Author: Ldavis0260

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February 21, 2022

     These are demoralizing days. For the last several weeks, we have been living with the threat of impending World War, as Putin escalates the number of troops surrounding Ukraine and lies about it. Black History Month has been marked by book bans and the prohibition of the very teaching of Black History.  Then, on Friday, we received a stark reminder that the quickest way to prove your “patriotism” in this country is to display utter contempt for Black people.

    How else can we explain the appalling performance of Judge Regina Chu in the sentencing of Kim Potter.  Potter, a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota veteran police officer was convicted of first and second degree manslaughter in the killing of 20 year old Daunte Wright over a traffic stop.  Judge Chu sentenced Potter to a mere two years, one third of the minimum recommended sentence for the crime that she committed. The Judge choked up while delivering a slap on the wrist to the officer who recklessly took Daunte Wright’s life. Clearly Judge Chu was more pained by the thought of imposing any accountability on Potter for killing  Daunte Wright, than by the loss suffered by Daunte’s mother, father and child, (Source:  “Family:  Judge in Potter case swayed by ‘white woman tears,’” by Steve Karnowski, Associated Press, abcnewsgo.com, 2/19/22).

     Potter’s light sentence can be seen as just the latest example of privileging white comfort over Black lives, but in truth, it is evidence of a much darker fact of American history.  For most of this country’s history there was simply no consequence for the taking of a Black person’s life.  For our first 244 years on this continent, we were considered property with no rights of our own.  After the Civil War, the brief glimmer of hope that we might flourish as equal citizens thanks to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments was extinguished by the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 and the passage of Jim Crow laws throughout the former Confederacy.

     It took nearly 100 years and murder of Black people and their white allies for Black people to gain the most basic of civil rights.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was only passed after the brutal assaults on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were broadcast on the evening news, (Source:  “How Selma’s Bloody Sunday Became A Turning Point in the Civil Rights Movement,” by Christopher Klein, History.com, 3/6/15, updated 7/18/20).  It took the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King to pass the Fair Housing Act in 1968, (Source:  “The Fair Housing Act was languishing in Congress.  Then Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed,” by DeNeen L. Brown, The Washington Post, 4/11/18).

     Despite purchasing a modest measure of equality through bloodshed, the backlash was immediate.  In 1968, Richard Nixon harnessed white fear and resentment to capture the presidency.  Nixon understood that many white Americans viewed civil rights for Black Americans as a “zero-sum equation, with African-American gains translating into white losses,” (Source:  “How Richard Nixon captured white rage— and laid the groundwork for Donald Trump,” by Scott Laderman, The Washington Post, 11/3/19).

    Republicans have used this strategy to secure electoral victory ever since, eroding more and more of the gains won in the movements for equal rights with each successive administration.  They know that the success of this approach depends upon keeping white Americans in a constant state of fear, anger and ignorance.  The erasure of actual American history is a linchpin of their strategy.  The summer of 2020 showed that exposure to the truth of how this country has treated its Black, indigenous, Latinx and Asian citizens galvanized a majority of Americans to take action to push for a more egalitarian society.

     The propaganda campaign we have witnessed in the last two years is the direct result.  It began with Trump’s Executive Order establishing a “1776 Commission” to rebut The 1619 Project, continued with Christopher Rufo’s assault on Critical Race Theory and has reached its crescendo in the proliferation of laws seeking to ban teaching about racism and bias.  The truth is, in the fight for a multicultural democracy, knowledge is our greatest weapon.  We can’t afford not  to use it.

#Runforschoolboard

#Buybannedbooks

#RedWine&Blue

January 30, 2022

      Knowledge exposes the lie.  Millions of Americans rock themselves to sleep each night with the fairy tale that their place at the top of the pyramid of American society is evidence of their intellect, their industriousness, of some innate, ineffable quality that makes them somehow “superior.”  Knowledge threatens that mind numbing illusion.  Small-minded, power hungry bigots know that, which is why we have seen an epidemic of book banning over the last several months.  

     It began with “The 1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah Jones’ brilliant recontextualization of American History through the lens of slavery and the persistent persecution of the descendants of the enslaved.  The attack on The 1619 Project failed to garner the reaction that right wing extremists were hoping for, so Christopher Rufo widened the attack to encompass Critical Race Theory.  It did not matter that CRT was a scholarly approach primarily taught in law schools (Source:  “Critical Race Theory:  A Brief History,” by Jacey Fortin, The New York Times, 11/8/21).  In Rufo’s hands, it became the label for teaching any books by or about Black people, leading to bans on books ranging from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” to a children’ s book about Ruby Bridges, the Black girl who had to be escorted by federal marshals in order to integrate a New Orleans public school.  This did the trick, igniting moral panic in suburban white women eager to “protect” their children from the knowledge of the harm that racism inflicts on children.  Republican Glenn Youngkin rode that panic straight into the Virginia Governor’s mansion, where he has wasted no time in further demagoguing the teaching of Black history, going as far as setting up a tip line to report teachers who dare to teach about racism, (Source:  “The Virginia Education Department Is Getting Flooded With Memes After Creating A Tip LineTo Report Schools Teaching About Racism,” by Steffi Cao, BuzzfeedNews.com, 1/27/22).

     The purpose of this ban is to bolster the belief that the position of Black people at the very bottom of the hierarchy is the natural order of things.  If Black History is banned, it can seem credible to the ignorant that Black  people’s position in society is a function of indolence, “deficient culture,” or disdain for education— their innate inferiority, if you will.  Knowledge exposes the lie.

    Teaching Black History would expose white Southern children to the fact that they owe the very existence of public education in the South to the activism of Black people, (Source:  “How former slaves established schools and educated their population after TheCivil War,” by Craig Chamberlain, Illinois News Bureau, 2/12/07).  During Reconstruction, emancipated Black people used their newfound political power to push for public schools open to all children, only to be segregated in under-resourced inferior schools after the establishment of Jim Crow.

     Teaching actual history might expose children to the fact the Brown v. Board of Education decision was the culmination of a decades’ long strategy engineered by Harvard trained lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, to dismantle segregated public education so that Black people could have access to the same education as white people, (Source:  “Charles Hamilton Houston,” by Stephen D. Jamar, Brown @50, law.Howard.edu).

      Reading books like Maus would show children how easily ordinary people can be complicit in evil.  It might cause some children to condemn those who chant, “Jews will not replace us,” and slow the alarming rise in Antisemitic vandalism, harassment and assaults, (Source:  “Antisemitism in the U.S.,”  ADL.org).

      Kids who learn history will know that the First Amendment of our Constitution bars the government from banning books with facts that make adults uncomfortable. Reading these uncomfortable facts might cause kids to ask tough questions about what they’ve been told.  It might foster empathy for folks who don’t look like them.

   The adults waging a crusade against so-called “woke history” and Critical Race Theory know that. Let’s face it, it isn’t their children’s innocence these folks are trying to protect.  It’s the illusion of their own.

December 31, 2021

      As this year draws to a close, it is tough to summon the characteristic optimism with which we usually turn the calendar page.  This has been a year of incalculable loss.  A loss of brilliant and prophetic Blackness, from bell hooks to Greg Tate to Desmond Tutu.  A loss of transcendent artistry and creativity from Cicely Tyson and Michael K. Williams to Chucky Thompson.  The words and the work and the beauty lives on, but we are left in a country awash in ugliness and anger, trying to chart a path forward with inconstant allies.  2021 has been a year of stasis, with one step forward and two steps back in the pandemic; where every gain has been stymied by selfishness.

     On January 6th, we were stripped of any illusion that the center of this republic would hold based on tradition, inertia or a widespread belief in the Constitutional principles of representative democracy.  We could no longer plausibly deny that for  a large percentage of our fellow Americans, our skin color or sexual identity rendered us stateless persons with no rights they were bound to respect.  To them, a President elected with our votes could never be a legitimate officeholder.

     The promise of the spring that vaccines would free us from the tyranny of Zoom cocktails and quarantine pods gave way to a summer of hopes dashed by Delta, aided by the obstinately ignorant, who placed their faith in quack cures or an egotistical faith in their “superior” immune systems.

     The institutions we relied upon to protect us consistently let us down.  They were ineffectual at best or actively malevolent at worst— from a Congress incapable of passing voting rights legislation or a spending bill that would truly help children and families, to a Supreme Court  recklessly undermining the Voting Rights Act or eagerly stripping women of their bodily autonomy.

    Evil seems to be flourishing unchecked.  Windows are closing on our chance to save democracy as state after state enacts a raft of legislation designed to entrench minority power — from laws restricting the franchise to those enabling a Republican minority to invalidate election results they don’t like.  Meanwhile, the CDC’s covid guidance seems more informed by the dictates of CEOs than the needs of public health.

    In the face of these daunting circumstances, it would be easy to give in to despair, but the truth is that acting as if there is no hope becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We still have agency and we can’t afford to squander it. Instead of looking to Washington to rescue us, recommit to focusing on your local school board elections, where hysteria over critical race theory has taken hold, to your local and state election administration, where the will of the people can be thwarted, and to your state legislatures that are busy passing all of these undemocratic laws.     Most importantly, honor those prophetic voices we lost this year and remember that love is a verb.  Real love requires action.  If you love your country or your people, you must act!  No other resolution counts.  Happy New Year!

November 20, 2021

    The most shocking thing is how unsurprised we are.  Given the all-white jury, the judge’s brazen misconduct and the coddling of a baby-faced killer, we all expected Kyle Rittenhouse to get away with murder.  When the verdict was announced, few of us could summon the raw outrage with which we greeted George Zimmerman’s acquittal, when we still had a faint glimmer of hope that justice could be done.  Now we’re just numb.  We are inured to the fact that killers are not held accountable for taking Black lives and have had to learn anew, that the lives of those who stand with us are not valued either.

     Some thought that a salient difference between George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse is that Rittenhouse’s victims were white. This facile observation ignores the long line of white accomplices from  Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and Viola Liuzzo; to Heather Heyer, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, whose uncompromising advocacy for Black lives cost them their own.

      Analysts have stated that Rittenhouse was acquitted because of the combination of the prosecution’s high burden of proof in self-defense cases and Wisconsin’s open carry law, (Source:  “When It Comes to Self Defense The Burden is Often On The Prosecution,” by Shaila Dewan and Mitch Smith, The New York Times,  11/19/21).  That is technically correct, but ignores the larger context.  Rittenhouse’s acquittal comes while we are in the midst of an extremist project to restore the pre-Civil Rights era status quo— where Black people were denied basic human rights and where no white man was ever held accountable for killing a person of color.  Back then, most white people were in one of two camps — those cowed into silence by the example of white martyrs and those all too happy to outsource rigid enforcement of the racial hierarchy to goons, cops and the Klan.

      The evidence is all around us, from the January 6th insurrection to white nationalist Congressman Paul Gosar circulating a doctored video which depicts him killing Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez.  This movement seeks nothing less than to maintain power and silence dissent through violence.  

    Yet this is hardly new.  As detailed in this recent piece in The Atlantic, “each time minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo,” (Source:  “America’s Most Destructive Habit,” by John S. Huntington and Lawrence Glassman, The Atlantic, 11/7/21).  Huntington and Glassman describe the current Trumpist movement as a “counterrevolutionary dynamic,” that has antecedents in the dismantling of Reconstruction and ensuing Jim Crow reign and the “mid-century fight against Civil Rights.”

     All three movements share “a hostility to racial equality;” a tendency to characterize proponents of equality as terrorists or Communists and then use that characterization to justify violence.  To add insult to injury, these conservative counterrevolutionaries then accuse the victims of their violence “of inciting it.”

We need to see the Rittenhouse trial and acquittal as a recruitment video, signaling to other extremists that not only won’t their violence be punished, but that it may be rewarded. These people have shown that they are willing to kill for whiteness. The question for the rest of us is, “What are we willing to live with?”

November 2, 2021

     We can feel complacency setting in.  Many of us treat the daily drumbeat of alarming stories of how close Trump and his supporters came to violently overthrowing our democracy, and of how committed they still are to doing so, as mere background noise.  Just last week, The Washington Post reported that John Eastman, the architect who wrote the blueprint for the coup attempt in his notorious memo sought to use the Capitol insurrection itself as a basis for stopping the peaceful transition of power, (Source: “During Jan. 6 riot, Trump attorney told Pence team the vice president’s inaction caused attack on Capitol,” by Josh Dawsey, Jacqueline Alemany, Jon Swaine and Emma Brown, The Washington Post, 10/29/21).  Eastman alleged that the fact that Pence displayed a scintilla of decency by allotting his time to shaken members of Congress to speak once Congress reconvened violated the Electoral Count Act by extending debate beyond the specified two hours (ibid).

     Thanks to a massive data dump by Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, we learned just how much Facebook chose “profits over safety,” and refused to take steps to stop the flow of incendiary misinformation because it might cost them money, (Source:  “Whistleblower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety,'” by Ryan Mac and Cecilia Kang, The New York Times, 10/27/21)[NB:  The irony of my posting this on Facebook is not lost on me].

      Worse still, there is plenty of evidence that those who favor a fascist coup remain a clear and present danger.  The calls for violence against Democrats are escalating, with “almost one in three Republicans believing that violence may be necessary to ‘save’ the country.”  Yet Washington remains stuck, thanks to the performative obstruction of Joe Manchin, who takes perverse pleasure in playing Lucy with the football to the Democrats’  Charlie Brown.

      Frustrated by the sameness of the story, cushioned by rising 401k values and a receding pandemic, millions of us simply tune out.  We can’t be bothered with writing postcards, let alone knocking on doors or hitting the streets.  Many don’t feel threatened, even as women scream that Texas’ S.B. 8 turns us into compulsory baby making machines. Even if we felt heartened by the Supreme Court’s spirited questioning during yesterday’s oral argument, we remember that the Mississippi law which bans abortions after 15 weeks is likely to be affirmed by a Supreme Court more offended by a threat to its supremacy than a threat to Americans’ humanity, (Source:  “The Architects of Texas Abortion Ban Overplayed Their Hand,” by Mark Joseph Stern, Slate.com, 11/1/21).

     Many sit on their hands, even as Black, Brown and Indigenous people, who delivered The White House and Congress to the Democrats, scream that widespread voter suppression is nothing less than the dismantling of democracy.  Many look at the paralysis in Congress and blame the Democrats, rather than the Republicans who prefer fascist cosplay to governing.

     In the face of all of this, the governor’s race in Virginia shouldn’t even be close, yet many are more alarmed at the idea of their fragile children reading the work of a Black woman Nobel laureate whose work dares to depict the horrors of slavery, than of elected officials who cozy up to those who traffic in lies and political violence, (Source:  “Glenn Youngkin Was a Traditional Republican.  Then He Became a Culture Warrior,” by Jeremy W. Peters, The New York Times, 10/29/21).

Those folks have made it clear to the rest of us. Cosseted by comfort, they feel no threat from the destruction of women’s reproductive rights or the civil rights of BIPOC and LGBTQ Americans. They don’t realize that when they’re done with us, there will be nobody left to stand up for them.

#Weareallwehave

#Arepublicifyoucankeepit

September 25, 2021

     As trouble mounts on every front, from a barbaric Texas law that deprives women of their bodily autonomy to a spate of laws in 18 states that deprive people of color of their right to vote, Democrats in Congress are tied up in Gordian knots of their own making. Hamstrung by fealty to fusty procedures and paralyzed by posturing moderates, they are incapable of even crafting a strategy to avert the government shutdown being engineered by nihilist Republicans.

     Despite the existential threats to our democracy posed by the relentless attacks on voting rights and election integrity, Congressional Democrats are unable to eliminate or even amend the filibuster. The party is hostage to the performative centrism of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are not only torpedoing voting rights legislation, but imperiling Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda by objecting to its $3.5 trillion dollar price tag.  Very few are pointing out the hypocrisy of objecting to spending $350 billion per year over ten years on programs that will help Americans and confront climate change, while not saying a word while the $768 billion National Defense Authorization Act covering one year, passes in the House by a margin of 316 -113.

Last Sunday, our hopes of including immigration reform in the reconciliation bill were dashed when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that “the policy change would far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation,”. (Source: “In A Blow to Democrats, Senate Official Blocks Immigration Reform In Budget Bill,” by Claudia Grisales, npr.org, 9/19/21). Given that the proposal was projected “to increase GDP by a cumulative total of $1.5 trillion over ten years and create 400,800 new jobs,” this seems like a political decision made by an unelected bureaucrat. Democrats expressed “disappointment” with the Parliamentarian’s decision, pretending they were powerless to overrule or fire her in order to create a path to citizenship for 8 million undocumented immigrants.

        Meanwhile, at the Southern border, a full fledged humanitarian crisis erupted, which only got uglier by the day.  Last week, we learned that the Biden Administration responded to an encampment of 15,000 Haitian migrants seeking refuge from their dangerously unstable country by announcing a plan to speed up deportations.  The administration shipped 500 migrants back to Haiti in the first 48 hours after announcing its plan, (Source: “Some Haitians at U.S. border released, others deported, as pressure builds on Biden,” by Diana Beth Solomon, Reuters.com, 9/22/21).

     The day after we learned of mass deportations, images emerged of white Border Patrol officers on horseback grabbing and berating Black Haitian migrants, while wielding their reins overhead like whips, (Source:  “Images of Border Patrol’s Treatment of Migrants Prompts Outrage,” by Eileen Sullivan and Zolan Kano-Youngs, The New York Times, 9/21/21).

     The violent anti-Blackness was so sickening that it prompted Daniel Foote, the U.S. envoy to Haiti, to resign.  Foote wrote a blistering resignation letter, stating ““I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the dangers posed by armed gangs in control of daily life.”

    Foote’s bracing moral clarity does not reckon with American complicity in that instability, but it is a welcome contrast to others in the administration who claim that Border Patrol depravity “is not who we are,” while packing planes to deport more Haitians in the middle of this crisis, (Source: “Biden Condemns Border Patrol Treatment of  Haitian Migrants as Expulsions Continue,” by Katie Rogers and Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, 9/24/21).  There is a marked contrast between the speed with which this administration relied on a reviled Trump era policy to deport Black migrants and its hesitation to pressure holdout Democrats to act to protect the Constitutional rights of Black citizens.  One has to ask – are Democrats more afraid of a truly representative multiracial democracy than of a takeover by fascist white supremacists?  All I can say is — actions speak louder than words.