The AFRO-American Newspapers has a daunting task ahead: Creating a searchable and publicly-accessible database to house an estimated 3 million photos, thousands of letters, business records, original audio recordings, advertisements and even reporters’ notebooks. And then there are the newspapers themselves — 129 years of them. “The collection is really remarkable. It’s probably one of […]
Category Archives: American Politics
The Conservatives Dreading—And Preparing for—Civil War – The Atlantic
A faction of the right believes America has been riven into two countries. The Claremont Institute is building the intellectual architecture for whatever comes next.
. . . As Donald Trump rose to power, the Claremont universe—which sponsors fellowships and publications, including the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind—rose with him, publishing essays that seemed to capture why the president appealed to so many Americans and attempting to map a political philosophy onto his presidency. Williams and his cohort are on a mission to tear down and remake the right; they believe that America has been riven into two fundamentally different countries, not least because of the rise of secularism. “The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people,” Williams told me. It’s possible that violence lies ahead. “I worry about such a conflict,” Williams told me. “The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs.”
That almost is worth noticing. “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two,” Williams said. Trump has left office, at least for now, but those he inspired are determined to recapture power in American politics. My conversation with Williams has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Source: The Conservatives Dreading—And Preparing for—Civil War – The Atlantic
“We’re not going to be able to hold that base”: Park Police overwhelmed hours before Capitol breach on Jan 6th
“The Capitol has been breached. Protestors have entered the building.”
Less than an hour later, the day had turned into a horror movie.
“Capitol Police is reporting a possible IED, First St., south of the Capitol by the Republicans club, uh, it’s been photographed, it’s currently being investigated this is breaking right now…it’s being described as a black pipe with wires protruding from it.”
Texas GOP sees Haitian migrant border crisis as a political opportunity – Vox
” . . . The situation in Del Rio — where more than 12,000 migrants are camping in increasingly squalid conditions without adequate access to water, food, and sanitation — is growing dire from a humanitarian perspective. Most of these migrants are from Haiti and plan to seek asylum in the US, as is their right under federal and international law. In just the last few months, Haiti has suffered from a political crisis stemming from President Jovenel Moïse’s July assassination, resultant gang violence, and the two-punch of a 7.2-magnitude earthquake and a tropical storm that left about 2,200 dead and many thousands more injured or missing. Those conditions appear to have driven more Haitians to make the treacherous journey to the US border: Federal immigration authorities have encountered more than 30,000 Haitians this fiscal year, nearly six times the number encountered over the previous fiscal year.But Abbott has sought to twist that humanitarian crisis into a security crisis designed to appeal to Republican voters in his state, who have long identified immigration and border security as top priorities in public opinion polling. He told the Texas Tribune that he was trying to “stop these [migrant] caravans from overrunning our state” and described US Customs and Border Protection agents as “overwhelmed by the chaos.” That’s in line with his recent rhetoric trying to demonize migrants arriving on the southern border as lawbreakers and carriers of disease. . . ”
Source: Texas GOP sees Haitian migrant border crisis as a political opportunity – Vox
Why does TikTok hate this affordable housing development? – Vox
The new multifamily buildings in your neighborhood actually slow displacement.
” . . . That discussion of gentrification is instead frequently diverted to what the buildings look like is a massive coup on behalf of existing property owners. Those current owners often want to maintain aesthetic control, sometimes as a means of blocking new homes from being built (experts have found that historic preservation is often weaponized to prevent new, more affordable housing options).
It is fine to dislike the way a home looks; not all art is for everyone. But the convergence of aesthetic preferences and physical displacement under the same “gentrification” banner only serves to maintain the current system of housing development, one that has made housing prohibitively expensive for many Americans and displaced people under countless different architectural styles.
The problem with this conflation became clear when I looked into the building depicted in the aforementioned Camden TikTok video. Branch Village isn’t a “gentrification building.” It’s actually an affordable housing project funded in part by low-income housing tax credits. According to the Courier-Post, the project’s second phase included the construction of 75 townhomes, all of which “will be considered affordable, accessible to those making less than 80 percent of the area’s median income.” Per an affordable housing database, the development now has 245 units.
Despite the primary concern of gentrification usually being the displacement of low-income residents, the top two comments on the Camden video, which collectively received 76,000 “likes,” were stylistic complaints: “why is it ALWAYS h&r block green, and “they really had to pick the worst colors didn’t they?”
This is common in gentrification discourse. People want to use a word that evokes visuals of marginalized communities being displaced, either through evictions, rising prices, or even violent displacement. But, after prodding, the actual concern is artistic. The rhetorical sleight of hand is not always intentional. For many, the concepts of “new, modern buildings” and “displacement” have simply become inextricable. But the confusion around how the word gentrification is being used has real policy consequences: If people believe that new buildings work against housing affordability, they will oppose the very policies necessary to solve the nation’s housing affordability crisis . . .”
Source: Why does TikTok hate this affordable housing development? – Vox
Accelerationism: the idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world – Vox
Accelerationism is the obscure idea that’s inspiring white supremacist killers around the world.
Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence — attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that.
Accelerationism has bizarre roots in academia. But as strange as the racist movement’s intellectual history may be, experts believe it has played a significant and under-appreciated role in the current wave of extremist violence.
“It’s not an ideology that exists in a theoretical sense,” says Joanna Mendelson, a senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s an ideology that has actually manifested in real-world violence.”
Source: Accelerationism: the idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world – Vox
The Great “Awokening” and Ruling Class Uses for Racial Grievance Discourse | Black Agenda Report
The Great “Awokening” and Ruling Class Uses for Racial Grievance Discourse
The Black political class is wedded to the centrist Democrats for its “fatback and biscuits” patronage.
“Racism is the linchpin tool in keeping capitalism functioning in America.”
The liberal establishment, the Democratic Party, and the left flank of capital are playing a cynical game post-George Floyd to pimp out Black trauma to keep Blacks wedded to Biden and the Centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Since the brutal murder of George Floyd, Foundation largesse, corporate philanthropy, and commercial media productions have been pouring in resources and programming highlighting depictions of Black trauma and historical suffering in a way that makes these spectacles deserving of the title: Black Trauma Porn.
This posturing from the liberal establishment, which we know has never truly cared for the lives of the majority of Black Americans who are working-class or poor, serves two main functions. Originally the post-George Floyd racial grievance discourse was viewed by liberals as an effective bulwark against Trump, as a counter to his racist dog whistles and his depiction as a brutal ogre unfit for the presidency because of his comportment and offensive language. The focus on race and racism, divorced from any analysis of how capitalism demands racism to disproportionately render poor and working-class Blacks to labor redundancy and the reserve army of labor, has been the main form of racial grievance pushed by the Black Political Class and its class partners during the 50-year counter-revolution that has spanned history since Martin Luther King was assassinated.
This class politics is what allows racial grievance to be remedied with class-based “racial democracy,” as political scientist Preston H. Smith II refers to such programs in his book, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Post War Chicago. Post-civil rights era racial democracy is exactly why the lions’ share of anti-racist policies from the 60s actually helped Blacks who could more easily attain Black Middle Class status while the majority of Blacks faced de-industrialization, mass incarceration, and drug infested neighborhoods. As Preston Smith II explains, there was a time before the McCarthy Era when Blacks, especially socialists and communists, rooted their politics in “social democracy,” which was class-based materialist politics rooted in the position of Blacks as the bottom of the labor totem pole while fighting to reverse that trend by challenging capitalism and wealth hierarchy.
“The lions’ share of anti-racist policies from the 60s actually helped Blacks who could more easily attain Black middle class status.”
This brings us to the second reason this cynical racial grievance discourse is being pushed by the left flank of capital and the centrist Democrats. Such racial grievance posturing is being tolerated to ensure that Blacks en mass do not join the Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders faction of the Democratic party and enter the fight for more public goods government policy. Therefore, the reason why even though the Sanders faction of the party offers the agenda most needed by poor and working-class Blacks who are the majority, the Black Political class and it’s class acolytes will deem the Sanders coterie as “class reductionists,” who don’t care about racism even though we know this is cover for the fact that the Black political class is wedded to the centrist Democrats for its “fatback and biscuits” patronage.
The whole corporate Black chattering class and Black media establishment has been dispatched since the 2016 election to push Blacks away from the socialist and anti-capitalist politics that was the norm for Black people before the McCarthy Era. An integral part of the background of Black activists and civil rights leaders like A. Phillip Randolph, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson, Hubert Harrison, and even the Black Panther Party was rooted in either socialism or communism. Even Martin Luther King and Malcolm X’s politics shifted from simple anti-racism to challenging capitalism. Before Malcolm and Martin were assassinated they both changed from simply focusing on “racism” to rooting the problem of Blacks in the function of capitalism. Racism is the linchpin tool in keeping capitalism functioning in America.
Therefore, for South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn to say, “I don’t know of any Black Socialists,” with a W.E.B. Dubois statue in his office tells you how a Big Pharma-paid leech like him is dispatched to deny Black people the politics they need while using Black Politics and the charade of racial kinship to cloud his duplicity. But this has become the nature of Black Politics in the post-Obama era. The Black Political Class and its Black media arm continue to push the class agenda that will benefit themselves while leaving most of Black America behind.
Pascal Robert, an OUR COMMON GROUND Voice, is an iconoclastic Haitian American Lawyer, blogger, and online activist for Haiti. You can find his work on the web at Thought Merchant , and at Huffington Post . He can be reached via twitter at https://twitter.com/probert06 @probert06 or thoughtmerchant@gmail.com .
Source: The Great “Awokening” and Ruling Class Uses for Racial Grievance Discourse | Black Agenda Report
Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project – The Atlantic
Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project
Objections to the appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones to an academic chair are the latest instance of conservatives using the state to suppress ideas they consider dangerous.
The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s appointment to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship, after a “rigorous tenure process at UNC.” But in an extraordinary move, the board of trustees declined to act on that recommendation. Hannah-Jones was instead offered a five-year, nontenured appointment following public and private pressure from conservatives. Notably, other Knight Chairs at the journalism school have been tenured on its professional track, which acknowledges “significant professional experience” rather than traditional academic scholarship. Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer and MacArthur genius grant surely qualify.
One anonymous trustee told NC Policy Watch that “the political environment made granting Hannah-Jones tenure difficult, if not impossible.” A statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted that “if it is accurate that this refusal was the result of viewpoint discrimination against Hannah-Jones, particularly based on political opposition to her appointment, this decision has disturbing implications for academic freedom.”
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Adam Serwer: The fight over the 1619 project is not about the facts
If you’ve taken recent debates about free speech and censorship at face value, you might find Hannah-Jones’s denial of tenure deeply confusing. For the past five years, conservatives have been howling about the alleged censoriousness of the American left, in particular on college campuses. But the denial of tenure to Hannah-Jones shows that the real conflict is over how American society understands its present inequalities.
The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.
The 1619 Project is a particularly powerful part—but not the cause—of a Black Lives Matter–inspired reevaluation of American history that began in the waning years of the Obama administration. Many Americans were struggling to understand how a nation that had elected a Black president could retain deep racial disparities not only in the rate of poverty, access to education, and health care, but also in matters of criminal justice and political power. The election of Donald Trump, a president who understood American citizenship in religious and ethnonationalist terms, accelerated that process of reevaluation.
Like all the works this period of reevaluation has produced, the 1619 Project has its flaws—although fewer than its most fanatical critics would admit. But the details of its factual narrative were not what conservatives found most objectionable. Rather, they took issue with the ideological implications of its central conceit: that America’s true founding moment was the arrival of African slaves on America’s shores.
Hannah-Jones’s conservative detractors cast this claim as an argument that America is a fundamentally and irredeemably racist country—indeed, as NC Policy Watch notes, a columnist at the right-wing James G. Martin Center complained that the 1619 Project “seeks to reframe American history as fundamentally racist.” A different columnist at the same organization fumed that “young people—the white ones, at least—are even taught to hate themselves for the unforgivable sins of their ancestors.” The idea that ugly aspects of American history should not be taught, for fear that students—white students in particular—might draw unfavorable conclusions about America, is simply an argument against teaching history at all.
In truth, the animating premise of the 1619 Project is more threatening to the right—the idea that America can indeed be redeemed, by rectifying racial imbalances created by government policy.
The civil-rights movement of the mid-20th century was concurrent with the academy’s reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, whose attempts at building a genuine multiracial democracy in the South had until then been portrayed by most white scholars as a tragic mistake. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to the historian C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow as the “historical bible” of the movement, by which he simply meant it showed that segregation had been the product of political choices rather than an inevitability. New choices could be made.
The tone of the textbook Franklin co-authored, Land of the Free, remained “resolutely patriotic,” as Joseph Moreau wrote in his account of the conflict in his book Schoolbook Nation. But this was not sufficient for the textbook’s opponents, who, Moreau wrote, believed that “history teaching existed to cultivate patriotism” and that the “debunking of historical myths or premature attempts to furnish young people with painful truths could not be countenanced.” Anxiety over the civil-rights movement, and this reevaluation of American history, fueled a white backlash against the textbook, and rewarded conservative politicians willing to exploit that sentiment. Franklin’s history was closer to the truth than the version his opponents wanted to promote—but the accuracy of the history was beside the point.
Again, it is not the case that every proposal to remedy racial inequality or fight discrimination is a good one. As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has argued, some suggestions to remedy inequality in education are misguided or counterproductive. Good intentions do not a good idea make. But to accept that a problem exists is to accept the obligation to find a solution. And conservatives who don’t want to address America’s deep racial disparities are attempting to suppress any reading of history that suggests contemporary inequalities are the product of deliberate choices.
To that end, conservative opponents of what they derisively refer to as “wokeism” are engaged in a campaign to stigmatize such arguments, and where they can, use the state to purge them from the educational system. State legislatures are outlawing the teaching of “critical race theory” which in this context as my colleague Adam Harris reports, is ultimately a shorthand for “anything resembling an examination of America’s history with race.” The Trump administration threatened to investigate institutions of higher education that discussed systemic racism, and conservative state governments are interfering with state institutions of higher education.
In Texas, legislators are seeking to ban the teaching of the 1619 Project, and suppress the role of slavery in the state’s independence. The 1836 constitution of the Republic of Texas not only protected slavery, but also barred slave owners from emancipating the enslaved and denied “Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians” the ability to become citizens. The state government is seeking to prevent exhibits at the Alamo from “explaining that major figures in the Texas Revolution were slave owners.” As with the Trump White House’s “1776 Commission,” whose report reads like a Twitter thread from a cocaine-addled right-wing Wikipedia obsessive, the objective here is not a more accurate history but one that justifies the present economic and racial hierarchy, and offers conservatives, as Moreau put it in his book, a “comforting alternative to the burdens of the past.”
This won’t work with Hannah-Jones; in fact, I suspect it will make others more sympathetic to her arguments. But UNC’s decision also reflects an unhealthy conservative preoccupation with her as an individual—like many of us, Hannah-Jones has a combative social-media presence that has drawn critiques more personal than substantive. Although the essays from a variety of scholars and journalists published in the 1619 Project provoked a number of interesting discussions over issues such as slavery’s relationship to capitalism or health disparities, in the political debate these have been shunted aside in favor of a campaign to punish Hannah-Jones personally, and thereby discredit the 1619 Project as a whole, rather than contest its individual assertions or arguments.
Such attempts to stigmatize positions one disagrees with are a natural part of how societies form a consensus of acceptable opinion, and are distinct from using the power of the state to silence one’s opponents. But in this case, the same people who insist that harsh criticism of their ideas or behavior is a form of censorship are also highly engaged in using the state to suppress speech, on the grounds that the ideas they oppose are too dangerous to be allowed the usual protections.
The historical record shows that efforts to use the power of the state to settle an argument usually fail, although they can be successful for a time. The irony is that these awakenings about the truths of American history are the result of people attempting to warp the facts into a narrative that reassures them of their essential virtue, and subsequent generations discovering that what they were taught was but a bedtime story. These attempts to use the state to suppress ugly realities about the past are merely setting the stage for the next awakening.
ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.
Source: Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project – The Atlantic
The Plague of Historical Amnesia in the Age of Fascist Politics – CounterPunch.org
APRIL 5, 2021
The Plague of Historical Amnesia in the Age of Fascist Politics
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
As the boundaries of the unthinkable become normalized, historical consciousness is replaced by manufactured forms of historical amnesia and ignorance. As white supremacy becomes entrenched at the highest levels of power and in the public imagination, the past becomes a burden that must be shed.[1] Disparaging, suppressing or forgetting the horrors of history has become a valued and legitimating form of political and symbolic capital, especially among the Republican Party and conservative media. Not only have history’s civic lessons been forgotten, but historical memory is also being rewritten, especially in the ideology of Trumpism, through an affirmation of the legacy of slavery, the racist history of the Confederacy, American exceptionalism, and the mainstreaming of an updated form of fascist politics.[2]
Theodor Adorno’s insights on historical memory are more relevant than ever. He once argued that as much as repressive governments would like to break free from the past, especially the legacy of fascism, “it is still very much alive.” Moreover, there is a price to be paid with “the destruction of memory.” In this case, “the murdered are …cheated out of the single remaining thing that our powerlessness can offer them: remembrance.”[3] Adorno’s warning rings particularly true at a time when two-thirds of young American youth are so impoverished in their historical knowledge that they are unaware that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.[4] On top of this shocking level of ignorance is the fact that “more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust.”[5] Historical amnesia takes a particularly dangerous turn in this case, and prompts the question of how young people and adults can you even recognize fascism if they have no recollection or knowledge of its historical legacy.
The genocide inflicted on Native Americans, slavery, the horrors of Jim Crow, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, the rise of the carceral state, the My Lai massacre, torture chambers, black sites, among other historical events now disappear into a disavowal of past events made even more unethical with the emergence of a right-wing political language and culture. The Republican Party’s attack on critical race theory in the schools which they label as “ideological or faddish” both denies the history of racism as well as the way in which it is enforced through policy, laws, and institutions. For many republicans, racial hatred takes on the ludicrous claim of protecting students from learning about the diverse ways in which racism persist in American society. For instance, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida stated that “There is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”[6] In this updated version of racial cleansing, the call for racial justice is equated to a form of racial hatred leaving intact the refusal to acknowledge, condemn, and confront in the public imagination the history and persistence of racism in American society
Bolstered by a former president and a slew of Vichy-type politicians, right-wing ideologues, intellectuals, and media pundits deny and erase events from a fascist past that shed light on emerging right-wing, neo-Nazi, and extremist policies, ideas, and symbols. As Coco Das points out given that 73 million people voted to re-elect Trump, it is clear that Americans “have a Nazi problem.”[7] This was also evident in the words and actions of former president Trump who defended Confederate monuments and their noxious past, the waving of Confederate flags and the display of Nazi images during the attempted coup on the Capital on January 6th, and ongoing attempts by the Republican Party legislators to engage in expansive efforts at enabling a minority government. America’s Nazi problem is also visible in the growing acts of domestic terrorism aimed at Asians, undocumented immigrants, and people of color.
Historical amnesia also finds expression in the right-wing press and among media pundits such as Fox News commentators Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, whose addiction to lying exceeds the boundaries of reason and creates an echo chamber of misinformation that normalizes the unspeakable, if not the unthinkable. Rational responses now give way to emotional reactions fueled by lies whose power is expanded through their endless repetition. How else to explain the baseless claim made by them, along with a number of Republican lawmakers, right-wing pundits, and Trump’s supporters who baselessly lay the blame for the storming of the US Capitol on “Antifa.” These lies were circulated despite of the fact that “subsequent arrests and investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with Antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the insurrection.”[8]
In this case, I think it is fair to re-examine Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that “Propaganda actually constitutes the substance of politics” and that the right-wing embrace of and production of an endless stream of lies and denigration of the truth are not merely delusional but are endemic to a fascist cult that does not answer to reason, but only to power while legitimizing a past in which white nationalism and racial cleansing become the organizing principles of social order and governance.[9]
In the era of post-truth, right-wing disimagination machines are not only hostile to those who assert facts and evidence, but also supportive of a mix of lethal ignorance and the scourge of civic illiteracy. The latter requires no effort to assess the truth and erases everything necessary for the life of a robust democracy. The pedagogical workstations of depoliticization have reached new and dangerous levels amid emerging right-wing populisms.[10] It is not surprising that we live at a time when politics is largely disconnected from echoes of the past and justified on the grounds that direct comparisons are not viable, as if only direct comparisons can offer insights into the lessons to be learned from the past. We have entered an age in which thoughtful reasoning, informed judgments, and critical thought are under attack. This is a historical moment that resembles a dictatorship of ignorance, which Joshua Sperling rightly argues entails:
The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.[11]
It is clear is that we live in a historical period in which the conditions that produced white supremacist politics are intensifying once again. How else to explain former President Trump’s use of the term “America First,” his labeling immigrants as vermin, his call to “Make America Great Again” — signaling his white nationalist ideology–his labeling of the press as “enemies of the people,” and his numerous incitements to violence while addressing his followers. Moreover, Trump’s bid for patriotic education and his attack on the New York Times’s 1619 Project served as both an overt expression of his racism and his alignment with right-wing white supremacists and neo-Nazi mobs. Historical amnesia has become racialized. In the rewriting of history in the age of Trump, the larger legacy of “colonial violence and the violence of slavery inflicted on Africans” are resurrected as a badge of honor.[12]
America’s long history of fascist ideologies and the racist actions of a slave state, the racial cleansing espoused by the Ku Klux Klan, and an historical era that constitutes what Alberto Toscano calls “the long shadow of racial fascism” in America are no longer forgotten or repressed but celebrated in the Age of Trump.[13] What is to be made of a former President who awarded the prestigious Medal of Freedom to a blubbering white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, conspiracy theorist, and virulent racist who labeled feminists as “Feminazis.” In this case, one of the nation’s highest honors went to a man who took pride in relentlessly disparaging Muslims, referred to undocumented immigrants as “an invading force” and an “invasive species,” demonized people of color, and recycled Nazi tropes about racial purity while celebrating the mob that attacked the Capitol as “Revolutionary War era rebels and patriots.”[14] Under the banner of Trumpism, those individuals who reproduce the rhetoric of political and social death have become, celebrated symbols of a fascist politics that feeds off the destruction of the collective public and civic imagination.
William Faulkner once stated “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In its updated version, we live not only with the ghosts of genocide and slavery, but also with the ghosts of fascism—we live in the shadow of the genocidal history of indigenous inhabitants, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and systemic police violence against people of color.[15] And while we live with the ghosts of our past, we have failed to fully confront its implications for the present and future. To do so would mean recognizing that updated forms of fascist politics in the current moment are not a rupture from the past, but an evolution.[16] White supremacy now rules the Republican Party and one of its tools of oppression is the militarization and weaponization of history. Fascism begins with language and the suppression of dissent, while both suppressing and rewriting history in the service of power and violence.
In the age of neoliberal tyranny, historical amnesia is the foundation for manufactured ignorance, the subversion of consciousness, the depoliticization of the public, and the death of democracy. It is part of a disimagination machine that is perpetuated in schools, higher education, and the corporate controlled media. It divorces justice from politics and aligns the public imagination with a culture of hatred and bigotry. Historical amnesia destroys the grammar of ethical responsibility and the critical habits of citizenship. The ghost of fascism is with us once again as society forgets its civic lessons, destroys civic culture, and produces a populace that is increasingly infantilized politically through the ideological dynamics of neoliberal capitalism. The suppression of history opens the door to fascism. This is truly a lesson that must be learned if the horrors of the past are not to be repeated again. Fortunately, the history of racism is being exposed once again in the protests that are taking place all over the globe. What needs to be remembered is that such struggles must make education central to politics, and historical memory a living force for change. Historical memory must become a crucial element in the struggle for collective resistance, while transforming ideas into instruments of power.
Notes.
[1] John Gray, “Forgetfulness: the dangers of a modern culture that wages war on its own past,” New Statesman, [October 16, 2017]. Online: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/10/forgetfulness-dangers-modern-culture-wages-war-its-own-past
[2] Paul Street, “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial: 26 Flavors of Anti-Antifascism, Part 1,” Counter Punch. (Feb 7, 2021).Online https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/07/the-anatomy-of-fascism-denial/; Sarah Churchwell, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Again,” The New York Review of Books, [May 26, 2020].Online https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/22/american-fascism-it-has-happened-here/; Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy, (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020); Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, [Random House, 2018); Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (San Francisco: City Lights 2018); Carl Boggs, Fascism Old and New: American Politics at the Crossroads (New York: Routledge, 2018); Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown, 2017)
[3] Adorno, Theodor W., “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” Guilt and Defense, trans. Henry W. Pickford, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 215.
[4] Harriet Sherwood, “Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust,” The Guardian (September 16, 2020). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/holocaust-us-adults-study
[5] Ibid., Harriet Sherwood. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/holocaust-us-adults-study
[6] Michael Moline, and Danielle J. Brown “Gov. DeSantis has found a new culture-war enemy: ‘critical race theory,” Florida Phoenix (March 17, 2021). Online: https://www.floridaphoenix.com/2021/03/17/gov-desantis-has-found-a-new-culture-war-enemy-critical-race-theory/
[7] Coco Das, “What are you going to do about the Nazi Problem?” refusefascism.org. (November 24, 2020). Online: https://revcom.us/a/675/refuse-fascism-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-the-nazi-problem-en.html
[8] Michael M. Grynbaum, Davey Alba and Reid J. Epstein, “How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot,” New York Times (March 1, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/us/politics/antifa-conspiracy-capitol-riot.html
[9] Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (London: Polity, 2020), p. 13.
[10] I take this issue up in detail in Henry A. Giroux, Racism, Politics and Pandemic Politics: Education in a Time of Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
[11] Joshua Sperling cited in Lisa Appignanesi, “Berger’s Way of Being,” The New York Review of Books (May 9, 2019). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/09/john-berger-ways-of-being/
[12] Angela Y. Davis, ed. Frank Barat. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement, (Haymarket Books, 2016: Chicago, IL), pp. 81-82.
[13] Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review. (October 27, 2020). Online http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/alberto-toscano-long-shadow-racial-fascism;
[14] Anthony DiMaggio “Limbaugh’s Legacy: Normalizing Hate for Profit.” Counter Punch. (February 19, 2021). Retrieved https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/19/limbaughs-legacy-normalizing-hate-for-profit/
[15] See, for instance, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, eds. Four Hundred Souls (New York: One World, 2021) and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Crown, 2016).
[16] On the American origins of fascism, also see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018).
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Source: The Plague of Historical Amnesia in the Age of Fascist Politics – CounterPunch.org
The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is. | McClatchy Washington Bureau
The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is.
UPDATED MARCH 11, 2021 10:28 AM
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I’ve lived 55 years in the South, and I grew up liking the Confederate flag. I haven’t flown one for many decades, but for a reason that might surprise you.
I know the South well. We lived wherever the Marine Corps stationed my father: Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas. As a child, my favorite uncle wasn’t in the military, but he did pack a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun in his trunk. He was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan. Despite my role models, as a kid I was an inept racist. I got in trouble once in the first grade for calling a classmate the N-word. But he was Hispanic.
As I grew up and acquired the strange sensation called empathy (strange for boys anyway), I learned that for black folks the flutter of that flag felt like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And for the most prideful flag waivers, clearly that response was the point. I mean, come on. It’s a battle flag.
What the flag symbolizes for blacks is enough reason to take it down. But there’s another reason that white southerners shouldn’t fly it. Or sport it on our state-issued license plates as some do here in North Carolina. The Confederacy – and the slavery that spawned it – was also one big con job on the Southern, white, working class. A con job funded by some of the ante-bellum one-per-centers, that continues today in a similar form.
You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks – a third of the South’s laborers – to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.
Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, a majority of American one-per-centers were southerners. Slavery made southern states the richest in the country. The South was richer than any other country except England. But that vast wealth was invisible outside the plantation ballrooms. With low wages and few schools, southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than northern whites.
My ancestor Canna Hyman and his two sons did own land and fought under that flag. A note from our family history says: “Someone came for them while they were plowing one day. They put their horses up and all three went away to the War and only one son, William, came back.”
Like Canna, most Southerners didn’t own slaves. But they were persuaded to risk their lives and limbs for the right of a few to get rich as Croesus from slavery. For their sacrifices and their votes, they earned two things before and after the Civil War. First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern pie. And second, the thing that made those slim rations palatable then and now: the shallow satisfaction of knowing that blacks had no slice at all.
How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?
They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would – in today’s lingo – trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.
Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, Reason magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch.
For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid – which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites – resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.
Lowering the flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day.
One can love the South without flying the battle flag. But it won’t help to get rid of an old symbol if we can’t also rid ourselves of the self-destructive beliefs that go with it. Only by shedding those too, will Southern whites finally catch up to the rest of the country in wages, health and education.
Frank Hyman lives in Durham,where he has held two local elected offices. He’s a carpenter and stonemason and policy analyst for Blue Collar Comeback. This essay originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and is reprinted with permission.
Confederate artillery at Charleston Harbor,
Source: The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is. | McClatchy Washington Bureau