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.
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
Only a Little Forgiveness for Old Debts
I came across this parsimonious student loan forgiveness proposal in a tweet earlier today. The author, Beth Akers, even had the nerve to call this stingy proposal a student-loan jubilee. The $5000 (which isn't even cash, but a 1-time tax credit), is just 1/6th the average total student debt for recent college graduates. She ends her piece this way:
More than half of Americans have built their lives and made ends meet without a college degree. Call universal student loan cancellation what it is: elitist.
The conservative think tank crowd never seems to have a problem with the government giving away money to businesses, and are quick to hand wave away any evidence of abuse of such programs by big businesses. But the moment there's even a chance of the government doing something to help individuals, we get to hear a lot of concern about taxes and budgets, along with faux populism.
A cursory amount of digging reveals that the picture of who owes student loan debt is different than the stereotypical "whiny millennial" (some of whom are much closer to 40 than they are to 20). A Forbes piece from February of this year is particularly enlightening. The piece is worth reading in full but here are some of the facts I found most interesting:
- Of the $1.6 trillion in student debt owed, Texas and Florida rank 2nd and 3rd in the number of borrowers and amounts owed (California and New York rank 1st and 4th).
- Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan are also in the top 10 by number of borrowers and amounts owed
- Arizona and Florida rank 1st and 3rd in the nation in average student loan debt per capita
- Over $300 billion of that $1.6 trillion is owed by people aged 50 or older.
- The 50+ cohort of student loan borrowers is about the same size as the 24 and younger cohort (a little over 8 million borrowers), but the amount they owe is nearly triple the size of their younger counterparts.
So not only is student loan debt not merely the province of the young, nor is it restricted to "coastal elites". You could be eligible for retirement and still owe Sallie Mae. If the student loans you owe are private, there's no guarantee that debt will be forgiven upon your death.
I am quite fortunate when it comes to student loan debt. Graduating with a computer science degree from a state university with zero debt (thanks to parents who paid in full, and a state smart enough to subsidize in-state tuition) meant that I didn't incur any student loan debt until I decided to go to grad school. In the interim, I was able to buy a home.
Attending grad school part-time at night while working full-time (as my parents did for their undergraduate and graduate degrees, while raising my sister and I) and paying at least some tuition while in school mean that the amount I currently owe is well below the average for recent college graduates. Even so, it will be another decade from now before I've finished paying off Sallie Mae. I'll be thinking seriously about higher education for my own children then, since my twins will be in high school 10 years from now.
What the green eyeshade crowd is missing is that the $1.6 trillion owed by students is preventing them from putting their earnings elsewhere in the economy, such as home ownership or investment. That debt is almost certainly a factor in whether or not people choose to have children. Akers harking back to an era where a college degree was not a necessity to live a middle class life does not change the facts about the type of globalized economy we live in today. Nor does it change the fact that automation isn't just changing "low-skilled" labor, but also some of the jobs that a college degree formerly provided a gateway to. If you actually want to grow the middle class in the United States in anything approaching a sustainable fashion, a solution to student loan debt (both the current amounts, and a mechanism to prevent forgiven debt from simply growing back to even higher amounts) is just one part of a larger conversation.
Life and Religious Liberty for Me, But Not for Thee
With Amy Coney Barrett now on the Supreme Court and weighing in on cases, the payoff to the evangelical right for their unstinting support of Donald Trump becomes even clearer than it has already been. She joined a narrow majority to block COVID-19 limits on church occupancy. Despite numerous cases of COVID-19 outbreaks tied to church events (whether worship, choir practices, or other gatherings), despite over a quarter million Americans dead from COVID-19, the Supreme Court majority ignored the known science around how COVID-19 spreads because of "religious liberty". Much has been made of the fact that six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, but there were Catholic justices (including the Chief Justice) in the minority. Even the Pope was critical of those protesting restrictions on church attendance.
As someone who felt compelled to quit my first full-time job out of college because of constant pressure from my employer to work on my day of worship (as a Seventh-day Adventist, my family and I typically attend church on Saturday), I am angry that religious liberty is being used as the pretext to invalidate measures intended to preserve public health. When those measures (and stricter ones) have been applied elsewhere (parts of Europe, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, etc), we've seen them work successfully in slowing and stopping the spread of COVID-19. Particularly because the same Supreme Court was not at all concerned about religious liberty when it came to the Muslim travel ban (the Quakers, among others, see the hypocrisy clearly), the ruling seems especially hollow. Plenty of churches (including my own) have stayed remote throughout the pandemic, either broadcasting services from empty sanctuaries except for themselves and musicians, or from home. I've given offering and tithed online. It is by no means an ideal experience, but given my own comorbidities it is better than risking my twins being orphaned.
Because Supreme Court confirmation fights (and the attendant press coverage) have focused so narrowly on where a nominee stands regarding Roe v. Wade, no attention has been paid to their stances regarding other issues quite relevant to life--and death. Invalidating restrictions on church occupancy during a pandemic is just one of the ways in which "pro-life" applies very poorly to describing where a justice actually stands. As the clock runs out on the Trump presidency, the Department of Justice under Bill Barr is accelerating the pace of executions. Barrett has already participated in her first capital punishment case on the Supreme Court. She did not recuse herself, nor register her opposition to the execution going forward as justices in the minority did.
I suppose it has always been this way, but when a lot of people talk about religious liberty, they only want it for themselves--and no one else.
Rest In Peace David Prouse
I’ve loved science fiction and fantasy for as long as I can remember. But I hadn’t thought much lately about exactly where that love began until a phone call from my mom today. She called to let me know that David Prouse had died. While James Earl Jones was the unforgettable voice of Darth Vader, David Prouse was who we all saw.
Before tonight’s conversation, where she reminisced about taking my sister and I to see it in the theater, I distinctly remember her taking me to see Return of the Jedi in the theater when I was 9. I remember the anticipation of seeing and just how much I enjoyed it. But when she mentioned my sister being in a stroller, I paused. Because my sister and I are 4 1/2 years apart, she wasn’t talking about when we saw Return of the Jedi. My mom was talking about the preceding movie—The Empire Strikes Back. While I’ve seen it many times since then in almost every conceivable format save LaserDisc, I didn’t remember the very first time. She thought I would be scared of Darth Vader, but as she told me I mostly stared in awe.
So Rest In Peace to David Prouse. Thanks to you—and my mom—for starting my journey into science fiction.
Empathy Now
Predictably, the calls for empathy for “the other side” have already begun. This tweet from Ian Bremmer is one example:
[twitter.com/ianbremme...](https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1325135387707269121?s=21)
While I understand the sentiment, I find these demands for empathy to be premature. The speed with which these demands have come (and the people they tend to come from) tell me that they do not know anyone who has been hurt by the effects of Trump's policies--much less have been hurt themselves.
One of my former co-workers had his wife prevented from joining him here because of the Muslim ban. He and I were working on a contract at the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service at the time. Another co-worker from that time was married to someone from one of the banned countries. Imagine trying to explain to your child what the president said about the place you come from, and your faith.
For years I have listened to Trump and his supporters attack birthright citizenship--the very thing that makes me an American. I've seen his administration make it harder to become a citizen legally and try to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens like my parents. I have quite a few friends from the places Trump called "shithole countries". I've stressed out along with my staff and friends at work about whether or not their visas would be renewed as they navigated a process made deliberately harder by the Trump administration.
The people who voted for Trump--twice in some cases--meant for us to endure another 4 years of these assaults on citizenship, faith, and dignity. Even as I write this, some of his supporters are amplifying Trump's baseless charges of voter fraud. To ask those who opposed Trump to show empathy to his supporters now shows a real lack of understanding for the profound harm Trump's presidency has inflicted on marginalized people (and likely will still inflict because his presidency doesn't officially end until Inauguration Day in January 2021).
Sympathy may be possible later, perhaps even empathy--even though his supporters certainly displayed none who disagreed with them in 2016--because those of us who at least attempt to take our Christianity seriously believe Matthew 5:44 to be a command, not a suggestion. But it will not be on anyone else's timetable.
2016 Was Not an Anomaly
As of this writing, we lack certainty regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. But we know enough to be sure that 2016 was not an anomaly. Trump has already surpassed his vote total from 2016 by over 4 million votes. In the midst of a pandemic that has claimed the lives of nearly a quarter million of our fellow citizens—due in significant part to the incompetent handling of the pandemic—Trump still has a path to a second term. Despite the open corruption and self-dealing, despite Trump's racism and misogyny, despite impeachment and a trial for pressuring President Zelensky into opening an investigation into Biden, 4 million more voters want a second Trump term.
Those 4 million additional votes for Trump include improving on his performance with Hispanic voters. While it is easier to see hindsight (as most things are), the combination of the Supreme Court preventing Trump from cancelling DACA, the targeting of previous fear mongering about "caravans" not being directed at Cuban-Americans (or not perceived by them as such), and the successful branding of Democrats as socialists by their GOP opponents seems to have resulted in a faster and clearer result favoring Trump in Florida than in 2016. Even some of those targeted by the caravan rhetoric have not been swayed from their support of Donald Trump. This election should mark the official death of the "demographics is destiny" idea that Democrats have been operating under for many years. As Chris Ladd puts it perfectly in this paragraph from a piece written November 2, 2020:
"Democrats’ POC coalition was premised on the notion that these targets of white racism would recognize their common interests and unite in resistance. Thing is, many don’t want to risk sharing the fate of Blacks in America. Educated whites and more affluent immigrants generally feel safe from being treated like Blacks, but less affluent newcomers on the margins of whiteness don’t. Rather than joining forces with this coalition, many immigrants see an alternative path to safety – becoming white."
Becoming White: The Weakness in Democrats' "People of Color" Coalition
Another key factor in Trump's apparent Florida victory: the successful imposition of what is effectively a poll tax by Florida's GOP governor and legislature prevented nearly a million Floridians who had completed sentences for felony crimes from voting. They did this in clear defiance of the 65% of Floridians voted in favor of automatic restoration of voting rights in 2018.
While the Democrats appear to have retained control of the House of Representatives (including all 4 original members of The Squad), the majority will be smaller than it was after the 2018 midterms. Even as Cori Bush joins The Squad, QAnon will seat its first congresswoman, and Madison Cawthorn (known for a bucket list that included visiting Hitler’s Eagles Nest) will become the youngest member of North Carolina's delegation to Congress--and of the entire body.
As significant as the uncertainty regarding the presidential election is, the GOP appears to have retained control of the Senate as well. The electorate not seeing fit to punish any of the senators who have enabled all of Trump’s excesses has created a huge opening for a slightly more subtle authoritarian to successfully challenge Biden, Harris, or whoever else the Democrats put up for the presidency in 2024. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, and/or one of Trump’s children seem likely candidates to at minimum form exploratory committees if not follow through and run to succeed Donald Trump. Even in the event Trump loses the 2020 election, I would not rule out the prospect of Donald Trump running for re-election in 2024.
The Senate remaining in GOP hands even if Biden wins kills most (if not all) prospects for meaningful legislation to reform the issues we've seen during the past four years. If the latest anti-ACA lawsuit succeeds with the 6 conservative justices now seated on the Supreme Court, millions of Americans will lose the healthcare insurance they gained because of it and millions more (including myself) with pre-existing conditions at risk of becoming uninsured (and uninsurable) due to changes in employment. Without control of the Senate, Democrats would have little power to put a legislative fix into law. The same would be true of nearly any law the GOP chooses to make a court case out of. Because this same Senate has stocked the lower court with Trump appointees (mostly political hacks with law degrees rather than serious jurists), such cases reaching SCOTUS if lower courts don't rule the way the GOP prefers seems more likely than not. GOP control of the Senate almost certainly puts a wrench in any plans Biden has for staffing cabinet and sub-cabinet positions requiring Senate confirmation.
While it appears that Biden may yet win the presidency, we know that for the second consecutive election and the third in just 20 years, a minority of American voters has (for now) successfully stymied the will of a majority of American voters at the ballot box thanks to the Electoral College.
Kamala
Perhaps unlike most people of Jamaican or West Indian descent, I was somewhat conflicted by Biden’s selection of her to be his vice president. During her presidential run, a lot of people focused on her responses to the questions about whether or not she smoked weed in college (and what music she listened to). What put me off about her response was not that she smoked, but that she used the Jamaican part of her heritage as an excuse to lean hard into a stereotype about the island and its people. Her father apparently had a similar reaction.
Even without the bad weed joke, some of my conflict was regret that Colin Powell wasn’t first. I came of age politically at a time when his name was bandied about as a possible vice president and when he thought about running for president himself. As a teenager, I was thrilled at the prospect that someone just like me–right down to both parents immigrating here from Jamaica–would run for president. I even said at the time (and again in a recent family group chat) that I’d have volunteered for a Colin Powell presidential campaign.
Despite my conflict, I wish the Biden-Harris ticket success. They would give this country at least a chance to move toward its stated ideals. And as for the commentary in some quarters regarding how insufferable Howard graduates will be, or AKA sorority sister will be, (or Jamaicans), I welcome that prospect. Jamaica has always punched above its weight culturally. A vice president of Jamaican descent would just be the latest example.
Thoughts on "Cancel Culture"
On Twitter, I'm one of those guys who tweets "At-will employment" every time someone loses their job because they did something stupid enough publicly enough that their employer decides the cost of their continued employment is too high. Lately that stupid thing tends to be something racist, and given the various and sundry ways at-will employment has put people--including myself--out of work in the past, I'm 100% okay with racist deeds being added to the list of things that can make you unemployed. Amy Cooper getting fired from her job at Franklin Templeton because she went viral for calling the cops on Christian Cooper (a black man) under false pretenses isn't "cancel culture". That's the downside of at-will employment.
In October 2017, Juli Briskman was out cycling one weekend in northern Virginia when President Trump's motorcade passed her on the road. She gave the motorcade the middle finger. When she informed her employer (a government contractor) that she was the woman in the picture that had gone viral on social media, they fired her. That wasn't "cancel culture" either, just the downside of at-will employment (the wrongful-termination lawsuit she filed the following year was dismissed for that reason). The same is true of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi attendees of the Unite the Right rally who were fired by their employers after being identified. So how do these examples connect to the Letter on Justice and Open Debate?
The signatories of this letter (at least a few of whom went on Twitter to withdraw support from it after they learned who else had signed) purport to be concerned about the weakening of "our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity". This begs the question of what is being debated, and what differences people are refusing to tolerate in favor of ideological conformity. "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces;" hints at one such example, but gets the key fact wrong. James Bennet, who did not read the Tom Cotton op-ed he chose to publish, resigned as the head of New York Times Opinion--he was not fired. The piece in question was updated with a 317-word editors' note indicating the piece "fell short of our standards and should not have been published". Another example "a research is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study", refers to the firing of David Shor for retweeting the work of Professor Omar Wasow. Jonathan Chait writes about it at length in this piece, and argues far more persuasively against "left illiberalism" than the vague and anodyne Harper's letter because he is specific. When I first learned of the Shor firing, it seemed unjust to me--and still does. His employer did wrong in firing him, and doing so smacks of precisely the sort of "woke liberalism" that those to the right on the political spectrum often decry.
Another friend of mine asked for my thoughts on J.K. Rowling and Noam Chomsky signing the letter, so I'll address them specifically here. From the little I've seen on Twitter, Rowling is receiving backlash for some tweets and more detailed opinions regarding transgender people that could be characterized as transphobic. To me it is unsurprising that Rowling would sign the Harper's letter. There is no downside I can discern to signing onto a vague letter about free speech and tolerance for differing views, but it will not prevent those who see Rowling's positions as transphobic from being any quieter or less vehement in their opposition to her opinion. Chomsky is a scholastic giant who has influenced multiple fields of study. He has been an activist for many causes above and beyond free speech, subjected to multiple arrests, and earned a place on Nixon's enemies list for that activism, so unlike many others on the list he has demonstrated the courage of his convictions for decades.
I think Mansa Keita was on target regarding the objectives of the Harper's letter when he tweeted the following:
The term "cancel culture" is simply a rhetorical device meant to control the contours of acceptable speech. The speech and values of those telling you how you should speak is not more privileged than your own.
Another friend of mine quite recently described cancel culture as being "seated somewhere between McCarthyism and market forces". I find this description quite apt as well.
There are certainly other examples beyond those I've listed where the expression of one's opinion resulted in them losing a job. James Damore's firing by Google is one example from my line of work. Rush Limbaugh getting fired by ESPN some years ago is another. Twenty years before Colin Kaepernick began the silent protest against police brutality that would ultimately cost him his career, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was suspended by the NBA for refusing to stand during the anthem. Whether "cancellation" for one's expressed opinion is as prevalent or permanent as some claim is an open question. So is the assertion that many people are self-censoring due to fear of consequences for speaking out. Anecdotes (including those I've shared) are not data.
The signatories (all of whom have substantial platforms of their own from which to convey their opinions) seem to be asking for themselves, and presumably other less-powerful people that controversial speech be somehow more privileged than other speech. They seem to be asking for a "freedom from consequences" that Juli Briskman (and certain Unite the Right rally attendees) were not exempt from. This piece on Digg goes much further in exploring that ground, and deals more specifically with some of the letter's endorsers. If freedom from consequences is at heart what the Harper's letter is asking for, how do we square that demand with the current nature of at-will employment? Instead of vague open letters in magazines with a vanishingly small total circulation, do we reconsider the current nature of at-will employment? Do we ask employers to be braver? Do we go so far as to change laws? Or do we continue to complain about the status quo?
Academic tenure is the concept I think comes closest to what the endorsers of the Harper's letter are asking for. The intent of academic tenure as I understand it (not being an academic myself) is to preserve the freedom of academics to hold a variety of views. Academic tenure is not a guaranteed job for life however, though it is purposely difficult to fire a tenured professor. By the same token, academic tenure is exceedingly difficult to achieve. While this does not mean that a tenured professor expressing opinions I find abhorrent would not bother me any less, the difficulty of achieving tenure limits that possibility quite significantly.
Gatekeepers in spheres beyond academia no longer command the same power they once did. First blogging, then social media platforms disintermediated news organizations as ways of getting one's opinion heard more broadly. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms added virality to the mix. These platforms combined with ubiquitous cellphone cameras have disintermediated the police as the only source of information about their activities, providing brutal documentary evidence of the need for the police reforms the Harper's letter calls overdue. These platforms also make the letter's assertion that the free exchange of ideas is becoming more restricted a somewhat dubious one. There is probably more free exchange of ideas than ever--but within echo chambers of the like-minded. Those who believe in all manner of conspiracy theories can easily find their tribe in the same way fans of particular sports teams, musicians, or hobbies can. Those of us on different sides of any number of issues are more likely to talk past each other--or at each other--than with each other. The echo chambers and the absence of a shared set of facts may be as much of a danger--if not more so--than "cancel culture".
An Imperfect Dividing Line for Honor
America still wrestles with names, symbols and statues. But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, some of the nation’s idols are falling faster than I can type. Just today came news that Princeton University is removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from their school of public policy and a residential college. Woodrow Wilson famously screened the pro-Klan Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915. Earlier this week, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina voted unanimously to remove a statue of John C. Calhoun from their city square (and the removal work has already started, likely with a museum as its final destination). In addition to serving as Vice President, Secretary of State, and senator, Calhoun was perhaps this country’s most ardent defender of chattel slavery. The reckoning has even spread abroad, with protesters in Bristol, England pitching a statue of Edward Colston (a slave trader) into the harbor and Belgium beginning to remove statues of King Leopold II (brutal colonizer of the Congo).
Resistance to removing these men and certain symbols from places of honor still continues however. While Mississippi has begun the process of considering a new state flag (minus the Confederate flag insert), the current flag still has its defenders. A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (whose Confederate troops massacred black soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow, and later led the Ku Klux Klan) still stands in the Tennessee state house after an 11-5 vote against removing it in favor of another Tennessee historical figure.
Two things prompt my attempt to craft a dividing line (however imperfect) for honor:
- The toppling of a Ulysses S. Grant statue in San Francisco
- News of protesters' demands for the removal of an emancipation memorial in Washington, DC.
Adam Serwer’s defense of Grant is reason enough that no state of Grant should ever be abused in such a fashion. Professor Aderson Francois adds Grant’s role in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and in a congressional commission that studied post-Civil War terrorism against black men and women in the South.
Professor David Blight (perhaps the best living authority on Frederick Douglass), writes an eloquent defense of The Freedmen’s Memorial. Before reading his column, there was so much about the monument I did not know:
- 100% of the $20,000 that funded its construction came from the formerly enslaved
- it was in part an homage to Lincoln after his assassination in 1865
- Frederick Douglass spoke at the unveiling--and was critical of Lincoln's attempts to have black people leave the country to establish colonies elsewhere both before and after emancipation.
Rather than take down this monument to Lincoln and emancipation, create a commission that will engage new artists to represent the story of black freedom from one generation to the next. Let today’s imaginations take flight. Perhaps commission a statue of Douglass himself delivering this magnificent speech. So much new learning can take place by the presence of both past and present. As a nation, let’s replace a landscape strewn with Confederate symbols with memorialization of emancipation. Tearing down the Freedmen’s Memorial would be a terrible start for that epic process.In response to the Blight column (which I shared with friends on Facebook), one of them asked me if I felt monuments to Thomas Jefferson should be torn down. Here is my response to him:
The short answer is no. The longer answer is while the hypocrisy of certain of the founders of the United States re: chattel slavery is obvious, they were trying to build a nation. I favor Dr. Blight’s approach of adding more context. The Confederate States of America and those who led it (by contrast) betrayed the nation the founders built and had the explicit goal of breaking this nation in two for the purpose of preserving and expanding the institution of chattel slavery. Statues of those who supported the Confederacy were erected to support the myth of the Lost Cause, and in concert with violence and terrorist acts against black people, despite the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. With the exception of tombstones and gravesites, I would not preserve a single Confederate monument on public land were it up to me. Strike Confederate names from every military base, every road, every school, and/or other public facility as well.The Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin is a place I've visited many times. The words of the Declaration of Independence inscribed on one of its panels are clearly at odds with Jefferson's treatment of the enslaved and profit from chattel slavery. Monticello, Jefferson's primary plantation, is attempting to address this contradiction even today. When it comes to the Founding Fathers, hagiography has characterized too much of our treatment of them. As more is revealed, it seems that what we have been taught as history looks more like propaganda. Continued denial of the unsavory, hypocritical, and contradictory beliefs and actions of America's founders serves the nation poorly. But destruction of their monuments may not serve us any better.
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:
When you read the letter written by eight Alabama clergyman that King was responding to, the motivation for this paragraph becomes crystal-clear:
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).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.