Monthly Archives: November 2019

What my mother’s death taught me about money as an African American – Business Insider

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My mother purchased her home on the south side of Chicago for $55,000 in 1986, the equivalent of $123,000 today.When she died without a will, court fees and fines left our family with just $40,500 — a loss of over $80,000 on the purchase price of her house.I realized that, because of our history, many African Americans haven’t learned how to transfer wealth generationally by making an estate plan.So, after my mother’s death, my husband and I drafted an estate plan, which we review annually around my mother’s birthday.

  • My mother purchased her home on the south side of Chicago for $55,000 in 1986, the equivalent of $123,000 today.
  • When she died without a will, court fees and fines left our family with just $40,500 — a loss of over $80,000 on the purchase price of her house.
  • I realized that, because of our history, many African Americans haven’t learned how to transfer wealth generationally by making an estate plan.
  • So, after my mother’s death, my husband and I drafted an estate plan, which we review annually around my mother’s birthday.

Full Article and Source: What my mother’s death taught me about money as an African American – Business Insider

The Importance Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities | News One

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The Importance Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities

Excerpt

Key role played by black schools

HBCUs have always been the vehicles for liberty and equality in the journey toward black liberation within America.

Black Americans have long understood the relationship between education and democracy. Following the Civil War, learning the rules of the American and southern political economy was necessary to take full advantage of one’s citizenship rights.

However, at the time, not only did most people believe the formerly enslaved had no desire for education, they also thought black Americans did not possess the mental capacity to pursue it.

The fervent efforts of the formerly enslaved to establish colleges in the post-bellum South ran counter to these beliefs, although the founding of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1854, even prior to the Civil War’s conclusion, proved beyond doubt that black Americans were keen to seek education.

The point is, HBCUs played a crucial role in transforming how America was to understand and envision what it meant to be black following the Civil War. And throughout the years, these schools have served as incubators for future generations of freedom fighters.

It was HBCUs, for example, where the carefully crafted educational strategies that birthed the mass protests and civil unrest of the 1950s and 1960s emerged, a fact that many people today may fail to appreciate adequately.

Contributions of black colleges

HBCUs influenced the character of the black liberation struggle. They trained the leaders and served as key sites of exchange where ideals about the best paths toward freedom took shape.

Take Howard University, an HBCU founded in 1867, as an example. Without this school, our understanding of equality and access would be quite different.

It was Howard graduates who would use the law to challenge the idea that separate educational facilities could ever produce equal outcomes for black Americans.

Charles Hamilton Houston, vice dean of Howard Law School, viewed the school as a laboratory that would “create the select and talented corps of lawyers who would work to fulfill constitutional promises.”

So it did.

Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who would argue the Brown v Board of Topeka case and later became a Supreme Court justice, emerged from this environment. He came up with a brilliantly constructed critique of racially segregated education that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the system.

Past and present challenges

Predictably, black schools faced many challenges. From the start, defenders of white supremacy have understood HBCUs as spaces intricately connected to the fight for civil rights and black liberation.

To impede these schools’ ability to become training grounds for equality, political foes did all they could to make sure HBCUs remained underfunded, underresourced and understaffed.

For instance, southern state legislative bodies routinely diverted money away from HBCUs, leaving the schools to operate on razor-thin budgets.

In the 1920s, foundations urged the schools to limit their curriculum to politically neutral yet economically relevant subjects such as domestic service and agriculture, which were not likely to inspire students to challenge a system that denied their humanity.

Unfortunately, some of these challenges continue to this day.

Data from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities indicate, for example, that between 2010 and 2012, the state legislature underfunded South Carolina State University by more than US$6 million.

Impact of black colleges

Questioning the contemporary relevance of HBCUs is the modern-day equivalent of such efforts.

It is true that only about 9% of all blacks enrolled in college attend HBCUs. And I can agree that if we understand the role of HBCUs only in terms of the numbers educated, then these schools are not as relevant to the majority of black Americans as they once were.

However, if we are to understand the role of HBCUs as vehicles of freedom and black liberation, then they still have an important role within our society.

In fact, when compared to predominantly white colleges, HBCUs continue to have a disproportionate impact on the production of college-educated black Americans. They may account for approximately 3% of all colleges and universities, but well over 20% of black Americans continue to earn their degrees at these schools.

And about 25% of black Americans earning STEM degrees do so at HBCUs.

Why we need black colleges today

So, I find it troubling when people question their contemporary necessity.

Also, doubts about these schools’ continued relevance underestimate the relationship between HBCUs and the struggle for black liberation within America that continues to this day.

Students of these schools have been at the forefront of peaceful protests. Learning from past efforts that used art as a tool for black liberation, students at Morgan State University created a large-scale photo installation around the theme of “Black Lives Matter.”

Students from Howard University gathered in front of the White House to protest the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown case. Likewise, Morehouse College students staged a march and, in conjunction with students from nearby Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College, also held a peace rally protesting the decision.

The contemporary economic, political and social precariousness of black life in America indicates that we need more settings like HBCUs, not fewer.

If we as a society come to recognize that black lives matter, then we must do the same for the venues that cultivate and nurture these lives as well.

In fact, no set of institutions better exemplifies the American ideals of civil rights and equality than historically black colleges and universities.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Source: The Importance Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities | News One

The Inside Story of Christopher Steele’s Trump Dossier | The New Yorker

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In a new book, the founders of the firm that compiled it defend their work.

In “Crime in Progress,” the Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson (pictured) and Peter Fritsch present a mountain of evidence on Trump’s dealings with corrupt foreign players.

Photograph by Zach Gibson / Getty

For nearly three years, President Trump has spun an alternate reality in which he was not helped and tainted by Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign but, rather, his political opponents and his accusers were. During a rambling fifty-three-minute live phone interview with “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump insisted again that the plot to block his election and bring him down once he was installed in the White House was “perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

On Tuesday, two of the President’s most prolific accusers plan to disrupt the narrative by telling their own story. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the co-founders of the Washington-based private-investigative firm Fusion GPS, which has mined deep veins of muck on Trump for years, at the behest of his various political enemies, will try to throw the book at Trump with the publication of “Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.”

Fusion was the firm that hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to research Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. After nearly three years without a word from Steele, while the so-called pee tape and his other sensational findings sparked furious controversy, the former M.I.6 spy speaks directly and on the record about his own part for the first time in the book, an advance copy of which was given to The New Yorker.

Whether Simpson and Fritsch’s score-settling, tell-all account will change any minds remains to be seen, but they present a mountain of evidence that Trump’s dealings with corrupt foreign players—particularly those from the former Soviet Union—are both real and go back decades. Steele’s dossier has been debated, denounced, derided, and occasionally defended almost since the moment it was first published, in January, 2017, by BuzzFeed News, against Steele’s wishes. Although Carl Bernstein helped to break the news of its existence on CNN, his friend and Watergate-reporting partner Bob Woodward dismissed it almost instantly as “garbage.” During impeachment-hearing testimony last week, the former White House national-security adviser Fiona Hill, one of America’s foremost experts on Russia and a professional acquaintance of Steele’s, described the dossier as “a rabbit hole” and suggested that Steele may have been “played.” But the authors defend Steele’s work, and their own, arguing that it has proved “strikingly right.”

As the authors tell it, they became obsessed with Trump almost accidentally. Their involvement in his campaign began as a business proposition. In the past, they had worked mostly for corporate clients, but in 2012 they had also done some political-opposition research on the Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. (They declined to disclose their client.) So, in 2015, as Trump gained momentum, but before he clinched the nomination, Simpson and Fritsch again decided to look for political work. After firing off a quick e-mail to a big conservative donor they knew who disliked Trump, they were hired. They don’t identify that donor but note, helpfully, that he arranged for them to contract their opposition-research assignment through the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site known to be funded by Paul Singer, a New York hedge-fund magnate. Once Trump secured the nomination, however, the G.O.P. donor fled.

At that point, Fusion switched clients and political parties, pitching its services to Marc Elias, the lawyer for the D.N.C. and Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. Clinton’s identity, too, was kept hidden, in this case behind the screen of Elias’s law firm, Perkins Coie. In the beginning, Clinton’s identity was also hidden from Steele, who knew only that Fusion was hiring him in the late spring of 2016, as a contractor, to investigate the tangled web of Trump’s ties to Russia for an unknown patron. Contrary to the conspiracy theories that the right later spread, Simpson and Fritsch write that they never met or spoke with Clinton. “As far as Fusion knew, Clinton herself had no idea who they were. To this day, no one in the company has ever met or spoken to her,” the book reads. As I reported, although Steele went to the F.B.I. with his findings out of a sense of duty and, by the late summer of 2016, knew that the F.B.I. was seriously investigating Trump’s Russian ties, the communication channels were so siloed that the Clinton campaign was unaware of these facts. Far from conspiring in a plot, the Clinton team had no hard evidence that the F.B.I. was investigating its opponent, even as its own opposition researcher was feeding dirt to the F.B.I. As one top Clinton campaign official told me when I wrote about Steele, “If I’d known the F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the rooftops!”

Source: The Inside Story of Christopher Steele’s Trump Dossier | The New Yorker

Overdue reparations is the key to closing the racial wealth gap II Dr. William “Sandy”Darity

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Overdue reparations is the key to closing the racial wealth gap

Dr. William Darity‘s congressional testimony lays a path to fix historic inequity that produces unequal outcomes for blacks

Dr. Willliam “Sandy” Darity, Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University.

The case for black reparations must be anchored on three phases of grievous injustice inflicted upon enslaved blacks and their descendants. First is the atrocity of slavery itself.

The case for black reparations must be anchored on three phases of grievous injustice inflicted upon enslaved blacks and their descendants. First is the atrocity of slavery itself. Second are the atrocities exercised during the nearly century-long period of legal segregation in the U.S. (the “Jim Crow” era). Third are the legacy effects of slavery and Jim Crow, compounded by ongoing racism manifest in persistent health disparities, labor market discrimination, mass incarceration, police executions of unarmed blacks (de facto lynchings), black voter suppression, and the general deprivation of equal well-being with all Americans. Therefore, it is a misnomer to refer to “slavery reparations,” since black reparations must encompass the harms imposed throughout American history to the present moment — both slavery and post-slavery, both Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow — on black descendants of American slavery. It is precisely that unique community that should be the recipients of reparations: black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S.

Second are the atrocities exercised during the nearly century-long period of legal segregation in the U.S. (the “Jim Crow” era).

In a 2003 article written with Dania Frank Francis, and, more recently, in work written with Kirsten Mullen, we have proposed two criteria for eligibility for black reparations. First, an individual must demonstrate that they have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S. Second, an individual must demonstrate that for at least 10 years prior to the onset of the reparations program or the formation of the study commission, whichever comes first, they self-identified as black, Negro or African-American. The first criterion will require genealogical documentation — but absolutely no phenotype, ideology or DNA tests. The second criterion will require presentation of a suitable state or federal legal document that the person declared themselves to be black.

iStockphoto.

… it is a misnomer to refer to “slavery reparations,” since black reparations must encompass the harms imposed throughout American history to the present moment

I also recommend, like the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the commission on reparations proposals commission should be appointed exclusively by the Congress. The commission appointees should be experts in American history, Constitutional law, economics (including stratification economics), political science and sociology. These appointees must have expert knowledge on the history of slavery and Jim Crow, employment discrimination, wealth inequality, health disparities, unequal educational opportunities, criminal justice and mass incarceration, media, political participation and exclusion, and housing inequities. The commission also should include appointees with detailed knowledge about the design and administration of prior reparations programs as guidelines for structuring a comprehensive reparations program for native black Americans.

Where do we go from here?

What would it take to bridge the black-white wealth gap?
A Q & A with Duke University economist William ‘Sandy’ Darity, who has some radical—yet doable—ideas
mlk50.com
Reparations well-intentioned, but insufficient for the debt owed
City of Memphis gives $50,000 each to the 14 living black sanitation workers from the 1968 strike
mlk50.com
The Loebs : Exploited black labor and inherited white wealth
Penny-pinching Loeb ancestors kept wages flat for 25 years as black laundresses did “miserable” work
mlk50.com

Source: Overdue reparations is the key to closing the racial wealth gap

Cuban government promotes program against racism and discrimination

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Cuba

According to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, there are still “some vestiges, which are not part of policies in our society, but in the culture of a group of persons.”

By Cuba News —

The Cuban government has created a program against racism and racial discrimination, a problem that continues latent in the country’s society, where it generates complaints, criticisms and insistent calls for its eradication.

This was one of the issues addressed during the most recent meeting of the Council of Ministers―headed by President Miguel Díaz-Canel―which state media reported on this Friday.

Díaz-Canel said that the Cuban Revolution “possibly has been the social and the political process that has contributed the most to eliminating racial discrimination,” but acknowledged that there are still “some vestiges, which are not part of policies in our society, but in the culture of a group of persons.”

As an example, he mentioned the manifestations of racism that are perceived in jokes, in certain attitudes at the social level and in some convocations for positions in private businesses that “specify skin color.”

The new program aims to “combat and eliminate the vestiges of racism, racial prejudice and racial discrimination that remain in Cuba,” explained Deputy Minister of Culture Fernando Rojas.

The deputy minister considered that the dismantling of racial discrimination began since the coming to power of the Cuban revolution in 1959 with advances that he described as “gigantic, solid and unquestionable,” but admitted that “it has been difficult to reverse in just 60 years four centuries of inequality.”

The Cuban program against racism will include “the fight against regionalism and discrimination based on ethnic and national origin,” manifestations that are also associated with that problem.

He said that it is a government program whose follow-up will be integrated into the president’s work agenda, and a Government Commission headed by Díaz-Canel himself will be created to coordinate the tasks.

Rojas highlighted the active role in addressing racial issues by the official Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the José Antonio Aponte commission of that organization that combats racism and racial discrimination from a cultural perspective.

In recent times articles on this subject have been appearing in the official media with some frequency, but it is in social networks where there are the most comments and complaints.

A couple of years ago, the case of a private taxi driver who was arrested after the complaint of a black passenger was published in the state weekly Trabajadores. The passenger accused him of having treated her violently, asking her to get off before what had been agreed.

The young woman―a law student at the University of Havana―said in a letter to the newspaper, which published it, that the driver ordered her to get out of the car and told her that “he didn’t want blacks in his car,” so she photographed the car with her mobile and took note of the license plate.

The publication indicated that after the complaint Havana’s police authorities immediately proceeded to locate the owner of the vehicle, who was arrested for an alleged act of racial discrimination that was investigated by the District Attorney’s Office in order to confirm the “criminal offense.”

Source: IBW21  _ IBW21 (The Institute of the Black World 21st Century) is committed to building the capacity of Black communities in the U.S. to work for the social, political, economic and cultural upliftment, the development of the global Black community and an enhanced quality of life for

Cuban government promotes program against racism and discrimination

Cuban News

How Black Mothers Prepare Their Children for School – The Atlantic

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An illustration of a black mother walking her son to school.
MIA COLEMAN
In observing her own family and others, Black has noticed a pattern: Behaviors that many black parents might consider annoying but developmentally appropriate, such as an ill-timed joke or talking back to an adult, are treated by school staff as cause for suspension. From there, students are pushed out of classrooms, lose learning time, and can end up in the school-to-prison pipeline. “It’s a totally different environment, a totally different culture,” Black said when we spoke in July 2018.

Black knows that her kids are not alone in their struggles at school. She works with the Black Organizing Project nearby in Oakland, where she offers peer-to-peer support to other black parents whose children are going through disciplinary proceedings. Black told me that many parents say their children behave as all children do, but wind up targeted by school officials because educators misinterpret these students’ actions, assuming the worst. Glaring, making noise, and violating the school dress code can all lead to suspension. The consequences are significant: When students are excluded from the classroom, they’re more likely to do worse academically, become truant, drop out, and eventually come into contact with the juvenile-justice system.

I heard similar concerns about the gap between home and school cultures when I interviewed dozens of black mothers for my book, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. Many of us know about the disparities: Black students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be expelled or suspended. Less frequently discussed are the strategies black parents use to prepare their children for schools where they might be perceived as threats or expendable misfits who aren’t core members of the community.

The mothers I spoke with were concerned about these disciplinary patterns. They were also worried about subtler ways black students are told they don’t belong in classrooms where the dominant culture, with its emphasis on obedience and hierarchy, is unlike the culture at home. These mothers talked about their efforts to encourage their children to question authority, speak freely, and express opinions—all things they valued—only to then watch as their children were reprimanded or even criminalized for doing so at school. They shared how nonblack peers would unexpectedly touch their children’s hair, making them feel violated and objectified. Some had placed their black children in predominantly white, suburban schools that offered strong academic programs, but that were limited by their own insularity and thus were unable to prepare black kids for the more racially and economically heterogeneous real world. Others felt that teachers had treated their children coldly, and were unable to see them simply as children.

I had many of those conversations around the time that I started taking my toddler—my first child—to a library story circle, a weekly sing-along, and other enrichment programs that were our earliest experiences of school-like environments. We were often the only family of color or one of few, and I began to think about the socialization that comes with schooling for black families of school-age children. The verb socialize means “to make suitable for society.” The word is typically understood as benign, but I wondered: What does it mean to encourage a child to become suitable for a society that isn’t really suitable for her?

Through my research, I learned that helping children survive and have positive experiences at school is another way in which mothering is different in black families. I came across a 1992 book titled Raising Black Children, co-authored by the psychiatrists Alvin Poussaint and James Comer. Poussaint consulted on The Cosby Show and was known as a kind of Dr. Spock within black communities in the 1980s and 1990s. In the book, the authors write, “Many black parents question and have mixed feelings about passing on the values and ways of a society that says in so many ways, ‘We do not value black men and women, boys and girls, as much as we do whites …’ The need to preserve our culture and community springs from a desire to maintain a real and psychological place, where we are accepted, respected and protected. For this reason we are concerned about whether ‘white psychology and child-rearing approaches’ will change us, hurt us, destroy our culture.”

For many white parents, the process of socializing their children is an unalloyed good, an uncomplicated part of child-rearing that poses no real threat. For the mothers I spoke with, immersing their children in a school’s culture meant hoping they’d get what they needed academically without sustaining too much damage to their sense of self.
As both an academic and a mother, Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho knows this balance well. She is a professor of educational leadership at Lewis & Clark College and has written extensively on school discipline; she also has six children, all of them black. Roebuck Sakho told me that she chose to send her children to public schools, even though she knew they would create challenges for her family. Her children are there to learn and participate, but they’re also there to question and transform negative aspects of their schooling. Roebuck Sakho’s children accept this as part of their work as student-activists, she said. When they come home with stories about factually questionable content in a lesson or a teacher’s dismissive behavior, the family has a conversation about how best to respond. Roebuck Sakho said she doesn’t want her children to absorb all the cultural norms introduced by educators. “I’m sending them to school to get a part of education,” she told me.

But conversations like those in Roebuck Sakho’s home aren’t happening everywhere. Parents of color are about three times as likely to discuss race with their children as are white parents, according to a 2007 study of kindergartners and their families in the Journal of Marriage and Family. Three out of four white parents in that study avoided talking about race entirely, according to Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, whose 2009 book, NurtureShock, highlighted the research. White parents often believe that talking about race is itself somehow racist, and so communicate to their children that skin color doesn’t matter and that everyone is equal, Bronson and Merryman found. But even toddlers, with their brief experience of the world, can see that’s not true. When white parents leave kids to make sense of these contradictions on their own, without historical context or guidance on how to think about difference, classrooms are bound to become fraught spaces for black children.

Many parents I spoke with emphasized the role of peers in establishing and maintaining norms at school. When I interviewed Monifa Bandele, a Brooklyn-based community organizer and a senior vice president of the advocacy organization MomsRising.org, in 2018, her daughters were 16 and 19. The girls attended a Quaker school that in many ways aligned with the values the family embraced at home. But her daughters still had to learn to navigate what Bandele described as white-liberal racism, which tends to be practiced by progressives in denial of their own white-supremacist beliefs. Bandele and her husband were raised in families that organized against apartheid and created African-centered schools, so their children’s thinking around issues of race and power is well developed and generations in the making.

Bandele worries that her daughters’ sharp perception has at times left them exhausted from dealing with racism both outright and more subtle, but she’s also seen them take it in stride. “I can check you on this; then we can still work on the science project together,” she told me, giving an example of how one daughter has responded. “You shouldn’t touch her hair, and let’s get these projects done.”
Not all children so gracefully develop survival strategies that allow them to participate in predominantly white schools while also resisting and even transforming the culture. Aya de Leon directs Poetry for the People, an arts and activism program that’s part of UC Berkeley’s African American Studies Department. She said her students carry different types of burdens, depending on the type of high school they attended. “If you’re in a hood school, the harms are clear, and you know when they’re happening that you’re being harmed,” she said, and pointed to physical fights and subpar academic offerings as among the problems. “In these white environments, you’re being harmed, and you don’t even know it because you think there is something wrong with you. [You think] if only you could get these white people to like you,” then everything would be okay.

In her own journey as a parent, de Leon has chosen schools where her daughter can be surrounded by other black and brown children. De Leon was one of several mothers I interviewed who talked about the importance of curating and nurturing friend groups that provide their children with allies and positive reflections of themselves. “Going into the tween years, the beauty stuff is gonna hit hard,” she told me. “And when it does, I just need her to have brown girls around her.” Other families enroll their kids in after-school or community-based youth-development programs that provide lessons on the history of the African diaspora, trips to historically black colleges and universities, and other forms of cultural enrichment that their predominantly white schools do not.

My own daughter has just started preschool. I’m excited and feel I’ve done my due diligence in choosing a place that will value and support her. But I’ve also tucked away tips parents shared with me that may come in handy as she gets older. Maybe one day I, too, will need to tell my child to take pictures of her assignments before she turns them in, a safeguard against some teacher “losing” her work as a provocation or punishment. Maybe I’ll need to remind her that I’m always just a phone call away, and that she should never be the only child in a room of adults asking her questions that make her feel scared, embarrassed, or confused. Like generations of black mothers before me, I’ll think up ways to help my daughter feel safe and confident as she learns about this society and how to survive in it.

You should think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

DANI MCCLAIN is the author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood.

Source: How Black Mothers Prepare Their Children for School – The Atlantic

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Visualizing racism: Nine photographers take on the challenge of depicting bigotry – The Washington Post

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Racism is this nation’s telltale heart beating ominously in the collective subconscious. From time to time we come to believe we have expiated and silenced it once and for all. But then it is back — changed, perhaps attenuated, but unmistakable.

Eleven years ago, we were congratulating ourselves on a historic milestone: the election of Barack Obama, the first African American U.S. president. Some dreamed — foolishly, it turned out — that we had finally entered a “post-racial” era. Instead, we find ourselves at a hyperracial moment of heightened friction, a time when six in 10 Americans believe race relations are “generally bad,” according to a Pew Research Center survey, and nearly two-thirds believe it is now more common for people to express racist views than when Obama left office.

More than half of us blame President Trump for making race relations worse, according to Pew. But Trump may be more of a symptom than a root cause. If he exacerbates and exploits jagged divisions for political gain, he is able to do so because those divisions were already there.

It is depressingly easy to quantify the stubborn disparities that linger from our centuries of racism. The median black family earns just 62 percent of what the median white family earns, according to the Census Bureau, and has little more than one-tenth the accumulated net worth — gaps that have barely narrowed since the 1970s. Latinos fare, on average, just slightly better.

Much harder to catalogue is how Americans feel on a personal level. Racism hurts. A growing body of research shows it negatively affects the mental and physical health of its victims. Like any burden, it wears the bearer down. Sometimes it makes you feel like lashing out. Sometimes it makes you feel as if you are drowning.

In what surely is not a coincidence, racism is rising along with diversity. The country’s 10 biggest cities and two biggest states are already majority-minority, meaning non-Hispanic whites no longer constitute more than half the population. The nation as a whole will reach that tipping point around 2045. Hispanics are now such a huge minority that one could argue the nation is already functionally bilingual. Perhaps the sense that demography equals destiny has something, or maybe everything, to do with the fact that about half of white Americans, according to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, believe discrimination against whites is as big a problem in the United States as discrimination against minorities.

This is how the war against racism goes: progress, setback, optimism, despair — a cycle that frustratingly repeats and yet somehow inches us forward. Racism may be worse than in the recent past, but the individual and collective punishment it metes out is a shadow of what black Americans suffered a half-century ago. We have no choice but to believe that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. We have somehow taken a detour, however, and must find our way back to the true path.

This issue is devoted to photography that documents this moment — not just our external struggle with racism, but the internal struggles as well. Some of the images are beautiful and unsettling. Some are jarring. If some make us uncomfortable, that is progress. An easy conversation about racism is not a real conversation at all.

Eugene Robinson is a Washington Post columnist focusing on politics and culture.

Source: Visualizing racism: Nine photographers take on the challenge of depicting bigotry – The Washington Post

Trump’s Conspiracy Against Democracy – The Atlantic

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” . . . Trump saw an opportunity to strong-arm a weaker country into helping him win reelection, he abused his presidential authority to coerce it into doing so, and then he and his advisers sought to hide what they had done in order to maximize the public impact of the conspiracy. This plot, spearheaded by Giuliani, had already drawn credulous coverage from sympathetic reporters, and would likely have succeeded had the anonymous whistle-blower not registered a complaint exposing the scheme on September 9, which forced the Trump administration to release the aid to Ukraine on September 11.

A president who was genuinely opposed to U.S. entanglement in Ukraine, concerned about corruption, or involved in an internal struggle with bureaucrats over the ideal policy toward Ukraine would not have released the aid, because those concerns would have remained unaddressed. A president defying the bipartisan war lobby, seeking to prevent U.S. aid from being misused, or seeking to develop a better Ukraine policy would have had no reason to be concerned by the complaint. But the aid was released because a corrupt scheme to defraud the American people had been exposed, and so withholding it served no further purpose.

Trump’s defenders, having previously insisted that there was no “quid pro quo” involved in the president’s effort to extort Ukraine using taxpayer dollars, are slowly shifting to insisting, as much of the president’s base already believed, that Trump did nothing wrong. This is of a piece with the general anti-democracy trend in the Republican Party, which justly fears that the majority of the country no longer supports its agenda, and that extreme measures must be taken to shield its grip on power from democratic accountability.

The Republican Party has responded to the increasing diversity of the electorate with an accelerating intolerance for ethnic and religious minorities, and with elaborate schemes to disenfranchise rival constituencies and rig election rules to its advantage. Crucial to this effort is its conviction that the Republican electorate is the only one that can confer legitimacy on elected officials, and that the party’s political opponents are no longer wrong but fundamentally illegitimate, faithless usurpers with no right to determine the direction of the country. This has manifested in the quasi-religious dogma that Trump represents the will of Real America, and therefore defiance of his will is itself a form of treason . . .”

REad the Full Article at the Source: Trump’s Conspiracy Against Democracy – The Atlantic

Wealthy Democrats Are in Denial About Inequality – The Atlantic

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The Democratic Party’s establishment is in denial about the ways in which concentrated riches are warping society and contributing to the disunity it seeks to heal.

” . . . Just as the 2008 recession ushered in the election of the first black president, a subsequent white backlash, and a rebirth of left-wing populism led by figures such as Warren and Sanders, the economic hardships of the late 1870s inspired both worker activism and racist retrenchment. In times of economic hardship, it was not a difficult matter to discredit Reconstruction as an attempt to raise ignorant black laborers above white men who were entrepreneurial, responsible, and refined. Nor was it difficult to justify government intervention on behalf of Big Business while condemning such intervention on behalf of workers. The rich, after all, had earned it, or they wouldn’t be rich.

Foner documents how former antislavery figures such as Horace White of the Chicago Tribune “condemned agrarian and labor organizations for initiating ‘a communistic war upon vested rights and property,’ and insisted that universal suffrage had ‘cheapened the ballot’ by throwing political power into the hands of those influenced by the ‘harangues of demagogues.’” Antislavery publications such as The Nation “linked the Northern poor and Southern freedmen as members of a dangerous new ‘proletariat’ as different ‘from the population by which the Republic was founded, as if they belonged to a foreign nation.’” With Reconstruction ended, capital took advantage of the stability of its aftermath to expand convict leasing, a new regime of forced labor that white southerners would impose to replace slavery and keep the region’s black labor force captive and subordinate. Big industries—lumber, railroads, mining, and others—would take eager advantage of this system of neo-slavery to boost their profit margins.

The end of Reconstruction coincided with the Republican retreat from civil rights. But that retreat was precipitated by deep-seated fears over workers in the North and South seeking labor reform, income redistribution, and regulation of industry. “The South sensed the willingness of Big Business, threatened by liberal revolt, labor upheaval and state interference, to make new alliance with organized Southern capital if assured that the tariff, banks and national debt, and above all, the new freedom of corporations, would not be subjected to mass attack,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America. “Such a double bargain was more than agreeable to Southern leaders.” Racism not only threatens democracy and prosperity; it accrues tremendous benefits for those already leading lives of plenty.

America’s political parties are now as polarized as they were at the end of Reconstruction. And just as at the end of Reconstruction, a multiracial party whose ranks include both frustrated workers and wealthy capitalists finds itself at a crossroads, with no certain options for healing the nation’s divides or its own. As ever, America’s gilded class regards the possibility of higher taxes and redistribution as a greater threat than a resurgent racist authoritarianism that imperils America’s still-young experiment in multiracial democracy. The latter, after all, does not jeopardize its profits.

Into this divide steps Patrick, a man who went from poverty on Chicago’s South Side to the heights of both business and politics, practically an avatar of the old free-labor ideal that animated the 19th-century Republican Party, an ideal whose blindness to how concentrations of wealth warp politics and society leaves it ill-equipped to deal with the threats to democracy and prosperity America currently faces. The paradox for Democrats is that the candidates who understand this appear less likely to prevail in the general election, and those who have yet to grasp it may be better positioned to unseat the president.
In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal argue that economic inequality and polarization reinforce each other. Economic suffering and ideology foment anger toward minorities, who are blamed for that economic suffering. The very wealthy exploit those divisions to sustain their streams of income, which in turn makes it less likely that redistributive legislation addressing that economic suffering can be passed . . .”

Source: Wealthy Democrats Are in Denial About Inequality – The Atlantic

Jim Crow South’s lynching of blacks and Christianity: The terror inflicted by whites was considered a religious ritual.

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The cliché is that Americans have a short memory, but since Saturday, a number of us have been arguing over medieval religious wars and whether they have any lessons for today’s violence in the Middle East.

For those still unaware, this debate comes after President Obama’s comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, where—after condemning Islamic radical group ISIS as a “death cult”—he offered a moderating thought. “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ … So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”

It’s a straightforward point—“no faith has a particular monopoly on religious arrogance”—that’s become a partisan flashpoint, as conservatives harangue the president for “equating” crusading Christians to Islamic radicals, accuse him of anti-Christian beliefs, and wonder why he would mention a centuries-old conflict, even if it has some analogies to the present day.

What we have missed in the argument over the Crusades, however, is Obama’s mention of slavery and Jim Crow. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates puts his focus on religious justifications for American bondage, and it’s worth doing the same for its post-bellum successor. And since we’re thinking in terms of religious violence, our eyes should turn toward the most brutal spectacle of Jim Crow’s reign, the lynching.

For most of the century between the two Reconstructions, the bulk of the white South condoned and sanctioned terrorist violence against black Americans. In a new report, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documents nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—between 1877 and 1950, which the group notes is “at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported.”

For his victims, “Judge Lynch”—journalist Ida B. Wells’ name for the lynch mob—was capricious, merciless, and barbaric. C.J. Miller, falsely accused of killing two teenaged white sisters in western Kentucky, was “dragged through the streets to a crude platform of old barrel staves and other kindling,” writes historian Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. His assailants hanged him from a telephone pole, and while “the first fall broke his neck … the body was repeatedly raised and lowered while the crowd peppered it with small-arms fire.” For two hours his corpse hung above the street, during which he was photographed and mutilated by onlookers. Finally, he was cut down and burned.

More savage was the lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child, killed for protesting her husband’s murder. “[B]efore a crowd that included women and children,” writes Dray, “Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death.”

These lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes, “celebratory acts of racial control and domination.” They were rituals. And specifically, they were rituals of Southern evangelicalism and its then-dogma of purity, literalism, and white supremacy. “Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort,” writes historian Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. “It would be inconceivable that they could inflict pain and torment on the bodies of black men without imagining that violence as a religious act, laden with Christian symbolism and significance.”

The God of the white South demanded purity—embodied by the white woman. White southerners would build the barrier with segregation. But when it was breached, lynching was the way they would mend the fence and affirm their freedom from the moral contamination, represented by blacks and black men in particular. (Although, not limited to them. Leo Frank, lynched in 1915, was Jewish.) The perceived breach was frequently sexual, defined by the myth of the black rapist, a “demon” and “beast” who set out to defile the Christian purity of white womanhood. In his narrative of the lynching of Henry Smith—killed for the alleged rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance—writer P.L. James recounted how the energy of an entire city and country was turned toward the apprehension of the demon who had devastated a home and polluted an innocent life.”

James wasn’t alone. Many other defenders of lynching understood their acts as a Christian duty, consecrated as God’s will against racial transgression. “After Smith’s lynching,” Wood notes, “another defender wrote, ‘It was nothing but the vengeance of an outraged God, meted out to him, through the instrumentality of the people that caused the cremation.’ ” As UNC–Chapel Hill Professor Emeritus Donald G. Mathews writes in the Journal of Southern Religion, “Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” The “sacred order” was white supremacy and the “holiness” was white virtue.

I should emphasize that blacks of the era understood lynching as rooted in the Christian practice of white southerners. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” wrote NAACP leader Walter White in 1929, “No person who is familiar with the Bible-beating, acrobatic, fanatical preachers of hell-fire in the South, and who has seen the orgies of emotion created by them, can doubt for a moment that dangerous passions are released which contribute to emotional instability and play a part in lynching.” And while some church leaders condemned the practice as contrary to the Gospel of Christ—“Religion and lynching; Christianity and crushing, burning and blessing, savagery and national sanity cannot go together in this country,” declared one 1904 editorial—the overwhelming consent of the white South confirmed White’s view.

The only Southern Christianity united in its opposition to lynching was that of black Americans, who tried to recontextualize the onslaught as a kind of crucifixion and its victims as martyrs, flipping the script and making blacks the true inheritors of Christian salvation and redemption. It’s that last point which should highlight how none of this was intrinsic to Christianity: It was a question of power, and of the need of the powerful to sanctify their actions.

Still, we can’t deny that lynching—in all of its grotesque brutality—was an act of religious significance justified by the Christianity of the day. It was also political: an act of terror and social control, and the province of private citizens, public officials, and powerful lawmakers. Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina defended lynching on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and President Woodrow Wilson applauded a film that celebrated Judge Lynch and his disciples.

Which is all to say that President Obama was right. The vastly different environments of pre–civil rights America and the modern-day Middle East belies the substantive similarities between the fairly recent religious violence of our white supremacist forebears and that of our contemporary enemies. And the present divide between moderate Muslims and their fanatical opponents has an analogue in our past divide between northern Christianity and its southern counterpart.

This isn’t relativism as much as it’s a clear-eyed view of our common vulnerability, of the truth that the seeds of violence and autocracy can sprout anywhere, and of the fact that our present position on the moral high ground isn’t evidence of some intrinsic superiority.

Source: Jim Crow South’s lynching of blacks and Christianity: The terror inflicted by whites was considered a religious ritual.

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