Tag: racism

More susceptible to falsehood than to truth

Anything can be corrupted, polluted or discredited

truthI receive Quotable Notes daily. One from March: “Man’s mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.” –Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), a Dutch humanist who was the greatest scholar of the northern Renaissance. I don’t know that “the first editor of the New Testament” is correct. But it WOULD appear so.

For the past couple years, in order not to write about him ALL THE TIME, I’ve posted on this date some links about a person who has described himself, more than once as a “an extremely stable genius”.

This has turned out to be an extremely difficult task. It’s not that there’s a dearth of examples of unsettling behavior but rather a plethora of them.

He feels compelled to comment about his claimed expertise in all subjects in some way, even when it comes to offering advice about something for which he is completely unqualified. He offered unsolicited advice on the best way to fight the Notre Dame Cathedral fire. It was met by derision and laughter because the weight of dropped water on a rooftop fire would have collapsed the structure and made things much worse.

He prevaricates brazenly, having lied or misled the American people more than 10,000 times.

He berates senior officials constantly. It’s remarkable how many times his aides ignored his dodgy or possibly illegal requests. He is tired of hearing “You Can’t Do That.” We should all be afraid.

Back in March, his 32 tweets were noteworthy, from a Saturday Night Live rerun he groused about to several attacks on the late John McCain.

He “railed against Shep Smith and other Fox hosts he doesn’t like; called on the network to defend Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirro, two hosts he does like.” He’s since dissed Chris Wallace, and the network in general for allowing Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg on the platform.

Nation of Change noted: “No one has yet assessed the full disaster from stripping the office of dignity and competence, plus shredding prestige overseas. When ‘anything goes,’ even changes weekly, then anything can be corrupted, polluted or discredited.”

Frank S. Robinson says he has plan-free fact-free anal sphincter foreign policy. He CLEARLY has no idea how tariffs work.

Robert Reich wrote that, as a result of the tax cuts, “business is booming for connoisseurs of private planes. That’s because the tax law allows businesses to deduct the full cost of buying a plane in the first year of purchase… Some wealthy individuals have even created shell businesses to utilize the deductions.” His golf habit has cost American taxpayers $100 million.

Most Americans believe he has made race relations worse. He again targets transgender people – this time in new proposal to rescind Obama-era healthcare protections.

I could go on, and on, but it’s exhausting. He says he would listen if foreigners offered dirt on opponents; he feels no responsibility to protect the integrity of our democracy.

Should he be impeached? Probably, and for all these reasons. Even Justin Amash, a Republican, finds his actions “inherently corrupt.”

That said, as awful as I find him, he can win re-election in 2020. And THAT depresses the hell out of me.

A fugue

Wilmington, NC coup d’etat of 1898

The mob broke out windows and set the building on fire

Wilmington
Richmond (VA) Planet newspaper, 19 Nov 1898
The only coup d’etat In U.S. history took place in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. “Almost two-thirds of its population was black, with a small but significant middle class.” There were a number of black businesspeople and civil servants. “A good feeling between the races existed as long as white Democrats controlled the state politically.”

In the Jim Crow south, the race relations were practically idyllic. “But when a coalition of predominately white Populists and black Republicans defeated the Democrats in 1896 and won political control of the state, Democrats vowed revenge” two years later.

The outbreak stemmed “from an editorial published by the Wilmington Daily Record, an African American newspaper edited by Alexander Manly. In response to an appeal for the lynching of black rapists made by crusader Rebecca Felton in Georgia, Manly wrote that white women ‘are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women.’

“Moreover, Manly argued, many accusations of rape were simply cases where a black man was having an affair with a white woman. Because it involved the sensitive issue of interracial sexual relations, the editorial struck a raw nerve with many whites and led to bitter denunciations of Manly in the Democratic press.”

“On November 10th, Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and a white supremacist, led a group of townsmen to force the ouster of Wilmington’s city officials… Waddell led 500 white men to the headquarters of the Daily Record on 7th Street. The mob broke out windows and set the building on fire. Manly and other high profile African Americans fled the city; however, at least 14 African Americans were slain that day.

“When their criminal behavior resulted in neither Federal sanctions nor condemnation from the state, Waddell and his men formalized their control of Wilmington. The posse forced the Republican members of the city council and the mayor to resign and Waddell assumed the mayoral seat.

November 10, 1898 is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. The event initiated an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South, a shift already underway.

Read The Lost History of an American Coup D’État in The Atlantic magazine.

For ABC Wednesday

Three TEDx videos: acknowledge your biases

America works overtime to create a colorblind society, but does this colorblindness perpetuate, rather than resolve, racism?

biasesFriends of mine, a couple at my church, have shown, just in the relatively few years I’ve known them, how amazingly aware they are of cultural biases. It was they who led the adult education discussion at church about Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race and other discussions about white privilege.

There are few discussions more dreadful than black people discussing white privilege. No matter how sensitively presented, hackles are almost always raised. But when white people talk about white privilege, it can be a very different conversation.

Did I mention this couple was white? They moved from a very nice suburban home to a lot in the “inner city” of Albany, where they built a very nice house. When asked about that, they waved it away saying it was no big deal. They’re wrong, but they’re so right about other things, I let it pass.

They had been attending some workshop recently and emailed these three TEDx videos. The first two were cued to a specific point in the presentations, but you should listen to all of them in toto as your time permits.

The Exceptional Negro: Fighting to be Seen in a Colorblind World – Traci Ellis

America works overtime to create a colorblind society, but does this colorblindness perpetuate, rather than resolve, racism? Despite a growing racial divide, attorney, activist and author Traci Ellis says the time is now to have the courageous conversation about the damage done in the name of colorblindness.

Is My Skin Brown Because I Drank Chocolate Milk? – Beverly Daniel Tatum

When her 3-year-old son told her that a classmate told him that his skin was brown because he drank chocolate milk, Dr. Tatum, former president of Spelman College and a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, was surprised. As a clinical psychologist, she knew that preschool children often have questions about racial difference, but she had not anticipated such a question.

How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them – Verna Myers

Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we’ve seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Verna Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable.

Living while black, doing everyday things

Some Americans are afraid to explore their own country.

while blackIt is absurd in its awfulness. Someone who is black, let’s say a Smith College student, is quietly eating her lunch in a campus common room. A white person, an employee, calls the police to report someone who “seemed out of place.” When campus police arrived, they found the Smith student, taking a break from her campus job.

It is yet another example of police being called to investigate black people in everyday situations, the criminalization of blackness. There have been calls for laws to punish people who call police on black people for no reason. But I was curious as to the WHY.

“Because they’re racist!” Well, perhaps. Vox looks at the sociology of the living-while-black incidents.

“Many white people have not adjusted to the idea that black people now appear more often in places of privilege, power, and prestige — or just places where they were historically unwelcome. When black people do appear in such places, white people subconsciously or explicitly want to banish them to a place I have called the ‘iconic ghetto’ — to the stereotypical space in which they think all black people belong, a segregated space for second-class citizens.”

The ACLU has developed LIVING WHILE BLACK ON CAMPUS – A Roadmap for Student Activism.

Meanwhile, folks deal with selling real estate, babysitting, eating, grocery shopping, swimming, helping a homeless man, or cashing a check, all while black.

One reads White lady in golf cart calls cops on black father watching his son play soccer. “Gas Station Brenda” Calls Police on People Shopping In Her Convenience Store. North Carolina Woman Tells Black Sisters Waiting For AAA, “You Don’t Belong.” And there’s the language variation: Dunkin’ employee calls police on student speaking Somali with her family.

Some folks have looked at the phenomenon in a more comprehensive way. Dating While Black: What I learned about racism from my online quest for love. TRAVELING WHILE BLACK: Some Americans are afraid to explore their own country, concerns that evoke the Jim Crow-era Green Book. And it’s not limited to the USA: Morgan Jerkins: Three writers share powerful stories on what it’s like to seek escape in a world that surveils black bodies.

There are what I guess are “good” outcomes in these instances. White woman fired after blocking a black man from entering his home. And this scary tale: Michigan Man Who Shot at Black Teen Asking for Directions Found Guilty of Assault, as well he should have been.

On the other hand, being a “good guy with a gun” doesn’t necessarily apply while black.

This hardly-exhaustive list, mostly from 2018, is exhausting to write about. And scary. Having the cops arrive unnecessarily is not only nerve-wracking, but it’s also a waste of the police’s time and resources.

As Renée Graham in (Boston) Globe Opinion wrote back in April 2018, “To be black is to always be in the wrong place at the wrong time because, in America, there is never a right place for black people.”

“Lynchings” museum and “The Religious Instruction of the Negroes”

“As a Presbyterian minister and the son of a Plantation owner, [he] is the epitome of the establishment voice for this time and place.”

As the person who’s been involved with Black History Month at my church, I was asked to write an article about the evolution of BHM at the church, which I wrote in March, and will link to it at some point.

Stealing from me:

There may have been a sense in the country “in 2009, after Barack Obama was inaugurated as President, that perhaps we didn’t NEED Black History Month anymore. It was seen by some that, in a “post-racial” America, we HAD overcome.

“Of course, nine years later, after Charlottesville, the murders at a Charleston church, and Black Lives Matter, it’s clear that we have not yet reached the promised land.”

And America has a lot more history to learn. Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, wrote In the Shadows of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. Based on hearing him talk about the book on The Daily Show and C-SPAN, he’s helping to fill a void.

Surely, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice addresses a major blind spot in our national consciousness. “The memorial captures the brutality and the scale of lynchings throughout the South, where more than 4,000 black men, women, and children, died at the hands of white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Most were in response to perceived infractions — walking behind a white woman, attempting to quit a job, reporting a crime or organizing sharecroppers.

“Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard University-trained lawyer who created the Equal Justice Initiative in 1994 to fight for justice for people on death row, found himself transfixed by the South’s history of lynching African Americans. Stevenson and a team of researchers spent years documenting those lynchings, combing through court records and local newspapers — which often notified the public that a lynching was coming — and talking to local historians and family members of victims.”

Even earlier, 1842, brought The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States: A Sermon, Delivered Before Associations of Planters in Liberty and M’intosh Counties, Georgia by Charles Colcock Jones, 1804-1863. One of the descriptions on Amazon – there are multiple editions – reads: “As a Presbyterian minister and the son of a Plantation owner, [he] is the epitome of the establishment voice for this time and place…. the ways in which he does and does not allow the humanity of the black population are in themselves fascinating. Read the praise he has for ‘colored ministers’ but brace for the descriptions of the flaws he believes he sees in the black population of the plantations he has visited.”

The more we think we know the history, the more often we are brought up short.

Ramblin' with Roger
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