Commentary
2016 Was Not an Anomaly
As of this writing, we lack certainty regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. But we know enough to be sure that 2016 was not an anomaly. Trump has already surpassed his vote total from 2016 by over 4 million votes. In the midst of a pandemic that has claimed the lives of nearly a quarter million of our fellow citizens—due in significant part to the incompetent handling of the pandemic—Trump still has a path to a second term. Despite the open corruption and self-dealing, despite Trump's racism and misogyny, despite impeachment and a trial for pressuring President Zelensky into opening an investigation into Biden, 4 million more voters want a second Trump term.
Those 4 million additional votes for Trump include improving on his performance with Hispanic voters. While it is easier to see hindsight (as most things are), the combination of the Supreme Court preventing Trump from cancelling DACA, the targeting of previous fear mongering about "caravans" not being directed at Cuban-Americans (or not perceived by them as such), and the successful branding of Democrats as socialists by their GOP opponents seems to have resulted in a faster and clearer result favoring Trump in Florida than in 2016. Even some of those targeted by the caravan rhetoric have not been swayed from their support of Donald Trump. This election should mark the official death of the "demographics is destiny" idea that Democrats have been operating under for many years. As Chris Ladd puts it perfectly in this paragraph from a piece written November 2, 2020:
"Democrats’ POC coalition was premised on the notion that these targets of white racism would recognize their common interests and unite in resistance. Thing is, many don’t want to risk sharing the fate of Blacks in America. Educated whites and more affluent immigrants generally feel safe from being treated like Blacks, but less affluent newcomers on the margins of whiteness don’t. Rather than joining forces with this coalition, many immigrants see an alternative path to safety – becoming white."
Becoming White: The Weakness in Democrats' "People of Color" Coalition
Another key factor in Trump's apparent Florida victory: the successful imposition of what is effectively a poll tax by Florida's GOP governor and legislature prevented nearly a million Floridians who had completed sentences for felony crimes from voting. They did this in clear defiance of the 65% of Floridians voted in favor of automatic restoration of voting rights in 2018.
While the Democrats appear to have retained control of the House of Representatives (including all 4 original members of The Squad), the majority will be smaller than it was after the 2018 midterms. Even as Cori Bush joins The Squad, QAnon will seat its first congresswoman, and Madison Cawthorn (known for a bucket list that included visiting Hitler’s Eagles Nest) will become the youngest member of North Carolina's delegation to Congress--and of the entire body.
As significant as the uncertainty regarding the presidential election is, the GOP appears to have retained control of the Senate as well. The electorate not seeing fit to punish any of the senators who have enabled all of Trump’s excesses has created a huge opening for a slightly more subtle authoritarian to successfully challenge Biden, Harris, or whoever else the Democrats put up for the presidency in 2024. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, and/or one of Trump’s children seem likely candidates to at minimum form exploratory committees if not follow through and run to succeed Donald Trump. Even in the event Trump loses the 2020 election, I would not rule out the prospect of Donald Trump running for re-election in 2024.
The Senate remaining in GOP hands even if Biden wins kills most (if not all) prospects for meaningful legislation to reform the issues we've seen during the past four years. If the latest anti-ACA lawsuit succeeds with the 6 conservative justices now seated on the Supreme Court, millions of Americans will lose the healthcare insurance they gained because of it and millions more (including myself) with pre-existing conditions at risk of becoming uninsured (and uninsurable) due to changes in employment. Without control of the Senate, Democrats would have little power to put a legislative fix into law. The same would be true of nearly any law the GOP chooses to make a court case out of. Because this same Senate has stocked the lower court with Trump appointees (mostly political hacks with law degrees rather than serious jurists), such cases reaching SCOTUS if lower courts don't rule the way the GOP prefers seems more likely than not. GOP control of the Senate almost certainly puts a wrench in any plans Biden has for staffing cabinet and sub-cabinet positions requiring Senate confirmation.
While it appears that Biden may yet win the presidency, we know that for the second consecutive election and the third in just 20 years, a minority of American voters has (for now) successfully stymied the will of a majority of American voters at the ballot box thanks to the Electoral College.
Kamala
Perhaps unlike most people of Jamaican or West Indian descent, I was somewhat conflicted by Biden’s selection of her to be his vice president. During her presidential run, a lot of people focused on her responses to the questions about whether or not she smoked weed in college (and what music she listened to). What put me off about her response was not that she smoked, but that she used the Jamaican part of her heritage as an excuse to lean hard into a stereotype about the island and its people. Her father apparently had a similar reaction.
Even without the bad weed joke, some of my conflict was regret that Colin Powell wasn’t first. I came of age politically at a time when his name was bandied about as a possible vice president and when he thought about running for president himself. As a teenager, I was thrilled at the prospect that someone just like me–right down to both parents immigrating here from Jamaica–would run for president. I even said at the time (and again in a recent family group chat) that I’d have volunteered for a Colin Powell presidential campaign.
Despite my conflict, I wish the Biden-Harris ticket success. They would give this country at least a chance to move toward its stated ideals. And as for the commentary in some quarters regarding how insufferable Howard graduates will be, or AKA sorority sister will be, (or Jamaicans), I welcome that prospect. Jamaica has always punched above its weight culturally. A vice president of Jamaican descent would just be the latest example.
Thoughts on "Cancel Culture"
On Twitter, I'm one of those guys who tweets "At-will employment" every time someone loses their job because they did something stupid enough publicly enough that their employer decides the cost of their continued employment is too high. Lately that stupid thing tends to be something racist, and given the various and sundry ways at-will employment has put people--including myself--out of work in the past, I'm 100% okay with racist deeds being added to the list of things that can make you unemployed. Amy Cooper getting fired from her job at Franklin Templeton because she went viral for calling the cops on Christian Cooper (a black man) under false pretenses isn't "cancel culture". That's the downside of at-will employment.
In October 2017, Juli Briskman was out cycling one weekend in northern Virginia when President Trump's motorcade passed her on the road. She gave the motorcade the middle finger. When she informed her employer (a government contractor) that she was the woman in the picture that had gone viral on social media, they fired her. That wasn't "cancel culture" either, just the downside of at-will employment (the wrongful-termination lawsuit she filed the following year was dismissed for that reason). The same is true of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi attendees of the Unite the Right rally who were fired by their employers after being identified. So how do these examples connect to the Letter on Justice and Open Debate?
The signatories of this letter (at least a few of whom went on Twitter to withdraw support from it after they learned who else had signed) purport to be concerned about the weakening of "our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity". This begs the question of what is being debated, and what differences people are refusing to tolerate in favor of ideological conformity. "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces;" hints at one such example, but gets the key fact wrong. James Bennet, who did not read the Tom Cotton op-ed he chose to publish, resigned as the head of New York Times Opinion--he was not fired. The piece in question was updated with a 317-word editors' note indicating the piece "fell short of our standards and should not have been published". Another example "a research is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study", refers to the firing of David Shor for retweeting the work of Professor Omar Wasow. Jonathan Chait writes about it at length in this piece, and argues far more persuasively against "left illiberalism" than the vague and anodyne Harper's letter because he is specific. When I first learned of the Shor firing, it seemed unjust to me--and still does. His employer did wrong in firing him, and doing so smacks of precisely the sort of "woke liberalism" that those to the right on the political spectrum often decry.
Another friend of mine asked for my thoughts on J.K. Rowling and Noam Chomsky signing the letter, so I'll address them specifically here. From the little I've seen on Twitter, Rowling is receiving backlash for some tweets and more detailed opinions regarding transgender people that could be characterized as transphobic. To me it is unsurprising that Rowling would sign the Harper's letter. There is no downside I can discern to signing onto a vague letter about free speech and tolerance for differing views, but it will not prevent those who see Rowling's positions as transphobic from being any quieter or less vehement in their opposition to her opinion. Chomsky is a scholastic giant who has influenced multiple fields of study. He has been an activist for many causes above and beyond free speech, subjected to multiple arrests, and earned a place on Nixon's enemies list for that activism, so unlike many others on the list he has demonstrated the courage of his convictions for decades.
I think Mansa Keita was on target regarding the objectives of the Harper's letter when he tweeted the following:
The term "cancel culture" is simply a rhetorical device meant to control the contours of acceptable speech. The speech and values of those telling you how you should speak is not more privileged than your own.
Another friend of mine quite recently described cancel culture as being "seated somewhere between McCarthyism and market forces". I find this description quite apt as well.
There are certainly other examples beyond those I've listed where the expression of one's opinion resulted in them losing a job. James Damore's firing by Google is one example from my line of work. Rush Limbaugh getting fired by ESPN some years ago is another. Twenty years before Colin Kaepernick began the silent protest against police brutality that would ultimately cost him his career, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was suspended by the NBA for refusing to stand during the anthem. Whether "cancellation" for one's expressed opinion is as prevalent or permanent as some claim is an open question. So is the assertion that many people are self-censoring due to fear of consequences for speaking out. Anecdotes (including those I've shared) are not data.
The signatories (all of whom have substantial platforms of their own from which to convey their opinions) seem to be asking for themselves, and presumably other less-powerful people that controversial speech be somehow more privileged than other speech. They seem to be asking for a "freedom from consequences" that Juli Briskman (and certain Unite the Right rally attendees) were not exempt from. This piece on Digg goes much further in exploring that ground, and deals more specifically with some of the letter's endorsers. If freedom from consequences is at heart what the Harper's letter is asking for, how do we square that demand with the current nature of at-will employment? Instead of vague open letters in magazines with a vanishingly small total circulation, do we reconsider the current nature of at-will employment? Do we ask employers to be braver? Do we go so far as to change laws? Or do we continue to complain about the status quo?
Academic tenure is the concept I think comes closest to what the endorsers of the Harper's letter are asking for. The intent of academic tenure as I understand it (not being an academic myself) is to preserve the freedom of academics to hold a variety of views. Academic tenure is not a guaranteed job for life however, though it is purposely difficult to fire a tenured professor. By the same token, academic tenure is exceedingly difficult to achieve. While this does not mean that a tenured professor expressing opinions I find abhorrent would not bother me any less, the difficulty of achieving tenure limits that possibility quite significantly.
Gatekeepers in spheres beyond academia no longer command the same power they once did. First blogging, then social media platforms disintermediated news organizations as ways of getting one's opinion heard more broadly. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms added virality to the mix. These platforms combined with ubiquitous cellphone cameras have disintermediated the police as the only source of information about their activities, providing brutal documentary evidence of the need for the police reforms the Harper's letter calls overdue. These platforms also make the letter's assertion that the free exchange of ideas is becoming more restricted a somewhat dubious one. There is probably more free exchange of ideas than ever--but within echo chambers of the like-minded. Those who believe in all manner of conspiracy theories can easily find their tribe in the same way fans of particular sports teams, musicians, or hobbies can. Those of us on different sides of any number of issues are more likely to talk past each other--or at each other--than with each other. The echo chambers and the absence of a shared set of facts may be as much of a danger--if not more so--than "cancel culture".
An Imperfect Dividing Line for Honor
America still wrestles with names, symbols and statues. But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, some of the nation’s idols are falling faster than I can type. Just today came news that Princeton University is removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from their school of public policy and a residential college. Woodrow Wilson famously screened the pro-Klan Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915. Earlier this week, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina voted unanimously to remove a statue of John C. Calhoun from their city square (and the removal work has already started, likely with a museum as its final destination). In addition to serving as Vice President, Secretary of State, and senator, Calhoun was perhaps this country’s most ardent defender of chattel slavery. The reckoning has even spread abroad, with protesters in Bristol, England pitching a statue of Edward Colston (a slave trader) into the harbor and Belgium beginning to remove statues of King Leopold II (brutal colonizer of the Congo).
Resistance to removing these men and certain symbols from places of honor still continues however. While Mississippi has begun the process of considering a new state flag (minus the Confederate flag insert), the current flag still has its defenders. A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (whose Confederate troops massacred black soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow, and later led the Ku Klux Klan) still stands in the Tennessee state house after an 11-5 vote against removing it in favor of another Tennessee historical figure.
Two things prompt my attempt to craft a dividing line (however imperfect) for honor:
- The toppling of a Ulysses S. Grant statue in San Francisco
- News of protesters' demands for the removal of an emancipation memorial in Washington, DC.
Adam Serwer’s defense of Grant is reason enough that no state of Grant should ever be abused in such a fashion. Professor Aderson Francois adds Grant’s role in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and in a congressional commission that studied post-Civil War terrorism against black men and women in the South.
Professor David Blight (perhaps the best living authority on Frederick Douglass), writes an eloquent defense of The Freedmen’s Memorial. Before reading his column, there was so much about the monument I did not know:
- 100% of the $20,000 that funded its construction came from the formerly enslaved
- it was in part an homage to Lincoln after his assassination in 1865
- Frederick Douglass spoke at the unveiling--and was critical of Lincoln's attempts to have black people leave the country to establish colonies elsewhere both before and after emancipation.
Rather than take down this monument to Lincoln and emancipation, create a commission that will engage new artists to represent the story of black freedom from one generation to the next. Let today’s imaginations take flight. Perhaps commission a statue of Douglass himself delivering this magnificent speech. So much new learning can take place by the presence of both past and present. As a nation, let’s replace a landscape strewn with Confederate symbols with memorialization of emancipation. Tearing down the Freedmen’s Memorial would be a terrible start for that epic process.In response to the Blight column (which I shared with friends on Facebook), one of them asked me if I felt monuments to Thomas Jefferson should be torn down. Here is my response to him:
The short answer is no. The longer answer is while the hypocrisy of certain of the founders of the United States re: chattel slavery is obvious, they were trying to build a nation. I favor Dr. Blight’s approach of adding more context. The Confederate States of America and those who led it (by contrast) betrayed the nation the founders built and had the explicit goal of breaking this nation in two for the purpose of preserving and expanding the institution of chattel slavery. Statues of those who supported the Confederacy were erected to support the myth of the Lost Cause, and in concert with violence and terrorist acts against black people, despite the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. With the exception of tombstones and gravesites, I would not preserve a single Confederate monument on public land were it up to me. Strike Confederate names from every military base, every road, every school, and/or other public facility as well.The Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin is a place I've visited many times. The words of the Declaration of Independence inscribed on one of its panels are clearly at odds with Jefferson's treatment of the enslaved and profit from chattel slavery. Monticello, Jefferson's primary plantation, is attempting to address this contradiction even today. When it comes to the Founding Fathers, hagiography has characterized too much of our treatment of them. As more is revealed, it seems that what we have been taught as history looks more like propaganda. Continued denial of the unsavory, hypocritical, and contradictory beliefs and actions of America's founders serves the nation poorly. But destruction of their monuments may not serve us any better.
My First Juneteenth
Today marks the date in 1865 when General Gordon Granger read General Order 3 to the people of Galveston Bay, Texas, informing the enslaved there and in all of Texas of freedom that had been rightfully theirs two years earlier. That was essentially the full extent of my understanding of Juneteenth until recently, so I’ve taken the additional time off my employer gave us today to dig a bit deeper. Juneteenth.com, the Wikipedia entry about Juneteenth, and this explainer by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have been my starting points. I shared these links with my direct reports as well as my co-workers before our 2PM close today, and was heartened by how generously they were received.
In today’s national discussions of and writing about Juneteenth, the role of Texas and black Texans doesn’t get nearly the prominence it should. Even as someone who has read The Warmth of Other Suns, and the way that aspects of black southern culture migrated north and west out of the South along with its people, it didn’t occur to me that holidays would or could migrate too. Once I looked at the map of dates when different states granted it official recognition however, it made sense that Minnesota and Florida were among the first states outside of Texas to grant that recognition before the year 2000. In reading a story like this one, it reinforces yet again that we in this country are fundamentally miseducated about its history when it comes to the Civil War, Reconstruction, its failure, and the consequences of that failure.
Even a widely-acclaimed documentary like Ken Burns' The Civil War–which my high school classmates and I watched parts of in history class on VHS after each episode aired–can’t convey just how determined some in this country were to preserve the institution of slavery. Only in reading about Juneteenth did I learn of plantation owners and other slaveholders migrating to Texas and bringing those they enslaved along with them to escape the fighting (and leveraging their distance from Union troops to extract years of additional labor from them). This thread by Aderson B. Francois, professor of law at Georgetown University, tells a story I definitely did not know about concerted efforts to make it unconstitutional to abolish slavery. Not only was the Corwin Amendment passed by both houses of Congress by the necessary margin to proceed to ratification, not only did Abraham Lincoln support it, but my home state was among five that ratified it (and only rescinded that ratification in 2014). Thanks to a friend I met back in grad school, I learned that some of the defeated Confederates attempted to preserve the Confederacy in Brazil.
Spending the time to learn more about Juneteenth has unearthed quite a few things done in previous years to focus attention on it, and the story of black people in this country more generally. This interview with Isabel Wilkerson from 2017 leads off with audio from the 1940s housed at the Library of Congress from a formerly-enslaved woman old enough to remember the original Juneteenth, and reflects upon the death of Philando Castile at the hands of police in the previous year. This piece on the National Museum of African American History and Culture website talks about the legacy of Juneteenth. A brief story from The History Channel originally published in 2015 talks about the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth. I’m not sure how many other holidays have their own flag, but Juneteenth does and has for over 20 years.
Another interesting thing Juneteenth has done in the wake of George Floyd’s murder is spark good faith questions from white friends and co-workers about aspects of black history in the United States. While my heritage makes my connection to the term “black” more complicated, I refer friends to documentaries like 13th, and to the scholarship of Dr. William Darity to learn more about reparations.
In addition to spending at least a part of today learning more, I donated to two non-profits and encouraged friends to do so as well. The Innocence Project works to free those wrongly convicted of crimes. The Equal Justice Initiative operates The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which seek to educate about the history of enslavement, lynching, and mass incarceration of black Americans in the United States. Perhaps this Juneteenth will be the beginning of an annual tradition of learning and contributing to the cause of justice.
COVID-19 Doesn't Care About Our Politics
A friend on Twitter asked the following question:
Does the shortage of ventilators/mask[s] show the cruelty and inefficiency of capitalism? If so, would a centrally planned economy have better outcomes?My response:
It's nothing to do with capitalism being cruel or inefficient, and everything to do with what can happen when the profit motive is the main driver of private sector companies involved in the healthcare supply chain, and in healthcare provision.Even as the total of coronavirus cases worldwide has exceeded 1 million (as of April 2, 2020), it’s too easy to find people trying to use the pandemic in favor of their preferred ideology and against others. From my vantage point, no ideology is faring particularly well against coronavirus. Most of the countries at the top of the charts for total cases and new cases are democracies, but the top 10 also includes China (communist), the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Turkey (effectively a dictatorship).That combined with incompetently led governments both at the federal level and in some states are why the United States finds itself leading the way in the number of [novel] coronavirus cases.
What the coronavirus is highlighting (in addition to the problem of allowing the profit motive to take primacy in healthcare) is the importance of competent government–regardless of what ideology they claim or operate under. Many articles (including this one) have pointed out that South Korea and the United States reported their first positive COVID-19 case on the same day. The differing results of their responses couldn’t be more stark. South Korea has a tiny fraction of COVID-19 deaths compared to the United States, and a very low number of new cases.
Puerto Rico was a harbinger of the botched response to covid-19
In reading this excellent Financial Times piece, I was struck by this paragraph in particular:
People often observed during Trump’s first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. “Trump’s handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,” says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment.
It struck me as incorrect because I thought almost immediately of the poor federal response to the devastation in Puerto Rico wrought by hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017. Plenty of news stories at the time (including this one from the year after the storm) focused on Trump throwing paper towels at a crowd of hurricane survivors. But a closer look at such stories yields many examples of Trump, his administration, and others connected to them operating the same way nearly 3 years ago as they are now in their response to covid-19.
Looking at how the Trump administration talks about death tolls from covid-19 today, I see many similarities to how they talked about death tolls from the hurricanes in 2017. In this US News & World Report story from last month, Trump is quoted saying he's proud of what his administration has done, as well as insisting the death toll could have been much worse and that no one could have done better. In 2017, the BBC News story I linked earlier recounts Trump telling Puerto Rican government officials that they should be proud of the low reported death tolls from the two storms. This led me to another similarity between the handling of the two crises: under-reported death tolls.
The aftermath of the storms in Puerto Rico is when I first encountered the term "excess mortality". Researchers from Harvard did a study (including interviews with some 3000 randomly-selected Puerto Rican households the year after the storms) and estimated that some 4600 people died as a result of the damage done by Hurricane Maria due to interruptions in medical care caused by infrastructure damage such as power cuts and impassable roads, and suicides, as compared to the same time period in the previous year. The power cuts led me to yet another similarity between the aftermath of the hurricanes in Puerto Rico and the federal response to covid-19: contracts granted due to political connections instead of competence.
There have been numerous stories (like this one) about GOP fundraiser Mike Gula getting out of the fundraising business to start a company called Blue Flame to sell N95 masks, ventilators, and PPE despite having zero relevant experience. My home state (Maryland) and Trump's DOJ have both begun investigations into the company after it failed to deliver on contracts it signed. Nearly 3 years ago, a 2-year-old company with 2 employees named Whitefish Energy won a $300 million no-bid contract to restore Puerto Rico's wrecked power grid. The Interior Department insisted that Secretary Ryan Zinke played no role, despite his personal connections to the CEO of that company. Whitefish would ultimately lose that contract and Secretary Zinke would ultimately resign due to pressure from over a dozen different investigations launched into his conduct while serving as interior secretary.
Another way that Trump's response to covid-19 was predicted by his response to the hurricanes in Puerto Rico is in how he praised political leaders who played to his ego and blamed those who did not. In this story, Trump is quoted praising then-governor Ricardo Rossello (who had no criticism of federal recovery efforts) while attacking San Juan's mayor (Carmen Yulin Cruz). His complimentary words to the GOP governors of states (and his attacks on governors Whitmer, Inslee, and others) are very similar.
Further exploration would probably yield more similarities between the botched handling of Puerto Rico's recovery from the hurricanes and the federal government's continuing response to covid-19. Sadly, the island is not fully-recovered after 3 years and is now suffering the additional burden of covid-19. Denials of housing assistance by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the hurricanes is inflicting consequences on Puerto Ricans--all US citizens--to this day.
Philanthropy is Marketing
This post is the product of a conversation with some friends on Slack, on the topic of billionaires and their philanthropy. What kicked off this thread of our ongoing conversation was this New York Post piece on Elon Musk. The column (which is worth reading in full) strings together some of Musk's frankly stupid tweets regarding CoVID-19 before correctly (and brutally) pointing out a few ways his attempts to "save the day" have fallen far short of what he promised. Here's the pull-quote from the piece added to our conversation:
Elon, it’s time to take a breath and think — and possibly research work that may not have been done by you — before you speak. Take a page from the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, and put your money where your big mouth is (without constantly crowing about it). Dorsey, who has teamed up with Rihanna and Jay-Z to donate $6.2 million to CoVID-19 relief funds, recently announced the creation of Start Small LLC, using $1 billion of his own equity to “disarm this pandemic.” After that, the fund will “shift to … health and education” for girls.
According to Wikipedia, Jack Dorsey's net worth is slightly south of $4 billion, making his $1 billion offering against the pandemic at least a quarter of his net worth. The number of other billionaires donating that proportion of their current net worth to such a cause is zero. While that level of generosity is commendable, American society has become far too dependent on the noblesse oblige of billionaires.
Here's the comment from our conversation that prompted the title of this post:
But whining they [billionaires] aren't donating then whine when they do donate and most people haven't donated is also a double standard.
Right, the tax code needs to be fixed but the [R]epublicans have basically twisted the logic of "if you remove these billionaire tax writeoffs and loopholes it's gonna affect average joe making 40k a year" into the mind of their base.
It's some of the best marketing I've ever seen.
Scott Galloway has said something along these lines on at least one occasion: "philanthropy is marketing." For the various and sundry "tech bros" (and others) who do it, it represents a tiny fraction of their net worth for immense reputational gains. Consider Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to reform public schools in Newark, or the Sackler family's support of the arts. Whether or not the money had the desired effect is incidental to how the public regards the people who gave the money--it "launders" their reputations (a necessary washing in light of what we now know about how they earned their billions). Even the amount Charles Kushner spent to buy Harvard a building with his name (and incidentally get his son a spot at the school he didn't earn with his grades) somehow counts as philanthropy.
Unfortunately, philanthropy doesn't just rehab reputations. More and more often it seems to be offered as a substitute for government involvement. Philanthropy has been offered as a substitute for a social safety net funded with taxes before. But it hasn't been (nor will it ever be) adequate to the scale of certain problems American society faces, whether we look at schools, poverty, pollution, public health, or any number of other challenges. The degree to which we have built an expectation of, if not a dependence on, the largesse of the very wealthy for key things is not merely sad but dangerous. Not only can their interests and focus change in a flash, but we have no mechanism for holding them accountable for failure. A properly-functioning society cannot and must not let this status quo regarding philanthropy continue.
(Stay) Inside
[embed][youtu.be/mKzVc0rTh...](https://youtu.be/mKzVc0rThK8)[/embed]
I came across a shorter clip of this great video thanks to a group called the Global Jamaica Diaspora Youth Council (@GlobalJAYouth on Twitter).
Jamaican Anatomy
I remember having a good, long laugh about this particular image when one of my cousins shared it on Facebook awhile back. It reminds me that my parents were right about me being Jamaican, even though I was born and raised in America. When I became a dad, among the many parenting things I did (and still do) was baths. And while I was washing the twins (moreso when they were smaller than now), I would find myself calling out their body parts in patois as I washed them. “Come mek me wash your neck back”, and so on.
When I was growing up, I made no effort at all to speak patois–not even when we were in Jamaica visiting for weeks at a time. I even teased my younger sister for her attempts. But now the joke’s on me–in more ways than one. The patois that sneaks out when I’m not even thinking about it isn’t the only way the heritage is more firmly embedded than I realized in my youth.
Does Diversity & Inclusion Disadvantage Poor Whites?
I came across a Twitter thread today (it begins here) which argued that diversity & inclusion is “systematically marginalizing disadvantaged people from majority groups”. Having read the full argument and thought about it, the assertion has a number of problems in my view. The argument suffers from a fundamental error of attribution. If any member of the majority is disadvantaged, it is in economic status—and capitalism is the primary culprit there. The diversity part of D & I only began in the 1970s and 1980s, adding barriers to inclusion as a focus in the 1990s. Capitalism by contrast has a head start of approximately 300 years.
Capitalism has always exploited the economically-disadvantaged. Ethnicity is a variable often used to determine which of the poor to exploit first. This doesn’t mean that white people could not be disadvantaged—some of them certainly are. We should be clear that whiteness did not always include Eastern Europeans, Italians, Scots-Irish people, etc—they faced real limits in what kind of work they could do, where they could live, etc for many years until whiteness expanded to include them.
That said, Thomas Chatterton Williams (among many others) has already noted that historically, economic alliances between the poor that span ethnicities have been purposely attacked and broken by those who serve the interests of capital. If you’ve read about The Great Migration (black people fleeing north to escape domestic terrorism from the KKK and others between 1915 and 1970), black migrants arriving in the north often faced discrimination and violence from newly-arrived immigrants not yet even fully-included in whiteness.
Beyond the attribution error, the argument fails on a second but related front—the assertion that a single ideology built around D & I is marginalizing poor whites. At least one other ideology exists regarding D & I—an ideology built to oppose D & I. This ideology scapegoats some immigrants for blame when it comes to the economic disadvantage suffered by certain members of the majority—even as the capitalists it supports continue to exploit cheaper, non-white labor for increasing profit. Perhaps even more insidiously, it selects certain other immigrants as proof that capitalism is somehow meritocratic and just when quite often it is not.
To extend the analysis to higher education, the argument against D & I weakens even further by skipping over the gigantic inflation of tuition prices, the continuing existence of legacy admissions (which predominantly favor the majority group, and the wealthiest members of that group), and the role that gifts to schools from wealthy donors have in admission of their children, you should question it. Selective (if not dishonest) arguments like this are why my alma mater (which still uses legacy admissions) was ordered by a court ruling to open its Benjamin Banneker scholarship to non-black students. It’s how Abigail Fisher received a ruling 7-1 in her favor from the Supreme Court on the basis of the 14th Amendment—one of 3 passed during Reconstruction to recognize and protect the citizenship of newly-freed slaves.
I will extend my observations further, into K-12 education. The author of the Twitter thread touched not at all on residential segregation—or the funding formulas primarily dependent on property taxes—which have the effect of reinforcing and perpetuating inequitable access to quality teachers and facilities. I’ve read any number of news stories and watched a documentary about wealthier, whiter school districts breaking away from poorer and more diverse ones. This cannot help but impact what every incoming freshman class at colleges and universities nationwide looks like. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t white people suffering from poverty as well. But a combination of deliberate government action, followed by neglect, combined with white flight does mean the impact of poverty is disproportionately felt by black and brown people. Zoning decisions as well (for example) tend to result in facilities with negative health impacts being situated near neighborhoods that are predominantly populated by black and brown people.
The reality of residential segregation prompts me to touch on a particular pair of tweets in this thread that stood out for me:
“Another thing that bothers me about these movements is their condescending behaviors. Yesterday, a proponent told me I was tone policing persons of color. I wasn’t. I was tone policing an ideology.”
“Whether you believe it or not, this ideology argues that it is totally reasonable to suggest that, systematically, a woman or POC understands *the* majority viewpoint, but members of the majority cannot understand members of minority group.”
As a black man who has navigated majority white schools and corporate environments successfully enough to begin making a six figure salary around the time I turned 33, having at least some understanding of the majority viewpoint in those particular context was necessary to achieve some level of success. I’ve watched enough white flight in real time—even in an allegedly liberal place like Montgomery County, Maryland—over the decades I’ve lived here to be relatively sure that a majority that doesn’t even want to be my neighbor probably isn’t terribly interested in understanding me either.
Whatever you think of D & I efforts in either the academic or corporate spheres (and as an aside I don’t personally believe that representation can or should match nationwide demographics in every field), the argument made in the thread suggests that D & I is somehow more powerful than capitalism—an assertion which beggars belief (to put it mildly).
A Thought on Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap
I listened to this conversation between Dr. Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes with great interest. I found it to be at times thoughtful, challenging, frustrating, and maddeningly incomplete. One example of the incompleteness, if not flawed nature of the conversation was the discussion of correlation between blood lead levels and levels of crime. Hughes cited a book titled Lucifer Curves on this subject, but there is additional scholarship that seems to support lead-crime hypothesis (with lead as a contributing, but not the only factor in crime increasing and decreasing). The incompleteness and the frustration I had with the argument was how quickly Hughes tossed off the assertion that “we’ve already removed lead from fuel”. Absent from this throwaway line are factors like:
- Sources of lead well beyond just fuel, including pipes, paint, dust, toys, pottery, imported canned goods, industrial waste, and batteries.
- In addition to being highly-toxic, there isn’t really a “safe” level of lead exposure. Damage from lead exposure is cumulative.
Retroactive Repudiation
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware that Virginia’s Democratic Party has been trying and failing to navigate a controversy about blackface because both the governor and the attorney general of the state were found to (or confessed to) having donned blackface in the past. I mention this only to provide some context for a Coleman Hughes piece I was sent by a conservative friend of mine. It may indicate something about the quality of the argument that it is written by a black undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia University instead of by any number of black conservatives with more of a track record. But this 40-something graduate of a state university is going to share some of the ways in which Coleman Hughes’ opinion is not merely weak, but dishonest.
Strike one against this piece: he winds the clock back to last year to remind the reader of Megyn Kelly’s brush with blackface, and the resulting cancellation of her show. Omitted from Hughes’ history is Megyn Kelly’s long history of racist comments with her prior employer, Fox. There’s also her regular practice of bringing on racist ex-cop Mark Fuhrman as a guest to comment on various issues. Despite this history, NBC not only hired her anyway, but gave her the timeslot held by two black anchors (Al Roker and Tamron Hall). What really prompted NBC to cancel her show was a decision that the blowback they were receiving from their own staff wasn’t worth it, due to the low ratings of her show.
Skipping past Hughes brief history of blackface, we get to the heart of his issue: a proposed zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who has ever worn blackface, and the way in which it would “thin out the supply of reputable public figures rather quickly”. To make his point, he then rolls out a long list white actors and late-night personalities who have donned blackface for commercials, movies, or TV. He names a few famous dead actors and actresses for good measure. That’s strike two against this piece. It’s a complete dodge of the issue at hand (which is the past racist behavior of elected officials, and what consequences if any should result), and a transparently obvious dig not just at the left, but the “Hollywood left”.
Having chosen Bouie’s argument as representative, Hughes presumes to knock it down with this: “Anyone uncomfortable with the liquidation of much of America’s artistic class should reject the idea of a retroactive zero-tolerance policy toward blackface. Instead, we should take a more measured approach, one that, without minimizing the ugly legacy of minstrelsy, allows a modicum of mercy for the accused and accounts for the intentions of the transgressor.” We’ll call this strike three, because as with seemingly anything involving redress of harm to black people in this country, the “more measured approach” is already regularly-applied–and the way blackface is treated will be no different.
Even as I write this, Northam remains in office, attempts to shame him into resigning having failed. He is still deploying what others have called “the Shaggy defense”, saying he wasn’t the person in blackface or the person in the Klan hood and robe. He’s even attempted to pivot to making some sort of racial reconciliation the theme of his remaining years in office. That effort is off to a poor start, since he made the obvious mistake of calling enslaved Africans “indentured servants” before being corrected by his black interviewer, Gayle King. Mark Herring remains in office as well.
A fourth strike for the piece’s omission of Republicans from among the “professionally offended”. Despite being a party with a candidate for multiple statewide offices in Virginia who campaigned on preserving Confederate monuments, and a state senate majority leader who edited a yearbook at Virginia Military Institute chock full of racist photos and slurs, this same party (to say nothing of the President of the United States) had the audacity to call for the resignations of Northam, Justin Fairfax (the lieutenant governor facing 2 allegations of sexual assault), and Mark Herring (the attorney general).
Hughes quotes Bayard Rustin at length in advocating for his “more measured approach” to those who demonstrated sufficiently poor judgment to think blackface an appropriate thing to do. Rustin is worth quoting in full here:
“I think the time will come in the future when the Negro will be accepted into the social, economic, and political life of our country when it will no longer be dangerous to do this sort of thing, and then, of course, we would not be opposed to minstrels per se.”
If NBC executives felt sufficiently comfortable with throwing two black anchors out of their time slot in favor of a white woman with a history of making racist comments, how accepted are black people really in the social and economic life of our country? If voters could replace the country’s only black president with the man who spent a majority of the preceding decade cheerleading for the birther movement, how accepted are black people really in the political life of our country? With neighborhoods and schools re-segregating and supposedly-liberal northerners fighting the integration of their schools today, it seems we are a long way from a time when we can afford to tee-hee about minstrelsy.
The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World
A piece well-worth the time to read, regardless of your ideology. I disagree with Dr. McWhorter’s characterization of anti-racism as religion (a critique made far more eloquently and convincingly by Dr. Glenn Loury) as overly simplistic. As the eldest child of immigrants who came to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1969, my chief objection to the piece is my parents’ generation being held up as examples that anti-black racism wasn’t sufficiently onerous to prevent their success. I see these examples held up often in conservative circles and they never seem to go beneath the surface.
McWhorter (and others) severely underestimate the degree to which having immigrant parents is an advantage–not just in terms of different expectations, worldview, and culture, but because of the absence of baggage tied to the country’s history. The mantra he blithely refers to in the beginning of that paragraph is one I only recall hearing once or twice in the 24 years I lived at home before moving out–and only in jest, not seriously. Black people whose parents and grandparents were born in the United States almost certainly remember a time when that mantra was also a lived experience. Interestingly enough, the very piece McWhorter links to says the following:
“While U.S. born blacks have had to battle generations of institutional racism, such as predatory lending, that has put them at a socioeconomic and psychological disadvantage that some immigrants have not experienced in this country.“
That shortcoming aside, McWhorter is making a good faith argument. His desire is for meaningful action on the part of progressives to improve the lives of black Americans. While I’m not a fan of the term “virtue signaling” (it’s a pejorative often found in the mouths of conservatives making bad-faith arguments), McWhorter is right in describing what one might call “performative activism” as a dead end.
Ta-Nehisi Coates isn't Voldemort
Calling Out Racist Voters Is Satisfying. But It Comes at a Political Cost.
I’m not sure what took so long for the “broad political left” to conclude that Trump is a racist. Before he even ran for president, there was his cheerleading for the birther conspiracy, his insistence on the guilt of the Central Park Five despite their exoneration by DNA evidence, derogatory comments about Native Americans (back in the 90s when their casinos were competition for his), and being sued (along with his father) by the Department of Justice in the 1970s for discriminating against blacks in housing. It should also be noted that quite a bit of the so-called mainstream media still uses euphemisms to characterize Trump’s behavior.
From this point forward however, Ms. Gray seems to be playing a game. On the one hand, there’s a subtle criticism of The Daily Beast for not publishing the full context of Sanders’ remark. On the other, a concession that “Sanders’s comment didn’t make much sense”. Finally, she tries to rationalize Sanders’ statement by comparing with those of other politicians.
This game doesn’t work because unlike Gillum, McCain, O’Rourke, or Obama, Sanders gave white voters who didn’t vote for black candidates solely because of their race an excuse. He renamed their rationale as “[feeling] uncomfortable” when even the author of this piece concedes it is racist by definition. Sanders engaged in what many in the supposedly-liberal mainstream media have done for the better part of 2 years since Trump’s election–find some reason (any reason at all) for Trump’s victory that didn’t involve racism. Many column inches were written about economic anxiety, fear of change, change happening too quickly, etc. How could it be that people who voted for Obama would vote for Trump, some pieces asked (not mentioning, or purposely ignoring the outcome of the midterm election after Obama’s re-election).
To be fair, the author of this piece is correct in describing the ways that racism is exploited by politicians from both parties. Even in this election cycle, the candidates of color and women who won the nomination of the Democratic party (and the general election as well in some cases) for various seats across the country (New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Minnesota are just some examples) often had to beat the party establishment’s choice to do so.
It is one thing to argue that you shouldn’t label people as “deplorables” or “racists” even if they are. it is quite another to essentially argue that it was ok for Sanders to equivocate because it will gain him necessary white votes in 2020 if and when he runs for president again. The sad truth is that assertions of what type of candidates “the country is ready for” continue to be driven by those with the most backward beliefs and attitudes because too many in the majority who aren’t racist, misogynist, or xenophobic are either silent, or willing to equivocate like Sanders did. Perhaps the challenges to these old and tired stereotypes need to come from the people instead of politicians.
Thoughts on America’s Need for a Healthy Conservatism
The link above is Andrew Sullivan’s latest diary entry for New York Magazine (his regular gig since “unretiring” from blogging). Any analysis of this piece must begin with the picture that precedes the first word. Behind Trump stand Mike Pence, the current vice president, and Paul Ryan, the current speaker of the House and 2012 vice presidential candidate on Mitt Romney’s ticket. Any column that purports to discuss the need for a healthy conservatism and fails to even name two of Trump’s key enablers–both long-time members of the mainstream conservative movement–is already falling short of its purported goal. There is no mention of either man in Sullivan’s column.
Instead, Sullivan puts forward the things he is for as a conservative, and references a book by Roger Scruton that he feels defines conservatism well. While he references a few of the ideals and people I typically hear from other conservative thinkers, what Sullivan ultimately describes as conservatism is ideal mostly disconnected from both history and its current political expression. He attempts to separate the Republican Party from conservatism as well, as if a philosophy of how a state should function can realistically be separated from a party in power claiming to hold its ideals dear. But the most telling omission from Sullivan’s hagiographic treatment of conservatism is Barry Goldwater. Only by not mentioning Goldwater at all can Sullivan allow his false equivalency instinct to take over and blame “the left” for putting his (false) ideal of conservatism under siege and resort to the same tired, pejorative use of the term “social justice” too common among conservatives to describe the advocacy efforts of the left for those who are neither white nor male.
After getting in his requisite dig at the left regarding their attacks on conservatism, I find it especially puzzling that Sullivan’s conservatism is supposedly “anguished when the criminal justice system loses legitimacy, because of embedded racism.” I’ve seen precious little evidence that mainstream conservatism sees the criminal justice system as somehow illegitimate because of its disparate treatment of people of color. Other conservatives, like Sohrab Ahmari, Erin Dunne, and David French have publicly rethought certain positions regarding the criminal justice system in the aftermath of Botham Shem Jean’s senseless death at the hands of the police. Sullivan doesn’t do that here. Meanwhile, New Yorkers of color alone can point to the abuse of Abner Louima by the police (in 1997), the wrongful death of Patrick Dorismond at the hands of police (in 2000), the conditions of Rikers Island, and other aspects of the criminal justice system to question its legitimacy.
So-called mainstream conservatism is deathly ill precisely because it lacks sufficient diversity of race, class, gender, and faith both among its most high-profile advocates and its rank-and-file. The small number of its advocates who are neither white nor male are given prominence only because they speak in favor of the status quo–not for a genuine equality.
Sullivan is correct in describing the degree to which the GOP is actively destroying what he sees as the tradition of mainstream conservatism. They believe in tax cuts to the exclusion of all else–including fiscal solvency. Their deregulatory fervor will result in an environment that will put our health at risk. Their unstinting support of Trump lays bare the contempt the GOP has for the rule of law–unless it applies to those they dislike. Which makes it all the more jarring when he writes: “I also believe we need to slow the pace of demographic and cultural change.” Whether he intends the statement to do so or not, Sullivan gives aid and comfort not just to the immigration restrictionist, but to Stephen Miller and those like him who seek not to slow the pace of immigration but to reverse it. When Sullivan writes that “the foreign-born population is at a proportion last seen in 1910″, he effectively endorses the arguments of Jeff Sessions, who spoke glowingly of a 1924 immigration law with the express purpose of keeping Asians, Africans, southern Europeans, and eastern Europeans out of the United States. He can insist all he wants that seeking to slow the pace of immigration “is not inherently racist”, but when his arguments can’t be meaningfully distinguished from those of Jeff Sessions, he ought not be surprised when he’s not treated as arguing in good faith.
There might be something to the Sullivan argument regarding “elite indifference to mass immigration”, were it not for the fact of a Senate immigration passed with 68 votes in the recent past that didn’t become law because the GOP-controlled House refused to take it up (perhaps fearing it would pass). No doubt some in the GOP want cheap, exploitable labor. The Democrats may indeed encourage it because they think it will get them votes. Neither of this changes the necessity of immigrants to our labor force. There are plenty of difficult jobs Americans don’t want to do that immigrants will do.
The following passage of Sullivan’s latest diary is a fairly tight summary of straw man arguments and falsehoods:
“A nation has to mean something; to survive, it needs a conservative weaving of past, present, and future, as Burke saw it. And you cannot do that if you see this country as a blight on the face of the earth and an instrument of eternal oppression; or if you replace a healthy, self-critical patriotism with an ugly, racist nationalism that aims to restore the very worst of this country’s past, rather than preserve its extraordinary and near-unique achievements.”There may be some that see the United States of America as a blight and an instrument of “eternal oppression”, but I have my doubts that the majority of the left believes this as he infers. The idea that this country ever widely believed in a healthy, self-critical patriotism is laughable. You need only look at school board battles of what to teach our children as history to know that many would prefer to teach them propaganda than the truth. The ugly, racist nationalism to which he refers was never truly past. It may have retreated into the shadows or underground, but was never entirely gone. The continuing battle over Confederate monuments and the endurance of the Lost Cause myth should be sufficient evidence of that.
Sullivan’s idea that somehow a healthy conservatism would rescue the United States from the position it finds itself in is wishful thinking. Without an honest reckoning with Barry Goldwater’s role in shaping what conservatism has become, and how easily the purported conservative party was taken over by Trump, mainstream conservatism will be fully and deservedly discredited.
Empathy Now
Predictably, the calls for empathy for “the other side” have already begun. This tweet from Ian Bremmer is one example:
[twitter.com/ianbremme...](https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1325135387707269121?s=21)
While I understand the sentiment, I find these demands for empathy to be premature. The speed with which these demands have come (and the people they tend to come from) tell me that they do not know anyone who has been hurt by the effects of Trump's policies--much less have been hurt themselves.
One of my former co-workers had his wife prevented from joining him here because of the Muslim ban. He and I were working on a contract at the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service at the time. Another co-worker from that time was married to someone from one of the banned countries. Imagine trying to explain to your child what the president said about the place you come from, and your faith.
For years I have listened to Trump and his supporters attack birthright citizenship--the very thing that makes me an American. I've seen his administration make it harder to become a citizen legally and try to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens like my parents. I have quite a few friends from the places Trump called "shithole countries". I've stressed out along with my staff and friends at work about whether or not their visas would be renewed as they navigated a process made deliberately harder by the Trump administration.
The people who voted for Trump--twice in some cases--meant for us to endure another 4 years of these assaults on citizenship, faith, and dignity. Even as I write this, some of his supporters are amplifying Trump's baseless charges of voter fraud. To ask those who opposed Trump to show empathy to his supporters now shows a real lack of understanding for the profound harm Trump's presidency has inflicted on marginalized people (and likely will still inflict because his presidency doesn't officially end until Inauguration Day in January 2021).
Sympathy may be possible later, perhaps even empathy--even though his supporters certainly displayed none who disagreed with them in 2016--because those of us who at least attempt to take our Christianity seriously believe Matthew 5:44 to be a command, not a suggestion. But it will not be on anyone else's timetable.