Journal of the Plague Years

May 6, 2022

     Monday evening, while some of us were on Vogue.com, indulging in the opulent escapism of the Met Gala, Politico dropped the seismic bombshell of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.  The release revealed that a 5-4 majority of the Court was poised to overturn Roe v.Wade and strip women of their bodily autonomy, a right that has been guaranteed to us for nearly fifty years.

      The arrogance and contempt on display in Alito’s draft is stunning.  Alito’s absolutist reasoning is based on the shaky foundation that the right to abortion is not found anywhere in the Constitution, conveniently ignoring the text of the Ninth Amendment which states in full, “the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  Alito states that the applicable Constitutional provision is the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and invents a new test holding that the Fourteenth Amendment only protects those rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history,” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” (Source:  Draft Majority Opinion of Alito, J., citing Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721, (1997), Politico.com, 5/2/22).

     By ignoring the Ninth Amendment and devising a new test that limits Constitutional rights to those enumerated specifically in the Constitution as they were understood at the time of the founding, Alito opens the door to the denial of any right not namechecked in 1791.  Of course, that is the point.  Ultra-conservatives have long hated the concept of “penumbral rights,” articulated in Griswold v. Connecticut, (S.Ct. 1965), the case which established the Constitutional right of privacy and permitted married people to obtain contraceptives.

      Alito’s dismissal of the Griswold line of cases allows him to invent a history test and rely on the absence of any mention of abortion rights in 19th Century cases and commentaries as evidence that it is not part of the concept of “ordered liberty,” that define the outer limits of individual rights. As Jill Lepore writes, “To use a history of discrimination to deny people their constitional rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice,” (Source: “Of Course The Constitution Has Nothing To Say About Abortion,” by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 5/4/22).

     The history of late 20th Century Constitutional jurisprudence has been one of a gradual expansion of the polity to include those previously excluded—women, Black people and LGBTQ people.  Jettisoning the Griswold line of cases and substituting Alito’s “history test” endangers Obergefell v. Hodges, (marriage equality), Lawrence v. Texas, (right to engage in private consensual sex acts), Loving v. Virginia, (interracial marriage).  A history test would endanger Brown v. Board of Education, since equal rights for Black people are hardly “deeply rooted in our nation’s history.

       This is not a drill.  Alito’s opinion does not simply destroy women’s bodily autonomy and relegate us to noncitizen status.  It is also a roadmap for the erasure of the rights of “discrete and insular minorities” to allow Christofascists to impose their cramped and punitive worldview on us all.  We can’t afford to sit back wringing our hands in despair.  We have to help the very real women who will be harmed by this decision and donate to abortion funds to allow women to travel to states where abortion will still be legal.  We have to hit the streets in protest and loudly proclaim that we refuse to go back to the world of back alley abortions that killed us. We must mobilize to elect Democrats in Blue states and fight voter suppression in Red ones so that we can pass federal legislation protecting reproductive freedom and expanding the Supreme Court.  In other words, we have to use every one of our Constitutional rights…while we still have them.

In Our Own Voice:  Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda

National Network of Abortion Funds

Indivisible

April 16, 2022

      T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” and by any measure, that seems to be true.  It is hard to resist being crushed under the weight of unrelenting grim news.  Russia, frustrated by its failure to conquer Ukraine in a matter of days, has escalated its genocidal campaign to level the country and erase its people. Russia has repeatedly shown its blatant disregard for international law and contempt for humanity, bombing a train station in Kramatorsk last Friday that was packed with women, children and elderly people seeking to evacuate.  Fifty civilians were killed, including two children and 300 people were injured, (Source:  “A missile strike in eastern Ukraine kills 50 people waiting for trains to escape the fighting,” by Megan Specia and Michael Levenson, The New York Times, 4/8/22).  

      This past week, a terrorist with a Glock boarded a rush hour train in Sunset Park and set off two smoke bombs before firing 33 bullets.  Miraculously, although 10 people were shot and 19 people injured, no one died.  It is notable that the officers in the subway at the time failed to prevent the crime, or apprehend the suspect before he boarded a train across the platform.  Frank James was arrested 29 hours later thanks to an eagle eyed Syrian immigrant, Zack Tahhan, who spied James in the McDonald’s next to the bodega where Tahhan worked.  James also apparently called the tip line himself to alert the authorities to his location.  Remember these facts when we’re told that more police officers are the solution to rising crime, (Source: “Suspect in Brooklyn subway train shooting called in the tip that led to his arrest, sources say,” by Brynn Gingras, Shimon Prokupecz, Pervais Shallwani,  Artemis Moshtagian, Laura Ly, Kristina Sgueglia, Eric Levenson and Mark Morales, CNN.com, 4/13/22).

       Earlier this week, Oklahoma voted to criminalize abortion, passing a law that makes performing or having an abortion a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison (Source:  “Oklahoma governor signs near-total ban on abortion,” by Paul LeBlanc and Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN.com, 4/12/22).  Not to be outdone, Thursday, the Kentucky state legislature overrode Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s veto to pass a law that immediately shut down all access to abortion in the state of Kentucky, (Source:  “It’s now practically impossible to get an abortion in Kentucky,” by Nicole Narea, Vox.com, 4/14/22).

     Faced with depressing proof that the barbaric impulse to dominate others through murder and persecution knows no borders, it is easy to forget that it has only been a week since the uplifting South Lawn celebration of the vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to be the first Black woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court.  It is easy to forget Judge Jackson’s recognition that her family “took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court” and to forget that it was our Herculean organizing efforts to elect Joe Biden and two Democratic Georgia Senators that made that moment possible.

      It is easy to forget that less than a month ago, a small band of workers led by two Black men, won their battle to unionize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse.  Despite the Amazon lawyer’s dismissal of leader Chris Smalls as “not smart or articulate,” despite being outspent by more than 20 to 1, Chris Smalls and his best friend, Derrick Palmer defied conventional wisdom and established the independent Amazon Labor Union.  Smalls and Palmer succeeded because they were undeterred by Amazon’s derision and staunch opposition.  They won over their co-workers by building bonfires to warm them as they waited for buses home, bringing them home cooked food, and fundraising for a co-worker who was in danger of becoming homeless, (Source: “How Two Best Friends Beat Amazon,” by Jodi Kantor and Karen Weise, The New York Times, 4/2/22).

    Now, more than ever, it is critical that we not give in to cynicism and despair.  Now, more than ever, we all must commit to standing up for one another and actively resisting injustice, whether we are personally affected or not.  The confirmation of Justice Jackson and the victory of the Amazon workers is a timely reminder that we should “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

March 18, 2022

     For more than three weeks now, we have watched in impotent despair as Russia has assaulted Ukraine, literally trying to bomb it into submission.  Frustrated by Ukrainians’ steadfast refusal to surrender their sovereignty and embarrassed by ground forces beset by ineptitude and morale problems, Russia has resorted to targeting civilians for death and destruction, indiscriminately bombing hospitals, theaters and apartment buildings.

    Confronted by barbarism on such a massive scale, we all want to do something, yet whatever we can actually do seems puny in response.  The blue and yellow lights on buildings and bridges in foreign capitals are cold comfort to the 3 million refugees with nowhere to live.  Armchair military strategists call for a “No Fly Zone,” blithely dismissing the folly of provoking a hot war with the country with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world.

      There are no easy answers. While the United States and the European Union have shown admirable unity, getting arms to Ukraine and imposing punishing economic sanctions to isolate Russia, Russian attacks on civilians have only escalated.  After decades of happily allowing Russian oligarchs to purchase yachts, luxury real estate and football clubs with their ill-gotten gains, the West is finally saying that the cost of this blood money is too high, (Source:  “ Abramovich flies into Moscow as yachts are seized and caviar banned in hit to Russia’s rich,” by Catarina Demony, Francesco Guariscio, and Ali Kucukgocmen, Reuters.com, 3/15/22). 

     Last week, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil and gas.  Sadly rather than using this opportunity to aggressively embrace renewable energy and address climate change, the administration announced that it would entertain purchasing oil from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, two countries with abysmal human rights records, (Source:  “Biden announces ban on Russian energy imports,” by Kaitlan Collins, Jeremy Diamond, Kevin Liptak, Phil Mattingly, MJ Lee and Kate Sullivan, CNN.com, 3/8/22).

      In fairness to Biden, that decision was probably driven as much by pragmatism as by shortsightedness. After all, a nation in which nearly half of the people rejected the mild inconvenience of wearing a mask to halt the spread of a deadly pathogen could not be counted on to endure sacrifice for a nation of people half a world away.

       Yet, if we are unable to take action that decisively ends this horrific war and preserves Ukrainian sovereignty, it provides an opportunity for us to reflect on what America has become and what we truly want it to be. We are transfixed by the courage and selflessness of Volodymyr Zelenskyy because we are awash in politicians who only seek office to gain undeserved fame or the power to persecute (and sometimes both).  Even the few who genuinely seek to serve the public are unwilling to risk re-election, let alone their lives, to do so.

      Americans feel vicariously ennobled by the actions of ordinary Ukrainians who are taking up arms to preserve the things we say we stand for, but here in America, we use AK-47s to deprive people of freedom, not to fight for it.  Our most watched cable news show is hosted by a white supremacist Putin apologist.  We sit on our hands as state after state passes laws depriving Black and Brown people of the right to vote.  Last week, the Florida legislature approved the creation of an “election police force” to address the nonexistent crime of voter fraud.  Texas threw out an alarming 13% of mail-in ballots in its primary this month, thanks to strict new voter suppression laws.  Meanwhile, those already in office use their power to criminalize gender affirming healthcare for transgender youth and ban them from participating in school sports, effectively trying to legislate them out of existence.

     So yes, we should applaud the brave citizens of Ukraine.  We should condemn Putin as a murderous autocrat who is committing war crimes.  By all means we should give generous assistance to Ukrainian refugees, and while we’re at it, welcome and assist non-European refugees fleeing autocracy and persecution.  Yet, as Americans simultaneously cheer the brave people of Ukraine, while maintaining a stunning silence in the face of escalating attacks on democracy at home, we have to ask, “Do we only cheer democracy when everyone who stands to benefit is white?”

​​

February 21, 2022

     These are demoralizing days. For the last several weeks, we have been living with the threat of impending World War, as Putin escalates the number of troops surrounding Ukraine and lies about it. Black History Month has been marked by book bans and the prohibition of the very teaching of Black History.  Then, on Friday, we received a stark reminder that the quickest way to prove your “patriotism” in this country is to display utter contempt for Black people.

    How else can we explain the appalling performance of Judge Regina Chu in the sentencing of Kim Potter.  Potter, a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota veteran police officer was convicted of first and second degree manslaughter in the killing of 20 year old Daunte Wright over a traffic stop.  Judge Chu sentenced Potter to a mere two years, one third of the minimum recommended sentence for the crime that she committed. The Judge choked up while delivering a slap on the wrist to the officer who recklessly took Daunte Wright’s life. Clearly Judge Chu was more pained by the thought of imposing any accountability on Potter for killing  Daunte Wright, than by the loss suffered by Daunte’s mother, father and child, (Source:  “Family:  Judge in Potter case swayed by ‘white woman tears,’” by Steve Karnowski, Associated Press, abcnewsgo.com, 2/19/22).

     Potter’s light sentence can be seen as just the latest example of privileging white comfort over Black lives, but in truth, it is evidence of a much darker fact of American history.  For most of this country’s history there was simply no consequence for the taking of a Black person’s life.  For our first 244 years on this continent, we were considered property with no rights of our own.  After the Civil War, the brief glimmer of hope that we might flourish as equal citizens thanks to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments was extinguished by the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 and the passage of Jim Crow laws throughout the former Confederacy.

     It took nearly 100 years and murder of Black people and their white allies for Black people to gain the most basic of civil rights.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was only passed after the brutal assaults on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were broadcast on the evening news, (Source:  “How Selma’s Bloody Sunday Became A Turning Point in the Civil Rights Movement,” by Christopher Klein, History.com, 3/6/15, updated 7/18/20).  It took the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King to pass the Fair Housing Act in 1968, (Source:  “The Fair Housing Act was languishing in Congress.  Then Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed,” by DeNeen L. Brown, The Washington Post, 4/11/18).

     Despite purchasing a modest measure of equality through bloodshed, the backlash was immediate.  In 1968, Richard Nixon harnessed white fear and resentment to capture the presidency.  Nixon understood that many white Americans viewed civil rights for Black Americans as a “zero-sum equation, with African-American gains translating into white losses,” (Source:  “How Richard Nixon captured white rage— and laid the groundwork for Donald Trump,” by Scott Laderman, The Washington Post, 11/3/19).

    Republicans have used this strategy to secure electoral victory ever since, eroding more and more of the gains won in the movements for equal rights with each successive administration.  They know that the success of this approach depends upon keeping white Americans in a constant state of fear, anger and ignorance.  The erasure of actual American history is a linchpin of their strategy.  The summer of 2020 showed that exposure to the truth of how this country has treated its Black, indigenous, Latinx and Asian citizens galvanized a majority of Americans to take action to push for a more egalitarian society.

     The propaganda campaign we have witnessed in the last two years is the direct result.  It began with Trump’s Executive Order establishing a “1776 Commission” to rebut The 1619 Project, continued with Christopher Rufo’s assault on Critical Race Theory and has reached its crescendo in the proliferation of laws seeking to ban teaching about racism and bias.  The truth is, in the fight for a multicultural democracy, knowledge is our greatest weapon.  We can’t afford not  to use it.

#Runforschoolboard

#Buybannedbooks

#RedWine&Blue

January 30, 2022

      Knowledge exposes the lie.  Millions of Americans rock themselves to sleep each night with the fairy tale that their place at the top of the pyramid of American society is evidence of their intellect, their industriousness, of some innate, ineffable quality that makes them somehow “superior.”  Knowledge threatens that mind numbing illusion.  Small-minded, power hungry bigots know that, which is why we have seen an epidemic of book banning over the last several months.  

     It began with “The 1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah Jones’ brilliant recontextualization of American History through the lens of slavery and the persistent persecution of the descendants of the enslaved.  The attack on The 1619 Project failed to garner the reaction that right wing extremists were hoping for, so Christopher Rufo widened the attack to encompass Critical Race Theory.  It did not matter that CRT was a scholarly approach primarily taught in law schools (Source:  “Critical Race Theory:  A Brief History,” by Jacey Fortin, The New York Times, 11/8/21).  In Rufo’s hands, it became the label for teaching any books by or about Black people, leading to bans on books ranging from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” to a children’ s book about Ruby Bridges, the Black girl who had to be escorted by federal marshals in order to integrate a New Orleans public school.  This did the trick, igniting moral panic in suburban white women eager to “protect” their children from the knowledge of the harm that racism inflicts on children.  Republican Glenn Youngkin rode that panic straight into the Virginia Governor’s mansion, where he has wasted no time in further demagoguing the teaching of Black history, going as far as setting up a tip line to report teachers who dare to teach about racism, (Source:  “The Virginia Education Department Is Getting Flooded With Memes After Creating A Tip LineTo Report Schools Teaching About Racism,” by Steffi Cao, BuzzfeedNews.com, 1/27/22).

     The purpose of this ban is to bolster the belief that the position of Black people at the very bottom of the hierarchy is the natural order of things.  If Black History is banned, it can seem credible to the ignorant that Black  people’s position in society is a function of indolence, “deficient culture,” or disdain for education— their innate inferiority, if you will.  Knowledge exposes the lie.

    Teaching Black History would expose white Southern children to the fact that they owe the very existence of public education in the South to the activism of Black people, (Source:  “How former slaves established schools and educated their population after TheCivil War,” by Craig Chamberlain, Illinois News Bureau, 2/12/07).  During Reconstruction, emancipated Black people used their newfound political power to push for public schools open to all children, only to be segregated in under-resourced inferior schools after the establishment of Jim Crow.

     Teaching actual history might expose children to the fact the Brown v. Board of Education decision was the culmination of a decades’ long strategy engineered by Harvard trained lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, to dismantle segregated public education so that Black people could have access to the same education as white people, (Source:  “Charles Hamilton Houston,” by Stephen D. Jamar, Brown @50, law.Howard.edu).

      Reading books like Maus would show children how easily ordinary people can be complicit in evil.  It might cause some children to condemn those who chant, “Jews will not replace us,” and slow the alarming rise in Antisemitic vandalism, harassment and assaults, (Source:  “Antisemitism in the U.S.,”  ADL.org).

      Kids who learn history will know that the First Amendment of our Constitution bars the government from banning books with facts that make adults uncomfortable. Reading these uncomfortable facts might cause kids to ask tough questions about what they’ve been told.  It might foster empathy for folks who don’t look like them.

   The adults waging a crusade against so-called “woke history” and Critical Race Theory know that. Let’s face it, it isn’t their children’s innocence these folks are trying to protect.  It’s the illusion of their own.

December 31, 2021

      As this year draws to a close, it is tough to summon the characteristic optimism with which we usually turn the calendar page.  This has been a year of incalculable loss.  A loss of brilliant and prophetic Blackness, from bell hooks to Greg Tate to Desmond Tutu.  A loss of transcendent artistry and creativity from Cicely Tyson and Michael K. Williams to Chucky Thompson.  The words and the work and the beauty lives on, but we are left in a country awash in ugliness and anger, trying to chart a path forward with inconstant allies.  2021 has been a year of stasis, with one step forward and two steps back in the pandemic; where every gain has been stymied by selfishness.

     On January 6th, we were stripped of any illusion that the center of this republic would hold based on tradition, inertia or a widespread belief in the Constitutional principles of representative democracy.  We could no longer plausibly deny that for  a large percentage of our fellow Americans, our skin color or sexual identity rendered us stateless persons with no rights they were bound to respect.  To them, a President elected with our votes could never be a legitimate officeholder.

     The promise of the spring that vaccines would free us from the tyranny of Zoom cocktails and quarantine pods gave way to a summer of hopes dashed by Delta, aided by the obstinately ignorant, who placed their faith in quack cures or an egotistical faith in their “superior” immune systems.

     The institutions we relied upon to protect us consistently let us down.  They were ineffectual at best or actively malevolent at worst— from a Congress incapable of passing voting rights legislation or a spending bill that would truly help children and families, to a Supreme Court  recklessly undermining the Voting Rights Act or eagerly stripping women of their bodily autonomy.

    Evil seems to be flourishing unchecked.  Windows are closing on our chance to save democracy as state after state enacts a raft of legislation designed to entrench minority power — from laws restricting the franchise to those enabling a Republican minority to invalidate election results they don’t like.  Meanwhile, the CDC’s covid guidance seems more informed by the dictates of CEOs than the needs of public health.

    In the face of these daunting circumstances, it would be easy to give in to despair, but the truth is that acting as if there is no hope becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We still have agency and we can’t afford to squander it. Instead of looking to Washington to rescue us, recommit to focusing on your local school board elections, where hysteria over critical race theory has taken hold, to your local and state election administration, where the will of the people can be thwarted, and to your state legislatures that are busy passing all of these undemocratic laws.     Most importantly, honor those prophetic voices we lost this year and remember that love is a verb.  Real love requires action.  If you love your country or your people, you must act!  No other resolution counts.  Happy New Year!

November 20, 2021

    The most shocking thing is how unsurprised we are.  Given the all-white jury, the judge’s brazen misconduct and the coddling of a baby-faced killer, we all expected Kyle Rittenhouse to get away with murder.  When the verdict was announced, few of us could summon the raw outrage with which we greeted George Zimmerman’s acquittal, when we still had a faint glimmer of hope that justice could be done.  Now we’re just numb.  We are inured to the fact that killers are not held accountable for taking Black lives and have had to learn anew, that the lives of those who stand with us are not valued either.

     Some thought that a salient difference between George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse is that Rittenhouse’s victims were white. This facile observation ignores the long line of white accomplices from  Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and Viola Liuzzo; to Heather Heyer, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, whose uncompromising advocacy for Black lives cost them their own.

      Analysts have stated that Rittenhouse was acquitted because of the combination of the prosecution’s high burden of proof in self-defense cases and Wisconsin’s open carry law, (Source:  “When It Comes to Self Defense The Burden is Often On The Prosecution,” by Shaila Dewan and Mitch Smith, The New York Times,  11/19/21).  That is technically correct, but ignores the larger context.  Rittenhouse’s acquittal comes while we are in the midst of an extremist project to restore the pre-Civil Rights era status quo— where Black people were denied basic human rights and where no white man was ever held accountable for killing a person of color.  Back then, most white people were in one of two camps — those cowed into silence by the example of white martyrs and those all too happy to outsource rigid enforcement of the racial hierarchy to goons, cops and the Klan.

      The evidence is all around us, from the January 6th insurrection to white nationalist Congressman Paul Gosar circulating a doctored video which depicts him killing Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez.  This movement seeks nothing less than to maintain power and silence dissent through violence.  

    Yet this is hardly new.  As detailed in this recent piece in The Atlantic, “each time minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo,” (Source:  “America’s Most Destructive Habit,” by John S. Huntington and Lawrence Glassman, The Atlantic, 11/7/21).  Huntington and Glassman describe the current Trumpist movement as a “counterrevolutionary dynamic,” that has antecedents in the dismantling of Reconstruction and ensuing Jim Crow reign and the “mid-century fight against Civil Rights.”

     All three movements share “a hostility to racial equality;” a tendency to characterize proponents of equality as terrorists or Communists and then use that characterization to justify violence.  To add insult to injury, these conservative counterrevolutionaries then accuse the victims of their violence “of inciting it.”

We need to see the Rittenhouse trial and acquittal as a recruitment video, signaling to other extremists that not only won’t their violence be punished, but that it may be rewarded. These people have shown that they are willing to kill for whiteness. The question for the rest of us is, “What are we willing to live with?”