Exploring Mastodon Continued: Timelines and Federation
While checking out the Mastonaut desktop client for Mastodon, I came across the following diagram explaining the visibility of a toot:
Still reading? I appreciate your patience. I don't blame any of the folks who noped out of this post after seeing that diagram. It's a consequence of the servers thing I mentioned in my previous post on exploring Mastodon. It's one of many features that highlight who the target audience for Mastodon really is (people like me who used to write software for a living, or still do).
Even for me, the Home timeline is the only relevant one because it will display toots from people I follow--regardless of what server they're on--toots those people boost, and your replies. The Local timeline shows toots from people on the same server where you registered whether you follow them or not. The Public or Federated timeline appears to show toots from people across all the Mastodon servers (again, whether you follow them or not). We’ll see if more time on Mastodon confirms or changes my understanding of the timelines.
Exploring Mastodon Continued: Verification
As I mentioned at the end of my first post on Mastodon, I’ve been following Martin Fowler’s notes on his own journey. His November 1 memo on verification interested me, especially in light of Twitter’s recent update to charge $8 for the blue check mark.
As Fowler explained it, Mastodon being decentralized (unlike Twitter) means verification is up to each server. Whoever runs it can verify members however they wish–or not at all. The approach to verification he describes and implements is what he calls cross-association. By adding a <link> element to the <head> of his personal website with an href attribute for his corporate Mastodon profile, Mastodon “sees” the link and marks it as verified.
I followed Fowler’s example to do the same thing with my Mastodon profile. I updated the header.php of the WordPress theme I’m using this way:
<head> <meta charset="<?php bloginfo( ‘charset’ ); ?>"> <meta name=“viewport” content=“width=device-width, initial-scale=1”> <link rel=“profile” href="//gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <link rel=“me” href=“https://mastodon.cloud/@genxjamerican"> <?php wp_head(); ?> </head>
With that change made, my Mastodon profile now looks like this:
This way, people who follow me on Mastodon know that I control this website as well.
Churches Are Breaking the Law by Endorsing in Elections, Experts Say. The IRS Looks the Other Way.
by Jeremy Schwartz and Jessica Priest
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Six days before a local runoff election last year in Frisco, a prosperous and growing suburb of Dallas, Brandon Burden paced the stage of KingdomLife Church. The pastor told congregants that demonic spirits were operating through members of the City Council.
Grasping his Bible with both hands, Burden said God was working through his North Texas congregation to take the country back to its Christian roots. He lamented that he lacked jurisdiction over the state Capitol, where he had gone during the 2021 Texas legislative session to lobby for conservative priorities like expanded gun rights and a ban on abortion.
“But you know what I got jurisdiction over this morning is an election coming up on Saturday,” Burden told parishioners. “I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.”
What Burden said that day in May 2021 was a violation of a long-standing federal law barring churches and nonprofits from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Although the provision was mostly uncontroversial for decades after it passed in 1954, it has become a target for both evangelical churches and former President Donald Trump, who vowed to eliminate it.
Burden’s sermon is among those at 18 churches identified by the news organizations over the past two years that appeared to violate the Johnson Amendment, a measure named after its author, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Some pastors have gone so far as to paint candidates they oppose as demonic.
At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, are greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.
In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.
Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions.
Trump’s opposition to the law banning political activity by nonprofits “has given some politically-minded evangelical leaders a sense that the Johnson Amendment just isn’t really an issue anymore, and that they can go ahead and campaign for or against candidates or positions from the pulpit,” said David Brockman, a scholar in religion and public policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.
Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at the University of Indiana-Purdue, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”
The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit churches from inviting political speakers or discussing positions that may seem partisan nor does it restrict voters from making faith-based decisions on who should represent them. But because donations to churches are tax-deductible and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, without such a rule donors seeking to influence elections could go undetected, said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Seidel said.
Churches have long balanced the tightrope of political involvement, and blatant violations have previously been rare. In the 1960s, the IRS investigated complaints that some churches abused their tax-exempt status by distributing literature that was hostile to the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. And in 2004, the federal agency audited All Saints Episcopal Church in California after a pastor gave an anti-war speech that imagined Jesus talking to presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. The pastor did not endorse a candidate but criticized the Iraq war.
Some conservative groups have argued that Black churches are more politically active than their white evangelical counterparts but are not as heavily scrutinized. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was accused of turning Sunday sermons into campaign rallies and using Black churches to raise funds. In response to allegations of illegal campaigning, Jackson said at the time that strict guidelines were followed and denied violating the law.
While some Black churches have crossed the line into political endorsements, the long legacy of political activism in these churches stands in sharp contrast to white evangelical churches, where some pastors argue devout Christians must take control of government positions, said Robert Wuthnow, the former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.
Wuthnow said long-standing voter outreach efforts inside Black churches, such as Souls to the Polls, which encourages voting on Sundays after church services, largely stay within the boundaries of the law.
“The Black church has been so keenly aware of its marginalized position,” Wuthnow said. “The Black church, historically, was the one place where Black people could mobilize, could organize, could feel that they had some power at the local level. The white evangelical church has power. It’s in office. It’s always had power.”
At the end of his two-hour sermon that May, Burden asserted that his church had a God-given power to choose lawmakers, and he asked others to join him onstage to “secure the gate over the city.”
Burden and a handful of church members crouched down and held on to a rod, at times speaking in tongues. The pastor said intruders such as the mayor, who was not up for reelection last year but who supported one of the candidates in the race for City Council, would be denied access to the gates of the city.
“Now this is bold, but I’m going to say it because I felt it from the Lord. I felt the Lord say, ‘Revoke the mayor’s keys to this gate,’” Burden said. “No more do you have the key to the city. We revoke your key this morning, Mr. Mayor.
“We shut you out of the place of power,” Burden added. “The place of authority and influence.”
Johnson Amendment’s Cold War Roots
Questions about the political involvement of tax-exempt organizations were swirling when Congress ordered an investigation in April 1952 to determine if some foundations were using their money “for un-American and subversive activities.”Leading the probe was Rep. Gene Cox, a Georgia Democrat who had accused the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others, of helping alleged Communists or Communist fronts. Cox died during the investigation, and the final report cleared the foundations of wrongdoing.
But a Republican member of the committee argued for additional scrutiny, and in July 1953, Congress established the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. The committee focused heavily on liberal organizations, but it also investigated nonprofits such as the Facts Forum foundation, which was headed by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, an ardent supporter of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who was best known for holding hearings to investigate suspected Communists.
In July 1954, Johnson, who was then a senator, proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that would strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status for “intervening” in political campaigns. The amendment sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Johnson never explained his intent. Opponents of the amendment, as well as some academics, say Johnson was motivated by a desire to undercut conservative foundations such as the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, founded by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett, which painted the Democrat as soft on communism and supported his opponent in the primary election. Others have hypothesized that Johnson was hoping to head off a wider crackdown on nonprofit foundations.
Over the next 40 years, the IRS stripped a handful of religious nonprofits of their tax-exempt status. None were churches.
Then, just four days before the 1992 presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging voters to reject then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in his challenge to Republican President George H.W. Bush.
The ads proclaimed: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They asserted that Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads said, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”
The IRS revoked the church’s tax-exempt status, leading to a long legal battle that ended with a U.S. appeals court siding with the federal agency.
The case remains the only publicly known example of the IRS revoking the tax-exempt status of a church because of its political activity in nearly 70 years. The Congressional Research Service said in 2012 that a second church had lost its tax-exempt status, but that its identity “is not clear.”
Citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election between incumbent Bush and Kerry, IRS officials created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative to fast-track investigations.
Over the next four years, the committee investigated scores of churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, according to IRS reports. But it did not revoke the tax-exempt status of any. Instead, the IRS mostly sent warning letters that agency officials said were effective in dissuading churches from continuing their political activity, asserting that there were no repeat offenders in that period.
In some cases, the IRS initiated audits of churches that could have led to financial penalties. It’s unclear how many did.
In January 2009, a federal court dismissed an auditinto alleged financial improprieties at a Minnesota church whose pastor had supported the congressional campaign of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota.
The court found that the IRS had not been following its own rules for a decade because it was tasked with notifying churches of their legal rights before any pending audits and was required to have an appropriately high-level official sign off on them. But a 1998 agency reorganization had eliminated the position, leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.
Following the ruling, the IRS suspended its investigations into church political activity for five years, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report.
During the hiatus, a conservative Christian initiative called Pulpit Freedom Sunday flourished. Pastors recorded themselves endorsing candidates or giving political sermons that they believed violated the Johnson Amendment and sent them to the IRS. The goal, according to participants, was to trigger a lawsuit that would lead to the prohibition being ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The IRS never challenged participating churches, and the effort wound down without achieving its aim.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the IRS produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.
Despite the agency’s limited enforcement, Trump promised shortly after he took office that he would “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”
As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to remove the restrictions on church politicking through a 2017 executive order. The move was largely symbolic because it simply ordered the government not to punish churches differently than it would any other nonprofit, according to a legal filing by the Justice Department.
Eliminating the Johnson Amendment would require congressional or judicial action.
Although the IRS has not discussed its plans, it has taken procedural steps that would enable it to ramp up audits again if it chooses to.
In 2019, more than two decades after eliminating the high-level position needed to sign off on action against churches, the IRS designated the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division as the “appropriate high-level Treasury official” with the power to initiate a church audit.
But Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney and University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, said he doesn’t read too much into that. “I don’t see any reason to believe that the operation of the IRS has changed significantly.”
The Pulpit and Politics
There is no uniform way to monitor church sermons across the country. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches now post their services online, and ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed dozens of them. Many readers shared sermons with us. (You can do so here.)Texas’ large evangelical population and history of activism in Black churches makes the state a focal point for debates over political activity, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“Combine all of that with the increasing competitiveness of Texas elections, and it’s no surprise that more and more Texas churches are taking on a political role,” he said. “Texas is a perfect arena for widespread, religiously motivated political activism.”
The state also has a long history of politically minded pastors, Wuthnow said. Texas evangelical church leaders joined the fight in support of alcohol prohibition a century ago and spearheaded efforts to defeat Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party, in 1928. In the 1940s, evangelical fundamentalism began to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Today, North Texas remains home to influential pastors such as Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas. Jeffress was one of Trump’s most fervent supporters, appearing at campaign events, defending him on television news shows and stating that he “absolutely” did not regret supporting the former president after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Burden went a step further, urging followers to stock up on food and keep their guns loaded ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. He told parishioners that “prophetic voices” had told him in 2016 that Trump would have eight consecutive years in office.
The Frisco Conservative Coalition board voted to suspend Burden as chair for 30 days after criticism about his remarks.
Burden called his comments “inartful” but claimed he was unfairly targeted for his views. “The establishment media is coming after me,” he saidat the time. “But it is not just about me. People of faith are under attack in this country.”
Since then, Burden has repeatedly preached that the church has been designated by the Lord to decide who should serve in public office and “take dominion” over Frisco.
As the runoff for the Frisco City Council approached last year, Burden supported Jennifer White, a local veterinarian. White had positioned herself as the conservative candidate in the nonpartisan race against Angelia Pelham, a Black human resources executive who had the backing of the Frisco mayor.
White said she wasn’t in attendance during the May 2021 sermon in which Burden called her the “candidate that God wants to win.” She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active.
“I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won’t take a political stance,” White said in an interview. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”
Pelham’s husband, local pastor Dono Pelham, also made a statement that violated the Johnson Amendment by “indirectly intervening” in the campaign, said Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles
In May 2021, Pelham told his church that the race for a seat on the City Council had resulted in a runoff. He acknowledged that his church’s tax-exempt status prevented him from supporting candidates from the pulpit. Then, he added, “but you’ll get the message.”
“It’s been declared for the two candidates who received the most votes, one of which is my wife,” Pelham said. “That’s just facts. That’s just facts. That’s just facts. And so a runoff is coming and every vote counts. Be sure to vote.”
Pelham then asked the congregation: “How did I do? I did all right, didn’t I? You know I wanted to go a little further, but I didn’t do it.”
Angelia Pelham, who co-founded Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in 2008 with her husband, said the couple tried to avoid violating the Johnson Amendment. Both disagreed that her husband’s mention of her candidacy was a violation.
“I think church and state should remain separate,” Angelia Pelham said in an interview, adding: “But I think there’s a lot of folks in the religious setting that just completely didn’t even consider the line. They erased it completely and lost sight of the Johnson Amendment.”
She declined to discuss Burden’s endorsement of her opponent.
In his sermon the morning after Pelham defeated his chosen candidate, Burden told parishioners that the church’s political involvement would continue.
“So you’re like, but you lost last night? No, we set the stage for the future,” he said, adding “God is uncovering the demonic structure that is in this region.”
“Demonic” Candidate
Most Americans don’t want pastors making endorsements from the pulpit, according to a 2017 survey by the Program for Public Consultation, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.Of the nearly 2,500 registered voters who were surveyed, 79% opposed getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. Only among Republican evangelical voters did a slight majority — 52% — favor loosening restrictions on church political activity.
But such endorsements are taking place across the country, with some pastors calling for a debate about the Johnson Amendment.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, New Mexico became an island of abortion access for women in Texas and other neighboring states.
The issue raised the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 8 New Mexico governor’s race between incumbent Lujan Grisham, a supporter of abortion rights, and Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, who advocates limiting access.
“We’re going to fast become the No. 1 abortion place in all of America,” a pastor, Steve Smothermon, said during a July 10 sermon at Legacy Church in Albuquerque, which has an average weekly attendance of more than 10,000 people. Smotherman said the governor was “wicked and evil” and called her “a narcissist.”
“And people think, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I truly believe it. In fact, she’s beyond evil. It’s demonic,” Smothermon said.
He later added: “Folks, when are we going to get appalled? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? When are we going to stop saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s a woman’s right to choose’? That’s such a lie.”
Church attendees had a stark choice in the upcoming election, Smothermon said. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti.”
The governor’s campaign declined to comment. Neither Legacy Church, Smothermon nor Ronchetti responded to requests for comment.
The sermon was a “clear violation” of the Johnson Amendment, said Sam Brunson, a Loyola University Chicago law professor. But Smothermon showed no fear of IRS enforcement.
Those who thought he crossed the line were “so stupid,” Smothermon said during the sermon. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
In another example, pastors at a Fort Worth church named Mercy Culture have repeatedly endorsed candidates for local and statewide offices since its founding in 2019.
“Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” the lead pastor, Landon Schott, said in a February sermon about a church member who was running to fill an open state representative seat.
Johnson Amendment rules allow pastors to endorse in their individual capacity, as long as they are not at an official church function, which Schott was.
In other services, Schott challenged critics to complain to the IRS about the church’s support of political candidates and said he wasn’t worried about losing the church’s tax-exempt status.
“If you want it that bad, come and take it. And if you think that we will stop preaching the gospel, speaking truth over taxes, you got another thing coming for you,” Schott said in May.
Schatzline, a member of Mercy Culture, received 65% of the vote in a May 24 runoff against the former mayor of the Dallas suburb of Southlake. He works for a separate nonprofit founded by Heather Schott, a pastor at Mercy Culture and the wife of Landon Schott.
Schatzline said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that Landon Schott, not the church, endorsed him. He added that the church sought legal advice on how to ensure that it was complying with the Johnson Amendment.
“I think prayers can manifest into anything that God wants them to, but I would say that the community rallying behind me as individuals definitely manifested into votes,” Schatzline said.
Mercy Culture also supported Tim O’Hare, a Republican running for Tarrant County judge, this year after he came out against the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. His opponent in the primary had ordered churches and businesses to temporarily close when she was mayor of Fort Worth.
O’Hare came to prominence as the mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, where he championed a city ordinance to prohibit landlords from renting to immigrants without legal status. A federal court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010 after a legal battle that cost the city $6.6 million.
O’Hare has pledged to hire an election integrity officer to oversee voting and “uncover election fraud.”
“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Begin to pray for righteous judges in our city,’” Heather Schott said during a Feb. 13 service. “I am believing that Mr. Tim O’Hare is an answered prayer of what we have been petitioning heaven for for the last year and a half.”
Neither Mercy Culture, Landon Schott nor Heather Schott responded to requests for comment. O’Hare also did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.
Schott’s comments were a prohibited endorsement, said Aprill, the emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles.
“It doesn’t say ‘vote for him’ but is still an endorsement,” she said. “There’s no other way to understand the statement that O’Hare has answered prayers for righteous judges.”
Two weeks later, O’Hare won his primary. He faces Deborah Peoples, a Democrat, on Nov. 8.
A New Tactic
On April 18, 2021, a day before early voting began for city council and school board elections across Texas, pastors at churches just miles apart flashed the names of candidates on overhead screens. They told their congregations that local church leaders had gathered to discuss upcoming city and school elections and realized that their members were among those seeking office.“We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running,” said Robert Morris, who leads the Gateway megachurch in Southlake and served as a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.
On the same day, Doug Page gave a similar message less than 5 miles away at First Baptist Grapevine.
“And so what we decided to do is look within our church families and say, ‘Who do we know that’s running for office?’ Now, let me clarify with you. This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you.”
Saying that you are not endorsing a candidate “isn’t like a magic silver bullet that makes it so that you’re not endorsing them,” Brunson said.
The churches’ coordination on messaging across the area is notable, according to University of Notre Dame tax law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, who said he hadn’t before seen churches organizing to share lists of candidates.
“I do think this strategy is new,” said Mayer, who has studied the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s quite a sophisticated tactic.”
Eight of the nine candidates mentioned by the pastors won their races.
Mindy McClure, who ran for reelection to the Grapevine-Colleyville school board, said she thought church involvement contributed to her defeat in a June 5, 2021, runoff by about 4 percentage points. Her opponent campaigned on removing critical race theory from district curriculum, while McClure said students “weren’t being indoctrinated in any way, shape or form.” Critical race theory is a college-level academic theory that racism is embedded in legal systems.
McClure said pastors endorsing from the pulpit creates “divisiveness” in the community.
“Just because you attend a different church doesn’t mean that you’re more connected with God,” she said.
Lawrence Swicegood, executive director of Gateway Media, said this month that the church doesn’t endorse candidates but “inform(s) our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.” Page told ProPublica and the Tribune that “these candidates were named for information only.”
Eleven days after responding to ProPublica and the Tribune in October, Morris once again told his church that he was not endorsing any candidates during the last Sunday sermon before early voting. Then, he again displayed the names of specific candidates on a screen and told parishioners to take screenshots with their cellphones.
“We must vote,” he said. “I think we have figured that out in America, that the Christians sat on the sidelines for too long. And then all of a sudden they started teaching our children some pretty mixed up things in the schools. And we had no one to blame but ourselves. So let’s not let that happen. Especially at midterms.”
African-American Evangelicals and their November Dilemma
Pastor Dwight McKissic, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, sees the dilemma of African-American evangelicals this November (and perhaps future ones) this way:
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To give credit where it is due, Pastor McKissic is a doer, not just a talker. He pulled his church out of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention because of the convention's stance on Critical Race Theory. He has pushed his denomination to repudiate the Confederate flag and condemn white supremacy. For a denomination founded in defense of slave-holding missionaries, these are not small steps.
That said, I would ask a different, more fundamental question were I in his position. Does the term evangelical retain any religious connections to the teaching of the gospel and Christianity today? Or has it been transformed into a primarily political identity retaining only some of the form and ritual but none of the salvific intent (or power)?
Looking back at the entire aftermath of 9/11 (not just the Trump era, as professional commentators tend to), it seems clear that in practice the word evangelical now functions primarily as a political identity—often in opposition not just to the values of the gospel to which it refers, but to the values of evangelicals who aren’t white. In 2009, a majority of white evangelical Protestants surveyed said torture against terrorism suspects could sometimes or often be justified. In 2018, 75% of white evangelical Christians surveyed rated “the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants” as positive, compared with 46 percent of U.S. adults overall, and 25 percent of nonwhite Christians.
McKissic characterizes voting for Democrats as "anti-family values". But it is quite difficult to ignore the hypocrisy of talking about “family values” when government policy under the GOP deliberately separated children from their parents and gave those children to foster families, as this country has done in decades past with Native American children (and may soon do again, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in this term). To bring the question of family values to the present, does it reinforce them or undermine them to support a candidate like Herschel Walker? He has not only engaged in intimate partner violence against his now-former wife on multiple occasions, but infidelity resulting in children on multiple occasions, paid for one of his girlfriends to have an abortion, and pressured her to have a second abortion (which she refused). It is very telling that one of Walker’s earliest defenders after these latest revelations was Newt Gingrich, a man whose own infidelities cost him the speakership of the House. The language Dana Loesch chose to degrade the woman Walker paid to have an abortion (and with whom Walker would later had a child) is very telling, as is her complete lack of actual concern re: abortion in favor of prioritizing the power the GOP would have if Walker’s election gave them control of the Senate. Even today, the deliberate cruelty to asylum seekers by Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas appears to find significant support among white evangelicals, not at all consistent with the words of Exodus 23:9, or Leviticus 19:33-34, or Deuteronomy 24:14, or any other verses regarding the proper treatment of strangers.
Karen Attiah has written quite powerfully about the politics of toxic black men like Herschel Walker (and Kanye West). The contrast between how white evangelicals regard Walker and their treatment of Barack Obama (and his wife) couldn't be starker. They celebrate the former and denigrate the latter. It is necessary and important to question the "pro-family" bonafides of those who promote and elevate people who embody some of the worst stereotypes of black men--especially when it comes to how they treat the women in their lives. During his presidency, I heard more than one white congregant in my own church denomination suggest Obama might be the Antichrist. To hear any Christian to say such things about any political leader (Obama or otherwise) while making excuses for the likes of Trump--who made deliberate cruelty to asylum seekers official government policy (to say nothing of his consistent and flagrant disregard for numerous tenets of Christian belief) saddens me.
A single tweet doesn't allow room for either nuance or more expansive thought, but the most consequential divide between the GOP and the Democrats right now is the insurrection on January 6, 2021 and their responses to it. It is difficult to imagine actions more contrary to the words of 1 Timothy 2:1-4 re: prayer for our leaders than the participation of white evangelicals in violent opposition to the peaceful transfer of power to Biden from Trump. There is plenty of room to disagree with the policy choices of the Democratic Party. But rather than win the arguments at the ballot box, many Republicans are on record not only pushing falsehoods about the results of the 2020 presidential election, but continuing to strive for the power to overturn whatever popular will voters express in November 2022 and in elections to come. Having succeeded in using the courts to diminish the power of black voters, the GOP now seeks to invalidate any and all elections that don't go their way. True religious freedom--not just for Christians, but for those of other faiths (or no faith)--will not survive in a country where a party that doesn't win at the ballot box can simply ignore the result and stay in power.
Who Is Worthy of Forgiveness?
Plenty of people aired (and are still airing) their opinions regarding this question in the wake of President Biden's long-anticipated decision to cancel some federal student loan debt. But when I skip the "free at last" responses (from those grateful for the federal student loan debt relief) and dig beneath the specifics of the various responses, they are ultimately judging whether or not the recipient of the debt forgiveness is worthy of receiving it.
Quite a few of our fellow Americans believe those who are getting some (or all) of their federal student loan debt forgiveness are unworthy--undeserving. Those responses sound a lot like "what about those who already repaid their loans?" and "it's not fair". Publicly expressing my happiness for those eligible for debt cancellation on Facebook prompted 1 negative response from my friend list along exactly those lines. Sadly and predictably, there are many Christians in that chorus, despite what we claim to believe about forgiveness--despite being undeserving--and what the Bible says about forgiveness, debt, and debtors. We claim to believe in a Bible with multiple verses about cancellation of debts after 7 years and in a jubilee year and this is how some of us choose to respond? It's beyond merely sad, but a poor representation of what Christianity is supposed to stand for.
Ironically, the bulk of the opposition comes from people who very likely supported the Republican president and the Republican Congress who passed the law which made Biden's action possible:
What really highlighted the fact that this federal student loan debt was really about the worth of the people receiving the relief (instead of the fiscal implications) is the response of critics to being called out as hypocrites by a thread from the official Twitter account of the White House:
Half a dozen Republican congressional representatives were found to have received hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars of forgiveness for Paycheck Protection Program loans. Leaving aside the absurdity of congressional representatives applying for and receiving these loans in the first place, this shabby defense really stood out:
This particular defense reminded me of Mitt Romney's 47% insult about Obama voters when I first saw it. But after some more thought, it occurs that a better analogy for what David French is doing here is being like the older son in the story of the prodigal son. French (and at least some other self-proclaimed conservatives) see themselves as responsible, faithful, yet neglected while those receiving debt forgiveness are undeserving profligates. Here's Ted Cruz making essentially the same argument in a far less subtle and far more deliberately insulting fashion than David French:
But when I actually looked for information regarding whether or not the Paycheck Protection Program we're being told to view as disaster relief actually served that purpose, what I found was not very encouraging. Only 25% of the PPP loans actually protected paychecks as intended. Of the 77% of businesses which received funds, nearly half cut staff anyway. Just one investigative report by Fox43 News in Pennsylvania found numerous examples of this. Despite this (and numerous instances of PPP loan fraud, including $268 million recently recovered by the Secret Service) some 94% of PPP loans granted by the federal government have been forgiven in full.
I found this summation of the way that federal student loan forgiveness will actually work in practice particularly compelling:
And that's before you get to student loan forgiveness programs that predate Biden's latest action by years.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz makes a persuasive argument that this program will help the economy instead of harming it. He also turns the discussion to a much more useful place than whether or not the recipients of the forgiveness are worthy, but to whether or not it is beneficial to the country at large. One of the online friends I discussed the loan forgiveness plan with had the following thoughts on it:
I've noticed that American discourse tends to frame universities as a place that hands out goodies individuals (access to jobs and prestige) vs a place that expands the human capital of the nation. One way to look at Biden's plan is it releases a lot of highly educated people to do more risk taking things like open businesses and more altruistic things like work for non-profits. It's not just good for those people but possibly everybody else in society.
This comment gets at the heart of a very particular way in which too many of today's political leaders fall short when compared to their predecessors. Instead of elected officials (particularly those in the GOP) using their positions to govern in a way that benefits as many people in their particular sphere of responsibility as possible, many choose instead to validate and amplify a false individualism. They deliberately heighten the "us vs them" dynamic that already exists in the country to retain their own power, defining more and more Americans (those eligible for student loan forgiveness in this case) as an unworthy "them". However imperfect Biden's debt forgiveness plan is, it at least attempts to do something for the benefit of a broad set of Americans who can use the help.
An Ironic Independence Day
In two days, this country celebrates 246 years since the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, after a Supreme Court term that has seen the Supreme Court overturn Roe v Wade and Casey v Planned Parenthood, expand qualified immunity for police officers, weaken enforcement of Miranda rights, issue multiple rulings undermining the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, issue multiple rulings undermining tribal sovereignty, and issue a ruling undermining the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions and fight global warming. The featured image for this post, which I took during a walking tour of Old Philadelphia on June 19th (Juneteenth) after Alito's draft of the Dobbs decision but before the final issuance on June 24th, is an unfortunately timely encapsulation of the contradiction between America's founding documents and ideals and the reality of how the failures to live up to them played out in the lives of everyone else. Our guide, a Philadelphia public school history teacher, did not hesitate to point out the contradictions here or at any other point in his tour.
During this time in history, and the period just after from which Alito drew his arbitrary rationale, women in general had few rights the US government was bound to respect and black men and women had none. As has been written far more eloquently by Adam Serwer among others, it seems that the 19th century is the era to which Alito would have us return. Having heard and read the parallels drawn between the Texas Heartbeat Act and fugitive slave laws, I found it very educational to visit the Independence National Historical Park (home of the so-called Liberty Bell) and read exhibits describing the impact of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act on black people.
Before seeing this exhibit, I wasn't aware of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 which preceded the 1850 law. Fugitive slave laws weren't just a feature of the 13 colonies prior to independence, the US Constitution itself contains a fugitive slave clause added at the behest of southern politicians. Whether traveling for freedom from enslavement or to a state where abortion remains legal, it is quite disturbing to be able to draw any parallel between a woman's legal status in 1851 and her status in 2022. It simply should not be the case that my daughter should grow up in a modern democracy with fewer rights than my wife did when it comes to her body. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, nightmarish stories such as this are already coming out:
The very idea of a rape victim being this young is horrific enough. But the state compelling a child to bring another child into the world only compounds the horror--especially if whoever committed this crime was a family member.
Autonomy is one of a number of synonyms for independence. The overturning of the Roe and Casey decisions has certainly taken that autonomy away from women and girls in states with so-called trigger laws. It appears the losses of autonomy won't stop there however, regardless of the words of Justice Kavanaugh's cynical concurrence with the Dobbs decision. Beyond the Supreme Court's decision to undermine tribal sovereignty, a decision so egregious that even Neil Gorsuch dissented from it, the political right in this country intends to ban abortion nationwide if they gain sufficient power. Justice Thomas' concurrence with the Alito-authored opinion puts the rights granted by decisions like Griswold v Connecticut, Lawrence v Texas, and Obergefell v Hodges (but not Loving v Virginia, despite it having the same rationale) in the crosshairs for repeal.
At the same time the Supreme Court has seen fit to seize autonomy from women and marginalized groups with multiple decisions in the recent term, it has granted increasing autonomy to religious institutions--especially Christian ones--under a questionable interpretation of religious freedom. The court's ruling in Carson v Makin compels states to fund private religious schools. In Kennedy v Bremerton School District, a ruling which granted a right to Christian prayer led by a state employee, the majority's stated grounds for doing so were so obviously false that Justice Sotomayor was able to include photographic evidence in her dissent of the coach in question conducting what was clearly not private, individual prayer.
A little over a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Fulton v City of Philadelphia that despite being funded by taxpayers and acting as an agent of the government, a Catholic foster agency could use religious grounds to discriminate against LGBTQ couples in adoption. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court also used religious freedom as the rationale to exempt churches from government rules broadly applied to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (despite well-documented evidence that church gatherings both domestically and internationally had proven to be superspreader events in the early days of the pandemic). The unwillingness of some of my fellow believers to be part of slowing and stopping a pandemic that killed 1 million of our fellow Americans and over 6 million worldwide has been a frankly depressing thing to see. Regular church attendance has been part of my life for decades, the point of origin of many of my longest lasting friendships, and where I met my wife. Church had been a regular part of our children's lives as well until the pandemic hit, and for the better part of two years we've forgone in-person church attendance in hopes of helping bring the pandemic to an end. Looking to the interests of others instead of ourselves is just one of many lessons of Philippians 2 that the American church has not done a good job of exemplifying of late.
The willingness of my fellow Christians to abuse the power of the state and the judiciary to impose their particular interpretation of the Bible on those who don't share that interpretation (or share their faith at all) does not merely bode ill for both the church and the state, but is contrary to the free will we believe God grants to accept or reject salvation. Having seen not just the Supreme Court, but conservative politicians so blithely dismiss the rights of those who do not share their beliefs or worldview, it is not difficult to imagine a future that is as bad as our past when it comes to religious pluralism. My own home state of Maryland, originally intended as a refuge for Catholics (though few actual Catholics were part of its founding), ultimately brought up the rear in this respect for the entire country at the time.
The Declaration of Independence may be 246 years old soon, but true democracy in this country is much younger. The response of this country to both 9/11 and 1/6 demonstrate that the experiment is far more fragile than many Americans realized. We are in grave danger of becoming far more a cautionary tale than an example to be emulated.
What Do Black Americans Think About Roe v. Wade—and Why
Another excellent piece by Dr. Ted Johnson that makes sense of the disconnect between the voting patterns of black Americans and their personal views. Johnson touches only briefly on the ways in which black distrust of medical and governmental institutions is informed by a long history of abuses visited upon black people by those same institutions. It’s bad enough that maternal mortality in the United States is among the worst in the developed world. The rate of maternal mortality in the US for black women is even worse. The end of Roe v. Wade will certainly reduce the availability of safe, legal abortion care and will disproportionately impact poor women, black women, and other women of color.
Our Dishonest Discourse About "The Hard R"
A controversy that began with this open letter asking Spotify to "take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform" (with regards to COVID-19 and vaccines) and musicians including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulling their music from the platform took an interesting turn when India.Arie shared a supercut of Rogan not just using "the hard r", but calling black people apes in talking about why she was pulling her music from Spotify. Joe Rogan has since apologized, and Spotify removed 70 podcast episodes where he used the slur.
It is possible, if not highly likely that I am being overly cynical regarding the sincerity of Rogan's apology. My cynicism is animated at least in part by how often mea culpas for this sort of thing include phrases similar to this:
"It’s a video that’s made of clips taken out of context of me of 12 years of conversations on my podcast. It’s all smushed together and it looks f------ horrible, even to me”
and this:
"I never used it to be racist."
and especially this:
"I do hope that this can be a teachable moment."
This last quote in particular is one that provides an opportunity to pivot to academic usage of "the hard r". Randall Kennedy argued last year in favor of what might be called a pedagogical exception for the word to be used in full for teaching purposes. Included in his argument however, are skepticism of some of the claims of hurt by students hearing the word used. Further, he argues that his race should not give him more leeway to use the n-word than his white colleagues. Dr. John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics, has written about the n-word on multiple occasions prior to the controversy over Rogan's usage of it. Beyond pedagogy (in use) or virtue-signaling (in non-use), the question not being asked or adequately answered is why this debate only seems to persist around the use of a slur that only applies to black people (though there is a modifier for it that applies to Middle Eastern people that I first heard in the movie The Siege)?
This quote by James Baldwin poses and answers that question more eloquently and bluntly:
“What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it is necessary to have a 'nigger' in the first place, because I'm not a nigger. I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it.”
A poem written in 1912 and attributed to H.P. Lovecraft, provides another answer to where the necessity for the word (and the idea) comes from:
"When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shap'd at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next design'd;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Fill'd it with vice, and call'd the thing a NIGGER."
In Lovecraft's conception (and almost certainly in the conception of others who subscribed to the eugenics movement as he did), black people were not fully human. We were beasts to be feared, objects of and/or causes of lust, purveyors of vices, corrupters of innocence--but not human beings like everyone else. While Lovecraft is long since dead, the sentiments behind his poetically-expressed contempt for black folks live on in others--not just in the body politic, but in some of its leaders as well. This is why the governor of an entire state can say publicly that Joe Rogan should not have apologized (for using the n-word). I believe this to be at the heart of why the debate over the word continues.
To borrow from James Baldwin again, he expresses the sentiment well regarding how American society in his time used and viewed black people:
"That in a way black men were very useful for the American. Because, in a country so absolutely undefined - so amorphous - where there were no limits - no height really and no depth - there was one thing of which one could be certain. One knew where one was, by knowing where the Negro was. You knew that you were not on the bottom because the Negro was there."
Though decades have passed since Baldwin spoke these words, it seems that America has yet to outgrow its need for black people to define where the bottom of society is, and the casual (if not unapologetic) usage of the n-word is just one manifestation of that broader sentiment. I maintain no illusions that this affliction is unique to the political right, or to libertarian ideology. Those on the political left are no shrinking violets when it comes to using "the hard r".
It is very telling that many of the same people who rush to defend voices of dissent in other contexts lack the same concern when it comes to black people objecting to the use of a slur targeting them. The social norms against using slurs and stereotypes which attack Jews, or Italians, or the Irish, or Hispanics, or Asian people remain intact. You rarely (if ever) see people from those communities presuming to give out metaphorical hall passes for others to use slurs against them without consequences. Because black people are still not seen or treated as full citizens of this country, our opinions on "the contours of acceptable speech" lack the same weight as those of others. Too many people in this country apparently still prefer an older version of it where slurs against black people could be said without consequence. But that isn't a version of America we're returning to.
Social "Firsts" and the Supreme Court
A few days ago, Stephen Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of the United States at the end of the current term. Because Joe Biden pledged to nominate a black woman to the nation’s highest court if he became president, he now has an opportunity to make good on that pledge. Predictably, we began to hear and see a lot of high-minded (and hypocritical) commentary about how Biden should be choosing the “most-qualified” justice–regardless of their skin color. Our attention span as a country is so short, we’ve already forgotten that Trump’s rise to the presidency was powered at least in part by publicizing a Federalist Society-authored list of high court nominees he would choose from if the opportunity presented itself. We’ve already forgotten that Ronald Reagan promised to name a woman to the Supreme Court.
But the history of using the Supreme Court to accomplish social firsts stretches back much further than we might suppose from current commentary. This thread by David Frum takes us all the way back to 1887, when President Grover Cleveland appointed Lucius Quintus Lamar to the high court in a bid to gain the support of conservative white southern Democrats for re-election. Read Frum’s thread in full to get a complete sense of how unrepentant a Confederate Mr. Lamar was. This dubious social first—the appointment of a traitor to the Union to nation’s highest court–would prove very important for a reason not fully touched on at all in Mr. Frum’s thread. 1887 marked the year the US federal government fully abandoned Reconstruction–and the nation’s black citizens to decades of voter disenfranchisement, terrorism, property theft, murder, and Jim Crow laws.
No discussion of the Supreme Court and social firsts would be complete without mentioning Maryland’s own Thurgood Marshall. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from 2 HBCUs (graduating 1st in his class from Howard Law because the University of Maryland School of Law was still segregated). Out of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, Marshall won 29, losing just 3. He served as a federal appeals court judge for the second circuit for a number of years prior to becoming the nation’s first black solicitor general. Some months of his tenure as an appeals court judge were served as a recess appointment due to certain southern senators holding up his official appointment, including the same segregationist James Eastland that Joe Biden recalled a civil relationship with. He would win 14 cases on behalf of the government in that role, losing just 5. Among his peers both at the time and since, there may not be a more successful justice at winning arguments before the Supreme Court prior to becoming a member of it.
Discussing the legal and rhetorical brilliance of Thurgood Marshall requires discussion of his successor. Few nominations to the high court are a better demonstration of the hypocrisy of many of today’s conservatives regarding “qualifications” (including those who oppose Trump) than the absence of such concerns being raised when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court. In contrast to the years served as an appellate court judge and solicitor general by Marshall, Thomas was an appellate judge for the DC circuit for just 16 months. Thomas graduated in the middle of his law school class at Yale in contrast to Marshall’s 1st in class at Howard. The White House and Senate Republicans apparently pressured the American Bar Association (ABA) to give Thomas a qualified rating even while attempting to discredit the ABA as partisan–and this is before Anita Hill’s interview with the FBI was leaked to the press and led to the re-opening of Thomas' confirmation hearings. The same GOP that loves to quote that one line from that one speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not have cared less about “the content of [Thomas'] character”. They cared that he was both conservative and black. The way the Senate treated Anita Hill during those re-opened confirmation hearings would in retrospect be a preview of the treatment awaiting future black women appointees to federal roles.
How Thomas fared during his confirmation hearings almost certainly animated the treatment of Lani Guinier after her nomination to become assistant attorney general for civil rights by Republicans. Her treatment by them, conservative media, and by the White House who nominated her was utterly shameful. Conservatives lied about her positions. The same Joe Biden who contributed to the poor treatment that Anita Hill received before the Senate Judiciary Committee he chaired 2 years earlier, reported “grew lukewarm about Guinier”. President Clinton would ultimately withdraw the nomination in the face of lies and distortions about her writings. His administration had apparently instructed her not to make any public statements about until after he’d already decided to withdraw her nomination, enabling her opponents to smear her in the press and her “allies” to get cold feet about supporting her. Particularly now as a wave of anti-CRT legislation, book bans, and attacks on affirmative action gain traction around the country (especially in light of Guinier’s recent death), it is important to remember that Guinier only got to make her case to the public in one interview with Ted Koppel–and the public received her views well. She never got the Senate hearing that even Robert Bork got for his extreme views because Bill Clinton–her friend from Yale Law School–pulled her nomination instead.
Not even two weeks have passed since the annual hypocrisy-fest that is MLK Day, and a significant majority of Americans surveyed seem to have decided once again that black women should wait for what should be theirs.
The attacks on the first black woman Supreme Court nominee will be fierce (if Biden follows through on his commitment).
When it comes to the Supreme Court and credentialism however, perhaps the best example of the double standard that seems to exist for women generally is the brief nomination of Harriet Miers. Conservatives in particular dragged this woman for her lack of elite education (she earned degrees in mathematics and law at Southern Methodist University). Only in looking back did I learn that Harry Reid (Senate minority leader at the time) actually recommended Miers as the successor to O’Connor, and that other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee hoped to see nominees from outside the federal appellate court system. Perhaps because Reid earned his law degree in George Washington University’s part-time program, he didn’t put as much stock in an Ivy League pedigree as he did in bringing the perspective of an experienced practicing lawyer to the Supreme Court. Potential conflict of interest concerns raised by Miers' relationship with President Bush and his staff might ultimately have sunk her nomination anyway had she not withdrawn it. By contrast, Clarence Thomas has ruled in numerous cases where he had clear conflicts of interest with little or no criticism from his supporters on the political right.
Considering the sorts of cases which will soon come before the Supreme Court, we should remember that as an institution it has been used as often as a tool to remove and restrict rights as it has to grant them (if not more so). The aforementioned appointment of Lucius Lamar is not the only time that the Supreme Court has been used to undermine full citizenship for black people in the United States. Before William Rehnquist became associate justice (nominated by Nixon), then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (nominated by Reagan), he was a “poll watcher” in Arizona under the auspices of Operation Eagle Eye, a nationwide campaign by the Republican National Committee to suppress black votes. This 2021 piece by Charles Pierce makes a convincing argument Rehnquist tried to pass off his personal opposition to the ultimate outcome of Brown v Board of Education as that of the justice he clerked for (Robert Jackson, Jr). In this memo, he defended Plessy v Ferguson as good law, and likely lied about it in both of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. From the time he became one of Rehnquist’s law clerks, to replacing him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts has had the Voting Rights Act in his sights as a law to be weakened (if not destroyed).
Contrary to the polls (and numerous previous demonstrations of an utter lack of spine), Lindsey Graham has emerged as a supporter of the idea of a black woman nominee to the Supreme Court. Current US District Court judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina being a possible nominee certainly doesn’t hurt. If the current shortlist is any indication, any of the black women Biden selects from it will be just as qualified–and likely more so–than any of their colleagues at the time of their selection. It wouldn’t surprise me if Biden chose Breyer’s former clerk (Ketanji Brown Jackson) to succeed him. But as a state university graduate myself, part of me hopes that someone with at least one degree from outside the Ivy League gets selected.
Two Tales of Tech Recruiting
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In an industry that has had (and continues to have) persistent problems when it comes to how it hires and treats black people within its ranks, few things are worse than a black woman announcing on social media that she short-changed a candidate of $45,000 because "I personally don't have the bandwidth to give lessons on salary negotiation".
I've worked with both contract recruiters and full-time recruiters in 10 years as a manager staffing software engineering positions on multiple teams and none of them low-balled any candidate I chose to extend an offer because I intended to keep those folks for as long as I could. The alternative--losing good people to companies that can poach them simply by offering more money--meant not just losing their skills, and having fewer people to divide the same amount of work between, but my employer incurring costs trying to backfill the open position. Especially in a market where the competition for talented people is more and more challenging, the last way any company should start a relationship with a new employee is by undervaluing them from the moment they join.
A position I only filled a couple of weeks ago had been open for two solid months before that. Rather than risk losing a good candidate over $10,000, I requested an exception to offer a larger signing bonus. With the exception granted, we made a best and final offer that he accepted. The onboarding process is going smoothly, and since we're paying him what he's actually worth based on the geography we're in and what our competitors are offering, he will be harder to poach with just money.
Fortunately, there are good examples of recruiters doing well by the people they recruit.
Unlike the first Johnson, this one probably built a significant amount of goodwill and trust--not just between herself and the candidate, but between the candidate and the company she will be working for. In an industry where software engineers are encouraged to switch jobs every couple of years, this company has a good chance of growing this junior software engineer into a senior software engineer--perhaps even a engineering leader--because a recruiter put their best foot forward.
As is sometimes the case on Twitter in cases like this, someone tagged the company Mercedes S. Johnson is recruiting on behalf of--and someone responded requesting a DM with more information. The tweet that actually led me to this whole story was about doxxing and how Ms. Johnson shouldn't lose her job over the post. I've written about at-will employment and cancel culture before, and people have definitely lost their jobs for less than what this woman bragged on Twitter about doing. As of this writing, she was still defending her action.
If you work in tech recruiting and the opportunity presents itself, choose to be a Briana instead of a Mercedes. Both the companies you hire for and the candidates you recruit for them will thank you.
MLK Day 2022
The third Monday in January is here, and once again people who oppose everything Dr. King stood for are abusing the one line they know from the I Have a Dream Speech (because they don’t know any others) for their own political ends. This annual whitewashing of King’s legacy only succeeds to the degree it has because the people doing the whitewashing don’t dare venture beyond the confines of that line in that speech because too much of what he written stands in direct opposition to their political aims. This applies not just to the secular, but to the religious as well.
One of my cousins read his children Letter from Birmingham Jail yesterday. This letter is where we can find the phrase “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This letter is also where we can find this phrase: “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider”. You can be certain that none of the hypocrites quoting King today will quote that. Decades after this letter was written, we’ve seen how this country continues to treat and talk about certain immigrants. Decades after this letter was written, the segregation and police brutality of which King wrote in 1963 are still problems in this country today. Actually reading his letter reveals that direct action was chosen as a last resort, only after the local leaders they negotiated with broke their promises.
This passage from the letter is sadly relevant once again in the wake of GOP measures to make it harder for those in the electorate who oppose their program to cast votes:
An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?
One key insight among many in King's five-and-a-half page letter is the different ways in which the black community responded to the stubborn persistence of Jim Crow & segregation: adjusting to it, being desensitized to the problems of those black less secure economically and academically than themselves, or bitterness. His warnings about what could happen if the nonviolent efforts for justice he supported were rejected would unfortunately become true--not just in the immediate wake of his assassination five years after this letter, but many times in the wake of police violence resulting in the death of someone in their custody (and/or acquittals as the result of the rare court trials officers faced for such violence).First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
King’s decades-old criticism of the contemporary Christian church in the America of his day should shame today’s Christian church:
The hypocrites referencing King on this day are doing things like invoking his name in support of "All Lives Matter", or to support their bans on Critical Race Theory (which could pretty easily prevent children in our public schools from actually learning anything about King's letter). Some More News has a hilarious, profane, and correct take on the annual whitewashing of King's legacy.The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.
1/6 and 9/11
Absent from much of the written commentary I've read about the insurrection at the US Capitol last year has been any mention of how much the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks helped to pave the way to where we are now. A friend sent me this piece by a Canadian professor which serves as a good example of what I mean.
Though he correctly identifies specific individuals and economic forces going back 40 years that transferred wealth upward even as they directed discontent (if not rage) about this state of affairs against poor and minority populations at home and "foreign aid" abroad, there is not a single mention of the nation's response to the 9/11 attacks. The nation's lurch toward authoritarianism in the wake of those attacks was bipartisan. Just a single congresswoman, Barbara Lee of California, voted against the open-ended Authorization for Use of United States Armed Forces which would later be used to invade Iraq on pretexts that would prove false. Large bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate drafted and approved the Patriot Act for George W. Bush to sign into law. It authorized the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. George W. Bush's administration engaged in warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans, extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects, and torture of those same suspects. Enemy combatant status was created out of thin air, as were the military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--all to deny people the rights they should have had under our Constitution. The NYPD illegally surveilled Muslims both inside and outside New York City for over a decade after the attacks. The LAPD tried and failed to create a similar surveillance program in 2007.Thomas Homer-Dixon’s piece mentions Christians just twice, once as fertile soil for the seeds of white nationalist great replacement theory to take root and flourish, and again as a group that would be super-empowered in a second Trump administration. He projects a rise in violence by vigilante, paramilitary groups in the same sentence, though the use of Christian symbols and rhetoric by such groups has a history stretching back well over a century in the US. The involvement of conservative Christian groups in the insurrection is much less-surprising however when you look back at their response to 9/11. When surveyed in 2009 by the Pew Research Center, a majority of white evangelical Protestants said that torture against terrorism suspects could sometimes or often be justified. This belief was held both by majorities of Christians who attended church a few times a year or monthly, and those who attended church weekly–or more often. Years after the original survey, you could even find a piece like this one in The Federalist quoting Bible passages and Thomas Aquinas to argue that Christians can support torture.
Not mentioned at all in the Homer-Dixon piece–significant increases in anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The first murder victim of an anti-Muslim hate crime turned out to be a naturalized American citizen, Balbir Singh Sodhi. The turban he wore in adherence to the Sikh faith was sufficient cause for a bigot to murder him. Anti-Muslim sentiment would later take the form of the birther conspiracy, for whom Donald Trump would become the most powerful cheerleader. We have seen other anti-Muslim murders due to the ignorance of bigots (in Olathe, Kansas) as well as violent assaults. We’ve also seen the political right demagogue Park51 into the “Ground Zero mosque”. That same year (2010) saw the introduction of anti-Sharia bills in a significant majority of our 50 states. The number of conservative professed Christians who believed (and perhaps still believe) the birther conspiracy is in retrospect perhaps one explanation for the ease with which the QAnon conspiracy spread within the same community. But looking back a bit further, that community’s response to 9/11 might have revealed a predisposition to conspiracy theories more generally. In 2006, a division of the denomination publishers for the Presbyterian Church published a 9/11 conspiracy book.
There will certainly be more commentary about January 6th as this year progresses–particularly as more insurrectionists plead guilty to the crimes with which they’re charged or (finally) face trial. But the absence of a full reckoning with how this country’s responses to 9/11 helped pave the way for 1/6 will prevent us from fully understanding that event–and might enable the next insurrection to succeed.
Is a College Degree Worth It?
Public discourse has turned (again) to the question of whether or not a college degree is "worth it". I say again because in the tech industry, this question has been asked about computer science (CS) degrees over a decade ago. I was prompted to revisit this blog post from over 14(!) years ago by Scott Hanselman's response to a TikTok video saying a computer science degree is never worth it:
Is it worth getting a bachelors in computer science? Let’s just say that making massive declarative statements is very rarely a good idea. https://t.co/qwmabnYCth pic.twitter.com/hmzvFa4bq3
— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) August 12, 2021
Back in 2007, I was managing a team which consisted mostly of what Tarver calls "street programmers". In that particular experience, Tarver was wrong about street programmers being superior to formally-trained CS graduates. The members of my staff who consistently turned out the highest-quality code (which not coincidentally was also the best-tested and the least likely to require re-work) all had CS degrees. In my next role, one of my colleagues was an Air Force veteran who was self-taught in software engineering. He was one of the most skilled engineers I've worked with in my entire career, and taught me a ton about the practice of continuous integration over a decade ago that I still use in my work today.
In re-reading Tarver's post, even he concedes that the combination of hands-on programming practice and a strong grasp of theory creates a superior programmer when compared to one trained only in university or only on-the-job. The other thing which struck me as odd in retrospect was the lack of any mention of summer internships. Back in the early-to-mid 90s when I was earning my own computer science degree, it was definitely the expectation that CS majors would complete at least one summer internship before they graduated so they had at least a little experience with programming outside of coursework requirements. I found an on-campus job where I worked during the semester which at least had tasks that I could automate with scripts, as well as database work. My summer internship with The Washington Post as a tech intern turned into a part-time job my last semester of undergrad and a full-time job offer at the end of the year. So instead of a declarative statement such as "college is never worth it" or "college is always worth it", a better answer to the question is more like "it depends".
Quite a lot has changed since 2007 when it comes to the variety of ways available to learn about programming. There are lots of programmer bootcamps now. My current employer partners with one to train college graduates with degrees in fields other than computer science for entry-level software engineering roles with us. Beyond instructor-led bootcamps, there are a wealth of online education options both free and paid. Having worked with engineers who came into the field via the bootcamp route at two different companies now, I've seen enough inconsistency in the readiness of bootcamp graduates for professional work that most require more oversight and supervision at entry-level positions than graduates from computer science programs.
At least some of the discussion about the worth of college degrees (in CS or many other fields) is a function of tuition continuing to increase at rates triple that of inflation (and have been doing so for decades). The total amount my parents spent on in-state tuition for my CS degree in the 90s might not even cover 2 years at the same school today. A year of tuition at my 1st-choice school today, Carnegie-Mellon University costs at least triple the $24,000 they charged in 1992. It might be possible to rationalize paying high tuition for a STEM degree with high long-term earning potential, but those high tuition rates apply regardless of major.
Another issue that discussions of whether or not college degrees are "worth it" consistently misses is how open different fields and companies within those fields are to hiring people without formal training. Particularly in tech, that openness exists for white men in a way that it definitely does not for people of color. Shawn Wildermuth's documentary Hello World gets deep into why women and minorities tend not to pursue careers in software development and even with the credential of a college degree and experience, it can be very challenging to sustain a tech career--much less advance--if you don't look like the people who make hiring and promotion decisions.
Count me in the camp of those who believe a CS degree is worth it. I wouldn't have the tech career I have today without it.
Thoughts on the Many Shades of Anti-Blackness
A friend shared the following tweet with me not long ago:
Whoever Jen Meredith is, she is hardly alone in sharing these sentiments. Few routes to acceptance by the still-predominant culture in the United States are shorter and more reliable than implicit or explicit criticism of the black community in America whose heritage here stretches back even before the founding of the country as we know it. There have always been people who buy into the model minority myth. The term “Asian” elides significant differences between its various subcultures (and erases the parts of that very large community which don’t support the immigrant success story in exactly the same way some white conservatives do). People from the Philippines have meaningfully different backgrounds than those from South Korea, Pakistan, and Vietnam to take a few examples.
Meredith is (obviously) sub-tweeting American blacks with her entire comment, but the “no ethnic leader” part in particular betrays a very specific ignorance about the history of black people in the United States. Black people in this country have never just had one leader. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. are just the ones that recent history (the vast majorities of which have not been written by black people) has acknowledged. Less often-noted are men like Marcus Garvey, who while Jamaican (not American) nevertheless found a receptive audience among some black Americans (including the parents of Malcolm X). A. Philip Randolph was no less important than either of those men. The same can be said of Bayard Rustin, Fred Hampton, W.E.B Dubois, or Booker T. Washington.
Asians in the United States may not have had a singular figure that history chooses to recognize in this way (or a Cesar Chavez, like the Mexican-American community), but perhaps that’s in part because they haven’t really needed one. This doesn’t mean they haven’t even experienced racism in this country. The federal government passed laws against Chinese immigration and some were even lynched in California the way they did blacks in the South. Japanese-Americans were put in concentration camps and had their property taken. But at least they had property to take, which could not be said of black Americans in many cases. One Asian-American experience which may not be broadly known, but is emblematic of the subtleties of racism in this country, is that of the Mississippi Delta Chinese. The entire project is well-worth reading and listening to in full, but here is one part which stood out to me:
After WWII, China was an ally to the United States and then the rules relaxed; I think it was in 1947 or 1948. After the war, Chinese kids were allowed to attend white public schools, so that was the year that I started first grade.”Issac Woodard was just one of many black veterans of WWII who was attacked just for wearing his uniform around this time. Some black veterans fared even worse than Woodard. The US military didn't desegregate until 1948. Over two decades would pass before schools in Yalobusha County, Mississippi (and the rest of the state) would finally desegregate. At the same time members of the Asian-American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) community were attending better-quality schools and building wealth, many black military veterans were being denied the benefits of the GI Bill. Black people resorted to overpaying for housing via contracts, due to racist real estate covenants and redlining by the Federal Housing Administration. All of this happened before you even get to the ways in which federal civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing legislation have been actively undermined or passively neglected from the Nixon administration forward.
When your experience (and your parents' experience) of the United States doesn’t include the combination of chattel slavery, pogroms, property theft, terrorism, segregation, and other aspects of the black American experience, you’re bound to see this country differently. That’s why you can (unfortunately) hear some of the same anti-black American sentiments from black immigrants to this country. Particularly as someone who writes software for a living and leads teams of software engineers, I have more common experiences with my fellow church members, classmates, and co-workers from India, China, and the Philippines than I do with some black people with hundreds of years of heritage in this country.
Finally, it is exceedingly unwise to underestimate the growing political power of the Asian-American & Pacific Islander community. This movement with “no ethnic leader” (as Meredith claims) got federal legislation passed against Asian hate crimes—in our current political environment—when we still don’t have a federal law against lynching after over a century of attempts to pass one. It’s all well and good to talk about having agency in one’s life. I am doing my best as a parent to teach my own children the same lessons about making good choices that my parents taught me. But criticisms of the American black community that fail to acknowledge how an unjust society increases the difficulty of making wise choices are dishonest.
Thoughts on Diversity in Tech
Excerpt of Prepared Remarks
False Unity and “Moving On” is Dangerous
Even before yesterday’s inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the new President and Vice President of the United States, there were calls for unity—even empathy—and not just from Joe Biden. Such calls seemed very premature at the time, given the efforts of Trump and his allies to overturn the election result. With the failure of those efforts, despite a literal assault on the entire legislative branch incited by Trump resulting in five dead, such calls for unity and healing look even more naive.
Too many so-called conservatives (and some of those further left on the political spectrum) would rather put unity ahead of accountability. MAGA adherents and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory essentially invaded the US Capitol and delayed the legislative branch from executing its responsibility to certify the Electoral College results at the urging of the president and his allies. They may have been aided and abetted in this insurrectionist act by multiple members of the GOP in both the Senate and the House. At least one shared the location of Speaker Pelosi on Twitter, as if to direct insurrectionists to her location. The wife of a Supreme Court justice may have funded the transportation to the Capitol for some of these insurrections. Even the death toll, the damage to the US Capitol, and the risk to their own lives did not prevent some Republicans from voting against certification of the Electoral College tally once the Capitol was secured.
Placing unity before accountability too many times before is what has led the country here. Unity before accountability killed Reconstruction, subjecting black Americans to almost another century of domestic terrorism, property theft, and subjugation at the hands of whites. The Nixon pardon, the Iran/Contra pardons, and the lack of accountability for those who engaged in torture and warrant less wiretapping of US citizens all placed unity before accountability. All of these actions paved the way for President Trump to be acquitted despite clear evidence that he tried to shake down the president of Ukraine in exchange for the announcement of an investigation into Hunter Biden.
Less than a year has elapsed between the Senate's acquittal of Trump on two impeachment charges and the insurrection on January 6. Only a tiny number of GOP House members put their country ahead of their party in voting for a second impeachment. A second acquittal for Trump seems likely--and we will live to regret it.
The Minimum Wage Debate is Too Narrow and Small
Recently I've found myself having variations of the same conversation on social media regarding the minimum wage. Those to my political left have made statements such as "if your business would fail if you paid workers $15/hour you're exploiting them." Those to my political right--some current or former business owners, some not--argue that minimum wage increases had a definite impact on their bottom line.
I have two problems with the first argument: (1) it oversimplifies and trivializes a very serious issue, (2) these days, the arguers tend to aim it at small business owners. Worker exploitation is real, and conflating every employer who follows the law when it comes to pay and other facets of employment harms the cause of combatting serious harms. The outgoing Trump administration has been trying to reduce the wages of H-2A workers. Undocumented workers in sectors like agriculture, food, home-based healthcare, and others fare even worse. In some cases, drug addiction treatment has turned thousands of people into little more than indentured servants, with complicity from judges and state regulators. Until recently, large corporations like Wal-Mart and Amazon evaded accountability for low worker pay and mistreatment despite having significant percentages of workers on food stamps and Medicaid and a high rate of worker injuries.
Another variation of the first argument takes a starting point in the past (like the 1960s) then says the minimum wage should be whatever the rate of inflation would have grown it to be between then and today. If you go back to when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive (for example), the minimum wage today "should" be $22/hour. You can pick any point in time and say what the minimum wage should be based on inflation, but that's not the same as grappling honestly with how industries have changed and/or how the nature of work has changed in the half-century plus since the civil rights era.
One challenge with the second argument is that the examples cited are typically restaurants or food services--businesses that operate at low margins and have high fixed costs in addition to being labor-intensive. Even in that sector, the impacts of a $15/hour minimum wage are not necessarily what you might expect. But not every business is the restaurant business, and a single sector cannot govern the parameters of debate for an issue that impacts the entire economy and the broader society get a broadly beneficial result.
At this point in the discussion, someone usually brings up automation, followed by someone mentioning universal basic income (UBI). What I have said in the past, and will continue to say, is that automation is coming regardless of what the federal government, states, and/or localities do with the minimum wage. As someone who has written software for a living for over 20 years, the essence of my line of work is automating things. Sometimes software augments what people do by taking over rote or repetitive aspects of their jobs and freeing them up to do more value-added work. But if an entire job is rote or repetitive, software can and does eliminate jobs. The combination of software and robots are what enable some manufacturers to produce so many goods without the large number of workers they would have needed in the past.
Talking about UBI enlarges the conversation, but even then may not fully take on the nature of the relationship between government, business, and people. We do not talk nearly often enough about how long the United States got by with a much less-robust social safety net than other countries because of how much responsibility employers used to take on for their employees. Nor do we talk about the amount of additional control that gives employers over their employees--or the cracks in the system that can result from unemployment. The usual response from the political right whenever there is any discussion of separating health care from employment is to cry "socialism". But the falseness of such charges can be easily exposed. Capitalism seems to be alive and well in South Korea, and they have a universal healthcare system--a significant portion of which is privately funded. Germany is another country where capitalism, universal healthcare, and private insurers seem to be co-existing just fine.
The conversation we need to have, as companies and their shareholders get richer, share fewer of those gains with their workers, and otherwise delegate responsibilities they used to keep as part of the social contract, is how the relationship between government, business, and people should change to reflect the current reality. The rationale always given for taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages was investment. But as we've seen both in the pandemic, and in the corporate response to the big tax cut in 2017, corporate execs mostly pocketed the gains for themselves or did stock buybacks to further inflate their per-share prices. Far from sharing any of the gains with workers, some corporations laid off workers instead. Given ample evidence that preferential tax treatment for capital gains does not result in more investment, the preference should end. People of working age should not be solely dependent on an employer or Medicare for their healthcare. A model where public and private insurance co-exist for those people and isn't tied to employment is where we should be headed as a society.
We need to think much harder than we have about what has to change both to account for the deficiencies in our social safety net (that corporations will not fill), and an economy on its way to eliminating entire fields that employ a lot of people today. Bill Gates advocated in favor of a tax on robots year ago. The challenges of funding UBI and whether or not it's possible to do that and continue to maintain the social safety net as it currently exists need to be faced head-on. Talking about the minimum wage alone--even as multiple states and localities increase it well beyond the federal minimum--is not enough.
Why Conservatives Are Anxious About America
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cultural domination of progressive views on race, sex, immigration and other topics in mainstream media and academia
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the distortion or banishment of other views on those topics from those institutions
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the prospect of irreversible cultural change
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It suggests that despite fairly broad, moderate conservative control of the country's political institutions, conservatives want their views of race, sex, and immigration to control cultural institutions as well
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it suggests that the ongoing, multi-decade project of building competing conservative institutions has failed to produce any prestigious ones
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Note the absence of any explicit mention of economic issues in the list of topics driving conservative angst
Waiter, there's a [brown person] in my [fictional world]
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power finally debuted on Amazon Prime, and right on cue came the complaints from white fans of Lord of the Rings about “wokeness”. What seems new about this latest iteration of the “waiter, there’s a [brown person] in my [fictional world]” phenomenon is the deliberate decision of the mainstream media to legitimize these complaints about said fictional world. The tweet below is a great summation of the journalist malpractice being engaged in here.
twitter.com/carnage4l…
When you lead off a piece with complaints about a fictional world with the deputy managing editor of redstate.com, that’s bad enough. But it’s even worse when you conflate fans of Tolkien with actual scholars. Running a story like this–which elevates the weakest of arguments from people with thin credentials at best–seems to be a preview of what we can expect from the new, “neutral” CNN.
I’ve written only briefly about Star Wars being my earliest fandom. But nearly as old as my Star Wars fandom is my love of The Lord of the Rings. I came to it first through watching the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit in the early 80s, then the books. The Lord of the Rings definitely contributed to my becoming a D&D player later on (and a reader of many other books in the fantasy genre). In college, I took the comparative mythology class taught by Dr. Verlyn Flieger (a well-known Tolkien scholar) because it gave me an excuse to read The Silmarillion for credit instead of just for fun. It’s been nearly 30 years since I took her course, but I still remember it because to her credit she gave us what would later be called a trigger warning regarding the depictions of Gollum in Tolkien’s work (which wasn’t perceived as racist by many people then, but likely would be now). I don’t recall if she gave us a similar warning regarding the descriptions of orcs, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did. N.K. Jemisin (the 1st and only sci-fi author to win 3 consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel in the genre) has definitely made that criticism of Tolkien’s description of orcs.
When Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, my fellow Tolkien nerds and I made sure to see all three movies at The Uptown, the best theater in the area at the time. I bought and watched the extended editions of all three movies on DVD, and am overdue to add to my collection whatever 4K version of the trilogy my XBox One X will play. I even watched the not-as-good Hobbit trilogy. The books of the trilogy, The Silmarillion, and an old copy of The Tolkien Reader are on a shelf in the home office where I’m writing this right now. I’ve read The Children of Hurin (a copy from the public library anyway), but have not yet added a copy to my collection.
Richard Newby is a longstanding member of the black Tolkien nerd tribe, and he’s written the only piece worth reading on this subject. So rather than write an inferior version of what he’s already written, I’ll write more broadly–because these complaints from white fans aren’t new. Moses Ingram had to deal with these same people when they objected to her presence as an inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. At least Disney (and her co-stars) seemed to have learned something from their failure to stand up for John Boyega when he first showed up as a black stormtrooper in The Force Awakens. Disney failed Kelly-Marie Tran in a similar way. Marvel has attracted much of anti-woke ire in recent years, for everything from Black Panther, to She-Hulk, The Eternals, and Ms. Marvel. Steve Toussaint gets cast to play Corlys Velaryon–cue the anti-woke whining. Now it’s Sir Lenny Henry’s turn, and Ismael Cruz Cordoba’s turn to contend with toxic fandom. Toxic fandom can suspend disbelief for magic, dragons, laser swords, faster-than-light travel, and time travel–but not for brown people–human, elven, dwarven, or harfoot in this case. Even as I write, these sad know-nothings are arguing on Twitter about “the author’s vision” with the likes of Neil Gaiman–who in addition to being a great and prolific fantasy author himself (American Gods, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and countless others)–has such a deep knowledge of Tolkien’s work that Christopher Tolkien personally thanked him for explaining a reference his father had written years before.
Before the internet, being a black fan of science fiction and fantasy was a lonely pastime. Depending on where and when you grew up, you might not have had many other black kids as classmates at school or friends at church to begin with. Add to that an interest that not many other kids might have and you had to be prepared to like or love that thing on your own. You had to cultivate an appreciation for these stories despite the absence of characters like you playing parts in them at all (except as stereotypes and/or foils for whoever the hero was). You don’t realize that’s what you’re doing as a black fan of these genres (because you’re in middle school when this starts, or younger), you only see it in retrospect when you’re an adult. I was most recently reminded of that mental work when I watched Lovecraft Country, and again when I rewatched the Far Beyond the Stars episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these stories impact me the way they do, both set in the 1950s United States, when black people continued to be treated as second-class citizens at best. Decades after these stories were set, self-appointed gatekeepers are still trying to keep us out of “their” genre–despite the fact that we know and love as well and as much, if not more than they do.
When I listened to this episode of Throughline, and heard how the work of Octavia Butler impacted–and still impacts–the life of an NPR co-host (who is originally from Iran), it reminded me of how thrilled I was to read Wild Seed and know that someone who looked like me had written it. I only watched it in syndication, but still remember how important it was to see Nichelle Nichols play Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek. Seeing Billy Dee Williams play Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back, LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn play Geordi LaForge and Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Avery Brooks play Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really mattered–not just to my childhood, but into the present. Deep Space Nine in particular has yet to equaled, much less surpassed in the genre, for its positive representations of black manhood, father-son relationships, even romance between a black man and black woman who are peers (Captains Sisko and Yates).
Today, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and other black authors are putting out some of the best work on offer across the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Twitter hashtags like #DemDragons allow black fans of these shows to enjoy them together in near real-time. Facebook groups and private chats (and their moderators) do the work of keeping toxic fans away. And even when Hollywood makes mistakes, like firing Orlando Jones from American Gods, or policing the language black writers use, we are finally getting to see ourselves more and more in the work of this genre–and the work is better for it. Studios and fans are fighting back against bitter review bombers. And while such defenses shouldn’t have to be made, at least they are being made. Toxic fandom may not like us in their fictional worlds anymore than their real ones, but we aren’t going anywhere in either one.