Not quite my take

It feels petty and even a little silly to wish that an author had written a different book. It is, after all, his book. But I found John Ganz's When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s a surprisingly unsatisfying account of its time.

His subjects -- David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and their tiresome intellectual mentors and apologists like Rush Limbaugh and Sam Francis -- remain just repulsive clowns, part of the long tradition of right wing grifters who've played on racism and grievance to assume an unmerited central role in our lives. Rick Perlstein has chronicled earlier incarnations in Goldwater's and Reagan's eras. These guys and their movements fight the full realization of the country's egalitarian potential. They will do so as long as doing so remains profitable, and beyond. So does Trump today. I see no point in dignifying them; they are unserious figures as a contemporary politician has observed.

Taking them seriously means more than telling their stories for drama; what in American society makes us suckers for these characters? That's the difficult subject.

I lived the early '90s as a politically active progressive. There were plenty of countervailing events and trends that find no significance in Ganz's telling. In particular, the international campaign against apartheid came to fruition with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the beginning of democratic majority, African, rule. The GOP's St. Ronnie had opposed the South African freedom struggle -- with plaudits from Pat Buchanan.

Those years were also a pivotal time for the emergence of LGBTQ+ full participation in American life. A decade of Republican neglect of the toll of AIDS on the community helped launch gays as a political force and we've never stopped since. Though gays sang "Ding, dong the witch is dead!" on Castro Street when Clinton was elected, we did not look to national Dems for our progress. The same day, we elected an Asian American lesbian to the San Francisco school board, one tiny step in a long march through the institutions of democracy. We understood, as marginalized people always must, that we had to make our own path forward. Establishment pols will follow.

Many of the themes of that era arose from Black demands for full human dignity in American society. Right wingers thrived on pointing to the riots after a southern California jury acquitted Los Angeles police thugs who beat up Rodney King. But a combination of subsequent community organizing and prudential reforms encouraged by big business actually laid the ground work for a Black president 15 years later. Though racial atmospherics of the time were awful, the movement was forward.

Little as I liked this book, I find Ganz's substack, Unpopular Front, vital reading. I'm curious where he goes next.

DNC: exorcising hate

The unity of purpose was exciting; Kamala was powerful.

But I want to highlight something that probably very few people saw live since it was on air so early in the evening. Yesterday Yusef Salaam, Harlem councilman, one of the wrongfully convicted "Central Park Five," got to take it to the men's tormentor, Donald Trump. 

Here's David Firestone explaining to those too young or too distant to recall that ugly racist episode.

When Yusef Salaam was elected to the New York City Council in 2023, it was a thrilling public vindication for a member of the so-called “Central Park Five,” a group of young Black men who were wrongly convicted of the rape and assault of a young jogger in 1989.

But for Salaam, true personal satisfaction came on Thursday night at the Democratic convention, when he got to stand on the stage before a huge national audience and denounce the man who has continued to vilify him and the other four since their arrest and wrongful conviction some 35 years ago, Donald Trump.

“That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict,” Salaam said, to furious cheers from the delegates. “He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will. That man thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not.”

In 1989, in fact, Trump was explicit about his eternal hate. 

“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump wrote in a full-page advertisement he paid for in The Times and three other newspapers. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” He added, for emphasis, “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.” ...

... Even after the five men were exonerated, Trump refused to admit he was wrong, and suggested there was a case to be made that they were guilty.

Nobody has a clearer view of Donald Trump than Black New Yorkers from the '80s.

Lay off the cat people!

I am indeed a "childless crazy cat lady." Janeway and Mio will testify to that. 

When I first heard of this slur from Trump's mini-me JD Vance, I figured I was hearing garden variety homophobia. If we find these posturing bros repulsive, we must be queer. Well, yippee for that!

But Republican natalism -- their obsessive fixation on women bearing children -- is even more vile than simple homophobia. 

JVL of the Bulwark spells out the deeper scandal of GOPer bigotry:

... while Vance and his confederates are super-duper concerned about childless people who “have no stake in America’s future” I have also heard many conservatives/Republicans express a great deal of concern about brown people having too many babies.

... You may have forgotten, but back in the 1990s, conservatives were worried about African-American women having too many babies, so they pushed for a welfare “family cap” which denied extra benefits for low-income women (translation: African-American women) who had children while on public assistance.

Sometimes the Republican pro-natalists let the mask slip. Last year in Texas Republicans pushed a bill that would give large property tax credits to households with four or more children.

But not all households with four or more children. The bill was tailored so that in order to qualify the household would have to be comprised of two heterosexual married adults, neither of whom had been divorced, and—most importantly—who owned the property in which they dwelled.

I’m sure it was just coincidence that in Texas home ownership rates are significantly higher for whites than blacks and Hispanics.

So remember: When you hear JD Vance & Co. talk about the importance of having babies because parenthood gives you some sort of special stake in the country, sure, that’s a batshirt idea.

But this batshirt idea isn’t even on the level. They mean something very different. Here’s what they actually mean:

They are threatened by the fertility patterns of minorities and view white women who don’t have babies as race-traitors.

For too many of our MAGA compatriots, it comes back to racial fears projected outward as racism.

Soul, empathy, and sport

I used to have no doubt about the unifying superpower of sports — how they turn strangers into teammates and teammates into family, how they make community out of motley spectators, how they raise the curtains for societal progress. I used to believe it was an imperishable kind of magic. I don’t anymore. Or rather, I can’t. Division has seized too much control. -- Jerry Brewer, Washington Post sports columnist

Mr. Brewer offers what is, so far, a four part series -- Grievance Games -- which illustrates why sometimes sports journalism is some of the most insightful social commentary around. 

“The first part of the project centered on exclusivity: who gets to play and who gets to lead,” [Arizona State sports historian Victoria] Jackson said. “In America, so many of the origins go back to White males controlling the access. The second part, and it’s still going, is inclusivity — people of color and women gaining access on the field and behind the scenes.

“That’s how sport reflects society, and the way it handles its own issues of exclusion and inclusion has a great influence.”

 ... For more than a century, American sports have manipulated politics for their benefit.

The most prominent leagues didn’t become lucrative entertainment giants because they kept the nation’s problems and politics from eating away at them. They succeeded precisely because they swallowed politics whole, turning the public craving for diversion into negotiating tactics to receive government subsidies and influence lawmakers to champion their most ambitious profit-boosting ideas, all under the guise of bringing people together.

When pressured to change, the gatekeepers return to where they have always gone in times of need, expecting the politicians and traditionalists to help them maintain their systems — while claiming to be apolitical. One group gets mocked and ordered to stick to sports. The other attempts, without apology, to stick it to sports.

“We don’t see the politics of the privileged,” Jackson said. “We only see the politics of those challenging privileged authority.”

A statue of Jackie Robinson was cut off at the feet by a White man who claimed he'd "stolen it for scrap metal" in Wichita in 2024

At the beginning of the modern era of there was Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947: The trailblazer’s story symbolizes the pain and resilience of America. Can the reality outlast the myth?

How we remember Robinson says much about how we view America. It symbolizes our cruelty and our glory, our pain and our resilience. It’s the most important tale in our sports history, a breakthrough of incalculable moral, cultural and financial proportions.

[Robinson] wrote: “There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Brewer calls contemporary sports media to account: The media’s role in fracturing sports: As societal grievance divides sports fans, will media members meet this moment or get trampled by it?  Brewer has much to say about the enterprise of which is he is part.

... The pursuit of truth now competes with the desire for attention. It’s no contest, sadly. Instead of reporting, instead of wondering and scrutinizing, instead of building trust and gaining insight and providing context, we exhaust too many diminishing resources to facilitate screaming. There is seldom enough fresh information to react to, so we regurgitate arguments, only louder, all in the name of provocation. ...

... At worst, it creates “a grievance industry for fans who love sports but hate the people who play them.” That’s the perspective of Dave Zirin, a journalist and author who lives at the intersection of sports and politics [at the Nation.] ...

... “In some ways, I think the evil empire has kind of won,” [ESPN commentator Robert] Lipsyte said. “I think sportswriting has gotten a lot better, but I think there’s no real call for it anymore. Fans don’t really want real journalism. They don’t want to read the truth about their entertainers. They really don’t want to read the truth about how predatory everything around sports can be. They used to have to listen, but there are institutions happy to give them exactly what they want.”

Brewer's struggle with sports journalism's infirmities moves naturally on to the hot topic of the moment: The panic over trans sports inclusion: In the fight over transgender participation in U.S. sports, the right to play is simply an opening act. In this extraordinary installment, Brewer cuts to the heart of what competiton means to any athlete, a struggle to be one's best self.

Before the hate, she changed in peace, transforming out of her body and into herself. She started to look the way she felt. She saw it in her breasts, hair, skin, muscles, fat, bones. She knew the person in the mirror.

Then she would go to the track — her refuge — and experience a different reality. As she ran, her legs would not fire the way they once did. She could not shift gears. She did a standard 150-meter acceleration drill, progressing from jog to stride to sprint every 50 meters. Her calf muscles begged her to stop. After the workout, she struggled to walk. She did not know this person.

“I could feel how abysmally slow I was,” she said. “It started to take a mental toll.”

So she did what athletes do. She spent more than a year adjusting to the effects of the gender-affirming hormone therapy. She relearned her body — every movement, every twitch — amending a lifetime of instincts. She dared to compete again. In December, at a college invitational, she had the nerve to win again.

Immediately, the success thrust her into the fiercest political battle in American sports. Sadie Schreiner became the latest exception made to seem like a widespread threat: a transgender women’s sports standout. ...

Brewer doesn't claim to know what it means that some people who've been born with one set of anatomy might feel themselves fully alive only when identifying with a different or even apparently constrasting gender. But he's not going to claim they don't exist among athletes and try to throw them out of the human family. He can see them as humans -- such a little thing -- and so huge too.

The links in the article are all gift links -- read Grievance Games for yourself.

Many Israelis are not European-origin white people.

And too much of American discourse about the present horrific phase of the long Israeli/Palestinian war tries to shove the conflict into a framework derived from U.S. racial history, a Black/White binary.

Insisting that this terrible conflict is different than U.S. experience and carries its own complications in no way justifies Israel's current brutal effort to simply eradicate or expel the people of Gaza and the West Bank. Nor does it justify hostage taking and vengeance raids. I'm tempted to say there aren't any good guys, though the work of the Jewish and Palestinian group Standing Together may point to better possibilities.

Standing Together on the Gaza border: marching for LIFE, PEACE, FREEDOM & SAFETY FOR ALL. "We need to end the war. We need to end the occupation. We need to end this cycle of violence and killing. We need a real, just peace that gives everyone a future here - Palestinians and Israelis." via Xitter

But it isn't adequate to think of the hell of the two clashing nations as indigenous dark Palestinians rising up against white Jewish intruders. Both justice and compassion require a more nuanced view.

John Ganz [@lionel_trolling], historian and Xitter pundit extraordinaire, has attempted to recomplicate the agony of Israel/Palestine in simplified form. I've excerpted some of this here, but urge those concerned to Read the Whole Thing.

... as many others have pointed out, the more than half of Israeli Jews—between 50% or 55%—are Mizrahim or Sephardim, rather than Ashkenazim.

... The fact that most of the Israeli population is of non-European descent—including a sizable population of Ethiopian Jews—somewhat complicates the picture given by some Western activists of Israel as a white supremacist settler-colonial state lording it over darker peoples. The Mizrahi population tends to be more religious, more conservative, less educated, less prosperous, and to vote for right-wing parties, like Likud, Shas and the Judeo-Fascist Otzma Yehudit, headed by the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, himself of Mizrahi descent. ...

... Mizrahi and other non-European Jews are also more likely to be IDF combat troops involved in the most dangerous and violent missions in the occupied territories and Gaza: They do a lot of the grunt work of repression. ...

 ... “Living in Israel is for us, coming from Arab countries, the continuation of our Jewish identity. Whereas the programme presented by the left is cosmopolitan - in which nationalism is overcome - we, Mizrahi Jews, do not relate at all to this discourse, in which human and civil rights come before our Jewish identity,” as one Likud activist told Middle East Eye.

... To understand why the Mizrahim became so right wing and nationalist, we have to look to the process by which they became integrated into Israeli society and politics. In the wake of the U.N. Partition vote of 1947 and the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, some 900,000 Jews from the Middle East fled their homes. Around two thirds of these would end up in Israel. When they arrived, the Israeli state was dominated by the largely Ashkenazi founding generation, figures you will have heard of like David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and Golda Meir. The Ashkenazi elite had a paternalistic and prejudiced attitude towards their newly arrived cousins, who were often extremely poor and uneducated. ...

... It would be a mistake, however, to put too much weight on the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction as the sole explanatory factor in Israeli politics. The ethnic issue is often a proxy for other things. A recent study shows that as educational attainment rises, voting behavior starts to look the same. Some argue that increasing rate of mixed marriages is reducing the saliency of ethnic politics. Not all class differences map easily onto these ethnic differences: for instance, Iraqi Jews are often part of the elite. One should also not map Mizrahi onto “Settler” or Religious Zionist: Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is the head of the more Ashkenazi National Religious Party. ...

Click to get a look at Smotrich

Would it matter if we learned a more nuanced view of the agony we watch and seek to impede from here? Perhaps not. But more truth still seems better to me  ...

Schooled by Fani Willis' Daddy

When Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis testified that she could not produce receipts showing she had reimbursed her boy friend for joint vacations because she always paid large sums of cash, I did think this a weird practice. Maybe not suspicious in itself, but odd. Who carries gobs of cash?

When former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama Joyce Vance read the same assertion, she commented: 

... her testimony that she was in the habit of using cash because it was what her Daddy taught her will ring true to people who understand the culture in the Deep South.

I suspected I was missing something ... and I was.

Fani Willis's father, the distinguished international lawyer John Clifford Ford III, explained in court why he advised his accomplished daughter to hold and pay in cash.

Floyd said he was the one who advised Willis to always carry cash — and to keep “six months worth of cash always.”

“Excuse me, your honor, I’m not trying to be racist, okay, but it’s a Black thing,” Floyd said. He told a story about attempting to pay for his family’s meal at a Cambridge, Mass., restaurant; Floyd was at Harvard on a fellowship, and Willis was 3 years old at the time, he recalled. “The man would not take my American Express credit card. So I pulled out my Visa card, and he wouldn’t take my Visa card.” The same with his traveler’s checks. But the $10 bill Floyd had — that was accepted.

“I’ll never forget that as long as I live,” Floyd said.

Not only did Floyd keep three safes in his own home, he gifted his daughter “her first cash box,” he added.

When she testified, Willis said cash meant financial independence and security, values her father had taught her.

It would be nice to think those days are over. But are they? By trying to use this Georgia court proceeding to humiliate an accomplished Black woman prosecutor who is chasing him down, Donald Trump and his minions are striving with all their might to bring those days back.

Kareem calls bullshit

The media are reporting this morning that Harvard University's board is refusing to be stampeded into firing their recently installed Black president. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar knows racism when he sees it. Here's his opinion of the hue and cry to throw out a Black woman.

Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman is good at making money. I’m good at making baskets.

Neither one of us is qualified to select the president of Harvard University. Sure, Ackman has a BA and MBA from Harvard, but just because I attended UCLA doesn’t mean I have special insights into the requirements for being president.

Here’s what I do know: Accusing Harvard’s first Black president of being hired only because she was Black is a pretty racist statement. Being Black might have been a consideration in her being hired, but that in no way diminishes her other qualifications.

For example, let’s say I ran a hospital in which all the doctors were White and I needed to hire another doctor. I looked at three candidates, two White and one Black. All are equally qualified. I might then take into consideration that many of our patients are non-White and might feel more comfortable with a Black physician (several studies back this up). Did I hire him because he was Black? Yup, but only because he also met all other qualifications, and having a Black doctor would make us a better hospital.

The enrolled undergraduate and graduate student population of Harvard University is 34% White with the 66% majority of students non-White. [Yes, that surprised me too, so I looked it up. Seems true if you include foreign students as non-White.] Yet, Harvard has never had a Black president before. Coincidence?

So, what’s Ackman’s beef? Well, he heard from someone else that the search committee wanted to hire someone to change the White Wall of presidents. First, he’s formed his opinion based on gossip. Second, even if that was their choice, he’s offered no evidence that she wasn’t as qualified as any other candidate.

Ackman’s real problem with her is that he didn’t like the answers she (and two other university presidents) gave at a congressional hearing when questioned by Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose interrogation technique was akin to asking, “Are you still beating your wife? Yes or no.” I’ll get into the specifics of that story at a later time, but for right now, the question Ackman raised was about Dr. Gay being hired in the first place. He demeaned her with the usual racist rant that she was hired because she was Black. Based on his inability to use logic, perhaps he should return his Harvard diplomas.

This tempest in a teapot isn't really about Israel/Palestine/free speech/antagonistic and overzealous students. It's about what a president of a super-elite institution ought to look like. I assume Dr. Gay has been getting this crap all her life, as has Kareem.

What a country!

Air Force General Charles Q. Brown has just been elevated to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest military officer. The video, from back in 2020, shares his reaction to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter uprising. 

I never thought I'd be posting something like this here -- in part, I think, because I never thought a U.S. general would be sharing what Brown shares here. And most certainly, if he did, that he would then continue to rise in his career. 

But he has risen. As he says, he's "living in two worlds." I assume he still is. What a country!

When activism is not optional

Chicana feminist and San Francisco Mission stalwart Yolanda M. Lopez passed in 2021; a free exhibition of her art, Women's Work is Never Done, is currently on display within the library at the University of San Francisco.

Lopez's voluminous body of work touched all the struggles of her time:

Moving from San Diego to San Francisco in the late 1960s, she became active in the cause of Los Siete de la Raza, young Latinos charged with killing a police officer who were eventually acquitted with broad community support.

 

Latino Californians were forced during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly by 1994's racist initiative Prop. 187,  to organize themselves to win political power commensurate with their numbers. 

 

Although Lopez eventually won increasing respect for her more sophisticated feminist art, one explanatory panel reminds exhibition visitors that, "at the height of her career she still made ends meet by working at the Macy's gift-wrapping counter." Lopez was a worker.

I found an installation she called "The Nanny" most poignant:

The show will be open daily from noon to six until November 12.

Strange sight in the 'hood

 

Just another Mission District walker out for stroll. Until you zoom in a little ...

 

What's former President Reagan doing on that guy's leg?

I spend a good deal of time reading/listening to Never Trump (mostly ex-) Republicans these days. They are some of the most insightful folks around on the sad topic of the anti-democratic degeneracy of so much of the GOPer party. In this emergency, the anti-fascist coalition needs everyone. But hey ...

This bunch all seem to have an absolute blind spot when it comes to Reagan. They revere him as a kind of saint. Here was a guy who launched his campaign from the Mississippi locale made famous by the racist murder of three voting rights workers, made war on workers by firing striking air traffic controllers, and spent a term refusing to mention the AIDS epidemic because speaking up might indicate sympathy with dying gay men.

Not a saint to me.

Priest exiled

California was not always a blue -- progressive, Democratic -- state. Far from it. Until the turn of this century, California was often home to a multitude of regressive, conspiratorial right wing movements, often abetted by "respectable" business leaders. And most especially, the state was aggressively racist.

Forgotten now, was 1964's Prop. 14 which sought to stick a bar against laws ensuring non-discrimination in housing into the state constitution. Realtors and property owners wanted the right to openly discriminate against nonwhite people, especially Black individuals. Backed by realtors, the proposition was sold to white homeowners as a way to preserve the value of what was usually their sole asset, their new suburban houses, against threatened integration. And the campaign worked. Voters approved the measure with 65 percent of the vote.

It took until 1967 for the U.S. Supreme Court to excise this blemish from California's constitution. 

I was reminded of this very Californian struggle by this archival photo from Religion News Service.

The caption reads: Father John V. Coffield, pastor of Ascension church in Los Angeles, requested — and was granted — a “self-imposed exile” in Chicago for an indefinite period. He is shown here with Father Juan Soto, left, and a group of parishioners, on Dec. 29, 1964. Coffield, in announcing the exile, claimed he had been forbidden to preach out against racial problems by Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles. Coffield said he preferred the exile to maintaining “silence on racism,” and as a solution to “an impasse between my cardinal and myself.” Coffield also claimed he had been given an “enforced vacation of five months” from June to November after he had spoken out against a state proposition nullifying anti-discrimination laws in housing, later approved by voters. 

RNS credits the Presbyterian Historical Society for the image. 

UPDATE: An alert reader has pointed out that there is far more to the history of this peripatetic priest than RNS knew. Coffield died in 2005. He has been credibly accused of molesting a child.

Convenient for all concerned that he could be shipped off to the Midwest.

On anti-anti-racism

Paul Waldman offers some observations about what Republicans are so mad about that ring true to me. It's easy enough to denounce as bull-bleep such antics as DeSantis' Florida teaching that slave status served as vocational education for the enslaved. But what ails so many Americans? Something like this:

The true commitment of today’s Republican Party is not to racism (though there are plenty of genuine racists who thrill to what the GOP offers, and especially to former president Donald Trump). It is to what is best described as anti-antiracism.

... Listen to conservative rhetoric on book banning, affirmative action, teaching history or any of the ways race touches their war on “wokeness,” and you hear this theme repeated: We must stop talking and thinking about racism, and most of all we must stop trying to do anything about racism. Virtually all racists, of course, would also be anti-antiracists. But there are also millions of people who are not racist yet who are fervent anti-antiracists.

... Feelings have become central to the way conservatives think about race; it’s no accident that many of the laws regarding critical race theory passed in conservative states explicitly outlaw discussions in schools that could make students feel “guilt” or “discomfort.” Anti-antiracism is fueled by White people’s unease with the growing diversity of American society, the knowledge that they’ve lost their dominant position — and to boot, liberals keep trying to make them feel bad.

... all the GOP presidential candidates — even the non-White ones — will trumpet their commitment to anti-antiracism, even if they won’t call it by name. By now, the Republican base expects nothing less.

Or -- too many White people will refrain from spitting at Black and brown people who share their country, but it is their country, damn it.

An exhortation that we don't have to go down that route comes from an unlikely source. Can you guess who?

My faith tells me that we're all children of God, equally loved, equally cherished, equally entitled to the rights He grants us all.

For nearly 200 years, our nation failed the test of extending the blessings of liberty to African Americans. Slavery was legal for nearly a hundred years, and discrimination legal in many places for nearly a hundred years more. Taken together, the record placed a stain on America's founding, a stain that we have not yet wiped clean.

When people talk about America's founders they mention the likes of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams. Too often they ignore another group of founders -- men and women and children who did not come to America of their free will, but in chains. These founders literally helped build our country. They chopped the wood, they built the homes, they tilled the fields, and they reaped the harvest. They raised children of others, even though their own children had been ripped away and sold to strangers. These founders were denied the most basic birthright, and that's freedom.

Yet, through captivity and oppression, they kept the faith. They carved a great nation out of the wilderness, and later, their descendants led a people out of the wilderness of bigotry. Nearly 200 years into our history as a nation, America experienced a second founding: the Civil Rights movement. Some of those leaders are here.

These second founders, led by the likes of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in the constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality. They trusted fellow Americans to join them in doing the right thing. They were leaders. They toppled Jim Crow through simple deeds: boarding a bus, walking along the road, showing up peacefully at courthouses or joining in prayer and song. Despite the sheriff's dogs, and the jailer's scorn, and the hangman's noose, and the assassin's bullets, they prevailed.

Some of the history in this could be more accurate. It's not hard to question the conviction of great "progress" achieved, especially with the current rightwing Supreme Court. But the essential vision of hope rings out. The speaker? That would be George W. Bush in 2006 addressing an NAACP convention. Did he believe it? Who can judge? But he needed to say it. How very far have Republicans devolved!

Beyond bad cops and bad neighborhoods

Sociologist Patrick Starkey wanted to explain, first why crimes against property and people soared in the 1970s and 1980s -- and then rapidly declined after 1993. In Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, he outlines, both meticulously as befits a quantitative scholar, and journalistically, as suits an author who wants to be read, what he found out.

It's all there, from theories of widespread lead poisoning in inner cities leading to more violence (he's skeptical) to figures on increased militarized policing (he attributes to this both some success and some exacerbation of racist violence) to an examination of what growing up amidst heightened violence does to children (not good, as you might expect.)

The most novel bit of his survey to me -- as someone who lived these years by choice in what is widely considered a violent, depressed urban neighborhood -- was his appreciation of successive nonprofit efforts at community building and rebuilding that characterized some to the worst locales.

Yet for all its virtues, I would describe this book as "stranded." Starkey wrote in the mid-2000 teens -- he identifies 2014 as the deepest year of the "great crime decline," knowing as early as 2017 that crime was again on the rise. Of course he couldn't predict the pandemic and its discontents which seemed to raise the murder rate, then has seen it drop, while reported burglaries and assaults have gone up and then gyrated. He saw trouble ahead. He concludes:

The calls for justice that have dominated recent debates about policing, poverty, and crime are well justified and crucially important to developing effective reforms of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. But the war on violence -- with all its tremendous physical, emotional, social, educational, and financial costs --starts with investment.

• • •

I'm suspicious of survey research on crime. Sure, there is hard evidence which enters into this -- there are bodies on the street. 

But not in most places in the country, most of the time. For most Americans, even in the bad old '70s and '80s, crime was something over there, among those people. But our media told us it was bad and out of control. And even when material evidence says it is bad, most of us don't encounter its violence in person everyday. 

I suspect it would take a long period of rising incomes and social peace before most of us would tell a researcher that crime is getting better. Our fears exceed our realities, even when the underlying trends are good. We're not smart about objective observation -- for the good reason that overconfidence might be dangerous.

We can't have fairness without some affirmative interventions

The notion that using awareness of the injuries inflicted by the American system of racial caste to work to remedy those injuries itself constitutes a form of bigotry is simply nonsense. Evil nonsense, which defies common sense -- and will likely be endorsed this month by our rightwing Supreme Court.

The arguments about affirmative action measures in college admissions are frayed and tired. To the credit of the New York Times, they have published an article [gifted at the link] focused not so much on the policy equity conundrums, but on how affirmative action makes people who have benefited feel.

... A few concluded that the downsides of race-conscious admissions outweighed the benefits. Some spoke of carrying an extra layer of impostor syndrome. Many more grieved the closing of a path that led to rewarding careers and the building of wealth.

Their experience may inform the present, as Americans continue to debate how to define — and align — the principles of fairness and merit, as well as address enduring racial disparities without deepening racial divisions. At least in the immediate future, Black and Hispanic enrollment is expected to plunge.

Mr. [Granderson] Hale, 71, can sympathize with those that want the end of race-conscious admissions. He credits Wesleyan with paving the way to an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and a more comfortable life. But he would prefer to see investments in early education for Black and Hispanic students, who often attend low-performing K-12 schools.

He said he had seen enough of how Black professionals were regarded by their white counterparts to feel that race-conscious admissions had not worked to their overall benefit. “People don’t respect you if they have to let you in,” he said.

That view is not widely shared by Black adults with a bachelor’s degree, who supported the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions by more than a 2-to-1 margin in a recent poll by the Pew Research Center.

Andrew Brennen, 27, is entering Columbia Law School this fall, perhaps the last class shaped by race-conscious admissions. He has no doubt that given his test scores and grades, being Black played a role in his admission — for which he is unapologetic. Like Mr. Hale, he sees K-12 education as a key to racial justice, and has accepted a scholarship from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that commits him to eight years of practicing civil rights law in the South after graduation.

... Mr. Brennen’s family was upper-middle class; his father was a dean at the University of Kentucky law school. But he also grew up in small southern towns, his the only Black family in predominantly white neighborhoods.

As a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he watched protesters fight to keep a Confederate monument on campus and felt guilt, as one of two Black students in a freshman writing class, for “not adequately defending my race” when the topic of affirmative action arose.

Any self-doubt he and others like him feel on elite campuses, he said, stems from a sense of isolation, lack of institutional support and routine displays of racism, not “because our SAT scores aren’t as high as our white peers.’’

Read it all.

Travel advisory

 

I'd been wondering when it would come to this. 

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The NAACP over the weekend issued a travel advisory for Florida, joining two other civil rights groups in warning potential tourists that recent laws and policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

The NAACP, long an advocate for Black Americans, joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, in issuing travel advisories for the Sunshine State, where tourism is one of the state’s largest job sectors.

The warning approved Saturday by the NAACP’s board of directors tells tourists that, before traveling to Florida, they should understand the state of Florida “devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”

Once again, we are living in a States of Disunion. Sad -- and angry for my Florida friends.

The algorithm creates racist results

The Internal Revenue Service has up and admitted that it has been auditing Black taxpayers at a much higher rate than others. 

... Commissioner Daniel Werfel told lawmakers Monday, confirming earlier findings by researchers at leading universities and the Treasury Department.

... Tax examiners do not know the race of the people they are auditing, but the algorithms the IRS uses to monitor fraud around the earned income tax credit — one of the U.S.'s largest social safety net programs — target filers that make errors on their returns and do not report business income. The result, the researchers found, is that the algorithms are more likely to identify Black taxpayers for audits.

There is no evidence that Black taxpayers perpetrate fraud at a higher rate than any other demographic.

... “While there is a need for further research, our initial findings support the conclusion that Black taxpayers may be audited at higher rates than would be expected given their share of the population,” Werfel wrote. Washington Post

This insight has been around for years, first highlighted by the journal Tax Notes and later amplified by ProPublica in 2019.

The study estimates that Humphreys [Miss.], with a median annual household income of just $26,000, is audited at a rate 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, which boasts a median income of $130,000, the highest in the country.

Click to enlarge. Darker is more audits.

Yes, there is such a things as systemic racism. We practice it in the tax system.

And note that the GOP wants to claw back the funds appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act to staff up and modernize the I.R.S. After years of budget cuts instigated by Republicans, no wonder the agency turned to computer prompts to choose which tax payers to audit.  Rich people are so much better at hiding any deviation from the tax rules. But rich people are where the money is.

Morsels for a quiet Saturday morning

An awful lot of commentators seem to want to chip away at New York County D.A. Alvin Bragg's case for indicting Donald Trump for multiple felonies. That's a game I can't play.

Bragg is a guy with a hell of a pedigree: Harvard College, Harvard Law, corporate practice, State Attorney General's office, assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, winner of a contested election for his current job. He likely knows something, both of law and of politics.

Seems to me there are obvious reasons -- adjacent to possibly substantive commentary that informs the legal doubters' views -- he's Black and he's fat. Both mean in American society, he's a lesser light, demanding a full place in the sun. Dude undoubtedly knows this.

• • •

A deep article by Jason DeParle  [gift NYT article] describes the living conditions of new immigrants, documented and not, who have landed in urban Tennessee. It is very much worth a read. He dissects the multiple intricacies of a hodgepodge social-welfare system, while profiling a Salvadoran pastor whose church provides a landing place for newcomers:

Luz Canales and her husband, undocumented immigrants from Honduras, were living in a garage with five young children when they first came to church. Her husband fell ill and could not work. Ineligible for food stamps, though they received free school meals, the children arrived at services so hungry that Mr. Acevedo took them home to eat.

“Look, there’s one thing I want you to understand,” Mr. Acevedo said, referring to the limits on immigrant aid. “The fact that I’m not complaining doesn’t mean I don’t have my opinion that it’s unjust.”

Citing scriptural commands to seek justice, he said he was speaking out despite the risks to encourage compassion. “Sometimes we see each other’s struggles but feel indifference — there’s no love,” he said.

DeParle describes Nashville as a "a growing immigration hub." Might the bad behavior of Republican good old boys in the state legislature who have kicked out a couple of young Black members be colored by their terror about a population of new citizens who are already in town? Seems likely. White Tennessee is going to be mighty nasty for awhile.

What's this "woke" stuff?

I've been trying for a couple of days to work up a post on "woke." Maybe I should just drop the effort, but instead I'll offer a sort of brain dump. Here goes, FWIW -- possibly not much.

For me, being "woke" connotes empathetic awareness of the feelings and life circumstances of other people. When practiced, it might lead to something like to politeness, curiosity, and striving "to be in love and charity" with our neighbors. That's both a lot -- and just the stuff of human life.

That set of connotations may underlie findings that seem to create consternation among political combatants:

According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos Poll, 56% of Americans surveyed say they think that being woke means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices”.

The same Guardian article by Arwa Mahdawi points out:

The term comes from African American Vernacular English and, originally, was broadly defined as being “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”.

The term has somewhat escaped that origin context. As is so common with the Black experience in this country, other groups have repurposed the word to refer to additional conditions in which society renders people unseen -- and deserving of awakened attention. This strikes me as both a rip off and a form of cultural appreciation. Your mileage may vary.

As a white person who still, at 75, is often misgendered by oblivious retail clerks, I am viscerally aware that I have spent a lifetime wishing that people could be a little more "woke" to the person in front of them. Though having aged, I just figure they weren't paying attention when they make me male.

Meanwhile, as Molly Roberts observes watching the brouhaha over the "woke" (?!) Silicon Valley Bank:

Woke is the word these days, and conservatives are shouting it whenever they can — to the point that what exactly it’s supposed to mean, beyond “thing that I don’t like,” has become a mystery.

The best commentary on "woke" I've run across anywhere is this discussion between two smart lesbians coming from quite different histories. They decode what people say in Longwell's voter focus groups and by the end find themselves just talking personally about what "woke" has meant in their lives. Enjoy.

Giving up is not an option

Like Bill McKibben, who pointed me to this Pew Forum statistical picture of How Religion Intersects With Americans’ Views on the Environment, I experience the findings as more than a little demoralizing. 

Click to enlarge

In summary: 

... the survey ... finds that highly religious Americans (those who say they pray each day, regularly attend religious services and consider religion very important in their lives) are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe.

... The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion. Highly religious Americans are more inclined than others to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and Republicans tend to be much less likely than Democrats to believe that human activity (such as burning fossil fuels) is warming the Earth or to consider climate change a serious problem.

Religious Americans who express little or no concern about climate change also give a variety of other explanations for their views, including that there are much bigger problems in the world today, that God is in control of the climate, and that they do not believe the climate actually is changing. In addition, many religious Americans voice concerns about the potential consequences of environmental regulations, such as a loss of individual freedoms, fewer jobs or higher energy prices. 

Finally, climate change does not seem to be a topic discussed much in religious congregations, either from the pulpit or in the pews. And few Americans view efforts to conserve energy and limit carbon emissions as moral issues.

Notably, among Christians, Historically Black Protestants are far and away the religious grouping most likely to consider climate change an urgent concern. This perhaps should not be a surprise, since people of color are often less insulated from climate-induced disasters than are more influential and affluent communities. Black Protestants. members of "other religions," and religiously unaffiliated people show similar levels of concern. And this is true, even though Black Christians reported similar levels of belief that we are living in "end times" to white evangelicals who doubt or are indifferent to the climate crisis.

Of course these Black Christians know, come what may, giving up is not an option. It's more than time for the rest of us to listen up.

No hiding this ...

Down the road from Reno, the Orange Cry Baby held one of his rallies the other day. 

Republican US Senator Tommy Tuberville, of Auburn U. college football fame, came along for the festivities. Tuberville, one of the Senate's dumbest bulbs, shouted the quiet part out loud. By way of Judd Legum: 

On Saturday, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) appeared at a rally in Minden, Nevada, to support the Republican nominee for Senate, Adam Laxit. During his speech at the event, which also featured Donald Trump, Tuberville unleashed a racist diatribe against Black Americans. Tuberville said that reparations, which would provide benefits to Black descendants of slaves, would only benefit criminals. 

Some people say, well, [Democrats are] soft on crime. No, they’re not soft on crime. They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullshit!

The crowd, full of people wearing Trump hats and other MAGA paraphernalia, responded by erupting in applause.

I raise this racist morsel up because, at the UniteHERE Reno campaign, something like half our folks knocking doors are Black workers - cooks and housekeepers - from the east coast, come to help out among the cowboys and tech bros of the high desert. They encounter this racism every day. And they just keep searching out our voters. I am in awe. 

You can join us for a weekend or a week.