Ilhan Is What Democracy Looks Like

I wanted to write about Indigenous People's Day today, but the news about the DHS raid on Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's Washington, D.C., home makes that impossible. 

So far it sounds like the search warrant was immigration-related, supposedly about documents her now-deceased father filled out when her family emigrated as refugees when she was a child. It could be completely fabricated, or it could be some minor error that she is not responsible for. Who knows. Either way, she didn't do it herself and it's unlikely any evidence of it would be at her home in Washington.

According to several immigration attorneys I've read online, the statute of limitations is past and the fact that it was her parent signing both make it all but impossible that there's a case against her, or that a warrant should even have been approved.

As with the renewed pursuit of Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, though, I have a feeling there will be more trumped up charges and accusations to come. These people are salivating to distract from their own misdeeds and illegalities. There have been years of right-wing conspiracy theories about Omar having married her brother in her first marriage, for instance, and more recently there were attempts to prove financial wrong-doing by her current husband.

They will make every attempt to drag her down, but Minneapolis and the Twin Cities will be with her. 

Art by Sean Lim.
 

Their Personal Dignity Is So Important

Always read Ari Berman on voting rights. 

His latest work in Mother Jones is on redistricting and the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais decision. Louisiana, with a population that is one-third Black, has in recent years had two of its six Congressional districts with majority-Black populations.

Until the Callais decision. 

Once again, [Rep. Fields'] district was immediately challenged, this time by the “non-African American” voters led by Bert Callais, an election denier who attended the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol attack. Some of the insurrectionists carried Confederate flags that day—a striking symbol of their mission to overturn not just the 2020 election, but multiracial democracy writ large. Under Chief Justice Roberts, the high court used the Callais plaintiffs to accomplish this goal.

They claimed that the creation of a second majority-Black district was an affront to their “personal dignity”—an absurd argument, Fields says: “Literally, Louisiana elects more white members of Congress in one year than [Black members] we’ve elected in my whole lifetime.”

In a 6–3 decision, the court held that a majority-Black district that gave equal representation to Black people actually violated the rights of white voters under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

It's important to understand how the most recent voting rights repression fits into the long history that came before. 

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John Roberts Playing the Long Game (March, 2021) 

Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot (August, 2016) 

Quantifying the Effect of Slavery Today

No wonder the Right hates sociology and social psychology and tries to defund and destroy it.

A new study analyzed mortality rates in counties across the U.S. between 2010 and 2020, comparing them by what percent of the population was enslaved in 1860. The researchers found that the higher the percentage enslaved 150 years ago, the higher the mortality rate today, even though they controlled for the obvious confounding variables.

And get this:

The researchers also saw signs of ... “backsliding.” According to the new results, racial health disparities were slightly worse in the 2010s than in the 1970s, a trend that has also been found in other studies. Though his study doesn’t delve into why that might be, Galvan interprets the trend as reflecting the “largely temporary” reduction in health disparities during the civil rights era. “That momentum was lost,” he says, “in the 1990s and 2000s.” 

The link is from science.org, and worth reading in full.

Sinking to New Depths, As They Do

I had no interest in voting for Michele Tafoya in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, but if somehow I had, it would have been killed when she sat there and smiled during a Fox News interview as Larry Kudlow parroted Republicans' new line about Peggy Flanagan being a fake Indian, complete with references to Elizabeth Warren. (Other right-wing pundits and Republicans have rolled out Trump's "Pocahantas" label for Flanagan, though Kudlow did not.)

Flanagan, winner of the DFL primary in a runaway last week, is a citizen of the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota. It is well-known in Minnesota that she's Native American. I'm sure even Tafoya — who is from California, having moved here 30 or so years ago — knows that.

The fact that Tafoya did not reject the interviewer's bullshit, and in fact smiled at his words so she could work them into her talking points, is unforgivable. 

I suppose I should point out that the Kudlow interview took place to clean up the blow-back after Tafoya had said it was "embarrassing" to be from Minnesota in an earlier Fox interview. That's just the kind of thing that gets a majority of voters to elect you in most states, right?

Leave It on the Prairie

This morning, I read two stories about the new Little House on the Prairie television series (which I don't plan to watch). Not surprisingly, they both focused on how it differs from the 1970s version and from the books.

The first was brief, and talked only about the way the new show incorporates the Osage in one episode. In the original series (and in the book), the Osage men are unwelcome raiders who take food and jabber in a "savage" language. In the new series, in contrast, the Ingalls family shares the food and Laura sits and talks with them, learning that it's the Ingalls who are squatters on Osage land — which is the historical truth of the situation. The show even creates a Native best friend character for Laura!

The other story was by the Star Tribune's T.V. critic, Neal Justin. He gives details on the new show's greater historical accuracy (the physical hardship and post-Civil War trauma), but also the way it attempts to clean up the books' and the Ingalls' antipathy toward Native people. In the show Ma Ingalls, for instance, quickly becomes a champion for the Osage ("with Jane Fonda-like spunk," according to Justin). That fits with what the other article said about how Laura's interaction is portrayed toward the Osage men who visited.

The Little House books have fallen from favor among librarians, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's name has been removed from a prestigious library award in 2018 because of these very issues. 

What happens when children watch this rosy new show and then read the books, only to find the racist version in print? We can bet that book publishers will reissue the books with new covers tied in to this series. Where is that Native best friend character? Why are the Osage not even named as such, but instead only called savages?

Who does it help to have this show made at all? Only the owners of the production company and network, the Ingalls Wilder estate, and to a much lesser extent the people who worked on it. 

New ideas are what we need in media — not old, racist stories that need to be left to be understood in their context, not yanked into the present and promoted in a bright, shiny update.

One That's Definitely for the Filing Cabinet

Radley Balko has published an updated version of the guide to research findings on racism in the criminal justice system, which he started when he was at the Washington Post. He left there three years ago.

He says he will continue to update it a few times a year.

There are more than 60 studies listed. A couple of his shortest descriptions:

• A 2023 study used the geolocation data from the smart phones of police in 23 major U.S. cities. It found that police spend far more time patrolling Black neighborhoods than other neighborhoods with similar crime rates and similar socioeconomic demographics. 
• Between 2012 and 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department received more than 1,350 citizen complaints of racial profiling. The department didn’t uphold a single complaint.  

 Balko's page, of course, provides links to all of the studies.

One Shirt – Oops

I'm not sure I would have heard about the eye-wateringly offensive T-shirt design offered by IndyCar, if Rachel Maddow hadn't covered it on Monday night.

IndyCar, which runs the Indianapolis 500 race, will be putting on a road race in Washington, D.C., near the end of August. The event is meant to be the final, grand moment of Donald Trump's glorious vision for this country's 250th anniversary. Cage matches, concerts with no one to sing at them, and yes, cars racing through city streets at inappropriate speeds, making it unusable for the people who live there: that's what this country is all about.

Anyway.

The shirt – only available in ivory – looked like this:

And it said those words. 

Here's MotorTrend's write up of the debacle. From what I can tell, knock-offs of the shirt are available for sale on line, so unfortunately anyone who wants to own the libs can still get one.

Aside from the egregious headline, I wanted to talk about the illustration. Possibly a person immersed in IndyCar culture would not see it this way, but contrast that inhumane, Boba Fett-like figure with what the real Lincoln figure looks like:

The person who created this illustration — or the people who were art-directing them — made choices about what to change from the original. They wanted to modify parts of it to look "Indy" and be what they considered clever, but still have it be recognizable as the Lincoln statue. 

Personally, I didn't understand it as referring to the Lincoln Memorial statue when I first saw the shirt on Maddow's show because the figure is so transformed, it thought it was some kind of pilot in a science fiction show. The arms of the chair were not enough of a signifier for me to get the reference right away. In addition to the space-suit-like clothing and the helmet, the figure's body arrangement is part of the reason.

These are small things, but the way the Indy figure's hands and legs are portrayed diverge from the original: both hands are draped, while one of Lincoln's lightly grasps the chair arm and the other rests in a loose fist; the Indy figure's legs are splayed open as wide as they can go within the space, with feet even — something any woman will recognize as manspreading — in contrast with Lincoln's legs, which are parallel to his body, right foot farther forward. 

Generally, the Indy figure appears to be leaning back in the chair more than Lincoln is, possibly a reference to acceleration, but that reinforces my association with science fiction pilots. (The vertical red stripes may also be feeding my association with rockets taking off.) 

And I keep thinking about the feet. Because they are closest to the viewer, they're prominent. Lincoln is wearing boots so simple you almost don't notice them, and his trousers drape over the tops to obscure them further. The pants of the Indy figure, on the other hand, rise high above his ankles and make his much more detailed shoes prominent in the illustration. Which seems strange. (Maybe there was supposed to be an accelerator pedal under the right foot at some point.)

One final point: in addition to the possibly unconscious offensiveness of the headline, the very idea of replacing Abraham Lincoln with an IndyCar driver is offensive on its own. Have you been to the Lincoln Memorial? If there are any secular churches in this country, that is one of them. The thought of replacing him with something as trivial as a race car driver makes me angry, even without the headline. 

Altogether, this design is a perfect fit for the Trump regime. It: 

• shows no respect for anything about the good parts of this country or its history, 
• is unconscious of obvious racism at best or sends out racist messages at worst (take your pick, maybe some of each in this case for the different decision-makers), and 
• is embarrassing to everyone associated with it, except any die-hard believers who want to double down on the racist message.

 

Dishonoring All of Us

Among all the bad (disgusting? immoral? illegal?) news that comes out of the Trump regime's Department of Defense, you may have heard about the U.S. removing a display honoring Black soldiers in the Netherlands American Cemetery... at least that has gotten some coverage. 

Less has been said about the renaming of U.S. military bases to once again name Confederate military leaders, usually with a sneering wink that the renaming is in honor of someone else who happens to have the same last name.

Today's post by the Equal Justice Initiative is such an example, and most likely one you won't read about, unless you happen to be in Louisiana. 

Near the western border of the state, about halfway between the Gulf Coast and Shreveport, is a fort that was called Fort Polk until 2023, when it was renamed Fort Johnson, after Congress outlawed naming military installations for Confederates. 

Johnson was "a Black World War I soldier who was wounded 21 times, suffering a permanent foot injury that would leave him with limited mobility, as he single-handedly drove back a German raiding party in France in 1918."

Leonidas Polk, on the other hand, was not only completely incompetent as a military leader: he should have had R for a middle initial because he was a reprehensible racist through and through. And he was an Episcopal bishop, to boot. (I've read a lot of EJI's daily write-ups, and this may be the longest one.)

The fort has now been named back to Fort Polk, supposedly to honor a different General Polk, who served in World War II, but everyone knows why it was renamed. 

Johnson's name, to add insult to injury, "has been relegated to Fort Polk’s exchange, where service members go for haircuts and fast food."

The title of the EJI post is "The U.S. Project to Dishonor Black Americans in 2025."

Strict Scrutiny of SCOTUS and the Civil War Amendments

Despite my admiration for Melissa Murray (a frequent guest on Chris Hayes's show), and knowledge of her sister law professors Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, I've never listened to their shared podcast, "Strict Scrutiny," until now. As I've said before, my life is not well-suited to listening to podcasts, and even the ones I subscribe to, I don't listen to most of the downloads.

However, I heard that their September 29 episode included two of my favorites as guests, Sherrilyn Ifill and Jamelle Bouie, discussing the post-Civil War Supreme Court, essentially in comparison with the current court majority. The Reconstruction-era court was a roadblock to implementing the post-Civil War amendments and making Black people full citizens, just as the current Supreme Court is trying to dismantle the achievements of the Civil Rights movement.

The part of the two-hour podcast where Ifill and Bouie come in is around the 1-hour mark (after a bunch of judicial news of the week).

Just after 1:10 or so, Ifill sets out a truth about the post-war amendments that I don't know if I ever fully realized:

Melissa Murray: [The ethos of the Lost Cause and the idea of restoring the honor of the South] is very much underpinning John Roberts's 2013 majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which dismantles the preclearance regime on the view that subjecting formerly discriminatory states to preclearance degrades them in some way in the eyes of their sister states.

Sherrilyn Ifill: See, this makes me crazy. Because it is a denial of the very project of the Civil War amendments. The Civil War amendments start from the premise that what we have learned is that, if we are going to integrate — and we are — going to integrate Black people, both formerly enslaved and free, into the body politic and into full-class citizenship, the states cannot be trusted to protect their rights. That's basically it, if we just kind of put it in a nutshell. The great reordering of the Civil War amendments is the expansion of federal power to the detriment of the states. The words NO STATE SHALL — right? — that is kind of the core of the thing.

And there's no better example of Congress doing that job than when the Congress passes those Enforcement Acts that you were talking about, and they hold a series of hearings, the Ku Klux Klan hearings. President Grant is getting letters, he's going nuts, he's gotta do something about this violence in the South. Congress doesn't just write up an Enforcement Act! They hold hearings, and brave Black people come forward to say, This is what has happened to us. We live in the woods because we're afraid to be in our house. They broke something in me when they violently raped me. They tied me to a tree and they whipped me.

All of this information, which then leads Congress to pass the Ku Klux Klan Act or the Enforcement Acts, as we call them. This is like Congress spending a year investigating whether Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and the coverage formula is still needed, by having 90 witnesses, by having thousands of pages of material. And ultimately concluding, we thought it would be better — and it's actually worse! And therefore, we're going to extend the Voting Rights Act again in 2006.

And [then] the Supreme Court coming forward and saying, But that is a dishonor to the reputation of the South. YES, the whole point of the Civil War amendments was — the South is dishonored. They have dishonored themselves and we don't trust them to protect the rights of THESE particular people.

I don't think I'm exaggerating! All of the signs, all of the legislative history point to that.

Near the very end, one of the hosts asks, What can we do about this? Their primary answer is education of the public, of course, whether through writing, like Bouie, or literal higher education, like Ifill. Both also make media appearances and do social media. 

Ifill started the 14th Amendment Center at Howard University to call attention to the importance of that amendment, and she offered this as her ending comments:

I've said it all the time: People have no problem talking about their 2nd Amendment Rights, people talk about their 1st Amendment rights all the time — ordinary people...they feel like they know what their 1st Amendment rights are. You can be in a conversation, joking with somebody, and they'll say, I plead the 5th. It's not that we don't ever talk about the Constitution in normal language. But even those of us who are Civil Rights lawyers or activists — if someone is the subject of bias, we don't say "They violated their 14th Amendment rights." We say they were discriminated against or there was prejudice or there was bias. But we don't ground it in the Constitution.

And that's on us — that people in this country think that when we talk about race, we're talking about feelings and we're talking about morality, and we're not talking about the Constitution.

And so my hope, and part of what I want to do with the Center, is to have an opportunity to embed, to inculcate, the ordinary American public with the ideas, the values, the principles, of the 14th Amendment.

It's this incredibly powerful democratic moment. I use it as inspiration for what I hope will be a moment for — if we manage to make it past this period, no guarantees that we do, but if we do — that's the spirit that we should have towards thinking about refreshing democracy in America. It's allowed. You can do it. We've done it before. You can make a new country.

I think we need to learn about Reconstruction and the Civil War amendments and this period also as a sense of empowerment. To empower ourselves like we can be constitutional actors, that we can be founders and framers of a new republic.

The whole thing is worth a listen.

Possibly the Worst Supreme Court Decision of All

It's hard to say that it's the worst of all (I haven't looked back through this court's trail of travesty, and — of course — there was the 19th century), but today's decision on ICE stopping and detaining people without real basis has to be among its worst. Worst in the sense that they know better and are doing it completely for power and acknowledged white supremacy, rather than assumed white supremacy.

From Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern on BlueSky:

BREAKING: By an apparent 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court halts an injunction that had prevented immigration agents from racially profiling Latinos in central California.

Sotomayor, dissenting, says the decision is "unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation's constitutional guarantees."

From a Facebook friend's post:

The same Supreme Court that said colleges couldn’t use race as a factor in admissions ruled today that ICE can absolutely use race to target people who “look” Hispanic or who look like they have a low-paying job.

What a piece of shit government we have right now. All forms, all fronts, all agencies.

From Elie Mystal, legal writer for the Nation, on BlueSky:

I guess it was smart of the Supreme Court to release its most racist decision since Plessy on the same day it was confirmed that Trump used his signature in the place of a vagina in his pedophile love letter/birthday card.

I'll admit, I can't top that.

Other BlueSky posts:

Education expert Diane Ravitch:

Supreme Court nullifies the 4th Amendment to the Constitution to help Trump.

From journalist and professor Bill Grueskin:

"Half the population” of greater Los Angeles "now meet the government’s criteria for reasonable suspicion," in the wake of today's 6–3 SCOTUS ruling.

From Ebony M @ebonyabsolutely.bsky.social

Race as a factor in college admissions: [thumb down]
Race as a factor in detaining you on the street: [checkmark]

From Anagram Doe

the supreme court says you can never use race to help people but you can always use race to hurt people

From Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council:

It's not the most important part of the issue but Kavanaugh saying "well they should just sue if they're the victims of excessive force from ICE" when he himself has previously voted to bar lawsuits against federal officers for violations of the 4th Amendment in immigration cases takes chutzpah.

From Chris Sprigman, NYU law professor:

If I were a Democrat in Congress I'd be introducing legislation to suspend the Supreme Court's upcoming term (it's happened before, in 1802). The suspension would be to give us time to figure out what to do with this dangerous, anti-democratic institution.

Fear of Cities, Anti-Urbanism, Anti-Blackness

Dartmouth professor and writer Jeff Sharlet posted a thread on BlueSky today that resonated with my experience.

It's about fear of cities, which underpins the current moment and motivates much of MAGA (and not just MAGA) thinking.

Sharlet grew up across the river from Schenectady, New York. He doesn't say in which white-flight suburb, but it went without saying among its white residents that the largely Black city across the river was a dangerous, scary place. And as a child you just believe what everyone around you believes.

In school other kids liked talking about Schenectady, a small city, as something like Escape from New York. And then, of course, there were movies like CHUD, and Adventures in Babysitting. Even my beloved Blade Runner was a “beware cities, white people” parable.

Personally, I grew up in a rural area in central upstate New York where there were almost zero Black people, and any city was thought to be a frightening place. I didn't think about the upstate cities like Schenectady or Syracuse much, but I have clear memories of assuming Harlem was utterly terrifying.

Which is why a book like Antonia Barber's juvenile novel The Affair of the Rockery Baby was such a tonic for me... Its white, English characters discover that Harlem is a normal place and make friends with other kids there. (I need to write about that book some day. It doesn't appear anyone else has!)

Like Sharlet, kids in my town were basically inculcated to think that any white person who went to a Black neighborhood would be instantly attacked — when the opposite is what was true, given the history of lynching, white race riots, and sundown towns.

His point in describing his own history (and mine) is this:

Anti-urbanism is a way of speaking anti-Blackness without naming it as one’s own. It’s a sociological euphemism for racism. I didn’t know that as a white kid among white kids who liked to vow they’d never live in NYC, they always wanted to be in a small town....

What’s happening now with the Trump regime…is the conversion of the latent racism of anti-urbanism into explicit and hysterical racism. Previous GOP — and plenty of Democrats — were content to leave it unstated. Trumpism wants to foreground and escalate it.

The most common version of this subtle (not so subtle) white racism is the desire for so-called good schools, which always means ones with very few Black students. Ask yourself how often you hear that from liberals.

Naively, I never thought these attitudes would lead to where we are, with the Trump regime using it to send the armed forces into an American city, and getting ready to send them into others. But here we are. It was ready-made for manipulation by a racist sociopath.

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Here's another earlier post on the topic nice white people who are not so nice.

The Return of Pike, the Erasure of Truth

The statue of Confederate general Albert Pike was removed from federal park land in the core of Washington, D.C. in 2020. I wrote about this at the time and about the statue earlier. 

Now, of course — big surprise — the Trump regime is working on restoring the statue to reinstall it in Washington.

This is about "historic preservation," they say.  

At the same time, National Parks staff and visitors are asked to report signage at our parks that include content "negative about either past or living Americans."

We all know what that means: the true history of the U.S., which has only recently begun to be represented at the parks, can't be told. We have to have signs that promote Manifest Destiny and white supremacy. They want parks workers and MAGA visitors to snitch on signs about anything white people did that was bad (like genocide of Native people and enslaving African people).

For instance, the fact that George Washington kept his enslaved servants when he lived as president in Philadelphia would have to be erased from signage, because it disparages Washington. Washington also had his enslaved bodyman sleeping at his feet in the house where he overlooked the Hudson River to prevent a British invasion in the last 18 months of the Revolutionary War. I suppose that information will also have to go away. (The Hudson site is a state historic site rather than a national park, but you get the point.)

Because this regime is all about truth and historic preservation.

More DHS Nazis at Work in the Comms Department

For anyone not paying attention, the Department of Homeland Security — that part of the government that was established after 9/11 with the name that told us it should not exist in this country — posted this to its official account:

Aside from the offensive use of the John Gast "American Progress" painting that anthropomorphizes Manifest Destiny into a giant white woman, respondents to the person who reposted it on BlueSky pointed out that the accompanying words had the Nazis' favorite number of words (14) and the two capitalized words begin with H, the 8th letter of the alphabet and therefore make 88, another Nazi symbol. 

Another person responded to the BlueSky post about the DHS image, 

The author of this post is unfortunately correct. Also every time I see the gast painting, I feel compelled to post an image of the ‘Reversing Manifest Destiny’ painting that the Indian Land Tenure Foundation commissioned from Sokaogon Chippewa artist Charles Hilliard:

I know which painting I prefer, but it's staggering to know that a U.S. government agency has communications staff putting out work with coded Nazi messages in it. This is what we have come to, and worse is yet to come.

Five Years Later

The Star Tribune's coverage of five years since the police murder of George Floyd is, as I expected, a mixed bag with a bit too much centrist suburban b.s.

The poem they commissioned by the Minneapolis poet laureate, Junauda Petrus, was wonderful (gift link). The multi-page timeline of the week that followed, with quotes from various people (reproduced online here... gift link) is a fair representation and worth reading, though of course it omits major aspects that stick in my mind. 

I looked back at my own blog from those days. As happens too often, I clearly was not able to write about what was happening as it was happening. At the time, I was also dealing with another major life upheaval related to the covid pandemic, so as my city was on fire, I had to carry on to keep some other things from falling apart. 

I wrote about the killing first, briefly, on Tuesday, the day after it happened. On Wednesday, as police were firing "less lethal" rounds at the crowd outside Minneapolis's Third Precinct, I wrote about being a "race traitor." On Thursday, when the precinct and other buildings there and in Saint Paul were on fire, I wrote a short post called Here in the Twin Cities, May 28. On Friday, just a quote from my then-City Council member. On Saturday, after both Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis and a Saint Paul locally owned pharmacy had been burned (and many other local businesses and institutions), and the National Guard was on our streets... I couldn't post about any of it anymore, and put up this.

The Black folks — like local poet Michael Kleber-Diggs in our neighborhood paper the Park Bugle (pdf, page 5) or University of Michigan Professor Ebony Thomas — who predicted at the time that white backlash would happen in response to the idea of Black lives mattering… have proven all too correct. 

And here we are, with millions of people denying George Floyd died from Derek Chauvin's actions, just like they deny many other facts.

Sherrilyn Ifill on MLK Day

For this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is also the awful day of Trump's second inauguration, the best thing to do is read Sherrilyn Ifill's post, It Is MLK Day. Do Not Despair. This Year Especially, We Have Work to Do.

Her perspective on the combination of King's vision and what could have been in a Harris administration vs. what we face in this Trump administration is bracing. 

Maybe this terrible thing that has befallen this country, this descent into fascism and oligarchy, invites us to a more honest confrontation with the truth about the state of our democracy. Dr. King warned us. He feared that Black Americans were seeking to “integrate into a burning house.” Had President Harris been inaugurated, we would we have been lulled into believing that the house of our democracy was safe? Would we have imagined that we could fix what ails our country without the painful process of confrontation and repair to which Dr. King called us?

....perhaps now and only now, this country can confront honestly the nature of its mythologies, and the depth of its pathologies. To love this country and to work to strengthen it requires first a proper diagnosis of the weaknesses that lie at its core. We cannot protect against that which we refuse to diagnose and name.

Much more worth the time than anything in the inauguration.

Apologizing for Discovering Racism

The Star Tribune has been teasing an upcoming special feature for a few weeks called "Ghost of a Chance." Their first podcast series, it's about the house in Southwest Minneapolis where one of their writers lives, and where a Black couple named Robinson lived a hundred years ago.

The writer, Eric Roper, started researching the Robinsons shortly after moving into the house five years ago. He dug into various archives to find out about them and what happened when "200 of their neighbors gathered in 1920 to rid that corner of the city of about nine Black families."

I was looking forward to the series, and I think I will still listen to the podcasts. However, in the intro to the series, which ran on the front age of today's Sunday paper, I was taken aback by the "I'm not woke" disclaimer Roper included:

I had not spent much time talking or thinking about race, perhaps because my social circle is largely white. I actually bristle at elements of today’s culture that reduce people’s identity to their race, gender or sexual orientation.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I remained quiet as the world scrutinized Minneapolis. The message seemed to be that something was rotten here that had left Black people behind. Police brutality, racial covenants, destructive freeways — a lot had happened in the city. But it also felt like I was being asked to accept an oversimplified narrative about the past.

My curiosity about the Robinsons provided a path for me to investigate the history on my own terms and really dig into the details.

Well, duh, Eric. Perhaps! All the other things you're still ignorant of because you're a white guy also have those details — you just don't know them. Those "oversimplified narratives" have lots of details you haven't looked for.

It was embarrassing to read those paragraphs. I wondered if including them was Roper's idea, or his editors' — required to make the article palatable to suburban white readers, the Strib's core audience. They're an apologetic for even covering a "race" topic in the first place, especially in the latest age of Trump.

The paragraphs made me distrust what the podcast will contain. So if I do listen, it will be with a critical ear. Already the use of the word race, as in "the history of race in Minneapolis" irritates me, when clearly what he's talking about is the history of racism in Minneapolis.

So we'll see.

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Here's the location of the podcasts. The first one will be posted on Monday, January 13, and then weekly on Mondays through February 10.

Two from the Equal Justice Initiative

The Equal Justice Institute joined BlueSky in mid-November, one of my last favorites to make the move from Twitter, making it possible for me to stop checking there. 

These appeared two days in a row, but in history occurred about five years apart.

U.S. Army Executes 13 Black Soldiers in Houston, Texas: On December 11, 1917 "the U.S. Army executed 13 Black soldiers who had been previously court-martialed and denied any right to appeal." That was the beginning of the killing and life sentences for soldiers who had confronted racist police from Houston. The Black soldiers were assigned in July to guard white soldiers deploying to Europe out of Camp Logan, and had been constantly harassed and sometimes beaten by the police. When they marched in protest in late August, they were attacked by an armed white mob. "In the ensuing violence, four soldiers, four policemen, and 12 civilians were killed." The only ones held responsible were the Black soldiers, 63 of whom were court-martialed. 54 were convicted: 43 to life in prison, and 13 to death with no appeal. Two more trials resulted in 16 more death sentences, but they were allowed appeals and Woodrow Wilson commuted 10 of them; 6 of the men hanged. Work by the NAACP got most of the other 50 early release. "No white civilians were ever brought to trial for involvement in the violence."

White Mob Lynches Arthur Young in Taylor County, Florida: December 12, 1922, was the culmination of a racist manhunt and series of killings, following the murder of a white woman on December 2. There was no plausible evidence that a Black man was involved in the killing —in fact the opposite — but a suspect was fabricated. One Black man (unnamed in the EJI story) was killed first during the search. The suspect, Charles Wright, was captured and burned alive on December 8, and then for no reason I could discern, his friend Arthur Young was arrested on December 12. While the cops were moving Young to the jail, a lynch mob seized him, shot him multiple times, and hung him from a tree. They then burned a number of homes and civic buildings in the Black community of Perry, terrorizing the people there and driving dozens to leave permanently. "No one was ever held accountable for the lynchings of Arthur Young and Charles Wright. They are among 15 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Taylor County, Florida, between 1877 and 1950."

For every story EJI shares in their daily posts, remember that many powerful and monied forces in this country want to make sure that no one, but especially young people, learn about these truths of our country's history, let alone the greater existence of white supremacy that underpins them.

It's possible to get their daily calendar entries sent as an email by signing up here.

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Here are two of my past posts about EJI:

Bryan Stevenson: Just Mercy, November 2014

The Gnadenhutten Massacre, April 2024

Pick Me, I'm White

Every time Donald Trump says Kamala Harris is dumb, stupid, or some other version of that, it's obvious racism and sexism. Anyone who can't tell that is open to his racism and sexism, because it takes no effort to find multiple examples that demonstrate it's not true, and if anything, the opposite is true: that he is in cognitive decline, at a minimum.

Tonight, after Obama's speech in Pittsburgh and Trump's in Detroit, All In With Chris Hayes had political journalist Alexi McCammond on. She said,

His pitch is literally at this point, Pick the white guy over the Black girl. And he's asking people who are the most racist of this country to support him and to actually come out and vote. Because that's who he knows he needs to get out to vote in order to win this election.

It's a fairly succinct version of this year's election reality. I'm glad it has been a short campaign so there is less of it to see, and less time for the message and its reach to get consolidated. Imagine if she had been the candidate for 18 months.

It's an utter head-shaker, because as Trump is fond of saying in many other cases, Harris is "right of central casting" for the role of modern-day president. Sure, she could be a bit taller, but other than that, she hits every note of what a U.S. president (who's a woman) would look like in a movie.

And the idea that she's stupid is just...so clearly not true. He has mentally blocked out the debate, of course.

Everything Trump says is his insecurity speaking, when the opposite is true. Usually he makes accusations of actions and therefore is confessing to acts (they're stealing the election!), but in this case it's an admission of his own intellectual inferiority.

Sundown Towns Map – Adding a New One

Today, as the racist libel of Haitian immigrants continues to be amplified by Republicans, and unwittingly by liberals*, I saw a link to an interactive data map of sundown towns in the U.S.:

(Clicking to enlarge helps, but the real deal is in the first link, which gives you info on each town.)

It's on a site called History and Social Justice hosted at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi. It was created with content by historian James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Springfield is not on the map, but Vance and Trump are doing their best to make it one, if it wasn't one at some points in the past. That town's city hall and school were closed because of a bomb threat. Haitian people are not leaving their homes, and are keeping their kids home, for fear that they will be attacked. Their cars have been damaged. The parents of the white 11-year-old killed in a van-school bus crash last year have gotten death threats because they dared to tell Republicans to not use their son's name for hate. 

A few comments from BlueSky and one from Twitter:

What's happening in Springfield is LITERALLY Klan shit. Terrorize people until they leave, if they're not killed. Combined with policy-based oppression. It's why millions of Black Americans fled the South for the North and the West.
@nathankalmoe.bsky.social

The top of the GOP ticket should be arrested for stochastic terrorism
@kaikronfield.bsky.social

It’s one thing to live in a Sundown Town, it has to feel like a nightmare to live in a place that has Sundown Town status thrust upon you by the goddamn US Senator of your state.
Nails Nathan @chadstanton.bsky.social

repeating those lies without clear refutation embeds them further into the public imagination no matter the intent. There are studies on this
jj skolnik @modernistwitch.bsky.social

I will never, ever understand conservatives' pathological need to gang up on and abuse the weakest and most vulnerable. It's like... the opposite of morality. It's just so gross. I don't have the words.
David Roberts @drvolts

You can donate to the all-volunteer-run Haitian Community and Support Center in Springfield's PayPal account here.

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*Too many people are sharing "funny" photos and memes about cats and dogs. They think they're making fun of Trump, Vance, and the Right, but they're trivializing and normalizing the dehumanizing words and images, and the violent and threatening effects those things are having in Springfield. They're also ignoring the fact that this libel has been and still is used on other immigrant groups. It's not funny, it's hurtful to people you know. Stop it.

I am really disappointed in how much news people are laughing about "eating pets" line, WCCO anchors just did now. This is straight up RACISM, and not a laughing matter. Sure its delusional how he completely buys the disinformation he sees in his bubble. But it's a very old racist trope. CALL IT THAT!
@quick13.bsky.social

 

Under Every Rock

Someone was recently telling me that their grandparents came from Granite City, Illinois. I hadn't heard of that place, so they told me it was just across from St. Louis. I said, Oh, is it by East St. Louis?

You may or may not know that East St. Louis is the Black ghetto — there is no other word for it — just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis in Illinois, created by racism, segregation, deindustrialization, disinvestment, and a history of white race riots.

Granite City, it turns out, is not far north of East St. Louis, and it's a white working class to middle class industrial city of moderate size. Its Wikipedia page describes the industries based that have been based there (steel and, yes, granite), and the various European immigrant groups who populated it.

I was not terribly surprised to find this information on the page:

Around 1903, Granite City expelled its African American residents. In 1967, the Congress of Racial Equality alleged that Granite City was a sundown town. Mayor Donald Partney acknowledged that the city was commonly understood to have a sundown ordinance but denied that it was official.

As of the 2020 Census, Granite City's population is still 91.5% white.