Month: August 2020

WASHINGTON POST SPORTS SCORES!

This was supposed to have been a commentary on the Republican National Convention. Unfortunately, I shut down over the repulsive narrative of Donald Trump singlehandedly defeating the coronavirus and championing the cause of Black people. Drastic times call for drastic actions.  So, for the first time since leaving journalism school, I started reading the sports section.

To say that I am not a sports fan would be an understatement on a par with the assertion that Yogi Berra was not a skilled linguist.   There are, I suspect, some traumatic youthful memories prancing about in the deep reaches of my hippocampus that might explain my estrangement with competitive athletics. Suffice it to say they remain beyond the scope of this essay. The single purpose of this paragraph was to establish my bona fides as a confirmed sports news nonreader. Until now.

I had imagined the sports pages as almost a parallel universe, an abyss of meaningless scores and statistics on the way to the classified ad section. To the delighted astonishment of my wondering eyes, this was far, far from the case.  At least in our local newspaper, The Washington Post. 

These sports writers have managed to elegantly and empathically capture the poignant and painful ethos of our long summer of racial reckoning. And they have done so in a manner – and with a depth – that far and away surpasses most of the straight news reporting I’ve seen on this issue.

The sports news of the week, of course, was the decision of most professional athletes to cancel games as a way of shining a light on yet another heartbreaking story of a Black person shot by a white cop, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Video shows the officer firing seven shots into the back of Jacob Blake, who remains hospitalized in serious condition, paralyzed from the waist down.

The immediate news reports were heartbreakingly formulaic, only because we’ve been through this too many times. Peaceful protesters march through the streets chanting the names of Black people felled by police. Late into the night, a few among the many of those marchers channel their rage into acts of vandalism, smashing and burning cars and storefronts.  This is when Trump reminds us once again that the only way for white America to feel safe is by reelecting him. 

The Post’s sports writers reached far beyond the inverted pyramid of basic news reporting. As a result, their storytelling wasn’t just about the Milwaukee Bucks leading an unprecedented strike for racial justice. They captured – as well as any words could – the pain of being Black in America in 2020.  Our language has inherent limitations when it comes to conveying the profoundly visceral. Yet, these sports reporters, to borrow a metaphor from their domain, hit it out of the park.   

Here’s what Post sports columnist Jerry Brewer wrote: “(Sports figures) do not exist in some imaginary world that can be turned on and off. They are people – part athlete, all human. To be Black and human is to know society can separate the former and dismiss the latter.”  That’s why, Brewer wrote in a later paragraph, that “NBA teams stopped dribbling because too many fellow citizens would rather they shut up and watch a man get shot in the back without feeling a sense of desperation.”

This sports coverage was replete with anecdotes about strong, macho, manly players and coaches reduced to tears over what it means to be Black in this country.  According to The Post, a New York Mets star sobbed in talking about his fear of what police might do to family members simply because they are Black. 

A Los Angeles Clippers coach was quoted by The Post as saying, “You hear Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear. We’re the ones getting killed. We’re the ones getting shot. It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.”

Post columnist Thomas Boswell, who is white, wrote about being deeply affected by such words from Black sports figures. Not just their words, but also their “facial expressions, their honest human anguish. . . their angry exhausted tears.”  

Wrote Boswell: “We white people don’t have to face the daily biases and injustices Black people experience. Nor do we have to live with the fear that we or a loved one might be choked to death or shot in the back seven times by a cop for a minor or imagined wrong. We just need to know it is profoundly wrong, and we need to stand and be counted against it.” 

Boswell then ties it all together with this conclusion: “The solution in any society in which one group opposes another is dependent on the majority viewing the afflicted minority as fully human and then saying: ‘Wrong. Our fault. Must be fixed.’”

Since I’m not a regular sports reader, I will go out on a limb and suggest that this is not typical prose for that section of the newspaper.  But right now, in these turbulent times, this is journalism at its best. Nothing involving race relations in this country has been the same since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer more than two months ago. These deaths have been occurring for. . .well, forever.  But it’s different now. 

The Post’s sports coverage explains why it is different.  We see in these stories the intense pain of millionaire athletic stars confronting the reality that they and their kids are just one police stop away from being killed.  We see revered sports heroes who are cheered during the game, only to lose their humanity when it ends. And we learn that we white folks will never fully comprehend the pain of being Black and treated as if you don’t matter, but that we need to see the injustice and fight to correct it.

The day may come when a rich blend of police reform and a healing of hearts eliminates the anxiety of Black people upon viewing a flashing squad car in their rear view mirror.  Basketball players can then go back to dribbling. Sports writers can go back to box scores and statistical spreadsheets. And I can go back to tossing the sports section into the recycle bin upon its arrival every morning.

Until then, however, I will turn first to the sports pages of The Washington Post to follow our reckoning of racial justice.  So far at least, nobody does it better.

WILL A POST-TRUMP GOP RETURN TO ACTUAL BELIEFS & VALUES?

Here’s a history question to kick off our quadrennial political party conventions: Name the candidate whose nomination acceptance speech contained these five sentences:

  • “Everyone, from immigrant to entrepreneur, has an equal claim on this country’s promise.”
  • “Bigotry disfigures the heart.”
  • “Corporations are responsible to treat their workers fairly and to leave the air and waters clean.”
  • “Greatness does not rise or fall with the stock market.”
  • “True leadership is a process of addition, not an act of division.”

So, who spoke those words?  John Kennedy in 1960? Lyndon Johnson in 1964?  Hubert Humphrey in 1968? How about Barak Obama in 2008?   

Try George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes, those compassionate, caring  and inclusive thoughts came from the last Republican president prior to the dark and daunting dawn of Trumpism, an era that began with quite a different nomination acceptance speech:  “I alone can fix it.”  

It’s jarring to read Bush’s speech just as Trump prepares to accept the GOP nomination for four more years of chaos and corruption. Although only two decades have passed, it’s easy to forget that the Republican party once had actual values, that it stood for principles larger than electoral self-preservation.

Here’s how Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican operative, put it in a Washington Post op-ed: “Most Republicans would have said that the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today, it’s not that the Republican party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.”

Donald Trump not only owns this party, he has remade it in his own image.  Most historians mark the birth of Republicanism in 1854 when members of the Whig party broke away over the Whigs’ embrace of slavery.  Little did they know that, 166 years later, their anti-slavery movement would evolve into a white grievance party. 

This bizarre evolution, however, has less to do with conscious and deliberate policy changes, and everything to do with raw fear. It wasn’t as if Trump got congressional Republicans to alter their beliefs and values based on the strength and logic of his argument. Instead, it was that figurative gun he held to their heads, a weapon in the form of a single tweet that could end their political careers faster than a speeding bullet.

Focusing strictly on Trump’s merits back in 2016, many prominent Republicans rejected him. That rejection was a gift in disguise. He used it to fire up his base, to bond with them over their shared disdain and distrust for the elite political class.  This president’s fire power has always been his base, a passionate contingent of fed up white folks searching in vain for a rebirth of the 1950s. 

Here’s what some of the GOP stars were calling Trump before the 2016 election:  

Senator Lindsey Graham:  “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

Senator Ted Cruz:  “pathological liar, utterly amoral,  a sniveling coward.”

Former Congressman Mick Mulvaney:  “terrible human being.”

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry:  “a cancer on conservatism, a barking carnival act.”

Once Trump was elected, and his base displayed its steroidal bona fides, the Republican establishment caved, abandoning all remnants of beliefs, values and decency. Winning elections was all that mattered. That meant keeping The Donald happy and avoiding a demeaning tweet. So, Graham became Trump’s golf buddy, confidant and best friend in the Senate. Cruz sang his praises whenever possible. Mulvaney became his chief of staff. Perry joined the Trump Cabinet as Energy Secretary. 

Those few congressional Republicans who refused to march in lockstep with Trump either retired or were defeated for reelection. For the most part, their replacements have been sycophantically aligned with the president.

This is not at all how Republicans envisioned its future a mere seven years ago. In 2013, GOP leaders, ordered a probing and strategic evaluation of the party. It had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Many key states that had been considered Republican territory were increasingly voting Democratic. The result was an eye-opening reckoning with demographics. 

Here’s the upshot of that study: In a country where the Caucasian majority is on a steadily downward spiral to minority status, and where women and LGBTQ folks are both growing as a constituency and gravitating to the Democrats, the GOP needs a much larger tent.  In other words, white men alone will not save Republicans from extinction. Under the banner of the Growth and Opportunity Project, the party allocated $10 million to back comprehensive pro-immigration reform and outreach to women, Black, Asian, Latino and LGBTQ voters.

And then along came Donald Trump. As Stuart Stevens, the Republican political consultant, put it, Trump “didn’t hijack the GOP and bend it to his will.” Instead, he sensed correctly that there was no burning desire for big tent diversity in this party. So he, in Stevens’s words, “offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger.”  

What most of us saw as acts of compassion, caring and inclusion, Trump decried as political correctness. He encouraged division and white supremacy as the justifiable fruits of political incorrectness. “Trump didn’t make America more racist,” Stevens wrote, “he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. . .and let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.” 

Like everything Trumpian, this mind-boggling 2016 course correction – a reversal, actually – was rooted only in the moment it happened, with absolutely no thought of long-term strategy. Even in that moment, it just barely worked. Trump won with 46.1 percent of the vote. 

The GOP’s 2013 study is more germane than ever. A party tailored to the enmity of angry white men has no long-term future in a country that is growing more racially and ethnically diverse by the day. 

The only hope for Republicans is that Joe Biden scores an overwhelming victory in November. That might be enough for them to finally realize that the pro-slavery Whigs their party broke from 166 years ago was reincarnated into the Party of Donald Trump.  

They badly need to sever those bonds.

AS AMERICA BEGINS TO ATONE FOR RACISM, TRUMP EMBRACES IT

It’s been a head-splitting two months since George Floyd died for the sins of white privilege.  Outside of the White House, important Caucasians in all walks of life are suddenly rushing to atone for the totems of racism. 

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have finally been put to rest, a scant 158 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. NASCAR banned the confederate flag. HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its streaming platform. Walmart stopped locking up Black hair products.  The Dixie Chicks drove old Dixie down, and will forever be known as simply the Chicks. 

None of these symbolic gestures, of course, begin to touch the deeply entrenched economic and quality of life disparities based on race. Still, it is hard to remember a point in our history when attitudes on racial injustice changed so dramatically in such a short period of time.  Four years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement’s approval rating hovered around 40 percent.  As of two weeks ago, more than two-thirds of the country supported the BLM protests. One poll showed that 88 percent of white respondents found the protests to be justified.  

With the election only three months away, America faces its most profound racial reckoning since the 1960s. Two opposing forces are at work. One is a sustained and rapidly growing movement to eradicate systemic racism. The other is a racist president, doubling down on the white power ethos that propelled him into office. That we are trapped in this bizarre odyssey more than two decades after the death of George Wallace is depressingly mindboggling.

Donald Trump entered this arena by enthralling his supporters with the racist lie that the nation’s first black president was a Kenya-born Muslim. He’s been playing to that crowd ever since. Yet, anyone who has ever run for office, from student council on up, knows that political resiliency flows from an ability to read your constituency and pivot accordingly.  Trump neither reads nor pivots.  Instead, he clings to his signature bigotry, and is cranking it up several notches.  

As a result, our president is now far to the right of Mississippi Republicans. That party’s governor and legislators just passed a law removing the confederate symbol from the state’s flag. Trump, on the other hand, spent the past several weeks as a national spokesman for confederate flags, monuments and ideology. He has opposed his own military advisors and Senate Republican leaders who support changing the names of military bases named for confederate generals. He insists that preserving the memory of men who fought to retain slavery as a vital part of our “Great American Heritage.”

The Mississippi GOP is by no means the only entity that showed our president up when it comes to shedding the worn and weary cloak of white power. The Washington, D.C. football team, over Trump’s objections, is ditching the “Redskins” nickname.  The NFL, also over Trump’s objections, reversed itself on the practice of players taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest police violence against Blacks. Juneteenth, commemorating the freeing of enslaved people, has been made a paid holiday by a number of states and large companies. The American Medical Association declared racism a public health crisis and called for an end to police brutality against Black Americans. Many corporate leaders have resigned after claims of racism and a toxic organizational culture.

All of this happened since George Floyd’s Memorial Day death under the asphyxiating knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.  Through it all, Donald Trump has stood alone as a force against the dismantling of systemic racism.  He insists it doesn’t exist, an assertion with all of the credibility of his earlier claim that the coronavirus was no big deal and would be gone by April.

So here’s the narrative of Trump’s reelection campaign: An unpopular president, already wounded from his failure to manage a pandemic response, hits the accelerator on racism at the height of a seismic racial justice movement.  Outside of an Ayn Rand novel, the storyline makes no sense.  A Marist poll found that 67 percent of Americans say Trump has increased racial tensions since Floyd was murdered. Why is this guy going full bore on racism while the vast majority of Americans are all in for racial reconciliation?

The answer is quite simple: That’s who Donald Trump is. This president’s belief in white supremacy is the closest he gets to an actual ideology.  On all other issues, Trump formulates a position based not on core values and beliefs, but on whatever he thinks is best for him at the time. His racism, however, has been forever embedded in his heart and soul. 

Back in 1973, the federal Justice Department accused the Trump organization of discriminating against Black Americans at its housing project in Brooklyn. As part of the litigation, Elyse Goldweber, a Justice Department lawyer, questioned the now-president in a deposition. According to Goldweber, Trump walked up to her during a coffee break and said, “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”

With anyone else, you could say that was 47 years ago, enough time to grow out of that mindset.  Not Donald Trump.  Just last week he sent out this tweet: “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”  

Trump lifted an Obama-era requirement that municipalities receiving federal housing funds had to address biased practices connected with low-income areas. His tweet was no dog whistle. The president of the United States was telling suburban white folks that he was protecting them from Black people.  (As The Washington Post’s Eugene Scott noted, most of today’s suburbs are quite diverse, as opposed to the white flight days of the ‘60s and ‘70s, an era Trump equates with greatness.)

Clearly, racism will have more presence on the November ballot than it has had in more than 50 years. Despite all of the polling that shows widespread support for racial equality and justice, Donald Trump believes there is a “silent majority” out there that will give him four more years of bigotry. We’ve got about 90 days to do everything we can to prove him wrong.