Tag: black lives matter

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A Big Step in Reparations

From House Panel Advances Bill to Study Reparations in Historic Vote:

A House committee voted on Wednesday to recommend for the first time the creation of a commission to consider providing Black Americans with reparations for slavery in the United States and a “national apology” for centuries of discrimination.

I’m currently reading a graphic novel about Canada’s indigenous population in the Northwest Territories, and so much of the reporting depends on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s investigation of the Indian Residential Schools, a harrowing episode in Canada’s history that resulted in the cultural destruction of Canada’s indigenous peoples. 

While I am absolutely in favor of reparations for the United States’ historic exploitation of black bodies and its continued subjugation of black people, I don’t believe a Congress that refuses to accept the basic principle of majoritarian rule will ever get 60+ votes in the Senate for a reparations bill. I can, however, be hopeful for the creation and funding of a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. 

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politics

Andrew McCarthy Demands Proof But Denies Reality

I follow The National Review on Facebook because I like to keep an eye on what passes for intellectualism on the right. I don’t read every article, but I read the headlines, and if something seems particularly saucy, I’ll dive in.

They recently published an essay by Andrew McCarthy titled, Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It, in which he argues that systemic racism does not exist, and if it does, it is the fault of progressives, since “they are the system.”

The judges, the top prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political progressives.

To be sure, he doesn’t accuse these political progressives of racism; instead, he sees them as “professionals [who are] doing the best they can.”

He continues:

Still, the legal elites will insist there is systemic racism…because the outcomes the system produces are not “equal” — equality being a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.

I had to stop reading at that point. 

Notice how McCarthy conflates arrests, convictions, and sentencing with the committal of crimes as if the former somehow gives us a real sense of the latter.

We currently have a President of the United States who brazenly violated the Hatch Act and certainly obstructed justice (not to mention the complete catalog of his criminal acts and cruelties), and yet, after 50+ years of criminal activity, this bonafide conman and historically recognized practitioner of systemic racism has never been charged with a felony. 

No member of Big Tobacco spent a night in jail for knowingly giving cancer to millions upon millions of customers. No member of Big Oil will do time for lying to consumers about the economic realities of recycling, thereby encouraging the continual production of virgin plastic and the continuing degradation of our planet.

You don’t have to look any further than the FinCEN Files to see the vast criminal activity taking place in the financial sector ($2 trillion worth of dirty transactions), and yet how many felony convictions will this scandal likely result in? None.

McCarthy’s conflation reveals his deep misunderstanding of systemic racism. He’s incapable of noticing the crimes that don’t result in arrests, convictions, and sentencing, the crimes that the dominant caste generally gets away with. 

McCarthy wants to force progressives to prove systemic racism (and to be sure, it’s easy to prove), but for evidence, he’s only willing to accept information produced by the system as it exists, which is racist. If a white-collar criminal destroys the lives of thousands of people, as President Trump did with Trump University, the chance of them being arrested, convicted, and sentenced is next to zero, but a black man selling loose cigarettes can be murdered on camera by law-enforcement officers who in turn will not be charged with a crime.

Unfortunately for those who want to rebut Mr. McCarthy, it is impossible to provide reliable information regarding the commitment of criminal acts broken down by race. If no one is arrested and charged with a crime, or no accusation is made to a reporting authority (as is the case for most sexual violence), how could we know a crime was committed? 

The charge of systemic racism comes from a 400-year-long collection of lived experiences. It comes from anecdotes, memories, past and present traumas, cell phone footage, investigative journalism, documentary films, songs, and local, state, and federal policies (past and present). It is supported by a wide range of statistical evidence relating to the different (and sometimes starkly tragic) challenges a person is likely to face in their life simply because of the color of their skin. 

According to the systemic racism argument, law enforcement in the United States (as well as other systems and institutions) reinforces the unwritten rules of our racially divided caste system. It argues, among other things, that rich, white men generally get away with committing whatever crime they want, while poor persons of color get arrested, charged, and sentenced for crimes they did not commit.    

But to prove such an argument, Mr. McCarthy would like progressives to produce evidence that rich, white men commit just as many crimes as poor, black men. The only way to do that would be to interrogate their priests for confession rates, and I recall a papal law against that.

Mr. McCarthy writes that, for progressives, “equality [is] a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.”

While he doesn’t say it outright, his statement implies an affinity for the countering thesis: racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates. He doesn’t develop this counter thesis, however, because: a) it’s racist as fuck, and b) he can’t demonstrate evidence for it. Like me, all he can do is demonstrate evidence of convictions and not the committed acts. 

Instead of supporting his terrible, racist counter-thesis with evidence he can’t provide, he transitions to accusations of systemic racism in academia, calling the Middlebury College President a “doyen of higher education” whose observation that racism occurs on her campus seems to have really troubled Mr. McCarthy.

He asserts that those who claim to see evidence of systemic racism are practicing “Marxism and voodoo, mainly.” This is how he denies the concept of disparate impact, which recognizes that a system designed to be neutral can still have discriminatory effects. 

For an example of disparate impacts, look at the Fair Housing Act of 1934. A creation of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the act was designed to make homeownership more accessible to Americans,  but it did so in ways that reinforced the 300-year-old caste system. Nothing in the Fair Housing Act of 1934 would have predicted this effect. The act is, in essence, race-neutral, but in effect, it was incredibly harmful to black Americans.

Though Mr. McCarthy writes for a supposedly intellectually rigorous publication, his argument misunderstands the basic premises of systemic racism and reveals his desire to maintain a status quo where “professionals [who are] doing the best they can” continue to be given the benefit of the doubt over the subordinate caste members who have been crying out for 400 years for relief. 

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politics

From Tahrir Square to Kenosha, Wisconsin

On February 2, 2011, as thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to protest the three-decades-long regime of President Hosni Mubarak, men with swords, whips, clubs, stones, rocks, and pocket knives rode camels and horses into the crowd and throughout the rest of central Cairo, attacking civilians and killing nearly a dozen of them in the process.

The “Battle of the Camel” came after more than a week of protest. In the days and hours before the attack, police began to disappear from the streets of Cairo and armed vigilantes set up checkpoints to ward off potential criminals.

In Tahrir Square, families picnicked, young people played instruments, and protestors chanted anti-Mubarak slogans.

Then the men on camels attacked.

A man riding a camel and wielding a stick rides through a crowd in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt
Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Later, following the fall of Mubarak, twenty-four former government officials were charged with manslaughter and attempted murder for allegedly sending the men on camels into the city and telling them to “kill the protestors if they had to.” An Egyptian court, however, acquitted all of the officials of any wrongdoing and refused the prosecutor’s attempts at an appeal, calling the state’s witnesses unreliable and evidence against the officials weak.

While investigators found that the mounted attackers were ordered into the square by government officials loyal to Mubarak, the camel riders themselves claimed to be “good men” who were trying to safeguard their jobs and reopen Cairo to tourists. “Look at us here,” one of them told a reporter, “we are poor, we have horses and camels to feed, we have no money. But we are good people. You don’t see houses and shops burned or with their windows broken [in our neighborhood].”

Flash forward nine years and move west to the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin. On Sunday evening, August 22nd, a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, a black man, seven times in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. The shooting occurred in front of Blake’s three children and was also caught on camera by a civilian across the street.

With the United States reeling from video footage of repeated police shootings and killings of unarmed black citizens, the Blake incident set off another storm of protests, lootings, and fires in a yet another American city.

The following day, the governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers (Democrat), ordered 125 members of the Wisconsin National Guard to reestablish peace in the city, but that night, hundreds of demonstrators defied the temporary curfew of 8 pm and marched through Kenosha. Police fired tear gas into the crowd, and the protestors responded by throwing water bottles and lighting off fireworks near the line of officers. Someone burned down a furniture store, while others knocked over lampposts. Windows were smashed. Dump trucks burned.

More protests followed. On Tuesday, Gov. Evers requested more National Guard members, and counter-protesters started arriving “to protect the buildings.”

One of those counter-protestors was a 17-year-old boy from Illinois named Kyle Rittenhouse. Like many of the counter-protestors, Rittenhouse arrived in Kenosha with a gun: an AR-15 style rifle. He would claim in a video taken before the night’s fatal incidents that he was in Kenosha “to protect this business and…part of my job is if somebody’s hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle, to protect myself obviously. I’ve also got my med kit.”

Throughout the night, Rittenhouse would be put on camera several times. He was involved in a confrontation between protestors and counter-protestors near a gas station; he claimed to have been pepper-sprayed in the face by a protestor; he was among the people at a car dealership whom were thanked by law enforcement officers for showing up on the streets of the city with rifles and whom received water from the officers as well.

At 11:48 pm, gunshots rang out in Kenosha. Video captured Rittenhouse making a phone call and then fleeing the scene, calling out to someone, “I’ve shot somebody.” As he ran, the crowd started to give chase. Someone in a white shirt caught up to him and threw a weak punch at the side of his head. He fell to the ground, and as members of the crowd came closer, he raised his rifle and began to shoot.

The footage of the event (see link above) clearly captures the damage done by his shots.

The crowd fled, and Rittenhouse stood up and walked quickly towards a line of police officers with his hands up. Despite leaving bodies in the street behind him and the crowd yelling to the officers, “That dude just shot someone right here,” Rittenhouse walked past the police officers and, somehow, was able to sleep in his own bed that night.

In both Tahrir Square and Kenosha, deadly violence came not from protestors seeking a change, but from counter-protestors loyal to the status quo.

Hopefully, Rittenhouse won’t be acquitted of the six criminal charges the state has levied against him, but in a country where the criminal justice system is so obviously rigged against the interests of black America, I’m not sure I have enough hope for that.

Categories
life politics

My Daughter’s Confederate Heritage

On July 18th, 1861, roughly three months after the outbreak of the American Civil War, my daughter’s great-great-great grandfather on her mother’s mother’s side, John Morgan Wages, enlisted in the 6th Regiment of the Arkansas Cavalry at the age of 16 years old to fight on the side of the Confederacy.

According to his enlistment papers, Morgan was 5’6” tall with fair complexion, blue eyes, and light hair, and prior to enlisting, he worked as a farmer.

Just a year prior, his father, Lemuel Wages, purchased “forty-six acres and twenty four-hundredths of an acre” of public land in Arkansas from the Federal government. While I haven’t found any record of Lemuel or his father, William, owning slaves, I did find a record in the 1810 U.S. Federal Census that Morgan’s great-grandfather, Dawson Wages, owned four slaves back when the family lived in Richland County, South Carolina.

I don’t know if Morgan fought for the Confederacy because he believed in white supremacy, or if he was “defending” his family’s land, or if he was “defending” his family’s property (i.e., slaves), but I do know he served as part of the Company G (the Ouachita Cavalry) and fought “for the Confederacy east of the Mississippi River.” After fighting for a year, he reenlisted in July 1862. 

Three months later, in October 1862, at the Battle of Corinth, a critical rail junction in northern Mississippi, Morgan was either “severely” or “slightly” wounded in the head (a handwritten note says “severely,” but a typed note of the list of casualties from the battle says “wounded slightly”). Morgan is listed as “Absent” on the next two company musters and disappears from the Confederate record after December 1862.

However, his name shows up again in the military record on November 25, 1863, when he enlists in Lewisburg, Arkansas, for a three-year stint as a private with Company B of the 3rd Regiment Arkansas Cavalry, fighting on behalf of the Union. Interestingly enough, the first time his name appears in the record for signing with the Union cavalry, there’s a note that reads, “Have no horse.”

I don’t know why Morgan switched sides, but many went where the wages were (no pun intended). Morgan would stay with the Union regiment for the next year and a half, fighting as part of the Camden Expedition, which was the final campaign against the Confederate Army in Arkansas (and it was wildly unsuccessful). 

In the June of 1865, there’s a remark on Morgan’s record that reads:

Stop for ordinance retained $8.00 + in confinement awaiting sentence of court martial since May 13, 1865. 

I could not find any more information on why he was courtmartialed, but he was mustered out of the regiment on June 30th, 1865. I’m assuming he wasn’t dishonorably discharged because he would collect a pension until his death, and his widow, Alcesta Wages (formerly Brazil), would continue to collect until her death in 1917.

After the war, Morgan made his living as a farmer in the Behestian or Red Hill townships in Ouachita County (according to the 1880 Census, anyway). He and Alcesta would get married in 1870 in Camden, Arkansas, and go on to have nine children (six boys and three girls [two of the latter died before the age of 1]).

I lose track of Morgan after the 1880 Census. Other family-tree researchers have his death listed as April 19th, 1892 in Edmond, West Virginia.

His wife’s grave can be found in the Scotland Presbyterian Cemetery in Scotland, Arkansas, but she’s buried with their son’s wife, not with her husband, so I don’t yet have a reliable record of his death.

All of which is to say that I have proof that my daughter directly owes her life, at least in part, to the slave economy and the fight for white supremacy.

Categories
life

Writing For Bail Money

Today marked the first day of my two-week summer break. So what did I do?

I fucking terrified myself.

I watched the long-form videos and read the long-form articles and scrolled through the lengthy and well-sourced tweet threads. I read Gorsuch’s bullshit undergraduate-essay of a Supreme Court decision (“Webster’s dictionary defines ‘frozen trucker‘ as…”), which thankfully came out on the only logical side of history in spite of the 11th fucking Circuit’s retreat to a previously invalidated precedent. And I discussed with my wife our various opinions and perspectives on various local and global events.

In short, I tried to catch up.

One of the articles I read today (thanks to a link shared by a white colleague) made the observation “When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs.” Tomorrow, my white wife and her white colleagues will gather for a meeting of their summer book club, the first assignment of which they’ve dedicated to issues of race.

Written by Tre Johnson, the article (which is fantastic) offers a clear critique and alternative:

[W]hen things get real — really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive — my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read. And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened.

What they do is never enough. This isn’t the time to circle up with other white people and discuss black pain in the abstract; it’s the time to acknowledge and examine the pain they’ve personally caused.

He continues:

The right acknowledgment of black justice, humanity, freedom and happiness won’t be found in your book clubs, protest signs, chalk talks or organizational statements. It will be found in your earnest willingness to dismantle systems that stand in our way — be they at your job, in your social network, your neighborhood associations, your family or your home.

So here I sat, in rural Vermont, a super white village in a super white state in a super white region of a super white-supremacist country, and I was being tasked with dismantling systems that stand in the way of black justice, humanity, freedom, and happiness.

I wracked my brain about what to do.

A white friend of mine recently attempted to be the fastest known woman to complete an unsupported run across Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness. She asked people to pledge $1 per mile to one of three organizations that “support BIPOC folks in the outdoors and sports [including ultimate frisbee]”. She “hiked/ran/stumbled-through around 57 miles, unsupported, with 10,000 ft. of elevation gain in 25 hours” before a knee/IT band injury forced her from the trail.

That’s something I could do — not run (I can’t do that) — but a pledge drive! I can do a pledge drive.

My friend is a runner. I fancy myself a writer.

Maybe I can get people to pledge money to a worthy, relevant cause by writing something.

First, I needed the cause, a place where 100% of the money would go directly to the front lines of black justice, where and when it is needed the most.

I chose The Bail Project.

The Bail Project works like a Kiva micro-loan, where the money doesn’t come back to you, but “back” to another person in need:

We pay bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence. Because bail is returned at the end of a case, donations to The Bail Project™ National Revolving Bail Fund can be recycled and reused to pay bail two to three times per year, maximizing the impact of every dollar.

The question then became, what to do as a writer to drive pledges?

Well, who better to ask than you? For a donation of $5 to the Bail Project, you get to tell me what to write about. It can be on any topic you choose, but not any thesis; you don’t get to make me write an essay denying the Holocaust, for example, but you can make me write an essay about the topic of Holocaust denial.

I know this isn’t much (as one of my friend’s sarcastically said when I suggested the idea, “The opportunity of a lifetime!”), and I know this plays directly into Tre Johnson’s critique of his white, liberal, educated friends who “read [and] talk about their reading,” but writing is the labor my body does best, and this is the only way I can think of to put its product to use on the front lines.

So please, pledge at least $5 to the front lines, and then get a kick by having me write about whatever you think is fun, important, educational, stupid, arcane, fantastic, deep, idiotic, meaningful, controversial, ridiculous, etc. And remember, part of the fun is not just reading the result — it’s also getting me to spend significant time researching and formulating thoughts on whatever it is you want.

For example, the first person who donated to this campaign asked for “a critical appraisal of the vaporwave genre of music.” The assignment came with a 22-minute YouTube documentary to get me started on my research. For comparison’s sake, I watched a two-hour documentary on Miles Davis last night. And now I have to watch one on “the vaporwave genre.” I am not looking forward to this.

But thankfully I’m free enough to do it. With your donations to the Bail Project, other people can be free as well. So please don’t $5 to the Bail Project and then influence the writing that shows up in this space.

(After making your donation, just leave a comment on this post with your topic idea).

PS: This project that will as long as The Bail Project is needed, so if you’re stumbling on this post through some random Google search three years in the future, and the Bail Project is still running, then yes, you can still make a donation and still force me to write on whatever topic you choose.

Categories
life

Overwhelmed

I sat in the backyard opposite my wife. We had very consciously put our phones away and were enjoying the strong June winds,  my feet on her chair and her using my shins as a leg rest. Our daughter came out of the back door with a paper cup in one hand and a stick in the other. Wrapped around the stick was a worm.

I don’t 100% know what her plan was. I know it involved babysitting the worm overnight, and I think she planned on putting it in the cup with some grass and some water.

She had found the worm with a friend, and somehow, they agreed my daughter would be the one responsible for it, at least for that first night. As I sat in the backyard talking with my wife, I heard her little feet running down the sidewalk from her friend’s house, and she was yelling something over her shoulder, something about promising to not let it get too much sun, as if her friend (whose parents are both biologists and who definitely knows more than my daughter about how to take care of a worm) was calling down the sidewalk, giving her advice.

My wife and I didn’t want the worm in the house, so we tried to guilt her into not traumatizing another living creature by imprisoning it against its will. We suggested she either return it to her friend’s yard, where it would have a chance of finding its family again, or release it into the boxed garden in our yard, where she could keep it contained and visit it while also giving it plenty of what it loves (while also surreptitiously working for us, since worms are good for gardens).

She agreed to put it in the garden, but then realized she’d have to dig each day just to find it, and wouldn’t all that digging hurt the garden?

I remembered the terrarium kit one of my colleagues generously made for her, which still sat unused on our back porch. I suggested we try that. She’d be able to provide the worm some nice soil, surround it with some plant life, and give it some light and water; plus, she wouldn’t have to dig it up each day.

And just like that, we forgot about not wanting to imprison another creature.

My daughter and I followed my colleague’s nicely printed out instructions on how to build a healthy terrarium. After pouring in the charcoal starter and soil, establishing the hardscape, positioning the moss, sticks, rocks, and (just so) the chestnut shell, my daughter gave the moss some nice cool water. She checked to see if the worm, which she recently imprisoned on a pile of ripped up grass under an upside-down paper-cup, was still alive. Find it so, she carefully picked it up and placed it in the terrarium, giving it both a gentle ride and a smooth landing.

My wife brought dinner from the house, and we ate at the picnic table. Later, my daughter carried the worm and its terrarium up to her bedroom, then ran off and played with her friend some more. I walked down the street and brought her home as the sun set. She took a shower. As she dried off and dressed, I read to her the last pages of The Wild Robot. She made sure she put on the right underwear, and when she couldn’t find it in the drawer, she chose a very specific different pair to wear instead (her reasoning? they were the same color as the right pair).

She stood in front of her bureau and looked into the terrarium. I was reading to her a scene where a mother (the wild robot) has to say goodbye to her son (a goose) and set off alone on a new adventure.

“Hey dad,” she whispered, “I think it’s dead.”

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asides

Occupied America

From Where Did Policing Go Wrong:

Police are trained to behave like occupiers, which is why they increasingly dress like they’ve been sent to clear houses in Mosul and treat random motorists like potential car-bombers – think of poor Philando Castile, shot seven times by a police officer who leaped backfiring in panic like he was being attacked by Freddy Krueger, instead of a calm, compliant, educated young man. Officers with histories of abuse complaints like Daniel Pantaleo and Derek Chauvin are kept on the force because senior officers value police who make numbers more than they fear outrage from residents in their districts. The incentives in this system are wrong in every direction.