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.”
On the afternoon of February 8, 2018, more than two dozen law-enforcement officers crowded into a conference room in the Henry County Sheriff’s Office, on the outskirts of Atlanta. They were preparing to execute a no-knock warrant at 305 English Road, the home of a suspected drug dealer who had been under investigation for almost two years. The special agent leading the briefing told the team that 305 English Road was a small house with off-white siding and several broken-down cars out front, showed them an aerial photograph of the house, and gave them turn-by-turn directions to get there.
When the officers arrived at their destination, the house described in the warrant—305 English Road, run-down, off-white, with cars strewn across the yard—was right in front of them. But they walked past it to a different house, a tidy yellow one, 40 yards away. The house at 303 English Road looked nothing like the house described in the briefing and in the warrant. Yet, less than a minute after getting out of their cars, the officers set off flash grenades and used battering rams to smash open all three doors of the home.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Inside, they found Onree Norris, a 78-year-old Black man who had lived there for more than 50 years, raising his three children while he worked at a nearby rock quarry. Norris was no drug dealer. He had never been in any trouble with the law; he’d never even received a traffic ticket.
Onree Norris was watching the evening news in an armchair in his bedroom when he heard a thunderous sound, as if a bomb had gone off in his house. He got up to see what the commotion was and found a crowd of men in military gear in his hallway. Norris was more than twice as old as the target of the search warrant, but the officers pointed assault rifles at him anyway and yelled at him to raise his hands and get on the ground. When Norris told the officers that his knees were in bad shape, an officer grabbed Norris, pushed him down, and twisted his arm behind his back. Norris’s chest hurt, and he had trouble breathing. He told the officers that he had a heart condition—he’d had bypass surgery and had a pacemaker put in—but they kept him on the ground for several minutes. Norris was eventually led outside in handcuffs. When the officers realized they had blasted their way into the wrong house, they turned their cameras off one by one.
Whatever one believes about the job of policing—whether it’s that well-intentioned officers often must make split-second decisions that are easy to criticize in hindsight, or that the profession is inherently corrupt—there is no doubt that police officers sometimes egregiously abuse their authority. The videos that have filled our screens in recent years—most recently the surveillance footage of officers in Memphis fatally beating Tyre Nichols—offer horrifying evidence of this reality.
People who have lost loved ones or have themselves been harmed by the police often say that they want the officers involved to be punished and an assurance that something similar won’t happen in the future. Yet justice for victims of police misconduct is extremely difficult to achieve.
What happened in Memphis last week—the swift firing and arrest of the five officers who beat Nichols, and the murder charges they face—is highly unusual, a result of immediate public attention to an inconceivably barbaric attack. Although officers can be criminally prosecuted and sent to prison, they seldom are: Police are charged in less than 2 percent of fatal shootings and convicted in less than a third of those cases. Police departments rarely discipline or fire their officers.
Typically, victims’ only recourse is a civil lawsuit seeking money or court-ordered reforms. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that people could sue officers who violated their constitutional rights under a federal statute enacted 90 years earlier, during the bloody years of Reconstruction. That statute, known then as the Ku Klux Klan Act and referred to as Section 1983 today, was meant to provide a remedy to Black people across the South who were being tortured and killed by white supremacists while local law enforcement either participated in the violence or stood idly by.
After that 1961 decision, the number of police-misconduct suits filed shot up. But so did concerns about the suits’ potentially ruinous effects. Settlements and judgments would bankrupt officers and cities; no one in their right mind would agree to become a police officer; the very fabric of our society would become unwound. These claims were exaggerated, if not simply false. But they have nevertheless been relied upon by courts, legislatures, and government officials over the past 60 years to justify the creation of multiple overlapping protections for officers and police departments that regularly deny justice to people whose rights have been violated.
The best-known of these protections is “qualified immunity.” When the Supreme Court created qualified immunity, in 1967, it was meant to shield officers from liability only if they were acting in “good faith” when they violated the Constitution. Yet the Court has repeatedly strengthened the doctrine. In 1982, the Court ruled that requiring officers to prove good faith was too much of a burden. Instead, they would be entitled to qualified immunity so long as they did not violate “clearly established law.” Over the years, what constitutes “clearly established law” has constricted. The Roberts Court, invoking the importance of qualified immunity to “society as a whole,” has emphasized that the law is “clearly established” only if a court has previously found nearly identical conduct to be unconstitutional. What began as a protection for officers acting in good faith has turned into a protection for officers with the good fortune to have violated the Constitution in a novel way.
It was qualified immunity that dashed Onree Norris’s hopes of getting justice. In 2018, Norris sued the officers who had raided his home, seeking money to compensate him for his physical and emotional injuries. But in 2020, a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia granted the officers qualified immunity and dismissed the case; in 2021, a panel of three judges on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling.
The three appeals judges recognized that officers who execute a search warrant on the wrong home violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution unless they have made “a reasonable effort to ascertain and identify the place intended to be searched.” In fact, the very same court of appeals that heard Norris’s case in 2021 had ruled five years earlier that it was unconstitutional for an officer who executed a warrant on the wrong house to detain its residents at gunpoint—almost exactly what had happened to Norris. But that earlier court decision was not enough to defeat qualified immunity in Norris’s case, because it was “unpublished”—meaning that it was available online but had not been selected to be printed in the books of decisions that are issued each year—and the Eleventh Circuit is of the view that such unpublished decisions cannot “clearly establish” the law.
Just as george floyd’s murder has come to represent all that is wrong with police violence and overreach, qualified immunity has come to represent all that is wrong with our system of police accountability. But, over the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has created multiple other barriers to holding police to account.
Take, for example, the standard that a plaintiff must meet to file a complaint. For decades, a complaint needed to include only a “short and plain” statement of the facts and why those facts entitled the plaintiff to relief. But in 2007, the Supreme Court did an about-face, requiring that plaintiffs include enough factual detail in their initial complaints to establish a “plausible” entitlement to relief.
This standard does not always pose a problem: Norris and his lawyer knew enough about what had happened during the raid of his home to write a detailed complaint. But sometimes a person whose rights have been violated doesn’t know the crucial details of their case.
Vicki Timpa searched for months for information about how her son, Tony, had died while handcuffed in Dallas police officers’ custody in August 2016. Department officials had body-camera videos that captured Tony’s last moments, but they refused to tell Timpa what had happened to her son or the names of the officers who were on the scene when he died. Timpa sued the city, but the case was dismissed because her complaint did not include enough factual detail about those last moments to establish a “plausible” claim.
When the Court set out the “plausibility” standard, it explained that, if filing a case were too easy, plaintiffs with “a largely groundless claim” could “take up the time” of defendants, and expensive discovery could “push cost-conscious defendants to settle even anemic cases.” But this rule puts people like Timpa in a bind: They are allowed discovery only if their complaints include evidence supporting their claims, but they can’t access that evidence without the tools of discovery.
(Timpa did eventually get the information she sought after she filed a public-records request and sued the city for not complying with it. Only with that information in hand could she defeat the motion to dismiss. But then her case was dismissed on qualified-immunity grounds because she could not point to a prior case with similar facts. That decision was overturned on appeal in December 2021, and Timpas’s case is set to go to trial in March, almost seven years after Tony was killed.)
The Supreme Court has also interpreted the Constitution in ways that deny relief to victims of police violence and overreach. The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But in a series of decisions beginning in the 1960s, the Court has interpreted the “reasonableness” standard in a manner so deferential to police that officers can stop, arrest, search, beat, shoot, or kill people who have done nothing wrong without violating their rights.
On a July night in 2016, David Collie was walking down the street in Fort Worth, Texas, headed to a friend’s house, when two officers jumped out of their patrol car and yelled for Collie to raise his hands. The officers were on the lookout for two Black men who had robbed someone at a gas station. Collie was at least 10 years older, six inches shorter, and 30 pounds lighter than the smaller of the two robbery suspects. But he, like the suspects, was Black and was not wearing a shirt on that warm summer evening. Collie raised his hands. Just seconds later, and while standing more than 30 feet away, one of the officers shot Collie in the back. The hollow-point bullet entered Collie’s lung and punctured his spine. He survived, but was left paralyzed from the waist down.
When Collie sued, his case was dismissed by a district-court judge in Texas, and the decision was affirmed on appeal. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals called the case “tragic,” and a prime example of “an individual’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” but concluded that the officer had not violated Collie’s Fourth Amendment rights, because he reasonably—though mistakenly—thought he had seen a gun in Collie’s raised hand.
The Supreme Court has undermined the power and potential of civil-rights lawsuits in other ways: It has limited, for example, plaintiffs’ ability to sue local governments for their officers’ conduct and to win court orders requiring that departments change their behavior. Any one of the barriers, in isolation, would limit the power of civil-rights suits. In combination, they have made the police all but untouchable.
Even when people are able to secure a settlement or verdict to compensate them for their losses, police officers and departments rarely suffer any consequences for their wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court has long assumed that officers personally pay settlements and judgments entered against them. That is one of the justifications for qualified immunity. But officers’ bank accounts are protected by a wholly separate set of state laws and local policies requiring or allowing most governments to indemnify their officers when they are sued (meaning that they must pay for the officers’ defense and any award against them). As a result, vanishingly few police officers pay a penny in these cases.
Police departments typically don’t feel the financial sting of settlements or judgments either. Instead, the money is taken from local-government funds. And when money is tight, it tends to get pulled from the crevices of budgets earmarked for the least powerful: the marginalized people whose objections will carry the least political weight—the same people disproportionately likely to be abused by police.
Officers and officials could still learn from lawsuits, even without paying for them. But most make little effort to do so when a lawsuit doesn’t inspire front-page news or meetings with an angry mayor. Instead, government attorneys defend the officers in court, any settlement or judgment is paid out of the government’s budget or by the government’s insurer, and the law-enforcement agency moves on. In many cases, it does not even track the names of the officers, the alleged claims, the evidence revealed, the eventual resolution, or the amount paid.
Fundamental questions remain about what we should empower the police to do, and how to restore trust between law enforcement and the communities it serves. But no matter how governments ultimately answer these questions, they will almost certainly continue to authorize people to protect public safety. And some of those people will almost certainly abuse that authority. We need to get our system of governmental accountability working better than it does, no matter what our system of public safety looks like.
The fact that so many barriers to justice exist means that there is something for officials at every level of government to do.
The Supreme Court should reconsider its standards for qualified immunity, pleading rules, the Fourth Amendment, and municipal liability. But this seems unlikely, because a majority of the justices have demonstrated a durable hostility to plaintiffs in civil-rights cases.
Congress could remove many of the obstacles the Supreme Court has devised. And at least some members of Congress have shown an appetite for doing so. A bill to end qualified immunity, among other reforms, was passed in the House soon after the murder of George Floyd. But following 15 months of negotiations in the Senate, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was abandoned. Republican Senator Tim Scott described the bill’s provision ending qualified immunity as a “poison pill” for Republican lawmakers.
In the face of intransigence at the federal level, states have stepped in. Since May 2020, lawmakers in more than half of the states have proposed bills that would effectively do away with qualified immunity; these bills would allow people to bypass Section 1983 claims altogether and, instead, bring state-law claims for constitutional violations where qualified immunity could not be raised as a defense. State legislatures have additionally proposed bills that would limit police officers’ power to use force—prohibiting choke holds and no-knock warrants.
A bill enacted by Colorado in June 2020 is, in many ways, the gold standard. It allows people to sue law-enforcement officers for violations of the state constitution and prohibits officers from raising qualified immunity as a defense. The law also requires local governments to indemnify their officers unless they have been convicted of a crime, but allows cities to make officers contribute up to $25,000 or 5 percent of a settlement or judgment if the city concludes that the officer acted in bad faith. And the law bans officers from using choke holds, creating a bright-line limit on police power. Similar bills have passed in New Mexico and New York City, and are on the legislative agenda in other states. But other police-reform bills have failed in California, Washington, Virginia, and elsewhere.
I’ve testified in legislative hearings for bills in several states, and each has been frustratingly familiar. The people speaking against the bills threaten that if police officers cannot raise qualified immunity as a defense, they will be bankrupted for reasonable mistakes, and frivolous lawsuits will flood the courts. These assertions are just not true. Nevertheless, they have led lawmakers to vote against legislation that would take tentative but important steps toward a better system. Their inaction has left us with a world in which Onree Norris could receive nothing more than a few repairs to his doors after officers busted into his home and forced him to the floor; a world in which the Dallas Police Department could hide information about Tony Timpa’s death and then argue that his mother’s complaint should be dismissed because she did not have that information; a world in which David Collie could be shot and paralyzed from the waist down by a police officer, and require medical care for those injuries for the remainder of his life, but receive nothing, because the officer mistakenly thought Collie had a gun.
We need to stop being scared of unfounded claims about the dangers of too much justice, and start worrying about the people who have their lives shattered by the police—and then again by the courts.
This essay was adapted from the forthcoming Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.
Why Black Women Will Never Be Safe in Blameless White America
About the senseless murder of Devonna Walker
A confident Black lady near frame with flowers and plants| Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava via Pexels
America is not a safe haven for Black women, it’s a snake pit. We know that Black women are over three times as likely to die giving childbirth than White women, are the most educated group but earn the least, and are under constant pressure to change themselves to appease others. And the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, who police shot as she lay in bed, was a painful reminder that Black women in America can’t even expect safety in their own homes or communities. Misogynoir has fangs.
Devonna Walker was a 29-year-old Black woman living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. However, Walker’s life was cut short after a White neighbor stabbed her following an argument at the Cambridge Townhomes on Monday, January 2nd. Devonna was a mother of three children. The local district attorney, Nick Maybanks, has not filed any charges in this case. So, how did this tragedy occur? And what does Devonna Walker’s death mean for Black women in America? Let’s unpack this.
Cell phone footage of Devonna Walker’s last moments shows her speaking to a White woman wearing a black sweatshirt, walking her dog, “arguing about a previous alleged attack.” Their conversation suggested Walker and her neighbors had unresolved problems and that she regularly faced hostility. As the argument escalated, the White man put himself in the middle of the fuss, telling Devonna, “shut the fuck up, you fucking nigger!” As the White woman walked back towards their home, Devonna pushed her, and she fell to the ground. Then, the video showed the White man stabbing Devonna. Afterward, she stumbled off and fell on the grass. Neighbors accuse her of faking her injuries.
Like many Black Americans, Walker lived near White people, who weren’t too happy about having a Black neighbor, which is why he called Devonna a “nigger,” while they were arguing. As
Nada Chehade wrote, “the man, could have just pushed her off his wife, but he chose to stab her quickly, sleazily; the knife was already waiting in his hand.” Now, of course, many White people are making the rounds to say Walker deserved to be stabbed for pushing her neighbor and that the White neighbor who stabbed Walker to death was acting in self-defense. While stabbing someone who hasn’t caused you bodily harm doesn’t seem like self-defense to me, that’s for a jury to decide. It’s disturbing to see so many people are willing to treat Devonna Walker’s death like an open-shut case.
Police questioned both of the neighbors but released them soon after. It’s as if a cloak of whiteness protected them from further scrutiny. And if Nick Maybanks, the local prosecutor, refuses to press charges, then Devonna Walker’s family won’t have a chance to see justice in her case. So, for those who claim this is a case of self-defense, why not advocate for charges to be filed? You shouldn’t be afraid of the outcome if you think neither of the White neighbors broke the law. Too often, when a Black woman becomes a homicide victim, there are excuses as to why no one should be charged and why we shouldn’t look any further down the rabbit hole. And those excuses are rooted in misogynoir. Black women will never be safe in a nation that routinely treats their homicides as blameless. A Black woman was stabbed to death. So, how can it logically follow that no one is to blame?
When Devonna Walker lost her life, she was an unarmed woman arguing with racist neighbors. And it could have easily been me, my sister, or my mother since each of us has weathered negative experiences with racist neighbors. Just yesterday, I caught a White neighbor fogging up the glass of my brother’s car as she snuck a peek inside. Because his car is not familiar to her, she thinks she has the right to snoop, to police our home, and to any Black visitors that she sees.
As we remember Devonna Walker, let us not forget that she was an unarmed Black woman and mother, who would still be alive if it weren’t for the violent act of her neighbor. As
Nada Chehade put it, Walker was “bullied, taunted, baited, then killed.” According to the Department of Justice, “a hate crime is a crime motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability.” Calling someone a “nigger” prior to stabbing them to death sure seems racially motivated. So, why isn’t Devonna Walker’s story trending on social media and making the rounds on major news outlets? As I said, misogynoir has fangs, and it seems the venom reduces Black women to an afterthought in blameless White America.
Systemically oppressed survivors face tremendous, overwhelming barriers to seeking advocacy and justice. The challenges, and the history of institutional oppression of our people is often time met with lies, propaganda and obfuscation. There are historical underpinnings include events that took place in the past which impact how an individual or community perceives events or reacts to issues in the present. Additionally, the government, elected officials and mainstream organizations are not designed for or by systemically oppressed peoples and are often complicit or architects. Thus, it is critical that people who advocate on our behalf, analyze for us, comment or any other form of representation understand the historical trauma and its impact on Black people as a systemically oppressed people. We are told and offered illusionary idea of what will fix it. To some of these systemic and institutional impediments, traps and weapons, there is no fix. They must simply be “burned down”.
We use history as a lens to provide a holistic approach and knowledge to claim our own liberation. Sometime, those who are unable to access relevant information may have blind spots, in places that are critical. We use others to “fill us in”. Unfortunately, all opinion is not critical analysis. All talk is not critical examination or analysis. Cultural, economic and political relevant response requires a deep understanding of our story and how different every context is, paying close attention to where we are in our struggle and the multiplicity of our experiences and reality . We need people who are able to break through the BS and see clearly what is before us at every turn. Know the rules, the playlist and the players. People brave enough, smart enough and capable enough to show us the traps and tell us the truth. I have tried to be one of those. As I prepare to end my broadcast presence, I am on the hunt to recommend to the thousands of listeners who have depended on me over the last 34 years. Kim Brown is one of those people. We are grateful to have her share our microphone.
“BURNING IT DOWN: BUILDING ANEW”
“Burn it Down with Kim Brown” is a twice weekly live broadcast and Kim Brown calls out systemic issues within our society and envisioning a new world. She talks about how to restructure and create systems that are inclusive of everyone. She keeps it real, and actively destroys myths that the media and politicians love that we believe, like American Exceptionalism.
Burn It Down with Kim Brown is the place where you can set oppression ablaze. A Black woman led independent media that DGAF about taking on the establishment.
She makes a microphone rumble.
-Janice Graham
“Burn it Down with Kim Brown” is a twice weekly live broadcast and Kim Brown calls out systemic issues within our society and envisioning a new world. She talks about how to restructure and create systems that are inclusive of everyone. She keeps it real, and actively destroys myths that the media and politicians love that we believe, like American Exceptionalism.
Burn It Down with Kim Brown is the place where you can set oppression ablaze. A Black woman led independent media that DGAF about taking on the establishment.
BURNING IT DOWN with Kim Brown
Facebook https://fb.me/BIDWKB Follow us on Twitter @BurnItDownKB Check out our Insta @BIDWKB ALL
Burn it Down content remains FREE and available on a YouTube channel, listener support is the only thing that can keeps BID going!!
In the arc of American history, Donald Trump’s election as the president of the United States is no shock. The functional preamble remains that all white men are created superior and those who subscribe to it are periodically compelled to stick it in the face of Black folks — and now brown and Muslim folks, too — even if it comes at considerable cost to the nation and world standing.
It did not matter that under Obama the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent from the 10 percent he inherited from Bush. Under Obama’s Affordable Care Act insured millions more Americans than under Bush. It did not matter that many of Obama’s policies put money in the pockets of the working class, such as dramatically raising the federal salary threshold to collect overtime pay, or the Lilly Ledbetter Act for fair pay based on gender. Despite that he was so much like all Presidents before him. He was like them. The same kind of occupant of the WH, as Bush, Clinton, Kennedy. But, ultimately, they would elect an obnoxious, underachieving, corny, egomaniac conman to ensure that an Obama would never again usher shadows into their sacred places.
Since none of that mattered, all of Trump’s rhetoric about everything in America being a “disaster” was a smokescreen for the consolidation of crude white power. The majority of white Americans, a century and a half after the end of slavery, still spectacularly preferred economic uncertainty in exchange for returning Black people to their place and now sending brown immigrants and Muslims “back home.”
Early in the Trump candidacy an opinion columnist wrote in The Boston Globe that his “hateful nonsense, meant for white people who still think the country is theirs, is a death rattle for the most crude forms of white privilege.” I was hoping that his election would be as a death rattle for the snake, not for those whom the snake struck. Finally, and most disturbing of all, there was the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump last November, despite his record of governing incompetence – crystallized by the COVID-19 debacle – and toxic, divide-and-conquer political, to say nothing that he literally ran a global criminal enterprise out of the White House and throughout the government.
In the “The Matrix”, the film describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix, a simulated reality created by sentient Machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population while their bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. In Matrix parlance, red pills are those who are aware of the Matrix construct while blue pills are not. An often used admonishment to Black people to be realistic, clear about the political nuances of our citizenship.
The Matrix represents a system of control that operates completely in the mind. As a complex, machine-driven program, it appropriates any personal, political, or ideological leanings and renders them wholly false. It allows illusions but no action. The problem with the matrix that most people of control and power depend upon has a glitch. That is that Black people don’t believe in things, as Stevie Wonder reminded us in his awesome song, “Superstition, ” When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer. . . “ The matrix which encapsulates America is built on the superstition of American exceptionalism- a superstition of massive import. Black people have taught this country the potential value and power of its own rhetoric around democracy. We have also taught them the lessons of its hypocrisy and fragility. Uncovering, exposing, and revealing. Demonstrating time after time that “we” are not who “we” say that we are. So many Americans are beginning to understand more and moving beyond the energy field of the matrix. The glitch in the matrix ? Black people. We discuss it at OUR COMMON GROUND tonight.
Pascal Robert a regular contributor to the online publication Black Agenda Report and is the current co-host of the THIS IS REVOLUTION PODCAST. He is an OUR COMMON GROUND Voice and INterLOCUTOR
04 Aug 2021
Glen Ford
Glen Ford and the Need for Black Radical Analysis
Black radical analysis was the foundation of Ford’s work
Since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the fifty-year counter-revolution against the transformative politics that had reached their apex in the 1960s brought forth a constriction of the American political imagination. When Richard Nixon took control of the executive branch, he used appeals to Black capitalism to tamper support for radicalism among the emerging Black middle class. Thus, just as the hammer of Jim Crow segregation was lifted, the class schisms that would shape Black political life became sharpened. In the post-civil rights era, the Black working class and poor, whose labor as sharecroppers and domestic workers during Jim Crow became obsolete, were forced to confront a new set of social and economic maladies: deindustrialization, urban blight, mass incarceration, and heroine epidemics. Yet at the same time, the nascent Black middle class who benefitted from minority set aside programs, affirmative action, and foundation funded racial uplift programs emerged as the gatekeepers of Black politics. The consequence of Black politics becoming a predominately middle-class politics of elite management meant that the clarion call of the Black radicals, who from the earliest days of the American Republic fought against political lethargy, complacency, and collaboration with forces of Black oppression, was largely lost. Glen Ford, founding editor of Black Agenda Report, was one of the few exceptions to that rule.
Glen Ford was born in 1949 to two parents who had met as radicals in the post WWII era. Thus, he was exposed at an early age to people that did not simply fold under the weight of the status quo. Glen’s father was a storied Black media personality in Georgia, while his mother was a dedicated activist in all aspects of Black politics in New Jersey. Following their separation, Glen spent time with both parents mastering the respective skills of each. Indeed, Glen Ford soon became a noted radio and television personality in his own right, joining the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and subsequently living his life as an activist journalist.
The details of Glen Ford’s life are easily ascertained, but even accessing the facts of his many accomplishments distracts one from understanding what made Glen Ford so important to American society. Glen Ford was a journalist and thinker who was rooted in the tradition of Black radical analysis. Black radical analysis is the ability to look at the overall social and political reality of Black people. It is premised on understanding the forces of racial and economic antagonism that hinder that constituency’s emancipation. However, this is coupled with keen awareness of internal mechanisms, forces, structures, and individuals within the Black constituency which collaborate with the social, political, and economic establishment resulting in further subjugation of the larger masses of Black people. Such a realization may seem simple for many to fathom. Yet, the over-arching social consensus views Black people as a singular underclass without internal conflict or class stratification. Therefore, those who dare expose how internal social and ideological schisms among Black people facilitate ruling class subterfuge are not merely anomalous, but clearly exceptional. Some may ask, “What is particularly Black about this form of analysis?” I would respond that awareness of the social mechanisms within the Black constituency requires not only proximity to the constituency, but the capacity to have such analysis taken seriously by larger Black society without breeding the suspicion of it being created by racial antagonists. Does anyone believe that Black America would take kindly to the exposure of the limitations of the Black political class if they were mostly leveled by voices outside that community? Anyone who assumes as much does not realize how much ire and push back those who engage in Black radical analysis receive from those within the “community” who are blinded by the charade of racial kinship politics into believing most Black political actors work under unitary Black interest.
Glen Ford, starting at Black Commentator and eventually through Black Agenda Report, created a lexicon and analysis of the Black political class, the civil rights establishment, the Foundation/Philanthropy world, and the left flank of capital. He introduced a whole generation of online readers unfamiliar with such strident critiques to a deeper understanding of the type of neoliberal Black politics that became more common in the Obama age, while even Black activists and academics incorporated such analysis into their work. Before the regular publications of Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, and Margaret Kimberly one could only find such Black radical analysis in the books of a certain cadre of Black intellectuals and Black political scholars. Otherwise, one had to have personal access to the few Black radicals who kept such analysis alive during the fifty-year counter-revolution. What Glen Ford was able to do was take such trenchant analysis and popularize it. In doing so, consumers of online news media would begin to understand what was meant by terminology such as the “Black political class”, more notoriously, the “Black mis-leadership class.” At the same time, he was able to communicate the reality of the more cannibalistic neoliberal shift in American capitalism that took place during the post-civil rights era fifty-year counter-revolution. In short, he helped readers understand the disorienting waves of hyper privatization, de-unionization, gentrification, and public-school evisceration while such processes inflicted incalculable pain upon the laboring classes in general, and Black and Brown communities in particular.
In the area of foreign policy, Glen Ford and Black Agenda Report stood alone among online publications in keeping the spirit of Black internationalism and Pan-Africanism that was once a common fixture of Black thought alive. A nuanced analysis of almost every political and economic crisis that affected the global Black diaspora was a regular part of Glen Ford and Black Agenda Report’s weekly repertoire. Furthermore, challenging the exploits of American Empire in the Muslim word, Global South, and even Europe, was also well within the purview of Glen Ford and the Black Agenda Report crew. This level of global and domestic coverage made Glen Ford one of the most important journalists in an age when Black politics was sadly embracing the neoliberal turn in both economics and policy.
However, without a doubt the most important contribution of Glen Ford and Black Agenda Report was to strike a massive journalistic blow against the curated Black consensus that supported the trojan horse, Robert Rubin hatched presidency of Barack Obama. My personal affiliation with Black Agenda Report developed from watching Glen Ford eloquently explain how the Wall Street Manchurian Candidate Barack Obama represented a threat to Black politics and Black people unseen in the modern history of the republic. Ford and his coterie were viciously attacked for exposing what only became obvious after almost fifty percent of Black wealth evaporated under the stewardship of the Obama presidency without recourse.
Therefore, not only did Glen Ford provide a critical service to Black America as a journalist, but he also provided a massive service to the burgeoning new left that developed in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sander presidential campaign by having a journalistic record that challenged both the neoliberal Wall Street pawn Obama, and the whole corporate bought and paid for Democratic party establishment. The importance of Glen Ford to contemporary American journalism and political commentary cannot be overstated. In the wake of his passing, I can only consider myself fortunate to have personally experienced his wisdom and political education through regular phone conversations when I submitted articles. This, combined with the close friendship I developed with Bruce Dixon, made the work of Glen Ford and Black Agenda Report not only politically significant, but personally crucial to my development over more than ten years as a writer and political commentator. It is largely because of Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, Margaret Kimberley and Black Agenda Report that I have the foundation needed to engage in my own media project with Jason Myles on our show “THIS IS REVOLUTION PODCAST.” It actually gives me a sense of honor to think that in some way, the work of Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon, who have both transitioned, can live on in the political commentary I bring forth in my work. In this way I feel personally enriched by both these men who dedicated their lives to the betterment of humanity. I salute their memories and hope to only improve upon the standard they have set. They embodied some of the best of what America has to offer in terms of political commentary and thought. Let us all recognize the importance of Black radical analysis in light of their passing.
Pascal Robert is an essayist and political commentator whose work covers Black politics, global affairs, and Haitian politics. His work has appeared in the Washington Spectator, Black Commentator, Alternet, AllHipHop.com, and The Huffington Post. He is a regular contributor to the online publication Black Agenda Report and is the current co-host of the THIS IS REVOLUTION PODCAST, which is live streamed via Youtube and relevant social media on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9pm eastern standard time and Saturday’s at Noon. Pascal Robert is a graduate of Hofstra University and Boston University School of Law.
Although the Southern Poverty Law Center says it has alerted Amazon to sellers who sell hate group material, the company has not always been receptive to completely eliminating these sellers.
The report, “Delivering Hate: How Amazon’s Platforms Are Used to Spread White Supremacy, Anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia,” details a variety of ways that hate groups take advance of Amazon’s massive platforms and inconsistently enforced policies. Two advocacy groups ― Partnership for Working Families and Action Center on Race and the Economy ― compiled the study.
When asked about the report, Amazon referred HuffPost to its official guidelines, which prohibit the selling of “products that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views.”
But critics say that this policy often doesn’t reflect reality.
Amazon’s approximately 300 million active customers can encounter products that feature hate symbols and hateful language on Amazon Marketplace, which has allowed racist, Islamophobic, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic groups to sell merchandise.
The report found items for sale that included a costume of a lynching victim, a hangman’s noose decal, Nazi memorabilia and children’s toys featuring alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog.
We usually don’t call out our acquaintances and friends about their micro-aggressions towards us — probably because we know they’re fragile, and when we do correct them, there’s a large amount of white tears that fall and hit our shoes, shoes that are now soaked from the previous white person’s tears you just had a work meeting with.
When you think of a racist what pops in your mind? White supremacists? The KKK? You usually think of white people down south right? You know, the ones who have confederate flag bumper stickers, and hurl the N-word at Black people who cut them off while driving, or school districts that ban Black hairstyles. These folks are more of the poster children of racism.
I’m here to let you in on a little secret: You don’t need to write a resume for the new available seat in the Ku Klux Klan to be a racist. We’ve heard many times before that racism is taught, that it starts at home with our parents and caregivers. This is absolutely true, but racism is also in our school systems, the media, it even comes from the mouths of orange men running for president.
I’m sure your parents never actually said that you should cross the street when you see a black person walking on the same side walk as you, but you do it anyway because you’ve witnessed them do it. Or maybe you’ve seen hundreds of movies where the predator character was a black person, and over the years you took that theatrical scene into you’re reality, allowing your mind to swallow it whole.
Racism isn’t always angry and mean. I’s subtle, mild and, at times, friendly. It was your boss in that interview who was amazed at how intellectual you were, so amazed that he even prolonged the interview with concerning inquiries and assumptions:
“How did you manage to succeed in a low-income one parent household? Was it hard growing up without a father?”
It’s hopping on the train and seeing the sweet white lady scoot her belongings over and make room for a white person to sit down. Although five minutes ago you asked if the seat was taken, and she put on a Oscar-worthy performance about how sorry she is that it’s not available for your black body. Or the white friend who laughs and makes fun about racial stereotypes, but they insist its only a joke, to take them at their word, it’s not how they truly feel.
We usually don’t call out our acquaintances and friends about their micro-aggressions towards us — probably because we know they’re fragile, and when we do correct them, there’s a large amount of white tears that fall and hit our shoes, shoes that are now soaked from the previous white person’s tears you just had a work meeting with.
People of color are made to feel wrong and guilty when we voice our pain and correct our white counterparts. We avoid these racial stress related topics because the guilt you feel from hurting us, form into fear and anger. Instead of an apology, you defend your character and explain repeatedly how nice you are, you use your white tears as a weapon. Suddenly, a knife is pointed at me, and I’m the bad guy.
You’ve gone on and on for hours to tell me that I’ve hurt your feelings. Well, you know what? It’s a privilege to only get your feelings hurt after being called a racist, rather than experiencing racism itself.
We’ve been conditioned to think that racism and being a nice person can’t go hand and hand. We have to start realizing that racism is built in this society, it’s a dangerous and violent system that oppresses people of color in more ways than just a white supremacist group. You don’t have to wear a white hood and hate black people to play into stereotypes and racist undertones.
Yes, you’re a kind person — we all love your joyous smile — but one day, you’ll be confronted and have that talk with a black friend about an offensive status you wrote or that comment you made at dinner. Don’t start to defend your character or your intentions. Wipe your tears. You shouldn’t be the one hurting right now.
Don’t make this about you.
Don’t put your fear over my pain.
Don’t make my feelings less important than your anger.
While you’re still here, and still crying, I should also add that I don’t really appreciate your reaction to MY hurt feelings. Quite frankly, I find it to be abusive. To flip the script, shed tears, and make me feel horrible, horrible to the point where I lose focus on myself, (the person who’s truly offended), to comfort you.
My entire existence as a black person is to make white people comfortable, to coddle your feelings and never tell you that you’ve hurt me — the least you can do is apologize, take responsibility and own up to your offense, try harder, learn from this.
We’re not always aware of what we’re taking in from the world, but it influences our behavior and actions, regardless if we’re nice people. It doesn’t matter if the racism you endured was intentional or not, just know that racists don’t always appear as evil and violent. It’s inviting, it’s friendly, it’s simple, and at many times, it’s produced by the nicest of people.
One of the study’s authors, Harvard economist Sandhil Mullainathan, told the Washington Post, “Poverty is the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter. Picture yourself after an all-nighter. Being poor is like that every day.”
Poverty Has Same Effect On The Brain As Constantly Pulling All Nighters
The mental strain of living in poverty and thinking constantly about tight finances can drop a person’s IQ by as much as 13 percent, or about the equivalent of losing a night of sleep, according to a new study. It consumes so much mental energy that there is often little room to think about anything else, which leaves low-income people more susceptible to bad decisions.
One of the study’s authors, Harvard economist Sandhil Mullainathan, told the Washington Post, “Poverty is the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter. Picture yourself after an all-nighter. Being poor is like that every day.”
The researchers came to this conclusion after conducting two separate experiments. The first gave low- and moderate-income shoppers at a mall in New Jersey a number of tests that measure IQ and impulse control, but half of the participants were first given a question about finances: what they would do if they needed to make $1,500 worth of repairs on their car, putting financial concerns at the forefront of their minds. They found that it reduced cognitive performance among the poor participants but not those who are well-off.
The second experiment looked at the cognitive functions of farmers in India before the harvest, when they are poor, and after the harvest, when they have much more money. The same farmer performs lower on cognitive ability before than he does after — which researchers say “cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort” nor by stress. Instead, it appears to be poverty reducing their mental capacity.
A past study came to a similar conclusion: It found that scarcity can sap mental capacity and lead to short-term decision-making over long-term considerations.
Poverty has other negative impacts. The chronic stress of growing up in poverty has been found toimpair children’s brains, particularly in working memory. A study of veterans found that poverty is a bigger risk factor for mental illness than being exposed to warfare. The mental stress of being poor is also a major reason for why low-income people tend to have negative health outcomes like high blood pressure and cholesterol or elevated rates of obesity and diabetes.
Poverty takes its toll on health in a number of other critical ways: It prevents people from buying healthy food, makes people more likely to smoke, means they are more likely to live in areas with poor air quality, and can cause health problems that begin in the womb.
This week on OUR COMMON GROUND, we review and examine the truth about the policies and intent of the “War on Drugs”. We need to talk about the money making behind the politics; how the drug war can be considered slow Nazi policy on the poor and the racial profiling used. We look at these destructive and failed policy and manipulation in its historical context and destructive outcomes. We will present audio clips for our discussion which will assist us in understanding just how much the “War on Drugs” was really never about drugs.
For sheer government absurdity, the War on Drugs is hard to beat. After three decades of increasingly punitive policies, illicit drugs are more easily available, drug potencies are greater, drug killings are more common, and drug barons are richer than ever. The War on Drugs costs Washington more than the Commerce, Interior, and State departments combined – and it’s the one budget item whose growth is never questioned. A strangled court system, exploding prisons, and wasted lives push the cost beyond measure. What began as a flourish of campaign rhetoric in 1968 has grown into a monster. And while nobody claims that the War on Drugs is a success, nobody suggests an alternative. Because to do so, as Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders learned, is political suicide.
As a community we need to understand how Drug War fever has been escalated; who has benefited along the way; and how the mounting price in dollars, lives, and liberties has been willfully ignored. Where are the policy maker offices where each new stage was planned and executed? What happened in the streets where policies have produced bloody warfare. This is a tale of the nation run amok – in a way the American people are not yet ready to confront. Are you?
You are invited to bring your thoughts about the pressing issues facing our community. Come listen and learn. SHARE please.
OUR COMMON GROUND where friends come to confer with allies.
OCG 