Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label politics of race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics of race. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Bigotry Finds A Way

There is something superficially true - and understandable - about the knee-jerk rejection of any affirmative action kind of effort.

No one should gain or lose advantage - social, political or economic - based solely on their ethnicity or anything else over which they have no control, and should never feel compelled to change even if they could.

But, like I said, that's a superficial viewpoint, based on "all things being equal".

Guess what - all things are not fucking equal. They've never been equal, and they never will be equal until we get our stupid white heads out of our stupid white asses and start making up for the shitty way we've treated POC for 500 years.

We take a few steps forward, and then some jagoff comes along with some warm-n-fuzzy nostalgia, mixed with a little contemporary grievance and manufactured resentment, and we're right back in the White Supremacy soup.

And the kicker - it's the same old shit that plutocrats have been pulling on us for as long as there's been anything that even looks like 'civilization'.

Tim Wise, on the creation of "whiteness":
... it was a trick - and it's worked brilliantly.


Along comes a jagoff - aka: Stephen Miller



How a Trump-allied group fighting ‘anti-white bigotry’ beats Biden in court

America First Legal was founded last year by Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigrant family separation policy


The deal in early 2021 was hailed by advocates for Black farmers as the most significant piece of legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — about $4 billion in President Biden’s massive pandemic stimulus package to rectify decades of discrimination. Minority farmers began investing in new machinery and other improvements, anticipating tens of thousands of dollars in government aid.

But today, the landmark deal on behalf of historically disadvantaged farmers is dead — successfully challenged in court by a fledgling conservative organization that argued the program racially discriminated against White farmers.

America First Legal is headed by Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. While AFL lacks the name recognition and financial heft of many conservative counterparts, it has racked up notable court victories over the Biden administration. Casting itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL has weaponized the grievance politics embodied by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement through dozens of federal lawsuits, challenging efforts to remedy racial disparities, support LGBTQ students and expand the pool of early voters.

AFL-backed suits helped doom a $29 billion program that prioritized struggling female and minority-owned restaurants last year, and last week, a council created by the Department of Education that conservative parents groups viewed as partisan. AFL has won in part by consistently filing lawsuits in a conservative-friendly judicial district in Texas and taking advantage of a larger federal court system revamped by Trump’s predominantly conservative nominees.

The group’s success is alarming civil rights advocates, who fear Miller has figured out how to harness the courts to protect America’s declining White majority and unravel government policies intended to right historical wrongs against marginalized communities.

“Many of these lawsuits are centered on making sure that White people remain in control and continue to benefit from unearned privileges, and on maintaining the systemic discriminatory policies that have harmed Black people and other people of color for generations,” said David Hinojosa, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “To argue that White men are being pushed to the back of the line is unfounded and ridiculous. What they’re being asked to do is share a place in line with other people who do not look like them.”

In an interview, Miller said AFL is filling a void in the conservative legal movement by challenging what he termed “a hyper-racialization of American political and corporate life.” Programs seeking to remedy past injustices and boost historically disadvantaged groups are punishing people based on their skin color, he said.

“I believe that the equity agenda represents one of the single greatest threats to the survival of our constitutional system,” he said.

The group’s mission was fueled by more than $6.3 million in donations last year, recent tax filings show, including about $1.3 million from the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose leadership includes key figures in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Steve Wynn, the casino magnate who resigned as finance chair of the Republican National Committee in 2018 amid allegations of sexual misconduct, is an AFL donor, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who were not authorized to speak publicly about its fundraising. Wynn, who has denied the allegations, declined to comment.

AFL is part of a constellation of groups led by Trump allies that represent an administration-in-waiting upon his potential return to the White House. AFL’s all-White, all-male board includes loyalists who recently trekked to Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement, including Miller, who helped write the speech, former Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought and former acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker. Miller, who is expected to work for the 2024 campaign, received $110,762 from AFL last year, about $134,000 from his Save America political committee since Trump left office, and is slated to be paid about $80,000 by the General Services Administration as part of Trump’s post-presidency funds, government documents show.

In the lead-up to the midterm election, AFL also bankrolled a multimillion dollar ad campaign that included inflammatory radio and TV spots demanding an end to “anti-white bigotry” and accusing the White House, businesses and universities of discriminating against White people.

Trump critics see AFL as the extension of a White House that frequently stoked racial division and a former president who last month dined at his Florida home with two well-known antisemites.

“The Trump administration didn’t care about people like me, it was for White men, and that’s what this group represents and is fighting for,” said John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, which intervened in the AFL-backed lawsuit challenging the aid to minority farmers. “It’s continuing the legacy of divisiveness.”

Miller, though, argues that AFL is fighting against “bigotry and insanity.”

“I think that it is inescapably true that there is insidious and explicit discrimination against White Americans, Asian Americans, Indian Americans and Jewish Americans based on their skin color and their ancestry,” he said.

According to Trump advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, Miller stays in close touch with Trump, contributes to his speeches and gave significant input on his endorsements in the midterm election, where many Trump-backed candidates who rejected Biden’s 2020 victory and took other far-right positions were defeated. Miller repeatedly complained during the campaign that Republican candidates were not talking enough about culture war issues and immigration and focusing too heavily on an economic message, people who spoke to him said. America “is the apex of achievement of Western civilization,” Miller said, with “a heritage to be jealously guarded.”

Miller founded AFL in early 2021, as a newly elected President Biden issued a flurry of executive orders dismantling the former president’s nativist agenda. Miller was involved in policies fervidly challenged by civil rights groups that banned immigration from several Muslim-majority countries and separated immigrant children from their parents.

“During the four years of the Trump administration — especially in the arena of immigration — every single executive action, no matter how rigorously lawful, was subjected to a never-ending stream of activist litigation,” Miller said. “One of my goals when I left the administration was to try to help and inspire and coordinate a larger legal movement on the conservative side of the spectrum to do the same.”

AFL was among several groups incubated in the first year of the Biden administration by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a central hub of the GOP’s pro-Trump wing. CPI describes AFL as a “partner” on its website, and three AFL board members, including Mark Meadows, who served as a chief of staff to the former president, also have top CPI posts.

Neither of these tax-exempt groups are required to disclose their donors to the public, though federal campaign records show Trump’s political committee, Save America, donated $1 million to CPI last year. In its 2021 annual report, CPI called AFL “the sling that hardworking, patriotic Americans can use to fight back against the abusive Goliath of the Biden Administration’s Deep State.”

CPI’s revenue exploded last year to $45 million, up from about $7 million in 2020, according to its latest tax filing, obtained by Accountable.US and the Center for Media and Democracy. Its $1.3 million donation to AFL was the largest of eight grants that it made last year. Tax records also show AFL last year received $25,000 from DonorsTrust, a nonprofit that contributes to a number of right-wing causes, and $10,000 from Citizens for Self-Governance, which favors a convention of states to limit the power of the federal government.

Miller declined to answer questions about the group’s donors. “It’s best for your adversaries to have less rather than more information when they meet you in court,” he said.

A Washington Post review found at least four dozen AFL-backed lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country since April 2021, some of which have received little attention outside of right-wing media.

To attack Biden’s aid to disadvantaged, minority farmers, Miller’s group made a brash choice for lead plaintiff: Sid Miller, the Trump-endorsed agriculture commissioner of Texas, who has questioned Biden’s dire warnings about white supremacy and compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes in social media posts.

Sid Miller did not respond to interview requests. The lawsuit was later amended to include four White plaintiffs who, unlike Sid Miller, actually carried federal farming loans, according to court documents.

The suit argued that the debt relief approved by Congress was unconstitutional because it excluded “white ethnic groups that have unquestionably suffered ethnic prejudice,” referring to Irish, Italian, German and other European immigrants and Jews. Sid Miller is White, with primarily Scotch and Irish roots, but said in the lawsuit that he has 2 percent African American ancestry.

“Any person with a traceable amount of minority ancestry must be regarded as a member of a ‘socially disadvantaged group,’” the suit said.

Sid Miller earns a $140,938 annual salary as a statewide official. He reported owning about 145 acres of land, a nursery, landscaping business and a ranch, as well as stock in dozens of companies, according to public records. Known for his signature white cowboy hat, he was first elected agriculture commissioner in 2014 and previously served as a state lawmaker.

To Black farmers who say they have felt the sting of racial bias, making Sid Miller the face of the legal challenge was an insult.

“Here is this very powerful person in a huge state who instead of wanting to assist Black farmers filed a lawsuit to block aid?” asked Boyd, who farms soybeans and other crops in southern Virginia. “It’s really disheartening.”

Judge Reed O’Connor, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, ruled in July 2021 in favor of the White plaintiffs, the third of four federal court orders that summer against the program. Congress repealed the program in August.

Boyd and three other minority farmers represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump sued the federal government two months later, alleging breach of contract by doing away with the debt relief program. That case is ongoing. Black farmers have lost more than 12 million acres in the past century, which agricultural experts attribute in part to discrimination in government loan programs.

Three weeks after AFL challenged the aid to minority farmers, it turned to an even larger federal program: the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which gave women, minorities and veterans a head start to submit applications for nearly $29 billion in pandemic relief. The suit argued that the fund was likely to run out of money before White restaurant owners got a chance to apply and thus discriminated against them.

A federal court in Texas agreed in late May of 2021, as did an appeals court in Tennessee that reviewed a similar lawsuit. At the same time, Gregory León, the son of a Venezuelan immigrant and the owner of Amilinda restaurant in Milwaukee, received notice that he would receive $285,000 from the fund to help him get through the pandemic-related downturn. Just two weeks later, as León struggled to pay vendors, he was among about 3,000 restaurant owners who got another government letter: The fund had been quashed by litigation.

León said he seriously considered closing down.

“I know the pandemic didn’t care what your race was, but it definitely affected certain people harder than others. This country was built on the backs of immigrants,” he said. “I find it quite shocking that people like Stephen Miller don’t see that ... The message is that if you’re not White you’re not welcome in this country and you do not deserve opportunity.”

AFL has notched some of its biggest successes in the Northern District of Texas, a popular venue for conservative plaintiffs because it includes divisions where one to three judges nominated by Republican presidents handle all civil cases. The lawsuits opposing federal aid for minority farmers and restaurant owners, among others, were all filed in that district.

Liberal organizations are also known for “forum shopping,” and frequently challenged Trump policies in the Northern District of California, where most judges were nominated by Democrats. But the small size of some divisions in the Northern District of Texas allows conservative plaintiffs to essentially handpick a particular judge by filing in certain courthouses.

That strategy was apparent in an AFL lawsuit filed in August 2021, which argued that the Affordable Care Act does not outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The case was filed in the Amarillo division, where Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee whose anti-LGBTQ views set off alarms, is assigned all civil cases. In response to questions from U.S. senators in 2017 about those views, Kacsmaryk promised to impartially apply the law.

Last month, Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of the AFL-backed plaintiffs, including two Texas doctors unwilling to prescribe hormone therapy to transgender minors. The judge had previously certified the case as a class-action lawsuit, extending its impact on health care providers nationwide.

“This is obviously a case that raises concerns about the most extreme form of judge shopping,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, counsel at Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ rights group. “This is also a case that ignores the reality and prevalence of health discrimination against the LGBTQ community in the health care context and the serious harm that causes.”

Miller called the ruling “epochal” and an “inflection point for what I believe is going to be the biggest legal battle for the next generation.”

The Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment.

Another ongoing AFL-backed lawsuit assigned to a judge nominated by Trump argues that the Texas A&M University’s hiring practices are unconstitutional “by giving discriminatory preferences to female or non-Asian minorities at the expense of white and Asian men,” leading to promotions for “inferior faculty.”

A Texas A&M spokesperson, Laylan Copelin, said the university is planning to recruit faculty whose research is focused on “underrepresented communities” but does not making hiring decisions based on gender or racial preferences that would hold back White or Asian men.

“It appears they were more interested in using Texas A&M to support their fundraising and publicity efforts, as opposed to addressing any actual misconduct,” Copelin said.

AFL partnered in this case and several others filed in Texas with the state’s former solicitor general, Jonathan Mitchell, who is credited with the novel legal strategy behind the state’s 2021 ban on most abortions after six weeks.

Most of the AFL-backed lawsuits are still pending and allege that federal agencies are withholding public records about a range of right-wing targets, including the prosecution of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, censorship by Big Tech, the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and a laptop used by President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Many of the records requests echo allegations made by the far right and are treated as news stories by conservative media outlets. AFL has also demanded nearly every federal agency to produce documents related to Biden’s executive order promoting racial equity, which Miller has called “government sponsored and directed racism.”

In some of the requests, AFL claims “widely recognized status as a representative of the news media” to expedite its requests.

Federal court judges have ruled against AFL in lawsuits opposing admissions criteria to ensure racial diversity at Philadelphia magnet schools, a New York program that considered race in determining eligibility for covid-19 treatment, a vaccine mandate for civilian federal employees, and Biden’s removal of Sean Spicer, a White House press secretary under Trump, and Vought, an AFL board member, from the U.S. Naval Academy Board of Visitors. AFL is appealing most of those cases.

“They step forward,” Spicer said. “No one else on the right is doing what they are doing in terms of holding the administration accountable.”

As a nonprofit charity that receives tax-deductible contributions, AFL is precluded from participating in any activity that urges voters to support or oppose particular political candidates. Instead, the group spent on ads and mailers this fall that broadly attacked the Biden administration and the left wing in states with high-stakes races for governor and Senate.

The ads, which included misleading and false claims about Biden’s policies on racial and LGBTQ issues, were condemned by left-leaning civil rights groups. “They’re trying to create mass hysteria and fear,” said Joni Madison of the Human Rights Campaign.

AFL Vice President Gene Hamilton, who worked in Trump’s Justice and Homeland Security departments, defended the ads in a previous statement that speaks to the group’s broader mission.

“The Biden administration and left-wing officials in education, business, and governments across the country are imposing policies that systemically and routinely discriminate against American citizens based solely on the color of their skin. That is illegal,” he said. “Our advertisements make the point that racism is always wrong — regardless of who it is targeted against.”

Two things to remember always



Thursday, February 24, 2022

Today's WTF

Basically: "I don't know what Critical Race Theory is, but lemme tell you what it is."


"The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony ... unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self deception and comfortable vanity." --MLK

Sunday, February 13, 2022

Sunday, July 04, 2021

Who Ya Callin' Snowflake?


From the good folks who constantly sneer at "safe space", and who love to bitch about all the cupcake libtards who can't stand a little hardship.

WaPo: (Kimberlé Crenshaw - Twitter: @sandylocks)

The nation’s summer holiday season was refreshed this year with the addition of Juneteenth National Independence Day a few weeks before the Fourth of July. The day symbolizes the end of enslavement in the United States, and its place on the federal calendar was won in large part thanks to the energy of the broad movement that emerged last year in response to the murder of George Floyd.

The speed and virtual unanimity with which June 19 joined July 4 might seem to foretell a new reckoning with America’s brutally racist past, spurred on by 2020’s push to confront injustice. Yet instead of a new era of honesty and critical inquiry, the United States is being dragged into a moral panic about anti-racism itself, as agitated parents, right-wing activists and red-state lawmakers rail against their version of critical race theory. Their assault would allow only for a “history” that holds no contemporary consequences; racism ended in the past, according to the developing backlash, and we would all be better off if we didn’t try to connect it to the present.

So in the same week when Juneteenth became a national holiday, schoolteachers in Texas, where the commemoration originally marked the end of slavery in that state, could teach about these events only at their peril: Texas now precludes any teacher from exploring the state’s own history of enslavement if any student should “feel discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish . . . on account of the individual’s race or sex.” On the federal level, the same Republican senators who voted for the Juneteenth holiday also demanded that the Education Department end its effort to encourage schools to fully explore the history of enslavement, saying the push involved “divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda.”

In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an ill-conceived, overbroad bill that chills the long-overdue reckoning with the Tulsa Race Massacre — a vicious orgy of racist violence carried out in 1921 against one of the nation’s most affluent African American communities. This new law, passed under a special emergency provision, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” implying that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

Texas and Oklahoma join a list of six states that have ratified such legislation, with more than a dozen others considering it. These laws cut off the necessary classroom discussion of racial justice and reconciliation taking shape in Tulsa, Houston, Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, Chicago and other communities across the country inspired by and responsive to #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName.

Banning ‘critical race theory’ would be bad for conservatives, too

Proponents of such reactionary legislation insist that nothing in the laws bans teaching about historical racism. Technically, that’s true: The text of these laws does not necessarily mention particular historical events, critical race theory or the 1619 Project. That would be far too obvious.

Instead, the laws’ language — often eerily identical — is even more insidious: It explicitly sets out to sanction certain feelings as part of a disingenuous crackdown on racial division. In closing off room to explore the impact of America’s racist history by citing “division” — a subjective condition that turns on any student’s (or parent’s) claim to feel resentment or guilt — the laws directly threaten any teacher who pursues a sustained, critical understanding of the deeper causes, legacies or contemporary implications of racism in fomenting uncivil discord.

The hysteria about this putatively un-American inquiry is possible in part because Americans are not often taught about the policies and practices through which racism has shaped our nation. Nor do we typically teach that racist aggression against reform has been repeatedly legitimized as self-defense — an embodiment of an enduring claim that anti-racism is racism against White people.

The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy

This pattern of defending white supremacy by resorting to group interest embodies the very opposite of the individualism so frequently touted in conservative politics. Very few Americans learn that just after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson vetoed legislation protecting the civil rights of newly freed African Americans, essentially claiming such laws to be preferential treatment for Blacks and reverse discrimination against Whites. Nor is there much candid discussion today about how the wave of White racial terrorism that destabilized Radical Reconstruction in the South was framed as self-defense. This was followed by White segregationist rule for the better part of the 20th century, buttressed by the acquiescence of the Supreme Court and the supposed greatest legal minds of the era.

The reverse-racism trope emerged again after World War II, when segregationists denounced the simple demands for nondiscrimination in public accommodations as assaults on Whites’ civil rights. Likewise, the Southern Manifesto against school desegregation, signed by dozens of White lawmakers, framed widespread resistance to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in terms of defending White heritage and the well-being of vulnerable White schoolchildren. Unsurprisingly, White children are once again the front line in this current war against critical race theory in the classroom — it’s a tried-and-true method of racial retrenchment.

But the comfort of a ban on whatever conservatives imagine critical race theory to be will further deny students and scholars the chance to understand the past. The massacre in Tulsa a century ago is just one telling example of how the convergence of law, institutions and individuals enabled diabolical attacks on American citizens. Examining Tulsa through the prism of the real critical race theory, which I’ve been a leading scholar in developing, would involve unearthing the conditions that allowed White institutions and leaders of the time to mobilize the law to set a massacre of hundreds in motion, and uncovering the long-term consequences. The legal dimensions would include the formal deputizing and arming of White citizens, the rounding up and interning of survivors, and the filing of charges against victims for inciting violence. Oklahoma’s new law and the others around the country would apparently forbid a close look at the massacre’s legal aftermath — namely, the failure to indict or prosecute anyone. Teachers would be further discouraged from mounting a broader inquiry into the massacre’s legal backdrop — the laws that corralled Blacks into certain neighborhoods and that shored up the economic segregation of professions. The prohibition of any discussion suggesting that there are contemporary responsibilities shared by society as a whole precludes consideration of what a long-overdue commitment to justice might entail.

What is critical race theory and why did Oklahoma just ban it?

We know from the history of race in America just where sanitized and whitewashed versions of our past lead — to assumptions that yawning inequalities in health, wealth and a range of other areas are simply inherent features of American life. The fact that the 1921 Tulsa Massacre happened was always knowable — a few survivors are still alive — but without a critical confrontation with our history, the long-term impact of the massacre fades into a bloody mist.

Those who want to expand our nation’s literacy about our racial past and those who wish it to remain illegible to all but a determined few do agree on one thing: that examining our history has consequences. The disagreement becomes volatile when those who embrace America’s promises ask that we take up the truths of our history, while critics claim it is only patriotic to perpetuate a lie. (Martin Luther King Jr. warned of just this sort of turn more than 50 years ago, in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” his final book before he was murdered: “In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.”) Theirs is not a debate about ideas but rather an attempt — on behalf of the racially inequitable status quo — to shut down debate altogether.

The impulse to quash discussion of racism comes out of the same political movement that believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election — and that mobs ransacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 were justified in their bloodthirsty assault on democracy because they contend they were there to save it. Understood in context with parallel efforts to suppress democracy and protest, it should be clear that the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Indeed, beyond this incendiary 2022 campaign strategy lies the future of America. We cannot fight to realize our loftiest values if past and present injustices are made unspeakable. This is why anyone who marched for justice for George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor, anyone who can acknowledge that a sanitized history of the Civil War and Reconstruction led to nearly a century of segregation, anyone who does not want their children insulated from our nation’s past, anyone who is concerned about a creeping authoritarianism and the myths of the past that abet it, and anyone who believes in a truly multiracial democracy should be relentless in opposing the new efforts to banish anti-racist thought and speech from public institutions.

When it comes to racial reckoning, the future of our country depends not on whether we litigate who among us is guilty but whether we all see ourselves as responsible. Let us together stand up to these cynical attacks — we have seen them too many times before to fall prey to another cycle of race, reform and retrenchment.


Buncha whiny-butt pussies.

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Today's Culture War Dispatch

"My dearest Karen...I have run afoul of the woke police, who, in this case, are the actual police..."

The Daily Show:


And I'll say it again.

If they think the key to winning elections is the heat they can generate by pimping white backlash to Critical Race Theory, then the GOP is confirming the tenets of CRT itself.

Republicans are acknowledging the premise that race - and thereby oppressively racist policy - is their central issue.

Thursday, June 24, 2021

Republican Freak Show Du Jour


What this latest bullshit comes down to is the Republicans getting their undies all knotted up over Critical Race Theory because Americans are saying we prefer a dose of healing reality instead of the continuation of the GOP's toxic fantasies.
  • CRT has been around for decades
  • It's available as an elective at some law schools and at some universities 
  • It's not being taught anywhere in K12 - because it's not a body of knowledge - it's a study tool
Learning more about America's history of systemic racism and the sometimes-totally-ineffectual attempts to change it will not cause anyone to hate this country. And if that's what you think, then this country is so thoroughly fucked up that we can't afford not to teach people about it so we can have a decent shot at fixing it.


What is critical race theory? Explaining the discipline that Texas' governor wants to "abolish"

Those who study the discipline say attacks on it are targeting any teachings that challenge and complicate dominant narratives about the country’s history and identity.


Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill last week that restricts how current events and America’s history of racism can be taught in Texas schools. It’s been commonly referred to as the “critical race theory” bill, though the term “critical race theory” never appears in it.

But in signing the bill, Abbott said “more must be done” to “abolish critical race theory in Texas,” and announced that he would ask the Legislature to address the issue during a special session this summer.

Meanwhile, the debate has taken hold across the nation. Last year, conservative activist Christopher Rufo began using the term “critical race theory” publicly to denounce anti-racist education efforts. Since then, conservative lawmakers, commentators and parents have raised alarm that critical race theory is being used to teach children that they are racist, and that the U.S. is a racist country with irredeemable roots. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and others have called the theory racist itself for centering the nation’s story on racial conflict. In addition, conservative commentator Gerard Baker has argued that critical race theory bans critical thought in favor of what resembles religious instruction.

Those who study the discipline say that the attacks have nothing to do with critical race theory, but instead are targeting any teachings that challenge and complicate dominant narratives about the country’s history and identity.

They say that critical race theory itself actually shifts emphasis away from accusing individuals — in history or in the classroom — of being racist, which tends to dominate liberal discussions of racism. Instead, it offers tools for shifting public policy to create equity and freedom for all.

So what is critical race theory, and why is it relevant to Texans? And why is there an effort against it in Texas — and around the nation?

What is critical race theory?

Critical race theory is a discipline, analytical tool and approach that emerged in the 1970s and ‘80s. Scholars took up the ways racial inequity persisted even after “a whole set of landmark civil rights laws and anti-discrimination laws passed” during the civil right movement, Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, said.

“These scholars and writers are asking, 'why is it that racial inequality endures and persists, even decades after these laws have passed?'” HoSang said. “Why is racism still enduring? And how do we contribute to abolishing it?”

HoSang described critical race theory not as “content,” or a “set of beliefs,” but rather an approach that “encourage[s] us to move past the superficial explanations that are given about equality and suffering, and to ask for new kinds of explanations.”

In the introduction of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, a seminal collection of the foundational essays of the movement edited by principal founders and scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Neil Gotanda, the editors write that critical race theory is about transforming social structures to create freedom for all, and it’s grounded in an “ethical commitment to human liberation.”

Key concepts

Racial formation: One key concept in critical race theory is racial formation. Developed by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, the theory rejects the idea that race — Black, white, Asian — is a fixed category that has always meant the same thing. Instead, it traces the way that race has been defined, understood and constructed in different ways throughout history. Omi and Winant define race as an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.”

For example, they write that in the U.S., the racial category of "Black" was created as slavery was established and evolved. Africans whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba or Fulani in Africa were grouped into the category "Black” as they were enslaved in America. Part of the meaning of being “Black” in America was being less than human and therefore enslavable. James Baldwin wrote in “On Being White and Other Lies” that Europeans who moved to America became “white” through a process of “denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.”

Omi and Winant describe racial formation as the “process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” — a process that has continued throughout history.

Monica Martinez, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in Latinx history, described how racial formation has played out in Texas in the racialization of Mexicans and the history of anti-Mexican violence.

“Before this region became Texas, there were debates about the character of Mexicans as a group of people,” she said. Figures like Stephen F. Austin and John Calhoun cast them as “treacherous people, thieves and murderers.”

From 1910 to 1920, she explained, hundreds of ethnic Mexicans were victims of lynchings, as well as violence at the hands of police and the Texas Rangers. Many of them were American citizens, and they included labor organizers and journalists who were writing about race and injustice. This amounted to an effort to “remove Mexicans from having economic or political or cultural influence,” she said.

“Oppression was enacted through violence, and it was sanctioned by governors, Texas legislators and local courts,” she said.

Oppression was furthered by “Juan Crow” segregation laws that racially segregated communities, relegated Mexican American children to poorly developed schools and intimidated Mexicans from voting. This system of laws and policies had lasting effects on Mexican Americans and how they’re conceived of today.

Rhetoric has played a role in racial formation as well, continually loading the term “Mexican” with racial meaning.

“100 years ago, people talked about Mexicans as bandits, as thieves, and as a threat,” she said. “Today, they talk about them as potential cartel members and gang members.”

This language contributes to racial profiling and violence today. “In communities in south Texas, anybody who looks 'Mexican,' or looks like an 'immigrant,' can be targeted—not just with policing, but also by [general] hostility,” she said.

Racism is structural: The mainstream understanding is that racism is an individual prejudice and choice. The default is to be free of bias and racism, so racism is an exception from the norm. It can be addressed by individual measures, such as humiliating and punishing the person who messes up, and enforcing moral codes on an individual level.

On the other hand, critical race theory says that racism is inherent in our institutions and structures of governance. It’s ordinary, and it’s baked into all our consciousnesses in complex ways through our education, government, the media, and our participation in systems. Racism must be addressed not just by punishing individuals, but by shifting structures and policies.

HoSang, the Yale professor, explained that critical race theory isn’t focused on “the stock characters of a racist,” such as Bull Connor, who directed police to use fire hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. HoSang said that a focus on denouncing individuals is “not a good use of our energy.” Instead, he said, the question is, “Even in places where civil rights and anti-discrimination laws passed, why do these forms of inequality persist?”

“So [critical race theory] actually says, no, we shouldn't be preoccupied with trying to discern ‘who is the racist here,’ because that moves the attention away from the structures,” he said.

One example of this is in housing segregation — how “many, many complex layers” of “policies around zoning, lending and redlining, around private realtors and developers” have reproduced unequal access to housing, which in turn furthers gaps in generational wealth and stability, HoSang said.

In his article for the Austin American-Statesman, Dan Zehr traces how this process has played out in Austin, which has one of the highest levels of income segregation in the nation. In 1928, city plans created a “negro district” east of Interstate 35 and denied public services and utilities to Black people outside of it, pushing Black residents to the eastern part of the city. When the government began offering loans to promote homeownership and help citizens rebuild wealth as part of the New Deal after the Great Depression, neighborhoods for people of color were excluded through a practice called “redlining.” Austin’s “negro district” was the largest redlined zone in the city, Zehr writes.

“As most Americans gained equity in new homes or upgraded the value of their existing houses, the black population saw a racial wedge driven deeper between Anglo affluence and African-American poverty,” he explains.

All these processes are systemic. “You can’t explain [this] through any one person's biases and prejudices.” HoSang said.


Is critical race theory being taught in K-12 classrooms?

Experts and teachers put it plainly.

“Nobody in K-12 is teaching critical race theory,” Andrew Robinson, an 8th grade U.S. history teacher at Uplift Luna Preparatory in Dallas, said. “If I tried to walk in and teach critical race theory, my kids would just have a blank stare on their face.”

“Critical race theory is not being taught in schools,” Martinez said.

Keffrelyn Brown, a professor of cultural studies in education at UT-Austin and a teacher-educator, agreed.

“A vast majority of teachers in K-12 schools don't know critical race theory,” she said. “They are not coming into the classroom and saying, ‘I'm going to teach critical race theory.’”

HoSang pointed out that to begin with, critical race theory is not “a body of content that can be taught.”

Given that, Abbott’s calls to “abolish critical race theory in Texas” make no sense, those who study it said.


“I don't think you can ‘abolish’ a theory,” Brown said.

How does Texas' new law and surrounding debate discuss critical race theory?

While it has gained the ire of national Republicans on Fox News and elsewhere for months, critical race theory was thrust in the political spotlight in Texas this spring because of the progress of HB 3979. Lawmakers claimed that it combats the theory.

The wording of the bill is vague — for example, it bans discussion of current events unless a teacher “strive[s] to explore those topics from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective,” and teachers can’t teach that “with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”

In an early statement supporting the legislation, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that critical race theory is a “woke philosoph[y]” that “maintain[s] that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex or that any individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive.”


The phrase “critical race theory” does not appear in the bill once, however.

Brown described the way the term “critical race theory” has been mobilized as a label that has nothing to do with critical race theory itself.

“It has become the catch-all phrase for any kind of perspective, or any kind of framework, or any kind of knowledge that shows the roots of racism and how deeply they are embedded in our society,” she said.

Experts pointed out several key mischaracterizations of critical race theory.

Political discourse has claimed that critical race theory unfairly assigns guilt and blame to individuals based on their race. In one section that lists concepts teachers can’t teach, the bill prohibits teaching that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex.”


“[Critical race theory] has nothing to do with sentiment, guilt or shame,” HoSang said. “In fact, one of its premises is that those are not actually helpful places to examine. It's taking us out of racism as a psychological and emotional question, and is focusing much more on the structures, the policies that people create that govern our lives.”

Martinez said the worry comes out of “false claims that when you teach histories of slavery, or race, or racism, that you make some white students feel guilty or shame for being white.”

To focus on directly instilling racial guilt would be taking a liberal, individualistic approach that critical race theory actually critiques.

The bill also prohibits teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

If anything, Martinez said, the current, longstanding way of teaching Texas history already teaches that one race is superior. “Look at how it teaches the history of the Texas revolution — that people like Stephen F. Austin are racially superior to the treacherous Mexican, like Santa Anna,” she said. “Texas history has been taught in a way that celebrates people who were fighting for the institution of slavery, that were espousing publicly that Mexicans were an inferior race.”

HoSang agreed. "There’s so much of the dominant curriculum that does just what the bills claim they're objecting to, in terms of constructing a moral ideology," he said. “One could argue the current curriculum promotes intolerance and animosity against Indigenous people, and that it does the same for immigrants.”

Future impact

Brown, the UT-Austin cultural studies professor, described the new Texas law as an effort to “try to stop the momentum over the last year and a half of families and communities saying we need to know more about racism.”

“We need to understand [our history of racism] so that we actually can get to a place where we are operating with justice, with equity, with fairness,” she said.

Instead, she said, the bill may “create enough confusion and possible concern that teachers or districts would just simply not talk about issues of race, or racism, for fear that it's going to create some conflict.”

Abbott’s press office did not comment on what he additionally wants the legislature to do about “critical race theory” during this summer’s special session. But many teachers worry about the “chilling effect” that the new law will already have on their attempts to teach history well — which includes nurturing students’ critical thinking skills by bringing in multiple perspectives on historical events, and showing how the past has impacted present day issues.

“What they're trying to say with this is that the actions of the past aren't affecting the present,” said Robinson, the 8th grade history teacher in Dallas. “They want us to act like slavery and Jim Crow have no bearing on the issues in our society right now. And if that's the case, then they should cancel my class.”


And don't overlook the subtext of all this bluster: the pearl-clutching carries with it further attacks on public schools and teachers unions.

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Thursday, July 23, 2020

A Little Progress

WaPo:

The House voted Wednesday to remove statues of Confederate leaders from the Capitol and replace the bust of Roger B. Taney, the U.S. chief justice who wrote the Supreme Court decision that said people of African descent are not U.S. citizens.

The vote was 305 to 113 for the bill that would replace the bust of Taney, which sits outside the old Supreme Court chamber on the first floor of the Capitol, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first black member of the Supreme Court.

The legislation also would direct the Architect of the Capitol “to remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America.” It specifically mentioned three men who backed slavery — Charles B. Aycock, John C. Calhoun and James P. Clarke.

Democrats were unified in backing the measure; all the no votes came from Republicans, who were divided with 72 GOP lawmakers voting for the bill and 113 opposed.

And of course, everybody's favorite Designated Yahoo has to get in one more little dig on "states' rights" because what would these discussions be without some good old-fashioned GOP fuckery?

The legislation faces opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate, where several lawmakers, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have said the decision should be left to the states.

Fake lord have mercy.

Each state provides two statues to Congress of individuals the state wants to honor.

House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that a museum would be the appropriate home for the unwanted statues.

“When people say these are symbols of heritage not hate, I say to them hate is a heritage depending on what side of history you’re on,” Clyburn said.

Sunday, May 31, 2020

On Privilege

I have privilege as a white person because I can do all of these things without thinking twice:
White privilege is a real thing.

Saturday, February 02, 2019

Sorry Ralph



Gov Ralph Northam (D-VA) will have to resign. Stay tuned for all hell breaking loose if he doesn't.



The statement:


And I don't really care about all the tearing at clothing and the gnashing of teeth going on in the halls of power as the operatives try to position things in a way that minimizes the damage and squares things up with blah blah blah. Stop it. Just stop that shit.

Northam fucked up. 35 years ago - when he was 24 years old. I fucked up in somewhat the same way. A lot of us fucked up like that. We told and retold "black jokes", and laughed our asses off, and we tho't using the N-Word meant we were "just keepin' it real". We believed we weren't being the racist assholes we were actually being. 

"It was just a joke".

All of that is by way of explanation and not excuse. Because there is no excuse, because there can be no excuse.

I can say oops, and try to do better, but I'm not the Governor. I'm not the guy everybody has to be able to count on not to be that racist asshole - and not to have been a racist asshole - and at least to have not covered up being that racist asshole.

Seriously - when do these "political smart guys" finally learn that it's the cover up that comes back to fuck 'em?

The feeling of betrayal will never go away. Some will artificially nurture it as a useful political weapon, but for the people who matter - the people who believe public service is an honorable thing - they won't forget or forgive. And they shouldn't.

Northam is done.

And I think we'll be OK with Justin Fairfax.

Monday, May 07, 2018

On Kanye

It's always about a lot more than is obvious at first blush - and I'm not minimizing - I don't think it's unreasonable to include "Privilege Envy" in the description.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic:

Kanye West, a god in this time, awakened, recently, from a long public slumber to embrace Donald Trump. He hailed Trump, as a “brother,” a fellow bearer of “dragon energy,” and impugned those who objected as suppressors of “unpopular questions,” “thought police” whose tactics were “based on fear.” It was Trump, West argued, not Obama, who gave him hope that a black boy from the South Side of Chicago could be president. “Remember like when I said I was gonna run for president?,” said Kanye in interview with the radio host Charlamagne Tha God. “I had people close to me, friends of mine, making jokes, making memes, talking shit, now it’s like oh, that was proven that that could have happened.”

There is an undeniable logic here. Like Trump, West is a persistent bearer of slights large and small—but mostly small. (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Nike all came in for a harangue.) Like Trump, West is a narcissist, “the greatest artist of all time,” he claimed, helming what would soon be “the biggest apparel company in human history.” And, like Trump, West is shockingly ignorant. Chicago was “the murder capital of the world,” West asserted, when in fact Chicago is not even the murder capital of America. West’s ignorance is not merely deep but also dangerous. For if Chicago truly is “the murder capital of the world,” then perhaps it is in need of the federal occupation threatened by Trump.

It is so hard to honestly discuss the menace without forgetting. It is hard because what happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers—unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country which specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral, and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.

- and -

What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that “we.” In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.


For my own bad self, I'll try to remember that whatever else Kanye thinks himself to be, he is first a foremost a Kardashian.


Monday, August 28, 2017

More Monuments Mess

LA Times Op-Ed, Lisa Richardson:

Blacks and whites will have different perspectives on their entwined history. War victory for my white great-great-great grandfather, Jeremiah H. Dial, who enlisted in the 31st Arkansas infantry regiment and was wounded in the battle of Stone River, Tenn., in December 1862, would have meant defeat for my great-great-great-grandmother Lavinia Fulton and their daughter, Mary Ellen. Instead, Lavinia died a free woman, living to play with her grandchildren and give thanks to God every Sunday in church in Birmingham, Ala. I thank God my great-great-great-grandfather lost. Every right-thinking person should be glad he lost.

Yet the monuments debate isn’t really about the past. It’s about a present-day assertion of white supremacy and whether our nation is going to stop making excuses and stare it down. Most of the statues, as has been widely discussed, were erected long after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. They were hoisted into view to assert white dominance at specific points in time when African Americans gained a measure of political influence — during Reconstruction and the civil rights era. With the bronzes came domestic terrorism, lynchings, bombings and cross burnings. The current uptick in neo-Nazi and white supremacist activity was entirely predictable. With clockwork precision it surged at the time of the nation’s first African American president.

So why do some people treat modern icons as if they were ancient relics, like marbles from the Parthenon?

Fear. History isn’t being erased, but it is being corrected. Relocating a Confederate statue to, say, a museum, is an acknowledgment that we see the naked emperor; we see through the contorted logic that it is possible to separate the Confederacy from the institution of slavery, that it’s a whites-only story and slavery is blacks-only, and that treason is the same as patriotism.

- and -

To all the bronze Confederate soldiers, in whom I see the image of my great-great-great-grandfather, I would extend this grace. Without resentment or rancor, I would move them into museums and there tell the story of their lives. I would end their utility as flashpoints for racism and division, and, once and for all, allow them to retire from their long service as sentries over a whitewashed history.

The only problem is in that last graf: "once and for all". It doesn't happen that way. 

This is the weirdness of politics, as practiced by very clever people who can be devious and cynically manipulative.  There's no such thing as once and for all.

Not as long as we have assholes like this guy:

Richard Wilson Preston
Charged with gun violation

- because there's no expectation for a shortage of assholes under current market conditions.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Yeah - Even Those Assholes

Unite The Right rally is on track - Aug 12, 2017 at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville.

Reminding us of the foundation of the First Amendment, Lloyd Snook put up this post at Snook & Haughey (here in Charllottesville):

Many in the community want the City to withdraw the permit necessary for them to take over Emancipation Park for the day. There are many legal reasons that the City might scrutinize the permit application very closely, but we need to steer clear of the illegalreasons that have been suggested. Let’s look at what the City can or cannot do.

The City can regulate or deny a permit application for reasons of safety, but notbecause of the content of what the alt-right people are going to say. Any regulations must be content-neutral.

The City can impose conditions and restrictions on marches and demonstrations only if the conditions and restrictions are reasonably tailored to specific needs and problems, and only if the conditions and restrictions do not have the effect of being an undue burden on public speech.

The City cannot pass on the costs of security to the permit applicants, at least where the security costs are incurred to protect against the angry responses of others.

Content Neutrality:

There are a few points that need to be made here:

  • Hate speech is still protected under the First Amendment.
  • Unpopular speech is protected under the First Amendment.
  • Government cannot regulate or restrict protected speech.
  • There is no such thing as a list of domestic terrorist organizations whose members can be denied the civil rights given to the rest of us.


Advocating pro-white viewpoints and flanked by members of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club, local right-wing blogger Jason Kessler spoke outside the Charlottesville Police Department on Tuesday night to discuss his upcoming rally and to denounce his opponents.

Kessler’s “Unite the Right” rally, planned for Aug. 12 at Emancipation Park, will take place a little more than a month after about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Justice Park that drew more than 1,000 counter-protesters.

-and-

Kessler has distanced himself from the KKK rally, saying that the leader of the Klan chapter that filed for the city permit is an FBI informant and was paid by “left-wing groups to discredit legitimate conservatives.”

hat tip = Walker Thornton