DO THREE GUILTY VERDICTS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?-Part 2

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Continuing the discussion of criminal justice in the US begins with an acknowledgement that it ain’t working for anybody. No one in the country feels safe. Conservatives are expert at exploiting that fear while reinforcing it with false narratives about immigrant caravans, antifa, socialism, BLM and Black riots. The specter of Black bodies is a deeply ingrained contrivance to elicit fear among the general population. At the same time, they dispute the real threat that is the rapidly expanding organization of violent and armed white nationalists/supremacists who are encouraged, supported by and intimately tied to elected Republican officials.  

Leaving aside the larger question of national security, how can current threats to personal safety like thieves, rapists, murderers and for nonwhites, law enforcement itself, be addressed? The obstacles to change sit squarely in the leadership of law enforcement and the justice system itself. That resistance will intensify as those in political power feel increasingly threatened by widening public sentiment for change. Among the most important are police unions. Union leaders are steeped in the traditions of a privileged, unaccountable force that imagines itself fighting for their lives against a heavily armed public. They uphold the thin blue line as a matter of principle handed down generationally through police families. Union and affiliated organizational memberships are often dominated by retirees, not active duty officers. In addition, their ranks are drawn from some of the most ferocious proponents of anti-Black racism, handed down at their family dinner tables.  And they are deeply entrenched in the MAGA universe. They have built a fortress around law enforcement, a steel wall against a view inside; an exemption from the normal procedures for investigation of suspects and legal disclosures to prosecutors.

Provisions negotiated within union contracts include a prohibition against officer firing, no matter the malfeasance; an appeals process that typically reverses most officer disciplinary actions and terminations; leave with pay during investigations; internal reviews conducted by departments themselves that generally find no wrongdoing. During investigations, many officers can’t be questioned by prosecutors for weeks, not hours like civilians, opportunities for co-conspirators to “clean up” their stories, encouraged by their union reps. Under the contract in Louisville, former home of Breonna Taylor, no officer can be fired during the duration of the contract. Another recent example is the officer who shot Rayshard Brooks in an Atlanta fast food restaurant parking lot. Despite pending prosecution, he was recently reinstated to the police force because the appropriate waiting period was not observed before his firing. At least, he’ll be on administrative duty although it’s questionable if that’s an appropriate use of tax funds.

Police unions are powerful enough to influence state legislatures to act to protect them. In 22 states, police have a bill of rights which protects them from accountability for their actions. Many limit the ability of civilian police oversight boards to review police misconduct and augmented by police contracts, allow their unions or a police chief to overrule disciplinary actions recommended by those boards. All of that is in addition to qualified immunity.

Beyond the unions, the culture of policing is another significant concern. Police union officials have been overheard making anti-Black slurs and expressing common racist tropes. These attitudes percolate throughout an atmosphere of officer fear. As detailed by Michael Sierra-Arevalo in a podcast, the culture is built around the canon that the officer’s safety is paramount above all else. This leads to paranoia on the street where every situation is dangerous to them personally. Infused into a military training regimen that draws heavily on military tactics, what Sierra-Arevalo has called the “danger imperative”, allows police to defend everything about their every action. Their “us against them” (them implicitly dark-skinned people) perspective is reinforced by their everyday routines that bring them overwhelmingly in contact with people of color. Those hostile interactions generate hostile reactions to officers’ animosity and disrespect in the people they encounter. Officers’ experiences reinforce implicit biases that intermingle with racial stereotypes to further reinforce their biases. To be clear, there are dangerous criminals out there, but not every Black person is dangerous or a criminal. Most 13 year old boys and 30 year old men and 60 year old women are just regular folks, minding their own business. But, in the stereotypical perception of the policing world constructed from the idea that most crimes are committed by descendants of the enslaved, they are all potential criminals. Stalking African Americans wherever they are, in consequence, is the heart of crime prevention in the minds of law enforcement officers. 

 The specter of gun ownership looms over it all. Total US gun ownership is 4 times the adult population. But far more guns are in the hands of white people than African Americans; that’s a no brainer when in 2020, whites make up 60% of the population. In reality, a white suspect is far more likely to be armed than a person of color. And yet, every Black person is probably armed is the idea in these officers’ heads. And cops aren’t stopping white folks often enough to think about them. 

The danger imperative is enhanced by rituals around officers killed in the line of duty. Word spreads quickly when any officer from around the country is injured, whether in car accidents or shootings. Officers travel across the country to attend funerals; national police auxiliaries plan and coordinate funeral arrangements swooping the family up in their vision of the pomp and circumstance. (I’ve had some tangential personal experience in that atmosphere of bullying.) Memorial walls of badges and plaques in departments which stand as reminders of potential dangers before each shift, reinforce this obsession with loss and spread an overarching sense of doom. This is not to say that there is anything wrong per se in honoring friends and colleagues.  

Almost all officers claim that when they’re involved in a shooting, they feared for their life. The fact is they’re scared when they walk out of the station door. This is why they empty excessive numbers of rounds into their victims. Even in the heat of the moment, 2 officers armed with tasers and guns should feel their physical superiority over a suspect armed with a knife running away from them. After all, they are trained to handle these situations. Unfortunately, their training seems to boil down to just shoot ‘em. The standard justification for excessive use of force, fear, is simply the outlook that officers have toward their job and the population they police. The danger imperative is the blank check that underwrites excessive use of force against people of color and their murder. In contrast, law enforcement’s attitude toward whites lacks that same element of fear, no better demonstrated than by its response to the January 6th gang. Authorities were lulled into a sense of safety by the commonality of their skin color. Despite the potential for violence, they failed to prepare. Despite the presence of weapons and the mob’s violent behavior, seditionists were simply released to mill about the streets after the attack was repelled. No excessive use of force there.

The culture of policing also inculcates a tendency to deceive the public in an effort to avoid accountability. Both police officials and prosecutors seem to instinctively falsify their reports and statements about use of force, particularly in cases that result in an injury or death. The incident reports on Breonna Taylor for example were mostly blank without reporting a death from gunshot wounds. The initial statements by police officials and the prosecutor about George Floyd said that there had been a medical emergency and the suspect had died at the hospital. No mention of knees on his neck as the cause of the emergency nor death at the scene while being restrained. The officers must have falsified their reports, even though the whole world would soon see the video of Floyd’s execution. 

The practice of half truthful paperwork appears to be widespread, as departments routinely delay public release of body cam footage or fail to disclose incidents until a bystander or family releases their video or talks to the press. This suggests that officers have some sense that they are behaving badly. The most common officer reaction to most incidents, viewed through the danger imperative prism, is to affirm the appropriateness of any action as a necessity. They take for granted that it will be unpopular with people of color and their sympathisers but believe that the general public will agree. The impulse to cover up comes from a desire to avoid media attention and debate. Their instinct is to draw up the gate to their heavily fortified law enforcement castle, ensuring that all of them are protected against the legal consequences of their missteps. 

In service of the goal of obfuscation, data collection on officer misconduct is strictly controlled by police departments and reinforced through union contracts. Some contracts mandate destruction of complaints and disciplinary records after specified time periods, often 5 years. Over a 10 year career, an officer has 2 chances at a clean slate, leaving them free to employ excessive force with impunity. The only way to gain transparency in law enforcement is the creation of a national database of officer conduct. Police departments need access to hard data about potential hires if they want to avoid officers who either are “bad apples” or have the potential to become one. Their ilk should be eliminated from law enforcement ranks rather than passed around like abusive Catholic priests between parishes. Accountability theoretically becomes a deterrent to bad behavior particularly if the database is open to the public or at least subject to open record investigations.

Whatever the consequences for employment, officers generally pay no legal consequences for killing or injuring suspects. Qualified immunity protects them from prosecution for most activities, another gift of police union lobbying with Congress and state legislatures. Instead, the American public pays for police misconduct. Our tax dollars pay for settlements like Breonna Taylor’s family received, remembering that federal grant dollars supplement local police and municipal budgets. Ironically, Black Americans are paying for being killed in the street in the few cases where civil settlements have been reached. But plenty of that moolah is coming from white, Latinx and Asian taxpayers too. Part of our discussion should include whether taxes should be spent on protecting police officers or on resources that would ameliorate the circumstances that lead to crime in long ignored communities. Perhaps the prospect of exorbitant legal fees and settlements could alter police conduct as well as send officers inclined to work in unconstitutional ways into alternative occupations, maybe security guard or private eye. 

Closely intertwined with the culture of policing is officer training. In a piece in the Atlantic, Olga Khazan points out that some European countries have 4 year police academies which teach the country’s rationale for their justice and legal systems. In contrast, the average training period in the US is about five months in a classroom and another three or so months in the field. Among the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the US, including 1000 departments with only one person, training is whatever the agency decides. In one or two man departments, there is no training at all; just a do-as-I-do apprenticeship where the officer may have no experience in law enforcement or the body of jurisdictional law. There are no national standards for best practices and procedures. 

The bulk of the training curriculum revolves around military drills and tactics. The emphasis on military discipline has created a paramilitary force, outside the rule of law. From the first day, the armed forces break down a civilian identity to refashion recruits into a cog in a corps, without individual will. A strict hierarchy is welded into place where the soldier must follow a superior’s commands without question or thought. In battle, their life depends on it. The military has its own laws with its own police and court system outside the national system. For the purposes of defense, society has chosen to create an armed force that operates only outside its own soil, except against Native American tribes and in the Civil War, before there was a standing army. But the price for society is an armed body of persons who are outside the rule of law. And when they leave the service, they bring that lawlessness with them to join a body of civilians trained in military maneuvers with the potential to accumulate an armory of automatic weapons.

From New York Times video

Police training replicates that microcosm. Law enforcement sees itself as its own uniformed corps, rules and loyalty codes where a superior officer is a god. In this structure, where questioning a superior is unlikely and reporting one is almost unheard of, a ring of collusion encomposes every person present at an incident and all who discuss it later. They have their own rules of engagement and think their intra-organizational regulations replace federal and state laws, much like the armed services. In parallel, law enforcement glorifies dead officers as fallen heroes defending their country. But they are not at war. They’re trained to believe that they are, but preventing or solving crime is not war. There is no identifiable enemy, only criminal acts, not people or identifiable organizations or countries.

 Following graduation, training updates concentrate in that area as well. Where departments have included implicit racial bias training and de-escalation techniques, these are often one shot engagements or sometimes on line and even when repeated, account for less than 10% of training time. Surprisingly, even firearms evaluations have become less frequent as departments have become more budgetarily strapped. Absent from most law enforcement training is education in federal, state and local laws, keeping in mind that they change every time state legislatures and city councils meet. Nor are the fundamentals of the legal system, including constitutional protections, being taught routinely or being reviewed periodically. This was demonstrated by the Justice Department report on the Baltimore PD at the end of the Obama administration. The report details a Justice Department ride-along where a police sergeant instructs his partner to stop and search a group of Black men on a street corner doing nothing. The sergeant’s response to the question, “What for?” was “make something up”. So ingrained was the police practice that the sergeant didn’t even realize that those actions are constitutionally unlawful search and seizure performed in front of DOJ officials! 

Mimicking the military, law enforcement has tried to create a parallel separate tract nestled within the justice system using the interdependence between the police, prosecutors and judges. In an overcrowded system that is driven by the number of convictions it can achieve, crime solvers have influenced prosecutors and judges to accept their word as truth even when they all know it’s not quite kosher. These cozy relationships are threatened if prosecutors pursue legal action against policemen. Restricted access to court proceedings and a general lack of interest by the public allows the court system to rumble along in its own realm. Plea bargains, the most common resolution of legal proceedings, mean that evidence is never presented in court. Over the years, the judicial process has trapped millions of victims, many of whom are innocent, out of sight of the general public. 

A public safety doctrine with its current emphasis on crime prevention through an assault on minority communities has left those communities unsafe. Calling the police invites in the very people who are stopping and frisking youth for no reason. Does someone with a warrant out for nonpayment of parking tickets call the police when they’re mugged? The police are likely to make the situation worse possibly leading to a confrontation over an outstanding warrant; at the same time, they are unlikely to recover the cash, cards and stolen goods. It’s far more reasonable to go to the ER to treat injuries if severe. A Post Reports podcast retells the story of a woman living in Albuquerque who called the police to check on her father at his home. When the police arrived, they discovered he had an outstanding warrant and when he resisted arrest, they shot him because he raised a shovel over his head. A daughter’s concern for her father resulted in his death at the hands of the police. The fact that there is nowhere else to turn is also illustrated by a bystander to George Floyd’s murder who called 911 to report Chauvin to the police. He was hoping that they would come and stop their colleague from murder. Phillip Goff of the Center for Policing Equity has researched how changing police tactics like minor traffic infractions stops can make African Americans safer. And just as importantly, those departments were willing to listen and change their procedures. So there are remedies when law enforcement accepts alternative approaches to current tactics.

 In the wake of BLM demonstrations and the action by some mayors to discipline officers for misconduct, officers are abandoning their jobs in droves. Police departments, particularly urban ones, are reporting manpower shortages and difficulty recruiting. Whether the officers who quit are disturbed by a loss of privilege and immunity is unclear. The demand from the public to examine police actions and have some role in oversight, particularly in urban departments, is receiving some attention from mayors and that may be making some officers nervous that their past and present behaviors will catch up with them.  

The intense national focus on police has also decreased recruitment and may be skewing the types of recruits who are stepping up. Multiple incidents of racial antagonism from officers have been documented across multiple locations. The events of January 6 have revealed that there is a significant strain of anti-democracy within law enforcement who turned out in some numbers to the Stop the Steal rally and assault on the Capitol. Within the crowd were many who expressed anti-Black prejudice, as detailed by the Capitol Hill police who testified that they were assailed with the n-word. How many of those people were from law enforcement will never be known, but birds of a feather typically flock together. 

Another example is one of the assailants of Ahmaud Arbery, a former policeman, is rumored to have said, after he shot him, that he got Ahmaud, referring to him using a derogatory racial epithet. 

Former military personnel are a significant source of recruitment for law enforcement. Recent investigations have also exposed a significant number of white supremacists within their ranks, a problem that the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense are now attempting to address. Recently, an active duty soldier and a National Guardsman have been indicted for actions on January 6. Former military personnel form a central core of white supremacists militias, some of whom also participated in the January 6 insurrection.

The real difficult areas to cleanse of racial prejudice are the smaller, nonmetropolitan departments, particularly sheriffs of the sort like Arpaio in Arizona. Since the former president, these officers have been seen wearing MAGA hats, Qanon symbols and decals, white nationalist symbols and of course confederate flags without compunction. And these may be areas, given the preponderance of political identifications within them, to recruit officers who don’t hold these beliefs. 

These findings should set the stage to reevaluate what type of people make good law enforcement officers. A disturbing report from Atlanta showed that 93% of their potential recruits were unable to complete the application correctly and only about 1% of candidates were accepted. The authorities decided to change the packet rather than consider what the problems were for those who couldn’t complete it, seemingly a step backward rather than forward. 

Recruitment must screen out both the white supremacists and those who disparage people of color and fire those whose service is marred by these ideologies. Consideration should be given to attitudes of former military personnel and examination of their records before they’re hired. But police leadership and unions, mired in their culture of hostility, can’t be expected to spearhead these changes. Perhaps the new approach to DOJ investigations of police departments initiated by Merritt Garland will bring some new perspectives. However, the DOJ doesn’t have the resources to consider 18,000 departments even though it may be able to make a dent in large and moderate sized urban areas. 

There is some evidence that women tend to be more respectful and are more likely to de-escalate interactions. In concert with an effort to demilitarize police interactions and parcel out functions that can be performed without weapons, recruitment of more women and their promotion up through the ranks must be increased. The British police force which has long incorporated and promoted women to leadership positions is a potential example. 

The difficulty in deciding criteria for officers without a clearer societal understanding of a proper approach to policing and desired law enforcement functions is self-evident. But the undesirable has been well defined. And changes in who is doing the policing can occur as various locations modify their law enforcement agencies. After all, police continue to kill individuals daily, at what feels like an even more hectic pace. 

On the other hand, the recent surge of crime during the COVID19 pandemic has created a public demand for more intense policing rather than less. In this atmosphere, law enforcement agencies are likely to relax their recruitment requirements rather than reexamine and strengthen them. Politicians are more likely to be reactive rather than imaginative and to use public demand as an excuse to double down on current police tactics, particularly in jurisdictions where GOP politics reign. But the length of the process should not be an excuse for failing to start it. 

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a discussion about the philosophy of policing in the US is the refusal of some people to engage in it at all. In our post-truth atmosphere, and actually around the globe, denial is the signature core of the conservative mediasphere and the MAGA cult. Their spokespersons are masters of creative reconstructions of history and current events which, through constant repetition and reinforcement, have fabricated a parallel universe. There is no better example than Tim Scott, the GOP’s puppet in Black skin. Even as he has detailed some of his encounters with racial profiling by police, some with the Capitol police no less, he towed the party line in his response to Biden’s first joint address before Congress. America is not a racist country he said, a statement that can only be said by someone completely ignorant of history who also refuses to look at his own personal experience in context. Doesn’t he recognize the commonality of his experience with Cory Booker, even though the latter is very light skinned? He might like GOP economic policies but a tour through his state is the best demonstration that they are not intended to meet the needs of people who look like him despite decades with them in place. Is there not something systemic about the centrality of skin color in the lives of nonwhites? Doesn’t he get tired of people who look like him being scapegoated by his party? He’s traded his common sense for a GOP Senate seat. 

It’s not that Scott’s missing an interpretation of history; it’s written in the policies and the documents of the very people who designed them. Their own words state their intentions. The purveyors of America’s myths about itself can easily be identified by anyone who can read. The path from the Civil War through White Redemption to the Lost Cause can be charted through the Daughters of the Confederacy. It’s all there unless your business is denial in order to thwart the threat of the masses to displace the people in power. Those people require that the majority of Americans remain deceived about the forces that control governance, the wealthiest and most powerful few. The powerful rarely concede power willingly and they have the resources to put down most attempts. Doesn’t Scott understand that he only has a seat at the GOP table as long as he is useful to them. They’ll ditch him as quickly as the former president turned on Michael Cohen. 

In the face of an upsurge in the demand for a more just criminal justice system and system of policing, Tim Scott will be the face of the conservative attempt at the federal level. He will try to win the public over to the slicing and dicing of the George Floyd Criminal Justice bill. GOP compromises are aimed at nibbling around the edges of true change to give the appearance that some progress is being made and then trot out the idea from Voltaire, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. 

And the federal response is unlikely to make a dent at the local level where every individual officer operates on his recognizance. The department can be sued, but the victim will still be dead and their family will still mourn. One point that Scott has said is immutable is the maintenance of qualified immunity which creates an accountability bubble for officers that is a powerful counterweight to policy and behavioral change. The result will be more Black children, women and men dying at the hands of the police.

Because this will be a struggle against the powers that be, it will be long and bloody. At this point, they hold all the cards: the government, the media, the institutions, the Congress, the economy. The presence of agents of subversion in the House and Senate has never happened in our history. Even on the verge of the Civil War, the secessionists in Congress supported the institutions and accepted the votes that went against them. They admired the structures enough to replicate them in the Confederate States of America.  

It will take a generalized revolutionary movement of the maybe 60% of the population that wants to retain the democratic structures that exist, however flawed, to rise up. They must battle against the opposition of the hard kernel of throwback supporters whose destination is something that never existed in the past, only as a mirage conjured up by the powerful to mesmerize them. The 2020 Census makes continued GOP domination of governmental structures almost a certainty as they exclude more and more of the electorate from access to the ballot and redraw districts to allow candidates to hand pick their electorate to maintain permanent seats. Whether the former president continues to be their mascot or someone else captures center stage, they are well positioned to quash organizational efforts of a majority of the country still invested in maintaining our imperfect democracy. Far fewer are invested in the fight to make the society truly democratic. Even though the republic was designed for lily white men, it’s been updated to encompass white women while we continue to fight over people of color, youths, the poor and non-cis gendered individuals with halting progress toward more inclusion and giant steps back to expulsion. But lukewarm odds of success should not be a deterrent to persistence in the fight. It’s life or death for the first democratic republic in history. 

On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court rules in Brown v Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, sparking massive white resistance and violence.

LIZ CHENEY IS ON HER OWN

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Liz Cheney has charted her own path. She is not willing to lie, at least about one thing, the results of the last presidential race and the former president’s role in fomenting the January 6th assault on the Capitol. She voted to impeach him for that act of sedition. The party of which she’s a leader in the House has chosen a different route. They want to remake the truth about the events on January 6, jumping wholeheartedly into the giant footprints of the master fabricator, the Pied Piper of MAGA Land. They can’t bring themselves to denounce the myth of the stolen election for fear that the MAGA mob will unseat them. And so the pilgrimages to Mar-a-largo; the echoing of themes, now so familiar to the whole country.

Their two paths, the Congresswoman and her party, have headed in opposite directions. Cheney concedes that she is not the person to carry the message of a party bent on Trumpism, meaning a change in leadership is appropriate. She’ll have to take her fight to a different audience. Perhaps the anti-Trump forces, which seems so demoralized at this point, are quietly organizing ahead of the approaching midterm election campaign season. It makes no sense for her to run for re-election, but she might, just to show her defiance, if she can raise the money. Perhaps, the enthusiasm for the Pied Piper will have cooled or current leadership will have shot itself in the foot.

Even now, there is polling that suggests that his popularity is waning among those who consider themselves Republicans, if not with governors, in state houses and Congress. Take the ludicrously mischaracterized audit of Maricopa County ballots in the 2020 races of Biden and Mark Kelly. Apparently they’re looking for traces of bamboo in the ballot paper to confirm that thousands of ballots were imported from China, an imaginative conspiracy theory if ever there was one. Clearly, these politicians are all about retaining power while the electorate may be increasingly interested in making their lives better, however they concieve of that.

Pundits are batting around the question of the future of the GOP and our two party democracy. That’s difficult to say; the country has never stumbled to this juncture before. But it feels inherently dangerous. Will Fox News and Qanon carry the day? Or will a considerable number of Americans come to their senses? The clock is ticking.

On May 10, 1740, South Carolina enacts the Negro Act of 1740, allowing masters to whip and kill those enslaved who violate the law by growing their own food, learning to read, assembling in groups or earning money.

DO THREE GUILTY VERDICTS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

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Zooming out to a panoramic view, the absurdity of the gatherings in George Floyd Plaza seems obvious. Half a nation and many in the world are rejoicing that a man has been convicted of murder. He’s a white man who murdered a Black man. He’s a white cop, an officially designated protector of the citizenry. A bystander invited the world to watch the execution of a Black man on a city street for attempting to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Did he even know it was counterfeit? It’s like revolutionary France in “Les Miserables”,  where the poor are sentenced to die by being ignored or imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread. In the US, it is the punishment for standing on a street corner with a couple of buddies. Perhaps a better word than absurdity is revolting.

Cop shows often have a line like “we just arrest them, the jury decides.” Not in Minneapolis. There a cop can be judge, jury and executioner, as shown by the police murder of Daunte Wright during the Chauvin trial. Fortunately, not this one time. This one time, the jury and the judge rendered a verdict on the officer’s conduct. We Black Americans take solace in even the tiniest step. This is the only white cop to be convicted of murdering a Black man while on duty in the state of Minnesota ever. There was a Black cop convicted of murdering a white woman in Minneapolis. The fact that he is Black is significant; the bias in society that Black men are expendable extends to law enforcement officers too. 

About 1000 people are fatally shot by the police each year, according to a Washington Post database. There have been over 800 police shootings in the country so far this year; only 6 cases have been prosecuted. What’s clear from the data is that African Americans make up over 50% of the victims but only 13% of the population. Note also, the database includes only fatal shootings, not injuries or other causes of death. George Floyd is not included here. Unfortunately, good data in this area is scarce because federal reporting from law enforcement agencies is voluntary. Another study found that between 2015-2019, 104 officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter for a shooting while on duty. Only 4 officers were convicted of murder with an average sentence of 12 years. Eighteen were convicted of manslaughter. Forty-five were not convicted. These numbers mean that a significant number of those arrested were not prosecuted. 

For the most part, the cases that get widespread attention are those where the victim is killed, most often by shooting but there is Eric Garner, the victim of a choke hold and of course George Floyd. But there are hundreds of others annually who are injured, like Jacob Blake now paralyzed after being shot in the back by an officer holding his T-shirt.

Still, the conviction in the George Floyd murder is an historic moment. But it means very little for progress in criminal justice. It doesn’t assert that BlackLiveMatters as a general rule. One of the purported cornerstones of this country is the rule of law. We all make a social contract to abide by the law and when violated, to be punished.  We like to believe that our laws are both just* and fair*. As with most things in America, the asterisks mark the exceptions. From its very beginnings, the law in this country has been for white people; Black people weren’t even considered people. Nor were native Americans. Since then, the “less thans” expanded to include brown and yellow skinned people as well. Laws are only as good as their enforcement, by law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges and juries. The fact that the laws have been written to favorite white groups is augmented by differential enforcement, a subject too broad to discuss here.

There are unique features to the Chauvin trial that are probably associated with that unique outcome. One is the composition of the jury, remarkably diverse for race, age and occupation. Most jurors were under 50 years old, unusual in a system that relies heavily on retired citizens to fill jury boxes. There were a couple of professionals in their ranks. Another feature is that the thin blue line was smashed. In fact, Minneapolis PD, including the chief, went out of its way to deny that Chauvin represented the department. The department disavowed him as an outlier. Unaddressed were the policies and procedures that allowed Chauvin to flourish, because the department wasn’t on trial, the officer was. He was after all a training officer who was teaching his trainees how to act that fateful day. Hopefully, now awaiting trial themselves, they learned what not to do although if justice prevails, they won’t have an opportunity to use their new knowledge in any police department ever again.

And certainly, BLM demonstrations and the discussions around racial justice have changed the prism through which many citizens have begun to view law enforcement. White jurors are no longer convinced that voting to convict a policeman will make their community less safe; minority jurors have seen how police actually make them less safe. This is particularly true in Minneapolis, where the discussion around shifting resources to alternatives to armed officers for particular functions has been ongoing for years. The general population has become increasingly aware that policing in this country is neither fair nor just but disparately applied. The Jan 6 insurrectionists were not thrown on the ground and handcuffed. Paul Manafort was not slammed against a wall and rousted from his home; he was allowed to turn himself in on his own time, in a suit and tie. And these people are traitors to the country, not people with broken tail lights or passing a $20 counterfeit bill.

While Chauvin’s conviction is probably not the beginning of a national trend, hopefully it will spark the beginning of local, state and national discussions about public safety. Law enforcement officers come in all varieties of uniforms, local county sheriffs, small town police, urban police, marshalls, highway patrols, etc. Judges, it turns out, also come with all kinds of credentials. There are county magistrates who, in smaller locations, are generally not lawyers and have no training in the law. There are elected judges, who are not required to be lawyers, just popular with the few voters who cast ballots in their election. At the highest level, there are federal judges, appointed by the Chief Executive and approved by the Senate. And then there is the Supreme Court, the pinnacle of the system that is mistakenly perceived as objective but throughout the major portion of its history has prioritized business and economic interests over individuals. Despite this hodgepodge of entities, they are all imbued with a concept of public safety that imagines boogey-men (and women) who are nonwhite.

In many districts, law enforcement is in the hands of an individual who works solo or runs a department in any way he pleases. Sheriff Arpaio is a perfect example; even when a federal court ordered him to cease his racial profiling and stealing money and property from Hispanics in his Arizona district, he defied the ruling and persisted. It’s no accident that a suspected terrorist in New Jersey engaged in a shootout with police is merely wounded when a Black man leaning against a car window with his hands in the air without a weapon is shot dead. Was the shooter thinking the same thing as the helicopter cop who characterized that man as a “bad dude.” Terence Crutcher was in fact a wholly compliant gentle giant. What are cops thinking when they hesitate to shoot a man actively shooting at them but are quick to shoot a man in his back as he’s running away because the cop thinks he might have a weapon when none is evident? Similarly, a white man who killed several Black people after praying with them in their church is taken to Burger King to eat before being taken to the station but a Black man walking away from several cops is shot dead in the back in a hail of bullets? The lame excuse that each case must be judged on its merits can’t account for the number of cases of white men who are actively killing victims and yet are arrested unscathed compared to the number of Black men who are shot and killed because the police feel threatened when they are holding a gun against a single individual without a weapon. Even after taking fire, the cops just seem more relaxed when dealing with armed people who look like them than they are with unarmed people who don’t. Officer Chauvin appeared extraordinarily composed and relaxed as he choked Mr Floyd to death.

The task ahead is to design a system of public safety that will keep all citizens safe. The country has never had this ideal in mind. Policing was initially designed to restrict the movement of enslaved Blacks. Anyone with brown skin was presumed enslaved and had to demonstrate otherwise. Authority to seize Black people was extended to every white person. By the 19th century, the focus remained on descendants of the enslaved in the South but in northern urban centers, the police who primarily served the wealthy, often used their power to prey on the poor. Corruption and false convictions of the poor were the rule of the day. 

Crowd control

Fast forwarding to the 1960s when LBJ sought to include African Americans in civil and economic society. Within his decisions about the Great Society was the nidus to transform policing into an assault on primarily urban segregated communities across the country. In those years, crime fighting shifted to crime prevention. Crime was theorized to be concentrated in Black youth, somehow predisposed to crime, not by the economic desolation in their communities but by a congenital predisposition. Not so mysteriously, this is a racist trope that sailed over the Atlantic with Black bodies when they were dragged onshore. An initial decision as part of the Great Society to invest in poor communities, where poor always means Black, became a decision to invest in monitoring, policing and jailing Black youth, enlarging the prisons to hold them and upgrading weaponry to assist in the effort.

The war on drugs brought an even more intense invasion to Black communities aimed at the users and small time dealers, not the suppliers. Crack, introduced through Reagan’s Iran-Contra program that used the profits from the drug trade to support Nicaraguan rebels and interdict arms in El Salvador that then secretly supplied arms to Iran in a complicated web of intrigue. Law enforcement militarized its weapons and tactics, prisons expanded into a private industry. Militarized equipment then expanded exponentially as the surplus from Iraq/Afghanistan wars dumped old equipment into police departments through grants and giveaways.

In the meantime, drug use among whites has always been higher than people of color, but their neighborhoods and college campuses were not only spared from scrutiny and raids but also patrols. Living in primarily segregated communities, they could identify a criminal as someone who didn’t belong there by virtue of skin color, but white on white crime seems to escape police notice. The police have no crime prevention programs there as if white youth don’t commit crimes even as the opioid epidemic rages on. Cops so seldom respond when called that most people don’t report theft except for insurance purposes because stolen goods are almost never recovered. White neighborhoods understand this and have taken on their own public safety: gated communities, restricted access and security cameras and guards.

Police departments have evolved new strategies for crowd control as well. America began as a nation of protesters. 2020 showed that the police vision of crowd control- helmets, shields, tear gas, rubber bullets, military regalia, humvies, tanks- in essence military weapons they use to violently attack demonstrators is anything but peaceful. Those scenes are reminiscent of the brutality shown to Russian demonstrators marching peacefully for Alexi Navalny. Russian laws prohibit demonstrations; the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and assembly. Violence by police against lawful demonstrations often provokes more widespread personal injuries and property damage. These forces are most often mobilized against demonstrations that are majority nonwhite. They were missing in Michigan where the demonstrators were more heavily armed than law enforcement. They were missing in Charlottesville, when a Nazi flag carrying crowd shouting an anti-Semitic chant marched across the UVA campus. They were missing when the MAGA rally decamped for the insurrection at the Capitol building. Clearly, law enforcement appears to have a problem with assessing risks when it looks through a colored lens.   

The scope of police responsibilities has expanded further. Departments folded their war on Black communities into local government revenue generation, making traffic infractions into the excuse to ratchet up the number of encounters they had with people of color, now on the road outside their communities. Confrontational authorities humiliate and insult victims, searching vehicles without provocation. Resistance often leads to additional charges, arrest and either injury or death. Recently, a stop in Virginia for an expired tag became the opportunity for 2 white deputies, guns drawn, to insult, bully and finally mace an active duty Black soldier with his hands extended through the window as he had been instructed. In video from the officer’s body cam, that officer is later seen subtly threatening the victim not to tell anyone, so the victim doesn’t get in trouble with his military command. The crime and the cover-up. wisely, the soldier filed a civil suit against the department, town government and the 2 officers, the aggressive macer now fired.

After institutions that housed the mentally ill and the handicapped closed, the number of unhoused and mentally ill has exploded as the number of services has shrunk to infinitesimal. Managing this population has fallen to police without training on how to cope with people in crisis. In addition, police have moved into the schools, creating an early tributary into the school to prison pipeline. Even more recently, immigration enforcement has received added emphasis in police departments across the country, not simply in southern border states. 

The failure of the current approach to public safety is very clear. Crime rates have fallen significantly since the 90s, but police case closures have not improved proportionately. Only 25% of reported crimes are solved by arrest. Only 5% of arrests are for violent crimes, 80% are for low-level offenses. The case closure rate for major crimes, murders and burglaries varies from 25-50% over the different jurisdictions. Nationally, police cleared about 60% of murders last year. The clearance rate was lower for aggravated assault 50%, rape, 33% and robbery, 30%. Only 18% of larcenies/thefts, 14% of burglaries and 14% of motor vehicle thefts were cleared. The vast accumulation of “cold cases”, serial murders and rapes are testimony to the poor state of policing. The tendency of police to railroad suspects into confessions, plea bargains and close cases with circumstantial evidence which has resulted in the imprisonment of innocent people contributes to further crimes. Simply put, the criminal is free to commit more crimes when the innocent go to jail. 

It’s pretty clear that what is being done is not working. To summarize, policing as it’s working today neither effectively prevents nor solves crimes as the principal part of their workload has shifted to traffic enforcement and mediating disputes. People do not feel safe in the US and they shouldn’t. Points made in this all too brief summary should be augmented by additional historical exploration to begin to formulate a basis for re-envisioning a new American ideal of public safety. Potential considerations include resolving whether the objective of the justice system is punishment or rehabilitation. How are rehabilitation programs carried out, through education and skills training, treatment of  addiction, PTSD, anger management or solitary confinement and disregard for basic prisoner needs?  Must all convictions result in incarceration or can many instead involve community service with home residence that is supported by adequate resources to live in the community? Is investment in education, business development, skills training, opportunities for higher wage employment, access to fresh produce in neighborhood grocery stores and pharmacies, access to healthcare a better approach to crime prevention than stop and frisk, arrests for low level crimes, fines and extended prison sentences? Does eliminating child poverty lead to better educational outcomes and lower violence in communities? Would a different approach to the availability of illegal drugs actually diminish the supply and break the influence of drug, sex and undocumented immigrant trafficking since the arrest of low and medium level dealers has failed so miserably. These objectives must be made retrospective to change the lives of the presently incarcerated and on parole.

But in the interim because people are dying today, the possibilities for tweaking the system are vast if, and this is a big if, the modifications are revisited as a vision for the ideal evolves. My next blog post will explore some of these ideas.

On April 28, 1936, just before his trial for attempted assault, Lint Shaw, a 45 year old Black farmer, is shot to death by a mob of 40 white men in Colbert Georgia.

WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU

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When they came for indigenous peoples, Americans cheered.

When they kidnapped Africans, Americans exalted in the profits from enslavement and turned their backs.

When they came for the freed descendants of the Africans, the country stayed silent again and again and again and again.

When they came for Mexicans, the country cheered the seizure of their lands in a trumped up war. 

When they came for the Chinese, the country cheered again and again and again.

When they came for the Japanese, the country cheered them on.

When they came for immigrants from countries south of the border, the country stayed silent again and again and again.

When they came for Muslims, the country stayed silent.

This is the reality of American history. When they come for the next group, will you cheer or stay silent? Or act? Do not assume that because you’re considered white today, you will still be tomorrow.

When the KKK dominated Oregon politics.

THE BROWN DUCHESS V THE MONARCHY

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Photo by Romu00e9o on Pexels.com

When Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex sat down with Oprah Winfrey, she was a David facing off against a Goliath, the British monarchy. Newly freed from a royal agreement to hold her tongue, she was anxious to regain her voice. And she did, in a quiet, measured manner that along the way released a Kraken. She appeared earnest, although because she’s an actress, any certainty about her sincerity is speculative. 

It did seem curiously naive that Meg didn’t Google Harry because actresses need to be careful about these things. But then again, maybe it’s not necessary for a prince. As for the royal family, most Americans know very little about them except the pomp and circumstance in news clips. As a busy Afro-American actress, there’s no reason why the British monarchy would attract her interest. Actors are often not particularly well educated, not simply because many drop out of school but also because their focus is on the craft of entertainment, not history or current events. Entertainers are often assumed to have a level of sophistication that is more a product of their image than their daily lives. Meg was busy filming her TV series “Suits” with the attendant publicity obligations. Add in the fog of new love, it’s only in retrospect that a bit of preparation seems like it would have been a good idea. The kind of stuff she needed to know can’t be found on Google.

Of course, once they were engaged, she might have dug deeper, and perhaps she did, but details about the royals are sparse beyond the superficial. It was on Harry to fill in the important bits. Maybe the fear of being turned down tempered his early disclosures. After she accepted was when the real orientation should have started. For instance, she had no reason to know the British national anthem if she’d had no occasion to sing it? How many Americans do? Still, his ignorance strains credibility a bit since he must have had run-ins with the Firm in the past over his bachelor exploits exposed in the tabloids. 

The Duchess chose her words carefully, in an attempt to shield herself, the couple and the royal family. Oprah’s reaction to the bombshell about the concern over Archie’s skin color was not the surprise that much of the press assumed. She’s lived enough life to have expected the question. No, Oprah’s shock was that Meg said it out loud so nakedly, a shock magnified by Oprah’s considerable acting chops. Yes it came with considerable softening, not the bare worry that he would look Black, but an inquiry about complexion, kind of like one would think about Harry’s anomalous red hair. Given Meg’s origins, it’s likely that her parents faced similar questions which sprung from the exact same origins. (This is an experience that I share.) 

But the significance of the disclosure was important in exposing the relentlessness of the racially biased attacks, not simply from without by the press but from within the family and the Firm. None of those entities is sympathetic or kind. If “The Crown” is to be believed, this is an institutional order that quietly erased two family members with genetic handicaps from their tree, hiding them away in a mental institution.

Always disposed to a negative perspective, the press accused the couple of not naming the person(s) involved in the “complexion discussion” so the press could not investigate it. And yet it was very clear from Harry’s remarks that it was to protect them from the public shaming that would reverberate across the Commonwealth most importantly, if not in the US and the world in general. This is after all, his family for better or worse. Even in the distance that royal parents maintain from their children, children love their parents no matter what. Often they are driven into bizarre behaviors to elicit some expression of parental love. Here too, “The Crown” weaves some nifty tales.

Harry and Meg should probably spend more time catching up on episodes of “The Crown”. The series has drawn a clear picture of Queen Elizabeth’s battles between duty and her personal feelings. She has acted to do what she thought would sustain the monarchy. She drove her sister to alcoholism and numerous unhealthy romantic relationships. She arranged for Charles’ love Camilla to marry someone else and then forced him to marry Diana, setting up the marriage for 3 that crushed Diana. All of these maneuvers were designed to keep the royal entourage in their proper place. That Elizabeth had the stones to make these decisions was set in sharp contrast with her uncle Edward VIII who pursued the personal, i.e., Mrs Wallace, over the interest of the crown. When the Firm pushed back against his intentions to marry, he wanted to change the institution. But he lost that battle big time and so jumped ship. That’s how Elizabeth eventually came to the throne.

Elizabeth has wanted to change nothing, but she was dragged into beginning an era when the royal family became available to the regular public, sending the family on rounds of official appearances after a wave of unpopularity threatened the institution. She responded to a tsunami of grief over Princess Di’s death with a public funeral when she wanted to ignore the death of a traitor to the family, yet another follower of the personal over duty to the crown.

Harry could have seen his own oppressive trap laid bare in “The Crown” as well. An accident of birth that left him outside the line of succession made his escape possible. The centuries-old pomp and circumstance, the protocols, the traditions are the trap, outside the control of any one player, even the reigning monarch. Gone are the halcyon days of Henry VIII when the monarch actually controlled the fate of the nation. Now the monarch is a figurehead, commanding legions of men and women decked out in centuries-old costumes for rituals of state. Everything related to the queen like how to approach, how to address and how to leave the room is controlled by protocols not of the queen’s making but which she relishes. The monarchy is an institution that’s built to last, as it has, for centuries despite momentous historical changes. But Harry’s father Charles and brother William are locked in. Perhaps Charles has made his peace in his decades-long wait to assume the throne, having been allowed to finally marry his beloved Camilla and see her public acceptance, no matter how tepid. 

“The Crown” nailed one other important piece, the role of the press, all of it, not just the tabloids. The press is the window into the monarchy and the family is acutely aware how much their image and popularity is dependent on them. The press is the only interface the public has with the menagerie of characters who, after all, are a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells who contribute nothing to the country’s well being. They sit around, eat, drink, hop in and out of numerous beds, party, fund raise for charities, cut a few ribbons and put on a public face. Their exploits come with an enormous price tag, which is why they have to at least be entertaining. The British public hungers for juicy bits of gossip made all the more salacious by the tabloid press. It’s like watching the Kardashians, except the Brits’ taxes are floating their bills and the Kardashians are free. They want something back for their cash. 

The tabloids like to get ugly, because ugly sells. So the royals have to smooze them and titillate them with harmless tips. They also have to treat their royal staff right, least they sell out to the very generous tabloids. But all those sumptuous dinners can’t buy compassion or loyalty. It’s like feeding a pack of wolves and hoping they won’t get hungry again. 

Okay, “The Crown” is fiction. It’s well researched and based on actual events, but the creators weren’t in the rooms. They didn’t hear any of those conversations that fill the dialogue in their scripts. But they seem to have captured the essence of the lives of a pampered, self-obsessed nobility, an anachronism in and of itself, with nothing to do except what they call “public service”. On the other hand, what do we really know? Except that the couple’s experience seems to mirror what’s on the small screen. 

The British press consistently refer to Meg as biracial, a not so subtle reminder that Meghan is a product of “racial mixing”, a cardinal sin in the eyes of many concerned with separation by skin color. This trope from the very beginning of white superiority propaganda is deeply embedded in the brain’s neural networks that coalesce into implicit racial bias. In the US, with its one drop rule, Markle is simply Black. Meg committed another cardinal sin, not knowing her “place”. Black people are supposed to understand their subordinated position and give way to the dominant white caste. Place is acknowledged by both attitude and deferential self-censorship. But she just wouldn’t shut up, insisting on talking about justice and the circumstances of women around the world, too “political” for a royal. For the Brits, class adds another layer to status in society. Like in the US, a commoner retains more status than a darker skinned person but both must continue to defer to the aristocracy. A commoner with the privilege of entry into the royal family is supposed to count their blessings, look decorative and keep their mouth shut. 

The queen’s official response stated that the royal family was saddened and would address the questions raised by Markle within the family. Boom! She immediately shut down any discussion of racism. The family, raised in a bubble that has no real interaction with any normal Britons, has literally no idea of the racism that pervades their subjects. They are, after all, descendants of the purveyors of the big lie, that of the inferiority of people of color, on which the Empire is based. They’ve seen no reason to reconsider the ideas in which they believe so deeply. They are the end of a line of monarchs who believe in the God given right of Britons to subjugate the rest of the world and extract the wealth from it for the country’s own growth. The Queen continues to believe in her right to reign over the people of color that populate the countries that remain in the Commonwealth, the remains of their tattered empire reduced by Britain’s fall from global significance. Emigres from Commonwealth countries have felt the sting of imperial white supremacy as they’ve come to Britain’s shore, where whites refuse to examine their attitudes or their historic role in the oppression of people of color. 

Photo by Ivan Bertolazzi on Pexels.com

The entire royal frame of reference renders the family incapable of understanding racial prejudice. They literally can’t see it. It’s as invisible as coronavirus. Their lives would have to be cracked open, like Harry’s, in order for them to begin to dig into their history. And they can’t look at something they can’t see. The cerebral gyri are neatly twisted upon themselves but the mental paradigms that govern the ways our minds work would have to be turned inside out for that kind of inquiry. This is not something that people between 60 and 80 like Prince Charles and the monarch, raised in a lifetime bubble akin to that of the MAGA cult, can do. And so the royal family will further bury their heads in the sand, stiffen their upper lip, batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to blow over as it always has. Because they can’t see that they’ve done anything wrong. 

This is not the missed opportunity to confront racism that the American press wants to pretend it is. There isn’t even a ripple of that in the British press. Queen Elizabeth is not the person who can lead or even participate in discussions of race in the UK or the Commonwealth. Prince William’s “my family is not racist” response to  a question from the press is a good example. First of all, it’s a stupid question. No one, not even the late George Wallace, ever answers yes. Any automatic response that claims a white individual is not a racist is disingenuous. Both the question and the answer demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the many faces of racism. As premiere representatives of British institutions, the family can’t be anything but. Although the British tend not to be copious conversationalists, there are no doubt millions of microaggressions scattered throughout the royal families’ lives, of which they are probably blithely ignorant. That is in the face of their very limited exposure to people of color. And without even considering their innate sense of superiority.

Black British activists have been beating their drum for a long time and no one in the government has listened. This may be an issue that the younger generation can tackle, but the time has not come yet in the country as a whole and nothing the Queen or Harry can say will jump start a reckoning. Our hearts and support go out to the UK Afro- and Caribbean communities in their struggle against the national deafness, but we are in a period of retrenchment of our own here. 

Perhaps, the couple’s ironic flight to the US is an indication of their desperation, for Meg knows all too well that racial animus is alive and well and now more explicitly expressed in her country.  Celebrity combined with a security detail and an entourage of assistants provides some shield (she is unlikely to be stopped by a cop for a broken taillight), but the editorial frame of the media can be no less relentless even if it is more subtle. However, the crushing influence of a titled nobility that sits atop a rigid class system is absent here, allowing space for the worship of celebrities, regardless of color, as nobility if not royalty. In fact, Canada, their first choice, was a better one, not because it is a Commonwealth nation, but because their racial antipathies tend to be directed toward citizens of First Nations rather than the tiny Black community, 3.5% by 2016 census data. On the other hand, there might be a residue of loyalty to the Queen that would have tainted their residence there even as murmurs about leaving the Commonwealth are spreading there in the wake of the whole affair.

Royal watchers have speculated that most members of the royal family didn’t watch the interview, an activity they consider beneath them. For them, it’s part of a media circus that is reminiscent of the disruption wrought by Princess Di. Their concern is not really what happened, but how they can protect themselves, i.e., the cover-up. They’ve plucked out the key words forbidden for them to respond to (oops to William’s faux pas) and garnered deflection strategies outside silence,  i.e. Meghan’s cruelty to the royal staff.  

The very fact that they announced an investigation of Meghan as a staff bully to head off any negative publicity before the interview speaks volumes about the likelihood that any investigation into how the Firm dealt with the duchess’s charges will happen. The fact that her pleas for psychiatric support for suicidal ideation, a life threatening emergency, went ignored should assume a high priority. If the Firm, with little interest in the individual person that is passing through in the long arc, is to spearhead that investigation, it will die a quiet death. It’s concern is the maintenance of the institution apart from any individual cog particularly when they’ve escaped their control.

In truth, the complaints from the staff themselves are probably another manifestation of racial animus within the household staff. The diversity of the staff, a place where jobs are handed down, raises the question of the lens through which the complaints will be viewed. As for the commoners who make up the staff, no doubt they were affronted by their new duties to serve a confident Black woman who wasn’t cowed by the privilege of being let into the royal family. We know that whites interpret the exact same behaviors differently when they come from the dark skinned rather than people who look like them. It’s highly likely that they saw that stereotypical angry Black woman, a level of presumptiveness they would have found hard to stomach. And from an American divorcee to boot. This stereotypical temptress, a Black Jezebel, mesmerized their poor Harry to force her way into their paradise. Needless to say the duchess will be found guilty, if not in the findings themselves, then in the tabloid press. The narrative will go something like, “if you think she’s an innocent, look how mean she was to people [like you]. If she can do that, can you even trust that she was suicidal? Can you trust anything she says?” She’ll be done and dusted. No stone will be left unturned to vilify her person because the words of the vilified can be ignored. Voila! “What racism, what is that?” Britons will continue to live in their cozy national coma. Their love-hate fascination with the royal family, their national treasure, will go on and on or at least the Prince of Wales hopes it will extend to his coronation if not beyond. Britons love Elizabeth; they hate Charles, simply because he was mean to a canonized Diana.

But Meghan is not Princess Di. She was one of them; Meghan is not. And Brits can’t get over her brown skin. Harry thinks only the tabloids are racist, but he’s wrong about that. After all, his experience with real people is pretty limited. He admitted during the interview that his wokeness mostly came from the couple’s collision with the tabloids, his family and the Firm. He must have seen plenty of it in his military experience in Afghanistan, but perhaps he hasn’t reprocessed it yet in light of his new reality.

Harry doesn’t want to believe that his family is racially biased either. For him to understand that will require him to delve into his upbringing and education and to flip flop on British imperialism, an enormous task for any individual. Still, the question why his wife was hung out to dry with the British tabloids has to be asked. As Meg put it, why would the Firm choose to lie about her while correcting the record about other family members? Could it have been to provide Meghan as chum to distract away from the Prince Andrew debacle. Andrew is a perfect example of “pulling back from the public” to let the storm blow over. And yet, shouldn’t the public remain outraged over the presence of a pedophile in the royal family or is it simply tolerance of the many vices within the monarchy over the centuries. No doubt, Andrew is not the first. Our present age of enlightenment has been exposed as a fraud once again.

Or maybe, despite the Queen’s personal feelings for the Duchess, the Firm felt she was the one who didn’t belong and just like Diana, wanted the wrath of the nation and the tabloids to wash over her. The Firm was successful in their efforts with the tabloids then but instead of wrath, the nation embraced Di as “the peoples’ princess”. But as the essence of British imperial racism, it calculated correctly in the case of Meghan, particularly among elderly residents of the UK, the Queen’s staunchest supporters who have fond memories of their glorious empire. Those memories are the counterweight to their feelings of national and personal powerlessness that precipitated Brexit and now cloud their days as pensioners.   

The Black community watch the press coverage and recognize its racist roots. Those in mixed marriages instantly recognized the comments about Archie’s complexion because it was part of their experience too.

The Brits will rally around their queen. Meg insulted her, headlines cried, so she’s toast, except within the Black community. They love her and they love Harry for loving her. They saw themselves in her and hoped that her presence heralded a new day for the monarchy and possibly for them. The ripple of the BlackLivesMatter movement suggested that finally, the country might hear them and come to see their plight. Those in mixed marriages instantly recognized the comments about Archie’s complexion because it was part of their experience too. They’ve watched the press coverage and recognize its racist roots; they haven’t been fooled by the volley of superficial denials. The comparisons with Kate Middleton are particularly revealing; same behavior, radically different interpretations. 

One royal watcher, Peter Westmacott, interviewed by Christiane Amanpour tried to dismiss the concerns over Archie as an expression of unconscious bias that meant no harm. He’s a little foggy on what racism is and how it manifests. Implicit bias is racism and it is never harmless. Intention has nothing to do with it, since implicit bias is unconscious. In contrast, explicit racial bias, like that of the British press is very conscious and all too intentional. In either case, the hurt is always real. In Archie’s case, it went beyond a naive remark. His mother determined his place within the royal family, not because of her person but the color of her skin. No princely title, no protection detail, not because of protocols, but because the queen had decided to change the protocols. 

Meghan’s presence was a boost with residents across the Commonwealth as well. She pointed out during the interview that if Archie had a light brown face, it would change how Commonwealth residents would view the monarchy. But that was not an advantage to the monarchy, uncomfortable about change, because their presence in the Commonwealth is the embodiment of their whiteness and tan skin would upset the balance of power. That distinction is precisely why Meg could never think like a royal. The interview has rekindled interest in some Commonwealth countries to follow the Duke and Duchess out of the realm. Caribbean Islanders and Africans are asking themselves why shouldn’t their titular head of state be one of their own, not a reminder of a colonial past laced with bad memories of forced subservience.

The tabloids are well versed in British racism. Many of those attitudes abound in their newsrooms, where Black faces are at best a rarity if present at all. They are masters at focusing, framing and reflecting English racism back on itself. Rupert Murdoch is a magician at shaping public opinion and recycling it. But he didn’t create the deep seated racism that has permeated Britain forever. Remember, these are the same people who thought the Irish were a different race, lower than the dirt they planted their potatoes in. And then there’s the whole Brexit thing, sold to the public through anti-European rhetoric prominently against Eastern Europeans. Brits have been reluctant to roll out the welcome mat to others, preferring instead to invade other countries rather than welcome their natives onto their own shores. Maybe it’s an island thing.

The British tabloids will never let up. If the couple is to make their way in the world, capitalizing on their fame and Meg’s connections in the entertainment industry, they will have to maintain a high public profile. Every time they stick their heads out, the tabloids will come hunting and they’ll be hostile, like sharks circling in the water. The couple can try to shape their narrative, and outside Harry’s home country, they may have some success. Americans have no love for the monarchy; they mostly just enjoy the big spectacles. At the same time, the couple will need to harness the American eye that first came to know them as part of royalty in order to make a living. They’ll have to compete with a crap load of other celebrities, from Instagram influencers to Oprah. 

I empathize with Meghan because of our common ancestry and the burden it brings with it. She was blindsided by vicious racist behaviors that she never imagined and further devastated by a monarchy that refused to have her back. She seemed genuinely rocked emotionally by that betrayal as was Harry, their disappointment repeated several times during the interview. And Harry who is a newcomer to the venomous bites of anti-Black racism is only discovering its many faces and flavors. All that in the midst of trying to reckon with the generational trauma of the paparazzi and tabloid “reporters” that killed his mother, not to mention the parallels with his mother’s treatment by his family members and the Firm. I feel an emotional connection to them as an interracial couple having travelled that path myself. Neither had the parental guidance as children that would help them cope with their life together on the huge world stage. They have the resources to survive economically which should buy them the psychological support they need. I have to root for them, the way a parent roots for a child. But they’ll be alright, whether I do or not.

From the Equal Justice Initiative calendar 2021

During the week of March 14, 2015, protestors march after University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity is taped singing a song that includes the n-word and “You can hang him from a tree, but he’ll never sign with me.”

A WINNING COMBINATION FOR THE GOP

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The 2020 elections were fair without evidence of significant fraud under the very trying circumstances of this coronavirus pandemic. There is no question that this is a true statement, despite the disinformation spread by the former president and his clique of authoritarians. There were the usual incidences of innocent procedural errors, because there is no large enterprise that does not involve human errors, but US security agencies unanimously agreed that the election was secure. However, the populist cult led by the last guy in the White House is trying to maintain the power of a significant number of elected officers across the country in order to return to the presidency. On the surface, that sounds like the GOP represents the majority of the country. In reality, several quirks in the electoral system– the two party system, winner-take-all elections, the creation of legislative districts by the legislatures themselves and the electoral college allow otherwise. Over decades, the Republican party has perfected the art of shaping the electorate to transform its minority party into the ruling party from governor’s mansions and state legislatures to city and town councils. Just looking at the Senate vote on impeachment, the 43 who voted to acquit represent only about 125 million while the 57 senators who voted to convict represent 202 million people. While the Senate is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats represent 42 million more people than the Republican half, about 13% of the population. Worse disproportionalities are present across Republican dominated state legislatures.

The party continued to be successful in 2020, with the exception of the presidency, where the electoral college comes in, and the Senate. They made gains in the House and retained control of state legislatures and many local offices. Overall, the Republican Party’s strategy of minority hegemony is still working quite well even though one big one, the Senate, slipped from their grasp. They generated the Big Lie to try to overturn the electoral results, supported a violent attempt to overthrow the government and have settled into the role of the seditionists within until the next round of elections in 2022.

While Georgia was a surprise addition to the Electoral College vote for Biden, it was the epicenter of the loss of the GOP Senate majority. The whimsy of 2 vacant Senate seats at the same time delivered a double whammy. The two Democrats ran as a team; the two Republicans ran as dyed in the wool cult members, appendages of the former president. The Democrats generated a supercharged voter turnout larger than that of the Republicans to narrowly nab both seats. 

Georgia Republicans may have been temporarily thrown off by the pandemic, unable to anticipate how it would affect the voting of the majority they had successfully suppressed in prior elections. But their belief in the superiority of whiteness blinded them to the skills and proficiency of Blackness. They didn’t believe that Stacy Abrams and the numerous organizations who mobilized the votes of people of color could out-mobilize their own forces of authoritarian darkness.

Now Georgia Republicans are engaged in a mea culpa to fix what they screwed up. The legislature where they enjoy a considerable majority, thanks to very effective gerrymandering and the manipulation of the mechanics of voting, is in the process of passing a coterie of bills to limit voting, down to the most minute details. For instance, it will be illegal to provide water or food to voters waiting in the long lines generated by their strategic under-resourcing of polling locations in minority voting districts. Fewer polling places, fewer machines in them, fewer personnel have been the hallmarks. But it is the restructuring of the electoral system that will have the largest impact.

Because absentee voting was the big culprit, the legislature moved to eliminate no excuse absentee voting. Henceforth, each person must present a reason to vote absentee like absence from their precinct, having a physical disability that would prevent them from going to the polls or age 75 years. That done, they moved on to further curtail that much smaller pool of absentees, forcing the majority of their perceived undesired voters into those hours long lines at the polls. One proposal would prohibit third-party and nonprofit groups from sending out applications for absentee ballots, a strike at national organizations that set up websites to facilitate absentee ballot requests in each state. Next up was the requirement of voter ID when requesting the absentee ballot and again when casting it, despite the fact that ID is required to register to vote. Other bills will shorten the time interval to request a ballot, when they can be sent out and the deadline for their receipt. Next up was making it harder to return an absentee ballot by banning ballot drop boxes, forcing ballots to be returned by mail or dropped at an election board office. Another version would limit drop boxes to inside early voting sites where ballots could only be accepted during hours the voting was occurring.

Having tied absentee voting in knots, the legislature has moved against early voting as well. As part of an omnibus bill in the House, the early voting period would be restricted to 9-5, Monday to Friday for three weeks before the election with an additional 9-5 session on the second Saturday before the election. County boards would be able to extend hours to 7 pm, but could add no other days. This was a strategic strike at Sunday voting, a popular day for church organized events to get people to the polls. In a last minute retraction, one allowable early Sunday voting day was reinserted after an uproar from constituents, including their Republican base. 

To limit the number of potential voters, bills have been advanced to eliminate automatic voter registration through the Department of Driver Services which registers or updates registrations each time a person interacts with the department. Not only did this add a huge number of potential voters to the rolls, every new licensee and renewer in the state, it also made it easier to update voter registrations with change of address. 

In an effort to curtail election board funding, county elections offices would be banned from accepting grants from outside organizations. And just to make the process less transparent, the Senate has approved a ban on the public release of any election results until the total number of ballots is reported. They have allowed scanning of the much smaller number of absentee ballots to begin 8 days before election day and will require updating records of who voted within 30 days after election. 

Republicans have doubled down again on the falsehood that voter fraud is a major problem, last expanded during the 2016 campaign by the ultimate winner who suggested that his loss would have been an indication of fraud. Even with the win, the president pushed back against the reality of his popular vote loss by declaring that the margin was full of illegitimate votes by the usual culprits, illegal immigrants, dead people and pets. He dusted off his fantasy again in the run-up to what he probably anticipated would be a 2020 loss, the first plank in his crusade to retain the presidency no matter what the voters wanted. His action was the bridge-too-far personal extension of the GOP’s long standing strategy to engineer electoral victories for a minority party. But El Trumpe’s concern was only for himself, the rest of the party be damned. So now that the party has sunk into worship of a golden idol, the party must hitch its wagon to his entrails or they fear they will suffer the wrath of the gods. (As if the pandemic is not enough; but then again, they don’t acknowledge its reality either.) All that work to control state and local offices washed away.

Unfortunately after decades of propaganda and the emergent dominance of the GOP in elected office, the idea of rampant voter fraud is firmly planted in the national ether. The GOP has built a ferris wheel to continue to ratchet up voter suppression of minorities and the young, the voters who tend to find the party’s racialized themes, both overt and dog-whistled, non-starters for their votes. It’s not that the Democratic alternatives are better in terms of attention to the needs of these groups. It’s just that there is no alternative beyond simply staying home. But the more voters the GOP pushes out of the electorate, the stronger their hold on it will be.

The GOP’s idea of fraud is underpinned by their insistence that the only valid votes are the ones for them; any candidate outside their fold is illegitimate and should not be allowed to rule. Through Qanon, Democrats have literally become the devil incarnate. In this scenario, their attempts to insure their own victory is their patriotic duty; they are saving the country they love. In a battle against the Devil, no weapon is off the table, including the Devil’s own tools: lying, cheating, stealing, character assassination, etc. These tools have replaced policies except for one: dismantle the government so it can’t interfere. The accents of the Confederacy loom large; the Confederates fought to save from extinction what they considered civilization itself, based in the enslavement of fellow human beings reimagined as beasts of burden. But they replicated the same institutions of government as the nation they fought to leave behind. Now, the sole purpose of the effort is to elevate a single individual whose interest lies more with self-aggrandizement than the fate of the nation and its citizens.

Voting in Georgia will never be the same under this regime. Of course, the better angels will challenge these new laws in court, but the process will be slow. The state courts will favor the laws because legislatures have a right to set their electoral policies. The federal courts have not been supportive of voter rights; apparently the idea of one (hu)man, one vote is no longer in fashion. The trail to the Supreme Court is long and slow. If a case were to reach it, its decisions are unlikely to favor wider access to the voting booth. For one, the majority of justices are card carrying members of the party that created the voter fraud lie. In addition, that majority were hand picked by the Koch funded Federalist Society to cite originalism as the source of their rulings when it happens to be convenient. Of course originalism itself is a sham. It is an exercise in divining the thoughts of the Founding Fathers to interpret current events, truly an absurdity. 

There is no way that a 21st century mind can envision the perspective of a 19th century thinker. Poised as it was at the beginning of science and discovery, there were so many things they didn’t know. Those lessons can’t be extracted from the 21st century mind except by a process of extreme denial, a critical component of mental processing. Republicans have elevated denial to a high art. For the justices today, there are broad advances in discovery that can’t be expunged from our world because they are the facts of its physicality, even as flat earthers wish that they were not. 

Even the thought of straight jacketing the Constitution of a nation that occupied only the eastern coast of a vast continent is antithetical to the Framers’ purpose. They left parts of the document purposely vague and room for amendments to accommodate growth and change in the nation they hoped would prosper. Imagine their response to Justice Clarence Thomas, three-fifths of a person, channeling their ultra white thoughts. They could never have anticipated the United States, 50 states strong, would become the leader of the free world burdened with a decades long cold war against Communism, a philosophy that was not even a glimmer in their eyes. Originalism is a betrayal of what the Founders held dear. 

But Republican appointed justices seem determined to turn back the clock to the days of Reconstruction when the Court invalidated the very amendments, 13th, 14th and 15th meant to achieve the promise of the Constitution: a true democratic republic.  Part of the reason the justices were elevated to the Court is to saunter back into the days of yore. 

Georgia is leading the charge to curtail voter access to the polls, a wave that includes states where the former president won handily.  These developments only highlight the battle ahead. We are still only inches away from the brink of authoritarian rule and clawing back from that dangerously tottering edge will take decades. While the media has focused on the drama inside Washington, the real work is at the state and local level where the idea of one party hegemony has burrowed deeply into government itself. 

This is a crisis that the nation has never known before. While the Civil War was a battle to keep the Republic in one piece, January 6, 2021 was the shot across the bow in the battle to keep the Republic democratic. Americans who want a republic committed to freedom, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the rule of law for every person in the country stand opposed to the Americans who want the dictatorial imposition of whiteness to decide who can be a citizen, who can participate in governance, who can rule the labor force, who decides who will own land and businesses. There can be no middle ground.

On February 26, 2012, 17 year old Trayvon Martin, a Black boy, was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a self appointed vigilante whose defense was the Florida Stand Your Ground Law, ironic since Zimmerman did not stand on any ground. He pursued Trayvon through the streets believing the boy did not belong in his space, a white space. Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder.

THE ELEGANCE OF THE IMPEACHMENT MANAGERS

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An elegant case for the conviction of Donald J Trump was laid out before the nation by House impeachment managers. It was at times poignant and painful as they covered the insurrection against Congress whose members only barely escaped execution. They detailed the call to assassinate the Vice President of the United States. There is no protected free speech that can call for and attempt the assassination of a Vice President. The brutal assault on the Capital and DC police was laid bare. The preparation by the traitorous mob was laid out almost exhaustively. There was testimony from multiple participants that they felt called by “their president” to “stop the steal” which was itself a lie. And then finally the complete inaction of the then president to defend the Capitol against assault, in violation of his oath to protect the nation. It‘s an airtight case. 

The problem is that over half the Republicans in the jury are co-conspirators in the insurrection. They disseminated The Big Lie. Some continue to hold on to it now, particularly in their home districts. They retweeted the calls to fight. Some amplified the calls for violence. The managers’ points apply equally to these Republican Senators as they do to the Proud Boys and others who stormed the Capitol Building. To convict the former president is to convict themselves. To admit the treason is to call themselves treasonous. But to admit their part is too abhorrent for them to do.

To admit their part is not politically expedient as they see it. For these Republicans are all politicians who want to run for another office in a year or three or five. They have to guard their far right flank. The more aggressive individuals are plowing even further right into the company of their allied radicalized militia. They already sold their souls a long time ago.

The defense has provided a couple of faux off ramps. As the House managers have already previewed, the Senate has already voted to establish that it can hold an impeachment trial after a president is out of office. It is the only body authorized by the Constitution to make the rules about impeachment and it has spoken. It should be mentioned that the former president was impeached before he left office and the trial was only shifted to a later date because of manipulations by Senate leadership itself.

There is the free speech argument that is completely baseless, as the defense will try to hone in on isolated words in the speech on the 6th, not the full breath of Trump’s advocacy of violence, dating back even to the Central Park Five. But Senate Republicans have long landed on words that are nonsensical in context hoping they sound appropriate. They know it works in their Fox News media bubble because their audience is not composed of the most discerning thinkers who grapple with nuance. These Republicans just have to say something often enough, exposing the disdain they carry for their “gullible” supporters. In actuality, these people are not their supporters; they belong only to Agent Orange but they tolerate the tail of politicians who cling to him.

Is there a crevice where one or two Republicans will finally have the courage to jump ship and declare enough is enough? Could it be in the mob’s violence toward the police or the call that nearly assassinated VP Pence, the man most loyal to the president thrown under the bus with escalating tweets from Trump as the melee proceeded? Could it be visualizing their own near misses? Or perhaps the revelation of intention exhibited in 45’s glee while watching the violence and his inaction in violation of his oath of office? Could it be a new found investment in a co-equal branch of government? Or perhaps their realization that they themselves have participated in an intentional treasonous cabal? Maybe, that they enabled 45 by failing to convict him the first time impeachment came around? Possibly but far from likely. Their consciences were scrubbed out a long time ago. The Republican party has so debased itself that there is no path out of hell.

The impeachment trial presents in stark contrast the two visions of America battling it out for ascendancy. One, bequeathed from the Founding Fathers, of the superiority of whiteness. The insurrectionists carried their symbols, the Confederate flag, the swastika and Trump flags. The Confederate flag is a remnant from the war that was supposed to actualize the other vision, a land where all inhabitants are created equal. That it still flies is testimony to a defeat turned into victory when the country tired of the effort to fulfill its promise, establishing Jim Crow and segregation and castigation of Blackness from coast to coast. 

The BLM demonstrations of the summer suggested that once again, the many were trying to birth the vision of equality. But it triggered the historic response disseminated directly out of the White House through MAGA rallies encapsulated in the re-raised Confederate flag. January 6th poses the question: how many Americans will choose the dominant white caste over democracy? 

The GOP has answered loudly and clearly, officially stamped by the upcoming acquittal of Donald J Trump for inciting sedition. But maybe the Americans who want to fight for the other vision of America are listening and they will remember when those Republicans run for office in a year or three or five. Or, maybe not.

On February 12,1901 Delaware ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing enslavement after initially rejecting it in 1865.

COVID RESPONSE 2.0 RESET: TESTING

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Until recently, there has been national silence on an essential tool to fight a viral infection that is spread primarily through asymptomatic transmission. The Biden administration has announced 2 initiatives to increase the supply of rapid primarily self administered tests. The core of the problem is identification of people not simply infected but simultaneously capable of infecting others. These are not the same thing; people are infectious early in the course of the disease, then lose the ability to transmit the virus later in the course. The infectious interval is almost surprisingly short.

Once coronavirus invades a victim, the virus must replicate in sufficient numbers to be emitted into the atmosphere for others to inhale. The replication rate is fairly rapid, so a person can become infectious quickly, 2- 3 days before they develop symptoms if they are destined to do so. The mechanism that determines who becomes ill and the many more who don’t is not yet well understood. Viral load, or the number of organisms capable of infecting others, will decline over time, but the virus will remain detectable by PCR tests for a tail perhaps as long as a month. 

The exquisite sensitivity of the PCR test, as well as the technical difficulty in performing it, makes it ill suited for the task of rapidly identifying people capable of transmitting infection. The test’s expense and requirements for specialized equipment, reagents and proficiency limit it to specialized settings, the largest of which are the commercial labs of which there are primarily two, Quest and Labcorps. Overwhelmed by the constant demand, which must be met in the context of all the other medical tests they perform routinely, huge backlogs and delays are the anticipated results. Such delays make testing meaningless; if the virus is transmitted in the first 72 hours and spent after a week, a 3-5 day turnaround time has missed the infectious period. Add to that the limited availability of testing; by the time a nasal swab is tested, the victim has spent their days in general circulation in the community spreading infection, diminishing the impact of isolation after testing. By the time a positive result notification is delivered, the patient is no longer contagious.

Other aspects of the spread of coronavirus infection remain mysterious. While most people infect only one or two others, a few infect dozens to hundreds, i.e. superspreaders. The former president was probably not a superspreader, but someone on the White House staff may have been. Still not clear is whether superspreader events are the result of the circumstances or the presence of specific individuals within the crowd. Some of the effect may be attributed to the patterns of interactions in these days when many people remain wary of interactions with others and restrict interactions to a limited number of people. But there must be other factors at play that have not yet been uncovered. 

Throughout the year since COVID-19 was first detected, the lack of a testing strategy has facilitated its explosive spread across the US. It was wrong from the moment the CDC decided to develop its own test. The agency’s idea was to manage the bulk of the testing, a wrong headed vision that failed to see the enormity of the numbers that would be involved and how logistically expansive the need would be. Nothing seems to have changed much; even the Biden administration seemed to have conceded that adequate population testing is beyond the country’s capacity or at least a proposal seemed to be missing from the flurry of Biden initiatives. And yet, the lack of extensive testing coupled with the absence of a national database that includes all of the testing done hampers our understanding of who has actually been infected. The estimated 30% of the population is almost certainly a gross underestimate. The country is flying blind as the testing desert expands.

Big corporate entities have demonstrated that infection can be contained with frequent testing surveillance, among them the W/NBA, MLB, the entertainment industry as it resumes films and TV production and professional tennis. Their arrangements have allowed athletes to have prolonged intimate contact mixing body fluids, without wearing masks even with loud vocal exclamations known to intensify viral aerosolization. In contrast, choir practices have become superspreader events. These entities have used a combination of isolation bubbles, testing and quarantine. Colleges have also been relatively successful at holding a lid on infections if not completely stopping them; college football and basketball have been less successful, probably because of schools’ insistence on live audiences, but have soldiered on, to the possible detriment of student athletes.

Conversely, food processors, large retailers like Amazon and Walmart, grocers like Krogers have opted out of protecting their workforce, in turn putting the general public at risk. They too could institute widespread workforce testing but the testing would obligate them to provide sick leave pay to insure that workers testing positive could stay isolated. That is not an investment they have any interest in making, deferring to the federal government to provide the benefits they refuse to while they pay negligible amounts into the tax kitty to support them. Their capital has doubly released them from any contribution to the public good, no matter how many ads they put out about their charitable community activity. 

Add to that, even semi government entities like the postal service have not instituted routine testing at least for the parts of its workforce that routinely interact with the public.

Clearly the manufacture of rapid testing and equally important home testing has been retarded by the failure of the FDA to authorize these types of tests. Only one home test has been approved for the market and it’s cost over $100 makes it prohibitive for many. The principal barrier is the use of PCR as the gold standard for sensitivity and specificity, the very thing that makes PCR inappropriate to zero in on the individuals who are capable of transmitting the virus. What rapid testing sacrifices in accuracy is compensated for by frequency; essentially, the more often it’s performed, the more accurate the assessment of viral load. More frequent testing also provides a better indication of when infection occurred and if it is accompanied by contact tracing, it can narrow the scope of investigations. Until the FDA modifies its approach, inexpensive, widely available, rapid home coronavirus testing will not be in our future. Home testing which requires the compliance of a positive tester to quarantine can only be effective if some entity, probably the government as the system is currently structured, provides the resources for working people to stay out of the workplace until no longer infectious.

The need for extensive population testing has been accentuated by the rise of new viral variants as dominant strains has exposed the inadequacy of viral genomic testing. With new cases still rampant, the virus has open ended opportunities to amplify the genetic variants that are a routine part of its replication into better adapted forms to allow the virus to thrive. To our detriment, it is survival of the fittest at its best. The UK has been doing random population testing for some time and the availability of those samples have made it possible for health authorities to better understand the path of its namesake strain to prominence in the population. The amount of genomic analysis being done in the US is paltry and facilities would likely be overwhelmed by any increase in routine population testing samples. It goes without saying that to be able to get a handle on variants will likely require significant investment in viral genomic technology which will almost certainly have to come from government funding as well. The knowledge gained may not actually lead to any different course of action, but it can perhaps tweak or better target particular strategies.

While the public health basics are still our best defense, the advantage of the new vaccine technology is that it can be modified to respond to viral variants in a relatively short time. But as we have seen, the jump to mass production and mass immunization is dependent on collaboration with many other social, business, logistic, commercial and governmental entities. We are in the midst of a demonstration of how screwed up that can be.

Intensive testing could provide a way back to normal long before the infamous herd immunity is achieved. Public schools could reopen safely, with the confidence of teachers, students and parents, if only rapid testing were available to reassure them. Home testing would allow parents to isolate their families before ever getting to school. If only school systems had access to the funding and the political will existed across all communities. Instead Republican run governments are so invested in maintaining pandemic denial that they want schools to simply reopen, community spread high or low. If only a semi-rational approach that responded to community needs dominated politics. We’d probably have to wander back to perhaps the 1950s to find that nonpartisan philosophical approach to governance. Ah the good ole days!

And then there is that other nut, the fantasists who live in La-La-Land, where coronavirus is a hoax dreamed up to attack their fearless leader. No doubt, testing will be construed as a government conspiracy that tramples on the freedom to remain stupid or provides government surveillance data even as their cell phone data tracks everywhere they go and who they interact with and their web search history. Seems they feel safer that ginormous commercial entities like  Apple and Google and Amazon have their data and sell it to almost any Tom, Dick and Harry with the bucks. Go figure.

Imagine Super Bowl Sunday with rapid home testing among those patriots who believe in a country for everyone not one where only white men rule. Recalling that no test is 100%, people could have gathered, almost certain that they could not transmit COVID19 to their friends as they nosh on nachos and chicken wings, high fiving their victories or drowning their sorrows in beer. There would be no subsequent spike in coronavirus cases and deaths over the next month, running neck and neck with the pace of vaccinations and new variants. What a different world for those of us who live in the real one.

For American History Month, James McCune Smith M.D became the first university trained African American physician to practice in the US. After being rejected from American medical schools, he graduated from University of Glasgow in 1837. He was the only practicing university trained Black doctor in the country for over a decade. He served as physician for the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. He was the first Black author of a scientific paper and to publish in a medical journal. Smith pioneered statistical techniques and research methods including the use of a control group for statistical comparison, now the standard for evidence based research. With his research done in the antebellum period, he was the first to propose  “race” was a social rather than biological category that served only to support enslavement. His arguments foreshadowed by over 150 years current ideas about race as a social construct that creates the circumstances for disparities in health status grounded in socioeconomic circumstances resulting from systemic racial bias.

COVID RESPONSE 2.0 RESET: VACCINE HESITANCY

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To insure the success of Biden’s campaign to vaccinate America against COVID19, comprehensive public health messaging to combat vaccine hesitancy has drawn extensive media attention. It’s difficult to find a news piece across all platforms that doesn’t feature a story about which people are opting out. The first mention will be African Americans, as if we are the principal concern. While the intention is good, the media has stumbled into a common trap that reflects their racial biases.

Once the story hones in on the Black community, they quickly cite historically well grounded suspicions of the medical establishment, always beginning with the Tuskegee experiment. The media believe they are doing an educational service here, by familiarizing their audience with the infamous 30 year study of “the natural evolution of syphilis” among poor Black farmers in Alabama. Unfortunately, there is little more than a mention before they move on with their narrative. 

To fill in that gap, first and foremost, the study was not associated with Tuskegee College; the town was the site of an experiment by the U.S. Public Health Service, now the CDC. This is no oversight but a product of the narrative spearheaded by the public health and medical establishment. While this may sound conspiratorial, it is clearly not in the interest of the CDC to remind people continually that it was that organization, not an HBCU that designed and executed an unethical study that continued from 1932 to 1972.  It subtly implies that descendants of the enslaved were experimenting on themselves, yet another example of blaming the victims for crimes against them. The objective was to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis, a disease known since at least the 10th century and fairly well documented by the 1930s. The stated intention was to demonstrate the need for establishing syphilis treatment programs. 

The infamous Tuskegee Experiment was run by the U.S. Public Health Service, now the CDC, not run by the college. Calling it by its location allows us to forget that it was a government study conducted by the very agency, the CDC, charged with protecting the health of the whole public, inclusive of African Americans.

The 399 poor men were enrolled through the offer of free health care from the government which included for some men not only free medical care but also meals and burial insurance. What they were not told was that they had been diagnosed with syphilis. Once penicillin was introduced, study participants were denied the treatment that had become the standard of care in the 1950s, as was generally done in medical practice across the country but most especially in the South. In that sense, it was not a deviation for medicine as practiced, simply an extension. These men went on to die from their disease. Even after treatment was given to the survivors in 1973, they continued to die because the damage to the heart, brain and nervous system had already been done by the previous decades of the disease. Those could not be reversed by treatment.

But the US Public Health Syphilis study in Tuskegee AL is only the most well known egregious example of the history between dark skinned people and the medical establishment. The very foundations of modern science were constructed to argue the inferiority of Africans and their descendants. Modern science in the 1830s began as classification of the species, including human, as in white and a possible different species, more ape-like and black. Many of these early pseudoscientists were enslavers determined to build the now “scientific” as well as religious argument for white people as masters saving dark people from their own savagery and ignorance. The enslaved were often used as subjects in this pseudoscientific discovery.

As medical science evolved, the enslaved continued to be experimented on. Dr Marion Sims, a gynecologist memorialized with a statue in Central Park, developed the vaginal speculum, an instrument he used to invent a surgical technique to repair recto-vaginal fistulas. He bought 5 enslaved women in whom he cut fistulas, a channel between the rectum and the vagina that naturally occurred during childbirth, and then repaired them. The anesthesia he reserved for white women after he perfected his surgical technique wasn’t even imagined for the women in bondage he considered to be animals. His first subject nearly died during the 5 months it took her to recover which did not deter Dr Sims from further operations on her like he might do on a cow.

   Much of the details of human anatomy were learned on Black bodies, either in bondage or routinely stolen from graves in cities with the early medical schools like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins is also well known for the Henrietta Lacks story, only one example of the routine practice of using overwhelmingly Black clinic patients, because no private physicians would take care of them, for whatever they chose without informing their patients. Physicians were gods back then! 

While most African Americans may not know the details of this history, there remains a community memory of mistreatment kept alive by its current interactions with the healthcare system. This is the element that the news media fails to capture. African Americans are suspicious of the healthcare system because what they feel is general dismissiveness and often degradation. We feel it when we are sent home with COVID19 symptoms when white patients with the same complaints are admitted. We feel it when we are sent home without the pulse oximeter monitoring that can identify a sudden drop in oxygenation that requires hospitalization and treatment to avoid death. Women sense it when their Ob provider sees the Jezebel stereotype which assumes they are promiscuous when they are long married monogamous professional women. Professional Black women dress up and wear monikers of their work organizations to their medical appointments so they won’t be considered ignorant by their provider who goes on to tell them to live with their uterine fibroids rather than offer the surgical options they extend to white women. Even wealthy celebrities like Serena Williams with a super wealthy white husband to boot, couldn’t get nurses and physicians to act on her complaints about a pulmonary embolus, almost becoming another Black maternal mortality statistic. And she had had an embolus before! If she couldn’t get attention, imagine what the everyday clinic patient experiences.

So while the media has attributed higher coronavirus mortality rates for people of color to their medical risk factors and socioeconomic conditions, they have missed perhaps the biggest piece of the puzzle, the implicit racial biases within medical practice itself. Even the medical establishment has acknowledged that, almost 20 years ago in the Institute of Medicine report in 2003, Unequal Treatment. They noted it, published it as a book and then moved on. Even today, in the wake of the BlackLivesMatter movement, the medical establishment reiterated its concern but has not moved beyond simple lip service to actively restructure the implicit racial biases in the minds of medical providers and reinvent medical institutions to become actively anti-racist. In fact, many physicians are radical conservatives, witness Rand Paul, an opthamologist and member of the Trumpology cult. Sadly, Ben Carson and Justice Thomas are no exceptions as they are self loathing dark skinned versions of those who pay homage to the superiority of whiteness. Medical and legal education does not teach common sense. Neither, more importantly, do they undercut racial bias; they do just the opposite by enhancing it as witnessed through my own long career in medical education.

So if our routine encounters with the healthcare system convey a message of hostility toward our dark skin, is there any wonder that we would suspect a vaccine brought to fruition by a white supremacist president? If we are consistently ignored by the research establishment, even in the vaccine studies where AstraZeneca reported on a handful of Black enrollees in their initial publication, how do we know that the vaccines are even safe? Operation Warpspeed, the former president’s instrument of distribution, has confirmed what the pandemic itself confirmed, a lack of care for people of color. Thus statistics demonstrate that African Americans have been disproportionately excluded from vaccine distribution, not because we’re hesitant, but because we haven’t been given access. People from other countries have gotten vaccinated in Florida; black market vaccine is on sale on the web; and yet hundreds of Black seniors were turned away from a white student run distribution center in Philadelphia because of botched appointments. These were people in their 80s and 90s who had waited for hours. These sound like isolated incidents, but they are not. They reflect that old adage, when America gets a cold, Black people get pneumonia. If a system is going to be chaotic, it will never advantage us. The story of America is white versus black.

Facilities for the elderly are reported to have a high rate of staff immunization refusal, in some places as high as 80%. Because these are generally low wage workers, many of whom are darker skinned recent immigrants, some of the general suspicions of people of color may apply. But other factors likely do as well. These are primarily women who are overworked and disabused by facilities where profit is more important than the care. While these jobs have a high turnover rate, the staff retain the memory of being betrayed by management who left them unprotected with PPE while coronavirus raced through their workplace. There is no real reason to trust them now about a vaccine when there is a lot of online misinformation and community rumor about unassociated side effects. Side effects could lead to lost work days and therefore pay because they have no sick leave.

For their part, nursing facilities seem to be at a loss for ways to reduce staff hesitancy, beyond building trust with people that staff members already know. One facility offered an entry in a sweepstakes to win a gift card. Seriously! An obvious oversight is money. Give people a bonus to get the shot. A $25 Walmart gift card for each dose is the least they could do; it’s worth much more, at least $100 a shot. 

Keeping that in mind, African Americans make up only 13% of the population. The big vaccine resistant nut lies with those who still live in La-La-Land, the anti-vaxxers led by whatever Kennedy it is, the anti-government crowd, believers of the Big Lie and of course believers in Q. And they are 99.9% white. Estimates number them to be at least 30% of US residents, a daunting task indeed. All of these people have lost their grip on reality and no PSA or respected role model can restore that. The ethos of the Trumpology cult sees acknowledgement of the virus as an insult to their fearless leader and any response to the pandemic as a plot to attack the beleaguered former president. They are the rule breakers; no mask, no social distancing, continued travel, restaurant and bar patronage, large gatherings dripping with automatic weapons and lots of shouting. If one’s own death or that of a loved one can’t bring them into the realm of reality, they seem doomed to circulate the virus among themselves until they achieve immunity or die trying. 

If only they would go ahead and secede and we could seal the border behind them. Unfortunately, they live among us, a reservoir spitting out new viral droplets to catch us unawares, rejuvenated with RNA variants that increase their transmission rate or the severity of disease or resistance to the vaccines. Thus these people have taken on the second dimension of the enemy within. Not only do they stand on the verge of toppling our republic, from its very halls of governance, they can also become the nidus of infection that will take down the globe.

So who has a plan to pull the blinders from the eyes of the largest group of vaccine resisters? Will it require freeing their minds or can a more limited approach succeed? I don’t have any idea but let’s hope someone does. A solid 50% of them might put us in the realm of vaccine induced herd immunity, 75%, provided the vaccines continue to be effective against the dominant viral variants. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

On the eve of American (Black) History Month, we recognize Christian Fleetwood who won the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the United States. In April of 1865, Christian received his medal in the first group of 26 African American soldiers decorated for bravery in the Civil War for action in the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm outside Richmond. Rescuing the American flag after it was almost dropped by a wounded color bearer, Fleetwood rallied Union troops in retreat, inspiring the men to continue to fight on. Even though every officer in the regiment petitioned the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to promote him to a commissioned officer for his leadership, Stanton refused. He resisted the requests of those all white officers and stuck firmly to the rule that Sergeant Major was the highest enlisted rank permissible for a Black soldier.

COVID RESPONSE 2.0 RESET: FIRST MASKING

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COVID RESPONSE 2.0 RESET: MASKING

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Let’s face it, what we have been doing hasn’t worked. SARS-COV-2 is kicking our butts. According to Donald McNeil Jr, about 30% of the population has been infected with the virus, a startling number when you consider the disruption we’ve experienced that was supposed to diminish viral spread. Even though we know what to do, we don’t seem to be able to do it. Other countries like Australia have done what we have not and it has no new cases as of 1.27. That’s 0, zero new cases. 

The vaccine has become the messiah; it will save us if only we can do that right. No such luck. The last administration did help expedite the development process by providing funding and guaranteed purchases, two things that have retarded vaccine development for other diseases. But the new vaccine technology sits on at least 10 years of research done by dedicated scientists. In his usual braggadocio, the former president has taken far too much credit for work that would have made our money, not his, superfluous if not for the scientists past efforts. Still a policy decision that directed our tax dollars to the project sped up the process to get the country to this point. 

But that decision was not enough. The missing details have left us here, pretty much chaos on the vaccine front, and that’s only trying to give it to old people. Or is it? We can’t seem to agree on who should be prioritized, or even if there should be priorities at all. Each state seems to be going its own way. So what else is new? Everybody wants a shot and people are happy to cheat to get one, or actually two. Florida had to make a move to shut down vaccine tourism from surrounding states and other countries. But even as demand is high, some doses have still not been administered. In fact, it’s not even clear where some vials are. The Biden task force admitted that vials have been lost in transition. In the midst of all the hype about electronic tags that allowed shippers to know exactly where each box was located and the temperature inside it, tracking apparently ended at the delivery door. 

Even so, the public perception that we will be saved by the vaccine is misguided. In just the near term, at the topsy-turvy outset of American vaccination efforts, there are no plans about access for the general public yet. Estimates are that at the current pace, 80% of the population will not become immune until the fall. The necessary doses have not been ordered yet, in part because there are still several vaccines not yet FDA approved. Many of those manufacturers also have contracts for pre-ordered doses and have already started mass production in anticipation of FDA emergency authorization. How those vaccines will be integrated into the current immunization strategy is unclear. 

Also, it should not be forgotten that developed countries pledged not to hog the vaccines and committed to stamping out the virus around the globe. Canada stands out as one country that has ordered doses for 3 times its population. As yet, the Biden administration has made no comment on this element, limiting it’s message to it’s war to vaccinate America. Remembering that it is only a week into the new administration, global immunization is still an important consideration. Any plan that aims to push vaccination of the underdeveloped world into the future threatens the ability of the developed world to control viral spread as well as resume global commerce. 

Still, there is hope, as concrete plans are being revised for mass vaccinations. At some point Congress should allocate money to actualize them. Currently, the Biden administration is scrambling to redirect funds from the General Services Administration. The anticipated addition of other FDA approved vaccines can be anticipated to speed up the pace, if they can be mass produced and distributed in a quick start manner. However, glitches have to be anticipated in vaccine production and vaccination supplies because, shit happens. 

As science is making a comeback at least to the national government if not in the general public, we should understand what the science says about the effectiveness of the various vaccines. The vaccine protects against severe disease and death, not unlike the flu vaccine. The element that is unknown is whether it lowers the chance of acquiring infection and transmitting disease. Those things may be true but the data is not yet available because those were not the endpoints of the studies that have been analyzed so far. In part, the exposure rate in the study populations has varied in the tested vaccines and the infection rate in the control populations has been too small to generate good statistical analysis. Those answers may be coming; they’re just not available yet. Consequently, the recommendations for the immunization strategy were aimed at populations at highest risk for severe disease and death, not at the general population to prevent transmission. The bottom line is that the period when coronavirus spread will be lowered to annoyance level is not close at hand. It may fall to a point when it is not overwhelming the health care system and disrupting normal life before then, but coronavirus will remain a menacing threat to re-erupt until the former endpoint is reached.

In the meantime, the same public health maneuvers must be conscientiously applied across the board for the first time since coronavirus was first detected on our shores. The very things the country hasn’t been able to do. Hand washing, facial masking, maintaining physical distancing and one that has received less attention, adequate ventilation of indoor spaces. These are even more important as more contagious new variants become more dominant in the population.

Obviously, face masks are essential but proper use, which has not been emphasized enough, is make or break. If it doesn’t cover the nose, it might as well be in a pocket. The physiology is simple. A respiratory virus comes out of the nostrils as well as the mouth. An uncovered nose in someone infected, symptomatic or asymptomatic, is blowing out viral particles to infect others. Conversely, breathing in air loaded with viral droplets imports particles to the nasal mucosa where the virus can attach and reproduce. The nasopharynx is a connected chamber that joins the mouth, and the trachea, the highway to the lungs, where, because there is an extensive web of small capillaries, the virus can be pumped into the bloodstream to travel to all distal parts of the body.

Even as face masks are essential for the general population, they have been left to home seamstresses, fashion retailers and Etsy artists. Early on it was a question of supply; amazingly it still may be. There has been no wholesale attempt to provide adequate protection with high quality masks for the general public, as large a defect in the former president’s approach as his propaganda campaign against the face mask itself. Whether that would strain the current medical mask pipeline is not yet clear.

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But again, the science is clear. Surgical and N95 masks are an established defense against spread of infection, with N95s being 90% effective when worn properly. They are uncomfortable and not suitable for all day wear. After all, they are meant to be discarded after leaving each patient. This is in part why headgear that replaces goggles, mask and a face shield with one device while keeping the mouth visible is increasingly being used in ICUs. Ultimately, they are less expensive because they are designed for multiple use. In comparison, surgical masks are less effective because they have gaps at the sides and don’t have N95 filtration. They lower infection risk by 60%.

govtech.com

Unfortunately in the scramble to profit off the acute need for medical masks, counterfeits became a big problem without any regulation or enforcement to weed them out. Many an institution and municipality got caught up in the frauds, but they at least have the capacity to verify if an N or K95 mask is authentic. The public has no such capacity, so direct internet marketing and large retailers have sold millions of ineffective N/K95 masks to unsuspecting customers. They may work as well as cloth or surgical masks, but there is no way to know that for sure without evaluating each individual manufacturer. The Biden team should push the FDA or CDC or some agency to issue specifications or labelling requirements that consumers can use to verify the authenticity of N/K95 masks along with instructions for proper fit.

Cloth masks are another entity altogether. Studies done during the pandemic suggest that they can lower risk of infection by as much as 30% depending on construction. The most recent data suggests that they may also lower transmission rates.  The more layers of tightly woven cloth the better; the addition of filters, as mundane as a napkin or coffee filter, increases efficacy. It’s just a question of providing more overlapping fibers where the virus can settle. In that vein, two masks is probably better than one, as Dr Fauci has recently suggested.

But the explosion in the variety of masks, as one short scroll through Instagram can attest, has created a clusterfuck of choices. New brands have new materials that claim anti-viral properties or more effective filtration without any properly conducted scientific evaluation. Since this is commerce, there is no agency tasked with assessing advertising claims; the only recourse is the cumbersome legal process that accompanies an adverse outcome. That is a Sisyphean task. And because there has been no guidance from medical authorities, the public has no standards by which to judge which masks perform well and which do not or if there is any difference at all. So the face mask has evolved as a fashion statement, a purveyor of commercial logos, comedic or political commentary but not a protection against coronavirus spread. 

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Cloth masks should also have an adjustable nose clip to keep it more firmly on the nose. We’ve all had a mask fall away from our noses as we talk. It also helps to keep eyeglasses from fogging. In addition, many people wear their ear straps too loosely, which also allows the masks to fall down. A flexible metal nose strip can be added to masks that people have already bought, some are adhesive or a hot glue gun works so masks can be washed. Masks can be sanitized by heating in an oven for 30 minutes at 167o F but the CDC states that laundering in a washing machine and drying on high heat can also sanitize them.  

The face and neck sleeve is another unstudied piece of clothing. It seems logical that if it covers the mouth and nose with double fabric layers it must be as effective as other face masks. But scientific conclusions are not always logical. One question to consider is if pulling up the sleeve traps any theoretical virus inhaled in a vortex between the mouth and nose that recycles viral droplets. Is that even a reasonable question or just imagination? There’s no way to answer any of it without study. The CDC should develop and widely disseminate detailed guidance about the types of material and structure for effective mask use.

The emergence of more transmissible coronavirus variants makes effective facial coverings even more imperative. There will be more variants coming in the natural order of any RNA virus, some more, some less contagious or deadly. In summary, guidelines for proper nonmedical mask materials, construction, fit and use issued by a federal agency should be part of Biden’s 100 days masks campaign. A great slogan could be “If the mask isn’t covering your nose, it’s not worth wearing.” But the Biden administration should also be moving to shift the general public to more effective surgical masks. Science evolves and we should let it point the way. It would be great if that idea from the previous administration to mail every person 5 surgical masks was implemented as well, given that we still have months and months to go. The FDA should also move to authenticate N/K95 masks and remove fakes from the market and internet. A tall order for sure, but the effort should be made. This is exactly why we need big government.

From the Equal Justice Initiative calendar 2021

On January 27, 1967, a sheriff shot and killed a Black man in Birmingham Alabama during an arrest for not taking his dog to a vet.