Archive for the ‘Discrimination’ Category

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis Builds His Educational Petrie Dish

Tuesday, January 24th, 2023

I know it’s masochistic, but I couldn’t help it. I found myself thinking about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his all-out assault on education, specifically education about racism, Wokism (if that’s a word), the LGBTQ+ community, and anything else he doesn’t agree with.

I began my long and winding journey down the DeSantis rabbit hole when I learned that yesterday was the day in 1964 when South Dakota became the deciding and 38th state to ratify the 24th amendment to the US Constitution.

The 24th Amendment prohibits making the right to vote conditional on paying a poll tax, or any other kind of tax. It reads:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The 24th Amendment applied to Presidential and Congressional elections. Two years later, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes for any level of elections were unconstitutional. It said these violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Seven states never held a vote to ratify the Amendment. They are Wyoming, Arizona, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia. One state voted to reject the Amendment’s approval altogether. That was Mississippi. Mississippi again. The state seems to rejoice in being the bottom of the country’s bird cage.

Four states, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas, waited years to ratify the Amendment, with Texas being the last, in 2009.

If you don’t count Virginia, which enacted a poll tax in 1876, but repealed it six years later in 1882, Florida was the first state to make a poll tax a condition of voting, enacting the legislation in 1885. It became effective in 1889. In 1941, 52 years later, Florida repealed its poll tax.

Florida did not repeal the poll tax because its legislators were conscience-stricken and knew they had to do the right thing. No. The state repealed the tax because too many white legislative candidates (they were all white) were buying votes by paying the tax for poor black and white constituents (disproportionately black, of course) who couldn’t afford it themselves. In essence, the tax was no longer doing what it was intended to do: suppress black votes.

Florida had two other legislatively approved ways to suppress black voting. The first was the Literacy test. According to the Tampa Bay Times:

In 1915, the Legislature enacted a literacy test along with a companion grandfather clause. The clause, common throughout the South, declared that any person who had a relative who voted prior to a certain date did not have to take the test.

According to the proposed Florida law, if you had a relative who was eligible to vote on Jan. 1, 1867, you were exempt from taking the test. Since no black Floridian was voting prior to that date, all of them had to pass the test.

Blacks were frequently asked more technical and legal questions than whites. When one black applicant was asked what “habeas corpus” meant, he responded: “Habeas corpus means this black man ain’t gonna register today.”

The final way the legislature held down, disenfranchised, the black vote in Florida was by means of the Criminal Disenfranchisement Law. This law, first enacted in 1868, reenacted in 1968, and in effect even today, bars anyone with a felony conviction from ever voting. Florida is one of seven states that still retain this disenfranchisement statute, which disproportionately affects blacks.*

Disproportionate imprisonment of blacks is not something peculiar to Florida. Nationwide, according to Bureau of Justice data, 18 and 19-year-old black men are 12.4 times more likely to be imprisoned than their white peers. And it doesn’t get much better as blacks age, as the chart below shows.

With this as background (and here are 24 more charts showing pervasive racism directed at blacks), Governor DeSantis insists there is no such thing as institutional racism, especially in Florida. And he’s gone to great lengths to make sure anyone in Florida who suggests otherwise will require divine intervention to escape punishment.

Ask Andrew Warren. Last August, DeSantis suspended Warren, the twice-elected Hillsborough County State Attorney, saying he violated his oath of office and has been soft on crime (Remarkably, Florida’s Governor has the legislative authority to do this). What had Warren done? Nothing, except for signing a group statement with other prosecutors saying “we decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions.” In other words, Warren was suspended, not for something he did, but for something he said he might do at some time in the future.

Warren sued to get his job back. Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that, although DeSantis violated the Florida Constitution and the First Amendment, he lacked the power to reinstate Warren. In his 53-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, while grudgingly dismissing the case, excoriated DeSantis and his staff for attacking Warren for purely political reasons. Nonetheless, DeSantis won, which is usually the way things work in Florida.

And now, as we are smack dab in the second day of “Florida Literacy Week,” comes the Florida Department of Education’s new rules to enforce the Governor’s Parental Rights In Education Act, known by critics as “Don’t Say Gay” or the Stop WOKE Act and Florida law 1467, the Curriculum Transparency Law, which requires school districts to be transparent in the selection of instructional materials and library and reading materials.

Taken together, these two statutes limit what teachers can teach and what their students can read.

The two statutes are supposed to apply to what goes on in the classroom. Consequently, in federal court filings, lawyers representing DeSantis insist  the statutes do not apply to library books. In practice the opposite is true. A recent 23-slide librarian training program, approved by the Florida Department of Education, asserts: “There is some overlap between the selection criteria for instructional and library materials.” One slide says that library books and teacher instructional materials cannot include “unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination.”

Good luck trying to understand what an “unsolicited theory” is, or what “student indoctrination” means. Indoctrination into what?

The rules are confusing for librarians, but they’re even murkier for classroom teachers, many of whom have created little classroom libraries over the years of their teaching. The Department of Education’s new rules require “media specialists” to vet every one of the non-curriculum  books teachers may have in their classrooms, as well as all the books in the school libraries. In Florida, some school librarians earn “media specialist certificates.” These are the “media specialists” tasked with vetting all the books in Florida’s 4,202 K-12 public schools. In Popular Information, Judd Legum reports that Kevin Chapman, the Chief of Staff for the Manatee County School District, told him that County principals told teachers last week they are subject to a third-class felony charge if unvetted books in their classrooms are deemed to violate the prohibitions contained in either of the two statutes.

Needless to say, those little classroom libraries are disappearing faster than the small piece of meat I dropped on the kitchen floor this morning right in front of my 80-pound dog, Lancelot (so named because he’s not Lance-a-little).

Florida law 1467 on Curriculum Transparency is particularly pernicious, because it prohibits teachers from exercising their own educated judgement regarding what is appropriate for their particular students. For Florida’s teachers, this is scary stuff. They are going to have to be very careful with what they say, or even suggest, in their classrooms.

Some teachers, perhaps many, will refuse to give up their intellectual freedom. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. As George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

Nevertheless, it seems Governor Ron DeSantis has achieved in Florida what all autocrats crave. He has brazenly fastened iron bonds on what the next and future generations of Floridians are allowed to know. To my mind, he has also underestimated the youth of his state whose intelligence, curiosity, global involvement, and just plain desire to know and learn cannot and will not be inhibited by anything an autocratic governor, whose overarching goal in life is to rule the world, will ever do.

My money’s on the kids.

_________________

*Angela Behrens, Christopher Uggen, and Jeff Manza, Ballot Manipulation and the “Menace of Negro Domination”: Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850-2002, 109 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 559 (2003).

 

 

Racism In America: The Road To The New Jim Crow Runs Along The School To Prison Pipeline

Thursday, September 29th, 2022

The story of mass incarceration in America is bigger than American jails and prisons, even with their two million captives. And it’s bigger than probation and parole, even with the five million people held in the prison of their homes through ankle bracelets, weekly drug tests and GPS technology.

Thus, Reuben Jonathan Miller writes in the Introduction to his book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, published by Little, Brown and Company in 2021.

Today, 19.6 million people live with a felony record, four times the size of the population on probation and parole and ten times the size of the American prison census. One-third of those people are Black. More impressive is that one-third of currently living Black American men have felony records.  Think about that for a moment. And then ponder that the number of Black women behind bars is eight times greater today than in 1980.

Since the early 1970s, we have been incrementally putting Black Americans in a crime box. Today, as Miller writes, “An entire class of people are presumed guilty of some unspecified crime long before they break a law.” Does the phrase, “Driving while Black” ring a bell?

This week, in a new study from the National Registry of Exonerations, we learn Black Americans are seven times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of serious crimes, and spend longer in prison before exoneration.

The study examined defendants who were exonerated after serving at least part of a sentence — sometimes spending decades in prison. From the study’s findings:

  • Black people represent 13.6% of the American population, but account for 53% of 3,200 exonerations in the registry as of Aug. 8, 2022;
  • Innocent Black Americans were 7½ times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people; and,
  • The convictions that led to murder exonerations of Black defendants were almost 50% more likely to include misconduct by police officers.

Most of those long-serving Black defendants were exonerated by a handful of big city prosecutorial conviction integrity units (CIUs). It appears they have only scratched the surface.

How did this happen? One reason is because of the well-maintained “school to prison pipeline.”

Beginning in the 1970s, educators figured out that kids acting out in school could seriously disrupt learning for their classmates. What to do? The answer? Suspend them. And that’s what happened. It started with a trickle that slowly turned into Niagara Falls. And the kids most often suspended were Black, followed by Latino.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, which last year ordered school districts to respond to student misbehavior in “fair, non-discriminatory, and effective” ways, Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than White students, while Black and Latino students account for 70 percent of police referrals.

The bias—racism—starts young. Black children represent 18 percent of pre-school students, but account for 48 percent of pre-school suspensions. Yes, we’re talking about 4-year-olds. Also, students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended than their non-disabled peers, and LGBT students are 1.4 times more likely to face suspension than their straight peers.

According to the National Education Association,

According to research, Black students do not “act out” in class more frequently than their White peers. But Black students are more likely to be sent to the principal’s office for subjective offenses, like “disrupting class,” and they’re more likely to be sent there by White teachers, according to Kirwan Institute research on implicit bias. (White students, on the other hand, are more likely to be suspended for objective offenses, like drug possession.)

The Kirwan Institute blames “cultural deficit thinking,” which leads educators to “harbor negative assumptions about the ability, aspirations, and work ethic of these students—especially poor students of color—based on the assumption that they and their families do not value education.” These racist perceptions create a stereotype that students of color are disrespectful and disruptive, which zero tolerance policies exploit.

You can follow all this like a bright red rope in the snow. For some kids, Black especially, going to school leads to suspensions, which leads to staying out of school, which leads to questionable behavior, which leads to incarceration, which leads to a wasted life.

The Kirwan Institute calls this “implicit bias.” I call it implicit racism.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Many educators now realize they have been feeding the lion, rather than helping the student. In Colorado, for example a new law restricting the use of suspensions and expulsions has resulted in suspensions falling by 25 percent, while school attendance and punctuality have improved by 30 percent.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County Education Association, the superintendent and teachers put together a new student code of conduct that minimizes suspensions and allows students to learn from their mistakes. Meanwhile, other districts have signed “memorandums of understanding” with local law enforcement agencies that keep minor offenders out of criminal courts.

This represents progress, but progress only in a few places. The national school to prison pipeline still runs strong. And there is resistance to shutting it down.

Consider the tremendous efforts underway in red states to tamp down, even eliminate, discussion of race in schools. A bizarre and almost unbelievable one comes from Florida where, in April, Governor Ron DeSantis’s Education Department banned (they say “rejected”) 54 math textbooks, out of 132 submitted by publishers for the next school year. According to the  Department of Education, 26 of those math textbooks were rejected because they contained “prohibited topics,” including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). 2+2 = Racism?

CRT is a graduate-level academic framework which explores “laws, policies, and procedures that function to produce racial inequality.” This is sometimes referred to as “structural racism.” It is not something you typically find discussed in a K-12 math textbook. In fact, it’s not typically addressed in K-12 at all.

Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran said the math textbooks were rejected because children deserve “a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts in our classrooms.” The Department’s announcement, showed how much DeSantis controls things when it included this quote from him: “It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students.” Wow! I had no idea math could be so divisive. Stupid me.

The Department’s announcement also carried this jewel:

“We’re going to ensure that Florida has the highest-quality instructional materials aligned to our nationally-recognized standards,” said Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran. “Florida has become a national leader in education under the vision and leadership of Governor DeSantis. When it comes to education, other states continue to follow Florida’s lead as we continue to reinforce parents’ rights by focusing on providing their children with a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts in our classrooms.”

“Nationally recognized standards?” “National leader in education?” “World-class education?” This proved too big to resist.

Intelligent.com publishes annual state rankings of K-12 education drawing upon key metrics related to performance, safety, community, investment, class size, and attendance for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Where does “national leader” Florida rank in the latest analysis? Smack dab in the middle of the pack. Number 27 in academic performance and number 25 in overall performance. In no area does Florida rank in either the top five or the bottom five. That is the definition of mediocre.

I’m happy to say that my Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which DeSantis considers a socialistic state, ranked Number 1 in the latest rankings.

One last point about those math textbooks banned in Florida. Judd Legum and his team at Popular Information, a site with which I am becoming fonder by the day, bought the banned books and read them all. Try as he and his team might, they could find nothing objectionable in any of them. I mean, it’s math!

Once again, Governor DeSantis flexes his imagined Popeye muscles to push his personal, ambitiously political agenda rather than  objective truth. Meanwhile, the school to prison pipeline remains alive and well and continues to throw Black kids off the educational cliff into the oblivion below.

While we feel great empathy and sympathy for our fellow citizens weathering Hurricane Ian in FLorida, the DeSantis paranoia about any of Florida’s children learning about and actually studying the history of racism right up to the present jacks us back into a more sophisticated, but still real, still deadly, Jim Crow South.

 

 

 

 

The Sunshine State Goes Darth Vader Dark

Saturday, April 23rd, 2022

In 1967, 55 years ago, the Walt Disney World Company proposed building a recreation-oriented development on 25,000 acres of property in Central Florida. The property sat in a remote area of Orange and Osceola Counties, so secluded that the nearest power and water lines were 10-15 miles away. Neither Orange nor Osceola County had the services or the resources needed to bring the project to life.

In that year, the Florida State legislature created a special taxing district for Disneycalled the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID)that would act with the same authority and responsibility as a county government.

Walt Disney World then moved ahead with its vision to turn 38.5 square miles of largely uninhabited pasture and swamp land, into a global destination resort that today hosts millions of visitors every year.

The Special Taxing District designation gave the Disney company significant tax benefits amounting to tens of millions of dollars every year. However, those special tax benefits came with special upkeep responsibilities.

The new legislation said Walt Disney World would be solely responsible for paying the cost of providing typical municipal services like power, water, roads, fire protection etc.

Local taxpayers, meaning residents of Orange and Osceola County, would not have to pay for building or maintaining those services.

That all changed yesterday when Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation revoking Disney’s Special Taxing District designation. Now, Disney will be paying taxes it did not up to now have to pay. It will also be relieved of having to  provide the municipal maintenance services it has provided for the last 55 years for Orange and Osceola Counties, whose combined population is about 1.8 million. With Disney and its 80,000 Floridian employees no longer picking up the bill, the responsibility for all those municipal services, including Police and Fire, now falls to the counties. Property taxes (the way municipalities raise revenue in Florida) will  increase substantially.

Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings is worried. “My primary concern is about any particular cost shifts that are mandated by the state to local governments,” he said in an interview with Orlando’s News 6. He should be worried.

Digging deeper, Sarah Rumpf of Mediaite notes repealing Disney’s status means that Orange and Osceola Counties, in addition to municipal services, are now responsible for Disney’s $2 billion bond debt—a 20% to 25% tax hike costing $2,200 to $2,800 per family of four. And if that’s not enough, since Disney’s RCID pays more and has better employee benefits than the Florida government, county workers taking on the jobs currently performed by Disney will likely have to take pay and benefit cuts. Yikes!

In another little twist, since both counties voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Machiavellian DeSantis has found a new and improved way to stick it to opponents.

The creation, passage, signing and enactment of this legislation happened in four days.

The question is Why? Why all this political steamrolling? The answer is because Governor DeSantis, who brooks less dissent than Caligula, is upset because Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek had the daring temerity to criticize what has come to be known as the Governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Chapek even went so far as to apologize to his 80,000 employees for not condemning the bill earlier and more strongly.

The bill, officially known as the Parental Rights in Education bill, would ban classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade; lessons on those topics in other grades would be prohibited unless they are “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate,” a vague threshold, indeed. And parents would be allowed to sue over violations. It doesn’t take the Oracle of Delphi to see where this is headed.

The “Don’t Say Gay” bill is DeSantis throwing seasoned red meat to his right-wing carnivores in Florida. It is DeSantis showing his many followers exactly what he thinks of the LGBTQ+ population. It is discriminatory and downright bigoted. But in Florida, it resonates, and the Governor’s lapdog legislature is happy to walk three paces behind carrying the bags.

In the immortal words of that great American salesman and inventor Ron Pompeo, “But wait. There’s more!”

In response to the 2020 census, the Florida legislature was required to draw up new legislative maps. It did, and the gerrymandered result gave Florida Republicans a guarantee of two additional seats in the US Congress. However, this was not good enough for Governor DeSantis, who created his own maps, which guaranteed four additional seats. In DeSantis’s version, Republicans would be expected to win 20 of the state’s 28 congressional districts, a four seat increase from the 16 they hold now. The Republican-dominated Legislature, in happy subservience, approved the Governor’s maps, which he signed into law three days ago. In addition to giving the Republicans four more seats, the new maps eliminate two currently held by Black Democrats, one of whom is Val Demings, who is challenging Marco Rubio in next year’s senate election. In the game of Pool, we’d call this an Elegant Combination.

The map is expected to draw a near-immediate court challenge from Democratic-aligned groups that contend the proposal violates federal and state law because it dismantles and diminishes those two seats currently held by the Black Democrats. Recognizing Democrats would challenge in court the new maps, Republicans, planning ahead, even included in the final bill $1 million to pay for that fight. Trouble is, it’s not clear if that legal battle can be resolved before June, when candidates must qualify for the ballot.

If all this were real warfare instead of the political kind, we would say Governor DeSantis and his Republican army had just won a Battle of Annihilation.

 

 

 

 

 

Last Week Today: Mr. & Mrs. Thomas, Cory Booker’s Sermon, And The Loss Of A Titan

Saturday, March 26th, 2022

Last week was a crazy week in America. Trying to sum it up requires leaving out much. This column is a bit long, but its tragedy is there was not enough space to wax eloquent about the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Go Peacocks!

At home with the Thomases

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni have made more news in the last week than either of them has in the last ten years.

First, the Justice was admitted to hospital a week ago for an infection with flu-like symptoms (which were not Covid-19). In and of itself this was big news, especially with the backdrop of this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the soon-to-be-vacated seat of Stephen Breyer. Thomas was released on Friday, and is apparently healthy again, which makes many people happy and many others not so much.

Next, the Supreme Court released an 8 to1 decision on Thursday in which Justice Thomas spent 23 pages of a 60 page ruling in a dissent involving a condemned man in Texas who filed a motion to have his pastor present, “laying on hands” as he prayed over him in the death chamber. Twenty-three pages of “No.”

Finally, on Thursday night there was the bombshell story broken by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of Ginni Thomas’s involvement in the attempts to overthrow the results of the presidential election to keep Donald Trump in power.

Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had turned over a trove of emails and texts to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection (Meadows has since stopped cooperating with the Committee). Among the texts were 29 back and forths between him  and Ginni Thomas — 21 sent by her, eight by him. Typical of the lot was this one from Thomas:

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

In her texts, Mrs. Thomas was disparaging of Vice President Mike Pence (“We are living through what feels like the end of America. Most of us are disgusted with the VP…”) and complimentary of Sidney Powell, the attorney who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, and who led the “stop the steal” legal team, along with with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, and John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the eight-point plan by which he asserted Republicans could keep Trump in power. Of Powell, Mrs. Thomas wrote she should be “the lead and the face” of the battle. Thomas wrote, “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

This story will develop further in the coming days; there is no way it couldn’t. It cannot prove anything but awkward for Justice Thomas, especially when one considers that the Supreme Court will, as it already has, inevitably hear cases stemming from the insurrection. Thus far, Thomas has refused to recuse himself from these cases. Continuing that refusal would be saying to the American public, as well as to his Supreme Court fellow Justices, that, while he may have had knowledge of his wife’s intimate involvement with the attempt to overturn the election and keep Trump in power, they did not discuss it in any husband and wife interplay and her profoundly strong views about the election never influenced his thoroughly impartial decisions.

Perhaps. Mrs. Thomas recently told the Free Beacon,“But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Right. Perhaps.

Cory Booker’s paean

As any rational person knew it would, this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court had some predictable moments. We knew that certain Republican senators on the committee would take the national TV spotlight as an opportunity to demonstrate the fine art of political grandstanding. We were not disappointed. In fact, Senators Cruz, Hawley, Blackburn, Graham and Cotton exceeded our wildest expectations. The disrespect, utter poor taste, condescension, outright misogyny, and, let’s face it, naked racism on display by these five, while probably greeted with applause in their MAGA base, showed them for the woeful human beings they really are. That Judge Jackson took it all with grace and dignity, while responding cogently to their dog-whistle “questions” and sanctimonious, self-righteous speeches with exponentially more intelligence than they exhibited, was a credit to her beyond anything her cynical detractors could imagine.

But toward the end of the inquisition of the fifth female, and the first black female, ever nominated to the nation’s highest court, Senator Cory Booker’s turn came. He was fifth from the end of the ordeal. At that point, questions didn’t matter. Like an old time gospel preacher, he delivered a sermon on racial progress that reduced the hypocritical Torquemadas to burnt ash. Booker told Jackson:

“Your family and you speak to service, service, service. And I’m telling you right now, I’m not letting anybody in the Senate steal my joy. … I just look at you, and I start getting full of emotion.

“And you did not get there because of some left-wing agenda. You didn’t get here because of some ‘dark money’ groups. You got here how every Black woman in America who’s gotten anywhere has done. By being, like Ginger Rogers said, ‘I did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards, in heels.’ And so I’m just sitting here saying nobody’s stealing my joy. Nobody is going to make me angry.”

I want to tell you, when I look at you, this is why I get emotional. I’m sorry, you’re a person that is so much more than your race and gender. You’re a Christian. You’re a mom. It’s hard for me not to look at you and not see my mom. I see my ancestors and yours. You faced insults here that were shocking to me. Nobody’s taking this away from me.  Republicans are gonna accuse you of this and that. But don’t worry, my sister. Don’t worry. God has got you. And how do I know that? Because you’re here, and I know what it’s taken for you to sit in that seat. You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.

This was an emotional moment that broke through Judge Jackson’s week-long, iron-like wall of rectitude.

With the conservative bent of the current Supreme Court, it is a given that Judge Jackson’s presence won’t change much. But you never know. Over time, things can change.

The loss of Madeleine Albright

Speaking of formidable women, the nation has lost a great one.

As the first female U.S. Secretary of State and one of the few women in leadership on the global stage during the 1990s, Madeleine Albright — who died Wednesday at the age of 84 — stood firm against dictators and tyrants from the Balkans to Haiti to Rwanda.

Throughout her life, she demonstrated a steadfast belief that democracy would triumph over authoritarianism and that the United States had to lead for it to happen.

Born in Czechoslovakia just before World War II, she came to the United States at age 11 as a refugee from the Nazis and communism and graduated from Wellesley College in 1959. After her twins were born prematurely, she learned Russian staying in the hospital with them. She knew Russian would come in handy later in life. She earned a doctorate in government from Columbia University in 1976, and at the age of 39 reentered the workforce, having been shut out for many years prior due to the sin of being a woman. She always advised other working moms that “women have to work twice as hard.”

She joined the Clinton administration as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, and in 1997 she became the first woman ever to be Secretary of State.

She was an ardent defender of democracy; her time in Czechoslovakia gave her a first hand look at what the other side was like, the other side that is now doing all in its power to eliminate an entire country of 44 million people. Her final Book Fascism: A Warning is exactly that, a warning we had best heed.

Madeleine Albright will be missed — Greatly.

 

How Far We Must Go

Wednesday, April 21st, 2021

In 1675, the first and one of the deadliest wars ever fought on what is now American soil began. Fifty-six years after the sailing of the Mayflower, the tenuous Native American-Puritan bonds, built with careful distrust, burst asunder with disastrous results for everyone.

In 1616, European traders had brought yellow fever to Wampanoag territory, which covered present day Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. The epidemic wiped out two-thirds of the entire Wampanoag Nation (estimated at 45,000 at the time). So, when the first batch of Puritans landed in 1619, Massasoit, Sachem of the Wampanoags, was on high alert. He waited until 1621 to meet the new immigrants, and then forged a guarded relationship between his people and theirs. In late-March, 1621, he and Governor John Carver signed the Wampanoag-Pilgrim Treaty. In the Treaty the two peoples agreed to do no harm to each other, to come to each other’s aid if attacked by third parties and to have equal jurisdiction over offenders: if a Wampanoag broke the peace, he would be sent to Plymouth for punishment; if a colonist broke the law, he would be sent to the Wampanoags. In addition, the Wampanoag leaders agreed to tell neighboring indigenous nations about the treaty.

For fifty years, the entente, occasionally fraying, held. But as more and more English immigrants arrived with weapons native Americans had never seen, and as the new immigrants began asserting themselves more and more over the indigenous nations, it became a when, not an if, a war would break out.

When Massasoit died in 1665, his son Philip became Sachem. Philip had few of his father’s diplomatic skills, and his people were becoming more and more angry at the dictatorial actions taken by the white people. After three of his trusted lieutenants were executed by the pilgrims in a woeful miscarriage of justice, Philip had no choice but to go to war if he wished to remain in power. In 1675, he did just that.

King Philip’s war brought tragic consequences for all. As so often happens, the white settlers of Plymouth Colony grossly underestimated the tactical skill of the warring indigenous nations, but in the end European firepower won out. Before the war, historians estimate about 80,000 people lived in New England. Nine-thousand died during the fourteen months of King Philip’s War, more than 10% of the total population. Proportionately, that’s more than in both the Civil War and the Revolution. One-third of the towns in New England lay in ashes, farms were abandoned and the fields lay fallow. Philip was hunted down in Rhode Island’s Misery Swamp and killed. His body was quartered and pieces hung from trees. The man who killed him, John Alderman, sold his severed head to Plymouth Colony authorities for 30 shillings.

And so we come to war’s end in 1676, and Josiah Winslow, the governor of Plymouth Colony, had a problem. Namely, what to do with hundreds of native Americans—surviving leaders of King Philip’s War and their families.

Winslow decided to get rid of them by loading them all, including Philip’s wife and nine-year-old son, onto several ships bound for the Caribbean, one of which, ironically, named Seaflower.

As Nathaniel Philbrick writes in his masterful Mayflower (Viking Penguin, 2007):

In a certificate bearing his official seal, Winslow explained that these Native men, women and children had joined in an uprising against the colony and were guilty of “many notorious and execrable murders, killings and outrages.” As a consequence, these “heathen malefactors” had been condemned to “perpetual slavery.”

Thus, joining Rome and other ancient societies, our white ancestor enslaved a conquered people.

Yesterday, 345 years after the Seaflower sailed from Plymouth harbor, a jury of his peers, a diverse jury, convicted Derek Chauvin on all three counts of murder in the death of George Floyd. What struck me most, the image that cannot be unseen, is the smirk on Chauvin’s face as he kneeled the life out of a man who did not look like him. I imagine it to be the same look Governor Winslow had on his face as he signed the certificate condemning hundreds of indigenous people, who did not look like him, into perpetual slavery.

How far we’ve come. How much, much farther we must go.

 

If Not For The Water: Georgia’s Stick In The Eye Of Democracy

Monday, April 5th, 2021

Major League Baseball and Major League Corporations are turning on the state of Georgia. The baseball All-Star game, originally scheduled for Atlanta’s Truist Park in July, is picking up its bats, balls and gloves and heading somewhere else, depriving the stadium of more than 43,000 fans and all the money they bring with them.

This, of course, is due to the Georgia Election Integrity Act, a 98-page, nearly 2,500-line piece of legislation signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp a week ago Friday behind locked doors in the presence of nobody but six older white guys and a painting of Calloway Plantation. None of the more than 100 people the Calloways enslaved are pictured in the painting. In addition to MLB, the Coca Cola and Delta Airlines corporations, headquartered in Georgia, sharply criticized what they considered terrible voter suppression by the majority Republican legislature.

Coca Cola and Delta did not stand alone. The following major corporations have issued sharply condemnatory statements: Merck, Porsche’s North American operations, headquartered in Georgia, Georgia-based UPS, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft President Brad Smith, Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, Home Depot, headquartered in Georgia, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, American Express, Facebook, and Viacom CBS.

Texas, a few states to the west of Georgia, appears ready to pass similar legislation, prompting American Airlines and Dell, both based there, to issue similar strongly worded rebukes before any legislation has been voted and enacted. Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he will sign the legislation when, not if, it reaches his desk. And Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, the powerful Senate leader, slamming the corporations’ criticism, said, “Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy.”

As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states, according the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting legislation around the country. Arizona, alone, has 23 in the hopper.

It seems that the irresistible force is about to meet the immovable object as corporate America issues a ringing indictment of what it considers perfidious attempts by red states to restrict voting rights. What caused this immediate and strong opposition? MLB traditionally takes a long time to decide anything, let alone a law about voting.

I submit it has everything to do with water.

More than half of the Georgia Election Integrity Act deals with absentee and early voting. Reading those parts is like trying to negotiate the Labyrinth without Theseus’s ball of twine. However, there is one, immediately understandable sentence found on page 73, a section of which reads:

No person shall…offer to give…any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector…within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.

Violation of this section is a crime, albeit a misdemeanor.

The state of Georgia holds primary elections during or near summer. Summer is hot in Georgia, and the state is the seventh most humid in the country. Voting lines can be long in Georgia, and will be longer now due to the new law decreasing voting places and limiting drop boxes to either one per county or one per 100,000 people, whichever is smaller. People standing in long lines in the summer heat will get thirsty. Perhaps they will not have brought water with them. The urge to give a drink of water to a thirsty person in a long line in the Georgia heat is something very human, very Christian. What is neither human nor Christian is having to do so by putting the drink on a 26 foot pole.

This is the one thing that got America’s immediate attention, one person in particular: the President of the United States, who, during his first press conference, called it “sick.” Nielson reports 32 million people watched him live.

Biden calling out the provisions dealing with absentee ballots or early voting would have left many saying, “Well that’s a matter of opinion. He’s a Democrat, so, of course, he’ll criticize a new law Republicans wrote.”

But there’s no “matter of opinion” about the water. It’s a Black and White thing (the whole law is, but this part is special). If Georgia’s Republican legislators had told the genius who came up with it, “Now, hold on, son, we can get what we want without this,” it would have been ever so much harder to get corporate America to go full out in opposition.

Republicans in Georgia, especially Governor Kemp, are not backing down. No, they’re doubling down. But they’ve now set something in motion that will be hard to stop. And former friends in high places are aligned against them. In the long run, the Georgia Election Integrity Act may prove to be the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party in Georgia — and beyond.