Monthly Archives: January 2013
Jailhouse Blues l The Saturday Evening Post
By: Todd Pitock
In Issue: January/February 2013
Pelican Bay State Prison is designed to house California’s most serious criminal offenders. Photo courtesy California State Department of Corrections.
We are facing a crisis in America. The crisis is largely hidden from view, but like a cancer, it threatens the very health of society. We have become a superpower of incarceration. Today we warehouse 2.2 million inmates according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
That’s more than the entire population of Houston. More than two-thirds that of Chicago.
China, with more than four times the U.S. population, is a distant second with 1.5 million inmates. The United States imprisons 760 people per 100,000. The number for France is 96, Germany 90, and Japan 63. As an NAACP advertisement points out, we are 5 percent of the world’s population and we house 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
How did we get here? Between 1925 and 1972, our state inmate population increased 105 percent—roughly proportionate to the country’s overall growth. Since 1973, when stiffer sentencing came in—particularly the so-called Rockefeller drug laws providing lengthy minimum sentences for possession of small quantities of banned substances—the number of prisoners has increased more than 700 percent. That’s about 14 times the country’s overall growth.
The costs are staggering. In a survey of 40 participating states, the Vera Institute of Justice concluded that U.S. taxpayers were shouldering an annual bill of $39 billion. And that’s just the direct costs. Indirect costs, which tend to be carried by government agencies other than corrections departments, are incalculable.
“The system is so skewed,” laments Bob DeSena, executive director of Council For Unity, an anti-gang initiative headquartered in New York City. “As a society we are completely focused on punishment. People are willing to spend hundreds of thousands on incarceration, but they don’t want to spend a few dollars on programs that are proven to prevent them from becoming criminals in the first place.”
What to do with criminals—what warrants imprisonment, for how long, and how to reintegrate released men and women—is one of society’s most difficult challenges. In modern times, the great philosophical debate has been whether the mission is to reform or to punish. And possibly no society has cycled quite so widely between the two extremes as America.
The prison reform movement started more than 200 years ago, in the throes of the Industrial Revolution when a surge in the urban population came with a steep rise in crime. At the time, jail was little more than a means of segregating malefactors from the rest of the population. Perpetrators who weren’t killed outright (Pennsylvania, the first state to outlaw capital punishment for theft, didn’t do so until 1786) were dealt with harshly, confined in dungeons or tawdry, violent, and often disease-ridden jails.
One early attempt at reform was nearly as harsh as the system it replaced. New York’s Auburn Prison, built in 1816, was governed by the then-radical notion that prisoners were capable of change. Hence, prisoners were put to work, and community activity was encouraged during the day. But strict silence was enforced at all times, and prisoners were isolated in solitary confinement at night. Prisoners who so much as broke the silence were flogged or hung by their wrists or had their heads locked in iron cages.
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The Saturday Evening Post
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Can Anything Pass? 6 Things in Obama’s Gun Plan l Crew of 42
Can Anything Pass? 6 Things in Obama’s Gun Plan
- JANUARY 16, 2013 7:51 AM
- LAUREN VICTORIA BURKE
What in the President’s gun plan can actually pass Congress? It appears not much.
Gun control is an issue where it would pay to have a few friends in Congress. President Obama has few — which is clearly one of the reason VP Biden was handed the reigns. Can Biden’s strengths overcome resistance from gun manufacturers who have given money to 60% of Congress?
Much of the gun related policy due to be announced at noon today has already been introduced in Congress in recent years and has failed. Last night, the White House briefed lobbyists on the gun plan. Almost none of what is likely to announce today can pass the GOP controlled House.
1. The Assault weapons ban / limit high capacity magazines — Feinstein, McCarthy, DeGette offered this bill after Aurora shooter James Holmes shot 70 people in a movie theatre with a high capacity ammo loader attached to a Bushmaster. The President is set to re-announce the same ideas today.
2. Prohibition on gun trafficking — This is NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s idea. Mayors against guns has pushed this for years. NY Sen Kirsten Gillibrand offered legislation last year. It died.
3. Criminal background checks/eliminating the gun show loophole — Sen Frank Lautenberg along with Rep. Peter King offered legislation on this in 2009. Mayor Bloomberg and the Brady campaign have pushed this for years.
4. Bullying — This is a favorite topic of the LGTB community and Michelle Obama. The White House has held serval forums on the issue. Sen. Al Franken and Rep. Jared Polis’ bullying bill is most likely the language here.
5. Boosting mental health services — This is in here to kiss the ass of NRA and represents the Republican answer to everything on guns — let’s see where the $ comes from. The same Republican who want to de-fund Obamacare are the same ones who keep focusing on mental health issues after mass shootings.
6. Straw gun purchases — PA Gov Tom Corbett signed a straw purchase bill last last week and NY Gov Andrew Cuomo signed one yesterday. O’Malley is soon to follow. No one has offered federal legislation on the issue.
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A Theory of Obama Cinema? “Killing Them Softly” is the Defining Movie for the Age of Obama
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2013
A Theory of Obama Cinema? “Killing Them Softly” is the Defining Movie for the Age of Obama
I am suspicious of unifying theories which try to explain the relationship between popular culture and politics. However, A.O. Scott’s piece in the New York Times on the defining Hollywood films of the Obama era is pretty compelling:
Last year in The New York Review of Books the critic J. Hoberman wondered when we would see an “Obama-inflected Hollywood cinema.” “The longing for Obama (or an Obama),” he wrote, “can be found in two prescient 2008 movies,” citing “Wall-E” and “Milk” as releases about creative community organizers, with Harvey Milk also a political symbol of hope. It may be too soon to identify an Obama Cinema, but the president’s second inauguration seems like an appropriate time to try.
Film is one of the sites where societies negotiate meaning, develop and challenge their own mythologies, and express the hopes, anxieties, and feelings of the collective subconscious. Films talk to us, talk to each other, all the while revealing the “spirit of the age.” In total, popular culture is an informal type of public opinion, a barometer for the attitudes of a given society.
Obama’s election in 2004 was supposed to usher in postracial America. It did not. Hope and change was met by the twin realities of a coordinated assault on the legitimacy of the country’s first black President, as well as how practical governance is an exercise in realpolitik. As such, hope and change had to be surrendered to practical realities–here Obama’s right-leaning centrism was greeted by upset on the part of Progressives, and recast as treason and Socialist-Communist-anti-white tyranny by Conservatives.
How do the films in the Age of Obama reflect these dynamics?
Films can be considered political in a number of ways. They can deal with explicitly political matters of public policy or public concern as plot devices. Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty fit this mold.
[Question: Am I the only person who thought both movies were exercises in tedium? Am I the only person who thought that Cloud Atlas was one of the year’s best movies and should have been nominated for an Oscar?]
Films can also be implicitly political as they reflect changing attitudes, beliefs, anxieties, or social relationships in society without offering explicit commentary on “politics” per se. Likewise, films can tell us something about politics and society by how they reflect unstated cultural values and tropes–the lies and stories we tell to make sense of ourselves as a nation and community:
Some of the connections between politics and movies are obvious, but we wanted to go beyond the topical resonance of films like “Zero Dark Thirty” and enter into the realms of allegory and national mythology.
What these period pictures have in common is a sense that righting our wrongs is a shared burden. Or, as Nick Fury, in describing another battle between good and evil, puts it: “There came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes found themselves united against a common threat.”
“Marvel’s The Avengers” might have been called “Team of Rivals” — the title of the book, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, that was one of the sources for “Lincoln.” And Joss Whedon’s Marvel costume party is, like Mr. Spielberg’s historical costume drama, largely about an urgent response to a political crisis. It is also about community organizing, as Fury mobilizes a fractious group of individuals whom he must persuade to pursue a set of common interests.
As such, “The Avengers” may be the exemplary Obama Era superhero movie, replacing the figure of the solitary, shadowy paladin with a motley assortment of oddballs and, despite the title, focusing less on vengeance than on interplanetary peacekeeping. A similar ethic informs “X-Men: First Class,” which takes place around the time of Mr. Obama’s birth (at the height of the cold war and the civil rights movement) and which shows how the idealistic pursuit of justice and tolerance can end up tragically divided between radical and conciliatory impulses…
A.O. Scott omitted the movie Killing Them Softly from his theory of Obama Cinema. This is unfortunate. I would suggest that no other movie has captured the cynicism, anxiety, fear, and liminal moment between the end of Bush’s tenure and Obama’s election in 2008 with such clarity and insight.
The Great Recession is in almost every frame of Killing Them Softly. The disappointments of how easily Hope and Change became more of the same–where the banksters win, and the drones keep killing innocent people, while the 1% laughs all the way to the bank–lingers over the final scene of the movie as an ending note on what is a 90 minutes or so meditation on life in the Bush era and how it did (or did not) transition into “Obama’s America.”
Watching the hope embodied by 2008 election of Barack Obama in 2012, four years after we have seen the realities of his tenure, in a film about how even hitmen and gangsters are impacted by a failed economy is a profound comment on the American dream, and the realities of “austerity” and neoliberalism/hyper-conservatism.
Killing Them Softly came and went in the theater during the course of a few weeks. Maybe it spoke too much truth to power to be popular among the masses.
What do you make of A.O. Scott’s list? Are there any movies which you think speak to the Age of Obama with a particularly sharp amount of clarity and insight, and which should have been included in his theory of Obama Cinema?
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Votes Behind Bars l The Boston Review
Votes Behind Bars
Pamela S. Karlan
Nearly half a century ago, Isaiah Berlin delivered an extraordinarily influential lecture called “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The negative concept consists in freedomfrom—“warding off interference” from external forces. By contrast, the positive concept consists in freedom to—to be “a doer—deciding, not being decided for.” Democracy requires both forms, but current constitutional doctrine adopts an unduly negative approach.
This is especially the case when it comes to political voice. The Supreme Court has resisted attempts to constrain the political impact of money, most notoriously inCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). But just as telling is Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (2011), where the Court hobbled the states’ ability to construct public financing systems. Adjusting the funds available to candidates who accept public financing somehow burdens privately financed candidates’ freedom, according to the justices.
The Court’s rationale in campaign finance cases calls on protection of free speech, which invokes a negative concept of liberty because the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment is largely exercised without government assistance. Political speech, the Court points out, is “an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people.” True enough.
Yet voting is surely an equally essential mechanism of democracy, and arguably a more direct means for holding officials accountable, but the Court has upheld laws that burden casting a ballot, a positive liberty. In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008), the Court rejected a challenge to an Indiana law requiring already-registered voters to present government-issued photo identification at the polls. (Disclosure: I helped to represent the plaintiffs in the case.) The justices did not agree on every element of the case, but they accepted Indiana’s argument that ID prevents fraud (after recognizing that Indiana could not point to a single example, ever, of impersonation that an ID requirement would have stopped) and enhances “public confidence” in the election process, a rationale the Court has essentially rejected in the political-spending context.
The Court’s strikingly different treatment of burdens on political spending and on voting reflects this positive/negative divide. Effective exercise of the right to vote depends on affirmative government support. A citizen who is handed an official ballot written in a language she does not understand may effectively be denied the right to vote. If the government uses unreliable voting machines or staffs polling places with badly trained workers, citizens may effectively be prevented from voting by the press of other responsibilities that preclude waiting in line for hours. Voter ID laws disenfranchise individuals who find it difficult or impossible to obtain government-issued documents.
A superficial reading of the Constitution might support the Court’s opinions. Although the Constitution is filled with provisions mentioning the “right to vote,” the most explicit protections are phrased almost entirely in negative terms: they prohibit particular forms of disenfranchisement. The Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, for example, forbid denial of the right to vote “on account of race” or “sex”; the Twenty-Fourth, “by reason of failure to pay any poll tax.”
In light of this language, in 1875 the Supreme Court declared itself “unanimously of the opinion that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one.” To be sure, the equal protection clause provides one important qualification: the government cannot arbitrarily treat voters unequally. This fall a federal court of appeals relied on the clause to hold that if Ohio permitted military voters to cast early ballots the weekend before the November election, it had to make early voting available to other voters on the same terms. But the court was careful to acknowledge that Ohio had not been constitutionally required to offer early voting at all.
As of 2010, more than 5.85 million American citizens were disenfranchised because of criminal convictions.
The consequences of adopting an essentially negative approach to political voice extend beyond enhanced protection for the political deployment of concentrated wealth and beyond new rules, such as voter ID requirements, that block full participation. The negative approach underwrites a practice that continues to set the United States apart among advanced democracies: disenfranchising millions of citizens due to criminal convictions. Even incarcerated prisoners vote in countries as otherwise diverse as the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Israel, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, and Zimbabwe. In the last dozen years, the highest courts of Canada and South Africa and the European Court of Human Rights have each issued opinions recognizing the voting rights of incarcerated citizens.
As of 2010 more than 5.85 million American citizens were disenfranchised as a result of criminal convictions. Only a quarter of those individuals were then incarcerated. Roughly 30 percent were on probation or parole. The remaining 45 percent were ex-offenders, many disenfranchised for life as a result of felony convictions involving small amounts of drugs or nonviolent crimes that never resulted in prison sentences.
Such extensive disenfranchisement would be distressing in any event, but it becomes even more troubling in light of the dramatic effect that offender disenfranchisement has on the black community. More than 2 million African Americans currently are stripped of their right to vote. That’s more than the number of African Americans who gained the franchise in 1870 thanks to the Fifteenth Amendment. Precedent permits offender disenfranchisement unless challengers can show that states adopted or have maintained their practice for purposefully discriminatory reasons, a nearly insurmountable hurdle. In 2005, for example, the Supreme Court refused to review Florida’s lifetime offender disenfranchisement provision even though the ban had been adopted in 1868 precisely for the purpose of disenfranchising newly freed slaves. Lower federal courts acknowledged this unconstitutional motivation but held that the taint somehow had dissipated by 1968, when Florida renewed the ban without giving any reasons for doing so.
Offender disenfranchisement statutes impair the voting rights of people beyond the offenders themselves. Flawed records and negligent purges result in thousands of eligible voters being excluded. More than 2,400 black voters in Florida were erroneously purged before the 2000 election, dwarfing George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory. And punitive offender disenfranchisement statutes deprive the black community as a whole of political power, which in turn skews election results to the right and creates legislative bodies hostile to civil rights and economic justice for the franchised and disenfranchised alike.
Faced with these problems, some activists and scholars suggest the need for a new constitutional amendment recognizing the affirmative right to vote. I think a better approach lies in reviving the late legal scholar Charles Black’s approach to constitutional reasoning. Black argued that the overall structure of the Constitution presupposes free and fair elections in which all qualified citizens can participate. Individual amendments expanding the electorate reflect this general principle. Abolishing poll taxes, for instance, stands for a fundamental commitment to eliminating barriers to registration and to ensuring that wealth is not the means of accessing politics.
And the Court should apply to offender disenfranchisement statutes a principle it has already recognized elsewhere: whether a punishment violates the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment “is judged not by the standards that prevailed in 1685 . . . or when the Bill of Rights was adopted,” but instead by “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
Today, continuing to disenfranchise millions of our fellow citizens cannot survive that test.
Pamela S. Karlan is Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School.
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Emmett and Trayvon l Washington Monthly
January/ February 2013
Washington Monthly
Emmett and Trayvon
How racial prejudice in America has changed in the last sixty years.
By Elijah Anderson
A tale of two teens: After their tragic and premature deaths, both Emmett Till, 14 (left), and Trayvon Martin, 17 (right), became symbols of the unique challenges that have faced young black men in America.
Separated by a thousand miles, two state borders, and nearly six decades, two young African American boys met tragic fates that seem remarkably similar today: both walked into a small market to buy some candy; both ended up dead.
The first boy is Emmett Till, who was fourteen years old in the summer of 1955 when he walked into a local grocery store in Money, Mississippi, to buy gum. He was later roused from bed, beaten brutally, and possibly shot by a group of white men who later dumped his body in a nearby river. They claimed he had stepped out of his place by flirting with a young white woman, the wife of the store’s owner. The second boy is Trayvon Martin, who was seventeen years old late last winter when he walked into a 7-Eleven near a gated community in Sanford, Florida, to buy Skittles and an iced tea. He was later shot to death at close range by a mixed-race man, who claimed Martin had behaved suspiciously and seemed out of place. The deaths of both boys galvanized the nation, drew sympathy and disbelief across racial lines, and, through the popular media, prompted a reexamination of race relations.
In the aftermath of Martin’s death last February, a handful of reporters and columnists, and many members of the general public, made the obvious comparison: Trayvon Martin, it seemed, was the Emmett Till of our times. And while that comparison has some merit—the boys’ deaths are similar both in some of their details and in their tragic outcome—these killings must also be understood as the result of very different strains of racial tension in America. The racism that led to Till’s death was embedded in a virulent ideology of white racial superiority born out of slavery and the Jim Crow codes, particularly in the Deep South. That sort of racism hinges on the idea that blacks are an inherently inferior race, a morally null group that deserves both the subjugation and poverty it gets.
The racial prejudice that led to Trayvon Martin’s death is different. While it, too, was born of America’s painful legacy of slavery and segregation, and informed by those old concepts of racial order—that blacks have their “place” in society—it in addition reflects the urban iconography of today’s racial inequality, namely the black ghetto, a uniquely urban American creation. Strikingly, this segregation of the black community coexists with an ongoing racial incorporation process that has produced the largest black middle class in history, and that reflects the extraordinary social progress this country has made since the 1960s. The civil rights movement paved the way for blacks and other people of color to access public and professional opportunities and spaces that would have been unimaginable in Till’s time.
While the sort of racism that led to Till’s death still exists in society today, Americans in general have a much more nuanced, more textured attitude toward race than anything we’ve seen before, and usually that attitude does not manifest in overtly hateful, exclusionary, or violent acts. Instead, it manifests in pervasive mindsets and stereotypes that all black people start from the inner-city ghetto and are therefore stigmatized by their association with its putative amorality, danger, crime, and poverty. Hence, in public a black person is burdened with a negative presumption that he must disprove before he can establish mutually trusting relationships with others.
Most consequentially, black skin, and its association with the ghetto, translates into a deficit of credibility as black skin is conflated with lower-class status. This deficit impacts poor blacks of the ghetto one way and middle-class black people another. While middle-class blacks may be able to successfully disabuse others of their negative presumptions, lower-class blacks may not. For instance, all blacks, particularly “ghetto-looking” young men, are at risk of enduring yet another “stop and frisk” from the police as well as suspicion from potential employers, shopkeepers, and strangers on the street. Members of the black middle class and black professionals can usually pass inspection and withstand such scrutiny; many poorer blacks cannot. And many blacks who have never stepped foot in a ghetto must repeatedly prove themselves as non-ghetto, often operating in a provisional status, in the workplace or, say, a fancy restaurant, until they can convince others—either by speaking “white” English or by demonstrating intelligence, poise, or manners—that they are to be trusted, that they are not “one of those” blacks from the ghetto, and that they deserve respect. In other words, a middle-class black man who is, for instance, waiting in line for an ATM at night will in many cases be treated with a level of suspicion that a middle-class white man simply does not experience.
But this pervasive cultural association—black skin equals the ghetto—does not come out of the blue. After all, as a result of historical, political, and economic factors, blacks have been confined in the ghetto. Today, with persistent housing discrimination and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, America’s ghettos face structural poverty. In addition, crime and homicide rates within those communities are high, young black men are typically the ones killing one another, and ghetto culture, made iconic by artists like Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, and the Notorious B.I.G., is inextricably intertwined with blackness.
As a result, in America’s collective imagination the ghetto is a dangerous, scary part of the city. It’s where rap comes from, where drugs are sold, where hoodlums rule, and where The Wire might have been filmed. Above all, to many white Americans the ghetto is where “the black people live,” and thus, as the misguided logic follows, all black people live in the ghetto. It’s that pervasive, if accidental, fallacy that’s at the root of the wider society’s perceptions of black people today. While it may be true that everyone who lives in a certain ghetto is black, it is patently untrue that everyone who is black lives in a ghetto. Regardless, black people of all classes, including those born and raised far from the inner cities and those who’ve never been in a ghetto, are by virtue of skin color alone stigmatized by the place.
I call this idea the “iconic ghetto,” and it has become a powerful source of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination in our society, negatively defining the black person in public. In some ways, the iconic ghetto reflects the old version of racism that led to Till’s death. In Till’s day, a black person’s “place” was in the field, in the maid’s quarters, or in the back of the bus. If a black man was found “out of his place,” he could be punished, jailed, or lynched. In Martin’s day—in our day—a black person’s “place” is in the ghetto.
If he is found “out of his place,” like in a fancy hotel lobby, on a golf course, or, say, in an upscale community, he can be treated with suspicion, avoided, pulled over, frisked, arrested—or worse.
Emmett and Trayvon
Elijah Anderson is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His latest book is “The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.”
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Deconstructing Reconstruction l The Washington Monthly
January/ February 2013
From The Washington Monthly
Deconstructing Reconstruction
The tumultuous decade that followed the Civil War failed to enshrine black voting and civil rights, and instead paved the way for more than a century of entrenched racial injustice.
By Nicholas Lemann
Children in elementary school often come home with the idea that the purpose of the Civil War was to end slavery—but if that were true, then why did it take Abraham Lincoln so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and why was it less than universally popular in the Union states? If you see the movieLincoln, you get a much fuller picture of the contingency of emancipation, and of the difficulty of passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery completely—but why didn’t Lincoln and the Congress think to address at the same time the obvious question of what status the freed slaves would have after that? After Lincoln’s assassination, Congress and the state governments settled that matter by passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which gave the former slaves full civil rights and voting rights—but why was it necessary for exactly the same rights to be reenacted, after enormous struggle, nearly a century later, during the civil rights era?
The answers to all these questions are essentially the same: for most of American history, white America has been highly ambivalent, or worse, about the idea of full legal equality for black Americans. Emancipation itself was a forced move, an obvious consequence of the war only in retrospect; it happened because in war zones in the Confederate states, slaves left their plantation homes and appeared at Union army encampments (they were known at the time as “contraband”), and somebody had to decide what to do about them; sending them back to their owners would be both morally suspect and a form of material aid to the enemy. There has always been a debate about what kind of Reconstruction regime Lincoln would have instituted after the war, had he lived; his racial impulses were generous, but he was not an abolitionist until he actually abolished slavery. Reconstruction—the tumultuous decade or so that followed the Civil War—was an enormous shaping force in American history, and not just in the area of race relations. It’s worth recounting in basic outline, because it’s a far less familiar story than that of the Civil War itself, but far more relevant today.
The word “Reconstruction” is somewhat misleading in the American case, because it implies that the main challenge was managing the tension between punishing the South for seceding and getting it back on its feet economically and politically. In this instance the more pressing question was what the lives of the millions of freed slaves in the South would be like. Would they be able to vote? To hold office? To own property? To sue white people? Would government undertake an active, expensive effort to educate them and put them on the way to economic self-sufficiency? Merely to say that former slaves were now free turned out to resolve remarkably little.
In the period just after the Civil War, Lincoln’s vice president and successor, Andrew Johnson, was impeached for moving too slowly on these matters, and for being too lenient with the South. Then the fiercely antislavery “radical Republicans” took power, rammed through the Fourteenth (civil rights) and Fifteenth (voting rights) Amendments, maintained the presence of federal troops in the South to enforce those laws, and ran a proto-War on Poverty through a new federal agency called the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to help the freed slaves. Just as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment were enormously controversial, in the North as well as the South, so too, only more so, were these “radical Reconstruction” measures.
The freed slaves never got “forty acres and a mule,” a land-reform idea that has resonated through the years but wasn’t enacted (see “Rumors of Land”), but they did get the basics of citizenship—most importantly, the right to vote. One of the most amazing achievements in the history of black America was the creation, in just a few years, of an elaborate political machinery—Republican, of course—that produced far higher (in fact, pretty close to 100 percent) voter turnout among freed slaves in the South than the United States as a whole has now. One result of this was that the South elected dozens of black officials to national office, and another was that state and local governments delivered, at least to some extent, what the freed slaves wanted, notably education at all levels.
None of this was especially popular in the North, and it was wildly unpopular in the white South. Most of the rest of America chose to understand black political empowerment in the South in terms that are still familiar in conservative discourse today: excessive taxation, corruption, and a power imbalance between federal and state government. These arguments were more presentable than simply saying that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and they built sympathy for the white South among high-minded reformists in the North who were horrified by the big-city political machines that immigrants had created in their own backyard. Good-government reformers hated the idea of uneducated people taking over the democratic machinery and using it to distribute power and patronage, rather than in more high-minded ways. Liberal northeastern publications like the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Weekly were reliably hostile to Reconstruction, and their readers feasted on a steady diet of horror stories about swaggering corrupt black legislators, out-of-control black-on-white violence, and the bankruptcies of state and local government.
The Ku Klux Klan, which began in the immediate aftermath of the war and was suppressed by federal troops, soon morphed into an archipelago of secret organizations all over the South that were more explicitly devoted to political terror. These organizations—with names like White Line, Red Shirts, and White League—had shadowy ties to the more respectable Democratic Party. Their essential technique was to detect an incipient “Negro riot” and then take arms to repel it. There never actually were any Negro riots; they were either pure rumor and fantasy that grew from a rich soil of white fear of black violence (usually entailing the incipient despoliation of white womanhood) or another name for Republican Party political activity, at a time when politics was conducted out of doors and with high-spirited mass participation. The white militia always won the battle, if it was a battle, and nearly all the violence associated with these incidents was suffered by black people. In the aggregate, many more black Americans died from white terrorist activities during Reconstruction than from many decades of lynchings. Their effect was to nullify, through violence, the Fifteenth Amendment, by turning black political activity and voting into something that required taking one’s life into one’s hands.
Nicholas Lemann , a Washington Monthly contributing editor, is dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the author of “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.”
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The Mundanity of White Privilege l The Pickaninny Papers
The Mundanity of White Privilege
MONDAY, JANUARY 14, 2013 AT 10:39AM
By Lydia Holt
As a black woman living in the US, I find that it is often easier to get through my day if I ignore the everyday incidences of misogyny and racism that abound in our society. If I didn’t, I fear I would lose my mind. I’m not talking street harassment or being called “nigger.” No, nothing as overt as that. I’m talking about the small things that could be easily explained away as a misunderstanding having nothing to do with race or gender. They are subtle and unconscious behaviors.
The other day, I apparently left my blinders at home, and two incidents stuck out in my mind as perfect examples of white privilege in action. Perhaps it is a result of following so many academics and cultural critics on Facebook and Twitter.
My sister and niece were visiting Brooklyn from the wilds of central New Jersey, and we were going out to eat but first made a stop at a bookstore. There were six of us altogether including my husband and two kids. As we were leaving the store, my husband held open one of the two doors for us. My sister, niece and oldest son went through the door while I lagged behind slightly, herding my three-year-old through the doorway. Another man was also leaving the store and began opening the other door. Meanwhile, a woman was trying to get into the store. She was clearly in a hurry as she tried to push past me and my child and ended up being hit by the other door in the process. The man apologized, and she made some sort of verbal acknowledgement of his apology before continuing to squeeze by us without a look or word of excuse for her own rude behavior.
Now, usually, I would say she was just being rude and impatient and that would be true, but only partially. My husband was holding open the door, so that was clearly the path of least resistance so I can understand her desire to use that door. But, here is the thing, had I been a white woman, would she have been so quick to bum rush us to get at those books? If my husband were black, would she have more easily made the connection that he was holding the door open for me and waited those few seconds it would take for us to clear the threshold? I’m not privy to her inner thoughts, so I will never know for sure, but that is how racism works. It’s not all lynchings and Jim Crow. It’s the entitlement. Her need to go where she wanted to go trumped all else. She made the unconscious assumption that I would move out the way for her and the door was being held open for her benefit.
After dinner, we went to another restaurant for dessert. The kids bounded down the sidewalk ahead of us singing “Gangnam Style.” My sister and I walked a little behind while my husband took over herding responsibilities guiding them into the restaurant flight attendant style, one hand pointing at the open door, the other gently waving them inside. A couple that had been walking near us and were heading to the same place waited and smiled as the kids walked into the restaurant. My sister and I were a few steps behind and had to cut in front of the couple as they attempted to follow behind my husband. Of course there was no way for them to know that we were all together, but again, if we had been two white women, would they have given us the benefit of doubt and waited for us to either pass by or go inside? I don’t know. But given that my husband is white, he was with three obviously non-white children, and being trailed by two black women…. Perhaps I am expecting too much of their observational skills and over-thinking the situation, but that is precisely how all -isms and systems of oppression work, isn’t it? They, ever so subtly, put you in your place over and over again until you begin to do it to yourself. Until you begin to make excuses for the behavior.
I am sure that the woman and the couple are lovely people and would be the first to say they aren’t racist, and I am sure they even know some black people and may even call them friends (that old chestnut). But I can guarantee you that they are not at home blogging about what happened because for them, nothing happened. There were no incidences. They go about their days without ever thinking about their race and how they are being treated as a result of their race. White privilege offers you the luxury of always assuming the door is opened for you and not thinking twice about it.
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Violence, Demonization, & Apocalyptic Aggression l Chip Berlet l The Spirit House Project
Violence, Demonization, & Apocalyptic Aggression
Chip Berlet |
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Wed Aug 22, 2012 |
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 Anders Behring Breivik, being sentenced on Friday for his 2011 terror attacks in Oslo, Norway, sees himself as a Christian Warrior. Breivik grabbed many of his Islamophobic and anti-socialist conspiracy theories off the Internet. These theories are still promulgated by right-wing groups in the United States, especially Christian Right ideologue William S. Lind, formerly director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. The recent attacks on a Sikh Temple near Milwaukee, an Islamic Mosque in Joplin, Missouri, and the Christian Right Family Research Council in Washington, DC, illuminate a central tension within Christianity. Progressive Christian activist Ruby Sales calls this the struggle between Empire Christianity and Liberation Christianity. The former represents an apocalyptic view built around subjugation of enemies and use of violence. The latter sees the apocalypse bringing justice and peace. Sales wants to:
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Most mainstream media discussions about the recent wave of violent attacks dismiss the idea that political, cultural, or economic hierarchies and tensions, when coupled to the demonization of an “Other,” can encourage violence. When the Right demonizes the Left and the Left Demonizes the Right, sometimes an individual or group decides to take action to stop the evildoers before it is too late. This type of apocalyptic aggression can be carried out by people who are legally sane or insane; and whose political ideas come from the Left or Right or somewhere outside of rational thought.
I oppose acts of violence or terrorism to achieve political goals. My analysis of vilification, demonization, and apocalyptic rhetoric in the United States today, however, compels me to conclude that it comes overwhelmingly from the Right, especially apocalyptic rhetoric from the Christian Right. Nevertheless, we need to pay more attention to the linkages of demonization, apocalyptic aggression, and violence, no matter what part of the political spectrum employs this dynamic…wittingly or unwittingly.
Apocalypse is a word common in popular culture, what with the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” and the heroics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy stopped the Apocalypse on a weekly basis in a television series from 1997-2003. (reruns are easily discovered online and off). Buffy and her team were stopping evil from taking over the world. Nothing wrong with that.
The word “apocalypse” is often misunderstood. The words apocalypse, prophecy, and revelation are all related, and in the broadest sense an “apocalypse” is an upcoming struggle between good and evil during which hidden truths will be revealed and the world dramatically reshaped forever. So an apocalypse can bring bad news—or good news. Apocalyptic rhetoric that warns of an evil plot by “Them” can be interpreted as a call to act “before it is too late.”
Vilification by demagogues anywhere on the political spectrum can lead to incidents of directed violence by individuals who adopt a superhero complex to save “Us” from “Them.” This dynamic was first thoroughly analyzed by Hannah Arendt and Gordon Allport in the 1950s. The process involves the theory of Constitutive Rhetoric in which a leader creates (interpolates) an actual constituency in society.
Almost a decade ago I was invited by Ruby Sales, founder of the Spirit House Project, to have a public conversation in Washington, DC at a forum on the demonization and scapegoating common in the Christian Right. My focus was exploring how apocalyptic demagoguery prompted not only Christian Right political activism but sometimes acts of apocalyptic aggression and violence. We were demoralized in 2004 by the second term of George W. Bush, and we felt there needed to be more analysis of how the Christian Right was pursuing a path toward theocracy frequently based on apocalyptic conspiracy theories that vilified and targeted named “Others.”
Constitutive Rhetoric prompting Directed Violence fuels the real life and death consequences we are witnessing today, and has prompted similar incidents in the past. The New Hampshire Supreme Court Society recently presented the Life and Liberty Award posthumously to slain 1960s civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels, and a very much alive U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia who is a past chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Ruby Sales accepted the award on behalf of Daniels. They and many others whose names should be better known are amongst those who put their lives on the line and are Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Another activist from the Civil Rights Movement, Ruby Sales, accepted the award on behalf of her murdered friend and colleague, Daniels.
Sheila Zakre, a disability and employment rights attorney wrote that at the ceremony Lewis and Sales “pulled no punches in warning of a rollback in the civil rights they fought to obtain. How fitting that they did so in a state whose legislature seeks to do just that.” In a column in the Concord Monitor, Zakre said:
Shouldn’t we expect our appointed representatives, both federal and state, to appreciate that history teaches us that restrictions on voting are tied to discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender and disability, and that morality teaches us that voting rights is a nonpartisan issue? The warning about history repeating itself may be hackneyed but is nonetheless true. Sadly, the lessons of the civil rights movement can be forgotten even as we venerate its heroes.
John Lewis and Ruby Sales at the presentation of the Third Life and Liberty Award
photo credit David Wolowitz . [View event photos here].
My first encounter with Ruby Sales was over a decade ago at a lecture I gave to a class at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My topic was the challenge to equality posed by right-wing social movements. During the Q&A with students an older Black women pursued a series of questions about right-wing violence and our response as people of faith. They were sharp questions delivered with intensity but no hint of rancor. After class the professor explained the student was Ruby Sales, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, and she suggested I should learn more about her concern with apocalyptic demonization and violence.
I found out that Sales made her life altering choice to stand up against apocalyptic aggression as a teenager in the 1960s when she joined the Civil Rights Movement while a student at Tuskegee University. In 1965 the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee sent Sales with an organizing team to Lowndes County, Alabama—known among Blacks in the South as “Bloody Lowndes.” Sales was arrested with some 20 other activists protesting segregation and conducting a voter registration drive.
Released from jail, Sales and a few others were confronted by an enraged White racist wielding a shotgun. Sales witnessed her organizing colleague and friend Jonathan Daniels, a seminary student, shot to death on the street after he pushed Sales out of harm’s way. Another organizer was seriously wounded. The trauma left Sales literally speechless for seven months, but she persevered, found her voice, and carried on with her activism, eventually attending the same Episcopal Divinity School where Daniels had studied.
Apocalyptic Christian Right activists often link their plans to “take dominion” over the United States to their view of an End Times battle between good and evil; in which godly Christians must struggle against literal agents of Satan. In case it is not clear—those of us who read Talk to Action because we care about social, political, and economic justice are the agents of Satan in this Christian Right script. The overall tendency that seeks to make America a Christian nation is called “Dominionism;” and it comes in soft forms as well as hard forms that produce apocalyptic aggression against the targeted scapegoats.
Author and apocalypse scholar Lee Quinby calls these attacks “rituals of purification.” The destructive negative form of apocalyptic thinking is in part why the Christian Right blames all of the problems we face in this nation on scapegoats such as gay people, reproductive rights activists, feminists, and folks on the Left in general.
In the narrative of Liberation Christianity the Apocalypse brings an end to systems of oppression and exploitation, and let’s “justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” This quote from the book of Amos was a favorite of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. But as the Rev. R. William Carroll wrote in his essay on this theme, while Rev. King “spoke as a Christian…in so doing, he appealed to deep longings of every human being for freedom and righteousness, for brotherhood and sisterhood, for what he called the Beloved Community.” Rev. Carroll continued:
How easily do we forget that King’s vision was not limited to ending legal segregation! How easily do we forget how he confronted our nation with a shining vision of a beloved community that has not yet arrived! King’s dream was not limited to racial justice, though we should be quick to add that even here, his dream, like America’s promise, remains unfulfilled. If anything, in the last thirty years or so, we have moved backwards. King’s dream included peace and justice among nations. It also included justice and fairness for working people.
An activist for decades, Sales builds communities of compassion, commitment, liberation, and spirit. Her life was indelibly marked as a teenage college student when a friend was shot dead while they were organizing Black voters during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Now, more than four decades after this act of apocalyptic violence, Sales devotes her life to demanding justice for all of us.
Ruby Sales, Spirit House Project
In a number of essays and interviews and activities over many years, Ruby Sales has been on the road to fulfilling the task of building the “beloved community.” Perhaps the best-known essay by Sales concerning the ongoing struggle for freedom and justice is “Empire Christianity vs. Liberation Christianity.” She wrote it following the contested election of George W. Bush as President in 2004. Conservative Christians played a key role in electing Republicans to public office nationwide that year.
Sales placed the elections in the context of a historic struggle within Christianity—between those who support “Empire Christianity” and those who support “Liberation Christianity.” Sales charged that the “Empire religion espoused by George Bush and his white Christian conservative allies is headed by a God who appears to be white supremacist, patriarchal, and upper class, one who stood on the side of enslavement and the genocide of native peoples throughout the globe, including the Americas.”
Opposed to that form of theology is Liberation Christianity, which “begins with the assertion that God is on the side of the oppressed rather than the side of the Empire,” wrote Sales, who added that “Jesus made clear the radical nature of his mission”:
- to bring sight to the blind, i.e. to bring a new consciousness that freed his community and others from the false consciousness of identifying with the goals of the Roman Empire
- to feed the hungry, i.e. a systemic redistribution of resources that is not charity, but systemic economic justice
- to set the prisoners free, i.e. a recognition that the Empire uses law and order as tools of oppression and domination.”
Sales has a vision of Liberation Christianity that leads her to reach across many divides, not only of spiritual and ethical belief, but also race, gender, and class. She uses a wide range of tools to help prepare people for nonviolent action in pursuit of justice. Sales currently leads the Spirit House Project, “an intergenerational network of diverse people” using “the arts, research, education, action, and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic, and social justice, as well as for spiritual maturity.” Sales and Spirit House co-director Cheryl Blankenship oversee the Jonathan Daniels and Samuel Younge Institute for Justice and Nonviolence Fellows Program. This internship program is now based in Atlanta, Georgia, where the organization re-located after years in the Washington, DC area. The intern program:
Supports and prepares a new generation of peace and justice workers who want to discern a call to social justice and nonviolence; strengthens their courage, hope, resolve and reason to do this work; prepares them to play leading roles in public policy debates about issues such as poverty, prison industrial complex, militarism, and the shrinking budget for human needs, voting rights, privacy and judicial issues, and neo-conservatism; and helps grassroots communities meet their urgent need for trained and committed volunteers or staff.
Fellows of the internship program at the Spirit House Project
I have been inspired by Ruby Sales, and have written about my experience working collaboratively with her to sort out the tough issues of violence and oppression—the hallmarks of Empire Christianity in the United States that have delayed the promise of equality and democracy for too many for too long. Now in 2012 it is easy to see the forces allied in this country to barricade the path of progress trod by so many before us.
While acts of dramatic violence and the cacophony of hyperbolic election rhetoric snares our attention, Sales reminds us that there is an ongoing wave of police violence against people of color and immigrants. I will cover her views on this urgent matter in a follow-up essay here at Talk to Action.
In a book on “Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America” I wrote a chapter explaining that both Sales and I felt compelled by our spiritual beliefs to stand up and speak out in support of justice. “We all have to choose sides in an endless struggle,” I wrote:
Are we on the side of the powerful, the arrogant, the bullies who seek empire? Or are we on the side of the weak, the impoverished, the marginalized, and seek liberation for those who are suffering under the weight of oppression? Which side are you on?
Ruby Sales chose which side she was on at a young age, but it is never too late to make a commitment to justice, especially if you have spirit—no matter how you define that word.
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The Universe Bends Towards Justice l A talk by Obery M. Hendricks Jr., the Author
First Corinthians Baptist Church, Sanctuary Auditorium
A talk by Obery M. Hendricks Jr. on his new book, The Universe Bends Towards Justice. It includes essays on the gap between the spirituality of the church and of Jesus; the ways in which contemporary gospel music sensationalize today’s churches into social and political irrelevance; and how the economic policies espoused by the religious right betray the same biblical tradition they claim to hold dear.
Obery M. Hendricks Jr. is a Visiting Scholar in Religion and African American Studies at Columbia and author of The Politics of Jesus.
Co-sponsored with Institute for Research in African-American Studies.
OCG 