Category: Human Rights

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.

THE WORDS OF GEORGE FLOYD AND DONALD TRUMP: A PORTRAIT OF AMERICA’S DISGRACE

George Floyd and Donald Trump represent the insidious polarities of black oppression and white privilege, of powerlessness and excessive, abusive power. One was a black man down on his luck, unemployed due to the pandemic, dead due to a white cop who took a knee on his neck. The other is a rich white man packed with privilege, who secured the presidency by trying to make racism great again.

Together, they represent opposing archetypes in our abyss. They demonstrate how far we have fallen from America’s ideals and values, and the enormity of the work needed to restore our country’s soul.  

What follows are the words of both men. In Floyd’s case, they were among his final utterances (here and here) between his Memorial Day arrest and death at the hands of Minneapolis police. In Trump’s case, his words were spoken or tweeted in response to the protests over Floyd’s murder.  Floyd’s remarks are in bold. Trump’s quotes are in italics. Together, they depict a gaping and deeply infected wound in the fabric of American life.  

“Please, man, I’m claustrophobic.”

“My Admin has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln.”

“I can’t breathe, please.”

“Just spoke to (Minnesota) Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

“My neck, (long guttural groan) my neck.”

“(If protesters had breached the White House fence), they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons I have ever seen.”

“Please, please, I can’t move.”

“The lowlifes and losers are ripping (cities) apart.”

“Please, the knee in my neck. I can’t breathe.”

“The thugs must be stopped.”

“Can I have some water?”

On a conference call with governors and mayors: “Get a lot of men. You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“I’m your president of law and order.”

“My neck hurts.”

“When someone is throwing a rock, that’s like shooting a gun. You have to do retribution.”

“Everything hurts.”

“Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors. These people are ANARCHISTS. . .The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe (Biden). Is this what America wants? NO!!!”

“They’re going to kill me.”

“I am mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military, to . . .protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel . . .to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.”

“Mama, Mama. I can’t breathe.”

Against that backdrop, together with Trump’s declining poll numbers, the 45th president of the United States summoned the news media to the Rose Garden Monday and insisted that he is “an ally of all peaceful protesters.” As he spoke those words, peaceful protesters in front of the White House were being attacked by smoke, flash grenades and tear gas at the hands of riot officers and mounted police. 

The mission, on orders of the Trump Administration, was to clear a path so the president could safely walk two blocks to a nearby church and pose with a Bible for a photo op.  The New York Times reported that the stunt was the idea of his daughter, Ivanka, who accompanied him and pulled the Bible he used as a prop from her $1,540 MaxMara bag.  

George Floyd did not live in the world of photo ops and $1,540 designer accessories. He died after allegedly trying to buy cigarettes with a $20 counterfeit bill. Neither his life nor his humanity mattered to the four police officers who ushered him to his death.  To them, Floyd was, in the poetry of our president, just another “lowlife thug” they needed to “dominate.”

To be sure, a Trumpian testosterone tour of military might is the last thing we need right now. The road to fixing this problem is long and winding. But it necessarily begins with the acknowledgement that black lives matter. It ends only when that truth is fully codified in the policies and procedures of everyday life, and in the hearts of those who hold power.  

Until then, justice and peace will continue to elude us. 

BUSING: AN UNCOMFORTABLE STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE

Busing to achieve school desegregation has poked its head out of the ash heap of history. Just when we thought the next 16 months would be consumed with the Green New Deal, Medicare For All and the Mueller Report, comes this ghost of issues past, an oldie-but-not-a-goodie. 

What was undoubtedly intended as a metaphor for the generational and experiential gap between two Democratic candidates – Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden – quickly mushroomed into something much more, namely the painful reality that America’s schools remain as segregated today as they were 50 years ago. 

Harris, in the first round of the party’s primary debates, went after Biden for his self-inflicted wound incurred by boasting about his good working relationships with long dead segregationist senators.  As the only black candidate on the debate stage that night, Harris made it personal, identifying herself as “that little girl” who was bused to a white neighborhood school 50 years ago in order to get a better education.  Had Biden and his old racist Senate colleagues had their way, Harris argued, she would have been stuck in an inferior segregated classroom.

The aftershocks from that debate are still being felt.  Biden eventually offered a rare apology for his remarks about working with the segregationist senators, but defended his position on busing, saying that he was never opposed to it on a voluntary basis, but abhorred the idea of the federal government forcing the practice on local school districts.  For her part, Harris noted how Biden’s defense was taken from the segregation playbook, the one that insisted the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. 

Yet, asked after the debate whether she would support forced busing today, Harris initially said she would if states failed to desegregate its schools.  Days, later, however, she modified that position by saying she supported only voluntary busing, a stance not terribly different than Biden’s back in the 1970s. Alas, busing has never polled well. Welcome to a strong jolt of déjà vu, at least for those of us old enough to remember the political perils of busing.  

Through the first half of the twentieth century, public education in this country was structured around race.  Black schools were mostly run down and dilapidated with inadequate and inferior resources. White schools, for the most part, offered a vastly superior education.  The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, said such a separated and segregated system was inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.  And then for the next 17 years, nothing much changed.  In response to that inertia, the Supreme Court, in 1971, went a step further and said segregated school districts needed to bus students to other schools in order to achieve a racial mix.  

That’s when all hell broke loose. The reaction to the judicial edict made Roe v. Wade look like a walk in the park. It wasn’t just the schools that were segregated back then, it was virtually every neighborhood of every major city in the country.  Through decades of predatory real estate practices such as redlining and blockbusting, this country was literally and figuratively divided by race.  Yet, the courts were limited to remedies involving only the schools since that was the legal predicate of the Brown case.  

Many white northern liberals, who cheered the court decisions because they saw them directed at the segregated south, went apoplectic when they learned their kids were about to be bused into a black neighborhood school.  There was major turbulence, ranging from riots to recall votes of local school board members, in places like Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. Like Biden, many Democrats who supported busing as a concept quickly reversed course in response to constituent outrage.  

Eventually, as the makeup of the Supreme Court changed, and as the country’s angst over busing continued to grow, there came a series of partial reversals to court-mandated busing. By 1999 only 15 percent of the country favored busing for integration purposes. A few years later, the Supreme Court issued a decision that substantially reduced the circumstances in which local districts could use race as a basis of moving students from one school to another.  For all practical purposes, busing was nothing more than a bad memory of failed policy.

It was not, however, a failure for black children. The racial test score gap was cut in half for many black students. Longitudinal studies showed that black kids in integrated schools were far more likely to graduate from high school, get out of poverty and even live longer than their counterparts in segregated schools.  

Sadly, many of those educational improvements underwent severe setbacks as structured desegregation plans fell by the wayside. According to several studies, a number of school systems are more segregated today than they were a half century ago. Not only that, but black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods and have lower achievement test scores than back in the busing days. 

None of this is surprising. Neighborhood schools have long been touted as the shining exemplar of American public education. Busing was seen as the enemy of that system.  Ignored in such thinking, however, is this fact: The ugly underbelly of neighborhood schools is a funding mechanism – the property tax – based on real estate values.  We have chosen an arrangement in which the quality of a child’s education is based on the income of their parents. As a result, we are left with a bifurcated system every bit as separate-but-inherently-unequal as the one condemned in Brown v. Board of Education.

In a far more perfect world, the remedy for centuries of post-slavery racism and bigotry would have been deeper and broader than simply busing kids from one segregated neighborhood to another. How about integrating the neighborhoods themselves?  How about equal funding for all schools, regardless of local property values?  

As Joe Biden said last week, in his ongoing attempt to extract himself from his busing brouhaha, “There should be first-rate schools of quality in every neighborhood in this nation.”  Since we, as a country, have never come close to such a standard, maybe it’s time to ask this question in the next presidential debate:  Would you support federal control of public schools in order to assure that all students have an equal opportunity to a quality education regardless of race or family income?  If nothing else, it might make busing look more palatable. 

WATER POLO: THE NEW AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Now that we’ve spent a couple of weeks shaking our heads over the college admissions scandal, it is time to reckon with the fact that our system of higher education is seriously broken.  This is about more than a water polo coach on the take.  It’s about affordability, access and equal opportunity. It’s about how the decimation of those qualities has put a generation of young people at risk.

A four-year private college degree now carries an average price tag of a quarter of a million dollars. Even with scholarships and parental assistance, the typical graduate starts adult life $30,500 in the red.   Nationwide, student loan debt exceeds $1.5 trillion.  The insanity of those economics has created a scarcity of opportunity, a Hunger Games-like competition in which 18-year-olds are forced to fight for an educational slot that might give them a shot at the good life and upward mobility.

As a result, high schools throughout the country are experiencing a mental health epidemic. The intense pressure on kids to compete for grades and test scores that could create a path to the “right” college has heaped enormous stress on students. Wrote a high school counselor in Maryland, “Honestly, I’ve had more students this year hospitalized for anxiety, depression and other mental-health issues than ever.”  A February Pew survey showed that 70 percent of teenagers saw anxiety and depression as a “major problem”.  An additional 26 percent said it was a minor problem.  

From a public policy perspective, the fix for this predicament is not exactly rocket science. Rather than treating college education as a scarce resource, it needs to be offered in abundance, free of charge, or at least on an ability-to-pay basis. In addition to academic ability, admission decisions need to reflect a need for racial and ethnic diversity and a leveling of the family income playing field.  What we have now is just the opposite: a college entrance turnstile heavily weighted in favor of the financially advantaged.

The real travesty in the college cheating scandal wasn’t that rich parents bribed their kids’ way into top schools.  Sure, it was sketchy for coaches to take payola for greasing the admission skids of phony athletic recruits who had neither the ability nor desire to play on their teams.   But in terms of applying a moral compass, the repugnancy level of that alleged felony is not that far removed from standard operating procedure on many campuses. This broader ethical quandry is a quiet affirmative action plan favoring well-heeled white kids with a mastery of sports like water polo, sailing, fencing, golf, tennis, lacrosse or hockey.  

According to the recent cheating indictments, all of the elite colleges involved had a set number of admission slots for each sports team.  Coaches identify the kids they want for their teams and, for the most part, they get in.  The National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates that between 61 and 79 percent of student athletes are white. Of the 232 Division I sailing athletes last year, none were black. In the case of lacrosse players, 85 percent were white, as were 90 percent of the hockey players. 

Kirsten Hextrum, a University of Oklahoma professor, told the Atlantic that it is not unusual for parents to spend $10,000 a year or more on equipment, private trainers, summer camps, and travel to tournaments in order to help their kids achieve the level of athletic proficiency needed to secure one of the admission slots reserved for their particular sport. Her research, and that of others, shows that students admitted through the athletic route have substantially lower academic ratings than non-athlete applicants. 

This preference pool of mostly white and privileged water polo stars – and others of that athletic ilk – was constructed with the same architecture as the old affirmative action and quota systems that once promoted ethnic and racial diversity.  For the past 40 years, however, those routes to college enrollment diversity have been battered into near oblivion at both the state and federal level.

Eight states have banned race-conscious admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1979 landmark Bakke case, struck down the use of racial quotas in college admissions, but left the door open to the consideration of race as one of many criteria in student selection.  Through subsequent court decisions, however, that door has been slowly closing, and many legal observers believe it is about to be slammed shut in a case currently before a very conservative Supreme Court. As a result, according to a New York Times analysis, black and Hispanic students are now more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges than they were 35 years ago. 

This leaves us with a startlingly absurd result:  Colleges are prohibited from creating a diverse student body by giving preference to ethnic and racial minority applicants, but it’s perfectly acceptable for them to create admission quotas for a pool of predominately affluent white athletes with less-than-stellar academic records.  Affirmative action isn’t dead. It has simply become a codification of white privilege.

In a TMZ kind of way, it was tantalizing to see television stars and investment brokers doing the perp walk on accusations that they bribed their kids’ way into top schools. But their approach differs only in kind – and legality – from what has become the accepted norm in college admissions. Affluent white families go to the head of the line, and everyone else battles it out for whatever is left.  Delusional defenders of the system call it a meritocracy, but it is far, far closer to being a plutocracy. And it needs to change. 

RACISM RUNS FAR DEEPER THAN BLACKFACE & THE N-WORD

You would almost think we are smack in the middle of the biggest racial reckoning since the end of the Civil War.  Sheepish white pols are throwing out their blackface kits. A Maryland legislator is on political life support after having uttered the n-word in a cigar bar.  A member of Congress lost his committee assignments because he defended white supremacy.   We may never have another Black History Month as provocative as the one that just ended, nor as shallow.

Sadly, this spectacle of superficiality shows no signs of abating. We are now into a four-day international story over whether Virginia’s first lady, Pam Northam, committed a racist act by handing raw cotton to black students during presentations on slavery. She insists she gave the cotton to students of all color.  The BBC ran a piece headlined “Virginia’s First Lady in Cotton-picking Race Row.” This was only weeks after she mitigated her husband’s (Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam) self-inflicted wounds by stopping him from doing the moonwalk at a news conference where he confessed to having used blackface in a 1984 Michael Jackson dance contest.

Now comes Michael Cohen, former Trump attorney and consigliere, – and soon-to-be federal prison inmate – with scathing Congressional testimony about his former boss. Cohen said of Trump: “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”  In a day-long committee hearing, House Republicans made no attempt to defend their president on the conman and cheat charges.  But Trump loyalist Rep. Mark Meadows pulled out all stops on the racist label.  He had a black woman stand next to him during his televised questioning. Meadows pointed to her and said, in the tone of a Perry Mason gotcha moment, that she is a long time Trump family friend, so how could the president possibly be racist?  He proudly rested his case, but not for long.

It went quickly downhill from there.  A number of committee members said Meadows’s use of the woman as a prop was, in itself, racist.  That sent the Congressman into an intensely emotional diatribe, protesting that he can’t be racist because he has black nieces and nephews and is very good friends with the committee chair who is black.  As a child of the 1960s, I naively thought that old racist trope about “some of my best friends are black,” had gone the way of the hula hoop and segregated lunch counters.

There are two takeaways in all of this early 2019 racial news.  One is that America’s infectious goiter of racism is every bit as malignant as it was 50 years ago.  Regardless of how offending politicians try to frame the issue, white guys corking up in blackface is not just an ancient taboo.  It’s always been wrong, but prominent white folks seem hell bent on doing it, despite the ensuing furor. A Google search for blackface produces millions of hits, a virtual who’s who  of entertainers and political figures who keep right on smearing the burned cork over their white privilege (here, here and here).  

Yes, there is a slightly higher risk now for politicians who partake in racist symbols, whether by blackface, use of the n-word or similar bigotry.   When the Virginia blackface story first broke, there was a stampede of Democratic leaders and presidential candidates issuing calls for Northam’s resignation.  A few days later, however, the situation changed dramatically.  The state’s lieutenant governor, a black Democrat, was accused of sexual assault by two women.  Then the attorney general, second in the line of succession for governor, also a Democrat, revealed that he, too, had done the blackface bit.  If all three of them quit, the new Virginia governor would be the current speaker of the house, a Republican.  Suddenly public pressure on Northam to resign all but disappeared.  Polling data show that 58 percent of the state’s African Americans want him to remain in office.

Therein lies the second – and most important – object lesson.  While elected leaders donning blackface or spewing blatantly racist speech are inexcusably despicable, their behavior is but a symptom of a much larger problem, one that gets far less attention than the deplorable antics that have captured recent headlines.  Here’s the deal:  Institutional racism is deeply baked into our culture and government, putting non-whites at an inherent  structural disadvantage when it comes to virtually every aspect of life. That will change only through new laws and public policy. For the past 100 years, that aspirational transformation has been an anathema to the Republican Party. 

It’s not difficult to understand why most African Americans in Virginia want to retain a Democratic governor with a penchant for blackface.  The alternative is control by a party of white faces totally oblivious to their needs.  And those needs cut deeply into this country’s soul, inflicting far more pain than the racist buffoonery of ignorant politicians.

Here is the real problem with America’s racism in 2019:  Black households have only 10 cents in wealth for every dollar held by white households. Only 43 percent of African Americans own a home, a figure that has fallen almost every year since 2004. Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men.  Blacks are incarcerated in state prisons at more than five times the rate of whites. Overwhelmingly white school districts receive $23 billion more than predominantly black districts, despite serving roughly the same number of children. Black people face a greater risk of death than white people at every stage of life. One study found that racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths in a year, about as many as were caused by strokes.

As depressing and distressing as it is to relive the racist tropes of the 1960s, it is far worse to assume that our deep racial divide will be healed by simply getting rid of politicians who dabbled in blackface or used the n-word.  I’d like to think such a purge would be a start to dealing with the underlying evil of structural racism.  But I fear it is a superficial diversion, one that may create the illusion of doing the right thing, while leaving a diabolically broken system still very broken.

FORGET STORMY, COMEY & MUELLER, TRUMP IS TRASHING AMERICA

President Trump should be grateful for the Mueller investigation. Thanks to the special counsel’s work, news producers and consumers are obsessed with the daily minutia of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice theories, not to mention the deeply profound question of who paid Stormy and why. Easily missed is the most important story of this administration: Donald Trump is making America terrible again.

Yes, Russia’s interference in our elections is a big deal. So are alleged presidential attempts to interfere in the investigation of that foreign intrusion. But the daily bombardment of speculation, Trump attorney churn and bizarre Rudy Giuliani proclamations seems to have crafted a useful, even if inadvertent, cover for the severe damage the 45th president is doing to our country.

We desperately need an end to this American nightmare. Yet, unless a Nixonian-like smoking gun tumbles out of Mueller’s shop, impeachment is a longshot. A two-thirds Senate vote is needed to remove a president. That’s never happened, and it’s unlikely to any time soon, absent blockbuster evidence that would pull Republican senators away from a president who remains dismayingly popular with his party. A shoot-and-miss runs the risk of burnishing Trump’s outside martyr credentials for a 2020 reelection campaign. Six-and-a-half more years of Trump shredding America’s values is unthinkable.

That’s why Democrats need to march into the midterm elections with a substantive agenda for truly turning this country around. That means quantifying the damage done these past 16 months and offering a plan to reverse it, not merely running on an impeachment promise.

Here’s just some of the ways Trump’s administration has reversed decades, if not centuries, of American progress:

BIGOTRY RUNS RAMPANT. Emboldened by their president, bigots have come out from under their rocks, openly spewing their hate at anyone who is not an American-born white male. Every published study shows dramatic increases in hate crimes against blacks, Latinos, Muslims, women, and the LGBTQ community. One source pegged such incidents at 250,000 a year. Another study showed that one in five hate crimes was committed by people using Trump’s name. For example, this letter sent to at least 10 mosques across the country in 2017: “To the children of Satan, you Muslims are vile and filthy people. . .There’s a new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump. He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. . .You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”

SEGREGATED NEIGHBORHOODS are encouraged. The Trump administration suspended a rule requiring communities receiving federal housing funds to assess patterns of segregation and barriers to fair housing and devise plans to combat them. HUD Secretary Ben Carson called such desegregation goals “failed socialist experiments”.

SICK CHILDREN are shortchanged. Just this week, Trump asked Congress to cut more than $7 billion out of already approved funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to demonstrate fiscal constraint in the wake of huge budget deficits brought on by tax cuts for the rich.

MIGRANT CHILDREN are being separated from their parents. Trump’s Justice Department announced Monday that it will prosecute every migrant fleeing violence in Central America who crosses illegally into the United States. That means children will be taken away from their parents who will be immediately incarcerated. The previous practice was to treat such migrants as asylum seekers, not criminals, and allow the families to remain together in this country while their asylum request was considered.

HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS are soaring. Insurers say Trump’s successful push to end the individual mandate that required everyone to be insured has created a “death spiral” for the market. Insurance executives predict that premiums will increase by steep double-digits in 2019 as a result of healthy people stopping their coverage.

CONSUMER PROTECTION has been gutted. Trump has brought the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to a virtual standstill. Investigations into questionable business practices have ended. Hiring is frozen. No data is being collected and a database of consumer complaints is in the process of being dismantled. Existing cases against companies are being closed or put on indefinite hold. The department is expected to drop a major case against Navient, the student loan company accused of cheating borrowers.

The list of hits to the American people goes on and on. Trump’s much ballyhooed tax bill did zilch for the working class. Corporations, for the most part, used their enormous windfalls to repurchase about $800 billion of their own stock. Meanwhile, worker pay has barely moved. Close to a million immigrants, most with black or brown skin, are subject to deportation under Trump’s policies. This includes hundreds of thousands of young people brought here as children and who know no other home. The environment has been devastated by such Trumpian moves as eliminating regulations on carbon emissions from coal-based power plants, opening vast swaths of Alaskan wilderness to new oil and gas drilling and the reversal of another 29 environmental regulations.

Never has this country fallen so quickly from its core values. That’s why Democrats need to make the midterm elections all about truly restoring America’s greatness – without the red hats. As despicable as this president has been, this campaign cycle has to be about more than just Trump. We’ve been in an All-Trump-All-The-Time world since November 8, 2016. We need to focus now on the specific ways we can disengage from this dystopia and take our country back.

That means talking about true tax reform and a fair redistribution of wealth that will provide meaningful help to the poor and middle class. It means finding a way to let every kid who wants a college education to have one, without crippling student loans. It means having a sensible, fair and compassionate immigration policy, one that never closes our borders on the basis of race or religion. It means taking reasonable steps to protect our planet. It means renouncing every form of bigotry, and unabashedly protecting human rights whenever, and wherever, they may be endangered. This, after all, is what America is all about. As Trump mania blasts at us 24-7, let us never lose sight of that fact.

(Scheduling note: Due to a long-planned retirement trip in honor of my wife and editor, Melissa, this space will remain dark for a couple weeks. We will be back shortly after Memorial Day.)

IMMIGRATION REFORM: TRUMP’S WHITE POWER MOVEMENT

Every once in a while, even as we grow numb with the clownish inanity of all things Trump, there arises a clarion call of meaning about this presidency, a diabolical message seeped in the worst traditions of America’s past. It was there in his nod to white supremacists in Charlottesville. It was there when he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” And, most assuredly, it was there in a recent Washington Post analysis showing that Trump’s immigration plan would let white people cling to their majority status for up to five more years. In case there was ever a doubt, making America white again is what the Trump odyssey is all about.

The president is insisting that any immigration bill must drastically reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the country. According to the Post, such a move would disproportionately affect black and brown immigrants. Current census projections predict that whites will become a minority in this country in 2044. Trump’s proposed immigration restrictions could delay that seminal demographic shift until 2049. Those are metrics most of us rarely think about, but they represent the lifeblood of Trump diehards, angry white folks who feel they are being pushed aside by people of other races and ethnicities.

Racism isn’t merely one of many character flaws of our 45th president. It was the driving force behind his candidacy and it continues to fuel a cult-like base that worships at Trump’s altar and sees him as their last Great White Hope. This is not to say that the president is not also misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. There is no human right this guy won’t obliterate. Yet, the race card is always on top of his deck. And for good reason: Without the divide between white and non-white, this presidency is finished.

There is an overwhelming mountain of evidence that racism fueled Trump’s ride to the White House (here, here and here). He tapped into . . .no, he plowed into . . . a visceral strain of Caucasian anxiety and resentment, a feeling that white folks were being left behind in a country of people who no longer looked like them. Trump did something that no politician since the early days of George Wallace had even attempted: He made bigotry great again. For his followers, that is. He pulled it out of the darkness and onto the center stage of his campaign. Immigration policy is complicated, layered and nuanced, and Trump can’t be bothered with the details. All he cares about is the bottom line. If the number of black and brown people in this country can be significantly reduced, it’s a good day for Team Trump and the base.

As shocking as this phenomena may be to millennials – and to boomers with fading memories – there is nothing new here. Before the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ink was dry, Republicans were pushing their “Southern Strategy” to cash in on a raging white backlash against the end of Jim Crow laws. In every national election since, the GOP has milked white racism to its advantage, albeit with dog whistles through talk of “law and order”, “welfare queens” and “states’ rights”. Trump got rid of the dog whistles and dropped the subtlety. As much as we may have wanted the stain of our dark racial history to have remained in the past, it is very much part of our present. A major 2016 study showed that the number of slaves owned in southern counties more than 150 years ago accurately predicts the number of white voters who today identify as Republican and express racial resentment toward blacks. The higher the number of slaves, the more anti-black Republican voters.

A Richard Nixon campaign aide told the New York Times in 1970 that “. . .political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices.” Nixon’s Southern Strategy carried the day for him in 1968. According to historians, Nixon’s appeal to white racists came through his running mate, Spiro Agnew, a Trump-like persona with a larger and more alliterative vocabulary. Agnew once called an Asian-American reporter a “fat Jap” and referred to the press corps as “nattering nabobs of negativism”. He expressed nothing but contempt for black civil rights leaders, calling them “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting, caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type leaders.”

As the New Republic’s Jeet Heer observed, this Southern Strategy of turning white racial resentment into GOP votes was “the original sin that made Donald Trump possible.” Republican elites like Paul Ryan, who called Trump a racist during the campaign but has embraced him ever since, now own him and his unvarnished racism. “In truth,” as Heer put it, “he is their true heir, the beneficiary of the policies the party pursued for more than a half a century.”

There is something to be said for clarity. As the unapologetic cheerleader for white supremacy, Trump has given us a binary choice, more stark, momentous and crucial than this country has faced since the start of the never-ending Civil War. He has put racism on the ballot. Now that bigotry is no longer disguised with code words and knowing winks, the choice is clear. If you believe in racism, Trump is your guy. If you reject racism, you have to reject Trump, and with him, all the Republican sheep in his flock.

Long live the Resistance! Either we nail this, or we slip ever further into the abyss of highly uncivil rights.

DUMB GUYS REACT TO #METOO BY BOYCOTTING WOMEN

From Clarence Thomas bantering about pubic hairs on Coke cans, to Harvey Weinstein spilling his seed into a potted plant, we’ve had more than a quarter-century of teachable moments on sexual harassment. Every news cycle for the past four months has brought yet another revelation of once-important men falling rapidly into the abyss because they used their power to sexually harass female colleagues and subordinates. Surely by now, guys must get it, right?

No, not all of them. Not by a longshot. Sadly, it appears that many men extracted a bizarrely distorted lesson from the never-ending trail of #metoo stories. Professing profound confusion over how to avoid career-ending sexual harassment accusations, these organizational wizards have decided to keep their distance from women in the workplace, afraid that they might be branded as a sexual harasser. As a result, women are being kept out of key meetings, held back from crucial out-of-town trips and denied mentoring, all essential building blocks to career advancement in most organizations.

No good reckoning, it seems, goes unpunished. Consider, for example, these recent developments:

Major companies are telling men not to take female colleagues on business trips and even banning them from sharing rental cars with women coworkers.

Male investors in Silicon Valley are declining one-on-one business meetings with women.

Private work meetings with colleagues of the opposite sex were found to be inappropriate by a quarter of respondents in a recent poll.

A Texas public official was reprimanded last month for refusing to meet with female employees and ending his regular mentoring sessions with one of them.

Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook told of many men in the business community reacting to the #metoo phenomena by saying, “This is why you shouldn’t hire women.”

Then there is Dr. Mukund Komanduri, a Chicago area orthopedic surgeon who says he now stands at least 10 feet away from female colleagues and avoids being alone with them. He told the New York Times, “I’m very cautious about it because my livelihood is on the line. If someone in your hospital says you had inappropriate contact with this woman, you get suspended for an investigation, and your life is over. Does that ever leave you?”

Really, Doctor? Have we been reading the same stories? These guys were flashing their penises and groping, grabbing and forcibly tonguing their female associates. That’s why you can’t consult with a woman resident over a hip replacement procedure? Give me a break!

To be sure, this insipid overreaction has not been universal. Not every man has adopted the Mike Pence protective shield of never being alone with a woman other than his wife. But it has been widespread enough to spawn new corporate training programs, including one on “safe mentoring” which teaches male executives “how to mentor young women without harassing them”. Let that one sink in for a moment. That’s like teaching bank employees how to handle money without stealing it.

The #metoo effort has been enormously effective in shining a spotlight on the depth and pervasiveness of sexual harassment, but it is, by no means, a cure for all that plagues women in most workplaces. That will come only when they are on at least equal footing with men in running those workplaces. Yet, if the response to sexual harassment is to hire and promote fewer women and further marginalize the ones who are there, the goal posts of gender equality will have been moved back to the 1950s.

Not surprisingly, studies show that companies with the lowest incidence of sexual harassment are those where women hold at least half the key leadership positions. Conversely, consider the example of Amazon. One of the first post-Weinstein casualties involved Amazon executive Roy Price. He left the company late last year after accusations that he made repeated and unwanted sexual advances on a woman at a corporate social function. It turns out that the full episode had been reviewed by Amazon in 2015, and Price was told to drink less at company parties. Amazon is run by an elite group of 16 senior executives. Fifteen of them are men. It’s hard to imagine the same outcome if women had dominated the corporate leadership.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many of those places.

One recent investigation showed that women hold 46 percent of the entry level positions in large corporations, but only a small fraction of the key management jobs. There is an abundance of reasons for turning this around. Egalitarian organizations have not only been found to be more effective, but also more profitable.

So what’s the holdup? Power, mostly, specifically the power of male privilege. Numbers are power, as sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter noted in her seminal research decades ago. As long as women are, as Kanter put it, “the few among the many” in an organization, they remain underpaid, under-promoted and at a distinct disadvantage to change the dominant culture that enables sexual harassment.

Therein lies the quandary. In order to eradicate sexual harassment from our workplaces, we need to infuse more women into the leadership strata of those organizations. How do you that when anxious men are excluding female coworkers from the very activities that can lead to the advancement pipeline? Do we need more training? Maybe seminars that make it clear to these insecure males that, as long as they don’t act like they are in a pick-up bar at last call, it’s all right to work with women and treat them as equals? Seems like an incredulous message for 2018. But clearly, there are way too many guys who still don’t get it.

TIME TO LET GAYS MARRY AND HAVE THEIR CAKE TOO

Poor Antonin Scalia. He missed the dessert course of gay rights cases at the Supreme Court this week. Only his untimely death could have kept this corpulent originalist from an oral argument banquet he knew was coming long before he died. The question before the Supremes? Can an anti-gay-marriage baker refuse to make a wedding cake for two grooms?

Nobody could have anticipated a wedding cake dialectic back in 1986. That was when the Court decided Bowers v. Hardwick, a ruling that upheld state sodomy statutes criminalizing sexual relations between same-sex partners. The majority held that the Constitution confers no protections on gays and lesbians.

Seventeen years later, however, the Court embarked on what Scalia considered a slippery slope “to end all morals.” In 2003, the Court reversed its earlier decision and, in Lawrence v. Texas, said laws effectively banning gay sex were unconstitutional. Although none of the litigators in that case were even remotely thinking about gay marriage back then, Scalia was several chess moves ahead. In a sharply crafted dissent, he prophetically predicted that it was only a matter of time before the Court would be fighting over gay wedding cakes.

If “homosexual conduct” is no longer proscribed, Scalia posited in his dissent, “what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising the liberty protected by the Constitution?” Those words, although composed in a font of deep sarcasm, later served as the plaintiffs’ road map in legal battles that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 and, finally, in 2015, established the constitutional right to marry for gay and lesbian couples.

Scalia didn’t know whether it would be a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker, but he was pretty certain that this “slippery slope” of gay rights would one day end up with a hoot and a holler from somewhere in the vast matrimonial industrial complex. Stepping up to prove him right was Colorado baker Jack Phillips. The betrothed couple, David Mullins and Charlie Craig, went to Phillips’ Masterpiece Cakeshop to order a cake for their wedding. The baker told them he was personally opposed to gay marriage and, for that reason, would not bake them a wedding cake.

Mullins and Craig argue that Phillips’ refusal to do business with them violated Colorado’s law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission agreed, and found Phillips in violation of the statute. The issue before the Supreme Court this week was over whether the baker’s free speech rights were violated. Phillips argued that the act of making a cake for a gay wedding was, in effect, forced speech in support of the marriage.

Don’t let the relative frivolity of a wedding cake fool you. There’s a lot more than dessert riding on this case. If the baker gets a judicial pass to discriminate against lesbians and gays, a long line of other vendors are likely to emerge: dress makers, florists, photographers, caterers, venue owners. And that’s just in the context of weddings. In Colorado and at least 21 other states, it is against the law to discriminate in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. If the baker wins this case, it’s not a stretch to imagine homophobic employers passing over LGBT applicants based on “free speech” rights.

The history of civil rights legislation is replete with demands for exceptions to discrimination bans, but those adopted have been narrowly and specifically defined in the statute. For example, a religious institution may limit hiring to practitioners of that religion. The “free speech” exemption is a dishonest and absurdist escape from the very intent of nondiscrimination laws. Using the Colorado baker’s argument, a racist landlord could refuse to rent an apartment to blacks on the basis that to do so would be “forced speech”, namely that he approves of black people.

In the real world, selling a cake for a gay wedding, or renting an apartment to a black family, endorses neither the marriage nor the tenants. It simply follows the law. In the public marketplace, a seller’s wares must be dispensed in accordance with applicable nondiscrimination laws. Granting a pass for discrimination based on the discriminator’s personal belief could well set off the slipperiest slope of them all. All discrimination emanates from personal belief. That’s why the laws were adopted in the first place. You can believe someone is inferior because of who they are, you just can’t penalize them for it when doing business with them.

The notion that Jack Phillips, by making a wedding cake, would be forced into advocating for the marriage of his two would-be male customers is total nonsense. He’s not making a toast, throwing rice or even going to the wedding. He’s not blessing the happy couple. He’s just baking a cake. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “When have we ever given protection to food?” Unfortunately, this Court appears sharply divided on the issue. The crucial vote will likely be that of Justice Anthony Kennedy who kept everyone guessing this week by offering critical comments to both sides.

The only safe bet right now is that in some afterlife or another, Antonin Scalia is chuckling to himself. He was, after all, right about one thing: When you give basic human rights to the oppressed, those who benefit from the oppression will fight to maintain their ways. It’s time to serve up the just desserts (with Justice Scalia’s posthumous dissent duly noted): Let them eat cake.

TRUMP: A GROWING GOITER ON THE BODY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

In case anyone was wondering why President Trump broke with White House tradition by not officially recognizing June as LGBT Pride Month, we got the answer this week: he didn’t fly the rainbow flag in June because he was planning to burn it in July. It apparently wasn’t enough for our bully-in-chief to take cruel, cheap Twitter shots at individual citizens. Insulting Meryl Streep, Snoop Dog, his own attorney general and the Broadway cast of “Hamilton” might give him a quick morning buzz, but the Donald’s real highs come from decimating human rights for large groups of Americans. Like the thousands of patriotic transgender soldiers serving in the armed forces.

In a series of three early Wednesday morning tweets, the president said the government “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military”. That was just the opening act in his anti-LGBT crusade. Later that day, the Trump administration intervened in a major court case for the sole purpose of arguing that gays and lesbians should have no legal protection against employment discrimination. Apparently, that means this 2016 Trump tweet is no longer operative: “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you . . .”

Depending on who is doing the counting, there are currently between 4,000 and 15,000 transgender troops in the country’s military. Most were closeted until June 30 of 2016, when Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, announced that they could all serve openly. Trump’s Twitter reversal seemed, on its face, to be breathtakingly cruel, even for a president who has made cruelty an art form. These soldiers were told, at long last, they could be who they are and go right on serving their country, only to have the rug yanked out from under them by a tweet. It’s hard to think of any historic parallel where human rights, once granted, were taken away. It would be like Andrew Johnson rescinding the Emancipation Proclamation after he succeeded Abraham Lincoln. Coincidentally, Wednesday’s transgender ban tweet was issued on the 69th anniversary of President Truman’s order abolishing racial discrimination in the armed forces. The question is whether that will withstand another three-and-half years of this president.

The tweeted trans ban has so far produced little beyond anger, confusion and pandemonium. The military brass were stunned and said there will be no immediate changes until the White House clarifies the policy with something other than a tweet. Defense Secretary James Mattis was reportedly caught off guard by the announcement and was said to have been “appalled” by it.

Although some suggested that Trump’s move was a ploy to shore up his base, the immediate reaction from most Congressional conservatives was highly critical. (Here, here and here.) There’s another theory: the transgender ban is all about building the Mexican wall. Trump’s cherished wall project is part of an overall defense spending bill. That legislation has stalled temporarily due to a behind-the-scenes squabble over funding for gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatment. Some Republicans want to exclude such coverage from the bill. Others, including most military leaders, have opposed reducing medical benefits for transgender troops. (The estimated price tag for these services is $8.4 million a year, less than 1% of active duty health care spending.) So the speculation, advanced Friday by Politico, is that an impatient Trump grew tired of waiting for a resolution on the medical costs, and simply gave transgender soldiers the boot so he could get a vote on his wall. Only in a bizarre, two-for-one Trumpian kind of way, does this makes sense: persecute one marginalized group in order to build a wall around an even larger one.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Justice Department intervened in a federal lawsuit brought by another agency – the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – to argue that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. For years, it had been the position of both the Justice Department and the EEOC that the law’s prohibition against sex discrimination included sexual orientation. The EEOC’s case, now before a federal appellate court in New York, involves a sky diving company that supposedly fired an employee because he is gay. Although this story took a back seat to other Trump atrocities of the day, it was a highly significant reversal. The federal government is now officially on record supporting the right of private employers to fire lesbians and gays for being . . .well, for being lesbian and gay. Courts have issued conflicting interpretations and the matter is undoubtedly headed to the Supreme Court. Until Wednesday, it was going there with the U.S. government fully backing the view that the law’s ban on sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identification. In one 24-hour period, this administration not only threw transgender individuals under the bus, it gave every private employer the green light to discriminate against them and lesbians and gays.

With respect to U.S. presidents and presidential aspirants, the story of LGBT rights is not exactly one of profiles in courage. Ronald Reagan turned his back on the AIDS epidemic. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. George Bush used antigay animus to capture a second term. Barack Obama didn’t “evolve” into a marriage equality supporter until the fourth year of his presidency. Hillary Clinton didn’t get there publicly until 2013. But Donald Trump has achieved a level of human rights shame that soars past all of them. He boasts about not being an antigay ideologue. Yet, he is so much worse than that. Trump’s singular ideological commitment is to himself. Everybody else is expendable and irrelevant. He thinks nothing of crushing the hopes, dreams and esteem of transgender soldiers, or putting this country’s official stamp of approval on homophobic and transphobic discrimination, just to assuage whatever momentary mood may pass through him. When it comes to human rights, it just doesn’t get much worse than that.