he said.

“Permanently?”

He didn’t answer directly. He recalled a 2015 incident when he planned a fundraiser for Marco Rubio, and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called his display of Hitler’s paintings “the height of insensitivity and indifference.” “So I took them down, and I put them in storage,” he said. But he sees nothing inherently wrong with displaying them. “Three World War II leaders—Churchill, Eisenhower, and Hitler— all being artists is in itself an interesting story,” he told me. “And I think it would be reasonable at some point to show pictures of all three of them together … But in the current environment, I’m going to say permanently—until I change my mind.”

He said he understood that certain objects mean different things to different people, and even though it was obvious to him that Nazis were bad, others might misread his intentions. “In a sensible world, people would be interested in things like that. But right now we’re not there,” he said. And the outrage over his Hitler paintings had shown him that he should consider how others feel. (This willingness to consider others’ feelings is itself a sign of his anti-Trumpishness.) “The idea that I might offend somebody, particularly somebody I care about, one of my friends, with this stuff—that hurts. I would never want to do that.”

“How about Hitler’s teapot and table linens?”

“Oh, they’re still upstairs,” he said. He admitted that Kathy had urged him to just put them away. “I’ve felt that right now it would be kind of deceptive to do that.” He said I could see the items but could not take photos.

We walked to a small room, away from the main floor of the library. “Kind of a catchall,” he said—a room with random items that didn’t fit elsewhere in his collection. Here was a sword owned by Douglas MacArthur, and another by a Japanese general present at the surrender. Then he turned, looking tense, to a display case with a rectangular leather cover, and opened it up, expecting to reveal the Nazi tableware within.

The case was empty, except for a sign that read NOT TO COMMEMORATE, BUT TO REMEMBER, IN HOPES THAT IT MAY NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

It was an awkward moment, and he seemed agitated at having misled me, even in this bizarre manner. “What I just said to you was wrong,” he said. “Somebody did something I didn’t know about.” He checked elsewhere in the room and found another empty case. “I didn’t know that. I’m not happy about it … I apologize.”

Crow looked ruffled. Even weirder than having Nazi memorabilia in your house is having it in your house but somehow losing track of it.

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Yesterday, the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate judiciary subcommittee about the “significant harm” that ChatGPT and similar generative-AI tools could pose to the world. When I asked Damon Beres, The Atlantic’s technology editor, for his read on the hearing, he noted that Altman’s emphasis on the broader existential risks of AI might conveniently elide some of the more quotidian problems of this new technology. I called Damon today to talk about that, and to see what else has been on his mind as he follows this story.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What makes the Durham report a sinister flop Has North Carolina found an abortion compromise? TV isn’t about to get worse. It already is. The billionaires who are threatening democracy

A Missed Opportunity

Isabel Fattal: Can you talk a bit more about Altman’s emphasis on the existential risks of AI, and what that focus might leave out?

Damon Beres: Discussing artificial intelligence in terms of vague existential risks actually allows Altman, and others discussing the future of artificial intelligence, to dodge some of the everyday impacts that we’re already seeing from the technology. For those who work in developing these tools, it’s a clever way of putting the ball in the court of lawmakers and essentially saying, This stuff is so big and abstract, and I’m fully on board with the idea that it should be regulated, and I want to be your partner in all this, but this is something that you have to wrestle with.

Isabel: What are some examples of these everyday impacts that get lost?

Damon: There was not really any talk at the hearing about the impacts of AI on labor. There were broad allusions to the idea of job loss. But there are so many specific ways that jobs are already threatened by automation today. Amazon is pushing for greater automation on its warehouse floors. The Writers Guild of America strike has brought the issue of AI-generated writing in entertainment to the forefront, but the strike didn’t come up in specific terms.

Additionally, we’ve seen AI deployed in a broad range of settings that deeply affect how people live their lives every day. Four years ago, there was a study on the algorithms that determined whether patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston should receive extra proactive medical care. And the way this artificial-intelligence system was set up ended up privileging relatively healthy white patients over sicker Black patients.That’s an example of artificial intelligence being deployed in a setting that is not necessarily getting meaningful governmental oversight but is fundamentally having a significant impact on human lives.

Of course, Sam Altman and OpenAI have their own corner of the world that they operate in. ChatGPT isn’t the same thing as a hospital program. But given the opportunity for lawmakers to think seriously about the impacts of artificial intelligence and what regulation could look like, it seems a little bit like a missed opportunity—we’ve known about these problems for a long time.

Isabel: Where do you think lawmakers should begin the conversation about AI regulation?

Damon: The EU is working on an AI act that would essentially regulate the development and deployment of new AI systems. And China has drafted policies that would enforce a certain set of rules over generative-AI products similar to ChatGPT, and also limit the kind of content these AI tools can create. So there are already a couple of precedents out there. There have also been a number of interesting proposals put forth here in the U.S. by AI experts who’ve been paying attention to this for quite a long time.

It’s encouraging that we’re having these conversations, but on the other hand, the horse has left the barn in a very real way. ChatGPT is already out there. We’re already facing the potential of job disruption. We’re already facing the potential for the internet to be flooded by spammy content and disinformation to a greater extent than maybe anyone would have thought possible even a couple of years ago.

And some of these large language models are already out of the hands of the technology companies themselves, let alone the government. For example, in March, an AI language model created by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, leaked. This was supposed to be a tool that would be available to AI researchers. It ended up pirated, essentially, and released on 4chan. Anyone who knows where to look can access and download this technology. It’s not ready-made like ChatGPT, but it can be developed and purposed in such a way. And once that’s out on the internet, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

There’s also still a need for oversight of the existing AI applications used in health care, law enforcement, surveillance, real estate—those sorts of things.

Isabel: With those existing applications of AI that have been around for years, it seems like the horse is really far from the barn at this point.

Damon: I think that’s right. We are interacting with what would be defined as artificial intelligence countless times throughout the day. You might wake up and talk to your Alexa device. You might see algorithmically sorted content when you look at your phone and read Facebook or even Apple News over breakfast. There are instances where you might be in the hospital and, unbeknownst to you, the type of care that you’re getting could be influenced by how your data are processed by an algorithm. AI is a gigantic category of technology that has been in development for decades upon decades at this point. Some of the most consequential impacts are those outside of tools like ChatGPT.

Related:

Before AI takes over, make plans to give everyone money. A chatbot is secretly doing my job.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy stated their intention to reach a deal on the federal government’s debt ceiling, which could occur as early as Sunday. The Supreme Court rejected a request to block state and local bans on assault-style weapons in Illinois. A UN agency says that the world will likely experience record temperatures in the next five years, and that it is poised to breach the crucial threshold of a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase above preindustrial levels by 2027.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Nowhere in the U.S. should expect a cool summer, Matteo Wong writes—but even a less punishing season than recent summers would be hotter than historical norms.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Shelby Tauber / Reuters

Latinos Can Be White Supremacists

By Adam Serwer

A gunman turned a Dallas mall into an abattoir earlier this month, and parts of the American right reacted in disbelief. Not at the sixth mass shooting in a public place this year—by now these events have become numbingly routine—but that the suspect identified might have been motivated by white-supremacist ideology.

Why? Because the suspect was identified as one Mauricio Garcia.

Read the full article.

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Read. “A Week Later,” a poem by Sharon Olds in which she bids farewell to her husband of 32 years.

“And it came to me, / for moments at a time, moment after moment, / to be glad for him that he is with the one / he feels was meant for him.”

Watch. Fast X (in theaters this week), to understand why staff writer David Sims will only watch Fast XI, or whatever numeral it gets assigned, out of “grim professional obligation.”

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

A gunman turned a Dallas mall into an abattoir earlier this month, and parts of the American right reacted in disbelief. Not at the sixth mass shooting in a public place this year—by now these events have become numbingly routine—but that the suspect identified might have been motivated by white-supremacist ideology.

Why? Because the suspect was identified as one Mauricio Garcia.

As soon as the suspect’s name was reported, some conservative media figures declared that his name indicated that he could not have been a white supremacist. Twitter’s right-wing billionaire owner, Elon Musk, amplified suggestions on the social network that the reporting about Garcia’s ideological predilections was a “psyop,” a claim that proved particularly popular among those users desperate enough to pay him $8 a month to have their terrible opinions boosted by the network’s algorithm. Business Insider later reported that Twitter had apparently limited the visibility of the account of the website Bellingcat, which had first followed Garcia’s ideological paper trail to the far right. Musk has continued to insist that documentation of Garcia’s ideological background is a “psyop,” despite Texas authorities affirming Bellingcat’s assessment.

This disbelief is naive at best. Racial identity is a social reality, not a biological one, and Hispanic people can be of any racial background. “Latinos are a pan-ethnic group that have very many racial identifications within that grouping. So, you know, we can be Latino by ethnicity, but Latinos are also white, Black, Indigenous, Asian,” Tanya Katerí Hernández, a professor at Fordham Law and the author of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality, told me. “We have white Hispanics, and there are some white Hispanics who hold very white-supremacist views.”

[Xochitl Gonzalez: Enough with latino anti-blackness]

Reporters have uncovered a lengthy social-media trail testifying to Garcia’s racist and misogynist beliefs, and Texas authorities have described him as expressing “neo-Nazi ideation.” The initial reports in the aftermath of a mass shooting are often confusing and contradictory, and there’s nothing wrong with treating them with a little healthy skepticism. But the idea of a Hispanic person adhering to white-nationalist ideology is hardly ridiculous. The rest of the world does not conform to domestic American understandings of race, because race is an ideological concept, not a scientific one. Just because people classify you as one thing in America doesn’t mean they see you the same way everywhere else.

“Racial identity is not fixed. It’s not natural. It’s not biological. It’s not monolithic,” Ian Haney López, a law professor at UC Berkeley and the author of White by Law, told me. “Racial identity is culturally and politically produced. How people respond to it varies enormously. And that means that some people of whatever color respond to racism by saying, This is immoral and ugly. And other people respond to racism by saying, Yeah, I’m one of the superior races.” Indeed, two of the most prominent Hitler admirers in America are Kanye West and a guy with the surname Fuentes. America is nothing if not a land of opportunity.

Latin American countries have their own issues with racism. Although some countries present their “mixedness” as a cultural ideal, in practice, race and class tend to be closely intertwined.

“In the United States, there’s this binary that denies all the complexity of various other races and various mixtures, and also a cultural sense that race is strictly biological,” Haney López said. “And in Latin America it’s more of a continuum, with more room for social, economic, and cultural factors to be factored into one’s racial standards.”

A few examples drawn from the long history of race and racism in Latin America help illustrate the point.

Latin American countries, like the U.S., have a colonial history built on the displacement of native communities, and exploitation of African labor through the transatlantic slave trade. Less than 10 percent of enslaved Africans in the Middle Passage landed in North America; most of the rest landed in nations where the main languages spoken are French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Although the social dynamics in these countries are not identical, as in the United States, their societies remain scarred by the legacy of that history. Evo Morales, the first Bolivian president of Indigenous descent, was mocked by his political opposition as a “poor Indian.” In 2021, the then–Argentine president remarked that “Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came out of the jungle, but we Argentines came from boats from Europe.” This was a reference to Argentina’s 19th-century immigration policy, which, much like that of the United States, attempted to socially engineer its population to be whiter—and it was not the only South American country to pursue such a policy. “After the abolition of slavery, a number of countries across Latin America—some successfully, some unsuccessfully—wanted to bring in European immigrants in order to undercut the number of now-free people of African descent,” Hernández said.

[From the April 2019 issue: White nationalism’s deep American roots]

The Hispanic population of the United States is incredibly diverse, and its members subscribe to a wide array of views. Among the largely Hispanic communities along the Rio Grande Valley, many people are employed by the border-protection industry, and their views on immigration tend to be quite conservative. Fearmongering about illegal immigration, in terms that would be familiar to Tucker Carlson viewers, is prominent in Spanish-language right-wing media, which both illustrates the point that people of Hispanic descent can be as anti-immigrant as anyone else and raises the question of whether those contending otherwise are ignorant or dishonest. Several conservative commentators even blamed lax immigration policies for the Dallas shooting. Although Garcia, who was born in Dallas, might have been trying to martyr himself for the white-nationalist cause, to some conservative commentators, he was just another “illegal” because of his ethnic background.  

And the question of how Hispanics fit within America’s constructed categories of race has long been contested. Mexican was included as a category on the 1930 census, but Hispanic was not included until 1980. From the 1930s into the ’60s, Haney López told me, many Hispanic advocacy groups pursued the same political strategy as Southern and Eastern European immigrants, seeking to distinguish themselves from African Americans and ultimately be accepted as white.

“With the civil-rights movement,” Haney López said, “you get this rapid, significant shift where a lot of folks in the leadership class and the more politically engaged elements of the community say, No, we’re not white. We’re actually brown, and we always have been brown. And we’ve been brainwashed, brainwashed ourselves into thinking we’re white, but actually, we’re brown, and we’re brown in a way that makes us similar to African Americans.”

That shift, though, was hardly universal, Haney López said, pointing to a survey he worked on in 2020. Only about a quarter of Latinos saw the group as being “people of color,” he found, and those respondents tended to be more liberal.

The idea that a Hispanic American could be a white supremacist may seem confounding to those wedded to the idea that racial identity is both a biological fact and fixed throughout time. But neither is true. And it’s not at all surprising, given the history of racism in the United States, that someone would see such an ideology as a way to raise his status relative to others.

“You don’t have to look any particular way to want to be part of the club,” Hernández said.

Police confirm fatalities, but say they are not able to confirm how many people died in Allen, a Dallas suburb.

In red and blue states, Democrats are consolidating their hold on the most economically productive places.

Metropolitan areas won by President Joe Biden in 2020 generated more of the total economic output than metros won by Donald Trump in 35 of the 50 states, according to new research by Brookings Metro provided exclusively to The Atlantic. Biden-won metros contributed the most to the GDP not only in all 25 states that he carried but also in 10 states won by Trump, including Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Utah, Ohio, and even Florida, Brookings found. Almost all of the states in which Trump-won metros accounted for the most economic output rank in the bottom half of all states for the total amount of national GDP produced within their borders.

[From the March 2017 issue: Red state, blue city]

Biden’s dominance was pronounced in the highest-output metro areas. Biden won 43 of the 50 metros, regardless of what state they were in, that generated the absolute most economic output; remarkably, he won every metro area that ranked No. 1 through 24 on that list of the most-productive places.

The Democrats’ ascendance in the most-prosperous metropolitan regions underscores how geographic and economic dynamics now reinforce the fundamental fault line in American politics between the people and places most comfortable with how the U.S. is changing and those who feel alienated or marginalized by those changes.

Just as Democrats now perform best among the voters most accepting of the demographic and cultural currents remaking 21st-century America, they have established a decisive advantage in diverse, well-educated metropolitan areas. Those places have become the locus of the emerging information economy in industries such as computing, communications, and advanced biotechnology.

And just as Republicans have relied primarily on the voters who feel most alienated and threatened by cultural and demographic change, their party has grown stronger in preponderantly white, blue-collar, midsize and smaller metro areas, as well as rural communities. Those are all places that generally have shared little in the transition to the information economy and remain much more reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: agriculture, fossil-fuel extraction, and manufacturing.

Neither party is entirely comfortable with this stark new political alignment. Much of Biden’s economic agenda, with its emphasis on creating jobs that do not require a college degree, is centered on courting working-class voters by channeling more investment and employment to communities that feel excluded from the information age’s opportunities. And some Republican strategists continue to worry about the party’s eroding position in the economically innovative white-collar suburbs of major metropolitan areas.

Yet the underlying economic forces widening this political divide will be difficult for either side to reverse, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, told me. The places benefiting from the new opportunities in information-based industries, he said, tend to be racially diverse, densely populated, well educated, cosmopolitan, supported by prestigious institutions of higher education, and tolerant of diverse lifestyles. And the information age’s tendency to concentrate its benefits in a relatively small circle of “superstar cities” that fit that profile has hardly peaked. From 2010 to 2020, Muro said, the share of the nation’s total economic output generated by the 50 most-productive metropolitan areas increased from 62 to 64 percent, a significant jump in such a short span. “We are still in the midst of that massive shift, though there’s plenty of uncertainty right now,” Muro told me. “These are long cycles of economic history.”

The trajectory is toward greater conflict between the diverse, big places that have transitioned the furthest toward the information-age economy and the usually less diverse and smaller places that have not. Across GOP-controlled states, Republicans are using statewide power rooted in their dominance of nonmetropolitan areas to pass an aggressive agenda preempting authority from their largest cities across a wide range of issues and imposing cultural values largely rejected in those big cities; several are also now targeting public universities with laws banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and proposals to eliminate tenure for professors.

This sweeping offensive is especially striking because, as the Brookings data show, even many red states now rely on blue-leaning metro areas as their principal drivers of economic growth. Texas, for instance, is one of the places where Republicans are pursuing the most aggressive preemption agenda, but the metros won by Biden there in 2020 account for nearly three-fourths of the state’s total economic output.

[Read: An unprecedented divide between red and blue America]

“State antagonism toward cities is not sustainable,” says Amy Liu, the interim president of the Brookings Institution. “By handicapping local problem solving or attacking local institutions and employers, state lawmakers are undermining the very actors they need to build a thriving regional economy.”

At The Atlantic’s request, Muro and the senior research assistant Yang You of the Brookings Metro program calculated the share of state GDP generated across the 50 states in the metropolitan areas won by Biden and Trump in 2020. (The calculation was based on 2020 data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. In federal statistics, 46 metropolitan areas extend across state lines—for instance, the New York metropolitan area also includes parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Brookings disaggregated the economic and political results along state boundaries to ensure that each was apportioned to the correct total.)

The analysis showed that the metros Biden carried generated 50 percent or more of state economic output in 28 states, and a plurality of state output in seven others. States where Biden-won metros accounted for the highest share of economic output included reliably blue states: His metros generated at least 90 percent of state economic output in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, New York, and Maryland. But the Biden-won metros also generated at least 80 percent of the total economic output in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, as well as two-thirds in Michigan and almost exactly half in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—all key swing states. And the metros he carried generated at least half of total output in several Republican states, including Texas, Iowa, and Missouri.

The metropolitan areas Trump carried accounted for the most economic output in only 15 states. Twelve of the states where Trump metros accounted for the most economic activity ranked in the bottom half of all states for total output; the only exceptions were Indiana, Tennessee, and Louisiana. By contrast, Biden dominated the most productive states: His metros generated more of the output than the Trump metros in 22 of the 25 highest-producing states. As striking: Biden metros generated at least half of total output in 12 of the 15 most productive states and 19 of the top 25.

All of these results reflect the emphatic blue tilt of the largest and most economically productive metro areas. In 37 states, Biden won the single metro that generated the largest economic output. The results in the 50 metros that contributed the most to the national GDP regardless of their state were even more decisive: Biden, as noted above, not only carried 43 of them—and won the two dozen largest—but carried more of the highest-performing metros in red states than Trump did. The list of high-performing red-state metro areas that Biden carried included all four of the largest in Texas—Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio.

“The states that are most invested in the knowledge economy are overwhelmingly Democratic; large metros [in almost every state] are essentially universally Democratic; and affluent voters in these large metro areas are now overwhelmingly Democratic too,” Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist, told me. “The basic story seems to be that where you are seeing rapid economic growth, where the nation’s GDP is produced, you are seeing an ongoing shift toward the Democratic Party.”

Biden also won 28 of the next 50 metros that generated the most economic output, giving him 71 of the 100 largest overall, Brookings found. After the top 100, the switch flipped: Trump won 62 of the next 100 metros ranked by their total output, and 143 of the final 184 metros with the smallest economic output.

To understand these patterns better, the Brookings Metro analysis took an especially close look at the demographic and economic characteristics of metro areas in eight of the most politically competitive states, as well as the two mega-states in each party’s column: California and New York for the Democrats, and Texas and Florida for the Republicans.

[Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good]

Those results fill in the picture of a broad-based separation between the Democratic- and Republican-leaning places. Across those 12 states, Biden won about three-fifths of the metros with a population of at least 250,000; Trump won about three-fourths of those that are smaller. In these states, Biden won about three-fourths of the metros with more college graduates than average and Trump won about two-thirds of those with fewer college grads than average. Biden likewise won almost two-thirds of these states’ metros that are more racially diverse than average, and Trump won two-thirds of those that are less diverse. Biden predominated in the metros with the largest share of workers participating in digital industries, and Trump won 17 of the 20 metros with the largest share of workers engaged in manufacturing.

Despite their economic success, many of the largest blue-leaning metros, especially since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, have faced undeniable turbulence in the form of high housing costs, widespread homelessness, persistent economic inequality, downtown business centers weakened by the rise of remote work, and, in many cases, increasing crime. Some of the very largest metros “may be seeing new headwinds,” Muro said, but if employers look beyond them, the beneficiaries are less likely to be the smaller Trump-leaning places than the blue cities just outside the highest rung of economic activity, such as Denver, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Brookings’s analysis has found that even amid all of the pandemic’s disruption, the elevated share of total national economic output generated by the 50 largest metros remained constant from 2019 through 2021. Though trends can always change, Muro said, “it is hard to imagine a massive unrolling” of the concentration of economic opportunity that has characterized the digital era.

Lower taxes and especially less-expensive housing costs have helped many red-state metros remain competitive with those in blue states as the economy evolves, but a sustained conservative attack on red states’ most prosperous places could threaten that record. “The biggest worry is that the culture wars, the attack on the urban core, the attack on the self-governing of cities can have the unintended effect of pitting urban areas against their suburbs and rural neighbors when the modern economy is regional and we need all of these actors to work together,” Amy Liu of Brookings said.

This economic configuration has big implications for national politics. Hacker believes that over time, ceding so much ground in the most economically vibrant places “is not a sustainable position for the Republican Party to be in.” While the party is “benefiting from the undertow” of backlash against the overlapping economic and social transformations reconfiguring U.S. society, he added, “the places that are becoming bluer are growing faster; they are bigger … and they are also, as Republicans lament, setting the tone” for the emphasis on diversity and cultural liberalism now embraced by most big public and private institutions.

Still, Hacker noted, the GOP’s “structural advantages” in the electoral system—particularly the bias in the Senate and Electoral College toward small states least affected by these changes—may allow the party to offset for years the advantages that Democrats are reaping from “economic and demographic change.” The result could be a sustained standoff between a Republican political coalition centered on the smaller places that reflect what America has been and a Democratic party grounded in the economically preeminent large metros forging the nation’s future.

Photographs by Phyllis B. Dooney

One Tuesday this past fall, Senior Police Officer Terry Cherry was struggling to connect with some 75 bleary Clemson University students doing their best to stay awake and not make eye contact with the day’s guest speaker. Cherry, who packs a lot of ebullience and authority into a short frame, was deploying nearly all of it to get their attention.

“Who here wants to be a police officer?” she asked. A few tentative hands went up. “Raise your hand if you want to be an FBI agent.” Twenty-some hands went up.

“What does the FBI do?” A long pause. “Anyone? Raise your hand.” Another pause. “Okay, I get this all the time from college students. Everyone wants to be in the FBI. You know why? Television. Not a single one of you can tell me what the FBI does.” By now, sheepish grins were cracking around the room. “You know what they don’t do? They don’t fly around and profile people that are serial killers and eat caviar and drink champagne on private jets.” (What do they do? Lots of counterterrorism and working alongside local agencies, she said with audible disdain.)

Many police departments across the United States are facing a recruiting crisis. Getting a high-resolution picture is impossible, because the U.S. has about 18,000 police agencies and no centralized data collection, but departments across the country report shedding officers, some as part of natural waves of retirement, some in response to the post–George Floyd moment. What made the indifference at Clemson especially notable was that Cherry was speaking to a criminal-justice class, which you’d expect to be full of students interested in careers in law enforcement. Even there, almost no students wanted to work patrol in a city police department. “Normally when I talk about policing, it's like, Oh, I don’t want to be just a police officer,” she said.

[David A. Graham: America is losing its Black police officers]

Cherry’s job is to change that. Or rather, it’s one of her jobs. Cherry is the recruiter for the city police department in Charleston, South Carolina. She’s charged with keeping the department’s ranks full by bringing in new officers, whether fresh recruits or transfers from other departments, and by retaining officers already on the force. Cherry's ambitions are larger than filling open positions in Charleston: She wants to change policing.

Right now, many people have ideas about how to fix American law enforcement. Many of the most prominent ideas involve shrinking the footprint of police, whether that’s full abolition (on the far left), reduced headcounts, or taking the tasks of responding to mental-health incidents, traffic offenses, and other issues out of the portfolio of police officers—all of which roughly fits under the umbrella of defunding. Even in places where civilian and police leaders want to add more officers, they are struggling to hire, in effect achieving activists’ goal of smaller forces. But rather than defund the police, Cherry wants to rebuild the force, one officer at a time. As she sees it, the best way to do that is to bring in people of all backgrounds, including those who wouldn’t otherwise become cops, producing a department that’s fairer and more representative.

To that end, she’s in constant motion, speaking with a lot of different people. I heard her compare her role to both a sales rep cornering a market and a college-football coach scouting prospects. At a job fair in Maryland, she had learned that several northeastern police departments were planning to attend Clemson’s criminal-justice job fair. Cherry is pretty confident that job fairs aren’t particularly useful for recruitment—mostly good for hobnobbing and handing out swag—but she wasn’t willing to risk out-of-staters snapping up the most promising South Carolina recruits, so she’d driven the four hours from Charleston to Clemson to sew up any prospects a couple of days before the event. After handing out a thick stack of business cards, even to students who said they weren’t interested in law enforcement, she drove home for her stepson’s high-school open house. Then she came back Thursday for the career fair. Cherry had already worked connections to request a spot at the fair close to the FBI.

Officer Terry Cherry of the Charleston Police Department meets with Deputy Chief Chito Walker about her recruiting efforts at headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Police leaders began to speak about a crisis in staffing in the late 2010s. Across the country, tens of thousands of officers were hired following the passage of the 1994 crime bill, which provided federal money to departments to put cops on the beat, but many of those officers are reaching retiremen age. Not enough applicants have been coming forward to fill their roles.

Then came 2020, and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, which produced massive protests against police and political efforts to defund departments. At the same time that police were struggling to respond to the new scrutiny and sometimes animosity, they were grappling with the coronavirus. The pandemic posed a particular danger to officers, who couldn’t opt to work from home, yet once vaccines were available, a good number of officers hated mandates so much that they quit rather than comply. When violent crime rose across the country in the second half of 2020, many cities that had cut public-safety budgets after the protests scrambled to reverse those cuts or to fill vacancies. Even now, fewer people want those jobs.

[Adam Serwer: The absurdity of comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany]

That top-line description actually understates the challenge. Many agencies have announced initiatives to overhaul their hiring practices, though some skeptics regard much of this as window dressing. The goals include both avoiding some people who might want to join but who would make bad officers and also finding different kinds of officers. Though proponents of such initiatives mean that to include different backgrounds and mindsets and not just demographic diversity, it does include increasing the numbers of women, Black people and members of other racial minorities, and LGBTQ people in the ranks. The post-Floyd reckoning has made that task even harder, as some of the people agencies want aren’t feeling warm to careers in policing. Combine that dynamic with the wave of retirements, and you get large agencies that are actually seeing their diversity backsliding.

Last year, the chief in Durham, North Carolina, had to go on patrol to ease staffing shortages related to a 13 percent vacancy rate. Some 20 percent of jobs in the Philadelphia Police Department were empty. Chicago reported nearly 1,000 empty spots for patrol officers alone. New Orleans has lost about one-fifth of its force since 2020. After the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, some current and former officers there have blamed shoddy and hasty training by a department frantic to fill its ranks. This makes Charleston an outlier: Less than one-tenth of jobs is unfilled.

The Charleston Police Department has several things going for it: The city is beautiful, the climate is nice, the pay is better than in most other departments in the state, and the overall environment is friendly to law enforcement. “There’s an element of support in this part of the country, in this region, in the state, in the city, for police,” Charleston’s chief, Luther Reynolds, told me. “I talk to my counterparts in other parts of the country, and they don’t get that kind of support.”

He’s tried to use those built-in advantages to modernize his agency. “I’d rather go 100 officers short than hire somebody who does not deserve to be in this uniform.”

CPD hasn’t had to settle for major vacancy problems or accept subpar applications in large part because of Terry Cherry. She talks a lot about stereotypes—she complains that after Floyd’s murder, police officers were seen as all being like Derek Chauvin—and she herself doesn’t match the ones most people have about cops. To start, she is not a tall, clean-cut straight white man, though she does style her hair in what she calls a “man cut”: buzzed short on the sides, combed over the middle. She’s gay. She’s slowly working toward full sleeves of tattoos on both arms. She tried for a long time to hide those from her parents by wearing long sleeves until she just couldn’t bear the heat of a Charleston summer. Her father worried that the ink would keep her from moving up in the department, which cracked her up. “I was like, ‘I'm a little gay woman, like—what the hell, you think that’s gonna stop me? You’re crazy. You think tattoos are gonna be what it is?’” she told the Clemson students.

Cherry works at her desk at headquarters in Charleston on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic) Left: Trophies decorate Cherry’s office at the Charleston Police Department on February 22, 2023. Right: Cherry’s office features a photo of a female police officer at CPD headquarters in Charleston. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Cherry doesn’t come from a traditional policing background, either. She grew up in Boone, North Carolina, a hippie college town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her parents—“ultra-Democrats,” as she puts it—were professors at Appalachian State University. For college, Cherry went about as far away in distance and style as she could, studying theater at UCLA. But as she approached 30, in the middle of a recession and with her movie-star dreams fading, she decided to follow her brother, a U.S. Capitol police officer, into law enforcement. And when she couldn’t find a job with a department in California, she broke her vow to never live in the South again and moved to Charleston, where her parents were planning to retire, and joined the police department.

Like pretty much every officer, she started on patrol. While working that job, Cherry read One Tribe at a Time: The Paper That Changed the War in Afghanistan by Jim Gant, a former Special Forces officer, about building relationships with locals in Afghanistan, and wondered whether she could apply its lessons to policing. She persuaded her bosses to let her start a special problem-solving initiative, but her fellow cops were not impressed. “They called me ‘hippie,’ called me a ‘hug-a-thug,’” she recalled. “They called me all kinds of things.” But the initiative started helping solve crimes, and the department noticed. When Reynolds was hired as chief, he selected her as a recruiter because he was impressed by her energy and her success working with the city’s Latino population. Cherry was shocked, in part because the job usually went to a more senior officer.

“We wanted her because she has so much energy,” Reynolds told me. “Everywhere she goes, she adds value … There’s nothing magical about that. She doesn’t have a golden horseshoe or anything. That’s just from her hard work.”

Her work ethic was important, because there wasn’t much for her to take over when she started, in 2018. With Anthony Gibson, a young sergeant who is Cherry’s opposite in many respects—tall and clean-cut, soft-spoken where she is loud, aphoristic where she is voluble—she implemented a strategic plan she’d written and started building a team. Since then, she’s recruited about 40 percent of the current department while also conducting research, writing academic articles about policing, speaking at national conferences on recruiting, and pursuing a doctorate in public administration at Valdosta State University, in Georgia.

Charleston has a history of racism, from slave auctions to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter beginning the Civil War to the 2015 massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, and in 2019, the department voluntarily embarked on a racial-bias assessment conducted by an outside consulting firm. The auditors found “significant progress” but also racial disparities in traffic stops, vague policies on use of force and professional standards, and poor accountability measures. CPD has adopted a progressive approach in other areas, including a focus on evidence-based policing; officers, including Cherry, participate in the Justice Department’s selective LEADS Scholars program, which trains mid-career officers in scientific research.

“The Terry Cherrys of the world need to have an environment where they can prosper and they can be free to express themselves,” Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told me. “Policing traditionally hasn’t allowed that in ways that it needs to … and not every part of policing is ready for that yet.”

Cherry greets the forensics team, which usually works at a location off-site, at headquarters in Charleston on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Jeremy Wilson, a professor at Michigan State University who studies police recruitment and retention, first encountered Cherry at a conference. She immediately struck him as someone he needed to remember. They’re now working together on a paper on police retention.

What sets Cherry aside from typical officers also makes her an asset in trying to recruit nontraditional officers. She speaks cop fluently, but she’s equally conversant in the language of Millennial social justice and casually cites the Buddha. “I’m in the LGBTQ community. I’m very proud of that,” she told me. “But I’m also a police officer. I’m also equally proud of that.” Cherry speaks, with only a hint of irony, about “fighting the man” in pushing for social change. She rolls her eyes at the cavalcade of “dead white guys” assigned in the political philosophy class she’s taking for her doctorate and analyzes power dynamics in terms of “privilege.” She introduced and teaches a training course for officers on gender identity in Charleston. Don’t call her a liberal or try to place any other political label on her, though.

“I don’t think about it that way,” she said. “I love being a police officer … But that does not mean there’s not room for improvement in policing. Anyone who says that is a lunatic.”

Similarly, she said her approach to recruitment isn’t to try to find people from specific demographics to join the police. The end goal is a force that looks like society, but her method for achieving that is to cast a wide net and get the best cadets she can.

“People are attracted to the person selling the product. I’m not going to say it’s all my magnetic personality, but being nice to people makes the difference,” she told me. That basic kindness also happens to be what she’s looking for when she meets a prospective officer.

Left: Cherry changes into her “outdoor uniform” at headquarters in Charleston. Police officers are required to wear this uniform whenever out in public on duty. Cherry is preparing to go to a recruiting fair at the nearby Citadel. Right: An enlarged badge hangs on the walls at CPD headquarters in Charleston. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic) Cherry stands at her recruiting table at the Citadel in Charleston on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

But none of that soft stuff was her main focus at Clemson. Her problem was not fixing policing in the long term; it was getting a room full of tired, maybe bored undergraduates to see law enforcement as an enticing career path. One typical way to do this is to emphasize the traditional advantages of civil service: good benefits, early retirement, strong pensions, and public respect. The problem is that these are things of the past. The pay isn’t always high enough to entice the groups that departments want to attract now, especially when recruits know the job doesn’t come with the same public respect that the profession commanded in earlier times. What’s more, everyone knows that. So Cherry leaned into it.

“We’re the generation of being liked. Are we not?” She revved into full theater-kid mode, roaming across the front of the classroom in a CPD polo, cargo pants, and duty belt, throwing exaggerated shrugs and facial expressions at the class. But she told the students that if they wanted to see more social justice in law enforcement, the change would have to come from inside. So, she asked: Who wants to be a cop?

“If you won’t do the work, and you won’t do the work, and you won’t do the work, why should I do the work?” she said. “I shouldn’t. That’s what you think. Okay. Well, you know how long it takes me to quit? Two weeks. Today, I put in my leave slip. I say, ‘I’m done with policing.’ And I quit. Two weeks. You know how long it takes to train someone to do policing? A year. Or more, for them to be good.”

And then what happens? She pointed to places where wealthy residents have started their own private police forces, many with cops moonlighting, leaving poorer citizens to fend for themselves: “I’m sorry; did you think the rich wouldn’t get their security?”

Many law-enforcement advocates argue that defunding the police is a bad idea, because it doesn’t actually produce more justice. This is Cherry’s way of bringing that point down from the broad scope of policy to the personal level of career choice. Cherry returned to a point that I’ve heard reform-minded cops make many times: You can’t make policing pretty, but you can and should make it a lot fairer. She wants to convince people to accept the former in order to achieve the latter. Even the best policing sometimes requires using force. “It looks awful. It’s violence,” she said. “Everybody thinks they can do our job now. But no one wants to do it.”

This pep talk cum guilt trip might seem like a tough sell. But when the class was over, many more than the two timid hand-raisers approached Cherry to talk with her, ask for tips, or collect a business card. Almost all of them were women.

Cherry leaves headquarters with her recruiting table kit in Charleston. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Getting recruits to apply is the first step. You still have to get them onto the force and keep them there. Early one morning last fall, Cherry was holding a clipboard on the side of a track at The Citadel, the venerable military college in Charleston. It wasn’t hot yet, but even at that hour, the humidity wafting off the Ashley River was oppressive. Specifically, it was oppressing two aspiring Charleston police officers.

[Read: How a rising Trump critic lost her nerve]

At most police departments, applicants have to pass a physical abilities test, or PAT. In Charleston, that includes a bench press (indexed to percentage of body weight), sit-ups, then a 300-meter run, push-ups, and finally a 1.5-mile run.

These tests are a subject of debate in the profession, especially with so many agencies facing staffing challenges. Pretty much everyone agrees that cops should have some sort of fitness standard, because the job often requires physical movement. But as with so many aspects of policing today, a divide has opened between older-school cops who favor keeping things the way they’ve always been and reformers who find the specific requirements to be less important than a recruit’s holistic potential.

Cherry is an evangelist for fitness, warning the aspiring officers that cops who don’t exercise struggle to deal with stress and can end up divorced and with drinking problems. But she also bristles at accusations that changes to entrance requirements designed to attract nontraditional officers represents “lowering standards,” noting that as a short, gay, tattooed woman, she would have been excluded from many departments until recently. “I don’t wanna be a token,” Cherry said, but she believes that different life experiences make for innovation and creativity in the profession. And discrete skills are easy enough to impart. “I can teach you how to shoot. I can teach you how to drive. I can’t teach you to be a nice person.”

Before anyone could teach these two recruits, though, they would have to get past the PAT, and things weren’t looking good. The first, a young former bartender, breezed through every step until he hit the push-ups and got overheated; he eventually bowed out of the test. The second, a veteran, had passed a similar test in the military but said she was a little out of shape. She lagged behind her comrade through most of the tests but outlasted him on the push-ups. By then, however, she was too worn out to complete the longer run in enough time to qualify. Cherry, running in place alongside, half coaxed and half harangued her to at least finish the distance walking.

Cherry was encouraging in the moment, giving disappointed-coach vibes. She reminded the applicants to train before retaking the test, gave them some tips, and even offered to run with them if it’d help. In a recruiting study the department conducted in 2021, recruits said that one reason they decided to apply was that they felt Cherry and others took a personal interest in them and their families. Back at her desk later on, however, Cherry was frustrated that they didn’t prepare better for a simple test with transparent standards.

But she didn’t have time to dwell on it. She had an inbox of emails to answer from recruits, some of whom she wanted to take some on ride-alongs. She had more recruiting trips to make, she was teaching her gender-identity curriculum to another department, and she was participating in a police-centered social-justice fellowship. Cherry also had a full schedule of presentations in Las Vegas, San Diego, Dallas, and two in Washington, D.C., including one at the Department of Justice—plus another on Zoom, because she couldn’t find funding to travel to Iceland. Somewhere she had to squeeze in her doctoral studies.

Is it sustainable? Cherry probably can’t maintain her current pace, and in any case, she doesn’t want to. Going into recruitment was not her career plan. She still has aspirations to work on the department’s drug task force and apply for promotion to sergeant. Someday, she hopes to lead an agency of her own, something her colleagues see as certain.

“I told her, ‘I have no doubt that you’re going to be chief one day,’” Wilson told me. “I have no doubt she will accomplish anything she sets her mind to.”

Sometime soon, she’ll rotate to a new job. Gibson plans to change roles around the same time, giving the whole recruitment-and-retention team new leadership. Transitions like this are hard at any organization, but especially for one fronted by a charismatic individual. If Cherry is the one-of-a-kind officer who so many people who’ve met her say she is, then Charleston can’t expect to find another one of her waiting in the ranks of the department, regardless of how well she’s done her job. As I followed her, I wondered whether her success was just about her being the right person. No matter how many evidence-based studies and strategies an agency follows, someone has to implement them. I wondered whether Charleston will just revert to the national mean, struggling to fill its ranks once Cherry moves on.

She and her bosses are aware of this challenge. Cherry told me that she intended to leave her successor a strong foundation, but that whoever took the role next would have to find a way to make it work for them. Reynolds told me the test of the Charleston Police Department as an organization will be whether it has effectively built structures that can survive a change in personnel. That’s the challenge for policing more broadly too: To provide safe streets and just law enforcement, the profession will need to learn lessons from places like Charleston about how to build sustainable systems for hiring and retaining good officers.

For now, though, Cherry is still on the beat. Two days after speaking to the Clemson class, she was back at the university for its job fair, where a long line of students wanted to talk with her about her work and the department. Even more satisfyingly, she reported, “I was more popular than the FBI.” Not bad for just a police officer.