A Shakespearean twist in the dystopian script for 2020

When I read about a Saharan dust storm making its way across the Atlantic to the US, well, I will be honest here: It was the first time in my life that I have heard about a Sahara dust storm crossing the wide open Atlantic Ocean and reaching into places like Houston, TX.

My immediate question was a simple one: Does it happen all the time, or is this an unusual event?

But, finding the answer to this basic, simple question was not easy.  Because, practically everything that I read overlaid the dust storm on the COVID-19 context or the fact this is the hurricane season.  And, therefore, how the dust storm might affect COVID-19 patients, or the number and frequency of hurricanes.

This was typical of most reports:

The African dust cloud brought unhealthy levels of PM2.5 to much of the southeastern U.S. beginning on Thursday, June 25, when the air quality index (AQI) exceeded the 24-hour U.S. EPA standard for PM2.5 over the Florida Panhandle region. The AQI was in the orange (unhealthy for sensitive groups) range on that day, and reached the red (unhealthy) range on June 26 and 27 over the Florida Panhandle, much of Texas, and a small portion of Oklahoma. By June 28, the dust had thinned so only a few areas in the Midwest, primarily in Kansas, experienced PM2.5 levels in the orange category.
Air pollution aggravates COVID-19 symptoms, and likely led to increases in hospital admissions from the disease in regions where dust concentrations spiked. A PM2.5 episode as widespread and severe as this – even without the COVID-19 pandemic raging – could cause hundreds of premature deaths.

Or about the ocean surface temperature and whether it might dampen hurricane activity in the Atlantic:

Although the dust layer itself is full of warm air, it can block sunlight from getting through to the Earth's surface. That can cause sea surface temperatures to temporarily cool, making conditions less favorable for storms. ...
f a dust cloud happens to run into a hurricane that's already fully formed, the hurricane may actually help transport the dust across the ocean, Logan noted. But otherwise, dust plumes are thought to prevent new hurricanes from forming in the ocean as they move over the water.

So ... why are these caused?  We know about dust storms that are common in the deserts.  But, is it common for such a huge storm to float over the Atlantic?  Oh, btw, why are these reports only witn respect to potential impacts on humans?  Do these storms help other life forms?  How about the non-living things?

It takes a lot of reading in order to come across something like this:

A spinning gyre in the Atlantic Ocean helps determine the direction that large masses of air will take.
The gyre often shifts positions in the ocean, depending on the season. In the winter, it typically kicks dust plumes down to South America. In the summer, it sends them hurtling toward North America.
Dust clouds that make it as far as the Americas will eventually run into other weather systems that help break them apart. In the United States, they may get caught up in systems of westerly winds that scatter them over the East Coast.

Phew!  That was step 1.  The follow-up question: How unusual is this, or is it an anomaly?

Nobody knows.

Still, this week's massive event may have drawn more attention to the question — or, at the very least, to the phenomenon of dust plumes in general.

Great!

I bet there is one guy who alone knows the answers!

An interesting footnote to this is about "an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami, whose research team helped pioneer the study of Saharan dust clouds more than 30 years ago."  His name--Prospero.

What is interesting, you ask?

Because of Shakespeare.

In The Tempest, Prospero is the protagonist who was cast out on the open sea by his evil brother.  Prospero hits the books and becomes a master magician.  With Ariel--a spirit that Prospero freed but made it his servant--he creates a storm in order to cause a shipwreck.  Prospero the Shakespearean character, not the atmospheric scientist ;)

Caption at the Source
This June 24, 2020 image is from the Suomi NPP OMPS aerosol index. The dust plume moved over the Yucatan Peninsula and up through the Gulf of Mexico. The largest and thickest part of the plume is visible over the eastern and central Atlantic.

Do you know anyone who has read Ulysses from cover to cover?

Let's see if this cartoon tickles you ... at least half as much as how funny it was to me:

Source

Maybe the book was James Joyce's Ulysses! ;)

Every time I read an essay in which the author makes references to Joyce and Ulysses it is only to make a point that it is insanely difficult to go past even a few pages of that book.

Like this writer from a few years ago, who spoke the truth, during his graduate schooling, to his Joyce scholar professor: "If I had to choose between rereading Ulysses or Tarzan of the Apes, I'd go for Tarzan."

Yet, when we list our summer reading lists, even the wish lists, it is not the likes of Tarzan that we think of but the heavy ones like Ulysses.  What's up?  I like this take:

Of course, we tackle more elaborate books in summer because we have more time on our hands, with the season’s longer days, the time off from work, and the promise of leisure in the air. But there’s also a psychological effect at work. From our childhood days, the coming of summer and the end of the school year meant the end of our “required” reading: no more homework, no more chapter assignments, no more mandatory synopses of The Scarlet Letter or historical summaries of “Everyday Life in Dickens’ London.” Come the solstice, many of us experienced something that will never disappear: the exhilaration of setting our own literary agenda—a private summer syllabus devoid of grades and fueled by love alone.

For once, it is not about the grades.  Not because it is a required reading. It is love.

But the reality is that I rarely ever run into people anymore who want to talk about the books that they are reading or plan to read.  It is almost as if a vast majority does not read books anymore.  Neither here nor in the old country.  Maybe there really never was a book-reading culture and it was only a few who read?

This coronavirus summer that preempts travel should, logically speaking, give me plenty of time to read serious books and blog about them.  Even Ulysses!

But, life is illogical, for the most part ;)  I don't have a list of books for this summer.

This Tarzan will, however, continue to read, think, and blog.

A mad science

In blogging about the "primacy" of science, I wrote about my lifelong worry over STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) without the humanities and the social sciences.

There are those who defend the "pure research" of science.  It is all about the curiosity and to make order out of the chaos, they say.  If you are nodding in agreement, then Adam Gopnik wants you to think about Josef Mengele.

Remember Mengele?  Wiki will refresh your memory:

He is mainly remembered for his actions at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he performed deadly experiments on prisoners, and was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers^[a] and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.

Yes, that Mengele.

Gopnik writes that Mengele’s work in Auschwitz was what we would call “pure research.”  Gopnik quotes from David G. Marwell's book, Mengele:

He pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses but rather in a manner that his mentor and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards. . . . The notion of Mengele as unhinged, driven by demons, and indulging grotesque and sadistic impulses should be replaced by something even more unsettling. Mengele was, in fact, in the scientific vanguard, enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field. The science he pursued in Auschwitz, to the extent that we can reconstruct it, was not anomalous but rather consistent with research carried out by others in what was considered to be the scientific establishment.

The scientific establishment!

Mengele is gone, but the echoes of that scientific establishment are heard even today.  Like at the university where I earned my graduate degrees.

The building where my school was housed was called VKC, which was short for Von Kleinsmid Center. As I wrote in this 3-year old post, "That building was home to me through all the years that I was there."

It was named after the university's fifth president.  Well, he was a first-rate eugenicist too!

Eugenics was absolutely part of the "pure research" during his days.

All these years, the university let that slide.  And then George Floyd died.  Black Lives Matter started reverberating across the world.  The university acted quickly:

[The] executive committee of the USC Board of Trustees unanimously voted to remove the name and bust of Rufus Von KleinSmid from a prominent historic building on the University Park Campus. Both were removed last night. Students, faculty, staff, and the Nomenclature Policy Committee have pushed for this for years. He was the University’s fifth President, for 25 years. He expanded research, academic programs, and curriculum in international relations. But, he was also an active supporter of eugenics and his writings on the subject are at direct odds with USC’s multicultural community and our mission of diversity and inclusion

USC was founded in 1880.  Five years after that, in 1885, Stanford University was founded.  It's first president was David Starr Jordan.  "He was also one of the most influential eugenicists of the early 20th century."  And a white supremacist. A racist.

Unlike USC's swift action, Stanford is moving in the slow lane: "President Marc Tessier-Lavigne will appoint a committee to review requests that question views and practices of the university’s founding president and his mentor."

Mengele was, therefore, not that much of an outlier among the scientists of his day.  How terrible!  Gopnik writes, "Mengele was not, it turns out, a mad scientist. It was worse than that. He was participating in a mad science."

What did I do to be so black and blue?

Skin whiteners have always fascinated me because I grew up in a culture, in a country, where the skin complexion was categorized in so many ways, like:

Coal black
Dark
Dark brown
Brown
Light brown
Wheatish
Fair
Very fair
And, yes, even white!

Of course, in the matrimonial ads (yes, it is a thing, in case you didn't know) the skin complexion that is darker than light brown is rarely mentioned because, well, the preference is for lighter shades and advertising the darker shade does not do one a favor!

A graduate school friend, who was from Nigeria, used to joke that there isn't any black--it is all only various shades of brown.  A white American grad school colleague noted that there is no white skin and once held a blank sheet of white paper against his skin to prove his point.

Anyway, back to the skin whiteners. In the old country, "Fair & Lovely" was a product that was the brand back when I was young.  The manufacturer successfully brainwashed the public and continued to sell the product despite growing criticism.

Fair and Lovely is India's largest selling skin lightening cream, with 24bn rupees ($317m; £256m) in annual revenue.
Ever since the 1970s when it first hit the market, millions of tubes are bought every year by teenagers and young women in a country where lighter skin is routinely equated with beauty.
Top Bollywood actors and actresses have appeared in advertisements to endorse Fair and Lovely that promote fair skin as a means to a finding love or a glamorous job. 

And then George Floyd died.

What is the connection, you ask?

Black Lives Matter has now taken on the skin whiteners too.

As the Black Lives Matter movement prompts reckonings about race and skin color around the world, India's most popular skin-whitening cream is changing its name. Its manufacturer, Unilever, said Thursday that it's dropping the word "fair" from the Fair & Lovely brand name – and also eliminating any references to the cream's whitening or lightening affects.

I never ever imagined that such a day would arrive!

With up to 70% market share, Fair & Lovely has dominated the skin-lightening industry in India. Unilever's name change follows a similar announcement last week by Johnson & Johnson that it's discontinuing two of its skin-lightening product lines.

This change is fair and lovely!

The primacy of science

My childhood friend and classmate Vijay, who died three summers ago, was better than me by a whisker in the formal academic subjects in which we earned the marks and ranks.  It didn't show really in the scores because I couldn't care much about marks and ranks.  I had plenty of other things to worry about.

But, there was no comparison between Vijay and me when it came to the arts and humanities.

I couldn't draw even an egg, whereas Vijay could easily draw portraits and animals and .... He could act. He could orate. He knew books and authors. Thankfully, we didn't have tests and exams on those because I would have failed.  And failed miserably.

Vijay was admitted to a prestigious engineering institute, but withdrew from there after two years, and chose a career of journalism and poetry, in which he excelled.

I went to a podunk college for engineering. And then found a path for that really interested me, and which continues to interest me in my mediocre career.

As good as we were in math and science, in our own ways we opted to pursue intellectual and professional interests elsewhere.  Our lives are additions to the examples in a long list of people who try to straddle the divide between science and everything else.

This divide has worried intellectuals and plenty has been said and written on this topic.  I often refer to CP Snow's lecture, not because I want to promote STEM, which is the buzzword for dollars in the academic business.  Snow's lecture I use because I have always worried about the alarmingly low levels of scientific literacy among the public.

But, even more worrisome to me is STEM without the humanities and the social sciences, about which I have blogged a lot.  Here's one from 2018, for example, that was about racist algorithms.  Or, how about this one, also from 2018 in which an essential question was "How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression and discord?"

It has been a century of a battle that has been rapidly losing to "science."  In this book-review, the author writes about the debate in the late 19th century between Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold:

[According] to Matthew Arnold, who objected that during the previous decade, the science-not-letters movement had progressed from the “morning sunshine of popular favor” to its “meridian radiance.” Arnold, with whom Huxley had picked a fight by invoking him as the personification of literary culture, rose to the defense of letters by arguing that theirs was the quintessentially human task of integration: relating separate forms of knowledge and interpretation—moral, scientific, aesthetic, social—to one another. Science and literature, he urged, must be integral parts of the same larger task of “knowing ourselves and the world.”

The human task of integration.  If only we truly understood and practiced an idea that "Shakespeare and the sciences might be jointly relevant to one project of understanding."

The global pandemic reminds us about the human task of integration:

Covid-19 has presented the world with a couple of powerful ultimatums that are also strikingly relevant to our subject here. The virus has said, essentially, Halt your economies, reconnect science to a whole understanding of yourselves and the world, or die.

Working from home ... in Chennai and Chengdu

For more than three months, many of the employed have been working from home (WFH.)  Is this working out well?

To answer that, let's check in with the wealthiest people in whose direct or indirect employ are people working from home.  If WFH has not affected productivity, then those wealthy people would have benefited, right?

Guess what?  Those gazillionaires have handsomely profited: "U.S. billionaire wealth surges to $584 Billion, or 20 percent, since the beginning of the pandemic."

Overall, between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, based on the two groups’ analysis of Forbes data. Since March 18, the date Forbes released its annual report on billionaires’ wealth, the U.S. added 29 more billionaires, increasing from 614 to 643. During the same three months, over 45.5 million people filed for unemployment, according to the Department of Labor.
The top five billionaires—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison—saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26%.

Incredible, right?

It is no wonder that tech companies are looking at making permanent a great deal of WFH.  Think-tanks like Brookings immediately sensed an opportunity for those tech workers to get away from the expensive real estate like the Silicon Valley and move to the remarkably affordable interior of the country. 

Suddenly, it looks as if the COVID-19 pandemic could allow not just localized telework, but a more fundamental dispersal of America’s highest-value employment away from large “superstar” metro areas and into the lower-priced American heartland.

Not so fast.

If WFH has not affected company bottom-line, then why should the geographic dispersal be restricted only to within the US?  Companies might as well hire employees in, say, India, and have them work from their homes there instead of bringing them here to the US.  We could easily see a footloose economy on steroids!

A responsible policymaker might then look at these developments and begin to worry that big tech, which has brought wealth and power to the US, could easily start creating a whole bunch of satellite offices around the world.  Well, tRump is no responsible guy--he has proudly stated that he takes no responsibility.  So, it is no surprise that he announced a freeze until the end of the year on work visas for foreign labor.

So, let's recap.  WFH is doing well as a practice.  WFH has not affected productivity, and the big tech employers are reaping huge profits.  Many of the tech employees are foreign born.  tRump wants to prevent them from coming here.  Connect the dots yourself.

Or, read Shikha Dalmia's commentary:

high-skilled foreign workers that blue states like California, Washington, and New York depend on are out of luck. What is likely to happen in these states? Will they rush to hire Americans with big bucks in hand? Not really.
For starters, there just aren't enough high-skilled Americans sitting around to be hired. The unemployment rate last month—the peak of the pandemic—for computer jobs was 2.5 percent compared to the overall rate of 13.3 percent for all jobs, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy.
So as high-tech companies are choked off from hiring foreign workers, they'll start outsourcing more operations abroad.

If you prefer a "sound bite," Dalmia offers this:

The more Trump tries to turn America into a fortress, the louder will be the sucking sound of jobs fleeing overseas, to use the immortal words of failed presidential candidate Ross Perot.

As I wrote in this essay in Professional Geographer, in 2018, even the President of the United States cannot create an alternative facts of economic geography.

You can’t fight performatively when the other side is fighting to win

In a column in 2018, I wrote that a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) should worry us all. The report noted that our schools are not dealing with the “hard history” of slavery. In its research, the SPLC found that “high school seniors struggle on even the most basic questions.”

What we teach children is also an easy way in which we can (re)write history.  For instance, if children are not taught about the evil that slavery was, and the beyond-imagination hellish lives that the enslaved lived, then it is only a matter of a couple of generations before when that dark history is pretty much forgotten.  By whitewashing away the horrors, we essentially brainwashed people!

We laughed when President Orange Fascist did not know anything about Frederick Douglass.  But, I am willing to bet that even many good-hearted Americans did not know Frederick Douglass, nor do they know even now how he is different from Stephen Douglas.  To a large extent, this is always the case--most of us carry on with our lives without knowing much, and usually it is not a problem.  But, when "leaders" begin to spin alternative facts as history, we would not know fact from fiction unless we knew any better.

It is not any surprise that our collective ignorance has been revealed.  Turned out that the brainwashing in schools had worked out perfectly.

As the country grapples with a racial reckoning following the killing of George Floyd in police custody, educators said that what has and what has not been taught in school have been part of erasing the history of systemic racism in America and the contributions of Black people and other minority groups.  

It is even worse in the old country where we were taught the British history of India.  Here's a classic example: In school we were not taught about the First War of Independence, but about the "Sepoy mutiny," as the bastards referred to them!  Despite the fact that I was schooled in an independent Republic of India!!!  Whatever I know now was possible only because, as Mark Twain put it, I didn't let schooling get in the way of my education!

Here in my adopted country, the history in schools is pretty much a white supremacist take on the past:

“The curriculum was never designed to be anything other than white supremacist," Julian Hayter, a historian and an associate professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said, "and it has been very difficult to convince people that other versions of history are not only worth telling. They’re absolutely essential for us as a country to move closer to something that might reflect reconciliation but even more importantly, the truth."
LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri, said the history curriculums in schools are meant to tell a story and, in the U.S., that has been one of a “progressive history of the country.”
“Really the overarching theme is, ‘Yes, we made mistakes, but we overcame because we are the United States of America,'” said King

The Disneyfication of history!

The New York Times offered an awesome corrective and an education through its 1619 Project.  But, of course, tRump and his toadies believe that the NY Times is fake news and is a propaganda publication, which means that they perhaps never bothered to read even a word in that fantastic report.  Is it any surprise that they continue to defend "their" history and heritage!

If you want a recommendation, well, Jill Lepore's These Truths is a wonderful place to start learning about American history.  You need to know the correct history in your preparation to fight:

If Lepore is right and the nation is indeed the fight, liberals must understand what a fight involves. That is, you can’t fight performatively when the other side is fighting to win: that kind of fight simply won’t go on for very long. You have no option but to fight to win, too. You want to win because you are right and they are wrong; because you have a moral right to power and they don’t; because you are real Americans and they’re not.

Fight on!

Summertime, and the livin' is easy

Sunrise earlier today: 5:29 am
Sunset later: 8:58 pm

Add to that a few additional minutes of the early light before the sunrise, and the twilight after the sun goes down.

The longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.

It is summer solstice.

Source

A slightly depressing thought--from now on, the days will get shorter and the Sun begins to move south towards the equator! On the other hand, my brother, who lives way down under, is perhaps delighted that the shortest day of the year is history and from now on the days will get only longer and longer ;)

When we learnt back in the 8th or 9th grade about earth's tilt and the seasons, it was merely an intellectual idea for me.  After all, in the real world in Neyveli, which is about 11 degrees north of the equator, life did not change much with the "seasons" that the book said happened because of the tilt.

Growing up in Neyveli, and spending summers even further south,  I was familiar with only three seasons: hot, hotter, and hottest!  Now, after having spent most of my life outside the old country, I am convinced that there were only two seasons--one was HOT, and it rained during the other season :)

But, that hot season worked well because, as kids, we don't know any better.  The real difference was between school days versus holidays, which meant doing nothing, or climbing up mango and tamarind trees, or biking all over the place, or playing cricket, or fighting with my brother while doing any of the previously listed activities ...

The change in seasons here in Oregon, on the other hand, well, it is magical.

The cold, damp, and dark months yield to spring when green shoots and flowers appear.  And then summer explodes around the Fourth of July.

When it does, the endless days seem to go on for ever and ever and ever.  We even begin to complain about the heat.  We turn the air conditioners on.  We search for relief in the cool waters of rivers and lakes.

Just when it seems like we can't take the heat anymore, the cooling arrives.  We begin to appreciate why fall is just about everybody's favorite season.  We catch our breath.  The rains begin.

We embrace the first few rains like how we don't let go of a long-lost friend. And then the rains keep coming. And coming. The days get shorter and colder and darker.

We do this year after year.

May we live through a lot more solstices!

We shall live in peace, some day

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Some day, soon, we will have a truth and reconciliation commission that will help us collectively acknowledge the sin of slavery, come to terms with that horrible past, and launch us on a path forward.  And in that process, Juneteenth will become a national holiday.

For now, here's a Langston Hughes poem that I first blogged ten years ago:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

"As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank."

In today's news:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration may not immediately proceed with its plan to end a program protecting about 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation.

I had to read a couple of commentators to make sure that I had correctly understood that tRump could have ended the program had he gone about it systematically.

 "The muddled state of play likely prevents the administration from enacting any plans to begin deportations immediately, but there is little doubt that should Trump be reelected, the second-term president almost certainly would seek to end the program."

Thankfully, the haters went about with haste and created a legal nightmare for themselves and the relief of the rest of us.

The hater-in-chief is not happy about this:

"These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives," Trump tweeted. "We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!"
"Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" he added.

It is always about him.  This attitude is no surprise though; after all, throughout his public life he has made it crystal clear that it always only about himself.

An overwhelming 80%  of the Dreamers were born in Mexico--a country with which the US has had troubled relations practically right from the very beginning.  In These Truths, Jill Lepore wrote about the tangled US/Mexico history and the imperial ambitions of the early presidents.  Texas, which is the largest state by area in the contiguous US, was particularly attractive to the enslavers who wanted to expand their cotton-growing land.  "As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank," Lepore wrote.

The following is a re-post from January 2019.
******************************************

The European settlers continued to displace people.  That's what alien settlers always do.  That is happening even now in contemporary times, like how the indigenous Miskitos are under assault in Nicaragua.

In the young USA, the leaders decided that they ought to displace Mexicans too.

Mexico was as large as the US in land area, and had a larger population:

"As early as 1825, John Quincy Adams had instructed the American minister to Mexico to try to negotiate a new boundary," writes Jill Lepore.  Yep, the new country was not even 50 years old.  trump's attacks on Mexico are merely the latest in this long history.

Why were the European settlers so interested?  The Mexican territories of "Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton."

Perhaps you have an immediate question: Working on the cotton fields meant slave labor; so, if somehow acquired by the US, would Texas allow slavery?

The anti-slavery north protested.  Mexico considered Texas its province, though a rebellious one.  The US wanted to annex it, and more.  The US laid a trap for Mexico in order to begin a war.  It was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into that trap.  Almost exactly to this date--on January 25th--back in 1845, "the House passed a resolution in favor of annexation."  And about slavery in Texas?  The resolution included a compromise: "The eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion."

From the 3/5ths compromise, the US has been at such dealmaking in favor of slavery; yet, we have a president in office who loudly wondered why they had never struck a deal in the past in order to avoid the Civil War!  What an ignoramus that 63 million elected only because he appealed to their racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and more!

President James Polk had grand dreams to extend the American empire; "Texas was only the beginning," Lepore writes.  He hoped to get Mexico into an armed confrontation, and it happened.  He asked Congress to declare war.

What would happen if the US won the war and gained territory?  Would Mexicans there now become Americans?  Quite a few leaders were against it.  "Ours is the government of the white man."  Would the new territory then be slave states as well?

As the war with Mexico came to and end in the second half of 1847, Polk "considered trying to acquire all of Mexico" from 26 degrees N all the way to the Pacific.  But, it was finally settled at 36 degrees north.  With a formal end to the war in February 1848, "the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States."

Jill Lepore writes: "As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank."

The mask unveiled

In April 2010, which makes it more than ten years ago, I blogged about the French government fining a 31-year old French woman for wearing a niqab while driving.

Yep, that was her crime.

That seemed like a different era. I call that BC--Before Coronavirus.  Now, France requires everybody to wear masks in the public.  So, if masks are mandatory, then a niqab should work, right?  Keep in mind that there is a huge difference between a niqab and a burqa:

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A niqab and a face mask reveal the eyes comparably, right?  Here's a photo of the French president with a mask on:

Source

You put a baseball cap, er, beret, on Macron and the niqab equivalent will be complete.

But then in the age of the coronavirus, France reveals what the niqab ban is really about:

That one type of face covering is seen as withdrawing from society and another has become a sign of civic duty reflects the contradictory ways France defines community and solidarity, political analysts and historians say.
“It’s not a hypocrisy, it’s a schizophrenia at the end,” said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of secularism and Islam. “Which is to say that it’s about the problem of Islam. If you cover your face for Islam, it’s not the republic. If you cover your face for a reason not to do with Islam, it’s acceptable.”

So, if a woman ventures out wearing a niqab but not a face mask, "the result is a Catch-22. Those who do not wear a mask can be fined, as can those who violate the face-covering law."

Amnesty International notes that "the current recommendations on wearing face masks also lay bare the absurdity of the arguments that some European governments have used to prohibit the wearing of face coverings in the public space."  

When has politics not been a theatre of the absurd!

One politician has made a fashion statement out of masks.

Source

That person making a fashion statement is the president of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová.

Caputova was here in Eugene not too long ago.  When I met with her and chatted, I never imagined her as the president of her country!  Life --the coronavirus included--is beyond my imagination.

Xochitl and the Way of Humanity

A day or two before the term begins, I look up the names in the roster.  I started this practice early in my teaching career, back in California, because of a lack of familiarity with some names that I had come across and, therefore, to watch out for how students pronounced them when they introduced themselves.

One name stumped me.  It was "Xochitl."

I had never seen that name before.  Those days, when Alta Vista was the go-to search engine, there was no way of figuring out from the Web how to pronounce anything.

It was class time.  I was ready to learn how to say Xochitl.

She said her name that sounded like SHO-Chee.

The always curious me then asked her where that name came from.

It was Aztec.

Nahuatl.

Students have no idea how much they have taught me over the years.  I am glad they don't charge me tuition for it and they pay me instead!

Similar to how the Bastard Empire harshly and suddenly interrupted the history and thought of Tamil, the Spanish did that same--and worse--to Nahuatl.

Nahuatl is what we call a group of two dozen interrelated languages spoken mostly in central Mexico for the past 1,500 years and by 1.5 million ethnic Nahua people today. The lingua franca of the Aztec Empire, Nahuatl was decreed the official language of the Spanish colonies in 1570, and was used as the language of missionary work in indigenous communities. Scholarship arose around the language. Catholic Nahua elites proudly spoke their native tongue, using it to record ancestral histories. Then, in 1696, King Charles II decreed Spanish to be the one and only official language. Nahuatl survived, but in remote communities or in the hushed conversations of working-class urban Nahuas.

It is bizarre that a king who lived a huge ocean away, who never even visited the land, would impose his language, religion, customs, and more on a people who had been living their own lives for thousands of years!

Of course kings and warriors fought over territories.  But, this "enlightenment" colonialism was something else.  (Trevor Noah and John Leguizamo address this in their own ways.)

The author, David Bowles, writes about the "soft, melodic rhythms" of Nahuatl.  But, language is not merely about the language.  It is about the traditions, the thought, the myths, the explanations of life.  It is about our very existence that all of us, anywhere on this planet, try to understand.

Aztec thought recognised a need to gather the broken bits of oneself and rebuild, discarding those elements that hamper enlightenment and happiness. It’s a self-directed therapy that echoes in the sacred tale of our creation.

I like the way the author phrases it: "gather the broken bits of oneself and rebuild, discarding those elements that hamper enlightenment and happiness."  He refers to this as what "the philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa called the Coyolxauhqui Process."

Rediscovering the unadulterated indigenous myths of Mexico can help both Mexicans and Mexican Americans clarify their sense of self, of belonging to something greater, of being the latest in a long line of heroic and noble souls that have sought to balance chaos and order in North America for millennia. Psychological healing and health arise from such a perspective.
But using Classical Nahuatl as a way to harness the Coyolxauhqui Process and find spiritual equilibrium in the midst of nepantla? That is Tlacayotl, the Way of Humanity. A gift bequeathed by the ancients to all of us, their biological and spiritual children alike.

 The Way of Humanity.

And, oh, what does Xochitl mean?  Flower.

Corona Amman

Four years ago, a "kumbabhishekam" was organized for a temple in grandmother's village.  That Mariamman Kovil is dedicated to the goddess who, according to the believers, protected them from the dreaded small pox.

Praying to the gods in order to ward off the horrible small pox was not a Hindu thing.  Cultures all over the world did that.  The small pox is the only disease for which there are specific deities because people had such fears about it--and rightfully so.

A few weeks ago, I clarified to my mother that the coronavirus is less like a flu but more like small pox and tuberculosis that they worried about when she was young.  My mother knows well about those old diseases, having survived a TB infection in her chest that nearly killed her.  If not for the modern treatments that had become available, she might have had a short life like her favorite uncle and aunt who died from TB, and I would not be blogging!

Elders had stories about blood sacrifice at the Mariamman Kovil.  Chicken or goats were killed in front of the deity.  One aunt recalled her father taking her to the annual feast at the temple when she was a kid, and described how a guy took a knife to his elbow and then proceeded to "serve" a couple of drops of blood on every banana-leaf.  I wish I had asked her if people consumed that blood too!  Such stories terrorized me as a kid, instead of making me view the goddess as a savior.

But then, as anthropologists note, this was the standard operating procedure of those days.

Contagion goddesses are not angelic and gentle, as one might expect caregivers to be. They are hot-tempered, demanding and fiery. They are deemed wilderness goddesses – highly local and traditionally worshiped primarily by lower caste, Dalit, tribal and rural folk. Some are associated with tantric practices and dark magic.
Placating the goddesses through blood sacrifice, decorative offerings and self mortification, was – and in some places, still is – a way of preparing for a pandemic in parts of India.

And, yes, the Mariamman temples seem to be in the outskirts of the village and far away from the "high caste" neighborhoods.  (Click here for an old post on the caste/religious spatial organization in grandma's village.) 

High caste Hindus and those who mirror high-caste practices often ignored and shunned the contagion goddesses, fearful of the blood rites, possession and the tantric rituals, which they associated with low caste worship.

But, the higher caste folk in grandma's village also donated to the temple--with the hope that the goddess would protect them from small pox.

The Hindu faith is fluid and dynamic, and adapts to changing conditions.

With the widespread use of modern antibiotics, retrovirals and vaccines in the mid 20th century, traditional Hindu healing rituals became less relevant. Contagion goddesses were beginning to be forgotten and ignored. But a handful of them developed rich post-pox lives, reinventing themselves for modern afflictions. Some goddesses moved on from focusing on disease alone.

The gods must be crazy for unleashing such viruses on us humans!

Coming to terms with history

The Bastard Empire and one of its greatest bastards are in the news, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement that has gone global.

As an adult, I was always at a loss understanding how people born in India could not be angry.  Did they not care that the Bastard Empire ruined everything?  Even the loss of a historical continuity, and the very fact that here I am thinking and blogging in English?  Why such a worship of the barbarians who decimated life all around the world?  (Not that the rest of the world, including the old country, was a paradise otherwise.)

Over the years, I have blogged in plenty ranting about the Bastard Empire, and even celebrating the mess when the Conservatives tumble.  I am mighty glad that it has once again become a small island that is irrelevant to the rest of the world, as it was for most of human history.

So, of course, I read with delight the tweets about the statue of a slave trader being toppled and dumped in the water.  It is beyond my wildest imagination how that bastard could have branded the enslaved.  Branded?  Seriously, branded?

Between 1672 and 1689, Colston’s Royal African Company shipped about 100,000 enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean, branding them on their chests with his corporation’s acronym, RAC. Disease and dehydration killed more than 20,000 people taken onto those ships by Colston’s company, and their bodies were thrown into the ocean. Yet Colston’s bronze statue, which was erected in 1895 in Bristol, was engraved with the inscription “ … one of the most virtuous and wise sons” of the city.

What a bastard!  Honorable men they are!

Even more celebrated is the cigar-chomping bastard who was one godawful racist.

The history that we were taught in middle and high school didn't present such unvarnished truths.  Instead, the UK-educated Anglophiles presented the bastards as heroes!

Source

The following is an unedited re-post from October 28, 2010:

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Soutik Biswas writes in reviewing Madhusree Mukherjee's Churchill's Secret War:

Some three million Indians died in the famine of 1943. The majority of the deaths were in Bengal. In a shocking new book, Churchill's Secret War, journalist Madhusree Mukherjee blames Mr Churchill's policies for being largely responsible for one of the worst famines in India's history.

Why is the war time prime minister, Churchill, to be blamed?  Well, the acute shortage of food

was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy - which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy - in coastal Bengal where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks.

And, what was Churchill's response when this was discussed at cabinet meetings?  The soon to be appointed Viceroy, Archibald Wavell, writes:

"Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries than the Indians and there is reluctance either to provide shipping or to reduce stocks in this country," writes Sir Wavell in his account of the meetings. Mr Amery is more direct. "Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country," he writes.

As Shakespeare wrote, "And Brutus is an honourable man" .... :(

From 1492 to 2020

"The head of a Christopher Columbus statue was pulled off overnight amid protests against racial inequality in Boston," reports The Washington Post, along with this photograph:

In Richmond, VA, protesters toppled a statue of Columbus and dumped it in the nearby lake!

Cartoonists are going after this, of course, and playing on the theme of how Columbus "discovered" America ;)

I have written about how Columbus screwed up a lot of things for people in the Americas (and in India too.)  This I wrote in 2011 after my trip to Ecuador.  I wrote a more recent one in October 2019, in the context of the calls to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous People's Day.

The following is a slightly edited version of my October 2019 post:

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More than a decade or so ago, I met my cousin's son for the first time. 

He might have been about eight or nine years old back then.  He hesitantly walked up to me and asked, in English, "you live in America?"

"Yes. I have been there for a long, long time now."

The kid was now feeling a tad more confident. "We learnt in school that Columbus discovered America."

I could not let go off the teacher within me.  "Oh, really! Terrific!" And then I added, "so, Columbus discovered America?"

"Yes. That is what the teacher told us."

That's how I, too, was told when I was a school kid his age.

"So, before Columbus discovered America, there were no people there? He was the first person to go to America?" I asked him.

"No. Our teacher said there were people there."

"So, if there were people there already, then it means that somebody discovered America before Columbus did, right?"

The kid was stunned. He hadn't thought about it.  Here he was trying to impress his uncle, and little did he know that I am Captain Killjoy Major Buzzkill General Malaise ;)

Thanks to Columbus, who originally set sail to India, we have ended up referring to as Indians a whole bunch of different peoples with different cultures and traditions in an entirely different part of the world! I joke with students that "I am an Indian from India, and not an Indian from here" whenever I want to highlight this insane historical accident.

Columbus Day is a federal holiday and in some of the states.  No holiday for us here in Oregon.  (We memorialize Columbus Day in our own strange ways!)

Seriously, why are we celebrating Columbus?  He was merely an explorer, who was a product of the times.  But, it is not as if he accomplished something spectacular.  Magellan or Vasco da Gama were far better explorers.  And then the baggage related to Columbus.  So, why honor him with a special day?

Yes, there is the history behind the origin of Columbus Day.  But, the question is how this day has come to mean to us in these contemporary times.  In these tRumpian times, are we really confident that "Columbus Day is for all Americans"?

I like how some of the progressive cities mark that day as Indigenous People's Day.  Perhaps can be observed in many, many countries around the world too.  India, Australia, New Zealand, all the countries in North and South America, ... it is a long list of countries where the original inhabitants have been pushed aside--to say the least--to make space for the newcomers.

Wikipedia says so too.

ps: Given that "America" is derived from Amerigo Vespucci, shouldn't we celebrate Vespucci Day instead of Columbus Day? ;)

To experience art

All our days over the past three-plus months have been consumed by COVID-19 and #BLM.  If your days were any different, then you are the problem.  

But, yes, there are other things happening too.  A student emailed me a couple of weeks ago about the birth of his first child.  A father for the first time!

And there are deaths.  Like that of the artist Christo.

Christo, the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist who turned to epic-scale environmental works in the late 1960s, stringing a giant curtain across a mountain pass in Colorado, wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin and zigzagging thousands of saffron-curtained gates throughout Central Park, died on Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 84. 

He was truly a one of a kind artist, whose works included the installation over the mountains in between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, which is where I lived back then.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude simultaneously placed 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the Tejon Pass, just north of Los Angeles, and 1,340 blue umbrellas on a hillside near Ibaraki, Japan.

Thanks to Christo for helping the art-challenged like me also to experience art.

I have blogged about the umbrella project before; the following is a slightly edited version of my post from June 18, 2016.

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I have no clue about art.  

But, despite the art-challenged ignorance that envelops and defines my existence, I appreciate art in my own way.  Perhaps this is nothing but yet another version of Justice Potter Stewart's comment "I know it when I see it."  

I am happy when I see the beauty in art!  And I did see--and experience--one unique piece of art: Christo's umbrellas.

It was yet another warm and sunny day (in early fall, I think it was) when we drove up to the Tejon Pass in order to look at the umbrellas up, close, and personal.  And, of course, to stand under an umbrella because of the bright and hot sun!

I should note that the photo here is not mine, but one I found on Flickr--this too is from Gorman, and is exactly how I remember it.

The neatest thing about Christo's umbrellas was that the art was an experience.  Because, unlike a painting that might hang in a museum for centuries, Christo's umbrellas were temporary.  I liked that Buddhist sand mandala approach of his to remind ourselves of the temporary lease we have on this planet.  Like how what we experience now cannot be experienced again ever.  It is more than mere "art."  A few days later, the umbrellas were dismantled.  They were gone ahead of schedule because of an unfortunate accident that killed a visitor.

I would have loved to experience one of his projects and "walked" on water.

Source

Only Christo could have imagined such a project:

“The Floating Piers,” a walkway stretching three kilometers, or nearly two miles, that connects two small islands in Lake Iseo, in Italy’s Lombardy region, to each other and to the mainland.

In the interview, Christo talks about how this idea of his had been rejected over the years--nearly forty years--by the governments in Argentina and Japan.  Finally, Italy approved this art installation.  Christo comments :

Art is in the DNA of the Italian people.Italy has a paragraph devoted to art and culture in their constitution. In the US, we have a paragraph about guns.

I don't know if that that comment on the Italian constitution is true.  It does not matter to me; I rarely ever understand art and the artistic mind.  But, damn, I would have loved the "Floating Piers."

Privilege and Equality

Years ago, I was absolutely delighted with a statue that my grandma's town had installed in the town's center.  A statue of Vanchi.  The freedom fighter from the village who shot dead the British administrator for that region.  As I noted in this post a while ago, "The old teenage emotions on colonialism and anti-Britain have never gone away inside me."

Of course, the bastard Raj ended more than seven decades ago.  But, the scars are always there.  

The George Floyd protests are echoing in European countries and reminding them about their horrific colonial pasts.  Statues are being defaced and even thrown into the waters!

It is a time for all of us to think about our relationships with our own individual and collective pasts. Our lives today are not independent of the historical events. In fact, in many instances, our lives today are very much a result of historical events.  The contemporary lives of Native Americans and African-Americans today, or the lives of the Dalit, are continuations of an unbearable past, how much ever some might want to pretend, or even believe, that looking back does not do any good.

We have no choice but to engage in difficult conversations.  When my father asked me about the protests, I told him, "it is a white problem; not a black problem."  If there weren't a white problem, we would not be witnessing protests and riots.

It is easy to claim that we are not responsible for atrocities committed in the past.  But, that is a pathetically weak argument for so many reasons; the biggest of all is when our current fortunes are largely possible because of those atrocious practices.

I have often examined this in the blog. I have voluntarily looked at how the Brahmin supremacy of the past has made my awesome life possible.  I even dragged into this discussion my sweet dead grandmothers.

I have blogged about universities that profited from colonialism and slavery. I have written about the white supremacist winston churchill--they make yet another movie that glorifies the bastard and the movie wins awards too!  I didn't leave out Thomas Jefferson either.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people in powerful positions who deny these.  They shrug their shoulders. They actively engage in denying the past, and refuse to acknowledge how such practices continue in the present as well.

But, some of us continue with such examination anyway.

When privileged, it is easier not to talk about the troubling issues.  It is easy to not even think about problems.  What problems? Where?  Why don't they all eat cakes?

Further, as Charles Blow writes, will the privileged liberals walk the talk?

We will have to come to see and accept that this system of oppression has been actively, energetically designed and deployed over centuries, and it takes centuries of equally active and energetic efforts to dismantle it.

We must make ourselves comfortable with the notion that for the privileged, equality will feel like oppression, and that things — legacy power, wealth accumulation, cultural influence — will not be advantaged by whiteness. ...

How will our white allies respond when this summer has passed? How will they respond when civil rights gets personal and it’s about them and not just punishing the white man who pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck? How will they respond when true equality threatens their privilege, when it actually starts to cost them something?

I hope it is really different this time around.

"People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?"

Early yesterday, I wrote to my colleagues about a website that I had come across, of a project to map all the protests.

1,735 cities thus far ... 

https://www.creosotemaps.com/blm2020/

How quickly has this unfolded!!!  Very little violence from from us civilians when compared against the magnitude of the protests ... I have a reference point--during the Rodney King riots, I was a grad student in LA, and was surrounded by smoke and fire, and sounds of gunshots and police sirens and helicopters ...  

I hope that the protests this time around will bring about the long-delayed justice and equality, and that hose privileged by their skin tone will not view this justice and equality as loss of their privilege.

The following is a slightly edited version of my post from June 18, 2012, which I wrote after reading the news that Rodney King died.

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As a starving graduate student at USC, I lived quite close to campus, which was not any hot piece of real estate.  After living in an apartment complex that was only a few blocks of a walk to the campus, I moved to significantly cheaper housing more than a mile away.  I didn't understand, until much later, that it was also a drug-crime area!

There were many moments when I used to wonder how the neighborhood I lived in could possibly be there at all in the phenomenally rich country that the US is.  A trip to New Orleans and walking through some of the neighborhoods there quickly straightened me out: my LA neighborhood was much better than some of the places I saw in LA's New Orleans.

To cut a long story short, the rioting took on crazy dimensions.  People in buildings up and down the street were rushing here and there in their pickups and cars and coming back with shoes, tires, television sets, and anything they could lay their hands on.  One guy told me to go to the Pep Boys store that was round the corner and grab whatever I wanted.

The building manager, who was a Japanese-American (his stories will be for yet another day!) advised me, in his halting English, that I should not even peep out of the window.  I thought it was good advice, and turned the TV on. 

Every local channel was covering the riots big time, and then in one I saw my neighborhood.  A view from a helicopter above.  I could see my own building.  That was when the seriousness really hit me. 

Two days or so later, when things had calmed down enough, I biked down the usual path, on Hoover, to the campus.  Odd shoes were scattered all along the road--people were rushing that they couldn't be bothered to stop and gather the spills, I suppose.  I passed the Pep Boys store, which had some awful black coating from the fires. 

I reached the campus, where the perimeter was heavily patrolled by university and city police.  I remember trying to talk to one officer, who simply brushed me off. 

The entire riot was surreal.  But, even more surreal was the original event--the beating of Rodney King, which was captured on camera.  It felt unreal that real cops would really beat the crap out of a human like that.

I remember watching on TV Rodney King uttering those now famous words: "can we all get along?"

It was so profound.  Such simple words with such heavy weight in those dramatic moments.

A few months after that, I think, when I was working at a public agency in downtown LA, I was one of the few people who rode the Long Beach Blue Line in its trial runs, and when they were filming publicity campaigns.  From the train, I could see the Watts Tower and I was reminded of the narratives I had read and heard about the riots in the 1960s.  Another reminder that even as things change, they remain the same?

A few years ago, I drove by those old haunts. Every building, including the apartment complex where I lived, looks so much more spruced up and bright than ever.  Perhaps no more riots?  Wouldn't that be an achievement?

The ru(l)e of law!

Think about the US as 1799 was coming to an end.  The end of the 18th century.  The dawning of the 19th century.  A new country with a brand new constitution.  A couple of democratic elections and peaceful transfers of power.  A land that was ready to launch its own industrial revolution.

What an awesome time, right?

Of course I am setting you up to remind you that having a constitution, holding elections, and ensuring peaceful transfer of power--important aspects of what we refer to as rule of law--is by no means any indicator of an awesome time.  It was an awesome time if you were a white protestant male with property.  It was hellish for the enslaved and the nearly-wiped out Native Americans.

What good was the constitution and the rule of law then?  A constitution that did not even treat the enslaved humans as human beings, but lawfully protected slavery for three generations from the time it was adopted!

Historians and constitution scholars certainly engage in hair-splitting discussions on whether or not the document was pro-slavery. 

Americans and their leading historians still find it hard to account for how their Revolution, considered as a quarter-century of resistance, war, and state-making, both strengthened slavery and provided enough countercurrents to keep the struggle against it going. Tougher still is understanding how the work of 1787 constitutionalized slavery—hardwired it into the branches, the very workings, of the federal government. Given the subsequent history of disfranchisement and policing in this country, it’s not a stretch to say that it is hard-wired there still.

But, let's cut to the chase.  Apply Occam's razor principle.  What the hell does rule of law mean when the very body--the constitution--allowed for humans to be enslaved and treated as property?

It is a straight line that links the constitution and the three-fifths compromise with Black Lives Matter and the electoral college.

Bryan Stevenson points out that even the modern day policing has its roots in the era when the runaway enslaved had to be returned to the white property owners!  And how the police were instrumental in enforcing the law that treated blacks as less than equal:

Even before the Civil War, law enforcement was complicit in sustaining enslavement. It was the police who were tasked with tracking down fugitive slaves from 1850 onwards in the north. After emancipation, it was law enforcement that stepped back and allowed black communities to be terrorized and victimized. We had an overthrow of government during Reconstruction, and law enforcement facilitated that. Then, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, it was law enforcement and police and our justice system that allowed people to be lynched by white mobs, sometimes literally on the courthouse lawn, and allowed the perpetrators of that terror and violence to engage in these acts of murder with impunity. They were even complicit in it. And, as courageous black people began to advocate for civil rights in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, when these older, nonviolent black Americans would literally be on their knees, praying, they were battered and bloodied by uniformed police officers.

I will bring the following again to your attention:

I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.

Those words are from ... wait for it, Thurgood Marshall!

So, tell me again why the rule of law matters?

I yield the rest of the space here to Marshall:

What is striking is the role legal principles have played throughout America’s history in determining the condition of Negroes. They were enslaved by law, emancipated by law, disenfranchised and segregated by law; and, finally, they have begun to win equality by law. Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. The progress has been dramatic, and it will continue.

The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendant of an African slave. "We the People” no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers.