A friend asked for my thoughts on a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Ugly Truth about being a black professor”. It is written by George Yancy, a professor at Emory University and it is here if you want to read it. In it the author recounts hate mail and death threats he received after writing an op-ed piece for the New York Times in 2015. Another version of his response to the backlash is here. The op ed piece is here if you want to read it. He is writing a book about the reaction to his New York Times essay called  Backlash: What Happens When We Honestly Talk About Racism in America, My friend presumably asked me to comment on it because I spent 30 years as a black professor at a predominantly white institution. I have been trying to get my thoughts together in some sort of coherent fashion so I can comment on the situation.

First of all I was certainly not the black public intellectual that Dr. Yancy is, and did not write op ed essays for the New York Times. We are now in the Age of Trump where some people feel it is not only permissible to smack down uppity blacks, but that it is their duty to do so. However this did not start with Trump’s election. For decades even ordinary and banal things have provoked racial incidents that lead to the mistreatment, arrest, and even death of black folks when fearful whites or police officers respond based on stereotypes. Black folks have always asked a simple question when one of these incidents take place: Would it have been handled the same if it were a white person instead of a black person involved? Such incidents have always happened be they at restaurants like Starbucks or police killing unarmed black suspects on suspicion of even minor things. As Wil Smith says racism has not increased it is just being filmed. The internet has provided a medium where people can express their racism at a distance, often anonymously, and without fear of consequences. Social media have provided “silos” in which people can find others who share their racial views, amplify their fears, embolden their vitriol, and provide a outlet for its expression. It has also provided a way for news about racial incidents to spread like wildfire, encouraged people to organize against it, and created a way to do so.

The first interesting thing to me about this incident is that it the original essay and its backlash appeared in December, 2015 before Trump started winning primaries and eventually the election. In other words it pre-dated the Trump era. In a real sense Trump didn’t create this racial anger; the racial anger created Trump. Trump was able to tap into this anger and ride its wave into the highest political office in the land without any political experience; no knowledge of law, the political process or even the Constitution; and even though he actively represented the economic interests of his class rather than the very people who elected him. This tells me that he isn’t a passing fancy but the embodiment of a racism deep within the bedrock of American society: a racism that has been there for hundreds of years.  Social scientists are now putting the lie to the narrative (now popular among the Democrats and the media) that economic issues are the key to Trump support. The typical Trump supporter earned $72,000, was not being displaced by immigrants, and indeed had very little experience with them before seeing them as a threat. You can read articles about it here, here and here. This racism is now threatening the well being of whites as well as people of color. It is allowing the 1% to solidify its hold and increase the inequality in our country. I will keep saying this until the day I die: hatred against or fear of other groups, sexism and racism are tools used by those in power to stay in power. At least some whites are now realizing this.

In examining the backlash against Professor Yancy I identify at least three things. The first is a doubt that African Americans could be intellectuals at all. This confounds and threatens the stereotypes that these people hold about people of color. This claim to intellectualism must be attacked through charges that blacks succeed only through affirmative action rather than merit. Going back to Yancy’s original argument the second group of vitriolic comments concern the analysis of racism that he presents. The third category is the objection that to talk about racism is racist in itself. Yancy is accused of “hating” whites and promoting discord. I will take up each of these things in subsequent blog entries.

A scholar I know has just written an article bashing a jazz group for re-creating Miles Davis’s classic “Kind of Blue”album note for note including the solos’ of the musicians. She makes the point that this is a Western way of seeing music as property rather than the African American one of what Henry Louis Gates calls signifying. Gates defines signifying as “repetition with a difference” which is at the center of black art and culture. This Western way was fetishizing the form of the music rather than the experience of the music. A long time ago I read something by C.S. Lewis to the effect that humans are the only ones who want to repeat a pleasure exactly. Not to just have another pleasure or another version of that pleasure, but to have that specific pleasure with all its feelings, smells, tastes, and sounds exactly the same. This is of course impossible, just as you can never step in the same stream twice. My friend the scholar contrasts this with the work of pianist Jason Moran who when asked to do a recreation of Thelonius Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert did something totally different. Instead of trying to re-create the concert note for note, he produced an audio visual and live performance version which put him in conversation and connection with Monk that allowed him to “signify” to use Gates’ term. At the end, the big band musicians who had been playing the Monk tunes walked off the stage, paraded through the audience and waited in the lobby to talk to the exiting concert goers.

This reminded me of an experience I had back in the late 60’s seeing jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Village Vanguard. The Vanguard is a pie wedge shaped small basement room holding maybe 120 people.  I had just turned 18 (the legal drinking age in New York City at the time) so I could finally go to jazz clubs where alcohol was served. This was my first time seeing Mr. Kirk although there would be plenty to follow. Kirk was a very technically proficient musician and historian of the music. He was a blind multi-instrumentalist who often played two or three horns at the same time. His first few songs were the usual mix of originals, standards and even jazz versions of pop songs. He then started to use a laugh box, that is, a recording of someone saying exaggerated “Ha, ha ha’s” as a commentary on what he was playing. As the music changed the laughter became various things. A faint reminder of a party in the past now long gone, an ironic commentary on what was happening, or a joining into the current pleasure. As the penultimate song in the set Kirk asked whether we could go to New Orleans. My heart sank. I hated the sterile re-creations of the past that were codified as “Dixieland.” Kirk had something different in mind. He launched into a version of New Orleans music that took my breath away. I can put it no other way than he restored the life to the music. The laugh box became part of the party both of the past and of the present. As the audience was clapping along to the music, Kirk led the members of the group who had portable instruments and marched through the club. He then marched up the stairs out of the club onto the street outside to play much as a second line New Orleans band would. All the time the pianist, bassist and drummer continued playing in the club. They returned a few minutes later still playing and finished the song and the set.

This of course left the young me stunned. I returned to see Rahsaan whenever he and I were in New York at the same time. Each time was different, but each time was a pleasure. I never saw him do the laugh box and “march through the club” routine again, but then I didn’t have to. The point had been made. Music is best as a living breathing thing into which an artist’s joy, thoughts, and feelings are poured. No matter how technically proficient a musician is, unless they can bring something of their own to the music, particularly the music of others including the jazz masters, to quote Stevie Wonder, “you haven’t done nothing.”

Donald Trump doesn’t understand a lot of things, but right now we are concentrating on what he doesn’t understand about immigration. Historically most immigrants have come from “shithole” countries although which countries these were has changed over time. Even his beloved Norway was once a shithole and although I haven’t checked the stats I would hazard a guess that there was more Norwegian immigration then than there is now. Most of the 19th and 20 century immigration was from what were then “shithole” places. If you think about it people are more likely to leave their homes if the economy of their home countries is poor, there is political or religious oppression, or if natural disasters occur. In other words if their home country is to them a “shithole.” Why would someone leave a prosperous and comfortable life in Norway to move thousands of miles away to the United States. Sure there will be a few Norwegians (or other whites) who feel they can improve their condition by moving, but they are few and far between. Today the “shithole” countries are more likely to be non white and that is the problem.

Secondly those immigrants from “shithole” countries are probably going to be among the hardest workers in the United States. After all they were bold enough to leave their native land to come here to improve their lot in life. As the play Hamilton tells us “immigrants, they get the job done.” They are likely to take the jobs Americans don’t want to do because that may be the only thing open to them. I don’t even have to mention how they add to the cuisine, culture, and diversity of our country.

Trump’s comments are not about how immigration actually works but about some white supremacist fears. White supremacists and even some other whites have stereotyped those who come from “shithole” countries (by which Trump means non white majority countries) as less than whites. In this fantasy world these immigrants are criminals even rapists or murderers, and lay-abouts who sponge off hardworking (again in the fantasy mostly white) Americans through our safety net of entitlement programs. One of the characteristics social scientists have noted about  Trump supporters is that they actually have little experience with those who they denigrate. This leaves them free to project their fears upon immigrants with impunity. Anyone who has actually met someone from these so-called “shithole” countries can tell you that they are likely to be friendly, well educated, and to be willing to work several jobs at low pay.

To impose these fears upon immigration reform measures is to set us up for failure. Any new laws based upon these white supremacy fears is bound to negatively affect immigrants and eventually our country. The people who have received special dispensation to come here after natural disasters or political oppression like the Haitians or the Salvadorans; those who have been carefully vetted in the immigration lottery, and the “dreamers” who came here illegally as children, are much more likely to be hardworking, law abiding citizens than not. There is no reason to fear that these people are detrimental to America. White supremacists however see an America in which they are inevitably becoming a minority not through immigration but through natural growth which sees more non white births and a higher percentage of white deaths through things like the opioid epidemic.

We can hope that Trump and his administration are the last hurrah of these people and that a coalition of anti-racist whites, people of color, and forward thinking voters can turn back this movement.

From time to time there are things on the news that make me yell at my television because they are so outrageous or because the media have so spun the wrong narrative that it is brainwashing the public. Cases in point:

In a photo op I watched on CBS news Trump was  handing out sandwiches or something to hurricane victims when a middle aged white man contrasted Trump’s behavior in coming out to help with Obama’s who was golfing during the last hurricane. This of course is keeping with the internet memes which show a picture of Trump helping compared with a picture of Obama playing golf. The news commentators allowed this to stand without correcting this mistaken view. There are plenty of media photos of Obama comforting victims in the aftermath of natural disasters so it would have been easy to show that this is untrue. They let this man’s untrue statement stand. I also have not heard them correcting Trump supporters who say that as president he did not visit the victims of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation when he was years away from being president at the time. I know the media cannot go around correcting every ignorant thing uttered by Trump supporters, but at least they can combat the worst of them especially when they occur during their broadcasts. When they do not, they become complicit in the spread of misinformation that it is their duty to correct.

I also yelled at my TV when an open microphone caught Sen, Chuck Schumer (D- N.Y.) saying he thought Trump liked Democrats and specifically liked him. He sounded like the unpopular person at the school dance who is so grateful that someone has paid attention to him or her that he or she mistakes that for affection. Time again again Trump has shown that he cares only for himself and those who fawn around him. He will say anything to get what he wants from you by lying to your face and then stabbing you in the back. Just ask Jeff Sessions. Sen. Schumer he is only trying to metaphorically get in your pants and get what he wants from you. He no more “likes” you than a rabid dog can. I do not recommend snuggling with one. “Dealing” in politics is common but you must have two “partners” who are honest and trustworthy to do it. You do not.

I also yelled at my TV at the news just this morning about a cop in St. Louis literally getting away with the murder of a black man. I guess there is such a thing as outrage overload. This has become so commonplace that it is difficult to muster anger about it. It is the norm and what I now expect to happen in these cases all the time. Until whites muster enough concern about police over-reach as about Colin Kapernick, this will just go on and on. As Ella Baker told us “Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.” Job security.

Finally I yell at my TV whenever some pundit or another points to a Trump weakness which they feel might lead to the end of his presidency before 2020. This may be disillusionment among his base, rebellion from moderates in the Republican Congress, Mueller’s obstruction and Russian election influence investigations, or Democratic victories in state elections in areas where Trump drew support. This is just wishful thinking by progressives or liberals. Nowhere are clear enough signs that we can expect one of these deus ex machina (intervention from on high) solutions to end his presidency in the light of the massive outpouring of support by his voters. Unless Democrats can field appealing candidates for national offices none of that is going to matter. With only a few exceptions that does not appear to be happening. Democrats including Hillary Clinton show no understanding of why they lost. They cannot just continue business as usual or just try to win back the white working class in order to win elections. Trump’s victory is a watershed showing that drinking from the same trough as the Republicans, playing identity politics, and giving us the same old retreads will not generate the support needed to win. Even pointing out the lies and telling the truth does not seem to work.

Yelling at my TV as the indignities mount up does not seem to help anyone but me. Thank you for letting me rant at you. Perhaps you can do something to change where we are.

To be honest I have always been ambivalent about Martin Luther King Day. It’s not because I didn’t think he was a great man. If anyone in my lifetime deserves an American holiday it is surely this man. There are two things though that bother me about the holiday. First, it reduces the civil rights movement to the actions of one man when it really wasn’t. This is of course in line with the American myth that it is only great people who move American history. The civil rights struggle, as probably every other event in American history, was very different from this. It was the result of ordinary people, performing ordinary acts with courage and determination. It wasn’t just Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama but hundreds of people who walked, hitchhiked, and carpooled every day for a year to boycott a bus system which made them sit in the back of the bus. It was children from six-year-olds to teenagers who desegregated schools by walking past mobs with faces contorted by hatred, people who spit on them, and many who yelled vile things. It was college students who sat in Woolworth lunch counters while crowds of people shouted epithets and poured condiments over them. It was freedom riders who rode buses and were beaten, shot at, arrested, and jailed for the simple act of riding a bus or trying to use a restroom or waiting area. It was people trying to walk across a bridge or along a road, but risking physical harm or death to do so. Ordinary people doing ordinary things with courage and determination. These as much as Dr. King are the real heroes of the civil rights movement and should get the honor and respect due them.

My second complaint about the holiday is that it has allowed Dr. King’s legacy to be controlled by politicians and mainstream media who have turned him into something he wasn’t. Nostalgia always turns the past into what suits the needs of the present and this has been especially the case with King. As the Broadway play Hamilton tells us, history is not just who lived and who died, but who tells your story. Note the story they tell on this day. Martin Luther King was a highly principled man who exposed the segregation which black people had to endure and led marches to bring about change. All this of course is true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Yes, MLK was a spokesperson who preached nonviolence in the fight against racism and intolerance. There were some who were not nonviolent, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers come to mind, and they were an important part of the story. King’s memory is used to discredit them. Yes, the civil rights movement ultimately reached its apex in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1966. Racism however goes far deeper than what these remedies address.

In the last few years of his life King realized this too and turned his attention to the antiwar movement, income inequality and other ethnic groups. He saw that the growing defense budget was taking needed money from the social programs he supported. He saw that his vision of nonviolence needed to be extended to foreign affairs. He noticed that the hard-won gains in desegregation meant little if income inequality prevented people of color from having access to them. He heard the cries of police brutality and economic pain that his black critics were expressing. At the time of his death he was speaking out against the Vietnam War, he was planning a poor people’s demonstration in Washington, and he was bringing the media circus which followed him to a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis. In a speech delivered only months before he was killed he said,

it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

This side of King was less popular with the mainstream and is too often left out of the narrative that is told today.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached concern for others and standing up for what you believe is right, but he did more than that. He espoused the creation of a beloved community in which there would be no poverty because society would support all at a basic level of existence; there would be no racism because each would see the other as a brother or sister; there would be no war, not because people would live without conflicts, but because they would find non-violent ways to settle them. This beloved community was not some pie in the sky utopia for King, but an achievable goal if enough people adopted his belief in nonviolence.

King never thought that most people would support him because they were people of high moral character. As an African novel puts it “the beautiful ones are not yet born.” He undoubtedly thought that some would, but he also knew that others would support him only if they understood that their own self-interest would be enhanced if they did. It was part of his method to convince them that it would.

So, on his day let’s honor the real Martin Luther King Jr. and not some character that has been made up.

Keep in mind that I am an historian not a fortune teller and I am writing this before the final primaries and the convention. Maybe one of the Republicans wild punches will land and Hillary will be disqualified as a candidate;  maybe Bernie’s followers’ fantasy of the superdelegates becoming convinced that only Bernie can beat Trump, comes true. However,  Hillary’s march to the nomination seems to me the most likely scenario. I believe Bernie will ultimately endorse Hillary when she wins the nomination and I am not afraid of him dividing the party with a third party run. His followers are a different story. I can see them sitting out if she becomes the Democratic candidate and either allowing Trump to win or at least making me sweat on election night. Why then do I encourage Bernie to keep fighting? It is not about getting good sounding yet ultimately meaningless planks in the platform although I wish Cornell West the best of luck. The Democratic party has lost its way and become just as much of a tool of the 1% as the Republicans although of a slightly different flavor. This has left the middle class, progressives, people of color, single mothers, idealistic youth, and the poor, all disenfranchised. Many have pinned their hopes on Bernie as an agent to change this. To them the failure of Bernie’s campaign to achieve the nomination is seen as a loss that signals the failure of his “revolution.” I see it as a first step. Let us admit that to truly transform the Democratic Party is going to take time. Just as the insurgent campaign of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 begot the nomination for George McGovern in 1972. It was the disastrous loss of McGovern in 1972 that eventually led to today’s counter revolution of superdelegates who will protect Hillary. The country was a different place and not ready for McGovern or progressive ideas in 1972. It will take some preparation before they will be ready in the future.

The situation today is quite different. The electorate is changing not only in the demographic emergence of more voters of color, but in the rejection of politics as usual that Trump’s emergence has revealed. Right now what we are seeing is a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. I see Bernie not as the “Savior” but as John the Baptist readying the party for a “Savior” who is yet to come. His “revolution” rhetoric and progressive ideas are a preparation for the future. If HRC is elected we have seen that her “pragmatism” is simply a response to which way the wind is blowing. We need to ensure that the wind is a progressive one. I heard Eugene McCarthy speak many years after his retirement from politics and he said that the best candidate may be an opponent who could change. HRC is certainly that. Trump is that too, but I worry that if he is elected there may not be a presidential election in 2020. If Bernie loses the nomination he needs to ensure that he has enough delegates to help sway the inner workings of the party toward a progressive future. The ultimate importance of this next election cycle or two may be the election of progressive candidates to Congress. If we compare national opinion polls to the voting of elected officials we see a disconnect. For example, a majority of Americans support some kind of gun control yet the conservative Congress opposes even modest measures. We need to have a Congress more in touch with what Americans want and will support. Whatever their faults the Republicans have been successful in convincing the middle class to vote for them usually by scapegoating someone else. I think that if we see the ideas that Bernie has put forth translated into ideas that the electorate will support we will see his “revolution” transform into real reform.

There has been so much internet talk about the fact that at last Saturday’s GOP debate in New Hampshire Sen. Marco Rubio repeated himself four times, but there hasn’t been enough talk about what he actually said. Here is what he said:

But I would add this. Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America. And when I’m elected president, this will become once again, the single greatest nation in the history of the world, not the disaster Barack Obama has imposed upon us. …We have to understand what we’re going through here. We are not facing a president that doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows what he is doing. That’s why he’s done the things he’s done. That’s why we have a president that passed Obamacare and the stimulus. All this damage that he’s done to America is deliberate. This is a president that’s trying to redefine this country.

He said that President Obama is trying to make us too much like other countries with health care for all and government stimulating the economy. Obama also wants free community college, more renewable energy, less income inequality, fewer police shooting black youths, and more humanitarian immigration policies. Why does Rubio say we should oppose these things? Not because they are necessarily bad but because they would make us more like the rest of the world and less American. Obama is trying to make us one of those countries that has free health care, better education, less economic inequality, and lives up to its creed or justice and liberty for all. Obama is trying to redefine this country. That bastard.

Rubio wants us to remain low on the list of developed countries on how well we do those things because that is who we are. He has no suggestions of how we could get better but urges us to accept our poor performances as part of our identity.

I actually see what he said as a testimonial to Obama and the reason one should vote for the eventual Democratic candidate rather than whoever the GOP nominates: the blowhard, Eddie Munster, the boy in the bubble, or the fat cats’ nominee.

Although the Senate has rebuffed the first attempt to fast track defunding Planned Parenthood, there will be more attempts.  The Republican controlled New Hampshire state government has already done so. There is more sound than light in the recent opposition of anti-abortion advocates to the edited secret tapes of Planned Parenthood officials. I would no more accept those tapes as proof that PP was responsible for wrongdoing than I would accept Jurassic World as proof that dinosaurs exist. Let’s try to clear up the issues.

1. Defunding PP will not stop abortions. The information that PP provides about abortion is freely available on the internet.  If anything their counseling on contraception and that abortion is only one of the options available to women and couples, cuts down on abortions.
2. Planned Parenthood cannot use federal money to fund abortions.  There is a federal law against that.  If PP did then someone could bring a court case against them.
3. Planned Parenthood does not sell fetus parts for money. As a non profit with limited funds it only gets reimbursed for its handling fees when their clients legally donate their fetus parts for scientific research. Scientific research I might add that has saved lives and led to better treatment of all
4. The federal funds that PP does receive are used to provide its clients among whom the poor are overrepresented. A denial of federal funds would disproportionately affect the poor and the health services available to them.
5. According to NPR 97% of PP funding goes into things other than “abortion services.”
6. Defunding Planned Parenthood is not an issue about abortion but about federal funding of women’s health care. It is an attempt to use abortion as a wedge issue to curtail federal spending. One Republican candidate (Jeb!) has already said publicly that we are spending too much on women’s issues.
7. The Republican senators who are leading this charge know or should know all of the above, but are playing the anti-abortion advocates like a fiddle for their own political advantage. It is using them to stir up the Republican base. It is a calculated, hypocritical, and cynical move that turns sincere anti abortion advocates into political pawns.

No matter what your stand on abortion you need to see this attack on Planned Parenthood for what it is: a callous political move rather than an attack on abortion.