Postmarks Revisited
Since my initial post on Postmarks, I made two minor changes to my bookmarking site:
- I edited src/pages/layouts/main.hbs to eliminate the Login link from the header and the footer
- I also removed the About link from the header
- I moved the divider in the footer after the About link from outside the {{#if loggedIn}} to inside
This gives the site a slightly cleaner look I prefer.
Digging into the admin functionality a bit, I noticed the input textbox hid most of the JavaScript for the bookmarklet, so I replaced it with a readonly textarea and gave it the same id as the textbox I removed. This preserved the functionality while making all of the javascript visible. The bookmarklet itself works nicely, opening a pop-up that autofills the New Bookmark page with the URL, title, and description fields. When adding a bookmark, I forgot that multi-word tags weren't allowed and got an error message like the one below:
invalid tags: #invalid tag must be in #hashtag #format, tag name supports a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and the following word separators: -_.
When you get that error, the bookmark isn't created. I updated line 11 of src/pages/partials/edit_bookmark.hbs to add the following reminder:
Remember: multi-word tags must be separated by dash (-) or underscore (_).
A nicer way to handle this might be to prevent the save attempt and allow the bookmarker to correct the bad tag. If I figure that out at some point and implement it, the new capability will be available for everyone who opts to remix my version of Postmarks.
Remembering 9/11
It’s hard to believe 22 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of that day. I still remembering being on the way to work when I heard the news on the radio of the first tower being hit by a plane. I still remember a lot of my coworkers with children in school leaving the office early to pick them up and go home. I still remember how soon afterwards letters laced with anthrax started showing up in the mail.
I personally didn’t lose any family or friends in the attacks. But a girl I was seeing at the time lost her older sister, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald—a firm noted often in the news at the time for just how much of their staff they lost. I remember spending a lot of time on the road between DC and New York visiting her, and supporting her and her family at the memorial service.
The intervening years have made certain memories fuzzy—fuzzy enough that some people engage in mythmaking when it comes to the country being unified by the attacks. But Spencer Ackerman remembers the way things really were--particularly in New York City. This piece I read yesterday is a stark reminder of how our nation actually treated Muslim Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He plans to post follow-up pieces that I am looking forward to with great interest.
I wrote last year about how this country's response to 9/11 would ultimately pave the way for insurrection on January 6th. Were I to update that piece today, I would certainly connect Trump's various (and ultimately successful) attempts at Muslim bans to the surveillance, harassment, intimidation, and discriminatory treatment inflicted on Muslims in Brooklyn by the NYPD, INS, and FBI in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Years after it happened, I recalled that Trump's initial Muslim ban kept the spouse of one of my co-workers at the time from joining him. A second co-worker at the same job was married to a man from Somalia, one of the seven countries subject to that ban. Ending birthright citizenship (in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) is another idea that gained currency on the political right during Trump's term, but has had advocates among so-called conservatives before then.
Other anti-democratic impulses unbound by terrorist attacks of 9/11 threaten every American today, but especially those of us more traditionally and more easily "othered". The Department of Homeland Security was a bipartisan creation, certain of whose component parts were responsible for civil rights abuses of protesters ordered by Trump, others who were responsible for the vile child separation policy at our southern border. The moral outrage that is Guantanamo Bay remains open, despite the end of US troop deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if Biden wins the 2024 presidential election (which is by no means a certainty), small-d democracy remains under threat in this country.
The Presumption of Belonging
In my occasional attempts to learn from people I disagree with, I watched an episode Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast. Her guest last week was Irami Osei-Frimpong, a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Georgia and podcaster who has self-branded as The Funky Academic. She invited him on to talk about SCOTUS decision ruling affirmative action unconstitutional (among other topics), but embedded in the first 40 minutes or so of the conversation (beginning around the 16th minute) was a description and critique of American identity from Osei-Frimpong that I found so challenging that I found myself replaying it to make sure I was actually hearing what I thought I did. What kicked off Osei-Frimpong's response (which I attempt to transcribe below) was a prompt from Gray regarding a recent interview Senator Tommy Tuberville did where he conflated what white supremacy is with what being an American is.
Osei-Frimpong: I think it's fair to conflate American identity with white national identity insofar as we are the other. No one conflates American identity with the descendants of slaves. Our Americanness is as a degradation of our being. So we exist as like a not real people. There is a way in which black failure is American, but black self-determination would be communist. Part of an American identity is to treat black people like garbage.
Gray: So the condition of our American status is to be a second-tier, third-tier, fourth-tier member of the society.
Osei-Frimpong: And a condition of their American status is to think of us as second-tier, third-tier, fourth-tier. I think part of the middle class identity is to flee black people. Lineage is the American identity. People have to think about Jim Crow as a forward-facing regime. They were saying that not only are you not anything, but your grandkids won't be anything. The regime as always not just about you, but of your line. Your great-grandparents weren't anything, and your grandkids won't be anything. The regime is realized when you look at the outcomes today. The problem is we think of the Jim Crow regime and race in general as like a static moment ... when it was always a statement about a line in the past and a line in the future. And I think that line has held. Anywhere there's a congregation of black people--80% or above--it's not someplace that you necessarily want to drink the water. And that is not an accident. People think that Jim Crow just affected lineage property holders--which is true. But it's not just in property holding. [Jim Crow] overdetermined all of our institutional relationships, including the church, education, and family. I think the black family was overdetermined by the needs of surviving Jim Crow.
a recent Bad Faith Podcast with guest Irami Osei-Frimpong
Osei-Frimpong's argument regarding the status of black people in America isn't entirely new (as captured in book-length treatments of the subject I've read this year), but neither Wilkerson nor Reed make the case as bluntly that this lower status is a condition of being seen as being American and belonging in America. Through the lens of Osei-Frimpong's argument, the ongoing discourse around Florida's recent changes in what is taught about slavery can be seen as a variation on this idea of belonging. Defenders of these changes (including Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis) insist on the idea that black people benefited from enslavement because of the skills they gained--as if black people had no skills other than those taught by their enslavers. These are not the arguments of those who actually see black people as equals.
Some defenders of these new standards, such as Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review, have gone so far as to call Vice President Kamala Harris a liar in print for characterizing the changes this way. But the list of items he compiles, rather than refuting Vice President Harris' point, actually does more to confirm it. Some examples:
- Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit
- Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures
- Instruction includes the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery
- Instruction includes the comparative treatment of indentured servants of European and African extraction
- Exams the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619
- Instruction includes how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey)
- Instruction includes the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries (i.e., Muslim slave markets in North Africa, West Africa, Swahili Coast, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Indian Ocean slave trade)
- Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian cultures (e.g., Sumerian law code, Indian caste system)
- Instruction includes the similarities between serfdom and slavery and emergence of the term "slave" in the experience of Slavs
These and other examples make it clear that the aim of this new curriculum is less to educate children regarding the nature of slavery as practiced in American colonies and what would later become the United States, than to draw false equivalences between it and how slavery was practiced in other cultural contexts. Not once in Cooke's analysis or his numerous bullet points does term "chattel slavery" appear, which would make clear that enslavement was not merely permanent for those originally enslaved, but generational--passed down to any and all descendants.
Others of Cooke's bullet points seem selected to convey the message that other enslavers were worse than colonial (and later American) ones, such as these:
- Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease).
- Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.
Still other select bullet points seek to valorize those in power and the prevailing system of governance as actually working to end slavery, such as these:
- Instruction includes examples of how the members of the Continental Congress made attempts to end or limit slavery (e.g., the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that blamed King George III for sustaining the slave trade in the colonies, the calls of the Continental Congress for the end of involvement in the international slave trade, the Constitutional provision allowing for congressional action in 1808)
- Instructions includes how different states passed laws that gradually led to the abolition of slavery in northern states (e.g., gradual abolition laws: RI Statutes 1728, 1765 & 1775, PA 1779, ma & NH 1780s, CT & NJ 1784, NY 1799; states abolishing slavery: VT 1777).
- Analyze the contributions of founding principles of liberty, justice and equality in the quest to end slavery
- Instruction includes the contributions of key figures in the quest to end slavery as the nation was founded (e.g., Elizabeth "Mum Bett" Freeman, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay).
- Instruction includes how Abraham Lincoln's views on abolition evolved over time.
The word "ordinance" appears a handful of times, but never in connection with the ordinances of secession, the resolutions drafted and ratified by each of the 13 Confederate states regarding why they were leaving the Union (at least 3 of which mention slave-holding in the context of property rights as their rationale).
One of my personal frustrations with this curriculum controversy being focused on slavery is or isn't taught is the ways in which it has diverted attention from the virtual absence of any instruction at all, proper or otherwise, about Reconstruction and Jim Crow--a period of history spanning nearly an additional century after the end of the Civil War of what Osei-Frimpong described as "a degradation of our being". Cooke's analysis mentions Reconstruction just 3 times. Here is one of those three mentions:
Instruction includes how whites who supported Reconstruction polices for freed blacks after the Civil War (white southerns being called scalawags and white northerners being called carpetbaggers) were targeted.
Florida's State Academic Standards -- Social Studies, 2023, page 16
Cooke's callout on how Reconstruction impacted certain white people (rather than the black people it was intended to protect) reveals as much or more about his priorities than it does about the curriculum in question. References to the word "compromise" in the standards do not appear to include the compromise of 1877 (of which Florida was one of 3 key states), which ended the Reconstruction era and helped usher in Jim Crow. Entirely absent from his analysis is any mention of the Great Migration, which was at least in part motivated by the abandonment of Reconstruction by the federal government (which rates a scant 6 mentions in an academic standards document 216 pages long).
Jim Crow is mentioned just once in Cooke's analysis, and only five times total in my own search of Florida's new academic standards. This takes me to Osei-Frimpong's second point regarding Americanness and blackness, that Jim Crow is incorrectly seen as a static period in time. His characterization of Jim Crow as a statement about the past and future lineage of black people being "nothing" crystallized for me in a way few previous commentaries have that the intent of Jim Crow's architects was to ensure a permanent black underclass in the same way their predecessors intended chattel slavery to be permanent. When Osei-Frimpong says "there is a way in which black failure is American", to me it is a reminder of the ways the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, and Jim Crow, deliberately omit from the record all the ways in which black achievements were consistently hidden, threatened, stolen, and/or destroyed. As a result, well-meaning bureaucrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would write The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which would be used by some to reinforce their previously-held stereotypes of black people with no acknowledgement of how the necessities of surviving Jim Crow might have meaningfully and durably damaged black families. I'm reminded also of the ways in which prominent conservative black public intellectuals (Thomas Sowell in particular) both in the past and in the present have used the economic success of black immigrants like my own parents as a rhetorical cudgel to beat native-born black Americans for their relative lack of success with no acknowledgement of the differences in the circumstances between us or the impact of the multi-generational denial of the benefits of first-class citizenship on black citizens.
Defenders of these new standards include two members of the working group who created them. Dr. William Allen's training is in political science (not history). The initial defense has been thoroughly discredited by Twitter threads like the one below:
The thread above calls out numerous errors in the examples provided, such as:
- Numerous black men who were actually born free, or born after 1865
- Multiple incorrect professions
- Including the free white sister of George Washington
- Including a man never actually freed from enslavement
At least so far, I have yet to read or hear any responses the working group to these errors.
One of the things the Supreme Court did in striking down affirmative action was essentially state that black people do not belong in elite higher education. Antonin Scalia said exactly this during oral arguments for Fisher v University of Texas in 2015, a case brought by the same activist behind Students for Fair Admissions v President and Fellows of Harvard College. By contrast, the much older practice of legacy admissions--despite its history and origins as an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Asian set-aside for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants--went unchallenged by the Asian students of Students for Fair Admissions. Legacy students are presumed to belong at elite institutions, even though in many (if not most) cases their academic marks would disqualify them for admission absent their legacy status. The presumption of --if not entitlement to--belonging in elite higher education is apparently acceptable for everyone except (most) black people. It is very much at odds with the metaphorical pats on the head black people receive for their achievements in Florida's new social studies curriculum.
CRT bans in schools, book bans in schools and public libraries, and threats to corporate diversity initiatives are far from the only things I expect to see when it comes to challenges to the presumption that black people in this country belong anywhere we can currently be found. Within the past day, Matt Gaetz introduced legislation intended to end birthright citizenship--a direct challenge to the text of the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to former enslaved people (as well as to me). Gaetz has plenty of company in seeking to restrict citizenship, including presidential candidates who themselves would not be citizens without the 14th Amendment like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. We've reached a sad state as a nation when those who seek its highest office have closing the constitutional path to citizenship as part of sales pitch to the GOP electorate.
GOP state officials threaten legal action over company diversity policies
A group of Republican U.S. state attorneys general on Thursday warned the country's largest companies that certain workforce diversity policies could be illegal in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision effectively striking down affirmative action in higher education.
— Read on www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-state-officials-threaten-legal-action-over-company-diversity-policies-2023-07-13/
Not even a full month after this post suggested affirmative action in employment would be the next thing the Supreme Court majority would rule unconstitutional, GOP state attorneys generals have threatened to sue companies they assert (without evidence) have used race-based practices in hiring. Notable among the companies these attorneys general have singled out are Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Uber. The tech industry is an interesting target for these state attorneys general given it's historically-poor track record on diversity across any number of metrics.
A brief look at Apple's inclusion and diversity results show a workforce that is still 2/3rds men over the 7 years (2014-2021) for which they've provided data. Asian representation in their workforce has grown the most significantly over the same period, from 15% to 27.9%, while the percentage of black and Hispanic employees have grown by much smaller rates. Of the remaining highlighted companies, only Uber employs a workforce fewer than 60% male, and their ethnic diversity numbers have actually gotten worse in some respects (over 10% of their workforce was Black or African-American in 2021, while barely 9% of the workforce is as of the latest metrics published this year). But in the post-affirmative action American landscape, we can now expect even the good-faith efforts of companies to diversify their workforces to be challenged in court and for those workforces to be less-diverse as a result. We will learn the hard way that diversity isn't just a "nice-to-have"; the increasing lack of diversity will result in worse products from companies.
Religious Freedom is a Poor Cloak for Prejudice
One thing I have noticed in the rightward lurch of the federal judiciary over the years, especially the Supreme Court (and rulings that appear intended to repeal the entirety of the 20th century), is how often they grant relief to plaintiffs using religious freedom as their rationale. Such cases used to be about believers being able to observe their religious practice as they chose without being prevented from doing so by the government, or by secular employers, with accommodations being made where possible. At the very start of my career in IT, my employer tried to compel me to work on Saturdays (my day of worship as a practicing Seventh-day Adventist), and I ultimately quit that company rather than yield to the pressure (or pursue a court case).
Now religious freedom in the United States has been distorted to any and every expression of Christian faith in any context, aided and abetted by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, as an exemption to the laws everyone else in this country must adhere to. The latest example of this is the case 303 Creative v Elenis, recently decided 6-3 in favor of 303 Creative. Despite the proprietor of 303 Creative never actually being contracted by a gay couple to create a wedding website, and despite not even having expanded her business to offer wedding website services, "she brought a pre-enforcement challenge to the Colorado law, worried, as Gorsuch wrote, “the State will force her to convey messages inconsistent with her belief that marriage should be reserved to unions between one man and one woman,” according to the Washington Post. So the very prospect of a same-sex couple asking a public business to accept their money in exchange for a service was so alarming that the plaintiff chose to file lawsuits to prevent it. And after numerous losses in lower courts finally received a ruling in her favor from our nation's highest court.
This idea that engaging in a business transaction constitutes an endorsement of a practice someone deems sinful seems to me either a well-intentioned but significant misunderstanding and misreading of scripture, or a deliberate distortion intended to justify ones pre-existing prejudices. When I think about where in the Bible a Christian might look in order to guide their decisions in a matter like this, I think of the works of the Apostle Paul.
After these events Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus having recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. He came to them, 3 and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them, and they worked together, for they were tent-makers by trade. 4 And Paul was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.
Acts 18:1-4
Tent-making was how Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla earned money to support themselves as they pursued their main goal of spreading the Gospel. If any evidence exists that any of them refused to make or sell tents for Corinthians who were sinners, I haven't read it in the Bible. If any evidence exists that selling tents was somehow an endorsement of whatever lifestyle Jews or Greeks or anyone else in Corinth was engaged in, I have not read it in Acts 18 or anywhere else in Acts. So how exactly does a Christian in the United States come to the conclusion that making a website for money (or a cake) if the customers are a same-sex couple is an endorsement of same-sex marriage? Are we to believe that the modern Christian in the United States somehow has less religious freedom than Aquila and Priscilla, who were in Corinth after leaving Rome because Jews were being persecuted by the Emperor Claudius? Reading further in Acts, we find Paul engaging with both Jews and Greeks in Ephesus, Macedonia, as well as in Greece.
Given previous rulings by the Supreme Court, I'm not surprised by the ruling in her favor. What was surprising was this article in The New Republic, which suggests that the plaintiff or her lawyers fabricated a gay couple attempting to violate her religious freedom. If true, the owner of 303 Creative built this entire case on a lie.
Rev. Missouri, senior pastor at Invitation AME Zion Church in Snow Hill, NC is refreshingly blunt in his perspective regarding the dishonesty of 303 Creative’s position. But the questions he ends the threads with are the most important for anyone who points to their Christian faith as the rationale for their actions:
What gospel ethic—what value is communicated in this? Where is the divine in this?
Rev. Solomon Missouri tweets
While Rev. Missouri asks the question of Christian evangelicals in general, it should be asked specifically of white evangelicals. What gospel ethic is communicated by prevailing upon a secular court to sanction your desire to reject the provision of a service to people who haven’t asked you to provide it? A similar question could be asked of the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop. Contrast their example with that of the Apostle Paul, and how he engaged with both Jews and Greeks—both in his trade as a tent maker, and in his ministry work. Christianity spread throughout the Asia of Paul’s day, while many of the membership rolls in Christian churches in the U.S. are shrinking. Numerous Christian denominations (including my own) are still fighting over whether or not women should hold pastoral roles despite claiming to believe in a Bible with numerous examples of women in leadership in both the Old and New Testaments. The same Aquila and Priscilla of Acts 18:1-4 can be found later (in Acts 18:26) explaining the way of God more accurately to the evangelist Apollos. Rev. Missouri's question bears repeating in this context: what gospel ethic--what value is communicated in denying particular titles to women in the service of God? Is the gospel well-served by putting incompetent and/or untutored men in the office of pastor over women to whom God grants the same spiritual gifts as men?
A friend of mine shared this interesting Substack post with me which asserts that religion has become a luxury good. This quote toward the end of the piece is an unfortunately accurate picture of the state of Christianity in the United States today:
Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a “proper” life. College degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don’t.
This is also troublesome for American democracy, as well. Religion, at it’s best, is a place where people from a variety of economic, social, racial, and political backgrounds can find common ground around a shared faith. It’s place to build bridges to folks who are different than you. Unfortunately, it looks like American religion is not at its best.
Instead, it’s become a hospital for the healthy. An echo chamber for folks who did everything “right”, which means that is seeming less and less inviting to those who did life another way.
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/religion-has-become-a-luxury-good
Christianity as practiced in the U.S. today is definitely not inviting to those who did life another way, and increasingly not even to those inside the enclave.
What The End of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Means (and Doesn’t): Addendum
Finally (for now), the end of affirmative action is far from the end of anti-black rulings from this court. Affirmative action in employment will almost certainly be the next thing to be ruled unconstitutional.
June 29, 2023 blog post at GenXJamerican.com
The corpse of affirmative action (except the carve-out for U.S. military academies) is barely cold, and already (July 3, 2023) the anti-woke hounds are baying at the heels of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the workplace.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/diversity-workplace-affirmative-action-dei-3646683b?st=k0ouhiba4domk8q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
But as a brief glance at the historical record will show, complaints about black people getting “special treatment” originating from people who aren’t black have a rather long history in this country. On March 27, 1866, President Andrew Johnson gave an entire speech regarding why he was vetoing civil rights legislation passed by both houses of Congress. Among his many objections were that black people would receive “Federal citizenship” immediately while 11 states were not represented in Congress. The 11 states (of course) were the ones that started (and lost) the Civil War. Having “just emerged from slavery into freedom”, President Johnson questioned whether or not black people “possess the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizens”. But here is the passage that perhaps best explains and exemplifies the sense of entitlement—both then and now—that some have when compared to the black people who built and fought for this country:
The bill in effect proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners, and in favor of the Negro, to whom, after long years of bondage, the avenues to freedom and intelligence have just now been suddenly opened.
Paragraph 4 of the transcript of President Andrew Johnson’s March 27, 1866 speech vetoing civil rights legislation
If there is any meaningful difference between the logic President Johnson applied to reject civil rights legislation and the logic the conservative majority on the Supreme Court used to end affirmative action, it is not readily apparent. Within President Johnson’s objections to the granting of “Federal citizenship” to black people and the states right argument he advances to separate “State citizenship” from it are the seeds of modern arguments against birthright citizenship that we hear today from the same people who find common cause with the Confederates of that day. Should this country put the wrong person in the White House yet again, perhaps birthright citizenship will be among the many rights at risk.
What the End of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Means (and Doesn't)
Even though I believed affirmative action would die at the hands of the conservative majority, it still stings to see that belief confirmed. There are plenty of professional writers you can read that have already dissected the various and sundry contradictions, dishonesties, and foolishness in the text of the majority ruling. This piece is primarily about what is likely to happen in the aftermath of the ruling.
The end of affirmative action will require every public and private university in the United States to eliminate race as a factor in their admissions decisions (if they haven't already done so). In Texas, for example, that means UT-Austin will no longer be able to factor race into such decisions, and neither will private universities like Rice and SMU. However, as Michael Harriot succinctly put it, the end of affirmative action does not mean the end of admission preferences for those whose beneficiaries are primarily white (and/or) wealthy. At elite schools that use legacy admissions, those students will still be accepted at rates from 11% to 30% (far higher than non-legacies). Interestingly enough, some of those advocating for an end to legacy admissions can be found on the campuses that use them.
The end of affirmative action will not mean the end of black people being scapegoated by non-black people for being denied admission to elite universities. When I researched the 6 elite colleges Jon Wang blamed affirmative action for keeping him out of, even after you exclude U.C. Berkeley and CalTech (because California banned affirmative action in higher education via Prop 209 in 1996), the percentage of the undergraduate student body that is Asian-American at the remaining four schools are as follows: MIT (33.9%), Princeton (25%), Harvard (27.9%), Carnegie-Mellon University (over 20%). The percentage of the undergraduate student body that is black at those same schools: MIT (7%), Princeton (9%), Harvard (15.2%), Carnegie-Mellon University (3%). Years before this latest ruling, Abigail Fisher blamed affirmative action for the University of Texas at Austin denying her admission, even though 168 black and Latino students with grades as or better than Fisher's were also rejected for admission.
A friend forwarded me the tweet above. I've reproduced my response to it below:
We aren't "moving onto the content of our character" portion of civil rights. Barack and Michelle Obama are the most elite couple ever to grace the halls of the White House regardless of race. Christians who actually went to church for non-political reasons. And for the entirety of their 8 years [in the White House] the political right in this country talked about them like dogs. And that's before you get to the wealthy mediocrity this country elected as a backlash to his presidency. The idea that affirmative action--a policy to which this country's commitment was uneven at best--should have a time limit of mere decades as a corrective to centuries of chattel slavery and Jim Crow (while legacy admissions continue ad infinitum to perpetuate advantage for wealthy and/or well-connected and mostly white mediocrities who would otherwise be shut out of elite education) has nothing to do with "meritocracy" and everything to do with anti-blackness.
One of my own angry DMs
Contrary to the naive notions of those who have consistently opposed affirmative action—including and especially opposition from certain black conservatives—the end of affirmative action in higher education will not end questions about whether a black person in any elite context has earned their place. Opposition to affirmative action is a very specific, very pernicious form of anti-blackness which rests on two (false) propositions: (1) the number of black people at elite institutions is “unnaturally high”, and (2) native-born black Americans in particular are somehow deficient, even relative to black immigrants. Too many in this country are vested in the notion that no elite institution can be truly meritocratic if too many black people are a part of it. So despite the fact that many in elite spheres are there because of the connections and/or wealth of their parents (rather than their own intellectual or artistic prowess), their presence in the elite is never challenged.
The end of affirmative action will not increase the percentage of Asian-American students accepted to elite universities much--if at all. People of Asian descent are a little over 7% of the U.S. population but are already the largest minority population at elite institutions beyond the half-dozen already named earlier, at three to six times higher a percentage on these campuses than in the general population (over 40% at CalTech for example). Regardless of how badly people want to believe that admission to elite institutions of higher education will somehow be "fairer" in the absence of affirmative action, the reality of college admissions is a far more opaque process. Each incoming class is curated, and the criteria (and how much weight each input to the admissions process is given) are controlled by the institutions--not the applicants. Low admission rates and the relatively small sizes of each class are part of the institutional strategy for maintaining their elite reputations. Legacy admissions almost certainly contribute to the maintenance and growth of the sizable endowments these institutions have. In the years to come, we will see just how few native-born black Americans actually benefited from affirmative action intended for them.
Social media is filled with assertions that elite universities will be able to use socioeconomic status as a proxy for race and still achieve their diversity goals. But this article in the Wall Street Journal reviews data from 8 states in addition to California who banned race-conscious admissions to their higher education institutions and found that there are consistently fewer black, Hispanic, and Native American students despite all the additional efforts the schools put toward achieving their diversity goals through other means. The end of affirmative action will therefore mean far fewer black students (and brown students) at elite higher education institutions. The notable exception to this (which highlights the way in which the Roberts court lacks the courage of its convictions) is military service academies.
It was cowardly enough for Chief Justice Roberts to put the exception in a footnote. But even had he been bold enough to put the exception in the main body of the majority opinion, his message to black Americans is clear: you do not belong in the elite institutions of civilian life, but you are welcome to risk life and limb in the furtherance of this nation's military goals.
Finally (for now), the end of affirmative action is far from the end of anti-black rulings from this court. Affirmative action in employment will almost certainly be the next thing to be ruled unconstitutional. Nor do I believe the court to be finished diminishing the voting rights of this country's black citizens (despite recent rulings preserving what remains of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act).
Memorial Days, Past and Present
According to this article by Dave Roos, the earliest Memorial Day commemoration took place May 1, 1865. Formerly enslaved people and white missionaries staged a parade around the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina, which during the war had been pressed into service as a prisoner-of-war camp for Union soldiers. After the mayor of Charleston surrendered on February 18, 1865 and Confederate troops left the city, newly-freed people exhumed over 260 Union soldiers from a mass grave behind the racetrack's grandstand and gave them proper burials in a new cemetery. Exhuming and properly burying so many bodies took two weeks.
Like too many stories of the African-American experience of this country, it could have remained in the realm of solely oral tradition (if not lost entirely). But a Union veteran’s written remembrance and the persistence searching of historian David Blight (among others) led to a news account of the event in The New York Tribune (founded by Horace Greeley) and another in the Charleston Courier, brought this origin story of Memorial Day into the light.
Memorial Day 2023, the remembrances of American military veterans who have died will include those killed in action as part of Ukraine’s foreign legion. Malcolm Nance, a U.S. Navy veteran intelligence officer and commentator for MSNBC is perhaps the highest-profile of these volunteers, having joined the legion after his contract with MSNBC expired. He (and others) have done this as private citizens, despite repeated warnings not to do so from the Biden administration. In explaining his reasons for volunteering, Nance referenced the story of Eugene Bullard, one of a small handful of black pilots during World War I, and the only one who fought on behalf of France.
I’m especially struck by the story of Cooper T. Andrews, a retired Marine Corps sergeant who reported died last month at age 26 in a mortar attack while helping to evacuate people from Bahkmut, Ukraine (which recently fell to the mercenaries of Wagner Group). Andrews grew up around Cleveland, Ohio and according to his mother his passion for social justice was fueled at least in part by Tamir Rice’s death at the hands of police in 2014. Also according to his mother, his experiences with his Ukrainian unit were better than those during his service in the Marine Corps, where he experienced racism from his fellow Marines. This in particular reminded me of what I’ve read in history about the Harlem Hellfighters, who fought under French command during World War I. As of this writing, Willow Andrews (the mother of Cooper) is still fighting to have her son’s remains returned to the U.S. for burial, having struggled to do so via the U.S. State Department.
It saddens me that even today it can still be the case sometimes that an African-American finds more kinship and common ground abroad with the fighting men of those countries than in the country of their birth and citizenship.
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:
Lamech said to his wives: "Adah and Zillah, Listen to my voice, you wives of Lamech, Pay attention to my words, For I have killed a man for wounding me; And a boy for striking me!"
Genesis 4:23, NASB
An uncomfortably close parallel to the words of Lamech in Genesis might be those of Filemon Baltazar, who Neely assaulted in 2019.
Everyone in different situations has reasons for what they do. The Marine shouldn't be punished. Who knows what that guy might have done to other people," Balthazar said of Neely, who he insisted "should have been in some rehab center."
Alec Schemmel, The National Desk, May 5, 2023, CBS 6 Albany News
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.
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.
Exploring Mastodon Continued: Moving to Hachyderm.io
After almost 4 months of using Mastodon, I found the community on Hachyderm.io (and its administrator, Kris Nóva) so interesting that I decided to move from the larger instance I initially joined (mastodon.cloud). The advice in my first post about sticking with a larger server unless you come across a particular server/community that really interests you still holds. The specific way I applied it is tied to a Mastodon feature I didn't fully grasp the utility of back then: the Local timeline. I wrote about timelines later, but what only became clear after creating an account on hachyderm.io and using Local timeline was that because the vast majority of people there are techies like me, there was a much higher volume of interesting toots there than on a large instance like mastodon.cloud.
One of my Mastodon mutuals switched from mastodon.cloud to hachyderm.io due to racist harassment being directed at his account from a domain they don't block. Not only does hachyderm.io proactively block that domain, they do things like give you a chance to review certain follow requests even if your account isn't locked, as shown below:
The actual steps I followed to migrate were a combination of this article, and this post from Eugen Rochko (in that order). Migrating doesn't delete the old account, but it does disable the old account so it looks like this:
Migrating to a new account meant updating my account metadata as well to verify that new account belongs to me.
Only the posts from my original Mastodon account can't make the move to hachyderm.io--but only because I don't control the instance. If I were willing to run my own Mastodon server, it might be possible to import the archive I downloaded from my previous account and republish them there.
In addition to migrating to hachyderm.io, I provided a small donation to the administrator through ko-fi.com. In addition to the charitable giving I'm doing this year, I'll be putting more into these tip jars for online services that I find valuable. I contribute a bit to the main Mastodon project through Patreon.
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.
Unremarked Corners of Social Media: Substack Notes Edition
It's been about 5 months since Substack introduced Substack Notes. Some Googling to refresh my memory regarding the timing of the announcement and the impact surfaced articles like this Guardian piece that detailed Elon Musk's petty response to the launch of a (much smaller) competitor to Twitter. The shenanigans regarding blocked links, searches, and false "unsafe link" warnings have long since ended. An alert from one of the Substackers I follow prompted me to look at the service after some time away.
Here's my Substack profile:
I wasn't sure what the Claim Your Handle thing was about, so I clicked through to see:
Instead of the suggested handle, I went with the one I'm increasing using on all social media (and this website):
The Notes feature itself is nicely laid out, making it easy to see your "restacks", original notes, replies, and other engagement from the Substack community. I only follow a few writers here, and I suppose Notes makes engagement easier. But it's such a small audience it's pretty easy to see why Substackers came to rely on Twitter so much to drive engagement with their pieces. It might not even be fair to Substack Notes to call it a social media option. I definitely could see engaging with Substack Notes more if I had a Substack newsletter, but I don't write long enough or consistently enough for that to make sense (I also prefer to own my words, hence the choice to maintain this blog rather than let any one social media option own them).