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

Should progress have to occur funeral by funeral?

In 1955:

On this day in 1955, two white men abducted and murdered a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. Share this #racialinjustice https://t.co/i42tiT2xbm

— Equal Justice Initiative (@eji_org) August 28, 2020

In 1963:

Today is the 57th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic I Have A Dream speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

Half a century later, against the backdrop of nationwide uprisings demanding racial justice, much of his words still ring true.

Let's revisit them.

— ACLU (@ACLU) August 28, 2020

At that march in 1963, MLK said:

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

Police brutality.

Here we are in 2020.  It has been 65 years since Emmett Till's brutal murder.  57 years since MLK's soaring rhetoric.  A couple of days ago, the police shot a black man 7 times in the back. As his kids were watching.

Turns out that this group was always right, though I didn't initially see it that way.

Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground
A young nigga got it bad 'cause I'm brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
Fuck that shit, 'cause I ain't the one
For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun

It is beyond my wildest imagination how Blacks continue on with their lives without breaking into riots all over the country.  I have the utmost respect and admiration for how they have controlled their anger.

But, one thing is clear: This white supremacist shit cannot and will not continue for much longer.

Black Lives Matter!



PS: The title of this post is derived from Max Planck's observation that science progresses one funeral at a time.

Brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair

Take a look at the art below:

Source

A mother who has the Hindu "dot" on her forehead, with wavy hair and holding a child.

But then there is something that is off, right?  She is not dressed in the traditional sari.  Hindu women in history were not portrayed with pearl necklaces, but with gold and silver and precious stones.

So, you want to guess again on what that image is about?

If I had been asked to guess, which I was not because I read about it instead, I would never have imagined that it is a representation of Mary holding baby Jesus!

Here's the image in full:

The Holy Family, is how it is titled.

The note there is even more head-spinning: "c.1620s Northern India, Mughal court, early 17th century"

An artist in the Mughal court created this "Indian"-looking image of Mary holding Jesus, and making sure that the baby--whose hands are around a beautiful vase--does not knock the vase over.

Is this watercolor art work in India then?

Nope.

It is in Cleveland.

Yes, the Cleveland that every comedian jokes about.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art.

How did it get there?

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

How did these people get their hands on a Mughal court art from 400 years ago?  Stolen merchandise that has passed through many hands, and now in a museum half way around the world from where it was created!

As Ricky Ricardo often told Lucy, "you have some 'splaining to do!"

How did I get to viewing that piece of art?

I jumped off a hyperlink in this piece on how in art depictions Jesus started resembling white Europeans, even though Jesus was born in the Middle East.

The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime

Academics have talked about Jesus' "whiteness" a lot, and how it is highly likely that he was nothing like the northern European depictions.  Will the Black Lives Matter movement of today, and the challenge to the white narratives, dethrone the image of the white savior with blue eyes and blond hair?

I like this description:

Jesus was a man of color who was murdered by law enforcement and state-sanctioned violence for insurrection against the Roman Empire.

That is one powerful image!

So, ... brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair.  Jesus probably looked like me when I had lots of hair on my head!

Me at 27

Jesus looked like this? Source

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!

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? :(

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?

Yelling for freedom, while killing and enslaving!

Barely into a tenth of the book, one truth emerges--the hypocritical and contradictory beliefs of the Europeans who settled in the new world.  On the one hand, they claim to be fleeing persecution, and are in search of freedom.  On the other hand, they annihilate Native Americans and bring in humans from Africa as slaves.  All these well before the Declaration of Independence!

Jill Lepore compels us to think about a number of questions, which she then proceeds to discuss.  Questions such as:

In December 1511, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, delivered a sermon in a church on Hispaniola. Disagreeing with the king's ministers, he said the conquistadors were committing unspeakable crimes. "Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do yo wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?  And then he  asked, "Are they not men?"

That was less than 20 years since Columbus discovered America!

When Columbus landed on the shores of Hispaniola--his "India"--"there were about three million people on that island."  A mere fifty years later, "there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung."

Columbus couldn't care. The King of Spain couldn't care.  The Pope couldn't care.

Five hundred years later, trump couldn't care either--Haiti was his primary target when he specifically referred to a few countries as "shitholes."

"Are they not men?"

That was perhaps the first of the questions, to which there was no end.

As European invaders raped women, or even fell in love with them and stayed with them, the land now had "mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women,"  Soon, these outnumbered Indians, whose population sharply decreased.  "An intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color." Awful, "as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob."

And, therefore, "pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?"

In the contemporary US, trump and his 63 million toadies have clearly stated, over and over, that all people are not equal. 

The guy who co-chaired trump's campaign in Iowa, who had been spewing white supremacist and white nationalist talk for ever, recently said:

what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Oh, and what was the response to Montesinos' question?  The conquistadors were required to read aloud to anyone they proposed to conquer and enslave a document called the Requiremento.  If the natives accepted the story of Genesis the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen, then their lives were spared.

The Evangelicals' support for trump is a mere echo of this 500-year old beginning!

The brown-skin exclusion act of November 2016

The current administration in DC has come up with yet another scheme to restrict immigration by providing yet another phony story:

The Department of Homeland Security announced a proposed rule on Friday that would penalize immigrants seeking permanent status who use public benefit programs such as food assistance and housing vouchers. Under the new policy, those who seek financial help could risk losing their chance at a green card.

It is not about any evidence to back this up, obviously.  It is to merely feed into the false narrative that brown-skinned immigrants are lazy bums who are collecting welfare money paid for by hardworking (white) taxpayers.

Just for the heck of it, what are the facts on the ground?

[Research] shows that immigrants are far less likely to burden the federal government than native-born Americans; if anything, they bolster it.

Yep.  There is evidence that we normal people use, and then there are alternative facts that the current administration uses!

Keep in mind that this is the same administration that said it wanted to encourage immigration from Norway and not from shithole countries.  One doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that it is all about restricting the browns from coming to America.

White nationalists and supremacists are having a glorious time thanks to this administration mainstreaming their views that have been unwelcome in the public space for a couple of decades.  Here's what the son of a big time white nationalist has to say about it:

unfortunately, I think we don't have to look very hard for examples of this kind of rhetoric now in our politics. You know, when you have someone in a primary position of power saying that we should be prioritizing European immigration, saying we need to build the wall - which is an idea that David Duke and the Klan spent a lot of time investing energy in in the late 1970s. When we have somebody in a huge position of power who's saying we don't want people from [expletive] countries - when you have somebody in a huge position of power who is constantly referring to his own genetics, which is a huge white nationalist talking point. They love to talk about eugenics and the false science of race. And so when you have somebody who's saying, I'm a credit to my great, tremendous, really wonderful genes - which, it turns out, some people might think maybe weren't so tremendous - that's furthering white nationalist talking points.

Source

Listen to that entire interview with Derek Black, the son of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  The son has renounced the white nationalism that he was raised on, and is now an activist on the good side.  While the President might find it impossible, there is only one good side in this.  There are no good people on the other side.

The tightening of the immigration screws on non-Christian browns has had terrible effects already.  I suppose this is what 63 million "real" Americans voted for!

Fun game, colonization!

These days, I wonder if what the white nationalistic folks are really afraid of is this: The "superiority" of the past three hundred years is rapidly ending because the browns no longer kowtow to the melanin-challenged.  And their globally aware white nationalist leaders are fully in the know that the vast brown world, with the exception of a few Anglophiles and Francophiles, truly knows and understands how Europeans royally screwed them up through their colonization.  The worry now is that "they" are coming to get "us."

The white colonizers did one hell of a job messing up the lives of brown people all over the world.  All over.  Not merely colonizing and taking over the lands.  That is the least of it.  They successfully upended every aspect of the human condition. Language, traditions, foods, and--the biggest one of all--Christianity.

In the process, they committed horrors after horrors.  Belgians, who are famous now for their chocolates despite the fact that cocoa cannot be cultivated in Belgium, killed humans by the thousands millions:

Under the reign of terror instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium (who ran the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908), the population of the Congo was reduced by half -- as many as 8 million Africans (perhaps even 10 million, in Hochschild's opinion) lost their lives.
Some were beaten or whipped to death for failing to meet the rigid production quotas for ivory and rubber harvests, imposed by Leopold's agents. Some were worked to death, forced to labor in slavelike conditions as porters, rubber gatherers or miners for little or no pay. Some died of the diseases introduced to (and spread throughout) the Congo by Europeans. And still others died from the increasingly frequent famines that swept the Congo basin as Leopold's army rampaged through the countryside, appropriating food and crops for its own use while destroying villages and fields. 

As I often blogged, the bastard Raj even systematically and intentionally killed millions in the Subcontinent.  And through the decades, the fucking Raj de-industrialized the Subcontinent and reduced it to a land of beggars. Now, it is an island that has lost any relevance in the world, and if it were not for the browns there, well, the sun would have set forever on the "empire."

As Mohammed Mossadegh, prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s, said about Britain: "You do not know how crafty they are. You do not know how evil they are. You do not know how they sully everything they touch."  Of course, by expressing such truth, he invited trouble, which came in the form of  British-American supported coup that killed him and installed the Shah of Iran.  The British evil schemes continued even after colonialism had ended!

One could write for ever and ever about all the atrocities that Europeans committed in the non-white, non-Christian lands.  Some of that has been explored in this NYRB essay.  Compared to how many were killed by colonizers, and compared with for how long the colonized were in servitude, the Islamic terrorists of today are barely gnats.

A comment by a young Muslim man who had studied at an American university sets the tone for the impressively far-ranging Crusade and Jihad. “The bottom line,” he tells William Polk,

is that no Muslim ever tried to enslave or slaughter your people. You might think of the attack on the World Trade Center, 9/11, as a counterattack. It was terrible and most of us are ashamed of it, but just remember—it killed about 25 hundred people whereas imperialists killed at least 25 million of our relatives and tried to destroy our way of life and our religion. Do you care about that?  

Or, a more contemporary one, if you think those are irrelevant old stories:

under the sanctions that followed the invasion of Kuwait half a million Iraqi children are said to have died—“more than the number killed in the bombing of Hiroshima.” When asked about that figure, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” Polk comments:

Had such a remark been made about the deaths of children in Europe or America, it would have drawn universal condemnation; made about Iraqi children, it drew almost no attention in the American media. Nor would similar comments or similar actions against Afghan children draw condemnation. But such comments and such actions were widely reported and commented on throughout the Muslim world.

It is little wonder, then, that the deaths of Iraqi children featured prominently in the propaganda of Islamist ideologues such as al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Suri and in Osama bin Laden’s recruitment videos, which showed Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine.

All in a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."  For what?

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.

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

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.”

The browning of America is delayed ...

In the world of sovereign states after the Second World War, very few of them have allowed foreigners to permanently move into their countries.  Quite a few, like the ones in the Persian Gulf, tolerate migrant workers, and most of the rest of the countries practically do not allow for immigration.

The United States continued to stand out, in contrast.  In the 1960s, it even shed its racist immigration policies and made possible browns like me to make ourselves at home here in America.

And then trump happened.

Immigration is now targeted from many directions.  Because it is pretty much only non-whites who want to move to America--thanks to the global demographic dynamics--the anti-immigration nationalism is ethnic-cleansing through federal policy!

We are now setting ourselves up for immense losses.  Highly qualified, talented, and capable people are being denied work visas.  Like in this case:

After earning law degrees in China and at Oxford, after having worked in Hong Kong as a lawyer at a top international firm, after coming to United States three years ago for an M.B.A. and graduating and joining a start-up, I was given just 60 days to leave the country. I have 17 days left.

Law degrees, including from Oxford. MBA from Stanford.  Anything else?

My work involves artificial intelligence and big data, and my letters of support came from an authority in my industry and veteran start-up investor, and a Nobel Prize winner. But it wasn’t enough to convince the government that my job requires advanced skills.

What do Nobel Prize winners know anyway!  It is not like many American Nobel laureates are from other countries, right?

So, any final thoughts from the Hong Kong visitor who has been given her exit papers?

America is losing many very skilled workers because of its anti-immigrant sentiment, and while this is a disappointing blow to me and my classmates, it will also be a blow to the United States’ competitiveness in the global economy. Tech giants such as Google and Tesla were founded by immigrants.
I can’t make sense of why an administration that claims to want this country to be strong would be so eager to get rid of us. We are losing our dreams, and America is losing the value we bring.
As I make plans to go back to China, I find myself wondering: If I am not qualified to stay in the United States, then who is?

Who is?

J'accuse! J'accuse! J'accuse!

In June 2016, I was in an airport shuttle van with an Armenian-American driver and two German tourists.  The male tourist said that because it is illegal in Germany to say or do anything supporting Nazis, there is nothing there, at least in the open.  He blamed the US for exporting neo-nazi stuff to Europe.

This past weekend, the neo-nazi side of America was in full display.  A woman's death, and a black man's near-death, and more ...

Even prior to that post, in May 2016, I wrote about the looming dark clouds.

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.

The evil has taken a firm hold, and eradicating it now will be a much tougher problem than anybody could have imagined.

In those posts, the two highly religious and openly Republican readers who used to comment stayed away from commenting.  One of them had even pontificated a year prior in a post on our biased and bigoted selves:

I do not understand how one person thinks he is better than another simply because of skin color or religion or any accident of birth, such as the wealth of the parents or location of the home. Every human has value and has gifts and talents and skills to share. None is more important than another.

I bet that those readers were two of the 63 million who voted for trump, who was thanked today by the former KKK leader.  The "thanks" was because the president equated "activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend."

Two weeks after the November election, I wrote that white nationalism is not new to the GOP.

The big difference between 1984 and 2016 is this: Reagan used the political dog-whistle to remind the GOP white loyalists about blacks and immigrants.  Trump ditched the dog-whistle and went for the straight talk.

Elections have serious consequences.  This past election was perhaps one of the most consequential one ever, which is something for future historians to write about.

I quoted Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote:

Trump’s victory, in light of all of his antics during the campaign, makes it all but impossible to deny the continuing currency of racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia in the United States. It’s on display for all to see. This could be a good thing: It forces us to reckon with who we really are. Is America really about the democratic, progressive values professed in the founding documents? Or, are we really the small-minded, bigoted place Trump’s election represents?

The nine months after the election have made it clear that the 63 million did vote for racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, and more.  They stand accused!

There was King ... and there is king!

Two days ago, I referred to the blatantly racist post by a Republican member of the House of Representatives, steve king.  Guess what?  The party expelled him today--he crossed the Rubicon.

Nah, of course not.  He is very much a part of the party.  It is just that he loudly says what most Republicans (elected and otherwise) say in their safe spaces.

The GOP is now the bloody American party of white nationalism!

Today it’s Donald Trump’s party, and there is not much breathing room between King and Trump when it comes to white nationalism.

White nationalism gone mainstream!  Who would have imagined that back in 2009?

This is how the Bannons and Kings view the modern world: The West is threatened by hordes of swarthy outsiders, especially Mexicans and Muslims, and they are lonely defenders of the white Christian race against this insidious threat. There is no evidence that Trump has given this matter as much thought as they have, but, based on his public pronouncements, he has reached similar conclusions. That helps to explain why the administration is building a border wall, expanding deportations, and trying to keep out citizens of as many Muslim countries as possible. This isn’t about fighting terrorism or crime; it’s about fighting changing demographics. And it’s premised on an unspoken assumption that only white Christians are true Americans; all others are “somebody else.”
This is ugly stuff.

Such ugliness right at the Oval Office has emboldened all the white nationalism all around.  White nationalism posters were found posted at a university campus only a few blocks away from the White House:

Vanguard America, a group whose name appears on the signs, responded to a request for comment with an email: “We hope to raise awareness amongst college students regarding the problems facing the world today, and to advocate for a National Socialist solution to these problems.”

You see how these groups operate in broad daylight and even response to requests for comments?

Of course, churchgoing white Christians who voted for trump whose heart is so pure that he is the very image of Christ himself!

In 1962--yes, 55 years ago--James Baldwin wrote:

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

At the rate at which this country is changing under this president and his party, "may very well be never" seems to be the case.  What a tragedy that 63 million voters have created!

"Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history"

Alright. Quick reflex answer needed. No deep thinking before responding. Ok?

Answer with a yes or a no.

Do you think that people who are convinced that humans descended/evolved from apes will, by and large, subscribe to ideas that any one human "race" is superior to another?

Or, to put it differently, do you think that people who deny that we descended/evolved from apes might possibly belong to supremacist groups, or might operate with a sense of one human "race" being superior to another?

As I look at the American socio-political landscape, I see among the Republican Party a great overlap between those who deny evolution and those who are also convinced about their white supremacy.

Apparently there is a reason for me to think along those lines.  Darwin’s theory of evolution might have encouraged the abolition of slavery.  How?  First, what did Darwin himself say about where humans came from?

Darwin was so concerned about the heretical nature of his message that he decided to avoid mentioning the most incendiary of all his conclusions: that humans, supposedly created in the image of God, were in fact nothing more than modified great apes. He therefore devoted just 12 timid words to human evolution in the entire 500-page work: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

The man buried the lede, eh!

What's the connection to abolishing slavery?

Darwin, whose birthday is today--and, hence, this second post of the day--published his opus in 1859.  In that era, prior to his publication:

At the time, it was debated whether humans had a single origin or several, with each race being separately created. The multiple-creation school, polygenism, was popular with apologists for slavery. If, as they supposed, the Adam-and-Eve creation produced whites, but other races derived from earlier and inferior acts of creation, then whites were justified in applying a different moral standard to people of nonwhite race, who were not created in God’s image. Polygenists sometimes saw blacks as subhuman intermediates or even as members of a different species, justifying their subjugation and enslavement.     

You can see where this is going.  And you can, therefore, see why those who championed white supremacy in the American South even made a lawsuit out of the teaching of evolution.  (Click here for an older post on this topic.)

So, back to 1859.  Darwin's ideas are heretic.

But if humans had a single origin (monogenism), as Darwin proposed for other species, then all human races were genealogically connected: Blacks were every bit as human as whites — equivalent to distant cousins — and slavery became morally untenable.

Aha, you say!

Of course, even by 1859, there were enough abolitionists, and enough of a momentum to abolish slavery.  Darwin's book might have added that much more to the abolitionists' arguments.

Things haven’t changed much since 1860. A 2014 Gallup poll showed that 42 percent of Americans are young-Earth creationists, while another 31 percent are theistic evolutionists like Gray, accepting some form of human evolution but insisting it was directed by God. And only 19 percent of us — 1 in 5 — adhere to Darwin’s view that humans evolved in a purely naturalistic way with no supernatural help. Slavery, thankfully, is no longer with us

Only 1 in 5 view that humans evolved without a divine intervention.  Only one in five!  Oh My Darwin! ;)

On the creepy confederate flag

Way back when I was in graduate school, I was once talking about the road trip I wanted to go on in the Deep South, thanks to having read Gone with the Wind when I was in high school.  The three guys listened to my plan.  One of them--btw, all the three were Whites, born and raised in the US--said something like "even I would not want to get off the freeways there" which puzzled me.  He saw my puzzled expression and clarified--he was Jewish.

There is heritage and then there is heritage that comes with a mile-long freight train full of baggage.  The worry is that not only the baggage of the confederacy has not been completely thrown out but that it is even cherished!  As the NY Times noted in its editorial, "the Civil War is winding down":

to put away old business — the Civil War, Reconstruction, jut-jawed defiance to equality for black citizens — so their state could finally take up the ever-pressing, unfinished job of reconciliation.

Earlier this spring, the friend and I went to the coast.  On our way back, we decided to detour via a road that we normally do not take.  It was pretty, of course.  Not much of a traffic, other than a pickup truck that was behind me and was in a hurry.  No surprise for me when the vehicles behind want to pass me, because I am always the slow guy on the road!  When I got a break, I moved over to the sandy shoulder space to let the pickup overtake me and it did.

A couple more miles in, and the friend and I decided to pull over, figure out where exactly we were and to then proceed.  As I reached a clearing, where I thought I would stop, I passed the same pickup truck that was parked there.  Strange it seemed that the driver was in a hurry and yet was parked there.

We checked the map and figured that we had taken a wrong turn, which meant that I had to make a u-turn at that point.  I started the engine and crawled forward to find a sweet spot to make the u-turn.  The pickup truck also headed out slowly.  We thought it was creepy.  I made the u-turn and passed the pickup, and we never saw that truck again.

A few miles later, we passed a relatively rundown house with a huge confederate flag that was fluttering with the breeze.  After that pickup truck experience, the sight of the confederate flag worried me.  A dark-skinned me, and with a white woman too!  I visibly shifted into a worried mode.

If a dark-skinned me feels this way here in Oregon, far away from the Confederate states, then I cannot even begin to imagine how African-Americans feel about that flag and the "heritage" it represents.

I will leave it to my favorite go-to intellectual on race issues in the US; Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the confederate flag:

Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.