Ron DeSantis wants to break the unions and make a temporary advantage permanent.
” . . . In Florida, all of the most important macro-issues of American politics are screaming out as we speak. The proud fascism that DeSantis embodies must be met with radicalism. Clinton-esque Democratic attempts to triangulate their way out of the problem are doomed to fail, and will only serve to drive home the untrue impression that Florida is a red state. You can’t equivocate with DeSantis. He puts Black people in jail at gunpoint for voting; he bans books and outlaws Black history teaching with a bluntness that would make George Orwell blush; he demonizes trans kids, perfectly happy to drive a few young people to suicide if it helps him solidify his own position. This guy is not some sophisticated mastermind — he’s an asshole. He is the embodiment of the worst 30% of Floridians, the ones who make the state a national punchline. And those who roll over for him, like the dozens of college presidents who publicly kowtow to his backwards “vision,” are cowards who will find themselves on the wrong side of history when the uncensored textbooks eventually get written.
That is one thing Florida proves: The absolute need for the Democrats to stop being weak and afraid of their own convictions. The second thing it proves is the absolute centrality of organized labor as a path out of the political quandary that afflicts America. Inequality has killed public faith in institutions, and modern media has entrenched national partisanship to a degree that some perceive as hopeless. Unions can roll back inequality. Unions can bring people of different political persuasions together in common cause in the workplace. Unions can show people an actual functioning democracy. Unions can lead regular people to political activism based on principles they learn by fighting for fair treatment for themselves. Unions can be strong enough to serve as a wall that stops the predations of opportunistic, hateful politicians like Ron DeSantis.
But all of that can only happen if many people are in unions. In Florida, as in the rest of the South, they’re mostly not. Unions need to spend much more money to organize new workers. Unions need to spend much more money organizing in the South. The Democratic Party needs to prioritize and enable this to a much larger degree — out of self-interest, if nothing else. Unions can change people, and they can change Florida, and they can change the country. But only if they rouse themselves out of their stupor and organize millions of people.
All of these things are connected. Working people and environmentalists together can unquestionably be a strong enough coalition to control the state of Florida, far stronger than the petty racists and boat-owning car dealers that make up the DeSantis base. Pulling this together requires a strong labor movement, and it requires the Democratic Party helping to build that movement. There is nothing impossible about any of this. The threat here is bigger than one teachers union, or one state. Ron DeSantis intends to make Florida a stepping stone that he will use to walk into the White House and prove that America is still a racist, oppressive nation at heart. Stop him before he gets there. As a native Floridian, I politely call on the Florida Democrats, unions, teachers, and people of all stripes who don’t prefer life in a dystopia: Get your shit together, before it’s too late. . . “
The Florida governor’s long-ignored 2011 work, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, reveals a distinct vision of American history and how it should influence the present.
DeSantis of 2011 praises the Tea Party movement and the backlash it inspired, which cost Democrats the House in 2010. He thinks the movement was absolutely right to identify itself with the American Revolution, fighting against un-American tyrannies of the Obama Democrats. But he argued it should go deeper than symbolic acts like dressing up in 18th-century garb or brandishing rifles at rallies. The book is intended firstly as a wholesale indictment and a game plan, pointing out the ways Republicans should attack “progressives” for the “transformational change” they are attempting—by which DeSantis meant federally mandated health care, corporate and mortgage bailouts, and increased regulation.
DeSantis of 2011 praises the Tea Party movement and the backlash it inspired, which cost Democrats the House in 2010. He thinks the movement was absolutely right to identify itself with the American Revolution, fighting against un-American tyrannies of the Obama Democrats. But he argued it should go deeper than symbolic acts like dressing up in 18th-century garb or brandishing rifles at rallies. The book is intended firstly as a wholesale indictment and a game plan, pointing out the ways Republicans should attack “progressives” for the “transformational change” they are attempting—by which DeSantis meant federally mandated health care, corporate and mortgage bailouts, and increased regulation.
Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.
Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversees a juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, with a staggering history of jailing children. She said kids must face consequences, which rarely seem to apply to her or the other adults in charge.
by Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio, and Ken Armstrong, ProPublicaOct. 8, 2021, 5 a.m. EDT
Friday, April 15, 2016: Hobgood Elementary School, Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Three police officers were crowded into the assistant principal’s office at Hobgood Elementary School, and Tammy Garrett, the school’s principal, had no idea what to do. One officer, wearing a tactical vest, was telling her: Go get the kids. A second officer was telling her: Don’t go get the kids. The third officer wasn’t saying anything.
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Garrett knew the police had been sent to arrest some children, although exactly which children, it would turn out, was unclear to everyone, even to these officers. The names police had given the principal included four girls, now sitting in classrooms throughout the school. All four girls were Black. There was a sixth grader, two fourth graders and a third grader. The youngest was 8. On this sunny Friday afternoon in spring, she wore her hair in pigtails.
A few weeks before, a video had appeared on YouTube. It showed two small boys, 5 and 6 years old, throwing feeble punches at a larger boy as he walked away, while other kids tagged along, some yelling. The scuffle took place off school grounds, after a game of pickup basketball. One kid insulted another kid’s mother, is what started it all.
Screenshots from a heavily filtered video, originally posted to YouTube, showing a scuffle among small children that took place off school grounds. Credit:Screenshots by ProPublica
The police were at Hobgood because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all who were accused of failing to stop the fight. Officers were now rounding up kids, even though the department couldn’t identify a single one in the video, which was posted with a filter that made faces fuzzy. What was clear were the voices, including that of one girl trying to break up the fight, saying: “Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay.” She was a fourth grader at Hobgood. Her initials were E.J.
The confusion at Hobgood — one officer saying this, another saying that — could be traced in part to absence. A police officer regularly assigned to Hobgood, who knew the students and staff, had bailed that morning after learning about the planned arrests. The thought of arresting these children caused him such stress that he feared he might cry in front of them. Or have a heart attack. He wanted nothing to do with it, so he complained of chest pains and went home, with no warning to his fill-in about what was in store.
Also absent was the police officer who had investigated the video and instigated these arrests, Chrystal Templeton. She had assured the principal she would be there. She had also told Garrett there would be no handcuffs, that police would be discreet. But Templeton was a no-show. Garrett even texted her — “How’s timing?” — but got no answer.
Instead of going to Hobgood, Templeton had spent the afternoon gathering the petitions, then heading to the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center, a two-tiered jail for children with dozens of surveillance cameras, 48 cells and 64 beds. There, she waited for the kids to be brought to her.
In Rutherford County, a juvenile court judge had been directing police on what she called “our process” for arresting children, and she appointed the jailer, who employed a “filter system” to determine which children to hold.
The judge was proud of what she had helped build, despite some alarming numbers buried in state reports.
Among cases referred to juvenile court, the statewide average for how often children were locked up was 5%.
In Rutherford County, it was 48%.
Rutherford County Locked Up Kids in Almost Half of Cases
Tennessee used to publish statistical reports on juvenile courts statewide. For the last year available, 2014, we compiled reports for all 98 courts. Rutherford County locked up kids in 48% of its cases, eclipsing every other jurisdiction. (The graphic below shows the top 50 courts.) The state stopped publishing this data even as it figured prominently in a lawsuit against Rutherford County.
In one case, we obtained through public records requests 38 hours of audiotaped interviews conducted by Murfreesboro police as part of their investigation. That investigation included interviews with the school’s principal, Tammy Garrett, and 13 police officers, including Chrystal Templeton (who was interviewed twice for a total of seven hours), Chris Williams, Albert Miles III, Jeff Carroll and five higher-ups. Other materials we drew upon included videotape of the kids’ scuffle; the final report of the Murfreesboro Police Department’s internal review; the Metro Nashville Police Department’s external review; juvenile petitions; settlement agreements; and an email that Miles wrote to an investigator describing his conversation with a parent.
For this story we interviewed dozens of people, including children arrested in the April 2016 case and their parents. We interviewed, for the first time, the kids (now adults) whose cases launched class-action lawsuits against the county over its illegal detention practices and use of solitary confinement. We obtained thousands of pages of documents through 56 records requests to city, county and state agencies. We obtained more than a dozen personnel files and reviewed court records in seven federal lawsuits.
Donna Scott Davenport declined to be interviewed. But we listened to or transcribed more than 60 hours of her on the radio. We obtained her deposition and hearing testimony from a class-action lawsuit. Other records we relied on included disciplinary records from the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct; two personnel files; memos and emails; videotaped appearances before the Rutherford County Commission and a canvass of appellate opinions in cases she had handled in juvenile court. We also listened to the oral arguments from some appellate cases.
Lynn Duke declined to be interviewed. But she often appears before the county’s Public Safety Committee, and we watched and reviewed 137 of those meetings spanning 2009 to 2021. We obtained three depositions in which she was questioned. We reviewed her personnel file and drew upon her court testimony, memos and emails, as well as the detention center’s written operating procedures.
We reached out to each of the police officers named in our story. They each declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond. The sergeant who supervised Templeton also declined to be interviewed.
Michael Wrather, a Rutherford County commissioner, declined to be interviewed other than to say he stands behind his public comments praising Davenport.
We relied on reports and sometimes data from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, the Tennessee Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. We used Prison Rape Elimination Act audits and the 2004 consultant’s report from Pulitzer/Bogard & Associates. We also drew upon reporting from fellow news organizations, including Murfreesboro’s Daily News Journal, The Tennessean, the Murfreesboro Post and the Tennessee Lookout.
We’re planning to continue reporting on the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County and elsewhere in Tennessee. If you have any stories that you’d like to share, please get in touch. Meribah Knight’s email address is mknight@wpln.org, and Ken Armstrong’s is ken.armstrong@propublica.org.
Editing by Emily Siner of WPLN News and Sarah Blustain and Susan Carroll of ProPublica. Alex Mierjeski contributed reporting.
When the four girls were arrested at Hobgood Elementary School in 2016, media covered the community’s reaction and the immediate fallout. But left unknown was all that led up to the arrests; what the children, police and school officials, experienced, in their voices; and what the case revealed about the county’s failed juvenile justice system as a whole.
To reconstruct the Hobgood Elementary case, we obtained through public records requests 38 hours of audiotaped interviews conducted by Murfreesboro police as part of their investigation. That investigation included interviews with the school’s principal, Tammy Garrett, and 13 police officers, including Chrystal Templeton (who was interviewed twice for a total of seven hours), Chris Williams, Albert Miles III, Jeff Carroll and five higher-ups. Other materials we drew upon included videotape of the kids’ scuffle; the final report of the Murfreesboro Police Department’s internal review; the Metro Nashville Police Department’s external review; juvenile petitions; settlement agreements; and an email that Miles wrote to an investigator describing his conversation with a parent.
For this story we interviewed dozens of people, including children arrested in the April 2016 case and their parents. We interviewed, for the first time, the kids (now adults) whose cases launched class-action lawsuits against the county over its illegal detention practices and use of solitary confinement. We obtained thousands of pages of documents through 56 records requests to city, county and state agencies. We obtained more than a dozen personnel files and reviewed court records in seven federal lawsuits.
Donna Scott Davenport declined to be interviewed. But we listened to or transcribed more than 60 hours of her on the radio. We obtained her deposition and hearing testimony from a class-action lawsuit. Other records we relied on included disciplinary records from the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct; two personnel files; memos and emails; videotaped appearances before the Rutherford County Commission and a canvass of appellate opinions in cases she had handled in juvenile court. We also listened to the oral arguments from some appellate cases.
Lynn Duke declined to be interviewed. But she often appears before the county’s Public Safety Committee, and we watched and reviewed 137 of those meetings spanning 2009 to 2021. We obtained three depositions in which she was questioned. We reviewed her personnel file and drew upon her court testimony, memos and emails, as well as the detention center’s written operating procedures.
We reached out to each of the police officers named in our story. They each declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond. The sergeant who supervised Templeton also declined to be interviewed.
Michael Wrather, a Rutherford County commissioner, declined to be interviewed other than to say he stands behind his public comments praising Davenport.
We relied on reports and sometimes data from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, the Tennessee Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. We used Prison Rape Elimination Act audits and the 2004 consultant’s report from Pulitzer/Bogard & Associates. We also drew upon reporting from fellow news organizations, including Murfreesboro’s Daily News Journal, The Tennessean, the Murfreesboro Post and the Tennessee Lookout.
We’re planning to continue reporting on the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County and elsewhere in Tennessee. If you have any stories that you’d like to share, please get in touch. Meribah Knight’s email address is mknight@wpln.org, and Ken Armstrong’s is ken.armstrong@propublica.org.
Editing by Emily Siner of WPLN News and Sarah Blustain and Susan Carroll of ProPublica. Alex Mierjeski contributed reporting.
Ron DeSantis Battles the African American A.P. Course—and History
The state’s intent seems to be to provide white Floridians, from a young age, with a version of history that they can be comfortable with, regardless of whether it’s true.
The debacle surrounding the Florida Department of Education’s recent rejection of an Advanced Placement course in African American studies is a reminder that battles over the past are almost always tied to efforts to win some war being waged in the present. The late-nineteenth-century romanticization of the Confederacy was meant to justify the new regime of segregation then being implemented across the South. That campaign was so successful that, in 1935, when W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction,” his reconsideration of the period following the Civil War, he devoted an entire chapter to the ways in which the South had lost the war but won the historiography.
The road runs in both directions. The social movements of the nineteen-fifties and sixties spawned their own, generally corrective takes on the nation’s past. The discipline of Black studies, which originated in the late sixties and is now more often referred to as Africana or African American studies, is a direct product of that wave of scholarly revisionism. Today, during a period in which states, particularly with Republican-led legislatures, have taken to removing books from libraries, stoking fears about critical race theory, and eviscerating diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs in schools—forty-two have proposed restrictive measures—it’s scarcely surprising that a discipline built on an interest in exploring Black humanity would find itself in the crosshairs. That such a thing would happen in Florida is even less so.
Last year, Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is frequently mentioned as a 2024 Presidential contender, signed into law the Stop woke Act, a piece of Trumpist culture warfare that regulates how subject matter relating to race can be taught in public schools, picking up from where the right-wing crusade against Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project left off. (The State Board of Education had banned the teaching of critical race theory in public schools in 2021.) DeSantis also signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which limits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools and became the centerpiece in a conflict over gay rights with Disney, one of the state’s largest employers. (The Governor voiced concern, too, about the inclusion of “queer theory” in the A.P. course, saying last Monday, “When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”) Both laws have been challenged in court, but together they show the demagogic lengths to which DeSantis is willing to go to burnish his profile among conservatives nationally.
DeSantis shared some of his own ideas about the nation’s past during a gubernatorial-campaign debate last fall, stating that “it’s not true” that “the United States was built on stolen land.” That claim, of course, is starkly at odds not only with the history of westward expansion but with the history of Florida; thousands of Native Americans were forcibly relocated from the region, with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In general, the Governor’s objective is seemingly to provide white Floridians, from a young age, with a version of the past that they can be comfortable with, regardless of whether it’s true.
The A.P. course is being piloted in sixty high schools across the country, including at least one in Florida, and is scheduled to be available to any schools that offer A.P. courses in the 2024-25 school year. There appear to have been few problems with teaching it, even in Florida, but on January 12th the state’s education department sent a letter to the College Board, which oversees the creation and implementation of A.P. courses, notifying it that the curriculum is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” On January 20th, Manny Diaz, Jr., the commissioner of education, tweeted, “We proudly require the teaching of African American history. We do not accept woke indoctrination masquerading as education.” He cited the course’s references to notable academics, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the late bell hooks, as supposed examples of such indoctrination.
A day earlier, the College Board had released a statement saying that the course was still in draft form, and that “frameworks often change significantly” during the revision process. But the official framework of the course is scheduled to be released to the public on February 1st, the first day of Black History Month. The course guide for instructors, which runs to two hundred and forty-six pages, states in its preface that A.P. “opposes indoctrination” and that courses are built around an “unflinching encounter with evidence” and empirical analysis. It’s an odd note to direct at teachers of high-school students who have displayed the intellectual and emotional maturity to engage with college-level coursework. However, it’s likely intended not for them but for any bureaucrats and politicians who believe that “wokeism”—a threadbare slang term for social awareness—is an actual ideology.
Of all the criticisms aimed at the course, the most questionable is the department’s contention that it “lacks educational value.” The course includes contributions from some of the most highly regarded academics in the field, including the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the historians Nell Irvin Painter and Annette Gordon-Reed. Faculty from Harvard, Emory, Georgetown, the University of California, and the University of Connecticut are on an advisory board. With that contention, the department is, in effect, dismissing the import of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography “My Bondage and My Freedom,” excerpts of which are included in the curriculum; the Dred Scott decision, also excerpted; and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, whose origins are explored in detail. In fact, the idea that the subject matter covered in the course does not warrant a place in the classroom is contradicted by Florida’s own educational standards. Among the topics examined are the transatlantic slave trade, the roots of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the civil-rights movement, some of which students are taught as early as the fourth grade.
Last Wednesday, three Florida high-school students, represented by the civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump, said that they were prepared to sue the DeSantis administration if the ban on the course is not lifted. But there is little likelihood that the course can be revised in such a way that it is palatable to DeSantis and the state’s education department without losing the essence of what it is attempting to convey about the miasma of race in American history. Their sense appears to be that the evils of the past are not nearly as dangerous now as the willingness to talk about them in the present. ♦Published in the print edition of the February 6, 2023, issue, with the headline “Historic Battles.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at a daily news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on July 11 in Washington, DC.Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Democrats respond to GOP calls for debt ceiling negotiations: No
“In exchange for not crashing the United States economy, you get nothing,” one Democratic senator said. “You don’t get a cookie.”
Late last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent an important letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The cabinet secretary explained that the United States would hit the debt ceiling this Thursday, Jan. 19, and it was time for Congress to begin taking necessary steps to prevent default.
It’s worth emphasizing that hitting the debt ceiling this week does not mean that default is just a few days away. Rather, the Treasury Department will now begin a series of moves — described as taking “certain extraordinary measures“ — to prevent a crisis. But those temporary measures will be exhausted by early June. Before that deadline, lawmakers will have to agree to allow the government to pay its own bills.
“Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability,” Yellen said, accurately describing reality. She added that even threatening default has “caused real harms, including the only credit rating downgrade in the history of our nation in 2011.”
A day earlier, the new House speaker told reporters that, as far as he’s concerned, there’s no need to wait until the last minute: President Joe Biden, McCarthy said, should begin the process now of negotiating with GOP leaders and making them happy so as to avoid a default.
Democrats are not just rejecting Republicans’ demands, the party that controls the White House and the Senate are also explicitly rejecting the very idea of negotiations. The Washington Post reported:
“To many, our most shocking political crises appear unprecedented—un-American, even. But they are not, writes The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer in this prescient essay collection, which dissects the most devastating moments in recent memory to reveal deeply entrenched dynamics, patterns as old as the country itself. The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power with or without President Donald Trump—a fact borne out by what has happened since his departure from the White House.
Serwer argues that Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom. Serwer’s phrase “the cruelty is the point” became among the most-used descriptions of Trump’s era, but as this book demonstrates, it resonates across centuries. The essays here combine revelatory reporting, searing analysis, and a clarity that’s bracing. In this new, expanded version of his bestselling debut, Serwer elegantly dissects white supremacy’s profound influence on our political system, looking at the persistence of the Lost Cause, the past and present of police unions, the mythology of migration, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers abundant proof that our past is present and demonstrates the devastating costs of continuing to pretend it’s not. The Cruelty Is the Point dares us, the reader, to not look away.”
Adam Serwer has been a staff writer for the Ideas section of The Atlantic since 2016, focusing on contemporary politics, often viewed through the lens of history. He is the recipient of the 2015 Sigma Delta Chi award for commentary,… More about Adam Serwer
This week, South Dakota’s House of Representatives passed two bills, one targeting the teaching of “divisive concepts” and the other aimed at “protecting” kids from “political indoctrination.” While neither bill mentioned the words “critical race theory,” it was clear what they meant. They followed just a few weeks after the Mississippi Senate passed Senate Bill 2113—another “critical race theory” bill authored by Michael McLendon (R-Hernando)—over the objection of Black lawmakers, who walked out of the chamber in protest. Both of these efforts, along with many others, are part of a nationwide campaign led by conservatives to supposedly rid classrooms of “critical race theory”—a term for a high-level legal discipline that has been used as a cover to ban books by Black and brown authors.
While the obsession over “ critical race theory” is a new manifestation, it represents long-standing efforts to keep Black history—and the perspectives of Black writers—out of the classroom. For many conservatives, the attack on “critical race theory” is rooted in a desire to shield their children from the uncomfortable aspects of history and evade “sensitive” topics such as racism, white supremacy, and inequality. As this wave of anti-Blackness and anti-intellectualism grows, Black educators and their allies must be prepared to oppose these forces, building on a long tradition of Black protest.
For as long as white politicians have employed these tactics, Black educators in the United States have vigorously resisted. Through a myriad of strategies—including creative lesson plans and the production of anti-racist books and articles—Black educators have worked to counter the spread of misinformation and ensure that students have access to texts and perspectives that represent the diversity of the nation—and the world.
During the antebellum era, Black teachers in the North led the charge to ensure that Black students would receive a quality education—despite having limited access to resources. These efforts often required “conscious, vigorous, and sustained acts of defiance and protest,” as historian Kabria Baumgartner recounts in her groundbreaking book In Pursuit of Knowledge, but Black educators were willing to take such risks.
In 1830s Boston, for example, Susan Paul taught at a primary school for Black children where she intentionally included lessons on the evils of slavery and the significance of abolition. Paul brought her students to meetings of the New England Anti-Slavery Society—an interracial abolitionist organization founded in 1832. She also encouraged her students in the Boston Juvenile Choir to perform songs that extolled abolitionist ideas. Her inclusion of abolitionist materials and her focus on her students’ public comportment represented a direct challenge to the era’s racist propaganda on the capabilities and qualities of Black people—a mission she followed even as she faced threats of violence from white Bostonians at the time.
Paul published the Memoir of James Jackson in 1835 to honor a student of hers who had passed away from tuberculosis. In telling the story of Jackson’s short life, the book also revealed Paul’s pedagogical emphasis on Christian empathy as an opposing force to racial prejudice.
Similarly, Charlotte Forten, a Black educator from Philadelphia, passionately resisted the spread of miseducation in the classroom—and introduced an array of diverse materials to broaden her students’ perspectives. One of the first Black women teachers to be hired to teach in the integrated schools of Salem, Mass., Forten joined the staff of the Epes Grammar School in 1856. Though she only taught in Salem for a few years, she was unwavering in her commitment to nurturing Black students, and in 1862, traveled to the Sea Islands in South Carolina to teach Black children who were recently emancipated by Union forces.
Forten used this opportunity to instruct her students about the life of revolutionary Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture. “I told them about Toussaint,” she explained in an 1864 Atlantic Monthly article, “thinking it well they should know what one of their own color had done for his race.” This determination to center Black perspectives in the classroom as a counter to stereotypical representations of mainstream accounts guided Black educators in the decades to follow.
In February 1926, historian Carter G. Woodson, known as the father of Black history, devised a strategy to address the failure to teach Black history in classrooms across the nation. By first establishing “ Negro History Week,” Woodson provided an avenue for educators to recognize and celebrate the history of people of African descent in the United States. In so doing, he disrupted educational norms shaped by white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Woodson and members of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History—the organization he had established several years earlier—created and distributed books, lesson plans, and other curriculum materials to aid teachers across the nation.
Within five years of the program’s creation, 80 percent of Black high schools in the United States were celebrating Negro History Week. According to Jarvis R. Givens, author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Woodson’s mission as a scholar “was influenced and made possible by the pedagogical work of black schoolteachers.” These educators had instructed and prepared Woodson’s generation after the end of legal slavery, and a new generation now risked their own personal safety to defy the accepted curriculum by implementing Negro History Week lessons, influencing generations of scholars and activists to follow.
It is in this spirit that the famed scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. The pioneering book, which would go on to shape future writing and research on Reconstruction, was a direct refutation of the false narratives emerging from leading white scholars. Black Reconstruction in America unequivocally challenged the racist Dunning School of historians—named after William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University. In their portrayal of Reconstruction (1865–77), the Dunning School scholars, as Du Bois explained, had portrayed the South as victims and the North as having committed a “grievous wrong.” Their writings on the subject treated the free and enslaved Black population with “ ridicule, contempt or silence.”
This framing of the ideals motivating Reconstruction—and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments—as a mistake was further propagated in popular media, most notably in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction offered an important counterargument that not only reaffirmed the evils of slavery but also demonstrated the active role enslaved people took in liberating themselves. They were, as Du Bois powerfully demonstrated, not simply the passive recipients of white actions but agents in shaping their own destiny.
This tradition coalesced into the dynamic field of Black Studies during the 1960s and 1970s. As Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of Black Studies, points out in The History of Black Studies, the field’s growth is directly tied to the pioneering work of scholars like Woodson and Du Bois. The work of Black educators—combined with other forces, including the civil rights and Black Power movements as well as the vital intellectual space created by historically black colleges and universities—provided the catalyst for the establishment of Black Studies programs and departments.
Freedom Schools, such as those established by organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the rise of Black Power ideology, fundamentally shaped Black college students and challenged mainstream (anti-Black) university curriculums on college campuses and beyond.
Today, we are witnessing an effort to return to an era when Black voices and experiences—along with those of other marginalized groups—were excluded from classrooms. The recent legislative and executive bans on “critical race theory” are designed to intimidate teachers and school districts from teaching accurate representations of American history. As the historical record reminds us, these attempts are not new. But we can draw inspiration from the long line of Black educators and their allies who vigorously worked to overcome these forces in the past.
Keisha N. Blain is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and a 2022 National Fellow at New America. Along with Ibram X. Kendi, she is the editor of Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019. Her latest book is Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Twitter: @KeishaBlain
Black people in the US are the crash test dummies for the Democrats. The Democrats showcase the misery of Black people to maintain their legitimacy while deploying the Black political class to neutralize the “progressive” elements in the party.
A crash test dummy is a simulated humanoid used in car accidents to test the safety of vehicles for human consumers. In the U.S., Black people are the crash test dummies for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment. The Democrats showcase the misery of Black people – through a discourse of “racial grievances” – to maintain their legitimacy while deploying the Black political class to neutralize the “progressive” elements in the party.
During the Obama era members of the Black chattering class were used as crash test dummies to manufacture a liberal curated message that Obama, the Wall Street Manchurian Candidate and first Black president, was the embodiment of Black political aspiration justifying Blacks abandoning their civil rights posture toward racism. From this 2008 New York Times article, “Is Barack Obama the End of Black Politics:”
““I’m the new black politics,” says Cornell Belcher, a 38-year-old pollster who is working for Obama. “The people I work with are the new black politics. We don’t carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but that’s just the way it is.
“I don’t want in any way to seem critical of the generation of leadership who fought so I could be sitting here,” Belcher told me when we met for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown one morning. He wears his hair in irreverent spikes and often favors tennis shoes with suit jackets. “Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He’s the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that.”
During Obama’s tenure over 35% of Black wealth evaporated, and there was no recourse for or Black America. Furthermore, 95% of Obama’s presidential job growth was low wage temp jobs. Blacks were the crash test dummies whose noble history of struggle was pimped out so Banks could be protected as America saw one of the greatest wealth transfers upward since the gilded age.
After the 2016 election, the racial grievances of Blacks rendered them as crash test dummies again. This time the corporate faction of the Democratic party deployed the Black political class and its media acolytes to neutralize the rising cry for social democracy and anti-capitalist politics. Black thought leaders in the chattering class deemed the Bernie Sanders candidacy as “tone deaf on race,” while pushing to coral Black politics around neoliberalism and Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, the Black political class has been repeatedly dispatched to destroy candidates for office that have carried the Sanders message. This subterfuge became obvious with both the 2021 Nina Turner campaign in Ohio, as well as the India Walton campaign in Buffalo, New York.
What is fascinating about the deployment of the Black liberal political call to destroy progressive social democratic policy rooted in political economy is that during the inter-war period, before Anti-Communism made such politics impossible to demand, the Black liberal political class took its lessons from Black socialists and Black communists. They used these lessons to shape their advocacy for Black America.
The book, “What the Negro Wants,” was written in 1944 and is a series of essays by some of the most heralded Black thinkers and activists of that era. W.E.B. DuBois, Rayford W. Logan, Charles H. Wesley, Mary McLeod Bethune, and A. Phillip Randolph are just a few of the contributors. What is fascinating is how little discussion there is about racism and White Supremacy, and how much is based on programmatic solutions rooted in political economy. I guess these folks would have been called “class reductionists” since almost all their solutions were premised on social democracy. In reading the book, you realize the bankruptcy of today’s Black social and political thought. A review of the book tell us:
“What the Negro Wants provides a unique view into black politics during that time period. The essays reveal the wide array of ideological tendencies operating within black political life, something often missing today from analyses that adopt the monolithic framework of a singular “black community.” Perhaps more striking was the common agreement among the diverse tendencies — and what this tells us about the transformations in black political life from then to now.
The writers shared a broad consensus around the vital importance of the labor movement (especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO), given black people’s overwhelming working-class composition. There was also much agreement around broadly social democratic demands and the necessity of interracial coalitions.”
Under the current Biden presidency Democrats are worried that the strategy of using Blacks as crash test dummies by dispatching “woke” racial grievance discourse to stain Trump’s Republican party is backfiring. As working-class voters flee the Democratic party, the belief is that the age of “wokeness,” has cost Democrats so much that they might have to start appealing to working class white voters using whatever messaging is possible. The recent controversy over political data expert David Shor and his calls for the Democratic party to embrace his messaging strategy called “popularism,” has the vapid Black chattering class worried that the Democratic party is going to throw Black people under the bus to appeal to working class Whites. Elie Mystal, the Black MSNBC contributor, and writer for, “The Nation,” expressed outrage as he argued that the Democrats were going abandon Blacks to embrace David Shor’s “Popularism.” As, Mystal states:
“I disagree with Shor not on the problems but on his proposed solutions. Shor, according to Klein, suggests doing what Democrats have traditionally done: figure out what the racists want and give it to them, while simultaneously pretending the party will never take real steps to challenge white supremacy.”
Acolytes of Shor quickly responded to Mystal’s complaints by basically admitting that the Democratic party has no choice but to appeal to working class white voters because demographically the party cannot win without their support, regardless of the size of the Democrats’ Multi-racial coalition. As “New York Magazine,” writer Eric Levitz published in his piece, “Smearing Popularism Does not Help Black Voters:”
“All of which is to say: There is nothing inherently anti-Black about wanting the Democratic Party to avoid alienating bigoted voters, much less white working-class ones more broadly. A “mobilization” strategy will only benefit African Americans to the extent that it keeps the Republican Party out of power. Black families surely need a Justice Department that cares about civil rights, an NLRB that sides with working people, and a Congress interested in expanding social welfare more than they need Democratic messaging that rhetorically centers systemic racism. Yet Mystal makes no effort to demonstrate that the electoral math on his preferred strategy adds up. He does not sketch out how Democrats could afford to disregard white working-class voters and still capture a Senate majority. By all appearances, he simply presumes that there must be a way for the party to do so.”
The last time Democrats used major polling analysis to change their messaging we got the Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton Crime Bill, the New Democrats, NAFTA GATT and worse neoliberalism that was highly racialized against Blacks. And in 1984 the same argumentation was used, “Democrats need to find a way to appeal to working class Whites.” As vapid as the Black liberal chattering class has always been, I don’t think we can totally fault them for their paranoia about the Democratic party’s alleged embrace of “Shorism” or “Popularism.”
What we are seeing is the failure of Democrats’ cynical post Obama strategy of focusing on racial grievance discourse divorced from materialist policy. That strategy was supposed to both shut down the possibility of any social democracy, or Sanders-type politics that would benefit most Black people, while secondly using Blacks as crash test dummies to fight Trump. That strategy has blown up in the Democrats face and is doing nothing but feeding the reactionary right. This is largely happening because liberals and the left flank of capital chose to platform neoliberal Blacks and Black foundation types spewing race first politics that only lined their own pockets from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Black Lives Matter. The support for this liberal “woke” racial grievance discourse has allowed Trump operative Steve Bannon to organize a grass roots takeover of political apparatuses throughout the Red States using contrived paranoia about Critical Race Theory as a flashpoint. Liberals played the Black elite and the Black Chattering class like suckers again. Now with debates emerging about “popularism,” and the tactics of David Shor, Democrats might seek to hang Black voters out to dry, once again, since they now realize they were riding a one trick pony that was only good to get Biden elected.
These racial changes in political messaging have a long and effective history during the 50 plus year counter-revolution against the gains of the 1960s and the New Deal. Starting with the hard hat riot and framing late 60s radicalism as social chaos, Nixon was able to begin the process of White working class spillage into the Republican party causing the first fracture of the New Deal-Civil Rights Coalition. Reagan doubled on this strategy by using the Nixonian Southern strategy fostering the “Reagan Democrats.” Bill Clinton was the key to where this whole strategy of white racial appeal went bad. Clinton used the Southern Strategy as well to appeal to working class Whites by appearing tough on crime with the execution of Ricky Ray Rector and his Sister Soulja moment. Predictably, Clinton governed in a way that destroyed the working class across the board and savaged poor Blacks. The consequences of Clintonian politics were so bad that neoliberalism became equated with Democrats in the conscience of many Americans. Obama had an opportunity to repair these issues. Obama had more goodwill coming into office than any U.S. president in modern history. Instead, Obama doubled down on the worst elements of neoliberalism as a handpicked pawn of the banks. Furthermore, under Obama we also saw a massive opioid crisis ravage poor and working-class Americans hurt by Clinton Era NAFTA and GATT policies. Bernie Sanders revived a progressive left that had been dead for 50 years while Hillary Clinton was the emblem of all that was horrible with Clintonian Neoliberalism after Obama’s lack of recovery.
Therefore, the culture war nonsense is a product of a policy bankrupt Democratic party using vapid identity politics virtue signaling with no real material benefits to posture progressive while masking their complicity with the agenda of finance capital and the power elite. This shift to dump the working class was a strategic choice of the Democrats, not an accident. They did so under the charade of hoping Blacks and Latinos would forget they were working class and instead see themselves as ethnic and racial identities first. The Republicans have spun the culture wars to appeal to other aspects of the working-class psyche not contingent exclusively on racial identity, such as anti-vaccination mandates. Though neoliberalism has been a bi-partisan consensus since the 1970’s, the 30-year strategy and pivot of Neoliberal Democrats starting with Clinton and continuing through Obama, worsened the carnage. This is why Democrats deserve most of the blame for the turn in American capitalism to neoliberal privatization.
Some have argued that the current “wokeness,” paranoia has been caused by the social democratic Sanders faction of the Democratic party. Progressives did not ignite a culture war. Liberals ignited a culture war doubling down on woke racial grievance discourse to use black people both as crash test dummies to fight Trump and to neutralize the Progressive faction of the Democratic party’s actual demand for materialist politics. The Liberal institutions from media to foundations, and even corporate finance, all supported wokeness especially after George Floyd’s murder. Progressives weren’t pouring millions into capitalist streaming services like Netflix and Amazon to platform programming focused on Negroes racially navel gazing and fart sniffing their problems to pander to white guilt. Progressives, got their politics crushed by this materialist bankrupt form of race reductionism that they have been calling out while being called “class reductionists.” Yet the only class of Negroes benefitting from this race reductionist nonsense are pedigreed Blacks who have always leveraged the misery of Black toilers for policy considerations that largely only benefit those Black elites. Negro elites and certain Blacks in academia have made a fortune off George Floyd’s corps for doing nothing but protecting the status quo. So don’t blame Progressives. Blame the liberals, Black, White, and otherwise who have been using Black people as crash test dummies while showing sheer disregard for most of Black America during almost all the last 50 plus year counter-revolution.
Pascal Robert is an iconoclastic Haitian American Lawyer, blogger, and online activist for Haiti. He is an OUR COMMON GROUND Voice since 2012. He is co-host, This Is Revolution podcast.
You can find his work on the web atThought Merchant, and atHuffington Post. He can be reached via twitter at@probert06 or thoughtmerchant@gmail.com.
Wisconsin state judge Bruce Schroeder has presided over the Rittenhouse case from the beginning and has done nearly everything he can to tilt the scales of justice in Rittenhouse’s favor.
The trial of teenage gunman Kyle Rittenhouse begins next week, but the fix is already in. Rittenhouse, who is being tried as an adult, shot two people dead in the street in Kenosha, Wis., during the protests that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020. That he killed two people is undisputed, but Rittenhouse claims the homicides were justified acts of self-defense.
Rittenhouse is not from Kenosha. He went there, with other armed men, allegedly to defend a place called “Car Source,” which I point out just to emphasize that he wasn’t even trying to protect his own property in his own town. Once there, he began patrolling the streets with an assault rifle illegally gifted him by an older friend. I find the claim that Rittenhouse subsequently murdered two unarmed people in self-defense to be unconscionable. In a just world, Rittenhouse would go to jail for a double homicide and illegal gun possession.
But we do not live in a just world; we live in a white one. Rittenhouse has become a cause célèbre among white supremacists and their media sympathizers, who have proudly defended Rittenhouse’s decisions to kill. Rittenhouse is the very definition of an “outside agitator” who came into somebody else’s community armed to do violence, but because he murdered-while-white, he will probably walk free.
That reality is almost assured because, even if Rittenhouse somehow draws an impartial jury, he has already won the white people’s lottery and landed a very partial white judge.
Wisconsin state judge Bruce Schroeder has presided over the Rittenhouse case from the beginning and has done nearly everything he can to tilt the scales of justice in Rittenhouse’s favor. This week, in the last pretrial conference, Schroeder declared that prosecutors are not allowed to refer to the people Rittenhouse murdered as “victims” during the trial. He said “victims” is too “loaded” a term, as if there were some other word we should use for unarmed people who were shot to death.
Now, there is a progressive argument for not calling victims of homicide “victims” at trial. I can absolutely see the argument that using the term in a case where the defendant claims self-defense lacks neutrality. It’s a choice other judges have made, though I doubt that this kind of neutrality would be given to a Black teen who gunned down people at a MAGA rally. Still, I wouldn’t call Judge Schroeder biased for this ruling alone. I call Schroeder biased because at the same conference at which he decided to prohibit the prosecution from using the word “victims” to describe the people Rittenhouse shot, he said he would allow the defense to use words like “rioters,” “looters,” and “arsonists” to describe those same people.
That’s bullshit. The (ahem) victims are not on trial. Rittenhouse is. Refusing to allow prosecutors to use linguistically accurate terms for people who did not voluntarily attempt to catch a bullet with their face at the same time as allowing the defense to use prejudicial language to characterize what those people were doing at the time is the very definition of bias. There is and never will be a trial to determine whether Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum were arsonists, looters, or rioters, because Rittenhouse killed them in the street. Indeed, the sole surviving victim of Rittenhouse’s gunfire, Gaige Grosskreutz, has not been charged with rioting, looting, arson, or any crime whatsoever arising out of the protests in Kenosha. (The judge did say that the prosecutors could call Rittenhouse a “cold-blooded killer” if they could “back it up with evidence”—as if the presence of two unarmed dead people at Rittenhouse’s feet didn’t make the fact that he was a killer self-evident.)
At the same time, Schroeder announced that he will not allow prosecutors to introduce evidence of Rittenhouse’s prior disposition to shoot people to death. There is video of Rittenhouse watching from a car as people leave a CVS: He calls them “looters” and says that he wishes he had a gun to shoot them. The video was taken in August 2020, about two and a half weeks before Rittenhouse shot up the streets of Kenosha. There are also photos from January 2020 of Rittenhouse posing with members of the Proud Boys. Both the video and the photos will be excluded, but the police patting Rittenhouse on the head like a good little white supremacist will be included.
And these are just the biased decisions Schroeder has made before the trial starts. Once it gets going, once he gets to rule on objections and jury instructions, there’s no telling how much worse he’ll get. Schroeder’s actions suggest he has predetermined the case in favor of Rittenhouse, and at trial the prosecution will be fighting against that as well as against Rittenhouse’s actual defense lawyers.
All of this suggests that Rittenhouse will walk free. Schroeder appears to believe that the shooting of “rioters,” “looters,” and “arsonists” by a white teenager is a “victimless” crime. All the defense has to do is find one juror who agrees with the judge.
Two crimes, but the white justice system manages to see no perpetrators—or “victims.” Two violent white assailants to whom the system seems determined to give the benefit of every doubt. As James Baldwin once said: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all of the time.”
OCG 