Category: Justice

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.

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.

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.

TRUMPIAN JUSTICE: OUR CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Like a drunk progressing from slurred speech to crashing the family car, the presidency this week continued its rapid descent toward rock bottom. Regardless of your politics, is there anyone out there who wasn’t jarred – at least a little bit – to hear our president praise a convicted felon for refusing to cooperate with the federal government he defrauded? Sure, Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, but historically presidents have paid fealty to the law, not to the lawbreakers.

The president, after all, is the chief executive of that federal government, including its Department of Justice, which, a few days ago, Trump called a “joke”. This is totally contrary to those civics textbooks now welcoming students back to school. No president has ever repudiated his justice department. We inch ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

Here’s how fast we’ve fallen: In April of 2017, legal scholars expressed outrage when Trump accused a former Obama aide of having committed a crime. Since the justice department reports to the president, such a declaration of guilt without due process was seen by numerous observers as a flagrant abuse of presidential power and possible grounds for impeachment. They noted, as summarized in this space back then, that many similar slips of the presidential tongue over the years were immediately walked back. Prime example: Richard Nixon declared cult leader Charles Manson guilty before his trial began. He immediately withdrew his comment, saying, “the last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstance.” Trump, however, walks nothing back and has no qualms about prejudicing anyone’s legal rights.

What happened this week makes the president’s earlier comments look like jay walking. While Manafort’s unsequestered jury was deliberating, Trump repeatedly fired off messages claiming – in full Twitter shot of the jurors – that the trial itself was a “sad day for our country” and that Manafort was “a very good person”. The presidential attempt at verdict influencing, however, did not stop the jury from convicting Manafort on multiple counts of tax and bank fraud.

Hours later, Trump took to the stage of a political rally in one of those theater of the mind moments that flow from the bizarre politics of separate realities. With his former campaign chairman tucked neatly into a jail cell, and his personal attorney having just pled guilty to a felony charge that implicated the president, the Donald led the crowd in the ritualistic chant of “lock her up,” a vintage reference, of course, to Hillary Clinton, who has not been charged with a crime.

If you think that Trump was simply having a bad day and reverted to the Hillary ditty out of a pathetic combination of inertia and nostalgia, you would be wrong. Every day since that rally, Trump has eviscerated his justice department, along with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Never a strict constructionist on punctuation matters, the president said he now puts quote marks around “justice” when referring to the department because he sees no real justice there. He called Manafort “brave” for refusing to flip on him, like his attorney, Michael Cohen, did.

One of the federal prosecutors who helped convict mob boss John Gotti told Washington Post reporters that Trump’s recent statements about the criminal justice system struck him as “the modern-day version of a particularly inarticulate mobster.” That pretty well captures the moment we are living in.

Every day, the president lists names of more Democrats he thinks should be prosecuted by his “Justice” Department (here, here, here and here). Clearly, he has turned the notion of justice on its head. To him, it has nothing to do with the rule of law. It’s about using political power to protect himself and punish his enemies. Trump hasn’t merely hinted at that notion, he’s said it. He told Fox News this week, “the only reason” for appointing Sessions as attorney general was because he “felt loyalty” and expected his guy to protect him in the Russia investigation and then go after Democrats. Trump has never forgiven Sessions for recusing himself from the special prosecutor’s investigation.

The Washington Post has reported that the chief White House counsel and other top aides have repeatedly told Trump that he can’t call Justice and give orders, but the president refuses to embrace that concept. Here’s what a former senior administration official told the Post yesterday: “The president has not a whit of respect for institutions, whether it’s the DOJ or the Fed or the FBI. If you are a threat to him, he is going to try to kill you.”

Most of the news analysis and commentary produced by this historically tumultuous week has been focused on the future. Will Manafort flip for a reduced sentence? Will Trump pardon him? How much additional dirt does Cohen have on the president? What about impeachment? Will Mueller subpoena Trump? How will all of this play in the midterms? So many questions, and so little time to fully absorb the depth of depravity our country faces right now, in this moment, regardless of what happens later.

We have a president who has rejected the rule of law, who calls the Justice Department a “joke”, who thinks nothing of tampering with a jury, and who will do whatever it takes to subvert the processes of government in order to protect his own hide and punish his enemies. This is no longer an esoteric debate on the efficacy of a president opining on a person’s guilt or innocence. This is – right now, in this moment – a full scale assault on this country’s very concept of justice, with or without quote marks. Whatever may lie ahead, let us never accept a mobster’s notion of justice as our new normal.