Juneteenth 2026

Let us celebrate "a new birth of freedom!" 

Sociologist Robert P. Jones makes a suggestion that works for me:

... The period of 15 days that span the space between Juneteenth and Independence Day could ... function as an enduring season of critical patriotism for our time. Alongside the celebratory fireworks and other well-established practices surrounding the Fourth of July, we could develop a new civic liturgy that include the creative interplay of lament and celebration, reckoning and repair, truth-telling and hope. Borrowing from the High Holidays model, Juneteenth could function like Yom Kippur, recalling our struggles to overcome our shortcomings and achieve freedom, while Independence Day could echo Rosh Hashanah, recommitting us to shared national ideals.

Such a practice could also embrace a conviction that is deeply engrained in Judaism, Christianity, and indeed most religious traditions—that no people can live with integrity into the future if they cannot face their past failures to live up to their principles. ...

Bringing the Juneteenth and the Fourth of July together in a creative mutual orbit, where each is embraced by the gravitational force of the other, can also help us develop other rituals that are honest about our country’s failings while also being hopeful about its possibilities. 

Perhaps it takes time for a new federal holiday to acquire full potency. 

Juneteenth, proclaimed nationally in 2021, has been a living remembrance within Black culture, migrating from Texas along with the diaspora and particularly noted in California where so many African American citizens arrived from the southwest. Nationally the holiday still might take further seasoning. Somehow I doubt that Trump and MAGA will succeed in erasing this happy anniversary, anymore than they'll succeed in Making America White Again. All together now, "let us march on 'til victory is won!"

Is this what really inspires MAGA?

 

When this unprepossessing graph floated by in my media feed, I had an aha-moment. Apparently white American men's fraction of the income pie was highest in 1960 -- and ever since their segment of our economic prosperity has been declining. That doesn't mean white guys are earning or owning less in real terms. Most everybody is doing a lot better than in 1960 in a much larger economy that has seen repeated bouts of goods-inflation (troublesome) and higher wages (all positive). But relative portions taken home by different segments have changed.

 

So even though white men in this country, in general, are doing just fine, in the last 60 years changes in society have meant they've had to share their prosperity with white women and everyone else.

 

The chart is from a Medium post by Joe Francis.  Here's some of what he has to say about it, slightly edited:

White men’s position in the class structure has diminished considerably.

According to the census and the American Communities Survey (ACS), the median income of white men aged 18 and above fell from a peak of 264 percent of the national level in 1960 to 143 percent in 2023.

White men’s share of national income has similarly fallen dramatically. Figure 1 shows their share falling from 70 percent in 1960 to 43 percent in 2020, and it fell further to 41 percent in 2023.

There has thus been a historic shift in the income distribution away from white men toward non-white and female Americans. …

Non-college educated white men, meanwhile, are being left behind. ... the era of white male egalitarianism is long a thing of the past.

... inequality has surged for white men, even as the overall level has remained largely unchanged.  ...

As a class, [white men] have seen their privileges diminish due to the prohibition of racism and sexism, although the college-educated have prospered thanks to the greater education premium.

By 2045, even if Trump succeeds in throwing out millions of immigrants, the majority of Americans will not be what we currently describe as "white". (Racial categories can be mutable, subject to income, prejudice, and fashion, but that's another post.) He can't turn back the clock. The era of white America is over. We already live that in California; Texas and Florida do too, but haven't adjusted yet. MAGA diehards will eventually live in reality; Americans have survived such shifts before.

Ran across this paper thanks to Adam Tooze.

A different kind of woman

Caster Semenya knows who she is. She's had it with authorities, especially white and European ones, telling her they know her better than she does herself. She tells it like it is for her in The Race to Be Myself: A Memoir.

I love this book. I recommend it unreservedly, especially in the audio version, some of which Semenya performs herself.

She sets up her story like this:

I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am one of the greatest track and field athletes to ever run the 800-m distance. I've won two Olympic gold medals and three world championships ...

... I have what is called a difference in sex development (DSD), an umbrella term that refers to the generic conditions where an embryo in a different way to the hormones that spark the development of internal and external sexual organs. To put it simply, on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus. ... I can't biologically contribute to making new life.

I did not know any of this about my body until soon after August 2009, when I won the gold medal in the 800-m race at the World Championships in Berlin, Germany. I was only eighteen years old and had been subjected to invasive and humiliating gender confirmation tests without my consent just prior to the race. What followed was a media firestorm that continues to this day. ...

... I am a tall, dark-skinned, African woman with well-defined muscles, a deep voice, and not a lot up on top. I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I'm not a man. ... I'm a different kind of woman, I know. But I'm still a woman. ...

I accept and love myself just the way I am. I always have and I always will. God made me. I am fortunate to have had a family who never tried to change me, and a country that wrapped its arms around me and fought for my right to run. ...

... I am a proud South African woman born in a tiny village to people who loved me.They have survived more humiliations than I could possibly know. It is from them that I know about maintaining dignity in the face of oppression. It is my hope that by telling my truth, I inspire others to be unafraid, to love and accept themselves. May this story contribute to a more tolerant world for us all.

Semenya's birth village is in Limpopo, the northernmost province of South Africa. Though the nation boasts gleaming modern cities like Cape Town and Pretoria, agricultural villages in the countryside -- African villages in the racial frame of that nation -- don't even show up on Google maps. It was a long time before Semenya was pulled into the multi-racial, multi-class modernity of South Africa upon leaving the hinterland to take up an athletic scholarship to the University of Pretoria.

It wasn't until she started winning international races that the International Amateur Athletic Federation (now World Athletics) began to get hot and bothered about her gender. And it seems fair to say, then the shit hit the fan. She was tested and barred from competition unless she took testosterone blocking drugs that made her ill. The basis in science for requiring the drug regimen was poorly documented and eventually tossed out by courts. Meanwhile, she strove to stay sane and train hard amidst the dissonance of strangers questioning who she knew herself to be.

... Gender is a simple thing in my part of the world. Mostly people are born boys, or they are born girls. There is also what in our Pedi language we call lahara matana -- a person born with two genders, meaning they are born with both a penis and a vagina. In my culture, these people are not assigned a gender. They are allowed to live their lives and decide which gender is dominant in their soul. They go about their business and everyone is supposed to mind theirs. I have heard that in rich countries doctors can "fix" a child born like this. But how can you "fix" something if you don't know what a child will want to be? We don't believe in surgical intervention on infants for such a thing.

No one ever told me specifically about lahara matanas. I just knew there were people like this when I was growing up. And I wasn't one of them. I was born a girl, and I have never felt confused by that because there is nothing confusing about having a vagina, even if my mannerisms and interests were considered boyish. ...

I knew growing up there were other girls like me, meaning girls who didn't sprout breasts, who had deep voices, or girls who were not into girl things. I grew up with some of them, played soccer with them. They were around, just like I was around. ...

... My family accepted me the way I was, but it didn't mean they didn't deal with comments about my looks and behavior. But my actual gender has never been a thing to be questioned, much less tested. That's the thing people didn't seem to understand -- it was one thing to talk about how I behaved, how I looked on the outside -- my clothes, my voice, my musculature -- but questioning someone's gender, discussing it in public ... that was unheard of in my culture. ...

The gender issue became a difficult one for the politicians in my country. Everyone seemed to support me and my right to run. They saw me as an innocent Black child caught in a terrible situation. For us, it became more than about gender, it became about race. It became about White people coming and telling us Africans what we were and what we were not based on our looks -- the same categorizations and violations of human rights that were happening during apartheid. I became a symbol of how Black people had been violated and exploited throughout history. Would this be happening to a White European teenage girl? When did "rumors" become an official accusation that had to be investigated? My blood and urine had been tested dozens of times by ASA [Athletics South Africa] and the IAAF [International Amateur Athletic Federation] ...

Mostly Semenya's attitude in this book is simple amazement at the stupidity of people questioning her gender -- and proud fury as she asserts herself. She has no time for other women competitors who she thinks don't have it in them to work as hard as she does.

I remember reading how women were barred from running in the early days of organized sports because men thought their body parts would fall out and that it was "unseemly" for women to sweat in public. Well, look closely at professional women's races. Most of us run, cross the line, congratulate each other, and go on with the rest of our business. ... If you are an elite athlete and you really can't breathe and you fall down when you're done with a race, train harder.

I read this book from a stance of awareness that all world class athletes are freaks of nature.  It's just that sometimes we can't see quite how. Human diversity is enormous and a very few people can turn their biological divergence from the mean into athletic success -- such success only comes if they train to their limits and beyond. The best are disciplined freaks. The Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps has some of the largest hands you'll ever see. Brock Purdy apparently has a preternatural ability to see around him and remain decisive when facing being beat to a pulp. They are different, but they wouldn't achieve the athletic successes they have without brutal hard work.

I love the dedication of Caster Semenya's memoir. It seems about right to me:

For those who are born different
and feel they don't belong in this world,
it is because you were brought here
to help create a new one.

Thanks, Mokgadi Caster Semenya!

Shards from the embattled republic

Links to ponder or perhaps enjoy:

Legal writer and defense lawyer Teri Kanefield: 

Deep doo-doo is a recognized legal term well known to defense lawyers everywhere.

Margaret Renkl, who lives in the neo-Confederate state of Tennessee:

Twenty-first-century Republicans are always demonstrating a truth that the Roman historian Tacitus understood back in the first century: It is part of human nature to hate someone you have hurt. ...

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: 

When you’re too lazy, arrogant, entitled, complacent, or cowardly to search for the facts and understand the consequences to others of your actions, then you aren’t “good people.” You can tell yourself otherwise so you can get through the day. You can hide among others like yourself who do the same thing. You can all gather in a place of worship and proclaim yourself God-loving. But, on some level, you know better.

... Republicans need a bogeyman to rally fearful conservatives because they have no platform to address the country’s economic, educational, and social issues. All they have is an enemies list.

 

Feminist journalist Jill Filipovic:

Every single state that has refused to expand Medicaid so that more moms and babies can get health care is a a “pro-life” state. Every single Republican-dominated legislature passing anti-abortion laws has at least a few Republican members who understand full well that criminalizing abortion is going to mean worse health outcomes for women, and will also mean fewer doctors and nurses willing to work in labor, delivery, and obstetrics. They do it anyway.

Columnist and student of our history Jamelle Bouie: 

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

Catherine Rampell explains why Americans are so pessimistic about their finances. Sure seems right for tax season.

... Americans are frustrated by rising costs, yes. But they’re also frustrated by how much more attention they must pay to these rising costs — attention that is itself costly. This hidden strain on families is likely to continue for some time, even if some headline economic measures continue to improve. And if those improvements stop, and more people start to lose their income entirely, the current low-grade malaise could curdle into something much worse.

Student of politics Yascha Mounk via Persuasion podcast:

... conspiracy theories are actually deeply revealing of the person who believes in them. My model of the world is that it's a really chaotic place in which there are a bunch of powerful and affluent people, but nobody actually has a tremendous amount of agency, even the President of the United States. Even a billionaire feels very constrained within the various logics of their field of endeavor.

The truth is that nobody's fully in charge. And that's pretty scary. But if you believe in conspiracy theories, actually, what you end up thinking is that there are these thirty evil guys, and they get together at Bilderberg or Davos or whatever and make all the decisions; and if only we could replace them and put good people in charge, instead, then things will be great. There is something that is actually essentially reassuring about the implicit causal model of the world that conspiracists have, and I think that's part of the reason for its appeal.

Columnist for The Washington Post and retired naval officer Theodore Johnson: 

An uncomfortable question lurks beneath the anxiety about our nation becoming majority-minority. It is rarely asked out loud, and never in mixed company. The bluntness of the inquiry might feed existing divisions rather than lead to better race relations. But it must be asked and answered to satisfaction: Is the American republic for White people only?

 The question will strike the ear harshly. It can’t be helped. For the essence of it — how comfortable are White Americans in a democracy where people of color increasingly hold political power? — is the most important question in the nation today.

... This is subtly, but significantly, different from voter suppression. Angst and anger over particular groups’ increased participation in democracy is giving way to a despair associated with being governed by those groups.

Sunrise.

Time for a schools rant

San Franciscans have recalled three of our school board members and our more conservative friends are gloating. Here's a sample from Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

The Lessons of San Francisco: It's possible to be too woke for the wokesters ... there are flashing red warning signs about racial identity politics, historical erasure, and the attack on merit-based selection in schools. ... While board members were busy striking poses, the kids were suffering and parents were incensed.

I think of Charlie Sykes as a very significant ally in the great struggle of our times -- the ongoing struggle to preserve democracy in this dis-United States. But he and his comrades understand very little about San Francisco public schools and their governance, so they are over-interpreting the school board recall.

The job from which three board members have been ejected is inherently dysfunctional, as are our public schools and perhaps the city itself. Let's dig a bit:

• The school board has been composed of seven members, elected for four year terms citywide.

• These campaigns are expensive and offer little to the winners except slightly higher citywide name recognition.  For too many school board members, a seat is just a political stepping stone. (There have long been honorable exceptions -- but the committed ones are exceptions.)

• The job is essentially unpaid, offering a mere $6000 a year -- so members all need other jobs.

• Doing the job is very demanding. I once lived in the same household with a member. She received several pounds of paper by courier every day from the schools' professional administrators. She was expected to read and absorb it all -- you can guess what happened to most of it.

• A very high percentage of the voters who elect these school board members do not have children in the public schools. What do they (we) know? Children of all ages are only 13 percent of city residents. Many voters are childless -- or among the preponderance of white residents who, even if they have children, have left the public schools.

• The actual running of the system is accomplished by professional management hired by the board. In recent years, our public schools have a lousy record of attracting a long term, committed superintendents. This is not a good job, though maybe (like the board) a stepping stone.

• The school buildings are old, sometimes crumbling, and the system is broke physically and financially. SFPD loses students every year as families find they can't afford the city. With the students goes the state funding on which the system relies.

 • Most of the teachers are doing their best, but they have a hella tough job in a crumbling system. They can't afford to live here any more than their students' families can. Their union fights aggressively to save the teachers from being blamed for the general mess and is a political power house. This is a major factor in the situation of the elected board members -- they are both management and supplicants.

• Despite decades of stratagems, all unpopular and many burdensome to parents, the city has failed to integrate its schools. At the higher grades, there aren't enough white students to make much of a difference. So "integration" is trying to mix together students from various racial and immigrant communities. This has always crashed into the cultural reality that many Asian-origin and especially Chinese families cling to the public schools as the necessary entryway to good lives. They care a lot and very specifically about their kids' experience. Although individuals certainly differ, many Black and Latinx families are less future-oriented and less inclined to fight education battles collectively as communities. This can create explosive situations -- and does.

So what does the recall reveal? Not much. Some incumbent school board members failed at their impossible job of keeping the volatile ship on an even keel -- and then there was a pandemic. And everything got worse.

I'm not upset that three of these members got booted. I remain upset that this rich city with generally decent values can't manage to run a better public school system that works somehow for students, teachers, and all communities. I don't claim to know how to get there. The successful recall should mean something changes. Let's hope whatever the new iteration looks like, it's better.

Bored in lockdown? Fill out your census form!

Do it now if you haven't yet! You are not only being a good citizen, you are helping your city to the tune of $2000 in federal funding per person enumerated and ensuring that California is allocated all the Congresscritters we should get. Since we're a lot saner here than some places, we need all the representation our true numbers deserve. By filling out your form, you are also sparing Census employees one less door to knock on -- and one less potential risk of encountering the damn virus. They aren't out there now, but some level of virus is going to be with us for a long time ...

It's easy to do. You've almost certainly received a letter addressed to "RESIDENT."

There are more instructions than you'll probably need. The government goes in for paper.

The questions mostly seem innocuous: how many persons live in your home, who are they, do you "own" (pay a mortgage) or rent.

EP took offense when asked her sex. "What -- no place for 'sprite'?!" The census doesn't know diddly-squat about the variations within sexes and among genders.

We let it rip in the race/ethnicity section after declaring ourselves "White"; I'm "English, Irish, and French Hugenot"; she's "Ashkenazi Jewish, Ukrainian, and English." Wonder how, or even if, they compile this stuff.

Since the federal government is proving itself something of a hostile entity these days, it is slightly anxious-making to offer them information, even for folks like us. But we all have to do it for the sake of community solidarity ... we get by with a little help from our friends.

Sometimes moral action wins the vote

Georgetown University is the unusual U.S. institution whose history of profiting from slavery can be properly documented. Not only that, the descendants of the 272 enslaved men, women and children the University sold off in 1838 to deep South plantations to pay its debts have been individually identified.

Students wanted the school to do more than apologize. So they organized a student vote on a measure that

proposes a fee, starting with $27.20 per student for the fall 2020 semester, that would raise an estimated $400,000. The student fee would increase with inflation and would fund a nonprofit led by a board of students and descendants, who would give money to charitable causes directly benefiting descendants of the 19th-century sale.

More than two thirds of students who voted approved of the fee. (Tuition was over $50K per academic year in 2019.) It will be up to the administration to implement the measure -- or not. The student vote should create plenty of pressure here.

Hints of what is to come

I am not ready.

I understand why Dems who want to be president have begun coming out of the woodwork. They do have to test out their shows on the road right now. They have to establish who they are and why they want to be the Big Dog. For what it is worth (nothing), I am completely neutral among candidates at this stage -- excluding only Tulsi Gabbard who seems a putrid opportunist.

But I see hints of good developments. The Trump shit show seems to be driving Dem politicians away from their worst habit: trying to be all things to all people by obscuring the issues that divide us.

Two tidbits that flew by today:

• The Washington Post's David Weigel concluded from South Carolina where Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders made themselves visible for MLK Day:

  A party that used to triangulate around the demands of black leaders in the South now sees a strong, activated black vote as the most obvious part of a winning coalition.

  If you want to keep up on the 2020 campaign, read Weigel; he's the most interesting, diligent, wide ranging political reporter out there.

• Meanwhile that wise, warmed-over Clintonite, Simon Rosenberg used an extended interview with Leon Krauze on Trumpcast to urge aspiring Democratic presidents to "lean in" on immigration. By this he seemed to mean to explain to the U.S. population that immigration is good for the country, essential to all of our well-being including that of the immigrants, and that a policy both humane and widely beneficial is possible. These may seem obvious pronouncements until you consider the source: Rosenberg and his ilk of Washington policy purveyors have spent decades urging Dems to muddy their stances on immigration, to try to be all things to all people -- while grassroots groups raged at their timidity. No more. Thanks Donald.

It will be vital in 2020 for us all to unite around whoever ends up securing the Democratic nomination -- but there are already strong hints that our necessary Big Tent may feel far more healthy, less odiferous, to progressives than has been true for awhile.

California shows how GOP dies

An East Coast political pundit paid a visit to the exotic Wild West -- and noticed what those of us who live here already know: California passed through the white panic stage of the national demographic change over a decade ago and is demonstrating what a more civilized country might look like if U.S. democracy can survive Trump's kakistocracy. (Thanks to John Brennan for popularizing an academic word for government of the worst.)

The New Yorker's John Cassidy writes:

In many ways, the Golden State represents the American future that Trump—with his white nativism and economic protectionism—is trying to turn back, Canute style.

The 1990s in California were rough. The local Republicans recognized that their numerical advantage among the electorate was temporary -- soon enough (around 2000) all those Black, Brown, and Asian newcomers would outnumber them, even if these citizens weren't voting yet. So we lived through a series of attempts mostly driven by older whites to use government policy to slow the efficacy of demographic change: we passed initiatives that outlawed affirmative action in the university system (still in place), denied public services to immigrants (ruled unconstitutional), a three strikes law that locked up people (many of color) for life for relatively minor offenses, and outlawed most bilingual education (repealed in 2016).

But we lived through this storm of repressive white populism -- and came out in a California that should offer hope to the rest of the country. I think I know why. In Whiteness run amok, I laid out why I think we were so fortunate.

California is not a racial and social nirvana. Our (quite diverse) cops shoot black and brown men without justification all too frequently. A widening divide between economic winners and losers expresses itself in a housing crisis; nowhere in this state can people making even our quite high minimum wage afford available homes. But we have left the Trump/GOP train. Those politics don't work here.

Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira have characterized the state of the nation as verging on a civil war in which Republicans and Democrats represent very different futures. Their vision of how this all works out is both dire and exhilerating.

The red states held by the Republicans are deeply entrenched in carbon-based energy systems like coal and oil. They consequently deny the science of climate change, are trying to resuscitate the dying coal industry, and recently have begun to open up coastal waters to oil drilling.

The blue states held by the Democrats are increasingly shifting to clean energy like solar and installing policies that wean the energy system off carbon. In the era of climate change, with the mounting pressure of increased natural disasters, something must give. We can’t have one step forward, one step back every time an administration changes. One side or the other has to win.

... The differences between two economic systems or two classes that are fundamentally at odds could conceivably get worked out through a political process that peacefully resolves differences. However, culture frequently gets in the way. That’s especially true when pressures are building for big system overhauls that will create new winners and losers.

They are confident this doesn't end well for the Republican party:

... the entire Republican Party, and the entire conservative movement that has controlled it for the past four decades, is fully positioned for the final takedown that will cast them out for a long period of time in the political wilderness. They deserve it. Let’s just say what needs to be said: The Republican Party over the past 40 years has maneuvered itself into a position where they are the bad guys on the wrong side of history. For a long time, they have been able to hide this fact through a sophisticated series of veils, invoking cultural voodoo that fools a large enough number of Americans to stay in the game. However, Donald Trump has laid waste to that sophistication and has given America and the world the raw version of what current conservative politics is all about.

Where they write "cultural voodoo," I would say racial resentment. I think California proves these authors are right: the Republican party is simply no longer significant in California outside isolated rural pockets. Even Orange County is turning blue. Leyden and Teixeira conclude:

... political change is slow until it’s very fast. The fall of the GOP is likely to be no different.

Let's make it so. We must resist and protect much; be compassion with one another; and win.

Thanks to the Labor Center at UC Berkeley for documenting the state's condition in the video.

KKK: race and class formation in the 1920s

According to historian Linda Gordon, in The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, this iteration of the hooded knights made itself what I always urge on movement groups: throughout middle America, it was The Best Party in Town.

This Klan was national, anchored not in the South but in the middle, what we inaccurately call the "heartland." It was racist, xenophobic, aggressively Protestant Christian, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, patriarchal, bullying and boosterish -- a club for all that has always been small and mean in our society. Its millions of members and sympathizers were not so much the violent enforcers of white supremacy of the Reconstruction era (at least only infrequently, little as that relative restraint mattered to the few victims tarred and feathered). It was something all too recognizable today: a force aiming to organize politicians and community leaders around its fears and prejudices while venting an unmoored sense of victimization. Numerous elected officials were members, whether from conviction or expedience; the Klan claimed 16 US senators and 75 Congressmen. No U.S. president from Wilson to Hoover breathed a word against the Klan. And like so much of rightwing activity, it was also a profit making scam; its founders incorporated the Klan as a business and grew rich off mass recruitment into their pyramid marketing scheme.

But for its adherents, the Klan offered great fun: family picnics, pseudo-religious rituals, parades, cross burnings, and mass rallies.

Most of Gordon's book is devoted to showing how this Klan both aped and created the culture of white mainstream middle America in those years. Outside the big cities and even there, this seems from our vantage point a narrow world. Until radio and motion pictures nationalized consumer culture, local political orators and local preachers, revival meetings and processions, could assemble followings whose theatrics dominated large communities.

Gordon describes the Klan as representing a moment when both racial and class definitions were in flux.

The category "white" changed over time, especially in the period between the mass migration starting in the 1880s and the 1920s. In the Northeast, for example, the Irish, Italian and eastern European Jewish immigrants were not typically considered white by earlier immigrants; by the 1920s, these newer immigrants had become white. (The Klan could be seen as an oppositional reaction to this expansion of whiteness, by its efforts to limit "right" citizenship to a narrower group.)

... The Klan had a few rich members, but on the whole the rich had little to gain from membership. The very poor could not afford it. "Middling" people by contrast often had much to gain. ... The connections made through Klaverns could lead to jobs, customers, investment opportunities. ... In many areas Klan membership bought prestige ... Klansmen were often ambitious, and not only economically. In bringing community status, Klan membership could not only advantage those on the way up, but also offer compensatory status to those stuck in one level or even on the way down.

... the Klan helped redefine "middle class" so as to bring in men who did manual labor. Its emphasis on patriotism, religious affiliation, temperance, and sexual morality make membership a marker of respectability, and thus helped some working-class members become middle-class. ... (Precisely because respectability was fundamental to building the Klan, when it was ruptured by scandals the Klan went into free fall.)

... anger at displacement, blamed on "aliens," sometimes rested on actual experience but more often on imagination and fear stoked by demagoguery. We know this because the Klan flourished in locations with few "aliens" ...

... reclassifying working-class people as middle class, the Klan contributed to shaping that new, broader class identity...[it claimed] that its "100% Americans" transcended class ...

... The membership evidence demonstrates at the very least that white industrial workers, even those loyal to their unions, had no immunity from bigotry. That blue-collar workers were a minority in the Klan cannot be taken as a sign that their class consciousness make them critical of it. Those workers hostile to the Klan many have been motivated more by ethnic and/or religious identities than by class consciousness, and those who joined may have bene motivated by a bandwagon effect or a desire to hobnob with social superiors. It bears repeating, also, that the cost of Klan membership may have kept out many workers. ...

This reader is tempted to reflect: "it was ever thus." And yet my own reaction to the book makes me uncomfortable. I try not to read history so completely through the lens of my own location in place and time that I forget that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." (L.P. Hartley) Gordon's investigation of the culture of the Klan -- and of the culture the Klan made -- are the guts of this book and will, I think, be its lasting contribution. History is instructive, but does not neatly repeat. This is best read for the cultural history; current politics requires a current focus.

British democratic turbulence and our own

The other day, EP and I were interviewed by a chronicler of the antiwar movement of the '00s. This required me to revisit the strange presidential election of the 2004, when John Kerry, the Democrat trying to unseat George W. Bush, became functionally the candidate of antiwar forces, despite having voted for the Iraq war and offering yet no repudiation that failed endeavor.

British polling is not very good at predicting the outcomes of general elections -- all those obscure constituencies, intra-national currents, and multiple parties go a long way toward to defeating pollsters. But Brits have perfectly good post-election data from The British Election Study afterward, giving pundits and campaigners lots to chew over. Various outlets are now looking at the June 2017 parliamentary election results which ended with a shocking rise in the Labour vote, curbing the Conservatives' majority in Parliament. A piece from the BBC concludes that Brexit -- withdrawal from the European Union -- overwhelmed all other voter concerns. Voters had accepted the 2015 referendum result in which Leave had barely outpolled Remain, but in June were still litigating what Brexit meant: would they get "hard Brexit," cutting all ties and ending free movement of people to and from the continent or would they get "soft Brexit," tailored to continue Britain's trading position and open to the movement of people. The data show that how voters felt about immigration strongly determined how they chose a party.

Despite uncertainty over its position on the single market, Labour was seen as the best bet by those wanting to keep closer ties with Europe.

... One of the reasons Labour did so well among Remainers is that by the time the election was called, the Brexit debate was not so much about Leave or Remain but about how to leave.

... The results reveal a striking correlation between wanting to control immigration and voting Tory on one hand, and wanting access to the single market and voting Labour or Lib Dem on the other.

For example, the Conservatives lead Labour by more than 40 percentage points among those most in favour of full control of immigration, with Labour having a similar lead among those wanting complete access to the single market.

Labour was nominally for Remain in the 2015 referendum, but that never sat well with its older white members, many of whom voted to Leave. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seemed a natural anti-European, no enthusiast for his party's nominal position. He certainly is credited with running a strong campaign in the 2017 election. Yet opposition to anti-immigrant currents and affection for a cosmopolitan, open European connection also boosted the Labour vote in the recent voting according to these studies. Multicultural, multiracial London is currently solidly Labour territory.

This all does remind me of the tentative Democratic opposition to the Iraq war in 2004 which became a driving passion within two years. How Britain will sort itself out through the next two years of Brexit remains to be seen. They are not us, but their political system contains (and fails to contain) many of same tensions over race and immigration. As with our party system, popular feelings are poorly reflected by their institutions of democracy. This creates volatility. May decency and justice prevail, there and here.

On Martha's Vineyard: Rebecca of Africa and William Martin

When I visit Martha's Vineyard island off Massachusetts, my trail runs often take me by the plaque commemorating the life of Rebecca, Woman of Africa. The marker is nestled well into the woods on the way to Vineyard Sound near Great Rock Bight Preserve.

The island African American Heritage Trail's description of what is known about Rebecca's life includes that she was abducted from Guinea, West Africa and lived out much of her life as the "the property of Cornelius Bassett of Chilmark [MA]." She bore three children while enslaved, Pero, Cato and Nancy. Available records don't seem to tell who the father(s) were. They were sold away by Colonel Bassett. At one stage Rebecca lived with a native American man, Elisha Amos, to whom she was recorded as married, although she also lived at the Bassett property. When she died in 1801, the town recorded that she owned a plot of land near the present preserve.

The institution of enslavement in New England seems to have been ambivalent. It certainly existed on Martha’s Vineyard as it did elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There is evidence to suggest that Rebecca was “allowed” to have some freedom as witnessed by the relationship between her and Elisha Amos, and under Massachusetts law she was entitled to inherit property. The property she inherited from Elisha Amos was for her lifetime only, but the stipulations of the will suggest that Mr. Amos did believe that Rebecca could live in his dwelling house.

Rebecca's great grandson was William Martin, the island's only African American whaling captain.

A young William Martin was known in town because of the dubious behavior of his mother and grandmother.

“They would have known him. He did go to school in Edgartown and became a skilled writer,” Weintraub said. “In those days, there were classes for girls on how to sew sails and for boys on maritime navigation.”

Martin was accepted early on in the community because of his natural abilities on the ocean and his writing skills.

“You see, Edgartown then wasn’t the Edgartown of today,” she said. “It was a raucous town of sailors from all over the country and Europe.”

After Martin began finding some early success in the maritime industry as a ship’s log keeper, he also found love. An American Indian woman named Sarah Brown caught his eye. She had been a live-in maid in Edgartown.

In 1857, Martin returned from a successful voyage aboard the Edgartown vessel Europa and he and Sarah married. Between voyages, Martin lived with Sarah and her family on Chappaquiddick on land designated for American Indians called the Chappaquiddick Plantation.

... “He walked between two worlds really,” Weintraub said. “It was a balancing act. Both Sarah and William Martin would work and live for sometime away from home on Chappaquiddick. He would be on voyages and she would work for families in Edgartown.”

Martin died in 1907 and is little remembered today.

On this island where celebrities and tech moguls buy boutique farms and build McMansions amid the greenery, it's good to be able to learn that African Americans and natives have been part of island life as long as Europeans.

African-Americans invented Memorial Day

The graves on the racecourse

When I was a child, my mother would take me to the cemetery on what she called "Decoration Day" to check the placement of the memorial flowers which the management was paid to place on the graves of family veterans, including ones who fought in the Union army during the Civil War. They pretty much always located them wrong; we'd move the vases ... I remember feeling bemused by the ritual.

Yale historian David Blight has made it his business to correct the national memory of Memorial Day as a part of the project of correcting the wider historical understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. In Race and Reunion, he documents how the white Southern side won the history after losing the battles and tries to retrieve a more truthful story.

As part of a Yale Online Course he told the story of the first Memorial Day.

[In April 1865, shortly after the South surrendered to the Union army] ... the black folks of Charleston had planned one more ceremony. That ceremony was a burial ceremony. It turns out that during the last months of the war the Confederate Army turned the planter's horse track, a racecourse — it was called the Washington Racecourse — into an open air cemetery — excuse me, prison. And in that open air prison, in the infield of the horse track — about 260-odd Union soldiers had died of disease and exposure — and they were buried in unmarked graves in a mass gravesite out behind the grandstand of the racetrack. And by the way, there was no more important and symbolic site in low country planter/slaveholding life then their racetrack.

Well, the black folks at Charleston got organized, they knew about all this. They went to the site. They re-interred all the graves, the men. They couldn't mark them with names, they didn't have any names. Then they made them proper graves and they built a fence all the way around this cemetery, about 100 yards long and fifty, sixty yards deep, and they whitewashed the fence and over an archway they painted the inscription "Martyrs of the Racecourse."

And then on May 1 they held a parade of 10,000 people, on the racetrack, led by 3000 black children carrying armloads of roses and singing John Brown's Body, followed then by black women, then by black men — it was regimented this way — then by contingents of Union infantry. Everybody marched all the way around the racetrack; as many as could fit got into the gravesite. Five black preachers read from scripture. A children's choir sang the national anthem, America the Beautiful, and several spirituals, and then they broke from that and went back into the infield of the racetrack and did essentially what you and I do on Memorial Day, they ran races, they listened to sixteen speeches, by one count, and the troops marched back and forth and they held picnics.

In one marker that the South Carolina white planter class has so far won the battle for historical memory, the site of the racecourse is now "Hampton Park," named for Wade Hampton, a Confederate general later turned politician who is remembered for violently suppressing the Black vote.

Lessons from a survivor

Patricia Bell-Scott's The Firebrand and the First Lady -- Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice was a good book to read in the days following the election. However bleak our times may seem, it's worth staying aware of the brave and terrible struggles that have won us whatever is good in our country.

Pauli Murray, an obscure young Black activist, improbably forced her way into the patrician First Lady's affections, writing letter after letter alternately upbraiding, cajoling, congratulating, and demanding more equitable treatment for her people. The president's wife was 26 years older, both privileged and constrained by her husband's political career, insulated by her class from direct experience of the privations of Depression, yet determined to be on the side of "the people," a group that gradually, more and more, came to include Black people.

Murray is the vivid presence and center of this book, despite its organization around the two women's unlikely friendship; think of it as Murray's biography.

The label "firebrand" was ER's description of Murray. And no wonder. Murray's first letter in 1938 complained that President Franklin Roosevelt had lauded the University of North Carolina as a progressive institution at just the moment it was refusing her admission on the ground of her race. Two years later, Murray was back in touch with ER after being arrested for refusing to move to the back of a segregated interstate bus in Virginia. Not long after that, Murray became the field secretary for the Workers Defense League's campaign on behalf of Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper facing execution for killing a white landlord in self-defense. Murray, in tandem with Waller's mother, mobilized thousands of supporters, white and Black, to demand a reduced sentence. Roosevelt was persuaded to approach the Governor of Virginia and to try to push her very reluctant husband to intervene in the case. Their efforts failed; Waller was executed on July 2, 1943.

The struggle to save Waller led Murray go to law school at Howard University where she overcame discouragement from male professors and led student sit-ins to integrate lunch counters in the District of Columbia. Mrs. Roosevelt invited her "firebrand" friend to tea at the White House at this time. Also at this time, Murray's tortured struggle to come to terms with her attachments to female friends caused emotional breakdowns and even landed her in a mental institution. Homosexuality was considered a perverted "mental disorder." A concept of healthy homosexuality would not be invented for another 30 years. Bell-Scott quotes a painful letter Murray wrote to an aunt:

This little 'boy-girl' personality as you jokingly call it sometimes gets me into trouble. And to try to live by society's standards always causes me such inner conflict that at times it's almost unbearable. I don't know whether I'm right or whether society (or some medical authority) is right -- I only know how I feel and what makes me happy. The conflict rises up to knock me down at every apex in my career and because the laws of society do not protect me, I'm exposed to any enemy or person who may or may not want to hurt me.

In that last fear she was correct. Despite graduating from Howard with high honors, she was excluded from further legal study at Harvard for being both Black and a woman. She earned an additional law degree at Boalt Hall at Berkeley, but despite her accomplishments couldn't get a government job in the McCarthy-ite 1950s. Suspicions about her sexual orientation were an added strike against her on top of her work for racial justice. At one point, even Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP wouldn't hire her because of such rumors. Through all this Eleanor Roosevelt remained a solicitous correspondent whose friendship strengthened Murray. By then, also, Murray had established a stable, accepting relationship with Renee Barlow with whom she had worked at a law office.

By the beginning of the 1960s, Murray had added another justice struggle to her plate:

She had spent the first half of her life fighting for equal rights as an African-American, only to discover she would have to spend the second half fighting for equal rights as a woman ...

ER died in 1962; in 1966, Murray became one of the founders of the National Organization for Women; worked to keep sex discrimination as an element in the Civil Rights Act; and so influenced future Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg that Ginsberg credited Murray with co-authorship of the brief that established sex discrimination as unconstitutional.

And then -- having taken on race, sex, and gender struggles, Murray felt called to break one more barrier, enrolling at General Theological Seminary in 1973 and taking a place among the first cohort of women to be ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church.

"My ordination as a Negro woman priest comes some 172 years after the first Afro-American male priest was ordained ...The Holy Spirit in our Church moves slowly at times, but it does move."

In 2012, twenty-seven years after her death, the Episcopal Church added Murray to its calendar of Holy Men, Holy Women who are held up as worthy examples of godly lives.

I'll give the last word to Murray here:

“If anyone should ask a Negro woman what is her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, ‘I survived.’ ”

Election oddments, part 2 -- North Carolina voices

Jamelle Bouie has been talking with voters of color in that contested battleground:

“I think people are nervous about the direction we’re heading in with so many minority groups rising up, taking on corporate positions, political positions,” said Constance Martinez, an auditor who lives in the area. “They think America is going to be snatched from underneath them.”

... The popular narrative of this election is that it represents a rising nationalist tide in American politics. And that’s true, although this nationalism is shaped and defined by white identity and white racism. But there’s another side to that story, revealed in conversations with voters of color. For them, this election is one where they assert their place in the United States—where they say that this is their country too.

“They aren’t losing anything,” said Martinez of Trump voters. “They are gaining so much more. As a united people we are so much more than we are divided. I hope this election shows them that they have nothing to fear. That we are one country and we are moving toward one people.”

On Tuesday this thing will be over, praise be! For the next few days I'll be putting up collected oddments that have caught my eye which will soon be just history.

Poll on Charlotte police killing

In my participant research on polling, I had the chance today to answer some dumb questions about the police murder of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, NC. The results from the national sample have already been posted online.

It's nice to see that most of us don't think Blacks hate whites for our success -- though not everyone has their head out of their ass.

We're a lot closer to clear that Charlotte police should release any video they have NOW.

There's an unsurprising partisan split on general approval for Black Lives Matter.

Serena crushes it

We could all use some cheer and Serena William served it up after winning her historic 22nd grand slam tennis title at Wimbledon.

She raised a fist in victory, in an echo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos' gesture of Black pride at the 1968 Olympics.

Here's Vann R. Newkirk II reporting on her post match press conference:

“I feel anyone in my color in particular is of concern. I do have nephews that I’m thinking, ‘Do I have to call them and tell them, don’t go outside. If you get in your car, it might be the last time I see you?’” Serena said. “I don’t think that the answer is to continue to shoot our young black men in the United States.”

... [Her] greatness doesn’t only come from what she accomplished inside the lines; it’s also from what she means outside of them. The most enduring image from Wimbledon won’t be of one of her 13 aces or 39 winners, but of her walking off the court, her hair streaming in the wind, as the crowd cheered on. A single fist, raised.

Summing up Obama: revisiting Rev. Wright and the race speech

Since we're enduring an election, I'm giving a lot of attention to 538 Politics, the site where Nate Silver has landed his "data journalism" under ESPN auspices. Silver's choice of conglomerate overlord is appropriate; much of 538's coverage reads like ephemeral sports trivia. But occasionally they produce fascinating insights bringing to bear the sort of stats mojo in which they specialize.

In this vein, I want to recommend a podcast and documentary video looking back to the 2008 campaign, Inside The Five-Day Stretch When Obama Found His Voice On Race. This tells the story of the moment in that campaign when major media spotlighted some of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright's sermons which were not complimentary about U.S. national pretensions to global moral preeminence. Obama responded with his More Perfect Union speech in Philadelphia and commentators declared that he'd managed to push the racial camel through eye of the public's needle about his potential presidency.

The 538 gang, assisted by senior writer Farai Chideya, have produced a fascinating look back at whether, in fact, that moment in the campaign really deserves to have been seen as the turning point many of us thought it was at the time. On simple data grounds, they suspect not.

Harry Enten: This is the funny thing about studying events in real time — it’s difficult to disentangle one thing from another. For instance, John McCain had his largest lead of the campaign against Obama right around the time of the controversy, but was that because of Wright or because McCain clinched the nomination around the same time? I honestly don’t know.

farai: I also think we in the media sometimes think we’re more influential than we are. Not everyone watches wall-to-wall politics coverage. And network news ratings have been declining for years. So although this was a huge firestorm in the media, I also wonder how deeply it saturated the electorate. ...

harry: To Farai’s point, a CBS News poll taken during the controversy found that 28 percent had heard a lot about the Rev. Wright’s statements. That compares to 23 percent who had heard nothing at all about it. Most had heard some, not much or nothing at all.

So, outside the media, most people had either already formed their opinions of Obama, for good or ill, or weren't listening. Yet, they still find much to be learned from this episode:

natesilver: It showed us a little bit about how Obama stayed cool under pressure instead of wetting the bed. ...

Micah Cohen: … the response to Wright was an early sign that there would be a not insignificant group of Americans who would traffic in these race-freighted “controversies” regarding Obama, right?

farai: First off, there has never been a moment in American history when race didn’t matter … just more and less contentious moments. ...nonetheless, once Obama was elected, there was a period of racial detente, followed by a backlash. A 2010 Gallup poll found 13 percent of Americans said they were greatly worried about race relations; today that figure is 35 percent. ...

Mike Fletcher: And let’s face it, the clips of Rev. Wright’s most inflammatory sermons played into a fear narrative. If the question of whether or not Obama wore a flag pin was news, this was certainly going to be a running story. In a perfect world, it would have been presented in the context of black church traditions, but …

harry: What’s interesting here that gets lost now and may get lost to a younger generation is that this election was a pretty big freaking deal. ...Obama ... was not only likely to be the first non-white major party nominee, but he also had a very good shot at the presidency. And then here comes a story that plays in to the worst fears of a certain segment of white voters, who saw Wright as radical on race and thought maybe he could be offering advice to the next president. The fact that voters saw through that and trusted Obama was a turning point that I’m not sure would have been accomplished 15 years earlier, when a majority of Americans still didn’t believe in interracial marriage.

My strictly anecdotal memories of these events are naturally very different; having long been exposed to the Black theology of liberation via Dr. James Cone, Wright's views were unsurprising. But I certainly was anxious -- would white people freak out? The smooth competence Obama displayed in defusing this moment convinced me of his political gifts -- and left me bemused and frustrated when he couldn't seem to summon such capacity at many later moments in his presidency.

This podcast is an early entry in a "Summing Up" genre that we're going to see a lot of as Barack Obama leaves office. What did the rise and incumbency of this extraordinary figure mean, if anything enduring? I expect to write many entries about these items here, some less approving than this one.

To my Hillary-supporting friends ...

You know which ones you are: mostly women, not so young, accomplished, fighters whose lives have been about negotiating a minefield of sexist disrespect and disregard, who see in our likely next president one of your own. You've changed what's possible for women over your lives and you want more. You see in Hillary a champion for the best of the feminism -- that belief in women, in yourselves, that got you through some hard times -- and want it extended to all women. I've worked with you and I profoundly respect your guts and grit.

But what if Hillary in office disappoints? Sure, you're pragmatists, so you expect some of that, but enduring the let down is never simple or easy.

I've got a book suggestion for you. In The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, a journalist and preacher out of the black church tradition, Michael Eric Dyson, mulls what to make of the experience of electing an unanticipated, almost miraculous, figure who (partially) embodies both your pain and hope -- and how to live with the real world result.

In reading this book, if we're white, we need to understand we're eavesdropping on someone else's conversation; this isn't primarily for us -- except that if Obama's presidency means anything, it means we've ALL been dealing, somehow, with the great national conundrum of white supremacy and race for eight years.

Race is the defining feature of our forty-fourth president's two terms in office. Obama's presidency is a lens to sharpen the details of American ideas about race and democracy. His presidency also raises the question of how much closer the election of a single black man may bring us to a more just and inclusive society. ... What we learn about Obama says a lot about what we learn about ourselves; his racial reality is our racial reality.

Dyson lays out his project:

I have offered principled support for the president in tandem with far more sustained criticism.

In particular, Dyson mourns that being the president of the United States has meant that Obama could not share in the internationalist, anti-imperial vein within black culture.

As the nation flexed its muscles as a global empire, it created an even more complicated situation for black citizens: as they were being eyed suspiciously by white citizens, America's growing global presence inspired black folk to become even more empathetic toward international struggles for human rights. The sense that they were citizens of the world often gave them courage to fight for their rights at home. It also gave blacks moral leverage to highlight the hypocrisy of America's playing moral cop of the world while denying basic human rights to its black citizens.

Holding accountable one of your own in whom you've invested hope is not emotionally simple.

Obama [has been] wedged between the obstructions of the right and and the obsessions of racists ... Some African Americans feared that the obstacles Obama faced would be used as an excuse not to help blacks, lest he appear to pander to his tribe. ... Obama has searched for the best way to talk about race without raising the ire of whites, but here his struggle has been less acute; he has worried little about losing black support.

... Race has gained such artificial importance in this country that one group could hog most of the resources for itself and leave all the other groups gasping for legal and political air. Obama often takes the knowledge of racial division as his undeclared starting point. By not stating it too much, or too loudly, he can rush past the traumatic memory of race to its positive resolutions. ... Obama is willing to underplay evidence of black suffering while promoting a naively optimistic view of the depth and pace of racial progress, as he did in the aftermath of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014 and Eric Garner a month earlier in Staten Island. Obama's appeal to his biracial identity as a means of resolving racial conflict has at times only served to heighten anxieties and muffle legitimate concerns ...

... Obama seems to feel he cannot hold white folk's feet to the fire even as he warms up to criticizing black folk explicitly. ...

Yet at the end of his presidency, Dyson concludes that Obama has found a way through the eye of the needle.

In the year following Ferguson ... Obama found a way to be the president of all America while also speaking with special urgency for black Americans. ... It is undeniable that presidential attention to a population and its issues can buttress the belief that democracy is for all Americans. ....

Michael Eric Dyson's The Black Presidency is both fascinating as an assessment of this president completing his term and a gift to all progressives of all races and sexes who have to figure out how we might encounter the likely next one. I "read" this book in an audio version; Dyson narrates it himself. He's a preacher and the result is wonderfully engaging.***A Clinton presidency is sure to confront many people who respond to her with enthusiasm with moments of ambivalence. Our first woman president can be trusted to care about matters that were abstract (and perhaps not worth fighting over) to her predecessors -- for example, repealing the Hyde Amendment which prevents government-financed insurance from covering abortion. That's going to take some doing with a Republican forced-pregnancy Congress.

On the other hand, many people who support Clinton, though wanting safety and security, aren't really looking for an endless series of U.S. armed interventions around the world. Clinton seems inclined to muscular military power projection. Obama's sensible "don't do stupid shit" policy (for all his drones, spooks, and his "looking forward not backward") seems likely to give way to American hegemony as usual. Lots of Clinton backers aren't going to like that. How will they negotiate the emotional contradiction of seeing "their" president as war-maker?

Of one conclusion we can be sure: she'll be preferable to Trump!