Tag: civil rights

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Happy Independence Day

July 4, 2024

    No group of people have been more aware of the chasm between this country’s professed ideals and its ugly reality than Black Americans.  We know that many Americans define “freedom” as the freedom to exploit and harm others without consequence in pursuit of their selfish goals.  We know that American prosperity was built on the backs of our ancestors’ forced labor on land stolen from indigenous Americans. Yet we held out hope that we could use the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence as a cudgel to prod this country into recognizing that all people are “created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

     It was far from an inevitable march towards greater freedom and equality.  At every turn, progress by Black Americans was met with violent backlash, requiring us to gain, lose and regain the same rights that white Americans take for granted-  the right to vote, the right to a public education, the right to a job and the equal right to buy or rent a home and not to be blocked by the color of our skin.

     History is replete with examples of the viciousness that meets Black achievement, but rather than reckon with that history, those in power seek to erase it.  We have long warned those moderates who sit on the sidelines, unwilling to disturb the status quo, for fear of losing some unearned advantage, that the forces coming for us are greedy and won’t be satisfied with cementing Black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy.  These forces won’t stop until they have rolled back all of the gains of the last century, relegating all nonwhite people, all women and all LGBTQ people to powerless, disfavored status and leaving everyone without obscene wealth to lead “miserable lives of quiet desperation.”  

       As we know, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Just as Reconstruction begat Jim Crow, the backlash to eight years of a Barack Obama presidency was swift and brutal.  In 2016, Americans elected Barack Obama’s polar opposite— an incurious, insecure and corrupt vulgarian.  It was as if America plucked its lottery-winning racist grandpa from the American Legion bingo hall and installed him in the Oval Office.

     The results were as awful as many of us predicted.  From the child separation policy to his disastrous Covid response, Trump’s presidency caused real suffering and death.  Yet his most harmful legacy was his installation of three Supreme Court justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, creating a right wing wrecking ball empowered to eviscerate every law or policy that tried to level the playing field and create a more perfect union.

      Not satisfied with stripping bodily autonomy from all women two years ago in Dobbs, or cutting off ladders of opportunity for Black, Brown and indigenous students in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, this term the rogue right wing majority arrogated more power for itself than at any point since it decided Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

     First, in Loper Bright v, Raimondo, the Supreme Court struck down the 40 year old precedent of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, kneecapping federal agencies by eliminating the requirement that “if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute,” courts were required to “uphold the agency’s interpretation of a statute, as long as it as reasonable,” (Source: “ Supreme Court strikes down Chevron, curtailing power of federal agencies,” by Amy Howe, SCOTUSblog.com, 6/28/24).  After Loper Bright, six unelected zealots will be the ultimate arbiter of highly technical decisions that require specialized knowledge, despite not knowing the difference between nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, and nitrogen oxide, a pollutant regulated by the EPA.

     The worst and most consequential decision of the Term was handed down on Monday.  A mere three days ago, on the eve of the day the nation celebrates its independence from the British monarchy, the Court issued an opinion granting Trump 

partial immunity in the January 6th cases, holding that former presidents “can never be prosecuted for actions related to the core powers of their office,” and that they enjoy presumptive “immunity for their official acts,” (Source:  

“Justices rule Trump has some immunity from prosecution,” by Amy Howe, SCOTUSblog.com, 7/1/24).  As Justice Sotomayor pointed out in her scathing dissent, “no matter how you look at it, the majority’s official-acts immunity is utterly  indefensible.”  This decision exposes the right’s long vaunted veneration of originalism as nothing more than a convenient way to deny rights to anyone who was outside of the scope of the law’s protection in 1776.

        The decision is even more frightening when combined with the Heritage Foundation’s 900 page blueprint for the next Presidential administration. Project 2025 calls for the replacement of career civil servants with MAGA loyalists, the elimination of reproductive freedom for women, rights for LGBTQ people and any mention of diversity, equity and inclusion, (Source:  “Project 2025:  The Trump presidency wish list explained,” by Mike Wendling, BBC.com, 7/3/24). Make no mistake, the goal of Republicans is to make this country a “post-Constitutionalist” Christofascist hellscape for anyone who is not a straight, white, Christian man.

     Today, let us declare our independence from the thinking that women’s rights don’t affect men, that  LGBTQ rights don’t matter to straight  people, that stripping civil rights from Black people doesn’t affect white people.  The last eight years has shown us that they won’t stop.  Neither should we.  We need to mobilize, organize and vote like our lives depend on it—- because they do. Happy Independence Day! 

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Tick, tick…boom

December 6, 2021

     Baby-faced killers, banned books and forced birth.  As the news of the last week makes clear, this is the future that awaits if we don’t remove extremists from power.  Last Tuesday there was another harrowing school shooting in Oxford, Michigan.  The initial facts were devastating enough— a 15 year old armed with a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun, spraying 15 shots in five minutes, killing four beloved young people, injuring seven others and traumatizing countless more, (Source: “Key moments surrounding Michigan high school shooting,” by the Associated Press, APnews.com, 12/5/21).

      As the week wore on, the story only became more bizarre. We learned that the killer’s parents had purchased the murder weapon for him as an early Christmas gift at a Black Friday sale (Source:  ibid).  America has become a place where merchants of death tempt the violent with discounts on instruments of mass murder; where some parents’ twisted idea of love is to gift those guns to a child.

     When a visibly angry prosecutor announced that she planned not only to treat Ethan Crumbley like a Black child and charge him as an adult, but to charge his parents as well, the parents drained their bank account and skipped town. They fled to Detroit, no doubt imagining either that they could sneak across the river to Canada, or that the Black city was such a hotbed of criminality that no one would find them.  Instead they were captured late Friday night cowering in an empty commercial building (Source: “Dramatic Day Reveals Details About the Parents of a School Shooting Suspect,” by Sophie Kasakove and Susan Cooper Eastman, The New York Times, 12/5/21).  From our country’s steadfast refusal to regulate civilian ownership of weapons of war to the spectacle of parents who gleefully arm their troubled children and then abandon those children at the first whiff of accountability, the stench of American rot is inescapable.

      Stench, as Justice Sotomayor noted, was the only way to describe the odor from the contemptuous sophistry displayed by the six conservative Justices during Wednesday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.  Justice Kavanaugh cynically cited landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefells v. Hodges to disingenuously dismiss the argument that the Court should be bound by a precedent that has guaranteed women bodily autonomy for 50 years (Source:  “Majority of the court appears poised to roll back abortion rights,” by Amy Howe, Scotusblog.com,12/1/21).

      Amy Coney “Aunt Lydia” Barrett blithely ignored the fact that pregnancy itself carries serious medical risks and that the maternal mortality rate of Black women is  2.5 times that of white women, asking whether the “‘safe haven’ laws which allow parents to give up their newborns at designated safe places,” could serve as a substitute for women’s right to control their own bodies, (ibid).

     Chief Justice John Roberts, whose radicalism is tempered by his concern for the Court’s legitimacy, zeroed in on the viability standard in Roe v. Wade, asking why 15 weeks was not a sufficient amount of time for women to exercise reproductive choice, (ibid).

      While the high court’s conservatives were salivating over the prospect of giving the government control over the bodies of America’s women, in state after state Republicans were working feverishly to gain control of the minds of America’s kids.  From Texas to Virginia to Pennsylvania, rabid conservatives seek to ban authors from Toni Morrison to Alison Bechdel.   Radical conservatives are calling for the offending books to be burned and seek nothing less than the erasure of any knowledge of racism, Black history or the existence of LGBTQ people, (Source:  “U.S. libraries report spike in organized attempt to ban books in schools,” by Allison Flood, the guardian.com, 11/25/21).

       This is the current state of our country— awash in violence, ignorance and cruelty, full of people who seek to extinguish or erase anyone who is “different.”  Yet, like stubborn surfers, we mistake the preternatural calm before a tsunami for a permanent state.  We stand still at our own peril, thinking we won’t be drowned by the wave.  

#PasstheWomen’sHealthProtectionAct

#Eliminatethefilibuster 

#PasstheFreedomtoVoteAct

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We are the architects

June 17, 2020

      Toni Morrison famously said, “the function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” The unceasing onslaught of racist murders has distracted all 41 million Black Americans, who are forced, yet again, to concentrate all of our energy on just being allowed to live.  We are thrust, once again, into a familiar role, of an un-individuated mass, supplicating the powers that be to acknowledge our humanity.  In white Americans popular imagination, Black people exist as a binary— either noble and long suffering, or thugs.  There is no understanding of the human cost of requiring 41 million people, whose roots in this country predate the founding of the republic, to relitigate the question of whether we are American.

     People mistake their ignorance of Black achievement for its absence, failing to understand just how much they owe to the brilliance, persistence and resilience of Black people.  We have always had to literally provide both our brains and our bodies to garner greater freedom for the whole.The landmark decision holding that Title VII prohibits employment discrimination against LGBT people, handed down by the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. ___(S.Ct, 2020), would have been impossible if the 1963 March on Washington (and subsequent murder of four little Black girls in a Birmingham church) had not forced the hand of President Kennedy, and then President Johnson, to push for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, (Source: “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, kinginstitute.stanford.edu ).

      Few people know, however, that the March on Washington was the brainchild of A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, pioneering Civil Rights leaders who originally planned a March on Washington in 1941 to protest segregation in the defense industries. To head off the March, FDR signed an executive order desegregating the defense industries, but left segregation in the armed forces intact, (Source:  “African-American threaten march on Washington, 1941,” Global Nonviolent Action Database, nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu).

      Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is rightly celebrated as the “Thurgood Marshall of the women’s rights movement,” for her role in securing equal protection under the law for Americans, regardless of sex, but as RBG herself acknowledges, she relied on the doctrinal foundation built by the brilliant Dr. Pauli Murray, the queer Black lawyer, activist and minister, (Source: “The Dynamic Woman Who Shaped Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” by Meghan White, savingplaces.org).  Murray was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women with Betty Friedan and her scholarship was the basis not only for securing equal protection under the law for women, but for Black people as well.  Murray’s law professor, Spottswood Robinson, was part of the team that argued Brown vs. Board of Education.  Robinson used Murray’s law school paper outlining a basis for challenging Plessy v. Ferguson under the 13th and 14th Amendments, as a resource when developing the strategy in Brown, (Source: “The Many Lives of Pauli Murray,” by Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 4/10/17).

     When Black people are not forced to put our bodies in the service of our beliefs; when we are not consumed with grief over the unending list of Black people who become famous not for how they lived, but for how they died, we can provide the theoretical and organizational foundation for making this a more perfect union.  The truth is, Black people are the architects, not just the foot soldiers, of this nation’s freedom movements.  So thank us, and let us do our work.