IN DIRE NEED OF CREATIVE EXTREMISTS

from emptywheel

While many would point to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial  in August 1963 as his most powerful, the words from King that most move me come from a letter written four months earlier, as he sat in the Birmingham jail. It was a letter written to local pastors, who expressed support for his cause but concern for the manner in which he came to Birmingham to protest. When looking back at historical letters, there are some that are products of their time that illuminate the events of that day, but which need footnotes and commentary to explain to contemporary readers.

King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is *not* one of those letters. I wish it was, but it isn’t. It’s all too clear, and speaks all too clearly even now.

In that letter, King identified “the great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom” not as the hoodwearing Klanners or the politically powerful White Citizens Council folks, but the white moderate. These are folks who

• are more devoted to order than justice
• prefer a negative peace – the absence of tension – to a positive peace – the presence of justice
• constantly say they agree with your goals but not your direct methods for achieving them
• feel no problem in setting a timetable for someone else’s freedom
• live by the myth of time, constantly urging patience until things are more convenient

Anyone who has watched the news at any time over the last three years knows that this great stumbling block to freedom and justice, the Moderate, is an all-too-familiar presence, appearing in various guises. For example . . .

• police officers who, as one African-American after another is beaten, abused, and killed by one of their colleagues, silently watch the attack as it unfolds, who refuse to intervene, who write up reports to cover for this conduct, and who by their silence and their words defend and justify assault and murder done under the color of law;
• staffers at ICE facilities who, as children are separated from their parents, as people are crammed into unlivable facilities, as basic necessities like toothbrushes and soap are withheld, clock in and clock out without saying a word;
• personal assistants, co-workers, and superiors who watch as victim after victim were abused by powerful men like Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Epstein, and untold others, and who said nothing;
• Susan Collins, hand-wringer extraordinaire, who expresses her deep concerns about this rightwing nominee or that destructive proposed policy, and nevertheless puts her concerns aside time and time and time again to confirm the nominee or enact the proposal into law;
• media figures who practice “he said/she said journalism,” who twist themselves into pretzels in order to maintain their “access” to inside sources, and who refuse to call a lie a lie in the name of “balance”;
• corporate bean counters, who place such things as quarterly profits and shareholder value ahead of worker safety and well-being, ahead of environmental concerns, or ahead of community partnership, saying “we can’t afford to . . .” when what they really mean is “we choose not to spend in order to . . .”;
• lawyers who provide legal cover to those who abuse, torture, and terrorize, and the second group of lawyers who “let bygones be bygones” in order to not have to deal with the actions of the first group;
• bishops and religious leaders who privately chastise abusive priests and pastors, but who fail to hold them publicly accountable and seek justice, out of a concern to not cause a scandal that would bring the religious organization into disrepute; and
• leaders of sports programs who value winning so much that they are willing to look the other way when coaches, trainers, and doctors abuse athletes.

The tools of the Moderate are things like Non-Disclosure Agreements, loyalty to The Team, and the explicit and implicit power of the hierarchy. The Moderate may not be at the top of the pyramid, but as long as the Moderate can kiss up and kick down, they think they will be OK. They’ll keep their powder dry, waiting for a better time to act. But all too often, the Moderate refuses to use what they’ve been saving for that rainy day, even when they are in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane.

But there are signs of hope, and we’ve seen some of them as well over the last three years:

• career government professionals – at the State Department like Marie Yovanovitch, at the Department of Defense like Captain Brett Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, at the Department of Health and Human Services like Dr. Richard Bright, at the Department of Justice like Brandon Van Graak, and others like them – who refused to worry about personal consequences to themselves and fudge the data, ignore the facts, shade the advice,  or stand silently by while others do so;
• passers-by to acts of injustice, who not only document what is being done but who take action to hold perpetrators to account (NY dog walkers, represent!);
• young voices like Greta Thunberg who refuse to go along to get along, who ask the tough questions of those in power, and who question the answers that mock the truth, and old voices like Elizabeth Warren who do the same; and
• voices of political relative newcomers like Katie Porter, AOC, Stacy Abrams, who do not let their low spot on the political totem pole (or lack of a spot at all) keep them from speaking out for justice.

This past week, longtime AIDS activist Larry Kramer passed away. He founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to care for gays stricken with AIDS, while the government turned its eyes away from the problem. Later on, he founded ACT-UP, when he saw GMHC had become too domesticated and unwilling to rock the boat when the boat desperately needed rocking. He called out the gay community and he called out government officials, even those who were trying to help like Anthony Fauci, for not doing anywhere close to what was needed.

And in many respects, it worked. Maybe not as fast as it should have, or as well as Kramer would have liked, but it made a difference. From Kramer’s NY Times obituary:

The infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was one who got the message — after Mr. Kramer wrote an open letter published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988 calling him a killer and “an incompetent idiot.”

“Once you got past the rhetoric,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview for this obituary, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold.”

Mr. Kramer, he said, had helped him to see how the federal bureaucracy was indeed slowing the search for effective treatments. He credited Mr. Kramer with playing an “essential” role in the development of elaborate drug regimens that could prolong the lives of those infected with H.I.V., and in prompting the Food and Drug Administration to streamline its assessment and approval of certain new drugs.

In recent years Mr. Kramer developed a grudging friendship with Dr. Fauci, particularly after Mr. Kramer developed liver disease and underwent the transplant in 2001; Dr. Fauci helped get him into a lifesaving experimental drug trial afterward.

Their bond grew stronger this year, when Dr. Fauci became the public face of the White House task force on the coronavirus epidemic, opening him to criticism in some quarters.“We are friends again,” Mr. Kramer said in an email to the reporter John Leland of The New York Times for an article published at the end of March. “I’m feeling sorry for how he’s being treated. I emailed him this, but his one line answer was, ‘Hunker down.’”

Which brings me back to King’s letter and the title of this post:

. . . though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

We’ve got plenty of extremists like Stephen Miller and the cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died. We’re in dire need of more creative extremists.

Which leaves me with one question: how will you be a creative extremist today?

BLACK FRIDAY WORTHY:FedEx driver delivers racist attacker to the afterlife

from Boing Boing and Washington Post:

Working as a delivery driver is an easy path to a long dark night of the soul. Eight hours of folks wondering why their package wasn't delivered earlier, miserable traffic conditions and heavy carrying heavy stuff up flights of stairs or wheeling boxes around tight corridors on a dolly and people that won't get the hell out of the way is enough to wear anyone down.

And that's before bringing racists into the equation.

From The Washington Post:

Timothy Warren was driving his FedEx truck through a verdant Portland, Ore., neighborhood when the man he would soon kill screamed that Warren was going too fast.

Warren stopped his truck. He was exhausted, he tried to explain to Joseph Magnuson that night in late September, and just wanted to get done with his work.

Magnuson was unrelenting and hurled numerous aggressive insults and racist slurs toward him.

That was something Warren, who is black, could not abide.

He stepped out of the truck, and both men yelled at one another.

Magnuson took a swing. Warren swung back, connecting a single blow above Magnuson’s left eye that sent him tumbling to the ground.

Magnuson, 55, briefly lost consciousness, then died later that evening.

When police began the task of piecing together what the hell had happened, they had plenty to work with. Six people witnessed Magnuson's racist rant. Three of the six had seen the whole thing go down, from soup to nuts. Everyone the cops spoke with said that Warren had been driving safely. He hadn't been speeding. The witnesses all agreed that Magnuson had used racial slurs. Magnuson threw a drink at Warren. He threw a punch at Warren. Magnuson's was killed by his own hatred. When questioned about the incident, a man acquainted with Magnuson offered that nothing would have happened if Warren had kept on driving.

If Magnuson hadn't looked to break the body and soul of a man innocent of all but doing his job, Warren wouldn't have needed to stop driving. He wouldn't have had to stand up to hatred. He wouldn't have to live with the death of a hateful man.

The police and the district attorney's office concluded that Warren acted in self-defense and that no charges would be laid.

FOR THE RECORD Lest We Forget Bill Moyers and four historians on the big lie behind the rise of Trump.

In this web exclusive, Bill Moyers and four historians dissect the big lie Trump rode to power: the Birther lie. Nell Painter, historian and Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Christopher Lebron, assistant professor of African-American studies and philosophy at Yale University; and Philip Klinkner, James S. Sherman Professor of Government, Hamilton College discuss the fertile ground on which the birther lie was sown: our nation’s history of white supremacy.

Credits: Gail Ablow, Producer; Sikay Tang, Editor

NYC’s New Generation of Militant Activists — And The Media Blackout That Has Followed

from Vienna Rye on Medium

Over the past year and a half, New York City has seen the growth of an organized, militant grassroots movement, lead by young activists of color and completely ignored by the mainstream media. Gaining steam a few months after the Ferguson Uprising in 2014, tens of thousands of New Yorkers began taking to the streets to demand justice for Mike Brown and Eric Garner. Now, seventeen months later, a coordinated network has formed, shutting down the streets on a weekly basis in every single borough. If one only listens to the reporting by mainstream media, it would paint a naive, racist depiction of a movement that has seemingly “died down.” However, the reactionary behavior of the establishment and the NYPD, one of the largest police forces in the amerikkkan empire, reveals an entirely different narrative.

Activists on the ground in NYC are facing heavy state repression, including the targeting of organizers’ cell phones during protests, phone surveillance, false arrests, and political trials dragging on for months in the New York City court system. If this movement wasn’t a threat, if our organizing didn’t have a chance at the people’s collective liberation — then why are we flanked every single week by one of the nation’s largest counter-terrorist police units? Why are our communications being monitored and controlled by military grade surveillance technology? Why is the NYPD legal unit prosecuting violation charges, using resources to take summons tickets to lengthy political trials? When put into this context, the state and the establishment admit to a very different fight than they are letting on to the general public.

Groups such as Millions March NYC, Grand Central Crew: NYC Shut It Down, Cop Watch Patrol Unit, Peoples Power Assemblies, ICEFREENYC, Why Accountability, NYers Against Bratton, Justice for Akai Gurley, Afrikans Helping Afrikans, Black Lives Matter NYC, and the Campaign to Shut Down Rikers have organized major mobilizations and direct actions for a year and a half, bringing thousands of protesters to the streets on a consistent basis. These activists are young, radical and militant, with many of the aforementioned groups connected in large and expanding coalitions. Circumventing traditional respectability politics, themes of Fuck the Police are embraced, with organizing taking place on encrypted phone threads, allowing for quick and coordinated responses to push our revolutionary agenda against the racist, capitalist state intent on silencing us. We are young, we are revolutionary, we are absolutely not afraid — and the state wants more than anything to silence our momentum and kill this movement.



Major solidarity marches with Baltimore, Cleveland, Charleston, Ferguson, Minneapolis, Texas and San Francisco have shut down the streets with thousands of people, often organized in less than 36 hours. #PeoplesMonday has shut down the streets across all 5 boroughs every single Monday for over a year. Solidarity ties have strengthened between Black liberation and Palestinian liberation groups, building the groundwork for what could grow into an international proletarian struggle. Direct actions have targeted and disrupted Mayor de Blasio, Bronx DA Robert Johnson, DOC Commissioner Ponte, Donald Trump, and numerous local city government and jail officials. A newly formed grassroots coalition, The Campaign to Shut Down Rikers, has built momentum to shutter NYC’s most notorious jail complex, with coffins delivered to Mayor de Blasio at City Hall and to the home of Bronx DA Robert Johnson for Kalief Browder. Just this past November, DOC Commissioner Ponte was disrupted at a Board of Corrections Hearing, and the proposed harmful reforms were revoked shortly after. Justice for Akai Gurley and family organizing has led to the first conviction of an NYPD officer in 10 years. Typically there are multiple arrests every single week of lead organizers fighting back in the streets, and numerous trial dates and civil litigations are currently taking place.

The mainstream media has ignored all of the above for almost a year and a half. This is certainly not an accident — rather it is a strong indication to the extent of the fear on the side of the establishment. All we have as activists to fight back are our voices and our bodies. When we are then subsequently being silenced in the media and locked up by the counter-terrorist NYPD police unit — evidently, both our voices and our bodies are considered a high threat by those maintaining the status quo. To put it simply, clearly we are a threat of becoming free.

As state repression and racial tensions continue escalating locally and nationally, the stakes are too high for the media to exist as a deceptive “neutral” apparatus. Protesters today are being arrested for “walking on the sidewalk”, while demanding justice for a black man who was killed standing on the sidewalk. This is the amerikkka we are in today, and this was the amerikkka we were in 400 years ago when our country was built on the genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of Black people. It is time to make the tough decisions, publish the uncomfortable truths, and make the radical choice of oppression or liberation. There is an active genocide happening in our backyard and all over the world of people of color and poor people. The united states of amerikkka has become one of the largest open air slave camps in the history of mankind, with over 2 million people in cages and 7 million under correctional control, backed by its imperialist allies waging exploitive wars and massacres abroad. The only ecological system that sustains us with life, the Earth itself, is imminently collapsing under the white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchy. The civilization built by the west, built by the white man — is now threatening the very survival of humanity, and with it, all forms of life on the planet. It is long past the time to face the truth. If we are to survive, the distinctions have to be made, the sides have to be chosen, and the fight has to be picked up immediately. Otherwise, only history will live to tell the truth, and the blood will be on your hands.

Which narrative will our civilization survive to tell?

One of the most unbelievable stories you have probably never heard before

from NPR.org

The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state's right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate. The case, known as Buck v. Bell, centered on a young woman named Carrie Buck, whom the state of Virginia had deemed to be "feebleminded."

Author Adam Cohen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that Buck v. Bell was considered a victory for America's eugenics movement, an early 20th century school of thought that emphasized biological determinism and actively sought to "breed out" traits that were considered undesirable.

"There were all kinds of categories of people who were deemed to be unfit [to procreate]," Cohen says. "The eugenicists looked at evolution and survival of the fittest, as Darwin was describing it, and they believed 'We can help nature along, if we just plan who reproduces and who doesn't reproduce.' "

All told, as many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20th century. The victims of state-mandated sterilization included people like Buck who had been labeled "mentally deficient," as well as those who who were deaf, blind and diseased. Minorities, poor people and "promiscuous" women were often targeted.

Cohen's new book about the Buck case, Imbeciles, takes its name from the terms eugenicists used to categorize the "feebleminded." In it, he revisits the Buck v. Bell ruling and explores the connection between the American eugenics movement and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

Cohen notes that the instinct to "demonize" people who are different is still prevalent in the U.S. today, particularly in the debate over immigration.

"I think these instincts to say that we need to stop these other people from 'polluting us,' from changing the nature of our country, they're very real," Cohen warns. "The idea that those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it — it's very troubling that we don't remember this past."

get the book HERE.

From now on lets just call him what he is: DUMP

Snatch and share, spread the word.

This shit is the worst of our country, not the best, a shiny, smelly, disgusting version, a horror ...

From now on donald trump is shortened to DUMP - #DUMP is the name for the piece of shit running for office #meme #permanentMeme he is a Dump lets make that clear and let the world know that's how the majority of americans feel about him (and really all the republicans for that matter, but we'll concentrate on this 💩 for now).

PEACE ✌🏾👊🏾 👍🏽

GEF



#FeelTheBern

Killer Mike Schools Stephen Colbert on Systemic Racism in America & How To End It

Rapper and activist Killer Mike of Run The Jewels stops by The Late Show to talk about racial justice, Bernie Sanders and formal sweats.



from: Ambrosia for Heads

On last night’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Killer Mike (born Michael Render) dropped some knowledge on the state of race relations in this country, something he’s been doing for years through his music but which has only recently become something that mainstream media have begun to acknowledge. His visibility has grown exponentially thanks to the tremendous success of Run the Jewels, and his recent stint as guest speaker at an Atlanta, Georgia rally for Bernie Sanders was one of the most memorable Hip-Hop moments of 2015. Although his segment on last night’s show was only a few brief minutes, he managed to inundate audience members and a clearly appreciative Colbert of some very crystallized messages, and he held nothing back when it came to placing blame and calling for action.

After the general pleasantries about wardrobe and family, Colbert asked Render to comment on how the tragedies in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and North Charleston have changed anything in terms of the movement for racial justice and a national discourse. Before answering, Render pled that “White people who are watching, google Jane Elliott. She has an experiment called the blue eye/brown eye experiment. I encourage you all to just simply watch that, ’cause it’ll actually grow you.” He’s referring to an experiment in racism first conducted by former third-grade teacher Elliott in 1968, on the day following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. According to her website, the exercise “labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority.” Clearly, Render came into this interview armed with some serious heat, already schooling millions of Americans before even answering Colbert’s question.

However, Render quickly addresses the question at hand, saying “if White people are just now discovering that it’s bad for Black or working class people in America, they’re a lot more blind than I thought. And they’re a lot more choosing to be ignorant than I thought. The same problems that we’re discussing today we discussed in 1990, 1980, 1970, and 1960. And until we call a spade a spade and we say that this problem is coming from conditions that we’re creating or allowing to happen, as a White group of people who hold a certain amount of power…” Colbert then cuts in asking Render if he believes there is a systemic attempt in the United States to isolate poor and minority citizens and put them into communities that can be controlled. Render’s answer is immediate, as he briskly says “It’s not an attempt at all. It’s successful.” He goes on to support the statement with evidence, citing former Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who notoriously built highways in an effort to segregate his city. And the brain food does not stop there. Check out the rapid-fire education Render brought to the stage last night below.

Related: Killer Mike & Big Boi Are Helping Bring Hip-Hop’s First Amendment Rights to the Supreme Court (Audio)


Thanks Tristan!

The Blast Master KRS-1 Blasts American Politics, from CNN

This aired in November, perhaps before he "Felt the Bern"?

Still an interesting analysis...

[ Lessons on race, atheism and my white privilege ]

from Salon

Ta-Nehisi Coates woke me up: Lessons on race, atheism and my white privilege
I thought I was a race-conscious white progressive humanist. Coates' book taught me how much I need to learn

by GREG M. EPSTEIN


David Brooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Richard Dawkins (Credit: AP/Nam Y. Huh/Fiona Hanson/C-Span)

It was somewhere around the middle of the first chapter of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, “Between the World and Me,” where I began to realize that the quintessential atheist and humanist text of my generation, if there could be such a thing, was neither “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins nor “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris, nor any number of other worthy contenders by astrophysicists or cognitive scientists or philosophers or by humanist chaplains like me, but this shit right here.

Coates was writing of good intentions, at the point where I began to recognize. Americans have good intentions. Few of us see ourselves as wanting to oppress anyone. Most of us pride ourselves on not being racist. But in an era where we are trying to do better than simply not kill people like Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner, Coates writes, good intention “is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

I feel compelled, responsible to explain the importance of this book, particularly to a community I call my own. For the past 11 years, I have worked as a chaplain for atheists and agnostics, at Harvard University and beyond. I served for a term as the chair of the advisory board for the national Secular Student Alliance. And I’ve taken part in thousands of conversations about important social changes such as the rise of the “nones”– the 23% of Americans and 35% of young adult Americans who currently identify as nonreligious, according to Pew.

The point of discussion, in my circles, is often that we must be Rational. We must overcome supernatural beliefs in concepts like God, heaven, reincarnation, “The Secret,” alternative medicine (if it was proven, it’d just be called medicine, we like to quip) and many more. And I am in many ways an Orthodox Atheist: I disbelieve in all of the above concepts. Ten years ago I gladly signed a contract committing to never pray in public, not even as a metaphor. My atheist wife, who grew up enjoying religious Jewish rituals like singing the blessings, baruch ata adonai, over Hanukah candles, is often taken aback by the staunchness of my belief in godlessness, even at home, just us, where I will hum along with her beautiful melodies but I will not utter words of praise for a deity. And though Richard Dawkins once correctly pointed out, over lunch, that the difference between himself and me is that I “don’t like to mock religion,” and he relishes doing so, I consider myself to have far more in common with Dawkins, the world’s famous atheist, than not. At least when it comes to metaphysics. Yes, as a humanist I like to consider myself a person of knowledge and consciousness.

But reading Ta-Nehisi Coates woke me up from a groggy state, a kind of semi-lucid haze I did not realize I was in.

Coates, an award-winning journalist for the Atlantic, is primarily seen as a writer on race. And “Between the World and Me” is, on one level, a book about race, with the story of his murdered friend Prince Jones making Sandra Bland’s seemingly similar death look all the more like a depressing and infuriating act of terror. But atheists and humanists tend to see ourselves as transcending culture and race. So much so that I’ve always been dismayed to find the majority of people who tend to show up at the meetings of organizations with words like atheist and humanist in their names, are so very, very white. Why? Maybe, as I explored in my book “Good Without God” (a title meant to offer a three-word definition of humanism), in an America where religious identity is all many minorities have to fortify them against a society that treats them as inferior and other, identifying as an atheist is far easier for people of privilege.

But Coates’ new book is also, boldly, about atheism. It is even more so about humanism. Crafting a powerful narrative about white Americans — or, as he says, those of us who need to think we are white — who are living The Dream — Coates makes a profound statement of what is, and is not, good, with or without god. Coates refers not to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, not quite even to the “American Dream,” but rather to The Dream in which we forget our history, our identity and much of our nation’s prosperity is built on the foundation of the suffering of people of color in general and black people in particular. The Dream, in other words, is not a state in which only Fox News Watchers find themselves. It is a state that can cancel out the very best of white, liberal, humanist intentions.

If you, like me, are a race-conscious progressive who had never really given serious consideration to the thought that maybe, morally speaking, we actually do still owe reparations to African-Americans: welcome to The Dream. If you, like me, applauded with all your might at the election of our first black president, but had never truly stopped to re-evaluate your life in light of the fact that slavery was the single biggest industry in early American history and thus the “down payment” allowing us all to enjoy lives of relative, super-powerful comfort, welcome to The Dream. Or if you, like me, have walked through predominantly black neighborhoods feeling occasional pangs of fear for your safety, while also wishing fervently that residents of that neighborhood could achieve justice, but if you never fully contemplated the “moral disaster” that because of redlining, profiling and various other unjust policies, laws and scams, each black resident of that neighborhood had to endure fears at least as profound, every waking and sleeping moment, and what an unjust physical impact that might have on them and their families to this day and beyond — and therefore what an injustice we all suffer, because we are all one human family, right? …

This Dream was made for you and me.

Now you may be asking, what does all this have to do with atheism? Maybe my lack of experience as a reviewer has got the best of me.

Or maybe Coates is not merely a black thinker who happens to be an atheist, but a human thinker of the absolute highest order, who uses both his experience of living in a black body and his atheism to offer some of the freshest insights our culture and society have seen yet.

First of all, the still relatively young author was not only flipping but ripping up the script about church-state separation years before, say, Sam Harris ever considered penning a “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Did you ever wonder, in the name of atheism, as to the sociology of why there are so many churches in poor black neighborhoods? Coates did, straight out of Howard.

Sixteen years later, he has become the most deft and creative writer I’ve seen in years in terms of his ability to craft language about the meaning of disbelief. Power, for him, comes not from divinity, but from “a deep knowledge of how fragile everything … especially The Dream, really is”; a point made more profound coming from a member of the single most religious demographic group in the United States.

Coates even channels the late Carl Sagan, astronomer and humanist ~patron saint, in passages that could inspire anyone, regardless of economic or racial background: “godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.”

Is ”Between the World and Me” an important but angry book, as the New York Times’ David Brooks suggests, in an epistle that breaks the sound barrier of tone deafness? No, and in fact it angers me that such an interpretation keeps coming up. This is, in the best and most powerful way possible, not an angry book, but a fearful book. “I am afraid,” Coates writes, again and again risking the shame with which fear is too often stigmatized, to share his deeply felt terror for his son, for himself, for all of us.

The most astonishing moment of Coates’ previous book, “The Beautiful Struggle,” comes when he explains the mysterious magic of hip-hop music as being, primarily, about fear. And as he says in “Between The World and Me,” “fear ruled everything around me”; surely the most realistic and Rational reinterpretation of Wu Tang lyrics I’ve ever encountered. Coates’ unique voice is far more vulnerable than most reviews, even positive ones, give him credit for. Why should we celebrate the vulnerability — meaning, the willingness to recognize and admit one’s fears — of a white Christian woman like the famous TED speaker Brene Brown, but fail to recognize the power of that same quality in Ta-Nehisi Coates?

A final concern: Perhaps humanists and atheists will respond negatively to what they will see here as breathless praise. We nonreligious people do not cotton to the idea that anyone or anything is perfect. And neither the present author nor his subject matter is. So I would urge “constant interrogation,” as Coates himself advises in one of the many phrases that echo great skeptic intellectuals like Paul Kurtz or James Randi. But Coates is not unaware of the flaws in his own narrative. He not only owns that the black community and its intellectual tradition isn’t perfect or sacred, he credits his Howard University professors — the secular imams at The Mecca, as he refers to America’s finest historically black college — with teaching him this.

Fittingly, the book ends with an expression of profound fear: that the same human motives and frailties that created the institution of slavery have morphed into a technological juggernaut that now threatens every human life, and our very planet, in the form of climate change. Will we, together, come up with a better way to live? Will we do it fast enough to implement those changes and experience a better future together, or will we ironically figure out how to treat one another equally, just as we are floating off vanishing coastlines into oblivion? Maybe, as a humanist, I should be more optimistic. Or maybe I will just admire the amazing little lesson Coates’ mother taught him when he was a small boy, failing or misbehaving at school. She would make him write essays explaining why. Maybe the most humanistic thing we can do right now is wake up from the Dream, at least enough to look at our worst failings — as humanists, as human beings, as people who may think we are white — and write, about why.

Greg M. Epstein has served as the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University since 2005; he is also Executive Director of the Humanist Hub, a center for humanist life in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Noam Chomsky on the Roots of American Racism

from The New York Times
By George Yancy and Noam Chomsky

George Yancy: When I think about the title of your book “On Western Terrorism,” I’m reminded of the fact that many black people in the United States have had a long history of being terrorized by white racism, from random beatings to the lynching of more than 3,000 black people (including women) between 1882 and 1968. This is why in 2003, when I read about the dehumanizing acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison, I wasn’t surprised. I recall that after the photos appeared President George W. Bush said that “This is not the America I know.” But isn’t this the America black people have always known?

Noam Chomsky: The America that “black people have always known” is not an attractive one. The first black slaves were brought to the colonies 400 years ago. We cannot allow ourselves to forget that during this long period there have been only a few decades when African-Americans, apart from a few, had some limited possibilities for entering the mainstream of American society.

We also cannot allow ourselves to forget that the hideous slave labor camps of the new “empire of liberty” were a primary source for the wealth and privilege of American society, as well as England and the continent. The industrial revolution was based on cotton, produced primarily in the slave labor camps of the United States.

As is now known, they were highly efficient. Productivity increased even faster than in industry, thanks to the technology of the bullwhip and pistol, and the efficient practice of brutal torture, as Edward E. Baptist demonstrates in his recent study, “The Half Has Never Been Told.” The achievement includes not only the great wealth of the planter aristocracy but also American and British manufacturing, commerce and the financial institutions of modern state capitalism.

It is, or should be, well-known that the United States developed by flatly rejecting the principles of “sound economics” preached to it by the leading economists of the day, and familiar in today’s sober instructions to latecomers in development. Instead, the newly liberated colonies followed the model of England with radical state intervention in the economy, including high tariffs to protect infant industry, first textiles, later steel and others.

There was also another “virtual tariff.” In 1807, President Jefferson signed a bill banning the importation of slaves from abroad. His state of Virginia was the richest and most powerful of the states, and had exhausted its need for slaves. Rather, it was beginning to produce this valuable commodity for the expanding slave territories of the South. Banning import of these cotton-picking machines was thus a considerable boost to the Virginia economy. That was understood. Speaking for the slave importers, Charles Pinckney charged that “Virginia will gain by stopping the importations. Her slaves will rise in value, and she has more than she wants.” And Virginia indeed became a major exporter of slaves to the expanding slave society.

Some of the slave-owners, like Jefferson, appreciated the moral turpitude on which the economy relied. But he feared the liberation of slaves, who have “ten thousand recollections” of the crimes to which they were subjected. Fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture, with reverberations to the present.

The Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery, but a decade later “slavery by another name” (also the title of an important study by Douglas A. Blackmon) was introduced. Black life was criminalized by overly harsh codes that targeted black people. Soon an even more valuable form of slavery was available for agribusiness, mining, steel — more valuable because the state, not the capitalist, was responsible for sustaining the enslaved labor force, meaning that blacks were arrested without real cause and prisoners were put to work for these business interests. The system provided a major contribution to the rapid industrial
development from the late 19th century.

That system remained pretty much in place until World War II led to a need for free labor for the war industry. Then followed a few decades of rapid and relatively egalitarian growth, with the state playing an even more critical role in economic development than before. A black man might get a decent job in a unionized factory, buy a house, send his children to college, along with other opportunities. The civil rights movement opened other doors, though in limited ways. One illustration was the fate of Martin Luther King’s efforts to confront northern racism and develop a movement of the poor, which was effectively blocked.

The neoliberal reaction that set in from the late ‘70s, escalating under Reagan and his successors, hit the poorest and most oppressed sectors of society even more than the large majority, who have suffered relative stagnation or decline while wealth accumulates in very few hands. Reagan’s drug war, deeply racist in conception and execution, initiated a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s apt term for the revived criminalization of black life, evident in the shocking incarceration rates and the devastating impact on black society.

Reality is of course more complex than any simple recapitulation, but this is, unfortunately, a reasonably accurate first approximation to one of the two founding crimes of American society, alongside of the expulsion or extermination of the indigenous nations and destruction of their complex and rich civilizations.

G.Y.: While Jefferson may have understood the moral turpitude upon which slavery was based, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he says that black people are dull in imagination, inferior in reasoning to whites, and that the male orangutans even prefer black women over their own. These myths, along with the black codes following the civil war, functioned to continue to oppress and police black people. What would you say are the contemporary myths and codes that are enacted to continue to oppress and police black people today?

N.C.: Unfortunately, Jefferson was far from alone. No need to review the shocking racism in otherwise enlightened circles until all too recently. On “contemporary myths and codes,” I would rather defer to the many eloquent voices of those who observe and often experience these bitter residues of a disgraceful past.

Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this happened. The title of Baptist’s book is all too apt, and the aftermath is much too little known and understood.

There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called “intentional ignorance” of what it is inconvenient to know: “Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry.” The appalling statistics of today’s circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would require — that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was “the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams’s reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty...among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.”

What matters is our judgment, too long and too deeply suppressed, and the just reaction to it that is as yet barely contemplated.

G.Y.: This “intentional ignorance” regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans. It was 18th century Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus who argued that Native Americans were governed by traits such as being “prone to anger,” a convenient myth for justifying the need for Native Americans to be “civilized” by whites. So, there are myths here as well. How does North America’s “amnesia” contribute to forms of racism directed uniquely toward Native Americans in our present moment and to their continual genocide?

N.C.: The useful myths began early on, and continue to the present. One of the first myths was formally established right after the King of England granted a Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, declaring that conversion of the Indians to Christianity is “the principal end of this plantation.” The colonists at once created the Great Seal of the Colony, which depicts an Indian holding a spear pointing downward in a sign of peace, with a scroll coming from his mouth pleading with the colonists to “Come over and help us.” This may have been the first case of “humanitarian intervention” — and, curiously, it turned out like so many others.

Years later Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story mused about “the wisdom of Providence” that caused the natives to disappear like “the withered leaves of autumn” even though the colonists had “constantly respected” them. Needless to say, the colonists who did not choose “intentional ignorance” knew much better, and the most knowledgeable, like Gen. Henry Knox, the first secretary of war of the United States, described “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union [by means] more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”

Knox went on to warn that “a future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors.” There were a few — very few — who did so, like the heroic Helen Jackson, who in 1880 provided a detailed account of that “sad revelation of broken faith, of violated treaties, and of inhuman acts of violence [that] will bring a flush of shame to the cheeks of those who love their country.” Jackson’s important book barely sold. She was neglected and dismissed in favor of the version presented by Theodore Roosevelt, who explained that “The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries...has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place,” notably those who had been “extirpated” or expelled to destitution and misery.

The national poet, Walt Whitman, captured the general understanding when he wrote that “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history... A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that the scale of the atrocities and their character began to enter even scholarship, and to some extent popular consciousness, though there is a long way to go.

That’s only a bare beginning of the shocking record of the Anglosphere and its settler-colonial version of imperialism, a form of imperialism that leads quite naturally to the “utter extirpation” of the indigenous population — and to “intentional ignorance” on the part of beneficiaries of the crimes.

G.Y.: Your response raises the issue of colonization as a form of occupation. James Baldwin, in his 1966 essay, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” wrote, “Harlem is policed like occupied territory.” This quote made me think of Ferguson, Mo. Some of the protesters in Ferguson even compared what they were seeing to the Gaza Strip. Can you speak to this comparative discourse of occupation?

N.C.: All kinds of comparisons are possible. When I went to the Gaza Strip a few years ago, what came to mind very quickly was the experience of being in jail (for civil disobedience, many times): the feeling, very strange to people who have had privileged lives, that you are totally under the control of some external authority, arbitrary and if it so chooses, cruel. But the differences between the two cases are, of course, vast.

More generally, I’m somewhat skeptical about the value of comparisons of the kind mentioned. There will of course be features common to the many diverse kinds of illegitimate authority, repression and violence. Sometimes they can be illuminating; for example, Michelle Alexander’s analogy of a new Jim Crow, mentioned earlier. Often they may efface crucial distinctions. I don’t frankly see anything general to say of much value. Each comparison has to be evaluated on its own.

G.Y.: These differences are vast and I certainly don’t want to conflate them. Post-911 seems to have ushered in an important space for making some comparisons. Some seem to think that Muslims of Arab descent have replaced African-Americans as the pariah in the United States. What are your views on this?

N.C.: Anti-Arab/Muslim racism has a long history, and there’s been a fair amount of literature about it. Jack Shaheen’s studies of stereotyping in visual media, for example. And there’s no doubt that it’s increased in recent years. To give just one vivid current example, audiences flocked in record-breaking numbers to a film, described in The New York Times Arts section as “a patriotic, pro-family picture,” about a sniper who claims to hold the championship in killing Iraqis during the United States invasion, and proudly describes his targets as “savage, despicable, evil ... really no other way to describe what we encountered there.” This was referring specifically to his first kill, a woman holding a grenade when under attack by United States forces.

What’s important is not just the mentality of the sniper, but the reaction to such exploits at home when we invade and destroy a foreign country, hardly distinguishing one “raghead” from another. These attitudes go back to the “merciless Indian savages” of the Declaration of Independence and the savagery and fiendishness of others who have been in the way ever since, particularly when some “racial” element can be invoked — as when Lyndon Johnson lamented that if we let down our guard, we’ll be at the mercy of “every yellow dwarf with a pocket knife.” But within the United States, though there have been deplorable incidents, anti-Arab/Muslim racism among the public has been fairly restrained, I think.

G.Y.: Lastly, the reality of racism (whether it’s anti-black, anti-Arab, anti- Jewish, etc.) is toxic. While there is no single solution to racism, especially in terms of its various manifestations, what do you see as some of the necessary requirements for ending racist hatred?

N.C.: It’s easy to rattle off the usual answers: education, exploring and addressing the sources of the malady, joining together in common enterprises — labor struggles have been an important case — and so on. The answers are right, and have achieved a lot. Racism is far from eradicated, but it is not what it was not very long ago, thanks to such efforts. It’s a long, hard road. No magic wand, as far as I know.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Joy James, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth, Shannon Sullivan and Naomi Zack) can be found here.

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.

© 2015 The New York Times Company

How schools got desegregated ... and then resegregated

"In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened."

please click on the link in the paragraph below to read the article.

The rise and fall of desegregation efforts in the three generations since Brown v. Board. Incredible work by Nikole Hannah-Jones at ProPublica, following the school careers of James Dent, his daughter, and granddaughter in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

from Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing

Newt Gingrich is Awesome

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

What a piece of shit.

White Amerikkka has lost it's fucking mind

I saw this on the street the other night and was planning to blog it ASAP, but Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds beat me to it, or did he get it from when i mentioned it on FaceBook? haaa! Insane article just the same. Here's his comment and a piece of it:

Hey, you know something people? I’m not black, but there’s a whole lots a times. I wish I could say I’m not white”—Frank Zappa, “Trouble Every Day”

There is a well-written, fascinating—but fucking depressing—cover story (avec an awesome Drew Friedman cover illustration) by Steven Thrasher in the Village Voice today. Not much for me to add to this, I snarked myself into exhaustion yesterday, just read it and weep amongst yourselves:

About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel.

It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House).

But when that streak was broken—and, for the first time, a non-white president accepted the oath of office—white America rapidly began to lose its grip.

As with other forms of dementia, the signs weren’t obvious at first. After the 2008 election, when former House majority leader Tom DeLay suggested that instead of a formal inauguration, Barack Obama should “have a nice little chicken dinner, and we’ll save the $125 million,” black folks didn’t miss the implication. References to chicken, particularly of the fried variety, have long served as a kind of code when white folks referred to black people and their gustatory preferences—and weren’t many of us already accustomed to older white politicians making such gaffes? But who among us sensed that it was a harbinger that an entire nation was plunging into madness?

Who didn’t chuckle, after all, the first time they heard that white people had doubts that Barack Obama had even been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president? It sounded like one of those Internet stories in which some (usually white) writer does his best to prove something everyone knows to be true is actually the exact opposite. And you go along with it for a few paragraphs to see how long the writer can convince you that what you know is right is actually wrong.

Seemed like that, didn’t it? After all, what was the beef? Obama’s father was Kenyan, and the kid was born in Hawaii—which is barely a part of the United States to begin with (only a state in 1959!). His mother was white, and after the Kenyan guy left, she married an Indonesian guy, so little Barack lived in Jakarta for a while before coming back to Hawaii to be brought up largely by his white grandparents. . . . And that’s it? Come on, this was after-school-special material, the kind of thing that brings a tear to your eye because little half-Kenyan/half-white Barry made good, not the stuff of conspiracy novels.

But the more you shook your head at it, the more it seemed to have taken root deep in the lizard part of the white nervous system. Obama is not an American. He says he’s Christian, but he has a Muslim-sounding name. He’s not black, he’s not white. . . . Is . . . is he even human?

Today, Newsweek has found, nearly a quarter of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim, with barely 42 percent of the nation accepting his claim that he’s a Christian. CNN finds that a quarter of Americans also believe that Obama was “probably or definitely” born in another country.

Harris found in an online poll that 14 percent of Americans believe in their hearts that President Barack Obama is the antichrist, with nearly a quarter of Republicans saying so.

Read more of White America Has Lost Its Mind (Village Voice)

What If The Tea Party Was Black&The End of Whiteness

Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams’s demotion in the amorphous movement—read the foul bit of racial satire he wrote that prompted it—has put the Tea Party’s racial issues in clear focus lately, which made me think of two hip-hop-generation responses to where racial politics stand in the country.

First: Hua Hsu wrote his piece “The End of White America?” for The Atlantic‘s January ‘08 issue, many months before the Tea Party crystallized white resentment. Launching from the refined racial paranoia in The Great Gatsby, Hsu delves into a high-level overview of whiteness and how whites are fleeing both from and into it. The core of it:

Today, the arrival of what [Pat] Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable. What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?

Lots of food for thought, and still highly relevant. Please check it.

Second (and more rhetorically), check Pittsburgh MC Jasiri X‘s new video, based on Nashville anti-racist writer Tim Wise’s essay which asked the same trenchant question:



from Dangerous Minds