Journal of the Plague Years

March 25, 2024

     A week ago, courtesy of the activist group Until Freedom, I attended a screening of Origin, Ava DuVernay’s brilliant adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking book, Caste.  The film could not have arrived at a better time than now, as we confront regimes around the world determined to uphold or install rigid caste systems that arbitrarily cement a marginalized group to permanent lower class status. 

      Both the film and the book powerfully make the point that societies that ruthlessly dehumanize one segment of their society in order to mark them for subjugation or extermination have more similarities than differences.  They draw parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany, who modeled their Nuremberg Laws after the Jim Crow laws of the American South. Origin and Caste also do a deep dive into the original caste system in India, exploring the harsh persecution of the Dalit people.

     Origin does not argue that the caste systems of the United States, Nazi Germany and India are identical, but that they share common structural features, giving us a framework for understanding how such systems persist or re-emerge, so that we can recognize the danger signs.

      We are at such a moment in the United States right now, and the lights are blinking red. The outcome of this presidential election will determine whether we hurtle backwards 100 years, or continue our fitful journey towards embracing multiracial democracy. The signs are not good.  Although many Black people, LGBTQ people and women of all races have been shouting from the rooftops that Trump and this version of the Republican Party pose an existential threat to democracy, a disturbingly large number of people seem oddly complacent.

     Even though several of Trump’s former staffers say he is unfit for office and his own Vice President refuses to endorse him, one of our major broadcast networks, NBC, responded by hiring former RNC chair and election denier, Ronna McDaniel, as a political analyst.  When Trump promised a bloodbath if he loses and called migrants “animals” at a rally, the initial defense by Republican apologists  was to ask us to put Trump’s remarks “in context.”  As Mehdi Hassan said, the context is that these were statements made by a man who fomented an insurrection in which people were killed, (Source:  “Trump, a ‘Bloodbath’ and ‘The Banality of Crazy,’” by Mehdi Hassan, Zeteo.com, 3/18/24).

     Trump’s full-throated embrace of the most vile stereotypes and his efforts during his first presidency to enact policies to persecute everyone from Black people, to Muslims, to asylum seekers to Trans people created a permission structure for everybody else.  Americans are no longer shy about saying the quiet part out loud and an entire movement funded by billionaires has been supercharged to ban Black history and queer lives and to reduce every woman to a breeding vessel with no control over her own body.  This movement seeks nothing less than to torch every program or initiative that tries to level the playing field for Black people and other marginalized groups of Americans and remedy past discrimination.  They want to return to the jurisprudence of the Dred Scott decision, where Black people had “no rights the white man was bound to respect.”

      As Nikole Hannah Jones detailed in her essay in The New York Times, just as the right had a 50 year game plan for overturning Roe v. Wade, from the moment that Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, the right made a plan to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement, (Source:  “The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap. How A Civil Rights Idea Got Hijacked,” by Nikole Hannah Jones, The New York Times, 3/13/24).  Conservative Justices redefined  affirmative action to mean the pursuit of “diversity” for its own sake, rather than the redress of the continuing harm suffered by Black Americans as a result of slavery and the ensuing 100 year Jim Crow regime of segregation and terror. Recasting the goal of affirmative action as “cosmetic,” rather than rooted in justice, made it much easier to attack and dismantle.

     This is how we find ourselves in the present moment, where tech bros embrace debunked and discredited “scientific racism” and bankroll the quacks who peddle it, (Source:  “Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires,” by Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, 8/12/23).  Dope-addled Klan Wizard Elon Musk platforms the most vile antisemitism and racism, retweeting “great replacement theory” posts and blaming Boeing’s faulty door plugs on Black pilots.    The continuing decision by major media outlets to platform these people and sanitize their truly hateful and anti-democratic ideas is evidence either that our media is so warped by greed they don’t care about the content, as long as it gets views or that they’re silently hoping to re-establish a rigid white, patriarchal, supremacist caste system, with Black people permanently at the bottom, queer people back in the closet and women the virtual property of men.  As Sinclair Lewis warned us nearly a century ago, don’t think it can’t happen here.

 August 14, 2023

    On August 1st, after the initial feint of a superseding indictment in the Mar-a-lago classified documents case, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith dropped a second federal indictment on Donald Trump, charging him in Washington, D.C. on four felony counts:  1) Conspiracy to Defraud the United States 18 U.S.C.§371; 2) Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding, 18 U.S.C. 1512(k); 3) Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding, 18 U.S.C. 1512 (c ) (2) and 2; and 4)  the Reconstruction era statute designed to protect Black citizens, Conspiracy Against Rights, 18 U.S.C. 241. (Source:  United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, (Case No. 1:23-cr-00257-TSC, D.D.C.).

     The 45 page indictment meticulously lays out the myriad ways in which Trump and six unindicted (for now) co-conspirators worked feverishly to overturn the results of a free and fair election, spread lies to sow distrust among the American people and hold on to power.  Although countless journalists have summarized the indictment, it is well worth reading for yourself.  Again and again, the indictment provides evidence that Trump was repeatedly told by Republicans that he had lost the election.  It presents evidence that Trump knew that the wackadoodle theories advanced by his loon squad of “attorneys” like Giuliani and Sydney Powell were completely false.

     Trump and his confederates repeatedly pushed everyone from V.P. Pence to Governors and Secretaries of State to throw out election results where Trump was defeated. The conspirators “organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin),” (U.S.v Trump Indictment at par. 10(b)).

      Although Trump’s fake electors scheme covered seven states, he and his co-conspirators singled out the majority Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia for the bulk of their opprobrium.  Co-Conspirator #1, Rudy Giuliani accused mother/daughter election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of passing a thumb drive of fraudulent votes “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.”  In reality Ruby was simply handing her daughter a mint.  As a result of Giuliani’s vile slander, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were doxxed and threatened and had to leave their homes, (Source:  “Rudy Giuliani concedes he made false statements against Georgia election workers,” by Jaclyn Diaz, npr.org,7/26/23).  In Philadelphia, after Trump maligned a City Commissioner for stating that there was no evidence of voter fraud, the Commissioner and his family received death threats, (U.S. v. Trump Indictment at par. 42).  In Detroit, Trump supporters stormed the facility where votes were being counted after Trump made the baseless allegation that 149,772 fraudulent votes had been dumped in the overwhelmingly Black city, (U.S. v. Trump Indictment at par.41).

     Trump is many things, but subtle is not one of them.  Invalidating the votes of Black and Brown voters was the centerpiece of his scheme.  Trump has stoked white grievance and resentment by demonizing Black elected officials, Black prosecutors and rank and file Black election workers.  His central thesis is that any claim to, or exercise of, power by Black people is per se illegitimate.  For all of the hand wringing about the unique threat that Trump poses to American democracy, his position is not novel and he is far from alone in his belief.

     Trump has inspired or unleashed an army of copycats who believe that their path to power lies in the ostentatious persecution of people of color.  From Texas Governor Greg Abbott installing torture traps in the Rio Grande that maim and kill asylum seekers, to charisma-free fascist Ron DeSantis’ wholesale book bans and removal of democratically elected prosecutors for the crime of refusing to enforce draconian abortion bans or throw kids in jail, there is no shortage of elected officials eager to abandon democracy.

     The ugly truth is that for most of our country’s history, “democracy” has been a privilege reserved for white, straight, Christian men.  Any effort to expand the definition to include Black people has met with fierce backlash, from 1877 to today.  As Henry Louis Gates said in 2016, Trump’s election signaled the end of the second Reconstruction.  While Trump should certainly be held accountable for his attempted coup if convicted, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that jailing Trump will extinguish the threat to democracy.  The people who empower Trump and his pale imitations show no sign of relenting.  We need to take a page out of the book of the people of Ohio and the people of Montgomery, Alabama and face them armed with our vote… and a folding chair.

     On this 247th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, nothing comes to mind so much as Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech, “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?”  After this last dispiriting week of decisions from the Supreme Court, in 2023, Black people find ourselves asking the same question— what does the Fourth of July mean to us?

     From the time we were first dragged here against our will in 1619, Black people have been fighting a two-front war—famously shedding the first blood in the American Revolution and fighting our white countrymen for the right to be recognized and treated as human beings “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

     Of course, the Declaration was a lie from the start.  Inalienable literally means unable to be bought and sold, yet the venerable Founders who wrote and co-signed those words blithely owned, bought and sold Black human beings.  

     Despite the glaring contradiction, we have collectively bought into this blinkered myth, in a country that refuses to compensate Black people for the unpaid physical labor that built this country or the unpaid intellectual labor that forced this country to live up, grudgingly and in fits and starts, to the flowery sentiments in its founding documents.

    If we are being honest, Black freedom movements are the foundation on which the rights of other marginalized Americans are built— often by Black people with intersectional identities—like Marsha P. Johnson and Pauli Murray.    The misguided individual Asian American plaintiffs who allowed themselves to be used by the forces of white supremacy in the case of Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard didn’t just betray Black people. They betrayed the decades of coalitions between Asian American and Black activists who understood that we rise and fall together.  They betrayed the 70% of Asian Americans who support affirmative action and they dishonored freedom fighters like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama.  Like the protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” they have “sold their soul for a mess of pottage.  “Happy” Independence Day to us all.

* Originally posted on Facebook on July 4, 2023

     Today marks the federal holiday of Juneteenth, which commemorates the date in 1865 that General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Although Lincoln issued the Proclamation with an effective date of January 1, 1863, the Southern whites who took up arms to defend their “right” to own and exploit other human beings certainly did not honor the Proclamation during the Civil War.  Even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 19, 1865, white planters thought that they could simply continue slavery if they were beyond the reach of federal troops.

    The conventional wisdom is that enslaved Black Texans first learned of their freedom with General Granger’s arrival, but the truth is that Black people knew that they had been freed, but needed the power of the Union Army to compel white Texans to respect it.  Throughout the Civil War, Southern plantation owners moved westward to Texas in order to continue profiting from violently extracted free labor. “Within weeks,” Granger’s proclamation was followed  by “fifty thousand troops who flooded the state in a late arriving occupation,” (Source:  “The Hidden History of Juneteenth,” by Gregory P. Downs, TalkingPointsMemo.com, 6/18/15).

      Even after Juneteenth, white enslavers continued their violent recalcitrance. As late as October 1865, there were reports of white planters who continued to “claim and control slaves as property…and systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission,” (ibid).  Enslaved Black Texans were not passively waiting to be told they were free, but were actively engaged in the fight for their own emancipation.  The truth is that they needed not only the letter of the law, but the power of the Union army to enforce that law. 

   The same pattern has recurred throughout the last 158 years — violent white resistance to Black freedom which can only be overcome by a combination of Black organizing and federal legislation that is actually enforced, with federal troops if necessary.  After all, the continued recalcitrance of white Southerners gave birth to the 14th and 15th Amendments, which became hollow guarantees after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877.

      Although it was Reconstruction era integrated state legislatures that established universal free public education and enshrined the right to a basic education in Southern state constitutions, Jim Crow legislatures segregated public schools and starved Black schools of resources.  They then used the lack of education that they had engineered to disenfranchise Black people by imposing literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting rights (Source:  “The Constitutional Moment:  Reconstruction and Black Education in the South,”  by David Tyack and Robert Lowe, American Journal of Education, Vol. 94, No.2, pp. 236-256, (February 1986).

It took, not only one hundred years of Black people’s unceasing activism and strategic litigation, but our steely resolve to remain undeterred despite the ceaseless campaign of terror and murder waged by white supremacists, in order to regain the freedom supposedly guaranteed to us by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Just as in the 1960s and the 1860s, there are an alarming number of people in this country today who would stop at nothing to keep Black people from being free. The lesson of the true history of Juneteenth is that freedom is never given, it is fought for and won.

May 3, 2023

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2023/05/efforts-to-erase-african-american-history-is-a-frontal-assault-on-democracy-opinion.html

April 11, 2022

    When Donald Trump was elected seven years ago, Dr. Henry Louis Gates solemnly predicted that  “it was the end of the second Reconstruction.”  During the four years of his presidency, the country endured an endless assault on democracy and the Rule of Law, while those of us with marginalized identities also endured an endless assault on our very humanity.

     We were all relieved when Trump was defeated in 2020 and relished his arraignment last week on 34 felony counts as a sign that he might finally be held accountable.  Yet it was clear after January 6th that Trump left 1000 malignant seeds in his wake, prepared to sow chaos in his absence.  In every corner of the country, the hoods have come off, with hundreds of politicians seeking to ride a wave of hatred to power.

      These people are hellbent on getting and keeping power in order to control and oppress anyone who is not like them and they react to any challenge with blind fury.  Witness this past week.  In the hotly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court race, when Judge Janet Protasiewicz bested election-denying, anti-abortion zealot, Dan Kelly, he called her a “serial liar” and an unworthy opponent, (Source:  “What others are saying on Dan Kelly’s Supreme Court concession speech,” by Hunter Turpin,The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 4/7/23).  Not to be outdone, newly elected Republican Dan Knodl, vowed to impeach Protasiewicz, presumably for the high crime of winning the election by double digits.

   The egregiously racist ouster  of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee may be the high profile horror show, but it is far from the only one in the past week. Around the country, Republican officials are tripping over themselves in their race to outdo each other in ostentatious displays of racism, misogyny and transphobia.  Last Wednesday, the Kansas state legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto to ban transgender girls from competing in women’s sports.  The bill currently impacts a mere three students, a move that Taryn Jones, head of Equality Kansas said, “has to feel like bullying and erasure,” (Source: “Kansas bans women’s sports as Legislature overrides Kelly’s veto,” by Katie Bernard and Jenna Barackman, The Kansas City Star, 4/5/23).

      On Friday, Texas federal “Judge” Matthew Kacamaryk issued a nationwide injunction suspending FDA approval of mifepristone, the widely used “abortion-inducing drug that has been on the market for more than 20 years,” (Source:  “Federal judge in Texas suspends FDA approval of abortion pill,” by Eleanor Klebanoff, The Texas Tribune, 4/7/23).

     On Saturday, one day after a jury convicted Army Sgt. Daniel Perry of murdering Garrett Foster at an Austin Black Lives Matter protest, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he would seek to pardon Perry, (Source:  “Governor Greg Abbott backs call for pardon for Daniel Perry, who killed Austin protester in 2020,” by William Melhadi, The Texas Tribune, 4/8/23).  

       Yesterday, we were unable to savor the swift and unanimous Nashville Metro Council vote reinstating Justin Jones because we were reeling from the news of yet another mass shooting in Louisville, KY that left 5 people dead and 8 seriously injured, (Source:  “Gunman Kills 5 Co-Workers at Louisville Bank on Livestream, Police Say,” by Kevin Williams, Amanda Holpuch and Campbell Robertson, The New York Times, 4/10/23).

    It is long past time for us to confront the fact that Republicans are waging an undeclared holy war against the rest of us. That is the thread uniting their attacks on women’s autonomy, Black history, and trans lives.  They reject gun control not just because they are bought and paid for by the gun lobby, but because they know that a vitriolic minority cannot control a majority without weapons of war. Yes, we need to vote and overwhelm them at the ballot box, but that will not be enough. We have to become ungovernable.  Don’t let them hide behind “decorum” to silence us.  We need to clog the halls of state capitals and the streets. We need to disrupt “business as usual,” because business as usual is killing us.

April 1, 2023

     While Trump’s indictment yesterday is a decisive step towards accountability for an irredeemably corrupt, dissembling racist, we should not mistake circulating memes of Trump in prison garb for action.  With the indictment, Trump’s fate, at least on the New York charges, is out of his hands and out of ours and we should not confuse our armchair advocacy for activism.

       In the rest of the world, ordinary people are taking to the streets in massive numbers to protest authoritarianism and exploitation.  In Israel, thousands of people took to the street to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial “overhaul” that would dramatically weaken the country’s supreme court and allow the Knesset to overturn any of the court’s rulings by a simple majority vote, (Source:  “What are the Israeli protests about and what happens next?” by Bethan McKernan, TheGuardian.com, 3/27/23).

      France has seen two weeks of escalating protests and labor action since French President Emmanuel Macron pushed through a pension rescue plan that would raise the country’s retirement age from 62 to 64.  On Tuesday, “740,000 protestors joined 240 rallies throughout the country,” and as many as 1.3 million people protested on March 7th (Source:  “France wracked by more pension protests amid rising violence,” by Pauline Lockwood, Hannah Ritchie, Pierre Bairin, Oliver Briscoe and Sara Noor Haq, CNN.com, 3/29/23).

     Yet here in the United States, where elected officials have waged an unceasing attack on women’s bodily autonomy, Black people’s history and the right of LGBTQ people to exist, we are strangely passive.  Have we been lulled into complacency by the endless parade of distractions in our culture, from March Madness to Taylor Swift Tours?  Or have we been driven to despondency by the ubiquity of the challenges to our liberty and humanity?

     Tuesday’s grim news that another school shooting with an AR-15 at Covenant Christian School in Nashville left three precious nine year old children and three caring adults dead was met with numb inaction outside of Tennessee.  We sit on our hands as people we elected not only do nothing to stop the carnage, but actively make it easier for gun violence to escalate, passing permitless carry legislation and refusing to entertain common sense provisions like red flag laws or magazine capacity limits that enjoy widespread support and might have prevented this tragedy.

     Instead, hate mongering politicians and pundits have exploited the shooter’s gender identity to double down on vile rhetoric with the goal of making trans people even more vulnerable to violence.  They claim that transgender people are a threat to public safety, despite the fact that “96% of the mass killings involving a single shooter were committed by men,”(Source:  “Nashville shooting exploited by right to escalate anti-trans rhetoric,” by Finit Nirrapil, The Washington Post, 3/30/23).

      Far from being a threat, transgender people are targets, disproportionately the victims of both state and individual violence.  38 trans people were murdered in 2022 (ibid) and 435 bills have been introduced in virtually every state in the union aimed at criminalizing gender affirming healthcare and prohibiting trans kids from participating in school sports, (Source:  “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights innU.S. State Legislatures,” aclu.org, 3/28/23).

     This is nothing less than attempted genocide.  It is entirely consistent for the people who viciously attack trans children to be indifferent to the brutal and capricious slaughter of cisgender children.  Is there any doubt that the zeal to suppress Black history is motivated by the determination to prevent schools from cultivating empathy in white children and pride in Black ones?   Protecting white children has nothing to do with it.

    Why aren’t we in the streets like the people of Israel or France?  Is it because we don’t see threats to trans people as affecting us?  Do we not care about the literal whitewashing of history?  Do we feel powerless?

     If anything, Trump’s indictment should show us that the institutions we have long pointed to as evidence  of “American exceptionalism”  are not dead yet, despite the determination of an army of autocratic wannabes to kill them off.  It’s time to get off the couch and remember what our country’s motto, “e pluribus unum” means — out of many, one.  Let’s act like we mean it.

February 16, 2023

   Tuesday, on the fifth anniversary of the Parkland mass shooting, we awakened to another blood soaked Valentine’s Day.  Monday night, with an active shooter loose on their campus,  Michigan State students were told that their only options were to “Run. Hide. Fight,” underscoring just how badly we failed them.  Again and again, in places where they should be learning, laughing, studying and flirting, they are barricading doors and hiding in closets. When they finally received word from adults messaging from a safe distance that the crisis was over, they told us that they don’t know what to feel.

      It is hard to escape the conclusion that this country is addicted to hatred and violence.  We repeatedly watch our children slaughtered with weapons of war and do nothing to stop the carnage. There are those in our midst so dedicated to cultivating cruelty and so determined to keep Black people at the bottom of our societal hierarchy that they ban books about baseball greats Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente.  In the Florida statehouse, DeSantis plots to ride a wave of anti-Blackness and homophobia to the White House and The New York Times helpfully describes his attacks as “building his brand.”

     Meanwhile, we mistake the presence of two Black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl for “progress”, glossing over the fact that the game itself is the spectacle where  the brains and bodies of predominantly Black men are pummeled for our entertainment.  We conveniently forget that there are only four Black head coaches in a sport where 70% of the players are men of color (Source:  “Where are all the Black NFL coaches?” by James Brown, USAToday.com, 2/5/23).

    The chickens have finally come home to roost.  A country built on the myth of white superiority is on a foundation of ashes that is crumbling beneath us.  Behind the book bans and the hard right turn to fascism are a group of people terrified that they might  be exposed.  They know that every story of Black achievement, no matter how anodyne, features the irrational antipathy and capricious violence of white people as a backdrop. 

     Their fragile egos cannot bear for people to learn the truth—that Black people resisted enslavement and Jim Crow and achieved over and over again, in spite of unspeakable odds placed against us.  We achieved not simply in sports and culture, but in medicine, engineering, and most foundationally, democracy.

        As The 1619 Project demonstrates persuasively, more than any other group of citizens, it is Black people who forced this country to begin to live up to its ideals for all people.  Fascists know that their power is dependent on keeping people ignorant and hateful.  They can’t risk having white children develop empathy and Black children develop pride.  Let’s be clear about the endgame.  American fascists know that if you feed people poison and arm them with guns, they will destroy themselves.

#BlackhistoryisAmericanhistory

#Thetruthwillsetyoufree

#Guncontrolnow