‘The Fierce Urgency of Now’

“A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the twentieth century,’ wrote W.E.B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, ‘is the problem of the color line.’ A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world — here, there, or anywhere.” — James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 1962

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I barely know where to start. As if the grim reality that more than 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and more than 370,000 worldwide, wasn’t heart-wrenching enough, to see the collective pain and racial unrest across the nation after the murder of George Floyd (and many other black victims of police brutality) at the hands of an overzealous, white cop, has left me in a state of despair and, frankly, hopelessness that things will change any time soon.

My feelings on the current state of affairs barely register on the scale of what it must be like I can never know and won’t pretend to know to live in constant fear that your body or the bodies of your friends or family members could be broken in the year 2020, in the “greatest nation in the world.” That line is in quotes because we are, as it has been proven over and over, by our collective apathy, by our arrogance, by our selfishness, by our disregard for the interests and safety of black people in America, by our failure to reform the justice system, by our failure to hold people in power accountable and by our negligence, that we are far from the greatest nation in the world. In fact, I’m not sure we even rise to the level of “good” by the scale and scope at which we have utterly failed to protect our fellow citizens and our fellow human beings.

I’m aware of my place in this as a white male who grew up in the South. I’m aware that I can’t escape my upbringing, and I can’t escape the white guilt that comes with it. A white person growing up in the South in the 1980s could hardly escape the legacy of racism and bigotry that is almost soaked into the soil in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and my home state of South Carolina. The blood and sweat of slaves during the American Civil War and those who suffered and died during Reconstruction is, indeed, literally soaked into the soil.

I’m also aware of the impulse of white liberals to want to swoop in and “save” black people. A white firebrand named John Brown, who was a domestic terrorist for his half-cocked plan to invade the federal stronghold at Harper’s Ferry and for his murderous escapades in Kansas three years earlier, thought of himself as the literal savior of slaves in the run-up to the Civil War, donning the “armor of God” to overthrow the system of slavery. Unfortunately, God couldn’t protect him from the noose after he and his co-conspirators were caught. In any case, Brown’s actions paved the way for the coming war, and he is largely credited with having “seeded civil rights,” in the words of his biographer David S. Reynolds.

A term, “white savior industrial complex,” was coined in 2012 by novelist Teju Cole, who said WSIC refers to the “confluence of practices, processes, and institutions that reify historical inequities to ultimately validate white privilege” and that it includes a “big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

Brittany A. Aronson, in the scholarly essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex: A Cultural Studies Analysis of a Teacher Educator, Savior Film, and Future Teachers,” wrote the following about saviorism:

Ultimately, people are rewarded from “saving” those less fortunate and are able to completely disregard the policies they have supported that have created/maintained systems of oppression (i.e. The U.S.’s exploitation in Haiti has contributed to poverty and corruption, yet Americans can feel good about their charity after the Earthquake). The rhetoric around how Americans often talk about Africa—as a continent of chaos, warthirsty people, and impoverished HIV-infected communities, situates these countries as places in need of heroism. This mindset perpetuates the need for external forces to come in and save the day, but what gets left out of this conversation are the roles settler colonialism and white supremacy have had in creating these conditions in the first place.

So, extending this to current circumstances in America, what’s at play here with the saviorism concept is that white people can feel good about sympathizing with the plight of black people, and even support causes that bolster black lives either physically or financially all the while assuaging their sense of white guilt but the underlying problems that created the conditions of inequality and injustice remain unaddressed, whatever good intentions white people had at the onset.

Some in the black community have rejected the notion of having “white allies” outright if it does not work in tandem with requisite political change and the annihilation of whiteness itself as a construct.

In a blistering critique of white saviorism, Gyasi Lake, for the Black Youth Project, wrote last year:

In a reality where whiteness affords you the luxury of choosing whether or not to leverage your privilege and be revered uncritically, despite glaring flaws, Blackness can never flourish. Until whiteness is dismantled indefinitely, white voices will continue to be elevated and championed above the voices of the most marginalized communities.

The revolution can’t be sponsored and/or acceptable to those we are revolting against.

As a student at Clemson University, I took a course that addressed this very subject called “Whiteness in America.” One of the authors we explored was Noel Ignatiev, whose book, “Race Traitor,” argued that “whiteness” should be abolished altogether and that white people should eschew opportunities to use their privilege to their advantage. Race, for sure, is nothing more than a construct.

As James Baldwin said in “The Fire Next Time”:

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.

We now have a disturbingly long and terrible list of black people who were victimized by police brutality or negligence and who did not deserve to die. They include (far from comprehensive):

George Floyd

Breonna Taylor

Ahmaud Arbery

Trayvon Martin

Eric Garner

Dreasjon “Sean” Reed

Philando Castile

Jamar Clark

Botham Jean

Michael Brown

Freddie Gray

Ezell Ford

Tamir Rice

Laquan McDonald

Michelle Shirley

Redel Jones

Kenney Watkins

Stephon Clark

Compounded with these outright injustices, there is a long list of families in the inner city who live under the weight of a system of housing, justice and welfare that do not serve to make their lives better. In many cases, their lives are worse because of systemic racism that now threatens to rot the core of democracy. Indeed, policies under both administrations, but especially the Republicans, during the last five decades have failed to provide adequate and affordable health care and family support services for low-income families, have failed to make the inner cities safe, have failed to root out drugs, have failed to get guns off the street and have failed to offer compassionate economic policies that lift all of the boats, failures that can not be absolved with a $1,200 check. In fact, policies that prop up the rich and benefit inanimate corporations and Wall Street have been put in place at the expense of low-income Americans. And because we have failed the inner cities and because we have failed black people and because we have failed immigrants and because we have failed to take care of the poor and disabled among us, we have failed as a nation, and we have failed as human beings.

After Barack Obama was elected president, some people were ready to declare that racism in America was a thing of the past, but as we have seen, it hasn’t gone away, and maybe it hasn’t even diminished. The period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was something of a wandering in the desert for black folks. Black men finally got the vote through the 15th amendment in 1870, and some were even able to win public office, but thanks to the Ku Klux Klan and other fireeaters in the South, black people were intimidated and forced by compulsion to stay away from the polls. Ulysses S. Grant left the presidency after two terms, and Reconstruction fell apart. Civil rights would essentially be at a standstill until the mid-20th century, and former plantation owners in the South simply re-subjugated their former slaves.

The civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and many others, including a coalition of white supporters, experienced a watershed moment with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society social reform programs in the mid-1960s. The nation showed promise as we were seemingly poised to finally address poverty, economic disparity and social inequality. Unfortunately, while many of LBJ’s programs remain in place to this day, the project of improving life in the inner city fell by the wayside in the late 1970s and early 80s with the introduction of the supposed “War on Drugs,” the gradual privatization of prisons and tougher sentencing regulations for nonviolent drug offenses. These, coupled with a host of policies by conservative lawmakers that bolstered the rich at the expense of low-income workers led to the conditions by which inner city black Americans not only felt economic pressures just trying to make ends meet, but racial tensions and built-in, generational animosity among white people about new rights afforded to black folks, was a noxious recipe for a gathering storm of racial unrest that has spilled across the last four decades.

So, when Obama was elected as the first black president in the nation’s history, the racists and bigots, who briefly came out of hiding to dabble in the newly formed Tea Party in support of John McCain and Sarah Palin, scurried back into their basements to listen to Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and the myriad other far-right conservative voices on talk radio at the time.

Thus, the legacy of racism and prejudice in America is bound up with politics, and at the core, while some racism may be learned or is generational, some of it comes from white animosity that stems from the Civil Rights Era, animosity that is completely unfounded since America was built on the idea of white supremacy and privilege, ideologies by which many in power still operate. White people have always been in charge and have held all the cards.

Just because I am writing about racial injustice and care about black lives doesn’t mean I’m immune from the perils of white saviorism or privilege. As such, I must continually remind myself that I write from a privileged position inside my white skin.

That said, I, like many white people protesting alongside black people, want to help in the cause of reforming the police and the criminal justice system, ending systemic racism and discrimination and holding malevolent officers accountable for their actions. We need extremely harsh sentences for cops who wantonly kill black people with overzealous, dehumanizing behavior. We need every cop to have a body camera, one that they cannot deactivate. We need to end the militarization of police. Studies have shown that militarized policemen only fuel unrest. We need policies that, once and for all, bolster the inner city and increase educational opportunities for children. And people who display hateful or racist behavior need to be marginalized to the fringes of society. There is no place for them in modern America; for, we, white people, must take the following posture in solidarity: when racists speak ill of black people, they speak ill of me and this nation. There can be no tolerance for racism in 2020.

And at the very least, I want to raise awareness about the problems we face as a nation, provide some historical context and support my fellow human beings. Because of my health situation, I’m unable to get out and protest, but will continue to advocate for black lives, for justice and for equality.

The time for change is now “the fierce urgency of now.”

Reclaiming the Dream

Being a product of white America in the South, lacking historical perspective and maybe even some early prejudice, I’m ashamed to say that I did not grow up with a lot of admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. Each February when Black History Month rolled around, and usually at no other time throughout the year, I heard about King’s dream for a more equitable society, one in which, even in the Deep South, black children and white children could play together in harmony and mutual admiration and respect. I heard about his call for equality at the ballot box, in the workplace and in retail stores and restaurants throughout the nation. I heard the high rhetoric and remember actually saying, probably simply parroting the opinion of an adult, that, sure, King dreamed big, but what did he actually do to make the nation better?

The ridiculous arrogance and ignorance of that question became apparent to me when, a little later in life, I began to learn about MLK in college and on my own time thereafter. Consequently, I studied Civil War history, and to whatever extent it is related, Civil Rights Era history at Clemson University in northwestern, South Carolina. Clemson can’t escape its checkered past. It has for one of its founders a racist firebrand by the name of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, along with a hall named in his honor.

The college is home to the Strom Thurmond Institute for Government and Public Policy, which is named for one of the staunchest pro-segregation, anti-civil rights politicians of the 20th century and a true enemy of progress. And for some good, old-fashioned, southern-fried symbolism, as it was pointed out to me by a professor of mine when I was a student there, the sidewalk design near the library that proceeds to run above the Strom Thurmond center, which is underground, is in the shape of the Confederate battle flag’s stars and bars.

And so, as a student, I was aware of the debate surrounding how educators and students, past and present, reconcile what many consider to be the age of the New South — not abandoning the past, but learning from it and fostering a more progressive, inclusive track record on race and culture — in short, how to honor the past but move forward from it into a new era.

After college, I began working at a newspaper about an hour north of Clemson in a quaint town called Clayton, Ga. Here was an interesting mix of wealthy, white Republicans and Democrats, a smattering of black folks, including the chief of police at the time, and a not insignificant Hispanic population. In spite of that eclectic mix of people, the county was mostly populated by local white, low- to middle-class residents, who valued school, church and community. Essentially, this was an even more conservative place than Clemson, but it was here, ironically, that I went even deeper into my research on the Civil War and the push for equality.

I also fully abandoned conservatism because, as I saw throughout American history, it was conservatism that fostered an atmosphere of secession in the 19th century — my home state being the first to leave the union and the last to rejoin after the Confederacy lost the war — it was conservatism that largely led to the failure of Reconstruction, the Black Codes and Jim Crow after the Civil War, and it was conservatism in the early- to mid-20th century which spoke out so vehemently, and sometimes punctuated by violence, against equal rights and equal protection under the law for women, blacks and other historically marginalized groups. I don’t think conservatism alone is a problem, but I think conservatism created the atmosphere, and is still creating the atmosphere, by which some of the most pernicious ideologies in American history could flourish, much to the detriment of our national character and collective conscience.

I had read W.E.B. Dubois’ lyrical work, “The Souls of Black Folk” while at Clemson, but it was here in Clayton that I picked up Dubois’ much longer and detailed book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” which outlined, in painful detail, the part that black people played, as the subtitle suggests, “in the attempt to reconstruct Democracy in America.” I read books and information on people like white abolitionist John Brown, who, terrorist though he was, fought alongside his black brothers for their freedom, which he saw as a right consecrated from on high. I read about white abolitionist newspaperman, William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote vigorously and tirelessly, often at risk to his personal safety, on the importance of racial equality and ending the “peculiar institution.” I read about the lives of slaves and about slave religion and how, just as many slaves found comfort in the story of the Pharaoh’s enslavement of Israel and their subsequent freedom and the story of Jesus, plantation owners and supporters of slavery used the same scripture as justification to keep their property in shackles, since the Bible both condones slavery and offers no rebuke to chattel slavery. I read books on the sometimes tense, but working relationship, between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. in the run-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and LBJ’s “Great Society” programs that were designed to address issues in education, urban development and housing, transportation, employment and other areas.

And finally, with all of this as context, I come to MLK himself. So, what did he do, to answer my own question from 25 years ago, that specifically warrants honoring him year after year, to rewatch or reread his speeches, to shed new tears over the high-minded, courageous path that few people on earth ever walk?

First, this adoration for the man is not in the least an obligatory gesture, and I would say that if we are only thinking of MLK one day out of the year, or at most, for one month — the shortest month at that — we are doing the man, his legacy and what he stood for a grave disservice. Indeed, given the current environment of prejudice in the highest office in the land and the sustained bigoted remarks that began when Trump was a candidate and has continued to this day, the institutional racism that pervades the justice system and the overarching hostile position our nation has taken against legal and illegal immigrants the last few years, the need to remember what King stood for, how he remained above the fray and elevated a nation and what he accomplished in life and death, the need to recommit ourselves individually and as a nation to reclaiming his dream is as important now as it’s ever been.

The following is a short list of reasons why we honor King today and throughout the year.

Nonviolent resistance

King brought the idea of nonviolent protests to the forefront of America’s conscience in the tradition of Mahatma Gandi. Whereas some justifiably angry black and white activists thought the best way to enact change was through a strong-arm approach, King and his nonviolent protesters appealed to and pricked America’s collective conscience with what he called “soul force.”

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.

Cynthia Tucker, a black columnist working at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the same time as when I got my start at the newspaper, has argued that Black History Month is a relic and we should not just remember the accomplishments of black leaders during one month out of the year, and she argues, echoing King, that the history of black folks in America is inextricably linked to American history writ large.

In short, black history is our history.

First president of the SLCC

It feels kind of silly pointing out the more obvious parts of King’s life and legacy, but as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King was instrumental in helping to start the political action organization after the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s to begin a series of other nonviolent protests across the South to facilitate and support desegregation of public spaces and numerous freedom movements across the nation.

Before the March on Washington, the organization perhaps saw its biggest win come in Birmingham with its goal of desegregating the downtown area. This series of nonviolent sit-ins of businesses that previously denied access and service to black residents was met with a disturbing level of violence by local police under the leadership of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus “Bull” Connor, who, through his virulent opposition to equality and commitment to segregation, came out looking like a true villain, attempting to squash protests with violence and intimidation. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King writes to local clergy about why that was a time for action in Birmingham:

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. … Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

The march

The full name of the famous event, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, drew somewhere between 200,000-300,000 people and apparently went off without a hitch and without violence or skirmishes. It was organized by King, James Farmer Jr., with the Congress of Racial Equality, Roy Wilkins, with the NAACP, John Lewis, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others as a push toward desegregation nationwide and more equality in the workplace and in culture. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was brilliant for the way in which it positioned America’s highest ideals in, not just religious terms, to which many Americans, then and now, understand and relate, but in foundational terms. It explained that the nation has yet to fully grasp the full measure of Thomas Jefferson’s famous line from the Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream today. … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountain side, let. freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

King then ended his speech with some of the most stirring lines ever uttered in American history that thundered back through time and continue to reverberate to the present.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaeeous slopes of California.

But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountain side. Let
freedom ring …

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,”Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, we are free at last!

In October 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in racial justice and nonviolent resistance, and the next year, he helped organize perhaps the second most significant march of the civil rights era, the march to Selma en route to Birmingham to protest inequality and advocate for voter rights. This is the march in which John Lewis, and many other nonviolent protesters, got hosed and beaten by members of the Alabama state police. The incident became a powerful symbol for nonviolent resistance and led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Fifty years later on March 7, 2015, Barack Obama, the first black president in United States history, delivered a speech to commemorate the famous march. I was watching the moment on CNN that day, and I can tell you, seeing Obama’s presidential motorcade rumble over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was named for a former grand wizard of the KKK, was one of the most powerful and enduring images of racial progress I have ever seen, and it’s something I won’t soon forget.

The legacy

As we know, King was killed April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., as he was in the process of planning an occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People’s Campaign. On April 3, probably seeing the writing on the wall and seemingly foreseeing his own untimely end, based on the hate that had been generated against him from the conservative right in the South and elsewhere, he delivered his final, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” speech, an extremely powerful affirmation of this nation’s First Amendment rights.

… Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

And then, like a lightbulb going off in his mind, he turned inward and one could see tears welling up in his eyes as he could see the end peering him in the face.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

And in that moment, he looked completely spent, as if all of his emotional fervor and rhetorical power had all been used up in preparation for the next day’s events. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has gone down as the most important of his career, but the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech was the most vulnerable moment of King’s public career in my view.

King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in civil rights, and MLK Day was established in parts of the nation in 1986. Not until 2000 did all 50 states celebrate the holiday.

So, what of his legacy? Despite the almost obsessive efforts of J. Edgar Hoover to discredit King, expose his supposed marital infidelities and paint him as a communist, King was central in putting pressure on LBJ and other leaders in Washington to get the ball rolling on the Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on sex, gender or race illegal. Shortly after King’s death, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. It’s hard to underestimate the impact of these programs on American politics and culture. While they weren’t perfect and while racism and discrimination were far from resolved in King’s lifetime — they are still far from resolved now — these were obviously landmark achievements that may not have been possible without King’s persistence, intelligence, courage and unshakable faith in humanity. Working in tandem with his dedication to nonviolence, King was also against the disastrous war in Vietnam.

I have said all of that to say this: I might not have known much about MLK and Civil Rights starting out in high school and the early part of college, but the more I learned, the more convinced I became in adult life that wherever we go as a nation, we must go together as different people unified in mutual respect and understanding and be committed to the idea, even if previous generations were not, that all men, all human beings, are created equal — full stop — without qualifiers and without exception.

We must be committed to the idea, the idea for which King gave his life, that there is no white America or black America. There is only one America. And while in this era of blatant bigotry and hostility to immigrants spearheaded by Trump and his largely white, unlettered supporters, we can’t give in to apathy. We must believe that we will overcome ideologies that attempt to divide us and that we will overcome racial prejudice and injustice and create for ourselves a better tomorrow. Perhaps King’s greatest legacy to us, then, was that he offered more than a dream. He opened a door so that we could begin the long march toward its ultimate realization.

[Cover image: “I Have a Dream” by DeviantArt user Rachel Laughman.]

Heil to the Drumpf

Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so— but this is surely the way fascism can begin. — David Remnick, The New Yorker

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Although some personal travails have kept me away from this site for awhile, call it a lack of inspiration or sheer stunned silence, but the rise of real estate mogul Donald J. Trump (Make Donald Drumpf again) to be leader of the free world was a stultifying and surreal spectacle to witness, such that my own drive to offer any additional insight, outside of some microblogging on Twitter and Facebook has been on the wane the last few months. It all seemed so disappointing. And futile. And worst of all, regressive.

Rage in the machine

Perhaps I did not want to admit the thing that I feared the most: That the Republican Party would fail to eschew the fringe right from its ranks and take a more moderate bent going forward; that the party of Lincoln, whose endgame Civil War policy ultimately broke the back of the South and freed millions of slaves before the conservatives devised new forms of subjugation known as Reconstruction and the Black Codes, would turn in on itself and embolden new legions of racist and bigoted voters to come out from their mother’s basements and their camouflage duck huts and their white-bred, self-loathing lives of grinding discontent to offer up a candidate who made hostility to immigrants, MexicansMuslims and other outgroups; pathological dishonesty (here and here and here and here and here and here and here); childishness; sexismbullying; and unbridled narcissism as American as hot dogs and apple pie.

I have written in newspaper columns the last five or six years about the Republican Party’s flirtation with the precipice and essentially made the case that the centrists or establishment politicians on the right needed to reclaim the center before it was too late for their party and too late for America. The right’s supreme and utter failure after the emergence of the Tea Party to hew the rotting arm to save the rest of the body may have detrimental outcomes for the nation at large, for inner city and low-income Americans and ironically, for many of the GOP’s supporters, who routinely vote against their own vested interests.

As it stands at the moment, the GOP can revel in its victory, having secured both houses of Congress and probably an eventual majority on the Supreme Court, but if Trump proves to be as much of a disaster in the White House as he has been in his multiple abortive business dealings and personal relationships, we should expect the Democratic Party, assuming it takes the advice of Bernie Sanders and presents a platform that is more appealing to working class Americans and gets tough on Wall Street and the health insurance industry, to see a resurgence in the future as Trump’s voters learn the hard way that he is dangerously uninformed, brash and impulsive.

But that’s perhaps two or four years hence. For now, we have to consider the 6-foot-3, 236 pound soon-to-be elephant in the Situation Room and his track record so far.

On the homefront, Trump, and to some degree running mate Mike Pence, coerced Carrier to keep a paltry 1,000 jobs in the U.S., which amounts to 0.01 percent of all manufacturing positions in the nation, at the expense of the government having to shell out $7 million in tax breaks to the company. Far more than 1,000 Americans will be on the hook when that bill comes due.

Credit: FiveThirtyEight, Source: Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Credit: FiveThirtyEight, Source: Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics

In any case, Trump has deluded himself and deluded his followers if he thinks he can do anything to ignite a manufacturing boon in the year 2017. Economic experts agree that the manufacturing sector is not due for a resurgence at all. On the contrary, it’s on the decline, so Trump’s grand showboating after his supposedly grand deal with Carrier amounts to little more than that: a show.

On health care, Trump has vowed to help end Obamacare, which paved the way for an estimated 11.3 million people to get health insurance. The Affordable Care Act also banned insurance companies, which have operated with near impunity for decades, from denying patients coverage for having preexisting conditions. Even more relevant for many of the people who voted for Trump, the president-elect’s plan could have disastrous consequences for Medicare, according to Forbes.

Red scare?

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Trump’s early actions are his cabinet nominations, some of whom have direct or indirect ties with Russian oligarchs or the Russian government itself, including former Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson and billionaire Wilbur Ross

Trump, when given opportunity after opportunity, has refused to say anything negative about Vladimir Putin, an egomaniacal bully in his own right, and even praised the Russian president for his “great move” in deciding against allowing U.S. diplomats to leave Russia after the U.S. found that Putin’s government was behind a hacking attempt at the Democratic National Committee. The hack was believed to have been carried out in order to sway the presidential election in Trump’s favor.

One could even go so far as to say, as Sam Harris and Garry Kasparov pointed out on a recent podcast, that Trump has roundly insulted nearly every group imaginable inside and outside the United States, yet the one person he will not say a single bad thing about is Putin. This is unprecedented in American politics in the last 60 years, and it’s especially unprecedented for a Republican president-elect.

Compound these issues with the fact that we know little about Trump’s actual assets, since he skirted convention and would not release his most recent tax records. For all we know, Trump could have business ties with the Russian government or those close to Putin, not to mention other foreign powers. Yet, the Republicans have been slow to launch an investigation into Russia’s cyber attack, and few, if any, inside the party seem concerned that Trump has such a seemingly cozy relationship with the Russian dictator. Where is the outrage? Republican idol Ronald Reagan, who fretted over potential Russian trespasses for decades, is no doubt turning cartwheels in his grave.

Never forget, Rick Perry

Trump’s other cabinet picks include an assortment of firebrands, know-nothings, incompetents, jingoists and outsiders, many of whom know little, if anything, about the positions in which they have been selected to serve.

[pullquote]I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and – what’s the third one there? Let’s see. (After prodding) … I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”[/pullquote]

Rick Perry, who was chosen to head up the Department of Energy, represents the epitome, not only of incompetent decision-making on Trump’s part, but incompetence outright. For starters, Perry denies climate change and evolution despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that attests to their reality (climate change and evolution), once charging that scientists have “manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” He has also called climate change a “contrived phony mess” and a “secular carbon cult.”

On evolution, Perry, as governor of Texas, said he wanted to incorporate bunk intelligent design pseudoscience alongside actual science in textbooks. According to an article in Science magazine:

Perry has earned the opprobrium of science educators for his comments on the importance of balancing evolution with creationist theory in Texas schools. And he’s appointed a series of chairs of the state board of education who embrace that view and also criticized science textbooks that discuss the negative impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Yet science education is a tiny $20 million slice of the department’s $30 billion budget.

Of course, among scientists or those with enough intellectual honesty to look at the world with eyes wide open, the debate about evolution and climate change has been over for a long time. Indeed, there is no debate at all, and anyone who does not accept climate change and evolution and who, in other words, still has a grade school understanding of basic science, is unfit for office.

All of this, of course, is notwithstanding the fact that Perry floated a plan in 2012 to eradicate the Department of Energy, along with two others, and then couldn’t recall the name of the department he has now been picked to lead. I wonder how he would do recalling the three laws of thermodynamics or articulating anything coherent whatsoever about energy as a scientific principle.

Motley crew

I can’t possibly cover all of Trump’s cabinet nominations without spilling tons of virtual ink, but let’s briefly run down a few more.

  • Betsy DeVos, who was tabbed to lead the Department of Education, is a strong charter school advocate and a member of the Family Research Council, an anti-gay — and by extension, anti-science — Christian lobbying group. But other than being a Republican donor and supporter of private schools at the expense of public education, and possibly at the expense of the separation of church and state, she has no qualifications in the classroom and seems to be among the the least qualified candidates ever selected to any cabinet position.
  • Ben Carson is an affluent neuroscientist who knows next to nothing about the Department of Housing and Urban Development nor the experiences of low-income residents who actually live in HUD communities.
  • Twice failed Connecticut Senate candidate Linda McMahon, who was picked to head the Small Business Administration, is the wife of Vince McMahon, chairman and CEO of the WWE, and a former on-screen character as played out in an intrafamily saga with the corporate villain character, Mr. McMahon. Trump, of course, has a close relationship with the McMahons and has himself appeared on WWE programming multiple times. It is true that Linda, who was directly involved with WWE from 1980 to 2009, helped grow the company from a regional outfit in the Northeast to the global entertainment empire that it is today, but outside of her involvement in WWE and Titan Sports, Vince’s company before purchasing Capitol Wrestling (the World Wide Wrestling Federation) in the early 1980s, she has scant “small business” experience. Of course, potential conflicts of interest abound between the Trumps’ and McMahons’ various business ventures and their mutual support over the years, such that the appointment feels more like a favor to the McMahons than anything else. According to this article from the Connecticut Post:

In 2007, WWE paid Trump $1 million to appear with Vince McMahon, during WrestleMania 23, with Trump putting McMahon in a chokehold and shaving McMahon’s head in the “Battle of the Billionaires.” The alliance was further cultivated by Vince McMahon’s $5 million contribution to Trump’s foundation, making the wrestling impresario its top donor. Linda McMahon gave $7.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC during the presidential campaign.

Some of the couple’s detractors wondered whether Linda McMahon’s newfound clout in Trump’s administration could insulate the WWE from congressional prying over a myriad of issues such as concussions, steroid use and net neutrality, the free access of products and content by all online users.

“I think we can just assume it’s another example of the fox guarding the hen house,” said Irvin Muchnick, who has written several books on the culture of pro wrestling and maintains a blog on the topic.

  • And then there is South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who, to her credit called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the courthouse lawn in Columbia after the tragic church shooting in June 2015 in Charleston. She was nominated as ambassador to the United Nations, and other than her favorable opinion about Israel, she has no foreign policy or diplomatic experience.
  • Trump selected James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a celebrated commander and a student of military engagement and strategy, for the Secretary of Defense position, which was actually one of Trump’s better picks, if not for Mattis’ hostility to President Obama’s nuclear weapons program in Iran, a plan that has the support of the European Union, Germany, France, Great Britain, China and Russia. The program seems to be working, at least in the interim, as Iran had placed 19,000 centrifuges in storage as of this past summer, unloaded 98 percent of its uranium and opened up its facilities to nuclear inspectors.
  • Steve Bannon, who was nominated as Trump’s chief strategist, is perhaps the most troubling pick of the lot. An alt-right firebrand and former chairman of the shrill website Breitbart, Bannon has been criticized for his “nationalist, conspiracy-minded message,” and content at Breitbart has been dubbed “misogynist, xenophobic and racist” by people on both sides of the political aisle. According to The New York Times:

The site refers to “migrant rape gangs” in Europe, and was among the first news outlets to disseminate unsubstantiated rumors that Mrs. Clinton was in ill health. Its writers often vilify the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing what they call a scourge of “black-on-black crime,” and described “young Muslims in the West” as the world’s “ticking time bomb.”

During this past election, the site was essentially a mouthpiece for Trump, as it has disseminated some of the same anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, borderline fascist and bigoted rhetoric that has served to further divide the nation.

Bannon, then, fits right in with a candidate who has quite literally been able to spew any number of personal insults, lies and half-truths in person and on Twitter and has virtually gotten away with every single one of them with a smile on his face. This glorified Internet troll roused the base, roused the riffraff and in doing so, roused the worse angels of our nature.

Of course, numerous factors led to Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton got too comfortable and didn’t campaign hard enough in key battleground states. Too many of Sanders’ supporters stayed at home. The Electoral Collect failed us yet again.

But the most disappointing demographic in the whole election, perhaps even worse than Trump himself, was the stubbornness and rigid partisanship on display by traditional Republican voters — GOP lifers, if you will — who punch the red card regardless of who gets foisted to the front of the line. Some among the Republican faithful even agreed with the rest of us that Trump was obviously, laughably unqualified to take charge of the White House, yet voted for him anyway because of GOP loyalty or because of their contempt for Clinton.

In any case, rather than showing some modicum of courage and switching allegiances this one time for good of the nation, these hard-line Republicans, like the musicians frozen on the bow of the Titanic as the great ship gives up its ghost to the sea, steadfastly toed the party line and agreed to leave the fate of the nation with a man who has repeatedly exposed himself as a half-cocked, blatantly dishonest buffoon and one who may, when all is said and done, bend the arc of American history more than a few inches toward fascism in his four in office — assuming he lasts that long. An inch in that direction is obviously an inch too far, but this is the peril we now face thanks to a reckless candidate and even more reckless electorate.

I, for one, hope the situation is not as bad as I think it might be and am willing to give Trump a chance because if he fails, the whole nation suffers. But as machinations are already underway to repeal Obamacare, that hope may fall away quickly when dawn sheds new light over the Potomac come Jan. 20.

[Cover photo credit: “The Trump World Tower” by DeviantArt user toko.]

Racial injustice and the Kaepernick effect II

I thought I would take this opportunity, as unfortunate a time as it is, to provide a follow up to my previous post on Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem as a way to protest racial injustice and the continued deaths of unarmed black people.

Since he did it, numerous NFL players have joined in the protest, either raising a closed fist or kneeling during the league’s — and sports organizations’ — borderline neurotic, weekly homage to all things America. One has to wonder: If the police shootings persist, as they have now for years seemingly without any reprieve, at what point will these patriotic exercises become meaningless affronts to those we have lost at the hands of poorly trained and/or trigger happy police officers and the atmosphere of protectionism that pervades the entire criminal justice system.

Credit: AP Photo/Mark Zaleski: Raiders linebacker Malcolm Smith raises his fist during the national anthem prior to the game in Tennessee.

Credit: AP Photo/Mark Zaleski: Raiders linebacker Malcolm Smith raises his fist during the national anthem prior to the game in Tennessee.

At least two more names, Keith Lamont Scott and Terence Crutcher, have been added to the scrolls of injustice since Kaepernick began protesting. Even as I’m writing this and trying to work out the calculus that could lead to such wanton, systemic disregard for human life, as laws and police ethics are seemingly tossed out the window at the slightest of offenses, or at the lack of any offense, the blood boils. George Zimmerman is exhibit No. 1. Zimmerman got little more than a slap on the wrist for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black kid, yet a driver who shot at Zimmerman during a road altercation in the spring of 2015 who, like Zimmerman, argued on the grounds of self-defense, was convicted of second-degree murder.

I will preface the rest of this post by saying that, as with nearly any case, we don’t know all the details, but we do know enough to conclude with concrete certainty that Scott and Crutcher should still be alive today.

‘Reacted unreasonably’

Crutcher, of course, was recently shot and killed by white Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby after fellow Officer Tyler Turnbough had already tased him. Crutcher was stopped in the middle of the road and was, according to accounts, moving away from the vehicle and claiming it was about to explode. As the incident escalated, an officer in a helicopter made the following half-cocked, unsubstantiated statement about Crutcher: “That looks like a bad dude, too. Maybe on something.”

After the shooting, police let Crutcher lie in the street for a full 2 minutes before returning to him, not to administer attention to the shooting victim, but to check his pockets. Another 45 seconds passed before someone offered medical assistance. For her part, Shelby was charged with first-degree manslaughter.

According to court documents, Shelby

reacted unreasonably (italics mine) by escalating the situation from a confrontation with Mr. Crutcher, who was not responding to verbal commands and was walking away from her with his hands held up, becoming emotionally involved to the point that she over reacted.

As I pointed out on a Twitter a couple days ago, “reacted unreasonably” has to be the understatement of the year. Shooting unarmed people without serious provocation is now considered merely “unreasonable” police work in 2016? What about: “Shelby failed to follow her police training and took justice into her own hands?” What about: “Shelby was not trained properly by the academy or by her superiors and should have never been put into a position to make life and death decisions on the streets of Tulsa?” What about: “The decision to put Shelby on the street represents a categorical failure of leadership at the Tulsa police department?”

As if Crutcher’s death was not shameful enough for Tulsa County, an unarmed black man named Eric Harris was shot and killed by a 73-year-old, white, reserve deputy in April 2015 after the officer mistook his pistol for a taser. He was charged with manslaughter.

Deadly force

Crutcher’s family could scarce get through the grieving process before another unwarranted shooting claimed the life of Scott, who, although we still don’t know whether he had a gun, was seen getting out of his SUV and backing away from the vehicle as Officer Brentley Vinson, who is black, opened fire. According to police, Scott was spotted with a marijuana cigarette and a gun, although his family claims the man had a book in his possession. Video of the incident is inconclusive.

What is conclusive is that police had no reason to believe Scott was dangerous; he was not a fugitive and was not wanted in connection with a warrant. He did serve time for shooting a man in San Antonio in 2005 and was not allowed to carry a weapon because of it, but as The New York Times points out, police on the scene would more than likely have no way of knowing this at the time. What is conclusive is that Scott was surrounded by officers with loaded weapons and, regardless of whether he had a gun in his hand or not, his arms were by his side and not in a raised position, and thus not actively targeting police, when Vinson opened fire.

What is conclusive is that in most of the police shootings garnering national attention in recent history, officers had little, if any, justification for using deadly force to subdue alleged perpetrators.

Here is what the National Institute of Justice has to say on the use of force by law enforcement officials:

Law enforcement officers should use only the amount of force necessary to mitigate an incident, make an arrest, or protect themselves or others from harm. The levels, or continuum, of force police use include basic verbal and physical restraint, less-lethal force, and lethal force.
Learn more about the use-of-force continuum.

The level of force an officer uses varies based on the situation. Because of this variation, guidelines for the use of force are based on many factors, including the officer’s level of training or experience.

An officer’s goal is to regain control as soon as possible while protecting the community. Use of force is an officer’s last option — a necessary course of action to restore safety in a community when other practices are ineffective.

And according to North Carolina law as related to the Keith Lamont Scott case, police are only justified in using deadly force:

a. To defend himself or a third person from what he reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of deadly physical force;

b. To effect an arrest or to prevent the escape from custody of a person who he reasonably believes is attempting to escape by means of a deadly weapon, or who by his conduct or any other means indicates that he presents an imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to others unless apprehended without delay; or

c. To prevent the escape of a person from custody imposed upon him as a result of conviction for a felony.

By what strained logic can police claim to have been following any of these stipulations in Keith Scott’s case?

Suppose that he was, as police allege, brandishing a weapon and, although we can’t hear it on the video, what if he was defiant, belligerent or even threatening officers? Why couldn’t police simply have shot him in an extremity to bring him to the ground? What possible justification did they have to shoot to kill? Even if perpetrators are wanted on active warrants, escape from prison or are fleeing the scene of a traffic stop, unless they threaten officers or others in the community, police don’t have the right to gun them down OK Corral-style, which is apparently what happened to Keith Scott and precisely what happened to Walter Scott last year in South Carolina.

The white response

Finally, coming back to the NFL, while more players have joined Kaepernick in protesting police shootings the last few weeks, all of the athletes that have stood or raised their fists during the national anthem, so far that I can tell, have been black.

If I may be so bold as to ask, where the hell are the white players standing in solidarity with their teammates and brethren to raise awareness about such a critical issue facing the nation?

Amid the circus of coverage surrounding Kaepernick, I think this has been a severely under-covered part of this story, and the white players who have spoken up about Kaepernick’s actions have largely been dismissive or negative toward the protests and, as I pointed out in the previous post, numerous league executives have gone so far as to demonize the quarterback as a “traitor.”

Are white players, who may be sympathetic to the plight of black America, simply not courageous enough to stick their necks out and support their teammates? Do they think that it would be overstepping their bounds? Are they embarrassed? Do they fail to understand the issue sufficiently? Does their whiteness make them feel ill-equipped to protest racial injustice? Or, perhaps it’s more likely the case that speaking out against injustice and effectively peeling back the layers of racism and prejudice that we long since thought were dead and buried, undermines the league’s role as America’s cheerleader-in-chief.

Certainly, if someone knows of a white NFL player who has stepped out in protest alongside his fellow teammates, by all means, fill me in, and I will write about it. In any case, it is incumbent on us, not as white people on the outside looking in, but as human beings, as brothers and sisters, to view racial injustice, not just as a problem for black people, but as our problem as Americans.

Just like slavery, forced subjugation, disenfranchisement and legalized segregation from previous generations, today’s systemic racism, institutionalized bigotry and police brutality are all of our problems. Anything short of this recognition renders all the blaring displays of patriotism little more than sound and the fury, signifying nothing but an abdication of responsibility to our fellow citizens.

[Artwork credit: “Police Brutality” by DeviantArt user The Rising Soul.]

Racial injustice and the Kaepernick effect

Whether you agree or disagree with Colin Kaepernick’s decision to sit down during the national anthem as a way to protest racial injustice across the country, his right to do so as an American citizen, who is fully endowed with the freedom of speech and expression, is unquestionable.

Will his action, or lack thereof, spark a larger conversation on social justice, police reform or the broken justice system, or, in other words, will it get us talking about something other than Colin Kaepernick? Probably not. The opinion of a multimillionaire who plays football for a living is unlikely to move the needle. But what he has done, perhaps unknowingly, is lay bare the utter hypocrisy and contradictory ethical standards of more than a few head coaches and team executives in the NFL who have all but demonized the man for daring to take a stand for his convictions.

Credit: Associated Press

Credit: Associated Press

In a league that has been awash with nearly unbridled patriotism — bordering on psychotic nationalism — for decades, here is a guy expressing one of the nation’s founding principles: Resistance to injustice and oppression. Quite literally, there is nothing more American than that — arguably even more American than the so-called “paid patriotism” the government tried to generate when it gave the league $6.8 million for “military pageantry” at football games. The NFL supposedly paid back the money, but the same kind of manufactured, robotic, obligatory patriotism, with endless renditions of the national anthem, prayers and American flags as far as the eye can see — just in case we forget what country we live in — continues at nearly every sporting on almost every day of the week in every county in the union. Because, you know, if we tell ourselves America is the greatest nation on the planet over and over and over and sing to each other about it and pray hard enough to gods who somehow let us slip from the top spot because we now allow gay people to get married and be themselves in public without fear of getting stoned to death and because of whatever sins are being committed right now in Las Vegas or New Orleans, maybe, just maybe, it will be true again someday.

So, there you have it. The Kaepernick effect. Even if protesting the anthem will have little, if any, real world implications or lead to an open dialogue on the problems that plague our nation, Kaepernick has reminded those who needed reminding that we are far from the greatest country in the world, and until we stop the killing of unarmed people in the street and put an end to the culture of protectionism inside the criminal justice system, we will be far from it.

And it is this painful realization that seems to explain the unfiltered vitriol that has come from his detractors in recent days. They seem to think that sports is hallowed ground. They seem to think that when the lights go on, if we can just come together in a few fleeting moments to watch 22 guys rip each others’ heads off, all the world’s problems will just dissipate into thin air. In short, Kaepernick exposed the relatively insular world of professional sports to the ugly realities on the street and to a string of injustices that have rattled a nation, some of which, almost certainly took place mere yards or miles from the towers of excess we call American football stadiums.

I, for one, thought he put his rationalization in the plainest of terms:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

And the San Francisco 49s acknowledged that Kaepernick did nothing wrong by staying seated. Players are encouraged to stand for the anthem, but are not required. According to the team:

The national anthem is and always will be a special part of the pre-game ceremony. It is an opportunity to honor our country and reflect on the great liberties we are afforded as its citizens. In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem.”

While player reactions have been mixed, the rage over Kaepernick’s actions burned bright and hot in front offices across the league, as seven executives said they would not want the quarterback on their team, according to the Bleacher Report. Each of the seven suits said about 90-95 of other front desk execs agreed with their sentiments. Other comments got plain nasty. One executive called Kaepernick a “traitor,” while another threw this dart:

He has no respect for our country. Fuck that guy.

And here are the thoughts of one general manager in the NFL:

In my career, I have never seen a guy so hated by front office guys as Kaepernick.

As it turns out, folks who have, or are still, profiting mightily from their gainful association with the NFL have done a lot worse than refusing to stand up for the national anthem. The Will Smith movie, “Concussion,” has already exposed NFL officials’ wanton disregard for player safety in the past, and the league’s pattern of doling out soft punishments for domestic abusers like Greg Hardy and Ray Rice is nothing short of disgraceful.

I’m not going to attempt to approve of and justify all of Kaepernick’s behavior. Wearing the pig-cop socks was probably a little beyond the pale, although not without precedent in pop culture, but the NFL has committed vastly more egregious offenses than simply allowing a player to exercise his right to conduct peaceful and silent protests in the name of justice.

[Credit: Cover artwork “Racism” by DeviantArt user ahmedwkhan.]

Gravity’s pull: Returning to assess a world on fire

… And I’m back.

This may have been the longest stretch I have taken away from this site since I started it eight years ago. Recent national and global events have put me in kind of a general malaise about writing on here lately. I have still kept up with columns for work and have been following current events — obviously, or else I might not have been in this funk in the first place — but even at the office, I honestly haven’t been terribly inspired to sit down and pick apart or analyze much of anything in the form of op-ed work.

As a result, columns that I did manage to produce in the last couple months largely felt forced, although their content and spirit were genuine. Of course, I hope that they didn’t read like they were obligatory, but that’s kind of how I have felt trying to fill a 1,000 word news hole at a time when the muse was a bit lost in exile. Hopefully it will be returning with more regularity.

giant meteor2

With that said, here is a rundown of some of the things that have happened since my last blog and some not-so-brief commentary:

  • Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the presumptive nominee and Sen. Bernie Sanders, to the chagrin of many of his supporters, finally embraced Clinton as the nominee. So much for Sanders’ claim that Clinton was “unqualified” to be president and lacked the character and leadership acumen for the job. So much for Sanders’ strategy of winning over all those superdelegates at the convention, although a handful of people are still suggesting that Sanders still has an outside chance of winning. One writer went so far as to say Sanders’ “strategy” of endorsing Clinton could have been a “tactical master stroke” of political maneuvering. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell at this point. In any case, while I always chafe whenever candidates run down each other on the campaign trail and then do a complete about-face when it’s time get down to brass tacks in the general election (See: Chris Christie‘s shameful self), but the sad reality is that hatchet politics has always been part of democracy in America. The difference is that 150 years ago, if two politicians attacked each other, they really meant whatever unflattering things they said about the other. At least that was honest. Politics in the 21st century is just an intellectually dishonest game of smoke and mirrors, in which the most trustworthy, genuine people rarely, and indeed in many cases can’t, win. Sanders is just the latest example. I have more to say on what I think Sanders supporters should do on election day (Hint: Do not stay home and do not vote for Trump), but I will save that for another day.
  • Trump is still the nominee and could still become president, and despite a popular meme floating around that gave us all hope that Earth would be shattered by an oncoming meteor before that nightmarish reality could ensue, members of the GOP appear to be rallying behind him, presumably because they think Trump, who has, at one time or another, uttered opinions that could be described as racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic and ableist, would make a better leader of the free world than Clinton, who would, I think it’s safe to say, never hurl so much hate at so many people.
  • While I was in the process of writing this, I learned that Trump named Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, apparently silencing speculation that the pick was going to be Newt Gingrich. In addition to turning off black people, women, Hispanics and everyone else with half a brain, Trump, in his brash, off-the-cuff style, has also run afoul of the the evangelical Christian bloc of the GOP, so Pence will probably attempt to woo some of those folks back into the fold. Here is how the Indiana Star assessed Trump’s pick: “In Pence, Trump adds a social conservative whom GOP strategists say will reassure rank-and-file Republicans that Trump can be trusted to pursue their interests. Veteran political observers say Pence, a former U.S. House member and chairman of the House Republican Conference, will provide a disciplined counter to Trump’s improvisational campaign style. Pence also brings fundraising power and credibility on a wide range of policy issues that are important to conservatives.” And here is a decidedly less charitable analysis. Personally, if Trump was going to go with another old, white guy, Gingrich would have been a smarter and more seasoned choice. But I guess Gingrich, in his recent comments about black people in America, was starting to sound a little too sympathetic and a little too, you know, human, for Trump’s tastes.
  • The tragedy in Orlando. Of all the terrible things that have happened the last few months nationwide, this is, perhaps, the one that frustrated and disappointed me the most and largely contributed to me wanting to take some time off from blogging. As per our column schedule at the office, I was supposed to turn in a column on the Tuesday after the shooting — and Orlando certainly would have been the obvious choice on which to provide my thoughts since it was so clearly on everyone’s mind — but I didn’t have the stomach for it just a couple days after it happened. As the deadline loomed, I told my boss that I attempted to sit down and gather my thoughts, but I literally didn’t know what to say. In any case, details were still coming in, and I just had the sense that any words that I possibly could have strewn together would have been so inconsequential to what was happening in the lives of our brothers and sisters and their families that week that radio silence was the only adequate response. The shooting was supremely frustrating because, before that time, uplifted by the Supreme Court ruling last year that denying gay and lesbian people the right to marry was unconstitutional, it really felt like that the nation had turned a corner on accepting the LGBT community. And maybe it has in the population at large, and I certainly hope so. But in that moment, all I could think was that the shooting was at least one of, if not the, deadliest shooting in American history, which took place against a group of people who have been vilified and discriminated against for generations in a country that touts freedom and equality as some of our most cherished principles when, in fact, these have really only applied to certain people. In any case, I eventually opined on Orlando and gun control the following week in this column: “No longer if, but when.”
  • Speaking of gun control, at least two more unarmed black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, have been killed by the police, meanwhile Eric Garner’s family and many other relatives of shooting victims are still waiting for their long-overdue justice. I wonder how many years the families of Sterling and Castile will now have to wait before they get an answer on whether someone will be held accountable for their deaths?
  • Brexit happened. Other than to say the unfettered wave of populism that began, or at least grew to infamy, in the election of 2008 in America and has seemingly leapt the pond, is a bit concerning — here’s why — I don’t have much of an opinion on England’s decision to leave the European Union. I will simply say that the more modern European nations and America move toward the far-right, the more cherished principles I mentioned above will be put into jeopardy. If we had learned anything from the early 20th century, we would know that the far-right program and the set of ideologies that govern it are, at bottom, antithetical to democracy and liberty. Its terminus is fascism.
  • All of that, and then finally, there’s this horrific shit. Predictably, the jihadist in Nice, France, was said to have screamed “Allahu Akbar” [pullquote]Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance. — Sam Harris, “The End of Faith”[/pullquote] (God is [the] greatest) before getting killed and swept to away to his non-existent 72-virgin-adorned paradise. I have already said most of what I think about Abrahamic religion and radical brands of Islam elsewhere on this site. Suffice it to say that so long as revealed religion exists in all its forms and so long as people can convince themselves to believe things on bad evidence or on no evidence, faith, whether it is fanatical or more subdued, will continue to smash against modernity and stunt the progress that we could and should be making toward a peaceful and just society. Whereas the far-right endgame is merely fascism, religion terminates in a darkness that threatens to unmake our world. ISIS is only the most recent iteration of violent religious extremism that has caused untold human misery in previous centuries, and we, as a species, had better wake up to these realities sooner than later.

[Cover image credit: “world on fire” by DeviantArt user orangebutt]

Race-baiters: GOP’s descent to the bottom

The Republican Party, once a relatively progressive outfit by earlier historical standards, having played a key role in passage of the Civil Rights of 1964, was on the right side of history from the mid-1800s with the election of Abraham Lincoln up until the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s and the defection of Strom Thurmond from the Democratic Party to the GOP.

For about 100 years after 1860, and even before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the de facto breeding ground for bigotry and segregationalist thought in America, but in ’64, when about 80 percent of Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, compared to 60 percent of Democrats, the political landscape changed (here’s a detailed look at how the party has changed over the years) — perhaps irreversibly sending the GOP down a path of kowtowing to religion and big business, resisting societal progress, denying LGBT people of their rights and instituting programs designed to line the pockets of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, particularly poor blacks living in inner cities.

Indeed, for more than 30 years now, the Republican Party has operated on platforms and policies that seemed to only carry the hint of racism — implied, but not explicit; by that, I mean most lawmakers have not, by and large, come right out and said that laws related to the war on drugs and criminal justice, for instance, were implemented to lock up a disproportionate number of black people or that statutes on immigration were passed to address the “problem” of Hispanics taking jobs away from white Americans. But conservative lawmakers have, knowingly or otherwise, injected a kind of institutional racism in the post Civil Rights era. For Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” the clearest example of this is in the criminal justice system.

She writes:

The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias.

According to a 2015 study from political scientists Zoltan Hajnal and Jeremy Horowitz, Republican policies since 1948 have served the interests of affluent white Americans more so than any other group. Sean McElwee, with Al Jazeera America, sums up the findings:

Although they (all ethnic groups) still benefit significantly more from a Democratic president, the gap between the two parties is the smallest for whites. Hajnal and Horowitz estimate that black poverty declined by 38.6 percent under Democratic leadership, while it grew by 3 percent under Republicans. From 1948 to 2010, black unemployment fell by 7.9 percentage points under Democrats and increased by 13.7 points during Republican administrations. Black income grew by $23,281 (adjusted for inflation) under Democrats and by only $4,000 under Republicans.

“Put simply: However measured, blacks made consistent gains under Democratic presidents and suffered regular losses under Republicans,” the authors said. While there’s limited data, the findings hold true for Latinos and Asians.

It appears at first glance that Republicans actively transfer income to whites through government. Of course, there could be another explanation for this phenomenon. In a study published last July, Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found that from 1947 to 2013, gross domestic product, employment, corporate profits and productivity grew faster under Democrats than Republicans. The authors also noted that unemployment and deficits shrank and the economy climbed out of recession in less time under Democrats.

The following graph shows how ethnic groups have fared economically under Democratic administrations versus Republican presidents through 2010:

income equality

In further support of these points, Robert Smith, political science professor with San Francisco State University, argued in his 2010 book, “Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same,” that while modern conservatives may not be racists outright or in general, the policies they support and enact produce “the same effect as racism”:

Racism in the United States … is systemic – a complex, interdependent, interactive series of behavioral and ideational components. This “systemic racism” is reflected in the unjustly gained economic resources and political power of whites; empirically in a complex array of anti-black practices; and in the ideology of white supremacy and the attitudes of whites that developed in order to rationalize the system.

This complex systemic phenomenon is what African American thought challenges and African American movements have sought to overthrow. Conservatives, however, have sought to maintain it, or, at best, to change it gradually, always prioritizing stability over justice. This then, historically and situationally, is what in the first instance makes conservatism and racism in America the same.

Now, this shows the effects of GOP policies and ideologies when Republican lawmakers, politicians and conservative talking heads are at their most well-behaved. Enter Donald Trump, Ann Coulter and the legion of followers who, with the bigoted winds at their sails, aren’t afraid (anymore) to tell us what they really think.

What is new with the 2016 election, then, is a return of blatant, out-in-the-open racism and bigotry reminiscent of the old Dixiecrats of the mid-20th century. What is new is that racist and xenophobic sentiments are coming, not from some obscure third party candidate, but from the GOP frontrunner in an election to determine the leader of the free world. What is new is that Trump is on pace to get more primary votes than any candidate in American history.

Where to begin with Trump? He generalized that a whole wave of Hispanic immigrants contained untold numbers of rapists and drug dealers and flippantly conceded that “some” might be good people. He declared that he was going to force a sovereign nation to pay for a wall along the border, erroneously assuming that Mexicans, presumed to be cowering in fear, were just going to bow to the will of a power white guy in America.

He said he would turn away Syrian refugees seeking asylum in the United States, has called for a “total and complete ban” of Muslims entering the United States and used his followers’ irrational fears about Muslims to support a kind of isolationism even inside our borders. Here’s what he had to say about the refugees in April:

We don’t know where they’re from, we don’t know where they’re from, they have no documentation. We all have hearts and we can build safe zones in Syria – and we’ll get the Gulf states to put up the money, we’re not putting up the money – but I’ll get that done.

Lock your doors folks, okay, lock your doors. There’s no documentation. We have our incompetent government people letting them in by the thousands, and who knows, maybe it’s ISIS. You see what happens with two people that became radicalized in California, where they shot and killed all their coworkers. Not with me, folks, it’s not happening with me.

I’m not one to cry “Islamophobia” over criticisms of Islam as a religion or set of bad ideas. I have been as critical of Islam as just about any other religion except Christianity, but here Trump is obviously not running down Islamic thought or doctrines but implying that not only could ISIS members be “embedded” in groups of refugees, but the refugees themselves are so weak intellectually and spiritually that they might, at the turn of a switch, fall under the spell of ISIS and become radicalized, rather than recognizing that the couple in California was an extremely isolated case and hundreds of thousands of American Muslims worship peacefully every day in this country. In fact, Trump’s odious remarks on Muslims may have actually backfired, as significant numbers of the 3.3 million Muslims in America have been energized to get out and vote against Trump in the election.

Then, of course, there’s this and this.

Screenshot 2016-05-13 at 11.32.42 PM

Donald Trump’s retweet of a wildly inaccurate meme.

But perhaps most damning of all was Trump’s not so inconspicuous flirtation with modern white supremacy by failing to disavow the support of former KKK grand wizard David Duke and other racist groups that pledged fealty to him. Ludicrously, he initially claimed that he needed to do “more research” before commenting on David Duke and the KKK – more research? – and only when pressed did he rebuff these hate groups, although the rebuffing seemed more obligatory than heartfelt, signaling to the rest of us that Trump will apparently take votes anywhere he can get them and from literally anyone.

To add fuel to the fire, an avowed white supremacist named William Daniel Johnson was originally signed up as a delegate for Trump’s campaign from California, but later resigned, telling reporters that Trump campaign officers “don’t need the baggage.” Moreover, Trump’s rallies have included a virtual horde of white nationalists, apparently finally feeling newly empowered to crawl out of whatever sad and bitter life they have in the hinterlands of America in order to gin up some fresh hate against black folks and other ethnic groups.

For his part, Trump has said he is not a racist and doesn’t want the support of white supremacists, but given the numerous lies and half truths emitting from his mouth nearly on a daily basis, it’s hard to say whether he is being genuine or not on that point, or frankly, on anything else, especially so, since his campaign has admitted that he has just been “playing a part” in his “brash, bigoted, bullying” persona, as described by The Washington Post.

What we know for sure, however, is that his rhetoric is acutely responsible for stoking the flames of racism and bigotry in this country and continuing the work began by the Tea Party in the late 2000s, as the GOP’s failure to neuter the intractable strain of populism in its own ranks now threatens its existence.

[Cover photo credit: John Cole, Scranton Times-Tribune]

Just released: the Pandora’s box of stupidity

Racists Urge Boycott of ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’ Over Black Lead

Apparently, some bigots are all up in arms about a black man having a lead role in Star Wars and the fact that “Episode VII” has black storm troopers.

One would think that racists would approve of the fact that some storm troopers are now black since storm troopers are part of the Galactic Empire, but even in their faulty logic they can’t seem to manage a single rational thought.

These people do realize that Samuel L. Jackson was a Jedi master serving on the High Council, and Billy Dee Williams played the unforgettable Lando Calrissian in “The Empire Strikes Back,” right?

Their heads might explode when they consider the rather obvious point that James Earl Jones did the voiceover for Darth Vader, arguably the most famous villain in all of cinema.

In any case, these folks are apparently arguing, in futility, that the new movie puts forth a “very sinister multicultural agenda.” In what galaxy, in this one or one that’s far, far away, is multiculturalism a bad thing? Indeed, in the Star Wars universe, multiculturalism is the rule, not the exception.

One only need to look at the makeup of the High Council in the more recent films:

jedihighcouncil

Since I’ve already said more than this ridiculousness warrants, here’s Trevor Noah: