Month: February 2019

Black (American)History Month: David Walker

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David Walker was born in Wilmington NC in 1796, the son of a free woman and an enslaved man who died before he was born, This meant that David was free since slave status was conferred by the status of the mother not the father. While he lived with his mother, he became increasingly incensed by the bondage of the men and women he lived among and the cruelty and insults that they had to endure from enslavers. He would throughout his life speak out against chattel slavery.

As a youth, he moved to Charleston SC to join the thriving community of free Blacks there. He joined the AME Church, a church founded by an African American which had emerged as a center for discussions and activism around the rights of free African Americans. A fellow church member, Denmark Vesey staged a rebellion in 1822, leading freedmen and the enslaved in a plan to seize the city. The group was captured and Vesey was hanged.

As always in the wake of a slave rebellion, or even the rumor of one, enslavers looked to blame others for agitating their “property” rather than the condition of permanent servitude itself.

As always in the wake of a slave rebellion, or even the rumor of one, enslavers looked to blame others for agitating their “property” rather than the condition of permanent servitude itself. They focused on the Black sailors whom they blamed for spreading word of freedom in the North and the Haitian Revolution which had established a free Black government in 1804. Seamen travelled to international trading ports as well as up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They also sailed into ports like New Orleans and Mobile.

Slaveholders charged sailors with undermining their efforts to keep the enslaved completely ignorant of anything other than their labor. The state legislature passed the Negro Seaman Acts that mandated the imprisonment of Black seaman while their ships were in port.

To escape the new wave of oppression in South Carolina, David left for Massachusetts by 1825. The state of Massachusetts had effectively abolished slavery in 1783. The state Supreme Court had ruled in Commonwealth v Jennison that slavery was unconstitutional as the state constitution had been written.

In Boston, David opened a used clothing shop in City Market and later moved his shop near the wharves to serve Black sailors.  The sailors brought him news from across the country as well as internationally. As he became involved in helping runaway slaves, his contacts  with sailors extended the ways in which he could help, including receiving and sending runaways out of the country. At some point during this period, he married a woman named Eliza or Emily. It’s not known if she was Eliza Butler from a well known Black family in Boston or a fugitive slave.

David helped found the Massachusetts General Colored Association, the first Black political organization in the US. The Association opposed a growing movement to send free Blacks to Africa and Haiti which was growing, particularly among Southern anti-slavery proponents. The American Colonization Society had been founded in 1816 to “repatriate” freedmen, obviously ignoring the status of many freedmen who had been born in the United States. Many prominent Southerners supported expulsion of free Blacks including Henry Clay and Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and James Madison who became American Colonization Society President in the 1830s.

David began appearing publicly as an abolitionist speaker. At the same time, as a Prince Hall Freemason, he wrote for and supervised the publication of abolitionist pamphlets as well. Beginning in 1827 David helped to circulate Freedom’s Journal, the first Black owned newspaper in the country. The paper was published in NY for only 2 years, but his writings in it helped build his reputation as a leading abolitionist.

Boston’s African American community in the 1820s contained a mixture of educated men and women, with craftsmen, merchants and some wealthy members as well domestic service workers and laborers. Political agitation was tolerated and supported by some whites. While the atmosphere was less hostile than in other towns and states, it was not free from racial antagonism and discrimination. For example, there were three used clothes merchants tried for selling stolen merchandise in 1828. David was among them. This suggests that these shopkeepers were singled out. Records of the outcome of his trial have not been found.

David_Walkers_Appeal_1830_editionIn 1829, David published a short pamphlet that would become very influential across the country and strike fear of slave rebellion among slaveholders and their defenders.  An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to those of the United States of America was written in the style of a revivalist preacher. He preached that without the saving redemption of abolition, there would come a political apocalypse, the wages of the sin of slavery. The Declaration of Independence included Black Americans as well as whites, he wrote, in defense of his claim that African Americans had the right to revolt just as colonists revolted against the tyranny of England.

He asked whites if their suffering under Great Britain was “one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?” He presented the idea the American expansion from 13 to 24 states was another form of violence against the enslaved. Whites had dragged the enslaved around in chains and shackles to work in their mines and farms to make themselves and their children rich. Whites marched them hundreds of miles, chained together with neck collars and their feet shackled. This mission to fill newly opened territory he called a fraudulent pretense to entitle whites to lay claim to the fruits of the land and the bodies of the enslaved, based solely on their darker skin.

David addressed Henry Clay directed by calling his American Colonization Society “the colonizing trick”: This country is as much ours as it is the whites, whether they will admit it now or not, they will see and believe it by and by”.

“Every individual may plead innocence if he pleases but God will, before long, separate the innocent from the guilty.” David urged Black men to arm themselves,

“Every individual may plead innocence if he pleases but God will, before long, separate the innocent from the guilty.” David urged Black men to arm themselves, because there was no harm in killing men when they were trying to kill you, not at all different from “tak[ing] a drink of water when thirsty”. He preached that because God had given the Black race the same physical attributes as the white race; “they have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them.”

He condemned the belief that the enslaved should pray and wait for others to liberate them. Instead he preached that the community should take their fate into their own hands and act for themselves.

Authorities in New Orleans and Charleston arrested distributors and those in possession of the pamphlet in an effort to stop the distribution of the Appeal. While in Savannah, they passed laws restricting Black seamen to their ships while in port. Such activities could not, however, prevent seamen from interacting with porters unloading and supplying their ships.

David’s approach was something new.  No one before had dared to question what would later be called the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the national philosophy that underpinned the opening of the American frontier. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had doubled the size of the country. Jefferson believed the nation needed to gain more territory to feed its growing population and to remain a republic. It was the destiny of Americans to fill the continent and in doing so, to civilize the natives and make the land productive.

Beyond his reasoned argument,  David’s stance was far more militant than most abolitionists. He advocated armed defense and even rebellion. Walker’s pamphlet was widely read. He specifically targeted the enslaved by distributing it to them by sewing copies into the linings of clothes he sold to sailors bound for Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah and Wilmington. The Appeal was printed in 3 editions in the 9 months before David Walker was found dead in his shop’s doorway in August 1830. It was rumored that he had been murdered to collect one of the up to $10,000 reward offered for him in the South. It is more probable that he died from tuberculosis; his daughter had died from the disease the week before. But his message had gotten through to the enslaved. A copy of his pamphlet was found with one group of 30 who were caught plotting rebellion.

Nat Turner’s rebellion took place in the summer of 1831. The group of 70 slaves and freemen armed with axes, hatchets and knives killed at least 50 whites as they swept across plantations in Southampton County Virginia, sparing a few poorer whites in their path. It took the state militia and 3 companies of artillery to end the rebellion. Turner escaped capture for 6 weeks. He was tried, hanged and his body was drawn and quartered.

The retaliation came swiftly. The state executed 56 Black men in addition to those killed during the rebellion. The state militia set out on a spree of murdering random slaves, claiming 100 victims. Across the South, as far as Alabama, rumors of slave rebellions spread, prompting a backlash of violence against innocent enslaved and free men and women for at least 2 weeks after the rebellion was defeated.

The waves of violence were followed by a wave of legislation. The Virginia General Assembly passed legislation to ban the teaching of reading and writing to all people of color, regardless of status and made religious meetings illegal unless attended by a licensed white minister. New restrictions rippled across other state assemblies who passed their own versions.   

The Appeal had a wide ranging effect on the abolitionist movement as well. Abolitionists began shifting their antislavery arguments away from gradual manumission with compensation for enslavers to immediate emancipation. In the South, anti-slavery societies began shutting down. Most southerners who opposed their peculiar institution had supported forced expulsion and colonization of free Blacks rather than emancipation. Before 1827 there were four times as many anti-slavery societies in the South as there were in the North. David Walker’s Appeal essentially ended the antislavery movement in the South and radicalized the movement in the North to advocate for abolition of the institution of slavery itself.

David Walker’s death at age 35 meant that his son never met him. Edward G Walker, also known as Edwin G Walker, went on to become the first African American man elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1866.

When Fantasy Becomes Policy

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On the face of it, the CelebrityPresident has prestidigitated his path to declaring a national emergency into his “winning and more winning” signature. Some of the shift in rhetoric is subtle, not something usually attributed to him. If the stakes were not so high, you’d have to admire his acumen. Still, we have to marvel at his intent. Does he really believe the fantasy at the border that he’s spun?

It’s possible. Recall, that as humans, we like to believe what we believe. Something called confirmation bias causes the brain to release a shot of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that makes us feel good, when we do what we always do in the face new challenges. Dopamine is how cocaine makes you feel good. Each new bit of fabricated evidence lays a new brick in a secure cerebral home.

Agent Orange has lived a very sheltered life, guarded by security, limos, private jets, private clubs, doting children and devoted sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear.  Add in the Secret Service, the White House and a Cabinet of 45 strokers. He never goes anywhere alone, without a gaggle of adorants. He doesn’t often go places where he gets a glimpse of the world that most of us live in, if ever.

What are his information sources? He likes to say, he gets his own stats, failing to mention that he’s force fed by FoxNews/Trump TV, who have created the visual portrayal of the invasion at the border that he carries in his head. Somedays, you can track 45’s remarks from the TV screen to his lips. And armored with his vision, visual images are transformed in his mind to what he wants to see. That’s another trick of the human mind. Not that his trips to the border haven’t been guided to particular areas to support his narrative. The truth is, he’s hasn’t actually been to the border. He’s sent Homeland Security Secretary Kjirsten for the most part and even the First Lady to asylum seeker compounds.

Does he believe his rhetoric or is he just craftily devious? Sometimes, when he’s spewing out his thoughts through a rambling diatribe, it just seems sad, if it weren’t so terrifying. He  seems three sheets to the wind unpropelled by alcohol. Or perhaps a dotard rambling on. On the other hand, it’s working for him, only reinforcing for him it’s rightness. When he searches for “data” to underpin his arguments, he cherry picks a digit here and a digit there; what doesn’t work, he just fabricates. That’s the beauty of statistics; they can be configured in any way, particularly when they are loosed from how they were calculated. Method does matter; garbage in puts garbage out. It is both awe inspiring and petrifying that so many citizens are falling for it, like the woman in Minnesota, so distant from the southern border, who believes that caravan terrorists are going to suddenly pop up in her all white neighborhood.

It takes a huge amount of self assurance for 45 to say in one breathe that he’s declaring a national emergency and the next breathe to say “I didn’t need to do this”. He went on to explain that “I could do the Wall over a longer period of time. . . but I’d rather do it faster. . .I’ve already done a lot of Wall for the election.” His confidence has been buoyed by his repeated success; he said it first during his campaign in the infamous assertion, paraphrased as , “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it”. Or his success with the Supreme Court whose decision to support the Muslim ban came by ignoring the MAGA President’s direct statement that it was in fact a Muslim ban. SCOTUS declared that his public statements of his intentions were irrelevant to the law.  

The country is struggling against a wall of words, built daily with the same bricks, reshaped in the same repetitive narrative. Repetition is key to propaganda. There is the repetition bias, where things become familiar simply because we have heard them before. It is the centerpiece to shifting norms. And advertising for that matter.

How has Agent Orange reset the goal posts? It began when he snatched victory from the mouth of Nancy Pelosi. “In the bill, by the way, they didn’t even fight us on most of the stuff . . . we have so much money we don’t know what to do with it. It’s crazy,“ 45 asserted in the Rose Garden speech. I got $1.5 billion when they said not a dollar, he remarked. Why then has he upped his ask to $8 billion in the emergency declaration?

In reality, the $1.375 billion was less than the original amount in the compromise spending deal that would have avoided a shutdown in December. With 800,000 federal workers and additional numbers of federal contractors thrown to the wolves, the BullyPresident emerged from the showdown with Pelosi even farther away from his $5 billion than when he started his deal making art.  

During the course of the resolution of the last government shutdown, the Wall, no longer a “Big Beautiful Concrete Wall” morphed into a fence, “steel slats or whatever you want to call it”. When faced with pushback from Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, and on the eve of the National Emergency Declaration, it has reemerged as The Wall. And whenever he can, particularly when tied to a dig at the Democrats, he expands his Wall into “national security”. “The Democrats are against national security” he accuses as if he, alone is patriotic. This from the man whose lips are so snuggly attached to Vladimir Putin’s ass that it invokes nausea.

In El Paso, Agent Orange substituted the rally chant “Finish the Wall” for “Build the Wall” because “we’ve already built a lot of it”. “I’ve already done a lot of Wall” he’s said in the arena decked out with a banner Finish the Wall hanging from the rafters.The obvious question, why a national emergency, if the task is already substantially completed? Simply put, it’s not true that a lot of Wall has been built or that it’s even contracted to be built. The MAGAPresident asked for 200 miles over the 1900 mile border. There are, of course, fences from previous administrations and some of those have been reinforced. There are natural barriers as well, but not 1700 miles of them.

Obviously, if the CelebrityPresident is invested in security at the southern border, he would be happy with the Congressional appropriation for 75 more immigration judges, upgrades to ports of entry, electronic surveillance and the 55 miles of fencing specifically designated for Texas, as recommended by border authorities. They threw in $475 million for humanitarian aid, although their idea of humanitarian crisis is not at all what 45 has been railing against. Their crisis is the treatment of asylum seekers by Homeland Security and Ice. 

Moreover, if he was really interested in national security, he would turn his attention urgently to the true national threats like cybersecurity, not just in military and intelligence areas but in banking and the financial sector, the electrical grid, hospitals and insurance companies and election procedures. Ongoing cyber intrusions from the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans are all of the utmost concern. The Chinese have a well developed industrial espionage campaign assisted by the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in graduate and postgraduate labs who regularly take American discoveries back home with them. The MAGA President has no interest in them at all. Even rudimentary agency efforts are being dismantled. With federal agency staffing running at half empty, priorities have to be maintained in areas where the chief executive has chosen to shine his spotlight.  

All of government is now being moved on a lie, much like Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda genius, led a government to ravage Europe and commit the most massive genocide since the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Or the Red Scare of Joseph McCarthy that paralyzed government and hypnotized the country to see communists hiding under their beds. And noone in the GOP seems to care as long as it keeps them in office.

He hasn’t said much about the legislation. Democrats, and the Republicans who voted for it, packed it full of handcuffs against which 45 always rebels. He must have what he wants when he wants it. The bill details specific areas in the Rio Grande Valley where a non-concrete barrier can be built consistent with other fencing there. It also specifies places where the barrier can not built. In addition, Democrats tried to limit the number of detention beds, which unfortunately could worsen conditions for asylum seekers, leaving a larger number dumped on the Mexican side of the border.

Perhaps 45’s only real victory has been his campaign strategy for 2020. Don’t forget he started his campaign the day he took office, officially registered on January 1, 2017. So all of his shenanigans and rallies have been in service of reelection, unlike most previous presidents who didn’t start worrying until the end of their first term in office. He needs to keep the Wall around as his signature campaign rally cry. He understands more than most that a negative message inciting fear is more powerful than the positive one about a booming economy which just didn’t play in the midterms. It looked like Republican voters were ready to sit out the midterms until a snarling Brett Cavanaugh came on the scene. This is why Republicans can’t get him to switch the narrative.

Fear is a critical stimulus to thinking dominated by human’s bag of biases, skewing toward closing group circles against a perceived enemy outside. that accounts for 45’s ubiquitous use of the words criminals, terrorists, invasions, rapists, gangs, Muslims and people of color. All are automatic targets for fear mongering. 

“I’ve started the Wall,”  he’ll bellow, “over Democratic opposition. I fought tooth and nail with a National Emergency Declaration that I had to battle through the courts.” If he loses, though doubtful, he can throw in a dig about activist courts all while touting SCOTUS as one of his crowning achievements. He’s never wearies of throwing up contradictions. He knows it doesn’t matter what he says; none of his Trumpophants will ever see the border and anyone who does, will see it through his eyes, because humans see what they want to see.

With the number of asylum seekers unlikely to decline, many  more castigations of gangs, terrorists, rapists, criminals, human traffickers will fill his rostrum, spread large over the media canvas.   

Virginia Is Knee Deep in Blackface

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IMG_2353

They’re dropping like flies. As direct pushback to the pundit narrative that the use of blackface was not a common occurrence in the 80s, the Huffington Post reported that the Virginia Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring issued a statement that he wore a costume to an undergraduate party in 1980 dressed as a Black rapper with “brown makeup” and a wig. Is brown the new black? Is saying its brown a salient request for a pass? Is it any less mocking of African Americans? What to do about Ralph Northam.

It’s a sure bet that there are more out there.  It’s not a coincidence that Herring, the number 3 in line for governor, has been outed. But party affiliation is irrelevant. These revelations are merely the tip of the iceberg. It should be evident by now that flipping through photo albums picturing frat parties, Halloween costumes, dance contests, club shows, etc attended by whites would unearth a passel  of similar images of Klansman or blackface or other demeaning depictions of African Americans. And not just from the 80s or 90s but far more recently.

And so it is that blackface has tripped up another Virginian. This time it’s Republican Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment as reported by the Virginian Pilot. Norment was the editor of the Virginia Military Institute publication, the Bomb, in 1968 which holds a cornucopia of photos featuring men in blackface and the N word at least once. Norment’s response hedged his role has one of several editors which meant he was not responsible for all the pictures, seeking redemption for not being one of the men in the photos. And further, he supported VMI’s integration that year and led the way for admission of women.

This type of slicing and dicing of details is the norm. These explanations are exasperatingly half-assed. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t layout the pictures himself; he was obviously into the spirit of the Bomb and what it said about the values of the students. Did he speak out about them? Did he resign in protest?  His position on admitting women is irrelevant. It simply adds insult to injury. Clearly, he doesn’t understand that wearing blackface is demeaning to African Americans. Printing and distributing pictures is equally as reprehensible as appearing in them. It represents a continuum of bigotry. Supporting equal access for women can not counterbalance degrading a minority.

IMG_0362 (1)Norment’s transgressions are bound to raise the question of timing. Was blackface more acceptable in 1968 when racism rang out loud and proud than in 1986. Easy answer, Hell No. Demeaning and humiliating African Americans was wrong when blackface entertainment began in the 1880s; it will stay wrong as long as it exists. Blackface in minstrel entertainment spearheaded the assault, torture and murder of tens of thousands of African Americans.That’s what we recall when we see it. It’s no accident that the movie Birth of A Nation, premiering in 1914 led to the resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan. All of the African American roles were performed by white actors in blackface.American History Month.

The difference between 1968 and 1986 is that open bigotry became less socially acceptable which pushed racist practices to subterranean depths. In spaces occupied by whites, there was freedom to insult and lampoon African Americans without the prying eyes of civil rights supporters or uppity Blacks. Part of the appeal of blackface and KKK displays was their subversive nature. It was just having fun after all, but so much more fun because it was naughty.   

VMI’s Director of Communications, Col Stewart MacInnis, demonstrated in his defense of his school the tone deafness that provides a window into the general incomprehension of many. Stepping right into the time capsule defense, he confirmed that he had not found any racists photos after reviewing the Bomb from recent decades. How would he know? Did he consult any African Americans to overcome his own warped vision. We know it when we see it; he clearly doesn’t.

KKK MaskWhite Americans refuse to confront the miasmo of racism that permeates the country. They want to believe that each individual has no connection to racism if they haven’t subscribed to the rhetoric of white supremacy. They don’t feel any prejudice in their hearts. They have no intention of insulting or offending African Americans. But there is no neutrality in a society that is run by white people for white people. It is not a question of individual hearts and minds. It is not a question of intention to do harm. The harm itself is the issue, not whether it was intended.

Whiteness as the default normal is so entangled in American life that it is invisible; much of it is downstream accumulation from practices and policies that have long been accepted as norms. There can be no neutrality when whites have been advantaged over people of color. Whoa, a collective groan goes up; “not me. I didn’t benefit”.

One example is implicit bias. There is a significant body of scientific evidence that expose the implicit biases we carry around, often reinforced by messages that originated in the 18th century. Those messages about the inferiority of people of color who are inherently dangerous, evolved and were contoured to the needs of each subsequent era. Even African Americans are affected by these inherent biases because they are omnipresent and subliminally implanted. It’s the thing that keeps a white person from taking an elevator alone with a Black man or a woman clutching her purse more tightly when passing an African American man. Or a Black policeman rousting young African Americans as enthusiastically as his white colleagues.

The persistence of blackface, the makeup of minstrels shows, the most popular entertainment in the country in the 1890s through the 1920s is illustrative. Blackface was the makeup worn for routines that depicted African Americans as stupid, shiftless, lazy, unsophisticated and playfully happy-go-lucky. These were the exact same things the enslavers said about the enslaved, an ironic contrast to the reality of the hardest working people in the country.

Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman deftly illustrates how David Duke modernized his Klan propaganda to sound remarkably similar to mainstream conservative rhetoric. In its 21st century rendition it is the welfare myth. Overlooked completely is the fact that African Americans were excluded from Medicaid programs when they began and for much longer in Southern states. Put simply, we could not make up the majority of welfare recipients; it’s obvious that a group that makes up 13% of the population could not make up the majority of welfare recipients even if every man, woman and child were enrolled. This discrepancy is even more glaring as Medicaid rolls expanded with Obamacare. Senior citizens in nursing homes are the group that consume the largest proportion of the Medicaid budget, 22%. And yet, more often than not, except in stories on Medicaid expansion, print and visual media will show Black women in their stories on programs to assist the poor, continually reinforcing the visual association with the myth. Editorial decisions about what, when and how stories are covered are rife with implicit biases despite the artifice of the “objective” press. Take a look at how FoxNews/Trump TV picks at stereotypic scabs, in its objective to keep its viewers fearful and anxious.

The stereotype of the lazy African American has also been politically useful when cutting federal benefit programs is on the political menu. Reagan was the magician who masterminded the infamous Welfare Queen campaign to slash Medicaid programs in the 80s. Bill Clinton wasn’t far behind when he restructured benefits with work requirements. Both parties have made use of stereotypes when it was politically expedient.

Let’s just move on, say Virginia officials. Isn’t that how it goes. Offenders apologize for their indiscretion and then move on. “Virginians have weathered many storms and we can come together again.” Here, they’re speaking primarily to whites because they’re in control. It comes from the perspective of white men who, even if they lose their jobs, will continue to do just fine. And Black Virginians? Can they move on so smoothly, recover from the shock and disappointment that these elected officials who promised to improve their lives are just like all the others before them. Of course, they’ve known disappointment and in their hearts, they knew because they negotiate through a world of excessive police stops, the criminal injustice system and daily microaggressions.

Still, it may be a shock for millennials who have been fooled by the subterranean nature of obvious bigotry into the belief that there’s only a small extremist fringe. Their optimism and that of their parents is buoyed by the seemingly ubiquitous presence of interracial couples, even in Virginia, the home of the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v Virginia that struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage. But outside urban areas, there are large swaths of the country where few faces shaded deeper than cream can be found. The beauty of this optimism is that white Americans need only sit back and wait for the arc of history to bend toward justice.

For those who lived in Virginia in the 80s, they already knew who these guys are. Those guys are the ones they didn’t go to school or socialize with. Black Virginians were just praying that their officials had evolved their actions to reflect minority power in the voting booth. They have to hope they are on the slow road to something better or they would have to just give up.

The circle has already begun to close, embarrassed and guilty as the Virginia Democrats are at being discovered and disappointed that they could be losing their grip on power. Northam has refused to resign and is ready to move on with the business of governing. The calls for discussions about race have already begun to fade. It’s too painful anyway. It will need to be deferred. It was only going to start and end with the cruelty of blackface on which they could all agree.

A country ignorant of its history can not engage in thoughtful discussion. People carry a bundle of family myths on their back which they confuse with an objective study of events. Witness Elizabeth Warren who wanted to live in the arena of exotic racial origin and now has pretty much torpedoed her shot at the presidency over foolish youthful longings. Doesn’t anyone except white nationalists want to be white anymore?  Her choice reflects the mantle of white privilege that permits whites to assume whatever identity they choose without considering the oppression that their ancestors have forced on the true members of that minority group. Noone questions it. In contrast, a minority individual can’t join the ranks of whiteness without surmounting numerous barriers, often including the denial of their family members.

History is written by the group that has the microphone and thus our understanding changes over time when unexplored sources become available. Thus history written by southern apologists confirms that freedman were illiterate and uninformed during Reconstruction simply because the historians didn’t look for the petitions and assembly resolutions written by the formerly enslaved or free Blacks. But no one is teaching that in high school history class, generally the last time most people got information about it. Southern lesson plans on the Civil War are still quite different from the North, often including visits to Civil War memorials that were erected to promote the myth of the Lost Cause. They have to set the stage for the annual celebration of Confederate Day. There is no way to determine how much time in curriculums across the country is spent on the totalitarian Jim Crow state with its reign of terror that was both admired and imitated by Adolf Hitler. Perhaps more now than in past decades.

Lastly, in considering how this could change, we have to consider confirmation bias which prevents people from absorbing new information at odds with what they already think. Our brains actually reward us for continuing to think what we’ve always thought. This only adds to the difficulty of creating conversations when people don’t share the same vocabulary or knowledge base.

So Virginia politicians will kick the can down the road, as the nation has done at every past juncture. The past will once again dissolve into the present. Once again, white Americans can continue to ignore race, comfortably ensconced in some other struggle like climate change without ever considering the unconscious hand of racism in everything American. Or decrying the state of our democracy oblivious that African Americans, never fully included, are always the first to be lopped off in both obvious and more subtle ways. Even when minorities are included in the conversation, their concerns are often compromised away in the interest of a narrowly conceived “the greater good”. And yet, the elimination of systemic racism is the greater good, unlocking for the country the untapped talents of minorities, often thought to have none.

Democrats need a presidential candidate who can jettison Trump, so electibility will dominate their choice for presidential candidate and minorities will have to settle for the Tweedle Dum-Tweedle Dee status quo again. If that means people will mistake equality for equity, then so be it. If we all have equal rights, they can’t apply when everyone doesn’t have access to them.

Observers like David Brooks of the New York Times took the stance it’s up to the African American community to decide if they can forgive Northam and Herring because they are the ones who have been wrong. On the surface, that sounds good given that we have so often been left out of the rooms where decisions are made. In more recent times, we have been allowed to join the national conversation, but our opinions seem to count less. In fact, it’s another instance of removing whites from responsibility, as if they are uninvolved. The whole country has been wronged because we are all Americans and this not only reflects badly on the country as a whole but impedes our growth. Brooks should feel the country’s collective shame for tolerating racism. If more people like him would get angry, we could make a giant step forward. Because anger leads to action. And action is what we need; only white people can dismantle the system they built.    

Two important takeaways. The controversy is not about blackface; it is about deep- seated conscious and unconscious disrespect shown toward African Americans.  Two, this problem is not unique to Virginia or even the South. Given that, African Americans will continue to muddle along as best we can, just as we have always done. We’re still here because as flawed as it, it’s still our home.

Another Treaty Bites The Dust

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Joep Bertrams / The Netherlands

Joep Bertrams / The Netherlands

The AmericaFirstPresident would take any action that flies in the face of NATO allies, so tearing up a treaty is one dramatic option, prompted by a nudge from the snarling hyena John Bolton. He’s floated the idea of withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in the past and although 45 is never firm, the announcement seemed a bit precipitous. The timing of the announcement may have been that ever present impulse to change talking points, from Roger Stone and the whole Russia thing for instance. And the triumph of Nancy Pelosi in the Shutdown Showdown. And the “Trump is a wimp” comments that keep reverberating in the mediasphere. Now the jettisoning of the INF Treaty makes the questionable Dealmaker In Chief a winner, a decisive military leader standing up for national security not just at the Southern Border but around the world. He claims that the Treaty limits American ability to respond to growing threats from the Chinese as well as the Russians.

But now it all makes sense. Russia announced it too would terminate its participation in the 1987 pact that prohibited missiles capable of a range between 311 and 3418 miles. Putin must have given 45 the nod to lead the way, knowing his obsession with appearing to lead in everything, so the US takes the international heat and Russia is seen to logically react. Could this be one of those Putin meeting topics that Trump is so desperate to keep secret?

The US has charged that Russia already possesses these missiles, which Russian officials denied. They invited the US to come and inspect the missile, but US officials unwisely declined. Were they afraid they would find the missile was not in fact what they claimed or were they simply playing Putin’s propaganda game? While it’s unlikely that the Kremlin would have presented the actual missile, still an inspection would have demonstrated US intentions to preserve a missile freeze to the international community. Except 45’s administration seems to have no such intention.

No doubt, Putin has tried to welsh on treaty obligations as he poked at everything US and European to test their limits of retaliation. Previous administrations have complained that Russia was secretly developing missiles in violation of the treaty. So far the Russian leader has gotten off lightly for his aggressiveness around the world, with travel bans and sanctions on his oligarch buddies, some of which Agent Orange has walked back despite Senatorial disapproval.

Putin’s nationalist, in fact imperialist, rhetoric has managed to bolster his popularity at home with a citizenry that has long suffered as a way of life. The Russian national psyche is expectant and accustomed to suffering across its cold and frozen landscape. It is a country that has never known abundance and is unfamiliar with the concept of democracy as it’s symbolic bear. Of course the piece de resistance to keep his populace in-tow is his regime of repression – the RGU secret police, vigilante thugs, state owned media, torture and imprisonment of dissidents.

No matter, these dual actions open the way for a new arms race. But most importantly for the former Soviet Union, it puts pressure on the NATO countries, a stone’s throw away, well within the range of an intermediate range missile. As those allies have watched 45 shrink from support of the alliance, they will have to think seriously about mounting their own military defense, even if it is a common European defense force.  Still in an economic downturn, it will drain dollars from their budgets which these countries have never had to spend before. The prospect of defense spending adds another hump to the impact of the Brexit debacle on the EU. On the other hand, military expenditures can stimulate economic growth.

Similarly, the added stimulus of an arms race can crank up the military-industrial complex and add jobs, jobs and more jobs to the economy delivering another finger in Agent Orange’s promised hand. Similarly, it will add a missiles blossoming around the world page to his daily fear mongering, because China, not a nuclear threat in the 80s when the treaty was signed, is a new entry in the race. No doubt Xi Jinping in his quest for Chinese world dominance has already started building his arsenal.

Putin said he would direct his military to begin research and development on land based intermediate range missiles, including hypersonic ones, capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Of course, Pompeo claims they’ve already accomplished this. My money’s on Pompeo. Still there is a six month withdrawal period which both countries will probably ignore, 45 not being one to put much stock in rules.

So the world is a little scarier today, more so because the president lives in an uninformed universe unsullied by intelligence information. Agent Orange’s assessments, if his gut instinct paired with a Fox News feed can be considered an assessment, come from a parallel galaxy.  When the intelligence agencies delivered the Worldwide Threat Assessment Report to a Congressional committee, the Commander in Chief, still missing from daily security briefings, did not watch the hearings and had not read the report that presented an analysis of current international threats to the country.  The report presented situations diametrically opposed to 45’s declarations in significant areas like North Korean, Syria, Iraq and the Russian threat. Notably, there was no mention of the Southern Border and immigrant caravans.  His omissions led him to comment that the media had misquoted their testimony, despite the fact that he could have watched it before he had his minions spread that narrative. The hearings are on video for all to see. He can assess intelligence information at any time, day or night. But it’s so much easier to a click of a remote to get all he needs to know from his TV sets. He didn’t need to watch the hearings or read the report, a particularly difficult task for him; his mind is impervious to points of actual information. His vision is locked and loaded.

Granted the intelligence community has been way off base many times; the nature of the work means that analysts can be misled if not by the facts then their interpretation of them. WMDs stands out as one of the most infamous intelligence gaffs in recent history. Not often recalled is the detail that the analysis was manufactured intentionally to be misleading, as we were reminded in the movie Vice. Not long afterward the truth was discovered, to Colin Powell’s lasting shame.

The public should always be circumspect of government intelligence. There is no question that counterintelligence can also lead our own intelligence agents astray. But a chief executive should get down in the weeds, reconsider and rework the information and confer with agency heads to formulate his policies. Agent Orange says he’s allowed to disagree with his intelligence chiefs; he is but not without actually hearing their information. He might want to instead spend some of his “executive time” which is reported to be about 60% of his schedule to assume the act of governing and serving the country, rather than himself. I’m guessing he spends a bunch of it catnapping as 72 year olds are want to do.

Now, the leadership of the country is flying blind except for guidance from 45’s North Star, Vladimir Putin. Trump and Putin have bonded over similar goals, to wreak havoc in the world but for very different reasons.

The BullyPresident is avenging what he sees as a nation falling victim to the manipulations of other countries for its several decades of undisputed world leadership. The country thinks we operated from a position of power; Trump thinks we were weak. On the other hand, Putin wants that world leadership ring for himself, but he starts from a weak position, economically poor and reviled. His plan is to bring the powerful down to his level through back doors, by disrupting their governments through cyberintelligence and driving a Middle Eastern immigrant crisis, opening space for alternative right wing parties with policies that will align with Russia to ultimately coalesce into a new and better Soviet Union. Putin needs their raw materials and manufacturing to rebuild manufacturing of goods and services for trade, challenging Germany and the EU. The Russian leader has laid out his objectives very clearly to his citizenry. If the European Union folds, the game is over. For Putin, it’s a long term strategy. For the Donald, it’s a  “let’s see what I can get into today” approach. Without his own rutter, 45 is Vladimir’s greatest asset.

What to do about Ralph Northam

/ oleblacklady / Leave a comment

Black Sambo

Miles of folks are crowding the beach to jump into an ocean of condemnation for Ralph Northam, Democratic Governor of Virginia. It’s a golden opportunity; it’s impossible to take the wrong side. When a picture of one man in blackface and someone in KKK garb found on Northam’s page in the Eastern Virginia Medical yearbook surfaced on the internet, it set off an earthquake resulting in a landslide of abuse.

Northam was clearly shaken up, sputtering through a muddled defense. First he apologized profusely. Then he recanted and denied it was him. He explained that he had never seen the yearbook and didn’t have one to review the photo. When he finally looked at the page, he realized that it wasn’t him. In an act of political naivete which seems excruciatingly honest, he then went on to admit he had “browned” part of his face with shoe polish so he could play Michael Jackson in a dance contest later that year. Was he trying to head off further discoveries or was he just trying to clear the air about some other missteps from medical school? Blissfully ignorant of the  political imaging, Northam almost began moonwalking in response to a reporter’s question until his wife put the caibash on it. In effect, he dumped a bucket of water on the seriousness of the accusations and his response. The press conference screamed disrespect for African Americans and Virginians. He’s like a child who doesn’t understand not to put his hand in a fire. He looked inept and ineffective. Where are his media advisers?

Why would he apologize before he had seen the yearbook? It raised suspicions that he had engaged in a pattern of behaviors of which blackface was among the extremes. Clearly, he didn’t have the luxury of denial. In lieu of that, he should have admitted that he is a product of the racism still prevalent in Virginia, think Charlottesville. And then he should have owned his upbringing and called it out as always having been wrong. The news conference was the time to admit that he didn’t realize at the time the anguish he would have caused African Americans if there had been any present to see it. My bet is, knowing southern medical schools in the 80s as I do, there weren’t.

Sunday’s Meet the Press featured 2 members of the Congressional Black Caucus Donald McEachin and Karen Bass hammering him. They think he’s disingenuous, dishonest. He said that this was commonplace in 1984 where he grew up. No it wasn’t they thundered back; Bass insisted that “we were looking at the first Black president” in Jesse Jackson. Who are they kidding? They’ve misremembered the past. No one thought Jackson would win. And for Northam at Eastern Virginia Medical School, coming from Virginia Military Academy, it is absolutely true that then and probably now, racism was in the ectoplasm of those institutions. Let’s not pretend that 2 coeds who were recently expelled from some university for posting a video clip with one proudly sporting blackface didn’t happen. See how many recent 2008_Obama_Buckwheat_WatermelonTNblackface posts pop up in a Google search. Beyond blackface, cartoons picturing Obama as a pickaninny holding a watermelon slice and the First Couple with bananas symbolizing Blacks as apes are just the tip of the iceberg.   

Despite Northam’s being the child of a teacher and a judge, how can the pundits ignore that they were products of a southern upbringing in the state that was the seat of the Confederacy. Liberalism is relative; it loses its shine when one considers that the origins of liberalism that flowed from FDR specifically excluded African Americans. They overwhelmingly supported FDR who left them knocking at the back door as collateral to the need for him to maintain Southern Dixiecrat support for the New Deal.  

As Northam struggles to explain, he’s been caught in the same vortex that #metoo is screaming against. The haters are denying his experience as well as history. Americans like to pretend that they left racism behind in the 70s or 80s. But President Barack Obama was not possible in the 80s, 90s or even 2004. And look what happened after he was elected. They’ve turned what appears to be Northam’s honest befuddlement into cannon fodder. “He knew he had those pictures out there.” Miss Bass charged. One, how does she know? Two, does she remember everything that transpired in her life after age 24? My bet is that that kind of activity was so much a part of life at EVMS and VMA that any one incident doesn’t stand out to Northam. If it’s true that he didn’t have the yearbook, then it was long forgotten.

What isn’t being considered is his life experience since he graduated. A few years ago as lieutenant governor, he helped Governor McAuliffe restore voting rights to thousands of former Virginia felons who had completed their sentences. These felons are overwhelmingly African American, given the nature of the criminal injustice system that has wharehoused millions of minorities. It is easy to imagine how his military service, pediatric practice and his political experience intimately exposed him to the agony of the African American experience, revealing some of the lacerations that the reflexiveness of white supremacy cause. That leads to the emergence of a sense of empathy not easily achieved by those without interactions with real life African Americans or those who choose to ignore it.

Northam has done what all white Americans should do, evolve their understanding and empathy for the Black experience over time as conditions change. While the treatment of African Americans has always been morally reprehensible, it has not been recognized as such in the nation. In real life, what white individuals should do to effect change today is not what was called for in 1986 or 1998 or 2006.  It’s a safe bet that 90% of his critics are not woke either and probably never will be. No doubt they have racist acts in their past, even if they are not as overt as blackface. Surely their lives have been cluttered with microaggressions. There will be more of both in their futures as part of the media and political establishment. Opinions have always been cheap; action is much harder.

We should consider the photo’s source, a conservative website Big League Politics founded by a former writer for Breitbart and Daily Caller. What a masterful strategy to disempower a Democratic governor, sweetened by its new reporting of a charge of sexual abuse against the Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax. The debate has presented a golden opportunity for Republicans to pile on against racist acts while they simultaneously support the White Supremacist in Chief in the White House. Trumpophants pile on as the Democrats are exposed as the racists that they are always accusing them of being. The sweetness of the moment is the strike at Democrats over two issues where they maintain that they have a zero tolerance policy, sexual misconduct and racism.

Should Northam resign? At least his current behavior is in sharp contrast with the White Supremacist in Chief in the Oval Office. It’s not just what 45 says. In this area, he has been entirely consistent, since his early days refusing to accept African American tenants in his buildings in New York to his racist policies and almost daily tweets. GOP politicians don’t have a leg to stand on. If racist behavior is unacceptable for everyone, then why do they tolerate, excuse and refuse to acknowledge 45’s. There is no disguising the partisan expediency here.

While it sounds good to say that this is an opportunity for thoughtful discussion about racism, the raging hypocrisy on both sides demonstrates just the opposite. With people trying to make points to demonstrate their rabid indictment of only the worst manifestations of bigotry, a sensible discussion isn’t going to happen. Left ignored will be the tendrils of systemic racism that is as integral to America as light is to photosynthesis.  In fact, a sensible discussion on the national level is impossible. There can be no sensible discussions in this age of social media. As long as people are making points, they can’t hear what anyone who doesn’t agree with them is saying. How can thoughtful conversation take place in an atmosphere where politicians call for the resignation of a governor for something he did in 1984 and not for a president who did or said something yesterday and the day before that.       

Given the impossibility of having a thoughtful national discussion on race and racism at this time, and in fact any time in the past, what are the implications for government in Virginia? Unfortunately, like Al Franken, Northam is finished. He’s desperately trying to hang on. The life of scandals is remarkably short-lived in this fast paced culture, but Republicans will hammer this one in the legislature at every turn. That would seem to augur ineffectual government from a governor’s mansion ripped away from its Democratic and independent supporters. The prospects for any legislative agenda, with Democrats loath to support Northam associated initiatives are dim.

The clincher is that a well liked African American Lieutenant Governor is ready to assume office to move the party’s agenda forward. Now even he has been tainted with charges of sexual assault, currently in the classic consensual versus non-consensual statement phase. Fairfax has accused Northam of leaking the story, opening up further rifts in the party. In the interest of the state, it would seem Northam’s resignation is the best course. Northam will have to make the personal sacrifice. Life isn’t fair. Sometimes the modern reckoning for unacceptable behavior feels cruel. Sometimes good political leaders will be scrapped without an opportunity to redeem themselves. He can try to create a sensible conversation about race when the scandal has cooled. But he needs a lot of tutoring in public relations and probably some sensitivity training to avoid putting his foot in his mouth. Perhaps it is his forthright honesty, to which many attest, that is getting in the way. Sometimes the very honest have trouble smoothing the edges.

This media circus is indicative of a critical problem for the body politic in the age of TV, social media and advanced video and audio techniques. We don’t know our leaders and politicians. We can’t know them. What we see on screens is the image that a person wants to or fails to project. What we hear is managed communication. There is no such thing as a candid on the record conversation with a politician. This deficit is even more nightmarish as the caliber of political candidates in both parties seems to be diminished given the financial costs, the personal attacks and the scandal mongering of campaigning today.