Mercedes: A Success Story

Today I saw this Facebook post by one of my former students from John F. Kennedy High School,  Mercedes. I will share it here in its entirety along with one of the photos that accompanied it:

I have hesitated to post this because it is sharing my personal story. To my Republican friends who don’t believe in big government and programs to help the poor, I want you to honestly tell me that you accomplished everything in life without anyone’s help. “We should all lift ourselves by our own bootstraps,” they say but most people who are “successful, “ have had had help in some way or another. 

We are not all privileged to come from “rich families” or successful families or 2 parent households. A lot of people assume that by receiving help, you are not working hard enough. In order to be successful, it is impossible to do it without hard work. I am a Democrat because I would not be who I am today without programs to help people like me. I still worked very hard. I was an honor student, I got straight A’s, I did science research, I volunteered in hospitals, and still a lot of people questioned how I got into Cornell University, a prestigious Ivy League University. I was told by one of my white high school teachers that I would never get into Cornell. If I was white, no one would have questioned my admission to such a prestigious school. Why is that ? 

I came to this country at the age of 9. I didn’t know one single word of English. I lived in Washington Heights, a “poor” area in Manhattan that is made up mostly of Dominicans where most people spoke Spanish. I was in Bilingual education for the first 3 years in NYC (from 6th-8th grade). I lived in a building where I had drug dealers as neighbors and it was during the “crack era” when NYC was dangerous. We had many drug dealers outside the building at all times. They also rented apartments inside the building. I think we had at least 3 apartments rented by drug dealers. I became friends with them because it was impossible not to, and they would look out for me and keep me safe. Sometimes you have to become friends with your enemy to survive. 

We had many shootings inside our apartment building. We even had a few fires that were started by drug users. We were held at gun point inside our own apartment one time. Our apartment was robbed and they stole my mom’s rent money. My mom was a single mom that made only $13,000 a year. I have no idea how we survived in a city as expensive as NYC on only $13,000 per year. My mom did everything “right” per Dominican standards but she was poor and uneducated and as a result she always emphasized education to us. 

My mom married my dad in the Dominican Republic when she was very young. My father was older than her and was educated and was a policeman in my country. The police there, at the time, were highly regarded, were educated, made good money and are like a “military police.” My father never let my mom finish high school. I think she left school during 7th or 8th grade. It was a very chauvinistic society at the time and she was expected to stay at home and raise her children. We had a nice house, nice cars, vacation homes and would take nice vacations in our country and even in your USA. 

My mom divorced my dad after multiple infidelities and came to the USA for a better life for me and my 2 older brothers. My father hardly ever paid child support and after they got divorced we struggled financially. Our electricity was cut off many times because she could not afford to pay it. Due to this, she made the decision to come the USA. My father was able to get her a VISA since he was a high ranking police officer and had a lot of power. She came to NYC first and we followed a few years later. We all came here legally. I emphasize this point because I have been asked this question many times. 

I always wanted to become a doctor since the age of 5 but I was not in the “right path” for a while until 10th grade. I came here on July of 1985 and turned 10 years old on August 16, 1985. I was supposed to go back home to the Dominican Republic because my mom did not want me to grow up in the USA. I was only supposed to visit her for the summer but I refused to go back home. 

I was about to start 6 th grade when I first came to the USA. The school system wanted me to repeat 5th grade, because I would be the youngest student in 6th grade, but due to my strong grades and letters of recommendations from my teachers, I was allowed to move on to 6th grade. I always made good grades but in bilingual education, at the time, I was not challenged enough. When I started high school, I was on the lower level classes and not on the college bound classes. I was making 100’s on most of my tests. I didn’t know that I was not being challenged. 

I was pulled out of 10th grade science class by Mr. Perl, the head of the Science Honors Program at my high school. He looked at my grades and saw that most of my grades were 100 or high 90’s. He asked me “don’t you think this class is too easy for you?”
He asked me if I wanted to do Honors level work. I didn’t know the difference and what it entailed but I agreed and he truly changed the course of my life. I finally had a chance to thank Mr. Perl, a few years ago. He put me on the right path to get into a school like Cornell University and to be challenged for the first time ever. It led to summer internships at Mount Sinai Hospital, to science research and to countless other things. I will forever be grateful for teachers like him. 

Anyways, the point of the story is many times, students from low income families like myself, are not challenged enough or told by someone like Mr. Perl, “I know you can do this.” At the time, the Honors program had special funding to help students like me to help them get into the medical field. A lot of these programs that put me in that path no longer exist. When you go to a school in an inner city, a lot of times, the classrooms are crowded and it is impossible for teachers to do their job well and really teach us and inspire us. My life could have gone many other bad ways. I could have married one or those drug dealers in my building and gotten pregnant and my life and my path to

become a doctor would have been derailed. 

I am glad I had the mom that I had who emphasized the importance of education. I am glad I had someone like Mr. Murray Perl, Mr. Pat Clark and Mr. Rick Levine in my life in high school. They always believed in me and told me I mattered despite being poor and not having all the resources. I was told by another white teacher in that same school that I will never get into Cornell. I don’t recall his name but I also wish I did because he motivated me to work even harder to prove him wrong. 

It should not be this hard for students of color or for black students to have the same educational opportunities as anyone else, but it is because I lived it. I have looked around the room many times since becoming a doctor and not many people look like me. Why is that ? 

If you think we all have the same opportunities in life to get an education, to get a good job, think again because that’s not true. 

(I’m attaching the letter I wrote to Mr. Murray Perl and what Mr. Rick Levine wrote in my high school yearbook. I will forever be graceful to Mrs. Grace Newman for helping me find Mr. Perl. )

#Latinx
#Blacklivesmatter
#BLM

 This post struck a responsive chord with a lot of people, over a hundred likes and fifty comments in the first six hours. I should find it personally rewarding because I am one of the teachers she cites as have been influential in her success and because she I know she has gone back again and again in moments of doubt to that note I put in her yearbook.

Except.

Except Mercedes is a successful ob-gyn in Texas. Except Mercedes graduated medical school. Except Mercedes graduated Cornell.

Except Mercedes is an exception.

People love to point to successful people as evidence that the system actually works.

People love to suggest that the thousands of brilliant and talented students I taught who didn't achieve this level of success must - therefore - have been lacking some essential personal quality and held themselves back.

People love to suggest that the millions of brilliant and talented students I didn't teach and who didn't achieve this level of success might have done more if they had just one encouraging teacher.

Mercedes doesn't mention one teacher; she mentions three! I know for a fact that she credits a few more, by name. Look at the comments from her high school classmates who mention even more.

I lived in Washington Heights in those same years and I know exactly what immense social pressures existed against achieving academic success. I used to tell colleagues who drove down every morning from the suburbs that each child in our classroom had made a conscious decision to be there that day instead of riding around in a Jeep Wrangler with an Uzi under the seat, because that was an ever-present option for Heights teens. And that was only one pressure against success. There were the teachers who told them they weren't shit, one of whom Mercedes mentions. There were the cops rolling up the blocks treating every kid socializing with friends as if they were soldiers in the drug posses. There were (and still are) the standardized exams that create a pretense of objectivity in highly class-based college admissions. There is the sheer weight of social capital that Mercedes alludes to when she talks about the difference between her and her more privileged Cornell classmates.

I wish I believed that people would read Mercedes's story and accept her point that simply applying the same criteria to everybody is fundamentally inequitable. I wish I believed that people would understand why she thinks that race and class inequality in America won't go away just because we pretend to be "colorblind" and give everybody the same treatment.

But I don't.

I think they will see Mercedes as gifted, driven, and resilient. I think they will devote resources to "resiliency education" whatever the fuck that is. I think they will applaud themselves for applauding her, as if their appreciation of an exceptional story makes them exceptional, too.

I'm stuck elsewhere. 

I'm stuck on my former student, valedictorian at Kennedy High School and a much earlier graduate of the same Science Honors Program as Mercedes, who spent all four years at Harvard believing she didn't belong there because that's what so many of her classmates and professors told her. 

I'm stuck on the two girls I sent to a different elite New England school who came home after freshman year because they were the only Latinas in the entire college and convinced themselves they didn't belong. Neither has a degree yet.

I'm stuck on the boy I sent to an out-of-town two-year college, (literally... I had to bring him and his clothes upstate in my car to register and move into the dorm) who came home with an associates degree but was convinced by the people in the neighborhood that his real talent lay elsewhere. (Do you know what I'm talking about?)

I'm stuck on the boy I could not convince to attend college at all.

I'm not quitting, even in retirement. I was able to help the son of one of those two girls get into an appropriate college. I brought him to three of his campus visits myself. The daughter of that boy I brought to his dorm freshman year? I moved her into her dorm when she was a freshman. This week I have to write her a grad school recommendation.

Yes, this is me patting myself on the back. But it is also me explaining to you that it hasn't been enough. There are millions of talented kids from families who don't have the capacity to provide this support themselves and who aren't getting it elsewhere. And there are potent social forces holding them back when they do. I will not surrender to despair. But I will not act as though the successes we achieve are enough.

They are not enough.

And that is what I think Mercedes was trying to convey by sharing her painful personal history.

Some thoughts on the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre:

Army surplus airplanes like those used to bomb Greenwood

-The white rioters were initially blocked from entering the prosperous Black business and residential district of Greenwood (Black Wall Street). Black veterans  of World War 1 had learned from the recent history of racist violence. White rioters invaded Black communities in East St. Louis; Chicago; the Arkansas Delta; Wilmington, NC; Charleston, SC; and countless other cities and towns to murder, loot, and burn. Then the courts prosecuted Black survivors, apparently for the crime of not having been murdered during the first round of white supremacist violence. The Black vets of eastern Oklahoma set up a highly-organized, armed defense of Greenwood, especially along the railroad tracks that divided white from Black Tulsa. They were successful enough that the white supremacist mobs instead began dropping incendiary bombs from about a dozen airplanes to gain entry to the neighborhood. They were aided by the Oklahoma National Guard which was called up to “stop the violence”, by which the governor meant the armed self-defense of the Black community.

Attorney BC Franklin in his temporary law office

-Despite the countless murders and the aerial bombing that incinerated over 35 square blocks, Greenwood was not emptied of Black people. Attorney BC Franklin reopened his law practice in a tent while smoke still hung in the air to ensure that Black property owners retained their titles. (Yes, BC Franklin was the dad of the great historian John Hope Franklin. John Hope Franklin was six years old at the time of the massacre.) The uncompensated destruction of so much Black-owned capital in the form of hotels, office blocks, businesses, and homes meant that Greenwood couldn’t be rebuilt on the grand scale it had before the white-supremacist assault. Some of the families who fled the violence never returned. Some of the most successful Black entrepreneurs, now broke and broken, left, too.

Detroit Avenue after the aerial bombing

-Eastern Oklahoma offered a special case for several reasons, but the pattern of white resentment and envy of successful Black people existed throughout America. Maybe white people filed fraudulent lawsuits to steal Black people’s property, which were upheld by white judges. Maybe white people stole that property (or destroyed it) by totally extralegal means, but were then protected by those white  judges and juries. But the common thread is that property was robbed or burned and the owners were murdered or imprisoned. Historians will tell you about property records in counties all over this country which are unavailable for research because of “mysterious” fires many decades ago. This pattern also existed in South Texas where landowning families of Mexican descent - most of whom had lived in the area before the American Revolution - had their property stolen by Anglo newcomers. The entire history of Native treaties with the US is about land set aside for Indians because Anglos thought it was worthless, only to be stolen later when some new resource was discovered there. During the same time as the Tulsa massacre, hundreds of Osage Indians were murdered in Oklahoma for their oil lands. Then white judges appointed white receivers to “manage” the properties.

Prosecuting and convicting the police who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis is a start. But it does not put us in a post-racial era. We have hundreds of years of white supremacist murder and arson to confront. There is an entire system of white supremacist law to overturn.

Rainbow Coalition: Unity over Division

For about a year now, since the opening of the 2020 Presidential campaign, we have been hearing anxious calls for “unity” from the corporate shills who lead the Democratic Party. The message is always some variation of the absolute need for us to come together against the racism, misogyny, corruption, stupidity, self-dealing, and overall irresponsibility of Donald Trump and the Republican Party he has taken captive. 

The subtext of the call for unity, though, is the notion that some of us are actually responsible for his rise to the White House. When pressed, the “centrists” ask that we shut up about questions they consider “divisive.” They claim that those of us who insist on raising issues like the climate crisis, imperialist adventures, voter suppression, policy-driven income inequality, police impunity, school privatization, and ballooning student debt are making the perfect the enemy of the good and jeopardizing our chances of defeating Trump. The platform they propose instead can be simply stated: “Look at him! We’re not as bad as him!”

For Senators and Representatives in Washington this single-minded focus on Party and on what is the lowest-common-denominator that can assure them an election win makes good sense. They all seem to be fixated on continuing in their positions, as if there were no alternative way of living. (Except, of course moving up: Representative to Senator, Senator to President.) And its not just their own reelection, either, its their whole crew, because the capitalist party that controls government wins enhanced access to the bribes (oh, sorry, campaign contributions) distributed by lobbyists and other representatives of monopoly capital.

So when some Eliot Engel (my Congressman) tries to convince me not to vote for his opponent in the primary election I totally get his agenda: “Look at Trump! I’m not as bad as Trump!” He wants me to ignore the fact that after thirty years in the House his main claim to fame is getting in a handshake with every President at the State of the Union address. He hasn’t even been opposed by a Republican for the last three elections so his calls for unity feel less about substance than they are about his career. When some Henry Cuellar from a completely safe Democratic district in South Texas cries (as he did yesterday) about a “circular firing squad,” he is asking us to ignore the fact that he votes with Trump 70% of the time. When corporate Democrats whine that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t paying the $250,000 annual dues to their call center they want me to ignore the fact that she is raising money from everyday voters instead of dialing fat cats for cash all day long from those phone banks.

Nationally these arguments come down to our need to vote for a Joe Biden or a Pete Buttigieg instead of a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because Sanders and Warren are “alienating” somebody. My problem is that the only ones who seem to be alienated by those two are the monopoly capitalists who are profiting from student debt, medical insurance, pharmaceutical costs, banking, and fossil fuels. I want to know why the call for unity doesn’t go both ways, why the Democratic leaders in Washington like Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer aren’t willing to unite with us.

But all this is about elections and political parties. It doesn’t even address the issues that divide us so much that they turn people off from politics completely. One recent example is natural gas pipelines. It is convenient to point to Orange Hitler’s support of fossil fuels and of his reversal of the Obama administration shut down of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It is less convenient for Democratic partisans to remember Obama’s support for natural gas, and for oil oil pipelines like Keystone XL and DAPL. Yes, this current President proudly (and stupidly) asserts his support for fossil fuels that are losing the financial support of the market. Yes, he repeats nonsensical claims that there is no climate change. But the Democratic leadership is only better in that they acknowledge a “climate crisis” for which they propose no solution. Nancy Pelosi is happy to mock the Green New Deal. Trump enviously ridicules teen climate activist Greta Thunberg; Obama graciously applauds her. Neither has a plan to reverse global CO₂. 

The pipeline conflict received greater notice a few years ago because of the issue of Native sovereignty. The Dakota Access Pipeline had been mapped to cross under the Missouri River above Bismarck, South Dakota but public (white) opinion worried about the possibility of crude oil leaking into their drinking water. So the crossing was relocated to just above the Standing Rock Lakota Reservation, where any leak would affect Lakotas there and downstream on the Cheyenne River Reservation instead of the white people of Bismarck. Tribal leadership objected unsuccessfully until a group of teens running to Washington, D.C. (on foot) drew Indigenous people from all over the Americas to protest. The protesters’ camp grew to include thousands of Natives from many tribes along with their allies. The construction company used police and private security to attack the protesters with dogs, pepper spray, so-called “non-lethal” riot guns, and - in sub-freezing temperatures - water cannons. They arrested hundreds of protesters, including journalists, and held them in kennels. President Obama eventually granted a stay of construction for the river crossing which was rescinded the next month by President Trump.

But here’s what interests me right now. When Elizabeth Warren declared her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President, she chose to double down on her long-standing claim of Cherokee ancestry. When Natives rejected this claim, they were immediately denounced by her supporters as defenders of Trump! Warren’s supporters acted as though indigenous sovereignty has no significance except insofar as it buttresses “my side” against “your side;” as if the only question that matters is Donald Trump. 

Now Trump has a long history of  contempt for Native people, which has been a matter of public record because some East Coast tribes were his competitors in the casino gambling business. In the early nineties he testified in Congress that the Connecticut Mohegans “don’t look like Indians to me”! In 2000 he secretly funded an ad campaign against the Akwesasne Mohawks claiming that they were gangsters and drug dealers which resulted in him having to pay a $250,000 fine and issue a public apology. As President he held a ceremony for Navajo Code Talkers against the backdrop of a portrait of the genocidaire Andrew Jackson. And he persists in referring to Senator Warren as “Pocahontas” who history reminds us was a victim of child rape.

All of that is undeniably racist. But white claims of Native ancestry are also racist. Historically they have been a means of theft: claiming to be Cherokee or Creek in Oklahoma (where Senator Warren was born and raised) was a way for white grifters to claim Native allotments under the Dawes Act at the time of statehood. Such claims were also genocidal. David Grann’s 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon is the horrifying story of a white man marrying an Osage woman then murdering her, her sister, her brother, and her mother to get all of their land allotments. Tribes are polities with their own rules for membership. When Senator Warren used a (highly-suspect) DNA test to assert the truth of her family story, she was erasing the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation which decides who is and who is not Cherokee. But she was also perpetuating an ugly Oklahoma history.

It is easy to see Trump’s racism. It is easy to condemn it. But when the anti-Trump politician who you like engages in indigenous erasure by claiming to be Indigenous you, too, are racist if  you choose to defend her and to attack the Native people who criticize her. You are saying that Native claims only matter to you when they support the political team you choose. You believe in “unity” with Indigenous people only when it goes against Trump.

The refusal to see racism except when it is expressed by Donald Trump isn’t unique to issues of Native sovereignty. Trump famously opened his Presidential campaign by descending a golden elevator and addressing a few dozen people who he paid $50 each to attend. He told them that Mexicans are criminals, rapists, and drug dealers. He subsequently (and bizarrely) promised a giant wall along the entire 2000 miles of the US-Mexico border, and insisted that Mexico would pay for it. He has managed, in fact, to replace about sixty miles of previously-existing barrier at US-taxpayer expense. But he has also managed to deny entry to thousands of asylum seekers. He has managed to separate children from their parents and to hold them in impromptu prisons for protracted periods. He has drawn the opposition of huge numbers of Americans for this cruel treatment of refugees.

Trump has failed to deport the roughly ten million immigrants currently estimated to live in the US with expired or improper documents, but that was one of his more unbelievable promises anyway. He has also failed to match the record number of deportations achieved by his nemesis, President Obama. Democrats are mostly silent about this last number. They are happy to denounce Trump’s immigration policies as cruel, but choose to forget that Obama, too, separated children from their families and kept them in concrete-floored cages. 

Immigration activists haven’t forgotten, though. And they have to wonder about the commitment of people who only began supporting their cause when it was convenient and served as another strike against Trump. It is now considered divisive to ask what policy Democrats propose for the border and for immigration: “Look at that guy! We’re not as bad as that guy!” And I have to ask why anybody should favor “unity” with people who refuse to discuss the things that matter to them.

I don’t want to belabor this argument. I will simply ask the “moderate” Democrats who are demanding unity what is their position on Black Lives, on surveillance of mosques, on gerrymandering and voter purges in blue states, on FISA warrants, on coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, on police impunity, on free college tuition, on school privatization, on single-payer health care… I may end up having to vote for one of you for President because, in truth, you are “not as bad as that guy.” But I want to know: Do your calls for unity also extend to your supporting our policies?

It was not my intention when I began writing this to criticize the notion of unity, just to ask what kind of unity, with whom, and based on what principles. Because the truth is that I see altogether too much conscious division of our ranks. A few weeks ago we commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton by the FBI and the Chicago police. I asked then what made a 21-year old so dangerous that the entire coercive power of the State was brought down on him instead of somebody else. And I suggested that the answer was the way in which he was bringing people together. Chairman Fred called it a “Rainbow Coalition” before Reverend Jesse Jackson started using that phrase, and it was a revolutionary coalition, including the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Brown Berets, and white youth in the Young Patriots and in SDS. Chairman Fred didn’t deny the need for any of those groups. He simply worked to keep them from fighting one another as the repressive state preferred. (And if you have any doubt about that preference, just read about the FBI’s COINTELPRO.)

The people who want to divide us are everywhere and their work isn’t all that hard. It is easy, for example, for African Americans to see the contempt in which so many African and Afro Caribbean immigrants hold them. It has long been obvious that the first thing immigrants to this country - of all races! - learn is anti-Black racism. Immigrant cabbies learn to avoid African American riders before they learn their way around the city. Immigrant shopkeepers learn to suspiciously follow African American customers around their stores. One year I asked my ESL students to write a brief memoir about coming to America. Every girl wrote about a loved one they had been forced to leave behind. Every boy wrote about a haircut. Each one - Yemeni, Pakistani, Haitian, Dominican - had gone to the barber to look more American and each one had come home to family members who became enraged because they now looked like an African American.

I don’t really need to belabor this. For over a century now, middle-class West Indian immigrants have looked down on African Americans for not being more thrifty and industrious as they started businesses and accumulated property, not having their own direct experience with the economic terrorists who seized Black-owned farms and stores and murdered the owners. In this new generation immigrants from Africa have arrived to join in the quiet chorus of contempt. Their disdain doesn’t escape African Americans, or - for that matter - the immigrants’ own children who are brought up in the same white supremacist system as the children of African Americans.

Native American tribes like the Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles have taken great pains to exclude their members of African descent. African Americans have taken great pride in the role Black units (“Buffalo Soldiers”) took in wars of colonial conquest of Indigenous people and land.

Mexican Americans - especially in New Mexico - have insisted that they are “Spanish.” They go so far as to celebrate the bloody Spanish conquista of the Pueblo tribes. And when present-day Pueblo people object to public fiestas commemorating the murder of their ancestors, these Hispanos act like the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, crying that their “heritage” is being sacrificed in the name of political correctness.

When Mexican Americans do claim Indigenous heritage, though, there are always some Native people ready to denounce them as “pretendians” who are trying to steal an ancestry that isn’t theirs.

And I could go on. I haven’t even begun to discuss the long history of racism in the union movement, enough that workers of color could be excused for saying that the main goal of unions was to exclude them. There is more than enough fertile ground for our enemies to sow suspicion and dissension among us. White supremacy poisons everything.

But I think it is worth noticing when monopoly capitalism lifts up certain voices of “resistance,” especially when they are voices that divide rather than unify. First, a historic example.

From the time that the US Congress seized the Black Hills in explicit violation of the Fort Laramie Treaties, members of various tribes with claims to the hills met together to seek some sort of restitution. For roughly forty-five years those conferences of Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho elders frustrated federal officials who wanted them to start looking “forward”, meaning abandon their culture, their sovereignty, their land claims… even their existence as peoples.

In 1920, though, the Department of the Interior decided that a lawsuit was a good idea because it would finally allow the tribes to resolve this matter and stop dwelling on “the past.”* At the very next treaty conference the effect of turning this into a matter for compensation became evident. The first order of business was to exclude the Dakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho representatives from the meeting! This is how a potentially-successful class-action suit can be divisive. The possibility of a cash payout creates the incentive to reduce the size of the class.

The current version of this is #ADOS. The moment that reparations for slavery became an actual topic of discussion in the Democratic primary field we saw this hashtag emerge. I can’t deny its popularity, but I can question its origin and the role of Republican (and foreign) bots in spreading it. And I can say with assurance that white supremacy in the real world doesn’t distinguish. Racist cops don’t discriminate between ADOS and other Black people. When four NYPD plainclothes officers cut down Amadou Diallo in a hail of bullets his life wasn’t saved because he was African. The police who sodomized Abner Louima didn’t stop because he is Haitian.

It’s not just about Black people, either. When a Navajo man, speaking his own language, in his own territory, is ordered to “Go back to your country!” by some random white person, we should see more than a bizarre irony. We should see the grounds for alliance between Native people who come from one side or the other of the Rio Grande, independent of whether one has treaty rights in the United States or not. When we see that the most disproportionate levels of police violence against any group in this country are against Indigenous people, we should see the basis of an alliance between African Americans and Natives. And when we see environmental racism, employment discrimination, and housing discrimination against Natives, Latinos, and African Americans, we should find the basis for unity over division.

And this is the heart of the matter for me. It isn’t about Democrat or Republican. It is about resistance to monopoly capital. It is about resistance to racism. It is about a revolutionary rainbow coalition. 

*  The US Supreme Court decided in favor of the Lakota in 1980; sixty years after the tribes were given permission to sue, 103 years after the land was illegally taken. The Court awarded the tribes $106 million. The  Lakota refused the settlement, demanding instead the return of the land. Now it is 2020 and the matter remains unresolved.

Can a civilian child have PTSD? Not if she is your political opponent.

And now we are treated to the spectacle of partisan claims that Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar is "disrespecting veterans" by saying that children in war zones - including herself - can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder!

These are clearly bad-faith arguments. I sincerely doubt that Representative Jim Banks (R, Indiana) or anybody like him would get up and denounce advocates for children who have been kidnapped, or physically abused or caught up in human trafficking. No, they really dislike Representative Omar: she is a woman, she is Muslim, she is Black, and she won’t shut up or be intimidated. Their lies about her go on and on. They insist on circulating a photo of a soldier in the Somali regular army (from before her birth!) claiming that it shows her in a terrorist training camp. They insist that she is a homophobe who wants to punish gay people with public stoning despite her long-standing and very public support for LGBTQ rights. And they are quite certain that she is an antisemite despite her warm relationship with the Minneapolis Jewish community.

But I come back to the disbelief that a Somali child could experience PTSD and I think there is more to see than just party hacks lobbing a denunciation that they hope will stick. It has to do with how we view African children. It has to do with our myopic insistence on seeing the rest of the world in terms of their governments’ alignment for or against the US State Department and American capital. It has to do with our insistence on centering ourselves in every narrative, regardless of where it is taking place. 

Somalia has been without consistent central government since the successful coup against President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 when Omar was nine years old. All that most Americans know about the country is what they saw in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down about the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, when Omar was already living in a refugee camp in Kenya. But the violence and civil war of her childhood began before she was even born. It was the aftermath of a 1977 war between Ethiopia and Somalia, a war that became one of those proxy battles between the US and the Soviet Union that so characterized the Cold War.

When Siad Barre took power in a military coup in 1969 he declared the Somali Democratic Republic as a Marxist-Leninist state and allied it with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were happy to have naval and military bases in the strategically-important Horn of Africa, between the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea and adjacent to Ethiopia, which was then ruled by the Emperor Haile Selassie and was allied to the United States. Then the Marxist-Leninist Derg ousted Haile Selassie in 1974 and established the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia. An outsider might be forgiven for thinking this would have brought peace to the region. But that is the great-power chauvinism we have to avoid, the idea that all these countries exist to be bit players in our story. Siad Barre still had the ambition of taking over a large border region called Ogaden which was primarily inhabited by ethnic Somalis. He sent in his military and had enormous early success, occupying most of the area.

Do you see a dilemma for the Kremlin here? Do you wonder how they negotiate a war between two allied and explicitly Marxist-Leninist regimes? I don’t. At that time the Somali Democratic Republic was a nation of 3 million people; Socialist Ethiopia had a population of 46 million. 16,000 Cuban troops, 1500 Soviet advisors and two brigades from South Yemen turned the tide of battle. Somalia was driven out of Ogaden after the loss of one-third of their soldiers and half their air force.

Do you see a dilemma for the State Department here? Do you wonder how they respond to this war among avowed Communists? The United States traded its old bases in Ethiopia for old Soviet bases in Somalia. Somalia continued to be a one-party Marxist-Leninist state under the leadership of the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party and Mohamed Siad Barre. But now it was allied with the United States, along with the People’s Republic of China.

I hope the reader understands that I recount all this history of changed allegiances to show that neither ideology nor history - whether of alliance, enmity, or friendship - can outweigh geopolitical concerns for powers like the US and the Soviet Union. And I hope the reader understands that regional rulers, like those in Somalia and Ethiopia, have their regional concerns and recruit whatever stronger allies they can in order to promote their own interests.

The Ethiopian victory in Ogaden did not bring peace in either country. We are concerned here with the childhood of Ilhan Omar, so I will continue without a discussion of Ethiopia’s war with Eritrea. In Somalia, Siad Barre’s giant and costly misstep left him struggling to retain control. He reacted as dictators do, with violence and repression. In the northeast he moved against the Majerteens, Ilhan Omar’s dad’s people. The Red Berets murdered 2000 clan leaders, raped an untold number of women, killed livestock in the hundreds of thousands, and smashed reservoirs. Thousands died of thirst. When Omar’s family left the increasingly-unsafe capital it was not to their devastated homeland, but to Baidoa, about 150 miles northwest of Mogadishu. When the civil war made that unsafe, too, they fled across the border to a refugee camp in Kenya.

It is worth noting that the United States did not abandon Siad Barre because of the massacre mentioned in the previous paragraph. The United States did not abandon him when his regime killed 50,000 in an aerial bombardment of the city of Hargeisa. Much of the army deserted to join tribal militias that formed to protect their people from his army. He replaced them with Marehan tribal militiamen, whose salary consisted of what they could loot. And this didn’t lead the US to abandon Siad Barre, either. It was the fall of the Soviet Union. Once the USSR ceased to be a global adversary, the United States didn’t need Somalia as a counterbalance. In fact, without Soviet support, the Ethiopian Derg was thrown out of power with the support of the United States. If you wonder how the US press dealt with all of this you can go back into the archives of all the newspapers and discover that they barely covered it at all. Occasional feature stories appeared, always reported from the safety of Kenya, and usually with cryptic references to Marxists fighting “hardline” Marxists.

Before summarizing all this I want to return to Black Hawk Down. The events covered in that film took place in Mogadishu in 1993, after Ilhan Omar and her family left the refugee camp in Kenya and arrived in New York City, so they technically have no part in this story. But several things make that movie important nevertheless. When I first sat down to write this I was thinking that anybody familiar with Black Hawk Down would, of course, understand how a Somali child could suffer from PTSD. But then I remembered that this was only true of the 1999 book, not the 2001 movie. The book was based on interviews on all sides of the conflict: members of Delta Force, Army Rangers, helicopter pilots, yes, but also fighters in Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s Somali National Alliance and in rival Somali militias. If you read that book you get to know individuals on all sides as people. The movie, by contrast, is only about Americans. If you see the movie you know Somalis only as an endlessly-increasing number of anonymous enemies. No matter how many of them the protagonists may kill, more pop up with RPG’s and AK47’s. The only thing I can compare it to is The Walking Dead. How could the viewer ever empathize with them? How could the viewer ever imagine their trauma at having heavily-armed Americans dropping suddenly into the middle of their city, covered by aerial gunships, to kidnap their leader?

Then there is that leader. We remember the Battle of Mogadishu and the 19 American servicemen who lost their lives there, but who today remembers why it was so important that Aidid be captured? Mohamed Farrah Aidid was a general in the Somali Army who served in the Ogaden War and later became chief of intelligence. He was also one of the generals who deposed Siad Barre. By the time of the events in Black Hawk Down, one of the other generals, Ali Mahdi Muhammad, had declared himself president and been accepted as such by the UN, despite the fact that he didn’t even control all of Mogadishu, not to mention the rest of the country. Armed UN troops were backing Ali Mahdi Muhammad’s militia and they had clashed with Aidid’s militia, so the UN wanted Aidid to be arrested. Even at the time Americans wondered why this was worth the lives of so many Americans and - to be honest - the humiliation of seeing Somalis  on television celebrating over their bodies and the wreckage of $20-million helicopters. Democrats and Republicans bickered over whose fault it was. Then, when Clinton withdrew the troops because this debacle was so unpopular, they bickered again about whose fault that was.

That is what most Americans know. We have a limited attention span in this country so I doubt that many are aware that the Somali Civil War continues to this day. Moreover, I doubt that many people know that it began before Representative Omar was born. So when her Republican opposition isn’t calling for her hanging (yes, that’s exactly what her opponent in the last election advocated!) they’re on some other BS, like how could she be traumatized when she was already in New York when all this (meaning all they know about) happened.

Now I would like to summarize. For most people in Washington - Democratic or Republican, Bill Clinton or either Bush - Somalia only ever mattered insofar as it related to the worldwide confrontation with the Soviet Union. Even Somalis like President Mohamed Siad Barre and General Mohamed Farrah Aidid and President Ali Mahdi Muhammad were only ever meant to be pawns, not real people. Even our anticommunism never mattered; we were all too happy to align ourselves with the communist Siad Barre once he lost his alliance with the Soviet Union. We aren’t even able to imagine Somalis as people in a movie based on a book that did. 

Now a Somali child who was a refugee from the violence that was tangential to that Cold War (a violence fueled with huge numbers of heavy weapons provided by the superpowers to their client states) enters the United States House of Representatives. She dares to tell her own story. She dares to treat her story as if it matters, as if she matters, as if a pawn of a pawn is a real person! And that is why partisans like Indiana Republican Jim Banks think she is “disrespecting veterans” by describing her PTSD.

I have said elsewhere that Representative Omar is everything that the Washington elite of both parties hate. She is a woman. She is smart. She is Black. She is African. She is an immigrant. She is Muslim and shows it by covering her head with a hijab outside her home. But what they hate most is her refusal to be bossed and her refusal to shut up. She insists on telling her own story and she insists on telling her truth. When you believe the bullshit about her, when you repeat the bullshit about her, you say more about yourself than you do about Ilhan Omar.

#IStandWithIlhan

Is Union Theological Seminary's president, Serene Jones, a Cherokee?

Serene Jones is a well-regarded theologian: professor at Yale for 17 years, president of Union Theological Seminary for the last 12. She is considered “liberal” in her theology, a characterization which I find less than illuminating. Certainly she questions whether the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. That sounds like a less-than-conservative religious stance. She also treats racism as a sin, which seems to be a politically liberal view, but not theologically, considering Paul’s teachings in the Epistle to the Galatians and the statement in Genesis that we are created in the image of God. And her clear preference for the thinking of John Calvin marks a theological conservatism.

In her 2019 memoir, Call It Grace, Jones returns to a story she has told before, about her racist grandfather, Judge Dick Jones, and about the 1911 lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson in her family’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. She is horrified  by the possibility - perhaps probability - that her family members participated and by the certainty that they at least knew who did…and did nothing about it. But she also makes the claim, all-too-common among white Oklahomans, of Cherokee ancestry.  And I find it deeply disturbing.

Over the last year or so the whole country has been alerted to another Oklahoma-born Ivy League professor’s claim of Cherokee ancestry. President Trump made fun of Senator Elizabeth Warren for it; she doubled down with a DNA test while disclaiming tribal membership. If you insist on seeing issues like this through a partisan lens, that’s what you know. If you listen to Native voices you will have heard anger about her “pretendianism.” Oklahoma is rife with this because of the history of white people stealing Indigenous identity in order to steal tribal land. Angie Debo’s 1936 And Still the Waters Run is the classic account of the multiple forms this swindle took. David Grann’s 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon details the murders of whole families of Osages by white men who married in for their allotments.

Professor Jones’s story is more specific than Senator Warren’s vague story of a Cherokee ancestor. She identifies a great-grandfather - Judge Jones’s father, Redman Jones - as Cherokee. She even tells us in her memoir that Redman Jones was forced to change his race to white at statehood because Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws made it illegal for him to own land as a Cherokee.

Except Native land ownership in Oklahoma was not illegal.

Except Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws applied to Black people but not to Natives.

Except Okemah was located in the Creek Nation, not the Cherokee Nation.

Except it doesn’t take a professional genealogist to find reasons to doubt this story.

The Dawes Allotment Rolls were a comprehensive effort to identify every Native in Indian Territory (eastern Oklahoma) before statehood and to issue each of them a parcel of land in order to break up collective ownership by the tribes. This is not the place for a discussion of the reasons for this policy, for the restrictions the legislation placed on immediate sale by the owners, or for the ways unscrupulous lawyers and speculators found to subvert those restrictions. It is enough to say that those rolls provide an early 20th Century census for the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes so that people seeking membership today can show their relationship to those people as evidence. The Dawes Rolls are readily available online.

It takes a few seconds to discover that there was no Redman Jones in the Dawes Rolls.

Old US Census records are also readily available online. It takes a few seconds to discover that there was a Redman B. Jones living on Fourth Street in Okemah, Oklahoma at the time of the 1910 census. He was - as Professor Serene Jones says - identified as a white man, with a wife and four children. So is her story correct? Was Redman passing as white? Had his ancestors been forced out of the old Cherokee lands in the southeast on the Trail of Tears?

According to the census, Redman was born in Tennessee, as were his parents. So was his wife Dollie and her parents. So were three of his four children, all except the youngest, the two-year old, who was born in Oklahoma. I find this suggestive, not probative. It suggests that Redman Jones moved to Oklahoma right around the time of statehood and was not a member of a Cherokee family who had been living there since the 1830’s. But it leaves me room for doubt. Perhaps he reported all this to a census worker in order to buttress his claim of whiteness.

It takes a few more minutes to track Redman back to Coffee, Tennessee in the 1880 census, four years old and still white, with two white parents. Here his name is spelled Redmon, so is it the same person? Or is this just an easily-explainable coincidence? Well, if it is the latter then it is more than one coincidence. Back in Tennessee in 1880, four year-old Redmon’s father is named Carroll. In Oklahoma in 1910 Redman’s eight year-old son is also named Carroll. Toddler Redmon’s infant brother is named Alvah. Grown-up Redman has a son named… do I need to spell this out? Okay, his six year-old is also name Alvah.

All of us have family stories. And sometimes our oral history is more accurate than written records. I have spent too much time looking for people in archives who have clearly gone out of their way to make themselves invisible to the authorities. I know people who have trouble proving their identity because at the time of their birth nobody in authority thought it worth documenting. Grown men who played professional baseball with my father-in-law (who would be either 105 or 103 now if he were still with us, the records are unclear) reminisced with him about specific stories of their travels and games. But I find no evidence of him in the archives. I suspect he played under an alias because he was underage when he dropped out of college to play professionally. (14? 16?)

But Professor Jones’s story about her great-grandfather is no invisible in the archives. It is contradicted by them, which is a whole other story. Moreover, it fits a pattern of identity theft that was all too common. I do not blame her for believing what she was told as a child. We all do that. I don’t even blame her for carrying this story into adulthood. I do have some problems, though.

When Professor Jones left Yale for Union Theological Seminary in 2008 the Yale Daily News described her as a member of the Cherokee tribe and said this left Yale with only one Native faculty member to represent and counsel Native students. This is disturbing. It suggests that it wasn’t just her ancestors engaged in identity theft.

The public discussion of Senator Warren’s claims of Cherokee identity dates back at least to the 2012 Senate race when her opponent, Scott Brown, denounced (and mocked) her for it. Just as Yale listed Serene Jones as a Native member of their faculty, Elizabeth Warren was listed as a Native member of the Harvard faculty. By February of 2019, the difference between family story and tribal membership had reached a sufficient volume that Senator Warren issued a public apology for claiming to be Cherokee. She apologized earlier (although privately) to the Cherokee Nation. So why is Dr. Jones still making similar claims six months later in a summer 2019 Chautauqua interview with Krista Tippett that aired on the NPR show On Being in early December? Serene Jones is a theologian, not a historian of Native America. But one might imagine that the very high profile discussions of the very similar case of Elizabeth Warren would at least have triggered some curiosity. Well, that’s what I would imagine.

Moreover, as I noted above, Professor Jones has a lot to say about race, and about personal responsibility. She is curious about her ancestors’ part in the lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson. Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native identity? Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native land? Okemah, Oklahoma was founded in 1902 on the tribal allotments of Mahala and Nocus Fixico, members of the Muskogee Creek Nation. According to federal law, the absolute earliest date on which that land could have been transferred was 1906! (Had you ever wondered why white Oklahomans call themselves “sooners”?) The Fixicos were eventually awarded $50 per acre, but by the Department of the Interior, not by the town of Okemah.

I will just add that the lynching of the Nelson’s was memorialized by the creation of a souvenir picture postcard which was sold in the town of Okemah for years. I will add that the townspeople’s memory of that incident was of their fear that there would be violent retaliation by their Black neighbors. I will add that the word “townspeople” doesn’t require the modifier “white” because Okemah was a sundown town from the time of its founding. I will add that it was the county seat and that Black residents of the county had business in the courts and so a segregated hotel was built to accommodate them, but that it was dynamited in 1907 by - of course - “some persons, who have never been identified, under the cover of darkness.” Some things don’t change. 

We got out about half an hour before dawn this morning. Under the trees there wasn't much moonlight and the only way I could follow the trail was by memory. Prophet had a much easier time with it, but he was preoccupied with some other critters who were still out. Opossums? Raccoons? Coyotes? I have no idea. I just know he was following scent trails into the brush and doing a lot of barking. I also know that I couldn't read his body language because I couldn't see him.

Dawn is so different that dusk because the light is following your eyes' adjustment to the dark instead of the other way around. After the first ten minutes of feeling my way along I was able to walk with more confidence because I could see the rocks and the uneven surface. But I was also able to see the river and the Palisades on the other side. I often get to see the light traveling down the cliffs as the sun rises, even while our side is still in shadows, blocked by the Spuyten Duyvil-Riverdale ridge. This morning, though, I was seeing the cliffs lit more diffusely, by the entire brightening sky. I have no words to describe it, but it was riveting. I kept stopping just to look.

Prophet was still chasing around after those mysterious critters. I am always aware of his parallel sensory universe, in which the landmarks and objects of interest he notes overlap with mine but do not coincide. This morning it seemed as though the overlapping zone was much smaller than usual. We were attending to totally different things and were largely unaware - incapable of being aware - of what was interesting the other.

This dog is a gift. He gets me up and out every day. He gets me looking and thinking. He lifts my spirits. I try to do the same for him.

So the Twitter challenge was:

“if you like ‘the squad’ and hate bernie, please share why! i think saying it out loud will help you realize it’s at least a little silly. or maybe it’ll give the rest of us something to think about, who knows” 

Putting an answer in 240 characters really was tough. The people who responded with some version of “Bernie really had no position on #BlackLivesMatter” got two basic responses:

1. Bernie has gotten much better on that subject
2. Bernie’s programs will really benefit Black people

It is that second answer - invariably given by a white person - that I find so problematic and that I don’t think yields to a tweet-length rejoinder… unless it is calling that white someone out for being so certain they understand racism better than Black people do.

Socialism in America has historically stumbled on the issue of race. Last year at this time I suggested  that Bernie knows this and that it accounts for his move to Vermont half a century ago. I wrote:

In Vermont (95% white) he could talk about labor and capital without talking about race. Brooklyn, where Bernie grew up, is -- by contrast -- 36% white, 35% African American, 20% Latino and 12% Asian. Roughly half the people speak a language other than English when they are in their homes.

Those numbers actually understate the reality. In 1968 the African American population of Vermont was 0.2%. Even today it is only 1%, third lowest in the country after Idaho and Wyoming. But Bernie Sanders was not the first person who decided that his class analysis was clouded by discussion of race. He won’t be the last.

A century ago Eugene V. Debs ran for President of the United States on the Socialist Party line. He didn’t get out to campaign because he was locked up in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his opposition to World War 1. Debs was an opponent of racism in America and in the Socialist Party. He famously wrote: “The man who seeks to arouse prejudice among workingmen is not their friend. He who advises the white wage-worker to look down upon the black wage-worker is the enemy of both." 

There were explicit racists in the Socialist Party of Debs’s day. Victor Berger, the Socialist congressman from Milwaukee, was one. Kate Richards O’Hare, the Socialist candidate for Senator of Missouri was another. Debs said that this view was a “stench in the nostrils of honest men.”

It is important to note that this isn’t American exceptionalism. Throughout the imperialist countries there were people calling themselves “socialist” - leaders of Socialist Parties even - who believed in the “civilizing mission” of colonialism. That’s right, they claimed to be anticapitalist while demanding the wages of whiteness. One hundred years ago those countries were overwhelmingly white and so they could pretend to be parties of the “working class” as if the laboring people in the colonies were something else. Today these countries are home to millions of people from their former colonies and those who object are all open racists. But not here.

But what about the Debs camp? Surely in an era of open and violent disfranchisement, of forcible segregation, of frequent public lynching any socialist who believed in human equality would have spoken out against the structure of white supremacy? No. Here’s Debs himself again:

I have said and say again that, properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside of the labor question—the working class struggle. Our position as Socialists and as a party is perfectly plain. We have simply to say: “The class struggle is colorless.” The capitalists, white, black and other shades, are on one side and the workers, white, black and all other colors, on the other side

Nothing about lynching. Nothing about phony literacy tests or poll taxes. Nothing about segregation. And it all sounds terribly familiar, too. When Bernie supporters say “He is pursuing social programs that would improve the lives of vast majority of black people” they are making the exact same point as Debs, that the class struggle is all we need.

But it just isn’t so. Ever since Trump’s election we have been hectored by pundits about a “white working class” as a rationale for shutting up about racist violence and atrocities against refugees at our southern border. These pundits claim to be personally opposed to racism and xenophobia, but they talk about the danger of antagonizing this "white working class." Here are my thoughts about that “class.” These people clearly believe that stopping the horrors of white supremacy is of secondary importance to… well, to whatever they think is primary. They are clearly willing to sacrifice the lives of people of color to some value that they hold more highly. This goes beyond white privilege to white supremacism.

The history of the United States shows a repeated unwillingness to include Black people, Natives, Mexican Americans and Asians when the government was supporting families and enterprises, whether that was with land in the 19th century or with farm products and jobs in the 20th. Instead, the courts supported robbery from them. The result is monstrous discrepancies in generational wealth. But people of color are asked to believe that this time will be different. 

I am in favor of Medicare for All.

I am in favor of extending free public education through college.

I am in favor of a $15 minimum wage.

I am in favor of a job guarantee, expanded Social Security and a Green New Deal.

But when racial justice is sixteenth on your platform and when most of the details deal with general economic and environmental issues, I question the depth of your understanding and commitment.

I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary. If we were having the 2020 primary today, I would likely vote for him again. But I am underenthusiastic. By contrast, I am very enthusiastic about Representatives Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez. They are outspoken and active in support of economic and environmental justice. They are also women. They are also Palestinian, Somali, African American and Puerto Rican. I don’t have to insist that they “marched with Dr. King” fifty-plus year’s ago or wonder whether they really understand American racism. They live it every day.

So I don’t “hate Bernie” but that’s why I prefer “the squad.” Maybe you can put that in 240 characters. I can’t.