With help from Maya King, Nolan McCaskill, Renuka Rayasam and Catherine Kim.

The year 2020 was a lot of a lot, from pandemic to protests to the craziest presidential election ever. Judging from events thus far — Insurrection! Monster storms! Worsening pandemic! — 2021 is shaping up to be even more intense.

But amid the chaos, two very important takeaways are emerging.

First, the George Floyd protests, the fallout from those protests and the havoc wreaked by the pandemic, made it abundantly clear to official Washington that the skin you’re in shapes your lot in life. No matter how educated you are, no matter how hard you work, race and ethnicity play a role in everything, from health outcomes to education to your ability to get a mortgage to the way you are perceived — and treated — by police. And those disparities are now on the national agenda like never before.

Systemic racism isn’t just a concept. It's tangible, measurable, real. What’s more, today, there’s a growing willingness, in the Capitol and in corporate boardrooms, to acknowledge it exists. (Well, maybe not among everyone.) Witness the ease and frequency with which President Joe Biden brings it up.

Second, thanks to intensive grassroots organizing, communities of color now wield real political power. Black and brown voters played a pivotal role in the presidential election and in flipping the Senate. This is the most diverse Congress ever. Georgia sent a Black man and a Jewish man to the Senate. And a Black/South Asian woman is the vice president.

We’re in the midst of a massive revolutionary change in this country — the 21st century version of the 1960s. “White” shouldn’t be the default, the assumed norm — and indeed, the share of white voters is on the decline in all 50 states, while the share of Latino voters is on the rise. If anything should be clear about race and ethnicity today, it’s that we all have a race (or races) and/or ethnicity/ethnicities. And that informs our experience in the world. White folks, too.

Which is why we’re bringing you The Recast, POLITICO’s new, twice-weekly newsletter. Race and identity are an integral part of the DNA of American politics and policy. It informs our past, our present and our future. But power dynamics are changing. “Influence” isn’t just confined to the political establishment.

And here at POLITICO, we’re uniquely suited to put all this into context for you. We’re all about understanding and dissecting power across political persuasions. After all, politics and policy are embedded in our newsroom DNA.

So every Tuesday and Friday, we’ll be recasting how we report on the intersection of race, politics, policy and power. We’ll be digging into and documenting the changing political landscape, with newsy scoops, analysis and dispatches from around the country.

But this should be a conversation. Which means we want to hear from you: How does race and identity shape your life? What do you think of the country’s ever-changing political scene? Who are the up-and-coming leaders molding politics and power? Email us at [email protected].

All the best,
The Recast Team

Power dynamics are changing. With The Recast, you'll get a twice-weekly breakdown of how race and identity are the DNA of American politics and policy. Stay tuned for fresh analysis, scoops and new voices.

We hired NPR's Brakkton Booker as a national political correspondent and author of the newsletter. Newsroom announcement from Blake Hounshell, Carrie Budoff Brown and Teresa Wiltz.

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THE BIG STORY

As we mentioned before, the 117th Congress is the most diverse ever, with the largest representation of racial and ethnic groups in history, a 97% increase from the 107th Congress of 2001-2003, according to the Pew Research Center. But among Hill staffers — the people who really run Congress on a working level — not so much.

There’s a disconnect between the diversity among Congress members and the folks who work for them. These are the people tasked with drafting policies, planning legislative rollouts, monitoring staff pay rates and scheduling committee hearings. And in Congress, very few people of color can be found at the top making those decisions.

Maya King, POLITICO’S race and politics reporter, wanted to explore how the makeup of staff affects the shape and direction of legislation. So she dug into the numbers.

Here’s what she discovered:

• About 11% of Senate chiefs of staff, policy chiefs and communications directors are people of color, up from 3% in 2016. In the House, that figure is 19% compared to 14% in 2018.
• In Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, the three states where Black voters account for 25% of the electorate and were nearly 40% of the 2016 Democratic base, there is just one Black staffer in a top Senate position — Sen. Mark Warner (D-V.A.) hired a Black legislative director in January.
• Among the 10 states where Latino communities make up at least a third of the population, less than 14% of its top Senate staffers are Latino.
• Democrats tend to hire more diverse staffers than Republicans. But they still struggle to maintain and promote people of color in their offices.

Read more here. And listen to Maya talk about her findings on today's POLITICO Dispatch episode.

THE RECAST EXCLUSIVES

40 Acres & a Mule: A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll asks respondents if they supported or opposed “financial payments to the direct descendants of enslaved African Americans” or “Congress establishing a commision to study and consider... a proposal for reparations.” The results are decidedly partisan.

While 56 percent of Democrats support direct financial payments and 60 percent of Democrats support the congressional committee, independents and Republicans are opposed to both efforts. Among independents, 57 percent oppose direct payments while 49 percent oppose the congressional committee. Among Republicans, 70 percent oppose direct payments while 74 percent oppose the congressional committee.

Factoring in race, just 28 percent of white respondents support direct financial payments to the descendants of enslaved African Americans while 33 percent support establishing the congressional committee.

Statehouse Woes: This week, in POLITICO’S The Fifty, which explores how governors and mayors are reshaping policy, Renuka Rayasam, Nolan McCaskill, Beatrice Jin and Allan James Vestal take a deep dive into the demographics of state legislatures. And guess what? Statehouses are hardly bastions of multiculturalism.

White women and people of color remain largely underrepresented in states across the country, they found. Most state legislatures are lacking in diversity, with nearly every state failing to achieve racial and gender parity with their own population data.

Despite recent gains, every state in the country has a legislature that is disproportionately white, according to their analysis. And only one state, Nevada, has a majority female legislature.

The result is that people making laws look nothing like the people who must live with them.

Read more here.

THIS IS AMERICA

The recent uptick in violence against Asian Americans — including the killing of an 84-year-old Thai immigrant last month — is fueling increased political activism in the AAPI community, reports POLITICO’s Catherine Kim.

Grassroots organizing among Asian Americans is on the rise, according to Manju Kulkarni, executive director of Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council. They’re taking their grievances to the ballot box, as well: There was a 290 percent increase in early voting in presidential battlegrounds from 2016 to 2020, the largest of any group.

“There’s a galvanizing impact,” Kulkarni said.

The surge in activism has been fueled in part by discrimination, unfortunately, thanks to bigots looking for a Covid scapegoat. (Former President Donald Trump famously referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu.”)

At a Friday news conference hosted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, congressional groups condemned the violence and pushed for the reintroduction of the No Hate Act, which would make it easier to track identity-based attacks and help fund state-run hate crime hotlines.

“The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif), co-sponsor of the original bill.

TIME CAPSULE

W.E.B. DuBois, (1868-1963), public intellectual, agitator, co-founder of the NAACP, and the first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University, was born on Feb. 23, in Great Barrington, Mass.

In 1903, he penned The Souls of Black Folk, a classic which still resonates today: “The Negro is a sort of seventh son,” he wrote, “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world …. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness ... One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

THE RECAST RECOMMENDS

To Watch: Judas and the Black Messiah, starring Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield and streaming on HBO Max, is everything you’d want a biopic to be: Namely, to not be a biopic. Instead of the traditional cradle-to-grave treatment, the film focuses on the last few months of the life of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was assassinated by the Chicago police. It’s set in 1969, but it’s timely, compelling, political — and so, so good.

To Listen To: All things Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born, Bronx-bred bandleader who died last week. In the 1960s, the Juilliard-educated flautist/percussionist co-founded Fania Records, dubbed the “Motown of Salsa.” Fania Records was home to groundbreaking Latino acts — Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe and Ruben Blades — artists whose music was distinctly political, calling out racism and embracing racial and cultural pride. Check out this playlist of Pachecho essentials.

To Read: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a collection of essays, part memoir, part cultural criticism, by poet Cathy Park Hong, unpacking what it means to be Asian in America.