Commentary
Reading The South Through the Lens of Caste
I recently finished reading Adolph L. Reed, Jr’s memoir of life in the Jim Crow South and afterwards. Having read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste just before (and The Warmth of Other Suns years earlier), I went into Reed’s slim volume looking for points of agreement and points of conflict between it and Wilkerson’s previous works.
I hadn’t read any of Reed’s book-length work prior to The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, but from a few of his articles I understand him to be a left-wing critic of anti-racism and identity politics. The memoir focuses far more on the way Jim Crow functioned in practice than on criticism of anti-racism and identity politics in the present. Like Wilkerson’s previous works, Reed’s memoir highlights the arbitrary nature of the penalties to blacks people for challenging the social and legal structures of Jim Crow. The capriciousness of enforcement is heightened by Reed’s stories of travel from points north to places where Jim Crow governed expectations of behavior even after it was officially repudiated. As depicted by Reed, the level of effort black people had to go through to comply with the strictures of Jim Crow was substantial, and a thing he only realized in retrospect.
Reed doesn’t soft pedal the apartheid system Jim Crow was in the least, nor the nature of the chattel slavery system that preceded it. He quotes at length from the infamous Cornerstone Speech, references other ordinances of secession from southern states, and makes clear that the South shot first with the aim of preserving slavery. White supremacy clearly undergirds both slavery and Jim Crow in Reed’s telling. But ultimately, Reed’s memoir reinforces his “class-first” worldview and that of others on the left (including his preferred presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders).
Reed’s account of life under Jim Crow and afterwards is very enlightening. His lived experiences across decades and regions of the United States are both broad and deep, including New York City, DC, and parts of Louisiana (including New Orleans), Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Georgia. That said, I think there are limits to the power of the Jim Crow experience to explain the present. Reed's book was published just last year, in the wake of a Trump presidency (a direct repudiation of the nation's only black president) Trump's role in encouraging an insurrection to remain in power, and the continuing engagement in overt appeals to white nationalism by numerous GOP pols and those in their orbit. I find it difficult to square these facts with assertions that "race essentialism" on the part of black folks is the real problem.
Wilkerson's Caste, published in the summer of 2020, does a better job of capturing the subtleties and nuances of how we engage with each other by broadening our vision beyond race (race and class, instead of race or class). I still remember her interview with Terry Gross, and being initially skeptical of the book because of her response to the question of why the apartheid system in South Africa was not included in the book.
Actually reading the book revealed not only a larger number of commonalities between the way race and class interact in the U.S. and the way caste works in India than I realized, but a wealth of research in the U.S. during Jim Crow which studied it from the inside and called it a caste system. Some of the takeaways on Caste I took note of separately (so as to keep the copy I borrowed from the public library as pristine as possible):
- Dalits had an equivalent to the sharecropping system some black farmers endured
- W.E.B. DuBois and Bhimrao Ambedkar corresponded at least once regarding the similarity of the position of their people in their respective countries
- Madison Grant (a popular eugenicist of the early 20th century) saw India's caste system as a model to be emulated
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was seen by Indian untouchables as an American untouchable
- Among the earliest of the people to use the term "caste" to describe segregated schools in Boston was abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner.
- Gunnar Myrdal (Swedish social economist) and Ashley Montagu (British-American anthropologist) used the term "caste" to describe the the way black people (and others) were treated in the U.S.
While I have seen pushback elsewhere regarding aspects of Wilkerson's book (mainly people attributing causes other than racism to the personal experiences she recounts in the book), the only place I really disagreed with Wilkerson's book was the suggestion that the indigenous people of America were exiled from the caste system. From reading The Great Oklahoma Swindle, I learned (among other things) that the Five Civilized Tribes fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War and owned black people as slaves.
Wilkerson's book is a lot longer than Reed's, but no less valuable to the reader attempting to increase their understanding of the American experience for black people. Reading them close together in time provoked thoughts and revealed insights I suspect I would not otherwise have had.
Is American Christianity Due for a Revival?
Timothy Keller believes renewal is possible. He laments the decline in church membership and the closure & repurposing of former churches he first encountered in New York has spread nationwide. He then describes five factors as necessary for renewal and acknowledges that even those five will not be enough on their own. But only fairly late in the piece does he fully acknowledge the nature of political engagement of the white evangelical American Christian church:
American evangelicals have largely responded to the decline of the Church by turning to a political project of regaining power in order to expel secular people from places of cultural influence.
Keller, Tim. "American Christianity is Due for a Revival". The Atlantic, February 5, 2023
More than "turning to a political project", Christian churches have been violating the law regarding endorsement in elections, and only retained their tax-exempt status by virtue of the IRS abdicating its enforcement responsibilities.
As a Christian, and not withstanding the recent revival at Asbury University that began just days after Keller's piece ran and continued for weeks, I have serious doubts about the prospects for a broader revival of Christianity in this country anytime soon. Keller cites Émile Durkheim and Jonathan Haidt as secular social theorists who "who how religion makes contributions to society that cannot be readily supplied by other sources." But entirely absent from Keller's piece is any acknowledgment of the ways in which the Christian church as an institution, and those who lead certain individual congregations, has not only failed to be a positive exemplar of how to treat its members, but has reflected and reinforced some of the worst practices of the secular world in its treatment of women, children, and those who are part of marginalized communities. This goes beyond the sex abuse scandal of the Southern Baptist Convention, or similar cases in the Catholic Church going back decades, to the arguments we are somehow still having even today over whether or not women should be ordained and function as pastors.
Twenty-seven countries are currently led by a woman in the role of president, prime minister, or chief executive, and dozens of countries have elected women as leaders since 1960, nearly 10 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 were led by women CEOs as of 2021, but some Christian churches have decided that only men should exercise their spiritual gifts in the office of pastor--regardless of our claim to believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing God who has granted the same spiritual gifts to women as well as men. Our churches claim to believe in a Bible that depicts women as prophets, political leaders, business leaders, and ministers in the days of antiquity but denies their evident spiritual gifts in the present-day. These are not the actions of institutions in a faith ready for revival.
GenXJamerican.com Moves to Amazon Lightsail, A Follow-Up
One change I missed after migrating to Lightsail, was ensuring that all the posts with images in them were displaying those images on the new site the way they were on the old. A scroll backward through previous posts revealed the problem quickly enough, but life is busy so it took awhile until I had enough time fix it. The steps I expected I would need to take to resolve the missing images issue were roughly the following:
- Start up the old EC2 instance
- Download the old images
- Upload the old images to the new instance on Lightsail
Because I only stopped the previous EC2 instance instead of terminating it, I was able to re-start it. To download the old images, I'd have to find them first. Having self-hosted WordPress for awhile, I knew the images would be in subfolders under wp-content/uploads, so the only real question remaining was where exactly the old Bitnami image rooted the install. Once I "sshed" into the instance, that location turned out to be ~/stack/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content/uploads. Images were further organized by year and month of blog posts. To simplify the downloading of old images, I had to knock the rust off my usage of the tar command. Once I'd compressed all those years of images into a few archive files it was time to get them off the machine. I used this Medium post to figure out the right syntax for my scp commands.
Once the archive files were on my local machine, I needed to get them onto the Lightsail instance (and expand them into its uploads folder). But just as I did compressing and pulling the files down from the EC2 instance, I had to figure out where they were in the new Bitnami image. As it turned out, the path was slightly different in the Lightsail image: ~/stack/wordpress/wp-content/uploads. Once I uploaded the files with scp, I had to figure out how to move them into the years and months structure that would match my existing blog posts. Using the in-brower terminal, I was reminded that the tar command wouldn't let me expand the files into an existing folder structure, so I created an uploads-old folder and expanded them there. Then I had to figure out how to recursively copy the files there into uploads. It took a few tries but the command that ultimately got me the result I wanted was this:
sudo cp -R ./uploads-old/<year>/* ./<year>
Now, every post with images has them back again.
Salman Rushdie Talks Writing, Democracy, History & More
I recently listened to David Remnick's interview of Salman Rushdie--his first since barely surviving attempted murder by a young man not even born at the time Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination in 1989. He took the opportunity primarily to talk about his latest book, Victory City, but along the way talked about the attack on him, the impact of the fatwa on him, and democracy and history in India, England, and the United States. There are many places to listen to and/or watch the full interview, as well as reading Remnick's piece in The New Yorker.
Toward the end of the interview, Rushdie's response to one of Remnick's questions did an excellent job of summarizing the danger democracy faces in all the places he is connected to by birth, education, and citizenship. I've attempted to transcribe Rushdie's spoken words below, emphasizing what stood out most to me:
The problem in India is this, that the current government, which to people of my way of thinking is alarming, is very popular. It's the difference for example between India and Trump. Trump was only just about popular. And his level of unpopularity was at least as high as his popularity, that's not so in India because the Modi government is very popular in India, has huge support. And that makes it possible for them to get away with it. To create this very autocratic state which is unkind to minorities, which is fantastically oppressive of journalists, where people are very afraid. Which in a way it's getting to be difficult to call it a democracy.
A democracy is not just who wins the election, it's whether you feel safe in the country whether you voted for the government or not. India has a problem. The way in which this book just marginally engages with it is that it takes on the subject of sectarianism, and tries to say this is not the history of India. The history of India is much more complicated than that. It's not that there was an ancient culture that another culture came in and destroyed, that's a false description of the past.
And as we know we live in a world in which false descriptions of the past are being used everywhere to justify terrible behavior in the present. England pretending there's a golden age before any foreigners showed up, and completing ignoring the fact that they were <expletive> over foreigners in their countries in order to make possible their wealth and affluence at home. America, talking about being great again. I want to know when was that? What was the date? It was obviously before the Civil Rights Act. Was it before women had the vote? Was it when there was still slavery? What are we hark[en]ing back to? A fantasy past becomes a way of justifying bad behavior today."
David Remnick interview with Salman Rushdie from February 6, 2023
India's Ministry of Finance searching the offices of the BBC in New Delhi and Mumbai and accusing them of tax evasion so soon after their airing of a show critical of Prime Minister Modi is exactly the point Rushdie was making about oppression of journalists. Shireen Abu Aqla was shot in the head and killed in the West Bank, likely by a soldier in the Israeli military (according to their own investigation). Here in the U.S., police arrested, shot, and tear-gassed numerous journalists covering protests that occurred in the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police. Ali Velshi and his team of journalists were shot by rubber bullets from police during a live broadcast. A photojournalist named Lindo Tirado was shot by police with a non-lethal round and lost sight in one eye as a result. At least one journalist was arrested, handcuffed, and taken away while in the middle of a live broadcast. Nearly three years later, I haven't seen any evidence of disciplinary action against the cops who did all this shooting.
Rushdie's definition of democracy was an especially interesting one to me. My parents' native Jamaica has a long history of political violence where the party you supported could have the most serious consequences for your physical well-being. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has written about mob violence and vigilantism occurring w/ the knowledge and consent of political parties not just in India, but elsewhere in southern Asia (https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/03/political-violence-in-south-asia-triumph-of-state-pub-82641). Here in the U.S., video from some of these school board meetings, heavily-armed people protesting COVID restrictions, threats and harassment of election workers, voter intimidation, and the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 make me worry that we're returning to the sort of political violence which was once the stuff of history books.
What Rushdie says about false or fantasy pasts being used to justify bad behavior in the present resonated the most strongly with me because of how much present bad behavior it explains. Putin comparing himself to Peter the Great as he rationalizes his continuing invasion of Ukraine is a present example. The MAGA movement led by Donald Trump (though leadership of that movement is being quite vigorously contested now) is certainly another. The conservative Christian groups I've written about previously are certainly harkening back to a pre-Civil Rights Movement point in American history as the place to which they want the entire country to return. In retrospect, even some of the rulings of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court are explained by this framing. As I wrote last year after the leak of Alito's draft opinion which would ultimately overturn Roe vs Wade, black men and women had no rights the government was bound to respect and (white) women were scarcely better off than that. I'm old enough now to remember a culture warrior from decades earlier, Pat Buchanan, harkening back to what (in my memory at least) was probably the Revolutionary War with his "ride to the sound of the guns" catchphrase.
Beyond Rushdie's clear-eyed views of India, England, and the United States, his life speaks volumes regarding how petty and small what we call "cancel culture" today really is. The list of detractors regarding his novel The Satanic Verses is quite long, and included Prince (now King) Charles, John le Carré, Roald Dahl, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the British Foreign Secretary, and Jimmy Carter, among others. Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) agreed with the fatwa calling for Rushdie to be murdered. Remnick's piece includes the following shameful remark from the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper:
I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer."
The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, by David Remnick, The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2023 Issue
Trevor-Roper's remark can only be seen as more gruesome in the light of attempted and successful murders of translators of the book into Italian and Japanese, the attempted murder of the book's Norwegian publisher, and the firebombing of bookstores that carried it. In light of the rough reception his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid would receive less than two decades later, I wonder if former president Carter ever revisited and revised his opinion of Rushdie's book. Rushdie proves far more gracious to at least one of his critics than they were to him:
Meanwhile, the New York Times published a defense of J.K. Rowling--using Rushdie as an example of what could happen to her if she continued to be criticized--just a day after hundreds of current and former New York Times contributors published an open letter critical of the paper's coverage of trans people. Rowling, like Rushdie, was a signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate published in Harper's Magazine a couple of years ago. The ways in which the two signatories choose to use their free speech (one to attack trans people, the other to write novels) couldn't be more different, but the New York Times (predictably, in my view) treats them as the same. I still believe, as I wrote then, that the signatories of the Harper's letter were asking that "controversial" speech be somehow more privileged than other speech. But Rushdie has paid a far higher price for his art--from other artists and his own government (beyond the one that actually issued the fatwa)--than Rowling has paid (or will ever pay) for using her substantial platform to punch down at a community that has been, and continues to be under siege.
From "Quiet Quitting" to Loud Layoffs
One of the more loathsome inventions of the business press in this pandemic-impacted era of work is the term "quiet quitting". Ed Zitron is far more eloquent than I in expressing his fury regarding the term. But here is my own response to an article about a CEO complaining about the backlash he received to a LinkedIn post about firing 2 engineers who were working multiple full-time jobs:
"The Business Insider piece is kinda trash because they let the CEO posture and moralize. There's an obvious double standard for what CEOs are allowed to do versus regular workers and they didn't interrogate that at all. Perhaps some people work parallel jobs to make ends meet, but there are definitely folks taking advantage as well. The collusion of the press with business to invent this concept of "quiet quitting" still makes me angry. Having seen and been subject to layoffs [myself], stingy benefits, and being underpaid relative to my experience and skillset for a good chunk of my career, it's laughable to me that these companies expect loyalty for how little they offer in return. Even though I wouldn't do the parallel jobs thing myself, I can see how people rationalize it. They're just being as transactional with employers as employers have been with workers for decades now.
me in an online chat with friends from October 2022
Fast-forward to today and the news is filled with layoff announcements. PagerDuty literally quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr as part of a blog post laying off some 7% of their workforce. Friends of mine at 2 other companies regularly in the news are now out of work. My own employer laid off a little over 2% of the workforce. While I am still employed, a number of people I've done great work with over the past 5 years are now out of jobs. As far as I can see, these layoffs do not have a thing to do with performance. And given the profit numbers some of the most prominent companies in layoff news have posted over the past couple of years, these are not cuts needed to ensure the survival of these companies.
Ed Zitron's take on what should happen to the CEOs laying off all these people seems extreme at first, but is it really? Microsoft posted record results for fiscal 2022, but they're still laying off thousands. Is it really the fault of all those workers Google, Facebook, and others hired during the depths of the pandemic (as if consumer habits were going to remain that way forever) that the pandemic loosened its grip and consumer behavior moved back toward pre-pandemic norms? Perhaps we aren't being skeptical enough, or critical enough of cuts of this size and scale. As often as we've heard about and/or read about "the business cycle", CEOs who make the kind of money they do ought to know better than to assume that
I survived more than a few layoffs back when the internet bubble burst (leaving an internet consulting firm for a new role just months before it declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy). The company I joined, a telecom equipment manufacturer, turned out to be at the height of its headcount. Over the 4 years I was there, they shed well over half their workforce (even as they acquired failing competitors). The friends of mine at those companies that lost jobs never seemed to lose them because of performance. The RIFs I would be on the wrong side of in later years never seemed to be either. In a world of work that long ago replaced pensions with 401(k)s, we are just numbers when push comes to shove.
Not every company is as honest as Netflix in modeling themselves after a professional sports team, and all that entails about the short shelf life of the average player. I've been working more than long enough to know that any company that refers to itself as a "family" is a company not to be trusted. This season of layoffs is just the latest reminder that what matters most in life are the people who matter to you and the people who treat you like you matter in return--regardless of the work you do for a living, be they family or friends. When it comes to work, we should enjoy it and do it well, but not at the expense of what matters most. If we're going to give loyalty, let it be to people who have earned it and reciprocate it, not to institutions.
Insurrection Anniversary
On this day, the second anniversary of the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, I took a look back through what I posted on Facebook on that day, as well as some of what my friends posted in response.
I shared the following from my friend Brian:
"I just heard that the police are slowly, peacefully, and methodically dispersing these insurrections that breached our capitol, vandalized it, and desecrated it. Now compare that to how the police acted when they were dispersing BLM supporters in front of Lafayette Square so Trump could get a photo opp in front of a church while holding a bible upside down. Do not tell me that there is no such thing as white privilege. It cannot be more vividly illustrated than it has today."
I appreciated Brian's comment a lot because he's white, but especially because he's written at length about just how conservative he used to be. The two years that have elapsed since Brian posted this comment have only reinforced his point. Police in the U.S. set a record for the number of people they killed last year. Two years after the murder of George Floyd by 4 Minneapolis police officers and all the talk of racial reckoning, the police are just as unreformed as before and black and brown people remain in just as much danger.
I posted the following myself:
"Right after they finish certifying Biden's Electoral College victory, Congress should impeach Trump again."
This sentiment found a fair amount of agreement among my friends (as well as some whataboutism from a former classmate who also works in tech).
My last post on January 6, 2021:
"By the way, Ted Cruz is still going to object to the certification of Biden's Electoral College victory after all this. On behalf of a man who called his wife ugly, and called his father a murderer. To call this man spineless is an insult to actual invertebrates."
As it turned out, Ted Cruz had a lot of company--5 other senators and 121 House members (all Republicans) challenged the electoral results in Arizona (a state first called for Biden--correctly--by Fox News). Additional GOP senators and House members also challenged the Pennsylvania results.
Fast-forward to the current day, and as I write this the House has started the 12th round of voting for the next Speaker of the House. All three GOP nominees for speaker (Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and Kevin Hern) are among the 147 Republicans who voted in favor of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election--the very objective of the insurrectionists who invaded the U.S. Capitol and sent them running and hiding for their lives. In the wake of a 2022 election which gave the GOP control of the US House of Representatives, twice-impeached Donald Trump is once again running for president (an outcome which would have been avoided had he been removed from office and disqualified from holding future office).
The continued absence of accountability for any elected officials who gave rhetorical aid and comfort to the insurrectionists 2 years after it took place is sad, but unsurprising unfortunately. Also unsurprising is accountability (when it has landed) landing most heavily on the foot-soldiers of the insurrection. Particularly for former members of the military who participated in this attempted coup, the punishments meted out have not been sufficiently severe from my perspective.
Also lost in the coverage of the U.S. Capitol insurrection is a similar incident at another state capitol--Olympia, Washington. Even if there weren't other such incidents at state capitols 2 years ago, the comfort level on the political right with threatening and/or enacting anti-government violence, whether by those who plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan over COVID restrictions, or the Bundy clan and their abuses of federal land is far too high.
2022 Year in Review
Some highlights from this year:
- Very strong year-end review (best ever at my current employer)
- Substantial pay raise
- RSUs added to my compensation package for the first time in my career
- Promoted to senior manager at mid-year
- Returned to the office
- Hybrid model of Tuesday-Thursday in-office with Mondays and Fridays still remote
- 11th wedding anniversary
- Twins turned 7 years old
- I lost about 10 pounds
- Wrote 22 blog posts (including this one)
- Moved this site to Amazon Lightsail (more on that in a future post)
- Finally updated my library card so I can borrow books with Libby and in-person
- Completed some reading for pleasure, including:
- Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies (by Dick Gregory)
- Borrowed physically from the library
- The first three books of Mick Herron's Slough House books
- Slow Horses
- Dead Lions
- Real Tigers (borrowed via Libby)
- They Called Us Enemy: Expanded Edition (by George Takei)
- Black Cop's Kid: An Essay (by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)
- Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies (by Dick Gregory)
- Completed Building Microservices (by Sam Newman) in technical book club at work
- Took an actual solo vacation (Philadelphia)
Some lowlights from this year:
- Ending contractor terms early for performance reasons
- Navigating a headcount freeze (which will persist into 2023)
- Not enough exercise
Charitable Giving in 2022
As the end of this year gets closer, and more non-profits reach out for charitable donations, I thought it would be a good time to look at the organizations I've donated to throughout the year and share some of the reasoning behind my giving. The majority of my giving is religiously-motivated, while the rest isn't. When it comes to other giving, an increasing amount of that non-religious charitable giving is focused on non-profit journalism.
Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving
I've been a baptized member of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church since elementary school. My parents sent my younger sister and I to the same SDA elementary school and high school. My sister earned her undergraduate education degree from an SDA university as well. We grew up returning tithe and giving offerings to our church, and I've tried to be faithful with that practice, even through the pandemic. This year, as in previous years, my denomination and my home church will be the largest recipients of my charitable giving.
Another charity I donated financially to this year, and to which I've donated my time in the past (through assisting with ESL courses and teaching technology courses to seniors) is Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington (ACSGW). This charity was founded in 1983 by 3 SDA churches located in Takoma Park, MD and Silver Spring, MD.
The most recent change to my giving is the addition of my high school alma mater to the list of recipients. A fellow alum reached out regarding donations to projects at our high school and I chipped in a bit of money for one of the projects. Giving to my high school is something I plan to do more regularly in 2023 and years to come.
Other Charitable Giving
I've donated regularly to my local public radio and TV stations, WAMU and WETA respectively, for many years. I grew up listening to and watching them both, and I make sure that my children get at least of bit of PBS kids programming in their media diet regularly.
ProPublica received my earliest donation specifically for non-profit news back in 2010. Since then, my non-profit news donations have expanded to include Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ and ProPublica get monthly automatic donations and I need to put Reveal back on that list as well .
This year included a bit of giving to tech-focused non-profits:
- Internet Security Research Group (the non-profit behind Let's Encrypt, which provides certificates for website encryption free of charge for my website, and millions of others)
- The Internet Archive (not just of previous versions of websites, but free books, music, and more)
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending free speech online, fighting illegal surveillance)
- Wikimedia Foundation (they host Wikipedia and a wide range of other projects to make knowledge freely available online)
One of my longer-running monthly automatic donations has been to RAINN. I first learned about the charity through the experience and music of Tori Amos (specifically the track Me and a Gun, from her Little Earthquakes album). Over the decades she's continued to speak out as a survivor of rape and do other work fighting on behalf of sexual assault victims.
Edit: After I published this post, I discovered the software I use to track my expenses mischaracterized one of my charitable donations. Friends of the Library Montgomery County is a charity that supports the public libraries in Montgomery County, MD. Given how the culture wars have begun to negatively impact both public libraries and school libraries, putting additional funds (beyond tax dollars) toward libraries is more important than ever.
Charitable Giving Plans for 2023
I hope to give more, and more consistently to the causes I've written about above. I'll also look to resume giving to charities I missed this past year. Capital Area Food Bank is one such charity. Kiva is a non-profit microlending platform through which I've made loans to borrowers in 13 different countries over the years. I've also donated funds from time-to-time, but not as often or consistently as the sort of work they're doing probably needs. I donated to The Bail Project and the Equal Justice Initiative in the wake of George Floyd's murder at the hands of police officers in 2020 but unfortunately haven't done so in subsequent years.
I feel very fortunate to have the means and opportunity to give, and hope to encourage whoever may read this to give as well.
The [Tech Bro CEO] Strikes Back
What Elon Musk is doing to Twitter right now is what happens when someone with the same ideology and worldview as James Damore has enough power and money to be in charge of a company instead of just a worker. When I first wrote about Damore a little over 5 years ago, I wrote about the ways in which the ideas in his muddled, poorly-written manifesto were easily disproven. Subsequent years have demonstrated that Damore's worldview has plenty of representation not merely within the rank-and-file of tech companies, but at the very top as well. While Damore did not use this term in his manifesto, with today's perspective it's clearly recognizable as an a long accusation about the ways in which the Google in 2017 was too "woke". His manifesto is still available online, along with much of the criticism of it, but for the purposes of this piece I will summarize the tech bro worldview this way:
- The status quo composition of our companies, with its relative lack of women, black people, brown people, etc is the “natural order” of things
- Diversity initiatives require a “lowering of standards” and are therefore not meritocratic
The tech bro worldview bears enough similarities to the worldview of those who lead businesses outside of tech, hold political office, lead certain of our religious institutions, and those who populate newsrooms and shape popular opinion that Damore's manifesto even found a defender on the opinion page of the New York Times. Despite Brooks' call for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to resign, the National Labor Relations Board found the company acted lawfully in terminating Damore's employment for violating the company's code of conduct (an unsurprising outcome in my view, given the way at-will employment works).
There is plenty of evidence to debunk both the "natural order" and "lowering of standards" assertions (to say nothing of the idea of meritocracy itself). Nor can the timing of this particular conflict realistically be separated from what was happening in our politics at the time. But let us proceed to another example of how these false assertions nevertheless shape the thinking and actions not just of rank-and-file tech bros, but of those who typically lead them.
Fast-forward to April 2021, and I've been asked to be a co-panelist for a discussion on the intersection of race and technology. This discussion occurred just a day after Jane Yang (a now former employee of Basecamp) wrote an open letter to the founders while on medical leave. Yang was responding to the decision of the CEO (Jason Fried) to ban "societal and political discussions" from the company's internal chat forums. Yang's letter painted a picture of Basecamp's leaders that looked very familiar to me from my own experience with similar people in the industry. The letter is well-worth reading in full, but here is paragraph that makes it clear Basecamp's leaders were no different than those at other companies they'd criticized for years:
from Jane Yang's open letter to Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
"But there were also some yellow flags. Whiffs of smoke that I was starting to pick up on. Your disproportionate, chilling response to a retrospective that you asked for. The whispers of how you had handled a prior company discussion when someone raised the able-ist language in the title of a recently published company book. The continued mourning years later of an executive who had centered the employees as her job, and then was summarily fired for not living up to the additional expectations of working miracles in marketing. The quiet departures of women and people of color, all of whom held their heads up high and left a better place behind than they found it."
Fried and Hansson also announced the end of committees (including a committee for diversity, equity, and inclusion) and the end of 360 reviews (among other changes). As it turned out, Fried and Hansson were dealing (quite poorly) with an internal reckoning over a long-standing company practice of maintaining a list of "funny" customer names. The founders knew about the existence of this list for years, and predictably, the names that Basecamp customer service reps found ripe for mockery included Asian and African names. Particularly because of how public and opinionated Fried and Hanson have been regarding workplace culture--to the extent of having written five books on the subject, including a New York Times bestseller--and held up their own company as an example of how to do things better, it was (and still is) quite difficult to ignore the rank hypocrisy of their choice to shut down internal discussion of a significant cultural failure that they allowed to persist for years. The company all-hands called by the co-founders to try and mitigate the blowback from their decisions instead resulted in the departure of one-third of the entire company.
Over time, marginalized groups (and some of their allies) have mastered online tools and social media and leveraged them to amplify their voices. We saw that mastery at work in the responses to Damore's manifesto. At Basecamp, marginalized people used these tools to challenge the worldview of the company founders. Fried and Hansson's attempt to squash the backlash by fiat failed miserably.
While Coinbase didn't figure prominently in our panel discussion at the time, that's one of a number of companies whose lead Basecamp was following in being "mission-focused", and supposedly apolitical. So discovering that barely two years later, CEO Brian Armstrong has decided that politics is ok when it comes to tracking the "crypto-friendliness" of politicians prior to the recent midterm elections here in the U.S. was ... interesting to say the least. People and companies advocating for cryptocurrency have been far from apolitical when it comes to targeting black and brown investors, so the same groups targeted by unscrupulous operators in the mortgage space prior to the crash of 2008 have piled into crypto in disproportionate numbers relative to other investors--and have taken disproportionate losses as cryptocurrencies have plunged in value and multiple crypto companies have gone bankrupt.
Now we're just over a month into Twitter's takeover by Elon Musk--a takeover entered only because he faced certain defeat in Delaware Chancery Court. Musk has fired half the staff in layoffs so haphazardly executed that he ended up trying to rehire those not correctly identified as critical. He undermined the company's current verification scheme by pushing the launch of a feature enabling anyone to be verified by paying $8/month, only for numerous pranksters to pay the fee and impersonate numerous brands on Twitter like Eli Lilly. Musk's ultimatum to remaining Twitter staff to be "hardcore" or be gone resulted in a wave of resignations much larger than anyone anticipated, not unlike Fried and Hansson's attempt to mitigate the damage from their attempt to squash internal dissent. The same thin-skinned reaction to criticism displayed by Fried and Hansson has been even more on display from Elon Musk. He's fired those who tried to correct his ill-informed assertions regarding the ways the tech behind Twitter actually works--and mocked the skills and intelligence of the people he fired after the fact. Musk blames "activists" for the precipitous drop in ad revenue instead of being accountable for his own poor decision-making.
The reaction in various quarters to Musk's floundering incompetence as CEO of Twitter has been very telling. According to the reporting of Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer, some tech CEOs are hoping Musk succeeds. The same Hansson who not long ago "encouraged employees to read Between the World and Me, a memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's exploration of the racist nature of mass incarceration", is now writing tributes to Elon Musk cheering the likely end of affirmative action in higher eduction. Hansson even touts John McWhorter's Woke Racism these days, and speaks favorably of the likes of Glenn Loury and Bill Maher. Loury and McWhorter are regularly quoted by white conservatives too cowardly to share the stereotypical views of black people they already believed anyway without a black conservative to hide behind. We're already starting to see layoffs across tech, and as economic conditions change and COVID-19 (hopefully) recedes, these CEOs almost certainly see an opportunity to re-establish their worldview within their spheres of control without having to account for marginalized people. That desire is almost certainly behind the persistent belief in some quarters that what Elon Musk is doing is on purpose.
There is plenty of criticism that can and should be leveled at Mark Zuckerberg (particularly his continued pursuit of the failed metaverse strategy and cavalier approach to customer privacy). But when it comes to how to handle layoff news, he delivered a masterclass in how to handle layoffs professionally not long after Musk's deliberately cruel and haphazard ones. Other tech CEOs rooting for the man who treats his employees the worst will definitely be a trend to keep an eye on as time progresses.
Waiter, there's a [brown person] in my [fictional world]
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power finally debuted on Amazon Prime, and right on cue came the complaints from white fans of Lord of the Rings about “wokeness”. What seems new about this latest iteration of the “waiter, there’s a [brown person] in my [fictional world]” phenomenon is the deliberate decision of the mainstream media to legitimize these complaints about said fictional world. The tweet below is a great summation of the journalist malpractice being engaged in here.
When you lead off a piece with complaints about a fictional world with the deputy managing editor of redstate.com, that’s bad enough. But it’s even worse when you conflate fans of Tolkien with actual scholars. Running a story like this–which elevates the weakest of arguments from people with thin credentials at best–seems to be a preview of what we can expect from the new, “neutral” CNN.
I’ve written only briefly about Star Wars being my earliest fandom. But nearly as old as my Star Wars fandom is my love of The Lord of the Rings. I came to it first through watching the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit in the early 80s, then the books. The Lord of the Rings definitely contributed to my becoming a D&D player later on (and a reader of many other books in the fantasy genre). In college, I took the comparative mythology class taught by Dr. Verlyn Flieger (a well-known Tolkien scholar) because it gave me an excuse to read The Silmarillion for credit instead of just for fun. It’s been nearly 30 years since I took her course, but I still remember it because to her credit she gave us what would later be called a trigger warning regarding the depictions of Gollum in Tolkien’s work (which wasn’t perceived as racist by many people then, but likely would be now). I don’t recall if she gave us a similar warning regarding the descriptions of orcs, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did. N.K. Jemisin (the 1st and only sci-fi author to win 3 consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel in the genre) has definitely made that criticism of Tolkien’s description of orcs.
When Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, my fellow Tolkien nerds and I made sure to see all three movies at The Uptown, the best theater in the area at the time. I bought and watched the extended editions of all three movies on DVD, and am overdue to add to my collection whatever 4K version of the trilogy my XBox One X will play. I even watched the not-as-good Hobbit trilogy. The books of the trilogy, The Silmarillion, and an old copy of The Tolkien Reader are on a shelf in the home office where I’m writing this right now. I’ve read The Children of Hurin (a copy from the public library anyway), but have not yet added a copy to my collection.
Richard Newby is a longstanding member of the black Tolkien nerd tribe, and he’s written the only piece worth reading on this subject. So rather than write an inferior version of what he’s already written, I’ll write more broadly–because these complaints from white fans aren’t new. Moses Ingram had to deal with these same people when they objected to her presence as an inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. At least Disney (and her co-stars) seemed to have learned something from their failure to stand up for John Boyega when he first showed up as a black stormtrooper in The Force Awakens. Disney failed Kelly-Marie Tran in a similar way. Marvel has attracted much of anti-woke ire in recent years, for everything from Black Panther, to She-Hulk, The Eternals, and Ms. Marvel. Steve Toussaint gets cast to play Corlys Velaryon–cue the anti-woke whining. Now it’s Sir Lenny Henry’s turn, and Ismael Cruz Cordoba’s turn to contend with toxic fandom. Toxic fandom can suspend disbelief for magic, dragons, laser swords, faster-than-light travel, and time travel–but not for brown people–human, elven, dwarven, or harfoot in this case. Even as I write, these sad know-nothings are arguing on Twitter about “the author’s vision” with the likes of Neil Gaiman–who in addition to being a great and prolific fantasy author himself (American Gods, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and countless others)–has such a deep knowledge of Tolkien’s work that Christopher Tolkien personally thanked him for explaining a reference his father had written years before.
Before the internet, being a black fan of science fiction and fantasy was a lonely pastime. Depending on where and when you grew up, you might not have had many other black kids as classmates at school or friends at church to begin with. Add to that an interest that not many other kids might have and you had to be prepared to like or love that thing on your own. You had to cultivate an appreciation for these stories despite the absence of characters like you playing parts in them at all (except as stereotypes and/or foils for whoever the hero was). You don’t realize that’s what you’re doing as a black fan of these genres (because you’re in middle school when this starts, or younger), you only see it in retrospect when you’re an adult. I was most recently reminded of that mental work when I watched Lovecraft Country, and again when I rewatched the Far Beyond the Stars episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these stories impact me the way they do, both set in the 1950s United States, when black people continued to be treated as second-class citizens at best. Decades after these stories were set, self-appointed gatekeepers are still trying to keep us out of “their” genre–despite the fact that we know and love as well and as much, if not more than they do.
When I listened to this episode of Throughline, and heard how the work of Octavia Butler impacted–and still impacts–the life of an NPR co-host (who is originally from Iran), it reminded me of how thrilled I was to read Wild Seed and know that someone who looked like me had written it. I only watched it in syndication, but still remember how important it was to see Nichelle Nichols play Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek. Seeing Billy Dee Williams play Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back, LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn play Geordi LaForge and Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Avery Brooks play Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really mattered–not just to my childhood, but into the present. Deep Space Nine in particular has yet to equaled, much less surpassed in the genre, for its positive representations of black manhood, father-son relationships, even romance between a black man and black woman who are peers (Captains Sisko and Yates).
Today, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and other black authors are putting out some of the best work on offer across the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Twitter hashtags like #DemDragons allow black fans of these shows to enjoy them together in near real-time. Facebook groups and private chats (and their moderators) do the work of keeping toxic fans away. And even when Hollywood makes mistakes, like firing Orlando Jones from American Gods, or policing the language black writers use, we are finally getting to see ourselves more and more in the work of this genre–and the work is better for it. Studios and fans are fighting back against bitter review bombers. And while such defenses shouldn’t have to be made, at least they are being made. Toxic fandom may not like us in their fictional worlds anymore than their real ones, but we aren’t going anywhere in either one.
Who Is Worthy of Forgiveness?
Plenty of people aired (and are still airing) their opinions regarding this question in the wake of President Biden's long-anticipated decision to cancel some federal student loan debt. But when I skip the "free at last" responses (from those grateful for the federal student loan debt relief) and dig beneath the specifics of the various responses, they are ultimately judging whether or not the recipient of the debt forgiveness is worthy of receiving it.
Quite a few of our fellow Americans believe those who are getting some (or all) of their federal student loan debt forgiveness are unworthy--undeserving. Those responses sound a lot like "what about those who already repaid their loans?" and "it's not fair". Publicly expressing my happiness for those eligible for debt cancellation on Facebook prompted 1 negative response from my friend list along exactly those lines. Sadly and predictably, there are many Christians in that chorus, despite what we claim to believe about forgiveness--despite being undeserving--and what the Bible says about forgiveness, debt, and debtors. We claim to believe in a Bible with multiple verses about cancellation of debts after 7 years and in a jubilee year and this is how some of us choose to respond? It's beyond merely sad, but a poor representation of what Christianity is supposed to stand for.
Ironically, the bulk of the opposition comes from people who very likely supported the Republican president and the Republican Congress who passed the law which made Biden's action possible:
What really highlighted the fact that this federal student loan debt was really about the worth of the people receiving the relief (instead of the fiscal implications) is the response of critics to being called out as hypocrites by a thread from the official Twitter account of the White House:
Half a dozen Republican congressional representatives were found to have received hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars of forgiveness for Paycheck Protection Program loans. Leaving aside the absurdity of congressional representatives applying for and receiving these loans in the first place, this shabby defense really stood out:
This particular defense reminded me of Mitt Romney's 47% insult about Obama voters when I first saw it. But after some more thought, it occurs that a better analogy for what David French is doing here is being like the older son in the story of the prodigal son. French (and at least some other self-proclaimed conservatives) see themselves as responsible, faithful, yet neglected while those receiving debt forgiveness are undeserving profligates. Here's Ted Cruz making essentially the same argument in a far less subtle and far more deliberately insulting fashion than David French:
But when I actually looked for information regarding whether or not the Paycheck Protection Program we're being told to view as disaster relief actually served that purpose, what I found was not very encouraging. Only 25% of the PPP loans actually protected paychecks as intended. Of the 77% of businesses which received funds, nearly half cut staff anyway. Just one investigative report by Fox43 News in Pennsylvania found numerous examples of this. Despite this (and numerous instances of PPP loan fraud, including $268 million recently recovered by the Secret Service) some 94% of PPP loans granted by the federal government have been forgiven in full.
I found this summation of the way that federal student loan forgiveness will actually work in practice particularly compelling:
And that's before you get to student loan forgiveness programs that predate Biden's latest action by years.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz makes a persuasive argument that this program will help the economy instead of harming it. He also turns the discussion to a much more useful place than whether or not the recipients of the forgiveness are worthy, but to whether or not it is beneficial to the country at large. One of the online friends I discussed the loan forgiveness plan with had the following thoughts on it:
I've noticed that American discourse tends to frame universities as a place that hands out goodies individuals (access to jobs and prestige) vs a place that expands the human capital of the nation. One way to look at Biden's plan is it releases a lot of highly educated people to do more risk taking things like open businesses and more altruistic things like work for non-profits. It's not just good for those people but possibly everybody else in society.
This comment gets at the heart of a very particular way in which too many of today's political leaders fall short when compared to their predecessors. Instead of elected officials (particularly those in the GOP) using their positions to govern in a way that benefits as many people in their particular sphere of responsibility as possible, many choose instead to validate and amplify a false individualism. They deliberately heighten the "us vs them" dynamic that already exists in the country to retain their own power, defining more and more Americans (those eligible for student loan forgiveness in this case) as an unworthy "them". However imperfect Biden's debt forgiveness plan is, it at least attempts to do something for the benefit of a broad set of Americans who can use the help.
MLK Day 2022
The third Monday in January is here, and once again people who oppose everything Dr. King stood for are abusing the one line they know from the I Have a Dream Speech (because they don’t know any others) for their own political ends. This annual whitewashing of King’s legacy only succeeds to the degree it has because the people doing the whitewashing don’t dare venture beyond the confines of that line in that speech because too much of what he written stands in direct opposition to their political aims. This applies not just to the secular, but to the religious as well.
One of my cousins read his children Letter from Birmingham Jail yesterday. This letter is where we can find the phrase “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This letter is also where we can find this phrase: “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider”. You can be certain that none of the hypocrites quoting King today will quote that. Decades after this letter was written, we’ve seen how this country continues to treat and talk about certain immigrants. Decades after this letter was written, the segregation and police brutality of which King wrote in 1963 are still problems in this country today. Actually reading his letter reveals that direct action was chosen as a last resort, only after the local leaders they negotiated with broke their promises.
This passage from the letter is sadly relevant once again in the wake of GOP measures to make it harder for those in the electorate who oppose their program to cast votes:
An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?
One key insight among many in King's five-and-a-half page letter is the different ways in which the black community responded to the stubborn persistence of Jim Crow & segregation: adjusting to it, being desensitized to the problems of those black less secure economically and academically than themselves, or bitterness. His warnings about what could happen if the nonviolent efforts for justice he supported were rejected would unfortunately become true--not just in the immediate wake of his assassination five years after this letter, but many times in the wake of police violence resulting in the death of someone in their custody (and/or acquittals as the result of the rare court trials officers faced for such violence).First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
King’s decades-old criticism of the contemporary Christian church in the America of his day should shame today’s Christian church:
The hypocrites referencing King on this day are doing things like invoking his name in support of "All Lives Matter", or to support their bans on Critical Race Theory (which could pretty easily prevent children in our public schools from actually learning anything about King's letter). Some More News has a hilarious, profane, and correct take on the annual whitewashing of King's legacy.The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.
1/6 and 9/11
Absent from much of the written commentary I've read about the insurrection at the US Capitol last year has been any mention of how much the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks helped to pave the way to where we are now. A friend sent me this piece by a Canadian professor which serves as a good example of what I mean.
Though he correctly identifies specific individuals and economic forces going back 40 years that transferred wealth upward even as they directed discontent (if not rage) about this state of affairs against poor and minority populations at home and "foreign aid" abroad, there is not a single mention of the nation's response to the 9/11 attacks. The nation's lurch toward authoritarianism in the wake of those attacks was bipartisan. Just a single congresswoman, Barbara Lee of California, voted against the open-ended Authorization for Use of United States Armed Forces which would later be used to invade Iraq on pretexts that would prove false. Large bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate drafted and approved the Patriot Act for George W. Bush to sign into law. It authorized the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. George W. Bush's administration engaged in warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans, extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects, and torture of those same suspects. Enemy combatant status was created out of thin air, as were the military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--all to deny people the rights they should have had under our Constitution. The NYPD illegally surveilled Muslims both inside and outside New York City for over a decade after the attacks. The LAPD tried and failed to create a similar surveillance program in 2007.Thomas Homer-Dixon’s piece mentions Christians just twice, once as fertile soil for the seeds of white nationalist great replacement theory to take root and flourish, and again as a group that would be super-empowered in a second Trump administration. He projects a rise in violence by vigilante, paramilitary groups in the same sentence, though the use of Christian symbols and rhetoric by such groups has a history stretching back well over a century in the US. The involvement of conservative Christian groups in the insurrection is much less-surprising however when you look back at their response to 9/11. When surveyed in 2009 by the Pew Research Center, a majority of white evangelical Protestants said that torture against terrorism suspects could sometimes or often be justified. This belief was held both by majorities of Christians who attended church a few times a year or monthly, and those who attended church weekly–or more often. Years after the original survey, you could even find a piece like this one in The Federalist quoting Bible passages and Thomas Aquinas to argue that Christians can support torture.
Not mentioned at all in the Homer-Dixon piece–significant increases in anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The first murder victim of an anti-Muslim hate crime turned out to be a naturalized American citizen, Balbir Singh Sodhi. The turban he wore in adherence to the Sikh faith was sufficient cause for a bigot to murder him. Anti-Muslim sentiment would later take the form of the birther conspiracy, for whom Donald Trump would become the most powerful cheerleader. We have seen other anti-Muslim murders due to the ignorance of bigots (in Olathe, Kansas) as well as violent assaults. We’ve also seen the political right demagogue Park51 into the “Ground Zero mosque”. That same year (2010) saw the introduction of anti-Sharia bills in a significant majority of our 50 states. The number of conservative professed Christians who believed (and perhaps still believe) the birther conspiracy is in retrospect perhaps one explanation for the ease with which the QAnon conspiracy spread within the same community. But looking back a bit further, that community’s response to 9/11 might have revealed a predisposition to conspiracy theories more generally. In 2006, a division of the denomination publishers for the Presbyterian Church published a 9/11 conspiracy book.
There will certainly be more commentary about January 6th as this year progresses–particularly as more insurrectionists plead guilty to the crimes with which they’re charged or (finally) face trial. But the absence of a full reckoning with how this country’s responses to 9/11 helped pave the way for 1/6 will prevent us from fully understanding that event–and might enable the next insurrection to succeed.
Thoughts on the Many Shades of Anti-Blackness
A friend shared the following tweet with me not long ago:
Whoever Jen Meredith is, she is hardly alone in sharing these sentiments. Few routes to acceptance by the still-predominant culture in the United States are shorter and more reliable than implicit or explicit criticism of the black community in America whose heritage here stretches back even before the founding of the country as we know it. There have always been people who buy into the model minority myth. The term “Asian” elides significant differences between its various subcultures (and erases the parts of that very large community which don’t support the immigrant success story in exactly the same way some white conservatives do). People from the Philippines have meaningfully different backgrounds than those from South Korea, Pakistan, and Vietnam to take a few examples.
Meredith is (obviously) sub-tweeting American blacks with her entire comment, but the “no ethnic leader” part in particular betrays a very specific ignorance about the history of black people in the United States. Black people in this country have never just had one leader. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. are just the ones that recent history (the vast majorities of which have not been written by black people) has acknowledged. Less often-noted are men like Marcus Garvey, who while Jamaican (not American) nevertheless found a receptive audience among some black Americans (including the parents of Malcolm X). A. Philip Randolph was no less important than either of those men. The same can be said of Bayard Rustin, Fred Hampton, W.E.B Dubois, or Booker T. Washington.
Asians in the United States may not have had a singular figure that history chooses to recognize in this way (or a Cesar Chavez, like the Mexican-American community), but perhaps that’s in part because they haven’t really needed one. This doesn’t mean they haven’t even experienced racism in this country. The federal government passed laws against Chinese immigration and some were even lynched in California the way they did blacks in the South. Japanese-Americans were put in concentration camps and had their property taken. But at least they had property to take, which could not be said of black Americans in many cases. One Asian-American experience which may not be broadly known, but is emblematic of the subtleties of racism in this country, is that of the Mississippi Delta Chinese. The entire project is well-worth reading and listening to in full, but here is one part which stood out to me:
After WWII, China was an ally to the United States and then the rules relaxed; I think it was in 1947 or 1948. After the war, Chinese kids were allowed to attend white public schools, so that was the year that I started first grade.”Issac Woodard was just one of many black veterans of WWII who was attacked just for wearing his uniform around this time. Some black veterans fared even worse than Woodard. The US military didn't desegregate until 1948. Over two decades would pass before schools in Yalobusha County, Mississippi (and the rest of the state) would finally desegregate. At the same time members of the Asian-American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) community were attending better-quality schools and building wealth, many black military veterans were being denied the benefits of the GI Bill. Black people resorted to overpaying for housing via contracts, due to racist real estate covenants and redlining by the Federal Housing Administration. All of this happened before you even get to the ways in which federal civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing legislation have been actively undermined or passively neglected from the Nixon administration forward.
When your experience (and your parents' experience) of the United States doesn’t include the combination of chattel slavery, pogroms, property theft, terrorism, segregation, and other aspects of the black American experience, you’re bound to see this country differently. That’s why you can (unfortunately) hear some of the same anti-black American sentiments from black immigrants to this country. Particularly as someone who writes software for a living and leads teams of software engineers, I have more common experiences with my fellow church members, classmates, and co-workers from India, China, and the Philippines than I do with some black people with hundreds of years of heritage in this country.
Finally, it is exceedingly unwise to underestimate the growing political power of the Asian-American & Pacific Islander community. This movement with “no ethnic leader” (as Meredith claims) got federal legislation passed against Asian hate crimes—in our current political environment—when we still don’t have a federal law against lynching after over a century of attempts to pass one. It’s all well and good to talk about having agency in one’s life. I am doing my best as a parent to teach my own children the same lessons about making good choices that my parents taught me. But criticisms of the American black community that fail to acknowledge how an unjust society increases the difficulty of making wise choices are dishonest.
Why Conservatives Are Anxious About America
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cultural domination of progressive views on race, sex, immigration and other topics in mainstream media and academia
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the distortion or banishment of other views on those topics from those institutions
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the prospect of irreversible cultural change
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It suggests that despite fairly broad, moderate conservative control of the country's political institutions, conservatives want their views of race, sex, and immigration to control cultural institutions as well
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it suggests that the ongoing, multi-decade project of building competing conservative institutions has failed to produce any prestigious ones
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Note the absence of any explicit mention of economic issues in the list of topics driving conservative angst
Only a Little Forgiveness for Old Debts
I came across this parsimonious student loan forgiveness proposal in a tweet earlier today. The author, Beth Akers, even had the nerve to call this stingy proposal a student-loan jubilee. The $5000 (which isn't even cash, but a 1-time tax credit), is just 1/6th the average total student debt for recent college graduates. She ends her piece this way:
More than half of Americans have built their lives and made ends meet without a college degree. Call universal student loan cancellation what it is: elitist.
The conservative think tank crowd never seems to have a problem with the government giving away money to businesses, and are quick to hand wave away any evidence of abuse of such programs by big businesses. But the moment there's even a chance of the government doing something to help individuals, we get to hear a lot of concern about taxes and budgets, along with faux populism.
A cursory amount of digging reveals that the picture of who owes student loan debt is different than the stereotypical "whiny millennial" (some of whom are much closer to 40 than they are to 20). A Forbes piece from February of this year is particularly enlightening. The piece is worth reading in full but here are some of the facts I found most interesting:
- Of the $1.6 trillion in student debt owed, Texas and Florida rank 2nd and 3rd in the number of borrowers and amounts owed (California and New York rank 1st and 4th).
- Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan are also in the top 10 by number of borrowers and amounts owed
- Arizona and Florida rank 1st and 3rd in the nation in average student loan debt per capita
- Over $300 billion of that $1.6 trillion is owed by people aged 50 or older.
- The 50+ cohort of student loan borrowers is about the same size as the 24 and younger cohort (a little over 8 million borrowers), but the amount they owe is nearly triple the size of their younger counterparts.
So not only is student loan debt not merely the province of the young, nor is it restricted to "coastal elites". You could be eligible for retirement and still owe Sallie Mae. If the student loans you owe are private, there's no guarantee that debt will be forgiven upon your death.
I am quite fortunate when it comes to student loan debt. Graduating with a computer science degree from a state university with zero debt (thanks to parents who paid in full, and a state smart enough to subsidize in-state tuition) meant that I didn't incur any student loan debt until I decided to go to grad school. In the interim, I was able to buy a home.
Attending grad school part-time at night while working full-time (as my parents did for their undergraduate and graduate degrees, while raising my sister and I) and paying at least some tuition while in school mean that the amount I currently owe is well below the average for recent college graduates. Even so, it will be another decade from now before I've finished paying off Sallie Mae. I'll be thinking seriously about higher education for my own children then, since my twins will be in high school 10 years from now.
What the green eyeshade crowd is missing is that the $1.6 trillion owed by students is preventing them from putting their earnings elsewhere in the economy, such as home ownership or investment. That debt is almost certainly a factor in whether or not people choose to have children. Akers harking back to an era where a college degree was not a necessity to live a middle class life does not change the facts about the type of globalized economy we live in today. Nor does it change the fact that automation isn't just changing "low-skilled" labor, but also some of the jobs that a college degree formerly provided a gateway to. If you actually want to grow the middle class in the United States in anything approaching a sustainable fashion, a solution to student loan debt (both the current amounts, and a mechanism to prevent forgiven debt from simply growing back to even higher amounts) is just one part of a larger conversation.
Life and Religious Liberty for Me, But Not for Thee
With Amy Coney Barrett now on the Supreme Court and weighing in on cases, the payoff to the evangelical right for their unstinting support of Donald Trump becomes even clearer than it has already been. She joined a narrow majority to block COVID-19 limits on church occupancy. Despite numerous cases of COVID-19 outbreaks tied to church events (whether worship, choir practices, or other gatherings), despite over a quarter million Americans dead from COVID-19, the Supreme Court majority ignored the known science around how COVID-19 spreads because of "religious liberty". Much has been made of the fact that six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, but there were Catholic justices (including the Chief Justice) in the minority. Even the Pope was critical of those protesting restrictions on church attendance.
As someone who felt compelled to quit my first full-time job out of college because of constant pressure from my employer to work on my day of worship (as a Seventh-day Adventist, my family and I typically attend church on Saturday), I am angry that religious liberty is being used as the pretext to invalidate measures intended to preserve public health. When those measures (and stricter ones) have been applied elsewhere (parts of Europe, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, etc), we've seen them work successfully in slowing and stopping the spread of COVID-19. Particularly because the same Supreme Court was not at all concerned about religious liberty when it came to the Muslim travel ban (the Quakers, among others, see the hypocrisy clearly), the ruling seems especially hollow. Plenty of churches (including my own) have stayed remote throughout the pandemic, either broadcasting services from empty sanctuaries except for themselves and musicians, or from home. I've given offering and tithed online. It is by no means an ideal experience, but given my own comorbidities it is better than risking my twins being orphaned.
Because Supreme Court confirmation fights (and the attendant press coverage) have focused so narrowly on where a nominee stands regarding Roe v. Wade, no attention has been paid to their stances regarding other issues quite relevant to life--and death. Invalidating restrictions on church occupancy during a pandemic is just one of the ways in which "pro-life" applies very poorly to describing where a justice actually stands. As the clock runs out on the Trump presidency, the Department of Justice under Bill Barr is accelerating the pace of executions. Barrett has already participated in her first capital punishment case on the Supreme Court. She did not recuse herself, nor register her opposition to the execution going forward as justices in the minority did.
I suppose it has always been this way, but when a lot of people talk about religious liberty, they only want it for themselves--and no one else.
Rest In Peace David Prouse
I’ve loved science fiction and fantasy for as long as I can remember. But I hadn’t thought much lately about exactly where that love began until a phone call from my mom today. She called to let me know that David Prouse had died. While James Earl Jones was the unforgettable voice of Darth Vader, David Prouse was who we all saw.
Before tonight’s conversation, where she reminisced about taking my sister and I to see it in the theater, I distinctly remember her taking me to see Return of the Jedi in the theater when I was 9. I remember the anticipation of seeing and just how much I enjoyed it. But when she mentioned my sister being in a stroller, I paused. Because my sister and I are 4 1/2 years apart, she wasn’t talking about when we saw Return of the Jedi. My mom was talking about the preceding movie—The Empire Strikes Back. While I’ve seen it many times since then in almost every conceivable format save LaserDisc, I didn’t remember the very first time. She thought I would be scared of Darth Vader, but as she told me I mostly stared in awe.
So Rest In Peace to David Prouse. Thanks to you—and my mom—for starting my journey into science fiction.
Murder on the F Train: Vigilantism is America's New Normal
On May 1, 2023, Jordan Neely breathed his last breath on the floor of the F train after another passenger, Daniel Penny, held him in a chokehold for approximately 15 minutes (a few of which were recorded by a freelance journalist named Juan Alberto Vazquez). As is seemingly always the case when a black man dies a violent death in this country, we very quickly learned every possible negative thing there was to learn about Jordan Neely: his mental illness, his dozens of arrests, time spent in prison, previous violent assaults, even a verbal attack on the LGBT community. Even learning Penny's name took quite a bit longer to learn than the entirety of Neely's life story, despite his being questioned by police and released without charges.
Despite Neely's past (none of which Penny could have known before he murdered Neely), the most physically-aggressive action he reportedly engaged in during this encounter was throwing trash at other passengers and throwing his own jacket on the ground. Beyond that, he yelled about being hungry and thirsty and verbally threatened to hurt anyone on the train. And for this--not even a wound to another passenger--Penny attacked Neely from behind and strangled him to death while other passengers watched and two reportedly helped Penny hold Neely down, ultimately leaving him to die on the train floor in his own waste as he'd involuntarily soiled himself as he died.
As I write this on May 8, social media continues to be filled with ex post facto rationalizations of Neely's murder. The volume and frequency of these pro-vigilante, pro-murder takes was such that it brought to mind a literal, Biblical description of the degree of wickedness that prevailed in the world before the flood:
An uncomfortably close parallel to the words of Lamech in Genesis might be those of Filemon Baltazar, who Neely assaulted in 2019.
At least he suggests that Neely should have been in a rehab center. Others lack even that modicum of sympathy.
Here's Batya Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor with Newsweek:
Note the complete absence of any connection between what actually happened, and the hypothetical she's spinning. Note also the shot at men who "just sit there and pretend it's not happening." For Ungar-Sargon, what happened to Neely doesn't happen enough.
This execrable New York Post opinion piece leads off by saying Neely's murder followed "a struggle with other passengers" and uses his death to advocate for involuntary commitment, despite the decades-ago push for deinstitutionalization of the mentally-ill led by Ronald Reagan as governor of California, and again by Reagan as president at the federal level. Reagan signed a bill repealing the vast majority of The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, signed into law by Jimmy Carter. This legislation would be the only attempt at the federal level to improve mental healthcare in this country for the next 30 years.
Beyond the usual bots and low follower count trolls on Twitter amplifying longstanding political, racial, and other divides the country has, two commentators stand head-and-shoulders among the chattering class in their response to this murder: Thomas Chatterton Williams and Conor Friedersdorf. Both have displayed over the course of days levels of ignorance, cynicism, and moral bankruptcy I still find shocking despite their previous displays of most of these same qualities in different circumstances.
LARPing is "live-action roleplaying"--Williams is accusing people protesting Neely's murder of pretending to be concerned. He goes on to blame "the state" for Neely's death (instead of Penny, who actually murdered him). Friedersdorf goes on to display an ignorance of the impacts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott so profound, so fundamental, that I actually felt despair that someone so illiterate in this country's history continues to have the platform he does to shape the viewpoints of people who actually hold power in this country.
Today, Williams exceeded his previous heights in advocacy for vigilantism with this gem:
When I read this, I was reminded of Tucker Carlson's defense of Kyle Rittenhouse's vigilantism in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Like Ungar-Sargon, he refers to Neely's past actions--which no one on the train could have known about beforehand. Williams projects these past actions forward as a justification for Neely's murder. Instead of seeing Minority Report as a cautionary tale, he sees it as an affirmative path to take only worse--because civilians should feel justified in using deadly force against someone who *might* do something.
Thankfully, Janelle Bouie pointed to Williams' admitted violent past to highlight the manifold flaws in his hypothetical.
William's response is not merely inadequate, it fails to even acknowledge the numerous examples of youth not being a defense when you are black and male. Trayvon Martin was just 2 years older than Williams (and hadn't assaulted a girl in front of multiple witnesses) when George Zimmerman decided to follow him (and ultimately kill him). Ahmaud Arbery was just 25 years old when he was lynched by 3 men attempting to "detain" him for a crime they believed he'd committed.
In my view, Neely's murder, the recent wave of shootings of people who accidentally went to the wrong house (or car, or driveway), or were playing hide-and-seek too close to the wrong home, and a recent attempted vehicular homicide against homeless people are all connected. So is the militia movement that has taken it upon itself to "police" the southern border, and those who volunteer to "protect businesses from rioters". More and more often, these vigilantes are aided and abetted by officials elected to maintain law-and-order and/or paid and trained to do so (such as the police). NYPD tacitly endorsed Daniel Penny's vigilantism by not taking him into custody. Governor Hochul's comments effectively blamed Neely for his own death. Hochul does not share a political party with Greg Abbott, but her comments about Neely are no less dehumanizing than his regarding the victims of a recent mass shooting. He called them "illegal immigrants", completely ignoring the fact that they were victims of murder in the state he is governor of. The proliferation of so-called "stand your ground" laws not only remove any requirement for those who own guns to demonstrate competence in their use, they eliminate prosecution and penalties for incompetent use--even if it results in the death of innocents. Despite the strong correlation between weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun violence and gun death, states controlled by the GOP continue to weaken the laws further.
Despite the high-minded talk of those who claim to value life, all the available evidence points to life being even cheaper than ever. The backlash against the "racial reckoning" that some thought would happen in the wake of George Floyd's murder at the hands of the police has proven so strong that we've retreated to the point where a black man like Thomas Chatterton Williams is loudly advocating in favor of a vigilantism that has often claimed black men as victims not just in this country's long-ago history but in its recent past and present.