It has become a commonplace of the analysis of the Trump phenomenon to say that he throws away the dog whistles of previous Republican campaigns with his direct racism and xenophobia. The pundits say that GOP leaders frightened by the rise of Trump have nobody to blame but themselves. I think this is unarguably true. Politicians of both parties have raised the specter of "terrorism" to distract the voters' attention from real threats to our safety, like gun violence. Trump just says he will bar an entire religion from this country! Politicians of both parties use the coded phrase "border security." Trump just says that Mexicans are rapists.
Besides his open white supremacy and hatred of foreigners, Trump's other vulgar verbal habit is the disgusting misogyny that his fans applaud as "telling it like it is." He called candidate Carly Florina ugly: "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that face? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?"
He refused to participate in a debate because of the presence of FOX-TV anchor Megan Kelly and argued that she questioned him sharply because she was menstruating: "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever!"
He has a long history of calling women "fat slobs" and "pigs", accusing them of gold-digging and manipulation, and bragging about his sexual conquests. In short, his conversation about women is characteristic of a junior high school boy who is scared stiff of the girls, who are taller and more mature than he. Trump has never matured emotionally. If his rally attendees who applaud his oafish comments on race are closeted (or open) Klansmen, then those who love his attacks on women are Gamer-gate boys bringing their fears into the national political arena.
All this begs a question. What, then, were the dog whistles that Republicans used to disguise their hatred of women before Orange Hitler came along?
I think the answer is the so-called "right to life." The Trump phenomenon has made it utterly transparent that the self-described "religious right" is not religious in any way, not even Christian according to their own definitions. Donald Trump has repeatedly revealed himself to be profoundly ignorant of Christian belief and practice. These "religious" folk are now supporting a candidate who freely and casually uses obscenity, vulgarity and blasphemy in his own speech, who brags relentlessly about his sexual adventures, who has divorced twice, and whose current wife poses nude for publication. The double standard of people who speak of a "right to life" while opposing gun control and supporting capital punishment has long been obvious. But Trump doesn't even oppose abortion!
So why did those "Christians" (now exposed as worshippers of a very different sort of God) oppose abortion? Again, their opponents understood this all along. It was always all about controlling women, especially controlling their frightening sexuality. When off-message elected officials claim that women can't get pregnant from rape they show that same magical terror of women's bodies, along with the patriarchal need to get them under control.
We have generously allowed them their religious conservatism, arguing that they shouldn't impose it on others, but trusting that they themselves were authentic in their beliefs. It should be clear to everyone now that there was never any political conservatism in the Republican "base", there was just white supremacy and opposition to the rights of people of color. There was never any economic conservatism. A social safety net was a good thing as long as it wasn't extended beyond white people. The support of Donald Trump by people who laughably call themselves "evangelical" should show once and for all that they are not religious conservatives: they are just terrified of women.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Friday, March 18, 2016
Who is the real "pharma bro"?
The Martin Shkreli story was a good one for the Twitter age. It is both easy to understand and outrageous when a "pharma bro" purchases the rights to an essential anti-AIDS medicine (one whose patent expired sixty years ago!) and then raises its price from $13.50 to $750 a tablet. Those numbers are still astonishing, even now, six months after the scandal broke. The optics were good, too. Shkreli has a cartoon villain's smirk that would go well in a low-budget Batman feature.
From the beginning observers who are knowledgeable about the pharmaceutical industry raised storm flags about personalizing this story about one greedy hedge-fund capitalist. They argued that all of Big Pharma was doing even worse. Now, the collapse of Valeant Pharmaceutical stock prices is offering a different window into that world. In August, right when Shkreli bought the rights to pyrethamine, Valeant was trading at $263.70 a share. At the moment I write these words, the price is $27.13 a share, and falling.
One question might be, "How does a company lose 90% of its value in seven months?" An equally interesting one, though, is "What was the source of Valeant's value in the first place?" After all, it was trading under $70 a share only three years ago. Five years ago its price was close to what it is right now. Valeant's business model was not dissimilar to Shkreli's: Obtain the rights to drugs and then jack up the prices. They had a few additional components, though. Instead of buying drugs that they considered undervalued, Valeant was buying the entire companies that owned those rights and then firing all their scientists! Valeant was a drug company with no interest in developing new drugs unless they could do it on the cheap. For decades Big Pharma has been justifying their outsized prices as the cost of developing new cures. Valeant simply declared their indifference.
Then they stopped paying taxes. Buying a whole drug company instead of just its rights gave Valeant the ability to shift their corporate headquarters to the home of the company they purchased. If it was a place with lower taxes they could -- and did! -- claim that as their home and pay their taxes there. Like overpricing its products, like refusing to invest in research and development, reducing the corporate tax bill helped boost profit rates.
Finally, there were the secret mail order divisions. Ordinarily when a customer goes to the local drug store (or even to a legitimate mail order pharmacy like Express Scripts) the pharmacist will look at a brand-name prescription and recommend a lower-priced generic substitute if one exists. By refusing to sell through the normal outlets and making their drugs available only through their own mail-order subsidiaries, Valeant was able to leave pharmacists completely out of the loop and keep patients from getting that advice. This is how a company makes super-profits on a medication which is no longer protected by a patent.
All this is why Valeant was the darling of the investor class and why its stock price was bid up so very high. And that is how other pharmaceutical companies could be pressured to imitate their disgusting practices. If investment is flooding into a scam artist that means it is leaving elsewhere and if those CEO's want to keep their companies capitalized, well then the market is telling them what to do! And this means that those other companies have been imitating some of those practices -- especially avoiding taxes and reducing research -- for several years.
Valeant's initial fall began back in September when their deceptive practices regarding mail order sales came to light. Just because hedge fund managers want to profit from robbing sick people doesn't mean they want to pay for lawsuits related to fleecing the public. So they start unloading their shares and the price falls. But what interests me even more is the drop three days ago when Valeant opened at $69 a share and closed at $33 a share. What happened that day to this company to make the fund managers lose so much trust over the course of a single trading day?
They promised to stop their deceptive mail order tactics.
That is the beauty of the market. The only thing worse than being caught robbing the people is deciding to stop robbing the people. The pharmaceutical industry spends millions lobbying our representatives to reduce regulation. So does the finance industry. We cannot possibly match their influence. But we can never forget why they are willing to forego all those millions of dollars spent on lobbyists: it is because their returns on that investment are in the billions.
From the beginning observers who are knowledgeable about the pharmaceutical industry raised storm flags about personalizing this story about one greedy hedge-fund capitalist. They argued that all of Big Pharma was doing even worse. Now, the collapse of Valeant Pharmaceutical stock prices is offering a different window into that world. In August, right when Shkreli bought the rights to pyrethamine, Valeant was trading at $263.70 a share. At the moment I write these words, the price is $27.13 a share, and falling.
One question might be, "How does a company lose 90% of its value in seven months?" An equally interesting one, though, is "What was the source of Valeant's value in the first place?" After all, it was trading under $70 a share only three years ago. Five years ago its price was close to what it is right now. Valeant's business model was not dissimilar to Shkreli's: Obtain the rights to drugs and then jack up the prices. They had a few additional components, though. Instead of buying drugs that they considered undervalued, Valeant was buying the entire companies that owned those rights and then firing all their scientists! Valeant was a drug company with no interest in developing new drugs unless they could do it on the cheap. For decades Big Pharma has been justifying their outsized prices as the cost of developing new cures. Valeant simply declared their indifference.
Then they stopped paying taxes. Buying a whole drug company instead of just its rights gave Valeant the ability to shift their corporate headquarters to the home of the company they purchased. If it was a place with lower taxes they could -- and did! -- claim that as their home and pay their taxes there. Like overpricing its products, like refusing to invest in research and development, reducing the corporate tax bill helped boost profit rates.
Finally, there were the secret mail order divisions. Ordinarily when a customer goes to the local drug store (or even to a legitimate mail order pharmacy like Express Scripts) the pharmacist will look at a brand-name prescription and recommend a lower-priced generic substitute if one exists. By refusing to sell through the normal outlets and making their drugs available only through their own mail-order subsidiaries, Valeant was able to leave pharmacists completely out of the loop and keep patients from getting that advice. This is how a company makes super-profits on a medication which is no longer protected by a patent.
All this is why Valeant was the darling of the investor class and why its stock price was bid up so very high. And that is how other pharmaceutical companies could be pressured to imitate their disgusting practices. If investment is flooding into a scam artist that means it is leaving elsewhere and if those CEO's want to keep their companies capitalized, well then the market is telling them what to do! And this means that those other companies have been imitating some of those practices -- especially avoiding taxes and reducing research -- for several years.
Valeant's initial fall began back in September when their deceptive practices regarding mail order sales came to light. Just because hedge fund managers want to profit from robbing sick people doesn't mean they want to pay for lawsuits related to fleecing the public. So they start unloading their shares and the price falls. But what interests me even more is the drop three days ago when Valeant opened at $69 a share and closed at $33 a share. What happened that day to this company to make the fund managers lose so much trust over the course of a single trading day?
They promised to stop their deceptive mail order tactics.
That is the beauty of the market. The only thing worse than being caught robbing the people is deciding to stop robbing the people. The pharmaceutical industry spends millions lobbying our representatives to reduce regulation. So does the finance industry. We cannot possibly match their influence. But we can never forget why they are willing to forego all those millions of dollars spent on lobbyists: it is because their returns on that investment are in the billions.
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
A Carnival of Ignorance
Louis CK once described the
strangeness of relying on online forums to research products. He read a review of a Blu-ray player
and wondered what particular expertise this total stranger brought to the task,
imagining that the critic was about to “murder-suicide his entire family” but
first stopped to comment on the unit’s “counterintuitive controls.”
This almost captures my view
of the horror that is comments sections.
When I was a principal I once had to fire a new teacher only weeks into
his first semester. Minutes after
a meeting in which I warned him about a pattern of abusive language toward
students he returned to the classroom and told the kids that his mother hadn’t
sent him to Harvard to be a zoo keeper for a bunch of animals like them. The story actually made the NY Post,
with me cast as the villain. Most
of the comments vilified me as a pencil-pushing bureaucrat empowering thuggish
minority teens to threaten an idealistic, young, white Ivy graduate (while also
mocking his unfortunate liberalism.)
The teacher in question was actually an African American man in his late
forties who was still living with his mom, but that didn’t fit their
imaginative rendering of the facts reported by the paper.
What interested me about
this (and other similarly personal cases) was not the torrent of hatred I
elicited from people who don’t even know me. It was the highly-racialized narratives that people had
about the Bronx, about the children I taught, and about their parents. It mirrored what I saw in the responses
to all kinds of news stories that had nothing to do with me. People could not deal with what they
read without first mentally re-writing it to fit their prejudices. More than just seeing through the
filter of a worldview, they actively rejected every fact that might challenge
what they “know” to be true.
A little over a year ago I wrote
in this space about reader responses to a New York Times op-ed on the US’s
ugly history of lynching Mexican Americans. One commenter complained that white people always have to
“take it on the chin” and “grovel in the dirt.” Several raised the time-worn defense that social norms were
“different” in the past, as if somehow the Biblical commandment “Thou shalt not
kill” had not yet been written in the 19th and 20th
centuries. And one even wondered
what the point of this piece of “historical victimhood” might be, apparently
rejecting history – the need to understand our past – itself.
The level of venom in so
many online discussions suggests to me that there is a special class of lonely,
damaged folk who sit home on their computers heaving poisonous grenades into
cyberspace… usually anonymously.
It is a carnival of ignorance.
I try as a rule not to read it because it undermines my faith in
humanity.
Or that is what I thought
until yesterday. Because it
suddenly occurred to me that they aren’t sitting at home anymore. The whole crowd of misogynists and racists
and xenophobes now have arenas to fill to cheer each other and to cheer their
avatar, the phony real estate developer and reality TV star, Donald Trump. I cannot pretend that they are
isolated, because they have found a way to break out of cyberspace and into the
real world. They have found a way
to call women “cunts” to their faces instead of in online forums. They have found a way to sucker-punch
Black men from within the comfort of a jeering crowd of similarly minded
criminals instead of just threatening to do so under the cloak of a computer
pseudonym. And instead of
complaining about the “liberal” media (“liberal” because it publishes facts
they don’t want to know) they can physically assault reporters who come to
cover their hate fests.
People of color have been
observing for many weeks now that white folks have no right to be “shocked” by
the Trump phenomenon. Orange
Hitler has simply given all these vicious folks a nucleus around which to
coalesce. My realization
yesterday, though, was that these Trump rallies are an online comments section
brought to life. And I started to
compose this post.
But our thoughts are rarely
original. And they are often
better expressed by others. Also
yesterday a friend shared this tweet on Facebook: "Donald Trump is like if a comments section ran for office." Fifty-eight characters instead of
700 words. Oh, well. I am posting mine anyway.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Whose Gaze?
This morning I posted two short paragraphs from my sequel to the book Stones from the Creek on a Facebook page I put up to publicize that collection of short stories. It describes a character’s first day as a convict worker in an Alabama coal mine. It is a struggle for me to describe the end-of-shift beatings he witnessed… beatings for failure to make weight, to mine sufficient coal for the company. I want it to convey horror and brutality, not to avert eyes from the inhuman viciousness of the prison industry in 1907. But I don’t want to create a kind of violence pornography that fails in connecting the reader with the character in a full way.
One way of bringing historical text to life on the internet is the use of actual photographs. More and more are being scanned and it is a rich resource. While posting the selection from my work in progress I looked for a long time at a photo of two imprisoned coal miners — convict laborers, slaves — and considered using the picture to illustrate the excerpt. And then I couldn’t do it. The photo shows two young Black men sitting on what appears to be a wooden shelf about four feet high. I suppose it to be a bunk bed in the mine dormitory. They sit facing the camera, forearms across knees, bare feet pulled up to them. Their eyes are closed… against the powder flash of the photographer? Both of them have shackles around their ankles with three elongated links of chain tying those shackles together. How could the truth of this picture (and the injustice it represents) possibly outweigh the humiliation of the subjects who sat for it?
In the early 20th century, when photography was still the province of professionals, pictures of lynchings were printed and sold as postcards. James Allen put together a collection of these photos as an exhibition, a book and a website, all titled Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.
Like visual evidence of the Nazi extermination, these pictures remind us of what should never be forgotten. They demonstrate the horror of white supremacist terror in this country and the fact that it was not a secret or an anomaly. The photos document large, excited crowds of white people — some with children in tow — cheering the annihilation and mutilation of Black people.
But these images do more. Remember that they were not kept secret; they were sold as souvenirs to be looked at again and again. So what does it mean for us to look at them? What does it mean for ME, a white man, to look at a picture of the destruction and desecration of a Black person that was made for white people to savor and enjoy?
I have posted a photo twice on that Facebook page of soldiers of the 7th Cavalry standing over a mass grave of Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee. It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to those soldiers and to others, as well as to tourists. I have posted three times a photo of Texas Rangers posed on their horses with their ropes around the bodies of Mexican Americans in Texas in 1915. It is a lynching photo by any standard and was sold as a postcard by the photographer to whites North Americans along the Rio Grande.
I agonize over those photos, which illustrate two American pogroms that I am trying to write about with sensitivity and care for the sequel to Stones from the Creek. I have been unable to post photos of the Tulsa race riot of 1921. Those, too, are lynching photos. Those, too, were sold as souvenirs to the participants in a pogrom that killed hundreds and destroyed the entire African American district of the city of Tulsa, apparently in an effort to turn that city into another sundown town. There is something too personal about those photos, something that captures the faces of people and glories in their objectification.
I know that Ms. Mamie Till insisted on an open casket for her son Emmet’s funeral. I know that the photos in Jet magazine brought the savage beating and murder of Emmet Till to that publication’s readership. I know that the generation who saw those pictures in Jet was moved to oppose and upturn the system of disfranchisement and Jim Crow. I also know that those photos were Ms. Till’s and that she chose to share her personal loss and horror and to share them with an audience that would view them through her eyes and not through the eyes of the vicious criminals who took her son. She had the right.
I don’t know that I have the right. They are not my photos. I know that I look at the photo of those two men — imprisoned in order to provide the steel companies with a captive work force — and I identify with them and not with their captors. But who else knows that? I am a white Jewish man who struggles to look at photographs of the Shoah. The Nazis were proud to document their murders. Even as I understand the absolute need never to forget I derive no satisfaction or pride from that memory. And so, picture by picture and paragraph by paragraph, I struggle to decide how to capture these dark memories of how the United States became what it is today.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?
About two weeks ago Representative John Lewis (D-GA) explained to the press why he and other members of the Black Congressional Caucus are supporting Senator Hillary Clinton for president. Asked about Senator Bernie Sanders's activism in the civil rights movement as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Lewis was dismissive: "I never saw him. I never met him." And then he went on to recite his own credentials in the movement, which are well-enough known that they should not need repetition. The best known is the vicious beating he received at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was far from the only demonstration of personal courage and commitment that John Lewis demonstrated.
The Twitter trolling that John Lewis received may be beside the point. Anybody can (and will) say anything on Twitter. "Maybe John Lewis has Alzheimer's" and "I'm so over the civil rights generation" were relatively mild examples. It was certainly a graceless remark for Lewis to make as it implies that his personal imprimatur is necessary for a person to be taken seriously as a part of that struggle. More ill-considered, though, were some of the attacks on Lewis. Seriously, if you are a white twenty-something, do you really expect to sway the opinions of African American voters by calling John Lewis a sell-out or an Uncle Tom?
We saw it again this weekend during the Nevada Democratic Party caucuses. John Lewis is known to a younger generation through the movie "Selma" (2014) in which he was played by Stephan James, who will portray track star Jesse Owens in the upcoming "Race." Dolores Huerta, is similarly known to young people through the movie "César Chávez" (2014) in which she was played by Rosario Dawson. Huerta was the day-to-day leader of the United Farm Workers and has been an activist for labor, for Chicano rights and for peace for over five decades. Once again we saw a distinguished elder advocating for Senator Hillary Clinton. Once again we saw some tasteless attacks on Twitter. And that is a generous description.
I am no more interested in discussing the particulars of that Las Vegas caucus than I am in arguing the merits of John Lewis's dismissal of Senator Sanders. Suffice it to say that Huerta was quick to interpret a situation as an attack on Spanish speakers in general, on Mexican Americans in particular, and on her personally. And certain Sanders supporters were only too happy to oblige with the personal attacks. Many of them seemed to think that the particular facts of the event were what mattered, that shouting her off demanding a neutral translator is much better than chanting "English Only. And again, seriously, if you are a white twenty-something, do you really expect to sway the opinions of Mexican American voters by calling Dolores Huerta a vendido?
The thin-skinned, quick-draw partisanship I describe here is not unique to the Sanders camp, regardless of what the press has to say about "Bernie Bros." I posted in this space just three weeks ago about Hillary Clinton's completely wrong-headed characterization of the period after the Civil War, a characterization that ignored both the African American struggle for freedom and the terrorist campaign for white supremacy. After writing that piece I tweeted a link to it with the words "Why #HillaryClinton got #Reconstruction so very wrong." In under two minutes that tweet received a response, "Why you are so wrong." It came from a total stranger who must have a bot searching for any and all references to Senator Clinton on Twitter. It also came in much less time than it would have taken to click here and actually read the post. I was charmed by it in a way because it was more attention than this blog usually gets! But it also meant another person who was ready to go immediately on the attack at the hint of a discouraging word about their candidate.
Some readers will recognize my title, "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?" as coming from Chairman Mao's "Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society." No, I don't think there will be millions of deaths like the Great Leap Forward. Nor do I anticipate pro-Hillary and pro-Bernie student factions attacking each other with spears like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But I do ask that we consider who we are fighting for and against. Does anybody at this point think that Hillary Clinton's rank-and-file supporters are all our class enemies? (Note that I am not asking about her. She is.) Does anybody seriously think that Bernie Sanders (who has scrupulously avoided civil rights issues for decades by moving to one of the whitest states in the country) is a champion of African Americans, Latinos or Native Americans?
I am quite certain that some horrible things can come out of this election. I remain skeptical that much good can come of it. Will we still have a House and Senate dominated by a party that seems to think it is in their interest to oppose any idea coming from the White House? Or will the Republicans go back to the business of compromising with Democrats in order to destroy unions, privatize and eradicate public services like schools, provide tax benefits for the super-wealthy and attack people in other countries with armed drones? Because those are the policies of both parties.
I support the efforts to raise the minimum wage and re-regulate the big banks. I oppose the notion that those "color-blind" policies will benefit all of us equally. After all, we had Sanders-esque policies during the era of Jim Crow, and they primarily benefited white people. I am hopeful that the enthusiasm for Sanders can translate into a broadly-popular mass movement. I don't see how we get there by attacking one another.
The Twitter trolling that John Lewis received may be beside the point. Anybody can (and will) say anything on Twitter. "Maybe John Lewis has Alzheimer's" and "I'm so over the civil rights generation" were relatively mild examples. It was certainly a graceless remark for Lewis to make as it implies that his personal imprimatur is necessary for a person to be taken seriously as a part of that struggle. More ill-considered, though, were some of the attacks on Lewis. Seriously, if you are a white twenty-something, do you really expect to sway the opinions of African American voters by calling John Lewis a sell-out or an Uncle Tom?
We saw it again this weekend during the Nevada Democratic Party caucuses. John Lewis is known to a younger generation through the movie "Selma" (2014) in which he was played by Stephan James, who will portray track star Jesse Owens in the upcoming "Race." Dolores Huerta, is similarly known to young people through the movie "César Chávez" (2014) in which she was played by Rosario Dawson. Huerta was the day-to-day leader of the United Farm Workers and has been an activist for labor, for Chicano rights and for peace for over five decades. Once again we saw a distinguished elder advocating for Senator Hillary Clinton. Once again we saw some tasteless attacks on Twitter. And that is a generous description.
I am no more interested in discussing the particulars of that Las Vegas caucus than I am in arguing the merits of John Lewis's dismissal of Senator Sanders. Suffice it to say that Huerta was quick to interpret a situation as an attack on Spanish speakers in general, on Mexican Americans in particular, and on her personally. And certain Sanders supporters were only too happy to oblige with the personal attacks. Many of them seemed to think that the particular facts of the event were what mattered, that shouting her off demanding a neutral translator is much better than chanting "English Only. And again, seriously, if you are a white twenty-something, do you really expect to sway the opinions of Mexican American voters by calling Dolores Huerta a vendido?
The thin-skinned, quick-draw partisanship I describe here is not unique to the Sanders camp, regardless of what the press has to say about "Bernie Bros." I posted in this space just three weeks ago about Hillary Clinton's completely wrong-headed characterization of the period after the Civil War, a characterization that ignored both the African American struggle for freedom and the terrorist campaign for white supremacy. After writing that piece I tweeted a link to it with the words "Why #HillaryClinton got #Reconstruction so very wrong." In under two minutes that tweet received a response, "Why you are so wrong." It came from a total stranger who must have a bot searching for any and all references to Senator Clinton on Twitter. It also came in much less time than it would have taken to click here and actually read the post. I was charmed by it in a way because it was more attention than this blog usually gets! But it also meant another person who was ready to go immediately on the attack at the hint of a discouraging word about their candidate.
Some readers will recognize my title, "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?" as coming from Chairman Mao's "Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society." No, I don't think there will be millions of deaths like the Great Leap Forward. Nor do I anticipate pro-Hillary and pro-Bernie student factions attacking each other with spears like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But I do ask that we consider who we are fighting for and against. Does anybody at this point think that Hillary Clinton's rank-and-file supporters are all our class enemies? (Note that I am not asking about her. She is.) Does anybody seriously think that Bernie Sanders (who has scrupulously avoided civil rights issues for decades by moving to one of the whitest states in the country) is a champion of African Americans, Latinos or Native Americans?
I am quite certain that some horrible things can come out of this election. I remain skeptical that much good can come of it. Will we still have a House and Senate dominated by a party that seems to think it is in their interest to oppose any idea coming from the White House? Or will the Republicans go back to the business of compromising with Democrats in order to destroy unions, privatize and eradicate public services like schools, provide tax benefits for the super-wealthy and attack people in other countries with armed drones? Because those are the policies of both parties.
I support the efforts to raise the minimum wage and re-regulate the big banks. I oppose the notion that those "color-blind" policies will benefit all of us equally. After all, we had Sanders-esque policies during the era of Jim Crow, and they primarily benefited white people. I am hopeful that the enthusiasm for Sanders can translate into a broadly-popular mass movement. I don't see how we get there by attacking one another.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
The refrain "Keep your eyes on the prize" in the well-known freedom song means one thing to me: don't let anybody distract you from who we are and what we are about.
The Selma Voting Rights Movement went on in the face of beatings, arrests and murders -- not for the weeks covered in the film "Selma," but for two years, from 1963 to 1965. Dalles County, Alabama was a majority-Black county which had for decades prevented African Americans from registering to vote. Young activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee joined the local Black leaders from the Dalles County Voters League who had been conducting voter-registration drives since the fifties. Bernard Lafayette, now of Emory University, and Colia Liddell, now of the NY Green Party, were the SNCC organizers. Lafayette was severely beaten by the Klan to stop their work. They did not stop. They were replaced by Prathia Hall, who was later a professor of womanist theology at Boston University who kept up the pressure. Dallas County fired 32 African American teachers for attempting to register. The county clerk kept three hundred prospective voters lined up outdoors in the sun an entire day while arresting SNCC workers who brought them water or carried signs saying "Register to Vote." The attempts to register and the arrests went on for two years until a judge issued an order enjoining any gathering of three or more people to discuss voter registration!
Right after New Year 1965, the DCVL and SNCC were joined by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in a mass meeting at Brown Chapel AME Church in violation of the injunction. More groups of prospective voters walked to the courthouse and were arrested. That month three hundred new voters successfully registered while three thousand were arrested. Who knows whether the enemy understood these numbers as a loss for them? What we do know is that the enemy is devious and wanted to distract people from registration. On February 18, in Perry County, next door to Dallas County, the Alabama State Police turned off all street lights during a night march, probably so that they could attack Reverend CT Vivian in the dark. A state trooper shot a man named Jimmie Lee Jackson to death while he protected his mother from assault of the State Police. People were enraged and ready to retaliate. Reverend James Bevel came up with the idea of marching to Montgomery and dumping Jimmie Lee Jackson's casket on the steps of the State Capitol. It was a way to deal with people's anger without it devolving into a cycle of revenge violence against the state power. Note here that this police murder did succeed in getting people angry enough to shift their attention to white supremacist violence. For the previous two years, in the face of all those arrests and beatings, they had kept a laser focus on the vote. And then came the attack on that march to Montgomery.
When the march kicked off on March 7 almost two weeks had passed since the police murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson so his body was not being carried. The marchers crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge and out of the city limits and were immediately and viciously attacked by the Alabama State Police and Sheriff Jim Clark's posse. National TV covered the beatings at the bridge but did not capture the mounted possemen riding people down in the streets of Selma or following them home and clubbing and knouting them in their front yards and the doorways of their houses. Sitting at hospital bedsides that night, pulling guns from closets and getting ready to offer some payback to troopers and possement, going over the horrific events of the day in church meetings, nobody could have known that in eight days President Lyndon Johnson would call a joint session of Congress and demand that the House and Senate pass a Voting Rights Act. Nobody knew that two days later when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 2500 people out onto the bridge and then turned them around in compliance with a federal court order, enraging huge numbers of people who felt he had sold everybody out. Nobody knew that later in the day when white ministers James Reeb, Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller were beaten in the streets of Selma -- in Reeb's case, beaten to death -- for supporting African American rights. All these provocations fueled responses, including demonstrators throwing bricks and bottles at state police in Montgomery.
I will never make the argument that the loud sit-ins at the White House or the threatening demonstrations in Montgomery did not contribute to President Johnson's immediate demand for a Voting Rights Act. I will make the argument that provocations like the beatings at the bridge and the murders of Jimmie Lee Jackson and James Reeb were calculated to divert the people's attention from the vote and into retaliation. I have been working for the last few weeks on a chapter of my sequel to my short story collection Stones from the Creek. This chapter addresses the so-called "Redneck War" or "Battle of Blair Mountain." This was an armed conflict in the hills between Logan and Boone Counties. In 1921, coal miners in southern West Virginia were striking for union recognition and for collective bargaining. They were supported by coal miners across the rest of the state and the nation. The coal operators used gunmen hired by the Baldwin-Felts "Detective" Agency to intimidate the miners and their families. (I put the word "detective" in quotes because these were not Sherlock Holmes-type detectives. They were company thugs.) These gunmen launched sniper attacks on the tent colonies of strikers who had been evicted from their company-owned housing. In the town of Matewan, the Baldwin-Felts tried to run roughshod over the elected mayor and his police chief and they got the worst of a gunfight with that chief. The miners did arm themselves against these attacks and did retaliate, but throughout these months their attention remained on the strike.
Finally, the operators and their gunmen launched a provocation that succeeded in fully capturing the attention of the workers. They assassinated the Matewan police chief in broad daylight on the step of the McDowell County Courthouse. That prompted a march by thousands of armed miners from all over the state of West Virginia toward Mingo County. To inflame them, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin armed thousands of middle-class "deputies" with state-of-the-art military weapons paid for by the coal companies. US Army General Billy Mitchell arrived in the state with a squadron of bombers and threatened to drop gas and explosive devices on the workers. Mother Jones, the early 20th century labor organizer, unsuccessfully tried to turn the marchers back with a fabricated telegram, purportedly sent by President Harding. The following day, though, the United Mine Workers district officers were convinced by US Army General Harry Hill Bandholtz to turn the marchers back, which they did.
But is that what the coal operators and their allies in the state government really wanted? The subsequent events suggest that it was not, that they wanted the violent confrontation in the hills. As soon as the armed miners began boarding trains to return home, the West Virginia State Police along with Sheriff Don Chafin began a night-time raid through mine camps in a hollow near Sharples, arresting and killing striking miners. When the survivors got out and spread word of the murders, the homebound strikers turned their trains around and began the march on Logan County again. And, apparently to ensure that the firefight would not break off, Sheriff Chapin had his own planes drop bombs on the miners. The fight was broken up by the arrival of federal troops. The union lost members all over the state and didn't get its strength back for over ten years. The corporate press was able to stigmatize the miners as hillbillies and imply that, somehow, their battle for collective bargaining was nothing more than a continuation of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud.
In the heat of a difficult and dangerous struggle for our humanity it is all too easy for our enemies to divert us with murder. After all, they demonstrate their contempt for our lives all the time and they murder us slowly with starvation and poisonous food, water, and air. How hard is it for them to get one of their hirelings -- uniformed or not -- to shoot us or run us down or beat us to death? Arguments that we have to be "better than them" feel weak and meaningless when we are mourning an immediate loss and when there is no end in sight to more such losses. I think, though, that we have to remind ourselves that our enemies' desperation can be a sign that we are actually stronger than we think and that some victory may be closer than it appears.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
The Selma Voting Rights Movement went on in the face of beatings, arrests and murders -- not for the weeks covered in the film "Selma," but for two years, from 1963 to 1965. Dalles County, Alabama was a majority-Black county which had for decades prevented African Americans from registering to vote. Young activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee joined the local Black leaders from the Dalles County Voters League who had been conducting voter-registration drives since the fifties. Bernard Lafayette, now of Emory University, and Colia Liddell, now of the NY Green Party, were the SNCC organizers. Lafayette was severely beaten by the Klan to stop their work. They did not stop. They were replaced by Prathia Hall, who was later a professor of womanist theology at Boston University who kept up the pressure. Dallas County fired 32 African American teachers for attempting to register. The county clerk kept three hundred prospective voters lined up outdoors in the sun an entire day while arresting SNCC workers who brought them water or carried signs saying "Register to Vote." The attempts to register and the arrests went on for two years until a judge issued an order enjoining any gathering of three or more people to discuss voter registration!
Right after New Year 1965, the DCVL and SNCC were joined by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in a mass meeting at Brown Chapel AME Church in violation of the injunction. More groups of prospective voters walked to the courthouse and were arrested. That month three hundred new voters successfully registered while three thousand were arrested. Who knows whether the enemy understood these numbers as a loss for them? What we do know is that the enemy is devious and wanted to distract people from registration. On February 18, in Perry County, next door to Dallas County, the Alabama State Police turned off all street lights during a night march, probably so that they could attack Reverend CT Vivian in the dark. A state trooper shot a man named Jimmie Lee Jackson to death while he protected his mother from assault of the State Police. People were enraged and ready to retaliate. Reverend James Bevel came up with the idea of marching to Montgomery and dumping Jimmie Lee Jackson's casket on the steps of the State Capitol. It was a way to deal with people's anger without it devolving into a cycle of revenge violence against the state power. Note here that this police murder did succeed in getting people angry enough to shift their attention to white supremacist violence. For the previous two years, in the face of all those arrests and beatings, they had kept a laser focus on the vote. And then came the attack on that march to Montgomery.
When the march kicked off on March 7 almost two weeks had passed since the police murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson so his body was not being carried. The marchers crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge and out of the city limits and were immediately and viciously attacked by the Alabama State Police and Sheriff Jim Clark's posse. National TV covered the beatings at the bridge but did not capture the mounted possemen riding people down in the streets of Selma or following them home and clubbing and knouting them in their front yards and the doorways of their houses. Sitting at hospital bedsides that night, pulling guns from closets and getting ready to offer some payback to troopers and possement, going over the horrific events of the day in church meetings, nobody could have known that in eight days President Lyndon Johnson would call a joint session of Congress and demand that the House and Senate pass a Voting Rights Act. Nobody knew that two days later when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 2500 people out onto the bridge and then turned them around in compliance with a federal court order, enraging huge numbers of people who felt he had sold everybody out. Nobody knew that later in the day when white ministers James Reeb, Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller were beaten in the streets of Selma -- in Reeb's case, beaten to death -- for supporting African American rights. All these provocations fueled responses, including demonstrators throwing bricks and bottles at state police in Montgomery.
I will never make the argument that the loud sit-ins at the White House or the threatening demonstrations in Montgomery did not contribute to President Johnson's immediate demand for a Voting Rights Act. I will make the argument that provocations like the beatings at the bridge and the murders of Jimmie Lee Jackson and James Reeb were calculated to divert the people's attention from the vote and into retaliation. I have been working for the last few weeks on a chapter of my sequel to my short story collection Stones from the Creek. This chapter addresses the so-called "Redneck War" or "Battle of Blair Mountain." This was an armed conflict in the hills between Logan and Boone Counties. In 1921, coal miners in southern West Virginia were striking for union recognition and for collective bargaining. They were supported by coal miners across the rest of the state and the nation. The coal operators used gunmen hired by the Baldwin-Felts "Detective" Agency to intimidate the miners and their families. (I put the word "detective" in quotes because these were not Sherlock Holmes-type detectives. They were company thugs.) These gunmen launched sniper attacks on the tent colonies of strikers who had been evicted from their company-owned housing. In the town of Matewan, the Baldwin-Felts tried to run roughshod over the elected mayor and his police chief and they got the worst of a gunfight with that chief. The miners did arm themselves against these attacks and did retaliate, but throughout these months their attention remained on the strike.
Finally, the operators and their gunmen launched a provocation that succeeded in fully capturing the attention of the workers. They assassinated the Matewan police chief in broad daylight on the step of the McDowell County Courthouse. That prompted a march by thousands of armed miners from all over the state of West Virginia toward Mingo County. To inflame them, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin armed thousands of middle-class "deputies" with state-of-the-art military weapons paid for by the coal companies. US Army General Billy Mitchell arrived in the state with a squadron of bombers and threatened to drop gas and explosive devices on the workers. Mother Jones, the early 20th century labor organizer, unsuccessfully tried to turn the marchers back with a fabricated telegram, purportedly sent by President Harding. The following day, though, the United Mine Workers district officers were convinced by US Army General Harry Hill Bandholtz to turn the marchers back, which they did.
But is that what the coal operators and their allies in the state government really wanted? The subsequent events suggest that it was not, that they wanted the violent confrontation in the hills. As soon as the armed miners began boarding trains to return home, the West Virginia State Police along with Sheriff Don Chafin began a night-time raid through mine camps in a hollow near Sharples, arresting and killing striking miners. When the survivors got out and spread word of the murders, the homebound strikers turned their trains around and began the march on Logan County again. And, apparently to ensure that the firefight would not break off, Sheriff Chapin had his own planes drop bombs on the miners. The fight was broken up by the arrival of federal troops. The union lost members all over the state and didn't get its strength back for over ten years. The corporate press was able to stigmatize the miners as hillbillies and imply that, somehow, their battle for collective bargaining was nothing more than a continuation of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud.
In the heat of a difficult and dangerous struggle for our humanity it is all too easy for our enemies to divert us with murder. After all, they demonstrate their contempt for our lives all the time and they murder us slowly with starvation and poisonous food, water, and air. How hard is it for them to get one of their hirelings -- uniformed or not -- to shoot us or run us down or beat us to death? Arguments that we have to be "better than them" feel weak and meaningless when we are mourning an immediate loss and when there is no end in sight to more such losses. I think, though, that we have to remind ourselves that our enemies' desperation can be a sign that we are actually stronger than we think and that some victory may be closer than it appears.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Reconstruction and Understanding the History of America
Last night at the televised town hall for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton triggered a small Twitter storm by completing mistelling the story of Reconstruction after the Civil War. She said of Abraham Lincoln:
The most charitable tweet about Hillary's truly-monstrous view of Reconstruction as rancorous and discouraging to the South (read "white South" here) was that it was a product of the time when Hillary attended school: "Have to think that was her mid-century education on Lincoln and Reconstruction popping up. Amazing how durable that can be." That is a story worth exploring.
In the early twentieth century a professor of US History at Columbia University, William Archibald Dunning, began writing about Reconstruction. His starting point was that giving the right to vote to African Americans was at best unwise and probably criminal, because they represented a race incapable of governing themselves. Everything in his work stands on this racist assumption. He and his PhD students came to be known as the Dunning School and produced a body of work exploring the details of the Reconstruction period in every former-Confederate state. This is not "inside baseball" as Eric Foner explains:
Somebody reading this blog post is probably already dismissing it as "revisionist" history, and it was, at least it was in the sixties and seventies... "revisionist" in the sense of revising a wrong, false, view of the past rooted in racist assumption instead of fact. Already in 1935, W.E.B. DuBois -- the brilliant sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and editor -- published the monumental Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. While this 750-page work contained much that was new, the most striking thing about it is how heavily DuBois was able to rely on the work of the Dunning School. All he had to do was reread their work with one changed assumption: that African Americans are human beings! Suddenly, a completely different light is shed on the tremendous achievements of the Southern governments that included Black voters and elected officials. Suddenly, the Klan terror looks less like "redemption" (the word both the Klan and the Dunning school used) and more like the heinous and immense crime against humanity that it so clearly was.
In its time, Black Reconstruction received short shrift. It did not affect the dominance of the Dunning school. It wasn't until much later that his work was read again. Interestingly, this reversal involves Columbia again. During the height of the Red Scare of the 1950's, James P. Shenton, decided to ask his seminar class to read DuBois's book. This was a challenge for two reasons: the book was long out of print and DuBois's anti-nuclear activism had led the Justice Department to treat him as an enemy agent. He was charged for failing to register as a representative of a foreign state. The case was dismissed by the judge when defense attorney Vito Marcantonio said that Albert Einstein would be appearing as a witness for DuBois. Nevertheless, the State Department withheld his passport from him for eight years. Even daring to assign his work to a class was a suspect act. Retired Columbia College Dean Harry Carman supported Shenton in this, though, and actually invited DuBois to sit in on the seminar while they discussed his work.
Professor James Shenton was not a prolific writer but he was a nurturer of great historians. Among his PhD students were Eric Foner, Sean Wilentz, David Rothman, Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Ross, Robert Fogelson and Thomas Sugrue. Most important in this connection is Columbia Professor Eric Foner, whose Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, was considered groundbreaking when it came out in 1988. It is the standard for all historians today, as well as the basis for most textbooks. His conclusions are not dramatically different from those of DuBois. Like DuBois, he saw the end of Reconstruction as a tragedy for American democracy. Foner wrote in the NY Times book review last year,
Until I got to the chapter about Reconstruction and Native Americans. Then it wasn't just the ideas that seemed familiar; it was the actual words. It was so curious that I immediately skipped to the footnotes and discovered... my own work. The source was the journal version of my Master's essay. And then it all became clear: I was a product of the same intellectual milieu that had produced Foner's work. I had even contributed to it. James Shenton was my graduate advisor, too. Eric had been my academic advisor when I was a sophomore in college. Of course a 1988 synthesis of 25-odd years of scholarly work was familiar to me because I had been a part of it.
This experience highlighted the other side, too. I shouldn't be surprised to find myself familiar with Foner's work, but I also shouldn't be surprised by the lack of familiarity shown by other people. And this is especially true for this particular work, about Reconstruction. The Dunning view (Hillary Clinton's view) was a bulwark of white supremacy throughout the twentieth century. We have not finished -- by any measure -- overturning white supremacy. Therefore, we still have to oppose, challenge and defeat its intellectual base. Hillary Clinton's ignorance should be denounced and mocked. But it is far from a surprise.
I don't know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancor, a little more forgiving and tolerant than might possibly have brought people back together more quickly. But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the reigns of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.For anybody who has studied this history in the last forty years it should be shocking to hear an educated person confuse the period generally called Reconstruction (roughly 1867-1877) with the period after, sometimes called Restoration by its apologists. Reconstruction was a period when the franchise was extended to Southern men, black and white. It is the period when Southern states began public education and built hospitals and railroads. It held out the promise of democracy and constitutional law after centuries of slavery. What followed was a wave of Ku Klux Klan terror, including untold numbers of assassinations of candidates for public office in order to restore (hence, Restoration) the rule of the former slave owners. The "accomplishments" of this period were disfranchisement of African-American voters; debt peonage, sharecropping and convict labor; segregation of public facilities (that's right, there was no segregation before the Civil War); attacks on public schools for everybody, but especially African Americans; and the de facto legalization of white-supremacist terror in the form of lynchings.
The most charitable tweet about Hillary's truly-monstrous view of Reconstruction as rancorous and discouraging to the South (read "white South" here) was that it was a product of the time when Hillary attended school: "Have to think that was her mid-century education on Lincoln and Reconstruction popping up. Amazing how durable that can be." That is a story worth exploring.
In the early twentieth century a professor of US History at Columbia University, William Archibald Dunning, began writing about Reconstruction. His starting point was that giving the right to vote to African Americans was at best unwise and probably criminal, because they represented a race incapable of governing themselves. Everything in his work stands on this racist assumption. He and his PhD students came to be known as the Dunning School and produced a body of work exploring the details of the Reconstruction period in every former-Confederate state. This is not "inside baseball" as Eric Foner explains:
The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow System. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction. It was a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relations because of the worry of having another Reconstruction.This view was taught in high school and elementary classrooms and textbook well into the last decades of the twentieth century. For all I know it is still being taught, because teachers have such a strong tendency to repeat what they learned.
Somebody reading this blog post is probably already dismissing it as "revisionist" history, and it was, at least it was in the sixties and seventies... "revisionist" in the sense of revising a wrong, false, view of the past rooted in racist assumption instead of fact. Already in 1935, W.E.B. DuBois -- the brilliant sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and editor -- published the monumental Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. While this 750-page work contained much that was new, the most striking thing about it is how heavily DuBois was able to rely on the work of the Dunning School. All he had to do was reread their work with one changed assumption: that African Americans are human beings! Suddenly, a completely different light is shed on the tremendous achievements of the Southern governments that included Black voters and elected officials. Suddenly, the Klan terror looks less like "redemption" (the word both the Klan and the Dunning school used) and more like the heinous and immense crime against humanity that it so clearly was.
In its time, Black Reconstruction received short shrift. It did not affect the dominance of the Dunning school. It wasn't until much later that his work was read again. Interestingly, this reversal involves Columbia again. During the height of the Red Scare of the 1950's, James P. Shenton, decided to ask his seminar class to read DuBois's book. This was a challenge for two reasons: the book was long out of print and DuBois's anti-nuclear activism had led the Justice Department to treat him as an enemy agent. He was charged for failing to register as a representative of a foreign state. The case was dismissed by the judge when defense attorney Vito Marcantonio said that Albert Einstein would be appearing as a witness for DuBois. Nevertheless, the State Department withheld his passport from him for eight years. Even daring to assign his work to a class was a suspect act. Retired Columbia College Dean Harry Carman supported Shenton in this, though, and actually invited DuBois to sit in on the seminar while they discussed his work.
Professor James Shenton was not a prolific writer but he was a nurturer of great historians. Among his PhD students were Eric Foner, Sean Wilentz, David Rothman, Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Ross, Robert Fogelson and Thomas Sugrue. Most important in this connection is Columbia Professor Eric Foner, whose Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, was considered groundbreaking when it came out in 1988. It is the standard for all historians today, as well as the basis for most textbooks. His conclusions are not dramatically different from those of DuBois. Like DuBois, he saw the end of Reconstruction as a tragedy for American democracy. Foner wrote in the NY Times book review last year,
Citizenship, rights, democracy — as long as these remain contested, so will the necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction. More than most historical subjects, how we think about this era truly matters, for it forces us to think about what kind of society we wish America to be.How did all this escape the attention of Hillary Clinton? Because the stories we tell ourselves about our history and the development of America are tenacious. They have a very strong hold on us. I remember the reviews of Foner's Reconstruction when it came out in 1988. They were not merely favorable; they described this book as being totally seismic in the way it reversed conventional thinking. I read the book itself with surprise, though: what was so new about it? I couldn't really see.
Until I got to the chapter about Reconstruction and Native Americans. Then it wasn't just the ideas that seemed familiar; it was the actual words. It was so curious that I immediately skipped to the footnotes and discovered... my own work. The source was the journal version of my Master's essay. And then it all became clear: I was a product of the same intellectual milieu that had produced Foner's work. I had even contributed to it. James Shenton was my graduate advisor, too. Eric had been my academic advisor when I was a sophomore in college. Of course a 1988 synthesis of 25-odd years of scholarly work was familiar to me because I had been a part of it.
This experience highlighted the other side, too. I shouldn't be surprised to find myself familiar with Foner's work, but I also shouldn't be surprised by the lack of familiarity shown by other people. And this is especially true for this particular work, about Reconstruction. The Dunning view (Hillary Clinton's view) was a bulwark of white supremacy throughout the twentieth century. We have not finished -- by any measure -- overturning white supremacy. Therefore, we still have to oppose, challenge and defeat its intellectual base. Hillary Clinton's ignorance should be denounced and mocked. But it is far from a surprise.
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