Juneteenth

The Hidden History of Juneteenth tells a story that this week shows us we still need to hear: Juneteenth and what it really was.

Not just that white, rebel Texans hid the news of Emancipation.But that

Ending slavery was not simply a matter of issuing pronouncements. It was a matter of forcing rebels to obey the law. To a very real extent, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment amounted to promissory notes of freedom. The real on-the-ground work of ending slavery and defending the rudiments of liberty was done by the freedpeople in collaboration with and often backed by the force of the US Army.

Granger’s proclamation may not have brought news of emancipation but it did carry this crucial promise of force. Within weeks, fifty thousand U.S. troops flooded into the state in a late-arriving occupation. These soldiers were needed because planters would not give up on slavery. In October 1865, months after the June orders, white Texans in some regions “still claim and control [slaves] as property, and in two or three instances recently bought and sold them,” according to one report. To sustain slavery, some planters systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission. A report by the Texas constitutional convention claimed that between 1865 and 1868, white Texans killed almost 400 black people; black Texans, the report claimed, killed 10 whites. Other planters hoped to hold onto slavery in one form or another until they could overturn the Emancipation Proclamation in court.

Against this resistance, the Army turned to force. In a largely forgotten or misunderstood occupation, the Army spread more than 40 outposts across Texas to teach rebels “the idea of law as an irresistible power to which all must bow.” Freedpeople, as Haywood’s quote reminds us, did not need the Army to teach them about freedom; they needed the Army to teach planters the futility of trying to sustain slavery.

James Baldwin at Cambridge, 1965

I can't figure how to put the video itself here. But go watch it, it's short and it's powerful.  

The Guardian says: "At the start of Black History Month, we take a look at a seminal speech by writer, essayist, poet and civil rights activist, James Baldwin. Attending Cambridge University Union in 1965, Baldwin debates whether the ‘American dream’ has been achieved at the expense of African-Americans."

I add, take a look at 1:20 - William F Buckley doesn't like what he's hearing, at all.

MLK

Interesting...

At my work they run a survey every week on the front page of the intranet. Usually it's mild (what are  you looking forward to this summer?) and sometimes it's internally topical (what do you want to learn about the HR system?). This week's says:

National Peace Officers Memorial Day is 15 May, kicking off National Police Week. Have  you or your loved ones worked in public safety services, including police, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, etc?

Forget the lumping of firefighters and medical personnel in with the cops. Let's just look at the choices:

Yes, I'm currently in public safety service.
Yes, I am or previously served in this as a career or volunteer role.
My family members/loved ones currently serve in these roles.
My family and loved ones previously had public safety service careers.
No, but I've always admired and respected this work.
No, none of my loved ones have worked in these fields.

Again, let's forget the clumsy wording here - the "family and loved ones" one place, "family members/loved ones" in another, and just "loved one" in the third. Instead, just look at the two possible "No" answers. 

Is that last one meant to be "no, and neither I nor they ever would" or even, possibly, "no and we distrust cops"? Clearly it means "... and I don't admire or respect this work" - even though here we do have to consider that they put firefighters and emergency medical people in, probably to make it harder to say you don't admire and respect them. And this is a federal agency, pretty well staffed with jingoists and knee-jerk police apologists. And yet: nearly one in five (19%) chose that last answer.

I find that fascinating.

What Happened in North Carolina

This is a must read summary of the twelve-hour rollback of civil rights in North Carolina.

One of the worst parts of the bill is that it absolutely takes the teeth out of whatever protections it didn't gut. If, for instance, you suffer from racial discrimination in housing, you are expressly barred from going to court over it.

It's a grab-bag of anti-LGBT and anti-workers laws, with provisions that mean no locality can do anything about anything, from minimum wage to LBGT protections. And it took them just 12 hours from first calling the special session to signing the bill.

Breathtakingly brazen.

Vote Blue in November, from the top of the ticket to the bottom.

That Jewish baker

He will not have to make an anti-Semitic hate-speech cake ... unless he cheerfully makes racist, anti-Muslim, or ant-Christian cakes.

The Jewish or Muslim deli owner? He will not have to sell ham sandwiches ... unless he sells them to Jews or Muslims.

That homosexual baker? He won't have to frost a cake saying gay marriage is a sin ... unless he writes hate speech about straights on cakes he sells to other gays.*

If you sell a product, you have to sell it to everyone. If you don't sell it to anyone, that's fine.

I would ask why that is so hard to understand, but the truth is, I don't think it is. I think there's a segment of the political landscape that profits on whipping Christians up into a frenzy over their supposed victimization. After all, the religion began as a persecuted minority sect and it still teaches that ... hang on. Why aren't Christians happy that they're being "persecuted"? Didn't Jesus teach that meant they were blessed? But I digress.

Civil rights are not that hard to grasp. And neither is the difference between "Congratulations" and "Go to Hell."

* That video thing making the rounds of conservative sites? False equivalency. Making a cake that says "Congratulations Brian and Peter!" is not the same as making a cake that says "Gay Marriage Is Wrong".

"Somebody already got us over that bridge."

Selma.

"50 years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer. 239 years after this nation’s founding, our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer. Our job’s easier because somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us over that bridge. When it feels the road is too hard, when the torch we’ve been passed feels too heavy, we will remember these early travelers, and draw strength from their example…we honor those who walked so we could run. We must run so our children soar." —President Obama

(And how ironic that the bridge is still named for a KKK Grand Dragon.)

Martin Luther King, Jr

January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968

Something new to read for today, from Bill Moyers:

Vietnam and the ghetto riots radicalized King. “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King told the journalist David Halberstam in April 1967. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

Worth a thought or two

From Emmett Remsin and David Shor at The Baffler, a suggestion on how to help poor kids do better in school - simple AND backed by experience:

“Give more money to people”—not to specific institutions, teachers, schools, or outreach efforts, but just “people” who have low incomes and children—reeks of liberal parody. It isn’t much more sophisticated than the “throw money at the problem” reaction that’s so often deployed in a country that remains ineradicably possessed by the notion that we are short on cash.

But this is not soft socialism of the usual hand-waving variety; it does not rely on the complexities of differing economic axioms. It is only that keeping the lights on, keeping food on the table, and keeping parents from having to take a third job are all things that can demonstrably increase student performance.

RBG!

Six Supremes said it would be disruptive and confusing to strike down Texas's new restrictions on voting so close to the election.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg penned a dissent, joined by Kagan and Sotomayor, that says, in part:

"The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters."

Preach it, sister!

Seeing the light

Judge Posner, who once wrote an opinion buying into the whole "voter fraud" excuse for restrictive laws, has written a scathing dissent branding them down for what they are. Here are a couple of the choice quotes. More here, plus a link to whole thing.

—"As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem, how can the fact that a legislature says it's a problem turn it into one? If the Wisconsin legislature says witches are a problem, shall Wisconsin courts be permitted to conduct witch trials?"

—"The panel opinion does not discuss the cost of obtaining a photo ID. It assumes the cost is negligible. That's an easy assumption for federal judges to make, since we are given photo IDs by court security free of charge. And we have upper-middle-class salaries. Not everyone is so fortunate."

Or ... you know ... maybe not

Hmmmm. In today's Dear Abby, the writer says

Mom ... and [husband] Evan engaged in tense conversations concerning politics and religion. I asked them to please not talk about such things with each other, but they didn't listen. ... they had a huge argument and Mom walked out. She has never returned to our home.

Since then, I have never had a holiday with my parents, although I do travel once or twice a year with the kids to see them. Mom and Evan did come to an understanding when our third child was born, but that, too, ended in separation six months later.

Abby says:

If they were more mature, they would, in the name of family harmony, agree to disagree.

I don't know. That's a very sweeping generalization. Much depends on exactly what their argument was about.It's very difficult and quite probably not a good idea to "agree to disagree" "in the name of family harmony" with someone who has said others of your friends and family should be stripped of their civil rights. Or, you know, damned them - or you - to hell. Just for instance.

A lovely man

Here's a great picture I found on Facebook: James Garner and Diahann Carroll at the March on Washington in 1963.

The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield

Splitting those hairs

Nicholas Little's essay starts out:

In some ways, you have to hand it to Justice Alito. It is uncommon for a Supreme Court Justice to get every single question in a case wrong, but that is exactly what the newest member of the Court’s conservative majority managed with the contraception mandate cases.

Oh, snap, as the kids say.

And among the other points he makes is this:

The reams of facts and figures showing how women are discriminated against in health care, and pay 68% more out of pocket than men, and how reproductive health is perhaps the most central factor in equality for women is dismissed. All because a corporation that profits from making contraceptives doesn’t want to provide them, and five men agree. In my years of reading legal opinions, I can’t think of a dissent that so surgically eviscerates an opinion than Justice Ginsburg’s does on this point.

And this:

So, in the Brave New World of corporate religious exercise rights, making money off something is just fine and dandy, but providing insurance for others to use it will damn you to hell. This belief doesn’t bear up to scrutiny, and the case should have gone no further once it was clear that Hobby Lobby’s desire here was scoring a point not defending a genuine belief.

And this, exposing one of Alito's stupidest points (my italics):

According to the majority, for-profit corporations now have religious freedom rights. Commentators have been quick to point out that Alito sought to restrict this to closely held companies (which includes some of America’s largest corporations, such as Koch Industries and Bechtel); in the opinion the only thing he says regarding publicly traded corporations is he doesn’t think they will apply for such exemptions.

Oddly enough this doesn’t fill me with a great degree of confidence. The problem is, every piece of legislative history, and there is plenty of it, makes clear that RFRA was not intended to cover for-profit corporations. But the majority decided to play its textualist reindeer games, and subvert the clear intention of Congress (the elected branch) and instead impose its own view on the country, and elevate corporations to the same level, if not higher than, real people. I am not sure what will happen when Dell or Dole Foods attends your church next Sunday and sits in the pew next to you, but I can’t imagine the parking situation will be improved. Anyway, through a breathtaking piece of judicial activism on the part of the conservative majority, corporations now have free exercise of religion. Or at least Christian owned ones do. We need to wait and see if a Muslim-owned corporation would have been given the same leeway by the Court.

I would like to live in his US (maybe not)

John Roberts is an odd man*. He apparently believes racism is over, certainly that the Voting Rights Act is outdated and obsolete. And he believes that these people just "wish to converse with their fellow citizens about an important subject on the public streets and sidewalks."




* no odder than all the people who claimed to believe he was telling the truth when he said "I come before this committee with no agenda, no platform. I will approach every case with an open mind."

Juneteenth!

Today is Juneteenth -

"On Juneteenth we think about that moment in time when the enslaved in Galveston, Texas received word of their freedom. We imagine the depth of their emotions, their jubilant dance and their fear of the unknown."

Photo 17

Wow. Just found some photos of the Ukrainian election - here are a few. The first two are a soldier and his daughter in Lviv and a family in Kyiv.





This one - a polling place in a town called Kodra, near Kyiv - is honestly kind of creepy. A little bit like a lot of pictures you can see here on voting day, toy gun and all. For the old USSR seal, just imagine a Confederate battle flag...




That last one? Number 17 in the gallery? A guy in jail, life sentence, voting.



Felony disenfranchisement is part of the way we destroy participatory democracy in this country, in my opinion. Voting from jail may be too far in the other direction (though a couple of states allow it), but it beats losing the right forever - especially in a country where incarceration rates vary so wildly by factors unrelated to the actual crime.

Interesting, even fun, but

The owners of Hobby Lobby are large, family-sized hypocrites. This is undeniable. Not only did they cover birth control quite happily before 2012, not only do they get their goods from China because that keeps their costs down, but they invest in

companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions.

And not just birth control, but actual abortion drugs and equipment:

The companies Hobby Lobby invests in include Teva [...], as well as Pfizer, the maker of the abortion-inducing drugs Cytotec and Prostin E2. Hobby Lobby's mutual funds also invest in two health insurance companies that cover surgical abortions, abortion drugs, and emergency contraception in their health care policies.

But while pointing this out is a lot of fun, I worry about a possible consequence.

See, the thing is this: it's not because the Greens don't really believe their own story, or that it's easy to prove that. The sincerity of their "deeply held beliefs" doesn't matter.If we deny them their bid to not provide contraceptive coverage because it offends their belief by showing that their beliefs are highly convenient and mutable, then ... then we open the door to letting someone else with a firmer grasp on what "deeply and sincerely held" actually means actually win.

Then we let people pick and choose what law they obey by what religion they profess. That pastor in Tennessee, the one who won't perform interracial marriages? His congregants could refuse to serve or sell to such couples. A Muslim cab driver could refuse to pick up unaccompanied women. All kinds of Christians (and others!) could refuse to serve unmarried parents, or divorced-and-remarried folks. All those delicate folks in Arizona could refuse to bake cakes for gays.

No. Hobby Lobby needs to lose, but they need to lose because their argument is bad. Not because they're insufficiently sincere when they make it.

Juneteenth!

Today is Juneteenth -

"On Juneteenth we think about that moment in time when the enslaved in Galveston, Texas received word of their freedom. We imagine the depth of their emotions, their jubilant dance and their fear of the unknown."