Lynching's stepchild

The President and his attorney general, who couldn't care less about the rule of law, beat their chests and proclaim themselves to be defenders of the constitution only when it pleases them.  The death penalty is one of those instances.

After nearly two decades, the federal government resumed capital punishment.  Yes, resumed, and in the middle of a pandemic that is also killing people aided by the federal government's willful inaction.  The Supreme Court refused to stop it:

Hours after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute legal-challenge on a 5-4 vote, the Justice Department put a 47-year-old man to death for his role in the 1996 murder of a family of three, the first federal execution in more than 17 years.

A left-of-center person throughout my life, I have always opposed capital punishment.  But, as a secular liberal, what do I know compared to those god-loving Republicans who favor the death penalty!  I am sure that Jesus said torture and kill those who harmed you, right?

My earliest post on the awful Republican pursuit of the death penalty was in 2011, well before tRump became a darling candidate for the hate-filled Republicans.  I quoted Christopher Hitchens there when linking the religiosity of the country (especially Republicans) and the support for capital punishment:

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

The Jesus-loving, Bible-thumping, pro-life party wants the government to kill.  Whether it is the support for war or the death penalty, these ardent supporters are pro-death.  These proud pro-life people are maniacally pro-killing!

Dahlia Lithwick noted the unfortunate irony that most of the ardent supporters of the death sentence are simultaneously the same ones denouncing the role of government, and their primary reason is that the government can't get any damn thing right:

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?

They have such remarkable confidence that the government is awesome when it comes to killing people!

There is one more dimension that is exceptional to the US among the advanced liberal democracies that have otherwise done away with capital punishment--the continuing effects in a society that once enslaved human beings.  Capital punishment in the United States is linked with "its history of racially motivated lynchings in the South."

Southern legislatures shifted to capital punishment so that legal and ostensibly unbiased court proceedings could serve the same purpose as vigilante violence: satisfying the lust for revenge.

The Equal Justice Initiative reported on this:

The death penalty in America is a “direct descendant of lynching.” Racial terror lynchings gave way to executions in response to criticism that torturing and killing Black people for cheering audiences was undermining America’s image and moral authority on the world stage.

The reality is that we the people are not in favor of the death penalty; "a majority of Americans say that life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty is."

As with the results of the 2016 election, the majority opinion does not count here too :(

Republicans are one of the rare groups in society to indicate a preference for the death penalty over life imprisonment. Political conservatives (51%) are another.
Democrats and political liberals (77%) are two of the subgroups most likely to believe life imprisonment is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty.

There is only one way to get rid of capital punishment--vote against the pro-death Republican candidates in November 2020, and throw tRump and his toadies out of power.

Lying is as American as apple pie!

The relentless campaign about Barack Obama being a Muslim and a Kenyan.
The swift-boating of John Kerry.
The whisper campaign that John McCain fathered a daughter with a black woman.

From Jill Lepore's book, I come to understand that rare was a really truthful moment in American politics and elections.  Sure, Lepore could be a narrating the story with her progressive bias.  But, it is not as if she is working with "alternative facts."

Consider, for instance, the election of 1934, in which Upton Sinclair, "an eccentric and dizzyingly prolific writer still best known for The Jungle ... decided to run for governor of California."  As a prolific writer, Sinclair had established quite a paper trail.  And that's where his problems began.

Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who later became a couple, "like most California Republicans, were horrified at the prospect of a Sinclair governorship."  So, they huddled themselves in a room, and selected sentences from Sinclair's writing. 

Newspapers were partisans (faux news is not all that new!), and the "Los Angeles Times began running on its front page a box with an Upton Sinclair quotation in it"--the quotes, of course, taken completely out of context.  Sinclair lost.

Lepore writes, "as Sinclair argued, voters were now being led by a Lie Factory."

Whitaker and Baxter continued to fine-tune this new art of negative campaigning, especially lying, which seems to be a part of being a Republican!  They wrote the book on this, as they say.

Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. ... Never explain anything. The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support.  Say the same thing over and over again. ... Simplify, simplify, simplify.  A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think."

Like trump's MAGA; Drain the swamp; Build the wall; Lock her up; Repeal Obamacare; No collusion; Fake news; ...

In all the lying and cheating in order to get elected, the powerful whites could not be bothered about the plight of blacks. Not even about lynchings!  For all the things that we credit FDR for, his "New Deal programs were generally segregated, and Roosevelt failed to act to oppose lynching."  And when FDR refused to support an anti-lynching bill in 1933 , because he needed the Southern Democrats votes in Congress, "the anti-lynching bill died."

Across the Atlantic, in the continent from where the European settlers came and wiped out the natives and then imported humans from Africa in order to dehumanize them as slaves, a powerful populist also effectively used lying and negative campaigning--particularly about minorities.

On Tuesday, the president will use the stage in Congress in order to further engage in lies, damn lies, and fear-mongering, in the grand old white American way :(

Southern trees bear strange fruit

I like Jill Lepore's narration for many reasons, one of which she herself writes about:

My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves.  I've pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist ... the teller of truth.

In this, Lepore provides the raw and emotion-laden sentences of slaveholders and abolitionists, of conservatives and progressives, of Lincoln and Davis, ... All these then provide me the evidence to be the critic and call fouls, which I have done in every post that is about Lepore's book.

A reminder again that we are testing out the question that Lepore laid out:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

We know already how much America does not fare well regarding these truths within its ever expanding boundaries.  How about outside its political boundaries?

In the late 1880s, America had an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to "these truths" when the Spanish-American war began in 1898.  "Cubans had been attempting to throw off Spanish rule since 1868, and Filipinos had been doing the same since 1896."

A glorious opportunity to help Cubans and Filipinos with their natural rights and help them regain their sovereignty, right?  "Under the terms of the peace, Cuba became independent."

Do not celebrate, yet, for there is more: "Spain ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States, in exchange for $20 million."

Filipinos fought for their independence and were now stuck with the US as their ruler!

A U.S. occupation and American colonial rule were not what the people of Philippines had in mind when they threw off Spanish rule.  The Philippines declared its independence, and Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo formed a provisional constitutional government.

American revolutionaries declared their independence from a far away England, and a hundred years later, the Philippines was declaring its independence from a far away US.  A 100 years makes a huge difference about independence.  And, of course, Filipinos not being white folk also mattered!

Aguinaldo worried about "how bitter is slavery."  Yes, "slavery" was the word he used!

The war began.

From its start in 1899, the Philippine-American War was an unusually brutal war, with atrocities on both sides, including the slaughter of Filipino civilians.  U.S. forces deployed on Filipinos a method of torture known as "water cure," forcing a prisoner to drink a vast quantity of water; most of the victims died. ... Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.

trump now not caring about Puerto Rico is, therefore, not really new. He is merely practicing good old American politics of white supremacy; at least he tossed the people there a few rolls of paper towels!

Lepore writes that this war "dramatically worsened conditions for people of color in the United States."  The jingoistic war chants "filled with racist venom, only further incited American racial hatreds."

"If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched," the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903.

It was now separate-but-equal--and with lynching!

At this stage, do we really need to check for the answer to this?

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The end of history

Nope, I am not referring to Francis Fukuyama's best seller from nearly three decades ago.  it is the end of History as a subject that we study that I am worried about now.

Back in the old country, if ever a 18-year old said that she was studying history, well, the immediate--and only--interpretation was that she was an academic weakling who could not get into anything better and so was stuck in the condemned majors like history.

Whatever history I have learnt about India or anything has been despite the virulent anti-history educational framework back there.  It has been quite a struggle to learn history on my own, to learn to write on my own, to appreciate poetry on my own, to read up on philosophy on my own, to appreciate the arts on my own ... This listing adds up to something, right?  That something is liberal education, dear reader!

Liberal education is under attack on all fronts, and all over the world.  In this attack, even history is rapidly bleeding students.  As I noted in my reply there, the story is not just about history, but about liberal education.  Apparently, we, too, want to become like China, where higher education is not about the dangerously subversive liberal education.

My, and our collective, failure in understanding history came about in a rather interesting way last night when we watched a Netflix show.  Yes, a show on Netflix.  It was about the history of the people in the present Americas and the Caribbean: John Leguizamo's Latin History for Morons

There were lots that I was already familiar with.  But plenty that I had no idea about.  Especially these two: The repatriation of Mexican-Americans when Hoover was the President, and the lynching of hundreds of Mexican-Americans.

This was a well-prepared one-man show.  I was, therefore, confident that he was not making things up.  How come I never knew about those two things, which are not trivial footnotes by any means?

Late into the night, I read up.  I was shocked.  Mitt Romney's comment during his presidential campaign that the undocumented should self-deport took on a new meaning.

This essay begins with an eerie comparison of the current President with Hoover:

It was a time of economic struggle, racial resentment and increasing xenophobia. Installed in the White House was a president who had never before held elected office. A moderately successful businessman, he promised American jobs for Americans—and made good on that promise by slashing immigration by nearly 90 percent.
He wore his hair parted down the middle, rather than elaborately piled on top, and his name was Herbert Hoover, not Donald Trump. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under the president’s watch, a wave of illegal and unconstitutional raids and deportations would alter the lives of as many as 1.8 million men, women and children—a threat that would seem to loom just as large in 2017 as it did back in 1929.

And that is just the beginning!

Now to understand the lynching of Mexican Americans.

Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes.

I was one those unaware.  Not anymore.

From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming. 

Who cares about history, right?  Close down all the history departments, and put an end to liberal education.  Teach students programming and be done!

Oxford Blues

The title of this essay in the NY Times magazine immediately drew me to it: A Lynching’s Long Shadow.

A few descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, who was lynched by a mob in 1935, try to learn about what happened back in Mississippi.  Higginbotham was "one of at least 4,100 African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states clustered along the curve from Virginia to Texas."

The essay's timing is not any random occurrence.  Thanks to Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, "the country’s first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a museum to racial injustice" has opened in Montgomery, Alabama.  As Stevenson puts it:

We’re just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it’s sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first get to truth.   

Perhaps the current president would shrug his shoulders and exclaim that there were fine people on both sides.  He would even fault the late Higginbotham for having brought this upon himself!  Other than him and his 63 million voters, the rest of us want to honestly engage with this dark past and reconcile.

Stevenson points to the German experience on truth and reconciliation:

“In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Stevenson said. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that I think is necessary for that society to recover. In the American South, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve actually created symbols designed to make us feel great about our history, about the 19th century, about the good old days of the early 20th century.”

It is a shame that we do not have a national museum on slavery.  It is a disgrace that we do not even want to engage in honest discussions on this "original sin."  Discussions that can, once and for all, lead to reconciliation instead of the continuing simmering of those issues. 

In the essay, I came across a reference to a poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, “Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone.”  I searched for and read it on a website, and will wrap up this post with that poem:

Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone
By Birago Diop

Those who are dead are never gone:
They are there in the thickening shadow.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the tree that rustles,
they are in the wood that groans,
they are in the water that sleeps,
they are in the hut,
they are in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.
Those who are dead are never gone,
they are in the breast of the woman,
they are in the child who is wailing
and in the firebrand that flames.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the fire that is dying,
they are in the grasses that weep,
they are in the whimpering rocks,
they are in the forest,
they are in the house,
the dead are not dead.

At the Whitney Plantation