May 28, 1830

The Equal Justice Initiative informs me about an important event that happened on this very date in 1830:

On this day in 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing Indigenous people who had lived in the region for centuries to migrate west in brutal and dangerous conditions. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. https://t.co/jmxsbO2zup

— Equal Justice Initiative (@eji_org) May 28, 2021

We must confront our history.

That's exactly what the GOP's "leaders" do not want us to do.  At the federal and state levels, they are on a mission to stop teaching and discussing our history that involves atrocious treatment of non-whites.  Their catchphrase is about "critical race theory," even if the GOP base has no idea what that really means.

The following is an unedited re-post from January 2019:

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Remember this factoid?

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide and then the ethnic cleansing did not end just because it was now the 19th century!

Enter trump in his previous incarnation: andrew jackson, who "extended the powers of the presidency," writes Jill Lepore.

"The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies in a heap of ruins at his feet," declared a senator from Rhode Island.  "When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it."

Jackson set his sights on Indian removal.  He wanted to forcibly move Native Americans from east of the Mississippi to the West.

The Cherokees had forever been fighting to remain on their lands.

We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory.

And then a most unfortunate thing happened: "Gold was discovered on Cherokee land."

The US Supreme Court and its Chief Justice, John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokees.  andrew jackson "decided to ignore the Supreme Court."  The Trail of Tears was the result.

We often refer to slavery as America's original sin.  As sinful as that was, the destruction of the lives and histories of the original inhabitants of this land is an even older story.  As much as the aftereffects of slavery and white supremacy have never gone away, the shameful and atrocious treatment of Native Americans continues.  Especially now with version 2.0 of andrew jackson: trump.

President Donald Trump started off the week by mocking one of the worst Native American massacres in US history in order to score some political points. By Friday, a group of young white teenagers were following his footsteps by taunting Native American elders at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC — on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, no less.
In videos shared widely on YouTube and Twitter, a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” stands inches away from a native elder who is beating a drum. Different angles of the incident show a group of a few dozen young people, mostly boys, in the background, jumping up and down and jeering in unison at the group of elders present for the day’s march. In some shots, the teens appear to be shouting “build that wall, build that wall.”

The native elder, Nathan Phillips, is also a Vietnam vet--the war that President Bone Spurs dodged well.

“I heard them saying ‘build that wall, build that wall,’ ” Phillips said while wiping away tears. “This is indigenous land. You’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did for a millennia. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders, took care of our children, always provided for them, taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see that energy … put that energy to making this country really, really great.”

Yet another Indian elder shedding tears is not going to influence the thinking of 63 million racists!

The future is ours!

There is plenty to depress me on a daily basis.  But then, I tell myself the same thing that I often tell students in my classes: Look at the trajectory, and we will see that life has only gotten better.  However true that is, it is not easy to overlook the unpleasantness that we run into day in and day out.

I am not referring to the unpleasantness of things mundane, but--and especially--about issues that are political that then translate into everyday life.  It is disheartening, for instance, that 63 million voters have enabled a sociopath to turn this country into a banana republic.  They have ensured that our policies will not empathize with the "wretched refuse of your teeming shore."  It is a long list.

And then there is the trajectory.  The moral arc of the universe that MLK believed bends towards justice.

And what an evidence of that arc is Pete Buttigieg!

A gay married man continues in the Democratic primaries even as many other wannabes have quit the race altogether.  The person that I favored the most has long been gone.  Buttigieg is still in the race.

While other high-altitude candidates such as Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris followed an Icarus-like trajectory, Buttigieg kept flying above the tree line. ...
Butigieg has been in the upper ranks of the Democratic contenders for so long that we forget how unprecedented his ascent has been.

Indeed!

In the days ahead, Buttigieg will face a series of tests that approximate the pressures of the presidency.
Can he come across as a compelling presence in two debates within six days (the other is in Charleston, South Carolina, next Tuesday)? Did he build a political organization from scratch that can stand the rigors of the 3 March Super Tuesday primaries in 14 states? And will he continue to keep a cool head as the campaign inevitably grows ugly?

Against the well-funded Bernie campaign, the cash-drained Buttigieg will have a tough time ahead.

Whatever happens from here (and only the foolhardy would dare to predict), Buttigieg has made history with his campaign. And maybe the greatest accomplishment of this former South Bend mayor has been the seeming ease with which he has done it.

Whatever happens, we will look back at his candidacy and appreciate the trajectory that made it possible for a gay man, who openly and proudly kisses his husband in the public, to be a plausible candidate for the presidency.  The 63 million, who gloat over their short-term scorched-earth victory, cannot bend this moral arc to their will how much ever they try. 

Revenge is profitable. But, what about the meaning of human?

The nerd that I am, I scan the letters to the editor in the magazines that I value.  Thus, there I was reading the letters in the latest issue of the Scientific American, when I had to stop and start reading the letter from the beginning in order to make sure that the words were what I thought they were.  Here's how the letter begins:

Michael Shermer investigates the causes of death-row inmates' displays of positivity in “Death Wish” [Skeptic]. Although I am not on death row, I have served five years of a life sentence, so I may have some insight into this.

You see why I had to get to the beginning?  The letter writer is five years into his life sentence.  It is a letter in response to Shermer's column. In the Scientific American.

So, I did a Google search for the letter writer's name "Gordon Schumacher."   I pulled up another letter from him to the Denver Post, in which he is identified as "an inmate at Colorado’s Fremont Correctional Facility."   He writes in the letter, "As long as society is focused on revenge instead of healing, nothing will change."

In response to the letter in Scientific American, Shermer writes:

The problem that Schumacher identifies in the prison system is largely the result of the U.S. still mainly engaging in “retributive justice,” or the understandable desire for revenge and to give criminals their “just deserts,” instead of “restorative justice,” or the attempt to repair the damage done to the victim and to rehabilitate the perpetrator. Many countries are experimenting with complementing retribution with restoration, to great effect for victims, perpetrators and society.

Our system focuses so much on revenge.  There is an entire prison-industrial-complex that profits from this revenge.  Take the case of Canon City, in Colorado, where that letter-writer/inmate is.  I had no idea about the place until yesterday.  Wikipedia notes that the major employer includes the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Colorado Department of Corrections operates the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City.^[19] In addition to several correctional facilities near Cañon City in unincorporated areas in Fremont County, Colorado State Penitentiary, the location of the state death row and execution chamber^[20] is in Fremont County.^[21] Other state prisons in Fremont County include Arrowhead Correctional Center,^[22] Centennial Correctional Facility,^[23] Fremont Correctional Facility,^[24] Four Mile Correctional Center,^[25] and Skyline Correctional Center.^[26]

 Quite a few years ago, back in my California days, those of us interested in public policy issues started worrying about this dangerous prison-industrial-complex (the phrase being a takeoff on the famous military-industrial-complex that President Eisenhower worried/warned about.)  I lived in a county where cities competed against each other to be the location for a new prison.  It was bizarre.   And, politicians--locally and nationally--found that the public liked it if they seemed tough on crime, especially after how Bush exploited the Willie Horton incident in his campaign against Dukakis.  Incarcerating people for all kinds of crimes became a winning political strategy.  Just awful.

As the Economist noted a year ago in its commentary on America's disgraceful prison-industrial-complex,

Once we develop the mental habit of lumping together murderers and muggers as irredeemable monsters, it becomes possible to convince ourselves that it's okay to lock a man in a cage for most of his remaining years for having committed a relatively trivial "violent crime".
A reflexive dehumanisation of "criminals" and "felons" discourages the exercise of real judgment in sentencing and probation. It allows us to sleep well when judges commit injustice in the name of justice, consigning people to captivity long after they ought to be let free. And it helps us rationalise the disenfranchisement of those who are, eventually, released.

President Obama has set us (re)thinking about this awful mass incarceration.  We will hope that we will continue along this path and become civilized in the way we treat humans.

Hey, we are better humans than those in the past. Seriously, we are!

It's hard to accept the notion that people in the early 20th century were moral idiots, two standard deviations dumber than us. Their attitudes about race and gender sure seem morally moronic to us today, but does that mean in another half century our descendants will look at us with equal moral dumbfoundedness?

Perhaps you are feeling defensive after having read that.
Don't.
It is not about you or me.
It is about all of us.
Feeling better?

I think about the old country.  Even my own folks in the past.  Brahmins they were, which means they, for all purposes, were bigots with their Brahmin-supremacy and the awful caste system.  It is strong language, yes, to refer to the past, which includes people like my grandmothers, when we say "moral idiots."  But, compared to them and their practices, aren't we at a much better place now with people treated far less unequally than ever before?

Michael Shermer writes that we are becoming morally smarter, from where I had excerpted those couple of sentences.  He observes, and I agree with him, that:

Since the Enlightenment, humans have demonstrated dramatic moral progress. Almost everyone in the Western world today enjoys rights to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness. Liberal democracies are now the dominant form of governance, systematically replacing the autocracies and theocracies of centuries past. Slavery and torture are outlawed everywhere in the world (even if occasionally still practiced). The death penalty is on death row and will likely go extinct sometime in the 2020s. Violence and crime are at historic lows, and we have expanded the moral sphere to include more people as members of the human community deserving of rights and respect. Even some animals are now being considered as sentient beings worthy of moral consideration.

It is remarkable that we have reached this stage.  Not merely in the US or India but throughout the world.

Evolution endowed us with a natural tendency to be kind to our genetic relations but to be xenophobic, suspicious, and aggressive toward people in other tribes. As our brains become better equipped to reason abstractly in such tasks as lumping dogs and rabbits together into the category "mammal," so too have we improved in our capacity to lump blacks and whites, men and women, straights and gays into the category "human."

Isn't that a phenomenal development that we should celebrate?

Shermer also makes this claim that will make the two argumentative readers of this blog very happy, if they ever get to reading it!  With literacy and education, people become fans of democracy and freer markets:

Intelligence predicts economic attitudes, most notably abstract concepts such as the way that free trade is a positive-sum game. This runs counter to our folk-economic intuitions that most economic exchanges are zero-sum in a fixed pie of wealth. The economists Bryan Caplan and Stephen Miller culled data from the General Social Survey and published an article in a 2010 issue of the journal Intelligence tellingly titled "Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists." They found a correlation between intelligence and openness to immigration, free markets, and free trade, and a reluctance to endorse government make- work projects, protectionist policies, and business interventionism.

I better wrap this up before I comment anything about the "comrades" ;)

Shermer notes that when it comes to such abstract problem solving,
"Our improved ability to reason abstractly may also be the result of
the spread of scientific thinking-reason, rationality, empiricism, skepticism"