Category: Racism

THANKS TO THE SUPREME COURT, GOP MOVES CLOSER TO MAKING BLACK VOTES NOT COUNT

The racial reckoning ignited by George Floyd’s murder entered its second year with a severe case of whiplash. In a rare bipartisan vote, Congress designated Juneteenth as a national holiday, marking the end of slavery 156 years ago. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court took a sledge hammer to one of this country’s premiere civil rights laws.

As if that were not enough to provoke metaphysical vertigo, many of the Republicans who voted for the Juneteenth holiday are hellbent on keeping the subject of racial strife – past and present – out of public school classrooms.  They insist that systemic racism ended a long time ago and teachers should not talk about it.

So here’s a subversive extra credit assignment for high school students:  Download the Supreme Court’s recent decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act (VRA), and then, with a highlighter, mark every past and present example of systemic racism you can find. (Tip: don’t forget to read Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, even if you have to buy a second highlighter.) When you return to school this fall, quietly drop your work on the teacher’s desk.  If you live in a red state and like your teacher, put it in a plain paper bag.

The VRA was all about systemic racism. Long seen as the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, this powerful 1965 law was designed to quash a multitude of systems that kept Black people from voting. The law’s teeth were divided between two chapters. One of them required a number of southern states with a history of discrimination to have any new voting law approved by the Justice Department. Between 1965 and 2006, that department blocked nearly 1,200 discriminatory voting laws from taking effect (P. 8 of Kagan dissent).  

Eight years ago, however, the Supreme Court tossed that entire chapter out, saying that “times have changed,” and that states no longer need Justice Department approval on voting regulations.  To no surprise of anyone paying attention, the dearth of new discriminatory voting laws had little to do with changing times.  It was all about preclearance from the Justice Department.  Within days of that 2013 decision, Caucasian-centric states started cranking out election laws making it more difficult for people of color to vote.  That production line continues to operate at full speed.

The only solace was the remaining VRA chapter on enforcement, the one that prohibits states from having any election practice that “results in a denial or abridgement” to vote on the basis of race. In theory, the courts could strike down laws that brought about that kind of a discriminatory result. Until now, that is.  In its final decision of this year’s term, the Supreme Court used an Arizona case to effectively slam the door on the law’s only remaining enforcement mechanism.

That 6-3 ruling came from Justice Samuel Alito and five fellow conservative justices, all rabid adherents of deciding cases by the precise text of a statute, rather than attaching their own meaning to a law.  Amazingly, they ignored the law’s singular threshold for finding an election regulation to be discriminatory, namely that it “results in a denial or abridgement” of voting rights on the basis of race.  Instead, the majority upheld two Arizona election regulations that resulted in a disparate impact on the voting rights of Blacks, Latinos and American Indians (P. 32 of Kagan dissent). Why? Because, said the court, there was no proof that those results were motivated by an intent to discriminate.  Congress amended the VRA back in 1982 to make it clear that the standard of enforcement of a voting law is whether it has a discriminatory impact on the basis of race, regardless of motive.  

At issue in the Arizona case were two new election laws.  One made it a crime for people to pick up sealed absentee ballots and deliver them to a collection box or polling place. The other voided all ballots cast by voters in the wrong precinct. There was evidence that both laws impacted Black, Latino and American Indian voters far more than it affected whites.  

But, but, but, say Alito and his textualist buddies, the state had a noble intent with these laws, namely to prevent voter fraud, although there have been zero instances of such fraud involving out-of-precinct voting and ballot collection.   

Although intent is not an element in VRA enforcement, it doesn’t take a think tank to figure out what is motivating an avalanche of state election restrictions aimed at making it more difficult for minority voters to cast a ballot.  Most people of color vote for Democrats. Keeping them away from the polls is good for Republicans.

In making their case for these two Arizona laws, GOP legislators openly argued that the restrictions are needed to damage the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaigns.  During oral arguments at the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked an attorney for the Republican National Committee why the party has an interest in the litigation.  The answer: the restrictions reduce Democratic votes and “politics is a zero sum game.”

In other words, the party of Lincoln is saying, in effect: “Nothing personal, Black people. We want to keep you from voting because most of you support Democrats. It’s got nothing to do with race.” The enormity of this court decision reaches far beyond Arizona.  The flood gates in every red state are wide open to unlimited obnoxiousness when it comes to keeping racial minorities away from the polls.  So far in 2021, 28 restrictive voting laws have been passed in 17 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

There is a gravestone in a Hattiesburg, Mississippi cemetery that bares this inscription: “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” According to The Nation, buried in that grave is Vernon Dahmer, a voting rights activist and Hattiesburg NAACP chapter president back in the 1960s. Just months after the VRA was passed, Dahmer died when his home was firebombed by Klansmen.

Fifty-six years later, the future of the Republican Party depends on making sure that millions of non-white voters don’t count.  

Even with Juneteenth as a federal holiday, systemic racism marches on. And on. And on.

THE GOP’S NEW BIG LIE: SYSTEMIC RACISM DOESN’T EXIST

Just as Republicans pulled the plug on investigating the deadly January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, many of us were learning – for the first time in 100 years – of something called the Tulsa Race Massacre. It seems that the long and winding road from 1921 to 2021 is paved with deception.

A large Black community just outside of Tulsa was decimated by white Oklahomans in 1921.  Some 300 Black men, women and children were murdered, thousands of homes were burned to the ground. Black businesses, schools and churches were destroyed. 

As the great white fathers of Tulsa surveyed the ashes of their destruction, the obvious question was how to weigh, measure and record this brutal massacre so that future generations could learn from it.  Their answer: Fuhgeddaboudit!  They covered it up, claimed it was just another riot by uppity Blacks. The newspapers didn’t touch the real story and neither did the history textbooks.

The Tulsa Race Massacre, it turns out, was not unique to early 20th Century America. Similar atrocities of white mobs killing hundreds of Black people played out in Atlanta; East St. Louis; Chicago; Knoxville; Omaha; Chester, Pa.; Longview, Texas; Elaine, Ark.; Wilmington, Del.; and Washington, D.C., among numerous other cities. In each case, this murderous, torturous behavior of white citizens was treated as a deep, dark family secret. It took historians almost a century to extract and piece together these long-hidden truths.  

Nearly a hundred years later, our nation’s capitol was invaded by an angry white supremacist  mob of gun-toting, confederate flag-waving rebels, hell bent on stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the country’s duly elected president. Five people died and more than 100 police officers were injured. What sayeth the great white fathers of the GOP on the matter of thoroughly investigating this treasonous incursion so that we never encounter a sequel?  Their answer came directly from the script of their Tulsa forefathers: Fuhgeddaboudit!  Best to just move on and pretend it didn’t happen. Again.

Here’s a truth that passed the test of time with flying colors:  “The more things change,” wrote French author Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1849, “the more they stay the same.” Our world has changed in profound ways since 1921. We have Wi-Fi, Tesla and Zoom. We use words like “ideation” and “reimagine.”  We take conference calls where we “circle back” and “unpack.”  But when it comes to the politics of race, white conservatives still bury the truth and lie through their teeth like it was 1921.

And there is no bigger lie than this one:  Systemic racism doesn’t exist.  Former Vice President Mike Pence says it’s a “left-wing myth.”  South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham says there is no systemic racism in America, only a few “bad actors.” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton insists there is no sign of systemic racism in our country.  Then there’s the multi-tasking Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves who, on a single Fox News appearance, denied the existence of systemic racism and proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month. 

The same conservative crowd that pushed red states to make it harder for Black people to vote (based on the fabrication of rampant voter fraud), are now advocating legislation that would prohibit public schools from teaching about the way race influences politics, culture and the law. The bills are aimed at keeping students away from any notion of systemic racism. Such laws would forbid teaching about race, racism and white supremacy. Some measures go so far as to prohibit public universities from requiring diversity training.

Another key component of this legislative package requires teachers dealing with ugly historical episodes, or current racial controversies, to explore all sides of the issues “without giving deference to any one perspective.”  Can you imagine a lesson plan outlining the pros and cons of lynching, or the murder of hundreds of Back people?

The insipid irony in all of this is that a legislative coverup of past and present racial oppression is, in itself, a form of the very systemic racism these Republican lawmakers swear does not exist. For better or worse, laws create systems. The system these head-in-the-sand legislators want is one where we pretend there is no racism, and that Blacks are on an equal footing with whites. And that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 never happened.

The truth is that it is hard to find a system in this country that is not racially skewed to the detriment of Black people. Take, for example, our systems of education, home ownership and its redlining roots,  employment, wealth accumulation and medical care.  Although occasionally adjusted in response to issues of racial inequity, they all retain the same DNA that created them back in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. 

Here’s where those systems have taken us:  

  • Median net wealth:  White families: $188,200. Black families: $24,100.
  • Median net wealth for people between the ages of 25 and 40: White: $41,800. Black: $3,500.
  • Home ownership: 73.7 percent of whites own homes. 56 percent of Blacks do.
  • Health insurance: Although Blacks make up 13.4 percent of the population, they account for half of the 30 million Americans who have no insurance.
  • Education:  Predominately Black public schools receive $2,226 less in per-pupil government aid than predominately white schools.  

From a purely empirical perspective, systemic racism is as real as it gets. The far tougher question is how to dismantle a malignancy on our country’s soul that has been there for . . . well, forever? The only place to start is with the truth, no easy task in an environment where disinformation reigns supreme. Folks who believe that Donald Trump will be “reinstated” as president in August, are only too willing to accept the notion that America is a racist-free country.  

Only a powerful and aggressive countermovement – by Democrats, non-Trumpian Republicans, independents, progressives, Green Party members and socialists – can deliver us from the diabolical illusions that are now the cornerstone of conservatism. Let’s start by stopping state legislatures from banning classroom discussion about the evils of racism.

Whitewashing the ugliness – past and present – only begets more ugliness.  

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.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA! THE WORLD WEEPS FOR THEE

Donald Trump rode into the White House on his high horse of protecting white America from the dreaded Other. He vowed to slay the dragons of otherness: Mexican rapists and drug dealers; black and brown lowlife losers from shithole countries; and, of course, his imaginary caravans of violent gang members invading our southern border.  

As the curtain rises on Act Three of this Shakespearean-like tragedy, King Donald is encountering an abrupt plot reversal.  After nearly four years of trying to remake America in his own white nationalist image, the King has come face-to-face with the real dreaded Other.  

And it is us. 

The world, it turns out, has taken a good, long look at America in this troubled summer of our discontent, and found it to be . . . well, a real shithole.  

Trump was counting on his hosting of a summit of G7 world leaders in June as a symbol of what he branded as “transitioning back to greatness.” The conference, in his mind, would mean that those nasty little blips of a pandemic and demands for racial justice were yesterday’s fake news, and that he had moved on to greater missions, like leading on the world’s stage.  German chancellor Angela Merkel, however, rained on Trump’s transitioning parade by calling the U.S. gathering a health risk in light of our country’s unbent coronavirus curve. Other G7 players agreed and the conference was called off.

It turns out that the G7 rebuff was a mere prelude, an appetizer if you will, in a nasty, karmic feast of crow laid upon Trump’s table for his dining pleasure.  As of Wednesday, American travelers are prohibited from entering the European Union.  This will go down in the annals of international diplomacy as an elegant act of the pot calling the kettle orange (orange, of course, being the new black). 

Trump thinks he invented travel bans. He spent the first months of his presidency barring Muslims from entering the country.  He’s still trying to build a wall to keep the Mexicans at bay. His only aggressive pandemic moves involved travel bans, first against China, then Europe. 

To this president, the coronavirus was just another vile foreigner to be kept forever offshore. The disease, of course, was deeply into globalization.  By the time Trump boarded up the country’s entry portals, the virus had already taken up residence in the homeland, quickly spreading to millions, and killing tens of thousands.  

Europe now has a handle on the pandemic, unlike America where COVID runs rampant while Trump runs for cover. Based on the metrics of the past two weeks, E.U. countries as a bloc have slowed their new infections to 16 per 100,000 people. For the same period, the U.S. stands at 122 new cases per 100,000 people, a ratio that that grows exponentially by the day.  Who can blame them from treating us as the highly unmasked, infection-prone fools that we are?

Yet, this startling new phenomenon of the world seeing America as the ugly other, is by no means limited to the coronavirus. We have been steadily losing value, prestige and power as a country since Donald Trump took office.  He has belittled NATO and military alliances in Asia. He pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord and tore up the Iran nuclear deal. He took the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years.  He has insulted virtually every foreign leader who’s not a ruthless dictator.  

But it has gotten so much worse in the past few weeks.  Just as heads the world over were shaking at Trump’s utter failure to lead on virus mitigation, a Minneapolis police officer pressed his white knee into George Floyd’s black neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him and setting off a series of Black Lives Matter protests throughout the world.   Nothing has been the same since.

Trump threatened to call out the military and have protesters shot.  He had mostly peaceful protesters in front of the White House tear gassed and sprayed with rubber bullets so the president could walk to a nearby church for a photo op.  He retweeted a video of a man shouting “white power” slogans.  In another tweet, he sent images of black-on-white assaults and asked why white people weren’t protesting. 

And the international community, our longtime allies, responded with a stunning sense of shock, bordering on disbelief.  The Guardian reported that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, paused for 21 seconds after being asked to comment on his country’s southern neighbor.  The silence was broken with these words: “We all watch in horror and consternation at what is going on in the United States. It is time to pull people together.”

E.U. leaders called out the Trump administration’s “abuse of power” and racism.  The Spanish prime minister expressed solidarity with the demonstrators and concern for America’s growing authoritarianism.  Another European official told a reporter that recent U.S. developments have left most political figures on his continent “shocked, appalled, and scared. . . they are locked in a Trump-induced coma.”

The world has long been fascinated with America. George Floyd’s death triggered massive protests all over the globe in large part because of that fascination, that connection people of all countries have with the U.S.  Here’s what former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt told The Atlantic: “Normally, when something happens – a war, an earthquake – everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing . . . and they calibrate their own response based on that.”

That protocol is no longer operative.  No country in its right mind is copying us today. As New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman wrote the other day, “We’re not leading. We’re not following. We’re lost.”

Sure, we still have the expertise, the world’s best universities and the most innovative companies. Our country has produced more Nobel prize winners, and has more organizations devoted to social justice than any other. But those riches, that helped mold what is best about America, lie dormant now because we have a president who rejects both science and justice.

Donald Trump is the personification of Green Day’s American Idiot, a cartoon character who sputters aphorisms about America First and a return to greatness.  He is a deeply broken man who has turned our country into the dreaded and diabolical Other.

BUSTING POLICE UNIONS: NOT A PANACEA FOR REFORM

Less than a month ago, police unions sat, with comfort and arrogance, atop the power pyramid of this country’s labor movement.  Through campaign contributions and endorsements, they curried favor with the politicians who legislate and negotiate their working conditions.  They won job protections most private sector union members could only dream of.

Then, in the eight minutes and 46 seconds it took Minneapolis police to kill George Floyd, all that leverage and power went poof. It may have been the quickest power reversal in labor history. 

Calling for profound structural changes in policing, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the first step is to deny police officers the right to bargain collectively.  Black Lives Matter and at least one national labor union have called on the AFL-CIO to kick all police unions out of the country’s labor federation. Scores of progressive commentators have jumped on this binary bandwagon, insisting on the elimination of cop unions (here, here and here). 

I will argue here that the choice is not binary, and that there are far better fixes for this mess than to deny collective bargaining rights to the 800,000 workers – including 175,000 people of color – who police the streets of this country.

Negotiating over employment terms – things like pay, vacation, insurance, discipline and a grievance procedure – is hardly the source of our policing problem. Collective bargaining is content neutral; it is a process, not a result. The content of the agreement produced by that process is largely determined by how much power each side has. 

Mayor Frey’s frustrations are understandable.  Minneapolis’ police union is led by a macho, right wing zealot whose resignation has been demanded by state and national labor leaders.  (Unfortunately, democracy – in a union or a country – is no guarantee that the elected leader won’t be an idiot.) Yet, Frey was being irresponsible and disingenuous when he said collective bargaining had to be abolished in order to achieve meaningful police reform. He, or someone on the city’s behalf, agreed to accept a contract he now says was a bad deal. 

So Mr. Mayor, instead of burning down the union hall, negotiate a better contract.  The power dynamics couldn’t be better for him, and for other cities that want to make it easier to rein in errant cops. A month ago, that wasn’t the case.  The power of police unions flowed from law enforcement’s generally high police favorability ratings. That, in turn, placed a high value on police union endorsements from public officials involved in negotiating contracts and writing laws.  That meant powerful leverage for police unions.

And they used that power well.  Discipline language in police contracts (here and here) goes far beyond the basic standard of fairness and due process used in most private sector labor agreements. For example, many police contracts purge prior discipline from an officer’s record. That means an arbitrator deciding whether to uphold discipline for excessive force will be barred from giving any weight to prior acts of brutality. Other provisions require cops accused of misconduct to be given days or weeks to prepare for an internal investigative interview.  Some contracts prohibit a civilian review board from meting out punishment, and others require police management to complete an officer’s investigation within a defined time period. Since an arbitrator’s job is to enforce the contract, many have overturned discharges on the basis that contractual disciplinary procedures were not followed.

In the three weeks since George Floyd’s murder, the pendulum has swung far and wide, from police union power, to a national consensus favoring massive structural changes in policing.  Polling shows that a substantial majority of Americans support recent protests and want meaningful police reform.  This overwhelming change in public opinion has pulled even Senate Republicans out of their comfort zone. Almost overnight, they developed a sudden dim view of the choke hold and no-knock warrants.

Police union leaders are going through a similar death bed conversion by realigning their goals to comport with the diminution of their bargaining power. The three largest PD unions in California took out full-page newspaper ads this week calling for reducing the use of the force, more officer accountability and a rooting out of racist cops.  Washington, DC police union leaders signaled an interest in loosening some of the contractual restraints on management’s ability to discipline. The national president of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the country’s largest police union, also expressed support for revising disciplinary rules.

The Supreme Court once referred to labor union contracts as “living documents,” meaning the parties can and should modify their agreements as conditions and circumstances change. There is no problem created by collective bargaining that can’t be fixed by more bargaining.  Calling for the abolition of police unions is a grotesque overreach.  More than 90 percent of most police contracts have nothing to do with the issues triggered by the murder of George Floyd.  They cover such matters as pay, clothing and equipment allowance, work schedules, vacations, holidays, sick leave, insurance benefits and drug and alcohol testing.  

The policing problem now before the country, of course, goes far beyond a few incorrigibly abusive officers. The “defund the police” rhetoric of Black Lives Matter, and others, speaks wisely to a need to completely reimagine the role of dealing with public safety.  Why would we want to break all of the police unions before doing the reimagining?  Wouldn’t it be better to involve them in helping to alter the paradigm so that whatever we call them – cops, public safety specialists, social workers, facilitators – they will have an ownership stake in the change?

There has never been a better time to rewrite police disciplinary rules. The old ones were products of a different era, if only weeks in the past.  The union power propelling those lopsided agreements has turned into a public mandate for deep structural police reform.  

As a retired union negotiator, I remember what it feels like to go to the bargaining  table with less power than you’d like.  I also know that the choice in those circumstances is clear:  Sacrifice the merely nice in order to hang on to the essential.  In this case, that means union concessions on disciplinary rules in exchange for the right to continue bargaining collectively. 

That would be a win for both sides, and for the rest of the country.

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. 

TIME TO RID THE WHITE HOUSE OF ITS RACIST INFESTATION

With all due respect to Nancy Pelosi, there is an urgent and compelling need to impeach Donald Trump. I totally get and appreciate the speaker’s concern and pragmatism.  Wrangling for months in the nuanced weeds of the Mueller Report could give Trump a perfect platform for his victimization-by-witch-hunt narrative, and thereby boost his reelection chances. 

So forget the Mueller Report.  Instead, the articles of impeachment need to focus on what a majority of Americans are only too painfully aware of: the president’s racism. His bigotry, meanness and hatred are tearing the country apart. As conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote in the New York Times this week, Trump “is a disgrace to his office, an insult to our dignity, a threat to our Union and a danger to our safety.” It doesn’t get much more impeachable than that. 

As a matter of fact, the Constitution’s impeachment clause was crafted in 1787 with visions of Trump dancing in the founders’ heads. One of them, Benjamin Franklin, argued that some future presidents might “render (themselves) obnoxious.”  In such a case, Franklin posited, impeachment offers a more rational alternative to assassination. (Back in those days, the assassination of Julius Caesar still weighed heavily on the minds of the ruling – and sometimes dueling – elite.)  James Madison suggested that impeachment should be used in the case of a president’s “perfidy”, meaning someone who could not be trusted.  Alexander Hamilton said the impeachment option is designed to remedy “injuries done immediately to the society itself.” 

Donald Trump is not merely obnoxious and untrustworthy, he is inflicting a level of injury on this country that escalates daily.  In another time and place, the Mueller Report’s abundant and substantial evidence of obstruction of justice would have removed any president from office.  Given the moral paralysis of the Senate’s Republican leadership, it will not remove Trump.  Through the lens of the past several painful weeks, a prolonged – and ultimately unsuccessful – impeachment battle over the legal intricacies of the Russia investigation would deflect the focus from the much larger Hamiltonian issue.   This president’s racism and toxic narcissism are creating endless “injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

The prospect of protracted legislative hearings over what the Donald said to James Comey or Donald McGahn two years ago pales in comparison to the abject damage Trump’s culture of fear and hatred has inflicted on our country.  He has made America far worse than any of us could have imagined.  For that, he needs to be impeached.  

To be sure, Senate Republicans will refuse to remove him from office.  Yet, it is far better to proceed on a basis that viscerally resonates with voters, than on one that amounts to a sequel to Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony.  Only 37 percent of voters say the Russia investigation warrants impeachment.  On the other hand, 59 percent called many of the president’s tweets “un-American”.  Six in 10 people found Trump’s actions to be bad for Hispanics and Muslims. Another poll found that 56 percent of voters believe the president has made race relations worse. Some 57 percent said Trump is a racist.

Every day of this deplorable presidency is filled with horrid moments, the likes of which no dystopian novelist could have ever conjured.  On Sunday, hours after a shooter, using Trumpian phrases like “Hispanic invasion” and “send them back”, killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart, the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went on television to say that the alleged mass murderer developed his anti-immigrant views before Trump was elected.  And how did Mulvaney, know that?  Turns out he lifted the line from the alleged shooter’s “manifesto”.  Another White House first:  political spin ghost written by an accused mass murderer.

Then, later in the week, Trump made the mass shooting circuit, ostensibly to comfort traumatized communities in El Paso and Dayton, where nine people were killed early Sunday. He attacked local politicians in both places, and regaled medical providers, still weary from caring for the wounded and dying, about crowd sizes at his political rallies.  When none of the still hospitalized shooting victims in El Paso would meet with him, Trump’s team had family members bring a baby who survived the shooting to the hospital for a photo op.  The two-month-old infant lost both his mother and father in the Walmart shooting. Totally oblivious to the gravity and somberness of the moment, Melania held the newly orphaned baby and beamed widely with her husband who flashed a victorious thumb’s up for the camera. For that alone, he should be impeached. 

Based on Hamilton’s standard of “injuries done immediately to the society itself”, there is overwhelming evidence supporting impeachment.  

For example, Trump:  

LAUGHED when someone at a political rally yelled that immigrants should be shot.

REBUFFED Department of Homeland Security efforts to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority.

USED the word “invasion” or “invade” to refer to migrants in tweets 10 times this year.

CUT funding for a federal program designed to undermine neo-Nazi groups and other violent domestic terrorism.

WAS named as the motivating force by countless perpetrators of hate crimes.

REPEATEDLY attacked people of color with blatantly racist tropes (here, here and here).

CALLED Mexican immigrants “rapists”, Syrian refugees “snakes”, and countries of black and brown people “shit holes”.

Impeachment should never be used to get rid of a merely bad president.  That’s what elections are for.  Yet, our wise founders envisioned the possibility that a day could come when the leader of the free world might be way worse than bad, so toxic, in fact, that our entire society is left in spiraling agony.  Alas, that tragic day has arrived.  

As damning as the Mueller evidence is, this no time to thread a legal needle over whether the president obstructed justice or merely obfuscated it.  All along, the smoking gun was hiding in plain sight, in the president’s tweets, his rally speeches, his everyday actions.  

Donald Trump is a disgrace to his office because he has totally failed to insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, in accordance with the Constitution he swore to faithfully execute.  It is hard to fathom a more compelling case for impeachment.  

TRUMP’S RACISM IS DIMINISHING AMERICA

These are the times that try America’s soul in ways that not even Thomas Paine could have envisioned. Since 1776, our country has struggled to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility. Then along comes Donald Trump. Suddenly those noble aspirations bit the dust. They succumbed to the autocratic ravages of hate and division.

The gruesome and bizarre Trump antics of the past week, although certainly not out of character for this pathological egotist, rose to such a level of alarm that it is hard not to worry about how this sad chapter of American history ends without lasting damage to the very fabric of our nation.  

Here was the guy who used his inaugural speech to decry the “American carnage (of) crime, gangs and drugs”, calling out four congresswomen of color for criticizing the country.   As everyone knows by now, not only did Trump call them out for “not loving America”, he dug out the old racist trope of “why don’t they go back to the countries they came from”.  All four of the women are U.S. citizens.  Three were born here.

For days, we were subjected to constant debate and analysis on the insipidly stupid question of whether the president’s words were racist.  That’s like asking whether Minnesota winters are cold. As a matter of fact and law, scores of employers have been found in violation of antidiscrimination laws on the basis of telling minority group employees to go back to where they came from. 

As for Trump, his overt racism has never been a close question.  He called Mexicans “rapists and drug dealers”, said all Haitians have AIDS and that Nigerians would “never go back to their huts in Africa”.  He claimed some neo-Nazis and former KKK members are “very nice people”.  He ended a federal grant for an organization that combats white supremacism. The list is endless.

Trump, of course, says there “isn’t a racist bone” in his body.  He also says “no one respects women more than I do,” despite his boasts of grabbing them by their genitals, and that 17 women have credibly accused him of sexual assault. Facts to this president are whatever he says they are. He could hold an orange in his hand and call it an apple. Yet it would very much remain an orange.  He tried that kind of trick last week by claiming that he attempted to stop a campaign rally crowd in North Carolina from chanting “send her back”,  despite video of the event showing Trump standing in silence for 13 seconds of such chanting.  

Although the story has had longer legs than most of this president’s cataclysmic moments, it will soon fade into the data bank of Trumpian atrocities. If it is still alive by mid-week, the Donald will simply threaten Iran with a nuclear attack or fire another cabinet secretary, anything to change the subject.  Yet, the national psyche will have taken one more serious blow. The cumulative damage from this presidency is unlikely to be healed anytime soon.

That dynamic was captured perfectly on a New York Times podcast last week by conservative columnist George Will.  Here is what he said, in a broader context, about the malignant impact of Trump’s words: “. . .you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for school boy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did.” 

Some of that damage has already been measured. Studies have found correlations between Trump’s presidency and various medical conditions, including cardiovascular issues, sleep problems, anxiety and stress and, particularly among Latinos, a high risk of premature birth due to stress.

Research by social scientists at Tufts University found a dramatic reversal in a 50-year trend of honoring a clear social norm of not openly making racist statements. Since Trump started making degrading comments about racial and ethnic minority groups, that norm has been blown to bits, according to researchers. One study showed that people exposed to Trump’s campaign quotes about Mexicans were “significantly more likely” to make similar offensive remarks about not just Mexicans but other identity groups.  They were simply following their leader.

Since Trump arrived on the national scene, there has rarely been a day without reports of racial incidents perpetrated in Trump’s name.  “Donald Trump was right,” said two Boston men convicted of beating and urinating on a homeless man because they thought he might be an immigrant.

Repeated surveys of public school teachers have demonstrated a steady increase in Trump-attributed racial taunts in the classroom.  In one study, 90 percent of the educators responding said their school climate has been negatively affected by Trump’s racist words and actions. The vast majority of them expressed the belief that the impact will be long-lasting. 

Because of a crude, mean spirited, bigoted presidential tweet, millions of young children of color will return to school next month only to be told by a classroom bully to go back to where they came from.  We have reached the point where a racial taunt and a presidential proclamation are one in the same.

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this country has slowly struggled to shape that more perfect union in the form of a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, one that would, at long last, deliver both justice and domestic tranquility for all.  The journey has had its low points (George Wallace) and its high points (Barak Obama).  On net, forward movement outweighed the backslides. Yet, in less than three years, Donald Trump has wiped out decades of progress. We now have miles and miles to go before we sleep.  We cannot let this president take us all the way back to where we came from.   

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.