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.

Immersed and enlivened by a brutal history

Before he became a New York Times bestselling author, Atlantic writer, and later MacArthur genius award recipient, Clint Smith was a high school teacher in Prince George's County, Maryland. His How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America is his tour of eight sites that broke open his understanding of where he'd come from and what shaped all his fellow Americans, Black, white, and others. It's a book so carefully written to provide an accessible story that it seems almost effortless -- and then you realize this author knew what it would take to reach the young people he most sought to influence. It's a wonderful book for all of us and we should be grateful to his students for teaching him how to teach.

The sites are Monticello (Thomas Jefferson's estate); Whitney Plantation (Louisiana); Angola Prison (Louisiana); Blandford Cemetery (Virginia); Galveston Island (Texas); New York City; Gorée Island (Senegal, West Africa); and his New Orleans hometown. Each could be read separately but together the panorama is deep, deeply researched and deeply felt.

Two drew me in most. Whitney is a plantation built by slaves to enrich its owners but now offered up to tourists not as a specimen of antebellum gentility suitable for weddings, but as the slave industry complex that it was. I have seen the other kind; I want to see this one. The other experience that captured me was his tour of Angola Prison, one of the most famous hellholes in the country. (How did he ever manage to get the opportunity for such a tour?) He took a moment to sit in its famous electric chair where 20 men have been killed by the state since 1976. He describes feeling that he was invading prisoners' privacy -- and felt their need for someone to look straight at them. Most inmates are serving life sentences.

In Galveston, Smith attended a kind of children's pageant marking Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating emancipation, which originated there. Students from an educational enrichment program run by the Children's Defense Fund donned costumes and retold the history of European conquest and enslavement up through 1865.

I watched these young people read to the audience parts of the history that placed our country in context. I felt, in that moment, envious of them.

Had I known when I was younger what some off these students were sharing, I felt as if I would have been liberated from a social and emotional paralysis that for so long I could not name -- a paralysis that had arisen from never knowing enough of my own history to effectively identify the lies I was being told by others: lies about what slavery was and what it did to people; lies about what came after our supposed emancipation; lies about why our country looks the way it does today.

I had grown up in a world that never tired of telling me and other Black children like me of all the things that were wrong with us, all the things we needed to do better. But not enough people spoke about the reason so many Black children grow up in communities saturated with poverty and violence. Not enough people spoke about how these realities were the result of decisions made by people in power and had existed for generations before us.

After college, when I was doing more reading on my own, I began to understand all that has happened to our communities, to our people, over generations -- it was liberating. I had language to name what I felt but had never known how to say.

People sometimes believe that if they talk to Black youth about the historical legacy of slavery -- and the intergenerational iterations of systemic racism that followed -- young people will feel overwhelmed and shut down. But there is enormous value in providing young people with the language, the history, and the framework to identify why their society looks the way it does. Understanding that all of this was not done by accident but by design.

That did not strip me of agency; it gave me agency back to me. I watched these young people share this history; and I dreamed of what it might mean if we could extend these lessons to every child.

How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what has happened here?

Somehow I missed this book when it made a splash in 2021. I highly recommend it now. We need it, especially in our moment of calls for censorship.

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!

Remembering the Birmingham church bombing

I do remember the bombing by KuKluxKlan white supremacists of that Alabama brick Black church in 1963. The next few days, pictures were all over the Buffalo News and the Buffalo Courier which my parents received daily. The horror stuck.

Religion News Service shared a set of pictures from the bombing which I'll post here.

A man falls to his knees in prayer amid shattered glass from windows of the 16th Street Baptist Church and surrounding buildings in Birmingham, Alabama, in Sept. 1963. Four young girls died as a racist’s bomb exploded at 10:22 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1963, during worship services and Sunday school sessions. In the following outbreak of violence throughout the area, two young black men were shot to death. Pleas for effort to stop further bloodshed were issued from government, civil rights and religious leaders across the nation. Religion News Service file photo

 

Firemen and ambulance attendants remove a covered body from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where an explosion ripped though the structure during services, killing four black girls, on Sept. 15, 1963. Sarah Collins Rudolph lost an eye and has pieces of glass inside her body from a Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed her sister and three other Black girls inside the Alabama church. (AP Photo, File)

Mourners gather around Mr. and Mrs. Alvin Robertson Sr., seated at right, and a sister, at left, of 14-year-old Carole Robertson. Carole and three other young girls, attending Sunday school in the basement of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, died in the 1963 terrorist bombing. Religion News Service file photo

Yesterday's commemoration in the Baptist Church:

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court, speaks at the 60th Commemoration of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing Friday, Sept. 15, 2023, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)

Never again? It feels hard to promise ...

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.

Judicial inhospitality meets prophetic practice

Diana Butler Bass preached today on the bit from the gospel of Matthew (10:40-42) which reports Jesus telling his rag-tag comrades: “whoever welcomes you welcomes me.” She sees a Supreme Court majority locking down any promise of welcome.

... While we may be blessed enough to extend hospitality, sooner or later, every one of us shows up at a door unexpectedly and unsure who might be on the other side. We need to be welcomed as we are, without qualification, accepted and cared for. ...

... In 1954, a SCOTUS ruling made Americans choose: Would white people open racially segregated public spaces to those they deemed strangers? Would outsiders be greeted with genuine welcome? The court insisted white Americans open these institutions to Black citizens. ...

This week, SCOTUS rulings reversed direction. Instead of pushing Americans toward a society of larger hospitality, the court pulled up the drawbridges of welcome in education and business. Their decisions against affirmative action and LGBTQ rights circumscribe the spheres in which some people can participate in and benefit from the rights of citizenship.

The justices turned back the buses of democratic progress. In effect, they gave a few permission to exclude others, allowing those with power to deny certain people dignity and welcome. They took their weight off the legal scales of inclusion.

Like the 1954 case, these rulings also make us choose. How do we resist the inhospitality now deemed legal?

How do we welcome strangers who are unwelcome in other settings? How do we treat those who now find themselves the legal targets of rejection and exclusion?

... The New Testament is clear. When Caesar’s law rules against hospitality to strangers, God’s people inveigh against such laws. We welcome everybody. We respect the dignity of every person. If you turn people away, you are turning Jesus Christ himself away.

The justices seem to think they are defending religion and believers; Bass contends, on the contrary, their decisions have "turned hospitality into prophetic practice."

They "either do not know our Nation’s history or long to repeat it"

Earlier this week, I predicted that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would routinely school the racists in robes beside her on the Supreme Court bench when they seek to impose a "colorblind" history on this country. In her dissent to their decision to kill off affirmative action in higher education, she's at it again.

With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems. No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.

UNC [Univeristy of North Carolina] has thus built a review process that more accurately assesses merit than most of the admissions programs that have existed since this country’s founding. Moreover, in so doing, universities like UNC create pathways to upward mobility for long excluded and historically disempowered racial groups. Our Nation’s history more than justifies this course of action. And our present reality indisputably establishes that such programs are still needed—for the general public good—because after centuries of state-sanctioned (and enacted) race discrimination, the aforementioned intergenerational race-based gaps in health, wealth, and well-being stubbornly persist. Rather than leaving well enough alone, today, the majority is having none of it. Turning back the clock (to a time before the legal arguments and evidence establishing the soundness of UNC’s holistic admissions approach existed), the Court indulges those who either do not know our Nation’s history or long to repeat it. Simply put, the race-blind admissions stance the Court mandates from this day forward is unmoored from critical real-life circumstances. Thus, the Court’s meddling not only arrests the noble generational project that America’s universities are attempting, it also launches, in effect, a dismally misinformed sociological experiment.

We know this is true. California outlawed affirmative action programs in the state university system in 1996 -- and Black and Latino students have never recovered the ground they lost.

Black and Hispanic student representation at UC Berkeley both dropped by around 50 percent immediately following the ban. Those students probably attended less selective public universities in the state, the analysis suggests. ...

[Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University], who studied the long-term impacts of California’s ban, has found that Black and Hispanic students who attended less selective universities have poorer outcomes, such as lower graduation rates, graduate school enrollment and income.

“[At more selective schools] they might have been able to build networks that they couldn’t have otherwise had, learned certain kinds of information that were just not available to them in their high school setting,” Bleemer said.

A sad day. But the Court continues to delegitimize itself and our job is to help it along. We can refuse to repeat history.

Joe Biden at Howard University graduation ceremony

He does not look depleted to me.

We’re living through one of the most consequential moments in our history with fundamental questions at stake for our nation.  Who are we?  What do we stand for?  What do we believe?  Who will we be?  You’re going to help answer those questions.

... I don’t have to tell you that fearless progress towards justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces.  That’s because hate never goes away. 

... The sacred proposition rooted in Scripture and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that we’re all created equal in the image of God and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.  While we’ve never fully lived up to that promise, we never before fully walked away from it.
 
We know that American history has not always been a fairytale.  From the start, it’s been a constant push and pull for more than 240 years between the best of us, the American ideal that we’re all create equal — and the worst of us, the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart.  It’s a battle that’s never really over.

But on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to stand up for the best in us.  To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat.  To stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did in my Inaugural Address — to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. 

... To stand up for truth over lies — lies told for power and profit. 
 
To confront the ongoing assault to subvert our elections and suppress our right to vote.  That assault came just as you cast your first ballots in ‘20 and ‘22.  Record turnouts.  You delivered historic progress.
 
I made it clear that America — Americans of all backgrounds have an obligation to call out political violence that has been unleashed and emboldened.  As was mentioned already, bomb threats to this very university and HBCUs across the country.
 
To put democracy on the ballot.  To reject political extremism and reject political violence. ...

... We can finally resolve those ongoing questions about who we are as a nation.  That puts strength of our diversity at the center of American life.  A future that celebrates and learns from history.  A future for all Americans.  A future I see you leading.  And I’m not, again, exaggerating.  You are going to be leading it.  ...

Text excerpted from Whitehouse transcript. They do a very honorable job; it's all there. They even preserve the very brief stumbles when his stutter forced him to pause slightly. 

I don't look to presidents for salvation. Presidents are as good as the movements of people who push them around. But this one is a good one and worth pushing, which is all we get in this life. Let's keep him.

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.

A proud American

House Republicans thought to crush Michigan Representative Ihlan Omar. They voted, unanimously, to throw her off the Foreign Relations Committee. She had plenty to say about their bigotry, speaking on the floor of Congress.

"Is anyone surprised that I am being targeted? Is anyone surprised that I am somehow deemed unworthy to speak about American foreign policy? Or that they see me as a powerful voice that needs to be silenced? Frankly, it is expected because when you push power, power pushes back...

"Representation matters. Continuing to expand our ideas of who is American, and who can partake in the American experiment is a good thing. I am an American, an American ... I didn't come to Congress to be silent. ... my leadership and voice will not be diminished if I am not on this committee for one term. My voice will get louder and stronger and my leadership will be celebrated around the world ... Take your votes or not; I am here to stay and I am here to be a voice against harms around the world and to advocate for a better world."

It was interesting to hear on a podcast what "Never Trump" Republicans Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller had to say about Omar's statement. They assume she is some kind of anti-American radical and anti-Semite; like the Republicans who used to be their comrades, they can't imagine that she simply emerges from a worldwide culture where the United States is a known bully empire and the Jewish state of Israel is simply the oppressor of native Palestinians. (She's had to learn explain her understanding in a more nuanced way in office.) But the two Never Trumpers could hear Omar in this clip. Do listen up!

Wokeness without works

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. offers a dispiriting assessment of the condition our condition is in:

The racial reckoning led to lots of talk but little real change

Click to enlarge.

... In many ways, the racial reckoning ended on Nov. 3, 2020. Instead of Democrats winning a huge majority in the House and enough Senate seats to get rid of the filibuster, as polls suggested was possible, they won tiny majorities in both chambers. Major changes to improve Black people’s lives require funding, and the federal government is where a lot of the money is. With such small majorities during Biden’s first two years in office, a sweeping pro-Black agenda was immediately off the table, because centrist Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) weren’t likely to be on board.

... From its start in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement hasn’t had a formal organizational structure or a singular leader. That was both intentional (many of the activists didn’t want that kind of leadership) and unintentional (the movement was so broad and diffuse it was hard to organize, even in informal ways). So there was no organization that the millions of people who protested Floyd’s killing could join, nor a clear set of goals they could embrace and urge their local politicians to adopt.

... But overall, we have wokeness without works.

This seems spot on. Here on the home front, the San Francisco Police Department incurs no penalty for killing unarmed individuals with abandon, while residents are frightened by (some real, some over-hyped) property crime, and the sight of homeless people suffering. We want the irritants swept away, sometimes literally; we replaced a progressive D.A. who might have held police killers to account; we elected a police flack to the Board of Supervisors. That's backlash in San Francisco. We make noises about caring for impoverished people, for Brown and Black lives -- but, as almost always, we make those lives carry the burden of our distresses. 

Yet I am struck by one line here: "... there was no organization that the millions of people who protested Floyd’s killing could join, nor a clear set of goals they could embrace and urge their local politicians to adopt." 

This complaint makes me feel old. I've seen something like this before. It feels much as I think many of us ally folks, especially those of us who were white, felt in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- the Black Freedom movement had been our guiding moral star amid the horrors of the country's immoral war in Vietnam and the country's turn to Richard Nixon. That movement was splintering into its component threads under violent state repression and simple exhaustion. The leaders who survived needed to rethink, retrench, and regroup. Allies often became wandering lost sheep -- and did a lot of floundering because the unifying lodestar of Black freedom was clouded over. That was the 1970s -- for many in my generation.

We all had to learn new ways for new times, new ways that built on what had come before.

But since freedom is a constant struggle, movement veterans and new blood took up struggles old and new, many local, all vital. The drive to give organizational form to the moral imperatives raised up by the Civil Rights struggle was rekindled over and over. And new cycles of organization and uprising began, to be repeated as long as white supremacy and other injustices coexist with the national dream of freedom.

Maybe we can't -- at the moment -- drive forward toward freedom and justice at the scale we could imagine in 2020 and wish had born more fruit. But what else is there to do but try and try again in whatever organizational forms fit the moment?

On the trauma of our time

Mary Trump, in addition to having the misfortune of being Donald Trump's niece, is a psychologist. I did not read her first book, a best-selling memoir of growing up in unhappy proximity to her avaricious uncle. But her interviews, of which I heard plenty on podcasts, always seemed smart and insightful. So when I heard that she'd written The Reckoning, on the theme of the combined trauma of COVID and Donald's effort to overthrow U.S. democracy, I thought she might offer something from which I could learn.

The book turned out to be something different than I'd expected. Nearly half is devoted to an exposition of our country's original sin, what she calls "A Short History of American Failure: 1865–2020." White supremacy justified extermination of native peoples and the enslaving and exploitation of captive Africans. All of us are warped by this heritage, including white beneficiaries of privilege.

Mary Trump doesn't break any new historical ground here -- there are numerous other sources for the same insights. (I would start with W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction but your mileage may vary.) But her account is wonderfully clear and succinct, pitched at a good level for oblivious Americans. Anti-racism educators might do well to adopt it.

And for Trump herself, the meaning of that history is our enduring national trauma.

Ours is an ugly history full of depraved, barbaric, and inhumane behavior carried out by everyday people and encouraged or at least condoned by leaders at the highest levels of government. A denial of that history is a denial of our trauma.

... At almost every step of the way in our history, there were opportunities to make this country more democratic, more open, and more equitable. Instead, the North became more segregated and the South continued to be a closed fascist state.

Trump views our national failure to marginalize her sociopathic uncle and the political party he has gorged himself on as a consequence of our failure to make peace with and offer reparations for the inhuman crimes of our past and present.

Racism is something we white people inflict on our children as it was inflicted on us. It is a violence we commit against them — and as they grow up, they benefit from the same entrenched system that benefits us, because our racist, white supremacist society allows us to benefit from it. We become complacent and selfish and, in the end, just as guilty as the people, and the people before them , who did this to us. The cycle continues. Our ability to be decent and kind is stunted, our desire to belong to a broader community without fear is curtailed. It is a passive experience, until it’s not. The more we exercise our privilege, the easier it gets to cross that line between doing so unconsciously and doing so because we feel entitled to it. It is so easy to get used to the luxury of forgetting and the luxury of never having to know.

Trump the clinical psychologist insists that facing the truth is the only escape from our national trauma.

But if we want to heal, it’s important to resist calls to look to the future, not the past. The past is what shaped us. Trauma is enervating and it is entirely natural to want to move beyond it. But trauma changes us at the cellular level. We carry it with us in our bodies, and there is no moving on without facing what we want to run from, because to dismiss your own pain is to postpone your freedom from it.

... The impact of unacknowledged trauma can be catastrophic — at both the personal and the societal levels — and by failing to invest in the infrastructure necessary to prevent or at least mitigate these kinds of disasters in the future, we leave ourselves open to long-term damage that could be irreparable. One of the most striking developments of the last five years has been the trend toward cruelty, the cultivation of a callousness toward anybody who believes differently or thinks differently. The mantra of “Fuck your feelings” at Donald’s rallies reverberated and reminded us that, even though it goes underground from time to time, the impulse toward cruelty never completely goes away.

... Until the playing field is leveled, America is not a democracy. Until everybody eligible is allowed to vote unimpeded, America is not a democracy. As long as a majority of the majority doesn’t have a problem with the deliberate economic plunder and disenfranchisement of large swaths of the population, and as long as the rest of us ignore it — because to pay attention would be to challenge our privilege — nothing will change.

Sympathetic as I am to Mary Trump's account of our traumatized condition, I am also left wanting something more. There is an alternative to despair, even justified despair. 

We can still struggle for a better democracy, a better society. By razor thin margins, in places where choices were stark, in the recent election majorities of us said no to cruelty, no to lies, no to crushing the life out of the weak.

Trauma can be mitigated and exorcised by action. This may not be the only way, but I find it is my way. The work of the recent campaign, even beyond its relative success, was cleansing for me and I think for many. We can go on -- differently.

As my comrades in UniteHERE insist, "when we fight, we win!" The struggle for justice is the best remedy I know to the traumatized condition of which Mary Trump's uncle is such a national symptom.

We can’t let this painful moment hold us back

Lifted whole from CNN because, hey, I'm so proud of my younger friend and her life work; Renee demands that we listen.

Renee Bracey Sherman

This moment is incredibly painful for all of us, but the reality is that it has been building for well over a decade. Anti-abortion politicians used voter suppression and gerrymandering in their quest to consume and consolidate power while exploiting abortion access and trans justice to spread a White supremacist message. This has been a long time coming.

The modern anti-abortion movement grew out of the religious right’s effort to organize against school integration, secularism and busing of the late 1960s. When they could no longer use openly racist arguments, the 1973 Supreme Court decision provided an opening allowing them to divide the electorate along the same Jim Crow lines. The call for abortion bans became their dog whistle for politicians who fought tooth and nail to demonize immigrants, criminalize poor families and brutalize Black communities.

This moment is incredibly painful, and it’s a moment to rebuild and right the wrongs of the past. In order to rebuild abortion access, we must look at the root causes that got us here: anti-Black racism, misogyny and economic injustice.

We must create a nation in which everyone is able to access abortion care – and all health care – no matter who they are, how they identify or how much money they have in their pockets. We must call for the end of prosecuting people or putting them in jail for the outcomes of their pregnancies, for self-managing their abortions, or for parenting in poverty.

Our nation’s budgets are examples of where we want to put our priorities. They must become moral documents that prioritize the health of pregnant people and those living in poverty over violence and policing.

It starts with us creating a culture in which everyone who is pregnant is treated with love, dignity and respect. We cannot rely on politicians’ vague and empty promises to fight back when the campaign is over. We have to ask how they plan to do it now and get involved in our communities to make that vision of reality possible.

This moment is incredibly painful, but it is the perfect moment for us to rebuild a vision of reproductive justice for the future.

Renee Bracey Sherman is the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions and seeks to shift the way the public understands the context and complexity of accessing abortion care.

Juneteenth holiday observed

West Oakland during a 2021 Juneteenth celebration.  (Beth LaBerge)

The story of Juneteenth evokes pure joy. I linger every year on the thought of those enslaved people in Galveston in 1865 learning unexpectedly that their cruel bondage had ended, was gone for good. Is there anything in most of our lives that might unleash a comparable explosion of relief and delight? Perhaps if all the world's nuclear weapons were suddenly no more ...

The still-novel federal holiday is a consequence of our nation's ongoing reckoning with our past and with our future aspirations. It also comes out of our messy politics. Even good politics is messy.  Theodore R. Johnson, a writer at The Bulwark and the director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, explains. My emphasis:

Juneteenth is a civic reminder to pause and appreciate how far the nation has come. If Independence Day on July 4th is a day to honor all the nation got right, Juneteenth is a call to always right the things it gets wrong.

... the politics of how Juneteenth became a holiday is a lesson in the unserious ways we grapple with race in America. The unflattering fact is that Juneteenth is federally observed today primarily because there was no political penalty to be paid by congressional members who voted in its favor and insufficient political incentive for those who would block it to follow through.

... [it is] likely that both parties surveyed the political landscape and determined that Juneteenth was low-hanging electoral fruit that could signal to black voters that their voices were being heard—without incurring much backlash from other constituencies. A constant refrain within black America is that politicians either do not come around at all, or do so only when an election is near. Making Juneteenth a federal holiday was a way of both recognizing the strategic role that black voters play—especially in the urban metro areas of closely contested states—as well as a symbolic, low-cost move to help each party shape part of the electorate in its favor.

... the actual reasons for Republicans opposing MLK Day and Election Day as national holidays were not about budgets but about politics. In the case of MLK Day, Republican strategists worried that voters fresh off the Dixiecrat train [in the 1980s] would reject their new party making an overture to a recently enlarged black electorate. And in the case of Election Day, Republicans seem to buy the flawed argument that easier voting automatically leads to Democratic victories.

And yet, on Juneteenth? The Republican party got onboard, largely because it intuited that there would be no political cost for supporting it. Why is that? 

Hyperpartisan politics and voters’ entrenched partisanship have created conditions where there’s little risk of losing supporters to the other side on an issue to which most Americans aren’t paying close attention. ... 

... But the politics of Juneteenth’s ascendance to a national holiday is actually a story about a democratic system that is presently incapable of doing hard things, and choosing instead to take the easiest path available.

And that’s a shame. Because Juneteenth should be the commemoration of an America that does the hardest of things.

Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to provoking commentary. Some annotated by me. Lots of guns, GOPer malfeasance, and too little good cheer, but here goes ...

Ryan Grim: The horrifying massacre at Uvalde, then, is a graphic illustration of two of America’s worst problems: our epidemic of gun violence, and our plague of lawless, incompetent police departments. There really is a murder problem in many American cities, yet the police in most of them let the culprits get away with it half or more of the time. We’ve got far too many guns that are too easy to get, and we’ve got a sick police culture that needs to be torn out by the roots. San Francisco cops make an arrest in only 8.1 percent of reported crimes -- and naturally residents are not rushing to report. Why bother?

Sportscolumnist John Feinstein: If the NCAA had any moral standards, it would move the Men’s and Women’s Final Fours — one scheduled for Houston, one slated for Dallas — out of Texas next year. It would move all of its other championships from the state, too. And it would vow not to return until Texas reforms its gun laws. That might have an impact.

Food writer Soleil Ho: As a people, the amount of grief we’ve been asked to carry for the comfort of the gun lobby has rapidly exceeded our capacity to process it, and we need to acknowledge that. We can’t continue being their comfort food.

Senior journalist and media commentator James Fallows: Reporters like politics. Most readers care about governance—for which they wouldn’t use that term, but would instead think about schools, taxes, health care, jobs. Most reporters are interested in conflict and drama. Most readers and citizens would rather know that things are undramatically getting done. Reporters do thrive on the stories of who is up and who is down -- politics as sport. But too often, stories of governance only break through when the narrative exposes failures. It's hard to get heard about what's working.

Philip Bump: ... Defending the media is not easy. It’s uncomfortable, in part because it’s vexing to think that objectivity needs a defense.

Historian Serhii Plokhy: Poisoned legacy: why the future of power can’t be nuclear ... Can anything be done to make reactors safer? A new generation of smaller modular reactors, designed from scratch to produce energy, not to facilitate warfare, has been proposed by Bill Gates, and embraced, among others, by Macron. The reactors promised by Gates’s TerraPower company are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. But his claim that in such reactors “accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics” must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are no laws of war protecting either old or new reactors from attack. There is also serious concern that the rapid expansion in the number of plants, advocated as a way of dealing with climate change, will increase the probability of accidents. While new technology will help to avoid some of the old pitfalls, it will also bring new risks associated with untried reactors and systems. Responsibility for dealing with such risks is currently being passed on to future generations. This is the second great risk from nuclear power: even if a reactor runs for its lifetime without incident, you still have a lot of dangerous material left at the end of it. Russia's scorched earth attack on Ukraine should end debate over "safe" nuclear power. Invading troops crashed on into Chernobyl, one of the best understood and marked off nuclear hazards on the planet. As a species, we are not capable of handling nuke waste safely in perpetuity, so it is grossly irresponsible to generate it.

Speaking of messes we've made, this one might be somewhat remediable. Sociologist Tressie McMillam Cottom: The time for debating student debt’s political messaging is over. Anything less than across-the-board forgiveness extends the life of the mess we made. Student loan debt is an albatross around the Democrats’ neck. Kicking the can down the road is throwing good political capital after bad.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa describe what they felt while reporting on the life of George Floyd: Before reporting this book, I considered systemic racism to be an unmoving, dark cloud that hung over us. As I watched life unfurl for these families, I understood that the residue of America’s original sin was something more terrifying. Racism is a pervasive, insidious force threatening to corrupt the spirit of every American if it is not acknowledged and confronted. I realized why so many of the families felt they had little choice but to fight racial injustice. You could not simply run away. George Floyd's murder taught both white and Black people what it can mean to be Black.

Karen Attiah: ... when it comes to white supremacy, White liberals have long held on to dangerously naive replacement theories of their own — that increasing populations of nonwhites will automatically dent anti-Blackness, for instance, and that younger generations are automatically less racist than their forebears. If President Biden’s reactions are anything to go by, the temptation is to believe that the salve for America’s racist spasms is a good ol’ dose of national unity. This liberal complacency puts us all at risk. The article describes the attractions for U.S. Black people of moving to Ghana.

Brennan Center Fellow Theodore R. Johnson: ... in 2016, I conducted a study to examine how the black vote might become less lopsided in presidential elections. ... The results were mostly unsurprising: For black Americans, as with the general population, the political party cues were so strong that they far outweighed every other consideration. There was, however, one rather unexpected insight. The political issue that most influenced black voters’ choice was abortion. Supporting a pro-choice presidential candidate was more important to black voters than the unemployment rate, obtaining new civil rights legislation, a candidate’s race, and every other presented factor except party. ... For black America, the revocation of a woman’s constitutionally protected right to choose to have an abortion raises questions about what other rights might be suddenly found revocable. Johnson's Black respondents didn't necessarily approve of abortion. But when the Man comes for rights ... who is next?

Speaking of rights, Stanford law professor Elizabeth A. Reese, Yunpoví (Willow Flower): The reemergence of tribal governments in the United States over the last fifty years has been nothing short of a renaissance of resilience. 

Organizer Scot Nakagawa: This morning I was the subject of an interview on KBOO, Portland’s listener-supported community radio station. ... During the interview, a caller made a comment about the left arming up, citing it as necessary in the face of an armed rightwing insurgency. ... If we break with strategic non-violence, we may find ourselves not too unlike the person who fights back against second-hand smoke by lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke right back. They may, in fact, damage the health of those pesky smokers with second-hand smoke, but only while doing much more damage to themselves while the tobacco companies make out like bandits. Those folks in the Pacific Northwest have experience with right wing militias that many others can learn from.

Paul Krugman: Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate. ... And history tells us that this tactic often works.  

In The Atlantic, David A Graham: Come November, the wackadoodles shall inherit the Republican Party. It's satisfying to mock them, but vicious know-nothings with power are no laughing matter.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr.: The Republican Party isn’t fit to lead, and most voters know it — that’s why Joe Biden won the presidency. But all those 2020 Biden voters shouldn’t be expected to turn out for two more years of Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) blocking most legislation in the Senate ... The Democrats must stop trying to duck the so-called culture wars and instead fight hard to win them. There is no middle ground between White male Christian hegemony and multiracial, multicultural social democracy — and the Democrats shouldn’t be shy about using their power to impose the latter, since it’s what a clear majority of Americans want. 

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson: Oddly for a secular age, our country might be waiting on a theologian equal to the moment. Previous generations of generally liberal politicians, like Barack Obama, looked to Reinhold Niebuhr. This is a more passionate moment that aches for compassion and empathy. Perhaps Nadia Bolz-Weber might suit us better?

Economist and provocateur Noah Smith: We were not born into this world to fight over scraps until we die. We were born into this world to remake it so that we don't have to fight over scraps.

Buffalo's racist massacre

The news cycle whirls on. But I'm not willing to let Black Buffalo's trauma be pushed out of mind by new horrors.

Fortunately, some news organizations are providing those of us at a distance a means to learn something from the Buffalo community torn apart by a white supremacist, a sick evil man with a big gun.

Most local TV news is a cesspool of over-hyped police procedural pseudo-drama. But this local reporter stumbled into evoking honest answers from a small gathering of auto workers near the massacre sight.

 

The clip is longer than I usually post here, but raw and necessary. These men have something to say. Bear with the dumb questions. The outrage in Buffalo is so strong, he gets answers.

This clip is shorter, more polished: community leaders make their pitch for what the Biden administration can do for the traumatized people. 

I can't testify that these are good organizations, but they seem to have at least some amount of ground level reality. Buffalonians will have to struggle to define what happens after this crime.

• Black Love Exists in the Rust: getting food and support into the community in partnership with Colored Girls Bike Too.

• Open Buffalo

• Voice Buffalo 

Terrorism begets terror

It really is that simple. Washington Post reporter Clyde McGrady has shared an intimate story of what it feels like to have some random young white weirdo come gunning for your community.  People in the Buffalo Black community are reeling under the trauma of the massacre.

Some struggle to understand the motivations of the killer. Some feel their insides burn with rage. Others pray — for the victims, for the killer, that those contemplating retaliation will turn away from anger.

Tricia Grannum needed to pick up a prescription.

“I’ve never felt like this, going into a store,” she told her mother when she got home. “I’ve never felt scared to get out of a car.”

This is what terrorism does to people who have reason to fear they are not going to find any lasting support. That seems to be Buffalo.

Go read it all.

Also worth reading is Washington Post media correspondent Margaret Sullivan's account of what's so wrong in Buffalo. She knows much. She edited the local paper before becoming a national voice for journalistic integrity.

Deadly stasis

“Buffalo is a powder keg,” said Franchelle Parker, executive director of Open Buffalo. “We can’t talk about what happened on Saturday as one isolated event. Buffalo has been a breeding ground for this type of situation to occur.”

Has so little changed since the 1960s? Apparently not. The massacre in Buffalo took place two miles from my childhood home. Not that, as a young person, I hardly ever ventured over there -- into east of Main Street, into darkest Buffalo where Black Buffalonians were corralled. 

Since the 1930s, Black neighborhoods have been ranked as financially unstable to dissuade lenders from approving Black homeowners for loans. This meant Black homeowners were subject to different procedures when purchasing a home, which restricted the flow of capital into Black neighborhoods and prohibited Black homeowners from buying in white neighborhoods—reinforcing segregation. 

The lack of access to loans also made it more difficult for Black people to open businesses and build wealth, sparking a downward spiral of disinvestment. Today, the impacts of segregation are clearly visible in the resources available in the city of Buffalo. Of the five major employment centers in Erie County, only one is located within the city of Buffalo, and there are 51 census block groups that have limited access to supermarkets. Every single one is located east of Main Street.

Even in my insulated white high school, I knew something should be done to break the pattern; I demonstrated with a fair housing outfit. It seems to still be operating, still a necessary cog in Buffalo's nonprofit industrial complex.

In those days there was hope of a sort. There was the civil rights movement in the South. There were somewhat organized community demands. There was the communal outpouring of frustration/rebellion in 1967.

By then I'd escaped to California. White Buffalo wasn't any place for a lefty lesbian feminist then -- or probably now.

The people east of Main Street have not escaped, nor can they, nor perhaps do they wish to. I've even known people who moved there for refuge -- where else in the 1990s could you find a house, however dilapidated, for under $10K? Maybe in some burned out section of Detroit -- there's a pattern here.

I just pray that the folks east of Main Street can leverage some of the attention the murderous white man with an AR-15 has brought to their community for some improvement, some hope.

Who is left and who is right

Matt Yglesias offered one of his counterintuitive takes at his Slow Boring substack recently that that I found worth thinking about:

American politics has been shifting leftward for years. 

I know some people find that absurd. But imagine if [Republican House Speaker-in-waiting] Kevin McCarthy gave a speech this week where he said “after we retake the House this fall, we’re going to fight against wokeness by kicking gay soldiers out of the military and curb inflation by privatizing Social Security and cutting Medicaid and K-12 school funding.” That would be the best news the DCCC and DSCC have heard in years! But it would just mean McCarthy was reiterating his support for Paul Ryan’s policy ideas from 10 years ago. Meanwhile, Biden’s positions on virtually everything are at least a little bit to the left of Obama’s.

I think he is correct that Dems have moved left in many respects. 

This very broad coalition has to cover a lot of bases; we are a magnificent mix struggling to preserve a democracy in which citizen participation gives majorities some power. This coalition also struggles between and among its constituencies. This mystifies GOPers. Our internal battles look like "moving left" to a mono-cultural Republican party of old, white Christian nationalists. And they do move us somewhere new, in uneven fashion. 

But Matt's take is belied by what we saw in the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Republicans haven't moderated their most repressive aims; they merely expect to shift the battle away from the people to their packed court. At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern saw all too clear portents in the Republican grilling of the next Justice that, after decreeing that women are just vessels for fetuses, they hope the Court will come after the notion of a right to sexual privacy and individual choice, starting with gay marriage and moving on to contraception.

During Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings this week, GOP senators have, predictably, condemned Roe—but not as much as might be expected. Instead, many senators have turned their attention to a different precedent that’s likely next on their hit list once Roe likely falls this summer: Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision recognizing same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marry. 

Loathing for Obergefell emerged early on Tuesday, when Republican Sen. John Cornyn launched a frontal assault on the ruling, then sought Jackson’s reaction. He began by criticizing “substantive due process,” which holds that the “liberty” protected by the due process clause protects substantive rights, not just procedural ones. The Supreme Court has used this theory to enforce “unenumerated rights” that it deems fundamental, including the right to marry, raise children, use contraception, and terminate a pregnancy. Along with equal protection, it served as the basis of Obergefell. According to Cornyn, however, this doctrine is “just another form of judicial policymaking” that can be used “to justify basically any result.” 

... In case it wasn’t clear what these senators were up to, Cornyn made it explicit on Wednesday afternoon. “The Constitution doesn’t mention the word abortion,” he lectured Jackson, “just like it doesn’t mention the word marriage.” ...

Look for these attacks on the lives of us all to be labelled "protecting religious freedom." As a person who identifies with a religion, I am offended.

This packed Supreme Court will be an obstacle to human freedom -- and to the desires of majorities of us -- until it isn't. How that happens I don't know, but if we preserve democracy, it will happen.