The white man's burden

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.

One bastard, however, successfully managed to paint himself as the savior of western democracies.  Yep, this post is about the cigar chomping racist bastard.  It is beyond time to rewrite his history, like how Priya Satia writes in this essay.

(You may also want to read this book-review essay in the NYRB on the imperial delusions of the bastards; one of the books reviewed there is Priya Satia's Time's Monster.)

Satia, who is an endowed chair professor at Stanford, writes that Churchill had a godawful "sense of historical birthright, of masculine, upper-class entitlement to make history without accountability for human costs."

In every time, including ours, multiple value systems are in contest. Churchill’s decisions were guided less by intellectual consistency than an unapologetic sense of entitlement to make decisions (often opportunistically) based on his romantic intuitions.

I thought I had by now known enough about the bastard; yet, this was a shocker to me:

He praised Mussolini through the 1930s and continued to flatter him during the war itself. He sided with the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and admired Hitler, who also garnered a chapter in “Great Contemporaries.” He didn’t object to fascism but to the threatening continental expansionism that it inspired in Germany. 

I am reminded of George Carlin's punchline that the Allies were upset with Hitler because he cut in on their action.  It was not Hitler's Aryan supremacy and hitlerism that bothered the likes of Churchill, but that the fact that he went on an expansionist rampage into their own territories!

As we move forward in time, even those like Churchill who tried to engineer their stories will be defeated by the unfolding of history.  That is the fate that also awaits the contemporary GOP and the Republican "leaders" who, too, view "dominance as a birthright."

As a historian I assure you that what the @GOP and @LeaderMcConnell did today is completely in keeping with disenfranchisement after Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South. And history will judge them accordingly. They belong in the dustbin of history and will live in infamy.

— Manisha Sinha (@ProfMSinha) June 22, 2021

Racism is a public health crisis

Way back when I was a graduate student in Los Angeles, I interned for a while at a regional planning agency in downtown Los Angeles.  Some of my fellow interns were undergraduates, and one of them was an African-American.

Of all the interns, he was the only one who always showed up well-attired.  While the rest of us made it clear through our outfits that we were students, he came dressed as if he were a full-time employee.  I thought that maybe that was his thing.

Only decades later, it dawned on me that maybe he was well-dressed in order to make sure that many of us with our implicit biases would not mistake him for being a hooded mugger from whom we had to escape at least by crossing over to the other side of the road.  If that were the case, what a terrible burden that he had to deal with every single day!

Now, it is not that I have not been mugged.  Once, three guys surrounded me one late evening and I had to empty out the few dollars that I had.  I was now in a bind: I had no money to pay as fare for the transit bus, and it was quite a distance to walk to my crummy graduate student apartment.

A bus pulled up.  I told the driver that I had just been mugged, and that I had no money.  He waved me in.

Mugging was real.  But, to then suspect that every black young man is a mugger is where the racism kicks in.  And therefore people walking away from young black men is an explicit demonstration of that racism.  

Through his professional attire, my fellow-intern was perhaps signaling to those with explicit or implicit bias that he is simply one of us.

Racism is one damn public health crisis. 

As this commentary in The Conversation puts it, "Treating racism like the disease that the CDC says it is suggests boosting our investment in public health funding would be money well spent."

That's exactly what my county government resolved two days ago, following up on the CDC statement.  The resolution also makes an important public admission:

WHEREAS, the racist history of Oregon in particular, including the presence of the Black exclusion clause in the State’s constitution, has had lasting negative consequences for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (“BIPOC”) communities of the State and Lane County;

A terrible history that we have here in a "liberal" state.

If you thought that this was a unanimous resolution, then you don't know Oregon.   There are plenty of people, even my own neighborhood, who are racists.  It is not without reason that then-candidate tRump came to Eugene in May 2016!  Remember this post in which I described one effect of his visit?

So, yes, the county resolution was not unanimous.  There was one who voted no--Commissioner Jay Bozevich.

“If we’re already doing all of the work that is called for in this,” he said at the April 21 meeting, “I see this as almost an unnecessary piece of virtue signaling.” 

He added that he did support the definition of racism put forth by staff. 

As the report reminds us, "Lane County’s resolution comes weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s April 8 statement that racism is a serious public health threat."

The CDC's statement was possible only because of the outcome of the elections last November.  Thankfully!

The former fellow-intern perhaps has a son or two who could be in their mid-20s now.  I would certainly want them to have all the rights and privileges that people like Bozevich take for granted.

Race in the hat

A landmark at the university that my daughter attended is an odd-shaped building.

Source

It is the main library at the university: Geisel Library.

Geisel as in Dr. Seuss.

Dr. Seuss is in the news now because his estate has withdrawn a few books of his because of racist depiction.

As an immigrant, I didn't grow up with Dr. Seuss books.  I was unfamiliar with all things Seuss, and had to quickly catch up.  Like even the hat that a student was wearing when I was in grad school.  I had to ask what the deal was with that hat.  Turned out, you know, it was a Seuss hat!

As always is the case, it turns out that academics have looked into the messages in Dr. Seuss books.  One of them wrote in 2017 a book: Was the Cat in the Hat Black? In that book, the author Philip Nel "argues that the lanky and mischievous feline was inspired by blackface minstrelsy."

Interestingly, The Cat in the Hat is not one of the titles that is being discontinued.  Why so?  Not overtly racist.  Plus:

I would also say because it's the brand. Dr. Seuss isn't just a children's author. He is a brand. And for the Beginner Books series, which are the books designed for younger readers, written by him and many others, the logo for that is the Cat in the Hat. He's literally the corporate brand.

The hat that a student was wearing when I was in grad school is the Seuss brand.  You can't kill the goose that lays golden eggs!

Whatever it is, kudos to the estate for reconsidering Seuss' works.  In an interview with The Guardian, Philip Nel says:

Dr Seuss Enterprises has made a moral decision of choosing not to profit from work with racist caricature in it and they have taken responsibility for the art they are putting into the world and I would support that

Exactly.  It is a moral decision.  Good for them!

Perhaps you now have a thought that I had after the news broke.  Did blacks know that some of Dr. Seuss' stuff was racist?

At The Atlantic, Michael Harriot writes about this very question.  He writes about his mother who "went to enormous lengths to protect her family from negative stereotypes of Black people."  That meant that she banned Dr. Seuss at home.  Naturally, he and his sisters got into trouble when his mother found the copy of Green Eggs and Ham that Harriot thought he had hidden well from his mother!

Why did Harriot's mother adopt such a strict approach?

A few years ago, I asked my mother why she put so much effort into concocting this Caucasian-free cocoon. She informed me that our childhood was part of an experiment she had envisioned before we were even born. “A Black person’s humanity can never be fully realized in the presence of whiteness,” she explained. Not a single day has passed since in which I have not thought about that sentence.

That's powerful!

If you’re really worried about Dr. Seuss’ books being removed from shelves, we have just the book for you. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/OYizG8npDA

— A Late Show (@colbertlateshow) March 3, 2021

Sweet home, Alabama?

In my initial few days after getting to Los Angeles, I thought everything looked fantastic, like how a rich country should. 

It didn't take me much to understand that I was using the old country as a frame of reference. 

After that red-pill experience happened, I could see problems everywhere.  Like how the one grocery store in the area was always crowded and it stank.  Or how apartment buildings were secured behind electric gates and intercoms.  How the sidewalks were not all even, and how sometimes there were no sidewalks.

Halfway through graduate school, a friend told me about a room that was vacant in his apartment complex.  A single unit, with a shared laundry in the building.  The rent that he quoted was phenomenally low.  I rushed there and signed the lease.

It was inexpensive for a reason.  For plenty of reasons, actually.  The water in the faucet ran brown sometimes.  The neighborhood, it turned out, had a drug business problem.

The nearly two years there was my only ever experience to have lived in near-poverty conditions.

I was now increasingly convinced that there was something seriously wrong with the image of America as a rich country.

Close to graduation, I went to New Orleans for a conference.  I wandered through without a map and accidentally ended up in neighborhoods that looked run down and anything unlike a rich landscape.  I worried about the country that I knew would be home to me.

A decade later, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and when a good chunk of the country and the world woke up to the reality, I was relieved that finally a lot more people were seeing the city that I had walked about.

I have often told students that my travels provide me a wonderful reality check---going to economically depressed areas in the US or in the rest of the world gives me a clear idea of the luxurious life that I lead, and going to affluent neighborhoods in affluent cities reminds me that I am nowhere near the upper echelons.

Often, even without traveling, I get my lessons.  Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker.  It is brutal depiction of the gross economic (and racial) injustice in a rich country.  An injustice when a community lacks a sewage treatment process, and when crap literally floods people's yards.  A sewage scene that the UN rapporteur said "was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world."

This was not in New Orleans though.  It was in Alabama.  It was in "one of the poorest counties in one of America’s poorest states."

I have seen enough, read enough, and watched enough to know that it is way past time that we addressed the economic and social injustice in my adopted home.  I hope that the new administration will be laser focused on these.

What would Aristotle do?

Years ago, it was a young student who made me aware of something called “Nicomachean Ethics.”  Having grown up in India, and having gone to an engineering college, I found (find?) myself often playing catch up in the world of liberal education in which I feel truly at home.

Anyway, she then briefed me about it in the manner that most young people do when they get excited to teach their favorite topic to an older person.   In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle lays out how men should live.  (I assume that he literally meant "men" given his time period.)

Across the cultures of the world, philosophers and religious leaders have talked and written in plenty about how one ought to live a good life.  The best life.  I am not sure how much of all that talk and writing have gotten translated into everyday life.

Consider tRump's candidacy that led to his presidency.  And the past nearly four years of his rants and insults from the White House.  And the focus on the one question that he simply waffled at the debate--the one about condemning white supremacy.  He did not condemn it, similar to how he did not want to call out the torch-wielding neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us."

So ... Amy Vivian Coney #Barrett is thrilled to be nominated to #SCOTUS by this #POTUS who refuses to condemn #WhiteSupremacy?@VanJones68: https://t.co/UA3OZ8IYU6#Election2020 #Debates2020 #tRump

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) September 30, 2020

tRump has his voters.  His base.  Would you be friends with his voters?

I have dealt with this question directly with people I know who voted for tRump.  I terminated the friendship when they made it clear that they stand by tRump because, as Jamille Bouie wrote, there is no such thing as a good tRump voter.

That you have black friends or Latino colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect, change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice.

What do the Nicomachean Ethics suggest that I, or anyone, do in such a situation?

That is exactly what Kwame Appiah addresses in his Ethicist column.  He writes in response to a query from a reader who wonders whether she should continue the friendship with a friend who is racist.

Appiah writes:

“Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue,” Aristotle said in the “Nicomachean Ethics.” That is, and was meant to be, a pretty demanding standard. Given that your friend’s racist views, by contrast to your antiracist views, represent a vice, you are not alike in virtue.

But then nobody's perfect.  So, what do you do?  Tolerate that friend?

Friendship can and should err on the side of tolerance, but big-enough vices — beams rather than motes — can be an obstacle to it. The key point that Aristotle got right is that friendship is a morally freighted relationship; a friend’s character matters to a friendship.

Character matters.  (In choosing the presidential candidates too.)  "Let’s grant that, in Aristotle’s sense, you can’t be the best kind of friend with this woman. Is it worth being any kind of friend at all?" So, what do you do? 

Appiah being a philosopher par excellence, helps us think through and not merely give his bottom-line.  Well, he does give his bottom-line--but only after taking us through the process. He writes:

Still, when it comes to someone who, in this day and age, has remained attached to such views, I am not hopeful. If you withdraw from this friendship, it’s clear you won’t be doing so for a programmatic reason; you’ll be doing so for reasons of the heart. At the same time, what most effectively discourages the expression of backward views isn’t rational argument but social sanction. A loss to you could ultimately be a gain for others.

If my social sanctioning of another discourages people to change their backward views, then terminating friendship is the best thing that I could have done.  I am glad I did that.  But, I don't have any hopes that I am significant enough for them to consider the loss of my friendship as a reason to change their backward views on the human condition.  Further, a scorpion will be a scorpion, as the fable taught us.

It seems like I have done right by the Nicomachean Ethics. Maybe I should contact that former student, who is now a professor, to grade me here! 

You were born when? You, too, are responsible for this!

In retrospect, the comments to this post from four years ago come across as being consistent with how supremacists view the world.

In my post, I wrote, "The older I get, the more I am appalled that people lived and behaved so awfully.  Especially my people who belonged to the privileged upper caste."  I followed it up with, "Deep down within me, I want the leaders of the Brahmin community to issue a formal and heartfelt apology."

That was about the caste system in which I was born into the upper caste of Brahmin.

I reflected on the atrocities here in my adopted land, and I wrote, "we have a long way to go to correcting the grievous errors of the past."

The commenters, on the other hand, did not see any reason for any kind of a "I am sorry."

Referring to their horrible (ill)logic, I responded that according to them, "I, as a naturalized citizen, am in the clear and do not have to worry a bit about the American past, right?"  How twisted is that logic!  It has always been clear to me that "It is not about "victimhood" but about honest engagement with the past. It is our collective responsibility even though I--as an individual--had no part in this."

For a long time, I have been feeling the weight of caste issues from the old country, and anti-Blackness in the adopted country.  Two unbearable burdens, as I have referred to them.

Isabel Wilkerson brings them together in her latest book, Caste.  The book arrived a couple of days ago.  It lives up to the expectations.

Kwame Anthony Appiah articulates my feelings for me, as great writers do:

In chapter after chapter, Wilkerson brings out suggestive similarities in the treatment of Dalits in India, African-Americans in the United States and Jews in Nazi Germany. Lower-caste members are dehumanized and stigmatized, kept in their place through cruelty and terror, and forbidden to intermarry with members of the higher castes. Privileges are arrogated to the high caste. Pollution comes from contact with the low caste. When, in the 1960s, a Black civil rights activist sought to “integrate” a pool by swimming a lap, Wilkerson tells us, it was subsequently drained and entirely refilled to appease its white users.
What distinguishes Wilkerson is her grasp of the power of individual narratives to illustrate such general ideas, allowing her to tell us what these abstract notions have meant in the lived experience of ordinary people both of the higher castes (white Americans, Brahmins and “Aryan” Germans) and of the lowest (African-Americans, Dalits and Jews).

I am approaching the halfway mark of the book, and that is exactly how I feel about Wilkerson's writing.  The connections that she makes across the different strings of history when helping us understand the dark chapters of history!

While Wilkerson including the Nazi framework is understandable for how those monsters drew ideas from the American treatment of Blacks and Native Americans, the manner in which the Nazis treated their "others," especially the Jewish population, is starkly different from how the enslaved were treated and how the Dalits fared in India.  This is a point that this review in The New Yorker brings up:

In the book’s comparison of the Third Reich to India and America, for example, a rather jarring distinction is set aside: the final objective of Nazi ideology was to eliminate Jewish people, not just to subordinate them. While American whites and Indian upper castes exploited Blacks and Dalits to do their menial labor, the Nazis came to see no functional role for Jews. In Nazi propaganda, Jews weren’t backward, bestial, natural-born toilers; they were cunning arch-manipulators of historical events. (When Goebbels and other Nazis reviled “extreme Jewish intellectualism” and claimed that Jews had helped orchestrate Germany’s defeat in the Great War, they were insisting on Jewish iniquity, not occupational incapacity.) The violence exercised against Dalits in India and Black people in America provides an ill-fitting template for eliminationist anti-Semitism.

In the US and in India, the system made sure that everyone knew their respective stations and stayed there.  Any attempt to rise above one's station meant extreme violence for the "untouchable."

From 1619 to 1865 was a long 250 years of enslaving human beings.  And then another 100 years of separate-and-unequal.  How can we move forward?

I took a peek at the epilogue.  Isabel Wilkerson refers to the same framework that we always end up with--create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

For that, and more, we first need to vote away from power all the white supremacists--starting with the one in the White House.

Black Lives Matter!

The following poem by Gwendolyn Brooks is from The Poetry Foundation's collections.

Riot

By Gwendolyn Brooks

A riot is the language of the unheard.
—martin luther king

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,

all whitebluerose below his golden hair,

wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,

almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;

almost forgot Grandtully (which is The

Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost

forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray

and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,

the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty

(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)

and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.

In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.

And not detainable. And not discreet.

Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot

itched instantly beneath the nourished white

that told his story of glory to the World.

“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered

to any handy angel in the sky.

But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove

and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath

the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,

malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old

averted doubt jerked forward decently,

cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,

and the desperate die expensively today.”

John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire

and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!

Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”

A powerful poem.

It is a tragedy that the poem which was published in 1969 is relevant even in 2020!

Here's to hoping that anti-Blackness will be permanently voted out of power in November, and that the institutional structures that enable racism will be rapidly dismantled.

ps: I remain convinced that poems are to be heard. Listened.  So, here's another poem by Gwendolyn Brooks.

"Moonface" and "composite nationality"

While most of the country was asleep, my country's war-time President, Agent Orange, apparently went on a lengthy Twitter rant.

The Dear Leader, voted to power by 63 million, which includes a few of my neighbors and former commenters at this blog, was particularly upset at George Conway, who is married to the cheeto's lying aide.

The racist-in-chief knows all the racist usages out there, and he educates the rest of us who don't know that jargon.  The word today, boys and girls, is moonface.  Who knew there were such words that are used to insult!  He knows them all.

Source

Twitter immediately picked up on that, and Conway chimed in too:

I know you do.

— George Conway, Noble Committee Chair (@gtconway3d) May 5, 2020

Such is the behavior of the President who claims that he has been treated way worse than Abraham Lincoln was!

He and his racist base are trying their best to keep alive the racism and hate that has been a foundational aspect of these United States.  But, their days are numbered.  This is their final, dying, gasp.

What the racists fail to understand and appreciate is how easily immigrants create a “composite nationality" that Frederick Douglass envisioned.

In calling for a composite nationality, Douglass asserted that America’s strength lay in its capacity to welcome newcomers and make them Americans. Speaking at a time of growing hostility to Chinese immigration, he proclaimed that in America, immigrants added their talents, ideas, and energy, but in turn they were incorporated into the nation.

In a post slightly more than a year ago, which was a part of a series when reading Jill Lepore's These Truths, I blogged about Douglass and his open-door to immigration from anywhere.  The following is the unedited post from January 29, 2019:
*********************************

Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

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?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889!

Let's ask ourselves, again:

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?

Truth, Reconciliation, and Unbearable Burdens

I have written quite a few posts here on the caste and race issues of the old and adopted countries of mine.  The unbearable burdens of the past, as I often note them to be.

In the posts before tRump's election and mOdi's re-election that served as a Rorschach test of sorts, when regular readers had yet to reveal their true colors, the comments say a lot, like:

I understand, but do not subscribe to, the concept that any generation must apologise for the behaviour of previous generations. These symbolic apologies, in my humble view, are mere tokens and are not synonymous with real change, which is what is really important.
Am I to apologize for the actions of unrelated people centuries ago? Hollow apology. We should acknowledge our past and move forward. I am no more responsible for slavery than someone my age in Oregon is a victim of slavery.

Of course, the freedom of expression in a true democracy means that those views and worse are allowed in the public space.  But, if only they would think differently and better!

I wrote in one of my final commentaries for the local newspapers (or, was that the final one?) "We as a country have never truly come to terms with this history and the racial dimensions of contemporary America."  One of the emails that I got was from a reader (a stranger to me) who wrote:

I am so frustrated that Germany, a country which confronted its past head on, cannot be a lesson for America. Even the smallest acknowledgement of the horrors of slavery and the following disastrous treatment of black people cannot be found in the broader culture.
I am amazed that some of our finer movies which made powerfully and emotionally clear the evil and injustice of this treatment can't have a wider and deeper influence on the politics and everyday behavior in the U. S.
For me, some form of reparations seem correct, moral and necessary, but how can such a thing happen without acknowledgement of the crimes? I see your writing as a clear statement for the need of justice deserved.

Germany does provide us with an example that we can learn from.  Even now, in 2019, more than seven decades after the end of WW II, German leaders offer public apologies for the past.  There is no dismissive "acknowledge our past and move forward" nor are they "symbolic apologies."  It is sincere, heart-felt, and constructively moves into actions towards the future.

Angela Merkel did that again during her first visit as German chancellor to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust memorial:

Dressed in black, Merkel said the crimes committed at the site in southern Poland where the Nazis ran their largest death camp would always be part of German history.
“This site obliges us to keep the memory alive. We must remember the crimes that were committed here and name them clearly,” Merkel said during a ceremony attended by the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.
“I feel deep shame given the barbaric crimes that were committed here by Germans,” she added. 

What a profound statement by a leader who personally had nothing to do with the barbaric crimes that were committed in the past!

As Harvard's president noted in acknowledging the university's past:

The past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore.

Roof’s actions were completely consistent with the cause of that flag and all the “service, sacrifice and heritage” associated with it. The Confederate flag represents treason in defense of human bondage and white supremacy, it always has, and always will. https://t.co/WiKx8EQWFG

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) December 6, 2019

Science is political

In high school physics, I came across the meaning of the word "transistor"--transfer signal across resistors.  I was impressed that there was a lot more to the "transistor radio" than I would have imagined.

Even though I hated the undergraduate program in electrical engineering, I continued to be impressed with how humans had figured out so many fascinating aspects of electrons that we cannot even see.  i mean, it is one thing to observe the world in which we are able to see things, it is another to deal with aspects that we simply cannot see.

I was in graduate school when one of the main brains behind the transistor, William Shockley, died.  Many reports of this Nobel laureate's death provided details on his racist views that he claimed were  based on science.  Neither in my high school years nor in my undergraduate study of transistors was I made aware of the racism that Shockley spouted as science.

Yes, I had some vague understanding of how Nazis abused science in order to "validate" their views on racial superiority.  But, an American researcher who created the transistor? Naive and uninformed I was!

John Horgan reviews Angela Saini's book on scientific racism, in which he writes "scientific racism--an oxymoron if ever there was one--is a relatively recent, localized phenomenon. It emerged in Europe during the so-called Enlightenment and accelerated after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species."

It is an important issue that Horgan and Saini bring to our attention. "Race science has nonetheless recently re-emerged, heartening white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other bigots."

Those who espouse this ideology call themselves “race realists.” They insist that racial injustice and inequality “isn’t injustice or inequality at all,” Saini explains. “It’s there because the racial hierarchy is real.” Race realists claim that “they are challenging the politically correct wider world by standing up for good science and that those who oppose them are irrational science deniers.”

Scientists like Shockley and Watson and others want us to think that it is scientific to ask questions about race, and that their conclusions about the supposed superiority or inferiority of races are based on science.  And to deny their questions, research, and conclusions mean that we are deniers!

But then, one might say that there are some real benefits into investigating differences between races.  Like hypertension among African-Americans.  Right?

Wrong.

Saini presents evidence that environmental factors—including stress and poverty resulting from discrimination—are the primary causes of African-Americans’ elevated hypertension. Rural Africans, she points out, have low levels of hypertension The claim that black Americans’ hypertension stems from their genes “lays the blame for inequality at the feet of biology,” Saini writes.

It is like with diabetes that I often complain about.  There is nothing genetic among Indians or Chinese for them to have such significant numbers of diabetic patients.  I am now compelled to re-think this "masala" project!

Horgan adds:

Superior left me pondering hard questions: Can scientists study race in a way that doesn’t exacerbate racism? Or does all such research, no matter how well-intentioned, subtly reinforce the idea that an individual’s race matters? If scientists do research with the explicit goal of countering racism, are they really scientists, or are they social activists?

Do they systematically and consistently engage with science students about these?  I hope so, though I think not.

I agree with Horgan's concluding remarks:

I once suggested that, given the harm done by research on alleged cognitive differences between races, it should be banned. I stand by that proposal. I also agree with Saini that online media firms should do more to curb the dissemination of racist pseudoscience. “This is not a free speech issue,” she writes in Scientific American, “it’s about improving the quality and accuracy of information that people see online, and thereby creating a fairer, kinder society.”  

(Check out the comments at that YouTube clip--the racist language will shock you!

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

I forced myself to end this long Twitter thread with a tweet from Ilhan Omar:

There could not be a better ending to this thread ...
... than this one from @IlhanMN
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸https://t.co/CkY4PTkTkA pic.twitter.com/eJi0i01Mgo

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) July 18, 2019

The following is a re-post from May 2016--almost six months before the fateful elections.  It was also about when the fascists-loving commenters started dropping off--good riddance to bad rubbish, as we used to say in the old country!
****************************************************

There are somethings that I would way prefer that I did not ever know.  But, the cosmos couldn't care.

It was a pleasant evening when the friend and I walked up to the bridge over the river.  Spring time in the valley is simply beautiful.  But, then so is the summer.  And the fall too.  Anyway, it was a pleasant evening.  We stood looking at the river.  It just flows. Couldn't care for anything as it rushes to join the mighty ocean.

Which is when I spotted it.  A Nazi swastika etched on the bench.  Not very big.  Small or large, well, it is awful.  And, even stranger were the numbers that were fainter.  "1488."  1488?  What did that mean?

I checked with Google.  It led me to the Anti-Defamation League website:

1488 is a combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols. The first symbol is 14, which is shorthand for the "14 Words" slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The second is 88, which stands for "Heil Hitler" (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet). Together, the numbers form a general endorsement of white supremacy and its beliefs. As such, they are ubiquitous within the white supremacist movement

I did not need to know that.  Damn the person who had etched that on the bench!

The ADL adds this:

Some white supremacists will even price racist merchandise, such as t-shirts or compact discs, for $14.88.

How sick is that!

This graffiti is recent, I would think, because that is a spot that I frequent and I am usually observant of the places and people in my life.  My mind wants to jump to conclusions that it might have been after the visit of the hate-spewing fascist candidate for the White House; but, I have no evidence, of course.

A tad too unnerving given that only a couple of days earlier we had watched "Look Who's Back" (the  German title is "Er Ist Wieder Da")

Before shooting the dramatic film, [the director, David Wnednt] took the actor who plays Hitler all over Germany, dressed as Hitler and in character, to find out. The result is a mockumentary that makes you laugh and then it makes you feel uncomfortable that you're laughing. 

People knew that it was an actor.  Yet:

Oliver Masucci, the actor who plays Hitler, spent nearly a year traveling around Germany completely in character. He said it was a disturbing experience.
"The first thing they did was take selfies. I took about 25,0000 selfies. First [people] laughed and asked why I was dressed as Hitler," Masucci said.
He explained that he was Hitler and told them he was shooting a movie so people could tell him what they really think about today's Germany. "Then people started to talk to me. This was really awful."
Masucci says Germans told him they thought democracy wasn't working, that Germany needed another strongman, that refugees should be sent home and the unemployed should be put in labor camps.

Democracy not working. Needs a strongman. Refugees should be sent home. Sounds familiar as the hate-spewing fascist candidate's platform as well?

Meanwhile, this Slate essay argues that Trump is "the most prominent Aryan warrior of the modern age":

Trump’s vulgar, unvarnished manner of speaking and his penchant for favoring extreme measures—the very characteristics deemed unpresidential and dangerous by his critics—are seen as not only refreshing but also as essential for the rebirth of the Aryan nation-state. When Trump calls Hispanic immigrants “criminals, drug dealers, rapists,” and vows to “take our country back” from those “taking our jobs” and “taking our money,” white nationalists hear Trump telling the same uncomfortable truths about the sorry state of white society they have voiced for decades. Every time he eggs followers on to forcefully confront detractors or swears to “take out the families” of terrorists, he projects a muscular approach to protecting the white republic. 

Back to the Hitler movie; the director, David Wnednt, adds:

It was just normal people who elected [the Nazis], normal people who followed orders, and normal people who could've stopped him. And that didn't happen

It starts with a swastika and 1488 etched on a bench on a bridge over a river :(  Here is to hoping that we will end it all before it even takes hold.

***************************************************

If only it had all ended that November!

Source

What to do with the racist "thinkers" of the past?

One of the African-American commentators that I often check in with, Charles Blow, had a timely reminder about Abe Lincoln: Tweeting on Lincoln's birthday, Blow writes "He signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He was also a bonafide white supremacist."  Blow also included the following text from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates:

Somewhere else, Blow had argued that it is not inconceivable for a person to sincerely believe there should not be any slavery or mistreatment of people and also sincerely believe in the supremacy of their own kind.  We humans are capable of way worse, we forget.

Today, I was reading a book in which the author notes that the political philosopher David Hume was no different.  A quick Google search turns up more than I wanted to know, like this one that Hume wrote about 250 years ago:

“I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”

Any complexion other than white!

Did these "enlightened" Europeans even forget their tiny bit of interactions with the Moors?  Had they not even heard about the awesomeness of China or India?  Or Egypt? Or ...?

The more I learn, the more I am shocked at how awful the past had been.  Of course, to many hundreds of millions, like the Dalits in India, such ill-treatment is not stuff from the past, but is a continuing horror story.

The consolation is that at least today things are nowhere as bad as they were in the metaphorical yesterday--despite the best efforts of the supremacists in the US, in the old country, in Hungary, in ...

But, seriously, Lincoln too? :(

The darker brother ... and sister too

It was a coincidence, and a tragic irony, that the previous post, on the first day of Black History Month, was in a series on Jill Lepore's book and ended with a note on lynching. 

As I have noted many times in this blog, I am simply amazed that young blacks are not pissed off with an anger that the world had never seen before.  It is to their credit that they are this non-violent.  I am confident that had I been born into a black family, my anger and emotions would have ended my life a long time ago!

Source

To mark the month, which I have done in the past as well, the following is a re-post from last year.

About eight years ago, after the "Tea Party" activists essentially took over the GOP, as the anti-Obama approach became the only guiding principle for that party, and with the intense opposition to Obamacare uniting all factions within that party, I started worrying about the meaning of the "take the country back" that the maniacal Republicans were mouthing off.

It was in that context that for the first time ever I blogged about Langston Hughes' poem.

Since then, Republicans have made it crystal clear what they meant by taking the country back.

Thus, during this Black History Month, it is most appropriate to re-read Hughes.

I, too, sing America.

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.

To become white, which is not a color but the lack of one

In one of the conversations in the old country, a member of the extended family criticized "those Americans."

I cleared my throat. "Ahem," I started with a smile. "I am an American."

In that context, I was an invisible man!

Here in the US too, my "American" identity is not always self-evident to people.  Because, the default definition of an American is a white.

One middle-aged white man asked me a little over a year ago at a protest gathering: "where are you visiting from?"  And he is a liberal!  "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men." 

A visiting white Ukrainian or a Czech can pass off as an "American" as long as they don't engage in conversations because, well, because of the white skin, but a brown-skinned American might be stopped in Arizona! 

I am reminded of Ralph Ellision in his powerful and compelling Invisible Man:

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. 

"they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one." 

Do white supremacists eat Mexican food?

There is certainly one thing that makes trump stand out from previous presidents--he keeps his campaign promises.

Remember Obama promising to close Gitmo on day one? Papa  Bush with his "read my lips; no new taxes"?

trump, on the other hand, campaigned as a racist and promised a lot on immigration.  63 million people loved his racism and voted him into the Oval Office.  The guy is coming through with one action after another, fulfilling his promises.

Thus, for instance, we have the crisis of children being separated at the border from their fathers and mothers.  If trump voters are now outraged, well, this is Faustian Bargain, and now the devil is collecting his dues.  Pay up, you fucking bastards!  trump never hid his cruelty!

The policy of shattering families and the cacophony of conservative voices defending it are the fruits of a campaign of dehumanization that began when Trump announced his candidacy for president, declaring that Mexico was sending rapists and drug dealers to migrate illegally to the United States.  ...
Dehumanizing “some” dehumanizes the whole. This has been Trump’s strategy from the beginning. It has been an essential element of the most shameful episodes in American history, a list to which the Trump administration’s policy of detaining children to frighten their parents must now be added.

Yep, it began with the very announcement that he was running for the presidency.  The fucking 63 million voters embraced this cruel and horrible human being!

Dehumanizing the "others" is not new in America.

The Trump administration’s purposeful separation of families has roused the ghosts that haunt America. In the antebellum United States, abolitionists seized on the separation of families by slave traders to indict the institution of slavery itself. Family separation was a key part of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which so affected some readers that, the historian Heather Andrea Williams writes in Help Me to Find My People, they went to slave auctions to bear witness: “Some travelers wanted to see for themselves the scenes that Stowe described in the novel, and they likened the people they saw to her characters.”
For the enslaved, who lived lives of toil and hardship as chattel, the forced division of families was among the most agonizing experiences they ever suffered or witnessed.

If you need to be reminded of that, check out 12 years a slave, which that essay also refers to.

To preserve the political and cultural preeminence of white Americans against a tide of demographic change, to keep America more white and less brown, the Trump administration has settled on a policy of systemic child abuse intended to intimidate prospective immigrants into submission.

It is the white supremacists' power play, all over again.

Trump’s harsh policies are the product of his view that Latin American immigrants will “infest” the U.S., changing the character of the country. It is a racialized view of citizenship, one that perceives white Americans as the nation’s rightful inheritors and the rest of us as interlopers. It is a worldview both antithetical to the American creed and inseparable from its execution.

Jamelle Bouie echoes many of these observations.

President Trump sees all Hispanic immigrants—and not just MS-13—as “animals” threatening the cultural and racial integrity of the United States.

The 63 million voters, including past commenters and some of my neighbors, can claim all they want that they are not racists.  But, racists they undeniably are.

I have been telling friends and family that things will way worsen and that we are yet to hit rock bottom.  Bouie says the same:

This will only get worse as November approaches and the president fights to hold a Republican majority in Congress. To energize its voters, the White House plans a campaign of vicious demagoguery.

Yep, even more vicious than how things are now, if one can imagine such a scenario!

It was always clear Trump would lean on racism to try to win the midterms. What’s now apparent is the shape and scope of that appeal. In 2015, when he kicked off his campaign by calling immigrants “rapists” and drug dealers, Trump also tried to give himself a sheen of plausible deniability: “Some, I assume, are good people.” But in 2018, he intends an unvarnished message of brutality and dehumanization; a white-supremacy campaign for the 21^st century.

The world changed for us in 1965

Two of my father's four close friends from his youth went on to earn their doctorates in chemistry.  And they both came to the US for their postdoc work.  One returned to India.  The other stayed back, and taught for nearly three decades at a research university here in the Pacific Northwest from 1969. 

Those two would have been among the first few from India who came to the US after 1965.  What happened in 1965?

Inspired by the Civil Rights revolution in American society, the 1965 Immigration Act explicitly abolished the discriminatory national origins quotas that had regulated entrance into the country since the 1920s. It explicitly prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence in the U.S. government’s decisions to issue immigrant visas. Instead, the law established a new system preference system based on professional status and family reunification.

Essentially, the US was now open to non-whites.

trump's person at the UN, nikki haley, too is a part of this post-1965 story:

Haley's parents moved to Canada after her father received a scholarship offer from the University of British Columbia. When her father received his PhD degree in 1969, he moved his family to South Carolina, where he accepted a position as a professor at historically black Voorhees College

Slowly, more and more people from India came in through those doors that were suddenly opened to us.  Initially it was a trickle.  And then it was a flow.  Soon, it was a deluge, too keep up with this metaphor.

In 1960, just 12,000 Indian immigrants lived in the United States, representing less than 0.5 percent of the 9.7 million overall immigrant population.

A mere 12,000 Indian immigrants in the pre-1965 era. Over the past two decades, the growth has been phenomenal, and now we are second only to the Chinese-Americans here:

Source

We are America's Shithole Success Story:

Indian Americans are living proof that hailing from "shithole" countries is no barrier to success in America (and, conversely, hailing from lovelier places is no guarantee of avoiding failure). Immigrants who choose to come to America don't in any meaningful way resemble the stereotypes of their native lands. Indeed, countries become "shitholes" because they are led by assholes. But these presiding assholes are no measure of the "quality" of the people they are governing.

I hope that the US, led by its presiding asshole, does not go back to how the conditions were before 1965!

We are the elite!

Different sets of people.  Different dining table settings and food.  Different conversations.  But, one commonality stands out: We are globalists, and among the economic elite.

We might think of ourselves as "middle class."  But, middle class we ain't. In fact, halfway through one dinner, I proclaimed that we might not think about ourselves as elites but we are.

Of course, me admitting to the world that I am one of the upper-economic-crust is not anything new in this blog.  (Here are two samples: One and Two.)

Any which way we slice the data, well, as long as we don't deal with alternative facts, we cannot escape the reality.  "The families at our end of the spectrum wouldn’t know what to do with a pitchfork."

This elite in the US is mostly white or Asian (yes, including me.)

The Institute for Policy Studies calculated that, setting aside money invested in “durable goods” such as furniture and a family car, the median black family had net wealth of $1,700 in 2013, and the median Latino family had $2,000, compared with $116,800 for the median white family. A 2015 study in Boston found that the wealth of the median white family there was $247,500, while the wealth of the median African American family was $8. That is not a typo. That’s two grande cappuccinos.

Ah, yes, but we are middle class!

The other day, a sales agent told me my credit rating is a "you can buy whatever you want rating."  It is, indeed.  But that rating by itself is a piece of evidence that I ain't middle class, which struggles to keep itself afloat, which is why their credit rating is not one they will be proud about.

We then turn around and tell the real middle class, and the lower class, that they too can do this.  If only!  "In America, the game is half over once you’ve selected your parents."  If you are a regular reader, then you know you have read this before ... and you are right.  It has been one of my favorite ways to summarize the inequality: Choose your parents well!

Recall the old adage that health is wealth?  The two are increasingly tied together:

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and liver disease are all two to three times more common in individuals who have a family income of less than $35,000 than in those who have a family income greater than $100,000. Among low-educated, middle-aged whites, the death rate in the United States—alone in the developed world—increased in the first decade and a half of the 21st century. Driving the trend is the rapid growth in what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair”—suicides and alcohol- and drug-related deaths.

Yet, despite all such evidence, because of political ideologies, and implicit supremacist views because they know better than to voice them explicitly, many shrug their shoulders and prefer to interpret the other people's relative poverty as vice: "Why can’t they get their act together?"

You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market. It’s thuggish and anti-modern. Imagine if workers hired consultants and “compensation committees,” consisting of their peers at other companies, to recommend how much they should be paid. The result would be—well, we know what it would be, because that’s what CEOs do.

I have no idea how this story will end.  All I know is that this story is not unfolding well.

The Supremacists

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. Unlike many others, 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.

The latest to join in this is the celebrated National Geographic.  For years, many in academia have written about the horrible ways that the magazine portrayed non-whites in decades past.  The supremacy of the West and whites versus the primitive non-whites.  The naked breasts of non-white women were to be found in this magazine whereas the naked breasts of white women were in Playboy.

The editor of National Geographic writes about all these and more:

I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person—a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here. It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past. But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others.

Yep, if only more among us spent some time looking into our own respective pasts--as individuals, communities, organizations, and as countries.  If only the highly educated, in particular, would take the lead on this!

What did the magazine archives reveal?

until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile it pictured “natives” elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.

We need a lot more of such introspection and honest discussions.

I will leave it to the editor for the final words for this post too:

We hope you will join us in this exploration of race, beginning this month and continuing throughout the year. Sometimes these stories, like parts of our own history, are not easy to read. But as Michele Norris writes in this issue, “It’s hard for an individual—or a country—to evolve past discomfort if the source of the anxiety is only discussed in hushed tones.”

Algorithmic racism

A couple of years ago, when reading an article on photography, I had an "aha" moment.  Because, the article answered a question that had been bugging me for the longest time ever since I came to this country.

What was that problem?

In the photographs back in India, I seemed less dark than in the photographs here in the US.  How could it be that cameras were making me less dark in India and more dark in the US?

Turns out that cameras are racist bastards!  Ok, it is not the machine that is racist.

Think about those old days of roll film.  Exposure to light is what is recorded on the film, right?  Apparently those were calibrated with respect to the fair-skinned folks. It was the narration of a simple incident in that article that helped me understand how I was able to understand my own relative darkness and lightness.

The article said that in the shooting of the movie "In the heat of the night," Sidney Poitier had to have a whole lot of extra light on him in order for the film to properly record his image when he was standing with the white characters.  It made Poitier extra sweaty from the heat, but it worked with the storyline anyway--it was all in humid Mississippi.

Aha!

I was extra dark in the US because I was in mixed company, with whites.  I then looked at a few photos with fellow brown-skinned, and ... you get the point.

That calibration apparently continues with the digital imagery as well.

Think of how much bias exists in that simple aspect of life, photographs, that we don't think about.  Not that the photo technologists were intentional about this.  Not at all.  Now, think about computer software that looks into very many aspects of our lives.  And about artificial intelligence that learns through our responses, which are products of explicit and implicit biases.

And then read this essay that asks "Is your software racist?"

The examples there will/should worry you. I leave it up to you to follow up on the details there.

I want to end this post with this exciting footnote.  The computing expert who is quoted there (and he is working with ACLU on these issues) is, get this, Suresh Venkatasubramanian.  Yes, not only an Indian-American but a Tamil-American.  Yay!

No traitors we are. We, too, sing America!

About eight years ago, after the "Tea Party" activists essentially took over the GOP, as the anti-Obama approach became the only guiding principle for that party, and with the intense opposition to Obamacare uniting all factions within that party, I started worrying about the meaning of the "take the country back" that the maniacal Republicans were mouthing off.

It was in that context that for the first time ever I blogged about Langston Hughes' poem.

Since then, Republicans have made it crystal clear what they meant by taking the country back.

Thus, during this Black History Month, it is most appropriate to re-read Hughes.

I, too, sing America.

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.