Archive for the ‘Racism’ Category

Has The Past Become Prologue Again?

Friday, March 24th, 2023

On 30 January 1933, the 85-year-old German hero of World War 1, President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Nazi leader Adolph Hitler as Reich Chancellor, which was akin to being named Prime Minister. Hindenburg and his German Cabinet, many of whom shared Hitler’s Nationalist positions, thought they could control the loose-cannon Hitler better if he were in Government rather than out of it. Sort of like bringing the camel into the tent, where you hope he’ll spit out, rather than leaving him outside, where you know he’ll spit in.

Thirty-five days later, on 5 March 1933, a coalition of political parties led by the Nazis won the national parliamentary election.

Just as Hindenburg and his Cabinet thought they could control Hitler, so did his coalition party partners. They were all wrong. And, just like that, the 14-year Weimar Republic was dead.

Despite winning only 45% of the vote — 55% of the country having voted against them — the Nazis were now in charge, and within three months the coalition was a thing of the past, with every other political party in Germany having gone the way of the Wooly Mammoth. The Nazis, using what they called “coordination,” had banned them all.

Immediately, Hitler’s Storm Troopers, whose numbers had grown from 400,000 in 1932 to nearly 2 million in January of 1933 (they outnumbered the Jewish population by close to 4 top 1¹) amped up their brutal intimidation and persecution of Jews, Communists and homosexuals. According to the World Committee’s Brown Book, by the end of June they had murdered 43 Jews and severely beaten hundreds more, but the chroniclers point out these estimates are likely quite low.

The Prussian police force was the largest in Germany, and Hitler put Hermann Göring in charge of it. He immediately  populated it with unhinged Storm Troopers wearing police uniforms. They arrested anyone thought to be an “unreliable” German. This included Jews, members of the non-Nazi German press, intellectual elites, homosexuals, and more Jews. In fact, so many were arrested that the country’s prisons could not contain them all. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, solved that problem. On 20 March, just two weeks after the Nazis’ election victory, he announced to the press that “a concentration camp for political prisoners” would be opened at Dachau, just outside Munich. It was to be Germany’s first concentration camp and set an ominous precedent. Two days later, four police trucks ferried 200 of the Nazis’ newly ordained “criminals” to their swell new digs. The citizens of Dachau watched them go by.

Three weeks later, to show they meant business, Himmler’s guards took four Jews out of their cells, brought them outside, stood them against a wall, and shot all four dead.

Dachau, however, was not an improvised solution to an overcrowding problem. As far back as 1921, Hitler had declared that when they came to power, the Nazis would imprison German Jews in concentration camps along the lines of those used by the British in the Boer war.

But the Nazis did much more in the first three months of the Third Reich than round up their version of the usual suspects. They also eviscerated higher education. On 7 April 1933, the Reichstag, the German parliament now controlled by Hitler, passed the Enabling Act, which contained a civil service provision that provided for the dismissal of “politically unreliable” state employees. This was a catch-all phrase for Jews, Communists, non-Aryans, as well as  anyone who had had the temerity to criticize the Nazis. And since, unlike other countries, all colleges and universities were state-owned, that meant many of Germany’s best and brightest were now out of work and facing physical danger. This included 20 past or future Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein was one of them — Germany’s loss; Princeton’s gain. But the Nazis never cared.

And they did not stop with professors and scientists. On 10 May 1933, at the instigation of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, German university students organized an “act against unGerman spirit” in nineteen university towns across the country. They compiled a list of “unGerman” books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares, and set them all alight. Goebbels joined the students at the Berlin burning, the biggest, telling them they were “doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames.” One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre of intellect.

We’re not burning books in America — yet, but we sure are banning them.

That is how it started in that most momentous of years, 1933, a year scholars have likened to the Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 France.

But in reality, the Nazis’ rise to power began with a quickly-put-down revolution in Munich immediately following the end of World War 1. Right up to the very end, the German military and the Kaiser had convinced the German people the country was winning the war. The Armistice signed on 11 November 1918 came as a huge shock, and the people felt they had been betrayed or, as one man put it, “Knifed in the back by the ruling class.” Then came the Treaty of Versailles with its draconian terms of surrender.

Out of the shock and humiliation of that defeat, a small group of radical, fanatical zealots began to slowly poison the soul of what, at that time, was the largest and most advanced country in Europe. In the 14 years of the Weimar Republic between the end of the war and 5 March 1933, the Nazis gradually unleashed a cultural revolution that eventually became an unstoppable national revolution — which ended 12 years later, deep in the ground of a Berlin bunker.

The Nazis did not come to power overnight, but the circumstances of the 1920s and early 1930s sowed fertile ground for their eventual ascendancy. People wrote them off at the beginning. But an economic depression, tremendous bitterness over the perceived betrayal at the end of the war along with the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, and one man of messianic and evil determination was all it took. And millions upon millions paid the price.

Americans knew what was happening in 1933 Germany. Our journalists covered it in detail, and our newspapers published what they wrote: the beatings, the discovery of Jews lying in gutters covered in blood, the book burnings. All of it. But we had our own problems back then, so nobody did a thing to help. Right here, it’s fair to ask, could anything have been done, by anyone, to reverse the unfolding terror. The behavior of the Nazis had been horrific, but the regime had been in power for only a few months. At the same time, the entire world was still in the midst of a global depression, and most countries looked upon what was happening in Germany as a German problem that Germans would fix. At that point, no one cared. Germans had done it to themselves and had walked into that biggest of bear traps with their eyes wide shut.

In America right now we are undergoing our own cultural revolution, and it has some of the same chaotic characteristics of the early 1920s in Germany. Of course it’s different, and we’ve built systems that we hope will withstand the current partisan fanaticism. But January 6th really happened, and it could have been catastrophically worse, just as Adolph Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch really happened in November 1923, ten years prior to his coming to power. We might want to note that, while 335 of the January 6th insurrectionists have been sentenced to prison thus far, Hitler and his putsch cohorts also went to prison.

It’s what happened afterwards that made all the difference.

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¹ According to the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were approximately 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January, 1933.

 

Maternal Mortality In America: The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 Is Here To Help

Thursday, February 9th, 2023

The maternal mortality rate in the US is the highest in the developed world.

The World Health Organization and the OECD define maternal mortality as “the annual number of female deaths from any cause related to, or aggravated by, pregnancy or its management (excluding accidental or incidental causes) during pregnancy and childbirth or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy.” The rate of maternal mortality is the number of these deaths per 100,000 live births.

The U.S. defines it differently. In the U.S., the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) covers a full year following birth, not the 42 days of the WHO and OECD. This is why the CDC reports the latest MMR figures  in the U.S. as 17.3, while the OECD has it at 5.8 (for 2020). To confuse things even more, a highly regarded study in The Lancet in 2016 noted, ” The overall decrease from 1990 to 2015 in global maternal deaths was roughly 29% and the decrease in MMR was 30%.” However, the same study pointed out the U.S. rate for 2015 had risen to 26.4.

But regardless of how you count it, our rate still outpaces all the other developed nations. Moreover, according to the CDC, the U.S. rate has been rising since 1987, while our OECD global competitors have seen theirs decline since 1990.

In America, the maternal mortality rate is much higher among Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities. An October 2022 study by  the GAO (Government Accountability Office) put it this way:

• The maternal death rate for Black or African-American (not Hispanic or Latina) women was 44.0 per 100,000 live births in 2019, then increased to 55.3 in 2020, and 68.9 in 2021. In contrast, White (not Hispanic or Latina) women had death rates of 17.9, 19.1, and 26.1, respectively.
• The maternal death rate for Hispanic or Latina women was lower (12.6) compared with White (not Hispanic or Latina) women (17.9) in 2019, but increased significantly during the pandemic in 2020 (18.2) and 2021 (27.5).

Disparities in other adverse outcomes, such as preterm and low birthweight births, persisted for Black or African-American (not Hispanic or Latina) women, according to GAO analysis of CDC data.

The GAO study lays this squarely at the wide open door of racism:

Additionally, racism negatively affects the health of millions of people, according to CDC. We previously reported, and research has shown, that racial and ethnic disparities in maternal health outcomes persist, even after controlling for other factors like socioeconomic status, education, and access to care.¹ Some studies described specifically how racial discrimination can contribute to worsened maternal health outcomes. For example, chronic stress associated with racism can cause physiological changes and adverse health conditions. Moreover, bias or discrimination within the health care system can create communication challenges between providers and their patients, which may increase the risk of adverse outcomes. For example, pregnant women may be reluctant to ask questions about their condition if they faced discrimination from their provider.² In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted racial and ethnic health disparities.³

From the GAO study

MMR is highest in Louisiana, at 58.1, and lowest in California, at 4.0, which is the average for the OECD.

Federal law requires Medicaid to cover postpartum care for only 60 days following birth, which is one of the prime reasons for our lagging global performance. In the OECD, mothers not only receive postpartum care for a year, they also average 51 weeks of paid maternity leave. (The U.S. is the only OECD country with no requirement for paid maternity leave.)

Enter the  American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), the Act Republicans derided and didn’t vote for, but love to take credit for back in their home districts. The Act offers significant resources for states to extend postpartum care for Medicaid beneficiaries.

Here’s how it’s working. ARPA created an option for states to extend postpartum coverage for Medicaid beneficiaries from 60 days to a full year. Under the Act, the option was scheduled to expire in 2027. Under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, the 12-month extended Medicaid postpartum coverage option was made permanent. Now once states take up the option to extend the postpartum period from 60 days to 12 months, federal matching funds will continue to flow. Thus far, 35 states have already taken advantage of the option and the federal cash that goes with it.

And today, the Washington Post’s McKenzie Beard, author of The Health 202 newsletter, reported Republican legislatures in nine red states have pending legislation to extend postpartum health coverage for their Medicaid beneficiaries, thereby joining the other 35 states in taking up the option created by the ARPA.

For these nine states, and their red state peers, this is all in response to the repeal of Roe v. Wade, a highly unpopular decision all around the country, which could create a significant uptick in pregnancies. There is a quite justified fear among Republican Governors and legislators that as they severely tighten restrictions on abortion our already horrible maternal mortality rate will worsen even more and they will be the ones held responsible. By extending postpartum care for 12 months they may avoid that unhappy and unfortunate political outcome while actually doing something good for the poorest of their citizens.

This is the one positive thing I have seen come out of the Roe v. Wade decision.

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¹See two studies of severe maternal morbidity in New York City: E. Howell et al., “Race and Ethnicity, Medical Insurance, and Within-Hospital Severe Maternal Morbidity Disparities,” Obstetrics & Gynecology, vol. 135, no. 2 (Feb. 2020): 285-293; and
M. Angley et al., “Severe Maternal Morbidity in New York City, 2008–2012,” New York Bureau of Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health (New York, N.Y.: 2016).

²See R. Hardeman et al., “Developing Tools to Report Racism in Maternal Health for the CDC Maternal Mortality Review Information Application (MMRIA): Findings From the MMRIA Racism & Discrimination Working Group,” Maternal and Child Health Journal, vol. 26 (2022): 661–669.

³See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “COVID-19 Weekly Cases and Deaths per 100,000 Population by Age, Race/Ethnicity, and Sex,” accessed 9 February 2023.

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.

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*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).

 

 

Martin Luther King—Sharing The Spotlight With Confederate “Heroes”

Tuesday, January 17th, 2023

Yesterday, the city of Boston celebrated Martin Luther King day as no other city in the nation could. On Boston Common, the oldest public park in America, Mayor Michelle Wu and other leaders unveiled The Embrace, Hank Willis Thomas’s five-years-in-the-making monument to Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King.* 

The huge bronze hug is 38,000 pounds and sits 22 feet high and 40 feet wide. Boston’s newest monument is inspired by a photo of the Kings hugging after Martin won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The monument sits in an open circle with bench seating in the middle of Boston Common within another memorial, the new 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors Boston civil rights activists.

The Kings had met as students in Boston and were married there in 1953. Among other things, the monument signifies the linkage between them in the civil rights struggles to which they each committed their lives. Coretta Scott King, in addition to being the wife of MLK, was also an artist, an activist, and a driving force who was by his side  doing the work with him, which she carried on after he was assassinated. She founded the King Memorial Center and never gave up fighting for a federal holiday honoring King’s legacy. Mrs. King’s efforts resulted in the federal holiday we now celebrate, when President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law in 1983; it was first observed three years later on January 20, 1986. In 1995, Congress designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day as the first and only federal holiday observed as a National Day of Service. Congress charged the Corporation for National and Community Service with leading this national effort.

All 50 states now recognize Martin Luther King day as a state holiday, South Carolina being the last in 2000. But when that happened, the South Carolina legislature also voted to create Confederate Memorial Day, which would be celebrated on the same day we honor King. And South Carolina is not alone. As Shoshana Gordon, Jacque Schrag and Russell Contreras report in AXIOS, “Ten states — all in the South — observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day plus at least one Confederate holiday.” This from the AXIOS report:

Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas all have at least one day commemorating the Confederacy on other days of the year.

Mississippi and Alabama each celebrate a total of three Confederate holidays every year — Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’ Birthday — all paid holidays for state employees.

Many lawmakers in the ten states believe it is wrong to celebrate the confederate holidays, but nobody seems to want to propose legislation to repeal any of them. Now why would that be? Here is a map showing the states honoring the confederacy:

Of particular note is Tennessee with its three days honoring the confederacy. Why? Because one of them is Nathan Bedford Forrest Day (first observed in 1921). In honoring the confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s (R) 2019 proclamation saluted a “recognized military figure in American history” and a “native Tennessean.”

In these ten states Martin Luther King is lumped in with slaveholders, secessionists and murderers. The whole thing just oozes a terrible irony, especially when you consider how King’s life ended―and where―Memphis, Tennessee.

Those states aren’t the only places where Dr. King gets little respect. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI considered King “the most dangerous man in America” and conducted decades-long surveillance of him, surveillance encompassing more than 300,000 pages of documents.

Film director Sam Pollard chronicles Hoover’s efforts in his 2020 documentary, MLK/FBI. According to Pollard’s research and as reported on NPR:

The FBI campaign against King began with wiretaps, but quickly ballooned. When wiretaps revealed that King was having extramarital affairs, the FBI shifted their focus to uncover all evidence of his infidelity by bugging and taping him in his hotel rooms and by paying informants to spy on him. Eventually, the FBI penned and sent King an anonymous letter, along with some of their tapes, suggesting that he should kill himself.

Yes, like all of us walking God’s green earth, Martin Luther King had feet of clay. But he also had a heart as big as Texas and a passionate, life-long commitment to freeing his people from the chains of racism, a struggle that continues to this day, 163 years after the civil war’s first shot.

Were he alive today, King would probably be the first to acknowledge the tremendous strides made in the long journey for true equality in civil rights. He would also be the first to acknowledge how far away the last mile really is.

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*The Embrace has not won instant acclaim from everyone. In fact, there has been quite a bit of snarky criticism, some even calling the artwork “obscene.” It all reminds me of another monument, a memorial dedicated in late 1982—Maya Lin‘s minimalist Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. When it first opened to the public, politicians, celebrities, regular citizens and, most important, Vietnam Veterans, lined up to criticize it. It became known as “the black gash of shame.” Well, 42 years later, veterans go to the Wall and weep as they see the names of their fallen comrades. It is embraced by all, as will The Embrace be more and more as time goes by.