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 Seuss is in the news now because his estate has withdrawn a few books of his because of racist depiction.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

Whitey on the Moon

I read a book review.
An anthology of poems.
By African-Americans
Edited by The New Yorker's poetry editor.

I placed the order.
A pre-publication order.
A delayed gratification
For one who aces a marshmallow test!

The doorbell rang.
I saw the brown uniform walking away.
"Thank you" I yelled out
Even though he didn't hear me.

I opened the book
Somewhere to near the middle.
I was blown away
By the poem on the page.

Such issues have always bothered me
Which is why I quit engineering too
Are science and tech so important
To neglect the real needs of the poor?

I have blogged in plenty
About these awful injustices.
Including this about the protest
In advance of the Apollo 11 launch.

"Around 150 Americans,
Mostly black mothers and their children,
Walking with two mule-drawn wagons
through light mist and rolling thunder.

The contrast was dramatic:
mules and rockets, rambling wagons
and a vast sky to be conquered."
The poor Blacks who marched on Cape Kennedy!

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome ...
... some day

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.

"We have lost our Moses"

In the summer of 2016, "before an overwhelmingly white crowd in Dimondale, Mich., where 2.8 percent of the population is African American," then-candidate trump stumped for black votes, by asking them, "What the hell do you have to lose?"

Apparently that question did not get him African-American votes!  But, his negative campaign against Bill Clinton's crime bills, in order to remind blacks about Hillary, paid off well: "In 2016, black turnout was down eight points from 2012."  He and his political adviser and conduit to the Russians and Wikileaks, roger stone, played the dirtiest politics on their belief that “Hate is a stronger motivator than love ... Human nature has never changed.”

All these are a long, long, long way from Lincoln who believed in "the better angels of our nature."

Not all the people in the South wanted to secede.  Even in Virginia, where there was plenty of opposition to secede in the western part of the state.  Jill Lepore writes that in June, after Lincoln's inauguration earlier in March, "they held their own convention and effectively seceded from the state, to become West Virginia."

Ironically, West Virginia today is confederate flag land with people talking about their heritage and is a solid trump country!

Even the soldiers--North and South---fighting in the Civil War, knew well that the conflict was over one and only one issue: Slavery.  In 1862,  "a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade's newspaper wrote:  "Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation if the blacks is wither a fool or a liar."

Contrast that with the racists in today's "Party of Lincoln" who falsely claim that the war was about state's rights and not about slavery and emancipation!

Lepore reminds us: "It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy."

Think about this the next time you see a confederate flag!

Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation, shepherded the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibited slavery in the United States, and ran for re-election.  All "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

On Good Friday of 1865--April 14th--Lincoln was shot.  He died the following morning.

We the people ... which people?

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued his famous presidential proclamation, freeing slaves.  He was the 16th President.  Why didn't any of the previous fifteen issue such a proclamation?  For that matter, why didn't the first president, Washington, issue one?

Jill Lepore writes:

What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? ...
[Yet] he would not, could not, do it.  Few of Washington's decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.

Lepore doesn't sugarcoat her interpretation of history.  Good for her!

Of course, Washington was acutely aware of the deal that was struck--the three-fifths clause--for the Constitution.  He knew how the slave-owning southern delegates felt about slavery, slaves, and blacks. Like William Loughton Smith of South Carolina, who opposed emancipation "by insisting that if blacks were free they would marry whites, "the white race would be extinct, and the American people would be all of the mulatto breed."

Such bigotry exists today, even nearly 230 years later.  Iowa's long-term representative, steve king, has been saying such crap for years before trump jumped on that hatred and made it a winner!  When trump boasted to king about how much money he had raised for him, king's reply was telling: “But I market-tested your immigration policy for fourteen years, and that ought to be worth something.”

Washington set a precedent: In politics, leaders will compromise on morals and basic human decency for the sake of money and power.  It should not surprise us then that the GOP and 63 million voters prostrated before trump! 

During Washington's time, and later too, slaves were, after all, "property" and, therefore, wealth.  The leaders treated their fellow humans as less-than-human even though they fully knew otherwise.  And they compromised.

They all knew well what they were doing.  Which is why the framers of the Constitution "tried to hide it. Nowhere do the words "slave" or "slavery" appear in the final document."  They tried to hide it.  But, they knew that the truth will reveal itself sooner than later.

Everything flows into the Ganga

All we were taught back in elementary school was that Columbus discovered America, because history is always written by the rich and the powerful, which the white supremacists were for a long time.  Not anymore, because the poor and the powerless are not poor and powerless as they were, though we have to live through the repercussions of the white supremacist actions over the centuries.

Salt Spring's story does not end with the white supremacist invaders and the natives.  The history over the past 150 years is multi-layered.  This post is about blacks in Salt Spring.

The lucky ones who were freed from the chains of slavery in the US, fled to a few states to lead better lives.  Some of them went to California, which did not have slavery. But, that did not mean that California did not have white supremacists.  Blacks felt threatened by some of the legislative shenanigans that were directed towards restricting the freedom.

Before you read on, pull up a map and familiarize yourself with the locations of California and Salt Spring Island.

And then think about the transportation systems of about 1850. No planes. No trains. No automobiles.

Now, consider the nightmarish logistics of getting from northern California all the way to Salt Spring Island, about 170 years ago.

Yet, blacks ventured out to a tiny island far away from anything they would have ever known.

When lives are in danger, people flee.  The logistics matter the least.  That was the story back in 1850, which is no different from what is unfolding in the waters between Africa and Europe, or on land at the US-Mexico border.

Many of Salt Spring's first settlers were Blacks who came from San Francisco. While some of these were former slaves or children of slaves, all were free citizens of the United States when they immigrated to British Columbia. They included a wide cross section of society?merchants, miners, farmers, educators, and others. What these Blacks all had in common was a desire to escape the discrimination they faced then under California law and to be able to function in society as free citizens. Like many other settlers, they had little money. Thus, it was the offer of free land that drew them to an island wilderness.

The governor of British Columbia, Sir James Douglas, welcomed them.  At least partly because of his own roots--his mother was black.

Charlotte Girard, a former University of Victoria professor who began researching the Douglas family tree in the 1970s, determined that Douglas’s mother was Martha Ann Telfer, a free coloured woman of mixed race living in British Guiana. His father was John Douglas, a white Scotsman.

Incidentally, Her fucking Majesty's Ship Ganges that wiped out the natives on Salt Spring Island was built with genuine Malabar teak in Bombay, India!  "Building began in May 1819, under the direction of master shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia."  Why a person in a colony of the white supremacists would gladly and proudly build a flagship with 84 guns is simply beyond me!

An unexpected series of lessons in an island that has the contemporary reputation of being home to hippies with artsy galleries, and aging Vietnam war draft dodgers.

What kind of society does “America” mean?

I remember John Steinbeck's line somewhere that the poor in America don't consider themselves to be poor--they have been brainwashed into thinking that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.  Poverty is a minor setback, and it is only a matter of time before they become another Gatsby.

Except, it is not any minor setback.  And not everybody easily climbs up the ladder to become millionaires and gazillionaires.  Especially if you are not white in America!

But, when the dominant narrative is driven by whites, who shrug their shoulders and ask "Why can’t they get their act together?," to talk about inequality means that the trolls would immediately attack with name-calling. Socialist!

That shoulder-shrugging approach has always been the MO for the whites-only party, aka the GOP:

Republican orthodoxy is that inequality is not necessarily a problem. And if rising tides substantially lifted everybody’s boat, it might matter less that the yachts parked at the North Cove Marina a stone’s throw from Goldman Sachs rode a bigger swell. Tides in America don’t work like that anymore, though.

Most other boats are leaky.  And many don't even have boats!

Your heart doesn’t even have to bleed to care. The United States risks its prosperity by leaving so many Americans behind.

Republicans. Don't. Care. "Republicans just passed another round of tax cuts to offer a helping hand to the upper crust."

I have always wondered why there is simply no rioting on the streets. Why there is no looting. Why aren't the poor jumping into their broken down cars and rushing to ransack the Versailles of the greedy gazillionaires?

As Catherine Rampell noted in The Washington Post, populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.

To refer to trump as a populist is a twisted interpretation of what populism means.  He is no populist; he is merely a loud-mouthed racist, misogynist, ...

So, what happens to the poor?  Especially those who are not white?

Let them eat frog legs!

I made the Trump/Romney photo black and white, and it looks like a Twilight Zone episode where a guy just made a foolish deal with the Devil pic.twitter.com/froiDYDJei

— Adam 'Stuhlbarg' Murray (@Atom_Murray) November 30, 2016

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

Who is laughing now?

As much as I enjoyed the sarcastic humor in the Daily Show and the Colber Report, as the years went on, I stopped watching them.  For one and only one reason: I worried that instead of getting enraged, we were merely laughing things off.

If you were to go back and watch some of those clips, I bet you will agree with me.  Those were some serious, serious issues that the mostly liberal audience was laughing away--of course, for catharsis, more than anything else.   But, laughter has never overhauled society.  In fact, while we laughed and laughed till we cried, the others whom we were laughing at were loudly and openly gaining strength.

I provide you the following Colbert clip from six years ago as a piece of evidence.  Where was the outrage at Rush Limbaugh's and Steve King's atrocious statements?  I bet you also see how much of the fascist's rhetoric is along the same vein, right?

The Colbert Report

Or, how about this one from five years ago?

The Colbert Report

Race in America

In making the transition from electrical engineering, I spent quite some months thinking about what exactly it was that I wanted to study in graduate school, which would define the rest of my life. Which is how I finally settled on urban planning programs--cities were the physical settings where all the issues that interested me, worried me, came together.

In one of the courses in my first year, the assigned readings included a lengthy essay on the "underclass" here in America.  To quite some extent, that essay was also how I first came to know about a literary world in America that was immensely more than the Time and Newsweek and Readers Digest, which were the only ones that I had seen and read in India.

I was reminded of that essay when reading this book-review article in the New Yorker.  Yet again I am left wondering why a book-review essay in the New Yorker is so much more enjoyable to read, while book-reviews in academic publications are incredibly boring and painful!

The essay from the graduate school days introduced me to the spatial aspects of injustice here in America.  The setting of the university where I was a student further drove home the reality that America was a land of milk and honey, but not to everybody.  The university was surrounded by visible signs of poverty, in which the people's skins were in various shades of brown--to the south, it was a dark brown that we refer to as black, and to the north and east was the lighter brown of the Hispanics.

The New Yorker notes:

By some estimates, African-Americans are more isolated now than they were half a century ago. 

The President and his wife are more the exception than the norm.

The essay is about gentrification, which here in America is closely correlated with race issues as well.

The story of gentrification was, curiously, the story of neighborhoods destroyed by desirability. As the term spread through academic journals and then the popular press, “gentrification,” like “ghetto,” became harder to define. At first, it referred to instances of new arrivals who were buying up (and bidding up) old housing stock, but then there was “new-build gentrification.” Especially in America, gentrification often suggested white arrivals who were displacing nonwhite residents and taking over a ghetto

However, there is also a distinct pattern about where the gentrification happens:

A recent study found that Chicago neighborhoods that were forty per cent or more African-American were the least likely to experience gentrification. This statistic was cited by the journalist Natalie Y. Moore in her new book about her city, “The South Side.” She recounts the pride she felt when she bought a condo in a seemingly up-and-coming South Side neighborhood: she paid a hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars, and she was shocked when, five years later, an assessor told her that its value had depreciated to fifty-five thousand. She writes about herself as a “so-called gentrifier,” adding, ruefully, that “black Chicago neighborhoods don’t gentrify.”

Gentrification bypasses neighborhoods that are "too black"?

The more things change, the more they stay the same :(

We hold these truths to be self-evident

In commenting at this post, before Anne returned to her senses, er, to this blog, Mike referred to Woodrow Wilson's racism.  In my rejoinder, I hoped that we are at least moving forward in the correct direction.  I had also noted about the founding fathers--"slave owners on the one hand, but talking the big talk about all men being created equal and about freedom."

Why not explore that some more?

Consider Thomas Jefferson.  He was the main author of the Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson was only 33 years old when he drafted that.  Only 33!  With soaring, majestic, rhetoric, Jefferson tells us:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

The same Jefferson was a big time slave owner.   Writing at the Scientific American, John Horgan says that it was more than a small blemish; Jefferson was "an egregious hypocrite, who willfully betrayed the ideals he espoused."

"Willfully" is the key word here.  I.e., Jefferson knew better, and yet continued with his slave owning.

Jefferson was a “brutal hypocrite” even when judged by the standards of his time, according to historian Paul Finkelman. He notes that “while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution--inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration--Jefferson did not.” Jefferson also “dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality,” Finkelman writes. As a Virginia state legislator Jefferson “blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state.” As President he purchased the Louisiana Territory but “did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast ‘empire of liberty.’” Finkelman accuses Jefferson of being “deeply racist,” noting that he called blacks “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”

Pause.  Think about this.  Jefferson writes that "all men are created equal."  Many of his notable contemporaries, including Washington, freed their slaves consistent with the spirit of the revolution and the very idea that "all men are created equal."  Yet, Jefferson not only did not free his slaves, he even resisted legislative attempts to free them!

The public "doesn't know enough about Jefferson's poor record on issues of race."

"I don't think you go around honoring people for behavior that was truly awful, and Jefferson's relationship with slavery and race was truly awful, even from his own times," Finkelman said. "This is not looking back from now," he stressed.
...
"George Washington ceased using white overseers to manage his plantations before he became president," and gave the positions to slaves "as a prelude to emancipating them in his will," Finkelman said. Jefferson never took such a step. "Washington famously said that he did not take men to the market like cattle, but Jefferson sold nearly 100 slaves in the 1790s," Finkelman said.

Which is why I appreciate Horgan's use of the word "willfully" when it comes to Jefferson's slave ownership.  Not only Jefferson knew better, his contemporaries were freeing slaves whereas he continued to treat them worse than cattle.

Horgan runs quite a list of Jefferson's hypocrisy.  He ends with this:

The United States has come a long way since Jefferson’s era. Our moral progress is exemplified by the fact that a black man is President. But this country still falls far short of its professed ideals of peace, equality, justice and liberty for all. Perhaps if Jefferson had set a better ethical example, we would have come further by now. 

If Jefferson had set a better example by freeing his slaves, and as a legislator and president if he had championed the rights of blacks, perhaps our history would have been different.  Maybe we would have moved much faster in the correct direction towards Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and I would not be worried about the possibility of a racist in the White House making a speech in 2019 marking the four hundredth anniversary of twenty captive Africans sold into slavery in the British colonies in North America!

An Arab in the plane is the new Black on the sidewalk

In three years, in 2019, we will mark a very dark anniversary--four hundred years since the first Africans were sold as slaves in Virginia.  Between the old country's caste system and its untouchables, and slavery and African-Americans here in the adopted home country, I feel like I always carry an unbearable burden of the sins of the past.

I have no idea how a young black man makes peace with how his life has been screwed up forever thanks to this history.  It is beyond my wildest imagination.  Which is all the more why I am blown away by Martin Luther King's commitment to non-violence in the struggle for civil rights.

It took me a few years of living in this country to understand the deep effects that slavery and white supremacy have had on everyday life.  I am continuing to understand my own deep-seated biases as well, and am trying my best to rid myself of those.  The earliest learning experience was in graduate school when the friends from Nigeria and Ghana laughingly observed how people switched to the other side of the road in order to avoid walking up to them on the sidewalk.  Kayode and Seth laughed about it because they had a great sense of humor.  But, I suppose other than laughing about it what else could they have done anyway!

Now, we have added one more category to such awful behavior: An Arab, or anybody who even looks Arabic while on a plane is now viewed with suspicion.  But, unlike the sidewalks where people crossed the street, racists cannot get down and climb into a different plane.  Which is why things like this happen:

A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic.

That was a month ago.

The student, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, was taken off a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Oakland on April 6 after he called an uncle in Baghdad to tell him about an event he attended that included a speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
“I was very excited about the event so I called my uncle to tell him about it,” he said.

It turns out that one does not even have to speak Arabic.  One does not even have to wear a jubba for a fellow passenger to get all worked up.  You are a danger if you even look like this:

Source

Who is he?

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

So, if he was not speaking Arabic, or wearing a jubba , then what happened for him to be forced off the plane?  His seatmate, who was "a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag" "had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something":

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

And what exactly was Menzio scribbling?  Math!  "A differential equation, to be exact."

After reading the news report, I tweeted:

Rising #xenophobia in the US, thanks to #Trump :(#Economist ethnically profiled on American Airlines flighthttps://t.co/wAzfYAlXW1 #Menzio

— sriram khe (@congoboy) May 7, 2016

The trolls showed up right away.  Such is life in these United States, which will only get more awful if the fascist gets elected in November!  I shudder thinking that it could be President Donald Trump addressing the nation in 2019, marking the tragic anniversary!

Two depressing articles on Obama's "race" for a second term

I wonder what the reason was for me, even as a kid, to have gotten so interested in the news and events around me.  I remember even keenly following changes in the price of gold, and the exchange rates for the Indian rupee. Local and international politics--especially the Cold War issues--fascinated me.

Now, if only I hadn't that infection in my early years!  Because, then I would have never stuck my nose so seriously into attempting to understand this complex world.  I could have chosen a professional life where I could simply have punched-in and punched-out, and not worried about a damn thing.

Nah, that is an alternative that I would never have chosen! 

Thus, I end up reading and thinking and driving myself crazy.

A horrible feeling it was to read two articles, in two different publications, and feel that there is nothing I, or even millions of us, could ever do to change the way things are.

In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the worrisome fear of a black President, and he notes:

After Obama won, the longed-for post-­racial moment did not arrive; on the contrary, racism intensified.

Yes, it is awful how much race has become a divisive issue.  Coates' essay is intense, and I hope that it will gain a much, much wider audience.  Towards the end, he writes:

In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

Reading that essay while getting ready to sleep was a bad idea.  Instead of calmly drifting off into sleep, there I was wide awake, thinking about all the subtle and explicit racist jokes I have heard or read about Obama.  I wanted to yell out a big FUCK YOU in the middle of the night.

Sleep I did, eventually, and back to the routines of reading.  After laughing through the cartoons in the New Yorker, I settled down to read Jane Mayer's piece on the other race in this election--the race for money.  The more Obama falls behind in this race, Mayer thinks that he could even lose this election!  The idea(l) of one-person-one-vote is threatened ever more than before:

the top .07 per cent of donors are exerting greater influence on the 2012 race than the bottom eighty-six per cent. And this accounts only for publicly disclosed donations: much of the money raised during this election cycle consists of secret gifts to “nonprofit public-welfare” groups that claim to have no overt political agenda.

Rare are billionaires who donate gazillions to the Democratic Party and not to the GOP.  In the age of SuperPACs, that means disaster for Obama, or any candidate anywhere who is not aligned with the billionaire Republicans.

looking ahead, many Democrats grow more concerned. Bill Burton, the former White House aide who is now running Priorities USA, says, “My worry is that the numbers will just get even more astronomical. It could easily be doubled, or quadrupled, by 2016. Once big business realizes it can purchase the White House, you have to wonder what the limit is.”

Tell me why I should not be worried, and why I should not yell a big FUCK YOU in the day time as well.  You can now understand why sometimes I wish that I didn't have this intellectual curiosity when I was young!

On that suspicious looking (black) guy ...

Honestly, I have no idea how a black feels day in and day out ... I can only imagine that it ain't always fun.

On a very, very, small scale, the only way I think I can even begin to understand how the skin color and other differences could be viewed as off the norm is whenever I return to the US. 

It has been a different country the past few years, ever since Homeland Security became a monster organization.  The immigration officers ask a whole lot of questions when I am at their counters for processing.  Almost always, I don't get a green light at customs and am directed to go through additional checks.  When the lighter skinned people ahead of me and behind me don't face this, which is a consistent pattern, then I am left with a working hypothesis that my appearance and accent and everything else is viewed with suspicion. 

The conversation with the immigration official, during the latest instance, went something like this:

"How ya doin?"
"Fine, thanks. How are you?"
"Good. What countries did you visit while you were away?"
"Only India"
"How long were you gone?"
"For about three months"
"What did you do in India for three months?"
"Meeting with friends and family. And a whole lot of traveling"
"What work do you do for you to take off for three months?"
"I teach at a university"
"Where do you teach?"
"In Oregon?"
"What subject do you teach?"
"Economic geography"
"Where is your Indian visa?"
"Oh, sorry, it is in my passport that expired. This is a new passport. Here it is"
"Welcome home"
"Thanks"

In the years before Homeland Security, it was merely a quick scan of the documents with a friendly attitude and a parting "welcome home."  Now, it is often the case that I have to deal with so many questions, while it always seems to be the old-style quick processing for the lighter skinned travelers.

And then off to the customs. I hand the customs declaration form, and the officer does not wave me through.  Instead, I have to go through another process.  After scanning my suitcases and carry-on, the officer there asked me, "what do you have in here?"

I was so tempted to tell him that after he scanned it, he ought to have known what was in!  But, no point being smarty-mouthed in these contexts, right?  So, I politely said, "clothes, books, and gifts." 

"What kind of gifts?"

I hid my pissed-off feeling and replied "wood carvings, brass items"

He flagged me through and I was off wondering what the point was!

White. Whiter. Whitest. ... Portland, Oregon!

Click here for the text-analysis of the following graphics from the Oregonian:

Colbert explains reparations

Eating or drinking while watching this might be injurious to your life :)

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Dr. Condi Rice's Jim Crow childhood

This past summer I read Invisible Man and To Kill a Mocking Bird ... it is shocking to realize at every instance that the atrocious treatment of blacks was not that long ago.  It is the same way I feel about the caste-contexts in India.  The whole idea of "untouchables" being so less than human that an accidental brushing against the skin of one would send a brahmin to bathe ... while we are thankfully far removed from those bad days, we still have a long way to go.

Conoleeza Rice speaks of that atrocious past.  I watched her on The Daily Show the other day, and appreciated Jon Stewart for not (mis)using the opportunity to question Rice about her involvement in the decision-making on the wars that are dragging on and on.  Rice's factual and relaxed recollections of her childhood and her parents in the most segregated city were inspiring.  It is incredible that Rice--a global personality now--didn't have a white classmate until she was twelve, and after they moved to Denver ... All political differences aside, her life story is simply marvelous.

In the review of her book by Professor Stephen Carter, over at the Daily Beast, I came across this comment about the usage "African-American":

Rice, by the way, rejects this term, which she thinks too easily lets white Americans off the hook for slavery and Jim Crow, by making the black community seem like any other group of immigrants.

I am with Rice on this one, too.

Will be neat to have Dr. Rice over for dinner with just about four or five people and listen to stories about her childhood, parents, grandparents, the obstacles that she faced as a young black woman ...  ask her about her take on Invisible Man--what her reactions were when she first read it ... I wonder if she likes Indian food :)

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The new MIA--continued ... Muslims in America, that is!

I just finished reading "Invisible Man" ... a book that can get down to the deepest emotions even on a wonderful summer day with puffy clouds against a blue sky, with birds chirping and children giggling with excitement.  Reading it, and allowing the messages into my system where they seem to stir feelings that I didn't know existed against the backdrop of the Manhattan Mosque, Glenn Beck, Faux Noose, Pakistan floods, Chilean miners, Haiti homeless, ... I am surprised I haven't jumped off a cliff, yet!

As much as that book is about race, slavery, and so many of the complex issues many of which haven't gone away even now, all those are metaphors as well. Metaphorically, now the Muslims in America are rapidly facing the conditions of "Invisible Man."  For the first time in a long while I feel absolutely deflated. Ellison writes towards the end of the book, in the Epilogue:

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. 

Now, it is the same issue of dealing with diversity--the "different" Muslims ...

Ellison further writes:

America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he's going.

Apparently, unlike Elison's description of whites becoming blacker, there is a vehement opposition from many Americans who do not want anything to spillover from the new invisibles--Muslims in America. It is way too disheartening to read even the NY Times headline: American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?

Really? We have come down to this level now?

Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”
That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on.
Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day.

I still find it beyond my comprehension that conditions have deteriorated this fast. And to think of the impression it will leave on the young ones:

Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.
“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”

Fox News has black audience? That is news to me!

I thought it was merely Juan Williams watching himself; but, a huge 1.38 percent of their audience is black.  Really?

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