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.

of course he's not

Of course he's not in favor of "surrendering to words". Because if it doesn't offend a White Guy, it can't possibly offend anybody.


Fair disclosure: (1) I know this poster; he's very conservative and proud of it.  (2) I grew up saying that. I've tried not to for quite a while now.

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

Oh. What. The. Hell.

Here's a lovely book I ran across: For Such A Time. How could anybody think this book was a good idea?
"Lovely blue-eyed, blonde Jewess" gets fake papers but still ends up in Theresienstadt where she ends up falling in love with the SS-Kommandant, Arik von Schmidt. (Yeah. "von Schmidt".)

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.

New trend in Hollywood?

I saw two movies last week, one on Friday and one on Saturday, that both did the same thing: adding a black actor to an otherwise white cast - and making him the villain.

The details vary, of course. As is well known, Tim Burton cast Samuel L. Jackson as the over-the-top villain Baron, while keeping all the other characters white. Even in Florida we don't see a black person anywhere. All the children are white, though it would have been trivially easy to make one of them West Indian or India Indian at the least. Burton is famously on the record about being offended by adding black characters to white-sourced books or tv shows (though "fidelity to the source" isn't a Burton characteristic). But somehow he has no problem changing a white villain to a black one. hmmm.  

Inferno goes a different route. Its lone black actor plays a villain who wasn't even in the book at all, not just as a white man. And I find it very odd that the blatantly unnamed provost (described in the book as "a tiny, stunted man with tanned skin and deep-set eyes") not only gets a name in the movie (and is never called "the provost") - a very English name, too, Harry Sims and is played by Irrfan Khan.

Are film studios going to respond to the call for more POC in movies by making them all villains? Not so sure that's progress.

What the hell is happening

Randy Newman wrote a song called "Louisiana 1927". It starts like this:

What has happened down here is the winds have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day, the river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

And people are drowning in this flood.

(And one thing to remember: when people are drowning, they will often fight the person trying to save them. Or anybody else. That's one of the first things they teach you in life guard training. Drowning people aren't calm, they aren't rational, they aren't quiet. They're dying.)

Anyway, I've seen several pieces over the last few weeks referencing or quoting the first verse of this song. But I don't really agree.

The winds haven't changed. What's happened is that people are walking out in the rain and taking pictures. Taking videos.

This shit has been happening for a long time. But now (unexpected consequences!) we are seeing it happen.

All Are People

I've seen a number of posts, comments, and even articles saying that it shouldn't matter that the people at Pulse were gay. We shouldn't divide ourselves up. It was, in the words of Mark Longhurst on Sky TV, a crime against “human beings” who were “ trying to enjoy themselves, whatever their sexuality."

This sentiment may be a wonderful one. BUT. This is not the time to trot it out (and that goes a hundredfold for people who have nothing but hate for LBGT people in their daily lives and politics).

When Marc Lépine walked into the École Polytechnique in Montreal and killed fourteen women, twelve of whom were engineering students, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who were studying engineering". He was deliberately killing women.

When Dylan Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and killed nine black church-goers, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who were Christians". He was deliberately killing blacks.

And when Omar Mateen walked into Pulse in Orlando, he wasn't killing "people" or even "people who go to clubs." He was killing LGBTs.

As soon as we say that the victims of a crime shouldn't be described as what they are that made them the target, we are begging off from confronting what it is that our society does to make people into misogynists, racists, or homophobes. Also, we remove our ability to understand what just happened. Julia Hartley-Brewer, another panelist on the Sky show, said that the killer probably hated her, “a gobby woman”, as much as he did gays. Maybe. Maybe he did; he seems to have also hated Jews and blacks. But dammit, he didn't walk into a Curves and start shooting, just like he didn't walk into a bar in his own town of Port St Lucie, or a black club or a synagogue. He walked into Pulse. Maybe he did it because he knew Pulse and knew who would be there; maybe he did it because he might not be noticed for a while (Port St Lucie has gay bars). The point is: of all the groups he hated, it was gays he decided to kill.

And pretending that he didn't target gays, or that Lépine didn't target women, or that Elliot Rodger didn't hate women and the men who "got lucky with them", means we're just saying that oh, gosh, crazy people kill people and what are we going to do about it.

Omar Mateen didn't kill "people". Omar Mateen killed gay people. It's important to acknowledge that.


ps - people's reactions to Owen Jones's argument and actions on that video are illuminating, I think.

Raising obliviousness to an art form

Forbes has an article about ten ways to know the company you're interviewing with is a bad place to work.

As is common with such listicles, every reason is its own page. Eleven pages in all, serving up a heaping helping of ads all over the sides. But the really remarkable thing?

Every page has a picture of earnest young corporate worker bees. And every single person in every single picture is white.

NPM: The Black Unicorn

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.


-- Audre Lorde

A couple of thoughts on local politics

Yesterday I saw that PAC ad for Donna Edwards, the one accusing Chris Van Hollen of cozying up the NRA, like six or seven times in 80 minutes. Twice in one six-commercial break! I also saw the Van Hollen rebuttal, twice. The rebuttal says Obama said the ad should be taken off the air, it's so dishonest, but the Edwards campaign can (semi-)legit claim it's not theirs I guess; at any rate, the thing is clearly not being taken down. They've edited Obama out of it, at the White House's insistence, but what's left is still pretty ... well, let's say strong.

Edwards vs Van Hollen is an interesting race. Van Hollen has been my representative and I like him; Edwards I know little about. But I don't like dishonest attack ads - that particular NRA-lobby-exemption was supported by lots of people and the bill had virtually no Republican support. Intransigence in support of idealism sounds good on the campaign trail, but we've seen how it plays out on the legislative floor. And I also don't like PACs and super PACs throwing lots of money into campaigns without being in any way controlled by of answerable to the candidates.

And another thing - we have a lot of mayoral candidates in Baltimore telling us that we need to get kids through school ("our schools don't work, our government doesn't work, and so our people don't work. Vote for me. I'll get Baltimore working."). The trouble is that a high school diploma won't put a kid into a job in a factory that moved overseas. Baltimore has an incredibly high unemployment rate in many neighborhoods where the shipyards and steel factories and manufacturing plants fled for cheap labor. Thousands and thousands of jobs were lost in the last thirty years - exactly how many seems up for debate, but over 100,000 is pretty universally acknowledged. Yes, more and better schools are needed. So is better policing. So is massive infrastructure investment. But industrial flight is at the heart of Baltimore's woes.

And I have yet to hear one of the candidates address where those jobs are going to come from.

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.

Now = 600 years ago

The local paper ran this "guest column" today, What do YOU know about the nativity? by Kent Bush. He makes possibly the most awkward pop culture reference I'll see this week:

They cast the rebellious storm trooper in “The Force Awakens” as a black man and now there is a black man in the nativity scene. Is this just more liberal political correctness run amok?

I mean, first ... "now"? "Now there is a black man in the nativity scene"?

At least he tacitly acknowledges later in the piece that "now" would be a stupid, bigoted, right-wing overreaction. Tacitly. He says

Fortunately, no one from either party will have to modify their manger scenes.

and adds

The black wise man became a part of folklore in the 1400s.

Exactly.

There have been black people around for quite a while, even if YOU haven't had to acknowledge their existence until now. But honestly - why the heck can't some people get over there being a black man in Star Wars? I mean, there's still only one.

Today is a holiday

Which I almost forgot since all the days sort of bleed into each other now. But! Still!

Je reste Charlie

There's a lot of anger at Charlie Hebdo for its recent cover, which some claim was mocking

Here's an article by Maajid Nawaz about that.

And here's the actual newspaper that the infamous McDonald's cartoon was really mocking:



As Nawaz asks, "And how many of us noticed that on the day this Daily Mail cover went to print?"

They never thought it was a bomb

Ahmed Mohamed made a clock. No one except possibly his English teacher thought it was a bomb. The police never thought it was a bomb. They thought it was "a hoax bomb". That "broader explanation" the cops wanted? That was for him to admit he wanted to scare people by leaving it "under a car or in a bathroom". When he wouldn't back down from saying it was just a clock, that's when they arrested him. Because he's brown, he's named Mohamed, and his father is political, he therefore couldn't be a geek trying to impress people at his new school by building something, no; he had to be a troublemaker terrorist-wannabe out to terrify his school.

So it doesn't matter that they didn't evacuate the school or put the clock in the same car as themselves. They always knew it wasn't a bomb. But they thought he wanted people to think that, really, and that's why he brought it to the school.

I can't quite decide if that makes what they did worse or not. But it's not that they can't tell a bomb from a clock.

Analogy

Kim Davis is not Rosa Parks.

Kim Davis is the bus driver.

TooManyCops

The video of Samuel DuBose's killing illustrates one massive problem we have here in the US.

No, it's not that the cop murdered DuBose and then blatantly lied about it, despite having a body-cam on that showed he was, in the words of the prosecutor, "making an excuse for a purposeful killing of another person." (The prosecutor also said the killing was "murder" and "so senseless", and that "It was so unnecessary for this to occur. People want to believe that Mr DuBose had done something violent toward the officer. He did not. He did not at all." When a prosecutor says that, well.)

That is terrible, horrible, a huge problem, yes, absolutely.

But the fact is that at least one other cop backed up the killer's story 100%. He reported things that simply didn't happen. He lied to uphold the Thin Blue Line. And another one gave it a good shot, too.

So keep on saying "#NotAllCops". Keep on telling yourself and us that "most cops are good guys" and the "most cops don't kill people". Just realize that if 1 cop kills and 2 cops who wouldn't still lie to protect him, you've got 3 cops who conspired to cover up a murder. The whole barrel is becoming full of rotten apples.

If the Good Cops® cover up for the Bad Cops what is it exactly that makes them the Good Guys?

Now is not the time

Because the time is like "tomorrow" in Alice - it's always coming but it's never here.

An angry right-wing white man who hates women buys a gun in a pawn shop in Alabama and drives to Louisiana. He swaps his car's license plate. He then walks into a movie theater showing a rom-com starring a mouthy woman, a theater with about 25 people in the audience, mostly women, and sits in the back.  Once the movie starts, he stands up and starts shooting. He shoots methodically, not crazily, and he tries to leave the theater but apparently spots the cops rolling up. So he walks back inside, fires off a couple more rounds and then shoots himself.

But we shouldn't do anything but pray for the victims and their families. Because doing anything else is politicizing the tragedy.

We shouldn't ask how it's legal for a man with his history to be able to buy that gun

We shouldn't ask why his record of "extreme erratic behavior" didn't trip any alarms.

We shouldn't ask why his behavior was alarming enough that he was denied a concealed-carry permit, yet was allowed to buy a handgun in a pawn shop.

We shouldn't ask why he joins the long list of angry white men who shoot people, because every white man acts as an individual and is in no representative of anything larger than himself.

In fact, we basically shouldn't ask anything at all - except maybe "How long, Lord?"

Because asking - let alone doing - is "politicizing the tragedy". We just have to wait till things cool down. Except by then, there'll have been another. So far this year there have been as many "mass shootings" (not necessarily multiple deaths) as there have been days and over 40 mass killings, and the average number of "active shootings" (an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area) has gone from just over 6 per year from 2000-2005 to over 16 from 2006-2013).  By the time we're "ready" to talk about Lafayette, another big one will have come along to making talking about as heinous as doing it.

And one last note: we're always being told to pray for the victims ("Now it's time to shower the victims with love and prayers," says Bobby Jindal, and "The best thing we can do across Lafayette, across Louisiana, across our country, is come together in thoughts, in love, in prayer.") and not for a sea-change in our country's attitudes, not for people (men, mostly white men) to stop thinking shooting a bunch of strangers is the answer, not for the government to do something. No, "pray for the victims". So even the praying we do is meaningless by design.